00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, home of the modern whitetail hunter, and now your host Mark Kenyon. Hey'll, welcome to Where to Hunt. I'm your guest host Tony Peterson, and today we're talking with dear researcher Dr John McRoberts about a radio collared buck that walked nearly two hundred miles. Welcome to Wired to Hunt, which is brought to you by First Light. I am your guest host, Tony Peterson. Mark is out of the office this week. He is down I think he said at a Cosplay convention in Tuscaloosa. He said he was gonna be a anime samurai or something. Anyway, I hope Mark's having fun down there. I've got the rains to Where to Hunt today, and I've got a fascinating guest with me. His name is Dr John McRoberts, and he's done all kinds of wildlife research in his life, some really cool international studies, but he's also led some studies here in the States, including a pretty comprehensive two regions study in Missouri that they're still parsing through all the data. But it's the one that came uh that came out recently where this buck that they had Collard walked nearly two hundred miles from his home range as a three and a half year old and kind of set the dear world on fire a little bit, because a lot of us think that dear you know, stick to a core range, they disperse when they're young bucks, and then they find a nice area they like and they hang out there. And this GPS study kind of turn that around on its head and really has has opened up some possibilities that maybe that buck that you think is going to live on your farm forever, he could just lie out and take off. It also kind of explores the possibility that this was an anomalous one off event. Uh. John has so much interesting information. It's always it's always a pleasure to talk to wildlife researchers who are also passionate hunters, and he definitely Uh is that I think you're gonna absolutely love this episode. John, Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Tony, it's a pleasure to be here with you today. So you're you're like a secret celebrity in the hunting industry right now because you're you're you're one of the one of the folks behind this research study that's getting all this this crazy press in the in the white tail space, specifically on this buck who took a crazy journey that you guys tracked. And we're gonna get to that a little later, but let's let's talk a little bit about how you got into wildlife biology and you've you've done some really cool research not just with white tales but but other game animals as well. Where did that come from? Well, like a lot of biologists these days, I got interested in the field because I grew up hunting. I mean from a young age. My dad had me in the duck blind with him, and then that transferred to other hunting opportunities. Growing up in Missouri and we were a family farming. UH had that background going for me and so always access to a spot to hunt. And that interest in hunting blossomed into an undergraduate degree and Fisheries and Wildlife from the University of Missouri. And I was never a great student and grad's grad school was never on my radar, but I was having a lot of fun studying wildlife and helping with different research projects led me to some interesting travels and it just kept kept snowballing. So you wanted to your growing up with your background hunting, hunting and fishing in Missouri, you knew you wanted to be around that, you know, and there's only so many career paths to take, right. You could be a conservation officer maybe, or you can you can get into science. That's kind of kind of it, right, Yeah. And one of the funny things was I didn't even connect the dots when I was high school and younger that you could do this as a career. And so I knew that there were folks working in the in the field, but I didn't know how you got there. And so I started off as a as a biochemistry major in college and then figured out there was a fisheries and wildlife program and slowly started trick laing over into that, into that space. And it was a fantastic life decision. And I've never looked back. And you ended up in a in a position where you get to ask a question. You so something in your experience makes you ask this big question that you that you get to design a study around, to work with some people to design a study around. When you were growing up, was it, you know, were you looking at those green heads coming in or those deer walking through the field, were you thinking Do you feel like you were thinking a little deeper about it than the average hunter, where you're like, why are those deer here? Why do they do this? Or I wouldn't say thinking deeper. All of us as hunters are trying to figure out what the next step is for for those long beards, for those green heads, for whatever we're after. And so, yeah, there are a lot of questions from the deer stand and from the duck blind and as you're walking the fields for pheasants, just trying to figure out why are these species doing what they're doing, Why are they in this location and not the other location? And that was to be, you know, to enjoy hunting a bit more, to understand what made these species make the decisions they made. And so I think that's something that all of us hunters share together, and I had the good fortune to turn that into a career. Yeah, you and I were just chatting before we started here about you've got a little little, tiny baby at home, and I was telling you about my time with raising two babies at the same time time. And I think one thing that kids remind you of, especially when they get to a certain age, is they're they're just curious. They're asking questions all the time. And it's so it makes you think, like how jaded sometimes we can get as adults, or how we can kind of just like make up our mind that you know, X, Y and Z or this way we don't have to think about them anymore. And hunting fishing too, of course, but hunting is sort of a nice conduit to curiosity, Like it keeps you you know, because you're never gonna master it, and it keeps you thinking because you see things out there that you you just naturally have to question because it's something new or something different. I think that's one of the best things about it. I would agree entirely. And it's you're you're right, you don't master it, but you can hopefully get a bit better the more you learn and the more you study. Yeah, and if somebody tells you they've mastered it, there they're full of ship. Feel free to run away. So you go to college, you have this moment where you say, you know this is this is a career. Fisheries and wildlife research is something I could I could get into. Where where do you go from there. Well, the next step was gaining experience and the you know, the average college student in this field would spend a few summers or a year following graduation doing what we'd call technician work, and there you're on a research project. And that is one of the funniest parts of this whole career path because you're getting such a diverse exposure to wildlife research. I uh did, did tech work on blackfooted ferrets in eastern Montana. I spent some time in South Africa, spent some time catching waterfowl, and then right before college, I had an interesting chance to go to Western China and work with the Smithsonian doing panda research, and so spent six months in China and then came back and started grad school at Texas Tech and their wildlife program. What did you do in South Africa? That was a variety of projects. I was helping grad students, and so I did everything from radio tracking leopards, which was you know, maybe the pinnacle, to doing vegetation surveys, doing soil surveys. Spent a lot of time digging in the dirt to get soil profiles, and so everything was related to natural resources to wildlife, and I bounced around among grad students and had a ball, And that was really what solidified my my career path. Was that semester in South Africa. Yeah, I'm going to speculate here that growing up as a young man in Missouri, you probably didn't see yourself in South Africa studying leopards or in China studying pandas. No. I didn't. I didn't. Did you Did you ever have any close calls with leopards? No? I really didn't. I wish I had a good leopard story, but they were They had VHF transmitters on them, and we weren't trying to see how close we could get to these leopards. We were trying to get a point and triangulate and plot a location on their map. But we didn't. We had very clear instructions from the professor in charge not to Yeah, not to push it. Good call, good advice, reasonable advice. Yeah, they I got to go to Africa, South Africa in like I think two thousand and seven, and where we were hunting, they said, you know, we've got a pretty healthy leopard population. And when I went over there, I was like, I would love to see a leopard and I was sitting in a sort of a makeshift blind. It was like they kind of a test out spot first, So it was just it wasn't like the big concrete ones they build that are you know, almost impenetrable, right. And I was sitting there and I had all these kudo just go blowing out of there, and I was like, oh, that that was so weird. I mean they took off like knocking over trees and just crazy. And then I had a leopard call behind me, and I was like, I don't want to see a leopard. When you hear that guttural, just you know, it sounds like a saw going through wood, almost like a rough saw. I mean it's just that's that is an animal that commands respect really quickly. Yeah, yea. Through their vocalizations, they just convey power. Yeah. Yeah, they're no joke. And you know that a lot of the natives that we were around over there, that was what they were most scared of. Well, they they deserve respect, no doubt about that. Yeah. We're gonna get to deer in a second. I gotta ask you. Any everybody looks at pandas like they're these uh, sweet lovable teddy bear type of things. Are they secretly kind of pricks or not. I've never called him a prick before. But they aren't the They aren't the cuddly animal that that they get made out to be. I mean, there they you gotta watch yourself around them. And so where I was working was a breeding research facility looking at reproductive behavior oh pain because of the captive breeding interest in this species. And you didn't get too close to the bars on the cage. I mean, you didn't get in there and give them a big bear hug. They had stories of workers at this facility that had been hurt and a panda yawns and you see those canine teeth and it's it's not the cute, cuddly animal that is made out to be. Now, I did get to play with some of the baby panda cubs and that was that was fun. Yeah, I bet it's so interesting. So you so you kind of you go through this phase in your research career where you're starting out and you kind of get to be a globe trotter, go do some really cool stuff. What do you do when you end up back in the States. Well, I want I got back to the States in uh and started grad school in Texas and was doing lesser prairie chicken research and so lesser prairie chickens are getting a lot of press these days because of listing potential and some some conflict and some disagreement between different industries and conservation groups. And so got back here after China and started doing a research project design a aerial survey technique to find lex lesser prairie chicken breeding areas from helicopters, and so got to spent two years flying at low altitudes in Texas and New Mexico developing the technique to find these birds and and get a better idea of what populations were like. And it was the goal. There was the assumption, you know, that the populations were going down because the land use practices and stuff, and you're trying to figure out what the what the a more accurate way to determine populations to follow them or what well it was to get baseline information because everybody saw the writing on the wall that the populations had been declining for a long time, for decade and decades, and that had a companied land use changes, and there were other factors in play. But to start off with, with these conservation efforts, we needed to know where birds were, where birds were not, and how to survey their range, what was going on with them That was knock in the population down. Um. It was more feature, I mean, it was a variety of things. It was different grazing practices, it was different land use practices putting up features on the landscape like you know, telephone poles for example, that provide purchase for raptors and that would nail them. There were industries expanding in this area of oil and gas ranching, industries that I'm not saying aren't necessary to our our survival, but competition for for habitat, and any conservationist, me, hunter, outdoor enthusiast knows that we don't have the prairies like we used to down there. It was short grass or mixed grass prairies, and like everywhere else, those habitats were becoming more fragmented and prairie grouse like prairie chickens or sharp tails or sage grouse, they need big open spaces and they don't do well with overhead cover, no even the appearance of overhead cover right right now. And so that was an interesting project finished up that and then again was not going to go I was going to get out of school as quick as I could. But I had a wonderful advisor and decided to start a PhD project. Started one looking at mule deer research, and then had the opportunity to go to the Yucatan Peninsula and do some of the first oscillated turkey research down in the Jungles in Mexico. And so spent about four years down there catching oscillated turkeys, putting transmitters on them and tracking their movements, their survival, and learning as much we could about that species. What what what was the meal dear research all about? Well, that was that was looking at at habitat use in New Mexico, and I started on that, but it was only there for about three or four months before this opportunity came up to two doing the turkey research. So another student picked up the mule deers and I headed south of the border. So I didn't get too deep into that. Did you did you get to hunt oscillated when you were down there at all? I did a number of times, right place, at the right time. Do you as a you know you're ensconsin academia in your research, even though even though you're you're a chosen field is wildlife biology, which implies hunting and conservation. Do you do you find any times where you kind of have to hide that, like, oh, I'm doing, you know, oscillated research, but I'm also hunting these things. Or do you just you know, wave it loud and proud. I I don't it and I occasionally find folks who don't agree with it. But there's a real great story with oscillated turkeys specifically that ties in with hunting. And there's an area and I'm gonna name drop the area because I'm sure some of your your listeners have heard of Carlos Cana Cruz or Los Flores. There are two management areas in the state of Campeche and they are they're a commonplace for hunters coming from the US to go down and harvest an oscillated turkey. This area has without question, the most dense population of oscillated turkeys in the world. Now, when I say the world, we only find them in the Yucatan in Mexico and the northern parts of Belize and Guatemala. But the reason why populations are so dense is because it's it's more economically practical for the locals to conserve turkeys and not shoot them for the dinner pot each day and then bring Americans down who are paying three four thousand dollars into this community and you know, have a good hunt. Hunters come through, they win, they get their birds. You've got jobs for people, cooking for people, driving for guides in a hunting guide down there. Is one of the most lucrative business for these local Mayan people in that area and so the reason why there are are so many birds is because there's that conservation and that value in place directly because of sport hunting. Yep. Yeah, it's a there's just such a weird balance with you know. I mean, you could call nobody really needs to go hunt oscillated turkeys. It's like a cool trophy and kind of the you know, the fifth subspecies in the in the Grand Slam or the Super Slam, I guess or whatever it would be for turkeys, but you can't, you know, like trophy hunting is is sort of has a lot of negative connotations throughout the world, and you know that's what we get painted as all the time. But there's you can't divorce those cottage industries and those economic benefits from it like that. You can't. You can hate it all you want, but you can't take away the fact that some of those places that are really really economically challenged, these these little industries rise up around there and the conservation comes with it, and now all of a sudden, it's pretty much win win win, even though not everybody wants to acknowledge that, Yeah, it is the case. It's an interesting hunt. It's a lot different than hunting turkeys back in the US, and that's one of my favorite things to do is turkey hunt. But when you're out there and you've got the chance of seeing a jaguar walk by, and you've got two cans up in the trees, and you've got how our monkeys howling, it's it's a really unique, interesting, well interesting part of the world. And then when there's a hunt to go with it, is anybody making an oscillated decoy? Um, yeah, I've got one right here in my office. They don't work too well. Or yeah, I had one made up thinking that I could use it to help capture turkeys, and oscillated are as wary as as I've ever seen. And I grew up hunting turkeys easterns in Missouri, public land and private land, um, and that can be a wary bird. When you get an old tom but oscillated, it's just takes it to the next level. And I think it's because that so many predators down there in a oftentimes thick environment that they're just they're neurotic. They're on all the time, thinking that something's about to grab them. Is it? Is it any part of that due to Probably I would just assume there probably has been a pretty good history of unregulated hunting of them as well. Yes, And that is a would be a major mortality source of that bird down there, is the subsistence hunting. And you know, it's a poor part of of the country, Mexico specifically, and so it's hard to fault people. I mean, you can't fault them at all, and they need to feed their families. But that is a major mortality source. We had radio marked birds with radios that would end up in town, that would end up hung on a you know, on a t post somewhere along the road. And so the subsistence hunters were definitely definitely taking some birds. Uh. I know I keep saying we're gonna get into white ties. I gotta ask you something else. I swear to God, anybody who's listening, we're gonna get there. So the we we have a little place on a lake in north central Minnesota and they're doing a study on the walleye movements right now because they're the natural reproduction. The take is pretty high. The natural reproduction seems to be pretty low, and a lot of the walleyes seem to be reaching sexual maturity really small, because you know, there's not you're not getting those two females that would kind of be driving the reproduction in a lot of bodies of water. And so they they I don't know how many walleyes are part of this, it seems like a lot of them. But they went up, fisheries went out and I'm assuming the electro shocked um. And then they tagged a ton of them and put transmitters in them, and then they sunk some listening devices throughout the lake to to follow the patterns and see if there's one damn on there where if they go through it, they can't get back up. And so they're like, are we are we losing them down? There, and I get personally frustrated because I know a lot of people fishing up there who are not calling in or or you know, turning in any of the data. They're just knife in those suckers and chucking the transmitters. Like I I'm only assuming here, But it seems like the compliance with with you know, this study from the general population is really low. Have you bumped into that and some of the stuff you've done, I mean, I know that's a different kind of thing. Yeah, and you get a little bit of everything. Um, And we can talk about this as we move into deer. But as the technology improves, your capability to track wildlife species just keeps improving. And so when I was talking about the turkeys, we had a VHF transmitter that's very high frequency. That's the one that beeps and you hold out your antenna and try and home in or trying triangulate to find out where that animal is. When we started with this deer project, we're going to discuss it's all GPS based and so, um, it's harder for anybody not to comply because it's all satellite based, and you know, I get more worried about invading people's privacy than them taking a collar and not reporting it because if they throw it in the bed of their pickup truck, I still know where that collar is. Yeah, I guess you don't. You don't think about that that aspect of it. And so it's it's imperative that that people calling duck bands that if they harvest a marked animal, it's always helpful to know that. And we should all be on the same team. I mean, this is this research hasn't done for our own ships and giggles. It's for to inform well part of the part of the reason I asked that, right, I wonder about that. So this this study where this buck took this crazy walk and crossed all these rivers and highways and interstates. The when you when you read the research summary that you guys put out there the paper, you know it mentions you know this, this could have serious implications for c w D management. And you know, I know, as somebody who's written about CWD a million times, like I know, how like man, there's two factions, right, and some people don't want to hear it, and so I could see it. There's kind of, at least to some extent, some people just kind of seem to want to stick their heads in the sands say this is not an issue and I'm not gonna worry about that. And so I could see something like this where a study goes, hey, this buck walk two d miles, you know, in a way we've never seen before, or you know, beat the previous record by a hundred miles. I could see people kind of being like, I don't you know if this is gonna lead the more restrictions around CWD, I don't want anything to do with this. You pull their funding, whatever do you do you bump in anything like that. Yeah, and people will use whatever results you have, they'll spin them to align with their their personal values or personal objectives. Luckily, most wildlife biologists and the state agency we're working with through this research, the Missouri Department of Conservation, who have been fantastic and very valuable collaborators, and this whole research has been done hand in hand with them. But they get it that you manage for a population, you don't manage for an individual. And so we saw this this amazing uh dispersal, But we're not going to or I wouldn't recommend that CWD regulations are changed because we saw this and documented it. Once we can get into some more of the averages, and you know, I can check the figures, but about the deer don't move more than five miles. But then you've got something that go a little bit further. And then you need to be conservative with your recommendations on how to manage c w D, but also balance opportunity and be pragmatic with with those regulations as well. And so yes, some people say, you know two miles put a two hundred mile buffer on anything, and well, all of a sudden that covers Missouri and the surrounding states. Yeah, I mean the question behind that, right is is this a was this just a weird, circumstantial thing that led to this buck during a hunting season? Um, and you know the land break down as far as open ground and little little patches of cover, and the way those natural barriers are what we thought were natural barriers funneled in one way and then the next was this just sort of a one off phenomenally or as we do more of these GPS studies, is this gonna are we gonna see that dispersal range open up a little bit because of this? Well, I think I think your last two comments were both correct. One, it's an anomaly. I mean, we've got we've had hundreds of deer marked with these GPS colors where we can find them, and we're not seeing this. We had another interesting dispersal, but after this one, the next maximum distance was about forty seven miles and so that's that's almost a third of what we saw with this, dear. And maybe I should should just get in and describe this, dear, so we can all be on the same page with what we're talking about. Can we can we start with what the study was designed for first? Certainly so. There was a study that we did University of Missouri, University of Montana, and the Missouri Department of Conservation where we wanted to look at white tailed deer survival, population recruitment, habitat use, and resource selection. And the purpose of this study was to be able to manage dear more effectively, and so the survival and the recruitment data would be used for population models so that the dear biologists in the state could tweet different factors that they can use to affect deer management and see what the outcome of those would be. There was interest among landowners and deer hunters to know more about localized management scales, and so that's what we were looking at with resource selection and with habitat use, and then with those movement questions. C w D has been detected in Missouri, and so knowing how dear move on the land endscape would help the state agency designed the best management practices two try and minimize c w D transmission. So it was a big study. We had to study areas one in northwest Missouri and one in the central Ozarks in southern Missouri. And that was because basically we're two different states of Missouri. Northern it's more agrarian, glaciated planes agg country, and then you get down into the southern part of the state and it's it's the Ozarks, it's rocky soils, it's red oak dominated communities, some pine down there, and so two very different ecosystems, and so we needed to study areas. We captured deer using rocket nets and clover traps from January, February and March for five years and then would put GPS transmitters on the deer and that could give us information about where they're moving, what their survivals lie. Habitat that they're using. And then in the spring we captured fams the young neo Nate fawns day old faons and put expandable collars on them so that we could get an idea of fallon survival to get back at those questions about population recruitment. So this was I mean, this was sort of a multifaceted study where you're looking at uh, mortality rates, you're looking at dispersal rates, and and kind of the overarching theme there is to give the Missouri Department of Conservation better data to manage populations around exactly. So, and this is this is one thing when I I've dealt with state game agencies a lot, with interviews and just you know, various things, and I've always felt like the missing component to a lot of this stuff was the pr And you know, so when you when you talk about that, what you're really doing is is using science to give the Department of Conservation better to tools to manage the deer in a better way, which is you know, pretty easy to get behind. But there's always been this kind now I shouldn't say always in a lot of states, there's been this sort of perception that the state agencies are like, you know, we'll throw out a million deer number because it's I actually had a big game coordinator in Minnesota tell me this one time. We we say a million deer because it sounds really good, but because we you know, we don't really know. I mean, they're not actually counting noses in the woods, right, And so there's kind of this perception out there with a lot of hunters where it's like the state gaming they have no idea how many deer out there, and and and to some extent over the years, that's probably been a little bit true because of the nature of you know, an entire wildlife population in the state. That's a big thing to get a handle on. And so if you've fallen into that camp and said that this is the kind of research that makes you know, you don't get to an exact number, but you get better at these population modeling through this kind of research, You're exactly right, and it's it's to be more informed. And so, like technology, the methods to answer those questions on population size or growth keep getting better and better. And so we use these data that we're collecting put in a statistical model. I mean, this isn't me as a biologist designing this tool. These are high end statisticians who work with the biologists, and so you have biology and play, you have real field data, you have statisticians, and everybody brings their strengths to the table to develop this tool to manage dear and you get better estimates out on what population sizes are or growth rates are. But you also get measures of confidence around those estimates. And so instead of just saying, Okay, a million sounds like a nice, pretty round number, you might have this very odd number, very specific number, and then a measure of confidence around that number, so you know, you know how strong to place your bet. Yeah, and I the the idea behind the two separate you know study areas is I think that's super important as well. You know, anybody who's been in northwestern Missouri versus you know, the ozarks nose, it's the same thing here in Minnesota. If you're in you know, up by the boundary waters versus the southwest corner of the state, you might as well be in different states. There's they're so vastly different. So when you're talking about predation and fawn mortality rates and things like that, they're gonna vary. I would assume very so much from those two different areas. It is. It is the case, and you can't extrapolate one to another. And so to really have a complete study you need to have those two questions. I mean, you gave the Minnesota example, deer in so many states could could follow the same example, and so we needed both of those studies. And it's a it's a testament to the Conservation department. This research is expensive. I mean getting the collars out there, it's a lot of hands on deck to make this work. It's a lot of um of resources of a variety of types. And so to have one study is a big, a big step with with the size of the project we were working to have these two. It's it's more than double. And this this was this was a five year study. Five year study. Okay. And this Buck the Wanderer, Uh you captured him. It was a rocket net, right, correct? Yep. We captured him in January of two thousand seventeen in north west Missouri using a rocket net one evening. And how old was he then? Do you think about two and a half And we could say that with confidence, just with you know, going beyond two and a half for an adult is you know, there's some question, but still we can feel like we can get pretty close. But this one would have been a two and a half year old adult buck. When when did he go on his excursion? He started moving in early November of that year and Missouri's Missouri has a very long bow season, as you probably know, September fifteen to January, but then a rather concentrated firearms season ten eleven days in mid November, and he started moving about a week before that season began, and the next twenty two days he was on the move. So previous to the you know, we'll get into the red movement versus the pressure, the hunting pressure movement, but previous to that he had stayed pretty tight. Right, that's correct. But what was his home range before that? It was, you know, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Um the area where he was captured, it was a couple of sections of very good a deer habitat. It was a ground, there was plenty of timber, there was a stream moving through, and so it was where you would want to be as a deer. It was hunted, it was not pressured. In fact, two biologists owned the property where we happened to capture this deer, and so they knew management and up until he started moving. Well, from the time we caught him and collared him with the GPS collar until the time he began this this long distance movement, he was a very normal adult book as a hunter in this rule do you do? You just look at that buck and go. He had no reason to leave, knowing knowing where he spent most of his time. I as a as a hunter and as a biologist, I'd say that, I mean there there. It wasn't like it was a density dependent question where there were too many deer. It wasn't like there was too much hunting pressure. He was in a good spot when he when he starts moving. How how often are you seeing these you know, GPS readings? Is it? Are you? Are you seeing them every day? Or you did you did this happen? You check back a couple after a couple of weeks and go, holy cow, it was well, it was neither. We had so many deer that it, uh, it's not practical for me to check on each deer each day, something like that, And so we have hundreds of deer locations during the hunting season, we're coming in every ninety minutes, so it's just a huge amount of data that would come in. And so the story of this one was I got an email that kind of filtered through a handful of folks said do we have deer and a color deer in Monroe County? And I said, no, that's way off of our study area. And I would have been surprised at the number of questions I get, like that somebody will catch a fall on and put a dog collar on it or something stupid like that, and you know, do you have a color deer down here on though? And then I get a picture and it's whatever on this deer, which is too bad for the deer. I'd encourage people not to do that. But anyway, so I got this picture and it was a real grainy trail camp photo, and I thought, and that looks like one of our collars. And then I think, Okay, it's somebody playing a joke on me, because this wouldn't be the first time within the community that that sort of stuff has gone on. So I didn't There wasn't a real good way with how these data were structured for me to figure out if this was one of our deer. Other than looking at this game in camp picture, I could see that it was an adult, and so I got our list of adult deer one morning when I couldn't sleep but about two in the morning, and started going through deer by deer by deer looking at locations, and I don't know on deer, you know fifteen. I opened up these points and they all display on Google Earth and thought, holy smoke, and I see this line going across northern Missouri. Knew exactly where we captured it, and then lo and behold it was where this photo had had come from. So we would have figured out once we started running all the analyzes, but how this one transpired was a bit unusual and was a bit of a shock when I drew up all these locations for the first time. So when you when you get that email with that grainy photo and you look at it and you go, man, that could be one of our collars, and what what percentage are you buying into? Maybe this is one of our d are you? Are you at like three? It'd be hard to pay the percent I didn't. I thought something was up. I thought something was fishy, and you know, it's hard to trust what comes in on a trail camera. I mean, we get a lot of mountainline photos from around the country that end up in you know, who knows where, um, and so people just claiming, oh, yeah, here's a photo from the back forty So I wasn't quite sure what was up, but it looked enough like our collar that I was definitely curious. And then lo and behold it was our dear that had had moved across the better part of north Missouri and at that point he was still alive. Correct. What do you do? Then? Uh, share the news with with the study collaborators and say, hey, look at this. There was nothing that we needed to do that here obviously didn't do anything wrong. I was initially most surprised that he was still alive after making this movement during the firearms season, when we have hundreds of thousands of deer hunters in Missouri out there. This was a nice deer. Um. It was you know it dear that many a hunter would have taken without question. Ye, this this buck at that point three and a half, right, yeah, yeah, and he's he's walking a couple hundred miles through a state during a gun season that's open with like, you know, half a million hunters out there and there's seven of them that would give him a pass if that. Yeah, and so what you see this and you go, this is this is real? This buck did this. You start to I'm guessing you kind of start to reverse engineer his his route and take a look at these you know, these things that we kind of thought they're not he's not gonna cross or he's not gonna do this. And he he broke a lot of rules, didn't he. Well, he just he covered a lot of ground. And so the data that we had for this deer was a GPS point every five hours for most of the year, and then ten days before the gun season started the firearms season, I up that sampling frequency to every ninety minutes so I could see how the hunting pressure might affect dear. I did that for all deer, which was about the time he started moving. Now those were related. This was all just something done laptop to satellite to collar, and it wouldn't affect the deer any the change of sampling frequency, and so having that resolution is really pretty good to know every hour and a half, here's where he is. And this was big agg country, and seeing how he moved across some of these open egg fields was very interesting, seeing how some of the major barriers like Interstate thirty five going north south that he had to work along that, seeing across you know, the river crossings, and then he'd find some good place to hang up during the day. Typically timber area wasn't moving a lot during the day, and then night would fall and he'd be back back moving. Yeah, And I mean it's I think a lot of hunters would look at that and go, yeah, you know, it makes sense that he a buck during the rut in a heavily pressured state when the firearms season is open, it's going to kind of hole up in the day and whatever, you know, his just chosen cover and then at night he's going to cover a ton of ground and get his thing done and then hold up again. But this buck, and and this is kind of seems like what this buck did. But he did it, you know, eight miles apart every day for days. And it's not like he was not coming across Doze at this time. If he was looking for a breeding opportunity with the ground he covered, he would have found does and so that's him dispersing to find breeding opportunity. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. He was in good habitat. He wandered through very good habitat, And so what motivated this eighty five mile dispersal is still the big question. What do you think it was? I was afraid you're gonna ask that. No, I've had a lot of time to think about this. I think this was an individual deer that was just marching to his own beat, and a deer hunter would like a better answer. I'd like a better answer as a biologist. But you think of the things conventional wisdom that would drive a deer to disperse. You know, there's age related factors where you know, new deer are coming into the population, the young, the yearlings, the juvenile deer get pushed out by by you know, mom or whatever social pressures are there. That wasn't the case here habitat. He was an excellent habitat and he really went through good habitat this whole area. I mean, this is a place that does well by deer, not overcrowded, not undercrowded. It was just in good, good, dear habitat. This whole way, and I know this country well, and so I think this was a an anomaly of a deer that just started moving and maybe got to this new area as the breeding season was winding down and there was not the you know, some in a pressure that was driving him that maybe he didn't even realize. Yeah, it's it's a good question, and all of us involved at the study are looking for or interested in an answer, but we might never know what drove this particular dear to do what he did. He may have known that it was time to breed, but didn't connect the dots on what that meant. And maybe that's one out of ten thousand that this happens to. It's it's really interesting that the explanation might just be that he's wired to be a pioneer and not a settler and he really found his legs at three and a half years old, do you think. So. I do a lot of work in the dog space, the working dog and sporting dog space, and there's a new, uh, a new kind of trainer out there. I say, like a younger trainer out there. And I'm generalizing here, but the focus is is way more on assessing your dog as an individual you know, not as uh Labrador retriever or not as a GSP or what. You know, you can factor that and of course that stuff is gonna filter in, but really looking at like, how how's the best way to train this individual dog of mine through you know, taken into account of drive and temperament and the time I have and all of that stuff, and you start to realize how individualized dogs are. And we we kind of know this because we've co evolved with them for twenty years. But do you think that there's a chance the more research you do like this on deer, especially if you start, you know, mixing in uh bucks that are reaching more mature age, which are probably like typically a little bit underrepresented in a lot of these studies, you'll see just these individual tendencies of more dear kind of breakout or do you have enough history with research to go. I don't think that's going to happen. No, I think we'll see it more. I mean, I think this is a rarity, or we'd be more familiar with it already. But a while back in our conversation you ask if this was an anomaly or if we might see this more. I think we will see it more because of the technology. And so the traditional way to monitor deer for research like this would be with that very high frequency color that beats and you have to be so close to hear it. And so what happens when we have a major dispersal. I never would have looked for this deer where it was, and so with the VHF collar. You know, we biologists are great at coming up with excuses on why things don't work, you know, radio failure, hit by a car, poached, whatever the case. We can't hear the beep anymore. And the farther it goes from its known area, the more surveys you would have to do as the biologist to figure out where this dear moved. Well, now with GPS technology, we get locations delivered us via satellite that we pull up on Google Earth or whatever platform you're using, and we can see these long distance movements. We can see movements where dear go aways and then come back, where with VHF technology you just would have thought, well, I didn't find that dear today, and then it came back and you start tracking it again, and you had no idea that it had this this movement where it went ten miles and then came back. So not many folks are using VHF anymore. Everybody's gone the satellite route. And with the migration work out west, with deer research in the Midwest. I had an oscillated turkey that I put a GPS transmitter on into Yucatan, and right before she started to nest, she went twelve miles straight into the jungle, nested, and then came back to exactly where I caught her, without a hundred yards or where I caught her. So had I not had that GPS technology, I never would have seen that movement. And so I think we'll start seeing more of these interesting long distance movements just because we have the capability to track now. Yeah, and we should we should kind of clarify this too, because I probably I probably keep conflating these two. There's dispersal and there's excursions. And you know when you talk about dispersal for various reasons, you know, mom kicking the youngster out or whatever, because the in breeding. You know, there's bucks that are maybe a year and a half old ending up, you know, three miles away into what will be his home range, and you know, and vice versa Buck's coming back into that. And then there's these excursions we see and that there was that buck, I think it was in Pennsylvania. They did that study where that buck made an excursion. He lived on public land in a real tight area and early in his life made an excursion way, you know, twelve miles away or something, and then he went and died there and they were kind of like, well, what the hell happened here? Where this? This just felt like an area he knew about somehow, but you know, only built it into his life like basically twice. And so there's there's those two different things. Do you think you'll see maybe like a clear picture now of those excursions as well? I mean I think you'd have to. With this right, we'll see anything that that is movement, and so you can adjust these callers to take a point every you know, every fifteen minutes if you want to. And so depending on the research question, as your aunts asking, you'll see how animals move on the landscape. You'll see when they go, when they stop, and and you know, as with everything technological, it keeps getting more refined, more capabilities, lighter weight, better battery life, and so the the questions that we will be able to ask as biologists will keep getting more and more refined and informative. As a deer hunter, does this secretly give you hope that at any moment a buck could just show up from six counties away and you could kill him. It does, It does, But what's more this project. I've always been a deer hunter, But after five years of doing nothing but deer, after spending hours upon hours upon hours catching deer, handling deer, traveling for deer, I've taken a break from deer hunting for for just a year or two to regathered. Haven't taken a break from hunting, but I've I've hit a little bit of dear fatigue on waiting for deer to appear. Well, you're you're out in Montana, right, m Yeah, you can take a break from deer in Montana. Took a took a new position at the University of Montana, and so based out of Missoula. These days, if you if you live in I don't know, Pennsylvania or some of these dates, you don't get a break from deer. You take a break from dear. You're taking a break from big game hunting just about right, and I know I said that, and listeners are going to be thinking this guy's crazy because one of the neat parts about this job, in this research was being able to spend so much time with so many avid, passionate deer hunters. And I learned a lot from these folks and new things to think about and and so um, I will not claim to be in that in that rank, but the people who are man more power to him. So this this study, you know, obviously everything that the thing that gets the most attention is this buck that walked the eighty five miles out of out of his home range. Was there in anything else in there? Because this was this was comprehensive. It was five years and two locations and a lot of a lot of deer collared? Was there anything else? Like, is there like a one b uh, you know, secondary kind of finding that you saw or something that happened where you're like, man, that was really cool. But it's getting overshadowed by this this wanderer. No, but there will be and so uh we this data set was hundreds of individuals, thousands of individuals, really millions of data points. This was a huge undertaking and we're still in the in the stages of analyzing these data, and so this particular individual, This was a very comprehensive analysis, but it was pretty straightforward because you're reporting on on one individual. Over the next couple of years, we're gonna have more and more information coming out, and I think, I think we've just scratched the surface on the interesting findings that will result from this project. Yeah. So this, this buck and getting kind of clued into this, this uh anomaly of a dispersal is almost like a distraction or a little bit of a mission creep on the overall project. You know, this, this will probably have the most press, press and most exposure from anything we do. Now from a management standpoint, this will not be the most important, but it'll probably make the best deer camp conversation. Yeah. Does that? So let me ask you this, like, personally, does that drive you nuts that guys like me focus on just this part and then there's so much more to the work you're doing. Not at all? I mean, I whatever folks UH find interesting, I'm just glad that they're interested in the work that we're doing. I Mean, the the most frustrating thing is the research that gets done that really doesn't mean much, and it's done for the sake of publishing a paper or for doing research, and so that's that's where I get frustrated. We don't have that with this project. And that's the great thing. The work that we're doing will be used for management. It will be uh available to landowners, to deer hunters, to a wildlife enthusiasts of any kind to use what we find that might affect their land management or their conservation goals or their deer hunting or whatever the case will be. So any of it that gains exposure, gains interests, can help people is fantastic. Is there This might be a little bit of a weird question, but there's you know, there's kind of like politics involved in everything every career, and especially when you're doing you know, depending where you're getting funding and working with the general public or something that's you know, directly affects the general public. Is this Do you look at this kind of and you kind of just said this but as sort of a weird just like a nice win to get where it got people interested, and it could you could use it in the future at least as like a public goodwill thing, like somebody finds, you know, like the general hunting population finds this super interesting. It might make it easier to come up with some other research projects in the future and get support for it through you know, the Department Conservation or something like that, because of just like one little this is like this is like a weird little lottery ticket for you, I hope. So, I mean best case scenario, very best case scenario is some high school or reads this paper, finds it interesting, and then picks a path to be a wildlife biologist. And so if this gets us any goodwill this one deer that that is getting a lot of national press these days, even international press. Our our adult book from MISSOURIUS hit some international news outlets. Whatever gets people more interested in wildlife conservation. Wildlife research um is is excellent and I'll take that however I can get it absolutely it's a win. What's next then, Man, So you mentioned you've got some white tail burnout, and so are you Are you switching gears here and and studying something else or do you have something you're like, is there is there a white until related question you as a research or you're just sitting there. It's kind of rallying around the back of your head, You're like, Man, I want to address that. Is there anything like that? Not at the moment. I mean, with this work, we've got we've got the survival questions we're still asking, we've got the recruitment questions, we've got the habitat use. What I'm most excited about right now with these data, and we were just scratching the surface on on what we can use this data set for is to see this final product of the population model. And I think that's gonna be real slick, and I think it's gonna make everybody who cares about deer in Missouri make their lives better because we're gonna be able to manage that much better when we take all this this ecological data, land cover data, put the statistics to it, and we're going to have a product that will be very powerful for for deer management in Missouri. So that's what I'm most most excited about now. And I had I had a little white tail burned out. I'm not burnt out on on the question an answer side of it and doing these analyzes, I I just found myself. I took one dough this year with my muzzle loader because I needed stuff for the freezer. But in the November portion of the of the hunting season, it uh, it felt like I was back in the rocket net blind saying all right, where where's the deer? And I spent so many hours with that, I was ready to get my GSP and go go find quail instead. Believe me, man, you don't have you don't have to explain yourself. I've hunted deer for my job for a long time, and I really like fishing Smalley's and I really like following my dog around for roosters. Like there's a time every deer season I hit where I cannot wait to get out of the trees and go do something else. Well, my dad, Duck hunts hard, and he says his favorite day is opening day and his second favorite day is the last day of the season, and he doesn't miss too many days between. Yeah, it's it's a weird. It's a weird place to get into. I think, I think this is what a lot of you know this This podcast is so so focused on white tails, but hunting in general, it's weird to get into that space where you know, like this is the thing I just I have to go do this, like I live for this, I have to go do it. But you also come to terms with the fact that there's points where you're really gonna hate it and and really but but you also get to that spot where you're like, I know, even though I want to just smash that alarm and not get up today, I know it's going to be worth it every time I do. So you have these just up and down moments, uh huh, and you're exactly right, and then you get out there and the stunts sun starts coming up and you're glad you got up. Do you do you see? So you you mentioned that you know this is obviously a Missouri study and it's going to help the game managers in Missouri at the Department of Conservation balance that check book much better from year to year as far as figuring out, you know, how many deers should be, how many deers should be out there, and how many can we allow to be taken and you know how many you're gonna end up in coyote bellies and all that stuff. Do you have uh you know, are there are there state game agencies? Is does Kansas reach out to you and say, hey, can we like, can we talk to you about this or do other states or is there kind of like individual fife terms where you don't really work together. No, it's a very very collaborative field. And it's a small world. I mean, there's just not that many of us out there, and so you go to the meetings and you see the same faces and you bounce ideas, and there's no you know, there's no territoriality, there's no uh, there's really no competition because everybody's working toward the same goal and helping each other out. And so I mean it goes so far as to share an equipment if somebody gets shorthanded and you need to go help someplace over here or teach a new technique. I mean, with the the learning curve on some of this stuff is very steep, and so I've been people around the country about techniques for capturing gear or how to fit collars correctly, or what to watch out for with you know, programming, GPS, call ours or whatever the case may be. And so it's a very very collaborative community. And that's deer, that's turkeys, that's quay o, that's roosters, that's all of this stuff because we're all we're really all on the same team. Yeah, I suppose with the you know, you mentioned the rocket netting and some of the some of the other ways you capture deer for studies, I suppose you have to be super careful about how that's presented so the general public can digest it and be okay with it. Yeah, you do, and we take steps. I mean, the last thing we want to some you know, capture related mortality, because that's not why we're doing the work. That's not why we got into this field. And so, for example, the rocket nets, there have been many many times that I can think of having deer at the capture site where I can't hit the button on the net to shoot the net because there's too many deer and we don't have enough handlers, or their deer are two packed in close together and they're gonna hurt each other, or you know, they're too close to the net or too close to the rockets or whatever, and so it's not dear, show up and you you shoot things. You know, it's an ethical shot. And so usually with the rocket nets, that's how we are capturing adult books, and oftentimes they travel alone, and so that makes it a bit easier. But it's uh, you know, it's not just go out and take your first shot. You're waiting for things to be right so that that animal safety is ensured. Is there is there some like a similar kind of rush when you start doing that right away? As you know, like when you start hunting in a in a buck walks in and it doesn't wear off. No, it doesn't wear off. It doesn't wear at all. No, But I I can think of, well, you know all hunters know when your heart starts pounding and you're thinking, is this going to come through my shirt? I mean, it's just so it feels like it almost shakes your whole body. I've had those times in the rocket net blind and so you know, it's just circumstances or it's a big buck coming out or whatever the case may be, but it is. It is definitely a thrill. Do you ever miss? I don't. Some of your colleagues do. Some of my employees have missed before. And that's always a you know, when you miss with a forty by sixty ft net, usually you're the one buying beers that night, is I you don't have any like you've never just like filmed that have you somebody just with him? Oh withing, No, No, we don't do much filming just because there's enough other things going on. But we had one of the media folks with the Conservation Department come out and you know, I had to clarify this doesn't happen every time. And you know, it's like stars aligned and a nice ten point walked out about four thirty in the afternoon and it's snowing, and you know, he was on the road with the footage he wanted to share with the public before the sun went down, which rarely happens, and so we've had a few a few lucky spots over the years. I was just thinking with with somebody missing, what with a net like that, what a wonderful representation of buck fever that would be? Yeah, and there you know the it's happened. There's been some buck fever in the rocket net blind before, but it's a it's a very effective tool to catch him. Yeah, that's that's awesome. So you what, what do you want to do? You know, you're a young fellow, you've done a lot of really really cool stuff already. What's kind of like a dream study for you? Doesn't have to be white tails, Like, what's what's something out there that's just like man, I would that that keeps me up at night. I think more about oscillated turkeys, and just because there have been so few, there's been next to no research on there on those that species. And so I was one of the first, maybe the first to put transmitters on wild birds. Other people had caught some birds that were in some protected areas, but it'd be like collar and elk and yellowstone at one of the campgrounds doesn't really represent the wild bird. And that's such an interesting bird and an interesting area and interesting questions to be asked that that would be if somebody gave me a million dollars to design a study, that'd be where I'd go. So is there is there a level just of personal interest because you think it's they're cool and where they live is really really neat, But also there's just sort of a gap in the there's there's a void in the in the knowledge about him out there. Both of those definitely. And then the other thing is there's research like that that could really help people, and that's still used as a food source by, like I said, very poor people. And I don't see that changing. And then there's that international hunting interest in the species, and there is a void and so there's just a lot of reasons that it's appealing, but it's a personal, personal one. Yeah. I mean there's a lot going on there. There. There could be you know, globally, there could be so many kind of parallel situations to that that that that could benefit from this, This particular there might not seem related at all. Is there is there a part of that too? It kind of feels like, you know, white tales, there's there's been so much focus on them for so long, and they're the most popular game species out there, and you know, I would assume they've been studied as far as like game species, they've probably been studied more than anything is in this country anyway. Is there is there a part of that where you're just like, man, there's just less to learn about white tails or not. No, I think it just becomes more nuanced and and um, you know, white tailed research has gone back longer in any other game species research probably, and so you keep getting better tools to ask more difficult and more informed questions. And to me, that's progress. And I agree with you white tail deer are the game species of North America. They probably generate more excitement, generate more dollars for conservation than than other species. And so I I'm glad to see that that research is still going strong and glad to see that people are interested in it. Yeah. So last question here. You mentioned way at the beginning of this when we were talking about, you know, your time in South Africa, your time in China studying prairie chicken LECs and finding those like you you mentioned multiple times habitat and land use and habitat and land use. As you as you get further into your career and do more research on various wildlife species across the world, do you like, how often do you just come back to habitat and go, Man, this is like this is the lynchpin that holds everything together for game population. I know, I know, it's like so dynamically variable, but that's like one constant that just seems to need love all the time. Well, it exactly is. I mean, you need the food, water, the cover, and so you don't have good habitat. Some some species can live anywhere. I mean you look at coyotes, look at white tailed deer, I mean, um, some of these generalists can get by anywhere, but then you get more into the specialist species and the habitat needs become very specific or very large or something that makes it a challenge to have that on the landscape. But without good habitat, you're gonna have nothing. Yeah, and that's you mentioned this great intangible with some game species they just play well with man and some don't. And you know when you when you talked about that the buck that took the huge dispersal and you know, he crossed and he crossed I think it was the Grand River like multiple times, and you think of all these things that you go, that's probably a pretty good natural barrier, and a lot of times he paralleled it, it it seemed like, especially the roads. But eventually it was time to cross. And you you just I would think mule deer other than maybe a migration or elk or some of these other critters that maybe don't play as well with man. You'd think, man, that would be like a really really hard edge for them. They might cross it, but probably not. And then you think about that white tail and you look at his route and go, it didn't seem to really phase him, right, Now he definitely knew it was there. He responded to it, but it wasn't going to stop him. Yeah, yeah, it's wild. It's wild anyway, John, Uh, this was so much fun, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Where can people if they want to geek out on this research, where can they go to find it? Well, the the scientific publication is open access and so google or search however you want because it's in metric for the scientific title ko dispersal by a white tailed Deer and you can get the article. And that's where I'd encourage people to go, just to see what kind of work goes into preparing a peer reviewed scientific publication to find out more. This is um. This is really getting extensive news coverage and so um folks won't have to look for to find this. Now the future research that is coming out, keep an eye on the Missouri Department of Conservation web page and we're going to have everything out and available for the public. And they were the sponsoring agency and so they're going to help get the word out to folks interested in this sort of thing. Yeah, that's there's there's gonna be more coming on this. Let's let's touch on that quick and then we will wrap this up. When you mentioned this paper, this this peer reviewed research paper that's out there. People, they're very quick to make judgments on something like this. If you say, oh, this buck walking and you're you're laughing because you know this, go read. If you're like, I don't believe this is be somebody through that collar in the back of a truck and it drove a hunter in eighty five months, go look at this paper, look at the resources cited, the sources cited, go look at the extensive uh level of evidence in this and then make your judgment call on what happened here. Very I would encourage that, yes, yes you will. You will have a harder time refuting these findings if you actually go give that a read. It's kind of a long one and it's pretty dense, but it'll be worth it. Uh, John, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. It was my pleasure. I enjoyed visiting. That's it for this week, folks. I hope you enjoyed listening to John as much as I love talking to him. Such interesting conversation with deer researcher like that, who has who has so much real world information and also comes from a hunting background. You gotta love that I have been your guest host, Tony Peterson. This is Wired to Hunt, which is brought to you by First Light. As I always thank you, thank you, thank you for listening and checking in. If you want more white tail information, check out our YouTube stuff that we're putting out every week. We've got how to videos, all kinds of neat things there. Check out my Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast as well, and of course go to the meat eater dot com. You're gonna find a whole bunch of articles by some of the top white tail writers in the country.