00:00:05 Speaker 1: You're here in turkeys. You're chasing turkeys. They're responsive. I kill birds every spring. Fast forward to when my son was born. By the time he got to be the age of I'm going to become a fanatical turkey hunter like my dad, there just weren't that many turkeys, and there had been ten years before. On this episode, we're going from the creek bottoms to the ridge tops to contrast two eras of turkey hunting. We'll look at goblin turkeys through the lens of legendary turkey hunter Will Premost. I'm interested in examining his passion for spring turkeys, which shaped his life, and how the timing of their resurgence gave him a limb to roost on. But the energy will swing hard when we talk with University of Georgia turkey biologist Dr Mike Chamberlain and hear his message which has been brought to the forefront of the turkey world. We're exploring the fascination and excitement of spring turkey hunting, the passion that drives innovation, and the challenges the wild turkey is facing. What the plan is to help them. We'll even here from my friend and callmaker Jason Phelps. These are all incredible folks, and I doubt you're gonna want to miss this one. This is what books are written about. This is what forms companies, this is what makes friendships. This is what God gave us to have the intensity of what he wants to have in life. That's a turkey right there, man ha ha. My name is Clay Nukelem and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of a Marykins who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear, American made, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I've always loved turkey hunting. The emerging energy of spring, bringing the hardwood timber back to life is euphoric for the micro windows you're immersed into it. I love the charismatic flowering trees like red buds and dogwoods, and the intricate early growing plants like crested iris and mayapple, all indicators of one thing. As a kid watching VHS videos in the nineteen nineties, I remember Old Harold Knight saying, when the oak leaves are as big as a squirrels ere, the turkeys will be goblin. And there in lies the crown jewel of the spring. The reason we love it goblin turkeys. I love the audio sensation created by unseen gobbles, which enlivens the imagination. The act of turkey hunting is implanting yourself into the ancient and natural system of a spring morning. And maybe what I love most of all is the amount of roving across the landscape you've got to do to find one. This is Dr Mike Chamberlain of the University of Georgia. His passion has ignited a widespread interest in wild turkey biology, as he and others have sounded the alarm of concern specifically for turkeys in the southeastern United States. Let me know if you agree with my sentiment here. Have you ever been heartbroken, Dr chamber I have. I have a life philosophy that I would like to share with you goes way back in Newcomb lineage, and it's that you cannot trust a ground nesting bird. Okay, if you put your heart into a ground nesting bird, you're gonna get burned. Okay, My grandfather, Lewin Knewcom. He died in he was ninety four years old. He was a bird hunter, just the epitome of a Southern bird dog trainer. You know. I was born in nineteen seventy nine, which would have been about the time that quail, the quail demise came, and I spent my whole life bird hunting with him, and he lamented the loss of quail. My grandfather had this love of this animal and this thing that he did and invest his life in, and the last thirty five years of his life, the bird just wasn't there. And then I grew up and loved turkey hunting. And when I was in high school in Arkansas, we had a good turkey hun I learned to love it, killed turkeys, and then all that just kind of dissipated. And that's when my philosophy came. Do you think this is reasonable if you're from Arkansas? Yes, the same challenges that Arkansas has faced. There are many many agencies facing throughout the species range, not just in the Southeast, but in other parts of the country as well. I've heard it said it's kind of death by a thousand cuts in some ways, there's no smoking gun. It is death by a thousand cuts. Literally. I'm from Arkansas and our turkey populations are currently down six from our population peaks in the early two thousands, so it's easy for me to see our problem. But it has wider implications than just unfilled tags. I'm interested in how wildlife affects the trajectory of people's lives, and this goes way back, even to the very beginning. The Clovis hunters likely built their culture around populations of megafauna like wooly mammoths, fulsome hunters around bison antiquates the plains Indians tribes arose with the buffalo herds. Daniel Boone made a living off bear, deer and fur bears. My grandfather lived in the heyday of southern quail hunting, and the flutter of quail wings dominated his vacant thoughts. Wildlife can have big implications for people who live close to the land. Things beyond our controls shape our lives all the time, and in that statement, I want to make a big picture connection. So stay with me. I am a product of the nineteen nineties. I came into that decade age ten and left that decade at age twenty, which is an important period. What I didn't know is that I built my foundational expectations on the peak Turkey numbers of the modern era that some argue weren't sustainable. I wonder if the Clovis hunters felt the same way as wooly mammoths slipped through their fingers, would they have had enough cultural men murray to recognize the decline. I don't know. Interestingly, though, we do, and it's in large part due to outdoor media in the nineteen nineties that was television during that time. I was influenced by a man named Wilbur Primos from Mississippi. He lived about a hundred and five miles slightly northeast of East Fork, Mississippi, where Jerry Clower lived. Interestingly, Jerry's outdoor experience focused on coons and possums, not game animals like deer in Turkey. Why, you might ask, because they didn't have big game animals are very many of them back in Jerry's early years. However, the Turkey reintroduction efforts of the nineteen seventies eighties produced the nineteen nineties and you can almost hear the Turkey eggs hatchen. It was an incredible time to be a key hunter. Sain't bad. He's got to come up with a bit to see us dead. This is Mr Will Primos. I hit her at on its chest, I did, dude. All of a sudden, we had loads of turkeys. We had an explosion of turkey call makers being successful and people rising to the top through outdoor media brands. One of those people was an energetic, black headed man with a tightly trim beard name Will Primos. So when did you start turkey hunting? You know, back you grew up with your family, your dad turkey hunter. No, uh, my my uncle's and all the family around me started turkey hunting, and so I would watch them as a young man. I caret up quay Ol hunting with my uncle us. But then the turkey started just coming everywhere there weren't they weren't They were only on the river, way back in the Misssippi River, inside the levee, and that's where most of the people turkey hunting. So finally I got out of college. Things rolling, But I was, I was. You know, the first turkeys you killed, you were deer hunting. Probably weren't you supposed to shoot them? You know? But really springtime turkey hunting that started sometime in my early twenties, late teens, and just a little fire under me, you know, I just absolutely loved it. Okay, would you tell me if this statement would be degree with this statement that by the late sixties, early seventies, or or you know, some period of time in that time, World War two had happened, Baby boomers were in their prime, they had money, they had free time. I mean, that's when a lot of the American hunting heritage. It didn't start then, but a lot of the things that kind of we have lived off of began then. I mean, just kind of with a revolution and widespread pop culture nature of knowledge about turkey hunting. I definitely think it was after the end of war two. War two almost decimated the wild turkey, and it did so because everybody was going to war, and depression was owned and in the twenties that depression was hard on the Turkey too, and people were humans killing them, humans killing them, filling up a trough with corn and getting the one end of it. And when enough turkeys got the heads and that thing breaking and what have shot gun and feeding the family. I see. So, you know, until game laws came into being and seasons came into being. You know, they really didn't have a chance. You know, we were over harvesting them, we were over killing them, and because people were trying to survive. It's important to grasp that we haven't always had a lot of turkeys. Humans show up on planet Earth and think things are normal, and frankly, we just don't live that long. But a lot of stuff happened before we got here. We can assume that pre European settlement, turkeys were thick in the eastern half of North America. Boone and his bros. Talked about incredible of flocks of turkeys in Kentucky, but the gobblers took a dive in the late eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen hundreds, but then in the seventies, eighties and nineteen nineties they resurged in the East and Midwest. Interestingly, today, wild turkey is now thriving in much of the western United States and places that historically never had turkeys. They're pretty much an invasive species, but many believe that the peak of modern turkey numbers in the East was in the nineteen nineties. In early two thousands, but now we're seeing a decline in many areas. It's not extremely clear why other than there are a lot of reasons. Here's Dr Chamberlain. What about this idea that populations just flux up and down a lot. Is there any merit to just this is a natural thing that we're seeing. Oh yeah, And in fact, that's the point of open discussion amongst researchers and managers is we know that when we restored turkeys, we probably overshot the point at which they were going to sustain themselves. In other words, populations were just exploding. When we were moving turkeys all over the place and releasing like the sixties, sixty seventies, eighties, even into the nineties, you were putting turkeys into vacant habitats. There were no turkeys there, Predator communities were different than habitat was better than there, weren't as many human beings then all these things that affect this bird. So populations just skyrocketed and there were literally turkeys everywhere. We are now and what I call a new normal. We are never going to go back to where we were in n which is not going to the peak of my turkey hunting career. I distinctly. Remember, you know, when I was in grad school in the early and mid nineties, I thought that was the best thing ever. There were turkeys everywhere everywhere I hunted. It was just amazing. Everywhere I went, in every state, and I was so poor I couldn't go. I hunted in Mississippi, but every public clanned. I went to the turkeys everywhere. And now I can go back to those same places and they're not there. It's not that they are just in lower abundance. There are places on those properties they're not there. And that is a social problem, a human problem, because until the day I die, we'll talk about how good that was, and that was something unnatural, and that is like almost impossible for me to extinguish from my brain, you know. I mean when you think about that, where these people that had this connection to a wild animal that we love to hunt, unnatural, big populations of it. We build this culture around that, we build norms around it, we build stories around it. Of the turkey. I mean, I remember my dad talking about, man, I've heard twelve gobblers from that one spot. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget where he was. And then that all of a sudden is the bar. That's what I tell my kids about. I'm like, man, I remember when your grandpa used to sit on that ridge and here twelve turkeys. Now we maybe here one every couple of years. That's kind of confusing. It's a concern for me too, frankly, because when I was recruited into the spring turkey hunting ranks, there were turkeys everywhere, and I was successful. I could hear birds every morning, and that caused me to become addicted to it. It's like a candy or something. It's a drug, man, It's you know, you're hearing turkeys, you're chasing turkeys. They're responsive. I'd kill birds every spring and and I was just infatuated with it. And I fast forward to when my son was born and there were still a lot of turkeys around. But by the time he got to be the age of I'm going to become a fanatical turkey hunter like my dad. Where we live, there just weren't that many turkeys, and there had been ten years before. And as it turned out, Austin was not a fanatical turkey hunter like I am. He'd do it and he enjoyed it, but he didn't have the opportunities that you and I had to experience that, And so he could not reflect back on a day when you heard ten birds standing in one spot. So what he grew up knowing was that turkey hunting was a lot of times you wouldn't hear anything. And so his competing interest were deer hunts where he would see dear every time he went he was successful, duck hunting, goose hunting where he was successful, and it pulled his interest away from this turkey hunt. One thing is for sure. Humans gravitate towards success. This has kept us alive as a species. Hunting turkey is most fun when accompanied by reasonable odds of success, which produces engagement and excitement, which helps produce something else, passion, which then produces something else, innovation. I'm certain this is an ancient chain of events. The resurgence of the wild turkey was an exciting time to be a hunter. I'm on shoot him that minute, you got him? Yeah, okay, true, my old twenty double. Hey, that's that's the man right there. Don't tell you what this is what this passion, this intensity, This is what books are written about. This is what forms cutanies. This is what makes friendships. This is what God gave us to to have the intensity of what he wanted us to have in life. That's a turkey right there, man, that's in Alabama, Mississippi state line, swamp turkey, that's right. And that would have been the time frame late sixties, early seventies when spring turkey hunting being a sport, a thing that people mastered and perfected and called these birds not just bushwhacked birds. That's kind of when it came alive with calls, and would you agree with us? It came alot a lot, but there are some old timers. The first box call was patented in eighteen nineties seven by a guy named Gibson from Arkansas, and a lady gave me an actual original Gibson which I donated to the Natural Turkey Federation Museum. Designed about like our box calls. There's a whole lot of similarities, but it's a very primitive piece. Tinkers from seven forward learned so much changed the wood. Put a spring under the lid around the screw to balance the lid. But there were was a lot you're you're you're saying about these people that really it took fire people sitting down, putting their back into the tree, and calling up a turkey. In the late sixties seventies, there's a lot of that, but there was a lot of it in the nineteen hunt slight thing can't join about in the Ozarks. People who understood it, people who learned to yelp on a on a piece of a leaf, a green leaf. In Alabama, they were experiment with mouth calls. The story that I best I could figure out A guy from Alabama, from Andalusia, Alabama, was in New Orleans and he was walking by a guy who was selling trinkets on the corner, and one of the trinkets was a teeny tiny bird call. It was a teeny tiny diaphragm as big as your thumbnail, and the lotok guy would put in his mouth and make a little bird sounds. And that guy stopped and heard that, and he goes, I think I can make a thing yell. So he bought some him and started experimenting with it. And later that's supposedly where some of the beginnings of the mouth called really came about. Hands free passion fuels innovation, whether making a new style of stone point or developing projectiles slinging weaponry like adeladdles and bows. The primary success of the human species has been using natural materials as two rules. As humans had access to more tools, materials, and time, people started figuring out ways to replicate the sound of a hind turkey, which is the siren call the Achilles heel of the greatest of game birds, the gobbler turkey. Jason Phelps is the chief call maker and founder of Phelps Game Calls. I want to hear him nerd out on the development of the box call and the innovation they're in on record to the earliest that we know, Henry Gibson had the Gibson box call patented back in I believe he held half of the patent, and then there was a fella named John Body who many speculator he was maybe the financial backer as they kind of took this endeavor on. Henry Gibson patented the idea, but he didn't patent any of the specifications or any of like the important details, and so why he patented the idea. It really let everybody else go and make calls. It's pretty crazy when you look at the original patent drawings of the Henry Gibson call. It looks identical to what you would find today in today's box called. It has been improved upon, but it's very, very similar to what you see as a box call today is what they were producing back in you know, the the late eighteen hundreds. I can understand how a diaphragm, a mouth diaphragm call with a piece of latex on it can replicate the sound of a turkey as you push air through the soft tissues of your tongue and mouth over this latex read and it, you know, it sounds like a turkey. What's kind of bizarre when you think about humans just having this natural material trying to imitate a turkey that you would ever dream that you could take two pieces of wood and make it sound like the soft flesh of a turkey. How do we get the sound out of a box call that sounds so good? Yeah? And I always kind of wonder the same thing, you know, who was the first person and how did they come across this? And if if these things were never invented, would I be able to like think of it or hear that sound? And wood on wood makes a little bit of sense because we're, you know, in our day to day lives. You know, whether it's a wood drawer, a cabinet, or framing for a house. You know, wood out in nature, I imagine somebody had taken fairly dry wood of different sizes and and it replicated the sounds of a turkey, or it was similar or close enough where you know, maybe they went back and rEFInd it, but you know, you advanced today. Kind of what we're doing is it's it's all acoustical. We're taking very specific woods, typically a harder, heavier wood for your paddle, and then you've got maybe a lighter, slightly less dense wood for your your base, and by hallowing out the center and creating your two walls, what we're doing is is we run that paddle across one of the walls. We're forcing it to vibrate. And that's why the chalk is used. We need those two calls, that coefficient of friction to kind of go up. We want those two materials to kind of bite against each other. The reason all of these paddles, you know, all the way from Gibson's paddle all the way to what we're using now have a have a radius on them. And what that does is is you're is you're swiping that paddle across one of the walls of the bottom of the box. At one point you imagine you're you're writing up on the wall, and then once you're over halfway, you're starting to write down the back side of the wall, and that idea gives us our high note going in. And then as you start to break down the back side, you get that break over and you get the second part of a hen yell. Jason, I don't know if this is the right platform to tell them about the call that you and I are working on together, the Gary Nucomb black panther scream call that we're making. Now. My dad swears that he can tell the difference in a black panther and a regular panther by just the way they scream in the dark. Okay, so there's a difference. He has ears that can can dissect the difference we can differentiate between the two colors. I'm gonna move that to the top of the priority list on calls that need to be designed. When you think of humans as natural predators on the landscape, which we've been in North America for a minimum of fifteen thousand years, probably longer our participation in the ancient hunt is no less legitimate than a bobcat. However, the spark of consciousness, our ability for self reflection as reasoning predators, our ability to make tools has fueled creative strategies like squeaking chalked wood together to make a turkey sound, which is pretty bizarre. The only predator that impresses me more in the innovation department is the great horned owl. Dr Chamberlain exposed this story to many of us. Weighing in and around three pounds. These gritty little suckers target goblin turkeys on the limb and the pre dawned darkness and hit them flying it speeds up to forty miles per hour, knocking them out of trees and breaking their necks. Dad Gummant, those great horned owls are some good turkey hunters. Here is Mr Will talking about that predatory innovation. I was born into a restaurant family. We had five restaurants, so I had to keep doing that. As I figured out how to grow an outdoor hunting primarily a game call and later many other products how to do that. There was no money, so I couldn't I couldn't sell enough calls to pay me and somebody else to help run the place or make the calls or whatever. So I didn't quit my work until nineteen. I started the company in nineteen seventy six, so I didn't I didn't quit having a full time job until nineteen. So how old would you have been in nineteen seventy In nineteen seventy six, I would have been, what twenty four years old? So you started making turkey calls on your four years old? I started selling them, selling them. Yeah. I made them for me, for others, for friends. So a friend of mine, Buck Dearman, he challenged me to make a mouth call because he loved these mouth calls, but they would fall apart on him. And so I said, I don't know to make a turkey call, and so he says, yes, you do here, And so I just took it apart and looked at it. This is a diaphragm call. It was a staggered read had the reads that totally were separated by about a sixteenth of an inch. They didn't touch, which created a lot of rasp and had some different pluses to them that other calls that weren't stack did. And that was back before anybody ever did that. I mean some people in in Clarksdale were doing it. Lady by the name of Eleanor Wrestler and another guy named rosy Dantone were doing it. Um. They were handmaking them with lead. Usually had a lead frame, that's what they used back then. And they were malleable and you could take a we call them rubbers back then. I think they call them condoms and prophylactics. To David, we called them rubbers. And you couldn't buy them over the counter. You couldn't go up to a drug store and buy them. You primarily had to buy them from a coin operated machine at the service station. So you buy them and we'd slice them up and try to if somebody if they were lubricated, you had to wash them off and figure it out and drew them rye and then how to slice them. And we finally figured out how to slice them, and that's done with a paper cutter. Was much more efficient. Anyway. I took the call apart for for buck and took some shears and cut some Like then, beer cans were made from ten they weren't aluminum, and you cut the de gum thing up and you tried to make a horseshoe out of it and try to how to put it together and that kind of thing. And I figured a way finally use aluminum sheets of aluminum, and I had a sledge hammer, and I had a machinist to make me a die that could punch out the center of it. And then the next step was the outside of it. And I'd sit on in my car board on the concrete floor and put the aluminium strip in there and take a sledgehammer and hit it. We still have that tool at the office, that original tool that I would now so people were doing a similar thing like you. Oh yeah, So primarily quite a good boy was just getting going Ben Lee. I'm not sure he even started back when I was hand making him a pins. Wood was already around, and Old was a big call company at the top, primarily duck calls. But I was just oblivious to most of that. I just I didn't know what. You weren't thinking I'm going to build a company, Yeah no, And I don't one thinking I was gonna build a company. And I wasn't in that world. Natural Tricky Federation didn't start till seventy five, I think it was, and there wasn't a way to have like minded people come together and trade ideas and whatever. It's kind of a cottage industry in different places. But anyway, I finally figured out how to make this call for Buck, and he loved it, and I perfected a double read, and one year I made him all summer long, and I took him to a show that spring and I sold out, and I said, holy chross. I went to the sporting goods store and I had them all in a glass jar. People come and pick one out and and pay for it. I'd get my money. What did you get for a turkey call back in those days? Eight dollars? It's not much different that now. Well, later on my double went to nineteen. They were handmade, and I wanted to stop the demand, but it seemed like the demand just grew. But one day a guy came in there and grabbed a car in the sport and good story here in town and put it in his mouth. He helped on it, didn't like it and put it back in the jar. And the guy called me said, you gotta come get all these. We don't know which one was in his mouth. Here's Jason Phelps talking about Mr Will, Jason, You're a call maker and have been for a good portion of your life. You know when you talk about these kind of legendary call makers throughout the years, I mean, it feels like Will Primos would fit inside of that. And I know that call makers build off each other. Even when Mr Will tells his story like he didn't do this on his own, you know, I mean there were people before him. I think you you would fit into that lineage of great call makers. What do you have to say about somebody like Will? Growing up, I started out in a rifle hunting family, you know, and so using calls was never really something that that we were into. We didn't need it to hard, you know, kill game out here and fill the freezers. And so as I got more into it and wanted to continue to challenge myself, um, you know, the Truth series and Will was really kind of was everything there. You know, I couldn't wait for the New Truth Turkey series to come out, and then as soon as the Elk series went out, you know, I would go out and grab it, and you know it was really kind of looking up the Will and everything he was doing, and then kind of the class act that he was. I don't idolize a whole lot of guys, but he was definitely one of those guys I looked up to because you know, he seemed to be at the top of the game, is innovative as it as it got, and then just you know, super good guys. So I mean, I growing up the way before I ever started making calls, you know, I would say, you know, Will was one of those guys I looked up to, and you know still do. Here's Mr Will with more of his story and how it coincided with a vast change in Turkey hunting strategy. When I started trying to market my calls, I had a dealer here, a guy from Pennsylvania came down your hunting bought from college and took him back. Told a dealer in Pennsylvania's had a dealer in Pennsylvania, and add a dealer down here as my first two dealers. So when I get time off from the restaurants, I traveled the state of Mississippi and got call on different sporting goods stores. So I went to Greenville, Mississippi, which is in the Delta on the Mississippi River north of here, and Clyde McGee. I went in there and introduced myself to him. The great guy, told him what I was trying to do, show him my calls, and I said, here, listen to this. This was actually during turkey season and I just killed a turkey and I had a little recorder and these aren't these aren't digital. This is the cascess set tape recorder and I just put it on the ground, called the turkey up I think on the I remember correctly. I cackled at the turkey eleven times and finally got the turkey up there and didn't take long and killed him. I was just hammering him, just shot the turkey. This old man was sitting there in the store. I got through classes man as an unbelievable hunt. That man said you called too much and you called to loud and looked at that man. I said, sir, that turkey's dead. So you know, the aggressiveness, cutting and running is what it became to be known as started during that time. Yeah, it's kind of a new a new age turkey, ou see. And I'm I'm younger than you, but I very much don't know what you mean by the old timer way yelping on a box can sitting there. The really, really good turkey owners know how to involve both, and the best turkey collars are those that have good ears and can hear what they're saying, just like a musician that has good ears and he can hear all the notes and it doesn't miss anything. I'm missing a lot of high notes now I'll be seventy in three weeks. But those that are the best, you can hear what he's doing, and he can change what he's doing in his mouth to give you the sound that he wants. But back to the two styles, You've got to be able to do both, to know when the appropriate time, when you think you know, you never know. You just think you know, you think this might be a good opportunity to be quiet, to not yelping him for ten minutes or thirty minutes whatever. Last year, were you up to the turkey one time and he gobbled and he showed up two hours later. We never said another word. Guy missed him, but you know, and he didn't gobbleble one more time. But that was an afternoon. And you've got to feel like you can play the game you're living in their world. They don't have to go anywhere. They don't have to go to the dentist, they don't have to do anything, they have no appointments. They're making a living, staying alive, and they stay alive with their eyes and their ears. Sometimes I think they can smell me. Success is an interesting and complex phenomena. It favors the hard working, the discipline, those with passion, the focused, but it also favors those who come along at the right time. It's interesting and not hard to see that the resurgence of the wild turkey was the fodder of innovation in turkey hunting. I would say I would describe you as a contestsur of turkey hunting. Guys like you and some other's interpreted the world for and I'm gonna say us through your media, through your work, through your connection to the hunting industry. And you know, there's some people that just came along at the right time, and that's an awesome thing to have happened. And you came along at the right time and had a whole lot of things going for you. But I would describe your passion, your ability to articulate what's going on, and mainly just the passion that comes through just through watching videos you've interpreted turkey hunting for for me for sure, just like this has value. And I know the store bought answer of why turkey hunting why we love it so much? But I want to hear you tell me what it is about turkey hunting that is is so special because it is well, You've said a lot of things that I want to go back and talk about. First off, I appreciate what you're saying. In no way, shape or form in myself for any of the team set out to create what we did, I didn't realize the effect we were having on so many people. We were part of their living room, and we were clean about it. We didn't cuss. We we we love the Lord. I'm a Christian and I want to portray that and I want to live that life and I want to make him proud, and I want to make my mom and my daddy proud. My daddy is a World War two vette who's still living. He was a navigator in the Pacific Theater. So those things you said about connecting with those people like yourself, so many people have expressed that, and you're right. Timing is huge, and I challenge everybody to figure out what might be affecting them. That's timing related. There's a book called Outliers written by Malcolm Gladwick. He's a famous author, and he goes into the depth of why somebody can be an outlier. I was described by this person as being an outlier, so he gave me the book. Rockefeller not for monetary reasons, but when he was born he was able to do what he did. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs different people born at a certain time that if they had been born at any other time, would not have been able to do what they did. So because of when I was born, when Buck inspired me to make the Turkey calls, there were things available to me that hadn't been available to somebody years past, or that we're gonna be gone. A perfect example is the audio cassette tape we rode right in our car. This an audio cassette tape. So in nineteen to no Spring of eighty three I hired a guy to follow me around in the woods with a big Swedish Nagagar recorder two big wheels. He had to open it up and set the weig wheels on there and had a parabolic mite and he recorded me calling the turkey, killing turkey and running into Turkey. Is that what you showed the guys that the nod that went on a little you did that on a little walkman or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. So I did that and produced the tape. Well, that was unbelievable. That was available to me, and I fought it up to make the cassette tape and then to teach people how to use the circuit call. Very organized, I can teach as a gift. So I took it and organize it. I wrote it, and I taught everybody how to how to begin to make how to put a mouth call on the mouth, how to begin to make a say down, how how to begin to put it all together. It's all very easy. But at any rate, that tape was a huge success. I couldn't keep them in stop what year was with and so then we keep going along, and all of a sudden, about eighty five or eighty six or so, you could go to Walmart and for over a thousand dollars you could buy a video camera and go and video your kids out in the backyard playing and watch it. Immediately. It was no longer sending it off to have it developed and all that kind of stuff with an eight millimeter camera or whatever. So and that was incredible, and that was incredible. Here I am trying to figure out how to market promos. And I believe the year was nineteen eighty five because that was the year the National Wild Turkey Federation had their convention in New Orleans. I drove to New Orleans how to booth, and the guy next to me and with Marvin Kellysworth. He was an architect from Alabama and he loved turkey in and he bought him one of them video cameras. And he yelped up a turkey and at a loading site where they had logging woods and the loading side and he was backed up against some of them pilot up trash logs, and he yelped up this turkey and killed it on tape. And he was playing that on his TV. And the line was hundreds deep. They couldn't get to me if they really wanted to. But yet I had a had a built in crowd. When he'd have a break, I'd be able to talk about my stuff. And so I went, holy r, I'm going to get me a video camera. I know how I know how to market Primos. About the same time I read a book called Radical Marketing, Unbelievable Stories about the Grateful Dead, about Harley Davidson and how they radically marketed. They couldn't just go buy print ads. I didn't have any money. How did they do it? So got the video cameras, had Boyd Burrow, who worked for me at the time. We produced the first tape in nineteen eighties six and it was called Spring Turkey On with Primos and the Southern Boys. What a name and they're horrible, And we had two hunts on it and had had some success. It was VHS. We sold them to sporting goods stores for forty four dollars and ninety nine cents and they rented him like blockbusts. That's the way it was done. The next year I had met Ronnie Kusz strictly. He was working in Rex supporting goods in Natchez, down south, and he had sent me a recording of some stuff he had done, not video wise, but otherwise. I drove down there and went and sold him some more calls he was buying him already, And talked to him and said, you're come to work for me. Next thing I know he quit Rex. I bought him a truck and I said, look, I'm in the restaurant business. I can't afford this game call company. I'm gonna keep working in the restaurant business. I might can go hunting, I might not can go hunt, But I want you to take anybody that a go friends, family, anybody that let you hunt on land, public land, doesn't matter. Just go hunt. They were to make a couple of hunts because recorded twelve incredible hunts, me on some of them one spring. In one spring, this original video was the beginning of a massive success on many levels. It taught a lot of us how to hunt gobblers. It brought the excitement of turkey hunting into our houses in Our lead interpreter of the experience was Mr Will Primost. His passion, excitement, intelligence and authenticity were hard to resist. And the rest is history. This golden era of wild turkey hunting put a new cultural value on hunting turkeys, and as we know, that value creates an incentive for people to protect turkeys. Never forget this equation. Hunting creates incentive which creates protection. It was also during this time that the National Wild Turkey Federation came to maturity. It was started in nineteen seventy three, but the nineteen nineties produced vast expansion of the organization which is designed to protect turkeys and habitat, and they've done an incredible job. As great as it's been talking about the glory days, let's talk about modern times because the last twenty years have seen downturns and turkey populations in many places. And this isn't all gloom and doom, but because we've still got a lot of turkeys, and we've still got way more than we had in some other periods of this country. But the hunting community is now on red alert. Here's Dr Chamberlain breaking it down. Describe for me from the research that you have about the decline of turkeys in the Southeast, how do we quantitatively know that? Okay, so basically, state agencies in the South, not all, but most of them use poults observe per hen in the summer, poults being young turkeys, as a proxy for production. For many decades, we've always thought that three poults per hen on average would be a population that's increasing. Two pouls per hen would be a population that can just sustain itself, and anything less than two pouls per hen is a declining and this is them raising that pulp to maturity. Yeah, until they're large, you know, half the size of the adults in the summer. You don't want to talk about. You see a brood flock, if you will, where you've got like four or five hens and twenty young turkeys that were hatched that summer. Now they're twice the size of batam rooster or something. So at that point their survival is and so hen turkey would have a clutch of ten ten twelve. Yeah, So I mean that's that's even calculating her losing sevent her clutch. And that's good. We thought it was sustainable. And what you've seen over the past twenty years, we've seen declining productivity as measured by pulse observed per hen across the southeast, not in one state, all the states. Can I ask you something about pults observed just before we go any further. How do we know that's not anecdotal? Is it just the best we can do? I guess in some ways, yes, it is the best we can do, and it's fraught with biases. It's the same people observing birds in the same places every year. It's not distributed to broadly across states in the way it should be, but it's about the best we have at the scale at which agencies managed turkeys, which is a state level, you know, or a geographic region within a state. So what we've seen are these long term, precipitous declines in production, slow enough to where if you looked from one year to the next, it's not that big of a deal. But when you look across twenty years, it's a linear trend down. Boy, those are the tough ones. Yes, and it was right under our nose. And I say we because I take partial blame for this. I've been in this game a long time. I've studied this bird twenty five years, and I wasn't paying attention to those trends as they were unfolding, because when you just looked across three or four or five years, it wasn't that big of a deal. You know, you see noise and data up and down, up and down, up and down, but but the trend is down. And then all of a sudden, around two thousand and ten, myself and my students presented some data to the agencies using what they had provided us, and it showed these dramatic declines and production. At the same time, you've seen either increasing harvest, stable harvest, or decreasing harvest, depending on the state. So in other words, in some cases we were seeing declines in production and increases in harvest. Well, the basic math doesn't add up. You know, at some point that bubble has to pop. And of course when when US turkey hunters here fewer birds, see fewer birds, and kill fewer birds. Were concerned. And that's where you are right now with much of the Southeast, and it has agencies trying to identify what's going on and then how to address it. Sometimes all the talk about turkey decline, which is being talked about a lot, can be confusing. I hoped to get Dr Chamberlain to narrow it down to the top five culprits of turkey decline in the Southeast. Here's what he said. Number one is habitat. If you look across the species range, you can find situations where there's been not only a loss of habitat, it's just gone habitat that's capable of supporting farm turning into a walmart. Yes, so you've got lost where it's just disappeared. You have conversion of habitats. So, for instance, the loss of hardwood forest and it being replaced with pine dominated forest. Turkeys in the east are inextricably linked to hardwood forest. We also seen declines in habitat quality. So to your point, this field used to be grazed and kept it in what's considered good brood habitat, and that farm was sold and it was planted to pine trees, or it was converted to a fruit orchard or whatever. You can come up with a scenario. So if you look at the landscape from a thirty thousand foot view, you see that in the past few decades there's less habitat, there's poor quality habitat, and there's conversion of habitat, and none of that has benefited the bird. And you can go to other areas. You can go out to Rio country, you can go to Miriam's country. You can find this anywhere you go. If you go to South Florida, you see it magnified to the degree with Osceola's because Florida is such a destination stay for everything. So how tat would be that in habitat fragmentation to fragmentation at good point. By fragmenting habitats with roads and power lines and rights of way, we've made habitat that's better for predators than turkeys, and that very likely is influencing the increased predation rates that we've seen. Number two is confounded by habitat, and that's predation we have seen. If you look across the United States and North American general, we've seen obvious changes in the distribution and abundance of predators that would affect turkeys, the smaller carnivores. You know, you're a raccoon hunter. I can take you to properties here locally that you would run your dogs to death trying to treat all the raccoons on these properties. To a coon hunter, that sounds pretty good. Turkey hunter, it sounds terrible. Yeah. Species like coyotes that were not even historically present in the Southeast now are superabundant. There's no fur trade, as you know, so species like bobcats and raccoons there's no market for them anymore, or there are not trappers being recruited into the trapping ranks. So all of that points to these changes in predator abundance and density and then if you look at many species that have increased in abundance, and we know it's such as raptors, owls, hawks that affect turkeys as well. Uh species that are prominent nest predators, like rat snakes that benefit from a thicker, brushier understory in the forest. All of these things, fragmentation species like rat snakes, for instance, that hunt the long edges, and they're extremely effective along edges, they're not as effective in the interior of a stand. You put all that together and in the habitat confounds the predation issues. And so what we've seen is we are not producing as many turkeys because the predation rate on the nest is higher than it was historically. Twenty years ago, nest that hatched had a better survival rate than they do now. We even the few that hatched in our study populations, most of them fail before they're a month old. So the predation and habitat go hand in hand. Any idea, what number three is, It's another predator issue, but undoubtedly the most sneaky predator of all time. Number one is habitat related issues. Number two is predation, which is connected to habitat. What's number three harvest. We've got a bird that we hunt primarily during their breeding season, and we've known for year decades that harvest matters. It matters when you kill the birds, and it matters the rate at which you harvest them. Research decades ago suggested that you need to harvest your birds starting at a certain time, that being about when nesting starts, and you need to kill a conservative say thirty percent or less of your tim's in a population. The problem with all of that is those recommendations were predicated on what was happening in the nineteen eighties, and we've already talked about since nineteen eighties, we've seen a dramatic decline in production. We're not making as many birds, So the paradigm that has guided harvest for this bird is outdated, and science is showing that we're killing a lot of males in some of our populations were killing well over. If that's the case, then it's not sustainable. Given the production, again predicated under where we know we are as a new normal, the harvest thinking, if you will, the mindset that we've used historically, it's just not going to work anymore. And that's why so these liberal turkey bag limits, Like in some places you can kill five. I remember there was a time in Arkansas you'd kill three. Now you can kill two. I mean, we're gonna have to dial that back in. Yeah, and you see a lot of agencies that are already doing that. Because I'm not trying to advocate for the agencies, but the bottom line is, as a turkey hunter, you need to understand that agencies can only control harvest at a spatial scale that's commensurate with the bird. In other words, they can manage their state lands anyway they want, and it's still only impacts of time, any percentage of the turkeys on the landscape understood. But when they change harvest frameworks and they change the number of birds that are being killed, they can change that at a state level, and that's what they're charged with managing. So that's unfortunately harvest is often what agencies. What's the biggest level we've got exact? I mean, if we're talking about we want more turkeys on the landscape and we're killing turkeys, the way that we can have for sure more turkeys on the landscape is for us to kill less. Yeah. I'm dying to know what number four is what's number four? I see disease being problematic. The problem with diseases we don't understand the complexity of disease issues on the landscape because a sick bird dies and gets eaten and we don't know they're there. But what you're seeing, yeah, what you're seeing now is some emerging disease issues in parts of the country where we have these viruses and we have things that are affecting turkeys, and we don't understand how. We just know the birds are sick or that they're carrying the virus. Some of these viruses do have potential to affect reproduction, we just don't understand the magnitude of that effect. And it's such a hard question to get at at a broad scale. And what we're seeing through disease testing is you may have a high prevalence of a particular virus in certain areas and not in other areas. So it's not like a uniform problem, but it could be really problematic in a local area. What would be number five? This is your last one. I could almost pick about four or five different things, but I'll I'll use a little bit different take than I think most people would expect. It is us us as turkey hunters. Our mindset, our perspectives, are expectations, our willingness to take versus give. We are going to be the future of this bird. If we prioritize the fact that we want, that we're willing to give more than we take, then there's hope for this bird because we are the ones that are going to carry the torch. Who else is going to prioritize turkey other than turkey hunters, nobody else exactly. We get caught up in our mindset, as we've talked about as often about well, this is what I expect. I want to kill three birds or two birds, or whatever it is, and we get caught up in what we've experienced in the past, how we grew up, this is how we've always done it. Guys, gals, you gotta forget that we have to work innovatively and creatively together and recognize that if we don't prioritize the bird, and we don't work collaboratively with agencies and landowners, nobody else is We are the ones that are going to have to prioritize the bird. If we don't do that, it's not going to happen. So I look at number five as being us. I like the question. Dr Chamberlain asked and answered, who is going to protect turkeys? The only people are the hunters. Here is a look at the big picture of North American conservation. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but I know it's right and it's going to be worth it. I think about, Okay, am I going to be satisfied with one? If I go to this state and only harvest one, will I be satisfied? And as the older I've gotten, the more I realize the answers, Yes, yeah, twenty five year old turkey hunter has a very different mindset than I do. You know. I think what we were seeing and what we have to prepare for in the next fifty years of conservation this country is sacrifice, sportsman sacrificing for the resource because there's nothing that's getting easier about wildlife management in this country. I mean, primarily due to increase of human population and decrease of literal forest, swamps, habitat grasslands. I mean, and that ain't stopping anytime soon either. I mean, we will not be able to regulate humans surviving. And it was clear is that as sportsman if we really value this resource, if we really value this lifestyle that we have as an American sportsman, We're gonna have to suck it up in a lot of places. I mean, I've just spent a lot of time researching and interviewing about the Green Tree reservoir issues in Arkansas with the duck hunting, and I mean that's pretty much where we're at with that. It's like, uh, yeah, this is this kind of stinks for a lot of people, but we have to do this to say the resource. So really it's kind of like just this is the new normal. But that's okay. I mean that. And I'm I'm like exactly middle aged. I'm forty two years old, so I'm kind of a teeter on youthful lust of like want to kill a bunch of turkeys, but also the wisdom that might come with age. And I'm like, I see both sides of it. But situations like this are going to be the norm moving forward. When I go hunting, I want to bring home game. Otherwise we'd call it hiking. But here we'll see the reason why Mr Will hunts. It's kind of a cliche idea, but the answer is so compelling and we all know it gets truer and truer the older we get. So of all the things you hunt, and I know that you your experience in North America is vast. Where does turkey rank inside of that? Somebody asked me that the other day and I and I wrote it down. Oh man, he's got I'm gonna read. I'm gonna read it to you and answer to what do I like to hunt the most? Turkeys or elk or big mature deer, wild covey is on the rise, big bass on top water, or as the green heads when cup to the decoys. All can be exceptional, But day in or day out, it is the sunrises and sunsets I cherish most. So if I had to give him all up, turkey hunting is not gonna be given up. And then second from me after Turkey's gonna be ill. Okay, So turkey and elk, That's what I'm hearing you said. Yeah, Now I just had a dug hunt going tomorrow. Yea, In Big White Tales, I have to it's a it's a it's a trap question, I know. I mean, if you try the same thing, I would stumble around and be like just matters what every one of those days has sunrises and sun that's right. In closing, here's Mr Will talking about two things that have been most important in his success, and I think we can incorporate these into our approach of protecting wild turkeys. Passion, don't ever underestimate anybody with passion never and another thing, realize what discipline is. Discipline is giving up what you want to day for what you really want most to are be at weight loss. You gotta not eat that, or you gotta exercise. You gotta be disciplined about it to get what you really want. But remember, discipline is so important in every step of your life, every step of your life. From the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning, you've given up what you want today what you really want most tomorrow. After hanging out with Mr Will, it's clear that passion and discipline are two dominant features of his life. I was personally impacted by being around him, and since recording this podcast, I was able to hunt three days with him in Mississippi, and I can tell you the highlight clips of his turkey hunting videos don't portray how incredibly disciplined Mr Will is In every area of his life, his eating, his exercise, his finances, his reading, his spirituality, his relationships, and I've rarely met someone with such incredible focus. Being around people like him is personally challenging. He seems to be a student of life, never ceasing in pursuit of forward momentum, but able to enjoy the ride. I think in modern times of Turkey conservation, we can take a play for Mr Will just like we did back in the nineteen nineties. We're going to need passion and lots of it to fuel our energy and love of wild places and beasts. I've made it a spiritual discipline to never take for granted seeing a wild turkey or a covey of quail or a black bear. If my heart doesn't jump, I tell it to jump, and it asked how high. And secondly, we'll need discipline as we move into a new era of conservation. That discipline will take on different forms for all of us. It could be improving the habitat on your fifteen acre track of land that into jake Turkey walk, taking a neighbor kid hunting, Or it might be that in the future you are the leader of a powerful conservation group in charge of millions of dollars, and you'll need to do the right thing for the resource. In closing the gobble and red head of the wild Turkey has altered the course of my life. His iridescent feathers and swinging beard have imprinted me beyond reclamation. And it is my honest prayer that will be backed up with action, like Billy Coleman's prayer was that goblin turkeys will continue to thrive in America. Thanks so much for listening to Bear Grease. I've got two favors I'd like to ask of you this week. Number one, share our podcast this week with the worst and best turkey hunters you know and be sure to tell them which one they are. And number two, take an action step and join become a paying member of the National Wild Turkey Federation. Have a great week, and we'll talk on the Render next week with some of the crew. M