00:00:08 Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast, 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 ELK. 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. Okay, everybody, we're coming. We're recording in Africa. I'm pretty much African now, yeah, like in the real sense of the word, like from Africa. I've been here so long. I've watched I've watched a complete lunar cycle. Can you believe it? 00:00:54 Speaker 2: That's impressive. 00:00:55 Speaker 1: I came here on a on a new moon. 00:00:58 Speaker 2: What's it called? Screw that? 00:01:00 Speaker 3: Yeah? 00:01:00 Speaker 4: No new moons? 00:01:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, came here on a new moon. 00:01:02 Speaker 1: Watch that son of bit get full. That's the long I've been here forever. 00:01:06 Speaker 2: You watch the new moon get old and then it's getting new again. 00:01:09 Speaker 1: I know, it's so long. I've been here a long time. Joined by Morgan Potter is here today and Morgan Potters. This is the third time you've been on the show. You came on the show and basically without meaning to talk me into coming to Africa. Then you came on the show to get me up to speed my upcoming African trip. And now you're closing it all out by coming on the show again to do a debrief old part of my cunning plan yep. And then tomorrow we start picking our way back home. Also joined by George. And George helped me with your last name d O W D s okay. George is from Morgan's from Morgan is from Australia. As a as a young man, moved to Africa to get into the hunting thing. 00:01:57 Speaker 2: Yep, that's right. 00:01:58 Speaker 1: Came here like did what now seems to be impossible, came here, taught yourself, learned Swahili yep, in order to. 00:02:07 Speaker 2: Pursue your career. Yep. 00:02:08 Speaker 1: It's essential. Climbed from the bottom up right yep. And did that making my way up the letter, yeah, chasing a dream. George was born in Kenya, so it seems weird, like like in America, we were really tiptoe around this thing of like you know, when you say I'm a white Kenyan. 00:02:27 Speaker 2: People in America be like. 00:02:28 Speaker 3: What, Yeah, there's not many of us. No. 00:02:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a white Kenyon. Yeah. Family's been in Kenya for many generations. 00:02:35 Speaker 3: Yeah, many generations, early nineteen hundreds. 00:02:37 Speaker 2: Working You work in the farm and ranch world. 00:02:39 Speaker 3: Working in the farming and ronching world. Yeah. 00:02:42 Speaker 5: Yeah, and yeah, spoke to Healey from a young age. Quite lucky with that. Okay, made a lot easier for me. 00:02:49 Speaker 1: And you're pursuing the professional hunting thing in that you are in your second year, your second year internship to become a professes hunter. 00:03:00 Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, that's the plan. 00:03:02 Speaker 1: Yeah, and a professional hunter means something very specific here, explain professional hunter. It doesn't mean like you hunt, you know, and you make videos about it or something like. A professional hunter is a thing. It is a thing. 00:03:15 Speaker 2: Yeah. We have to be licensed, So one has to complete a two year apprenticeship and then be endorsed by the company with which you've done your apprenticeship to then ultimately go sit your license, which is a practical exam. There's some theory and some other bits and pieces sort of tied in with that, and that's all monitored and supervised by Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority. If you get through that stage, then your license to guide clients in Tanzania. Okay, so and that's you know, even when you get licensed, that's kind of the beginning of the journey too. There's a lot of learning that that will sort of pursue you through your career. But yeah, getting licensed is the first step. Ye know. 00:03:56 Speaker 1: I'm being cautious about being too redund If you've been following along from home, you've heard all of our our five by now, is that right? Five flop episodes. We did a specific flop episode with George about his upbringing, about why drafts hate drones, No and me hate drones, and the land land with hunting and Kenya, can you move gradually? Not gradually? Ken you moving away from regulated hunting even to the point where no bird hunting anymore. George talked about a little bit of his hunting there grow in his family's past and then coming up to be a professional hunter in Tanzania. So if you want to refer back, you can check that out. Says here he's just looking next to him to dirt. Dirt's here in love yep, But we can't talk of anything about who he's in love with. 00:04:54 Speaker 4: No, that's too great of a love is. 00:04:57 Speaker 1: Too grave of love. Dirt doesn't even want people to know. They're gonna think you fell in love here. Now maybe I did. Dirt doesn't want people to know even he's so he's so protective. I think he's afraid to get moved in on. He's so protective that he doesn't want people to know he was before the show began. He doesn't want people to know what country. 00:05:19 Speaker 3: This gal lives. 00:05:20 Speaker 6: This gal lives, and I will say gender. 00:05:23 Speaker 2: She is a woman. She is a woman. 00:05:25 Speaker 1: Okay, that narrows it down to like roughly fifty one percent of the global population. 00:05:31 Speaker 2: She's great. 00:05:31 Speaker 1: So if you're looking to a dude next to you and you're wondering if that who's Dirt is in love with not. 00:05:38 Speaker 7: Could be anyone, I wouldn't say if she's a dipper or not. 00:05:43 Speaker 2: Oh is she a dipper? I won't say she might be a dipper. I want to tell she's diper. 00:05:50 Speaker 4: No, she's not a dipper. 00:05:51 Speaker 1: Okay, So Dirt's love, he's very protective about wanting it. You don't want anybody to find out his his his the love of his life lives a very private exiit distance dirt doesn't win anyone checking in on her, talking about her, asking no questions about her. I have a quick thing to mention and then oh, also people in the audience today, Krin is going to represent the audience's interests. So if Krinn feels that there's like a burning audience question, she's gonna shout it out in representation of the audience. You follow me, yep, because Krin has quite a list of things in her head that she wants discussed, so she's gonna jump in from behind the scenes there. It's for many years now we've done our annual Me and Jannis the Labby and Eagle. Every year we do our TRCP Turkey Hunt giveaway. It's that time of year again. The way the TRCP Hunt giveaways went in the past is we used to auction them off to the highest bidder, and it was observed by many that by doing that and I'm not not hacking on orthodontis here, and in fact we had some orthodonis, but by doing that, it's like it's pretty much gonna be orthodontis. Do you follow me like it's gonna be or when you say like we're gonna auction off hunt Orthodonis perk up right, So we switched it years ago to a raffle so that any any schmuck, any joe, blow off the street guy like dirt can come win the hunt that's going on right now. So we've done them in the spring before. This is a summer raffle to win the t RCP Turkey hunt with me and Gianni's how it goes is, you buy your ticket tickets ticket, We pick a winner. The winner has a friend. The winner and and the winner and his or her friend. All their expenses are covered. We we agree on a date that works for everybody in the spring, so it'll be this coming spring. We pick a date that works for everybody. It's three nights, two full days of turkey hunting. We always find a great spot to go. We cover your airfare, lodging, food, all expenses. If you need gear, we'll take care of the gear. If you need a shotgun, we'll bring you a shotgun to yous we get We cover your AMMO. Did I say license or you pay nothing? Uh? The All that money, though, doesn't come out of the raffle pocket, the raffle pile of money. All that expense is covered by a donor, so that when you buy a raffle ticket, all of your money, all of your raffle ticket money goes to t RCP like it all goes there, and then we cover all the expenses for the trip. We've done it a bunch of years. We have everyone that comes has fun we've had. If you go on TRCP thing, they got testimonials from past winners. Those tickets are for sale from now to uh the end of the month. Krian, can you do you mind pulling up that what that's called. 00:09:00 Speaker 2: I'll do it. 00:09:02 Speaker 1: Where you go to get these tickets? One second, you go if you if a person wants these tickets, they go to. 00:09:11 Speaker 4: I don't know, man, you can probably just TRCP Turkey Hunt Giveaway. 00:09:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, t r C. 00:09:17 Speaker 1: If you search t r CP Turkey Hunt giveaway, then like adding like meat eater or something like that. Oh even better, go to t RCP dot org and one of the main things you'll find on the homepage there is a link to buy your tickets. Then you win and then we you pack your bags because we're turkey hunting the spring. 00:09:41 Speaker 8: If you if you google tr CP Turkey Hunt Giveaway, the first link that comes up is the Turkey Hunt giveaway. 00:09:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, now it begins the uh, the Great African Recap. I have a number of things that that's that we're gonna touch on here top of my list, and these are in no particular order, but top my list. We're gonna kind of jump almost to the end by saying this. I remember growing up fishing fresh water fish, and I remember getting to an age where me and my buddies would start going down we would like drive down to Florida to fish in Florida and having one day realizing that man fish from the ocean taste way better. Just generally fish from the ocean taste way better than fish from the fresh water. I'm not I don't think it's like me, dude, like stuff game animals are kind of better here, Oh definitely. But it's not like I keep trying to ask myself as like a psychological thing because there's like a novelty to it, but there's just like a consistent like the antelope species, the African antelope species I think are I I hate say it are like a better table fare than American servants. 00:11:04 Speaker 2: They are. 00:11:04 Speaker 7: I'd agree with that. It's pretty good just as an eater. Yeah, it's phenomenal, And that's really what you're saying. You're saying that because here there's so many species of antelope, and in North America we have all these dear family servid species. 00:11:16 Speaker 1: Just something about the antelope species. Yeah, antelope, but just delicious. 00:11:20 Speaker 2: I mean, I'm glad you said it so I didn't have to, because it's I think it's it's science religious. Yeah, it's borderline sacrilegious, but it's settled science now because you're here and you've tasted them, and no one can argue. I mean, let's use, for example, the war hog. It's an old boar. If you ate an old boar, I mean, obviously i'm this. You know, wild pigs aren't native to North America. I'm aware of that. But you know, if you ate an old bore of any other sort of species of wild hog, I think you'd be somewhat disappointed, especially in the way it was prepared for us, which is really like a grilled loin. But it was exceptional and it was like better than the best store bought pork you could find. It was unreal. Yeah, and that sort of is it's pretty universal. And then, as I always remind people we're eating the old males here. Well, never know because they're illegal to hunt in Tanzania. But imagine how good the young females taste. Yeah, that jumps us to a thing on my list is a little bit of the regulatory structure. They'll surprised by. 00:12:24 Speaker 1: No, no female anything. 00:12:26 Speaker 2: No. 00:12:27 Speaker 1: So even like a war hog, no has to be a male, has to be a male. Zebras which have very little, like visually very little sexual dimorphism. 00:12:36 Speaker 2: Yep uh, has to be a male. Has to be a male. You got to wait for its tail to flick. Yeah, yeah, that's one way to tell. Yeah, otherwise getting a good look between the legs there. That's about all you've got to work with. And you guys have a management strategy on this, on this piece of ground we're hunting where you're like basically your philosophy is you're you're hunting things that are on death's door. Yeah, yeah, ideally post productive males. So especially for our key species, buffalo and things like that. You know, there are certain times where we'll take a ball out of a herd for various species, but in general those will be bulls that when we look at it we're like, that's actually a really old one. He's not going to hold onto that herd position much longer, and it's not going to be a bad thing for a younger bull to come in and take his place. 00:13:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I said, I don't mean to suggest it was like like crippled or like you're like, yeah, looking for you have an awareness of what is the what are the sort of visual clues of an animal that's reached his Yeah, on the decline, not just peak, but reached like kind of the end of the line, absolutely in terms of horn growth whatever, And that's who you're after. Males only, old males only. Yeah, even and that stuff is good, oh yeah, even. 00:13:56 Speaker 2: In decline as far as horn growth, right, Like you'll have buffalo for example, like the one you shot, that have worn down. You know, they would have been longer at an earlier stage in their life. So that for us is ideal. That kind of is the cornerstone of the management strategy as far as off take is old males that are post productive or can easily be replaced in the population. Yeah, to get people's sense that. 00:14:24 Speaker 1: What that search is like, if you look at so we hunted, we focused on hunting, and we hunted for four different speceis of big game animals. Yeah, we knew that, like Kate Buffalo was the primary thing we're after. Now, the experience, ultimately, the experience we had hit hunting Kate Buffalo was a little bit different because it's you can sort of. 00:14:48 Speaker 2: Through things. 00:14:49 Speaker 1: We'll get into it when we were making episodes about all this, so people be able to watch this stuff happen in real time or in real life, you know. But you can make hunting decisions that put you in a position where you're like targeting old bulls. Absolutely, Yeah, like you can. You can go out and kind of specifically like where you go, how you go about it, what tracks you follow, where you're kind of dismissing. 00:15:13 Speaker 2: The herds. 00:15:14 Speaker 1: Absolutely, in order to focus on like a loan animal or two animals, you can determine our old Yeah, so we were able to go in and kind of like narrow our search a little bit. But on the other stuff we hunted, I would say that two huge examples stand out, like hunting Sable and hunting Warhog. I mean, we we got the biggest of dozens not just Sable, but dozens of Sable. 00:15:44 Speaker 2: Bulls, yep, yep, correct. Yeah, we looked at dozens and dozens of them, and I couldn't get comfortable with more so the age than anything. There was a couple of bulls that I felt were mature but perhaps had some growing still to do. And there were a couple of balls that I felt were mature but maybe a little unimpressive as far as more one size, And I felt that we could do better while also still getting an old animal. So yeah, it was. It was something to where it's it's an unusual experience, right. It can be frustrating at times too. I mean I myself was frustrated on this hunt multiple times with just like how many of these things do we need to look at before I see what I'm happy with? 00:16:25 Speaker 1: Yeah, we will see a half dozen warhogh sometimes because they're in groups. So since they're in small groups, a half dozen warhogs day became a run and joke that Morgan's like mister Norman. 00:16:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I became the crusher of dreams, Like I look at a dreams. 00:16:39 Speaker 1: I look at him, mom, like that looks like a spectacular specimen to me. 00:16:43 Speaker 2: No, no, no. 00:16:44 Speaker 1: But all that stuff paid off, man, All that stuff paid off. 00:16:47 Speaker 2: Now it has a way of coming together. I mean, that's the wonderful thing about this place. You never know what's around that next corner. It's so vast. 00:16:55 Speaker 1: Now that we've built up the hunting round here, we're going to market dam because I want to. I want to discuss the black mom Like, yeah, I want to discuss the black man, because we come out and patly know how we got at it. Somehow someone's aware of black marmers, because because when when you get George h really quickly, just give people a quick prime around what is a black marble. 00:17:20 Speaker 5: Black Mamba's probably our most venomous snake that will sort of encounter out here. And he's he's got a pretty mean concoction of venom. And you've got a pretty short window to get the anti venom and get help. And then I mean, come on, you got twenty minutes, I think by the book. I think I think by the book, you've got a couple of hours. You've got three hours if I'm not wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's. 00:17:44 Speaker 3: About three hours. 00:17:45 Speaker 2: Probably depends where you get zat exactly. 00:17:47 Speaker 5: Yeah, but yeah, they're they're pretty mean, and they you know, they get a lot of fan fair because they're quite an aggressive snake in the text. 00:17:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, they're an attack snake attack men. 00:17:57 Speaker 1: Like yeah, the only not I don't know, maybe not the only in the world. This is a snake, not just that you gotta like step on it to get it worked up. This is a snake that comes for you. 00:18:08 Speaker 5: Yeah, he's he's pretty moody kind of guy. You know, you'll you'll walk past him and he'll just he might have been a bad mood. 00:18:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, this is my hangout. Yeah, you know, welcome here, buddy, move onlo. 00:18:20 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:18:20 Speaker 1: If you want to see a great bit on the a great bit on black mamas. It's fictional. But if you get into the kill Bill series kill In kill Bill two, which is largely set in the desert Southwest, Michael Madsen rest Rest in Peace, died while we were here in Africa, Michael Madsen's character gets killed by a black mamba in the possession of Daryl Hannah's character, and uh she as he's dying, she runs. She has a little notebook, and as she's dying, she reviews some of her notes about the black mamba and gives a bunch of stats about black mambas as he's dying. So you could go watch that clip just type being kill Bill black Mamba. You can see it. So I never didn't think about it much. We somehow it came up like, oh, there's black mamas around here. 00:19:12 Speaker 4: Yeah, should we be aware moreans like. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: They're here, but you know, odds are running into one. 00:19:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, just not gonna happen. Yeah, the stupidest thing I've ever said. I knew when I said it too, was like, I'm going to live to regret this. Especially Yeah, I knew I was going to live to regret it. And sure enough, I'm on my face. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: I'm thrilled, half cool to see what we saw. So first we ran into jabber Walker. Know that puff adder? Yeah, we ran into a puff adder and uh that's chill. Yeah, but we'll talk about that. I want to talk about that one too, because it's he was like totally mine in his own business, wanted, but it led us kind of a little bit, like the thing that blew my mind about a puff adder. No American snake does. Like when you see a snake out, his ass. 00:20:04 Speaker 4: Is snaking. 00:20:06 Speaker 1: Doing an s Shad's kind of perpetual locomotion via the s locomotion via the s right like a slither a puff adder, which is another deadly snake, but you have a much bigger window, like a much higher survival rate with the top adder. I gather that puff adder. He goes down the he goes straight, exact straight line. 00:20:33 Speaker 2: He's like scaled, almost like he's got like a track, like you know, like like a track or something. 00:20:41 Speaker 4: He just would be like centimpew dish. 00:20:43 Speaker 2: No, because I've got little legs. It's what he's got is sort of his his bottom layer of skin and his top they sort of shuffle like that, you know, he sort of shuffles his but he sort of shuffles his bottom layer of skin forward his belly if you will. As the number. Yeah, deadly bite and very very rapid strike. But yeah, not as easily aroused as the mamba. 00:21:07 Speaker 1: Two hits before a balloon George saying, he can hit a balloon before it pops. 00:21:11 Speaker 2: You can hit it twice. 00:21:13 Speaker 5: That's the that's what they say. I don't know how true that is, but they are one of the fastest striking. 00:21:18 Speaker 1: Snakes, but they're like an ambush snake. 00:21:21 Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's that's our most common cases in Africa is puff out a bite because. 00:21:27 Speaker 2: They're ambush predators. 00:21:28 Speaker 5: They don't move particularly fast, so you might step on him, and if you step on him, he's going to defend himself and bite you, whereas most other snakes apart from the black Man, but they move off pretty quick. So he's our most common contender for snake bite victims. 00:21:45 Speaker 1: We saw one of those, we saw we saw Pope at her first because it just totally my on the road, but mine in his own business. 00:21:54 Speaker 2: We saw a cobra. What kind of cobra is that? I think it was an Egyptian cobra. I only got a quick look at it. He won and nothing to do with us, nothing to do with us, so he does. Yeah, he split out off. But the Poffodder or the Master the Mamba. We're in a. 00:22:11 Speaker 1: Can you explain our war rigs that sick? 00:22:13 Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's a it's a land cruiser FJ seventy eight that's rigged for hunting. So it has a lot of kind of custom metal framework on the back so that there's places for people to sit on the back on kind of an elevated platform above the cab so you can kind of see out while you're cruising around. Aside from that, you know, we really enhance the suspension on those vehicles. They've got to take a lot of weight in the back, Like when we load a full buffalo in there, it's a lot of additional weight. So there's souped up suspension and yeah, a few other little mod modifications and adjustments to the vehicle to make it suitable for safari. But they're a wonderful, wonderful piece of equipment. Yeah, loaded down with every kind of tool you can imagine. 00:22:58 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, no, for sure, ray of machetes, Yeah, yeah, yeah, machetes, jack shovels, cold drinks, sling shot a sling shots. We had nine old manner of chain and cable talked into various compartments. 00:23:12 Speaker 2: There were ricks. 00:23:13 Speaker 4: We had nine ricks, nine folks in our rig the whole time. 00:23:16 Speaker 2: Right, tables, chairs, What else have we got on lunch George, Yeah, lunch box, Yeah, lunch box, got a little well, we've got a bucket, trophy grining yet, trophy cares. We can do trophy care in the field if we have to. We've got hammocks in there. A bunch of water, yeah, a bunch of water. Pretty serious. First aid kit. Yeah, we've got a big first aid kit, like a trauma kit in case someone gets injured in the field. 00:23:39 Speaker 1: At times a package of cookies on the dashboard. Yeah, some time an entire trip through the cookies and two. Yeah, that was like something that magically would refresh. 00:23:48 Speaker 2: You know, the cookie supplied right up real quick with you. 00:23:51 Speaker 6: I gotta blame Adam on that too. 00:23:53 Speaker 2: Was he feeding? Was he belt feeding him? 00:23:55 Speaker 8: No? 00:23:55 Speaker 3: I was? 00:23:56 Speaker 2: I was. 00:23:56 Speaker 3: That was like. 00:23:58 Speaker 1: We'll get in a little bit. But all a lot of matches, yes, a lot of match war rigs and what we're gonna touch on those matches in a minute. 00:24:10 Speaker 2: What the hell's that even getting at? 00:24:11 Speaker 1: Oh so on the war rigs, the Safari rigs, there's a over the cab is a storage area, yep. But we would just have our camera guy, Chris gill or Dirt would usually sit up on that cab thing so they could film back and then swing and film forward as we're oute having our adventures and uh, Dirt, you know, you cruise along and we'll sometimes cover I mean I never turned a track or function on, but I mean like easily one hundred miles. 00:24:42 Speaker 2: Oh yeah a day. 00:24:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're we're out on we're out in a like a game reserve, that is. 00:24:50 Speaker 2: I keep throwing this out. 00:24:51 Speaker 1: There just because I think it's easy for Americas to picture, whether or not they actually can picture or not, but they can, they can sort of comprehend the scale. It's a couple million acres, YEP, a couple of million acres. So that so ye, Also, National Park is just over two million acres. This is about two million acres. But it's joined up with a national park. 00:25:09 Speaker 2: Yeah. Correct, We've got a boundary with a national park, and then the national park has a boundary with another game reserve, and so it's all kind of part of a big contiguous ecosystem. 00:25:19 Speaker 1: YEP, with the with the major river system through it, with all these lagoons and swamps and stuff. And there's a we'll call it a road network, but it'd be probably better for for an American audience to understand it be like like a trail network. Yeah, yeah, like two tracks would be the term I used. Yeah, two track network. Pretty impressive, two track network that like is tenuous. The land of us eat the road oh absolutely, yeah. 00:25:48 Speaker 2: They have to be remade almost I mean every year, there's a lot of them that just go back to nature. 00:25:53 Speaker 1: They have to be rebuilt from everything. There's a lot of uh, there's the Meambo, which is like a forest. There's a lot of wetlands yep, and their roads are extensive but tenuous in that times slow going. But you know by using winches, using people, pushing and pulling, filling in wet spots with some logs and brush and stuff so you can get around. You can do you know, one hundred plus miles of cruising around and then as you choose get out and walk to certain spots as well. But there's a lot of big openings you can kind of pull into or pull through in glass from the opening. So as you're cruising around, your spotting game absolutely all the time. Well, there's a little bit of midday doldrums, yeah, when you kind of kick it like anywhere hunting like you know, that sort of twelve thirty to three thirty kind of sucks. Mornings are great, Evenings are great. You spot a lot of game. And we had had this joke that dirt only can over the days over a couple of weeks, like dirt could now and then spot a warhog if it was in a twelve o'clock position. 00:26:57 Speaker 4: Because that's being aware of the branch at head heights too. 00:27:01 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's watching for getting hitting the head by branches. He's watching for branches. Would occasionally to see a word. I'm getting this. I'm getting into our black Mama story. I'm gonna tell my perspective because it was incomplete, and then Dirt can share his perspective. Whatabit So periodically maybe once a day, once every two days, dirtbile gesture out front. He'll do like a like a gesture, and I'll know to look off and I feel like I'm looking for whatever animal Dirt sees out front. So a cruise road, Dirt gifts like the like the outfront gesture, and I'm looking and and and I'm trying to figure out what it is. Dirt's gesture turns into him beating the top of the truck. 00:27:50 Speaker 2: With his hand. 00:27:53 Speaker 4: I didn't know how to say stop in Swahili. 00:27:57 Speaker 1: He's beating that, he's beating the and I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. And only then does it like occur to me because by that point Dirt is trying to get off the top of the trucks, roll off the cab into the back of the truck, and Dirt explained what what he's seeing as. 00:28:20 Speaker 2: This is taking place. 00:28:21 Speaker 7: Well, I was looking for the war Hogs out at twelve o'clock and I remember someone just I think you guys talked about her like out of the corner. In the corner of my brain, I had heard if you see a black Mama, you don't want to drive over it because it will raise up and potentially smack you through the window, which in my mind was kind of fictitional, but it just stuck. 00:28:43 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:28:44 Speaker 1: We note then would like hit a stick and the stick would jump up and hit the side of the truck, and I'd make the joke black MoMA. 00:28:49 Speaker 2: We were talking about the con dent trucks. Yeah, well, and they will when you're in the back there, you're you're quite exposed, and they they do rear op as we saw. 00:28:57 Speaker 7: Oh yes, So I saw this big ass snake and it just kind of froze me up, and I was like, that's probably freaking black mamba and we're about to drive over it. 00:29:08 Speaker 4: And I just couldn't use my words, and we. 00:29:12 Speaker 7: Had been slapping the roof to stop per game, and I just started slapping and trying to back up and then that sucker, I'll let you take it back over. But it it was going away from us. It was going away from us. We were I don't know, fifteen twenty feet and at some point it became aware of our presence and busted up four feet. 00:29:32 Speaker 4: I'm saying, I'm taking that to the grave. I don't know if that's true. 00:29:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, he was four. 00:29:37 Speaker 7: I mean Chris could see him throw over the hood, but yeah, lifted up his body and came at us. 00:29:45 Speaker 1: Don't way I could describe it. I had no idea, like i'd heard about him, I had no idea. The way I describe it is that he's got like a Locknus monster. Yeah, totally where he's like, you know, Locknus monster is down the water, but its neck is I mean, he's cruising around. It doesn't make sense mechanic. No, if he's seven feet long when he's cruising around, three and a half feet of him were straight up. Yeah, but he can cruise around like that. 00:30:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, he can move still. Yeah, and we like. 00:30:14 Speaker 1: He goes through the woods like he's like he goes through the woods at that moment, And I'm sure normally there's sneaking long he's going through the woods. He's like like providing his own crow's nest. 00:30:24 Speaker 7: Yeah, and it's good that Morgan before he reared up, you saw him and said back up, because if we weren't backing up, he would have came. 00:30:33 Speaker 2: He looked like he's gonna come on the hook. He was gonna come on. I think he would have, but you never know, You never know. But yeah, once we sort of started reversing, he moved off fortunately. Yeah, and then the guys were all gung ho to go and see if they could cure, which I very quickly put the kibo on that on that plan. 00:30:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, like he like is going away. I didn't see him going away. I see him like coming at the truck and he like it's a false charge. 00:31:02 Speaker 2: And then he leaves off in the woods. 00:31:03 Speaker 1: When he leaves off from the woods, he's still got his head up. Yeah, so you can watch his head going cruising like like belt buckle high cruise. Yeah, through the woods. 00:31:12 Speaker 2: Man. 00:31:12 Speaker 1: It's the most crazy thing I've ever magic. 00:31:14 Speaker 2: Yeah, dark, intimidating. 00:31:17 Speaker 1: Oh so weird, and it's not one of those things that happens now and then like like I remember like always hearing about lionfish, you know, and like, you know, you don't want to get hit by a lionfish. And you get hit by a lionfish and you're all worried about it, and but it winds being not that big. 00:31:33 Speaker 2: Of a deal. 00:31:34 Speaker 4: But you said it hurt like hell. 00:31:35 Speaker 1: Hurts like hell, but not a big deal. YEA, like a bullet ant. People like, oh watch out, you don't gets hit by a bullet ant, you know. And I got stung by bullet ant. Not a big deal. But the more we get talking about these black mambas, dude's like a big deal. It's a major problem. 00:31:48 Speaker 2: Now it's a serious problem. You've got a serious problem. But I have to I mean, I'm obligated to say that black mamba sidings, snake sightings in general here relatively rare. We just had a really good run of them on Safari. 00:32:02 Speaker 1: It's like there's there is an absolutely perfect parallel. There's a perfect parallel, and it is grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies. 00:32:12 Speaker 2: Right. 00:32:12 Speaker 1: You guys spend all this time here around black momas. You're like, probably won't see one, which I gather is totally true. We covered hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles and walked all over Hell and drove all over Hell and saw a grand total of one Yeah, okay, he did not bite anybody, right, so like non issue. But for people that are sort of like what now, what's this now about this thing? You know, and then you see it, it like it was not you can't bucket it in close calls at all. Right, it wouldn't even, it doesn't even it didn't even deserve like close call relegation. But it was just like a shocking I guess the thing that was shocking to me was the snake athleticism and athleticism and the idea that the snake would ever decide to like be like I'm gonna like, I'm takking on this land cruiser, dude, and I don't care. 00:33:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it's an unusual it's a wild set of behavior behavior for a snake, yeah, for sure. But we saw one. 00:33:12 Speaker 1: Yeah, Like I don't want to overblow it to people be like, oh my god, you're gonna killed by a black mom, because that stucks annoying. Like people think they're gonna get killed by mountain lions, anything killed by bears and they're gonna get killed by everything under the sun. It's not gonna happen. Nothing happened to us, George. You ever been killed by a black mom? 00:33:28 Speaker 4: But I'm still was born. 00:33:31 Speaker 1: In the bush across the border and grew up on a ranch. 00:33:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, he's still alive. Yeah. 00:33:37 Speaker 5: Yeah, they get they get a little fan fact because they're just different. 00:33:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, the fan fair. Yeah, it would be like the Yeah, back to the grizzling. Let's say you see your grizz and you know, and he takes five steps towards you before running off. That sticks with you for the rest of your life. Yeah, and people that know bears be like that bear was no. 00:33:57 Speaker 2: Wrist to anybody. Yeah. 00:33:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, he wasn't. He was serious. He was wondering what you were and you ran away. Yeah, but in your head you're. 00:34:05 Speaker 6: Like, good, Yeah, this person's a grizzly charge. 00:34:09 Speaker 8: Today on our on our cruise, we passed some water and there was a crocodile in there and I wasn't aware that the Swahili word for crocodiles mambah. 00:34:23 Speaker 6: Yeah. 00:34:24 Speaker 2: It was like. 00:34:26 Speaker 8: And everyone was so excited, everyone was ready and I had to put like pull cold water on it. 00:34:35 Speaker 2: It's a Swil word for crocodile. 00:34:39 Speaker 6: And mambo means hello, right. 00:34:42 Speaker 2: Mambo is jambo is so yeah, it's they're both forms of grading. Yeah, one's very informal and one's sort of a little more formal mamba. 00:34:52 Speaker 1: I think the only Swahili word I act for animals that actually got was. 00:34:56 Speaker 2: Bogo buffalo buffalo. Yeah, it's a good one. Good ones. 00:35:01 Speaker 1: Yeah, you always feel a little out of the loop. Yeah, they say a word like no, what now, what is it? I try to be pretty quick on the draw. You do a great job, You do a great job. 00:35:15 Speaker 2: Well, there's nothing worse than sitting there and you haven't seen it and you're wondering if it's like your target species is a good one, and like we're chattering back and forward without you even knowing what what's there? So it's it's critical. 00:35:26 Speaker 1: But yeah, you were quick to point out today that there is in fact not a black, in fact not a black, but. 00:35:31 Speaker 2: It's a crocodile. We're doing where it is. 00:35:35 Speaker 1: I want to hit on the back out of my notes that I got open. I'm going to run through this is against my better judgment to run through our list because it's so damn long. Yeah, like who would have a tension span long enough to hear what we ran into? 00:35:52 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I suspect it's incomplete too, so let's give it a let's give it a Listen to this now. 00:36:01 Speaker 1: I got the ten game animals and got bored. I'm gonna do them all. I was trying to tell people how maming around the list. Yeah, okay, a common read book. 00:36:11 Speaker 2: That's the white tail deer. Yeah, they they a white tail. 00:36:15 Speaker 1: It has runs through the woods like like it the white tail deer, and this animal took totally separate paths and landed at a very similar group. 00:36:25 Speaker 2: Converging evolution brought them together. 00:36:27 Speaker 1: They split at about the same time, like you know, you catch them. He's like, oh, sure, takes off. He's got a little tail, just different, totally different coloration. 00:36:39 Speaker 2: M Yeah. I kept we kept joking. 00:36:41 Speaker 1: I think maybe to Morgan's annoyance, we kept joking about how much they reminded us of white tailed deer. 00:36:46 Speaker 2: No, no, I see, I see the similarity. But he's is it an analope species? It is an analytic Okay. He's got a horn, Yeah, he's a horn. And they're beautiful. I mean they gorgeous creatures. I really enjoy them. 00:36:56 Speaker 1: We saw a bunch of topey, Yes, many hundreds of tope hundred top which are you know how you explain them? Man, crazy looking animal. They're like being around the river flats, the water game, open planes. What are a couple hundred pounds? 00:37:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, something in that range, A couple hundred two fifty something like that. A big ball, I would put it. 00:37:15 Speaker 1: Like most people who watched grow up watching nature documentaries are familiar with a wilder beast. Yes, there's a couple of animals that to me had a wilder beastie vibe. 00:37:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that sort of higher front and that sort of rocking gait. Yeah, you could certainly say that's true of topy. They're a little small, a little less sort of boxy than a wilder beast, and they're in that kind of harder beast family. Beautiful animals. 00:37:40 Speaker 1: Again, so these are things like we had we weren't if we were hunting, we would have had a hell of a time. Oh sure, yes, we would have had a lot of opportunities. 00:37:47 Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. The reed buck is. 00:37:49 Speaker 1: An animal that like seems that that's going to take some doing. 00:37:51 Speaker 2: Yeah, especially early season here with the high grass, the reed buck have got a lot of places to hide. They're an open plaines thing too, those you know we call them in bookers, you know, those open areas where there's just sort of more sparse vegetation. It's not the forest proper, there's kind of an edge habitat there. They like that edge habitat, so they'll be in those and bookers. But this time of year, unless the grass has been dealt with through burning, they're extremely difficult to spot edge habitat. 00:38:19 Speaker 1: You say, yeah, once again, white tail deer, yep, the Liechtenstein harder beast, quite an abundant critter. 00:38:26 Speaker 2: Yep, Lichtenstein's harder beast, very abundant here. 00:38:29 Speaker 1: And then a coloration that really just says here, I. 00:38:32 Speaker 2: Am yeah, that's sort of rusty brown. 00:38:36 Speaker 1: That's like a that's a beginner's if you want to spot animals. That's a good beginner's animals. One yet, the white rump, white running, reddish body. You're like, there's one. Yeah, ye, I don't do that. I got what's that? 00:38:49 Speaker 2: Very wary, you know, very very keen eyesight, A very worthy species to hunt. Enjoy them a lot. 00:38:57 Speaker 1: The defasser water buck, which has if you ever see a deer on a super cold when they're when deer in the winter put all their hair puff all their hair out the way some birds do. Like he's just trying to keep warm, puffs all his hair out like that. Yeah, the water buck. 00:39:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, they've got a very coarse hair bush buck. H Uh. 00:39:23 Speaker 1: Sable yep, which we hunted for. 00:39:25 Speaker 2: Ye. 00:39:26 Speaker 1: This is like one of the most kind of like holy ship looking of the animals. The bulls. We're hunting sable. The bulls turn black. Yeah, jet black, I mean black like a black horse is black with the main and then like an outstanding set at horns, exceptional, really impressive. 00:39:46 Speaker 2: Sides coming out of their head. 00:39:50 Speaker 4: Inch. 00:39:50 Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I wish yeah, uh forty inch sides's coming out of their head like are really like wow, yeah looking animal in the fact the females are reddish. 00:40:02 Speaker 2: The females are reddish brown, rusty again rusty brown. Uh. 00:40:07 Speaker 3: Nile. 00:40:08 Speaker 1: Crocodile, which is a game animal because if you buy a hunting licenses on your hunting correct hunt crocodiles. 00:40:13 Speaker 2: We saw at night. 00:40:16 Speaker 1: Driving at night, we saw a leopard and also saw a lot of leopard tracks we did, but one we got lucky, probably real lucky, real lucky, and a female leopard came out and boogie down the road in front of us. And at one point Morgan doesn't want to be quoted on this, but we're talking about leopards. So leopard is a mountain a little bit, I would say, like a little bigger than a mountain lion. 00:40:38 Speaker 2: Right. 00:40:38 Speaker 1: So in this area, in this area, you see males that are what one sixty one seventies. 00:40:44 Speaker 2: Yeah, a big male, a being that one sixty one seventy somewhere in the middle there, yep. 00:40:49 Speaker 1: So it can happen with like that can happen with mountain lions. But in some areas their top end kind of passes up the mountain lion top end. But interesting thing about leopard, So leopards are spotted like a jaguar, but there are so many more. There's such a denser and that there's so much more abundant on the landscape. The mountain lions. Yeah, absolutely much smaller home range. There can be many of them in the area, yep, because there's a lot of game and it's much more like like when you're out in this area, they're just around like right now, around our our leopards. These guys commonly hear them at night yep. Absolutely, yeah, they walk right through camp sometimes. 00:41:29 Speaker 2: So we saw one. 00:41:30 Speaker 1: A lot of dikers, a lot of dykers, which is a little shit. 00:41:34 Speaker 2: And how many pounds is that. 00:41:37 Speaker 1: Like her twenty pounds no, unless somewhere in that fifteen twenty range, I'd say maximum. And when you see him, he's usually moving. He's twelve foot leaps. Yeah, very agile clip springers yep, which is a little diker like rock yep. 00:41:58 Speaker 2: Very specialized analoge. They like to hang out on rock out crops. They've got specially adapted little hoofs with kind of a leathery pad on the bottom so they can kind of hop around and get really good traction on the rocks. 00:42:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, all told, we saw I don't know thirty dikers and saw the grand total of one who stood still for one moment. 00:42:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there was one that sits still. 00:42:21 Speaker 1: Yeah, drafts not a game animal. Not a game Tanzania. It's the national animal. It's our it's our bald eagle. Correct or, Now we have a national mammal, the American bison. But let's go with the bald eagle analogy because it shoot that thing very much, but lots of them, lots of daily occurrence. 00:42:40 Speaker 2: Very much so, yet very abundant in this area. Warhog. 00:42:45 Speaker 1: We'll talk about that cape buffalo. We saw and got a rone which is uh sable like we covered off on sables, but the roan bulls or roane color or tan color, Yep, a little bit kind of maybe a little bit of a heavier horn, much shorter, Yeah, heavier horn, slightly shorter and a bit of a stockier body than a sable. Yeah, like a small like a like a I don't know, man like it, like the height of a small mule. 00:43:14 Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, they're tall baboons all over damn plays. Lots of them. 00:43:21 Speaker 1: We saw greater kudoo, Yeah, we saw lots. Yeah that lights, we saw maybe over a dozen zebras. Yeah, yep, we saw a orby we saw it and yeah, and uh a male orbiye was that that little guy yet? The little guy which I had never even heard of. Yeah, and it was a fine specimen, but I didn't feel comfortable shooting something i'd never heard. 00:43:54 Speaker 2: Of, much to our dismay, because they're delicious and it was a particularly good special again, right, Yeah, small, a little longer in the leg than your dayker, a little longer in the body too, and and the neck as well for that matter. But they're they're very pretty pretty animal. Again, they hang out in those and bookers. We saw Eland, We saw Eland. A couple we saw today. One we hadn't seen yet in Pala. We saw it in Pala. Probably more stuff we have, well, hippo if. 00:44:26 Speaker 4: We're collective animal too, in power, a couple of vervet monkey. 00:44:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, we saw hippo. We saw a number of very small cat species. 00:44:39 Speaker 2: We did yet. We saw a ganet cat, an African wildcat, which is rare. And then we saw what's that little bugger it was out running on Yeah, that was a big deal. That was very cool. That's a very reciting. We got extremely lucky on this safari with like headlight spottings of just cool and unusual animals you don't typically run into. 00:45:02 Speaker 1: So we saw we're talking about with the exception of the nile crocodile. We saw over here's the point. We saw over twenty species of like medium to large size mammal game species and it's like this, it's this very obvious point that you could have set it to me and I would have like intellectually accepted it. But you have to live it, like like the places scene is alive all when we're talking about whenever we sit around, and we do it often on this show. We have anthropologists come in, paleontologists come in, archaeologists. We kind of marvel about, like the megafauna, the extinctions of the megafauna in North America. Yep, right where we lost the horse. We lost all these different like draft species. You know, we lost our elephants. Saw a lot of elephant tracks, but some weirdly, Yeah, I was very surprising thig as they are, like we saw elephant tracks a lot of days we cut elan. 00:46:05 Speaker 2: Yeah, the tall grass again was not and you'd be amazed at how well they can just melt into that tall grass. 00:46:11 Speaker 1: And you know that, I've heard a lot of people mention in my readings that people talk about that you sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees a little bit very much. So people be like you're thirty feet from an elephant, and also you realize there's an elephant because it's just like n Yeah, yeah, it's becomes like the lands. It's not it's not an animal on landscape. It almost becomes like the landscape people talk about does yeh and thick stuff. And you also realize like, oh my god, there's a ear. Yeah, they realized it was in front of them as an elephant. 00:46:40 Speaker 2: Yeah. Gray tree trunks sort of with the gray high they are deceptively difficult to spot. 00:46:47 Speaker 1: It'll seem wild to people, but passing like going by a drafte You also, it's it's in plain sight that you don't see it. You read it like you read the legs like trees. Yeah, because you're looking for like I don't know I'm looking for, you know, being especially being a hunter from America, I'm looking for like I'm looking for shit that's about one hundred and fifty pounds. Yeah, and you you know, which is about yay high, right, So it's about like yay high at the shoulder, right, but high at the shoulder. And so you get like when you're out on the hunt, you have a site picture and you're not realizing that four of those trees are like draft legs. 00:47:24 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:47:25 Speaker 1: It's you can't explain it until you live it, but you just you look through them. 00:47:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you do. They are very very well camouflaged. When they stand still, they kind of just they blend in and that kind of the pattern they have just breaks up their outline. So well. They're impressive. 00:47:42 Speaker 1: And to this, to this place, to see an extinction point, it'd be like the richness of of what's here that you have so behind us right now somewhere out here we saw that we didn't see what we saw a lot of the tracks. You have wines, leopards, and then a whole of small cat species. You have a hyena, so then know and like it's not probably even technically a keenaine is it, But like, no, it's not a not a true hyenas jackals afric Oh. 00:48:15 Speaker 2: We saw a jackal. 00:48:18 Speaker 4: That we saw, Yeah, would mongoose go on the list two or no? 00:48:21 Speaker 1: No, no, it's like a weasel equivalent adjacent. 00:48:26 Speaker 2: But then like. 00:48:28 Speaker 1: Dozens of species of horned dozens of kinds of horned animals. 00:48:34 Speaker 2: The biodiversity here is incredible, and the specialization is the thing that always impresses me. You'll find it. The clipspring is a great example an antelope that's adapted just to live on rock out crops, and grays the sort of surrounding margins of those rockout crops, use them for shelter and to get away from predators. It's really impressive. 00:48:58 Speaker 1: You might be like on a big you may be like cruise along a big ridge top, like a big flat top ridge top, and on it you'll get into area where there's outcrops. Then also shooting across the road as a cliffs where you're like you would point out like he's he's associated with that rock outcrop. He that's his little zone. 00:49:15 Speaker 5: Did they Did you get the Keshii wood for a clips bringer? No, pretty cool, call him Buzi mawe, which direct translation is real good. 00:49:24 Speaker 2: Oh really, Oh yeah, pretty cool. 00:49:29 Speaker 1: There was a thing I had, Like I keep pointing out this thing too, like maybe to the point of being annoying. 00:49:34 Speaker 2: Is uh. 00:49:36 Speaker 1: You grew up on wildlife documentaries like out in the Serengetti yep, right, like, and I can see why, Like, if you want to fill a bunch of wildlife, go there. Everything's wide, the grass is you know, there's grass. You have scattered trees and you can just see all the stuff here. You're in a lot of you're in forested country. Oftentimes you're in forested country, so you have in your head that you're gonna have these like panoramic views of all of the off out mingling out in the open in the in the forested area. It's very much like being you know, it's like there's like deciduous trees here. Yes, a lot of times you're you're in that environment where you're like, it's not this great abundance. It's just like scatterings of things, but they're different. But then today we had Today we went out and do a big I don't know what you can call it, well, sort of a floodplane. Yeah, like a big grass floodplane along of a coursing very swampy river like picture kind of river that's got crocodiles and hippos in it, and there's this mass grass flats coming off that. And there was a time where you're like, you're you're standing there and within the thousand yards of you are hundreds of animals. 00:50:45 Speaker 2: Yep, yep. There was an impressive concentration of game down there, and that'll that'll happen more and more as the season wears on. So one of the things that we've been up against on this safari and we've kind of used it to our advantage a little bit, but definitely been somewhat hindered by is that there's still a huge amount of water inside the myombo. Inside the forest, there's little water holes. I mean, we saw a lot of them when we were tracking Buffalo and tracking other game. You'll be kind of walking through the bush and then suddenly there's a bit of soil that's kind of low lying and there's standing water in there, or there's a little spring that's still seeping from the rainy season that in a few weeks here will be dry. Or there's a rock, you know, a rock area where spring's leaking into a rock and there's a collection of water. That stuff is definitely dispersing the game because a lot of animals don't need to go down to the river to drink. There's grass on those and boogers. There's grass on the freshly burnt sections, and there's little pockets of water that they can locate throughout the Miombo forest to where they don't need to concentrate on those floodplains. As those water sources dry up, you'll see a greater concentration of game later in the season. But certainly to your point about the Serengetti, this ecosystem doesn't have that kind of game concentration. It's naturally just a more dispersed, lower kind of yeah, lower yield as far as numbers of game per acre or hectare or whatever metric you want to use. But nonetheless, the biodiversity is incredible. It's unbelievable. 00:52:19 Speaker 1: But today we saw the mass amount we saw there was like you could see legno ahead of us. There's forty k buffalo, about seven zebras, hundreds of toby Yeah, and then there was a couple Okay. 00:52:34 Speaker 2: There's some impalor off there, and there's some water buck as well, but like hundreds, hundreds, Yeah, unbelievable. It was unbelievable, all mixed in, yeah, all mingling together, making noises, the bulls chasing each other around. It was impressive. It was a beautiful morning. 00:52:49 Speaker 1: Uh oh, you know, I was gonna mention we watched one water source go on, don't if you remember that. When we got here we went to shoot. Yes, the bad boons took off, but one bad boon didn't realize I was his left because he had his head down and out in a rock. Ye drinking and I looked, I peered down in there the ore day and that's gone. 00:53:06 Speaker 2: Try Yeah, classic example. So he's like he lost his little water pocket. Yeah yeah, and something like that could support one old buffalo ball or a handful of other planes game species that would come in just for that amount. And so now that's gone, those have moved on to another water source, and that'll kind of continue to happen until a lot of stuff's concentrating around the permanent water. 00:53:26 Speaker 1: One of the things that surprised me most grass fires. 00:53:32 Speaker 2: We got one going. 00:53:33 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm saying I'm gonna I don't know if you know, but I've told him I'm going to try to get a job with Robin Hurt. It's going to be chief Ignition Officers. 00:53:43 Speaker 4: You were going to be VP, I think ignition. 00:53:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, he's going to have like a sort of an assessment rule and monitoring. That's right, Yeah, perfect, signed me up. 00:53:53 Speaker 7: Uh. 00:53:55 Speaker 2: In reading. 00:53:57 Speaker 1: North American history, Native American land use North American history like there's not there's not many like landscape environmental historians that you can that you can talk to about pre European history in North America that don't comment on the active quality of human caused wildfires on the landscape, even to the point where like this is kind of I don't want to open up too I don't want to open up too crazy a thing here, But European diseases when European European diseases kind of like swept the landscape quicker than Europeans did when they when they arrived in the New World. So North and South America, European diseases maybe maybe killed as many as ninety percent of the humans that lived in North and South America. 00:54:52 Speaker 2: It's a it's a debated thing, like. 00:54:57 Speaker 1: There's there's no way it was leftless than fifty There's like no one argues that it was less than fifty maybe as many as ninety percent of people by diseases. Climatologists can see in like you know, like in glaciers and things that store I'm trying not to go too deep in this picture, glaciers where you have annual deposition of atmospheric conditions that you can dig a core and look, Yeah, climatologists can point to when that happened, that bracket of years when the Americans were depopulated by a sudden and dramatic reduction in ash. 00:55:34 Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, that makes sense. 00:55:37 Speaker 1: People were burning, people were benning, and like you read and it's so hard to picture. You're reading about history of like they'd burn to a tract, game, they'd burn to open up the landscape. Right, they burn for agricultural purchase purposes. I mean you read about in the Great Planes, Like a lot of people talk about big fires that the planes tribes. They're like, oh, no, they burned it all off to track buffalo on the planes that goes on here. 00:56:03 Speaker 2: It does. Yeah, this is a fire adapted ecosystem. So same thing you can easily imagine. And there is you know, understanding the people that inhabited this place prior to let's say four to six thousand years ago is a pretty in exact science. It's not really clear exactly who was here and what they were doing, but you can easily imagine that they would have burned for all of those same reasons that we still burn today, which is getting rid of that excessive decadent grass that's of no value feed value to animals, and it is difficult for them to move through and kind of navigate their way through. It's you know, it's clearing out the forest of fuel loads, so you get a very cool, quick moving fire, but it doesn't damage frees through it. Oh yeah, absolutely no. Yeah, we've had to drive through it a number of times because we've lit in one lit one and then realized that the road we were taking is a dead end. 00:56:58 Speaker 1: Right, you can kind of like STARp our go through whatever like doesn't harm the trees. Those very slowly, very low heat. 00:57:06 Speaker 2: And when it's happening this time of year, we don't get rain, so you're not putting runoff into the rivers. And it's we saw on the safari. The way that fire helps the habitat and helps us as hunters kind of goes hand in glove. But the early part of the Safari, we were burning furiously. I mean anything that did take a match, we'd set a match to it, just to burn that decadent grass and exercise of where we're sitting, or it might burn ten thousand acres. You lit a couple of couple of beauties, a couple for the books You should be, You should Be. But then towards the latter part of the Safari, we actually started to see that bearing fruit where we went places that we'd set fire to on day two or three, on day seven, eight nine, and there was already regrowth, green shooting grass and game. 00:58:00 Speaker 1: Absolutely indisputable, indisputable. The game moves on. Like I was laying out a scientific experiment, I still want you to do. I want you to go in and mechanically clear an area, rake it, clip everything, and scrape it out and then burn it area next to it and see what the regrowth pattern it's like. 00:58:21 Speaker 2: Man, it comes back. Well. 00:58:22 Speaker 8: The A good example of that is the runway strip. Yeah that's mode, yeah you guys. And George was saying that how they removed all the grass? 00:58:32 Speaker 5: Yeah, we rake it, so no burning on that. 00:58:36 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty good example you could see. 00:58:38 Speaker 2: And is it green up real nice? Not as well as the burd not close. 00:58:43 Speaker 1: Is there something about that burning man where the grass like it's such a low like we're not talking about new grass, it's just the plants, the grass plants that are there. Reshoots just aweso yep, reshoots. 00:58:55 Speaker 2: There's enough residual moisture in the soil, not so much up here on these sort of rocky escarpments where we are now, a lot of that will stay burned until the new rains come in, but it's great to clear the fuel load out of here. So again you're protecting the forest. If you do get a hotter burn, it could potentially damage this beautiful canopy we've got up here. But down there lower in the lower lying areas, the residual soil moisture is such that when you do one of those burns three four days, you'll have fresh shoots starting to emerge. And it is as opposed to the raked area, it's brand new grass like it's got all you can just see from looking at it, the like the vitality of the area. It's so nourishing looking. It's like bright green and like tender i. And the main point being for a fellow like me and south here is that you are transported to a time and place where anytime you feel like it, you can throw match. Oh yeah, the courage you not can you You're. 01:00:05 Speaker 8: You're doing stuff all day long that you would be a felling for in Montana. 01:00:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, you're driving down the road. Took me a while driving down the road in the track or is just with matches behind. 01:00:18 Speaker 8: We would we would stop to take a p break and you get out, take a leak and I'd. 01:00:23 Speaker 4: Strike a match and light whatever on fire and hop back in the truck. 01:00:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, there we go. Oh is fourth of July? All kinds of stuff. It was fun. 01:00:32 Speaker 1: Matter of fact, one of my prime rippers. 01:00:34 Speaker 4: What's fourth of July? 01:00:35 Speaker 2: That one was a good one. When we were driving out and seeing that whole hillside, it was beautiful. It was pretty cool after shooting a buffalo. 01:00:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, next time, next time. My list the Tetsi Fly odd critter, odd critter, terrible. We last the day at Tetsi Fly. 01:00:52 Speaker 3: Uh. 01:00:53 Speaker 1: He gets a six month run lived six months, she gets a six months. She gets a six month run drawn. To move moving vehicles, yes, very motion sensitive. They want to be where there's motion. 01:01:05 Speaker 2: You don't. 01:01:05 Speaker 1: I normally think about bugs, like if you're cruising along. Let's say you're back home and you're cruising along and you're like, you know you're gonna stop and get out, right. If you drive along on a four wheeler or something or can am and you're like your cruise along and you're like, eventually we're gonna stop and get out. When we stop and get out, we're go and get swarmed by mosquitoes. Here they get you while you're driving, it's all flipped the opposite. While you dri they just stop and the and get. 01:01:30 Speaker 4: You as like a serious apply. 01:01:35 Speaker 2: Chris liking he had that. He liked to get in taste. 01:01:41 Speaker 1: Sometimes they touch and neve, but then like you, you get out of a sudden it's like god, yeah, they like fast. 01:01:50 Speaker 2: I don't know. 01:01:50 Speaker 1: There's an odd bug and they're hard to kill. You gotta really roll them a few times to. 01:01:54 Speaker 2: Get got a pretty strong XO skeleton. 01:01:55 Speaker 1: My my program got, uh, my program got way to developed. Like you, like Morgan, you wear a heavy gauge Do you wear a heavy gauge material? Yeah, he wears like a heavy Yeah. You'd look at me like that might be a little uncomfortable in the hot part of the day, but he's thinking, because it's like super light, they can get through. And eventually kind of got my whole program squared away up to the point where the only thing I wished I had now and then there's. 01:02:24 Speaker 4: A light peer gloves and face covering. Yeah, I mean the drivers are wearing jackets. 01:02:28 Speaker 2: Yeah for peak Tatsy, the driver's seat's a bad place to be. Yeah, we caught the fly box. 01:02:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, the sham Tatsy teas peak tatsy is like what like like five thirty, four thirty to five thirty. 01:02:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, they get a little peckish before before bedtime. In the morning they come in and you might be going through a bad spot and they come in and say hi. But that night they're like ready to rip. Yeah, and then it gets dusk and gone. 01:02:54 Speaker 4: Yeah, smoke's helped to smoke helps you know. 01:02:58 Speaker 3: We did the. 01:03:00 Speaker 2: Off a dunge bucket. Yeah, you get a get a bucket or a small can and you put some elephant dry elephant dunge in there and it's smold as very smoky, smoldering kind of greasy fire and it works its them off. 01:03:12 Speaker 1: Any kind of smoke puts them off. A breeze puts them off. Burned off areas they don't like. There's a certain little pockets though, where you become like very Waird of suckers. And I was always really and I knew him and read about him because how they used to be like a real uh, they used to be like a health crisis in some places and the like for sorry, they used to be like a like a live stock. Yes, they still they are. They still are like a like a like a major livestock. 01:03:40 Speaker 2: Oh, that would kill live So I mean, when you think about how much we get bitten on a day, which is as extreme as it was for some of you guys, and you know it is what it is. It goes with the territory. But he was saying, we didn't see better than the We didn't see the worst day we ever had it four out of let me tell you, even for me and I high tolerance. But the game and live stock are just being bitten constantly, constantly, So they do kill, they do transmit tripanasamiasis to the live stock. The game has a natural immunity, the livestock does not. So for that reason, my relationship with the Tatsy is complicated because I see them very much as part of the guardians of this area and of these wilderness areas, because if they weren't here, it would have been all too easy to just bring cattle in the in years gone by. Now, obviously we have the wonderful protection kind of regime that we have, but you know, in years gone by, when there was a bit more of a free for all as far as that stuff, you know, even during the colonial period and before, these areas would have had a lot of livestock in them, and we're lucky we don't. 01:04:52 Speaker 1: Yeah, if you get into if you go down the path, and I think I'm just starting in and I'm going to do some more. But reading about early Europeans wars trying to penetrate into Africa, like you think that they're all getting dusted off by lions and stuff they were dealing with. Earlier mentioned like European diseases going to the New World and people not being prepared to deal with them. Yeah, Europeans like eighteen hundreds, late seventeen hundreds, whatever, Europeans would come to Africa and insect borne pathogens absolutely flattened by them. Yeah, it would be like that'd be like the thing that would get them. Oh, it's when you read they didn't understand where it was coming from. No, No, there wasn't that knowledge of parasites and whatnot. And when you read the accounts and memoirs and biographies of those early explorers, they were constantly sick with the fever, you know, and you know, fever's kind of the catch all term they use, so you can extrapolate a lot of it was probably malaria. Dengey's another one blackwater fever. I mean even even stuff you know, water born stuff too, that sort of under that catch all of fever. But they were constantly sick. Morgan showed us a tree they called the fever tree. It is like down in some of the swamp lands near the river, there's this tree that is kind of an inviting looking tree. 01:06:10 Speaker 2: That's a very shady tree here. 01:06:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's and people like traveling on the river whatever would come up and make camp and you'd go under the tree, and then then eventually all get sick. And he was saying, they're like, there's something about that tree. 01:06:21 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:06:22 Speaker 2: I realized that false correlation between the tree and it was like, you're right near the water, that's where the mosquitoes are, and so you wind up getting malaria. U. 01:06:33 Speaker 1: One of the highlights of the trip for sure. You talked to the trackers when when we first did a show. One of the things that excited me about wanting with you it is, uh, how respectful you were to the to the job of the trackers. How you put a lot of credit on the trackers right, and how you also like you kind of put it not not mystically, but uh uh you put it like they understand things that you you don't and won't never understand. They see things that you don't and won't ever understand what you're looking at, to the point where sometimes when we're out, like you've just gotten to a point where you just take the word and you don't need to be like, well show me what you're talking about. Yeah, like we're going we were at one point track and some buffalo and we're going along and I'm like, just I don't see what in the world you know? And I say to Morgan, I don't get what they're looking at. Morgan said, that's the point. They see things, not that you don't won't he said, they see things that you can't see. And at the end of that trail is a buffalo. 01:07:45 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:07:45 Speaker 1: Every time, it's just like it's and so you'll just at times they'll be like that's what's going on, and you never like, well show me the evidence. 01:07:56 Speaker 2: You're just like got it. I'm white. 01:08:00 Speaker 1: You don't like, you don't go like, are you sure show me what you're talking about. I'm like, what does he mean? What's he talking about? What's he looking at? Morris is beyond that is like it's just what it is. That's just the truth. 01:08:12 Speaker 2: That's what it is. It is the absolute truth. I mean they Yeah, these guys are brilliant. They are brilliant, brilliant humans in so many more ways than one. And you're the tracking is it's masterful. I mean, it's an incredible thing to watch. But they're real hunters too, Oh yeah, I mean they really like hunting tactics. Wise, I do. I bounce a lot of ideas off them. Oftentimes, if I see one of the guys has got a concept of how we might complete a stalk, I'll run with it because they have great instincts on that stuff too. They're very very sharp on the hunting piece obviously, the tracking piece and game spotting their second to none. And like fun guys to be around also. 01:08:58 Speaker 1: Through the language barrier. Yeah no, just ready to laugh and like just tuned in. There's a thing like this thing I marveled about. And one of the ways I marveled about was families at work. Marveled about is families that have for generations and generations been in livestock where I can't prove it, and it's like I feel like there's some kind of science there and that it's not well understood. But if you came into it, and I'm anything but a rancher at all, but like if you came into ranching at like twenty or thirty years old. 01:09:33 Speaker 2: You're never going to catch up. Yeah, yeah, that's right. 01:09:35 Speaker 1: There's something you can't put your finger about it. Like I said, it defies scientific understanding. But like someone a kid who's born into a livestock family sort of like through some kind of like genetic freakishness, absorbs a bunch of the knowledge. Yeah, so me like like a little kid, like he's looking at a horse and he's seeing a set of things. Yeah, and you're looking at a horse and you see a horse. 01:09:59 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, do you follow me? 01:10:00 Speaker 1: It's like there's certain things like that you just absorb and you're never gonna catch them, right, And there's like it's like with the trackers. It's not like the knowledge of what track is, what is somehow uh in a genetic code, but there's just something about. 01:10:21 Speaker 2: You're not gonna catch them. No, you'll never catch them, you know what I mean. 01:10:24 Speaker 1: And it's like it's like there's something about having that. There's something about like the upbringing, the attributes that would have been necessary to like exist on the landscape for a long time. It's just something that like it probably isn't taught. 01:10:38 Speaker 2: No, it's not taught. 01:10:39 Speaker 1: There's it's just like notice that they can't I'm like finding like I can't find the words for it. Like you're not gonna catch them, No, you'll never catch them. 01:10:46 Speaker 4: There. 01:10:47 Speaker 2: My theory that I've kind of explained before is they're like both born and made. They have some inherent traits. I think a lot of it's probably what you're talking about just being raised. The environment they're raised in has kind of shaped them. They obviously got excellent ice, which is something that's you know, you're born with that, but they have a knowledge. 01:11:04 Speaker 1: Guys are using the best of the best too. Oh yeah, so you're not just grabbing guys up the street. You're using guys that stand out as professional, exemplary, like the best. 01:11:14 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they are absolutely so. Among their peers, they're good. Oh, among their peers, they're extremely well regarded. I mean, they're they're famous, they're brilliant. And I've always been fascinated by tracking and not in the sense of like will show me because I don't believe you, but a lot of times I'll ask to see what they're looking at. And I've been doing this for years and years and years, and there are a lot of times, probably upwards of twenty five percent of the time, I can't see anything, like I could not perceive that there is any change in the in the like stuff that's on the ground. And they can say, no, that's you know, it's walked. They're they're they're there. So it's a beautiful thing to watch, and I'm so glad that we got the opportunity to apply it to things other than just Buffalo. We tracked a Ward Hug for a while, we tracked Sable for a while. What else did we track? I think that was kind of it that in Buffalo. But yeah, they're also one that's not gonna happen. They'll come and tell Moregan ain't gonna happen. Yeah, for sure. 01:12:13 Speaker 1: He started running again and it's yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened something. We'd already bumped something. We bumped it twice, Yeable, So they bumped them, bumped them again, kind of like very light bump, and then we did like a little bit more of a bump, and then we filed and then they're like they're running again, like. 01:12:32 Speaker 4: Based on track. 01:12:33 Speaker 2: Never mind, yeah, just based off track. 01:12:35 Speaker 1: Really, A really great moment too with the trackers is one time we're going down and they spot a track from a truck. 01:12:41 Speaker 2: Someone spots track. 01:12:44 Speaker 1: And I still don't really understand what they saw, but oh no I do. 01:12:47 Speaker 2: They're like a broken piece of grass. Whatever the hell? 01:12:50 Speaker 1: And we get out and they very quickly like there's happens. We've got two trucks to get us. There's four trackers, and they very quickly come to a consensus. No dissenting voice. There's four bulls going that way, like what coma? So at that point I said, Morgan, help me out here. What are they talking about? Why they all know that there's four balls, you know, and this isn't like eight foot tall grass. 01:13:13 Speaker 2: They're like one's here, one was here, one was here, one was here, And I'm like, okay, and there. 01:13:22 Speaker 1: Was, but there was like very little. It's like a very I mean we're talking like minutes minutes. No. 01:13:27 Speaker 2: You have to have complete faith, and they are the most faith worthy people that you'll ever find. I mean faith in their ability, faith in their loyalty, faith in their desire to see you be successful. You can you can have that and you will not be disappointed like they will. They will redeem you in every way oh another. Really, there's so many things that mentioned, like the way they read grass, like grass it's been bent, yep, grass that's been stepped on. How to tell how long ago grass was stepped on? But also what's really cool is there's these birds ox peckers yep. They like a lot of animals, and they like buffalo. Yeah, they seem to like buffalo the most. And a real awareness of like what's going on with the ox peckers. They got daybreak where the ox peckers are headed to. Yeah, and then that one time we got in that real tall grass and they were like pinpointing. We knew they were out in front of us somewhere, and just by the bird chatter yep, they could hear that the oxpecker chatter like pointing like right right there, yeah, right there. Because you can hear the birds. 01:14:38 Speaker 1: They can hear the birds that are on them exactly chattering back and forth between is fascinating. 01:14:45 Speaker 2: It's amazing. All the little cues that they used to just read these animals is amazing. Okay, uh the honey guys. Yes, there is a. 01:14:58 Speaker 1: Uh, there's a type of honey production that goes on. It's in the farmland, it's in the woods, whatever. There's a type of honey production goes on. It's really interesting where it's like, instead of having a honey hive that you buy like that, you populate with honey bees. 01:15:11 Speaker 2: Yep. 01:15:14 Speaker 1: Farmers and others guys on the woods will just build a out of natural materials, build a hive box and hang away to hell up in a tree. 01:15:23 Speaker 2: Yep. It'll draw. 01:15:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, it'll be colonized. It'll draw a colony bees and it's like you're running a trap line. Yeah, very similar to go out and I like those parallels. Yeah, you go out and you like, see if it got taken over by bees, and guys will climb way up in the trees. There's a honey season here. You can explain that that's wrapping up right now. Yeah, we're right at the tail end of it now. So it's I think it's twice a year. They come into the game reserve under permit from the district supervised by US and Tanzania Wildlife Management Authority to harvest their own honey from their own hives, and we've placed a lot of stipulations on their activities as far as what roads and routes they can use, what kind of equipment they can use, what kind of vehicles they can use to access the area, and the hives themselves. As you saw in the past, the sort of popular method of manufacturing a hive was to like ring bark, basically take all the outer layer of bark in a sort of anywhere from three to four foot long section off of quite a large tree, let's say, something that was sort of, you know, close to twenty inches around and then and then sort of staple that back together with pieces of wood with pegs and then put end caps on it, and that was the hive. 01:16:44 Speaker 2: The problem honey badgers don't get no exactly seah, honey badgers and other things that would interfere with it. They'll hang it up there. And the problem with that was, if you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of hives, every one of those hives has been resulted in a good sized mature tree being killed. Yeah, thousands of thousands of probably yeah, thousands of high So we've we've very much worked with these guys to implement a rule where that's not allowed anymore. They have to be manufactured. They're still manufactured from wood, but the wood has to be sourced from outside the game reserve. 01:17:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, and a guy might come in they're camped out, and they go around and do the deal. But we ate some of the honey heroes. It's terrific, super good honey. So that's like I remember when I got here seeing the first one of those in the tree and be like, what the hell's out of the tree? Just then interesting feature, absolutely not on the landscape. Yeah, uh, a consult other year. 01:17:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those activities that that we permit because it's a way that the local communities can extract value from the reserve in a way that's non consumptive. It's not destroying anything, it's not taking anything away from the reserve. It's, you know, a sustainable activity. 01:18:05 Speaker 1: Another another sustainable activity that again regulated. And it sounds like you guys, from a from your your foundations, from your wild a foundation perspective, and from the law enforcement perspective that you're involved in and managing a big chunk of ground. There's a fishery, yep, but it's also a fishery that that without regulation can kind of run a mark for sure. 01:18:31 Speaker 2: Yeah it could go. Yeah, it's it's a gill netting. So there's the lake itself, Lake Cigara, and then the Igala River. There's permitted fishing in the reserve water is allowed in both places, less so on the river, more so on the lake, but it definitely needs to be policed. There's issues with excessive use of certain types of nets, especially really small net A lot of them are converted mosquito nets or fishing nets that have been lined with a mosquito net that really just catches everything and even those small fish will be dried and they have nutritional value. And again, we want to see people get adequate supplies of protein. We see people do well from harvesting enough fish that they can sell some excess to pay for school fees or whatever else they want to pay for. We want to see all this happen. We want to see all this being done. But the risk is that if it just becomes a free for all, you get population collapse in those fish stocks and the game. Reserve waters are an extremely important part of the piece of the puzzle because they refill the breeding the spawning grounds there allow the waters that are more heavily fish that are outside the game reserve to be sort of restocked with fish from the reserve waters. So we're very focused on keeping those waters healthy for the benefit of those communities as well as the benefit of wildlife. 01:20:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't want it, like I'm gonna choose my words of care of because I don't want it in any way. 01:20:03 Speaker 2: Hack on. I don't want anyway. 01:20:06 Speaker 1: Hack on like government enforcement, because you're dealing with like huge, very very wild, very remote areas. Absolutely we're talking about in this landscape, we're talking about places that are seasonally inaccessible absolutely okay, with scatterings of human populations around. And like when someone thinks of if you're coming from the US, you're thinking of like poaching. You got one thing in your head. You think of a guy that you know generally, it's like a guy that sees a huge buck and he doesn't want to wait for season, and it makes a big like a poacher got caught because he had killed like a buck out of season, right, or he's keeping he kept ten walllle eyes instead of five or whatever. We kind of have this sort of a little more benign notion of poaching. Our threshold is pretty low, you know, like tolerance is pretty low, and you also have an enforcement structure that's pervaded. 01:21:00 Speaker 2: Yes, right, it's hard for it. 01:21:02 Speaker 1: It's would be hard for like an industrialized poaching outfit to exist outside of view, right. 01:21:09 Speaker 2: But here. 01:21:12 Speaker 1: Because of the remoteness and just historical factors and all kinds of stuff, like poaching winds up being a poaching winds up being a thing that can have like population level impacts. Absolutely it can, and it just doesn't play out anymore. 01:21:27 Speaker 2: It doesn't. It's not like that in the US, No, No, it's for sure. The US is way beyond that stage. And poaching here it will take on a commercial flavor too, where it becomes a commercial once it seems like it wants to it sort of naturally wants to move that direction, wants to go that way, for sure, And there's there's a subsistence element to it which one can be somewhat sympathetic to, and certainly we have been in the past and even in the present. You know, as you've seen here, a lot of our trackers have ex poaches. A lot of people involved in our anti poaching team or ex poaches or guys that were at risk of kind of getting drawn into poaching. So there's that subsistence element that one can be somewhat sympathetic to, but it very quickly evolves from that into mass snarings of thousands and thousands and thousands of heads of game. And that's not conversant with any kind of native hunting tradition. It's not conversant with anything that's sustainable. It's not conversant with any of the Tanzanian government's goals as far as management and as far as providing people with protein and employment and development opportunities. It is something that's just completely out of hand and verges on criminality. 01:22:47 Speaker 1: Well, we like we live through this, like in the US, like this this is very like that era is very much was part of our own culture. 01:22:59 Speaker 2: Yeah, where you had, you know, we had. 01:23:03 Speaker 1: Even with even with Europeans when Europeans can't there's like a sort of subsistence economy, and when the moment was right, it would really quickly move to like industrialized commercial stuff, and we were like, through very concerted effort, we eventually reined it in, kind of destroyed the markets, de incentivized it, and got there. You can see here and in some of these wilderness atmospheres here, it's probably a very similar situation than what we had in Yeah. Then what we went through too with that trying to get trying to find a point where you had some level of sustainable equilibrium of harvest versus exploitation, you know, harvest, a balance between some harvest not tipping into grotesque over harvest. 01:23:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's absolutely right, and it and it goes together with development too. Right. If you've got people that are very pole with very few opportunities like you would have had in the frontier of the United States at one time, you know, very limited industrial opportunities, then there's got to be away. Here in Africa, our big focus and our big goal is to make sure that wildlife and the presence of wildlife and the presence of these protected areas serves the people on the periphery, because as soon as it stops doing that, it just becomes a target for poaching. And once everything's poached, once it's over utilized, the game populations are very low because of poaching, then it becomes no longer viable as somewhere where you can run a hunting operation. And then those areas are then subject to further degradation from things like logging, mining, et cetera, et cetera, as that protection goes away, and then you have the potential to lose a whole landscape, not just in a whole habitat, not just your populations of wild animals. 01:24:52 Speaker 1: And you can go any direction from here, I'm sure, and fine places where slash and burn. 01:24:56 Speaker 2: Egg is denuded of wildlife, denuded of denuded of everything just agriculture, which again we're not in the business of telling people they can't make a living from agriculture. But these protected areas we have are so important and such a mass provides such a massive opportunity to these local communities as well as you know, the international community and the Tanzanian nation as a whole. So that's what we're focused on. That's what we're doing here. Uh, last thing on my list then we'll do. We'll do any little wrap up far as anybody has. 01:25:31 Speaker 1: But Uh, it was funny because there's certain impressions of just kind of like seeing Safari imagery and Safari stuff. You had these like questions over the years that you wondered about, and so many of those have been satisfied. Now I want to you guys both with a couple of these is are. For instance, I had no idea like why you don't see camouflage. Yeah it and like like in an African safari culture and aneral like camouflages of the thing. 01:26:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's well, it's not done. For one thing, military style camouflage is illegal here and Tanzania, it's not allowed. That's for the military only. Secondly, it it doesn't provide if I'm perfectly honest, with the exception of bow hunting, it doesn't provide a huge advantage for our style of hunting. You know, a lot of our stuff is really close quarters where movement is going to be the thing that gives you away. Movement and sound. You know, a lot of those buffalo we bumped, they didn't see us, they smelled us or hurt us and took off and so yeah, we I also think it's yeah, it's something we just don't need. Yeah, it was the legality aspect of it. And I've heard in a number there's a number of countries, the number of prohibit it's I don't know, it's just it's for the it's for the military, it's for the military. Don't be wearing it. Yeah, uh no backpacks, So that's a big one. When you hunt dangerous game, you need to be as unencumbered as possible. You need to have you I mean even these some I see some fairly elaborate kind of bino harnesses. Sometimes your one was about the maximum amount of shit that I want to see. That was about no, and you are, to your credit, it did never held you back. But the less stuff you could have on your person when hunting dangerous game, the better, because you need to be able to potentially react very quickly to a situation. And if you're getting your scope and your rifle stock and whatnot hung up in harnesses and straps, that's no good. If you're if you're not getting a proper gun fit because you've got another extra inch or inch and a half of backpack strap with your silly little water straw there or whatever, that's no good. You need to be able to find your sight's quick You need to be able to get on that target quickly, and that means being get unincumbent and get out of the way, climb a tree maybe if things go really sideways. So the less nonsense you can have on your person, the better you are positioned to hunt dangerous and that tires in. 01:28:15 Speaker 1: Another one is like, yeah, I see everybody carrying no slings. But another thing is like less and thick junk, like in thick cover. Yeah, when you got maybe you got like a wounded buffalo that you gotta be very carefully doesn't come for you. You just don't want anything that hangs out, slows anything down one hundred percent, even unwounded buffalo. Remember when we were tracking those three balls through that kind of river eye, Well it was like a dried creek bed, but the vegetation was thick, and oftentimes you had to change your rifle position, you know, three or four times in a minute, because one minute you're ducking under something, one minute you're squeezing between two things, you know, and so you're changing your rifle position all the time. The sling use isn't universally like not practiced here. A lot of professional hunters, a lot of people use slings. I'm personally not into it for that reason. We just discussed and then kind of tying back to the previous thing, I think that when you're hunting dangerous game, if you have your rifle in your hands. You have a small but not insignificant advantage in getting that rifle into action quicker. That might save your life. And out here you never know. I mean, when you're walking past this eight nine foot tall grass that's like a wall, you can't see more than two feet into it. You know there is poaching in this area. It's very minimal, but it is. There could be a wounded buffalo from a poacher laying right there and you walk past it. You know, Yeah, Rogers roound it. 01:29:52 Speaker 2: He didn't wound it. It was wounded by lions or something. And he never had any clue that was there until it was coming at him. So when you have that rifle in your hand in those kind of situations, you better position to respond, in my opinion, and that's why I like, I favor what we call Africa carry we hold it over your shoulder. 01:30:10 Speaker 1: Okay, sore give what what are your overall impressions of Africa? 01:30:14 Speaker 2: Man? 01:30:14 Speaker 4: Oh? 01:30:15 Speaker 7: I mean phenomenal landscape, animals? I was I was thinking to which we touched on, just the people that we went down to. What community was that Gordo Gordo's It's when we went to loombe like driving through those towns, just the kind of the cellar up, cellar up, celebratory kind of just everyone's happy, but quietly confident too, like there's not any angst, it seems, and I know this is just like you know, a scratching of the surface, but just people would smile and wave at us. And then we had a meal with one of the staff's families and they were so appreciative to have us, and just overall, like the landscape animals, people all are just they seem very comfortable and what they are and who they are. 01:31:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a great observation, Panzany. And people are really happy. Yeah, and it's I mean it is. It's a hard life out here in the bush. You know, you don't want to sugarcoat it and say that they've you know, they've I mean it's really really a lot of manual labor and a lot of hardship to be able to exist out here in these very remote rural places. But everyone just has such a a great view on life and a great way of going about everything. 01:31:32 Speaker 4: And the teamwork. 01:31:33 Speaker 2: Oh, it's like a big family. And the loyalty that that people will show you here is something you just you can't find in many places. 01:31:40 Speaker 4: And the mamba still. 01:31:44 Speaker 1: When Morgan I were in Massilan or the crocodile when Morgan I were in Thesiland before we came here to hunt, I was referring to is My family came out for a week and we hung around and did did some different things, and Morgan took us while they're viewing out mass Island in one of the hunting areas, and we're having a conversation with the Massi people like, you know, like how do they perceive us? 01:32:06 Speaker 2: How do we perceive them? 01:32:08 Speaker 1: And Mortgam made it comment he goes, I feel like they look at us and think we're idiots. Yeah yeah, they're like, dude, I got hundreds of goats, I got hundreds of cattle all this like we you know, yeah we have land. 01:32:26 Speaker 2: You know, probably like whatever we got, it's not because I don't you know, they're not us. 01:32:33 Speaker 1: These guys problems totally totally just like I'm very yeah, it's just a different perception. But now the people are the people are phenomenal. I do wonder like all the time you kind of like it's very uh it's harmlessly self centered, but unavoidable. 01:32:55 Speaker 2: To be like what, like what do they think of us? No? 01:32:58 Speaker 6: Yeah, just out of curiosity, like what would it be Like. 01:33:00 Speaker 1: How do you picture of like people that like pay money to come hang out? You like, what is the idea? Like, what is the idea going on? Whatever it is, whatever the thought is it somehow is like the Trackers and stuff that grew up here, whatever the thought is is damn sure friendly. 01:33:19 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you know what I mean. 01:33:21 Speaker 1: It's like it's just like yeah, protective, like very protective and kind of like looking out for what you got going on, watching you don't kind of make don't make any mistakes, and and like very warm. There's there's some things you're never going to understand, you know what I mean. There's there's like some aspects you're never going to understand with the Trackers, Like meal time for them is very different than meal time for us. They kind of communally out. 01:33:47 Speaker 4: Of a common Yeah that's great. 01:33:49 Speaker 1: They'll look like a common they'll have like some common dishes. They'll sit the guys will sit around together in a circle, no chairs, just different and they look at when they look at us eating, they're probably like what with all the bullshit? Why is it such a production. But you can't you don't know, you can't tell what anybody's thinking. But just like just a warmth and like human camaraderie there in the people involved. You know, the hunting brings you together in a powerful way. I think it's like it's a cross cultural thing. 01:34:24 Speaker 2: Like and you see how invested they get in your success to super. 01:34:31 Speaker 1: Excited, oh yeah, to find success. They are ecstatic driving success. It is like there's no kind of like, oh, this guy's not really into it. I mean those dudes are like here, they're playing for keeps. 01:34:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, they're all up in my business sometimes like make this happen, you know, playing keeps telling me which way to go. I'm like, yeah, I'll take it. Let's do this. 01:34:56 Speaker 1: What's your impression, Seth. You know a lot of lasting friendships I did. 01:35:00 Speaker 8: Yeah, my favorite part was the trackers, Like yeah, by far, just hanging out with those dudes and like seeing how they operate, and like I wish I knew more of the native language here because I would love to just like pick those guys' brains about whatever's going on. 01:35:18 Speaker 3: You know. 01:35:19 Speaker 8: Yeah, but yeah, just watching like you know, the one day we're just hauling ass down the road and like Frank's yelling him to stop because he saw a buffalo track like in dry dirt as we're going like it just they would do shit like that all the time. 01:35:35 Speaker 3: It was mind blowing to me incomprehensible. 01:35:38 Speaker 2: What they what they can see, what they pick up on is it's unbelievable. Yeah. 01:35:43 Speaker 8: And then just like kind of teaching them some American words and them teaching us Swahili words like yeah, it was I I'd never laughed so much with someone that, like I don't even understand what the color said. 01:35:59 Speaker 2: It's true, Yeah, it's true. 01:36:01 Speaker 1: Some comedy like transcend, Yeah totally. 01:36:04 Speaker 2: And they've all got a phenomenal sense of humor. Yeah they all day yeah yeah yeah, that was not righteous stuff. That was fun. And then lighting fires was just a blast fire lights great. 01:36:16 Speaker 8: You really hone in on like what type of grass is the best, and like where you should be throwing and like what time of day you should you should be hitting it hard? 01:36:28 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, moto fire. Oh and what's the word for white people zongu mazoomu as a singula? Yeah, what's fire again? Moto moto moto mazoong go. 01:36:45 Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's everything they went like, it's everything they went. Let you do growing up? Oh yeah, you can't flick matches. Yeah, it's like, you know what's funny, Like at our at our fish sack, we draw the water off the creek so a kid can stand there with the hose, oh, shoot holes all day and no one ever yells at you. 01:37:01 Speaker 2: Ye, it's just. 01:37:04 Speaker 1: You know, like all you do brow up, all you want to do is just to be able shoot the holes, but your parents won't let you, and you can just shoot the holes. So kids can stand there twenty four hours a day playing at the holes and yelled at It's like that with light and fire. 01:37:14 Speaker 2: Shot light fires yeah. Yeah. 01:37:18 Speaker 8: Yeah, So that was cool and just seeing the culture and how how the folks here live and it was awesome. And then the honting the hunting part was different on my end, just because we're truck two. They just kind of miss out on a lot of things. 01:37:31 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:37:31 Speaker 8: Well, I mean, yeah, in all fairness, I will say a little bit of riding truck one, but to hang with the big dogs. Yeah, but now that the trackers and stuff was awesome. 01:37:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say, like all in all man for me, like absolutely, I've I've texted and had multiple exchanges with friends of mine back home, and I'm like, dude, like life changing, Yeah, life changing experience. I mean percent I will refer to things I seen here, story, I'll tell stories from here for the rest of my life, and then like like the rest of my life, I'll feel like the impact of people I met and lifestyles on encountered skill sets, Like absolutely life changing. There's been a handful of trips like that, Like you know, going a couple of times, a couple times down to South America changed my changed me outside of my hunting self and hunting interests changed me, but also really changed me in that area of focus around hunting, you know, the culture of hunting, the sort of the global landscape of hunting. Like both of those things have changed, but also change even outside of wildlife, just experiencing like another continent, you know, different culture, and it had had the opportunity to bounce around a little bit, Like we went to some larger towns, yep, went to some villages, went to some very remote villages, went to some remote wilderness you know, over the course of a little over three weeks, and yeah, life changing so hell that the thing that drew me, it seems so small now. The thing that drew me is this idea that you can hunt this hunt Kate Buffalo, and you gotta worry about getting stopped in close quarters. Yeah, it's like that you're gonna get up like you know, you're gonna get up to you know, an animal in whatever, fifteen hundred pounds plus animal and and people are making shots on these things at like twenty yards thirty yards closer and there's a chance they're going to kill you. 01:39:36 Speaker 2: I was like, sounds great. 01:39:40 Speaker 1: Now, it almost seems silly, like that's a thing for sure, And we heard plenty of stories about it, like that's not the experience we had at all, but it's part of the lore. 01:39:48 Speaker 2: Ye you know. 01:39:49 Speaker 1: It's like it's like a it's a type of hunting where you gotta be careful, right, and that's exciting, Like there's like there's more on your mind, right, you got to play everything. You gotta play your situation right. And as we're gonna explained, a lot of that is if you wound an animal animal and track it, you enter a whole other game. 01:40:06 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:40:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't do that. We got one in it that we didn't need to trail it. But like in trailing them, you enter another realm for sure, Like it's a different dimension. Yeah, it's a very unpleasant one, I might add. I far prefer the hunts that go the way yours did. And yeah, I'm very I'm very, very satisfied to hear your take on all this, because I've been banging this drum for years now that Safari is so much more than just hunting, you know, there is just all these elements to it, and it tends to get you know, it gets wrapped up in just killing exotic stuff, which of course is a component of what we do here on a very selective basis, But there's so much more to it, and it was great to see, very gratifying for me, and I'm sure George feels the same way to see the whole crew, you know, yourself and just everyone that's been out here part of this production. Just kind of soaking that up, you know, and getting a lot out of that and kind of coming with really insightful questions and making a connection to the guys across that language barrier that I think, Yeah, if I went and asked them, they'd say the same thing that it was. 01:41:15 Speaker 2: It was a rare example of people really immersing themselves in it. So for that, I'm grateful. Man. 01:41:23 Speaker 1: The thing we didn't get into, but also just kind of like life changing too, is like like my cultural self whatever, you know, like a like as a person that lives on the globe, Like that part of me has changed, right, just to see this, like I said, a new continent and some of the new cultures. The hunting thing too, but the culinary culinary stampar, the sort of journey of the meat and the way meets used and the way meat is coveted, and the way meat is preserved, the way meats enjoyed fresh. Like we didn't get any of that stuff, but just fascinating. 01:41:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, we could do a whole show just on that. 01:42:00 Speaker 1: Fascinating man, how stuff goes from like how stuff goes from the bush to the guys to the guys family, the people in the communities, the way they utilize it, the different perceptions of it. The thing Morgan pointed out is, uh, all of it has huge value, right, Like we'll talk about Oh the backstraps are so good, and it's just like with a lot of the guys it's like it just is all enormously valuable. And when you butcher an animal. I went over with the you know, I went over to check on the sable and yesterday and they were working on the stomach. 01:42:40 Speaker 2: You know. 01:42:41 Speaker 1: Uh, when we when we left the buffalo, we left the grass clippings that were in his stomach, and we left some intestine and the lungs. I think that's it. Everything everything consumed. Yeah, absolutely, and the tail up, well tail, yeah, consume we both ends. Yeah, because we got the tongue and we got the delicious we got. We sampled the mid we sampled the mid range too, but we had the tail in the tongue. 01:43:08 Speaker 2: Yeah, we definitely hit the mid section. That was cool. 01:43:10 Speaker 1: And then going into going to a village and seeing how like dry meat is a real commodity drive me is a real asset. It's like huge, like the climate's perfect for it. You cut meat and strips and dry it. And we went into a village to uh, one of the guys that works here, he brings at the end of the season, he'll bring bags of meat home. We went to a village and the way they take dry meat, cut it up, rehydrate it, turned it into turned it into recipes, you know, turned it into food. But instead of it going to a freezer, it goes to a dry preserved state, to a rehydrated state, turned into just delicious food. Yeah, fantastic, very cool to see that stuff and all cooked with what heat everything. It was crazy, man, amazing. Stripped the bones down also when I went over there, the bones that had all been they'd stripped the bones down to make dry meat. The bones were all on the grill to get the mirror the Yeah, they're they're cooking all them, all them femurs and shin bones were laid out on a fire. 01:44:15 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's proper. It's proper utilization here and it makes a big difference to people's lives. And you know, there's you can go really down the rabbit hole of studies about how protein availability, brain development, ability to focus, all that kind of stuff. So it has a very important role to play in these communities where again livestock are not common and not used in the way that we would recognize in the West. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many things. I don't want to go on all night. It's getting late. But even that, like the last thing, we're going to open up. Many people are unbanked. 01:44:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, and more than we're saying wealth is stored as livestock, right, It's like it's not It's not like I'm gonna send those all off to slaughter this spring. It's like people have herds as a way of wealth management. 01:45:08 Speaker 2: Yep. And that's where they stole. All their money's tied up in cattle and goats. It's like morn in the bank. 01:45:14 Speaker 1: Transactions, yeah, absolutely, they transact with them too. Yeah, and thes Islam organs like goats are for small transactions. Calls are for big transaction. 01:45:22 Speaker 4: Cash. 01:45:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, He's like, that's your pocket change and at your check, but that's exactly it. Yeah, just fascinating man. I'm I'm so glad we're able to make this work. 01:45:33 Speaker 2: I'm so glad you came. 01:45:34 Speaker 1: I'm glad you guys told me crazy Kate Buffalo stories and and got me into it. 01:45:38 Speaker 2: Thanks for bringing us, Yeah, of course, Yeah, thank you guys for coming to seriously professional team. It's been fun. A lot of loss on this trip too. Some of them might make the make the cot, but some of them definitely enough TV friendly. 01:45:55 Speaker 1: And George, good luck dude, on your uh on what you got going on. 01:45:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, No, I'm looking. 01:46:00 Speaker 1: I just feel like if they weren't, I feel like, if you were gonna get next failure, Like I feel like if you were going to fail your apprenticeship, I'd be able to I'd be able to see it coming a little bit. I feel like you might be all right. Yeah, he's got a bright future in this business. 01:46:18 Speaker 2: Thank you. 01:46:19 Speaker 1: I feel like if you were on the outs, we would have picked up on it. 01:46:23 Speaker 2: I don't know. 01:46:23 Speaker 1: We're with George again, Yeah, they'd have they'd have you over digging a hole back of the house, George Wild, dig that hole deeper. 01:46:33 Speaker 2: You know, a lot of our lot of our success on this trip can be attributed to George's efforts. So for sure, a bright future. Oh it's been a pleasure having you. 01:46:44 Speaker 1: Remember I said we saw dozens of war hogs before we saw a keeper. 01:46:48 Speaker 2: George spotted the king. 01:46:49 Speaker 1: Yes, sir, all right, thank you guys both for putting us on. 01:46:54 Speaker 2: It's a lot of work, and thanks man. I loved it absolutely, thanks for coming. Enjoyed it immensely. 01:46:58 Speaker 4: Right,