00:00:00 Speaker 1: I'm Casey, I'm Tyler, and you're listening to the Element podcast. 00:00:15 Speaker 2: What is happening everyone? My gracious Turkey season is over for a lot of people. 00:00:19 Speaker 3: Can you believe? 00:00:20 Speaker 2: It's so sad? 00:00:21 Speaker 1: But I'm so happy because, I mean, deer season is coming up soon and we are ecstatic for the opportunity to enunciate all about deer, all those fancy words that y'all love to hear. Tyler Jones and Eric Gentry are here with us today. I've been doing some turkey and we're gonna talk about some of that, and then we're also gonna deep dive into the Illinois buck Truck story. If you don't know, the Element has got videos on Meat Eater these days. The buck Truck is out and if you're hearing this right now, the third episode is out. We'd really appreciate it if you go watch, go comment and tell people what you think about the video, be honest and just just you. 00:01:04 Speaker 3: Know, show you support all that kind of stuff. 00:01:06 Speaker 1: Oh, by the way, speaking of Meat Eater, it is the spring sale for First Light FHF Gear Phelps Game calls all that good stuff out there. There's a lot of stuff that's at a pretty good discount. I use that chest harness from FHF a lot, and it is I think twenty year or twenty five percent off right now, which is a pretty good deal. There's some Wick stuff which is acclaimed the best marino out there, even from people who aren't like first light diehards. You know, Tyler, you went on a sheep hunting like ninety eight or something like that, and you advise to get some Wick marinos back then. 00:01:48 Speaker 2: A guy who has tried all of it. Man, Yeah, for sure, that's what I have, some old school stuff. It's still in the closet. Eric. You you say one of the more underrated pieces. The first slide is the Catalyst, correct. What do you like about it? 00:02:04 Speaker 4: I like the how durable it feels on the outside, and it's good if you really want to wear it for cold weather, you can layer stuff under it and be fine, or you can wear it in hot weather. 00:02:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of you're right, like the layering aspect of it. It layers nicely because it's not like puffy or fluffy, you know what I mean. It's kind of just goes smooth on. I did wear that in New Mexico this past week a little bit, and I do like it. Eric, by the way, it is a like apparel and geared junkie. He likes that stuff, so if he, if he recommends it, it's worth you that it's right right there is on sales well, I think five percent something like that. It is. 00:02:46 Speaker 1: There'll be a link in the podcast description for you all to go click if you want. It supports us, so when you do go through that link. So if you like us, then we'd appreciate you clicking at least maybe doing some shopping. You don't have to buy now, but you probably should because there's a decent chance to this stuff won't be around. 00:03:02 Speaker 2: At that price for much longer. Yeah, you've got a you've got a short window here, mm hmm, as Mark Jury likes to say. So, speaking of those boys. 00:03:10 Speaker 1: Are from Illinois, right, and we're gonna talk a little bit of or not from Eric's like, well, from northeast central Illinois, which claim. 00:03:18 Speaker 2: Then, but I actually didn't know what they were. 00:03:20 Speaker 1: That's why I was like, I don't know if they're from I think it's from Missouri. Actually, I thought they got a bunch of land in Hunt, Illinois. 00:03:26 Speaker 2: A whole lot no they got hotels. 00:03:31 Speaker 3: And uh. 00:03:32 Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about the Illinois buck truck here in just a bit, but first we have got to cover uh actually one of the more enjoyable things I have done in a while, and that is hunt turkeys out west. We went turkey hunt last year with their buddies over at dead End, Mitchell and Patrick and Mark and all them guys, and uh had a lot of fun doing that, but I kind of personally, at least enjoyed the camaraderie more than I did this. The scenery the Midwest in the spring is just kind of a muddy mess of just plout fields. 00:04:10 Speaker 2: With nothing in them and stuff. 00:04:11 Speaker 1: And the turkeys are fun to shoot and they're really cool to call them in and all that stuff, especially when you're with a good caller. But I kind of was looking for something a little different, a little bit more, and heading west to hunt Miriams sounded like a lot of fun. People always talk about the parallels of elk hunting and turkey hunting, and I'm not a big fan of that, but when you go turkey hunting and where the elk live, it does feel a lot more like that, especially the lung burn and we'll get into that here in a little bit. So Tyler, I and Eric all hunted some turkeys out west. 00:04:47 Speaker 2: Are we gonna say what state? Are we gonna leave that? 00:04:49 Speaker 1: No? 00:04:49 Speaker 2: I think we tell them, man, all right, we're hunting New Mexico. It ain't that big a secret. No, it ain't like it's easy. If I gonna hunt Mariams, that'd be the last state of hunt. If I didn't live in Texas, I think New Mexico. Yeah really, I just yeah, I think if I live somewhere else where, like because I was close to New Mexico, then it's easy to go there. But like I would think hunting hunting them in Montana and Wyoming is. 00:05:12 Speaker 1: The place if you want to go kill Miriams. Like it seems, yeah, like that's the place to do it. 00:05:16 Speaker 2: Everybody I know that hunts them up in those two states just smoke them. So yeah. 00:05:21 Speaker 1: In fact, our buddy Parker, we were just on his podcast the other day and he's headed to Montana. 00:05:26 Speaker 2: I think he got there today to go hunt Miriams. Yeah. 00:05:29 Speaker 1: So it's it's a thing that people travel to go do. And I feel like I. 00:05:32 Speaker 2: Should stand up when we podcast see like a Pat McAfee kind of thing, you know what I mean? Doesn't he stand up when he podcasts? I don't know. Yeah, I think I should do that. I'm mnna start doing that, maybe not yet, but. 00:05:44 Speaker 1: See, yeah, I've been thinking about the standing up thing in general, just for the the calork thing. 00:05:48 Speaker 2: Come over here and sit down all day. Not colonic. No, we were talking about the smell of his colon the other day, don't Pat McAfee's. 00:06:01 Speaker 3: There's the it's I guess is me and Greg. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: There's like a Twitter account I follow that's it's you aren't gonna do the stand I feel. 00:06:09 Speaker 2: Like I really like this lot. I don't need to. I need I needed something to set this drink. 00:06:13 Speaker 1: On that currently for your standing height, it's just a weird hot I'm just facing away from you. But their for Colin. There's a there's a Twitter account I followed called. 00:06:29 Speaker 2: What's it called. 00:06:29 Speaker 1: It's called like Internet Hall of Fame, and uh, there's this post from like two thousand and eight of a girl who's talking about her boyfriend and she said, I just love the smell of his colon talking about. 00:06:40 Speaker 2: It's just every time I see it, it makes me laugh. So hard. 00:06:45 Speaker 1: It's just a really funny bathroom humor, you know, which is great for my maturity level. Oh well, anyways, when you're trying to smell colons and you're up real high in the mountains, it's hard to smell them. 00:06:59 Speaker 2: That's where we've be in. 00:07:00 Speaker 3: That's my transition is to that. So the air's then up there. 00:07:04 Speaker 2: Behavior air tends to go into the valley. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: Eric has been hunting a place that you had to get a limited permit draw for. It's a place that made you hunt with a bow, which Eric has a little experienced hunting turkeys with a bow, you can say, and not a. 00:07:22 Speaker 2: Lot, right, but. 00:07:26 Speaker 1: He he uh comes from a land that's not down under, but they still don't like the firearms there. 00:07:36 Speaker 2: So Eric is very close to Santa Claus live. Eric is kind of a made up world, you know. It's a make your own rules. Everything seems good on the outside, but there's a lot. 00:07:48 Speaker 1: Of just and then all those rules just radiate out from there and everybody's like, oh wait, we should try this, and we're like, maybe you shouldn't turn around and go back where you're from. 00:07:55 Speaker 2: Uh, so. 00:07:58 Speaker 1: You we we actually did a little, but a bow hunting turkey's with you a few years back, and uh, we didn't have a lot of success, but saw some birds and had fun doing it, and you thought that you'd go out and try your hand at it this year. 00:08:12 Speaker 3: Eric, what is your one liner about bow hunting turkeys? 00:08:17 Speaker 2: My one liner? He's only giving you one line. 00:08:23 Speaker 1: That's a three words, Yeah it is. Why why would you say that a person shouldn't. 00:08:29 Speaker 2: Bow hunt turkeys? 00:08:30 Speaker 4: It's just difficult, Yeah, I mean, if you if to get him into range, like at that point, just it's fair to have a gun, I feel like, because getting drawn is the worst part. 00:08:42 Speaker 2: Yeah, And. 00:08:46 Speaker 1: I can imagine that with a shotgun pretty much if you hit the turkey, there's a good chance they die. With the bow, it's probably not that way, Like you just have to Turkeys have vitals as weird as it sounds, and if you don't hit those, you might have a hard. 00:08:59 Speaker 2: Time and then they have fluffy feathers and all this and that. I ain't trying to be a preservationist or anything here, but like there's a lot of turkeys getting hit by TV guys that they ain't find it. I would imagine, so same with deer too. Yeah, so but let's just you know, let's not fool ourselves here. 00:09:19 Speaker 1: Well, there's a reason that they give out more archery tags and archery has a longer season normally across all mediums of game. Right, it's because the likelihood of success is lower with archery gear than it is with. 00:09:37 Speaker 2: Firearms. And now there are a lot of archery people who like, like, oh, it's not well, it is true. 00:09:44 Speaker 1: Maybe not in your hands, hypothetical person, but in general, the generalization is that point shotgun, go bang, turkey. 00:09:52 Speaker 2: Die, right, So it ain't better. It's fun, man, as a shotgun thing is like I just love it because I've talked about it before. But it is an abrupt end to a cool moment, as opposed to when you shoot that thing with a bow and he starts like running off, You're like heart attack all the time. Instead of just enjoying that moment of him strutting in and like it just being over and just laughing and letting all this steam off. Instead you just get more anxiety because it run steam. 00:10:20 Speaker 1: Right, Because like in the mornings, when you shoot a shotgun, there's this weird thing that happens. You talked about this, but something about the air you breathe in right after the shot effects Like is it gun smoke? No, it's it's something to do with that, like you breathe in a hot blast of air or something off the gun, and then when you breathe out, your. 00:10:39 Speaker 2: Breath fogs more for some reason. It's really cool. 00:10:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's all there's a video of me shooting some pigs that did the same thing. Eric was filming and like, as your first filming job, it was man could job field it wild? 00:10:51 Speaker 2: Well, you're first one of us. 00:10:53 Speaker 3: Yeah, so yeah, it's a lot of fun to do that. 00:10:58 Speaker 2: Eric, tell us more about the struggles of your hunt man between. 00:11:06 Speaker 4: Running into other hunters at the worst time and then having mule deer around me at the worst time. Like I don't know if they like turkey calls or something, but every time we called a bird end, there was a mule. 00:11:17 Speaker 2: Deer near it. Eric, it's a weird thing that you observed that Are they inquisitive? I've had two now I have a turkey hunt a lot. 00:11:25 Speaker 1: If if you were an Element follower, you know, it's just not something we do a ton of tyler shooting flies with bucket sault right now, just vagorizing the suckers. 00:11:37 Speaker 2: And which has a top pattern too. By the way, it's pretty nice. You got to judge the distance. 00:11:41 Speaker 4: Yah, that's right. 00:11:44 Speaker 3: What was I talking about? Oh, the deer ruin in the hunt? 00:11:47 Speaker 1: So one time in Texas we had deer mess up a turkey hunt, and one time in Iowa we had deer mess up a turkey hunt. Meal deer uh no, those are gonna be white tails, but just deer in general. It's kind of strange how I think it's a thing. I think deer mess up turkey hunts. 00:12:05 Speaker 2: I think they I would imagine they're used to turkeys enough that they're not real scared of them. And it's also like a it's like a maybe a form of entertainment for them to see something and go check it out and see what it's up to you or whatever. Yeah, that's what I was talking Yeah, yeah, you were you filming me that night? No, I don't think it. 00:12:26 Speaker 1: Was Yeah, yeah, Like straight up, we had a gobbler coming in the deer like mess around. And it's kind of because turkeys know they're not the top dog in the woods, right, Even the gobblers. 00:12:38 Speaker 2: Know they're not the top dog. 00:12:40 Speaker 1: When there's a bunch of jakes around, like they just are just used to trying to get eaten, So like a big unngulet, even though it's you know, a deer is not going to eat them, they're still kind of weird about it, right, So, like, I don't know, they're just so instinctive that they they don't reason as to why they're scared of something or why this's messes mo. They just know that, Ah, this is a weird situation. I'm going to live to strut another day. So were you doing the traditional like roost them and roast them out there? 00:13:08 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean we're roosting a ton of birds every night, so that's basically what we were doing. And we were using a decoy for most of the time, but then found out that certain situations it's probably not best to use a decoy, and we were in situations where we didn't think it was right. 00:13:27 Speaker 2: To have it. Why is that? What's the situation? 00:13:30 Speaker 4: I think when there's a lot of trees or you know, terrain, a bird shows up and then all of a sudden sees a bird decoy, it freaks them out a little bit. Where like if it's in the open, I think if they see it from further away, they can get warm up to it and maybe come in. 00:13:46 Speaker 2: Then this might be a thing for all animals. 00:13:48 Speaker 1: Todd, you were hunting Texas public this year and had something kind of similar with deer happened. You remember you were with Greg and had a big buck coming in and there was some other deer around. 00:14:04 Speaker 2: Hunted with Greg this year. Yeah, I did, Yeah, I remember, yeah, Okay, yeah, colle dude, slow. 00:14:14 Speaker 1: Deer hunting that half of last year, and I'm slow this year. So this morning and this year too, Yeah, what happened in that situation? 00:14:22 Speaker 2: Yeah? So, I mean I really have watched the video back and everything, and I think this is truly the case. This deer this coming in down basically this trail kind of in a into the wind, but he's not able to win the two dos that we have at like twenty yards, and when he comes around this brush pile, I mean it's an immediate reaction. He like looks up and just boom and there's no pause or anything. But it freaked him out because he just saw deer at like thirty yards forty yards all of a sudden, and it freaked him out, and he like busted out and then stopped, and I guess kind of look back a real briefly. I don't even know if he did look back or not, but I know once he started heading away, he just walked, but like not spooked. He just it's like he realized those were deer. But I still just am an old buck, and I'm just gonna go y, you know. I mean, that's not part of my plan out yet exactly. It's just a weird, you know thing where like these animals are instinctual and they they they're reactive, you know, and they and so I don't think there's a ton of processing that goes on. It's more just instinct and reacting at. 00:15:35 Speaker 1: You're almost act a lot different than hunters, whereas like we are at least I'll speak for myself as a hunter, I'm always trying to capitalize on the moment as good as I can, and I think that animals oftentimes are like. 00:15:51 Speaker 2: I don't like that one little thing. So I'm just gonna wait till tomorrow. 00:15:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, because it's that they live in groundholl day pretty much every day is the same. They have seasons that change, but like November sixth is no better than November seventh to a whitetail buck. 00:16:06 Speaker 2: They're trying to they're trying to survive. Yeah, that literally is everything appropriate. But that's part of survival, right. 00:16:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, That's what I'm saying, is like they're weighing out within their survival. They're trying to weigh out food, water, shelter, in sex. That's what they're trying to do. And they're like, and they understand the slow game a lot better than what I think we give them. 00:16:28 Speaker 2: Cred when you've got multiple places you can drink water, multiple places you can eat food, multiple doughs, multiple dough bedding areas like that, Like you said that versus survival is as the only kind of deduction that they make, and they're just like, well, let's just go do this, because you know, at the end of the day, I don't get to eat, drink, or breed if I don't survive. So I mean, truly, survival is top. 00:16:57 Speaker 1: You just alluded to one of my favorite conjugations in the English language, which is a conjugation of the form Uh. Well, the word is deduce, and deduction is that I like the word deduced. 00:17:10 Speaker 2: You know, deduce is like on my pa, two is it? Yeah, like when you drop like a big rock in the water. 00:17:19 Speaker 1: So, Eric, you figured out the decoy thing, and uh, it seemed like after y'all deduced that, uh, you kind of were like up in the birds a little bit more they were. 00:17:32 Speaker 4: So we had one encounter with the decoy where uh, two I think they were jakes. They may have been like really young Tom's I don't know, but two jakes came in and they kind of locked up and didn't come all the way, and Tom came and beat up on them, started fighting them, and they just never fully committed. So when we stopped using the decoy, that's where we realized they were coming in a little bit more because they they didn't see d and they kept moving in closer because they knew they heard a hen there. 00:18:04 Speaker 1: How close were you setting the decoy up to yourself when you're having the decoy problems? 00:18:08 Speaker 4: Well, I thought I was setting it up at like twenty But every time I set it up and get set down, say crap, that's only at fifteen yards. 00:18:14 Speaker 3: I think that's good. 00:18:15 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:18:15 Speaker 1: I think one thing I learned from from Mitchell Johnson was that dude, he'll set up decoys way closer than the shot range. I mean, whenever I shot my eye with turkey, those decoys are like at twelve yards and that turkey came riding and pecked on it. But the idea is your turkey gets locked up on decoys, you're still in range if your decoys are at like ten twelve yards, you know, but if you set it up to twenty to thirty yards, well, if your turkey's locked up, he's like at sixty and you're talking about scrolling pin range at that that's pretty tough to hit a turkey, especially the boat stuff at that range. 00:18:50 Speaker 2: Right. 00:18:50 Speaker 4: We also dialed in like how we should set up on the terrain because with the decoy, a couple of times we set up to where when the turkey came in and they were basically walking at us, and that wasn't good because they could see anything past the decoy. So we dialed it into where all of our setups like they would come from like behind us or to the side of us. And we're seeing better encounters with that too. 00:19:15 Speaker 1: We're just watching some footage of your hunt and before we get into like the encounter stuff too much, you're talking about setup there as an archery hunter. It's it seems to be different than just like a shotgunner, right, because as a shotgunner you kind of just face straight on. You can pick up your gun shoot, or you have your gun propped up and shooting, whereas with archery you're thinking about your strong side and shotguns to an extent, you have a strong side in week side. 00:19:40 Speaker 2: But it's just not as finicky as archery year, right, So I'll talk about that a little bit. 00:19:47 Speaker 4: Yeah, it's basically I'm left handed, so I was looking for a lot of stuff out to my right. We had one morning where we had a bird roosted and he flew a bu Again, there's mule deer there, so I don't know if the meal deer freaked him out when he was on the roost, because he stayed up longer than any other bird that morning. And he also may have seen me set out the decoy. We were that close, so that could have happened. But he flew. He flew above us, and so we knew his exact where he was flying down. And uh, is that afternoon or the next afternoon. We set up a blind like in his landing zone pretty much to set up for that and he never came back in unfortunately. Yeah, but it was the same where we set that up is where we had the encounter that you guys just watched. 00:20:38 Speaker 2: That's so, tell me about that encounter. What happened there? 00:20:41 Speaker 4: Well, that morning we were actually since we didn't have that bird roosted, we went to another spot where we had birds roosted. We had a couple of them, and we went in pitched black like just amp thinking we're about ready to kill. And we get up close and then we see another hunter pulling the parking lot and we kind of sit there and watch and slowly see his headlamp go from smaller to bigger, walking right at us, you know, and I flag him down. He gets to us and I tell him, hey, we got birds here. We're gonna, you know, sit up here. And he's like, okay, well, I'll go over there and try to hunt another bird. You know, there's a bunch out here. And instead he walks up pretty much where we were going to go and calls to our birds all morning and got and spooks both of them off the roofs. We watch them fly completely down to the bottom, and then he was like walking around right under the roofs calling all morning and then comes to us and he's like, do you see see those birds. 00:21:43 Speaker 2: Spook off? And we're like, yep, sure did so, so y'all went back and slit his tires and he left out. 00:21:49 Speaker 4: And left us there, you know, no more birds. And that's the way. Like me and Michael heard birds across on another ridge, which is where we're setting up most of the time. We're like, well, let's just go back there and try to get on those birds. And so we rush over there and rush up to that spot we already had like built for that roof spot that we're going to try to get one of the land right in our laps. But get over there, make a few calls and the bird rafters down on the bottom and he responds. So we get set up and he's just not working, and so I tell Michael, I'm going to go up the hill, little one call and try to pull him to us. So I go up the hill, call come back. We sit down. Instead, we call a bird that's on our ridge just up the mountain a little bit. He's probably at we're probably at like eighty three hundred and this bird's at like nine around there that's high country. And so he responds and like he was for far when he first responded, and so we just sit there and be quiet, and like that's a thing we notice, is like calling once you go to bird's attention to just shut up and they can't take it. 00:23:00 Speaker 2: I guess though. 00:23:00 Speaker 4: Ten Yeah, like ten fifteen minutes goes by, and then I see the bird just walking towards us. 00:23:07 Speaker 2: Michael, there he is. And so that ten fifteen minutes, you don't know where this turkey is. 00:23:11 Speaker 4: We're not even really really worried about that bird because we're calling to the other one that's below us. 00:23:16 Speaker 1: But so let me rephrase the question. Fourteen or fifteen minutes, you're sitting there, don't know where a turkey is? 00:23:22 Speaker 4: Yeah, you're just basically we know one's in the bottom. And that's about it. Man, that's hard for me to do. 00:23:27 Speaker 1: I know it works, and I probably need to because I mean, I've seen it, but it's just hard for me. 00:23:32 Speaker 2: If I can't hear a bird, he can't take it, I can't do. I want to be moving around and getting on them, but. 00:23:40 Speaker 4: I feel like I'm the same way little like I just get him paid and like I tell Michael like, I'm gonna call, and I feel like sometimes he like gives me a look like. 00:23:48 Speaker 2: I mean, turkeys are the worst thing to hunt. I don't know, dude, Michael, there's some worst things. I only said that. 00:23:59 Speaker 3: For a we have a hundred bears or handle o for moose. 00:24:01 Speaker 1: Hit. 00:24:02 Speaker 3: Dude, I'm telling you, you think white on turkey's hard. 00:24:05 Speaker 2: No, the white clay. 00:24:06 Speaker 1: I know you're didn't messing with them, but the white clay nukeom hunts moose up there. 00:24:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's bad. That's bad. I know until I heard about that story. Man. 00:24:15 Speaker 3: Yeah, but so anyways, continue with your encounter there. 00:24:18 Speaker 4: Sorry, no, you're good. Uh that's my fault. Seeing the turkey above us. And like, man, when you see these turkeys, like you just see the white in their feathers and it sticks out. It's something about the Miriams. They just like they go with the land really well. I don't know how to explain it, but they just look cool in the mountains and they stick out really well. And he starts working down gobbles, and uh, he stands there for a long time because he he's trying to check out the area, you know, try to find that hint that he heard, and he just stands there, stands there. The one that we're we actually came to hunt is gobbling in the bottom, and so he's gobbling back of that one. Then starts working towards that bird down in the bottom, and I turned and gave a few calls to try to bring him back, and it worked, and he just came full strut in and like just start starts working towards us perfectly and gets to I ranged a tree at like thirty four and a half and he gets to about that spot and takes a couple steps closer and he's just standing there, full strut looking around. He's a really long snood and it's just flopping around everywhere, and. 00:25:31 Speaker 2: Bible calls him noodles yep, I get at. 00:25:36 Speaker 4: And then also we had a mule deer come in like within ten yards of Michael, just on the other side of him, and the turkey's just looking at this mule deer freaking out from looking at us, and he starts getting weird. He couldn't get drawn, no, he should have. So the turkey starts getting weird. He's strutting and like turns around and that's like my one time I was waiting for him to do that to draw, and I draw. I put it right on the middle of his body, and that's probably where I messed up. I should have picked a little better spot. Uh, put my thirty yard right on the middle of his body and shot and just went a little high. I think he jumped it just a little bit, but I don't think it was enough to do a lot. But it did something. But if I aimed a little lower into the riot, it would have been money. Being close try getting hard, especially with Bo's man. But I'm glad you had fun. I'm glad you had some encounters. 00:26:37 Speaker 1: I know it's kind of stuck with the pressure and just that kind of stuff with the weather and all that stuff. But yeah, and then you came and met us, it was pretty Uh yeah, we had fun as well. 00:27:08 Speaker 2: You know. We were like, well, if Eric and Michael. 00:27:10 Speaker 1: Are gonna be out there, we're gonna go out and uh you know, after their hunt, have them meet us. We're gonna go do some shotgun hunting and. 00:27:19 Speaker 2: And roll them. 00:27:20 Speaker 1: Right, We're just gonna kill a bunch of turkeys since uh, you know, we got guns, which is kind of tongue in cheek of course, because we aren't turkey hunters man. We're just trying to learn this stuff. And at some of the points Eric was making to some of the stuff that we found as well. We went out to a pretty pressured area and uh, there was not a. 00:27:41 Speaker 2: Lot of talking going on. 00:27:43 Speaker 1: But I think the first evening we did hoot up a bird or two, but we covered a bunch of ground and didn't find very many turkeys. 00:27:51 Speaker 2: It seemed there were. Is that how you are roosting birds by hating them? Yep? Yeah, found the louder we were the mouth. 00:28:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, we tried our call, but I don't know if it wasn't loud enough, Probably that. 00:28:06 Speaker 2: CAC was using a call that was hitting the right frequency. Was that the Is that the Harrison hooter? The Phelps one? Yeah, but for some reason years it looks different than mine. Now I have I have the plastic one. You have a wood one, and the plastic one is a lot louder. You can change. 00:28:19 Speaker 1: It's kind of like an elk call where you can change the baffles and how much back pressure you're getting. I have mind opened up all the way and uh, we noticed something to one of the things we learned, and y'all think y'all talked about the same deal is having a bunch of notes and you're out hooter. 00:28:35 Speaker 2: It doesn't do you a lot of good. 00:28:37 Speaker 1: Just going or whatever is the way to do it. That way, you can hear the bird answering you because you go. 00:28:46 Speaker 2: And then like all of a sudden, I can't hear the God. There's a couple of thound up. There's a couple of things to think about here, right. First of all, people like to hear themselves. Second of all, people like this is so I think about this in relation to camo where people like to think that, like, for instance, the camo. A lot of times like when I was I remember when I was growing up, we were going dove hunting and I was like, why don't I told my dad, I was like, why don't Why don't anybohy doesn't anybody make a sunflower patterned camo? And He's like, well, dudes wouldn't wear it, you know what I mean? Like, nobody's going to buy a sunflower camo to wear out into the so you know, and then uh. We we grew up bass fishing a lot, and we always talked. I always used to look through all the bass pro magazines, you know, and look at all the baits. There's some cool colors. It's like them colors are just there to sell the dudes, you know what I mean. So it's, uh, it's there's some things that you have to you have to like understand about yourself as a hunter. Is that sometimes you need to like think about what are all the time? Really you need to think about like what is logical in this situation? Not what do I like the best? Right? What does what helps me to kill the bird? And in this situation, just like you know, tequila sunrise color and a bass worm probably ain't no better than a green pumpkin, you know what I mean. It's it's like because we encountered this when Eric and I were roosting a bird on this trip, where you were doing like a two note screech out right, which is kind of can you do a quiet version of that or not something like yeah, yeah, so you heard you've heard the owl if you've been out in the woods before, and it's that kind of a thing, but real out and Eric can do it well. Eric, actually your calling was really really good on this trip. Man. You've gotten a lot better. But the gentry that's it, man, old gentry kiky. But so we he did this. He was going to do this two note screech out thing, which has a pause in the middle. He does the first note. This is a place that we had We had roosted a bird the first night that you were talking about, and then not until like the end of the trip that we go back there and we're able to roost one. Me and Eric are there. He hits that first note and he's like going into a second note, and you hear a gobble and he it was like so close to when he hits the second note that he actually like vocalizes that second note just for a split second and realizes it registers there there was a gobble, so he cuts it off and I was like, he goes, I shured to gobble. I was like me, dude, I'm pretty sure. And so I was like, I try just one note of the screech Now. He hits that one note and that thing just popped off again. We were like, all right, dude, so you know it really is and ends up there we had We went in the next morning, or I guess you went in the next morning with an attempt to make an attempt at it. I guess it was you and Michael, right and so, And that bird was still in there, like just because we didn't make a full screech out noise didn't spook him off the roost, you know what I mean. It's still hanging out in the same spot and just ended up flying well way out to pass. 00:32:03 Speaker 1: Y'all the things that a turkey will shot gobble off of in the evenings especially, doesn't matter. 00:32:11 Speaker 2: Go to moving their roost more than a couple of yards in the morning. 00:32:15 Speaker 1: I don't think you want to go underneath the turkey and go with a big old calog howl. I think they're gonna freak out. But in the evenings it don't matter. They're in their safe place. And we saw that we had some birds roosted that we were feeling real good about. Well, okay, we found the same group of birds the day before, first day of our hunt. The only place we found gobbles, Tyler and I and Greg were there. These two guys Michael and Eric were coming in from their hunt, and we went in that morning, set up the decoy, did the thing. Because we don't have a turkey hunt, we set up like one hundred fifty yards from the roost, and we're just gonna try to call them over. Well, those birds had hens and they left. We tried to chase them. Well, ends up we up calling him back. We're trying to scramble around and get set up, and we get seen. Gobbles stop, no turkeys. We're assuming we get seen, like, okay, duke, so that day's over because pretty much about nine am, dude, we were six. It's one of those things where like we got surprised, yep, like all of a sudden, we're like. 00:33:18 Speaker 2: He should do it, Oh my gosh, you know. 00:33:22 Speaker 1: And so we hit the dirt and got seen while hitting the dirt and uh then we heard another gobble up on a ridge, so we made a move on him, got close to that bird, got surprised again. We thought the bird was like three hundred yards away. I let out afore yelp just to try to get into gobble and he gobbles at like sixty yards. Freak out, hit the dirt, Tyler and Greg get the neaseles. Yeah, I'm pretty clock I saw him though. 00:33:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, we did see him, and he was falling on a hen, and so we didn't spook him, and uh, we made some assumptions, yes at that point, and he found like an area we're like interesting, and we made these assumptions that these were taking these gobblers away they don't like the other hens. Yeah, yeah, and so that helped us out. The next morning we essentially were able to go in the next morning. We roosted birds in that area again. That night, Like you were saying, at about nine o'clock, I mean, it. 00:34:17 Speaker 1: Was just futile, pretty much suns up, wind's blowing, Yeah, mountains. 00:34:21 Speaker 2: This is the way it goes the mountains. 00:34:23 Speaker 1: It's cool and still almost every morning, no matter what the weatherman says. And then as the thermals heat up, the wind starts moving around because of the temperature change. And then by about nine you get a decent amount of wind and it lasts till sundown and then all of a sudden it's dead quiet and you can hear stuff late in the evening. So throughout the midday it's almost impossible to find birds. We did not have a single good turkey thing happened on the whole trip from about nine. 00:34:53 Speaker 2: Am through the rest of the day. 00:34:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's tough, but we went back there that evening, assuming that that bird would still possibly be around because we didn't spook him. And we get out of the vehicle, Michael and Erica with us. Michael drops a water bottle and we're like, far from these birds. 00:35:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, and the water bowl was empty. It wasn't like a loud noise really, and then we walk up. 00:35:17 Speaker 3: We're gonna kind of pinpoint these birds. 00:35:19 Speaker 2: And I have a condition that our friend Gary likes to call the altitudes. 00:35:27 Speaker 1: To where whenever I get at a higher elevation, all of a sudden, I become very gaseous, and as grown men do, it's a fun thing to laugh about when another man thoughts. 00:35:41 Speaker 2: And I said, hey, y'all watch this, and I get all perched up on the other side of this ledge. No way, this actually worked, man, And I let one rip and the turkey shot gobbled off of it and it was one of my finer moments of woodsmanship in my life. 00:36:00 Speaker 1: We didn't get it on film because we're dumb. I'm not they are dumb, not me, because I was doing the farm and it worked. But no, I'm kidding. Bird was fired up, Yeah, dude, he was. And that's the that's the actual point like he was. He would have shot gobbled off anything at that point. 00:36:14 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:36:14 Speaker 1: And so we were feeling pretty good about our opportunity for the next morning, and pairing that with the concept that if he has hens, that the hens are going to take him the other direction and I can work a turkey diaphragm. Call Okay, Eric's pretty good at it. 00:36:35 Speaker 2: Uh. 00:36:35 Speaker 3: Tyler is not a fan of diaphragms in general. 00:36:38 Speaker 1: So our thought was going to be that I was gonna be aggressive and moving close on the birds. Y'all were going to stay off just a little bit and be quiet, and either way, one of us was gonna get opportunity at the bird. 00:36:50 Speaker 2: And we also weren't at this point we were in one hundred percent sure of our theory. Uh huh. We just thought we had seen this happen. So we were like, Okay, these these hens might be taking these gobs away. 00:37:01 Speaker 1: So one of the things that I feel like brings us success is that we formulate a theory quickly and put it to the test quickly. Yeah, we don't sit back three or four days and make sure this is what's going on. And there's a way for that to buitch in the butt for sure, but I think that the the good outcome falls in our favorite more often than not whenever we're. 00:37:25 Speaker 2: Just quick to move. You know another thing, man, you're just so good at this stuff, dude. Like the one thing that you did that is you watched videos from mountain hunting turkeys, and we watched them while we're up there, and we watched them before we left, and you just like pick stuff up like nobody else, dude, and just see stuff that I'm like not even paying attention to, and you go at some point you were like, man, I don't think these turkeys fly downhill hardly ever. And so we realized pretty quickly and even from the morning before when we set up on those birds that they are when they fly down, they're flying down either at the same level. So like if you're if you're like, say the birds on the side of a ridge, it's gonna fly down on that exact same tope of line or higher pretty much. 00:38:17 Speaker 3: Not exclusively, not always, but I mean most of the time. 00:38:19 Speaker 2: Percent of the time. 00:38:20 Speaker 3: There's a real good reason to do something else. 00:38:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, So that helped us with the game plan going into because these birds could have flown downhill. There was places forming the land downhill of where they're at. But uh, we were like, if they're more more than likely going to land this tope of line are up, then let's get like even with them and surround them and hopefully get shots uphill. And if you can get shots uphill, then we stand a decent chance here, right, So we we thought we got on opposite sides, and if he goes straight up hill or or you know, maybe straight downhill, we that's our you know, we may not get him. Outside of that, he's potentially, you know, gonna fly on some angle towards one of us. And so he's either gonna they're either gonna come at you because you're calling, or they're gonna go away from you. If they go away from ya stand a good chance. So I thought we weren't. We were gonna be a little less aggressive, but we're gonna still be pretty close. And Michael and I start kind of going up this mountain and and hearing him he's gobbling. It's he's starting to starting to get light. We got in there plenty early, which was one of the Michael's mountain. This is it's similar size wise, but it's uh, it's actually not in makeup, uh so constitution differently. So we're heading up this mountain and uh, all of a sudden, like we hear God when we're down there peak. We get up there close to Spike's peak and we uh, all of a sudden, he hammers, and I'm like, dad, gum it, he's close. And because I had I had just measured from the pen that I put on him the night before, and I was like, we're at one o five right now according to my my my measurement. Well, he hammers, and I'm like, dude, he's inside of one hundred. Has to be right now. So we end up kind of getting little bit closer when we wanted to. We stood there for a while. Wind started dying all of a sudden as it started getting light, and so I was like, when it gusts, we're gonna move up to that tree right there, like ten yards you know. Well we find I mean it took like ten or fifteen minutes. We finally get moved up to this tree and we set up on both sides of it, and we're sitting there, still pretty dark. He's hammering. Every once in a while. I'm like, dude, he's pretty close. You know, all of a sudden, it gets light enough I see something move up in the trees, and I'm like, dude, there's a bird. There's a turkey in that tree at like fifty yards, dude. And he takes him a second. He's on the other side of the tree from me. He sees it finally, and it turns out, as it's getting lighter, you can see it goblin and it is the gobbler in this in this pine tree, you know. And I was like, that's cool. So we watched him filming for a while and I'm like, man, this who knows this could go either way. I can hear you calling every once in a while, but it sounds like you're pretty good distance. It turns out you were even closer than we were. And We're sitting there and things are getting pretty light, and I'm like I started, I'm like looking at my phone. I'm like, man, it's it's time, you know, like getting time. So I put my We kind of had time to fly down from the day before. 00:41:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, at six o two on the dot, and like it literally anytime I heard turkeys fly down on this trip, it was six o'clock to six o five. 00:41:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, So like it was very specific. 00:41:24 Speaker 1: Which is actually like almost thirty minutes after shooting light. They stayed in the roots for a while, which is good because, yeah, shooting light is still real dark all about for sure. 00:41:33 Speaker 2: Yeah. And dude, so as it started getting like within after about maybe five or ten minutes after shooting light started, I get my I got my hand my finger on the safety like ready to rock, you know, and I'm just holding it just like this, being so still because that God was just right there and I can see him pretty good, but I can't quite get the perspective. It's one of those instances where there's there is brushing between you and him, so I don't know exactly how far he is, but we've got a good opening, like it looks like fifteen yards from him that he could just pitch down in that's just barely maybe slightly uphill, but almost straight, you know, on the top of line. And we're sitting there and he turns around on the tree and like a one eighty and starts gobbling back up at y'all, and I was like, well, it din't good for us, but it might be good for them, and that one a second he turns back around and I'm like, man, he's kind of getting kind of getting the itch, you know, all of a sudden, I hate this and it's not him. A hen comes flying from nowhere. I didn't even know there was a hen involved, you know. And she comes flying around the corner this brush and she's like a jet plane coming right at our stand. I'm talking freaked us out, dude. She's just she's coming, and I'm like, I'm thinking immediately, I'm like, this is perfect. She just keeps coming. Dude, literally lands at like fifteen steps or less probably, I mean, she lands right in our face, and immediately I guess sees this. We didn't move an inch, but she you know, they just see stuff. 00:43:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, y'all are somewhat in not like in the op. Yeah, brush arounds were up against the tree. 00:43:07 Speaker 2: You know. She sees something weird, so she starts kind of high necking. Well before she even lands, or about the time she lands, that God comes down right after. I mean I think it was before she land and he's coming. And so she lands, and she gets weird and she starts to walk the other way slowly, and the God lands like a few yards behind her. Probably he probably lands about thirty five from us, I think, and I'm just like, you know, I'm telling Michael, he's like strutting, you know, her half struck, kind of doing some weird stuff. Head's kind of doing some weird stuff. I tell Michael to give him a call, you know, because I want him to stretch his neck out a little bit. So he calls to him. He doesn't react at all. And I think we figured out that there was another bird flying down. There was, and there was a lot of perspective. 00:43:51 Speaker 1: I can see all this going on, and Tyler and Michael had been quiet all morning, so I don't know where they're at exactly. 00:43:58 Speaker 2: I thought that y'all were further away, because y'all. 00:44:01 Speaker 1: Had talked about being like one hundred and twenty yards from the birde or something, and which is I'm glad you got to where you were because it went well, But like, I'm just thinking that y'all are nowhere around. I've been calling these turkeys and they flew down the opposite direction from me, and like, well, this is sad, but all morning and this is where things got. We got real weird trying to figure out what was going on because y'all didn't know. The third bird was around all morning. I was hearing two different gobblers from where I was sitting. I was hearing when close, and I was like, I have a biles up trying to see him in that tree. And I could hear and see y'all's once it got light enough down there. So what we think was going on is hen hits the ground, gobbler hits the ground, and then a turkey, probably a gobbler from our tree, like at thirty five yards leaves and that's why your gobbler is like. 00:44:51 Speaker 2: Looking at there. The head thing. Yeah, he's like looking up in the air. And he didn't pay attention to Michael at all on the call, and so I was like, well, I mean head, he's not full strut. So I was like you ready. I was like, okay, I'm shooting him. So I shoot and he just drops straight down. Oh dude, I would I could see the whole thing. 00:45:14 Speaker 1: I couldn't see y'all, but those hint those turkeys at the ground, and I was like it went from like oh man to I heard that yelp and I. 00:45:22 Speaker 2: Was like, there on the ground, so cool. I see all that from like one hundred yards up the hill from where we were. Yeah, that's cool. He literally did not flop until about probably ninety seconds later when I decided to kind of walk over to him. And I mean, I like as soon as I shot, I ran like halfway and he didn't stop flopping. It didn't start flopping at all. And I was like, okay, cool. So I looked over at Michael and I gave him the fist bumping or pumping everything, you know, and just like excited thing going on. I was shaking, dude, it was awesome. And then uh, I started to walk over him or over to it after a second, once Michael catches up with me, and then the sucker starts flopping. I thought I had stop the flop. I literally say it on video. I stop the flop, you know. He starts flopping and he just carries downhill and I'm like following him, like I don't really want to shoot him again because I mean, it's just like nerves or whatever. So I'm just following him down the hill the whole time, just making sure he doesn't get up, you know. But he's flopping way down the hill, like probably ended up flopping like sixty yards downhill, you know, and and we got over there, and I mean he had a he had a good beard. Oh hold on, yeah, it was a bad beard. As I'm walking to it. In New Mexico. 00:46:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, the way they regulate turkeys is you have to shoot a bearded turkey that they don't say has to have a visible beard. 00:46:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. So I'm walking over to him and I had seen the beard, and when I get close to him as he's flopping, I see the beard again. You know. I'm like, oh, that's good, you know whatever. Well, when y'all finally come over and meet us and I go to show you all the birds and lift him up and everything, we all walk up on him and I start, I don't know, maybe somebody said, where's a beard or whatever? So I start looking around. Dude, I diging the feathers. We got it on video for forty five seconds before I find the beard. I digging them. I can't find him. I digging him some more. I lift him up by his feet. The beard should flop out right, it don't know, they ain't a beard on this thing. Dude. I'm like, what's going on? Greg's like trying to He's like, should I film this or so? Finally like I'm just sitting there like spinning them around and digging through the feathers and it finally flops out and I was like, goodness, And it's a pretty I mean, it's like a probably six or seven inch beard. It's a nice Mariam as they say, don't get super long beards or spurs, and he didn't have big spurs either. But I think that that's a rock thing more than anything, because it looks like his spurs are like all chipped up and stuff. There's like skin layers like peeled back, and I'm guessing they just, you know, encounter a lot of rocks. They probably hopping over stuff all the time or whatever. So but it was it was really cool. You know, now I'm one away from the Slam. You are going have to go next year and get on that, I know, dude. So that hunt pretty much was uneventful from there on. We chased some birds around a little. 00:48:20 Speaker 1: Bit, but I did not kill a turkey on the trip, which I was happy with. I mean, it was a lot of fun going and doing the thing. I want to do that a lot. I don't know if we'll go back there or where we might look for happier hunting grounds. 00:48:31 Speaker 2: But it was cool either way. But one of the. 00:48:34 Speaker 1: Fun things about that is that we actually cooked some of that turkey in. Now, we don't do the old you know, meat eater deal too much, you know of like just going wild about making sure we cook everything like tonight we kill it or whatever, you know, because we're gonna eat it with our families throughout the year. Yeah, it's just practical. But we were there for a few more days and the house we were staying at had a croc pipe. By the way, if you're not capitalizing on Airbnb, this is a way to go because it is way cheaper than a motel and the accommodations are way better. It is it is for us well, but with buddies, yeah, if you know, like yeah, so if if you're gonna hunt with three or four dudes, like it's it's very efficient. Now, if you're by yourself, you know, you might be able to find fairly an expensive motail or whatever. But for a bunch of dudes it works out pretty good. But the point is that we're gonna we had the ability to cook, had a crock pot, bought us some green chilies and made up some stuff and made us a good pretty much turkey green stew over rice and ate it, and it fueled us to climb the mountains for a few days. 00:49:49 Speaker 2: It's pretty fun. 00:49:50 Speaker 1: But that's pretty much the extent of of our turkey hunt ended at that. There was some other excitement that we will probably tell you about later that involved the WAP. Yeah, but that's that's for another time. 00:50:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll probably post about that on social It's a pretty pretty crazy thing that happened, for sure. 00:50:11 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:50:33 Speaker 2: But yeah, so turkeys are awesome. This year is short lived. I got to hunt for one week. I have not even fished this year either, So this has been a year of editing. And what I've been editing in the spring is the buck Truck series, and Illinois is is what is what is now available for you to watch your channel. Let me just tell you this, My favorite part, probably in this whole video is the Man of Illinois. Right. Let's see Illinois's finest, if I could say it, Eric Gentry battling it out royally with our young and confident Michael J. Michael stole in a basketball game somewhere near Shytown. And you'll just have to watch it to see who wins. There's a there's a bit of just pure conquering that happens youth versus wisdom. We'll see which one. I mean, you think of basketball youth all day, right, but you know, O, John Morant's not very wise right now, it doesn't seem so. I mean, he can be as youthful and great as he wants, but he may not be on the court much more so. Anyway, there's the as we've done in the past, we'll do a smaller version of this. But we haven't spent a whole lot of time in Illinois. We spent a couple of we've done some scouting trips. I hunted there in twenty twenty shot one of the biggest year ever shot big, huge eight point and that was over a scrape about early October twenties. And so like in the past, what we've seen as being kind of something that was prominent there is that Illinois is an OTC big buck state. So you're going to see some pressure around and if you're hunting like public Lands, you're still you're going to see that. And that's one thing that we definitely dealt with. That's why I mean, there was a lot of pressure in October early or late October even you know, October twenty second. There was dudes around when I was hunting there. So one way we're going to kind of circumvent that this time around was to be hunting some private land that was really kind of exclusive and hard to get permission on. But our buddy Isaac Smith from Method Archery helped us out. Got us in on this place that hasn't been gun hunted in like sea six years, is a big old farm tree farm, and we got to go up there this summer do a little scout and put some cameras out. Our friend Market Multimobile sent us some cameras to use, and that was super helpful. We got to kind of see where some bucks were located. In the end, it actually helped us a lot, but starting out we didn't know how much it was going to help us. We kind of get, we get, we do this whole thing, we land, we meet the landowner, we help them build a horse barn, like there's some cool stuff going on that we're We're trying to make sure that we're good on this place. Right. We may want to hunt this place for a long time because it could literally be the best dear hunting of our life. I mean, we're close to Wisconsin, which is just you know, overall Boone and Crockett records number one, I believe in the in the US. So I mean just crazy good area in a place that's hardly hunted. Uh big big tree farm. So we're like super excited. We put the work in, we get back on the way, and we find doubt that we There are some people that have archery hunting this place, and they're a little more serious than we thought they were about it, and they don't like the fact that we're there. So ends up with getting into some some struggles there with like where can we hunt. 00:54:15 Speaker 1: It's a weird deal because I don't know, it's it's hard to even explain. We have rightfully gained permission to hunt this place, and h these other people have also rightfully gained permission to hunt this place. Where it gets kind of weird is that they don't want us there, not all of them. There's one of the guys there, he's pretty nice and helped us out some, but he's kind of like the guy who's like the in between guy. 00:54:48 Speaker 3: And then the landowners just like hey, you know, you know, just hunt. It's fine. 00:54:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, which I'm so thankful that they let us hunt, but it gets pretty dicey, and what ends up happening is that we kind of say, oh, okay, let's just we'll just make do with where they're gonna let us hunt, and they pretty much just draw lines around all the good stuff and say, y'all can hunt anywhere besides there. 00:55:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. It's not cool. So it was that was one of our biggest struggles, and you can kind of watch to see how we navigate that. But we end up, you know, some circumstances, some twists happened, for instance, and we noticed that a couple of things on top of that were really really tough for us that we were having to overcome. And those things were difficult access and to our places because all the corn was still in nobody had taken corn out. 00:55:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny because some of the farmers were out working on equipment and I went by and kind of like gave him a little cheerleading decision like. 00:55:49 Speaker 2: Hey, y'all gonna get something is done today. 00:55:51 Speaker 1: Like I didn't really tell them like on my motive completely, but I was like, yeah, y'all get her fixed. 00:55:57 Speaker 2: You're doing a great job, man, That's what I do with my baseball team. Man, y'all are man, you're you're doing great even though you've thrown mostly balls shining real hard. So anyway, that was that was a tough thing, but also a consequence consequentially, because the corn was in, the movement was super low. Right, there's no bed to feed because the bed is in the corn sometimes sometimes it's in the swamp, and so there's no like direct movement patterns. Everything's really random, and there's not a whole lot of movement because when they can bed in the corn and eat in the corn, there's not a whole lot going on. During the daylight, it wasn't. I mean, there was a couple of cold mornings, but we had pretty sunshiny weather afternoons or just we weren't seeing anything. I mean, this was literally the worst time I've ever been on. 00:56:44 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's tough because we like to see deer and make adjustments according to what we observe, and we just didn't have the observations to be able to make moves, so we're just guessing the whole time. 00:56:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, but we ended up with some pretty awesome success. Talk about your setup a little bit. We did. 00:57:04 Speaker 1: Through the help of our friend there who was one of the hunting parties who had previous access and through the landowner. They were like, you know what, y'all, just go ahead and go where you want and then you know, we'll have the rest of the season. So thankful for that opportunity to be able to just have free reign for a little bit. And it, I mean absolutely was an integral part of the success. We had some trail camera data of some nice bucks in a corner that was pretty messy as far as like habitat goes good deer stuff, you're kind of in a similar area where you were. And then also young Michael, using his vitality and youthfulness, was going to be filming Isaac doing some hunting, and Isaac had some family stuff going on and didn't hunt that morning, and so Michael went out and scotted for US spots a giant buck in this area. Actually I guess it was the evening, and then we went over the next morning and set up in the area kind of somewhat of an observation set, see a small deer pick out a tree for the evening from our observation point and set up pretty much on a transition point between corn slash food and just dense deer bedding that also has a northern boundary of a big body of water, so it sets up pretty good knowing the camera information that we have in there. There's kind of a target buck somewhat. I don't remember what we're calling him, but we end up calling him broke beam because he broke off like about probably six inches of his main beam on one side, and he was like a big eight. 00:58:42 Speaker 2: I think, right, yeah, I think he had an inside time or something too, but he's a mainframe eight, and I think he's a lot bigger than we actually thought he was. He is because the in person footage he looks ridiculous, and we also started to realize that these deer are way bigger than most of the deer we hunt. He's Northern Illinois, just ginormous, big bodies, big bodies which means big heads, which means big antlers and antlers with It's strange like do when you see a South Texas buckets twenty inches wide? Do you think that thing is a watusi? You know, like they. 00:59:14 Speaker 1: Because there their noggins are only about six or seven inches wide. Where you look at like an Illinois deer, it's like ten inches from like outside of school. 00:59:25 Speaker 2: Outside of school, it's crazy trim. Yeah, they're big. So we had started to finally kind of dial in on some stuff with Michael's help, that maybe swamp nasties where was also a good place to be instead of these like corn edges, And it definitely was. We ended up last night in a swamp. Is so so quiet, dude. Eric and I went into a swamp where I'd sent Michael. We were kind of hunting this swamp from two different areas. I'd sent them to this big stand of trees to just get an observation set that I think that morning right, And so this is the morning after he started the buck. You guys went in to hunt and he saw deer moving past this loan landmark tree. This is a willow tree and it was the only one that you can hunt this entire swamp pretty much. So Eric and I have to cross this canal and the swamp with like hip waiters. We only have one pair and so we had to tie a pair of cord to them. I cross take them off. We got my boots in my bag. Put those boots on. Tie the pair of corder around these boots, chunk them up. He has to pull while a chunk. We do a one two three because we want them to go across for sure, you know. And so I chunk them up and he pulls them across out of the air, and you know, puts them on crosses. We get up in the willow tree. We're making some noise. I don't have my release on them, getting a jacket on, get it on, and Eric goes, here's a buck. I was like, oh no, so you got him. Dude. Look over there's a buck standing at that just stepped out of his bed, had heard us. I'm sure getting in that wheel tree because there was no wind and he's looking right at us. Like, long story short, nothing I could really do. I didn't have my release on, so I didn't want to call to him because if he came at me, I you know, there's nothing I could do. It didn't have a release on, I didn't have an arrow knock nothing. So as soon as he turns around and walks back, I think he's going to go bed back in his little hole right there. So I put my release on real quick. Knock an arrow and get a grunt call and by the time by the time she's always trying to talk to us. Man, by the time I get called to he ends up crossing the canal. Like down, he didn't bed where I thought he was going to. I see him crossing the canal and I'm like, oh, no, so he's coming to get our wind comes to this huge wellow thicket and we hear him walk like we thought. We kept hearing something back here behind us, and for sure like confirmed it when he crossed another canal on the other side of us, and I could hear him walking through it. He got to like twenty yards, dude, I measured it on on X That canal is like twenty yards from us, and I guess he either winded us or something and took off. And I never didn't take off, but like he walked out of there, and then like fifteen minutes later I see him at like one hundred and twenty yards walking away. Tried to rally to him. Of course he's privy at this point, so that was my That was my final evening. But he's a nice ten point And then you guys kind of hunted a similar swampy situation. It's a good evening man, it was like. 01:02:28 Speaker 1: And it's also constantly moving closer to the rut, so we had It's one of the great things about hunting late October is that it stinks until it doesn't. Yeah, it's like bad, bad bad, oh, a little oh wow dear going everywhere right, And it's kind of you pair that with like gaining some knowledge and making some good moves and all of a sudden you're on bucks. 01:02:46 Speaker 2: And we kind of. 01:02:50 Speaker 1: Went and set up in a cottonwood, which is always a good place on the edge of a cornfield and a marsh that had water on the north. And so it was kind of a strange setup because you either had to set up to hunt the marsh and to be like eye level up the corn and couldn't see much, or you could get high and be like fifteen feet above the corn but you're like thirty feet above the marsh. 01:03:18 Speaker 2: And that's what I opted. 01:03:19 Speaker 1: To do because I kind of like to be high on the tree when I have the opportunity. Had good cover up there and everything, and big split in the tree for Greg and I to be in the tree. 01:03:27 Speaker 2: Well, not a lot's. 01:03:29 Speaker 1: Going on super still evening. We're like, if anything moves, we can hear it. Nothing's moving too much like early on a dough smells us or something or seize us, I don't know. From the marsh spooks out and I'm thinking, well, that stinks. And then we're watching the corn. There's birds moving around the corn, so you don't know if it's a deer or a bird or what's going on out there. So I'm like Greg and I pretty much zoned in two different directions. I'm zoned in on the corn, looking around, glassing around, try to pick out an antle or anything. Because it's kind of grunt season at this point in time, like it's a good opportunity to call in a deer, and so if I can just see a bug, you know, I'm gonna call at him. And Greg's keeping an eye on the marsh side, and he says. 01:04:15 Speaker 2: You freaking out all of a sudden. 01:04:18 Speaker 1: Greg is a lot of fun to home with because he gets excited, and if you know Greg, he's not like his normal tone is not very excited. He's very relaxed guy. So when Greg he gets excited, he gets you excited. He loves deer, dude, and so sure enough, I turn around slowly and pretty much in range, there's a deer at the edge of the water. There's this canal that runs right behind us, and this deer's on the edge of this canal, and it's like, for sure, Also, this is the last evening of our trip. We have to go home, and this is a for sure last day shooter, probably a first day shooter on this trip. 01:04:57 Speaker 2: And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, this deer is gonna walk up. 01:05:01 Speaker 1: He's acting like he's gonna get a drink of water, which he does, and I'm thinking he's gonna like walk down the canal, give me a twenty yard chip shot, and this is gonna be over and it's gonna be awesome. Well, this deer decides that he is an aquatics pieces at light tail and starts to cross. 01:05:17 Speaker 2: The canal and goes right across it or across we're. 01:05:20 Speaker 1: In northern Illinois, across it there, Yeah, so across the creek. I mean he like was a foot from swimming. I mean he was deep in that water and you can see it on the on the footage. And then he's starting to do I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe he's gonna come to this side of the canal and then head south, but no, he continues to go on his trajectory, and I'm thinking this year is. 01:05:44 Speaker 2: Gonna get out of our world. 01:05:45 Speaker 1: So I get out the grunt call and this is like at the angle I cannot see So I'm grunting at this deer, can't see him, and I'm getting cues from Greg on what the deer's doing and if I need to grunt more or not. 01:05:59 Speaker 2: And the I had to cut out so much footage, dude, because it had been bored, like a twenty minute clip, dude. 01:06:04 Speaker 1: It was the most exciting moments in my life that had been bored. It was boring on film, you know what I mean. It lasts so long, like it's a really good daylight when the deer comes out, and by the time he turns around and decides to come to us, it's like fairly dark. 01:06:18 Speaker 2: It's not like late. 01:06:19 Speaker 1: I mean, there's still probably fifteen minutes let to shoot the light, but it's just, you know, it's getting darker that evening. It's kind of crazy, and the deer walks too finally in range, and I am just like in so much pain because I turn around to try to get a shot, and I'm like not at full draw, but I am at that like five o'clock angle where it's just the hardest saddle shot of all. And I'm in a bad position at the five o'clock too. My teather's pretty long, so like I'm hanging out pretty far, which is not a position I like to be in. 01:06:53 Speaker 2: And I'm just like my back is breaking. 01:06:55 Speaker 1: It is, And I finally tell Gregor, like, dude, I'm gonna have to draw and shoot it this year, Like I just can't. 01:07:01 Speaker 2: I can't take this anymore. 01:07:03 Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna end up moving or my back's gonna spasm and we're just gonna run them off. I go to a just kind of shift my weight so I could draw my bow and my grunt call falls twenty eight feet down to the ground. Boom on the ground. And that's when you go to the meter YouTube channel and watch the. 01:07:21 Speaker 2: Rest of the video. Man, it's pretty good. I hope I need too. It was a crazy, crazy thing. Lots of water involved with this thing. 01:07:35 Speaker 1: So if you would, guys, we really appreciate the support, go watch it on the Mediator channel. Watch it all the way through, leave a comment, tell us what you think about it, and then just tell us what you've been liking about bunk trucks. 01:07:46 Speaker 2: And if don't forget the spring sale. If you need to get some stuff, man, this is the time to do it because they're giving some massive discounts and it's a good time to get stuff even though we're still a few months away. So with that, remember this is your element. Every