00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com. F I R S T L I T E dot com. All Right, everybody, it's an Aldo Leopold blowout. I'm looking around the room. 00:00:46 Speaker 2: I don't know about that branding. 00:00:52 Speaker 1: When we had babies, we'd say they had a blowout, if you know, yeah, it would kind of I'll tell them. We were celebrating my boys for birthday the other night and I was saying, everybody's kind of sharing a memory, and I said, the thing I remember about you is when you're a little baby, looking and seeing how you had a kind of a brownish yellow streak on your onesie above your diaper line. Oh yeah, going up the back, and we called a blowout. And I'd be like, and I would see that and I'd be like, man, I was like, that's my memory. Uh two huge, So there's like a there's like a what's your problem, Doug. 00:01:29 Speaker 3: It's just an interesting way of starting. 00:01:31 Speaker 1: Bubby bubbly Doug. Durn's here expressing disapproval already, and we're joining. We're joined by uh doctor Carl Malcolm. Uh. These are both longtime veterans of the show, joined by Randall is here, Brody's here, Giannis is here, and we're gonna we're celebrating, and we're gonna we're gonna explain why it warrants celebration. We're celebrating two sort of Elder Leopold anniversaries. One is like a real one. One's a big one because the centennial one hundred year anniversary of the Heat the Wilderness Area, which is our first wilderness area. 00:02:07 Speaker 3: Yep. 00:02:08 Speaker 1: And just to throw it in there, the seventy fifth anniversary, I don't know, is that legit? 00:02:17 Speaker 3: That's legit? 00:02:18 Speaker 1: I don't like fifty ten, fifty one hundred is seventy five? 00:02:28 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, there celebrates seventy fifth anniversary. 00:02:30 Speaker 3: All the time, Diamond, I was gonna say, man, if you were married seventy five years, you sure as he'll be celebrating. 00:02:36 Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well I'd be celebrating how long I've been alive. 00:02:43 Speaker 5: The seventy fifth year is known as the Diamond. 00:02:47 Speaker 6: And Diamond July. 00:02:48 Speaker 1: All right, so it's legit. I questioned it all along. I never had any hesitation that we were going to do a thing because and I'm gonna tell you why. If you're gonna do a mount rush more of American conservation leaders, you'd put Roosevelt, You'd put Roosevelt on it. But Roosevelt was you know, he was he was a political figure, right, he did things outside of politics. He was a political figure. He would go on it. And the second one, you'd have to stop and think about three and four. The second one would absolutely be Eldo Leopold. Like like Roosevelt shape so much policy from the buldy pulpit, right, But Eldo Leopold is sort of the philosophical He's the philosophical father, the philosophical founder of American conservation in that he was like he talked about things that are still relevant now. Roosevelt talked a lot about a lot of things that became He like this helped solve a lot of problems that got solved. 00:04:06 Speaker 3: Right. 00:04:06 Speaker 1: One of his first battles was against market like, you know, market hunting of waterfowl, market hunting of uh feathered birds, shore birds, right, like, real things that were real issues, and they solved them. And then Aldo Leopold came along and talked about He framed up all the discussions we're still having today. 00:04:30 Speaker 3: I would argue, I would agree with you completely. 00:04:33 Speaker 1: Here's some Eldo Leopold. We're gonna then we're gonna do our normal thing and talk about a couple of extra things. But here's some Eldo Leopold quotes. Unfortunately, these are ranked by likes. I'm on Goodreads, which I like that. I like the good Reads that will compile quotes from authors. You'll find that all of these I believe all of these quotes are from Oh we never explained anniversary of the publication of what I would regard to be the most influential piece of conservation writing ever in that it still maintains relevance today. Yeah, when you read, Just to keep this Roosevelt Leopold thing set up. Now, No, Leopold was a private person. Leopold was a forester, he was a land manager, he was an agency person. 00:05:22 Speaker 3: You know. 00:05:22 Speaker 1: Roosevelt was a governor in a president. So we're comparing apples and oranges. But if you said to people, name a great conservations, they're going to go Roosevelt. Be like, name a second one, They're going to go Elo, Leopold, And then three they're gonna be like, I don't know, uh, Desert Solitaire. You know, I don't know where they go with number three. The general public. But his book A Sand County Almanac, which is a collection of his writing, maintains relevant today. When you go read Roosevelt today, you're reading Roosevelt kind of like like a hobby historian. You know, you're sort of reading it to find out about a long time ago. When you read a San Connie Almanac, you're you're reading it and finding out. You're reading it and being like, holy, this could have been written yesterday and it would still be relevant. 00:06:11 Speaker 3: Wow, Steve, I am really happy to hear you read all this. So you guys, I'm not reading this. I mean say all this. 00:06:18 Speaker 1: That well, you know, I was before we started recording. I was pointing out that he was fathered by first cousins, and I was pointing out that he would take insanely long shots with the trad bow at deer just to kind of see what would happen. So Doug thought I was going to sit here and hack. 00:06:35 Speaker 3: On different. 00:06:37 Speaker 4: You're not confusing that with some with like Art Young in Saxon. 00:06:42 Speaker 1: Poell, Leopold would take some hail Mary's. I think he had basically to see what would happen. 00:06:47 Speaker 4: You think what? 00:06:48 Speaker 3: I think he admitted to it. I think he talked about it. 00:06:50 Speaker 1: He'd take his recurve and cockback and you know, hold like eight deer bodies high and take a seventy five yard winger. 00:06:57 Speaker 4: Oh well, everybody in the room, raise your hand. I have not done that. Yeah, you've never launched one at a deer with a recurve. 00:07:06 Speaker 1: What would have happened? 00:07:08 Speaker 3: No? 00:07:08 Speaker 2: Never? 00:07:10 Speaker 1: And Phil has it either. 00:07:11 Speaker 3: Well, I don't bow hunt, so I never really had that opportunity. 00:07:14 Speaker 1: Here's some quotes, and again these are ranked accurse. These are These are listed according to rankings one and seventy three. People who frequent goodreads dot Com like this one. I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness. I'm picking here. Here's another one that's that's so, then that's his number one. Then the next one down the line has a thousand less likes. That's too complicated for people. Here's a famous one. There are two spiritual dangers and not owning a farm. One is the day of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. There's another one. Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. Here's another one. I would apply this to someone taking a Hail Mary with his beau. He says, ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching, even when doing the wrong thing is legal to those of void of imagination. A blank place on the map is a useless waste to others the most valuable part. 00:09:10 Speaker 4: I feel like the first quote that you read had more to it, Like isn't there a follow up to that that has something about like what good is it without like places on a map to explore. 00:09:22 Speaker 1: Weak you have to take it up with good. Yeah, you're right, you have to take it up with good. 00:09:27 Speaker 4: Reads, right, But that's a part of that same quote, isn't it. 00:09:31 Speaker 7: There's none that he refers to the value of wilderness and wildness in a number of these quotes. 00:09:35 Speaker 1: But that's what makes I mean, we're all clear that what makes a quote is you've pulled it, like Twain didn't publish published one sentences, but he published bugs. Then a feller goes in there and pulls out the quotes like it's all contextual. It's surrounded by a whole damn book. 00:09:56 Speaker 7: But Yanni's mentioning there are some quotes that are in a similar vein, and what he's referencing is a slight tweak on the quote that you shared. That's also from Leopold, and in a similar kind of line of thought. He talks about the idea of what avails our forty freedoms without a young place, without a wild place to be young in. 00:10:16 Speaker 1: That's right, Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher standard of living is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free for us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television. Here's one on land management cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays. 00:11:10 Speaker 3: Here's one that I like farmer as a conservationist. When land does well for its owner and the owner does well by his land, when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. 00:11:25 Speaker 1: We hit to hit me with that one again. 00:11:27 Speaker 3: When land does well for its owner and the owner does well by his land, when both end up better by reason of their partnership, we have conservation. 00:11:38 Speaker 1: There you go. That's that's that's very close to it. Doug during quote Well, indeed, well, no, that's a Doug during great You will say, I see what the farmer gets out of it. I see what the hunter gets out of it, But what does the land get out of it? 00:11:57 Speaker 3: Yeah? Your memory never ceases to amaze me. 00:12:03 Speaker 1: Doug Durn Also another favorite quote of mind. Doug Durn said, when when he was conjuring other people, if the kids are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt. 00:12:17 Speaker 4: In reference to youth season. 00:12:19 Speaker 1: In reference to when when they put it to the concert, when they put it to the Wisconsin when they put it to Wisconsin voters, do you support expanding youth turkey from two days to four days? And simultaneously, do you support expanding youth deer season from two days to four days? They voted like a slim majority in favor of expanding youth Turkey, which I'm going to hire lobbyists to work on, and they had a minority in support of expanding youth deer. And Doug and if this process plays out of a gold with these meetings, and Doug was imagining going to the meeting and was imagining the man who would stand up and beat the table and say, if the kids. 00:13:09 Speaker 3: Are going on? She did not have to imagine that guy. 00:13:13 Speaker 1: Many of those guys exist that. Let me tell you who likes youth season. Let's tell you who likes it people with. 00:13:23 Speaker 4: Kids, well, and kids like under sixteen years of age? 00:13:27 Speaker 1: Yeah, And who doesn't like youth season? 00:13:30 Speaker 5: People without kids. 00:13:31 Speaker 1: Sure, there's there's an area of that. There's like an area of wildlife law. And I was trying to explain this. We're working on our next Close Calls edition, which has these sort of like transformative stories in it. But anyways, there's there's an area of wildlife law. I'm a juxtaposed two types of wildlife law. There's an area there's an area of wildlife law where there's sort of a moral basis right where you'll look at certain questions and it'll be like, well, clearly that's the right thing, like shooting a sow with cubs or something like that. Sure like it's like that. There's there's things that almost have like biblical reference about like like like waste okay, like and and uh like to take the most classic example. You know, it's generally been understood for a long time, like murdering your brethren is bad right in the Ten Commandments. It's generally you find this prohibition around the world. We now have very specific laws about it. But you look and be like, oh, yeah, of course wildlife law I think has some of that. You know, the people would look and be like, oh, yeah, that's got to be illegal. You just went shot a whole herd of elk and has left them laying out the rot in the sun. That ought to be illegal. Seems like that be illegal. But then you have areas of wildlife law that are Uh, wind up, there's no moral background, and it winds up being argued by who stands to gain the most. I'll point out that I think I feel like the corner crossing debate sits outside of morality. People that want to be able to cross corners are people that want to go into those areas. People that don't want you to be able to cross corners are people that don't want you going into those areas. There's no like, there's no one coming and saying like I have the moral high ground. And uh was talking about oh the youth season thing. Yeah, there's no like more, you know what I mean. It's like everybody's just jockeying for their own interests. Man on a bashing damn kids an opportunity away from me. Well, we had a guy right in. Were you here for that guy that wrote in why He's like sure? Pat Dirkin writes an article about it's the same old story you see all the time, Like during COVID is all the articles like oh these people hunting fishing. Now there's all these articles. No one's going hunting and fishing. Wisconsin's losing all their deer hunters. It's like and you're looking and be like, okay, like a demonstrable decline, but you know it's the same up down that has always existed. Anyways. The guy writes in well, I'll tell you and he writes it a piss He signs it a pissed off Michigan hunter. He wrote in being like, I'll tell you why no one's hunting deer anymore because kids seasons, kids kill all the big bucks. And he calls it what was his term for, like the the big hunt. Yeah, before the big hunt, the big hunt, like the big hunt in his mind, his general firearm. And he says, by the time the big hunt happens, they're all dead. Everything's dead. 00:16:34 Speaker 3: Now. 00:16:35 Speaker 1: You got this season and you got that season. 00:16:38 Speaker 5: And then the kid say it's not the kids shooting them, it's the kid's dad shooting. 00:16:42 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, oh. 00:16:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's a kid there in diapers with his picture, you know, six or five creed more or something in a big giant buck. 00:16:49 Speaker 1: And yeah, and like in say anthing with Doug, like if the kids are gonna hunt, I'm gonna hunt, and you season, here's my take. I'm gonna hunt. So you kids start un well, this is nothing new to your ass. Speaking the cup of extra days. 00:17:07 Speaker 3: And it is fun going out with kids. 00:17:09 Speaker 1: Man, I love it. But yeah, I'm like, I'm I'm I'm not like, Well, let me know when you want to wake up. I'm up. Everybody else, Get up, get up, get up, away back. Okay, so oh, a quick warning. But guy wrote in two things. If don't go to audible dot com and buy a Sand County Almanac, here's a problem you guys at the Elder Leopold Foundation need to figure out. Hmm, I just downloaded. This is a guy writing it. I just downloaded the only copy of a Sand County Almanac available on audible. He'd already read his hard copy several times. Okay, he says, imagine my discuss when I realized someone has added what amounts to a politically charged high school essay as an introduction, as well as removing the whole second portion of the book. Nowhere in the description does it say that it's an abridged version, with a I haven't listened to it and apparently questionable the introduction. 00:18:14 Speaker 2: The introduction is part of the book that's currently published. It's written by a Pulitzer Prize winning essay asked Barbara Kingsoliver. Right, Yeah, that's what's Yeah, there's a couple of people that are upset about the politics of the intro, which I think is actually. 00:18:30 Speaker 1: I thought that was highly I thought that that choice of an intro was highly questionable. 00:18:35 Speaker 2: It's not a bad intro. 00:18:37 Speaker 1: I've read her work. Yeah, I just really felt that that was a bad move. Yeah, I mean I could. 00:18:43 Speaker 2: See what it's one of those things and not to interrupt, but it's one of those things where like she mentions the fact that people disagree about climate change and this and that, but she takes a pretty even handed approach to it. 00:18:55 Speaker 3: I don't know what. 00:18:56 Speaker 2: That's not how I would have had right the intro. Oh No, I mean it's an interesting choice for sure. Nonetheless, I've seen several people. I looked at the comments on Audible after reading this email, and there's a lot of people that claim it's a high school book report. 00:19:10 Speaker 1: It's just like, eh, but as a part of the book missing. 00:19:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, that seems to be. There's like ten or so people that make the same claim. 00:19:19 Speaker 3: So the sketches here and there part they say. 00:19:23 Speaker 2: It's like a chunk out of the middle. 00:19:26 Speaker 3: Well, that would be the middle it's really three parts. Yeah, Carl and I of course have old copyright, don't have the intro. Yeah, his is signed by one of the Leopold kids. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: Okay, so anyways, you guys got to figure that out. Yeah at theold Yeah, once you get someone to read the sum bitch, do like a proper version. Put it on audible. 00:19:50 Speaker 3: I'll work on that, please. I have an idea. You know, there are no recordings of Leopold's voice. 00:19:56 Speaker 1: Hmm, there aren't. So you can't do an ai him. 00:19:58 Speaker 3: No, you can't him. But I listened to both Kurt Mighty and Stan Temple, who held Leopold's position at the University of Wisconsin, talk about Leopold, and if you close your eyes when Stan Temple's talking, you kind of feel like you're in the presence. 00:20:14 Speaker 1: He'd be a good guy to read it. 00:20:15 Speaker 3: I think he would be. 00:20:16 Speaker 4: I would agree with that. The current We also bought it on audible and the narration was not great. 00:20:22 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I also picked that up from the comments. I didn't go so far as to buy it, so. 00:20:28 Speaker 1: I can't really speak to that, but understood you put on your company card, Randall. 00:20:32 Speaker 2: I don't have a company card. 00:20:34 Speaker 1: Maybe Chili can put it on his company card for you. Okay, we have Okay. A long time ago, we did a special drop episode. I think it was called we had when Renee Cross came out. 00:20:49 Speaker 8: The title of that was, come on, Phil, good Lord, where did you come from? 00:21:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, Karin's sitting in here, Karen's on the floor. 00:21:09 Speaker 2: Title for this episode. 00:21:12 Speaker 1: Back in the old days, that would have been the title on the floor. Back in the old days, when we had titles that told you nothing, what was it called? 00:21:21 Speaker 4: Are you bitter about them? 00:21:23 Speaker 9: Yeah? 00:21:24 Speaker 1: I'm bitter about it. When we had to switch when you switch titlings so people could tell by the title what it might be about. Yeah, I remember we had an episode of call it an Object in Its Shadows. You look at it like, what the hell's that supposed to be about? 00:21:43 Speaker 3: Listen to that? 00:21:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like an easter egg. 00:21:46 Speaker 9: Hut. 00:21:46 Speaker 1: You got to figure out where they got the title from. Yeah, I explained it at the very end. I explained with the concept of an object in its shadow. Now that I brought it up, I'll just point out it means like I'll splay a smart time it takes too long from bass to blue Water yeah, Okay. A while back, me and Janni had in we did a appis. We did an extra drop, so a Friday drop? Did it? A Friday drop? 00:22:15 Speaker 3: Krinn? 00:22:17 Speaker 5: Yeah, Thursday? 00:22:18 Speaker 1: Whatever the hell? An extra drop called from bassa Blue Water. We had in a guest Renee Cross. As we explained back then, I became friends. Renee Cross owned Cypress Cove Marina in Venice, Louisiana. There's kind of like two marinas. There's a big, huge marina. I don't mean to knock it, but it's like very like a very touristy marina of the Venice Marina, and then there's Cypress Cove Marine, which is a smaller kind of I don't know, more intimate marina. We would I've been down there. I've been going down there to spearfish last few years, and we hunted ducks down there and did some filming down there. The owner of the marina came up one day and introduced himself to me while we're cleaning fish, and that was Renee Cross. And as we explained the special drop, I just became friendly with Renee Cross and we started coming up with this idea of doing a sort of a like a takeover of Cypress Coved Marina in October, and we have a thing called Meat Eater Experiences, and so we lined up. So we're starting out with we lined up two mediatter experiences. One is a waterfowl hunting Kansas in cooperation with foul Planes. So we're gonna have like Yanni's gonna for the times we're there, Yani's gonna be there. I'm gonna hunt there for a while. A couple of turns, Brent Reeves, Clay cal I don't know who all the hell is gonna be down there. 00:23:42 Speaker 2: There's one more. 00:23:43 Speaker 4: You got five out of six. I can't think who the six is. 00:23:46 Speaker 1: But bunch of people going there at foul planes. Now foul planes, they're already a waterfowl guide. We're taking time there to kind of make our own curriculum at foul planes. Okay, so you'll still go. And how many days of hunting? Is it? Three days of hunting? 00:24:02 Speaker 9: Yes? 00:24:03 Speaker 1: Yeah, three days of hunting because you can only transport three day limited birds. So they kind of do waterfowl hunts three days because you can have You could kill limits all three days and still go home. So what we're gonna do is the way it normally works is like you know, you go there, people clean your birds whatever, out of sight, you go have a cocktail. We're gonna kind of change the format up. We're gonna we're gonna hunt together, but we're also gonna do a lot of stuff around cleaning, food prep, nighttime entertainment, do trivia stuff, do some different lessons on waterfowl and lectures on waterfowl and make it a more educational experience and just more hanging out and really fill it out. So we have that with foul planes, and those are all happening in December and January. Okay, there's still some spots left there, and that's hunting waterfowl at Kansas. Hunting waterfowl in Kansas with foul planes with the Meat Eater Crew. Cypress Coved Marina trip is in October. Now. The reason we went with October is because October is kind of like an unsung time down there where the fishing is absolutely spectacular, but the sort of summer rush is laying off, and we're taking over the whole Cypress Cove Marina. 00:25:13 Speaker 4: From October fourth to the sixteen. 00:25:15 Speaker 1: October four to sixteen, So we're gonna come down and fish. We got a lot of guys from the crew coming down to fish. We got a lot of friends coming down to fish. We're gonna go down and fish, and you can go in and book trips, so it's all like when you book the trips, it's all your lodging. We have a ton of guides lined up because there's a lot of guides that fish out of Cypress Cove Marina, that run their own businesses out of Cypress Clost Marina. We took those guides and booked those guides for the time that we're there. And the cool thing about Cypress Cove Marina is you're sitting in Venice, Louisiana, so you have an amazing inshore fishery and then right there the continental shelf is twenty miles away. So when you're sitting there at Cypress Cove Marina, this is no joke. You've got guys launching bass boats to go fish largemouth bass. They're going upriver and like literally right next to them are people gearing up to go out for bluefin, tuna and mahi. It's like that crunch together. You got guys fishing bluefish, calffish. You got guys doing tons of redfish, speckled sea trout. We go down there for red snapper, we go down there for what they down there called lemon fish or kobia. It's just like it is the greatest fishing I would say globally of everywhere I've been, it is the greatest fishing spot I've ever been to. It's what I mean, like I love Alaska, it's just better. I mean, like the fishing is just better than Alaska. There's so much more to do. So we have when Renee Cross came on. When Renee Cross came on and talked about it, we weren't like the seats weren't We hadn't opened availability to book yet. It was just kind of a precursor to the whole thing. But it's open to booking to go and get trips to come to Cypress Cove. Fish with us, clean fish with us, eat cage and food at night. It's gonna be a great time. And like you're doing like guided fishing, so you're gonna do. You got three fish days you're gonna do in short and off shore. We'll be swapping out and jumping on the different boats. We'll be hanging out at night we'll be cleaning fish together. We'll get all your fish packaged up so you bring your fish home recipe ready. They'll be educational, be a ton of fun. Booking is available. 00:27:33 Speaker 4: Now, are you going to tell a couple of good stories while we're hanging out after cleaning fish. 00:27:38 Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell some great stories, and I'll be able to tell the stories I would never tell on air. Bumped Doug. Doug teld me a really good story I can't tell on Oh. I got a number of stories I've heard from Doug that I can't tell on air. I came home and he told me a funny one. I came home and shared it widely. I would get done, people, that's not funny. 00:28:02 Speaker 3: That's my favorite kind of story. 00:28:04 Speaker 1: It has to do with your little health scare. Oh, I thought I like that story. I thought it was a delightful. Dude, I heard I heard a turkey hunting story the other day that I vowed I like, I can't like, I really can't tell it on air. Yeah, I heard a turkey story the other day. That's just my new, absolute favorite story. You know, when you go to some comedy clubs where they tell like racy humor. And now they got that thing where you got to put your phone in that bag. When we do this Cypress Cove deal, I'm gonna get some of those bags and put your phone in one of these bags. So I'm gonna tell you a turkey hunting story. 00:28:48 Speaker 3: If you're going to tell me those other stories about yeah, well that one. You know, there were a couple of others that you that you know that I'd rather you didn't share, or that someone might hit record. 00:29:02 Speaker 6: Here. 00:29:02 Speaker 1: Let me tell you a quick version. I'm not gonna just don't even chime in. Okay, dog Doug had to have a battery of tests done and he came back with a and like the doctor calls him okay, And Doug wound up having a false positive, which is not a false positive you want. And they called and go, hey, we have your results, and Doug's like, oh, I'm sitting here with my wife. I'll put her on a speakerphone because she's real concerned about my health, you know, like the follow on as one would. 00:29:35 Speaker 9: Phone. 00:29:35 Speaker 1: And he's like, well, Doug, you're blank came back positive, to which Trish is like, what. 00:29:48 Speaker 3: Made for a really interesting weekend While waiting for how long did I sorted out? Well, the interesting thing about it was that we both then kind of had well, you know, before we were married, kind of talks. It was uh, yeah, no, it was. It was a Monday, and in the meantime I had to I was doing a talk at an environmental education center. We were selling a house, and all these things are bombarding me. And you know, when you go and do one of those talks, you try to gather your thoughts before you go out there. But I'm getting phone calls and checking messages and to see if the test results had come back. And I walked out there and I started doing my talk, and interestingly enough, I was talking about Leopold and the Riley Game Cooperative, which maybe we'll get to, and then I'm transitioning to the next part of the talk, which was about sharing the land, this initiative that I've started that was inspired by Leopold. And in the middle of the talk, I stopped and all of these things were going through my mind at that particular moment, and it just stopped me, and I'm like, well, we're going to sell that house, and I wonder what's gonna happen with those test results. And oh, this is in my head and I'm standing in front of two hundred people. 00:31:07 Speaker 1: He started crying, and. 00:31:08 Speaker 3: Then I and then I went and then went into the next part of it. And my wife said later, I said, did you notice that I kind of freaked out there for a minute. She goes, no, I thought it was a dramatic pause. It was, yeah, it was. 00:31:26 Speaker 1: Oh another thing about cypress calls. We're gonna record We're gonna record podcasts down there, and we'll, uh, we're gonna have a way for for people that that We're gonna have a way for people that come down and fish with us and book trips to We're gonna work on a way for people to join in the podcast recordings. Trivia board game, bag and stock How did it? When was it ever out of stock? 00:32:02 Speaker 10: Uh? 00:32:03 Speaker 4: Not long after we ran. 00:32:05 Speaker 1: Ran ran of them. If you wanted a trivia board game, they're back in stock, you know, go camping with your family, be able to play some trivia. And also Spencer's plugging away on Spencer's plugging away on the the packs expansion which I totally disagree with the avenue he took. What are the expansion packs he's doing? 00:32:27 Speaker 3: I don't know. 00:32:27 Speaker 5: He's talked about white tails, talked about I don't know. 00:32:31 Speaker 1: What what ones is he doing? 00:32:33 Speaker 4: I want to say, is uh is Mountain Man one of them? 00:32:36 Speaker 3: Not? 00:32:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's doing expansion packs. I'm sure everybody will like it. I would have made him a little weirder m hmm. I would have done the I was like more trivial, like the weird I would have called it. I've done an expansion pack called the Weird Ship mm hmm, and then and then Frontiersmen the mountain Man. But he's doing like white tails that people like those deer. 00:33:04 Speaker 4: Here we go. 00:33:05 Speaker 1: Before I'm joking. Before we started recording, all you Leopold fans, hang tight, we're getting to it. Before we started recording, We're gonna Before we started recording today, we were hitting on some reminiscing about about spring turkey hunts. I got some turkey hunts in the highlight of my turkey season was as always going to the Lovely during family farm for youth turkey season. Uh, we've had phenomenal hunts. We've had some bad weather now and then this year was phenomenal. We had four kids hunting, two got birds. Everybody had an opportunity. My little boy, it was his first year, my younger boy, it was his first year on the shotgun, had a miss, kept stoic with Doug. He was hunting with Doug. So my daughter was hunting with Doug when she got a turkey. My little boy was hunting with Doug when he had a miss. He kept stoic, got home, went upstairs at the farmhouse and cried. And then the other night my wife said, what's up with Matthew because he was crying about that turkey quite a number of weeks later. 00:34:13 Speaker 3: Yeah, and I thought that he was. He was so good about it after it happened. And I'm still playing it through my mind. So he's not alone in his disappointment. Haunted the lung, Yeah, I am. You're always haunted, haunted by the ones that got away, right, But we outside of the outside of the blind, and I was just I was crushed by it. And I said, Matthew, I'm so sorry that that happened, and talked about it a little bit, and he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, well, that's okay. 00:34:47 Speaker 1: No, he like he's he's private about Yeah, he kind of he kind of spills his guts at night. Yeah, but he spilled his guts upstairs at the farmhouse. 00:34:55 Speaker 3: Do you know. My favorite story that he told me when we were in the blind was about how the kids at school, because he's kind of bulky. Not my mom would have called it husky. He goes the kids at school thought I was a bully. 00:35:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, they call it. He says, I have a bully body. He's got a bully. He's got the build of a bully, but not the temperament. 00:35:16 Speaker 3: Yeah. No, he's such a sweet kid man, which makes me feel even worse about him. About that. 00:35:23 Speaker 1: He'll be fine. Yeah aa next year. It's like game on, full pressure on him. 00:35:30 Speaker 4: Oh, in the end, it's better this way. 00:35:34 Speaker 10: No. 00:35:34 Speaker 1: I like getting them. 00:35:36 Speaker 6: I'll like get it even Moore though. 00:35:39 Speaker 1: I like getting the turkeys. Brody Haten had a good year. 00:35:43 Speaker 4: You don't think that's some failure for your kids, and these hunts is a good thing. 00:35:49 Speaker 1: Really. I like getting them turkeys. I like cutting spurs off. 00:35:52 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:35:52 Speaker 11: I understand all that tell me that you think that the dry, but I never sit there. 00:36:03 Speaker 1: Okay, let me ask you this. 00:36:04 Speaker 3: Do you hope you're. 00:36:07 Speaker 1: When you're sitting there in are you saying yourself, I hope she misses, or it'll be more meaningful if she missed. 00:36:14 Speaker 2: Afterwards that you got and taking photos. Are you like, man, it would have been nice if she just do. 00:36:20 Speaker 1: You spookle out of the turkeys? 00:36:21 Speaker 2: Are valuable experience if she just missed this, do you. 00:36:24 Speaker 1: Spookle out of turkey so your daughter doesn't get the chance it'll be more meaningful to her, Or take her to really bad spots because it'll be more meaningful to her. 00:36:34 Speaker 4: No, but. 00:36:39 Speaker 12: Builds characters, what don't We don't take them to spots where there's a corn pile and just try to guarantee a turkey fe feeding there that they can shoot their head off of. 00:36:55 Speaker 1: In hindsight, yes, in the moment, that's how I put it. Yeah, in the yeah you did. And in the moment, I was like, oh, of course. 00:37:04 Speaker 5: And it's wazier for you to say that than to convince the kid of that at the time. 00:37:09 Speaker 1: His daughters will take out. 00:37:11 Speaker 4: You ain't never gonna convince the kid of right at the time. 00:37:14 Speaker 1: But I think you're right, honest, bro, your boy got a double Yeah, he hadn't. 00:37:18 Speaker 5: It was actually his first spring turkey, first two he had killed a gobbler in the fall or. 00:37:24 Speaker 3: A year or two ago. 00:37:25 Speaker 5: But yeah, we had a We had a gob a gobbler dragon, five jakes and he got two of them. 00:37:33 Speaker 1: So he shot the big boy and then got the jake. 00:37:34 Speaker 5: Yeah, that that that they were coming in. There's a log on the ground, and that I had ranged at fifty yards. I was like, they got to come closer than that log, and that gobbler when he got to that log hopped up on a branch on that log and sat there for like three minutes, didn't move, and all those jakes were bunched up behind him, and Hayden's like, can I shoot him? 00:37:54 Speaker 1: No? 00:37:55 Speaker 9: Shoot him? 00:37:56 Speaker 5: Finally hopped down, got one and I was like another one got him. By the time he handed me they I had left. We had repositioned, so I had left my gun away from us, so I didn't have a chance. 00:38:08 Speaker 3: He handed me the gun. 00:38:09 Speaker 1: They were all finally all scattered. But yeah, it was cool. 00:38:12 Speaker 3: You got a triple. 00:38:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe a quadruple quad I've never been present for I don't think I have either, but yeah, that's a mess. 00:38:26 Speaker 3: Yeah, John, he got a triple. You know, it was funny. Yes, I got in yesterday and I walked down to the from the hotel and walked down to the Mediator store, which I have to say is beautiful. I liked it a lot. Which buy a little thing for my wife? Yeah? Yeah, and what I thought I had got some kind of discount. But those guys and they held me right up for the Yeah, not that guy. You know, if they don't recognize. 00:38:50 Speaker 2: Do you have any idea who I am? 00:38:53 Speaker 1: So when you went into the media store, they didn't know who you were. 00:38:55 Speaker 3: They immediately recognized me. Anyway, was interesting because the the you've got that YouTube videos running on loop and here was the Turkey hunt that you did with Miller And I'm talking to the guy and I'm kind of looking around, and I was like, this doesn't get interesting until they leave Yanni's property and come over to my farm. And the guy goes I've seen this so many times already. 00:39:23 Speaker 5: How did how did I not see you guys get a triple? You know how Turkey populations are declining in this country because of guys like you. 00:39:34 Speaker 1: It's better when you don't get one. 00:39:36 Speaker 10: Yeah, not getting one? 00:39:42 Speaker 3: Yann. He's walking away. He's got a big gobbler in the middle of two, Jake's. 00:39:48 Speaker 1: It's always better to go. 00:39:51 Speaker 3: But you guys, you guys have had hunted quite a bit before you all of a sudden got into him. 00:39:56 Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we put our time the Durn Farm, didn't We had it. 00:40:00 Speaker 1: It didn't save one of our episodes, but it really helped it. Oh yeah, when we had to come over with Melroy, all over from Melroy. 00:40:10 Speaker 3: With your cheese curds on the dashboard. 00:40:13 Speaker 1: Uh, Carl, you got you hunters your kids this year? 00:40:16 Speaker 3: Yeah? 00:40:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, how'd that go? 00:40:18 Speaker 7: Had an awesome hunt And back to the connections to farms and and sort of the meat Eater crew after meeting Chester. He grew up about forty five minutes north of where I'm living in southeast Wisconsin, on a beautiful chunk of land, and his family has welcomed me there the last three springs on the farm where Chester grew up, and it's beautiful and actually the work that they're doing on that farm as stewards of the land ties nicely. They're doing a beautiful job. It is a beautiful piece of property. And so I've gotten to know both of Chester's parents and also his brother Ike. Ike's a cool dude. Trad bow guy, total entrepreneur and had a chance to take my four year old son along this year and we had just a phenomenal, phenomenal hunt with perfect conditions. First morning, got in there in the dark as things are getting light. We've got deer close to the blind, so my son's checking out the deer. He's got his farm and fleet plastic practice shotgun along and have a bird goblin on the roost. Had a possum come out in front of us, real close and walk by. I got to watch this possum, sand hill cranes, Canada geese, the just amazing diversity of dawn bird's song, everything just like ten out of ten in this incredible farm, just a beautiful spot. And as the morning wore on, we had a hen kind of calling back and forth with me, and my son was totally on edge listening to this hen. Hen comes out into the field into the decoy spread, and my son immediately is like, you're gonna shoot that You're you're gonna shoot that turkey, and I'm telling him no, waiting for a gobbler. You know, this is the spring hunt. Of course, it's got to be a male turkey. And every once in a while, you'd hear this gobbler gobble at the sound of us call him back and forth with the hen and every gobble. My son's getting more and more amped up. And I don't know, I think many of us here have been in the blind with kids. My son is the loudest whisperer ever. He whispers like borderline yelling. Right, It's like, did you hear that gobble? 00:42:40 Speaker 3: Yeah? 00:42:41 Speaker 7: I heard the gobble man, and we got to keep it down. So I'm trying to keep him quiet, and the hen comes in. I've got a strutting tom and a hen decoy out in front of us. The hen comes in. She's purring and making all kinds of very very subtle vocalizations, and she gets right in there with the two decoys, the gobbler and the hen. And I know this Tom is somewhere nearby, right, and he's he's been coming to the sound of the hen. And so I'm telling my boy, I'm like, just two things, do not move and don't speak. Don't move, don't speak. And it's that that moment where you know the gobbler is somewhere nearby, but we haven't seen him yet, and you could you could cut the silence with a knife, right, It's just like perfectly, there's not a breath of wind, nothing, And I'm just waiting for this gobbler to appear at any moment. And that's when my son farts, like loudly. Did he shot with a super add that to the list? And he's got just like a totally innocent look on his face. And I look at him, I'm like, dude, what the heck man? And he looks at me like what I'm like. When I said don't speak, I meant like, don't make any noise. And we're whispering back and forth. So you know, he's dude's four, right. So so then I'm wondering did the tom hear this? Because I'm serious. It's like that moment where any if you're thinking that the gobbler is going to show up any second, and ten seconds go by twenty seconds, we probably get close to a minute. 00:44:13 Speaker 6: And then at the edge of. 00:44:15 Speaker 7: The field, this gobbler comes strutting out and as soon as my son peeking out, you know, we got we got a ground blind step. As soon as as soon as the gobbler starts coming out, my boy starts reaching for the other side of the blind to get his farm and flight shot on the little little toy gun. I'm like, don't move, don't move like you can shoot the turkey in a second, you know, after after we take care of business. So the gobbler struts out right into the the spread and he's all fanned out, get starting to nudge right up on the on the streading gobbler decoy. So shot the gobbler went out there. My son was over the moon, you know, turkey's flopping around and he's asking questions about you know, is the turkey still alive? 00:44:52 Speaker 2: And we're talking is it. 00:44:52 Speaker 1: True that you can't stop the flop Daddy. 00:44:54 Speaker 7: I've got I've gotten to the point where, you know, I used to stand on the stand on the neck and all that anymore. If you I know you've made a good shot, just kind of wait for the flopping to stop. So took some pictures and then went back back up to the farmhouse and Chester's mom, dad, brother all there. I bump into Chester's dad Greg first, and he's. 00:45:15 Speaker 6: Over the moon. 00:45:15 Speaker 7: He didn't know I was going to have my boy along with me, right, So he sees my son and my son walks up to him without hesitation. He says, Hi, I'm Alexander, thanks for letting us hunt on your farm this morning, and Greg Greg Flood, Chester's dad says, hold on, I need to get my wife and brings her out. And that was the first time i'd met her. You can you know Chester is a super solid dude, and you can see when you meet his mom and dead brother, like why he turned out the way he did. They're just a really awesome family. And so his mom took a few more pictures of us up there at the farmhouse and we shot the shot the breeze a little bit more. And then his brother has a cookie business going right now, and he sent us home with a few of the cookies. So like we show up on at the farm, were treated like royalty by these folks. 00:46:03 Speaker 6: They send us home with they give you present. 00:46:05 Speaker 2: I know, man, I know. 00:46:07 Speaker 7: So we went we went right home, and my boy and I wrote a bit. He's getting the point where he can write a L e X pretty well. So he and I collaborated on a thank you card and send him a send them a little token of our appreciation. But super cool and seeing the way I mean that that farm, not unlike the little bit of property that my family and I live on has been heavily impacted by the Emerald ash boarer. So they've got dead ash trees everywhere, and they're also at the headwaters of a really important trout stream tributary. They're doing so much work to remove the dead ash trees to plant new trees. They're obviously they're they're big. They're big deer hunters. They've got deer blinds all over the place. They're thinking a lot about deer. But they're also they're approaching the stewardship of that property with a focus on back to what Doug was saying, like what does the land need from us? 00:46:54 Speaker 6: And they're providing it. 00:46:56 Speaker 7: And then you pull out of the driveway and I think at the end of the driveway they've got a bunch of big rounds of dead ash stacked up with a sign free firewood donations accepted. Oh so anybody wants to roll up and grab firewood and if they want to throw a few bucks in, like that's the kind of people that they are. So it just felt felt really privileged and that experience with my boy, like the the getting a turkey is always cool, but having that morning and seeing all the wildlife and the woods waking up and his excitement and just all those details. It was one of the most fun turkey hunts that I've I've experienced in my life for sure. So good, a good start to the spring. And up next week, man, I'm taking the week off to float some rivers up and up in the up and catch trout and uh and hunt some gobblers in the north country. 00:47:46 Speaker 1: We're going to talk about Yanni's Arizona. We're gonna we're gonna move on. I want to digging on Leopold, Okay, because it happened. First, we're here to we're here to celebrate the hundred one hundred years of the HeLa Wilderness heal Wildern yep. And then we're going to talk about more about San Countie Almanac. Yeah, but you want to take the Helo, Carl. 00:48:07 Speaker 6: You want to dive into the HeLa. 00:48:08 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, tell me like like how it happened, why it happened, what the repercussions were. 00:48:15 Speaker 7: Well, A good place, A good place to start the conversation as it relates to Leopold is just a reminder of the fact that that Aldough was a Midwestern boy by birth, grew up in Burlington, Iowa, spent a lot of time actually growing up, summer vacations in the Upper Peninsula, Michigan over in the Lasiano Islands, a lot of formative experiences in the Midwest that definitely shaped his philosophy ultimately around around private land management. But at a very formative period in his career, after just graduating from the Yale School of Forestry, he did what basically was really the only option for an aspiring young conservation professional at that point in time, which was to get a job with the also young United States Forest Service, the agency I work for now. 00:48:59 Speaker 1: I want to hear you with a quick question. Yeah, on biography. Yeah, we've joked before about how he's one of these people that has multiple places that claim him totally. You know, like the writer Jim Harrison is like Montana claims him, Patagonia, Arizona, crailing Michigan baby, Right, So so you get these people like they're claimed by Yeah, you know, a bunch of spots. 00:49:17 Speaker 7: Harrison gets claimed by Michigan though. We'll just put that to rest right now. 00:49:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, like the big claim, does Iowa take any like, Yeah, Wisconsin loves Leopold, Yeah for sure. New Mexico loves Leopold for sure. 00:49:29 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:49:29 Speaker 1: Iowa was a little bit like, yeah, that community, this. 00:49:31 Speaker 7: Is where his his the house that he grew up in is still maintained as a very important historical site right on the banks the Mississippi River and Burlington, Iowa is you know. Inarguably that's where he got got to start watching watching the birds in the yard with opera glasses that his mother okay him. 00:49:48 Speaker 6: So that's that's. 00:49:50 Speaker 7: Where it began, absolutely influential experiences throughout the Midwest. Yale School of Forestry graduates and does the one thing that a young forester can do at that point in time professionally, which is get a job with the United States Forest Service. They promptly ship him out to the Arizona Territory. Like bear in mind this this predates Arizona in New Mexico statehood and is what you're this would be early nineteen hundreds. 00:50:16 Speaker 3: Like I'd have to I'd have to get. 00:50:17 Speaker 7: A time nineteen oh ninety gets shipped out. Yep, okay, good, we can tag team this. So and and by the way, anybody, anybody who wants to get into Leopold's biography in a very detailed way. A friend, a friend of ours, Kurtmine, wrote a phenomenal biography of all the Leopold, All the Leopold, his life and work. Grab a copy of that if you really want to get into the details. It's fantastic. So young Leopold, straight out of college, shipped out to essentially cruise timber on the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest what is today the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest, which is right on the sort of southern end of the border between what is now the state of Arizona in the state of New Mexico. And so his job is to quantify essentially how much timber is out there. And bear in mind, at this point the history of the Forest Service, the genesis was rooted in a recognition that these landscapes were important for producing timber and also important for protecting the headwaters of critical drinking water sources, particularly in the Western United States. So early on in the Forest Service, the focus was really on watersheds and timber, and it wasn't until nineteen sixty there was a piece of legislation called the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, which broadened the set of responsibilities that the agency has to go beyond timber and water and include fish and wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation, and also brought in rangeland management as one of the five pillars of the multiple use mission that the agency has today. But at that point in time, timber was essentially king. So Leopold's out cruising around filing reports with the headquarters office, letting folks know how much timber out there, of what different varieties and potential merchant ability and logistics of accessing that timber, et cetera, which is what he was trained to do in school, and spending a lot of time. You got to bear in mind like that field work was on horseback, extended periods of time out in the back country, exploring a landscape that would have been totally unfamiliar to Leopold and quite like. 00:52:25 Speaker 6: And quite remote, quite remote back then. 00:52:27 Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I mean part of that landscape is one of the prominent features there right on the New Mexico Arizona state line is escadea Mountain, and there's an essay in a Sand County almanac called Escadia, which was the home of one of the last grizzly bears to live in the southwestern United States. So Leopold is seeing and experiencing all these things, including those those stories he's hearing about the grizzly bears, and coming to have a real appreciation for what that landscape has to offer, in addition to the timber that he's out there cruising and over the course of his time in the southwestern United States and ascending into different positions and thinking a lot about the change that he's watching occur on the landscape, he starts posing some questions that at the time were extremely radical. And this was a period of time where there was a huge expansion of the road network basically every corner of the western US, it felt like to Leopold and others had new roads being built into wild country in part to extract resources, but also to support people's tourism to these places and economic development. And this is when the automobile is becoming more commonly owned by middle class families throughout the country. And so Leopold started asking some questions about whether or not certain places, including the Hila, if we want to talk about highest and best use of these landscapes, does it not make sense to refrain from having that development incur into at least some of these remnants of wildness that exist. And he was able to do that because he was a well respected sort of insider within the agency. He wasn't you know, he wasn't seen as some radical from the outside with these crazy ideas. He was trained at the Yale School of Forestry. He was very much indoctrinated in agency culture. 00:54:30 Speaker 6: But he was also. 00:54:33 Speaker 7: Asking questions that nobody else at the time was really was really posing. And so with the Hila coming up here in just about two weeks time, right at the beginning of June will hit the one hundredth anniversary of the administrative designation of the Hila as the first wilderness area anywhere on the planet. And it was really at Leopold's urging that he convinced the regional forester or the big boss of the Southwestern region to make that administrative designation that then carried forward another forty years. So that was nineteen twenty four that the HeLa was administratively designated. It took forty more years before, in nineteen sixty four the passage of the Wilderness Act, and then the HeLa and a number of other wild landscapes around the United States were included in that first batch of congressionally designated wilderness areas a full forty years later. So Leopold is widely seen as one of the one of the critical players in helping set the stage for now. We have about one hundred and ten million acres of wilderness that's managed under the National Wilderness Preservation System, about two percent of the country. 00:55:39 Speaker 3: Right. 00:55:40 Speaker 5: Yeah, how big was the HeLa the area that he identified. 00:55:45 Speaker 7: It's in the ballpark of five hundred and fifty thousand acres And what's cool now, and there's actually some really interesting history here. But for anybody who's familiar with that landscape, you have the HeLa Wilderness and then just to the east of it, you have another wilderness area called the Aldo Leopold Wildern And there's a road that divides the two wilderness areas. I think it's Forest Road one point fifty, also referred to as the North Star Road, and that road. One of the reasons that that road was put in was actually to provide easier access to the burgeoning deer herds. And this relates to some of the other things that Doug and I were talking about earlier. Today about Leopold's questioning of predator control, his work on trying to argue in favor of more aggressive deer harvests, including antler list deer harvest, at times when that was wildly unpopular. But one of the concerns that he had back in the twenties was the idea that predator control had been so effective at promoting these burgeoning deer numbers that then the need to access and manage those deer numbers was one of the reasons that management agencies like the Forest Service and state game and fish agencies were using to build new roads into wild country to get more hunter to kill the deer that the predators no longer could control. And he published some research papers. There's a paper that he published in nineteen forty three titled Deer Eruptions where he evaluates a couple of different case studies where for various reasons. In the case of the Kibab Plateau this is post predator control, the deer herds, inflated by orders of magnitude, over browsed the range and then had massive die offs in the winter, and that impacted the ability of the forage in the near term. After those years to actually sustain the deer population rebounding. And then another case study where I've got a really personal connection is a research reserve in southeast Michigan called the Edwin S. George Research Preserve. It's a twelve hundred acre property near Hell, Michigan. If anybody's familiar with that, which is fenced. And the man who owned that property at the time in nineteen twenty eight, he brought in four doh and two bucks from the up of Michigan released him on the property at a time when there were virtually no deer in southeast Michigan, and over the span of just a few years, the population demonstrated essentially exponential growth in the absence of predation. Went from the four dos and two bucks to one hundred and sixty deer in the span of I think it was four years, six years somewhere in there. I'd have to go back and revisit the digits, but exponential growth. Leopold uses these two case studies to make the argument for. 00:58:31 Speaker 1: Did he have some real studs on that place? 00:58:36 Speaker 7: Well, so, I said a personal connection to that property because when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, they had no management planned for that deer herd, and so one of my first forays into wildlife management was incorporating a little consulting business and bidding on a contract to manage the deer herd at the Edwin S. George Reserve, where also some of the most important white tailed deer population ecology work was published by another scientist named Dale McCullough. So this is a really well studied herd that had a history of really good management and then they basically did nothing for a number of years. And so I was out there doing winter kill surveys and seeing we would find thirty to fifty winter killed deer per year inside this reason of that because there's no predation. 00:59:19 Speaker 3: How many how many acres was it again? Twelve vendre yep. 00:59:24 Speaker 6: Yeah. 00:59:24 Speaker 7: So there's another book for folks who really want to If you're in the wildlife management realm and really want to get into it, look for Dale McCullough's book The George Reserve Deer Herd, which is one of the foundational sort of wildlife management books on the reproductive capacity and population dynamics of white tail deer and Dale McCullough also did a lot of research in Australia with kangaroos, and he's a big population dynamics guy. Coincidentally also a student of one of Leopold's sons as a graduate student as well. So Leopold just tying this back to the HILA, he was the driving force for pumping the brakes on the idea that all of these National Forest System landscapes should be looked at through the lens of how much timber can they produce? Stepping back and saying like, wait a minute, in some of these places, these vestiges of wildness might actually serve us a much higher value over the long run. 01:00:23 Speaker 1: And this is what I wanted you to jump into next. Yeah, sure, And just to tee it up a little bit differently, at a point, Leopold has like make a non emotional case. Yeah, like he needs to go to and he needs to go to administrators like bureaucrats, Yeah, who are serving a mandate well delivering value. Yep, all right, And he needs to say maybe he feels something spiritual. Yeah, probably he's like feeling a spiritual need to preserve wild places in America. But that's not going to f. 01:01:01 Speaker 3: Right. 01:01:02 Speaker 1: He's got to put it into he's got to make it pragmatic. Yeah, in some way. Yeah, like talk about that that process, because so you still wind up with it, you still is you know, you still have people critical of wilderness. 01:01:16 Speaker 6: Yeah. 01:01:17 Speaker 7: Well so thinking back, I like where you started our conversation today, Steve and sharing some of those quotes, and no, no that doesn't seem relevant particularly, but where you did some of the language used in those quotes where Leopold is using language like beauty and love. 01:01:36 Speaker 6: There's there's. 01:01:39 Speaker 7: A number of points both in a Sand County Almanac and in many of his essays where he's using language that departs from the objective voice of a scientist. Right he he he wears it on his sleeve that these are these are places, are these are issues that are of deep importance to him, Right he clearly cares, which in the science realm, if you're working on a peer reviewed research paper, the culture of our western science approach is to purge virtually all of that from the conversation. 01:02:23 Speaker 2: And he and he was like very conscious of that, Like he wrote specifically about the need to balance the two. Yeah, Like there's some quote he has about like you don't need something like you don't need a PhD to see the land for what it is. But if you have a PhD, you run the risk of being like a mortician looking at a dead buy and you're not appreciating the actual what's you know, the magic of it, all the mystery. 01:02:55 Speaker 6: I'm going to hit you with it. It's damn it. 01:03:02 Speaker 7: I'll buy you just a minute, because the part that you're the part that you're getting into is it sort of represents an evolution of Leopold's thinking about the significance of these places in providing opportunities for people to participate in a form of outdoor recreation that he holds in very high regard, which is essentially observing and learning about the natural world. 01:03:32 Speaker 2: I think the other I mean, I'm not a leopoled expert, so I'm just sort of chiming in with what I've taken away. But yeah, one of his sort of utilitarian purposes that he identifies as specifically hunting pack trips. Yeah, in the HeLa, Yeah, He's like, we need places that can sustain a pack trip, And that's sort of his measurement of, like, what's a big enough chunk of wild country. 01:03:58 Speaker 6: Large enough to contain a two week trip. 01:04:00 Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's like, and I believe he proposed calling it like the the HeLa Hunting primitive hunting ground, Yeah, something like that. Really, Yeah, like it was baked into the idea. Yeah, so he had it. 01:04:14 Speaker 7: There was there was an article not included in a San County Almanac. I believe it was published an Outdoor Life, but it was entitled a Plea for Wilderness Hunting Grounds, where he lays this whole case out. So Steve, just going back to the question that you posed about what was the pragmatic argument that Leopold had to make, Because you're right, you can't necessarily go in with a bunch of flowery language about beauty and love and these emotive arguments that are that are such a compelling aspect of a San County Almanac and have that work in the bureaucratic space of a federal agency. So Leopold did bring a number of arguments and talking points to bear in support of this vision that were very pragmatic in nature, and one of the points was related to different forms of outdoor recreation. And he makes this argument essentially, if you have a whole universe of people who want to engage in different types of outdoor recreation. And you've got folks who want to go out in their ford and park and camp on the road side, and they've got ninety percent of the opportunity already locked up. And you've got other folks who want to be able to get off the beaten path and escape and get into the back country and get away from all that and experience some solitude. Doesn't it make sense to maybe hold on to the remaining five percent or ten percent and try to provide a diversity of opportunity types for the different ways that people want to engage. So that was one aspect of the argument. And then in the case of the HeLa, one of the points that he makes that maybe helped carry the day. 01:05:40 Speaker 6: And you've a. 01:05:41 Speaker 7: Number of us in the room have been down in that chunk of ground. It is rugged, it is gnarly, and it is not a place where getting at that timber would be particularly easy to do. And so he also makes an economic argument that in the case of the HeLa, at least that landscape, you'd have to put so much investment in the infrastructure to access the resources that you want to extract that the net gain wouldn't really be all that big anyway, So maybe just don't mess with it and keep it wild and spare yourself the hassle of all of that additional road building and infrastructure. 01:06:16 Speaker 1: So yeah, I feel like in a fact at a time he had said basically giving into the giving into the value thing, saying okay, let's talk about. 01:06:27 Speaker 6: Value, right, like you're saying economic values. 01:06:29 Speaker 1: Yeah, He's like, like, arguably the greatest value of this in time will just be itself. Yeah, And a criticism you hear a wilderness areas as you hear people say like it's a lot of rock. I mean, like like you go you look at a mountain range out here, you know, and be like, well, let me guess where the wilderness area is. It's up there at the back. It's like at the back end. And in time, know what we now know there's probably enormous mineral there's probably enormous mineral wealth in a lot of these places. 01:07:01 Speaker 3: Yep. 01:07:02 Speaker 1: Right, Like in hindsight, a gelgist might now be like being like, boys, you set the wrong stuff aside, because like gold whatever the hell in those hills. At the time, though you could kind of go, well, look at it, yeah, like what really what are we really leaving on the table. 01:07:22 Speaker 2: It's a pragmatic decision. 01:07:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not like there's not a ton of mature timber, you know, in some not all, but in a lot of the wilderness areas. It's like, it's like, be hard, it's not a lot of it. It's hard to get at a lot of rock, a lot of ice. 01:07:36 Speaker 6: Yep, yeah, rock and ice is set. 01:07:37 Speaker 1: It's like, we're just not leaving a ton of money on the table, and in time it might be that people are just glad to have that stuff. 01:07:44 Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a good chance Leopold wouldn't have won that argument today. 01:07:48 Speaker 1: Oh if you if Leopold, no today for sure. And if Leopold would have said, like I got an idea, all these big, huge valleys in the West, let's make these all giant riparian wilderness areas. 01:07:59 Speaker 3: Noah. 01:08:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, he had to point to the stuff that was like no one had touched and been like, listen, no one's gonna no one's gonna mess with that. 01:08:07 Speaker 6: Yeah, I just said it. 01:08:08 Speaker 3: Aside. 01:08:08 Speaker 7: Well, and a lot of the stuff that you're talking about, like the Ryperian Valley wilderness model, a lot of that was already wrote it up. You know, like if you think about that point in history, so nineteen twenty four, and you look at the remaining chunks of big wild country, And in a couple of these essays, Leopold highlights specific places. Another spot in New Mexico, he specifically specifically highlights as the Pecos up on the border between the Santa Fe and Carson National Forest northeast to Santa Fe, as another sort of opportunity. And coincidentally, the Pecost Wilderness was also included in that original batch of congressionally designated areas in nineteen sixty four. But there were not that many of them left, is the point. There had already been so much expansion. 01:08:50 Speaker 2: Of the of the road network in congressation, just throwing money at building roads. Yeah, both on the agency side and you know in the state side. 01:09:00 Speaker 1: Brody talk about or touch on what you were saying that you wouldn't be able to pull it off now. 01:09:05 Speaker 5: Well, I mean it's it's an argument that's been going on since for one hundred years, right, Like there are those people who will want to extract resources from it. So what good is it if it doesn't pay pay off in some way, some tangible way. But there's also I mean, you still hear this argument. You know, as far as the wilderness hunting area goes, there are people who are like, I can't get in there, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, like you young fellas that can hike all day long can get in there, but it doesn't do me any good. I've heard you say like, well you had your time. 01:09:43 Speaker 1: But well, Jim, I was gonna say, you remember how Jim Poswitz the conservationists, Yeah, Jim Poswitz put it. He's like, I used to get back in there. I'm too old now, I've been too old for a long time. But man, am I excited for you guys that can Yeah? 01:09:59 Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think these days it's more of a resource extraction thing that would not allow it to go down the way it did. 01:10:08 Speaker 1: This is a frustration I have about memory and politics in America would be and I say this every time the subject of Roosevelt comes up. I'm like, any politician would welcome a favorable comparison to Roosevelt on conservation. 01:10:27 Speaker 3: Record, right, yep. 01:10:33 Speaker 1: They would hang that guy from a tree nowadays. 01:10:36 Speaker 5: Yeah, and the amazing thing about the wilderness. 01:10:38 Speaker 1: And they wanted to then he would be a he would be regarded today as an insane lib tard tree hugger, but because he wanted to create a national force and people were pissed back then, but they were living, and now we're like, oh, let's carve him on a big mountain. Sure they felt that God he gave us the national force system. The same people that would be pissed now were pissed then, the same thing with with with with Leopold Leopold, I bring up all the time, the fact that the Wilderness Act passed the way it did. You wouldn't never pass the point. 01:11:16 Speaker 5: That I'm trying to make, like there was a time when both sides were like, this is a really good idea. It makes sense, like for a lot of reasons, Like one dissenter wasn't there in Congress, and only because. 01:11:31 Speaker 3: It wasn't big enough. 01:11:33 Speaker 1: Yeah it was. It was something like the senator, one of them. They both were like overwhelmingly and I think, yeah, this is something I talked about all the time. I gonna talk about it. 01:11:44 Speaker 2: What's interesting about Leopold, I think, is that he's got these two sides, Like he speaks the language of utility, and he also he's a talented enough writer and a deep enough thinker that he also has like this element of the row and sure mirror and you can sort of see what you want in him when you read it. You know, like you could you could have someone on the far left read this and think, oh, like he's in touch with the spiritual aspects of nature. And you could also, you know, people on the right side of the spectrum look at him and be like, here's a very like agency man. You know, forester works on the land, like has this sort of rural authenticity about him, which I find like there's just I don't know, I find like it's really he's he's hard to sort of wrap. 01:12:41 Speaker 1: Your mind or you can't box him up. 01:12:44 Speaker 2: He's a poet, yeah, exactly. 01:12:46 Speaker 1: He's a poet, he's a farmer, he's a forester. He's a big game hunter. You can't box him up. And that gave him room to do what he did, Yeah, because people had to take him seriously. And there's also a little bit of a he's going to be the smartest guy in the room, oh yeah, you know, which is hard for people to fight against sometimes darkness speaking of the smartest guy in the room, the smartest guybaby Doug. Let's move. Let's let's move into our set. What do you call the diamond anniversary? What's a one hundred? 01:13:25 Speaker 3: You believe? 01:13:26 Speaker 1: What's the hundred? Platinum? Airlines had to think of a new thing? Silver diamond? 01:13:37 Speaker 4: Does come after the diamond? 01:13:39 Speaker 1: No? Diamond? 01:13:40 Speaker 3: I think one. 01:13:42 Speaker 1: Hundred, centennial, centennial, obsidian, obsidian. If you said to me you want to. 01:13:48 Speaker 5: Hunker, natural, other other terms that are like natural. 01:13:53 Speaker 1: The obsidian anniversary. Who are these people, the centennial people who. 01:13:59 Speaker 3: Have the interest in obsidian? 01:14:02 Speaker 1: Apparently so big obsidian one hundred to your anniversary? Yeah, well, I got Well, I got one last question before we move into San Countie Almanac, which I want you both, you guys to talk about. But if you had to crystal ball it, okay, if he hadn't did, if he hadn't set this concept into motion when he did with the Heila, do you feel that we would have landed where we did anyway with wilderness areas? 01:14:31 Speaker 6: No, you don't, I think he I think. 01:14:36 Speaker 3: So. 01:14:36 Speaker 7: There's there's a lot of other rich history we could get into. Another very cool example from up in Colorado, like in the in the White River National Forest, flat tops wilderness area. There's a place called Trappers Lake. 01:14:48 Speaker 1: There's Jianni's old stop ground. 01:14:49 Speaker 7: Yeah, so you know Trappers Lake, right the story there. There was a another Forest Service colleague, Arthur Carhart, who helped inform some conversations about it. 01:15:02 Speaker 1: Had one pair of stiff bibs on and some stiff. 01:15:04 Speaker 7: Bibs that they got supple when they were broken in. It became real trendy about the pros and cons of developing more infrastructure on that Trapper's Lake property for recreation and debating whether or not it would be better left with an undeveloped lake shore. He had folks up in what's today the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness advocating for the importance of that wild landscape. But I think for a concrete administrative step to be taken in nineteen twenty four and to be able to hold that up as an example and an extension of that. One of the things that's really challenging about Leopold is there's so many different little anecdotes and alleyways that you can go down. But we didn't even mention the fact that he's one of the founders of the Wilderness Society as well. So not only was he advocating for that specific piece of ground to be administratively designated, but he was also instrumental in convening a community of other thought leaders to help push that vision more broadly, and that organization is still alive and robust today. But I don't think we would be in remotely the same situation with Howard Zohneiser's success in shepherding the Wilderness Act through to signature in September of sixty four without not just the HeLa, but all of that hustling that Leopold was a part of leading up to the HeLa and after the hela's administrative designation, and right through the end to the end of his life. I mean, these were concepts that he was helping try to advance and build community around into the late forties when he passed. 01:16:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's a good point about the He was doing the conceptualization right. 01:16:53 Speaker 7: It wasn't just like the HeLa came into being and then he moved on to other things, right, that was a very important milestone on that timeline, But he was helping foster a ground swell of movement around those concepts much more broadly as well. 01:17:05 Speaker 1: He came at this interesting moment in American history, a really pivotal moment in American history where if you look at pre Leopold, like pre Roosevelt, pre Leopold, you have we had wilderness in spite of our best efforts to get rid of it, you know. 01:17:25 Speaker 3: What I mean. 01:17:26 Speaker 1: It was like it was there because we hadn't gotten to it yet. Yeah, and then there was this this this minute, this moment where it also became not a thing that we were we we we like fought foughtought, fought, fought to rid ourselves of it. Yeah, then all of a sudden it immediately had to become we fought, fought, fought, fought, fought to keep it. Right, Like a lot of countries never got never a lot of countries never had the luxury to hit that inflection point. Right, they barred, you know, they like go to great survivalent yea, like go to like England's history. Yeah, you know, I mean they deforced the entire island. Right, There was no like inflection point where someone had the sort of like power and public backing and wan not to go like, hey, at what point should we just not do this to some parts? 01:18:21 Speaker 2: And the quote that you read earlier about the trading off the geese for the television. I mean, I think what's really interesting when you read Leopold is he recognizes that conflict. He doesn't have like this utopian you know, if you look at like previous resource managers, there's this very like progressive idea of we can just manage it better and manage it better and squeeze everything out of it. And he recognizes these trade offs. And it strikes me as like a very fundamental concept to our modern sensibility about wildlife and environmental issues is like someone's good. You know, someone is going to pay somewhere for any little decision that's made. You know, like every bit of you know, sure you could, is the juice worth to squeeze? Is kind of Leopold's big question and a lot of these things, and that's where it's sort of the ethic. 01:19:20 Speaker 1: He might be the father of fathers arguing with their kids about television. He might have been the first person that God bless him. He might have been like I picture a future conflict, yeah, between nature and TV. 01:19:35 Speaker 7: So that point you made Steve about sort of the tipping point between wilderness being this thing that we're stacked up against versus wilderness being this thing that we're trying to steward. One of the things Leopold had to say in that space, I'll try to I'll try to quote it here, but it gets at that idea that you were hitting earlier, on the blank place on the map. He talks about man always killing the things we love, and so we the pioneers, have killed our wilderness. 01:20:06 Speaker 6: You be that as it may. I am glad. 01:20:09 Speaker 7: I will never be young without wild country, to be young in of what avails our forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map. 01:20:17 Speaker 1: He did what his eyes closed. 01:20:20 Speaker 7: I think, I think that's the quote I was trying to get at earlier, and then Steve before we move off, got written back there. 01:20:24 Speaker 6: I want to, I want to. 01:20:26 Speaker 7: I want to touch on just like two very quickly, two principles that I think, in and of themselves could be a whole other conversation. 01:20:33 Speaker 1: But hit him then we're gonna get into the book. 01:20:35 Speaker 7: Well, hit him quick, so there is ample room to have a discussion about what the future for wilderness management holds and all of that complexity and what we know now that we didn't know at the time of Leopold's effort with the Hila or the Wilderness Act, and even the language in the Wilderness Act and the deeper history of these places. So a lot of that conceptualization of these wild lands is rooted on an idea that these places were uninhabited, the idea of terra nullius, that this was just wild land waiting to be So that's a whole that's a whole thing that needs to be acknowledged right it is. And in the Wilderness Act there's language of places where man is a visitor who does not remain. But in the case of the Hila, in the case of the Boundary Waters, in the case of every one of these places, there's a much deeper history that you know, a whole heck of a lot about, and we would be doing a disservice, I think, by just clossing over that reality. And then another aspect that I think is a nice segue to a Sand County Almanac, and I think the lifestyle that Doug lives, the lifestyle of Chester and the whole Floyd family with their property. This idea, and you've touched on it already on this podcast, Doug, but the idea of the reciprocal dynamic between providing what land needs from us and us getting what we need from the land. That active involvement, where human activity in a landscape can both make the land better and people better. A lot of the conservation and ecology discussions we have at this point in history are rooted in the notion that all people do is screw stuff up. You've got too many people, we're burning too much fossil fuels, We're having this many impacts with overpopulation and all this development, etc. 01:22:35 Speaker 6: Etc. 01:22:36 Speaker 7: But we are also capable of providing so much value to these places, just as these places provide so much value to us as human beings. And in the case of wilderness, one of the foundational tenets there is this idea of an untrammeled landscape, a place where we're not meddling in the system, and that made a lot of sense in nineteen sixty four. And as we're moving forward and trying to wrestle with some of these big conservation challenges of non native invasive species and climate change and the disruption of historic disturbance regimes like fire, we are quickly awakening to the fact that the land needs a lot from us. In terms of active management and taking a totally hands off approach in a lot of situations does not necessarily serve ecological outcomes. So that's a good pivot to thinking about a Sand County Almanac and this reciprocal relationship between land and people. What does the land need from us? 01:23:32 Speaker 1: It's a good pivot to talk about Doug because Doug started Doug has started an organization. When I talked about Doug's quote earlier, I'm going to talk about the contextualized contextualized Doug's quote. Doug has started an organization, a nonprofit group called Sharing the Land, and looking at the increasing trend we see all around the country of leasing agreements, like it's birthplace was in Texas, but it's it's spread everywhere. It's everywhere. It's in the it's in the Northern Rockies, it's everywhere now, which is landowners who might have traditionally generations passed their fathers, their mothers, might have just had granted permissions to neighbors, granted permissions to relatives, granted permissions to whoever it was. When I grew up, it was like loosey goosey. We hunted this the zerlots farm. We hunted the zeld Rose farm shiitloads of people hunted the Zerlots. Very much of their church hunted the Zerlots farm and the zeld Rose farm. And then it kind of came this awareness of like, oh, man, we have like as much as we're raising they raised apples, alfalfa, dairy, right, They're like, man, there's another like cash crop here in the cash crop, here is wildlife, right and people want it and they're willing to pay for it. So leasing as come in, You're not going to change it to just come in. And when when Doug looked at sharing the land and started to set up this organization, he's taking the same perspective like there's a landowner and the landowner holds a thing of value and there's people that want access to the thing of value it Well, rather than maybe taking that interest and leveraging it into cash payment, maybe we can solve that question of what does the land get out of it? So landowners through Shane Land, a landowner can have conservation work they wish they could do on their place. I wish I could do tree planning on my place. I wish I could take up old fences on my place. I wish I could fight non native invasive plants on my place. I wish I could restore my stream bakes on my place. Well, those hunters that are lined up waiting to hunt your place, put them to work, right, like through an organized fashion. Be like, here's your choor list, buddy, you know, and then let's talk about hunting. Let's get some chores done on the ground, right And that's kind of it's a very Leopold concept, right. 01:25:56 Speaker 3: Well, the concept was inspired, borrowed, possibly even stolen, but from Leopold and the idea of the Riley Game Cooperative. When Leopold, when he was living in Madison in the early thirties, looking for a place to hunt, he pulls up on the side of the road and here's a farmer working, and he starts chatting with him, this fellow named Ruben Paulson, And he gets around to that where one would about asking permission, and Paulson says, well, yeah, I guess you could hunt my place, but you know, I have to tell you there really isn't much game around here. And he thought it was because of trespassers more than anything else. Or poachers is actually what he called him. And Leopold one. I have this vision of these two guys meeting, you know, because people do stop, and I just have this vision of this meeting. And Leopold in that moment said to him, well, you know, you could have more a game if you had better habitat. And they came up with this idea, as as Leopold called it, and there Riley was born the Riley Game Cooperative, where his his buddies from town came out and Leopold put a plan together and then helped his buddies helped put implement that plan, and then they all they all benefited from that that work, and the land benefited, the members of the biotic community benefited, and the hunters and the farmers benefited. And from that a community also developed. That it became a community, a gathering of people who shared those ideas, and some of them kind of came to it because of that, and some of them were farmers and some of them were students of Leopold. Is a fascinating thing to me. You know. I learned about Riley about the same time I met you, and it was about fifteen years ago, and I was riding a bicycle through Riley and here's this they're putting up this kiosk, and it's I had no idea. I thought I knew a lot about Leopold, you know. And then they talk about there's this whole thing about the Riley Game Cooperative, and Uh, it's something that was in my head for a long time. And so that's where sharing the land was was born from. 01:28:23 Speaker 1: Uh And can you can you explain you got to him coming to Madison, Okay and his and we talked earlier about all the states that claim them. Can you, being from Wisconsin, can you set up what what Sand County? If you're looking for that on the map, what that is? 01:28:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, you won't. You won't find a Sand county that I'm aware of. But he was in uh near Barriboom in sauc County, right on the Wisconsin River. In the Wisconsin River is very sandy. That whole area is is Wisconsin Rivers, ever changing river. There's lots of sand, a lot of sand dunes, sandbars and a little side note, he ended up buying this piece of land sounds like pretty much for the back taxes that it was an abandoned farm. So if you're in Wisconsin and southwest Wisconsin, it's right on the banks of the Wisconsin River. So from our place, I guess you wouldn't necessarily know, but to the east of us on the Wisconsin River and very thirty miles away, and it's very very different terrain than what we have over in our driftless area, very sandy, lots of bogginess and water, lots of mosquitoes if you go over there. So a very different place, but about a half an hour forty five minute drive from Madison, and it was, you know, it was within reach and sounds like for the most part, it was exactly the property that he was looking for, the kind of property he was looking for, one that had been degraded that he could then practice these conservation ideas that he had been talking about, the whole idea of wildlife ecology and what kind of habitat that the wildlife that he was interested in, and that we tend to be interested in it as hunters, what kind of habitat they needed. And so he bought this and began working. 01:30:25 Speaker 1: On which you guys, best equipped you can decide among yourselves, is best equipped to explain what a Sand County Almanac is meaning like structurally meaning And I don't even know the details on it. He was dead when it came out, right, he did, and he didn't sit down and write it like beginning, middle end, like you write a book. Yeah, do you know that? That's about the extent of what I understood. That what I've come to understand. 01:31:06 Speaker 3: He had been putting these essays together in a logical manner, or what he thought was a logical manner, and his daughter, I. 01:31:17 Speaker 7: Think it was his sons who took I think the kids had a critical role in working with the publisher after he had gotten a letter of acceptance for. 01:31:24 Speaker 3: The Yeah, the book had been accepted, but it wasn't completely. 01:31:30 Speaker 5: It was a more those individual essays were not like previously published another place. 01:31:35 Speaker 7: Well, so if you look right at the right at the beginning, I've got my copy here in front of me. And one of the first things that you see as a grateful acknowledgment made to the editors of the following magazines and journals who have kindly allowed to be reprinted in book form from portions or all of individual articles. And here's a list of the periodicals. American Forests, Audubon Magazine, The Condor Journal of Forestry, Journal, of Wildlife Management. 01:32:04 Speaker 1: Meter dot com. 01:32:05 Speaker 7: Uh, perhaps if you'd been in existence at that point. Outdoor America, Silent Wings, Wisconsin Agriculturist and Farmer, Wisconsin Conservation Bulletin. 01:32:20 Speaker 10: So on. 01:32:21 Speaker 1: Parts of a Sand County almanac appeared in the Wisconsin Conservation is Bulletin's. 01:32:27 Speaker 7: I can give you the specifics so and actually one of my favorite essays Skydance, Burrow and Skydance. I believe that's right, if I've got the order here. There's a lot of semi colons to make sense of. But the short answer is it's a collection of a life's worth of work that he brought some structure to. 01:32:45 Speaker 1: But when you're reading it, it isn't like that. No, I read it without knowing that. I read it like a dude sat down and wrote this book. Do you know what I mean. It's not like you know when you when you get a writer you like and you read all their work and then you're stuck reading like the book of their like letters and correspondence, and this is how it's terrible. This is not that no, right, No. 01:33:07 Speaker 3: It's really it's really a lifetime of work. And I think that's one of the beauties of it. To me, the most beautiful thing is the first sentence in the or the first two sentences in the forward. There are those there are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot. The delights and the dilemmas yep, And and then the rest of the book just goes from there, so divided in three parts. As A as a young man, a sixteen year old walked into the high school library and our librarian, I'm sure I was going into study or something and not talk to girls in the corner or anything. But miss Hendrix handed me the book and said, I think you'd be interested in that. 01:34:00 Speaker 1: Really, how old were you? 01:34:01 Speaker 3: Then? 01:34:02 Speaker 2: I'm sorry? 01:34:02 Speaker 1: What was this? 01:34:04 Speaker 3: When was that a long time ago? It was nineteen seventy five. 01:34:07 Speaker 1: Of the book had just come out. He was still writing as a as a new release. 01:34:13 Speaker 2: Well it wasn't, I mean, it wasn't immediately like this iconic, Oh not at all. Yeah, Yeah, that's why I was. Yeah, and I didn't think you were a teenager in nineteen forty nine. I was kind of curious because it was a slow burn up until the early seventies. 01:34:29 Speaker 3: Late so it was like, yeah, late sixties, like sixty nine I think was when it was published. In sixty eight or sixty nine is when it was published in paperback, and of course that coincided with the new environmental movement that was happening, and so it became, you know, incredibly important and really spoke to a lot. 01:34:46 Speaker 1: Of people, and it has sold millions, yeah, millions of. 01:34:53 Speaker 3: Copies in a bunch of different languages. So yeah, so I wasn't reading I was whatever in nineteen sixty eight or sixty nine. I was nine years old, but nineteen seventy five to have miss Hendrix, who was our librarian, hand this to me and say this, might you seem like kind a guy would be interested in this? 01:35:17 Speaker 1: And what a compliment? 01:35:19 Speaker 3: Yeah, well that is a great compliment. I think she was really searching for some way to get me moving along a little more. And at that time in my life, the first part of the book, which is the Phenology of our Area, really where he goes through the seasons and he talks about these different things. I was just fascinated by that because he was putting giving voice to things that I was I don't know if that I was thinking about him, but I was certainly experiencing them. You know, I was sixteen years old. We were going hunting and you're hearing this different stuff and what's this and what's that? And I had kind of Karl and I were talking about this earlier when we're having breakfast that I walked along with my grandfather when I was eight, nine, ten years old and with a bucket of paint and a paint rush and I was marketing. He was telling me, paint that one and I put these. So I was having the marking trees, marking trees, and I was having this experience that I didn't think about for another you know, fifty years that my grandpa was teaching me that, whether he knew he or not, but I remember as every eight or nine year old kid would ask why why do I paint this one? He said, well, we're going to cut that one, and then why are we cutting that one? I mean, that's that was one of my earliest experiences with that sort of thing. And then spending time on the farm with my dad. 01:36:41 Speaker 1: So by the time just button on neck, because it's interesting that you had that because you came from an agricultural family, and that you had an introduction to conservation thinking like that, like landscape care, landscape manipulation. I would say that I that I was completely unaware of anything surrounding conservation, the conservation movement until I read the San County Almanac. I was raised with the get it while the gitting's good. 01:37:14 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I get it again. 01:37:16 Speaker 1: Like my dad was like brought up in a house where they spoke Italian. He was raised by Italian immigrants born in the Great Depression, right, the like these people aren't coming from Italy to be in the America in the Great Depression in. 01:37:37 Speaker 3: You know these. 01:37:38 Speaker 1: Trees, right, It's just like it was. It was good. All the getting's good was the attitude. And I didn't know about I didn't know about any of these even thoughts until I read a San County almac. So it's like to have an upbringing where he was at least talking about something you've been exposed to. That you picked this tree and not that tree. 01:37:55 Speaker 3: It's cool, right, oh yeah, And you know that because of the number of times visited my family. The reason they came from Germany in the eighteen fifties is they were looking for a place to set up sawmills, and they did over there en Durham Road, and then our and who knows whether the name was already named Durham Road or not. But the property that we own they bought because it had timber on it. My people weren't really farmers, they were sawyers. So my great great grandfather, my great grandfather, my grandfather all had sawmills. And they, you know, it's not like today where you're going through and you're just ripping. You can go through a lot of trees in a hurry. They were being selective about it. 01:38:48 Speaker 1: And Leopold speaks to those people at one point in Santa County Almanac. He's like talking about axe biting into a tree. Yeah, And he goes and he does a history lesson flap right out flies a chunk of the tree, and you think about the growth rings. And he walks you through where you're at, and you take a cup more wax, and where you're. 01:39:12 Speaker 6: At cross. 01:39:14 Speaker 1: Strokes. 01:39:18 Speaker 6: You're right, you're right there. 01:39:19 Speaker 1: That as that saw bites into that tree, he walks you back into time as you go into those growth rings. 01:39:25 Speaker 3: Right, it's. 01:39:28 Speaker 6: With his with his partner on the other. 01:39:30 Speaker 3: End that kind of exposure is not something that you think about at the time. It's just happening to you. Right Even now, identifying trees, I can't explain. It's difficult for me to explain to people that that's a a red oak, that's a white oak, and here's why, because the way it is, yeah, it's just right, you. 01:39:52 Speaker 2: Know when you see it. 01:39:55 Speaker 1: I mean pretty much everything in the woods just like you know, that's just the way. 01:40:00 Speaker 3: Well right, well, actually, my dad always used to say that's what they call and then insert whatever there, that's what they call. But had those experiences and I guess didn't appreciate him. It was more or didn't understand that there was a lesson being taught. And I don't think it was an intentional lesson at all. It was just this is what we do, and a farm was carved out of that land. And you know, to this day the farmland is one hundred acres or sixty acres of pasture and there's two hundred and forty acres of woods. And so I remember my father telling me fifteen years ago, you remember when we did the cutting of those big trees that I mean, this was one of these ethic things right. We were sitting there as I had gone through the management plan the shelter would harvest, and I was talking with him about it, and he looked at me and said, well, Douglas, this, I know this needs to be done. I just didn't want to be the one to do it, which was meaning he didn't want to be the one to kill those big trees because he's ninety years old at the time and he grew up with them. 01:41:09 Speaker 1: I've left. I've had that conversation with Yannie. 01:41:15 Speaker 3: Oh, killing killing trees. 01:41:16 Speaker 4: He doesn't want me to kill the trees, just. 01:41:19 Speaker 1: Cutting into them big old Yeah. 01:41:20 Speaker 10: You know. 01:41:20 Speaker 3: Here's the thing about that. The one of the my favorite lessons from Forrester was that kills the trees kill each other. That over time, the bigger they get, the fewer of them there are, and that what we're doing in our timber stand improvement process is we're selecting for the better trees so I can support you and your timber stand improvement. There's some things that maybe not so much, but I like what you're doing with your place. You know. It's Oh, I would never expect to speak for Leo Pulled, but I think much what Yanni's doing is Leopoldion. I don't think 'apoldion like that. 01:42:06 Speaker 4: Well, I mean I think I would certainly fall in like the greater than than rather than the lesser than category, you know, as most of what I'm doing he'd be into. 01:42:19 Speaker 3: I think you're right and the part in all of us. Right. So here I am sixty five years old, sitting here talking with all you young bucks. 01:42:29 Speaker 1: One second for folks at home. Yanni has taken a property that's he's spent his life around, and his family has deep history, and he's he's improving. He's taking steps to improve it as wildlife habitat. Particularly he's trying to attract big giant bucks and squirrels and squirrels. No, not anymore. 01:42:54 Speaker 4: It started, I'll be honest. Two years ago, when it started, I would have I would have said that's correct to say, particularly big giant books. But two years into it, it's just improving wildlife habitat. 01:43:06 Speaker 1: Yeah. And when I dog on Yianni, I'm joking. I know what he's doing. He's learned more about I don't. I've never done that project. He's studied up on it, right, I'm just teasing. 01:43:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it's fantastic what he's doing. And I think what Leopold would like is that you're you're thinking, you're adapting, you're managing, and you're looking at uh, that bigger biotic community. And I think that's the part of the thought process that I was learning and didn't really understand it. So then I'm sixteen years old and I read this book, and by that first part the phenology was just fascinating to me. Then I got a little older and I traveled a little bit, and so the central part, which sketches here and there, where he's talking about these different parts of the country where he visited and the different experiences that he had in there and how they were beginning to shape it all through it, you can see, you can hear that these essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot about wild places. So he's you can see what he's going towards. And then at the end it's the upshot the land ethic, and he says somewhere in there about I don't pretend to say that this is something that I've known all along, that this has been the evolution of life, is something that's learned over a lifetime and when. 01:44:31 Speaker 1: You I want to button out of things, you brought a thing up that reminds me of something I'd like to touch on with him. Is you mentioned the biotic community? That was a like somebody will say Eldo Leopold is the father of a cology because Eldo Leopold was looking at community like the wild, like nature as a community of parts. And he has this metaphor where he has this metaphor where you have a clock, right, and you have a person who doesn't know a lot about clocks, and they start going, what the hell could this wheel be for? That doesn't do any good? 01:45:09 Speaker 3: Right? 01:45:10 Speaker 1: And you start pitching parts. And he looked at nature that you have to have an appreciation that there's components of this that you don't understand. This is a collection of cogs and wheels that function together to do a thing. You cannot throw out little parts because you don't see what it's doing. That can't be helping this clock, right. 01:45:36 Speaker 2: He I think like as a game manager prior to Leopold, very generally speaking, it's like, if you want more game animals, you either stop people from hunting, you kill predators, or you you know, transplant animals or propagate animals and breathe them, and his his sort of generation. And it's not that he was just part of it, but I mean he was a leading figure in this recognition that all of these parts matter and that one way to get game animals is to improve habitat right. And like previously, there was a much more sort of narrow focus on like the number of deer in the woods and not necessarily like how the brows is doing and all that. 01:46:28 Speaker 3: And you've probably all heard the part about when he shot a wolf and saw the green fire go out of her eyes. I don't think that he was saying we should never control predators. 01:46:41 Speaker 1: He was, I feecially after that research just came out of British Columbia recently. 01:46:45 Speaker 6: That was interesting, but. 01:46:47 Speaker 3: The idea that they are members of the biotic community. And then later he wrote in the I think I sent it to you summary and I don't have it in front of me, but essentially where he said where rifles can control the antler the game populations, but they rarely do. As you once said to me as we were talking about white tail deer, you said, well, what do you mean too many deer. You were playing Devil's advocates to. 01:47:14 Speaker 1: Make that point all the time, and I don't make it. I make the point all the time when something the minute someone tells you something's overpopulated, I always point out, ask yourself, according to who right? 01:47:25 Speaker 3: From whose perspective? 01:47:26 Speaker 1: And I think my perspective is it overpopulated? 01:47:28 Speaker 3: And my response that day was. 01:47:30 Speaker 1: It's not like there's just not like an objective truth. 01:47:33 Speaker 7: Oh there is, please, there is one dog Leopold. Leopold told us what it was too right versus wrong. Okay, what a thing is right when it tends to preserve the beauty and integrity of the biotic community, it's wrong when it when it tends otherwise. And so if you have the land telling you there are too many deer, if you have the ecosystem telling you that there are too many deer, objectively, there are too many deer. 01:48:03 Speaker 1: As opposed to somebody who's like car insurance, car insurance company. 01:48:10 Speaker 2: It's not a number like fifty thousand and two and eighty two deer. 01:48:14 Speaker 7: Go on, Doug, Right, Yeah, you take a stance there too many. 01:48:22 Speaker 3: Absolutely, you're absolutely right, And that's uh, that is what he was getting at and all of that. When you when we had that discussion, I said, well, how about from the perspective of the land or something to that effect, And you're like, and I understood the position you were taking, but that that also goes to the biotic community. When we see ourselves as a member of the community, will treat it more lovingly as opposed to that that the first quote you read about one of the first quotes was that we are the masters the abrahamick that it's here for us to deploit. Essentially, that when we see ourselves as a member of it, we'll treat it more lovingly. And that's the kind of stuff that I've really taken the heart. I mean, I want a healthy biotic community. I want a healthy ecosystem, healthy forest, I want a healthy deer herd. I want big giant bucks when when you start boiling it down to my place in my area and I want turkeys a guy. 01:49:26 Speaker 5: But when it comes to hunting, like, what was Leopold's like, what was it about hunting for him? Was it that that game was a resource like timber or soil or water, or was it that that game was an indicator of a healthy landscape or did he just love hunting or was it everything? 01:49:51 Speaker 3: It was all of that, And again, I think that's an evolution and thought that that as my dad used to like to say, well, it's all part of it. And I think that's very My father was very Leopoldian when it came to things like that. Right now, it's all a part of it. And when we're in a situation very different than the HeLa and those wilderness areas, where I'm in a situation in southwest Wisconsin where ninety five percent of the land is privately owned and almost one hundred percent of that land has had this heavy impact of humankind and farming and and things that seemed like the right thing at the time, like the planning of multiflora rose or autumn olive or uh that kind of thing. And Yanny knows about this autumn alive, buckthorn, Japanese barbery, all of these different plants that we're really spending our time and we're out there managing invasive species now that we're introduced by us. Because it seemed like the right thing at the time, the same agencies that maybe encourage some of that planting are now also encouraging well will never eradicate it with the management of it. So that heavy hand of man and you know, in agriculture and and all of that is a real interesting part of this discussion to me. And I think one of the beautiful things of Leopold is that he was both this advocate for these wilderness areas and this this wildness, but then he was also heavily involved with private land conservation. 01:51:30 Speaker 1: That's a great that's a great point man that he like, when I look at my social circle, right, I got the friends right that are the you know, the last vestiges of wilderness and just like leave it be, leave it be, leave it be. And I got friends that are very steeped in like proper land management. We recently had Becky humphries On. Becky Humphreyes is like the ships sailed man. For most of the stuff, the lee even in alone ain't working. Yeah, it needs we need effort, money, time put into active land management. Leaving it be is not helping I, right, And it's like that here's this guy that at that time saw that these things are like was able to sort of see the world and these things that were like these two different conversations that needed to happen depending on location. 01:52:24 Speaker 3: Right, that's exactly right. So here in Uh, it was in nineteen twenty four that he moved to to Madison. You know, he was transferred to the Forest Products Lab in in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you know, he did that for about four years and ultimately quit and was hired by the Shooting and Shooting Arms Sammy. Sammy, tell me what it is, the Shooting Arms and. 01:52:54 Speaker 2: Orditions, Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers Institute. 01:52:59 Speaker 3: Yeah, there you go to do. Uh, that is really well. On tribune, it was just yeah, bro, are you kind of yeah? I know, I wonder if you're both going to play later tape their minds shut. 01:53:10 Speaker 2: I'm I'm looking forward to. 01:53:15 Speaker 3: Is he talking about if I ever have a podcast? 01:53:18 Speaker 2: The guy for Sammy? After quitting the Forest Products. 01:53:21 Speaker 3: Right, he quit and so this is in the nineteen twenties. You know, things are going pretty well and he quit and then he convinced that group to hire him to do a game survey of multiple ones of the Upper Midwest. So the folks who are selling guns and ammunition, we're beginning to recognize that if we're going to sell guns and ammunition for people to hunt. Boy, they better have something to hunt, and what can we do about it? So he spent a lot of time in the Upper Midwest, uh doing these game surveys, and what he came back from with that from was it's not just regulation and in fact regulation of well it, you know, just don't shoot any deer for a while and you'll come back, or don't shoot any of this. That they have to have the habitat too, whatever that species happens to be, that they have to have that habitat. So let's start to work in that work on that. And then of course in the nineteen thirties when the depression came and the things like the Civilian Conservation Course started and the Soil Conservation Service that we all know as the Natural Resource Conservation Service now and the programs that Becky Humphries was talking about, the farm Bill, stuff like the Conservation Reserve Program, Stewardship program, equip all of those things. The precursor to that, Leopold was involved with that on private land between Madison Lacrosse is this place called Coon Valley, and they wanted to do something they being the Soil Conservation Service, to conserve the land, you know, those were the dust bowl years been in that area. It was erosion from just over use, over pasturing, over planting, you know, just plowing right across the side hills, all of that. And so the Soil Conservation Service, using the CCC, started to help farmers to to slow that down, stop it, you know, improve soil conditions. And Leopold stuck his nose in and said, you know, we can probably improved some wildlife habitat at the same time. So rather than planting this, that or the other thing, let's look at that. What what improvements are going to be made and how we can improve things for wildlife. And they did that. They accomplished that in Kune Valley. But he and at that time when he was talking about he wrote an essay called conservation Economics, which is a really interesting you know, and it speaks to all of what I just mentioned. Conservation economics, and he said that conservation will ultimately come down to rewarding the private landowner for conserving the public's interests, and a lot of that was born of it. What bothered him ultimately, again these are things that you have to learn over a period of time, right, is that farmers were getting paid for this stuff and for doing that kind of work, or the work was being done for them in areas they were improving their pastures, they're stopping the erosion doing all these things. And what ended up happening then once the program was over and maybe the payment stopped, they began to revert to their old practices because we got to get as much as we got to extract as much as we can out of there. And that was definitely a part of his evolution in talking about the land ethic, about having that ethic modern day, we have seen that. I've seen it in my lifetime where if you would have done some of the farming practices that I've seen in our area on those side hills and people do in fall plunging, people would have called you out on that. When I was a kid, we don't do that, you know, big buffer strips and you always rotate hay into it. But now it's corn beans and corn beans and a lot of those areas and they've improved some of the soil conservation practices. But land that came out of CRP marginal highly a rodable land that's come out of CRP and went back into corner beans because there's more money in it in plant and corn and beans than there is in having it in a conservation program like CRP. So that's where he begins to in the last part of the book, the third part of the book that speaks to me more now at this later part of my life about conservation philosophy and having a land ethic and seeing myself as a member of the biotic community. And you know, I've had all this advantage in my life where I'm the steward of a property that's been in my family for one hundred and twenty years. It's easy for me to stand there and think about my dad, my grandfather, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, and them being on that land. And you know, I plane goes down on the way home and that land is still there, the land of bides. How do we influence how that because it's been so I was going to say negatively influenced, but that's not necessarily fair. It's been so influenced by the presence of man. How do we going forward? How do we going forward do the best thing that we can for the land? How can we honor the past while we plan and implement in the present. To do the best we can for the future. Summed up in It's not ours, It's just our turn. I just can't tell you how important this, the essays of this book have been to me. I've been reading through it again knowing that I was coming on and I kind of forgot about that or how he makes these points a lot of quotes, you know, one sentence quotes, but it's the whole paragraph. Yeah, that's important. 01:58:57 Speaker 1: When you look at like just this revolutionary figure and understood all this stuff so well, it does make you question current prohibitions on cousins, you know, like you know, he right, Yeah, it's a real, real check on the scorecard of the. 01:59:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, real it worked once. 01:59:23 Speaker 2: Obviously. 01:59:24 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll be like, well, you're saying it's almost unfair. You know. 01:59:28 Speaker 2: He's like such a brilliant thinker, this incredibly accomplished professional and made it. He's also like a prophet in some respects and a philosopher and a writer. 01:59:38 Speaker 1: It's just like, yeah, you tell me, isn't it that you tell me? That's no good? Huh. 01:59:42 Speaker 3: Well, and he was sixty two years old when he died, helping a neighbor he. 01:59:47 Speaker 1: Had Doug Hayes's joke, the cousin thing. Yeah, I'm he's changing the subject. 01:59:54 Speaker 3: Yeah, I am going to change the subject. 01:59:56 Speaker 1: So Leo wrapped the whole show up. I want you to have the last word, Doug. 02:00:00 Speaker 3: Uh Leopold died when he was night, when he was sixty two years old. Did he really died? 02:00:05 Speaker 1: I think I knew that and forgot it. He died that young. 02:00:07 Speaker 3: He was sixty two years old. He died helping a neighbor fight a grass fire. 02:00:13 Speaker 2: He had a heart attack. 02:00:14 Speaker 3: Yet when you look at pictures of Elder Leopold, just I defy you, folks. 02:00:19 Speaker 1: He died at six sixty two years old. 02:00:22 Speaker 3: Google Elder Leopold and then clicked on images and it will be a whole raft of images of him doing nothing but sitting on his butt. It just amazes me how much this guy did in a lifetime, and seemingly there aren't any pictures of him doing much other than looking off in the distance and maybe writing in a journal and whatnot. 02:00:41 Speaker 5: But sixty two, sixty two, I don't think that was that unusual back then. 02:00:47 Speaker 3: Well, you had to be sitting still to get a good photograph. 02:00:50 Speaker 5: No, no, that you would die had uncle died, burning leaves, smoke in ealation, no fire, it out of control. 02:00:58 Speaker 7: There's a good action shot on the Rio Grande of Leopold as a young man with a boat like a flat bottom boat that he fashioned for duck hunting, named the Binnacle Bat he called his boat. And he's out there dragging this this duck skiff. He's not sitting that one. But there are a lot of thoughtful he was action. 02:01:20 Speaker 3: Action in motion. Remarkable and I would ask you all to go and check out the Ela Leopold Foundation. It is the source for information about Leopold and it will take you in a lot of different directions. They are also the Leopold Foundation is located on the Leopold farm. The shack is there. It's open to tours. 02:01:47 Speaker 1: You should put that in the sports from Atlas Brody. Totally Leopold's farm. 02:01:52 Speaker 2: We got the HeLa. 02:01:53 Speaker 5: Yeah, we're gonna get to Leopold. Can landowners enroll? Can they say eyeing up to join your sharing the land program? 02:02:03 Speaker 3: Please? It's interesting. We have thirty landowners in eight different states and we have about thirteen hundred conservation resumes from access seekers who want to be cooperators. So we as you probably are not surprised. The demand is outstripping the supply and landowners, one of the things that I would tell you is that it's it's very much your What you're able to do is offer access for the things that that you are will. You don't have to offer access for everything. 02:02:38 Speaker 5: It's like conservation related. It's not like shovel and shit and taking out the trash. 02:02:44 Speaker 3: You know, it can be. What I've noticed about most of our landowners is that they're really interested. The ones who are interested in sharing the land and are part of sharing the land are very engaged with their property, very engaged landowners who are in interested in spreading conservation education. And you know, the need. The truth is that there is a big need to get things done on on projects. I got a list of stuff at home that that we're going to be getting busy on. I got to tell you what, Steve Ranella works his butt off in the very short period of time usually, but he gets, he gets, He gets more than most people do. We had an elm tree right by the house break off and it was just a mess in the yard, and uh yeah, he got after it to. 02:03:39 Speaker 1: The Tasmanian devil. 02:03:40 Speaker 5: That's just because all the windows were there's no more windows break. 02:03:45 Speaker 3: And the kids helped out, Jimmy mostly the other two. You know. They they come along. 02:03:50 Speaker 1: And they feel that helping is being in the vicinity. 02:03:56 Speaker 2: Well they can run, they can run for help if you need it. 02:03:59 Speaker 1: So so doing a chore they be like, I'm just gonna kind of play like buy the chore area. 02:04:06 Speaker 3: Right accept or the auxiliary. Steve had Matthew out because I had clearly failed as a guide, and uh, Steve took him out. But Rosie and and uh uh the other one, Jimmy had already gotten their birds, and I said, well, I've got some stuff for him to do. And I had a burroke tree, a couple of fruit trees to plant, a little a little more picking up to do. And they stepped right into its bring your kids. Yeah, they weren't afraid. They got right in there and they did a great job of it. 02:04:37 Speaker 1: We're gonna wrap it up. Oh no, you were The one that you're gonna say is for landowners that want to participate with sharing the land, you don't need to be like, hey, here's the keys of the farm. 02:04:44 Speaker 3: Oh not at all. 02:04:45 Speaker 1: You can be like, hey, turkey's cool. Hey, late season white tailed doz cool, squirrels cool. 02:04:52 Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's exactly right. 02:04:54 Speaker 1: Don't shoot my big giant bucks. 02:04:55 Speaker 3: Okay, well sure, I mean that that can be a part of it too, and and and to be perfectly on honest, I as I think everybody at the table knows here, I don't bow hunt because bow hunts for people don't have enough to do. But I lease my farm to some bow hunters and who do a great job of it, and I'm very happy to have them there. And that revenue I mean they simply pay is a part of it too, right, because that's a part of the a la carte menu that well, you can't bowhunt in. But some of my cooperators literally the day they're like, when are those guys leaving? And there's some good days of the rut left and they're in there right after that. And think about that on both sides, right, So those guys are, well, we've been doing this work, we should get that opportunity. But they know and then the guy who spends serious money to come and hunt, he's like, so will you explain this to me again that we're paying And then tomorrow after we leave. You got these other guys coming. They're not paying nothing. Yeah, that's the deal. Well you sum it up. I've been working with those those guys have been least in my place for eight years now, and that has been and and and then when we come in and then the gun hunting. 02:06:17 Speaker 1: You know, I'll help you hold up you're end of the deal though, man, Like you have a window of time that they want to hunt, carved out, hunted. 02:06:24 Speaker 3: And nobody else hunted before them, and they get that period of time and then I. 02:06:28 Speaker 1: Mean, you're you're you're you're being kind, but like you're taking like peak white tail rut on a beautiful white tail property and that's. 02:06:35 Speaker 3: Theirs, and that's theirs. And uh and then then they shot fortier last year, and then we came in with rifles and shot forty three more. 02:06:46 Speaker 1: Well you know, and you wouldn't know what from looking at it this spring. Well, it's like, oh my god, Well that's a whole there's a million deer in that place. 02:06:57 Speaker 3: That's a whole other thing. I uh, at our seat, I just want to put this in at our sea deck meeting the County Deer Advisory Council which I'm a member of. We actually had someone come in from the public and we had public comments but online. But somebody came in from the public and he was nice guy. I've had other conversations with me. I don't understand why you want to kill all the deer. Why are you killing all Why do you want to kill all the deer? And it's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to give opportunity as much opportunity as we can because we have a lot of deer and ninety percent of land as privately owned. And if you don't think that you have enough deer on your property, then don't kill many. It's a pretty simple premise. 02:07:42 Speaker 1: All right, man, We're gonna wrap up. Thank you boys, Thank you so much. Carol Malcolm from the US for Service, glad to be here. And Doug Durn from Casanova, Wisconsin. 02:07:54 Speaker 3: Casanova, that's what you like. 02:07:57 Speaker 1: To call it, Casanova Wisconsin. 02:08:00 Speaker 3: And please go and check out the Alder Leopold Foundation. 02:08:03 Speaker 1: Thank you very much. 02:08:05 Speaker 9: Mm hmmm. 02:08:12 Speaker 10: I used to be the one skin datiesy close enough for me and he say up more steps before you click the safety. 02:08:29 Speaker 9: Off of that O two forty three and do my best to sit there. 02:08:38 Speaker 10: Quiety say, so you gotta learn to be step. And now it's me telling his grandson all the things he used to whisper in my just a little more patient, son, I ain't gonna hurt no one. He ain't got a picking good shot before he pulled the trigger. 02:09:11 Speaker 9: Night on, gone on, the study untrue. 02:09:16 Speaker 10: Man. When you take came, the rest is up to you. Man, you're gonna do great. Just shoot in the street. Now, my daddy's up in heaven. One day I'll. 02:09:41 Speaker 9: Be up there with them looking down. 02:09:47 Speaker 10: Oh when watching now the Jemeration show, the next wom a ride. 02:09:58 Speaker 9: And they through these olds. 02:10:02 Speaker 10: Awkwards and they teach me everythings they need to know because they ain't learned from their daddy, learned from their daddy. 02:10:17 Speaker 9: And the story goes, just a little more patience. 02:10:24 Speaker 10: I ain't gonna hurt no wale. You ain't gotta picking good shot before we pulled the trigger, na on, gone order. 02:10:37 Speaker 9: Steady in true. And when you two came, the rest is up to you. Man. 02:10:48 Speaker 10: You're gonna do great. Just shoot street. Just a little more patience. So I ain't gonna hurt no one. You ain't gotta picking good shot before you pull the trigger from that old. 02:11:21 Speaker 9: Gone hold in steady R. And when you take the rest is up to you. Man, you're gonna do the great. Just shoot up the street. 02:11:45 Speaker 7: H