00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten in my case underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on X real quick before people listen to the show, I want to make it feel like they're being super constructive. And how would we do that? Well, we would have your honest tell this story. You like that? I set that up? I did, Um, which story do you want me to tell about the I've got a couple of them guy getting shot? Okay, what do you mean you got a couple of them? Well, we were just earlier talking about the weasel in your yard. Yeah, but how does that make people feel constructive? That's just something in your yard. They don't own your yard. When I'm talking about the shot they getting shot. Thing would show like how this how this program saves lives? Okay, I'm reading up though right now? How much does anybody in this room know? How much one unit of blood is? Point? I don't know, yes, roughly the equivalent of one point about five million leaders. Good job. So we had a podcasts a while back which was number Brody You Were Here, I Was Not Here? Episode one two called Bleeding Out and uh a fella rode in um Joey. Joey wrote in to say that this podcast saved his father's life. Now this podcast you here or not You do you want to give a quick rundown of what went down on that podcast? Well, we had our buddy Dr Alan Lazar, who's an emergency room doctor and uh that's correct, also a hunter in Detroit and Detroit. He had been helping us out with various research questions and uh so Steve decided to have him out because he's an interesting dude. And uh one of his main points was that all hunters and fisherman too probably should be carrying around a tourniquet in the woods because if you get cut bad, that's really the only thing that's going to save your life. Yeah, and he go ahead, Well he had mentioned everybody thinks like, well, I'll just jury rig one, right, do you know that it's okay to say Jerry Rigg and jury Rigg. No. I looked it up. People think, wow, does jury rig one? He's like by the time you jury rig one, you're dead. Your buddy's dead. How's it okay to say Jerry rig am? I not thinking that it's the same like kind of like it's a negative like, isn't it doesn't it come from Jerry's kids and doing it the wrong way? That's what I always understood. If that's the case, I'm not I don't say it anyway. Is If that's the case, I definitely wouldn't say it. But you think it has to do with Jerry Lewis telephone? Uh? Yeah, Where does Jerry Rick come from? I just thought it was people. Just Jerry can come from? Jerry can. It's a good one. I don't know. It's not a jury can No jury rig who seth you know the type he's just sitting over there watching this. Well you were the one that says that you found out that it's okay to say about so I want to know why that isn't And then it's we should just I don't mean okay, like socially okay that that that that the source I looked at accepts both. Now it wasn't making a moral it wasn't anyways, you're dead by the time, like if you're gonna go, like run back to your truck and get whatever you come back. Your buddy's dead, that's right. And he's got like a national campaign going on. Uh right, it's called Stop the Bleed. A bunch of e R doctors going around and uh educating people about how to stop bleeding better. Right. Yeah. Yeah, And he convinced all of us to start packing tourniquets. Yeah, I had never done mine. Finally made it from my desk, the tourniquets they left me or you gave them to me too, into my back my daily backpack, which I guess is better than at my desk. But now I'm gonna take one and put one of my turkeys. He was trying to fancy new turniquet out yesterday. It's a belt that you wear. It's pretty aggressive, but yeah, you'd have a belt. Your belt is a tourniquet. Your belt can be deployed aid, so you would always just have it on. Well, just so happens that in this story Joey writes in about he used his belt as a tourniquet. They were out pheasant hunting. I believe in uh Colorado, Kansas, maybe some some place that has a lot of pheasants and uh, to cut this story a little bit shorter, they get to a spot where they're giving their dogs some water and uh, Joey's dad is in front of one of the other hunters guns and the hunter's guns gun goes off. It's a twelve gauge and approximately eight yards and catches him in the ribs, abdomen and uh, one of his arms pretty bad bleeding. Um. They immediately realized it's bad. They call UH. It takes fifty minutes for them to get for help to get there. I think Joey did a good job with his story. I like the way that he explained this part right here. He said when he was looking at the blood, he's a big deer hunter, and he said, if I was tracking a deer and saw this much blood, I'd be expecting that deer to be dead or just around the corner. He said, it was like spurting right. Yes, that's a great detail. Yeah, great detail like that. And they're on snow to which always makes it makes it look like there's more blood. It makes you think you're gonna find deer that you don't. Yeah. Um. So anyways, he's saying that they had started a tourniquet with some ripped clothing shreads. One of the other hunters had well, he had just recently two weeks prior, listened to episode one two leading out, and he remembered three key points. One, nobody ties a tourniquets tight enough. Two, tying a tourniquet does not necessarily mean that the limb will be lost. And three, when tying the tourniquet, it's necessary to go as far up the limb as possible. So he took off his belt, put it way up his dad's arm, and cranked on it. Um. He made it to the hospital. He received fourteen units of blood, which we now know is uh roughly fourteen points and how many doesn't could that possibly be true? How many points does a human body hold? Seth come on eight eight to twelve, So they might it might have been more blood than his in your body losing they was pumping it in. I think I'm not calling the brother liar. This is hard to fathom. Okay, Well, let's just say it was tanned and not fourteen. Um. Yeah, it doesn't say like a pipe and an out pipe. The hospital complimented him many times on the quality and application of his tourniquet all principles uh that he learned on a podcast. So there you go, man, good job. Listen to the media podcast might save someone's life, especially episode one nine. Yep, now, uh real quick, Johnny, tell about the wheel quick. So I'm gonna get a little background, okay, Uh, well, just telling about the weasels. I was gonna talk about how I can't get permission on your property and whatnot. Yeah, well, my gal just loves loves the wildlife more alive than dead. Sometimes she loves them more in a way. In a way because there's a long list of things on your property that are on the goal list or they are on the okay list. Listen, Yeah, as soon as they took out a chicken or two and the ermine long tail weasel, it'd be game on. You know, Like we had some squirrels attack in the house. This winner, she's out there with the hunting them. You know, she said a babe pile for those squirrels, but she didn't. I think she got a shot off but she missed. But later I think one day I had come home, you know, you know, you pulping my driveway. You can kind of see past the back of the house. I look down there, I'm like, oh, what is that wondering what that squirrels doing there? I get a little closer and he just sitting there, munching away on whatever she'd put out, some seeds. So I went inside, I got the twenty two and dispatched him. She uh even almost declared war on a fox. What she did? She killed the fox. Okay, so don't give me the whole wildlife thing. Uh So it's pretty cool on these ermans around because you get to see him hunting every now and then, maybe once or twice a winter. And we have a decent, contentent population that lives in and around the house, and the erman's usually hunting. I've never seen anything besides the cotton tail. Anyways. The other morning i'm up, must have been this this weekend. It's snow and there's like three or four inches of fresh snow, and I see a bunny rabbit hopping around our plow truck. Watch him for a minute, go away, come back, he's hopping around. And then next thing I see is I see like the tumble the bunny sort of tumbling erratically down our driveway, which immediately because I've seen it before. Means that he and the ermine are locked together and the ermins trying to grab by the neck and suffocate it, and they're tumbling away. Now I've seen this two or three other times. The bunny rabbit always gets away, so they kind of go out of view over kind of the crest of the hill, and I wait for a bit, don't see him come back. Maybe five or ten minutes later, and a little farther down the driveway, I can just see a dark spot and I can see a magpie like five ft away. So I grab the grab the buyos and I look down there and like it's actually two dark spots because the white ermine is bisecting the cotton tail rabbit. And now he's just sitting there. Then a rabbit was still alive a little bit. He was sort of the ermine was finishing off. But it's amazing how fast and magpies were. They're sort of like, all right, we're gonna get our peace too. Well, as long as I watched, he fended off the magpies and eventually drug the bunny rabbit into the sort of hawthorn and thicket, and I couldn't see him I didn't. I don't want to go. I wanted to go investigate, but I didn't want to go disturb his you know, peace and his kill. So I didn't know. I don't know if the magpies eventually end up getting a chunk or not. But uh, he drug him out of the road and into the Hawthorne the Erman. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Fourteen inch really, that's a good one. I just had to throw a number at it. Well, we wanted one because we wanted we want one to get tanned. We want one big exemplary specimen to get tanned. Um, we want to collect up addition to stuff, we want to collect up one of all furbears. Uh as a little project. We're out. We got our big one because we were out that. I don't think I told this story. Me and my kid walk out of my friend's ranch house and he's like, there's a coyote. There's a coyote, And I look, I don't see an kyote. So now I'm a little bit annoyed. I'm like, dude, you know, don't just be like crying out that you see stuff. Yeah, but your boy usually doesn't. He's got a good game. Out, Well, check this out, So I mean, not thirty seconds goes by. He turns and looks the other way and yells, there's a weasel. Now you can go like a long time without seeing a weasel. So then I lay into him. I'm like, James, you gotta and I'm like yelling at him. This weasel runs back across the road the other direction, and he runs over there. It's a little for ten and the reason went down in the hole and I started doing one of those like making mouse noises with your hand. He popped his head right back out of the hole and Jimmy got him nice tanker. But then in skinning it, I broke The whole thing is in skinning the tail. I have a tail stripper that's used for like getting the tailbone out of tails. Um, but it didn't have a fine enough it doesn't have like a weasel setting, and I tried to flub it and broke the end of the damn tail off a little tip. So I'm My wife's annoyed because she doesn't like it, this whole thing. Um. I was like, we just need one, and she's like, well, here's your one. I'm like yeah, but the tail is broken now, so I might just stitch the tailback on Winners, kind of winding down. Michael Chamberlain special guest here today. Oh one last thing? Are you? Um? Are you doctor Michael Chamberlain. Okay? I like that that kind of adds, that kind of builds that resume here. Just call me Mike on the show. You just want to go by Mike. Yeah, only my wife and my mother called me Michael. Dr Michael chamber Uh. Wild turkey researcher. Yep. But I got one last point I want to before we get into that. We're good on weasels great. Um, one last thing I want to mention, and this has to do with turkeys. You know, when you're hunting turkeys, you don't use a blind. It's called running and gunning. Uh. A guy we're talking about on social media. We had a thing up about like when you guys don't where you're from, you don't ice fish and ice fishing. There's a thing now and then where you just strike off across the lake drilling thousand holes. Right. Um, it's the ice fish and equivalent of like walking along the bank, casting all over the damn place, and you call it hole hopping. Prospecting. Um what else you call it? Taking a poke, taking a few pokes whatever, You just like leave your area to start drilling holes all over the damn place and see what's going on. And a guy in Canada said, in Canada, that's called running and gunning, which I thought was because it's the gun. Um. Okay, how to turkey researcher? You're affiliated with the university University of Georgia. How does lay out? How that happens? Did you become a official turkey researcher hard work and good luck? Did you grow up hunting turkeys? I did? I did. I grew up in Virginia as a suburban kid that got to hunt on saturdays with his dad. Uh. We had a fall season that was actually as popular as the spring season then, so we actually learned the turkey hunt during the fall, calling them. Yeah, you'd you'd actually go and bust the flocks up, just walk until you run across the flock. Did you use a dog to scour him up? Sometimes? And as soon as the dog would flush or you would flush the birds, you just sat down where they flushed from and start calling. And usually the juvenile birds were the first ones to come back off in Jake's So you bust them up and they all fly in different directions. I want to know about the busting them up because I keep thinking I'm gonna gonna go out and do that. Some want to know you see them up like fifty year a hundred yards out right, we would actually like running and yelling at them. Well, what we would do is get up on high ground on ridges and call well you would, yeah, and as soon as you could get a response, you just start moving towards them until you could see them, and then you take off running. Now I didn't know there was like a locating components. So you're like really deliberately heading out to do this. Yes, yes, it's not like opportunistic and it's it's a bit on the redneck side because there you are running through the eastern hardwood forest, you know, wide open, trying to bust these birds just a shooting, no, just just just running and they would usually they would flush like quail. A lot of them would go in one direction, but the ones that did not, they were money. How close would you have to get to flush them just to really break it just depended. We used to do the same thing in Pennsylvania. Yeah, that was popular in a popular way to I can thought when you opened your mouth next it would be to tell us about jewelry. Agin No, just find anything out. Yeah, it's had two research projects. Well yahni covered the one. Um jury rigged means something was assembled quickly with materials on hand and jerry built this says, or jerry rigged means it was cheap or poorly built. But what does it say that does it give the etymology? Free folks at home. The etymology of a word is sort of how it came to. What am I trying to say? There was? It's the words history origin. Yeah, the Wikipedia says it's origin lies in such efforts done on boats and ships, sail powered boats. M hmm, Kenny, how what were you saying? Seth um, No, I I cut my teeth on Turkey hunting in the fall of the same exact way. Just walking. We used to like get a group of guys, just walk until you find them. That's how we did it too. Spring hunting was not. Fall hunting was way more popular in Pennsylvania than sing hunting. Really before the world. That's true when I was a kid before that. Turkey population blew up. There's really only turkeys in the mountains, like down by where Seth lived, and fall hunting was the way people hunted him Seth from the mountains. Yeah, man, yeah, that's exactly how I grew up. Yeah, it was people like it just was not as popular the spring hunting where the spring is limited, and that's why it was just gaining popularity at that time. I mean, yeah, but you grew up where there always were turkeys. Yeah, it was just not as popular. It wasn't it as the thing that it is now. And now you know, of course it's done a complete script flip if you will, and spring hunting is it's hugely popular, and fall huntings declining and you know most of the state. Yeah, I'm so, we're like basically the same age. My grandfather still to this day will take fall turkey hunting over anything else. It's like his favorite thing to do. Well, you don't have to figure out if it's a male or female in most places. Okay, so you guys are systematic though, Climp on the ridge, located group the flock, take off running, and then just talk about the use of the dogs. Because I got a a friend of mine from back home from high school. He's got a turkey dog trained up to bust him. You just probably get a more effective bust with something as fast as a dog. Absolutely, So the dog would run into the flock, scatter the birds in all directions, and then you sit down, put a coat over the dog, or put the dog behind you, and and start yelping. And usually, like I said, the birds that scattered by themselves, they would immediately come back to you. And you're so the call you're making is called a kiki. Yeah, just a ki ki and a you a real raspy yelp. Anything that would make you think, make those birds think it was mom, because most of those birds that scattered were I mean, they were juveniles, got you. So anything that would bring those birds back to you, Well, what what? What is the difference? I never understood this. There's a kiki and a kiki run? Is that not true? You hear people refer to them as it's basically just this this you know kiki ki ki call that that birds make when they're younger. Oh so just different words from the same thing. I think it's the same thing. I didn't know if it was a difference in kikikiki run, And that kind of originates from you know, when you when you scatter poults in the summer, you'll hear the poults start whistling that kiki ki ki ki, and you know, and mom will start putting, clucking, trying, you know, so she doesn't they do it, but she doesn't do it. She can do it, she can't do the whistle. Turkeys have all sorts of vocalizations. Show me the sound, like if you let's hear you are you're hunting the fall, you you bust up a group of turkeys, Show me a sound that would be like sound that would be effective? Huh, But you'd call a bird in the spring like that. Yeah, it's basically. I mean, all you're trying to do is say, hey, here I am. That's them collecting up. Yeah, come back over here. Everything's good when it's not. I got a buddy that used to get Hans that way. Really, he would bust Hans up. He lived not far from here. He would bust Hans up. And I don't know what vocalization they have. Um, I've probably heard it, but then it's a whistle. If memory stirs and that's spent several years. He would bust them up and hide and start doing that, and eventually you'd start drawing him back in mhm. Yeah, because they make that raspy kind of cackling. Yeah, it's like, get on the ground and start running. Yeah, there's a bunch of my neighborhood and I hear it all the time. If you bust them up, they you'll hear him all in different directions making that noise. So you guys did that growing up? Absolutely? Did you know? Were you like? Man? When I get old, I'm gonna be a turkey biologist. No. Now. I went to Virginia Tech just wanted to be a you know, a game ward and wildlife biologist, wildlife manager. And next thing you know, I ended up in grad school at Mississippi State and realized research was was kind of my thing and got the opportunity to stay on and do a PhD. And the project that I studied when I was a master student was a turkey project. I was basically I didn't play in the study turkeys. I just ended up in this project and became infactuated with the bird and their biology. What was the project? It was just studying turkeys in the Mississippi Delta, just flood prone areas, didn't know a lot about the birds in that area. Um, I got to get my you know, feetwet if you will. And then my PhD program was actually looking at predation on turkeys. So I was studying turkeys using radio telemetry, but then I also put collars on coyodes, bobcats, gray foxes, raccoons and studied how all those species interact with turkeys. And then I landed in Academia, which was just fortuitous. What year was was that going on that you were doing that that initial research, uh through Do you feel that at that time there was a lot of low hanging fruit from turkey research because the country had gone so long without that many turkeys around. Yeah, that, man, that was the heyday. I mean, turkeys were exploding everywhere. They were being restored throughout their range and beyond, as you know, and the research that was ongoing was grabbing low hanging fruit, partially because we could answer those questions with the technology we had at the time. And there were studies everywhere. There were there were research projects and all sorts of states, you know, you know, multiple universities had work on going. And then all of a sudden around two thousand to two thousand three, it just kind of started stagnating. And I think part of that was complacency. You know, there were birds everywhere, they seem to be doing well. People harvest was increasing, and at least in most of the Eastern United States, and agencies stopped putting research money into turkeys at that point. And then you kind of saw this lull until the late you know, two thousand nine, two thousand ten period, when I think a lot of people in the East and Southeast realized there was there was an issue, and you've kind of seen a resurrection of turkey research in my eyes, and people stopped taking turkeys for granted. Yeah, absolutely, humans got short memories, man, we do. We do shortsighted and short memory in some cases. When you were doing that work, that initial work, you did a lot of predator work I did. What if you look at that, but also all the things you've learned since then. And I want to get back into in a minute, I get back into your sort of like professional biography. But what kills turkeys in your mind? Not in your mind? I mean, it's not you got to guess, you know, as a matter of fact that you look at like a national sort of picture. Um, what kills turkeys? All of your larger mammals, coach, bobcats, foxes, horned owls. Great horned owls are an efficient predator of turkeys because they kill him in the tree. Oh, they do, they do. Someone was telling me that just the other day, the dude we're driving around. Yeah, they are really efficient. And they kill adult tom's too. And we find that they do that early in the morning while the birds are gobbling. They single land on birds on you know, in the tree, and then it is to get him on the ground. And they actually hit them in the tree and you can see a plume of feathers that goes away from the tree in the direction that they carry the bird down to the ground. And then they kill the bird on the ground, consume what they want and leave and they you know, horned owls are bad man. They is a big thing to hit. Yeah, horned owls when they're in breeding pairs. They I used to call at the Bermuda triangle I had really when I was doing my PhD work, I had four raccoons. There were collared a skunk, um, a gray fox and two turkey hens in the same kind of general area, and this pair of horned owls killed all of them. Back up, give me the list again. It was four raccoons, a gray fox, a skunk and two turkeys, and that that parah you kill a raccoon rad cougar put the fight and almost seen a raccoon kill a dog one time. Remember that horned owls are vicious and they're so if you think about it, the way they hit their prey with the force that they hit their prey and they blindside you. You don't know what's coming. They have the element of surprise on their side and they're they're incredible. But what's the actual like the method of killing, like what dispatches the animals, not just the hit because you it's the talents. They strategically put the talents like around the neck I'm guessing neck, vertebrae back, anything that disabled them, and you hit it like a peregrine hits like they hit it. It's like a it's like a baseball bat. So they'll blow a gobbler out of a tree. Yes, yes, I wonder why they responds, well, yeah, it's in their frequency band that that owl hoot is in the same frequency band that a gobbles in. So some of the gobbling work we do, it's very the technology we use to tease out the gobbles. It's in the same frequency band as an owl hoot, as a crow call, as a coyote, how a gunshot, a cow moving, they're all within on the sonogram, they're all within that same frequency band. So it makes sense we need to give him one of our t shirts that shows all the things that make a turkey gobble. Have you ever seen this shirt? No, but I'd love to happen. Do we gotta run? We got a running list that includes some incredible things. Oh, they'll they'll gobbled all sorts of things. It's crazy. Sonic booms, thunderclaps. Yeah, absolutely so a guy, a guy hawking rock to the stop signs in our list. That was me. When you say like the same frequency band, it's almost like they can't help themselves, like they just yeah you hear of shot gobbling? Ye Oh, I want to get I want to talk about this in like detail first ime on top. I want to finish up in the Great Horned Owls. So hold that thought about shot gobl exactly, Like what is he thinking, um, the great horned owls they ride it to the earth. Yes, so they hit. We lose, routinely lose. If we let's just for number or sake, let's just say we put fift GPS units on Tom's and on this site, we'll lose at least one or two before the turkey season starts to horned owls at least every year, and it always occurs from about right now, you know, late February early marks when they first start gobbling in the tree, until right before the turkey season when when we see gobbling really is starting to ramp up. That's when those horned owls hit. Those times, we had a gentleman the are day explained to me and Seth that he believes that his bobcats go up into the roost tree and kill the turkey's off the roost. Cats can obviously climb out. I can't really discount that. But I doesn't speak to you. It does not, because when you get under a turkey roost, they know exactly I mean, they know you're there. They know you're there long before you ever get there. And yes, cats are much more stealthy than we are. But but bobcats are are primarily stalk and sit hunters. They sit and wait on things to walk by them. They're lazy like our housecatch and your housecats sits on your refrigerator and smashing ahead when you walk by. Bobcats typically kill birds. We see they kill birds while birds are out forging. So it's you know, the kills made during the day sometime or early morning, late afternoon when birds are kind of strolling along roads or rights of way or whatever, and all of a sudden, boom, there's the kill. I'm not saying they couldn't climb a tree and kill a bird, but man, if you think about it, that would be It's hard to imagine them wrestling a turkey off on a tree branch. Yeah, yeah, I guess it could happen, but it could be a hack of a fall. You're putting putting yourself into a dangerous position to take at fall. Yeah with yeah, yeah, he seemed to think that he would get up there when they're still sleeping and surprise him, isn't that what he was saying, and get a whole bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would say the whole bunch probably. Yeah, I'm gonna have to call bs on the whole bunch. Maybe one of the time, I was just sharing a perspective with us. Uh okay, So you did all that, and that was in your your PhD project was in the Mississippi Delta, Well it was in Mississippi. My master's work was in the Delta, and my PhD work was in the kind of upland piney woods. And what was that work because PDHD work is very specific though, right, Yeah, that was the predation. That was where we went in and we marked. We radio turkeys, hens and all those predators. And basically what I did was I recreated GPS data, but I did it manually tracking there there was no GPS at that time, so I would track these animals simultaneously. So I may have three or four cats, a kaya, two boxes, five hens, two raccoons, whatever. How are you getting all that stuff colored up? We trapped our butts off live trapping. Yes, we foothold trapped for the cats, coyotes and foxes, and used cage traps for the raccoons, and of course you used rocket nets for the for the turkeys. And I did all that simultaneously. So there were several students working with me that Let's say student A he was studying raccoons and student B was studying bobcats. And then I was kind of overseeing all of it, trapping birds, trapping this, trapping that, making sure you didn't get a collar on. We we both years of that project. I tracked about a hundred and fifty animals simultaneously. How are you catching the bobcats foothold traps? I mean, what kind of sets did you make? We could trap with bait because we were permitted under the state mean visible like visible bits. We used um. It was funny based on your story this morning before we started. We used beaver because the caster has such a strong odor, and we had a local trapper that provided beaver carcss and we would uh, we would use the liver. We would use deer liver, deer ribs, anything we could get our hands on that that had a sight to it. We would hang feathers, you know, anything. Because cats are such visual hunters. The cats were pretty easy. The kyotes were more were more difficult. But but but because we could use meat, we were pretty successful. And then you had to have used um like rubber jaws, laminated jaws because you had these things, you couldn't cripple them up right. Yeah. Yeah, So we used either offset jaws, but most of them were padded Yeah. Soft catchy, soft catch. So we would, you know, we would catch the animals. We were in traps every morning, every afternoon, pulled animals out of the trap. Uh. We didn't drug foxes or coyotes, but we would immobilize bobcats and raccoons because they were vicious. Obviously. Oh, it was harder to wrestle bobcat than a coyote. Coyotes are so docile they with few exceptions. When you catch a kayat, they know they've been beat They you you can take a bath towel and sedata kayak truthfully, yeah, they even you know, we use catch poles or the dog catchers nets. As soon as the net would go over them, they kind of lay down because and they would just lay there, and of course we would hobble them, you know, with with leg hobbles, and we would put a muzzle around their mouth. But I can only remember too that ever tried to nip at me. The cats, on the other hand, when you try to throw a net or something over them, it is like hell on wheels. When you put a catchpole around a bobcat, it's like an explosion. It is. It is a lot of times will kill themselves. We'll fight the cat. So when we're talking about a catchpole like I used to have on that may, it just took a piece of cond to it. It took like a it must have been maybe three eight cable, three diameter cable, and imagine that you're run. You take like four ft con to it, let's say, and run both of the ends of the cable through it, so that on one end you got coming out the two ends of the cable, and then you just got like the loop and you can pass that loop over its neck pull tight with the other hand. And they make more sophisticated versions. But that when we're talking about a catch pulls like a catchpole and you can kind of control it and you got it where you want it. You can get it out of a trap or whatever. Yeah, you just have to be careful with cats because if you put a lot of pressure on them, you can because they're a lot of times um we would try to get one leg in the catchpole to like get them around under the armpit end around the neck that way when they freaked out, you know, you weren't snapping their neck. Yeah. We we used mostly dog catchers nets and they because they were big enough to cover the entire cat. I found those to be a lot quicker. And you know, as you know south, they start hitting the catchpole, you know, swat at it constantly, but that big net, they would grab it and chew on it. But most of the time you could kind of wrestle it over and then just take up. Believe it or not, we would just find beaver sticks, chew sticks from beaver huts that had all the bark chewed off that were water logs so they were having and we would just pin the cat down, draw them in the butt with with a mobilizing drug, and then remove them from the trout. And then did you guys have pretty good luck when you're doing that type of work? Do you have pretty good luck with with turning them out and there? Oh? Yeah, fine, yeah, very very seldom would we have any issues. Um cats are pretty sensitive to their feet obviously, that's their that's their gun, so to speak, So you have to be careful foot hole trapping with bobcats to try not to injure their you know, their digits. If you do that, you could lose them. Kays are a little more resistant to foot damage. But we you know, we trapped again with the padded foot hold traps, so we very rarely had any issues. So when you did this, when you did your pH d work, what was sort of um like, what was the biggest take away from it? Everything likes turkeys. Everything likes turkeys, and this bird share space with a lot of things that kill it, whether it be adults or nest. And this now, granted, this was back in the mid to late nineties, and it was kind of startling to me how many animals were within a turkey's home range that would eat it or its nest. And since then, as most folks in the Southeast and East can attest to, predator populations have exploded since then, Yes, I mean all all science points to higher raccoon populations, higher meso mammals in general, all of the smaller mammals raccoons, opossum, skunks. Explaining the term meso mammals just a mid size just a mid sized mammal. You know, coyotes were common in Mississippi at that time, but they were just starting to invade the Eastern Atlantic States and they're still not at saturation. And a lot of the work I do cay at work as well, and we still see that their territories are not completely like puzzle pieces on the landscape. Yet there's still are voids out there where coyotes are backfilling, so we're not we're not at saturation with that predator yet. And to your question, it startled me back then how many animals were within a turkey's range that could eat it or its nest. And now the predation that we see on nest, which is about of all our nest or loss. It's crazy. That's what the thing I want to ask you about because I had heard this and I heard a ball this this is the ballpark thing that someone telling me, like as a general rule of thumb, of the eggs to hit the ground, never hatch yep of the hatchlings don't hit their first birthday. Ye of the words that hit their first birthday won't see their second birthday. Just saying a ballpark. Yeah, what we see is about twenty ish percent nest success. Now my work right now, nest success, that success, my work right now is. I do work on a lot of Eastern populations. The eastern subspecies. Rio's are a different ball game. I have some work on Rio's, but Rio's are precipitation driven, so when it's really wet, the hatch is better. But just talking about Easterns, we see about success. What what classifies success. It hatches one or more eggs, that's the success, no matter what the hell happens to him. Yes, and then it then it gets more bleak, so you have success. And then we see about a third of our broods have at least one pul that that survives the first month of life, because we tracked broods that first month. The assumption is once they get about twenty days old, they're pretty safe and that that's a good assumption for the most part. Once they start roosting off the ground when they're two weeks old, they can they can evade predators. And by the time they're you know, bannam rooster size chickens at twenty eight days, they're they're pretty hearty, little you know, little things. So it takes them two weeks where they can sleep in a tree. Yeah, they'll climb up shrubbery and things to get off the ground, but it usually takes and there's some debate. You know, turkeys are like people in some ways. Some grow a little faster than others, and that depends on how much forwards they have and the quality of that forwards. But some early researchers, like love Att Williams, who was a famous turkey researcher in South Florida, he saw that some of those Osceola's actually would start roosting off the ground eight or nine days after they were hatched. But they're in a you know, really southern latitude, lots of bugs everywhere. They grow fast, but we typically see about twelve to fourteen days they'll start roosting off the ground with mom. And at that point they're in pretty good shape, so she leaves him on the ground at night when she stays with them, she stays with them and broods them under her at night, and then once she can get off the ground, she roost with them. But again they're they're right beside her and right under her, particularly during inclement weather, they're tucked up under her. And then as they get bigger, obviously they can't do that, so they just kind of assimilate themselves and in the tree around her, and then as they get bigger and bigger and bigger, that's when they start kind of moving out on their own and you'll flush them. You know. Let's just say we walk in on my brood that's twenty five days old. There may be two or three in this tree and one in the tree beside it, and three that are on the branch under her, and so they're kind of you know, in the area around her. When when mom's on the ground with the with the clutch, do you find that like hands are getting killed more when they're on the ground with the absolutely yeah. When you know, if you think about it from mom's perspective, she needs to be off the ground as well. I mean, that's why that's why a ten pound bird sleeps in a tree. It's because of predators, so that fourteen days she's much more vulnerable to being killed while she's brooding. So it it behooves a turkey to grow fast, quick and get off the ground. So from a brood habitat perspective, they need lights and lots of fords so they can grow quickly and start roosting off the ground for sure. But of those this is the you ever heard the analogy about the golden egg. You know, the probability that one of those eggs becomes a gobbler. So take eight of your nest and they're gone. Of those, only a third of those that hatch produce one pole or more that survives the first month. So if you do the math there, what we see from about East Exis all the way over to South Carolina is that about seven of nest produced one or more poults that survive. Yes, And then you start thinking about the probability that one of those birds is going to end up being an adult tom that you hunt in the spring. The odds are stacked really steep against that that happening. It's pretty remarkable for every for every leg rope dragon, mature bird out there, hundreds have died yes, yes, and hundred of died or whatever. And that those issues are what has driven research particularly the past decade, because back in the nineties, if you picked up literature on turkeys, you would see nest success of thirty times were good turkeys were hatching everywhere. That's the whole But that's that you believe that those are true numbers. It wasn't because the research was bad. Uh. I think no, not bad. I think what we ended up doing years ago is we we weren't able to track nesting as well as we can now. We missed birds that would incubate because the GPS that we have now is so clear. I mean, we can see with utmost clarity when she starts incubating. So we missed some nests back twenty years ago because they would start incubating and we wouldn't know it. But so what you you tended to overestimate nest success because you missed some nests that we're failed, you know that failed. But but but still the numbers were better then and you consistently saw it across studies. It wasn't like one or two studies, you know, would say, oh it's most studies were showing much better nest success than we see now. And that's kind of that's one of the things that prompted the Eastern Southeastern slash states to say we have an issue because we started noticing declines in in next success and and that popped up from brood surveys. Basically all the states in the in the Southeast have brood surveys that they conduct where agency personnel and the public record how many hens they see in the summer that have poults with them, And if you look across the last twenty years, it's been declining every year without exception. So this has been a problem that's actually been ongoing, and it was right under our nose, and we didn't see it because, like we've talked about, there were turkeys everywhere and harvest was really good. And and then about the late two thousands, you know, two thousand nine, two thousand ten, the Southeast States, and then about a year or two later, the kind of the Northeast States and the Midwestern states kind of put their heads together and said, you know what, we're kind of all in this together. We're seeing fewer poults per hen or fewer hens that have poults in the summer, which the only possible scenarios there is fewer are hatching and or more broods are dying. That's the only thing that could translate to fewer birds being observed that have poults with them. And that kick started some research that I think has really opened people's eyes to the fact that this bird is is suffering in areas and it's not obviously not uniform. I mean, turkeys are doing really well in some places, particularly urban kind of suburban areas. You hear about exactly, do you think there's a lot more predators on the ground because we've had lower fur prices for thirty years. There's no question, there's no question. I mean you if you if you go back and look at you know, pelp prices. People actually trapped raccoons and made money off of them, and you can't give raccoons. Yeah. Used to be like if you find like a coon dentry in the mid eighties, it was a big damn deal and you had to you know, get there on opening day because someone else is going to get there ahead of you. There was a big raccoon nighttime raccoon hound hunting culture in Pennsylvania. Know, the guys with the hounds would mop up more than trappers. But I mean, yeah, but you can sell a coon for forty bucks, yeah in those days. Yeah, and you can't. You can't give raccoons away at this point, so there's no motivation. And as you know, as we all sitting here and know that, you know that trade has declined. I mean, there aren't trappers being recruited into the ranks of people that would go catch for bears like there were years ago. You put all that together and and what we've learned about some of these predators, for instance raccoons, is you you will see uh five six males sharing the same home range. So this thought that well you just go trap one male and you got him. That's that's garbage. There could be half a dozen there. Um, they have all sorts of kind of unique breeding strategies. Males will den together, which is pretty interesting. Again, they share home ranges. You see females that have pretty high litter survival rates. Because what would eat a raccoon right other than a great one? Now, how does the raccoon kill a turkey? Um, we don't. We don't. See. The raccoons are a big predator of adults. They can't they can kill adults. They will kill poults basically if you think really young poults that they can kind of disrupt the brood and and get you get a polt off by themselves. But they like to hunt the nest down right, they do. But we found through some experimental work they don't actually go looking for nest. They just end up in areas where nests are and most of that is because raccoons in the spring and summer are looking for soft mast so like in the South, that would be blackberries, dewberries, you know, those types of things. They're looking for that invertebrates, um amphibians, anything that they can kind of get their hands on. And a lot of that ends up being in areas that are dense, shrubby, brushy, grassy sites. Well, turkeys end up nesting there and the raccoons stumble across the nest and and raccoons, once they find the nest, they'll they'll consume. Usually if they don't consume the entire clutch, they'll move eggs away from the nest bowl and consume them and then come back. So within short order the entire clutch is lost. Now here's a research question for you. How in the world you how can you say that you don't know that they're looking for turkeyness. We actually set up an experiment where we supplementally fed raccoons and we did this too. Look at how it's It's called area restricted searching. Basically, just think about it like this, So predators walking across the environment and all of a sudden queues in on something that hey, it's a smell, a site, a sound, something that I can eat. So they do. They start doing this kind of circuitous movements back and forth, back and forth through the same area, hunting for whatever it is that they detected. Well, we needed to figure out what that looks like in raccoons, so we set up this this experiment where we tracked raccoons and we stood there with them all night. Basically they were wild, but we stood out there with them and tracked them as they exhibited this behavior. And then we went back out on the landscape and had turkeys marked, had nesting place, you know, places where nest were located, and we tracked raccoons that we're not supplementally fed, and it clearly demonstrated that those raccoons are not going to areas where nests are and then start they don't start searching, they just start bebopping across the environment and all of a sudden they would end up in something that would look kind of like a turkey nesting area and they'd start foraging. But most of the time they ended up in areas that we're not nesting cover. They ended up in in areas that were more wet that a lot of our birds didn't nest in which led us to conclude that most of the time, when they bump into a nest, it's just them walking from one point to the next and they encounter something I suspect it smell, you know, they get some whiff of there's a bird over there on the ground. I'm going to go check it out. And of course when they when they flush a bird, I mean, turkeys are pretty they some turkeys can be pretty resilient to nest predators. They'll attack snakes, and we have pictures of Gould's birds that sit while foxes nose up on under them on the nest. Yeah, but that's not uniform. So a lot of times, you know, as you know, you flush a bird off the nest when you're hunting or something. That's what happens when a rackane approaches. They don't abandon that nest if they get bumped off of it. They will if it's We find that typically their abandonment is if it's early an incubation. If she's only tied some investment into that clutch for a few days and you flush her off, there's a pretty good chance she doesn't come back just getting flushed off, because I It's happened to me a couple of times where I've almost stepped on the nest and I'm always I've wondered, will she come back to that? Yeah? I had this a true story. I had a bird back in the nineties that had her UH radio telemetry unit was faulty, so I couldn't tell how close I was to her. And that's back in the day. We would approach to within a certain distance and kind of put a flag so that when she hatched, we could go find the nest, and inevitably I would try to this bird. I went into her her nest five days after she she started incubating, and I went to put the flag in the tree and she got up right under me, and I was like, a damn, you know, well she's not coming back. Well she came back. So one day, about twenty days in, I drive down the road, I get out of the truck, I check her. She's she's standing there and she flushed from the road. I have no idea why she's like thirty meters from the road and she flushed off the nest. And you gotta be kidding me. She did that every day from day twenty until she hatched. Every day I'd pull up there, she'd flush off the nest, or she if she didn't flush, she would run. Like I actually listened to the signal and think that bird just got up again and started walking off of that clutch and I'm thirty meters away from her. No idea why she did that. Usually, once you start flushing the bird that it's over. You know, they don't. And that makes sense if you think about it. If you're early an incubation, something flushes you, that's not a good spot. Yeah, you don't have a lot invested in it. Yeah, you know better. Yet you need to live and turkeys are a long lived bird relatively speaking, so they need to live to the next year. So if you haven't invested much in that clutch, you know, the sage decision is to go somewhere else and either try again or just quit. For them, if it's early enough in the season, they'll just lay another. Yet they'll just redust. Yeah, and that that depends on a lot of different things. But but yeah, how many how many attempts can they make? We've in the spring, we've had four. The most are if they try more than once. It's it's just twice. You'll get the occasional bird that will try three times, and we've had one, you know, a few that did four, but most are one or two. A minute ago, you just said that they're a long lived bird. But then when you lay out all the ways they get killed, the frequency with which they get killed, it would feel that they're not along with bird and that and that's that's part of that's part of the conundrum here. If you will, this bird is supposed to live a long time. They're supposed to live. The hens anyway, are supposed to live through multiple breeding cycles. Otherwise you you don't have a shot at being successful. So this bird needs to live years, given their high predation rates on their on their nest, in order for it to replace itself, right, because if she doesn't produce, if you think about it, if she doesn't produce one or more hen polts that survived to be her age, then the flock declines through time. And from a male's perspective, you know, these tom's, their reproductive success is driven by how many times they can breed. I mean that's they need to breed with as many hens to be successful in their life as possible. So if he only lives two years, he's he doesn't have near the reproductive success if he lives five years. So this bird is supposed to live longer than say a lot of them. I mean they're a large body birden and large body birds are supposed to live longer. And what we see with these hens is a lot of these hens have the strategy during incubation of living, they spend more time away from their nest than other hens. They may be in areas that are more open where they can see. There appears to be a strategy within every population we study where some of these hens they want to live their Their strategy is nest where I can see, evade predation if it if it shows up, and try again next year, whereas other hens forego that, and they tend to be hens that die on the nest, but they're more successful. So there's there's kind of two different strategies in these populations. The strategy of live until next year. That works if the bird lives multiple years. Oh because all right, because her strategy have lived till next year decreases the likelihood like she's more playing her own game rather than protect him. The thing that's right, she's she's more invested in herself than she is the clutch, because you know we're talking about they're like your house catches on fire. You got the ones that go in and get her kids, and you got the ones that just book. Yeah, And what we see is the birds that are less invested in their nest, they when they take recesses, when they take breaks during the day, they go farther away. They spend more time away from the clutch. And that makes sense if you think about it, because when you're sitting there, you're vulnerable, but when you're off. Turkeys have a periscope head. When they're off standing around foraging there, they're hyper vigilant. They can see, they hear. And when she's stuck there on that clutch, she's at the mercy of you know, things around her, whereas she when she's away from the clutch, she's much safer. The birds that end up dying as an aside, almost all of the birds that we have to be killed during nesting or killed at the nest, almost all of them are killed at the clutch. So there's a predator that is detecting her on the ground. Approaching her and then killing her as she's trying to escape from the nest. Almost all of them. What's an what's an old hen? Well, one problem is in the wild we unless we have banded known age birds, we don't know how old they are. We just know that they're either juveniles so they were hatched this year, or they're not. Now we've had birds. I had a bird back years ago in in Mississippi actually that we know was nine years old based on we used to put wing tags on them. And she was nine there and those in a hunted population of birds. Yeah, and she was. She was pretty slick. Um. We we see routinely, you know, we'll get banned returns of Tom's that are six, seven, eight years old. We had one that was d populations. We had one the other last year, like Sneaky Pete that was that was eight. So yeah, we we get some older birds. But Buying he had a gobbler and a hundred population lived to be eight. Yeah, the hell's he doing. He's pretty slick. He doesn't make a lot of noise. No, No, he's probably not doing too much breeding. If he is, he's he's using an alternative strategy for sure. You know, he's one of those gobblers that gobbles and then catches his you know, sticks his his foot in his beak if you will, to shut himself up, you know, don't don't call too loud, don't call it too often. Uh. Yeah, he's got a question. Well, yeah we are. You have you know, I want to do the question you just wrote, but because I think it has to do with that how hunters think they can still reliably age males. Sure. Um, I was just gonna ask, like what environmental? Um, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh? What makes it? What makes a long turkey spur subspecies? For one thing that's a an overriding factor is you tend to see patterns across the different subspecies as elways have the longest by far, and then Easterns and then your western subspecies tend to be much shorter. Can I tell you why that is? Sure? In hunting lower it has to do how rocky the ground is. Yeah, is that legit? I think there's some truth to that. I also think it's some of it and telling people that for a long time. I think some of that is probably just lower you know, Um, you know, if you as far as aging goes. And and I may be crucified for saying this, but I'm right, Um, you don't want to. If you if you go back and look at texts from years ago, they would tell you spur length as a reliable age indicator and it is not. We Oh no, that not true. You can tell he's one, he's two, he's three, he's four. I can promise you. You can't. You cannot. We We have known aged birds that that we're banded as Jake's that end up at two years old with inch and a quarter spurs, some with seven eighths inch spurs. We see we had a five year old killed that had three quarter inch spurs. Yeah, but harmon now, because he ground him down on rocks he was he was an Eastern. He was an Eastern, so not many rocks. But is it true or not true that it takes him to be and I know this is gospel did when he gets a pointy spur that you can prick your finger with, that's because he's three. That is false. So what you're saying is it's kind of the same as guys looking at antlers and being like that buck's four. Yes, because he's a six point yes, and you and the other thing you have to think about. Just like you know with deer, you're dealing with genetic issues. You're dealing with body condition and things that that would facilitate one animal growing bigger faster than another. So the bottom line is spurs are not. I mean about the only thing a spur will tell you is you're looking at a really young bird or not. That's pretty much all I can tell you. What about beard, beard is useless about. The only thing beards will tell you in general is if you combine them with the primaries on their wings having bars and or their tail feathers, you can pretty much back your way into that's a jake and therefore his beard is quite short versus that's a tom and he has a longer beard. Because you see all sorts of issues with beards. You see freezing, you see might you see um birds that are in brushier climates tend to wear their beards off more than other populations of beards really don't tell you a whole lot beyond which you can get from their primaries and their their tail fans. Here's why a little bit that's a lie, Because have you ever seen a jake throw like a nine inch beard. No, And that's what I'm saying for in general. You look at that, you know, four or five inch beard, and you're probably looking at a jake just confirmed. Like that's what I teach students. Just always confirmed with their tail feathers and their primaries. If those last two primaries are barred, have have barring all the way to the end of those primaries, and they have a little tiny beard that's an adult that just has a short beat. When jake the center feathers too, it's a two centers out or two primaries of their wing are not barred. They have black in tips. You don't know that one. And then their tail fans. Is that true about the tail fans? Yeah, that because they mold beginning with the center feathers of the tail, so there's eighteen feathers there, so they begin molting from the center and then they mold out. So that's what causes that notched looking appearance. Two longer feathers. So the later you kill a jake in the spring, the more likely he is to have the notch is bigger. It's not just the center two feathers, it will be the four or six, and then by the summer he's replaced all eighteen of those feathers, and the notch gets more pronounced. As the spring goes on, it gets wider. The width of the notch gets wider because he's molding those outer most I wish we could feathers. I wish we could explain this to people. Uh, I wish we could explain this. I think he's doing a fine job. People who never even looked at a turkey's tail. I have a fan on my desk. Yeah, So just look if you if you want to kind of think about it visually, just look at the tail from the front when he's fanned out, when he's fanned out, and look at the center to that are directly over his back goes straight up from the base of his tail. That's the two that he starts. That's the first two hemlts. So, but that means they're longer short, they're longer. So he molts from a juvenile plumage into his adult plumage, and the adult plumage is the longer feathers. So he's replacing shorter feathers with longer feathers. And as he replaces the shorter feathers working out from the center. That's why that notch gets wider and wider and wider, because it's working. It's what the longer feathers are replacing the shorter feathers as you work to the outside of the fan as it's fanned out. Yeah so yeah, uh but well he ever, by the end of the season, he'll he'll never like the way most seasons work. He's always gonna have lopsided tail. Yes, as a jake. He won't get there during season. Yeah, they get there during the summer. They finished that molting of their tail during the summer. They also mold those primaries during the summer, so by the time they pop in as a two year old, they have the full fan that we know, and their primaries are all barred. Um. And that's diagnostic. Yes, that is old proof. That's the that's the two ways you know, I teach students. Don't worry about the spur, don't worry about the beard. If you want to look at them, great, But if you really want to age turkeys, you look at their primaries and their tail fan. And that's only the agent one year or more than one year. Ye, yep, because what turkeys do they You know, once they go through that first malt to become an adult, they then continuously molt a little bit of time, so they they're always going to look like an adult once they're about a year and a half old. So you can't tell. You can't tell a four year old from five year old. Yeah he's got big spurs. Yeah, big long beard, big big long beard, big long spurs or not maybe short beard, short spurs. It's a crap shoot. Hey, who pays for all the research? Mostly state agencies. Um, most of my work is is funded by Pittman Robertson funds that yeah, that that hunters are contributing to their state coffers. That money then goes to agencies which ear market for partially for research, and then I work under contracts with state agencies to do the work. Nonprofits like you know n WTF they also provide a little bit of money, but buying large We're talking these are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do these studies and it's mostly almost entirely driven by agency funding. That's great. Yeah, uh, you've been doing a lot of work on gobbling. Yes, yes, there's a thing that a lot of times people will come like hunters, dudes like me will attribute low gobbling on some particular weekend, no one was gobbling because there's a lot of hunting pressure. But what brings that to, what makes me curious about that, is that I remember talking to uh former turkey researcher. No, no, no, he was a state agency guy who did a ton of work, but he had to do some turkey work. He was talking about they had they had collars one time on five gobblers or transmitted GPS units glued into the feathers I believe on five gobblers and they were fine. All winner spring came, they all got killed by bobcats. Um, you were just mentioned that great horned owls. We'll smack them more once they started goblin. So if all these predators, like native predators that the turkeys have always coexisted with, if all these predators are queuing in on gobbling and it makes the tom's more vulnerable, is the added pressure of humans queuing in on gobbling enough to like tip the scales. Yes, it is absolutely what we see. So we tried gobbling using these songmaters. They're called songmaters are just boxes that we put in a tree. We put a microphone thirty feet up to get above kind of the vegetation you know, on the ground, and that thing listens all all day and it records all ambient sound in an area of several hundred yards around it. And then we run that can detect like there's software that picks the gobbles out of that exactly. So we run the data through a software package. It extracts the gobbles out, and like we were talking talking about earlier, it also extracts crow calls and alcohols. And so we go through and we listen to verify that it's a gobble or not, and then we can track gobbling activity, you know, through time from weeks before the season starts to to the end, and we we do it all the way until the end of June. And what we see very clearly is that birds start gobbling in at least in the southeast, they start gobbling first of March. It really ramps up before the season starts, and then when hunting starts, it takes a nose dive and if it's heavily hunted sites, it may stop like entirely stopped. And if it's not a heavily hunted site entirely stopped. Yes. Yeah, we just published two papers. They're not even ripping one in the dark. No. In fact um two papers that we just published. Um, we showed the gobbling activity in there and it by April fift On that side, it was to study sites. With the exception of just a couple of days where we detected a dozen or so gobbles, it was zero, Like these birds stopped gobbling, And then you think it's because hunting. There's no question. Is it because the ones that like the gobble lot got killed or or one individual Turkey's like, man, I'm gonna chill out because every morning I got some dude standing below my tree. It's both. If you think about it, all times are not being killed, right, so even though we see from pretty high harvest rates, they're not all dying. What's happening is it's a combination of vocal birds are being shot, vocal birds are being disturbed and deciding okay, I'm I'm done, and other birds are just taking the strategy of you know what, it's not worth it. Every time I i'd start calling, I get a dude that walks under me and starts yelping, or I get a cat that chases me, or I get a coyote that comes into the pasture and runs me off, or I get an owl or whatever, and through time it just the bird. I think the bird see such a predation risk that they the adopt a different strategy, and that strategy is called less move about their range, I suspect strut more drum more, try to use more subtle cues and or go to places where they know they're going to interact with hens and just do it quietly. And that that's what we see. The interesting thing is on we also have gobbling data on a non hunted side the Savannah River site, which is one of the very few places in the South and Southeast that that there's no hunting and it is like a park or it's a UM, it's a nuclear plant. Basically, it's Department of Energy. So it's about two hundred thousand acres, very limited hunting on one little chunk of it and no hunting on the rest. And we see that gobbling does not do that. They got wall spring as you would expect. And we also have a wildlife management area where they're only allowed to hunt two days and I bet you you can predict before I say it what happens. They gobble their heads off during the week, and then when hunters show up on Friday and Saturday, gobbling tanks no way, really and just the increased activity. And then they picked back up around Tuesday and Tuesday, Thursday, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is pretty good, and then Friday it tanks again. And you see this pattern through the season, just like that. There's there's no question this bird detects. It perceives the risk that we put on them on the landscape when hunting is at a heavy rate, you know, when there's lots of hunters out there. There's no question. The data clearly show that they perceive that as a risk and they behave accordingly. Are there are we part of the problem? I mean, of course probably problects. We kill turkeys, but do our activities I guess it would be this. Are there hens that don't get bred because we're interrupting their cycle too much during the breeding season. We don't see many hens that don't initiate clutches, so they're being bred. Um. What we do see is that there are some infertility rates and some populations where some of the eggs, you know, say one or so in every clutch is infertile. We also see which I think is more problematic that and some of these populations that are that are heavily hunted. The nesting season is taking six d five to eighty or ninety days, and meaning these hens are starting to breed, say late March, early April, and there are still clutches hitting the ground in July, which puts those hens in the bed, but it puts those poults in the bed spot, right. It puts the poults in a bad spot if dodn't end up time to get big. And if you think about it from a predator standpoint, it puts nest on the landscape scattered through time instead of a big pulse of nest out there at once predator. That's called the predator swamping. So there's no swamping in in our population. So what happens is you have for instance, I just showed I just gave a talk at the in Arkansas to their commission, and I showed a figure where we tracked the same group of hens throughout the nesting season. There's one bunch of hens that were one social group. They were all caught together, so they're all kind of one group. And the first hen starts and she loses he clutch, and she tries again a few weeks later and she loses that clutch, and she tries again a third time. It was sixty five days across that period. Well, she didn't start until the I think it was April. The third or fourth was the first day. So if you think about it, she's on into June before she's trying a third clutch, and even if that hatches, those birds are behind the eight ball compared to a clutch that hatches April. Yeah, I've got a question related to that breeding disruption regarding like how seasons are structured, because you'll hear people say in many states the season starts too early, like in Pennsylvania doesn't open until May one, so they've got all of April to do their thing. And I think they do that to give them time to breathe. Yes, but here in Montana it starts, what you honest like April, and granted it's you know, a different climate, but do you do you think that those early stufs or could be a problem. Yeah, how much time do you um yeah, so I think some historical perspectives would be good. So back thirty years ago, there was a guy named Bill Heally, who's who's retired now. He he was a famous turkey researcher and he's a great guy. And he this was seventies eighties nineties. He was asked by the Northeast States to write a set of recommendations for timing hunting seasons. And he very clearly noted in this document that is widely used and sighted that you do not shoot this bird in the spring. You do not shoot Tom's until most and he left out a bit vague most breeding has occurred. And he goes on to say, to make sure you've you've hit the sweet spot just time it went incubations, you know, peaks and inkubation. So the bottom line is start removing Tom's when a lot of your hens are already bred and on the nest. That reduces a legal kill of hens because their secondary and those toms have already bred those hens. So there are some that are expendable at that point. And by and large the Northeast States accepted those recommendations. If you just mentioned Pennsylvania, Michigan, a lot of the Northeast states. There their seasons don't start until May, and the Southeast states have largely entirely ignored that. If you look across the South, seasons open three to four weeks before peaks and incubation, and that's uniform across states, with very few exceptions. Louisiana has a little later opening date, Arkansas has a later opening date, but by and large you have states opening weeks and weeks before incubation peaks. And what that does the research. We're just trying to grow kind of put our heads around this. But here's my thinking. So and and Bill pointed to this in his writing. So, you have these dominant toms, and we don't know who they are. We don't know who the dominant toms are in the population, but what we clearly do understand is that you have these groups of tom's that breed a group of hens. Right, So you um, so turkeys use a mating strategy that's like a leck. So you know what sage grouse do, right, Okay, So sage grouse are all out displaying for each other and all the males are there together so they can see each other. But what turkeys do is more of an exploded leck. And all that means is you take that sage grouse leck and kind of blow it up on the landscape where you've got pockets of turkeys across the landscape and they maintain contact with each other through gobbling. They don't see each other like a sage grouse, they hear each other and that gobbling activity maintains those legs. So if you go out and you hunt Miriam's or Rio's and even Eastern's, if if there's a lot of birds, you'll hear this. Gob will over here, Goble over there, goble over there. That's those exploded legs that are calling to each other saying I'm still here, I'm still here. So each one's kind of got his zone and telling each other, yes, don't come here. I'm here, and I have my hands with me, and I'm going to breed them. Within that group of Tom's that are that are in that little exploded leg, there's one breeder. There's a dominant breeder, and the others are not always breeders, and in some cases are not breeders. So you have one Tom and he is the breeder. He's breeding with those hens that are around him and his brothers, his siblings or Tom's that he grew up with as a poult. So he was hatched and and amalgamated into the same brood back years ago. He's been spending times with these, these other Toms since he was a pol. These are the groups of Jake's that you see on the landscape running around. Those group of Jake's all hung around together, and then they get older together, and as they get older together, they have an established hierarchy. There's one guy that's at the top of this ladder and we've all seen this, I mean, and they fight constantly to maintain these these hierarchies. So you have this one breeder and you have this group of hens. And if we go in, say a month early, and we removed that dominant Tom, which we've we've clearly seen early in the season, dominant Tom's are more easily harvested than they are later in the season. There's been a number of studies showing that. So if we go in and we removed that dominant Tom, and I'll be honest, I'm guilty of this. I used to think years ago, well, hell, the next guy will just step up. That's not how it works. So this. This researcher Bill um I spent some time in his house with he and his wife. He used to imprint birds to himself, right, He imprinted them as polts, and then they moved around. He basically took these turkeys and he observed them. And what he told me was that these birds, you, they have their pecking orders like a ladder. There's a guy on the top step and then there's a bunch of steps under him. If you remove the top step, the second bird just doesn't step up. They tear the whole ladder apart, and they start over. And somebody figures out who's the dominant tom? No kid, And meanwhile, what is the hen doing? Okay, so you remove the dominant tom, that's the one through sexual selection, she's already picked that's the top guy. So if you remove him too early, you're expecting her to just say, well, okay, well hell he's good enough. Number two is fine. That's not the way sexual selection works. So you see this in prairie chickens, You see it in fallow deer, you see it in sage grouse species that use lecking strategies. If you just go in and remove a bunch of these males. The females don't just breed with the next guy standing there. They go evaluate everybody all over again, which they've been doing for weeks before we we shoot them, and all of a sudden he's gone. On, Well, if he's gone, I need to go back through my checks and balances and figure out who's the most fit tom standing here, and then I'm going to breed with him. It just doesn't happen the next day. What about our dear? Different than that, the work on fallow deer is shown. They do the exact same thing, so they re shuffled that they do. And the work on fallow deer is shown, which is kind of crazy, is that some of these females delay breeding so long that they actually some don't breed, like they just can't figure out who the best buck is, so they just stop and they move on. And again we don't see that in turkeys. We we see that most of them try. They lay a clutch of mostly fertile eggs, so they're being bred. But the thinking and there I'm not just I'm not the only one that's tuting this. There there are there are many managers in the South and East in particular that have discussed us over the past few years that that maybe what we're doing is we're disrupting breeding to the point where they're there are these subtle effects to populations that are contributing. They're not the cause, but are contributing to some of these declines we're seeing because we're taking these dominant toms out of these legs too early, and in so doing, we are compromising the hen's ability to pick the best tom, who theoretically also has the most fit sperm, and we're removing him because what she's supposed to do is she's supposed to breed with the dominant tom, and then she's supposed to be able to go find other dominant toms. So there's good evidence showing that these hens will visit multiple legs. They don't just stay there. Some of them will actually go and find other times and copulate with them. So what she's doing there is she's taking sperm and she's storing at which turkeys do they store sperm? And I basically liken it to tupperware containers they're putting storm. Yeah, they think about his turkey tupperware. You've got all these tubules inside of her body that are storing sperm, and when it's time to produce a clutch and laying eggs, she her body allows that sperm to be released. There is there is mate competition right there. The best sperm wins, right, the most viable because she's got sperm from multiple males, multiple maybe, and if she does, then that should confer her better fitness and her clutch better fitness. We see this in mallards, we see it in the waterfowl war is replete in science showing this. They're supposed to be multiple males and clutches, And there's some turkey work previously showing that a lot of clutches in a in a population of Rio's that wasn't hunted did have multiple times. We're collecting this data now in hunted populations and we don't have the results yet, but hopefully we will soon. But I kind of use the analogy if you were to ask a duck hunter, if I were to give you the opportunity to go to North Dakota and shoot mallards in May, what would you think? And then the analogy is, well, that's when they're in their courtship flights, right, So you have five or six drakes that are flying around harassing one hen, and she's supposed to be able to pick the best males out of that courtship flight, and she will breed with more than one male. You wouldn't even consider harvesting males out of courtship flights. You killed deer during their courtship different, different mating system. So if you if you look at turkeys, they're the only game bird in the conterminous United States that are hunted while they're breeding. They're the only one. So should we be hunting them in the summer. No, No, we just need to this. I think the science is going to demonstrate that we just need to be more thoughtful, which we were warned about years ago. Again, this is this is not new that we need to time our seasons more commensurate with the bird and not our own desires. I want to get out there as soon as the snow melts. Yes, yeah, and you know I've been there. It's like, well they're gobbled out, they're bread out, and and here, you know, like we're pretty extreme north. I mean we're you're dodging snow patches and being in snowstorms. They haven't even started breeding yet. But I've been out turkey homever. This is not a liquid well even down to Missouri, remember, not a liquid green. And I think it ultimately hinges on the harvest rate because if you go into a population up here and let's just say you kill two or three percent of all your tom's a month before breeding, who cares? Probably but at least higher now in these southern populations and Eastern populations. If you're going in and removing thirty, forty, even fifty of your tom's which we see on some areas prior to breeding or during the kind of the midst of breed eating. Frankly, to me, it's nonsensical to think it wouldn't have some effect. It's just what effect does it have? That's kind of what we're trying to put our hands around. You Know. What I think listening to you is important for people is because you're not a state agency person, right, but you're a turkey hunter I am, And because the state agency guys gotta be careful not to piss everybody off, and you can, you can afford to piss people off. I can, But then we know your motivations are pure because you like to hunt turkeys, That's why I give what you say extra validity. I appreciate that, and I that is true. I mean I kind of look and be the bearer of bad news. It's not gonna screw your your voicemail is not gonna blow up with irate it will customers. I mean, I have people that attack me on social media every week. I post every every Tuesday, Turkey Tuesday. I post, you know, science tidbits every Yeah. What are they? Yeah, I want to talk about Turkey Tuesday. But what are they? What's the what? They don't think you like to hunt turkeys? They I think, you know, honestly, Steve, I think there's people out there that look at biologists in general. And You've had I've listened, I've listened to some of your previous podcasts, and and I think people look at me or Jim Heffelfinger or some of these people that that are biologists and they think, well, they don't hunt. They're not hunters. They don't They're not in the trenches where we are. And like I said, I grew up hunting. I mean the reason I'm where I'm at is because I loved to hunt everything, and I was a steward of the outdoors, like I soaked up everything I could, and then I fast forward, you know, twenty five years and I look at my my eighteen year old I'm thinking, is he going to have the opportunities to hunt turkeys or any species that I had? And and if if I shake my head and say no, then it's a failure on my part. It's a failure on our part to grasp what effect we may be having. And I tell people, you know, we turkeys and other species are facing all sorts of problems. It's not just it's not a hunting issue. Habitat and predators and these things we've talked about. But to me, we have to do due diligence and understand what effect we might be having, and if there's something we can control, then we need to try. Because I really look at a lot of the species that we hunt and I think, if if they're not here when my grandkids come along, and the numbers that they are now or were, then it's been a failure on my watch. And that's that's tough to take. It's tough to stomach, especially I think when you're when you're pointing at when you're looking at a game management problem, and you're finding solutions that don't entail screwing ourselves over. Um, that's not that hard of a Pilba swallow, right, right right. Someone's not coming and saying like, listen, man, I'm not saying let's stop on Turkey's. I'm saying, let's think about our start dates. Yeah, let's be a little more smarter about season structure. I don't know why that should be met with a bunch of hostility, well, especially when the end result possibly it could be that instead of a two tricky bad bad limit, you might have four or you know, I think I think there's a number of issues there. One is just you know, we're greedy. I mean, human beings are greedy. It comes down to a lot of Yeah, it's a lot of what this is what I want, And what I hear from hunters is well, they're gobbled out. If we don't get to hunt them early, they I'm not going to get the opportunity. Well, okay, So I try to couch this to people, and I I think about it in my own as as a person. I think, okay, so in Georgia, I get about five or six weeks to hunt, and if you told me you only get four, but ten years from now. Instead of going and hearing one bird, which is about what I hear, or two that I could hear four, I personally would look at that and go, I'll take that all day long. Um. But the complaints I hear a lot are, well, you're taking my opportunity. I've been allowed to hunt turkeys for six or eight weeks, my entire life or whatever. And I get that. But in the at the end of the day, I look at it from the standpoint of the resource and I think, again, we have to do due diligence. And you know, turkey hunters, I'm biased, are one of the most cerebral hunters out there. I mean they're they're hunting at the time of the year when you don't hunt other things, so they are solely focused on this bird. And you look at all the gear and the technology. These folks really get into this and they think about it. And I don't talk too many that don't perceive an issue, even folks in in that hunt Rio's and Miriam's outfitters that I've been with that look at this and think and in conversations they go, you know what, come to think of it. I hear a lot fewer birds than I did ten years ago or twenty years ago. Still here a lot of birds. I don't hear or see the number of birds that I used to see. And I've heard some other agency biologists in the Southeast. One is a really good friend of Mount Charles, and I've heard him saying in open forums, if you don't have a problem right now, just wait, just give it some time. If you're not seeing declines in your area, just just wait. So how like how precipitous are the declines, like in certain areas, and like how widespread are the declines? Like is there certain regions of the country that are seeing more declines that others? Like how how how is it spreads the productivity declines, which back to what we were talking about earlier, the poltz per him has gone down threefold in like in what places are across the all of the Southeastern states, several of the eastern more kind of eastern Northeastern states, they're also seeing that decline in productivity. What they're not seeing buying law larger drastic declines and harvest. I suspect they may at some point, but we'll see and then several Midwestern states have shown the same trend, but it's a little different in the Midwest because you tennessee turkeys more in a in that agricultural belt or more in kind of pockets, and they're not they're not heavily hunted in some places, and and they are and others, And we don't have a good grasp on reproduction and Rio's and Miriam's and Goulds, we just we don't have those broad data sets we do. They roam and larger chunks of land, they're they're less visible. Well, if you think like Rio's, for instance, a lot of them live on on private lands that are large tracts, and they're they're everywhere. And what we do find from we've banded thousands of Rio's in areas that are hunted, and we see really low harvest rates in general, some really high in pockets, but by and large across the landscape, really low single digit percent. And in the Easterns we see in Easterns we see thirty plus percent on almost every population. You've got a couple for you. I don't even know what I don't even know what the hell one means. Um did a sports question, No, oh, you're looking at I had I had written down Arkansas versus Wisconsin. It seems like this is just in my little world. But it seems like you hear a lot of griping recently out of Arkansas for what's going on with their turkey population. A lot of people are saying that it's just down and out, and then you go to and then in Wisconsin they're killing like what fifty thousand turkeys annually and just you know, it seems to be nuts like, what's what's sort of like the I can it be possible to put it in a nutshell to say, yeah, this is why one's doing great and one's not. Yes, and no, the yes would be in Arkansas, what you've seen is a strong precipitous decline in productivity that's been happening for decades. This is not just something that started. It's been twenty years plus declining productivity to now we're in Arkansas. In some areas they're less than one pulp per hen, which means the flock has to be declining because a lot of the poults you see are are males. So in Arkansas you have a productivity problem to the point where their harvest has declined. They've gone through a number of season changes. In fact, they've changed their season twenty times in the past thirty years, trying to come up with a sweet spot, and that that was one of the reasons I was there The other last week was to talk to their biological staff about why would you even consider moving a season later? Like we've the things we just talked about, those are the things that I think people need to hear so that they understand why an early season could be problematic, not saying it is, but why it would be from the broader sense. So Arkansas is now trying to move to a much later opening date and hopes that most of their breeding has occurred. In fact, I think what they were considering as an April nineteenth opener, which for the Southeast is really late, that that's by far would be the latest except for some pockets in East Texas that have a later April opener, you know, Wisconsin. I think two things. One, you tended to see that turkey hunting exploded in the Southeast long before it did elsewhere, and the Northeast states are just now getting, you know, really heavily hunted populations. They've got a lot of times. They've got a lot of birds out there, and to my buddy Charles's point, maybe they just need to wait because if you if you keep on down this road, you may see problems. Now that the good thing about Wisconsin is their their season dates are more appropriately time with the bird. But they also lay to kill a shipload of them. Yes, and you have says that right in the REGs. Yeah, yeah, Um. I don't know what the bag limit specifically is in Wisconsin is, but in some stace like Alabama's five, I should tell you it's interesting Wisconsin. They I never thought about how it's interesting until right now. And it might be to do with timing out the breeding because they got what a B C D E F seasons seeks a season opening day is very competitive to draw a tag from, not especially non resident You could try for years in that get day, very limited hunting pressure. By the time you get to see which is three weeks in right, then you can pretty much rest assured you'll get after d you can hunt all the damn seasons, right, So they're greatly limiting in some way, putting a throttle on how many people are out there pounding them. Opening day, which is what for a second week in April, where the hell it is? Yeah, very few people. And then by the time you're into mid late May, they just open the floodgates, but a lot of people are burned out by then. You already got a And their assistant game bird coordinator is a former student of mine. She actually studied at at Louisiana State University, but I was on her graduate committee and and she has sent those rags. Some of the southern states do something similar to that, like Missouri has there when their season opens, you can only kill one bird the first week or so. South Carolina just changed their regulations to mimic that they're still opening the first of April, but you can only theoretically legally, you're only supposed to kill one bird early and then, and obviously that's to delay some harvest on into the you know, the later part of April. Other states are just moving the season, the entire statewide season. I suspect, given the momentum that I've seen in the discussions that I've seen recently, I think most states, at least in the Deep South, are considering trying to entertain discussions about bumping it later even if that only means days, and you'll get about, you'll get you'll catch they'll catch a bunch of grief too. Absolutely hid biologists. Yes, hit him with the other question back to goblin, because a lot of some of these states you can't hunt afternoon or one or four. I mean we've hunted at least three different states. I think California was like four pm when we hunted it, Missouri's noon or one. I think what else do we hunt? Last year it might have been like one. We had a quit in time, Pennsylvania's noon the first two weeks. It helps, It keeps to be a sane man. But I don't. I don't like it when I'm there, But man, it keeps you sane, right, get rest? If not, did you pull your eighteen hour days? The proponents, usually we've talked to, like it because they think that it helps the goblin. Limits of pressure helps the goblin. What are your thoughts on that? What are they trying to solve? I suspect just pressure. We don't see a lot of gobbling in the afternoon anyway, um, but I suspect that when they do, you can't kill them anyway. They're hard to kill. At night. I'll tell you what gone the last hour a day. You know, here are some goblin. I get it, but you get you can't help but get all fired up. But if you like review your life, it's not a lot of death dealing happens at five pm. Yeah, see he's by five pm. If he's an hour from the tree, he's already. He has them, he has an agenda. I have had tremendous success killing birds one, two or three o'clock in the after If you can get them to gobbl it's money. I suspect the states that just open later or have that type of season, they're just trying to keep hunters out of the woods and keep the disturbance to a minimum. I honestly can't answer your question. I don't know if that translates to any change in Turkey behavior, because one the populations we study don't really they don't have that. And to like I said, very little gobbling happens in the afternoon anyway, So I don't we would. It would. The signal would have to be so strong in our data set for us to be able to detect it, because such little gobbling is in that time. You know, there's not that much disturb anyway. And plus you're saying that there's the daily hunter disturbances there anyways of every morning. Yeah, to untangle that too. And most of our what we see is most of the gobbling more than se is either in the tree or within the first hour after they fly down, so they're gobbling early and shutting up. Has anyone done a study like this, um to capture this sentiment that i'mna lay out for you, Like, imagine that you put out an electronic collar the hand call and you could somehow measure how many gobblers came within some specified uh distance of the electronic caller, and then you watch that play out over the spring and measure that like as the season wears on our gobblers meaning do they get do they get harder and harder to call as a season wears on because they're scared of getting shot? Or is it some other thing at play? If there has been work in that vein, I don't, I'm not aware of, dude, I would be tutting that on top of my list of ship to study. I think we see that in a lot of populations anyway, because if you if you go to the east or southeast. You see scouting. Scouting starts weeks in advance, and I hear, you know, horror stories I read on social media all the time, and you know, hey, I was out scouting. It's a week before the season. Dude, pull it into the cold sack up the road from me, hit the box, call five times, bird gobbled. Then he walked in spooked the bird type of thing, the flip flop flush here has already been out scouting, scaring them all up. Didn't make one call though, just looking, so I think we can see where they're at. You you may, I suspect there's some truth to the notion that the more we call, because our calling is often to associated with some type of disturbance, whether we try for that to occur or not, that the bird realizes through time that is not a hen and even if it is, I'm going to be really cautious. And and we see this in some of our data where we track hunters and tom's at the same time. So we put GPS units on the toms, and then we give the hunters my next question, and we actually see birds that show up at the site a hunter was at three or four hours later. So the hunter has already left, he's gone, or she's already back at the truck and going to work, and the tom shows up come sniffing around at one pm. Oh that's a question I was gonna ask you, like, if you if you're in the morning calling to a bird and he just like drifts away, is it is it smart to just sit there? Yes? What we we have repeated, Yeah, we have repeated examples of birds that end up where a hunter was hours hours later. Well that goes back to what you were talking a guy about that. He talked about how they'll come come back hours after right, Yeah, because he heard yeh, he marked you even though he's got he got like his morning agenda. And then later he's like, oh, but you know what, I'm gonna go and check on that one. If you think about it, it makes complete sense. What we're asking these birds to do is against their ecology. The tom's are supposed to stand there and display, and the hens are supposed to go to them. Okay, so that is true that one of my in nature, the hen should always go to the gob. Yes, think about the leck. Back to the leck. Those males stand there and display and the hens come to them. We're asking them to flip that. So if you think about the tom that wanders off, he's not wandering off. He's going about his business even if he's not gobbling, and he's displaying and he's doing his other things because in his world, she's supposed to seek him out. And then three hours later he goes, you know what, I haven't scored any opportunities doing the route I was going to take, So I'm going to go over there and and covertly kind of check this area out and see if she's still there. And he doesn't need to gobble to do that. All he's gotta do is strutt and drum and and look, and if he doesn't see her, he high tails it out of there. He moves on. How well do you think he uh like spatially, how tight is he thinking as far as where he thinks she is? Ye, Turkeys have an incredible sense of place. They they know And this comes from conversations I've had with with Bill who imprinted those birds. He would take these birds out and let them forge, and then he would take them back. He was the hen. He would take them back to their pen and put them up at night. And when birds would get lost. He put radios on them, so his pet birds, he had radios on them, so he would go find them the next morning and and help them come back home. And what he found is they didn't need any help. So they would take this this kind of circuitous route while they were foraging, and they'd end up lost, if you will. At night the next morning, they walked a straight line distance directly back to the pen, like they knew exactly exactly which path to take, because they knew exactly where they were going. And what he likened it to, he said, they have an incredible sense of place. They hear, they know exactly Their mapping system is so acute. They know exactly where they think you are, or where they're roost it or whatever resources are there, and they know exactly how to get there. So at any given point in time, if that tom decides he's going back to the place where that hunter is, he knows exactly where that spot is. Is it safe to say they won't leave their lexs zone like to go into another gobbler's territory. Like if you're let's say you're you're hunting and you hear a gobbler on one ridge, and then a quarter mile pass at there's a gobble on another ridge. Like, would that second gobbler come into another gobblers zone? If if their home range encompasses those other birds, which in some cases they do and in some cases they don't. If their home range didn't encompass those birds, it's very likely they're not going to just go wandering. They're going to stay in their range and continue to signal, because that's the range. We do see some tom's that makes some kind of you know, weird move months, particularly when hunters bumped them or something. But by and large, this is not a bird. This is not an animal that's just going to abandon its home range and start wandering around. So I think what's happening is you see, like to your points, you've got birds here gobbling and over here gobbling. Well, when this pocket of birds stops gobbling, why would the other birds gobble If they don't have to go, if there's no gobbling near them, what's their incentive to gobble? So there, once they do, let's say mid morning, start maybe looking for a hen that they heard a little further away, and they're just going back to check that area. They're only gonna do that, like with a with a noise that they heard in their own I'm not only but primarily yeah, absolutely, talk about what you guys found looking at When you put a GPS track and devices on hunters, what do hunters do? They hang around the road, You don't say they Almost all hunter locations we found were within a hundred yards of a road or a path. But I mean, like, but in some states, the hell you? I mean, it's hard to get that, and we haven't. That work has all been Southeastern Eastern stuff, you know. I mean it's hard to There's a lot of roads there are, and people know they can skirt down this firebreak and hear birds, so they stick to the roads, they stick to the paths. And what we found recently with some work is when the season starts, turkeys and hunters do the same thing. So folks start going to places where turkeys are because they scouttered them out or whatever, and then we see this clear divergence after a week or so of the season. Turkeys are doing one thing and hunters are doing something else. In fact, the turkeys are moving away from hunting pressure into human habitation or into like remote areas just into other parts of their range where they're not being disturbed as often. But how do you typify what they like to go towards just away from roads, just away from roads into subdivisions, no, just away from roads. And and that's not all birds. We see some birds that just hunker down and stick it out, and presumably they just quit gobbling and they just hunker and stay there. But we see this divergence and behavior where by the middle of the season, hunters are doing one thing. They're still sticking to the roads, they're behaving the same as they did two weeks prior. Turkeys have changed their strategy, and then by the end of the season they come back together because hunters buying large quit towards the end of the season, and turkeys realize it because there's not as much pressure, so they go back to doing what they were six weeks earlier. Pretty interesting, definitely pressure sensitive. We gotta email, no, no, it was here. If it's the article. I think it was the article someone sent us that in this state here in Montana, they have had I think in the last two years, like twenty four requests you know what I'm talking about of citizens demanding GPS tracking data on game animals, and they have a little choice but to give it to them. They have, and they're so people like, hey, I want to know where there's a bull elk in such and such area where and its radio collar? And apparently apparently the way it works, they have to divulge it its public information. Sure have you guys had that? No? No, we have. People want to know where your turkeys are? No, we have not, because you can tell them exactly where they are. We can, we can tell them with certainty. Now we have. In the past, in the interest of getting data, we have put on I have personally put hunters on birds trying to see how the birds would respond to hunting pressure. When I was putting a really good turkey hunter on them and found some pretty bizarre, crazy thing like what I had this one bird that the youth season opened, and I put a kid and a really good guide, a biologist, turkey hunter, really good guy that he's a killer, put them too on this bird, gave him the GPS, basically said put this in your GPS and you're going to be a hundred yards from him when he when he gobbles the bird. Um came up to him several times during the morning, they never saw him, and he ended up spooking and moving north about a half mile, and then he hung out and he stayed there all week. And then when the general season opened the next weekend, I put another hunter on him, and the hunter went in neew exactly where the bird was a bump the bird. After he flew down, the bird saw him. He traveled a mile and a half to the north to to an area that was about two yards from the check station, and and he stayed there for weeks until a guy killed him who was fighting with his wife. And took off and from the aft for the afternoon to get away from home, went to the check station, parked his truck, walked over the levee to just I'm just going to sit in the woods. Didn't call, put his face mask on, was playing on his phone, and he hears a bird gobble and he calls him once and he kills him. We're already fighting about I didn't have probably turkey hunt. Yeah, yeah, we've we've seen some pretty you know, we've seen some pretty bizarre behaviors, whereas some of these other times frequently encountered hunters. I'd love to know what they're fighting and and they just hunkered down like we had this. We have this one time. I cannot tell you how many hunters he ran into and none of them ever saw him. We'd interview the hunters when they come out of the w m A, so we had their GPS data, we knew where they were, and we knew where the toms were, and we'd interview him. So how many birds did you hear? How many hunters did you see? You know, etcetera, etcetera. And we had this one gentleman who who was right there the bird was and he's like, I didn't hear a bird all morning, I didn't see a bird nothing, And he was literally under this bird all morning. The bird was right there where he was, and he never heard. Yeah, but when they're not that's the thing, man, When they're not calling and not out chasing around, they're just they're there. That's the thing I always tell myself when you're hunting turkey's in the the middle of the day, it's like, dear, you be in some spot hunting deer in the middle of the day and be like he is laid up in a briar patch and you're never gonna get like you're not gonna get onto him. He's laid up in a briar patch. You're not gonna get a shot at him laying there. If you try to go in there, you're gonna blow him out. It's like he's essentially untouchable. But with turkeys it could be too. In the afternoon, like that's some of bitches out right now eating yep, loafing around. He's out perfectly visible somewhere on his feet unless he sees you first. And what I'm saying, but he's not. It's like he's findable and what we see a lot of turk he's due during the middle of the day as they don't move much. They forage in the morning, and then they settled down into a relatively small area during the middle of the day and they're just hanging out, and then they pick it back up in the afternoon. So I think a lot of these times during the middle of the day when you happen to strike one is you just happen to end up close enough to him where he was comfortable in that little loafing area. He may periodically get up and feed or strutt or whatever, and you just struck gold and hit him and got him in the right and he's there because he's loafing there, because he's comfortable there. So you happen to get, just by dumb luck, get close enough to him where you could strike accord with him, and then you kill him. I think that's a lot of it. We're in New Mexico. We're coming down that narrow little cane. We're coming out into sort of where maybe a couple of draanges sort of I don't know if they came together. We're departing each other, but it opened up, you know, into like a fighter zone. Were they actually part they don't part each other, well, depends on what way you're moving up and down on him going down. So another drainage was coming in from our left is a is a big wide open Tell him what we were looking at seconds earlier, Yeah, a turkey carcass that we believe was you know, taken out by a cat, some kind of cat, but somebody had eating him. Anyways, it was like we were in a narrow drainage can you eat sort of thing, And so we're a group of us five or six probably were fairly well hidden from this bigger opening, and right when the first two or three of us sort of popped out and you could see a couple hundred yards not far away, almost within shotgun range, there's a gobbler. And what does he do because he thought he was he had caught us early enough that he just sunk, I mean, just melted his head and neck out on the ground, you know. And something just thinking when you're talking about that guy that was right on top of that turkey. If the turkey was on the ground, he very well just could have sunk into the ground and just laid there for two hours. What How big is the turkey's home range? Several thousand acres in the east southeast. As you move in the Western States, much bigger, and in fact, like Miriam's have and Rio's to a lesser extent, they have fairly large ranges that can change by season. So you'll see, you know, birds that disappear from areas in the winter and then show back up in the spring. And ask about migrations as well, because I feel that here they migrate absolutely, they follow the snow line that they do, and they they have much broader ranges. But if you think, like you know, Easterns are four species and the forest don't change that much from year to year, so they tend to have several thousand acre home ranges. If you encompass the entire year, how many trees take your average gobbler, how many trees does he have that he will roost in? And does he have well he does at randomly add trees to that list or does he like got like I rust they're they're, they're there and there and that's where roost. Each bird has roosting areas that they go to. They don't necessarily use the same tree every time they go there, at least Easterns. Rio's and Miriam's obviously, roost are limited in some of those populations, so they go back to the exact same tree, but Easterns don't do that. We see that almost every gobbler has a handful or more range areas that they use, but they don't use them back to back nights during the spring. They tend to use a roost site here, and then they moved to a different roost that night, and then they moved to a different roost the following night. But other birds will come to the roost that they abandon. Oh that explains a little bit because I read in Colorado they did a study and there's only a thirteen percent chance that the turkey roost and that these gobblers, there's only a thirteen percent chance that heat roost in the same tree two nights in the world. That's right, And if you think about it, you know, back to these legs, they're very likely or places that are good for sound sound to travel, and they're they're somewhat static. Unless there's clear cutting or something that changes the forest, they're probably fairly static. So there are certain places where I hear this all the time. I've been hearing turkeys there for twenty years. Yep, you have, and you didn't hear the same birds night after night. What you actually heard was that this bird moved and his buddy came in and roosted in that same area. Because these birds know there's certain places where sound carries, and that's why they're gobbling. They're gobbling to hear each other and to attract hens. So there's probably some places that are just good roost areas. So what do you think the odds are that, Uh, on Monday I went out, season wasn't open, or or let's just say, you know, it was evening, and I went out and roosted a bird, heard him on a ridge, but I couldn't hunt for two or three days. I go back in there three days later in the morning, on that same ridge, there he is, goblin. Where the odds that that's the same bird I roosted three nights early. If it was three nights later, there's a decent chance that may be the same bird. If it was the next night, there's a better chance it's not. There's a better chance that he's somewhere else than him being there two nights in a row. Now, turkeys are like people, and they're like deer and everything else. They're all different. So we do. We've had some times that man, they were they were money, going back to the same spot every night for three or four nights in a row, sneaky pete. But by and large across the population, that's not a strategy they use. And which is what's interesting is if you they don't do that from the time their poults, I mean, brood hens don't roost in the same spot two nights in a row. They move roost every night, And if you think about it, that makes sense from a predation standpoint. Don't go signal in the same spot every night because you're just attracting undue attention. Move around a little bit, and don't pigeonhole yourself to the same place, you know, like rio's have to do that. They have limited roost sites, and there may be four or five trees and an entire home range that are roost locations, and they go back there every night. But Rio's roost in large numbers, and in large numbers their safety. There's more eyes, there's more ears, there's more predator detection. You got an eastern that's standing there with him and his buddy is right down the ridge and there it's just two of them. Just so people who aren't familiar. Rio's have limited roosting because they're riparian. That limited the ripe parian areas, that's right. They could be surrounded by pine ridges, arid area with no trees, yes, And and you're seeing across the rio range cotton woods are really important tree species for them, and in many areas you're seeing widespread loss of cotton woods to disease issues, and that's causing a drastic reduction and roost availability to the point where some of our rio's only have we have several marked birds that have only had to roost in their entire home range. So you flip a coin, they're going to be at one of those two clumps of cotton woods every night. You know what you're talking about having a great tree where people can hear you. Um. You see that with blue grouse Alaska when you can you can hunt them in the spring on their calling and you go and find them, and sometimes they'll be like you got like a big main ridge and there's a finger ridge coming off at that finger ridge and have kind of a hump that sticks out. It would be some giant tree leaning out over that thing. And then he's up on that thing and he's just broadcast into the world. Man. You know, he's just like hanging out looking out over everything, you know, And you get up there and be like, I bet you he's got to be in that tree, right, And he's in just some crazy tree where he's like like got a megaphone up there. That's interesting. That is the one other burden big bird that you can hunt during this ring. But it's limited in scope, very limited. It's only a few weeks. And I suspect how many harvested during the spring. I don't I think that it's we went. It's a tough punt and it's like that, it's like everything, like everything's at a forty five degree angles. Yeah. We took like a forty five minute boat ride to go to a remote island to, you know, to hunt him. So I don't think there's a ton of pressure. I wouldn't think so. But man, it's like it's great if I had to, if I could do that, or hunt turkey's. I have a hard time decide. I've never hunted the blue grouse, but I tried for sure. It's fun, man, But you gotta go with our friend Barb whatever. Just show you what's up. Not you driver, you you pull your hair out. I could I could see that being very being very frustrating, just thinking about what you just said. Steep inclines a lot of work and then it doesn't pay off well, kind of like that, like when you hear a turkey guy we start getting close, you kind of be like, well, he must be right over there. These things, the sound, the noise they make, which is you can't place it. Oh, so it's unplaced, breaks down in the environment. You're just like, I don't know, man, somewhere within a hundred yards me, there's a bird doing that noise. I don't know what direction. Yeah, that would make sense. It's more like, um, it's like you kind of feel it, canaring it or feeling it. You kind of know he's drumming over in that area, but out a rough grouse drum. The drumming is a little different from where you thought it was. I had it right there, and in reality it's right over there. Yeah, you can basically be like within a hundred I can tell you within about a hundred eighty degrees where yeah, yeah, yeah, what else we got, Johnnie, I just want to follow up a little bit more on the predator populations, like outside of low fur prices, what else is causing the big boom we see? Snakes are a huge predator of of eggs and poults, and I don't remember seeing that when I was a student. If you look at many areas of the of the United States, particularly that you know where I do most of my work, it's become brushier, shrubbier, woodier, less prescribed fire less land disturbance, um pine monoculture, edges, fragmentation, and snakes benefit from that. So we see snakes account for nest loss on some sites. Yeah, yes, rat snakes and they killed the poults. Uh. And a friend of mine who's A who's yeah, who's our hurt guy at u g A has has told me that rat snakes all snakes down. Yeah. He said that rat snakes are really savvy sage predators that they tend to revisit nest. So if they go and they eat three or four eggs in this area, they'll go back and keep searching and keep searching and keep searching until they get all the eggs. Yeah. So if you think about it, even if she's laying right, if she hasn't finished the clutch and the snake shows up and picks all four at snakes going back to that clutch before it's over satting, you know, all said and done. The Old Testament is right, man. Yeah. And and and John was telling me that buddy of mine, he was like, man, if if the the eggs are there, they're going to find them. So how do you think they're finding them from smell? They keen sense of smell as a snake has it. They also are visual predators. They sit in shrub mid story understory, and they watch and there's they got good long, they got long some type of long range type of vision that they know something is there. And I think probably what's happening is as these birds are leaving their clutches for recesses right there, moving away and back and forth, that through time the sense the key the snake keys in on that nest site and it doesn't take that many days. And if they're numerically more of these snakes, then there were that just through the law of averages, more nests are going to be eaten. So to your question that snakes are are an important predator by far, and there's more of them because the habitat is good for them. Yes, Basically, what we've done is create a landscape that's better for predators than turkeys basically in many areas. Here's my last question for you. Why do uh why did turkey? When you shoot a turkey sometimes his buddies beat the hell out of him. How is their desire to get each other when they're down higher than their desire to get away from a loud, sudden gunshot, Like, what is it in them that's so keyed up to wait for a moment of weakness. That's their social hierarchy. That's that pecking order where Turkey I was. I've been told turkeys they fight from the time they're young, and they never forget a grudge. They carry a grudge their entire lives. So they're around these other birds that have beaten them, and when you shoot that bird, he is suddenly vulnerable, even if you're the dominant. But they make that decision so fast because this is ingrained. This is what structures their populations. These social hierarchies start from day one of a of hatching, and they this is the ladder. That ladder has dictated their entire lives. So when that ladder, when one of those steps gets broken, the guy that's under that's the step below immediately sees that as a sign of weakness and he is going to attack that bird that's socially above him and win so that he can move up a step and he kill it. Well, he's well, they don't really kill each other. They just beat the hell out of it. You never see one actually get like, let's say they're in a fight and he gets or whatever. A bird gets weakened by something. Will they ever harass it to the point of killing it. Oh well, they will. They will injure each other to the point where they can suffer mortalities from it, because then it's just it just compounds against They spur each other, they cut each other. They if they get injuries, the other birds pack at those injuries if it's on the head. So you kind of have to isolate birds that are injured if they're in captivity, because they'll they will hurt each other. So when these tom see the other their buddy on the ground, that's an opportunity to move up in the pecking order. That's what they're doing. And they're able to make that call like that instantaneous because that that pecking order has structured their life from the time that they were little. So that's all they know. See, I looked to think that something happened to me. Yanni went just instantaneously. I've seen him looking at the funny out there like a trip and he just jumps out like Seth, Seth, I know you know how to do that turniquet, but you don't need to do it that not that put it around his neck. We never we never got back to Shoplin. We gotta have him back. We didn't get to Turkey Tuesday either. Oh no, we're gonna do that. Okay, tell people about Turkey Tuesay. I like Turkey Tuesday. Yeah, Turkey Tuesday started, So I go check it out by Slay. I gotta click. I gotta click the file with button? Please do that? Would that would help? Yeah? I just opened up Instagram. Yeah, so it's at wll Turkey Doc on Twitter and Instagram wal Turkey Doc. There are Wild Turkey Doc Mike Chamberlin. I'm opening to page. Yeah. So every Tuesday I fall back. I like it already because I'm seeing like diagrams and charts and yep, yep. That's no grip and grins, not yet. That's my ways a duck grip and grin. That's my way of putting a little bit of science out to people who may not see it and in a digestible way where they can appreciate why we do research and what it means. Oh, here's a here's a diagram, just for instance. It's a chart showing um prescribed burns. Yeah. How how how the scale of fires affects turkeys? Yep, yep. And that's a modeling word that came about to a point you made earlier. Um former student works as a state agency biologist. He posts on Facebook and he absolutely gets chewed alive and it really made me mad because he couldn't respond. And I said, right then, I was like, you know what, every week, I'm going to put something out there because I can respond. I have academic freedom and I can I can go back and forth. And it was so clear to me when Jeremy, who's the Turkey coordinator in Arkansas, when he made that post he couldn't respond to the two people that were criticizing him because they were misinformed. And right there, I said, you know what, I don't get paid to do this, to to to post on social media. I don't get credit for it per se. But I'm going to do this because this is a form where people can digest what I do. Now, if I can just take the ability to to to give it to him in a easily degestible way where they can appreciate what research is being done and why it's important to them, then every week I'm going to post something and I'm going to get as much momentum started as I can so that people understand the issues facing this bird and it's it's been great. I mean started, as you can imagine, it started slow, but recently it's really exploded. And it's awesome because I get people that that don't see academic work. They have no idea that I even exist. They don't they don't know what I'm doing, that I've been studying this birth for twenty five years. They have no idea who I am, they don't know the research it's ongoing. But when they see those posts, they suddenly realized that there's something and being done that I can relate to, and I think is is relevant to me as a hunter and a land manager. So I'm going to follow it. And if every post is not to their liking, fine, But I also respond to the naysayers, people that are critical of me or the work. I try to go back and revisit those posts and try to help explain two people that may not understand the science and what we're doing why it's important to them. I'm looking at I'm looking at your March third post right now, and it's a map. It's a satellite photograph of an area that's sixteen square miles and on it are six thousand one yellow dots all GPS locations where in turkey hangs out. So she's using she's using sixteen square miles, but the dots show of that where she likes to be. Yes. Think about that map, and there's big areas where she doesn't do ship she never goes, and there's big areas where she really really likes it. Yep, she has to maintain a sixteen square mile home range to be able to find those pockets. That's a problem. That bird should only maintain a couple of square miles. Back years ago, we didn't see sixteen square mile home ranges. The only reason a bird that's scaled to be the size of a turkey would move sixteen square miles is because they have to doesn't have So she's trying to balance energy to intake with energy loss and it takes her sixteen square miles to do that. To me, that's a habitat problem. That's something that I think most people would look at that map that Steve looking at and think, wait a minute, if he's telling us that is I mean, if you think sixteen square miles, that's a huge area. If a herkey's using that and I only own five hundred acres that birds disappearing from my land for weeks or months on end, and I whatever I'm doing is not benefiting this bird because they're not even on my property anymore. You know. It speaks to the need that we need to cooperate, We need to we need to think bigger about how we're managing how it's that for this bird. That was kind of the reason for that. Four hours ago you posted a chart that shows gobbling activity and barometric pressure correlated to barometric pressure. Yeah, so all the gobbling research done previous to this use people two to record gobbles. So their data sets had like five hundred gobbles. That has a hundred seventy thousand and and and we related to weather variables, and we see like that figure shows that if you on on any given day, if you have an average barometric pressure whatever they average is that day, if the barometric pressure starts rising point oh three inches right or point three inches, you see this market increase in gobbling activity. And conversely, if the pressure is declining, you might as well stay in bad right, because this is going to create like it's gonna be hard. Just a bunch of Mark Kenyan type turkey hunters man's you know this next year? Tuesday? The third? What's so? What's that? You know? You always hear people? I heard five gobbles this morning? Heard it was a thousand gobars morning. What in reality, since you know I'm in off of one censor, how far can you hear? How several hundred yards all the way around? What's the most gobbles one of those things ever logged in today? A couple of hundred? Yeah, that's it? Yeah, Because I mean, if you think gobble gobble, goals fly down and then they're moving away from the oh because okay, so you think you're not picking up a lot of the stuff he does on the ground because he moves away some I didn't think that. Sometimes I've sat there under a bird in a tree and you think he gobbles a hundred times before he flies down. When you start actually counting that, you don't get anywhere close to a hundred. I've done the same thing. I've sat there and thought, man, he has gobbling his head off eighteen nineteen twenty, and he flies down, it's like thirty four. And I would have texted my Bundy and said, gobbled two four. I'm gonna do a better job accounting. Yeah, and you're twenty five years of research. What's the most like surprising thing you've learned about turkeys? The most surprising thing cook them drumsticks long enough for good yea. UM, I would say without question the things that I published that were false, that's been the biggest surprise. Like I published a paper years ago saying that Hen's went out and searched for nest sites. Right, they went and looked for these really good nest sites. Because a lot of people have found the same thing. And in reality we see now they don't do any of that. They don't they literally fly down the day they're going to lay the first egg and they go find a spot to nest. They don't visit these sites days in advance or weeks in advance. They don't go pick this perfect spot like I thought they used to. So I've actually found that my own science was garbage, that that work was flawed, and it was flawed because of technology. We just didn't have the technology that we had, so we were inferring things that were inaccurate. It's good that you're comfortable, um admitting that moving on and not doubling down on I don't because that's what science is about. If you can't admit your own errors and flaws, then you shouldn't be in the academic. Well, that's why my father liked to discount all sciences, because because the story would change. So if like, if the story changed, he just was like, yeah, I screw the whole thing. Yesterday it was this, and today it says so. Therefore, I just live in a factless world rather than just sort of embracing the prices. If somebody comes along twenty years from now and proves me wrong, then I would welcome that because that meant that somebody cared enough to go revisit those questions for the resource, the people. These people change their minds all the time. If Mike is wrong and his assertions, then he was wrong, But at least science is moving forward. Seth. That was Broidy's concluder. What do you what do you say to people that say turkeys are dumb animals? They can do some stupid things. Understand, they have a brain that's quite small in their environment. They're incredibly savvy until it's time to breed, uh, and then they can do some Tom's can do some stupid things, as we all know. But by and large, I mean, this is a bird that in its own environment is quite intelligent. In the breeding season, all bets are off. So that's kind of even though even like what you just said, that sounds like they smarten up to there the pressure during during the breeding season, during the hunting season. If they didn't, we wouldn't have many. I mean they obviously become yeah, inadaptable, absolutely absolutely all right, Doctor Michael Chamberlain. Michael Chamberlain, c H A M B E R L A I N found on Instagram a wild Turkey doc Twitter two on Facebook. Yeah on Twitter, it's the same handling. On Facebook, it's just my name. Yeah, I'm an instagram man, me too. But you know why, because people don't get all keyed up on politics Facebook. They get all riled up. They get on Facebook like and then they go over to like some hunting thing and they're pissed. Yeah, it's a different demographic Instagram. Lets that what's going on on Yeah, you catch them in a different movie. If somebody gets cranky and fussy at me and cheesay on Facebook, almost always it's never already riled up or Instagram. They were mad before they ever logged on. What's this guy turkey? He thinks he knows about turkeys. Yeah, I've been hunting turkeys my whole life. What you're saying is you know garbage. I get that. Yeah, I'm sure it's okay. Uh all right, I followed you. I had looked previously, but now I follow Awesome, Thank you, thanks you go following Instagram. Let's let's let's smoke his number up. Also, we gotta present with our T shirt. So here's our T shirt. It says it's a circle, and inside the circle is a turkey, and the circle says me eater sounds that make a turkey gobble. And then within the then the turkey is filled in with things that make a sampling. Ice cream trucks, sonic booms, cattle guards, antlers, ratlin, revving motorcycles, the calls of a loon, monastery bells. These are all user sourced. Shotgun blasts, rumble strips, loosening log nuts, artillery fire, ambulance sirens, dropping anchors, the braise of a jackass kicking rusty hunks of metal, the calls of a peacock, woodpeckers hammering on trees, squeaky door hinges, dry heaves, rocks, thrown it, stop signs, train whistles, dog whistles, elk bugles, kyle halls, helicopters, and thunder the dry we only just scratch the surface. We got a list of curl your hair. I'll wear it with I'll wear it with pride. Knowing that whoever came up with a dry heaves example, that had to be a hell of a story. Three people really wrote in about puking and getting rips from it. I'm not going to try three people I designed anyway. Yeah, we're too old for that. Well, I appreciate you can considerably man like a real part of life. Been there there, I appreciate the opportunity to be here, all right, thank you. Yep.