00:00:00 Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast. We're in Paduka, Kentucky. How far out of Paduka? How about six miles. We're at the homestead of the gentleman who just clarified our distance from Paduka, Kevin Murphy, Um lives here, not far from what rivers down there, the Clarks River. There's so many rivers rounding you can't keep all straight lives down from the Clarks River. It's got horses, sixteen hunting dogs, a garage that in my that that I gave an organization grade of I believe a D plus. You're very generous, Steve D plus. He would have gotten f but it was at least still standing in there. Um. The dogs Kevin owns are small game dogs, and we just spent three or four We spent four days in and around western Kentucky hunting for a variety of small game with dogs. We hunted squirrels, we hunted eastern cotton tails, and today, for the first time ever in my life, we hunted swamp rabbits, which is the largest of the cotton tail family, and they are giants, five pounders. All the rabbits days, there's no doubt they would average over five pounds, and you've weighed a lot of them. Last year, we weighed twelve rabbits at the same location and they all averaged above five pounds. The smallest one was four and a half. The larger one topped just a little bit above six pounds with a digital turkeys scale. So it wasn't a bathroom scale. It wouldn't, you know, tabletop. It was a digital turkey scale. You know. My old man always would say that, Uh the heat wade. Yi are we boring you? No, not at all. I'm very interested in this book that I thought it might come into play later in the podcast. That's all. I'm just doing a little okay good. I was just curious why you're reading the book during the thing, Kevin, Uh, what, I want to talk about squirrels first, because that's what we came down here for years ago. I was at I was in St. Louis. We're trying to think of it tonight when we're eating dinner. Probably three years ago, it would be three and a half and be four years it's coming April. I'm pretty sure I was in St. Louis at the I was doing a booth appearance um at the n r A convention, and I think I was there. I think I was there for the network, I think Sportsman Channel. And I got to talk, and you know, when you're doing that, like I meet all kinds of cool people, and we talked a lot about stuff. But but Kevin, we met and got talking about squirrels, and I just sensed a tremendous amount of ashen for squirrel hunting. And not only that, but I could tell that you have that you have a very uh, almost scientific approach to squirrels. I'm used to seeing that level of detail in appreciation for the history and the management and what's going on seasonally. I'm used seeing it with turkey guys. I'm used to seeing it with dear guys, elk guys. You get like sheep fanatics, but you seldom meet someone who is a lifetime student of small game. There's a few of us around, there's a there's a brotherhood of us, but to very few here. There's a ton of them. There's a lot of local boys that you know, we liked our dogs and guns and horses and being outside and whether it squirrel, you know, any kind of small game, but the squirrel. We've kind of some squirrel fanatics here. But what was interesting when we were talking about all this, So you were born and raised here, yes, just right in the vicinity, yes, And what was interesting, as you said, it's cold times to me over the last day, as we've been hanging out hunting together, there was no option but the hunt. Like when you were a kid, there's no option but the hunt. Small game. That that was it, that was what we you know, you joined us. You couldn't wait till you got your first baby gun. Started with a baby gun and you were after you know, the barn rats and spurs, you know everything. Nothing was pretty much off limit when you're a kid there and you go you go from bb gun to twenty two and the rights of passage was to go out and take a twenty two or a shotgun on your first squirrel hunt and get your first squirrel. You know, that was the the first level of hunting there where you take something with the farm is pretty much a squirrel. Uh. Traditionally in Kentucky, Uh, squirrel season comes in the third Saturday in August and everybody hit the squirrel woods and then they it was mainly mostly deal hunters and uh yeah, still hunt hunting there not hound hunting. And uh I can remember I was probably years old. My dad was a big bird hunter. Um even back then, the birds we was getting just a little bit thinner. And he decided that he had a cousin that heat squirreld hunted all the time with when he was a kid growing up, and he took a German eight millimeter miles or I think you give about like for it back then and traded it to his cousin for a crossed uphound squirrel dog, and so that pretty much started. It was a hound type. It would bark on track and go around some kind of crossed uphound. You know. It didn't have any distinguishing marks about it, just an old red brown looking hound, you know, I'm trying to remember from fifty years ago. There's not any pictures of it. Her name was Lady, and we would go out hunting. My dad would be the rifleman, and for some reason he had me to be the shotgun with a little H and R twenty gauge at full choke that shot like a rifle. And so and that's where I started my career. And like I said, I have never never looked back and and met people all over the southeast, lifelong friends that you know, twenty five thirty years I've been been hunting with. And yeah, and at the time, there was no deer, no turkey, not like really huntable numbers. You're you're you're correct, you know, small game was king, you know, people rabbit hunting. We did have quail in huntable numbers and uh and in squirrels, and that's what that's what we all pretty much much hunted around here. What's interesting about that is, you know, we've met so many people this week through Kevin that and especially Danny whose property we hunted on today. You know that he was probably the third person this week that I talked to personally that said, I can remember when I saw my first year really you know what I mean. And Kevin said he remembered seeing his first turkey track. Yeah, I can take you the spot in the road right now where I saw my first turkey track. And that's like a generational thing that you know, people that we are peers, like we all just grew up with that stuff. Really dear turkeys, big game hunting opportunities. But you think about it, like being born in Michigan. They were like I grew up. Guys, you can hunt deer. There was turkey round us, but not a meet. Now it's a great turkey hunting. Like after I moved away and left home, my dad started killing turkeys in a mile or two of our house every year. You can hunt bear to the north of us. You can put it in for an elk tag to the north of us, all in that state. Now, had you rolled the clock back fifty sixty seven years, it was a very different picture. Yeah. But then my old man they used to hunt small game all the time. They were real serious about hunting contail rabbits. But it's just different. But you know, you mentioned that thing, like you having a twenty two year old man having a shotgun. I want to talk about that, Like you're taking old prisoners approach to squirrel hunting. Right when you go out with with a dog, you know, some somebody in the party needs to take a shotgun. You know. Uh, we try to kill the majority of them with the rifles. But if we have one that's timber in there, you know we're gonna shoot. We're not gonna go up there. I'm you know, very rarely. Well, I'll let anybody shoot a sating squirrel with a shotgun. I mean you're going, that's not when when you've got a twenty two rifle. I mean, if if that's the only means that you have to take it, then then that's good to do it that a way. But there's no sense to it. You know, we get into two utilizing that game. Mate. We don't want, you know, a squirrel shot up with a shotgun. There there as I've showed you guys the the tails cleaning method of cleaning the squirrel. If you've got a nice head shot squirrel, it comes right out and the meat is just pressed BEAUTI and uh yeah, and and and I'll put out Kevin's like super serious about small game cookery. And you've eaten I mean thousands of squirrels. Yes, yes, when I got when I got into squirrel hunt and squirrel Home is a big deal for us. It was in Michigan September open day of squirrel season, so later, and you guys got started, and we got onto me and our brothers, we got onto shotguns because if we wanted to go out and get a bunch of stuff. And when you're hunting, like I always divide squirrel hunting into leaves on leaves, off leaves on squirrel hunting when the deciduous trees are still carrying the leaves. It's it's a listening game as much as anything where you're out and you're just hear them up in the tree tops and we get under them, and a lot of times like you can't see them and they can't see you quite as good. You get under them and you get them moving through the tree tops and we'd blast them with shotguns and they get full of pellets, sometimes pretty bad depending um. You know. In our dad, Oh, he would never would shoot squirrels with it shotgun, you know. I remember he would do use twenty two and he insisted like two to the head because of the meat damage thing. And he hated picking shot. He didn't like the way the shot carried for into the meat. All that junk. A good trick for that, just if you're listening. If you do shoot something, birds, whatever, small game, and you get where the pellet carries fur into the meat or feathers into the meat, take it. Do you ever do that? Take a toothpick, man, You take a toothpick and poke it into the hole and twist it all the fur, all the feathers clicked around that toothpick and you pull it out. It's just clean. Yeah, remember that it'll look dark like because the meat on you know, the light meat on rabbits and squirrels. It'll look dark. And you don't realize because that pellet drug a little bit of think furn there and even if it passes through, like if the pellet passes through, it'll leave all that fur and feather in there. But you take a toothpick, sire, and toilet pulls right out. That's slick. It's slick. But anyhow, I now I think you said the same thing. I would rather have one squirrel shot to the head of the twenty two then three squirrels that got shot, yes, because it's so clean and nice that way. You know, I agree with you. You know, you don't have to struggle when you're you know, using the tail tail cleaning method. You can clean that that one squirrel just in a flash, be done with it. If it's shotgunning there, you you know, pulling too. Sometimes you've got the gut squirting out of the thing and it's just it's just, you know, it just doesn't look that good when you get done with it. Thing there you go beat beautiful when it's all the wise? So, uh, how how does like put it to me? From from however you'd like to discuss it? How does squirrel hunting with dogs differ? I can see that it's way more effective than still hunting for squirrels. But just explain the process of squirrel hunting dogs, what kind of dogs, what the dogs responsibilities are kind of how you trained up your dog dogs, and what you expect from your dogs when you're hunting squirrels. Okay, um, you know any kind of dog can make a squirrel dog. In in people say, well, I've got a squirrel dog. But a squirrel dog to me is a dog that can use his nose, his ears, his eyes to tree a squirrel. There's a lot of dogs out there that can only just use their eyes. They have to see it before they bark at it and tree it, or they have to hear it and then see it before there or then some of them may be a hand of the hand variety can only use their smell to go in there. But if you've got a top notch what I classify as a squirrel dog, you know there's dogs that can tree pre squirrels, and you can kill a squirrel with it. And then there's squirrel dogs. And a squirrel dog has these three. It has sent in ability, hearing ability, and visual location. There those three real quick. I'll probably interrupt you a whole bunch, so I'm not gonna apologies every time. But when he's saying hearing squirrels bark, yes, so there's that noise, I'll make like me, look at you know. But then what he's man talking about hearing is nails on bark, nails on bark scuffling through the uh, the leaves. That's a sure sign giveaway that some of them can hear that from a long ways, so not so they're not necessarily waiting to hear him do a squirrel noise. But he'll just decipher the sound of one running and the sound of one going through the woods, and he'll bay that noise or you know, and it may be something else running through the through the leaves or something, but he goes down in a good squirreld. I goes in there and said, well, this was a maybe a deer running through the through the woods or something, or or some other off game whatever there and he'll he'll come back, come back. You know, my terminology of running the deers when they hit a deer and they run off and they don't come back for an i or two. Occasionally, you know, we will bounce a deer there. Maybe we got some young dogs whatever, but predominantly we have no I have no trouble with with with our dogs running a deer whatsoever, you know, just to jump away from squirrels from I'll tell you something I saw today, and we were running swamp rabbits, not with your squirrel dogs, but with your rabbit eagles. I saw those dogs trail into a thicket on a rabbit's trail, trail into a thicket. A bunch of deer went bounding out the other direction, and I thought for sure all those dogs would go off in that directed to but they didn't. They didn't care. They stayed right on and came out there side of the thicket, still on the rabbit's trail. We couldn't have cared less. Yeah, we you know, they elect the e collar. You know some people may referred as a shot collar. You know that is I'm one of the main tools of training dogs, and most of them now have electronic buzzer, and all you have to do is shock your dog one or two times. When you shock it, they hear the buzzer also. Then after that pretty much they hear you can They've got a own button down there that you can use. And once you tone those dogs a couple of times, you know, they realize that they're not supposed to be running running the deers. You know, you may shock them once or twice and then have to tone them. And after that we pretty much don't have to. Now, if we bring a young dog into the pack, something that's around a year old, less than two years old, year and a half somewhere like that, sometimes we have just a little bit of difficulty with them. But with the e collars, we take care of that real quick. And if you don't, you can lose your whole pack of dogs real quick. Oh it's in the dog's own best interest, man, I don't think like I never stand being apologetic about something like that. But go way for a dog to get killed is to go chasing deer. Yes, yes, because the ear's gonna keep going in a straight line. He's gonna go out and roads and a lot of guys they see a deer. They see a dog running deer, the first impulse is to shoot the dog because they think it's a fer old dog. But it's just like a dog. Dogs that run deer have less chance of getting old. That's correct, a lot less of a chance of getting old than dog wearing a shot color, you know what I mean. So continuing about all that, So, like I said, you've got two types of dogs, a dog that ken tree, a squirrel and a squirrel dog. Um, you know, the best thing to do when you get a young dog it could be, you know, try if you're gonna go out shopping for a squirrel dog. You know, look at the guy that's got it, Look at his parents, grandparents, if they're around whatever. You know. Take that. So I want to go out with these dogs, You try to get some type of dog that's got a you know, a good history of being bred to be a squirrel dog. You know. To me, there's two categories of squirrel dogs. Maybe you could say three there if you really want to get into the hand right there. But you've got the fast dog, which is Bobby Jane. Oh, he's a small dog. Fist F I E S T. And uh you know that to me, that's a dog that's usually under thirty pounds. There's an organization called the American Tree and Fast Association and they have um rules and standards. Four dogs, uh feist and it's usually like a I think a male now can be way thirty to twenty eight pounds, don't you know they're about I have to have to look at the rigs and then it could be so tall at the shoulders. Well that's where Bobby Janeo is there. And uh they're supposed to be dogs that you know have those abilities scenting, carrying and um um using their eyes. And then you have a cur dog which is like but you bad Toe, which he's a cur that's mixed in with a porner bird dog. And we like to do that to give the dog bigger. He's a little bigger curd dogs using above thirty pounds to lose his toe. You know. He was that way when I got him as a puppy, when I picked him out. But you, bad Toe was supposed to be a barbie. Bad Toe was supposed to be a girl dog. I was getting ready to go on a fishing trip to uh Ontario to fish with some walleye and that was at a friend of mine's house and he had this brown and white dog looked like a clone to to butch you. They're running around his yards. Said man, I really liked that dog. He said, well, says so and so has got some more rems that he could probably get you once is I said, what do you think he'd let me, uh keep it for two to three weeks and how I get back from Kennedy said, I don't know. Let's just call him up. I said, I'd like to get a female, because if you have a female you can breed her to most anybody stud dog. If you have a male dog, people are real hesitants about taking your male dog and read it to their fail So that's where you know, I was wanting to get the kids. Yes, but um I went over there and picked out a dog, and for some reason I thought he was a female. And I get him home, and after like two or three days and fooding with him out of yard, all of a sudden, I was eight. I got a male dog there. Yeah, so you know, and like I said, he just all of a sudden I looked and he had looked like he had a toll that was hung up in a gate or something and has given any problems. So he just got the butchee bad though. He said of Barbie Bead though, but he's got a real sense of of using his nose. As you saw other day this, a lot of the squirrels they tread had been there probably an I or two before, around the den trees. Lots lots of heavy scent there and uh um or um. Bobby Jango didn't treat that many that day there. He came in after Butchie had him trade and tread with him. You know, he supported him there. But like I said, the curd dogs who usually use their more more of their nose um than than a fist. And then you go into the hounds, and some sometimes people take blue tickhounds or or red ticks or whatever and try to train them on squirrels or get them started on squirrels first. But like I said, what they'll do they'll hit a track and they'll start barking immediately, and then they'll run that track to the tree or I FicT or occurred doll. Predominantly they do not bark any on track. They might bark on a hot track or after when they're chasing after a squirrel running. You know, they've got him sight chasing him. They're barking yepping it at that time. But when a hound hits a track is you've probably seen with bared dogs and in line dogs and stuff. You know they're all barking all the time when they were on the track when you we didn't, we haven't seen any of that. You don't like your dog to bark. He's like, here's the tree, the squirrel in this tree. Yes, that's what the squirrel dog needs to do. Is there's no need because all he's doing is giving that squirrel. If he's barking on the way of the tree, that's giving him warning, saying, hey, he's not here yet, Now is my time to escape. If the squirrel dog runs in there and trees, the squirrel, especially younger juvenile squirrels, they'll freeze up a lot of times. They'll just stay, you know, stay there and they wait. You know, they'll keep it tree till you get there. Where If he's barking on a track, that gives a squirrel warning time to get out and say, hey, something is coming my way. Let's let's leave here now. I'll point out when when like most of the squirrel hunt. Well, I'll sit for squirrels, and I'll still hunt for squirrels. But what I generally do as a combination of the two. So the way I would go out with a non dog hunter, we'll go out for squirrels is like on the perfect day, when everything gets planned out right, I would go out just before like because the squirrels don't move like you'll see deer before you see squirrels in the morning. Like deer, you'll be active before squirrels, but a lot of times squirrels will be it'll still be kind of gray, you know, when you'll see squirrels coming around. But I'll go on the woods, and the first thing I like to do is just go sit somewhere. Just pick a great spot, sit, give it fifteen twenty minutes. Am I seeing anything around. If I'm not um, I might move all the ways. It might be twenty yards, might be a hundred yards, two h yards, kind of sitting watch again, move real slow or just trying to keep my movements still and just hunt like that. If I see a squirrel close but it's just out of range, I'll sometimes wait or all wait for a good opportunity to sneak up and get them. But it's quiet. You know, you don't talk and stuff like that. But hunting squirrels the dogs, it's like it's just like walking through the woods of your buddies. Oh, it's just a lot of camaraderie. Think you can go on, you can tell stories, talk whatever you yeah, pretty much blowhorns. You know. The only time that that you might need to be be quiet just a little bit is when you're in there the tree and getting ready to shoot. And you've seen how the squirrels move around if somebody's talking. You're over there getting ready to get a shot, and somebody talks right there. All of a sudden, the squirrel, I've got this perfect shot. Now he's moved over here, and um, like I said, slight movement, hearing whatever there though, that's the only time you have to be quiet is when you're getting ready to put them put the keel shot on it. Pretty much. The other day we went out, we met up that is cool area near here Land between the lakes was what's the Tennessee and Cumberland River right Tennessee and Combing River. So it used to be a big isthmus between the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. People called it land between the rivers, like a big what's about a hundred and seventy thousand acre block where the two rivers come within how many miles of each other. I'm just guessing across there five miles, not even not even maybe not even that far. So you've got two big gas rivers that flowing to the Ohio and at the time, they're flowing north parallel, and they got this chunk of land and people folks used to call land between the rivers or between between the rivers. They shortened but both whites between the rivers between the rivers or land between the rivers. And then for reasons of flood control and hydro electricity and otherwise, just like are great fervor to build a lot of dams in the In the mid nine they damned up first the Tennessee River, first the Tennessee. After the thirties, we had a tremendous flood here nineteen thirty seven. I talked to some of the old timers. They said they could remember seeing whole houses floating down the river. I forgot it rained for like twenty eight days in a row or something here. Instruction very much, very much. Um. Like I was reading this book, you had just like unidentified children that were never identified, founding back eddies and just devastaates. Yes, yes, they damned the river, and yes, the flood control is a big part of it. Inspired by that. By that flood, then they damned the other river and it became instead of land between the lakes or land between the river, was land between the lakes because these are two impoundments that both these rivers are impounded before they flow into the Ohio, which of course goes down to flow into the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. Um. They had this big chunk of land, and then the UH the federal government started a long and and sometimes contentious process I gather of buying out people in this area, residents. There was far It was very sparsely populated, but still people there. Many people sold out willingly. We're glad to go to areas that offered more opportunity, different kind of jobs, better land. Some people were very much in love with where they live and didn't want to move. But as it went, it was turned into a wonderful hundred and seventy thousand acre right. Yes, National Recreation are administered by National Forest Um. That's one of the biggest contiguous chunks of public land anywhere in this region. Open three miles of shoreline on major rivers and reservoirs. I mean, it's just like a gym. I'd always heard about the place, but I've never visited. But it's kind of amazing. I mean, it's just this giant block of land that you just will take a lifetime to to see it all thoroughly. And you've done that fifty years of it. So we went out here to hunt squirrels. Access is easy, you know, there's a lot of good access, a lot of good roles, and there's a lot of nice big chunks of woods that don't have a road running into them. But you it's it's a really well run spot, well thought out spot. But we went out, parked trucks like kind of drove down a paved road, turned on new dirt road, drove down the dirt road, pulled off, cut the dogs loose. There was a foggy no heavily overcast grade A caught the dogs loose, and uh, we were hunting. You wanted to hunt more thicker stuff. Yeah, explain that thinking a little bit. Two reasons um, one are mass. We had a mass figure this year. It takes about fifty pounds per aker of mass to ride the wildlife through the wintertime, and we were way below that this year with a bumper crop of squirrels. So what that meant was they were gonna eat everything up in the woods and when it gets wintertime, they're not gonna have anything no mast to eat. So squirrel the mast is the acron's uh mainly out there. I don't think they figured the hickory nuts any at all. We had a We had a very limited amount of hickory nuts. To give any example here at my house on fourteen acres, I've got to four pacun trees a front yard, several h hickory trees um produced nuts um um. They ripened early. Uh first, did you August? Traditionally when a squirrel season comes in. The squirrels came in. They wiped though the hickory nuts out the first and the next thing they attacked was my bacon trees. They cleaned those and we didn't have that strong a crop of them. Do to we had a two severe winters back to back and um, my fruit fruit trees guys to blueberries, uh, blackberries. Um, it killed the BlackBerry vines all the way back down to the roots. And I had very limited The year before last, I picked fourteen gallons of blackberries. I was lucky to get two gallons this year. Real bad, real bad year for production of fruits and nuts for this season. Um. Things that limited nut production. Uh. In the springtime, a late frost can can kill the buds of the trees there that produced the akrons. Um. Red oaks produce acrons every two years. White oaks produce acrons every year. So and and you know, not all the trees are lined up in cycle. That doesn't mean that, you know, you go two years and don't have any any acrons. They are all different sinks there. But it takes two years to produce a red oak acren one year to produce a white oak acron. Um. Getting back to our was that they ate the hickron hickores first, they ate the bacons, they hit the akrons, and after they hit the acrons, they went into there's a little pine thicket as you come down my drive. They started eating the pine cones. So you know, they wiped out that food source here before the first of November, so they've got nothing to eat. And I was just talking to to Jodie, the squirrel hunter that that went with us today. He said, you know, earlier sas you know, we had all kinds of squirrels at the house. We got none now, he said, my neighbor right down the road killed twenty five squirrels out of these para trees. So you know there they were outfraiding other all the sources there. So you know, in the woods now there's not any feeds, so they're going to the to the thickets to get whatever we'd seed. Mushrooms might be growing there, digging around for grubs. You know. The squirrel take advantage about any kind of food source that's out there. Yes, So rather than hunting like that. That was the thing I learned, because if I was going out to look for uh, squirrels, I wouldn't be paying like I wouldn't until now. I wouldn't think about where those trees were in production. My assumption would just be like, oh, going to the big oaks because of course there's acorns, but walking around we didn't see shipfre acorns. You didn't see if you'll remember, Steve, anywhere where you saw turkey scratching or the deer in there, we had squirrels because there was still just a little bit of fade. You know. Some of the trees did make some some some nut acrons, but but the big, the big part of the forest, there's there's just not you know, we saw one or two little logs there with a another ship. Sure sign that we have squirrels and vicinity is they'll pack acrons up to logs and at them there and you'll see the holes from the acorns. We saw very very little little of that. Another good point you had about hunting thickets. There's a lot of vines and those thickets. And as you get on and on in the year, you get fewer and fewer squirrels. Yes, like squirrels have they don't have a friend in the world, Like everybody's out trying to kill them and eat them. You get fewer and fewer squirrels. And you're kind of now getting into the part of the year up until early spring, like when they're gonna have more where you got the die hards right now are the ones left in the woods, and there's more security in those areas where you have some thickets and vines where they can get in there and have protection from avian predators, that protection from kyotes all the other stuff is trying to kill them. Yes, it's it's new purposes. A little bit of fade in there and plus protection. They they feel protected. You know, they're out in the big woods, then they're pretty much open prey for for anything they can. The prey can say them from long distance, can stalk them that away. Like I said, if they're in the thickets and stuff, you know, they were kind of little ravines and hidding. They're not great big places, so you know, they had some pretty tight quarters, so it would be hard for you know, the predators to get inner to see him from from a distance. And like you said, the birds of prey, the owls, the hawks and stuff have a little bit more difficulty in those there's areas than the open forest. Yeah, and we got out and we started hunting up a what I would call draining, like just small drainages you guys call hollows hollows. Yeah, that's a local, local term. But I always heard that. I never knew what the hell of meant. I thought they somehow meant like, I don't know what, like a little low pond area, because like like a hollow I think of like a bold depression. But you guys call a creek bottom of Howel hollow. Yes, yeah, I mean, I mean just that's what you grow up. And we're gonna go up the hollow here. And I don't know where it came from, term of cooley Cooley. Yes, I've heard of that out west. And then when I was bear hunting down in North Carolina, they called him bays. I said, where's the bay? I don't see any water out there, so we're gonna go up there. If you any of you guys ever heard heard that term, Well, that was the first time I've heard. We're gonna go over here and hunt this bay. You know, we call them like we had vians, but we think of it like a little bit steeper. But when I went out west, I discovered coolie. What are you talking about? Coolies? But yeah, coolie CEO U L E. S would be like a It's a type of all these different names for drainages. If anyone's interested in law, draw gut Callahan calls them guts, go up that gut anyone interested in landscape terms. There's a phenomenal book. It belongs on your shelf, Kevin, because you're a great collector of books that have uh, you know, very dangerous arcane information and interesting bits of information that no one knows. There's a book called by it was it was compiled by Barry Lopez, called home Ground Homeland. Looked it up on your phone, Yannie, I have it at home. Home Ground. Anyways, it's a it's a glossary. It's a big book. It's a glossary of landscape terminology. But it's all built out of great passages from literature and other stuff where you and you can look up any term, like I guarantee you look up a hollow, it'll probably like Faulkner and other people talking about what a hollow is, coolly, any landscape term, Arctic anywhere around the world. Anytime someone's saying to you, like hard pan or whatever, you like, what the hell is that mean? It's in this book. It's a good book. I need to get that. Yeah, it would fit right in with your stuff. Man, it's beautiful. Do you find it home ground? Well, you're here and there. No, it's but if you do find it, that'd be great. So uh pushed up this hollow and the dogs are doing We just had one that more the first morning. Bobby Django. Yes, yes, wind was just yeah, I should point out wind was howling. That was another reason we were staying down in the hollow is because the wind was howling and we're trying to find places where you get out of the wind a little bit. Squirrels they don't like real whipping wind. Tree tiles moving around, you can't tell what's going on. And the dogs are cutting out, like how far do they cut out? And they loop around like that. Usually, if you just got a single uh dog out there, Bobby Django ranges anywhere from like a hundred maybe to maxim two hundred yards unless he at that two hundred yard point hits a squirrel or something, go feather, but usually go out a hundred two hundred yards and come back in and check out us. Yeah, constantly, and you can guide his movements. At first, I thought we just followed the dog through the woods. But the dog, even though he's going all over and covering many many many times more ground than you're covering, he's always working in these circles based off year route. So you're sort of suggesting to the dog what areas we ought to be hunted, her name, her name, suggestion whatever. We're sending him in a direction, general direction that we want to go. And he's cutting giant circles around you all the time, hunting, hunting, hunting now, and you kind of forget about that. You don't forget about dog. But he's out and you can't Sometimes you can't see him, but all of a sudden, often grayness of the morning, you'll all of a sudden hear him going nuts and then I mean nuts like squirrel food, I mean nuts like going crazy barking. Yeah, we call it traying training squirrel. He's the dog is trying and the first time it happened, I was incredulous. First time it happened, he runs off, starts going crazy. We kind of half jog, half walk over there. Get there. He's standing against the tree, staring up into the tree, and we look up tens of squirrel. Just that's it. It's a little more complicated that because then you gotta get the squirrel, and it can be hard to find the squirrel up there, but you you do, like what what most squirrel hunters do is if you're working in twos, it's great because when you approach the squirrel, he's gonna get some the trees between you and him, and you might not notice them. Did you find home home ground? Oh Um, The squirrel's gonna go on the backside of the trees. You can't see him. But with two guys, one guy holds tight, gets a rest for his rifle, holds tight. The other guy goes around making some noise around the tree. The squirrel is gonna respond to him by squirting back around to the side of the tree the shooters on and that's often the guy that gets shot or the squirrels just gonna stick to where he was. And you guys, circle and circle. I use binoculars to look for my notice. You don't use binoculars to look for him. Use your rifle, sculpt look for him. Yeah, just one less thing I have to pack. He used to. I used to go in and pack lots of year, maybe a pistol in a little hatchet on the side. I don't do that anymore. Just clean, going as as light as I possibly catch. So you look around and find them. And you and these ones we were finding were all up in the top. Yes, pretty common on a windy day for them to go high for some reason. I don't know if they feel secure up there or why, but that I've seen it happen lots of times, lots of times. You know, people are amazed of them doing that because one of the sure easy ways to find a squirrel up there. You know, you see their tail blowing in a win there, flapping it's hard for them. And then the winding conditions. You know, even though we don't like the wind hunting the wind there, sometimes it is to our benefit because it is very difficult for the squirrels to hide their tail blowing in the wind. But they're not up there like feeding when they get treated by the dog. They're going got pushed up there, and for some reason they want they feel more secure up in the top of the tree. And I don't I don't. Squirrel would be smart too, never go into limbs. When they get in trouble is when they push up high into a tree into limbs. They're thinner than they are. Yes, yes, they're silhouetted. You know. You get this cilhouette of a squirrel up there. It's pretty easy to we're gonna do squirrels a favor, you would somehow communicate to them. Never hide on a limb smaller than a man's thigh, because they go up there and they hold still like they're hidden. But you can see him from so far away up from the top of the tree. Now, the squirrel that stays down a little bit and gets in the crotch of a tree, that's a tough squirrel to find, very very difficult, very difficult because you might see the tail, but that doesn't do you any good. I mean, it helps you look keying on the head, but you can't shoot the tail. But probably know one place that he can hide these tails in the crotch he goes. He can pull that down in there, and it's it's tucked in, you know, just like you know they and they're that tail is not the winds blowing whatever. It can't probably blow that tail inside that, you know, if it's a pretty good sized crotch there, could you know, fork in the tree can't. They won't get out and flop around. So but I've had him hiding pretty good on me when it's like not or a pretty solid limb, you know, six eight inches in diameter and the wind is not blowing, and they're laying on top of it. Yeah, and they get down. Yeah, and you know what I've just picked up. It's just like one arm, you know, or leg I had that. They don't have arms, No, yeah, I would say, I would say that arms. Yeah, I don't know what you leg out front leg, But I had that. I found. I found that one of the ones. This time I can see two were just grabbing around the thing. I didn't see him do that like I used to see him do it in Michigan of laying flat on the top of a limb. Fox squirrels are notorious for doing that around here. Gray squirrels, you know, some people call him a cat. Squirrels are a little bit more cagier than a than that. But but the fox squirrel, first, I have seen him on the river bottom just trying to be too too high off the ground, you know, maybet off the ground, just laying flat on it. You know, he can just seem he's just trying to get flat as he can on that on that limb. But you do not see gray squirrels do that much around here. Now you brought up fix squirrel and gray squirrel. So you know, there's always exceptions, a ton of stuff. So there's gonna be some guy out there listening, and he's gonna be like, good the tube. Oh, what I'm saying is not true. But for tree squirrels in this country, in North America, tree squirrels in North America, I'm gonna give the what I'll call the Big four. You have the eastern gray squirrel, that is a lightest gray squirrel. Now, when you see a black squirrel, you're seeing a color phase of the eastern gray squirrel. In some areas you go in and it seems like seventy five of the gray squirrels are black. It's typically the grays outnumber blacks. In my mom's yard. Over my life, I've watched man like all the squirrels seemed black now and then they're gray, back and forth. A gray, a gray phase gray squirrel can give birth to a black phase gray squirrel. I have heard. I don't know if it's true that maybe in some areas it's like maybe about tent or black face. Does that bring true to you? Well, you know, we don't have any any any black phase down here, gray none, none. When I went to Walston and Manistee for the first time. And we were driving down the road and I see something solid jet black. I think it looks like well, I thought it was a maybe a burnover place, like a stump, you know, a stob, small trees just sticking up right there. Then I realized that was my first sighting of a black squirrel. But we do not have any black gray squirrels that I have ever seen in this part of western Kentucky. I don't think. I don't think there's any. I don't know how far north you have to go to see that, but the man of State was the first place I had that's that that the southern terminus of that National Forest was about about a mile and a half from where I grew up. And yeah, I grew up with a lot of black face gray squirrels now continue on the Big Four. The fox squirrel doesn't have as big of a range as the gray squirrel, but it extends more westward in the eastern gray squirrel. Both these squirrels are mixed up because they've been introduced to a lot of places accidentally on purpose, so there and they're like native range is different than where they actually exist. When I was going to graduate school out in Missoula, Montana. We had squirrels all over town. They weren't from there. Then the western gray squirrel, which is fairly rare squirrel got rare in recent years. And now like you know, around Puget Sound you have eastern gray squirrels hell over impuge it sounds south there you have native western gray squirrel range. And then finally you got your pine squirrel or red squirrel those some people call fox squirrels red squirrels. Pine or red is a little souped up, oftentimes meat eating, fired up little squirrel that kind of like almost seems like a has like a weasel's intensity. And there a northern animal, more northern for tree squirrels. That's the main thing. Now you've got different phases of stuff here and there, and like down in Florida they got with the monkey squirrel something like that, the big gass fox squirrel, different color. Um. I think on a fox squirrel there's like tan subspecies, and have the gray squirrel. I think they're six I don't know, watch wash there, but um. When I was hunting on St. Vincent's Island in the Panhandle of Florida, one time, one of the funniest things I've ever said is a gray squirrel in a palm tree. I just I just thought that was he was up there and they had a bunch of dead palm fronds on it there, and he was up there playing rent and I was thinking, I said, you know, there was something about that. It just doesn't doesn't look right. For all my years I've seen him either in a deciduous oak tree or you know, decisions tree some kind, or possibly a fir tree whatever. But just to see a gray squirrel in a palm tree, just that's that's like, you know, I'm I'm thinking, you know, Gilligan's Islands with us with a squirrel all the time. Squirrel hunter, Jimmy Buffett Man, you know what I mean. So why was I talking about kinds of squirrels? Oh, you're talking about how fox squirrels like the lay up on top of the branch. Now, you know Daniel Boone, he one time was with a fellow named John Philson, wasn't exploring writer. We spent a lot of time hanging around during the frontier years. He claimed to have been out squirrel hunting with Daniel Boom and he even specified the year. I think he might have said he was squirrel hunt with Boone, and later in Boone's life, like after the Revolutionary War, maybe even as late as like eight in the early eight hundreds, was all hunt squirrels of Boom and described how Boone would find squirrels laid up flat tree, squirrels laid up flat against the tree, and he would take his rifle, muzzle loading rifle, and rather than hitting the squirrel with the lead ball and you know, damaging it severely, he would shoot the tree and so that the ball hit the bark right up where the squirrel was plastered, and he would call it barking him, and the just the jolt from the hit and the bark flying up with stunned to squirrel and sent it falling to the ground. The problem with Philson's story, it's historians later put together that the year Philson said he was shooting squirrels of Boone, I think he said he saw it happen in Kentucky. Boone never stepped foot in Kentucky that year, so Philson might have been pulling everybody's leg or mixed up when it happened. But he was saying that Boone was a big admirer of squirrel meat, and that's how he hunted squirrels. And when you see a squirrel hiding, it's like laying against that tree. I think of it every time because I always think, now, how that would be an exemplary piece of marksmanship to bark a squirrel like that. It works a lot better to use rim fire cartridges and shoot them in the naga very much. You know. I have seen on several occasions, um where we have shot squirrels in the head with a twenty two rifle and it never penetrated on him, just put a skid mark on him and come down. Never never penetrate the skull, just kind of ricocheted off and do that and kill them or put them unconscious, and that's when you you know, I have heard of people picking them up, put them in their game pouch and then come back to life and be crawling around and there. Yeah. So you know, if we ever do that skinning one across the head there, you know, we'll wipe them on a on a tree there and make sure that they are dead. But I have seen that on on several occasions. It's just hit a hit a squirrel with a twenty two. Just if burne his hair, but never break the skin, never be any sign of blood, and stune them and be down there, you know, not trying to do that. It just it just happened. That happened that way. What have you ever? Like, you you've never called squirrels? You know, you never had tried to squirrel call? Whatsover. I'm the type of individual I cannot sit still pretty much, so I've got to be pretty much on the move. I have done some predator calling and stuff. I could probably do the squirrel calling and get around, but I've never never script squirrel call. Well, when you squirrel call, you're not really trying to bring the squirrel to you. You're just trying to get one to light up the bark, yeah, to pause him. You know, like you'll see one, or you'll see one bouncing around and you can't get a shot at him, or any number of things. And you do that, and he'll squirt up a tree and position himself trying to figure out what's going on, or he'll start barking too, and he'll go from kind of running to he'll hear like what it sounds like his buddy doing a warning cry, and then he'll get up wanting to join in and chat or two and it let's put him up in the spot where you can get a crack at him, so it's not like you're sitting there calling turkeys. You know, I don't think anybody really uses it. I hear now and then of guys will do a very loud distress call with a turkey with a squirrel call, almost like where you're blowing a predator call noise and then shaking the call to get like that that really fast piste off call. And they're saying early in the year when there's a lot of young squirrels around. Sometimes I've never seen it happen personally, but people say sometimes you get it where you're just bringing squirrels down the tree, coming down aggressively, trying to figure out what's going on. But you sure don't need to call squirrels to get ot the dogs right, right, You just need a good set of eyes. How do you how do you train up a squirrel dog? Well, because I'm guessing you don't do like what bird guys do of you know, going out buying pen raised birds and getting them all dizzy and setting them out in the field, like you're not doing that. With squirrels, we do something similar, you know, when when they're pups. One of the first things we may do is uh uh put a squirrel tail on a like a cane fishing pible on the line and getting used to that and trailing around, putting up, getting squirreled out of the bark. That's one of the biggest challenges a lot of dogs where run squirrels up the tree, track them up right there, but when they get there, they just look up. They won't they won't bark no good. I mean, if he's two hundred yards away, we're you know, where is it? Unless you've got a GPS track and color on him? And and you know who wants a silent tree dog? But get a get a squirrel tail and get him to bark, you know what We call it on a hang up, you know, we'll hang it up somewhere, or we might pick a whole squirrel off the road, up something that somebody's running over in a car, drag it around, hanging up, put it in a bush. A lot of times, what I like to do and have done before, is put it in a bush, maybe tie a piece of straining to that bush or small tree, and then get back and shake it, act like it's got some movement. Get that dog fired up. You start there. Uh, then the next next thing, you may go and trap a noose and squirrel that maybe that's raiding somebody's bird feeder or they need to get to his fruit crop or whatever, and to get rid of it and bring it, show it to the dogs, let it loose, let it run up a small tree where the dog can see it there, and that gets them fired up and get them started. Now, don't ever do that more than one or two times, because after that that seemed like the dogs you don't gain anything either. He's gonna do it that first or second time. If you do it the third or fourth, it's kind of like you know, we were head to discussion over shooting pen raised birds. Once once you get a dog, and in my opinion, in a pen raised bird, if you really want a true wild bird dog, if you do that more than one or two times, you're gonna get that dog. Dependent on the dizzy, highly scented birds that come out of these coop situations there where they've got all kinds of unlimited sin on them that a natural bird probably does not have. This is just kind of my personal opinion. You know, it's like he's living this chicken coop with all this bird extrement on the floor there. You know, a wild bird doesn't, you know, doesn't live that way. A quail will, you know, roost at night, leave a quick you know louis droppings right there, then they go on. They do not live in it day in and day out. I know I never thought about in that way, like how much smell a gun? And but I have noticed that um dogs get like dogs that do that just can't cope with reality. They can they can't cope with what real They crowd, real birds. You know, they think they can get a lot closer to real birds than they can. Like a rough grouse in the Midwest. Don't hang out. You can't. You're not gonna get up and point it from six ft away. No, no, no, same same way. And Upper Peninsula in Maine or whatever. You cannot get in there and get close to grouse and then just and you run pointer. I want to point out point out that you run pointers to I've gotta said it right now. I used to have a German war haired corner. But we just had a recent trip back in October up up to Maine. Uh, several of us went up. There's one guy, real good hunter there and he had some some dogs that killed thousands on thousands of quail in a pen. He took them up there. They were totally worthless. He put them up. But he thought that he you know, because those dogs, you can go out there, turnal news so that that that quail farm it's there, and a point lock up hold. You know, you go around them out there. But they didn't have a chance up there against in hunting. Grouse and quails two different things anyway, too, So you know, so that was, you know, the dogs didn't have a chance to begin with because they're they're definitely two game birds. I know that. I got a good friend that I grew up with that always had bird dogs. I tried to get him to go grouse hunting with us, take his bird dogs. When I say bird, does bob white quail dogs up there? And the first thing out of his mouth was he said, Hey, said, then grouse, I'll ruin a good quail dog real quick. Why does he Why does he think that? Because you know, a quail will lock up stay there. Grouse you cannot crowd and they will not stay. They will run sometime. And you have to have that. You have to have that special dog that that knows that hey, I can, I can. He I smelled him right now at ten feet. Now he's at twenty. I can move up another ten mm and then then then he moves up again. I can move up another tin. That's I'm kind of a novice. Novice so a grouse hunter, but I tried to look at what goes on out there and see and try to improve it there. You know, I try to gain as much knowledge as I possibly can, just like you know you guys tear it up up there. Yes, well this is our second second year, and you know when we did, we had a very very successful one day. I killed three woodcock and in three grouse over a pointing dog, and that's a pretty good accomplished. I was. I was trying my best to limit out and get four woodcock and four four grouse over a pointing dog, and that would have been a pretty good lifetime accomplishment right there. And I got three and three. But I'm still happy it's gonna be. We saw three wood Cock today. You don't thing I want to talk about too. With the dog and running dogs for squirrels. Early we're talking about, oh, you're running up there's a squirrel. That happens. Probably correct me if I'm wrong, But just from my perspective from December hunting, that happens at the time that the squirrel is just sitting up there, like, oh, there he is, you know, because they got a bad habit of disappearing in the nescent holes. It's not a given. When I heard that dog bark the first time I ran up got a squirrel, I'm like, man, we're gonna be done doing this is no time. But the other day we had we showed up in ten of them treat into dentries. There's no fault the dogs. Dog did his job. He's like, I could tell you certainty there's a squirrel in this tree. Now if he went into a hole, that's not my fault. I can tell you he's in this street. So he's doing his job. But he's got no way of knowing that there's a two and a half inch diameter hold nod into some limb up there in the square, was not gonna come out of there. Anytime soon. Now, you know, the day's very you know, we turned loose. You know. The first one we trade was in a pine thicket, and with all the pine cones up there, it was just you know, we we gave it a pretty good look. Course, twenty five yards away another dog had a squirrel trade, pretty hot and heavy, with thought, well, you know, we'll give this a quick look over. Everybody looked out there, you know. I I couldn't say it with yeah, it wasn't there wasn't nest up there yet. Kid, we'd start shooting into the nest, thinking that with beaby guns and whatnot, we shoot into the nest thinking that. But I mean, yeah, just a good chance of killing the squirrel never comes out of the nest. Yeah, but we stick. You'd drive them out of that shooting up into there. But that's pretty silky. But on some days, you know, they're only outside here. Again, I'm gonna go back. And I talked to a friend of mine after we had that hunt to day to see what he had been doing up there, and he's been facing some of the same problems. He said. Other day, we made twelve d entries before we ever killed a squirrel, and I believe due to the low food sources out there, the squirrels are kg they're leaning mean, everything's after him out there, and a lot of times when we've got lots of masks, I don't like the first squirrels that we kill or come straight out of the den. They're looking for food. They have nothing in their belly. They can run off, but you give them thirty minutes, forty five minutes whatever. They gorge theirselves, you know, and you've cleaned some of the squirrels where their stomach their pouch is just pooching out. I think they get lethargic, just like a human does. When we go in there and do a buffet, eat everything we've got. Well, you know, I'm just gonna get and get where the guy can't reach me, and I have to go no further, you know, you know, just stay out here. And I truly do believe that stomach contents look like is uh my little daughter she's three. If you give her like cash using peanuts, she keeps putting them in her mouth, but she doesn't get around the swallow on them. I'm pretty sure she's walking around and you tell like she needs some help, and so she'll spit it all on your hand. It looks exactly like squirrel stomach content. Yeah, just a yella yalla tasty turns into that, but she can't like yeah, whenever she does that, I was like, man, it looks like cleaning squirrels. But so they get you know what you brought up anything I thought was interesting. Uh, there's so little food out there that they're probably burning more energy going out looking for limited food reserves. And that's partially keeping them around, maybe not even coming out and not venturing out far because it's just they're just not out right now. They're taking it easy. Things are. Times are tough, not a lot of grub. Going back to the conversation with another fellow squirrel hunter, he said, yes, Kevin said, you know, pretty soon it's gonna be where you go out and hunt an iron in the morning and the iron evening. You get what you get, take your dogs out. I mean as the season. As a season progresses, because they're gonna be looke, you know, moving less and less and lass sir, as we getting it's gonna get probably a little bit cooler and stuff. You know, right now, we still got ideal conditions. What was it the day before you all got here, seventy two degrees we need that day probably got up into the fifty nine sixty there during that day. Do we get that high on the first day? Cold cold that day, But you know we haven't got cold fingers now that the first day we hunted, we killed six, Yes, I saw seven, and it probably had I don't know, not more than four or five hole up on its not too many. That's that's probably correct. Another day we went out, we had a bunch of hole up and nest up, and then bam, bam bam, killed three in a row, yes, three trees in a well. We had a two pack and a one town And then went on to den up probably ten every bit of ten, yeah, every bit of ten where that dog is bade up on the tree, and that dog like no doubt in his mind that he knows what's up there. But you looking as plain as day holes holes, you know, I think a couple of them. We saw a few little nut shavings where they'd come out and eating. I said, I think they just come out from the den's peddled around on the ground there a little bit. He come in one of my buddies. He's got a a pet squirrel that he keeps at his house there, and he'll go out and show puppies that it's up hine. He's got a condominium squirrel condominium forward and wire cages like a hamster cage. He can run up and down all over right there. And that's another way you can start a lot of people in the area start dogs. That a way. Just go over and look at him and run around. You know. I took him a whole big, like three gallons of the cons the other day that we're left over from my trees from about two years ago that I didn't utilize there. And he says, he says, right now, Kevin said that squirrel his house is cram packed full of corn and nuts. He said, I've never seen one do like that before. Said it's cram packed up. He packed, he packed it in up there, and that's why he and, like I said, our conversation, we don't know. He says, I think a lot of the den trees out there that they've got a bunch of nuts and stuff holded up in them. Don't know that, you know, I said that just just looking at his pets squirrel that he has that is taking his nuts that he gives them out there, you know, you know, you know, may put a half a gallon at a time right there. And he says, you know, he the shells are not there, says, you know, they're in that they're in that house right there. He's got them packed in there. What genders that squirrel he's got, it's a it's a great squirrel male female, you know, I don't know, I do not know. I feel like you ought to put another one in there there. It's like we might think about someone put you in a situation like that one another you know, man, he really had to do that. Uh. I had some big thought about this whole thing with Oh, I want to tell you this. We're hunting deer in Wisconsin not long ago, and also heard just this loud shrill shriek and a squirrel going nuts too. At the same time. You could hear all this. There's a tree maybe up there's a crotch and tree with a cavity, and there's a mink and a squirrel fighting outside the tree. The whole the mink goes down in the hole, turns round, so his head's coming back out of the hole, and he's still fighting the squirrels trying to get into the hole. Eventually squirrel just says screw it and goes off and gets on a limb and starts barking and carrying on. And that mink we wash up there on and off for two hours. If he had come out, we had to notice that never came out of that tree. I think he r in there and and uh, eat all them, eat all the young. That's exactly what I would say happened exactly. He went in there and ate him. Probably the highest of my life I've ever seen a manking a tree um going back to predators in a tree. I guess it was back this last year for two years ago there. I've got some mulberry trees out here. Kentucky used to have what they call the spring mulberry season to hunt squirrels when the mulberry trees become right to have a spring squirrel. We still have a spring squirrel season there. But I've got some mulberries here at the house, and I could hear a squirrel with that, given the the real shriek sound rent there. And I had a young squirrel doull ground here. I thought well, last take him down there, and it kind of showing him that something's going on on there, says, I don't know if they're breeding or want but but it's making some kind of strange noise. And I went down there and there was a snake that had a squirrel in the top of that probably twenty five ft up in the top of that mulberry, and was wrapped around him putting the construction. Tell him there, first time in my life I've ever seen that. It's pretty pretty neat, pretty neat. I tried to take a little video with my my phone, but it was too far away and couldn't get get any good. But it looked like to me probably some type of of a rat snake, prairie king snakes, something of that name. Some kind of constructor there, some kind of black constructor there, Probably a king snake. I want to get into hunting the marsh rabbits, swamp rabbits. What kind of dog like, what's your dog for that? Well, I've got a little blue tick beagle um uh. And I also a little tri colored beagle there you know, um bagle ham. These swamp rabbits, I've always heard about him, but they lived down on the like they're down the low lowlands. We're hunting around the banks. We're hunting the banks of the Mississippi. In the bottoms, it's like some areas of sand mud, a lot of briers, and these things go down there. And one of the most peculiar things about them is they when they're huge, like you said, five pounds, they have the trine logs where they climb up and defecate on elevated stumps, whole bunches of it up there. Now, then you've heard it might have something to do with the territory territories what I've heard before. To go out and hunt them, they'd be like, I don't even know where to begin, because my whole life I hunting rabbits. We are just drive rabbits, push rabbits. You guys get lined up, depending on how thick the cover is, fifteen yards thirty yards apart, and you just push through a good rabbit cover and you get a couple of guys posted up on the opposite side, and you squirt the rabbits out and usually the guys posted up get shots as they come going by. But this you kind of line up and then you guys send all these packs of beagles in there, and once you kick up a rabbit, the beagles start trailing it, and the rabbit will go on a big loop or multiple loops and keep coming back around because he doesn't want to leave his familiar area, and he keeps coming around. And as you're listening to these things banging around, you eventually try to get where you can head it off. And in the case of the swamp rabbit, the rabbits out a hundred yards ahead of the dog all the time. Yes, so when you see the dogs coming, it might be too late. It is too late. The rab might already be gone at last. In some occasions you get a rabbit that goes out there and just kind of squats down there. But I think I might have sold at a time or two to two today, but after I saw it too, But always after they've already been running it forever. Yeah, I think one of the longest trails I saw today's they pushed the rabbit out four hundred yards from us. It got out of ear shot. That was curious because you had that GPS color on that dog and I was like, listen to it fade and fade and fade, and fading, and I was wondering, like, well, how hell like in this thick cover, how far does the dog's bart travel? And when it faded out of earshot, you held up four fingers to me and said, like there four yards out and it was a long time yet I appreciate you hear him coming back, coming back, coming back. We'veventually killed that rabbit. Yes, yeah, we had to. We had to push it back into the area. It's amazing to watch. By that time, we've kind of like almost it seemed like we we had to move up. We're jockeying in a position kind of maybe get like a half moon half circle. We came up I think three times only there before before we got that right back into the area, but no one got a crack at him. And then he went back out and started cutting smaller circles, so we had to like move our Yeah, like imagine he's just going like a big spiral, like a traveling spiral, like a circle that moves around on a page, and we're always trying to go up and get But you gotta be quiet, extremely quiet with a swamp rabbit, extremely because if he hears it, he's just gonna avoid you. Yes, yeah, yeah, that that they were short stop. And when I hung on there last year, I saw that they would get up there and do those short circles and they'd be a group of people back and and I don't know if you had a chance to notice that, if some even someone that whispered trying to whisper, how that sound would carry that far? And uh, I had Chris with me as his You know, Jason's coming through the weeds there, but you know, something crashing through there is a natural saying m but the briars and a brush hitting his corridora Chaps was a man made sound. And when they hear the man made sound there, they just go other way. I never will forget that deer hunting one time, or deer shooting. I'm not a deer hunter. I'm a deer shooter that down at pause, climbed up in the tree stand and had some cover roles on. I think I it got hot and I just didn't have room for him up to stand, and for some reason I just threw them down on the ground. Well I had a little prong horn, but come up to those cover roles and smell of them there. Then I thought well, I need some meat for the freezer, I says, I'm like the last day of dear says, I'm just gonna go ahead and shoot him his books young and timber. And as soon as I clicked, I mean, he smelt of my cover rows. But as soon as I clicked that, just for some reason, I just did the man click on the safety instead of an easy saved. As soon as that that gun clicked, that deer knew that that was not a sound of the woods and ran off. And that was one of the neatest things out in the woods. You know, he's snuggling up to your cover y. Yeah, I mean he's sitting there sniffing of the cover roles I just had on. That didn't really bother him, But that metallic sound did. I have that conversation all the time with people where I'd be like, everybody holds still. You know, we're gonna wear earth tones, we're gonna wear camouflage. Everybody's gonna hold real still. People like, oh yeah, but I was at one time jogging and I had a red shirt and I ran right past the here. I'm like, that's great, I'm glad they happened to you. But like I said, we're gonna wear a camouflage. We're gonna still because you just don't know, Like you don't know what their deal is. Everyone of them is different, you know. The rabbid thing. I found that my experience doing rabbit drives, and we spent tons of time doing rabbit drives, this one thing is getting a sense of how the rabbit is gonna travel and then being cognizant of your shooting lanes. I found beneficial today very much, very much like you're always like you're always jockeying, and you were encouraged me in that direction too. You're always jockeying to be like once the first spot I walked into, you told me there's no point being here. Yeah, you can't see anything because you need to see you Ideally, you want to get where you're seeing forty yards through a little lane so that when the dogs run that thing through, you got a chance to look at it. Because it's not gonna be like a long time. You're gonna have a narrow, narrow window, you know, into a three foot of elevation makes a big difference. You know. I actually saw somebody in the deer standarday trying to see what was going on, and that really and I killed and I actually killed a contentail the other day when Jayson and I we're hunting there. I got that twelve fourteen feet in the air, saw the rabbit coming, it comes by, you know, and getting that everybody else on the ground, and you know, you get advantage. And just sometimes two or three foot standing on the stump a lot of times will give you a little bit of an age out there. And you want your field evasion out to you know, if it's a big tree right there in front, try to move maneuver up and get in front of that tree and get a little height advantage there where you can say because if you if you have no if it's all a thick cover, you have no chance of you know, get the shot. Seeing what's coming out there, and it doesn't take much to hide those rabbits now now talking in feet, not really in yards. Once they get to that fifteen twenty ftmark, all of a sudden, just like the smallest little bit of briar lee for something, they stopped and you're like, where do you go? Where do you go? I was standing next to two They are gonna name any names now, but two guys where I'm like, there's a rabbit coming. There's a rabbit coming. See him coming right at you at twelve o'clock, and I mean, he's just hopping along reel slow. But the guys were just weren't picking him up, know, out of that dear stand. That was interesting because you're right. Also, I got little elevation. I could see a rabbit at it like two yards. And imagine you put down your three middle fingers down on the table, and I'm looking down kind of your middle finger, which is like this thick but small tree, you know, brush kind of cover, and there's two open lanes being your other two outside fingers, and I sent three hunters. One of them kind of is close hugging your middle finger, and then the other the other hundred the other two hunters are each taking those open lanes and just kind of working towards the main forest out away from me where I saw this rabbit. They worked through there. They wait a while. The dogs were doing a circle on another you know, rabbit somewhere off in the distance. They wait, wait, wait, ten or fifteen minutes goes by, no rabbit. They don't kick up the rabbit. They move on out of sight. You know, this is two hundred yards away from me, not ten minutes later, right down my middle finger coming right at me through that you know, rough rush. Here comes a swamp rabbit. Maybe not the same rabbit, but I mean right with These three hunters have just rocked through, and here he comes, just slipping through. Yeah, they're super sneaky. It's one of the more you know, I've done all kinds of hunting. It's one of the more exciting things is when those dogs get on the track, and it's not exciting right away because you know it's gonna be a long ass time until they bring it back around. So when they first take off, you can just sit there b s because it's like nothing to get that excited about. But eventually they'll bark way the hell out. They get a couple hundred yards out, you'll kind of hear them come back. Then everyone will be like, okay, we better get serious. And you fan out and you get where you got a little lane, maybe two lanes, you can actually see what's going on down in the swamp, and you hear those dogs coming. You know he's out ahead of them. Is one of the most exciting hunting moments there is, Man, I had a great time, you know, you know, I get excited out there and like should you hear a pack of those bagels and they go off and then you look at your GPS and are starting to come back, and you know, and then you they get louder as I come, louder as I come. Not to get a smile on your face. A lot of times, little buggers. I don't call them many things cute in this world, but those little buggers have just a smidgeing of cuteness. And they're just coming through their their tails. Because I asked Jason about this, Why don't because they're all those tails are bleeding. Oh yeah, And I thought, well, man, just dock them, you know. He said, oh no, I gotta see those tails wagon. Oh yeah, Like you have a dozen of those little dogs. They're having the best tip. They have more fun than anybody you have does, those little dogs. And they're just like little like vacuums, man, and noise they make and they're coming to and they all got blood coming off the end of their tails and they are just fired up, having the time of their life. And it's like nothing's gonna escape their notice. Man, it's just amazing to watch, if you know, you know how Adam and we are to him after we kill the rabbit, to show those dogs that we've got the rabbit, because some of them keep going. You know, they just that's their heart. They just that's what they're made to do, is to run a rabbit. And if you do not show some of them right there, they keep on looking for that that rabbit out there. That was another thing I enjoyed quite a bit. As they'd run a rabbit and like you said, the rabbits hundred yards out ahead of the dogs. You shoot the rabbit, go over, pick the rabbit up, talk about the rabbit for couple myths, and meanwhile the whole time er er er er, and eventually they run that rabbit right up to where you're standing. And then they're all like, hey, you got it, you know, and you show them all the rabbit. What was interesting about that is that, you know, speaking of like your scroll dolls having that sighting ability, those beagles they don't see that dead rabbit until their nose touches it. You know, some of them, you just kind of got it. Yeah, you know, they're they're so intent on that track that scent on the ground. Are you just gotta really get some of them, you know, and say hey there here, you know, wagon, let it smack him in there to get him to do it there. And then after they get it, you know, we had a couple of them that are pretty intent on getting hold of the dead rabbit. You know. Sometimes some of them they don't after they see it right there, they don't care. They know it's dead there. But there's but we got two or three in there that are you know, they're being there hanging on. You gotta watch it or they're gonna be stripping all the hides and stuff off the rabbit. You're interesting, I noticed, is you gotta dogs, but you bad to that when you get a squirrel, butch you bad. Till likes to eat the head right off the sir, he'll eat it right off. I don't you know. It's just something that that he does. That that he knows that, you know, twenty two heads shot there and and he eats it off and usually nine times at then he stops right there, you know, And that's that's all he wants, is the heat does he want? He'll may eat five or six of them out there. This is incredible to me, just chomps the head up, hiding everything, teeth and all up, chop. He was passed out. It doesn't even he doesn't even make like a weird turn. He doesn't. What's your what do you like? Eating the most out of squirrels and rabbits and like swamp rabbit regular eastern cotton tails for personally squirrels. The squirrel, uh is the most mildest meat out there. You know, they eat the nuts all the time and there, and to me it is the mildest taste of meat. And I think, like we've had the conversation under I don't know anybody that I haven't prepared any for that didn't say, hey, this was really really good meat. I used to take it to we had church potluck dinners take it. They're people would would starrow the nose finally kind of shame them into not eating something, and after they ate it said hey, this is really good. And then the next time we have a meeting or pot luck or something, you didn't bring it. So why didn't you fix any squirrel this morning? So you know, I just didn't have time to do at But I've converted a lot of people that thought squirrel was just a rodent or whatever out there that there was not fifty two. It's a very good source of protein. What are some of your favorite way? If you had to rattle off, like a half dozen favorite ways to fix squirrel, what would you say? You know, the chicken fried, squirreld baked squirrel in the oven is the easiest way, you know, quartered up, put it in a a cooking pan. Put your favorite type of season, whether it's tony satuaries, lemon pepper. I made a whole bunch of lemon pepper one time and put a put a It was like when you know when these great big aluminum pans to to the a good old boy function there and put lemon pepper over it with a few tabs of butter in there, low and slow on the oven two twenty five for about two to three. IROs kind of depends on your oven. In the in the mount of squirrel, you have the meat just falls right off the bomb. I mean you can just suck the meat right off the bone there. That is the easiest way. Uh. Squirreling dumplings, that's the one. I just to clarify, though, no liquid in that pan. No liquid, the raw meat, put some butter in air covered with foil through the oven. Three I or there. Four if you kill a bunch of two year old bucks, Yeah yeah, maybe a little bit longer, a little bit less their easy, easy, easy easy. My favorite that you've made you made squirrel a bunch of ways for us or the last few days is the dump like the dumplings your mom made, well, she does them in the squirrel broth. Ye, she'll put up. I had taken her several squirrels up there before you guys came and asked her to make me some some squirreling dumplings, which she favors for there. She makes a broth with the squirrel meat, takes the squirrels out, picks the meat off the bones, then takes the broth, makes her dumplings, drops her dumplings into the bowling broth, and that cooks. The cooks the dumplings, the dumps the squirrel meat back in there, and it's just like almost melts in your mouth. No, it's ridiculous. You make squirrel chowder. Squirrel chowder is is another another very very good uh recipe. Um Kentucky burgoo burg oo. Another one of my favorites we didn't get to do is a squirrel on a open charcoal uh, really like a cold fire over over a grill, and keep them basted. Make up a a sauce of one gallon vinengor um, a pound of lard, uh, two sticks of butter, and a can of like Texas pete or or glass bottle Texas pete or or whatever kind your uncle Frank's hot sauce. Frank's hot sauce. Mix that up and keep those squirrels basted in that. And and that's yeah, to keep them basic, keep them from drying out. It's a little bit takes a little bit. It's a little bit of time to do that, but you know, you're setting out with your eyes and it's a good good way. You don't drink a beer or whatever. Sit out there and cook that. And it's that is excellent. That is really good. I've had good luck grilling squirrel by take the squirrel cutting five pieces. It's got four legs the back. Now these are home squirrel, So that do that away home squirrel, the hole squirrel, keep them based down, big fox squirrel comes out really good. That a way too, And that's apple cider vinegar, not not white bitter. You're cooking them only till they're done. Yes, yeah, so it's done them. You can kind of stick a fork in them, and you know when it goes penetrate, you know that they're they're done. I've done, retake a bunch of garlic in time leaves and mashing the mortar and pestle, just pulp it. They put salt in there and then olive oil and some lemon stir it up, and I marinade the squirrel pieces there. But I got ahead of myself before I do that. I take the squirrel and put on the cutting board all the pieces and take a meat fork, like a sharp time fork, and poke it a bunch of times all over, so the marinade gets in there better then a marinade that eight hours or overnight. Then I do them by my grill, just two done, not like trying to slow. Was grill them on medium heat, too done, and they just get where he started a chart A little bit, just like if you're grilling chicken, like a little bit of char on there is very good, but you marinade for the night. I know a friend, uh, he had an elderly gentleman that's friend of him. And I don't know where the wrist bee comes from. But he used to like to take a host squirrel, he said, and keep the ribs on it, dress it out and make a dressing and put it into the cavity and then take a needle and thread and sew it back up. I need to go probably see him do that sometime. But he just he just went wild over that. But he made some kind of dressing stuff squirrel and took a took you know, you know, I took a needle, thread, sold it up in that cavity there and baked him into heaven. So that that sounds something that we probably ought to try sometimes. Yeah, that's interesting. Many have a nice visual appeal, Yeah, including thoughts. If you're not hunting squirrels, you are missing out. Yeah, I think you're stupid. You're stupid. If you don't want squirrels, I think you're messed up in the head. I mean, look not to nothing against Wisconsin white til deer hunting, but we took Helen and Brittany out there a couple of weeks ago. They had a blast deer hunting. They learned a lot but they're cooked on squirrel two days of squirrel hunting. I mean they wanted more and more and more and more of it. Yeah, they loved it. It trained you to be a good woodspin town. You know. When I met you, you know what what I think one of my my points of that said, I said, you know, I said, you're doing the outdoor shows out there, says you know, not very many kids can go out and go on al khunt or something out west there if you can go on deer count. But I said, just about every kid can go out of his back door and go squirrel hunting with a limited amount of equipment. Yeah, for more months out of the year than you can't, right, And and that's probably one reason why I'm like a squirrel hunter, because I can't hunt. You know, I hunt a little bit when the leads around with my dollars, getting them in shape, training them up. It's pretty difficult. You might get one out of ten. But I'm out there hunting. But then I've got December, January. In February got almost ninety days of squirrel hunting, and most of the Midwest, well Montana, there's you know, you hunt them. There's someplace you hut them a year ound and most of the Midwest you start hunting him in September. You can hunt him September, October, November, December, January, off in February. Some states have an early season, and then they opened the thing up for six months later on. And then, like we said yesterday, you can tie it into whatever. If you're a big game hunter, uh, bear, deer, whatever is out there, you can say, what's going on with those guys? After? How many buck scrapes we find? Man? I lost track probably at thirty? How many scrapes we found hunting squirrels? Did you see some of those giant rubs that we saw today? We found cops found two turtle shells, found two turtle shells, found, a drop, anler found. I don't know how many buck scrapes we can find, all guys junk on the woods, tracks all over the place. What's your concluding thought? Take a kid squirlhead first, ganchi yet make a hunter out having or her or her that's great. And we had a we had a young lady with us today got her first swamp rabbit. Oh yeah, so that was that was congratulations. Cover all shot with that pistol then really showed a shotgun. Uh. You know another tidbit today when we was hunting, we didn't get to see it, but the other guys did get to say. It is that that a county packed in with the with the bagel hands. We were still don't know for sure if the county was was chasing the dogs. They said he was barking on track, or if he was helping him chase the rabbit there. So that would be another thing to be very interesting thing to say when you're out in the woods. Oh, speaking of Western gray squirrels, you guys got your You guys got to California Hunt Eat shirt coming out? Yes, how long until now? It's gonna be after the holidays. I would check on the website. January one skinny's out. Yeah, we at Wisconsin, p A, Pennsylvania. It will also be out first of the year. The skinny one's got one on it. It's the UH. I don't want to it's not old. I think it's the It might be actually the retro UH state stamp, the official state stamp that we converted into a hunt to Eat T shirt, and California's got wildhog on it. The last doll sheep. Pa has got a white tailed deer. Man. You need to do Kentucky with a small game theme, swamp rabbit the squirrel. Well, I've got a small game themed Sure it's not stay affiliated in the works as well. Good. My concluding thought would be, I am so glad that when I was young we had that we could hunt squirrels right out of our house, because it just learns you to, like teach you how to go out in the woods and read sign yes, and you get a lot of shooting, and you just learn one of your one of those old timers you had out there today. You guys are talking, you're saying, like, go sit in the woods, in the world will come to you. That was that was one of the the old timers that did lots and lots of hunting. And that's one thing he told me. He said, you just get out there and said in the woods in the world will come to you. Be patient. Another thing he said about the coyote falling in with that pack of eagles, as he says, you know, you go out in the field long enough, it's amazing what you're gonna see. It's not all about taking game, you know. There's sometimes out there you just see things that just amaze you. And we've all seen that, and it is just another ding dong sunrise. Well, God, save a chicken, eat a squirrel, alright, anyone have any last thing to say Enjorge our hunting, Yes, sir, it was a pleasure, Kevin, thanks for having us, all right, signing off,