Ep. 670: The Secrets of Blacktail Deer

Steven Rinella https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork talks with Jim Baichtal https://www.instagram.com/drjimbaichtal/ of The Blacktail Foundation https://www.blacktaildeer.org, Janis Putelis https://www.instagram.com/janis_putelis/, Ryan Callaghan https://www.instagram.com/olcal406/, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics discussed: When you only shoot with a muzzleloader; all the records; the old ass deer bone; the conservation of blacktail deer; the "shirker buck" theory; moon phases; an animal at the edge; timber management and harvest; long days on the hunt for blacktail; how half of the blacktail fawns are eaten by black bears; licking branches; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 2:55Speaker 02

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• 3:04Steven Rinella?

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• 3:26Steven Rinella?

  Joined today by Jim Bechtel, who doesn't shoot shit unless he can shoot it with a muzzleloader.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  I know how to use a rifle. I just choose not to.

• 3:36Steven Rinella?

  When did you, when did you quit?

• 3:38Speaker 03

  1986.

• 3:39Steven Rinella?

  What happened?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  I decided I wanted to get close with a single shot.

• 3:44Steven Rinella?

  But you still get close to the thing. You wanted to force yourself to get close to the single shot.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:49Steven Rinella?

  What'd you shoot prior to shooting a muzzleloader?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Uh, I got my dad's .3006, a 721 that he bought in 1950. Bermington 721.

• 3:58Steven Rinella?

  Now's your gun.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  I still have it. I still hunt with it. I take my dad with me every year. We go out and do a hunt together and then I put him away and I take the muzzleloader out.

• 4:09Steven Rinella?

  So you keep, you house his gun for him?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  My father's passed away and so my.

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh!

• 4:15Speaker 03

  I made, I made a promise to him the day he died that him and I'd go hunting together every year.

• 4:21Steven Rinella?

  So you take it out?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  I take it out and we go hunting together every year.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  Alright.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Works.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  But in other than that, muzzleloader all the time?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  I try to. Sometimes I falter. Some days it's really wet up in southeast Alaska.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Makes it really hard to do flintlocks and percussion and stuff like that.

• 4:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz you live in the worst place to be a muzzleloader hunter in the world.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Pretty much. But you know, I figure all those, the people that came before us, the English and the Russian trappers and the natives who got muzzleloaders for straight items and stuff like that, they figured it out.

• 4:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  And so I use a wool bag. I place my firearm in a wool bag and, uh, and the wool swells up, keeps the moisture from getting in there and I think I've had one or two times in thirty-five years of being up there that that cap hasn't gone off.

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Now, our friend in common, uh, Jim Heffelfinger, said, "If you look at the Alaska muzzleloader records, it reads like a Bechdel phone book."

• 5:29Speaker 05

  That's a great line. That's a great line.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  And they're all named Jim.

• 5:36Steven Rinella?

  You got it. So you submit, how many state records do you have?

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Uh, quite a few.

• 5:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, well, just brag up for me. I, I asked you so you're not bragging. I'm just asking a question.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  I think I have over thirty deer. I have the world record sick of blacktail with, for a muzzleloader and number two. Somebody's got number three and then I have four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and a bunch more.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Oh my goodness.

• 5:59Steven Rinella?

  That's incredible, man. And you shoot flintlock or cap?

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Cap. But I'm experimenting now with flintlock. That's where we've been talking back and forth and so, uh, because I worked for Alaska Department of Fishing game for so many years, the gentleman that was the wildlife biologist, Dave Person, was a master gun builder and as a thank you for all the years of darting deer and following deer and stuff, he built me a beautiful, beautiful flintlock. And, uh, I've taken.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Probably eight or nine deer with that flintlock and I've got a couple of smoothbore flintlocks that I've I've killed a black bear and caribou and and stuff like that with them.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  Do you have a fowling piece?

• 6:46Speaker 03

  I do.

• 6:46Steven Rinella?

  Do you shoot ducks with it?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a choke and so the best pattern I get is about fifteen yards. So I I set twenty yards as my maximum. I won't shoot beyond twenty yards when I call those birds.

• 7:01Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Got to be close, really close.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Does a fowling piece, what you call a?

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  Shotgun.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Shotgun? Yeah, if it was specific to to just birds, but one of the during my back and forth with Jim and uh, it makes absolute common sense. So it's not like a big epiphany, but like the the reason that the round ball and smoothbore stuck around for so long, even when technology was readily available and far surpassed it is folks just could only have one firearm. So they'd take a smoothbore fifty eight caliber Hawken or whatever it got bored out to and they use that for small game birds.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  Like whether you're pouring shot down it or jamming a lead down it or?

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yep, exactly. So using it for with one piece of shot for big game, the big, big solid ball or pouring a bunch of small shot down there.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And it gives you tremendous versatility. I've I've hunted moose with a smoothbore flintlock in the interior and it's a sixty-two caliber French fusel fin. So if we would have been French voyageurs, we would have been issued this gun. And you take the round ball and I stitched the patch on and I set it down on there and in the morning I would go and hunt moose and then I reached down and I pulled the round ball out and put shot down and I went down along the river and shot a brace of grouse down along the river and put my round ball back on and hunted moose all the way back up to camp.

• 8:32Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  So I was like, super, super, super flexible.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's nothing more efficient than that.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  That's a joke.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  Um, when we were doing all of our research for our mountain man audiobook, we'd read these guys at night would take in a, at night, they would put five buckshot

• 8:58Steven Rinella?

  in their gun and then they'd cap it with a, or maybe vice versa.

• 9:05Steven Rinella?

  They'd take the rifles and put five buckshot in them and then they'd cap it with a ball.

• 9:11Steven Rinella?

  Now they're nighttime home defense.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Home defense thing?

• 9:14Steven Rinella?

  Home defense system.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what, they had, must have been pulling that ball then come morning because

• 9:23Speaker 03

  years and years and years ago, I was in the interior and I was hunting ptarmigan. And I came over a ledge and there was a beautiful bull caribou 20 yards away and I backed off and I had an ounce and a quarter of shot, number five shot, and I just set a round ball down on top of that and belly crawled forward and shot that caribou. And I figured out later it about tore my shoulder off because that was like 700 degrees.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  I didn't think about the equal and opposite reaction thing to recoil. Killed the caribou.

• 9:57Steven Rinella?

  You did?

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And actually, and I had like four or five pieces of shot in the heart too. It penetrated deep enough. I could have killed him with a shot load. He was really close.

• 10:07Steven Rinella?

  Uh, you always worked as a geologist?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 10:11Steven Rinella?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  I grew up around Mount St. Helens country, southwest Washington. We had a small farm there and by, we had about 120 acres of timber. That's where I disappeared into once my chores were done.

• 10:27Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. How'd you get in geology?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  As a kid, my folks decided we needed to have some kind of a family hobby and they picked rock hounding or lapidary where you go out and dig up petrified wood and agates and jaspers and opals and obsidian and other stuff and fossils and. Somewhere, I don't know, eleven, twelve years old. I got to thinking, this can't be random. We're finding this agate here because of a process and we're finding this thunder egg here because of a process in the petrified wood. Basically, that's geology. And so I always knew what I wanted to be.

• 11:03Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  I'm still looking for those answers.

• 11:07Steven Rinella?

  How'd you come to be doing it in Alaska?

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Luck.

• 11:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  I grew up listening to my grandfather. My grandfather on my father's side was in Alaska in nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty and twenty one. And then he was back again in thirty seven through forty two. And I heard all the stories of Alaska.

• 11:30Steven Rinella?

  What was he doing?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  He was a trapper.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  He soloed all the way down from basically the Yukon. He soloed all the way down the Yukon drainage in nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty and ended up in Kotzebu in the winter of nineteen twenty. Trapping along the Yukon River. Had a canoe and was by himself going down there. And I grew up listening to all those stories and had a huge fascination. And so in nineteen ninety, there was a position opened up with the Tongas National Forest to be a geologist there. And I applied for it and luckily got it. Most forest service people kind of come for three or four years and move off on some other kind of thing. And I fell in love with southeast Alaska.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And realized that very little was known about the geology. They had mapped around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the interior of the islands.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  And then I got into the whole cave and karst management thing up there that there's thousands of caves across vast areas of the rainforest. And there was a thing called the Federal Cave Protection Act. And so you were supposed to protect caves on federal lands. And the more developed the cave areas were, the bigger the trees were. So they were direct conflict with timber management going on. So I was tasked with going out and finding those caves and mitigating the impacts of any proposed activities. So I got to explore all those woods all over southeast Alaska.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And I just felt, just fell in love with it. Just fell in love with the place and the unknown things of geology, the things that you could map, the glacial history, the uplift history, uh, the kind of geoarchaeology side of things, like where are there people on the landscape and how could I help define that?

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Why is that important to map that sort of stuff?

• 13:29Speaker 03

  If you have an idea of the geology, it's kind of like a soils map. It's a productivity thing. Where's the vegetation? What plants are there? Why are those plants there? How did they, how did the glaciers interact with the landscape? Why does landscape look like it does? And that's all controlled by the bedrock geology. And Southeast Alaska is bits and pieces of continents that's been added on. So it's like this little, uh, pile up of pieces. I think we'd call it a terrain wreck. Uh, it's terrains are what this was in there. And so the geology is super varied as you kind of move, um, northeast, southwest across the island, but as you, uh, uh, or it's similar. You move northeast, southwest,

• 14:12Speaker 03

  but as you move towards the east across there, you're just going from terrain, terrain, terrain, terrain, where they all have their blocks of rock that have a similar geologic history and how they were added onto the continent. So it's, it's, it's, it's a fascinating geology that, that again, the original mapping was around the shorelines and wherever there were mineral deposits found, but kind of the rest of that had not been worked on very much. So I partnered with the US Geological Survey, a woman by the name of Sue Carl and I for 25 years have been trying to fill in some of those holes in the geologic maps and, and get that information out there.

• 14:49Steven Rinella?

  You, what you and me were running around, and I remember you showing me about how the trees grow extra big over the cave networks, but I can't remember why you, what, what it was that you told me that.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  Well, there's, there's two, in Southeast Alaska, there's two incredibly productive forest areas. What is a, a, a luveal fan or a riparian spru, uh, a riparian area down along a stream of gravels, well-drained gravels, but nutrient-rich. And the other one's on the carbonates. And so the fractures of the limestone are are open down maybe 50 feet. Little teeny hairline fractures and the roots can get down into that and they access the non acidic waters then because the limestone has buffered the rainwater and the organic water that's very acidic.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  So you have nutrient rich water that's basic in a well drained landscape, much like a gravel pile is well drained, except fluctuates with rivers and streams. And so this is, this is another type of productive landscape. And the other thing is, most of our big trees are big spruce and stuff like that in Southeast Alaska have a very shallow root system on top of glacial till. You've seen that. And they fall, when they fall over, you got a 30 foot diameter root mass that's like 18 inches deep.

• 16:14Steven Rinella?

  That always blows my mind when you see that and they tip and you're like, what in the hell is the hole nine two anyways? It just peels away and then you look and there's a rock sitting there and it's got like a never ending disk of shit that was a hand deep.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  A hand deep is amazing.

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  And you wonder how it ever stood there anyways.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  So in the limestone, it can get down in those fractures.

• 16:37Steven Rinella?

  Grab on.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  And it's holding on. And so you'll see instead of a root ball tip over frequently, you'll see it snapped off 40 feet up when the, when that sail in the top of the tree gets big enough that it can't take the wind pressure of our storms, it'll snap off instead of turning over the roots because it's still holding so tight. So a lot of the trees grew older and larger. So a lot of the original timber harvest in Southeast Alaska was focused on the limestone areas.

• 17:06Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Which makes total sense.

• 17:09Steven Rinella?

  It's the big trees.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  I, I, I explored those areas locating the caves and the rivers going underground, the streams going underground and the vertical pits and that kind of thing. But I, then I also put together expeditions of folks who would come and explore those caves and we had paleontologists and that, and we basically started.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  When I got to Southeast Alaska, any published document that you read said we were a blanket of ice to the edge of the continental margin till 10,000 years ago and nothing lived there. And the first thing we did was find a cave full of bones that were 10, 11, 12,000 years old that started challenging that. We kept pushing that back. And so we changed that paradigm through time on when did the ice pull back and what was the environments like and who was living there and stuff like that.

• 18:01Steven Rinella?

  What was the old ass deer bone you found?

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Heck of an island in a cave called Nautilus Cave in what used to be a vertical pit coming into that cave that had filled with sediment. In a little alcove, I found three, it was leg, leg bones. And those were basically 9,200, 9,500 years old, somewhere in that vicinity right there.

• 18:24Steven Rinella?

  Black-tailed deer.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  We now know they're black-tailed deer. We didn't know what it was then, because we'd actually found a bunch of caribou bones in the caves. So there were caribou on Prince of Wales Island till 10,500 years ago.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  But recently, working with Charlotte Lindquist and her students back in Buffalo, they did the paleogenetics and it is a Sitka black-tailed deer, pardon me, it is a black-tailed deer.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  So the, the, oh, the first deer to show up, so we have three bones. We have one out of that cave, one out of Xena Cave that's 7,800 years old, and a bone out of a shelled midden left by natives at a campsite, their waist, basically. There was a deer leg bone in there that turned out, I mean, it was a bone that had been identified as a caribou bone. But what we did, the genetics, it came out as a black-tailed bone. Those three black-tailed

• 19:27Speaker 03

  are definitely Sitka black-tailed, but they contain a little bit of mule deer mitochondrial DNA.

• 19:37Steven Rinella?

  Which should be different than now.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so then we've have, we have

• 19:43Speaker 03

  hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in caves.

• 19:47Steven Rinella?

  Can you talk about how those bones get caught in the caves? I mean, you may have the opportunity to go look. Um, just for, for people listening, when we were filming our, our show Hunting History, we spent a day with Jim in caves. So I, Jim was able to show me how they, how they function, but can you tell people how the caves? Trap shit?

• 20:08Speaker 04

  And, and also just to, it'll come out in your thought process, I'm sure, but like when you find a, a bone in a cave versus like the shell midden bone, there's probably some conclusions that you jump to from one or the other.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  When you find a bone in a cave, you absolutely don't know how old it is. It, it, they usually turn slightly brown from the tannins and the organic waters of Southeast. You've seen that many times around your place there. But the bone itself, a 20,000 year old bone will look like a hundred year old bone. You cannot tell by picking up the bone. Or and just looking at it. And, uh, mostly what happens is either a predator was in a dry portion of a cave and brought part of its meal in. Or

• 21:08Speaker 03

  and a lot of times we have bones in the, in one particular cave that had so many bones. Uh, it was Arctic fox bringing bones in from a large predator.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  And, and depositing in the caves, or they're a vertical trap. So, uh, remember as we came around from the flooded, uh,

• 21:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  sinkhole, there, there was that vertical pit right off of the trail.

• 21:34Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that scared the shit out of me. I mean, we were safe looking at it, but I was like, man, I didn't know there's shit like that around here.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  And we were on that boardwalk. Remember looking down that hole? So that was a hole that was roughly the size of this room. That the entrance was about three feet across.

• 21:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  And that was an organic mat. So if we would walk on that, you'd go right through. Well, that's what the dude.

• 21:56Steven Rinella?

  You would never know how. On some of that stuff, you would never, if you were just out dicking around, you would a hundred percent walk down in there and just.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Gone.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  How many dudes must be laying in those holes?

• 22:09Speaker 03

  We have, we've actually had, uh, a few vertical pits that have a little pile of bones, deer and bear and stuff, right where they, uh, one I can think of is a hundred and fifty feet deep. We called, we called Bear's Plunge. Cause the entrance is about the size of this table, but at the bottom, it's a hundred feet in diameter and it just bells out. So when you repel into that, you're like a spider coming down off of a web. And here was this mound of bones at the bottom that had accumulated over several thousand years.

• 22:41Steven Rinella?

  What all was in that pile?

• 22:42Speaker 03

  It was mainly, uh, black bear and deer. But there was a few small rodents and stuff like that.

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  No people?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  No, no people in that. So, yeah, it's, uh, so either a vertical trap or somebody brings it into the cave.

• 22:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  They can wash into the cave.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Hang it. But, uh, it's, uh, really hard, uh, the bones usually then get washed on through the cave if they get into a stream course or something like that.

• 23:13Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I want to jump out of this a little bit to get to something different. Um,

• 23:19Steven Rinella?

  after you, you retired from geology after thirty years, right?

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:25Steven Rinella?

  And then instead of just kicking it and hunting with your muzzleloader and everything, you got involved on a volunteer basis with Mule Deer Foundation?

• 23:33Speaker 03

  I'm actually a contractor for the Mule Deer Foundation.

• 23:35Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  But there's also some in, there's, there's, I am kind of going out and getting other things and so I'm not always working for them, but I'm still working for them.

• 23:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep, got it. And in particular, you became like particularly focused on black-tailed deer?

• 23:51Speaker 03

  So, Miles Buridi was the CEO for years.

• 23:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  And working, and I had, I had started going down in 2006 and I manned a booth at the Hunt Expo in Salt Lake City about sicka blacktail on the Tongus National Forest, which is kind of funny, the, I was the geologist representing the Tongus National Forest, talking about sicka blacktail deer.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  They weren't sending biologists down there, I went down.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  And so I kept saying, you know, like, in your mission statement, it says, uh, uh, mule deer and black-tailed deer and their habitat, that's what your focus is on, on the conservation of that. And I said, what can we do for blacktail? And so I, I was pretty relentless with that for years and years and years. And then, uh, Joel took over as CEO, uh, what, three, four years ago now, and he goes, what are we doing for black-tailed deer? And, uh, about that time, uh, Steve Belinda, a good friend of mine, uh, called and said, it's time to pony up. He knew I just retired. And, uh, I said, what's going on? And he goes, we want to start creating a focus on black-tailed deer. And I said, I was really

• 25:06Speaker 03

  enjoying retirement. And I said, but I meant a hundred percent, because this is where we've always wanted to get to. And so we, uh, we went to, uh, Leopold, uh, put on, and the Mule Deer Foundation put on a black-tailed summit that all of the, uh, agencies and a lot of the forest sent people to, and it was held at, uh, Leopold's headquarters in 22, in April of 22. We really realized that the conservation of blacktail is pretty much the same issues from Northern California to Alaska as related to habitat and how man has changed the landscape through timber management. There's different challenges. There's different things, different

• 25:51Speaker 03

  predation schemes and stuff like that, but the challenges were the same. And so we started putting a much larger focus in that and trying to get more chap- we could get chapters established. There was no mule deer foundation chapters up there.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  And one of the biggest problems I had in Alaska was going into a community and sitting down with a group of people and the first question was like, well, why does the mule deer foundation want to help us with blacktail? So I'd spend most of my time talking about that and finally get around to substantive things that we could do on the landscape.

• 26:31Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats, in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years and years of use out of

• 27:15Steven Rinella?

  a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. I used to think that like your mattress was like your shoe size. I mean, there's nothing you're going to do to change it, but man, was I wrong. That was before I ever like had an actual good new mattress. And once I had one, I couldn't believe I'd spent my whole life sleeping on dished out junky old mattresses. Well, Helix, check this out. They got over 20 mattress models. So you can find the perfect- Perfect model for you. Nothing to be embarrassed about getting yourself a new mattress. Helix has cooling upgrades too, so you can get the best rest even on hot nights. Good night's rest sets you up for a great day. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door

• 27:56Steven Rinella?

  with free shipping in the US. And you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free, customer-first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand, tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Here's what you do. Go to helixsleep.com/meateater for 20% off site-wide. That's helixsleep.com/meateater for 20% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com/meateater. This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp.

• 28:37Steven Rinella?

  Holiday season is damn near upon us. In my house, we've been talking about Thanksgiving and pretty soon we're going to start talking about Christmas, and it could bring on a lot of stress. Also, holidays could bring on a lot of family issues. And sometimes, when it comes to family issues, it might be smart for you to go and find someone you can talk to about it and to help make sense out of it all. Well, insurance options may now be available nationwide with BetterHelp. With insurance, many members pay $15 or less. Some pay nothing. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences. And their 10-plus years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate

• 29:21Steven Rinella?

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• 29:59Steven Rinella?

  Let's back up to that question though. Why do people think of mule deer and like, like talk about the taxonomy of a blacktail. Right? I mean, it's, it's like, uh, they're like not brothers, but cousins. Mule deer cousins?

• 30:13Speaker 03

  They're mule deer cousins. And so it was Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger, who we talked about,

• 30:20Speaker 03

  had, uh, did a genetic paper that showed that starting about at the beginning of the last series of Ice Age, the Great Last Ice Age, just two and a half million years ago, probably because of snow levels and glaciers in the Cascade coastal mountain range there of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, down to California, it separated whatever was a proto, proto deer from what we now know as a mule deer. And in coastal refugia or coastal areas, blacktail developed, separated from those mule deer.

• 30:54Steven Rinella?

  And so they got separated by ice?

• 30:56Speaker 03

  They got separated by ice and time. And they also was a slight divergence as you move north through Oregon and Washington away from California. So if I remember that paper right, that the Californian blacktail are a little closer to mule deer and are distinguishable, but they're, they're still Columbia blacktail.

• 31:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  So that's one of the separate subspecies. And then Sika blacktail exists only from halfway up the British Columbia coast through Prince Rupert and then into the islands of Southeast Alaska. And then they'd have been translocated in 1924 up to Kodiak and several places around Southeast Alaska. And so there weren't any on Kodiak before.

• 31:42Steven Rinella?

  But they're native to Prince William Sound though.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 31:46Steven Rinella?

  They're not native to Prince William Sound?

• 31:47Speaker 03

  No, they were translocated to Prince William Sound. They were translocated to Yakatah.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  They were all the whole Prince William Sound area. And there were several other places they tried to plant, uh, Sika or Sika blacktail that didn't take.

• 32:03Steven Rinella?

  So what was the northernmost, uh, if you go back, I don't know what the hell, 200 years, whatever, some, some timestamp, 200 years ago, what was the northernmost Sika blacktail deer?

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It was probably in the Juneau areas.

• 32:17Steven Rinella?

  So I've been telling people the wrong thing.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Gus Davis, the front range of Glacier Bay National Park around maybe up towards Skagway and Haynes a little bit up in there. I'm not sure how far the historic range was. I know they were on Admiralty, Chisikoff and Baronoff Islands and around.

• 32:40Steven Rinella?

  They were there naturally.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Naturally around there.

• 32:44Steven Rinella?

  Why do they look like, so why do they have such a vibe like they kind of got to look like a little whitetail deer kinda?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Those are badass. I love these deer.

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  No, but what is it like? Why are they, why are the sickle blacktails look different? Why do they, because you look at them and you look like, they look like they got some kind of like whitetail deer influence, but that's not true.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  You're comparing them to a Colombian.

• 33:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they just like their antler configuration.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  I think it's environmental. I think it was that tight coast range forest that they evolved in. And so

• 33:18Speaker 03

  overall body weights, they're not much different than Columbia and some of the other stuff. So like I did a study with Alaska Department of Fish and Game where I weighed stuff with the state over a two-year period. And it was nothing to have a sickle blacktail come in field dressed at 145 to 165. And there were a few big outliers. So I mean substantial deer. They're just a lot shorter and bulkier.

• 33:43Steven Rinella?

  Oh, little squatty little suckers, man.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  And their tail is not ropey at all. It is more white, veed with a black top and that white. And they'll use it to flag, just like a whitetail will flag. Of course, it's not quite as dramatic because it's not as long. And they're just, they're, I think they're the perfect reinforced animal because their antlers are probably more close in because of that vegetation and stuff they evolved in.

• 34:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So it's not because of whitetail deer lovemaking. It's just like it's conver, it's convergent evolution.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:18Steven Rinella?

  Rather than diverged or whatever.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a Valgeist years ago suggested that the blacktail were a function of mule deer and whitetail breeding or something like that.

• 34:29Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I, yeah. You want me to tell you the whole idea that he had?

• 34:34Steven Rinella?

  It was that, do you remember this?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  You just offered this up, not me. I don't remember that. I don't remember.

• 34:41Steven Rinella?

  It was that, like.

• 34:46Steven Rinella?

  There was some period in time, he proposed this. So Yanni, Yanni's a big Val Geis disciple. Cause Yanni likes his shirker buck theory.

• 34:56Steven Rinella?

  Val Geis proposed this idea. He's, he's still alive, or he passed away recently.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  He passed away.

• 35:01Steven Rinella?

  That whitetails have, whitetail deer have been down in like the southeast for millions of years, southeast US. And at some time, climatic conditions were such that whitetail deer spread all the way across the continent. Okay. And then, uh,

• 35:23Steven Rinella?

  the middle dried out.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  And then you developed mule deer and whitetails. Then something happened and all of a sudden, these whitetails came back out, made love with these mule deer and somehow, maybe I'm screwing it up. And that produced like a blacktail. It was elaborate.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:44Steven Rinella?

  It was elaborate.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  You're not far off. I actually had beers with Val one time and he described it and, and he, and, and later years, he, through genetic analysis, he said, yeah, I had that wrong.

• 35:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, he did?

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Do you know what his shirker buck theory is? Yanni will tell you.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  You don't know?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I think he said, he applied it to any, uh, servant, but that, that a buck, there are certain bucks that he, uh, deemed as shirkers because they would shirk the responsibility of mating or rutting. Uh, with the plan, with the long-term goal, that if they shirked for three, four, five years, that the year that they decided to enter in, their body mass and health and antlers would be so much bigger than any of the competition, that they could then dominate the breed, breeding period, and thus spread their genes across the whole pool.

• 36:42Steven Rinella?

  He's like, I'm gonna lay low for a couple of years. When I come down, I'm coming down.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  That's right. I'm gonna be bigger and better than everybody.

• 36:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It'd be like, if you never went to the bar and you just worked out.

• 36:54Steven Rinella?

  And did skin.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Didn't do any drinking.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  No, you just did like skin treatments and worked out, worked on your hairstyle until you were.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Read a lot of books.

• 37:02Steven Rinella?

  And you were ready.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:04Steven Rinella?

  And then one night you go to the bar.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Just witty, witty and pumped.

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  Just lay waste.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  No, he didn't share that with me.

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  Heffelfinger finds that theory, it's insulting to Heffelfinger.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  I know it is. I could see, I could see too. Ask him how to pronounce coups or cows.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  Oh, real quick on Heffelfinger, I, we were, somebody, somebody in our, somebody in our camp was using a app to predict deer movement.

• 37:36Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  And was saying that this app was so good that it could be within minutes. That when, when it said excellent time for movement, you just look at the watch and just start looking across the hillside and here they come. I didn't see it prove to be so good, but I asked Heffelfinger, I said, cause he was talking about these pages of information that he produces about myths around wildlife. I said, I said, do you have anything about, uh, moon? Or lunar tables affecting deer movement? Do you have a page on that? He goes, no, cause that would be real short. It'd just be one word, no.

• 38:19Steven Rinella?

  That's one of my favorites. I mean, I joke about the one that, that red squirrels bite nuts off big squirrels.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:25Steven Rinella?

  But, uh, the, the, the moon thing is just never, you're never going to convince people otherwise. In fact, Mark Canyon, you present all the evidence to Mark Canyon, like Mark Canyon's, I don't know if he is now, Mark Canyon traditionally was a big moon guy. And you present all the evidence to Canyon, radio collar data from deer that don't change their groove because the moon. Deer car collision data that doesn't show differences because the moon, like on harvest data, like on and on and on and on. And then Canyon, um, he one day says to me, well, if it affects it by a minute.

• 39:05Steven Rinella?

  Science like I'm paraphrasing. He's like, science might not be able to capture.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  Or they capture, but they say this statistically.

• 39:13Steven Rinella?

  But to me, that minute matters a lot. Cause it could be the last minute of daylight.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  There's also the, what question are you asking or, or solving for? Because Jim went on to say, he's like, now, if the moon's bright enough, deer may bed in a more open area or feed in a open area at night. Because there's increased light. He's like, but that's not uh, the moon phase so much as it is a photovoltaic.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Bioluminescence, I think is what he was saying.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  It's like, if it's brighter, they're more active. I'm like, well.

• 39:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 39:56Speaker 06

  We should do a.

• 39:57Steven Rinella?

  Martying the whole damn water up.

• 39:58Speaker 06

  We need to get back to Jim here, but we should do a podcast, Corinne, on and bring in Mississippi Deer Lab. Uh, they just recently processed a bunch of caller data. Speaking, speaking to, you know, cause so many people like these moon believers were just continually emailing in and just being like, yeah, but you guys aren't asking the right questions. You guys aren't, you know, you're looking at your data, but you're not aligning the red moon with the blue moon and the wind and the underfoot and the barometric pressure. And you need to look at that specific point. They're like, all right. Why don't you guys all tell us, we'll do a big survey and tell us exactly what we should look for in our data.

• 40:39Speaker 06

  And then we'll do it and we'll look for it. And they did it. And of course the conclusion is that it doesn't matter.

• 40:44Steven Rinella?

  Can you guest produce this segment?

• 40:47Speaker 06

  Segment, we should do a whole podcast.

• 40:49Steven Rinella?

  Guest produce the whole episode.

• 40:51Speaker 06

  Uh, sure.

• 40:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 06

  I'll help Corinne with it. I don't think she wants me to just take over.

• 40:57Steven Rinella?

  It'd be like, it'd be like an internship. You'd be interning at your old job.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  All right.

• 41:04Steven Rinella?

  We'll call it, we'll call it back, we'll call it back in the saddle and it'll be the, the Yanni episode. All right, back to black tailed deer.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Our black tailed deer, our black tailed deer don't even know there's a moon.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  That's awesome.

• 41:18Steven Rinella?

  Uh, one last thought on the moon thing. For a while, what I thought was this, for a while I thought when it's bright out, you see a bunch of deer because it's bright out. And maybe that's where it came from. Meaning when it's pitch black, you can't see shit. When it's moonlit, you're like, oh, look at that deer. Right? Like picture walking out when there's snow on the ground and a full moon and you're walking out. You're also aware of all kinds of stuff you didn't know was going on.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's no such thing as end of shooting light.

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  No. All right. Back to black tailed deer. So, uh, Columbia black tailed, let me ask you this question about black tailed deer. Cause this is something we've mused about a fair bit. I shot, I've shot one Columbia black tailed deer in California. Dude, I mean, it looks like a mule deer. And I've often talked about, um, just went and talked about the, the sort of arbitrary nature of certain classifications of wildlife. I've talked about how according to the Boone and Crockett Club, if a, if a deer is standing on the west side of I-5 in California, he's a black tailed. If he were to run across I-5, he's now a

• 42:28Steven Rinella?

  mule deer. But we have to be able to do a better job than that nowadays, right? Like, like, what is a Columbia black tailed? What is a mule deer?

• 42:40Speaker 03

  Actually, uh, Booted Crockett is offering genetic tests that you can send in your deer and get that answer.

• 42:47Steven Rinella?

  To get the real answer.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  And Jim and, uh, Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger came up with a, a percentile graph, looking at, at, at deer samples that they had and, and they cut it off at 0.9%. In other words, if it's over 10% mule deer, they're not calling it a Columbia black tailed.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  So are they going to go in and start kicking all kinds of, uh, mule deer out of the Columbia black tailed record book?

• 43:16Speaker 03

  No, because it depends on location.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  So the, the record book is a line that comes down. It doesn't always follow I-5. It takes off on one Meridian and comes down to through Bedford, Oregon and down in there.

• 43:31Steven Rinella?

  But there ha- but there has to be a bunch of mule deer.

• 43:35Steven Rinella?

  In the clu- like there's gotta be a bunch of-

• 43:37Speaker 06

  At the very top end.

• 43:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's gotta be some fakes. There's gotta be people that have record book Columbia blacktails that they just shot a mule deer that happened to be on the wrong side of the road.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And we, as when I grew up in Washington, we used to purposely go up and we called them bench leg muleys. They, they were these, we would shoot them and they'd field dress at like 225 to 240. They were these beautiful blacktails, little teeny racks and stuff like that with huge bodies. And we went up into the Cascades and targeted them.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  I mean, that's where we hunted because they were much larger deer.

• 44:11Steven Rinella?

  And you're saying that those were blacktails or they were mule deer?

• 44:14Speaker 03

  They were cross.

• 44:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Some kind of a cross in there.

• 44:17Steven Rinella?

  Got it. But then a Sitka blacktail is like much more distinct, right?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Sitka blacktail-

• 44:24Steven Rinella?

  Cause they don't have any exposure. Like Sitka blacktails don't bump up against any other kind of deer.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Yes, they do.

• 44:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they do. Okay.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  Uh, there's mule deer moving into Skagway.

• 44:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  And in 1991, I took a photograph of a mule deer doe with a fawn inside of a Velazca up by Hyder. And so there is the possibility of some uh, contact. Uh, there's mule deer just outside of Prince Rupert. So they could come down the, was it Skeena River in there and come out of the interior. And so I, I think that's probably the first batch of deer that made it out to Prince of Wales Island. Probably it had some kind of a contact like that, an interbreeding between mule deer and that isolated population that became Sitka blacktail. That's why they identified mule deer in that genome when they, in the, those three oldest bucks that we have.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  You gotta realize they have a really small sample size. And that, researchers say that. It's, you know, we're, we're basing this on just a handful of samples. But that all of the older ones were very distinct that they had a little bit of mule deer in them.

• 45:33Steven Rinella?

  So is it fair, like, I know we were talking about Val Geis theory, it's sort of like pre-genetics theory. But is it right that, that at a time you just had these little pockets of deer?

• 45:47Steven Rinella?

  That were bound in by glaciers and they survived along the Pacific coast.

• 45:51Speaker 03

  That's what the idea is. That that was kind of a what they referred to kind of like a chain of pearls of of habitat that wasn't overridden by ice. That if it wasn't so severe, if the winter's so severe that they and they could have existed there. Got to realize too, we had much lower sea levels. Our sea levels were 400 feet less than they are today. So there was a lot of land between 17,000 and about 13,000 that was exposed on the shelf out there. So and you know, and so we have land ice interactions with the weight of the ice pushing down on the land and the land rebounding back up.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  And so there were some of that stuff going on. And that's how

• 46:37Speaker 04

  Which means that these deer could have existed in a landscape that we basically can't see it at all. Like it could have changed dramatically and they could have evolved to be like their high alpine tundra environment could be closer to what they evolved in as in flat

• 47:00Speaker 04

  brushy in areas versus any, any of the stuff that we hunt them on in the slopes, like the rocky, mossy, dark timber terrain.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Absolutely. In fact, it looks like this, according to the, I've did a lot of coring with palaeontologists and links and looking at also at the speleothems in the caves, hold a record of climate, that somewhere at about 11 to 10,000 years ago, the, a very dry spruce and hemlock forest started to appear on the landscape, replacing a herb dominated tundra.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  That was, that had willows and alders around stream courses and stuff and in disturbance areas. And you start seeing that and that fires were on the landscape in southeast Alaska till about 7,800 years ago. And then it got, then you start seeing cedar and scum cabbage and sphagnum and stuff dominate the pollen record and the wetter climate plants start showing up. So the rainforest that we all know and love today and hunted up there is only maybe about 6,000 years old.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  That's relatively young. Those, those great big red cedars are by your place there. They may be the 10th generation on the landscape kind of a thing. When you think about that. So it's, it's been a really dynamic vegetation change over a relatively short period of geologic time. And the, the topography, those, those humps that we fish halibut off the coast on were alpine ridge tops when the sea level was lower. I love that stuff.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 48:47Steven Rinella?

  I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house. They all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean and they'll get years

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  and years of use out of a set. Visit weathertech.com for your holiday shopping today. I used to think that like your mattress was like your shoe size. I mean, there's nothing you're going to do to change it, but man, was, was I wrong. That was before I ever like had an actual good new mattress. And once I had one, I couldn't believe I'd spent my whole life sleeping on dished out junky old mattresses. Well, Helix, check this out. They got over 20 mattress models, so you can find the perfect model for you. Nothing to be embarrassed about getting yourself a new mattress. Helix has cooling upgrades too, so you can get the best rest even on hot nights. Good night's rest sets you up for a great day. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the U.S.

• 50:16Steven Rinella?

  And you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free, customer-first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand, tested and reviewed by experts like Forbes and Wired. Here's what you do. Go to helixsleep.com/meateater for 20% off site-wide. That's helixsleep.com/meateater for 20% off site-wide. Helixsleep.com/meateater. Time out in the field is not free. Okay, every time you go in the woods, there's a trade-off happening. Like you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever, you forego some family gathering.

• 51:02Steven Rinella?

  If that applies to you, what you gotta do is you gotta learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. An OnX Hunt's deer movement forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions. So you're not missing the kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce. The deer movement forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  So what, what does that mean? Like the overall picture of black-tailed deer conservation, right? So just, just as an example, we, this would be months ago, right? We talked about Arizona offering moose lottery draws to hunt moose. And part of their reasoning is like, moose are, they're a remnant of a remnant population in Arizona. They're, they're here right now, but long-term they're, they're not going to be here, more than likely. Is, is one of the, the arguments.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  In regards to black tailed deer, when they're in a such a, you know, geologically speaking, like a very rapidly changing ecosystem, are they adapting well to that ecosystem? Is there anything that says there were a hell of a lot more black tailed in when a different environment was more prolific? Kind of where are we at?

• 52:37Speaker 03

  The biggest thing that controls sick of black tailed populations in my, not that predation doesn't, but it's bad winters. A bad winter can do more to wipe out a population. 2006 and seven on Admiralty Island and at Byhuna, we lost like 85 or 90% of the deer. I was working with Dr. Sophie Gilbert on her PhD and we had a bad winter on Prince of Wales Island in 2011 at Control Lake Junction, right there where you split to either go to Thorn Bay or go north. There was five feet of snow May 1st. It was horrible. I followed those fawns that year. She went into the year, went into the winter with 50 fawns on the collar.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  We came out with three. So we basically lost a whole cohort of age class because of that bad winter. So I think about the little ice age. The little ice age ended, what, 300 years ago? There might not have been as many deer on the landscape. There's maybe more deer now than there was 300 years ago. And what was the winters like coming out of glacier, glaciation and as glaciers were more prominent and stuff, even though we were in a wetter climate from 6,000 to the present, those first 5,000 years, the sick of black tailed may not have been prolific on the landscape as they are today.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  So, and I think that timber management, when it was super active and there was still a lot of good habitat left, was creating all that forage. Of course, that forage wasn't available in a bad winter when those clear cuts get buried. So, I have seen in just the thirty some odd years I've been on Prince of Wales, I believe the population of sicka blacktail on Prince of Wales Island is half of what it was when I got there in 1990. And that's not a result of predation, in my opinion. It's a result of now all those

• 54:49Speaker 03

  older clear cuts have grown up and there's no forage. It's what we call stem exclusion, that there's no light gets to the forest floor. It grows mosses and lichens and mushrooms.

• 55:00Speaker 06

  That was gonna be a question of mine. Earlier, you mentioned, you know, timber management. Generally, is it good for blacktails?

• 55:12Speaker 03

  As long as, as long as you maintain what they need to survive in a bad winter. They need to, so they're, they're an animal of the edge, like all deer, and they'll, they better their little knobs and stuff like that. And when it starts getting snowy and stuff, they, they need to be able to access food. So they might be even on a steep slope with a modest forest on there. You've still got a lot of canopy interception because of the angle of the way the trees interlock. And they're getting around fine. When the snow depth gets higher than their brisket, so basically on a sicka blacktail, that's higher than about eighteen inches, they need to be able to get to someplace to eat. So

• 55:53Speaker 03

  you have to have corridors for them to move either laterally or vertically, and you have to have something for them to go to that's got thermal cover and food.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  So the mosaic that's been created by past forests, the challenge is going into that habitat and where should we be doing improvements and stuff like that? And that's what we're hoping to focus on is, is where are those, where should we put those improvements on the landscape to do the biggest bang for the buck? As it was.

• 56:26Steven Rinella?

  Sure. Uh, go ahead.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  For the deer. So.

• 56:30Steven Rinella?

  Can you walk through what, just as part of a broader conversation about timber management and harvest? Can you walk through the sort of lifespan of a clear cut?

• 56:42Steven Rinella?

  Only in like in terms of deer because I, I've watched them where uh, I've watched them where they're fresh. Nothing's really going on. A couple of years into it, they start getting loaded up with deer and I've been fortunate now to see one get to the point where it's, there's nothing living in it. So lay out like, like what it does as it grows. Cause a lot of guys think the answer to more deer is more clear cuts.

• 57:13Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and where does that get complicated?

• 57:16Speaker 03

  The food that's produced is incredible. The amount of forage that's in those clear cuts at about year three.

• 57:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Three and four and five is crazy nuts. Like the blueberry. So the primary thing that, thing that the deer eats are the vaccinium. So your, your huckleberries and your blueberries and especially the red huckleberry. They love the red huckleberry. And some of the.

• 57:36Steven Rinella?

  They've eaten the leaves and.

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And twigs and stuff right at, right at the very end of the new growth. And you've seen that stuff in the clear cuts up there where it's browsed back to where it's a brush. You could hardly push your legs through. So you start out, we don't have any of that for about two years and then that finally starts really taking over. And then, so you got from year, let's say year three to about year 10 or 12. It's doing pretty good. And now your trees are getting up to the point that they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff. But there's still a lot of forage in between.

• 58:14Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  That continues to close in.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  So the bigger the trees are, they get, the less forage there is in that vegetation. So you, and then you start getting maybe a little more salmon berry and stuff in there and, and depends on the, depends on the site. It depends on how much alders in there. There's a lot of variables, but we'll kind of do generalities.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Forest Service historically has gone into the stands. So by, I'd say by year 15, it's starting to get pretty closed in. You're starting to lose your forage. But of course a, a clear cut is not ubiquitous. Some of it regenerates really well and some of it regenerates more poorly. So there's places to eat out in there. Then the Forest Service goes in. Excuse me.

• 59:07Steven Rinella?

  I'll take time.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Somewhere between year 16 and year 20 and pre commercially thins. So they, there's so many stems per acre come back under natural regeneration. That they need to drop that down to a certain spacing because of over competition by the trees that are growing back. And you've seen this. They go in and they fall those trees and your slash load is enormous. It can be 10, 12 feet deep.

• 59:39Speaker 03

  It releases sunlight gets to that and the vegetation responds, but the deer can't access that under that slash.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  And if you're wondering listener, neither can a hunter. It's not fun to walk through.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  You can't go through that with a D8 cat.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Oh, brutal.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  It is amazing stuff. And besides the fact, because that was commercially thin, you've got all of the, usually about 12 to 24 inches high, the bases of the trees that they cut like pungy sticks sticking up through that stuff. So you fall through that. If you're up walking on that mess and you fall down, you gotta watch where you land. Uh, anyhow, but deer, deer don't access that.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Their Forest Service has identified certain trails and left unthinned strips through some clear cuts to allow for deer movement vertically. At which they use sometimes if they were, if they were well placed spots, the deer continue to use. If they were using them in the original clear cut, they use them post, post commercial thinning. Then.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  Thirty years in, that's growing back shut again. And then that continues to get less and less and less light to the forest floor. That slash starts to rot and break down. And you've got all of the, then it's, then it's usually like a maybe 18 inches thick with just the bowls of the trees that were originally fell in there that might still, but then they won't support your weight. But they're, they're up in there, but by that time there's no forage. Until that stand gets up.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  A hundred years old or something like that and starts to naturally select and wind starts punching holes through it. And, and you start to get some light filtering down in around the sides, you get light coming in, maybe that's doing pretty good. But there's a, there's at least a period there of.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  You know, between 30 and a hundred, a hundred and 50 years that there's just not a lot of forage for deer in that piece. Unless it's managed, unless you go in and open that up.

• 1:01:47Steven Rinella?

  God, that doesn't speak well for the deer hunting around my little spot.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:51Steven Rinella?

  So I got an 80, 90 year dry spell coming up.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Was, was. Actually, actually what happened, what I, what I did years ago is I saw this coming. I mean, it was the wave of green that was going to be there and I stopped hunting any managed areas. And I started moving. Uh, out into the unharvested areas and learning how to hunt that.

• 1:02:15Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  Because I knew this was coming. I mean, it was, and so what's happened.

• 1:02:20Steven Rinella?

  You want, you wanted to step outside of the, the, the, the, the clear cut system.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Right. And good Lord, I have killed hundreds of deer in harvested areas. When, when they're productive and it's crazy.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  We used to go into clear cuts in the early nineties and you'd blow on a deer call and 40 deer would stand up. It was, it was totally different than you have today. And it was, there was, you virtually went out and selected what size of buck you wanted, kind of a thing.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Uh, that was a totally different thing.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, Alpine areas you were talking about when we were first doing that in the eighties or nineties.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  It was nothing to crawl up onto a ledge and stop and glass sixty deer.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  And like half of those would be bucks.

• 1:03:13Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  It was amazing.

• 1:03:16Steven Rinella?

  With so much of the island that hasn't been logged, or just not even the, not even that island that you happen to live on, but all through black-tailed deer range. Okay.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:25Steven Rinella?

  A lot of it hasn't been logged.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:03:27Steven Rinella?

  You got big wilderness areas. So why are black-tailed numbers down?

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  No, they're, they're down in unit two. They're down where you, you and I both have explored.

• 1:03:36Steven Rinella?

  And you think that is because all those old clear cuts have entered the shitty period?

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  That's right. And but unit four, uh, so Admiralty Chichikov, Baranov Island, they're doing really good. They haven't had a bad winter since 2011 that the deer population is going nuts and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I'd never saw before. So they're doing good. Unit three, which is QU Mitkov and Kupernov Island, 1972 was a killing winter. There was six feet of snow on the beach, June 1st in 1972. They stopped the hunts in unit three for years and years and years, decades, and started it back up for a two, one week and then a two week period where you were allowed to take one buck.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  Those deer now are really rebounding. And there's a camera trap, uh, thing going on right now out of Petersburg and Wrangell, maybe not Wrangell, maybe Wrangell, uh, that's being conducted by the state and the deer numbers are really up in unit three. Ketchikan is responding and all of that area around Ketchikan is responding really well with deer numbers. So the only place that the deer numbers are down really is unit two on Prince of Wales Island. And that's not ubiquitous as you move south. So if you get down south of Craig and you move down island and stuff and some of those rebounded areas, that's warmer and they have less effects of snow down there and stuff.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  And so there's areas that are doing a little bit better. Then there's pockets up in the, I kind of hunt mainly the north into Prince of Wales and central to north. Actually, I hunt a lot in central. Um, and there's pockets in there that have higher deer numbers. And so it's not all been cut and it's not all gloom and doom, but it's definitely different. Just in my experiential time being on the island, it's definitely different. And it has been partially due to the state of Alaska having to walk a very fine line there for a number of years while the wolf was being suggested to be listed and limiting the amount of trapping that could go on for wolves. But the bottom line is, I believe

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  that we all agree here that if you have great habitat and your habitat's functioning really well, it can take the pressure repertation. And right now, we have a compromised habitat because of past management act. Not so much as past management, it's just right now, we have not transitioned at all to a second growth harvest economy on the forest.

• 1:06:18Steven Rinella?

  Tell me what that means.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  We are, and we're not cutting second growth. We're not cutting, we're not going into those stands, commercially thinning those stands, or doing patchwork or small clearcuts, or we're just not cutting those trees yet. Some of them are ready to harvest now. There's rules on how you can harvest, but most of it's going to reach critical mass in like 2030 and 2033, that there's going to be a bunch of stuff that's going to be ready to harvest. The problem is, there's not the infrastructure to do manufacture of the wood on the island right now. The one large mill that's there really doesn't want to do anything with second growth. He's tooled for old growth. And you have to have different

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  saws and different processes and stuff like that to be. Karen, my wife, works on biomass. Nobody is, there's only one place doing bio bricks on the island. You could be taking all of the slash of the non-merishable trees and grinding that up and making biofuels out of it, bio brick, bio pucks, some kind of log or something like that, or wood pellets. That, that infrastructure is not in place, so the only market is the export to Asia.

• 1:07:35Steven Rinella?

  For the little shit.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  For the young growth that could be harvested. And there's been a couple of young growth sales, but mostly it all was exported to Asia.

• 1:07:46Steven Rinella?

  What's the, what's the situation? Like go way down to California. What's the landscape look like right now? I mean, like, like where do black tailed deer stand down there?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  I am by far no expert in the Columbia black tail in Washington, Oregon and California. I will tell you from what we learned from that summit in Oregon. And I'm gonna, I won't do California because I don't have enough knowledge. But what I picked up from the wonderful folks at Oregon Department of Fish and Game, and they took us out on field trips. There's a lot of that is a checkerboard of ownership. And Southern Oregon, Central Oregon and stuff within the black tail home range. And so you have timber industry blocks next to state blocks or BLM blocks. And if they want to do a habitat enhancement project or something on those.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  The block next to it is being intensely managed to produce second growth wood for, for lumber. And so the challenges are in the land ownership makeup with the Pacific Northwest. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna venture to guess that that slops over into Northern California.

• 1:08:53Steven Rinella?

  Like it makes it hard to have a cohesive plan.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Cohesive plan. Uh, it also makes it hard when they're, they're trying to get, of course, I guess this is across everything is how do you do population estimates of a rainforest deer? You can't fly over. They don't have winter ranges where they congregate and stuff like that. So doing population estimates on the landscape down in Oregon, they were using, uh, deer pellet DNA and dogs to locate the piles of turds out in the clear cuts. And so they had a contractor out there picking up samples, using the dog to find where the deer had pooped, why it was feeding out there and then doing a population estimate.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  And Southeast Alaska, Todd Brickman developed this, uh, he's a professor at University of, of, uh, Fair, at Fairbanks up there. University of Alaska. And he developed a way of doing DNA. So he did transects. He did 1,200 meters.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  One meter either side, he went and removed all poop from that. And then he started running that transect and, and picking up fresh pellets. And from that you can get individuals and sex off of that. And, and after you do that time and time and time again through seasons, you can start to get an idea of how many deer are on the landscape, what the, the demography is, whether, how many males per female, 100 females and stuff like that. And that's the only way we've been able to do, uh, population estimates. They've, they're trying some, right now, the one I was talking about, I think it's at Petersburg, they're trying to use both deer pellet transects and trail cameras to see if they could come up with a population estimate

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  on the landscape. So it's really hard to estimate just how many deer are out there.

• 1:10:42Steven Rinella?

  What might be, what might be black tails per square mile in southeast Alaska?

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  I've heard things of 12 to 20.

• 1:10:51Steven Rinella?

  That's more than I would have figured, man.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that seems positive.

• 1:10:55Steven Rinella?

  Cause holy shit, can you go a long time and not see one?

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  They're sneaky little guys.

• 1:11:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  I, uh, I, I, you know, that, and, and the 20 might be winter range where they get a little more compressed.

• 1:11:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 03

  And stuff, so.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  There's definitely areas that it's not 12 to 20.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Like those areas where within a hundred yards, you're crawling as flat as you can on your belly to get under a tree and then you're also 15 feet above other trees that are tipped over, those areas. Might be a little hard for deer to travel.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Hard for us to travel.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  It is, it is probably the most challenging landscape that I have ever traveled. I have a particular place that I like to hunt. That's super hard to get to. And when you get off on the beach, to gain 1,200 feet in elevation, a mile and a quarter from the beach, I've never done it in under six hours.

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Oh, that's misery. What, so what's optimal? Or in, is there an optimal considering just like the huge variance of

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Optimal.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Habitat density?

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  I, I think you're probably in that 12 to 15 range, something like that.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  But they get, I mean, they get, when you get into, even yet today, when you get into really good, uh, alpine habitat, you may have 25 deer per square mile, but that's just a seasonal thing.

• 1:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  And then they, as the snow comes and fills that up, they start moving down that slope, they get into those crumb holds trees where you can never find them.

• 1:12:44Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Just below the, the, the beautiful vegetation in the alpine. And, uh, so I've got, I've got a theory that every piece of alpine across the landscape, I know, every piece of sub alpine, cause alpine is kind of defined, it's that's, that's those true highest peaks, but all those little bus gag ridges have the highest point on that ridge that's got the best Forbes and stuff that's around. And I think that the best buck of those watersheds goes to the best forage every year, and that's where you're going to find them, that every ridge has that spot.

• 1:13:27Steven Rinella?

  The best buck is on the best spot.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  It's just like the best bear goes to the best fishing hole, you know, that that best buck knows where that best stuff is. And I, that's, that's the theory that I apply. And I, in fact, I'm not hunting traditional alpine much anymore. I'm kind of hunting those lower ridges and stuff and finding those little pockets that's going to hold two or three really good crackerjack bucks.

• 1:13:52Steven Rinella?

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• 1:14:37Steven Rinella?

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• 1:16:05Steven Rinella?

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• 1:16:38Steven Rinella?

  I want to get back to conservation work, but real quick. Yep. What percentage of the bucks you killed, you call in and what percent do you creep up on?

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Fifty fifty.

• 1:16:49Steven Rinella?

  And how you creeping up on them? Just creeping?

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Alpine mostly.

• 1:16:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Or dumb luck.

• 1:16:56Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm talking those low, those low nasty, those low nasty muskeg ridges. How do you hunt them?

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Hike up, put a tent up. Because if it's, if it's nice weather, because we're not generally up there when it's really lousy weather. By seven o'clock in the morning, those deer in the timber.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  You've got between four thirty in the morning and seven o'clock in the morning. That's your window to get success. If you're not there, it's not gonna, if you're starting out at the truck at four thirty, you're not gonna be there at seven.

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  You've gotta be there when they get up.

• 1:17:29Steven Rinella?

  At four thirty?

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  They're already out feeding.

• 1:17:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  And what I usually, I usually find them, they're either bedded right on the edge of the timber, kinda chewing their cud and thinking about the great night they had out there forging on those forbs. And they're just taking those last few things before the sun gets too warm. And then they've drift back into the timber. And so I usually hunt those edges at bedding areas that I know around those upper level muskeg, you know, like twenty three to twenty six hundred foot elevation ridges.

• 1:18:02Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:03Speaker 06

  Do you get an evening period of movement as well?

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  If you have an overcast day.

• 1:18:09Steven Rinella?

  Full, full moon?

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  No, no, yeah, not full moon, which we never see.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  No, because I have, I go up with my tent and I stay there and I glass and I don't see anything before I go to bed.

• 1:18:23Speaker 06

  Interesting.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  And bed then at those times. So our season opens up the twenty fourth of July. So from the twenty fourth of July through August that they're I'm up in those things and, and hell, it's light till eleven, eleven thirty or something like that.

• 1:18:36Steven Rinella?

  And you're not seeing those deer?

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  And I'm not seeing those deer and I wake up in the morning and they'll be in the meadows.

• 1:18:44Speaker 06

  Interesting, because knowing that most of these deer get up every four to six hours, right?

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  To do some sort of feeding, moving around. They must be then doing that down in the timber where you just can't see them.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you just, I always take something good to read because you're gonna have long days up there. You're just not gonna have. There are some places I've found patches of snow and stuff like that where they'll go out and dig holes and they'll bed in the patches of snow. If you've, if you've got a snow that persists, but the last few years, since 2011, we haven't had snow in those, it's, so it just hasn't been there.

• 1:19:21Steven Rinella?

  Earlier you talked about starting the, uh, Black Tail Deer Foundation, right? Is that, that's what it's called?

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we actually, we actually hadn't got to that.

• 1:19:32Steven Rinella?

  Well, no.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  We, we were going towards that.

• 1:19:35Steven Rinella?

  Uh, is that what, we'll get to it.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:38Steven Rinella?

  But you'd mentioned it. And you'd said that the Mule Deer Foundation had looked for a long time and they hadn't been doing black-tailed deer conservation work. If I had to take a guess, like a stab at why, I would picture that if you came to me and said, what can we do to improve mule deer habitat and mule deer numbers? I feel like you'd have a, you'd really quickly generate a list of projects. Meaning, well, this place, we have a huge amount of highway deer collisions. This place, they like to move from this mountain range down into this sage flat,

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  but there's a bunch of fences and developments that are impeding the movement so we can do some micro work to help the deer in that area. Or in this little basin, um, some well-timed predator control would help in May when they're dropping fawns, right? And you could kind of go and do these little distinct projects that improve mule deer in these funnel points or these focal areas of activity. But then you go and you look at this just seemingly never-ending

• 1:20:55Steven Rinella?

  sea of timber that's very hard to access, very hard to tell what's going on. And someone says, well, generate me like a chore list for how to help black tails. I feel like you'd.

• 1:21:08Steven Rinella?

  It'd be like, I pray for weather. Do you know what I mean? Like, what do you, like, where would you even put money if you had it? Right? That would be my explanation of why no one's doing anything on black tails. Cause like, what do you, how do you, where do you begin?

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  I think that there was a lot of truth to that. I think you hit the nail on the head. And you know, and you've got to look at, it is absolutely quality of habitat driven. If there, if there is a lot of places out there, we don't need to do anything. Habitat is just fine. But because of past timber management, and in Washington, Oregon, land ownership changes and stuff, but I'm thinking I'm very Southeast Pacific. We have native lands, we're a lot of timber harvest on native lands and Forest Service lands with a lot of harvest on there. And all of that has grown back into a dense forest with no forage under it. I think we have unlimited opportunity. But where to do it on that?

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  So you have this great canvas, like a painter stepping up to a blank canvas. You want to pick the best place to do that habitat work. That's going to get the best return to those deer. So, anything you do and opening it up and creating forage, deer are probably going to find it and use it. But there's better places on the landscape to do it. And right now, we're in the process of, of looking at that whole thing called Southeast Alaska Past Timber Harvest of X Age. And where should we focus? The Togus National Forest is going through a forest plan revision. We're looking at where should we focus our

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  efforts? If we only have a small amount of money coming in, and we only are going to be able to do so much per year, where should we go first? And why?

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  And so that, those are the challenges that we're looking at right. We actually, there's a contract existing out there right now where we've got, it's a GIS Biology Exercise to take a look at that landscape, taking in LiDAR, taking in slope aspect, conductivity with existing habitats that's out there, planned projects, where roads, where can we access? Now, one of the things that, at least the Black Tail Deer Foundation has looked at too, is if we do a treatment out there, if we create...

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  Forage for deer and deer get back on landscape, are those deer going to be accessible for hunters? Can, are they going to be proxable to a road or can they walk in easily into that? If you're going to put deer on the landscape, it'd be nice to know that that would also create additional opportunity to put meat in your freezer.

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  The people on the island that I live, Prince of Wales, they rely on deer in their freezer. And I'm, this is the first time in the last couple of years, I'm hearing people that haven't been finding the deer they normally would have to put meat in their freezers. So this is serious stuff, especially as prices go up.

• 1:24:14Steven Rinella?

  So what would be a thing you would do if you identify, is this part of the project you're working on where you're running all those cameras?

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  No. But the camera thing started out with Sophie Gilbert and I had an idea. So the Forest Service would go in in the past and they would log most of a drainage, but they would leave where you'd have a huge bunch of creeks coming down and alluvial fans. They would leave those as a leaf strip in between clear cuts. Then they come back and they fell, they did the pre-commercial thinning and created the slash that was 10, 12 feet deep. And so the only vertical movement that could go on was in those leaf strips in between the clear cuts. So the deer were squeezed into narrow slots.

• 1:24:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  So we had control areas and so we had 20 control area cameras and 20 leaf strip cameras. And we started that and then they went in and they wanted to harvest in there, so we had to move. So I moved over to where I'm at now. And so at that time, Sophie, Dr. Sophie Gilbert was working for the University of Idaho in conjunction with Todd Brinkman up at Fairbanks, at the University of Alaska. And we were trying to look at deer movement. And I had an idea and a concept in my brain, my working thesis was as it greened up in the spring, the deer were down in the lower elevations and they slowly moved up as it greened up. And they finally got up to the alpine when the forbs came out and they foraged up there. Then as it started to snow, they moved back down in the landscape.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  And I started monitoring these cameras, 2018. So I've got 26 cameras out there right now. That's anything but the truth. The does and fawns above the lower elevation valley floor, bed 500 to 800 feet above the valley floor, and they come down to feed daily in the dark, usually, almost always doctrinally, and not always for the does, and they move back up as the sun comes up in the morning. I do see the bucks in velvet as they're developing antlers will be milling around down feeding in the bottom, and then they go up, which I'm assuming they go up into that better forage up in the higher elevation, because

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  I don't see them for a long time until rut. So I didn't know there was a daily vertical movement of deer on the landscape.

• 1:26:36Steven Rinella?

  They're climbing 5, 800 feet every time they want to eat.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  Yes, sir. And you could almost set your clock by it. They're so doctrinally driven. And then, as it comes into October, about on where I have my cameras, this changes. So as you move north in the Tongass, Peterborough and Wrangell, they rut 12, 14 days before Prince of Wales. So that the low, more higher latitude, little colder stuff, rut, rut a little bit sooner, probably moon phase. Anyhow, all of a sudden, you start seeing much more fork and horns and spikes. And they're starting to move vertically daily. Right before, right?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  Soon as it's dark, 10 minutes after dark, they're coming down. 10 minutes before daylight, they're going back up.

• 1:27:30Steven Rinella?

  Down into what? The bottoms, where all the lakes and ponds are and stuff?

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  The females are feeding down in the, not completely in the valley floor, but in the lower elevations of the valley, and those bucks are coming down that they don't know why they're doing it. They're too young to probably do much of the breeding. I also have found Sika blacktail do not make scrapes, but they have marking trees. They have hemlock, overhanging hemlock branches that they mouth and they, they push this, the, their preorbital gland in there and their, their secretions between their antlers and they urinate under those things. And I have 12 or 14 bucks coming to the same marking tree, this day after day after day.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  And that progresses until about the 25th or 6th of October and then the big bucks start showing up. Bigger bucks start showing up. The more older age clash bucks come up and they start showing up down in there. There's a frenzy between about October 25th and about the 6th or 7th of November. Waiting for that first doe to come into estrus. And I have, I'll have bucks all over the cameras. I mean, and they start showing up in the day. And I mean, it's, it's just a progression of, of, and I've got this all plotted up because I'm really anal and weird about this stuff.

• 1:28:56Speaker 03

  And boom, the big bucks disappear. Nobody comes to the marking trees anymore. So the first does have come into heat and they're, they're autumn. And that persists until about the 17th or 18th of, of November. And then they bucks start coming back and marking that thing again.

• 1:29:17Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  And then magic happens.

• 1:29:21Steven Rinella?

  What's that?

• 1:29:22Speaker 03

  These bucks that you have never seen, these oh my God bucks. Show up about the 17th or 18th of November and they persist on the landscape till about the 25th or 26th, maybe through Thanksgiving. And then they disappear, they vanish. And you've hardly see any of those other bucks when those, that's the guy that has been pumping iron for four years and shows up. But it's just like, whoa, where have you been?

• 1:29:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay, walk, walk me through all that. No, I like it, but walk me through all of it. So, so you're saying that...

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  There's about three, three days of the year that you should be in the woods.

• 1:30:07Steven Rinella?

  So, they're running all around. Okay, you got does on your cameras. Then all of a sudden you start seeing bucks showing up because the rut's coming.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:30:15Steven Rinella?

  Then you see all this buck movement.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  And the first bucks that show up are the spikes and the forked horns.

• 1:30:19Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Then you start, then you see a bunch of buck movement.

• 1:30:23Speaker 03

  Then you, then you see the next age class. You see the two to four year old.

• 1:30:27Steven Rinella?

  Their timing is a little better.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. They're closer to estrus. They have, they're not putting that much energy into chasing because they pretty much know when the first doe is going to come into heat. Because of the moon phase.

• 1:30:39Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  That we never see.

• 1:30:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:30:43Speaker 03

  And then bang, they disappear and they're locked down.

• 1:30:46Steven Rinella?

  That means they're on a doe.

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  They're actively on a doe until she's receptive.

• 1:30:51Steven Rinella?

  See, that's when I must be always hunting.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  Lockdown.

• 1:30:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  And at that, but at that moment, so that's the key thing for me. At that moment, her head is not switched from save the fawn, save the fawn, if you're doing a fawn bleat call. He wants to chase her and you call her in and he's going to come in behind her because he thinks she's just running away from him.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Or you will have bucks coming to the call. There's no doubt about that. But at that moment, that just before the estrus.

• 1:31:28Steven Rinella?

  And what day, what day are you in now?

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  The fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh of November.

• 1:31:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  These are days I'm never not in the woods.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  I've, and you gotta realize, this is Jim Bechtel's belief system.

• 1:31:47Steven Rinella?

  Understood. Well, you're here.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:31:49Steven Rinella?

  You're here for a reason.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  I, I'm telling you, there are certain days that you don't, you, you're there because magic can happen.

• 1:31:58Steven Rinella?

  All right, then tell me the next thing that happens. Now, explain to me why it happens that all of a sudden all these big bucks are running around again for three days.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  So you have really good two to four year old bucks. Do the initial breeding and I think there's up at the higher elevation, there's also a population of deer that don't come down. And I think the really big, huge dominant four year old and better bucks are up there taking care of that. And as soon as they've taken care of everything on the rest of the landscape, they come down to see what was not taken care of at the lower elevations and that tends to be the 17th, 18th, 19th of, of, of November through Thanksgiving.

• 1:32:43Steven Rinella?

  And you're in the woods.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  Man.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  And I don't, I don't hardly ever care of anything because I am, I am absolutely locked into, I know that the possibility of me, and they, they be actually become less nocturnal and a little more reliable. That they're going to be out sometime during the day.

• 1:33:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:10Steven Rinella?

  I like it.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  I have this tattooed on my arm. No.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  No, it's a, and it's, and then, but that transition time between asterisk, no asterisk right in there. That shifts seasonally. It might be slightly earlier. It might be third, fourth, fifth, sixth of November, or it might be eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th of November. I think I've killed more deer on the 11th of November than the other day.

• 1:33:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Now get back to how you'd fix the black tailed deer problem.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  But for real, when you got huge thousands of square miles, you know what I mean? Like, what are you going to do really?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  So just roughly on Prince of Wales, a ballpark, I think just on the Forest Service, there's like 360,000 acres of young growth that's at or approaching stem exclusion phase. If you do the math with 12 to 20 deer per square mile, that's somewhere between six and eight thousand deer that ain't there.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Pretty simple math.

• 1:34:09Steven Rinella?

  It won't be for 80 years.

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Or yeah, until something is done with that second growth. And so we need, this is my perfect world. We need a active young growth management industry. And that industry has to be good enough. There's, there's going to be some clear cuts made and they're going to go in and do some industrial larger scale logging and stuff. But we will have identified where we should, where the stands are that should be approached to a habitat point of view. And make the decisions why those are important for habitat. And those won't be intensely managed by clear cutting and stuff like that. We'll go in and do commercial, commercial thinning of those stands, opening that stand up and getting daylight down in there.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  And there, there would be an industry that would locally manufacture that stuff and the biomass would be used that comes off of it.

• 1:35:02Steven Rinella?

  How in the hell are you going to create, like it's rare when you say like for the conservation of a species and proliferation of a species, we need to develop a timber industry. I mean, how like?

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. How do you incentivize? An industry and what's like, is it the, the um, heating fuel wood pellet? Uh, Camp Chef Traeger industry, right? Like what, what is the market for that? Uh, growth that, that is currently like being ignored, waiting for maturation or further maturation.

• 1:35:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, Cal, I gotta share something with you. There's two things that have thwarted Dirt's dad. That he cannot make himself.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  Well, he can make anything himself.

• 1:35:48Steven Rinella?

  Uh, making his own dip.

• 1:35:50Speaker 05

  Earwax.

• 1:35:51Steven Rinella?

  Growing his own dip, making his own dip. And then making his own pellet grill pellets.

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  So there's your opportunity.

• 1:36:01Steven Rinella?

  He just can't figure it out. It's killing him.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  We actually, because my wife works at biomass and I love it, we heat all of our house with wood pellets.

• 1:36:10Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  But I'm shipping them up from Idaho.

• 1:36:16Steven Rinella?

  I thought you're heating with all that red alder?

• 1:36:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I do the red alder firewood stuff. So we also have a firewood stove and so I cut red alder. In fact, I'll probably be cutting it if I can get out in the woods when I get back from this.

• 1:36:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay, but you got a pellet?

• 1:36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  So, we have a timber industry that's an old growth timber industry and that industry needs to shift its... And we have several small mills that are actively milling and kill drying lumber and you can buy second growth lumber on Prince of Wales Island. They just can't take the volume that would be needed to make a difference in deer's lives.

• 1:36:56Steven Rinella?

  And, and the free market economy is not going to take care of this?

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  I personally think if the, if the...

• 1:37:06Speaker 03

  If the management strategy shifted

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  from the old growth strategy that it currently is on federal lands to a restoration economy based on, we're going to do better for the deer and water and streams and stuff like that, but we're going to also support some large-scale timber management and this is what we're going to be putting up. We're not going to be doing old growth anymore. We're going to be cutting second growth.

• 1:37:32Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  That would allow people to know that there was a supply of second growth there that would be coming.

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  Then they could look for the capital to incentivize developing the plants to handle that.

• 1:37:51Speaker 03

  Then that would be both biomass and wood. I mean, there's no, you go to Home Depot, you're not buying old growth, Doug, for two by fours. Those are all second growth. And that's what we have. We just, we're still on the initial harvest of trees in southeast Alaska and we have it transitioned over to young growth.

• 1:38:13Steven Rinella?

  Got it. But that initial harvest is winding down, man.

• 1:38:18Speaker 03

  It is winding down. And uh.

• 1:38:21Steven Rinella?

  Do you think they ought to quit altogether?

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  I hope, I hope not, I hope not.

• 1:38:25Steven Rinella?

  Logging old growth?

• 1:38:26Speaker 03

  I hope not, because there's a lot of uh specialty mills. That they don't need very much wood a year to produce an incredible product.

• 1:38:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  So, you know, small old growth timber sales, I hope they continue, and I think sustainably they could. But on large scale timber management. That could be uh steered very focused towards improving deer habitat. We need to change to a young growth industry.

• 1:38:56Steven Rinella?

  And they can do all that young growth on old infrastructure.

• 1:39:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:39:01Steven Rinella?

  Cause they've already got the roads.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  But see, so very selfishly, I don't want to take any habitat earmark dollars and rebuild roads and bridges and log transfer sites at saltwater and stuff like that. I would like to see a viable timber history that keep those roads and bridges and stuff in good working order that we can benefit from for deer.

• 1:39:24Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  And that's why I think they need to be there together.

• 1:39:29Steven Rinella?

  Is any of the stuff we're seeing, um, is any of the stuff we're seeing with the incoming administration? And like the tariff wars and all this stuff that we might be starting in on? Is any of that gonna have a positive or negative impact on getting the industry you want established? Established or does this stuff play out too slowly?

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  I think it's gonna play out too slowly, and I actually don't know what's gonna come out of this.

• 1:39:54Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  Uh, because the agencies and funding and people and all that is in flux right now. And we gotta kind of let the dust settle here for a few months to find out what, where we're at before we could pick back up.

• 1:40:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but some well-placed tariff isn't gonna all of a sudden spur the industry in the next few years?

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know what those answers are. I know what I'd like to do on the ground if I had the, if I was king.

• 1:40:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah, tell me.

• 1:40:23Speaker 03

  What I would do, I mean, that, that's habitat work, focused habitat work in the right places that there was a, a.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  A bunch of folks that have put a lot of thought into why we want to improve that place for deer. And what would we do there?

• 1:40:41Steven Rinella?

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• 1:41:26Steven Rinella?

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• 1:42:40Steven Rinella?

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• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  We actually have, right now, we don't know. The Black Tail Deer Foundation and Mule Deer Foundation does not know the status of the funding dollars that we had agreements in place for right now because of the changes that's happened in the last couple of weeks. So we have to let that settle and the people that we were working with inside the agencies. We hope that we are solid in the agreements that we have. And so we actually have four projects in Southeast Alaska that will impact close to 2,000 acres of wildlife habitat improvements. So we've already started down that road.

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  We were going to do the layout this summer and award the contracts this fall for work in 2026.

• 1:44:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  But to make a-

• 1:44:22Steven Rinella?

  That money might not be there.

• 1:44:23Speaker 03

  We don't know. To make a meaningful impact on 360,000 acres of young growth that are sitting there ready that is going to STEM exclusion phase, we're going to have to do several thousand acres a year to start making a difference on the deer population.

• 1:44:48Speaker 04

  It's a lot of work.

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  It's a lot of work. Lot of cash, lot of work. And, but it could also, it can be, if the philosophy of management of the forest was such that it was focused on making those changes, we wouldn't be relying on habitat enhancement dollars to make that, that would be normal timber management practices and focused change in the way they're doing work on the landscape.

• 1:45:15Speaker 04

  Yep, and then they just have to sign on to adhering to some areas of exclusion. Or, kinda like they did with like stream bank setbacks and stuff like that, right?

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  And a lot of that's, a lot of the early management, virtually, again, not passing judgment, walked right up the bottom of the streams with cats and removed all the large woody debris. So as we're doing this young growth management strategy, we could provide the logs that the uh, stream, uh, actually Trout Unlimited and a few other folks with the foresters where they're putting them back in the streams to get those pools and the riffles and the stuff back there for salmon habitat and stuff. So we can, we can work to do riparied management thinning for deer, but providing the wood for the in-stream restoration projects at the same time.

• 1:46:01Speaker 04

  And then, um, we gotta tackle, what, what about the Washington and Oregon folks?

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've got a group of folks-

• 1:46:09Speaker 04

  And California, I guess.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we gotta work, we have a group of folks that are working for the Black Tail Deer Foundation, Mule Deer Foundation that's there. I just, I, and I know that there's some grants and some funding coming along, I just don't know what opportunities exist. I don't have a breadth of experience to know enough what's going on there. Uh, and that would be working with Oregon Department of, of Fish and Game, Washington Department of Fish and Game and stuff, and, and, and state. And BLM and Forest, yeah, there is Forests that are on that side of the highway and the Black Tail World on the coast range stuff. So I'm sure, I'm more than sure that these same kind of conversations and these same opportunities exist on those landscapes there.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  It's just again, taking a look at where and why. Because there are places that are, they're, they're working great. We don't need to go in there and muck it up. There's stands on Prince of Wales Island that have regenerated with a spacing of trees wide enough that there is forage underneath there. And it's not in that slim exclusion phase. We don't need to be dumping money into that.

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:20Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that all the money, do, do you feel that habitat is the way to go? Or do you think that the, all, all the energy that people spend talking about predation, do you think it's a wasted energy?

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:47:32Steven Rinella?

  No?

• 1:47:32Speaker 03

  No, there's a balance between those two. And I totally understand the predation aspects of this and, and I've. One of the things I've learned from my trail cameras.

• 1:47:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  Is when wolves moves into that valley, the deer shut down, the deer don't come down to the lower elevations for two days when the wolves go through. There is a definite impact on the wolves on the landscape. So. There's a lot of people saying, oh, I go out deer hunting, I don't find any deer and I see all these wolf sign. If you think about it, so if we went out hunting together at the time that the deer wolves were in there. The deer are all compressed in these smaller habitat blocks because of all of this older second growth out here. Where do we go? We go to where the deer are compressed to because we know that's the best places to hunt. And we go there and we find all these wolf sign. Let's say it snowed and we see all the tracks and everything like that. We don't see any deer.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, no different than seeing a bunch of human boot tracks.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  So our conclusion that we draw is there's nothing but predators on the landscape and there's no deer there. When in fact, there's probably quite a few deer there. They just for that time period have slowly changed where they're at on the landscape.

• 1:48:51Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  So there's a definite impact. I, I mean, I've got, I've got the graph. The rut was in full swing. I had wolves move into the camera area for a two day period. And when I finished plotting my rut, usually the rut is a big bell curve of activity. It starts up here, it goes crazy nuts. I have 50 bucks a day past my 26 cameras and it drops off to nothing. There's a little teeny bit for a second rut in the beginning of December. That rut rut split into two bell curves around that time that the wolves were there. It was a dramatic uh departure from the normal rut activity. It doesn't mean the rut was stopping, but it was stopping where my cameras were.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  It was still going on up higher, I'm quite sure. They just weren't coming down and checking on, and the does weren't coming down and stuff like that in those lower elevation. They're like, oop, I'm out of here.

• 1:49:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 04

  But I imagine there's like a more effective time of year for predator harvest wolf.

• 1:49:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:49:51Speaker 04

  And and you guys are so they're right, mountain lions are starting to creep in and.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, around the, around the foot, there've been a few more. I'll tell you what are the, so.

• 1:50:00Speaker 04

  And but black bear.

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I've been, I've been involved in three studies with telemetry collars where we monitored fawns right at birth through the first two weeks of their lives. And the last one that that Sophie did and it and it and it basically agreed. Not quite 50%, but like 48% of all Sitka black tailed fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear. And what we didn't know is if a fawn doe has. Forty eight percent of all black tailed fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear.

• 1:50:44Steven Rinella?

  So, okay.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  That is a lot.

• 1:50:47Steven Rinella?

  So, so.

• 1:50:48Speaker 03

  One half the deer, boom.

• 1:50:50Steven Rinella?

  By black bear in two weeks.

• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  Two weeks we're gone. And what we found out was, which we had no knowledge of, because then we got does on collar that had twins that were on collars. She would take a geomorphic uh some kind of a a structure, like a ridge or a hill or a river or a road or something. And she would put one fawn over here, two to 300 yards away, and one fawn over here, two to 300 yards away. And she would live in between that and nurse both of those for that two weeks.

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  So if she lost one, she lost only one instead of losing both of them. And so there's a natural, so there's always been black bear there. The deer have grown up with black bear in the landscape. The deer have changed their habits to reflect the predation that the black bear put on those deer. And when and when there was a lot of black bear before 2004. When we were doing deer darting, there wasn't a day when I was calling to bring does in to shoot them to put radio collars on them, that I didn't have one to two black bears smoke into me.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  And I've got, I've had them get closer than you and I are and had them look past me to see where the fawn was. They were so locked into that sound. They knew I wasn't a fawn and they didn't care about me. They just wanted to know where that fawn. I always thought, what would it be like if you set a fawn decoy out? It would be, boom, it'd be gone.

• 1:52:13Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  They'd just bowl over it. So they're, they're super focused on that fawn distress call.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  And most of the fawns, what we find is the black bear's feeding, the female has left them. The black bear may not be actively hunting, but it's feeding and digging up scum cabbage in the spring. You've seen all that stuff. And all of a sudden it must get a scent or that fawn hears movement, thinks it's mom's and lets out one little bleat. And you see this acceleration and it's, it's gone.

• 1:52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  So more effective from your, based off of your research, more effective to target black bears in the

• 1:52:56Speaker 04

  ahead of time, right? Early spring?

• 1:52:58Speaker 03

  Well, see, we saw, so this is what, why I get back to the habitat and that the fact that we have a habitat challenge.

• 1:53:08Speaker 03

  Again, this is Jim Batstool's world. I moved there in 1990. We had tons of clear cuts. Tons of food, young clear cuts of that two to 15 year age.

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  We still had all kinds of old growth. And we had good conductivity, even though the landscape was fractured. Lots of deer, unbelievable number of bears. I can't even fathom to tell you how many bears were there. And wolves were numerous. I saw wolves weekly. I saw a black, I would see, I, my third day in the woods, I still have my journal entry. I saw 27 black bears working in the woods, the first, the third day I was on the Prince of Wales Island. I mean, that's the kind of numbers you used to see.

• 1:53:55Speaker 03

  It became really popular to hunt black bear and if you look at the graph, it went from seventy bears per year to almost five hundred bears per year coming out of unit two.

• 1:54:05Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:54:06Speaker 04

  Harvested bears.

• 1:54:06Speaker 03

  Harvested bears.

• 1:54:07Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:54:08Steven Rinella?

  That was one like the whole era.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  Non-residents could take two.

• 1:54:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, the whole era of like bringing in truckloads of dog food and hunting bait stations off the road system and yeah.

• 1:54:18Speaker 03

  And that crashed in two thousand and five. Wonk. And the state started managing it first with a registration and now with a draw.

• 1:54:26Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:54:27Speaker 03

  And they're actually, I think they're doing an incredible job. I'm starting to see those older age class bears. So the first thing we lost was the big boars. Then we lost the older females. And when we started losing the older females, you start losing the knowledge of where to den, how to den, where to fish and all that kind of stuff. And so there was an impact.

• 1:54:46Speaker 03

  Wolves, I think, have stayed relatively uh, constant in that three hundred to three hundred and fifty estimate population in there. We've had another twenty timber sales since I got there on federal lands. And, and this young, young growth that was all this forage is growing up to be nothing. So now we have hardly any bears, but we're starting to see them come back. We still have wolves on the landscape. Why aren't we, and we haven't had a killing winter since two thousand and eleven. Why aren't we seeing tons of deer? And I think the reason is, is because we're losing the habitat on the other end.

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  And that's my take on the landscape there. That, you know, that the, the wolves are still taking about the same number of deer that they always did. And the bears are too, but there's less bears. But the deer used to be able to, when there was tons of bears, the deer could still absorb, losing fifty percent back. So, so we see a reduced deer number, not so much because of predation, because the predation is probably roughly the same, it's just a lower number. But it's the fact that we just lost those deer that aren't in those older stands of timber anymore. Where they used to be.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  Doesn't bode well for us on Prince of Wales for the next few years. I don't know. I don't know how to tell you this.

• 1:56:10Steven Rinella?

  Me the next 80 years?

• 1:56:11Speaker 03

  I'll be gone. You might still be there.

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  But it's, it's, you know.

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  So I, I moved to Southeast Alaska and I grew up hunting Columbia Blacktail. And Washington State and I moved up there and I just fell in love with these deer and I realized like, nobody knows anything about these deer. Like they were, you know, there's tons of stuff written on whitetail and there's quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and stuff, but like, nobody knows anything about that. And it was one of the reasons why.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  In 2009, I bought the URL sicablacktail.org and about 2013, Sophie and I and Todd created that webpage sicablacktail.org. The Sicca Blacktail Deer Coalition. I wanted a place somebody could go find out information about Sicca Blacktail. So it's got all the stuff on translocations. It's got all the stuff in there about all, all of the written things, both.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  Peer reviewed publications and not peer reviewed publications, the stuff that's been written. It's a place you could go find out about Sicca Blacktail. And I'm excited to see this, the emphasis on blacktail throughout their region, both Columbia and stuff through the Blacktail Deer Foundation.

• 1:57:28Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna roll sicablacktail.org into Blacktail Deer Foundation?

• 1:57:36Steven Rinella?

  What you looking for?

• 1:57:38Speaker 03

  Oh wait, no.

• 1:57:41Speaker 03

  We might put it up on the page, but if you look at the Blacktail Deer on the Blacktail Foundation thing, that's what Sophie and I have on our webpage.

• 1:57:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  We said they were.

• 1:57:52Steven Rinella?

  That same photo?

• 1:57:53Speaker 03

  No, that, no, that drawing, the characterization.

• 1:57:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Right up there. That, that right there. That's on our webpage. They needed something and Sophie and I agreed that that was a good thing to allow them to use that.

• 1:58:06Steven Rinella?

  So will the Black Tail Deer Foundation sit separate outside of Mule Deer Foundation? Or is it just like a wing of the Mule Deer Foundation?

• 1:58:12Speaker 03

  It's within, kinda like the difference between Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever.

• 1:58:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:58:18Speaker 03

  Kind of a thing. And so.

• 1:58:20Steven Rinella?

  Who's the director?

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  Greg Sheen came on as director. I don't know if you know Greg?

• 1:58:25Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  He's awesome. He wasn't there very long and Steve Belinda called me one morning and said, you need to get on a call. Steve's got an idea and Steve says, what do you think if we created the Black Tail Deer Foundation? And I said, I said, three years ago, I told Steve, I would give him two and a half to three years on the emphasis that the Mule Deer Foundation was putting on black tail. And I was kinda getting ready to retire again and I said, I'll give you three more years. I'm all in. I want to see this thing be successful.

• 1:58:54Steven Rinella?

  So what will your role with Black Tail Deer Foundation be?

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  To try to be an advocate for deer in Alaska, deer habitat work in Alaska.

• 1:59:05Speaker 03

  And, and the work that we could do. We have a full-time wildlife biology trained employee for the Black Tail Deer Foundation, Lieutenant Lieutenant Scott Lenora. Scott's awesome. Scott has been working up with Alaska Department of Fish and Game to do the modeling thing to answer the where. So they're doing across all of the Tongus, native and non-native lands. Where? Where should we, if we get dollars to do things? Or if the agencies and the other landowners focus on a habitat restoration and a second growth industry, where should we be putting our efforts and work? And so they're working on that right now. And so I'm helping to develop chapters and be a spokesperson, basically,

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  for the Black Tail Deer Foundation. And to educate people on what, why, why? Why do we care?

• 1:59:56Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  I love these deer. I just, every day I go to the woods, I try to go out and learn something. And I think every day I get schooled.

• 2:00:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, which keeps you learning, right?

• 2:00:09Speaker 03

  No, it is. You know, like I like, wow, I wouldn't have thought that. You know, and every once in a while, I, the licking branch thing, there's not a lot of, I went out in the snow to start GPSing trails, because if you go out there, there's a hundred trails, hundreds of trails. You go out in the snow.

• 2:00:29Steven Rinella?

  And I found, you put a camera on one of those trails, and there's a trail there, but it doesn't necessarily mean something's gonna come down that trail.

• 2:00:35Speaker 03

  But go out in the snow.

• 2:00:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:38Speaker 03

  And GPS the one or two trails that are really ran, and go to, and you'll see, they, they go like this, and they'll come to a node, put your camera at that node.

• 2:00:50Speaker 03

  That's where three or four of the really used trails come together.

• 2:00:55Steven Rinella?

  They come together in the high spots?

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  No, they come together, they, they just, they're across the landscape, the deer trails will kind of mingle, and sometimes they intersect.

• 2:01:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  And when they.

• 2:01:06Steven Rinella?

  So you're not saying they intersect at a particular type of feature, just where they intersect?

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  And at that intersect, I'll almost guarantee you, there's a licking branch, somewhere, right there.

• 2:01:15Speaker 04

  The licking branch thing really surprises me, sorry.

• 2:01:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, do you ever sit the licking branch?

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 2:01:20Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever, do you ever set up and just sit on the licking branch?

• 2:01:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  If you go to, I got a YouTube channel, and if you go there, I have tons of videos I've put together of licking branches, you can watch buck after buck after buck come to these things.

• 2:01:37Speaker 04

  Um, have you done like mock scrapes and mock licking branch? Have you set up a totally synthetic one yet?

• 2:01:44Speaker 03

  No. I've thought about it. Well, first off, it would have to be a synthetic lure, because all natural lures are forbidden in Alaska, that's been outlawed, because they, they're so worried about CWD getting up there. And, uh, so they're, they're gonna have to, it'll have to be something, uh, a deer attracted. I know several people that used, uh, can't remember the name of the company that does the rope, hemp rope, and you, you soak it in some kind of a lure, and they, I can't remember it. Anyhow, they, they put that up, and, and our bucks just beat the pee out of there. The problem is, is we have so much rain, you've got to put lure on it about every two days.

• 2:02:24Steven Rinella?

  Got it. You ever hear of a thing called Buckman Juice?

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:02:28Steven Rinella?

  The urine from a man named Doug Dern?

• 2:02:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:02:32Steven Rinella?

  Might be worth checking out. I could try to get you a bottle of Buckman juice.

• 2:02:37Speaker 03

  I could tell you that I 20, 2013, I had a really beautiful four by four with eye guards coming through one muskeg between two and four for three days. And I hung a tree stand and I, I'm not a patient man. I hate being sitting there. But I went in and hung a tree stand and I got out of that tree stand because I had to backpack it into three quarters of a mile. And it got cold. I got cold because I sweated and then went after I hung it. I got down out of there and the next day my trail camera, 18 minutes after I got down, he pushed three does right by my stand. So the next day I got it there and I set from 7:30 in the morning until 2:30

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  in the afternoon and this doe came out. Well, I had peed out of the sand and she came over and she smelled every place I had peed and I had, I had dropped the little rope that I had pulled the muzzleloader up by and she mouthed that and stuff. And then she just slowly walked. She followed my tracks and smelled me and the frost. I could see she was exactly following my tracks. We don't have any predators that come from above. So she never looked up. I was only 12 feet above her, but she never looked up. And she took off and I cocked the gun and swung over to the opening she come out and he comes smoking into that opening and I got that buck.

• 2:03:56Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 2:03:57Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  In fact, I'm not this good. It was an accident. But I, my camera was set on a three-shot burst and he ran by the camera and it turned, set it off. I mouthed run him to a stop and I didn't know you could actually see me in the tree stand. And next thing you see is a big puff of smoke and he's dying on the edge of the picture. It happened that fast. Chit, chit, chit. That, that fast.

• 2:04:21Speaker 04

  Unreal. Now, we were told-

• 2:04:23Speaker 03

  But she did not, she was not wigged out by where I had peed at all. Just absolutely did not care. She was curious, really curious. But had not, she wasn't wigged out by that at all.

• 2:04:37Speaker 04

  Jim, we were told that you end up shooting a lot of bucks head on in the chest.

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:04:43Speaker 04

  And then you, uh, what's your aiming spot?

• 2:04:46Speaker 03

  Uh, the bottom center, the bottom throat patch. And you recover the round ball against the rear leg bone.

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  You'll hopefully you'll find this out someday.

• 2:04:58Speaker 04

  I hope so too. I hope so too.

• 2:05:02Speaker 04

  But why, how's it end up head on so frequently?

• 2:05:05Speaker 03

  Because they're coming to the call.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  Oh God, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:09Speaker 03

  They're coming to the call. The other thing is I try to set up a blind call all the time. And if he's sneaking in, what I do is I try to set up. So if there's a ridge over here or a travel way that I think they might be using, I set up here. Knowing that the wind is blowing across me this way with an opening on this side so that he's going to come and he's going to try to circle behind me.

• 2:05:32Steven Rinella?

  And you catch him crossing that opening.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  And I catch him crossing that opening and that's. A lot of times they'll still turn and look at you, but you can get them broadside if you're just don't. Man, you could, like when I start calling, I don't move. Cause they're locked on. They know the minute you blow that call from. Five, six, 700 yards away, they know, they know the stump you're sitting by.

• 2:05:54Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:05:55Speaker 03

  That's that, that, that I've watched them across large, open, fast bus gig systems. Come at full tilt run across there to that spot.

• 2:06:09Speaker 03

  I'm quite sure because I'm, I, what I'm trying to do now is be a little more patient. I find that big bucks come in between 30 and 45 minutes.

• 2:06:18Speaker 04

  What?

• 2:06:20Speaker 03

  And I'm not that patient. I call for 10 or 15 and I, I want to go over there. I might do something different. I'm sure. That there has been hundreds of bucks come to where I had just called and I'm no longer there. I'm off hunting something else. Or what I'll do is I frequently.

• 2:06:35Steven Rinella?

  When you, when you set up to call, how long you sitting there?

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  You should be there between 35 and 40 minutes.

• 2:06:42Steven Rinella?

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• 2:07:26Steven Rinella?

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• 2:08:11Steven Rinella?

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• 2:08:57Steven Rinella?

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• 2:09:21Steven Rinella?

  Can I give you a little bit of math that Mercer Lawing, there's a man named Mercer Lawing, gave me?

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:09:26Steven Rinella?

  So, similar situation, call them bobcats. Predator call them bobcats. Bobcats will sometimes show up like 40 minutes later. So, most guys that call coyotes, they'll sit for 15 minutes. That's kind of the rule of thumb, right? 15 minutes, everybody gets bored and they want to leave. But a bobcat might show up at 40 minutes. And I was talking to my friend Mercer, who calls tons of bobcats and used to do it professionally. He's like, "Yeah, but I can hunt twice as many spots at 20." Sure, some will show up at 40, most show up before. Like, most show up before, so I'd rather hit twice as many spots than wait around for the one

• 2:10:06Steven Rinella?

  that might show up at 40. Do you know, like a calculated loss. So, you're saying that when you run it, you don't sit there 40 minutes, but you should?

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  I should. If I timed myself and make it happen, I have tended to kill better bucks

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  at the 30 to 45 minute period.

• 2:10:28Steven Rinella?

  That is a long time.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Which means, Steve.

• 2:10:31Steven Rinella?

  I call, look around, be like, "Nah."

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  So, and you and I both know, sometimes you call in there, "Boop, they're there."

• 2:10:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's what I'm looking for, the one that just is all of a sudden in your face.

• 2:10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. And we love that. That's exhilarating. I mean, my God, you're talking to an animal that all of a sudden it's like smack in your face, like at five feet. It's like crazy stuff.

• 2:10:50Steven Rinella?

  40 minutes later.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Steven Rinella?

  And you're calling at what, like, how often are you calling?

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  I usually start out with a really aggressive call sequence. I'm much louder, and I've been told that I'm too loud. Oh, no, that's half the volume. I really crack on it.

• 2:11:08Speaker 06

  But this is all the classic black-tailed deer whistle that's sold in Alaska. That's what you're using?

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:11:15Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 2:11:15Speaker 03

  I don't know. Can I use brand names here?

• 2:11:17Speaker 04

  Oh, you don't have to give away any secrets either.

• 2:11:19Speaker 03

  Oh, no, there's no secrets. You know, the cow talk that was came out of years ago, the first cow call that ever was made?

• 2:11:24Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, the rubber band?

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  Rubber band, the plastic thing? That's what I've killed all my deer off of. I tighten that rubber band and I it's got you use it like the thorax in the back and can change my pitch. I start out really quiet.

• 2:11:36Steven Rinella?

  Just make the noise in your mouth.

• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  I cut it. I start out really, really quiet.

• 2:11:44Speaker 03

  And then I crescendoed a louder and louder and louder. I'm reaching out for the.

• 2:11:48Steven Rinella?

  You know what? You just use crescendo right. I've always I've used it wrong my whole life.

• 2:11:53Speaker 03

  It's like.

• 2:11:54Steven Rinella?

  I thought the crescendo was the top.

• 2:11:55Speaker 05

  No, it's the build.

• 2:11:57Steven Rinella?

  The build. Someone told me that one time. My whole life, I said, when it reached a crescendo, meaning the cap, the apex, it's like, no, the crescendo is the is the climb. Good job, Jim.

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  It's like throwing a pebble into a pond. Your your sound waves go out. You never know what's gonna how it's gonna come back to you.

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  And so I I imagine that I know in my mind, every time I call, some deer hears it. They may not choose to come, but they are hearing it. And so I start with a really loud bang. I try to get him to stand up.

• 2:12:33Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 2:12:35Speaker 03

  And start. Now, they may not complete it, but I try to get them to do that. And so I start that, then I go back down and I build and build. And then if I'm doing a rattling sequence, I start out super loud and a roar grunt. The deer, our deer are when they're aggravated and they do the roar grunt, you'll hear that from 200 yards away. It is nuts how loud they are.

• 2:12:59Speaker 06

  This is getting me excited for a hunt.

• 2:13:02Speaker 04

  Yep, for sure.

• 2:13:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, go on.

• 2:13:05Speaker 03

  Anyhow.

• 2:13:07Steven Rinella?

  Now, that rattling stuff is interesting.

• 2:13:10Speaker 03

  The other part of that is when if a buck responds to a rattling sequence and you decide not to shoot him, keep it going.

• 2:13:19Speaker 03

  Numerous times, I've had a smaller buck come in first and Mr. Holy Jesus walk in later. Like, oh my God, it's just like, five minutes later, you'll see these really big antler chips out in the brush moving around. And a lot of people will bang, kill that buck and go over and deal with it, and they didn't realize that there was a smoker buck coming in.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  I had, I had Sophie with a, with another biologist there, and I called it a beautiful three-point, and Sophie took that three-point, and she jumped up, and I said, no, no, no, no, let's keep calling, and they went like, no, let's take pictures, and they ran out across the muskeg, and I was like, shoot. So I went over there, and I, I stepped away from my gun, took my backpack off, and I laid my muzzleloader down, and I went over, and I grabbed their camera, and I hear snort, and I turned around, and there's this four-by-four with eye guards, 20 yards away, steam just rolling off of it. And I looked at my gun, which was about 10 feet away, and that buck, and he took off, and he ran down the edge of the muskeg, and I grabbed my muzzleloader, and I rolled out into the muskeg, and he

• 2:14:27Speaker 03

  went down 60 yards, and went in and stopped, but he stopped at the sweet spot between two trees, and he ought not to have done that. But, I mean, that was a classic example of a, he was hot, and he was looking for a fight, and he came in just virtually smoking.

• 2:14:47Speaker 06

  Little off-topic, but 60 yards, blacktail broadside, is that an offhand shot for you? Or do you look for a rest in that situation?

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  I almost always try to take a knee. I try to, I, I don't care if they're five yards, I try to, I can do it, I've done it, I mean, 70 yards, 80 yards last two years ago, I killed a buck in the Alpine, I had none of the rest on it, I was like, suck it up, buttercup, and I aimed and just did a perfect shot on him, but aim small, miss small. I tell you, you only got one shot, you're not going to reload in any kind of lifetime of that deer running off or anything else, you've got to make that one shot. And that's the challenge, that's why I went to muzzleloading eventually, is just to challenge myself to make that one shot.

• 2:15:34Steven Rinella?

  You've been married a hell of a long time, haven't you?

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  26 years on the 14th.

• 2:15:39Steven Rinella?

  I think I asked you, like, your marriage advice, I can't remember what you told me. I did ask you marriage advice. Did you tell me that you always treat your wife like a princess?

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 2:15:50Steven Rinella?

  That wasn't you?

• 2:15:51Speaker 04

  No, that was Randy.

• 2:15:55Steven Rinella?

  That's right. But I did ask you in that parking lot on the island.

• 2:16:00Speaker 03

  We did, yeah.

• 2:16:02Steven Rinella?

  What would you tell me your plan was?

• 2:16:05Speaker 03

  Oh, I went through the whole thing about why we got married in February. The fact that, you know, like trapping and bear season started in March and through April the trapping fell off. But then there was field season and then it was hunting season for deer all the way down through into November and then trapping season picked up again. And usually things were froze up in February and that was a good time. And it happened to be a three day weekend that year with Valentine's Day on it. So we got married on Valentine's Day.

• 2:16:30Steven Rinella?

  That's cute.

• 2:16:31Speaker 03

  So I'd be home on anniversaries.

• 2:16:33Steven Rinella?

  So have you, have you guys got all those years of marriage just because good luck or do you got like a strategy?

• 2:16:39Speaker 03

  I think she's tolerable to me.

• 2:16:43Steven Rinella?

  She just got lucky.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  I got lucky.

• 2:16:47Speaker 03

  We got together and I said, I hunt and she says, oh, I've known guys that hunt before. And I said, no, you don't understand.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  She does now. We get along good. She loves helping processing. She's gone a few hunts with me and stuff like that. But mainly I go out and hunt by myself and she does all the, helps all the cutting up and stuff when I bring it home.

• 2:17:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Has she shot a deer?

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  Nope. Not even interested.

• 2:17:15Speaker 03

  She's watched me kill a bunch, but other than that.

• 2:17:19Steven Rinella?

  What'd she say when you get one? She get excited?

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:22Steven Rinella?

  She doesn't feel bad for the deer?

• 2:17:23Speaker 03

  She'll point out every once in a while, like, we don't have any elk in the freezer.

• 2:17:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28Speaker 03

  I love those kinds of statements, like go forth and kill elk, you know, like.

• 2:17:31Steven Rinella?

  Hey, what's up with, uh, you know how you're allowed to kill elk on Prince Wales if you run into one? As long as you have a deer tag or something like that?

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  I've seen tracks and I've.

• 2:17:40Steven Rinella?

  You haven't laid eyes on one?

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:17:43Steven Rinella?

  I had a guy that was feeding me a lot of intel about where somewhere, but I never looked into it.

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  I can honestly tell you in about year 2000, Karen saw a cow and a calf in the middle of the road. Just before you get to Goose Creek Thorn Bay intersection there, come to Thorn Bay. She came home and said, I just saw something, a deer that I don't know what it was. She had never seen a winter calf with their kind of that brushy mane. And I think I went to a Bugle magazine and I held up, so it looked like that. She said, yes, I said, let's get in the truck and we drove back out there and their tracks were there. I mean, I tracked it for 800 yards and I never caught up to them.

• 2:18:23Steven Rinella?

  So they swam over?

• 2:18:24Speaker 03

  They, they, well, cause Brushy and Shrubby is not very far from Zerimbo. And so they went from Atlin to Zerimbo and then they can come straight across Brushy and Shrubby across Snow Pass there and on to Prince of Wales.

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  So there was dozens of sightings there when, uh, so they first planted Roosevelt elk over at Atlin Island. And then they came back with Rockies and the Rockies went off, I don't like this stuff and they would.

• 2:18:51Steven Rinella?

  So that's what was happening.

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  So they expanded and there was a, there was a three year.

• 2:18:56Steven Rinella?

  The Rockies would strike off swimming.

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  There was a three year period where we had a lot of elk sightings on Prince of Wales Island. And I know three times during that period that I crossed trail, tracks and I tracked them.

• 2:19:10Steven Rinella?

  But never, never put eyes on one.

• 2:19:11Speaker 03

  Those are the years that we were doing the deer darting and we were free ranging darting. Uh, and, and getting off the road system and calling deer in and processing deer and stuff. And, and during those years were the same expansion years of elk. And I, I definitely saw elk tracks at remote areas on Prince of Wales.

• 2:19:29Steven Rinella?

  So do you think right now there's none on Prince of Wales Island?

• 2:19:32Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I think they've got to settle down. And they have a population on Zerimbo now and they've all interbred.

• 2:19:40Speaker 03

  And.

• 2:19:40Steven Rinella?

  And they're not striking off.

• 2:19:41Speaker 03

  They're not, I don't think they're striking off. I'm sure some young male thinks that there's a whole island over there. It might be full of cows that I don't know about. So they might come over, but.

• 2:19:53Steven Rinella?

  You know, buddy mine, he one time, uh, this is the same buddy was telling me about where to go look for elk. But he one time found two, he pulled two blacktail fawns out of the water.

• 2:20:06Steven Rinella?

  Couldn't find their mom anywhere. Little fawns, they had swi- they were swimming. He got them both in his boat. One died right away. He got one wrapped in a space blanket. Got it all warmed back up again.

• 2:20:18Steven Rinella?

  Um, brought it up to the beach and it ran off. So some number of those things die like that.

• 2:20:25Speaker 03

  That and, um, also when they're walking on the beach, a bald eagle will take them. And they'll grab them and sometimes they let them go, but they've punctured their insides with their, I've found several that has the talon marks. But I've also had like, uh, 12 mile arm down the back road down towards your place down there.

• 2:20:51Speaker 03

  I've, I've saw where eagle was swimming across, you know how they'll get a salmon and they can't take off?

• 2:20:57Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:20:58Speaker 03

  Well, when it came out, it had a fawn in its talons.

• 2:21:00Steven Rinella?

  No shit.

• 2:21:01Speaker 03

  There's a.

• 2:21:02Steven Rinella?

  Grabbing them out in the water and drowning them.

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  So there was, there was quite a, there's quite, uh, we don't know what percentage of fawns get taken by eagles, but it is a predator of fawns.

• 2:21:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  Especially when they're those first two or three day wobbly leg kind of things. That's definitely a, definitely a thing.

• 2:21:21Steven Rinella?

  You know what you get like?

• 2:21:24Steven Rinella?

  You get sort of this idea, you know, think about turkey hunting, if you're a turkey hunter or not, but people, you're calling turkeys and people like, oh, you know, he's not going to want to cross the, he's not going to want to cross the ditch or, you know, you're trying to call them through the fence. He won't want to try to cross the fence. And people talking about stuff like that, like these little perceived obstacles, you know, when you're trying to call something in. Um, when you get up there, there's so much water. And you think of, like, you think of a bear deer coming down to the water and he's going to like kind of psych himself up and get ready, you know, and then go for it. When you're watching them, it's like they don't even think, man.

• 2:22:00Speaker 03

  If you're a rutting book on one side.

• 2:22:01Steven Rinella?

  They just like, just like, whoop, in the water, swim, whoop, out. They don't, they're not like, you know, they're not like, whoo, I gotta build myself up for the swim. It's like, they don't even, they, they, they seem as comfortable swimming as they do walking.

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  I've had wolves swimming in front of my boat and get out on the beach, just shake off, sit down and howl at you.

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  Whatever.

• 2:22:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's wild to watch deer like come down, boop, into the saltwater and just, shoot, fast.

• 2:22:25Speaker 03

  They're fast.

• 2:22:26Steven Rinella?

  You can't even catch them in a canoe.

• 2:22:27Speaker 03

  They don't even, they don't even have little webby things or nothing. It seemed like they really go well.

• 2:22:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's just they don't give a shit. They just go.

• 2:22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:34Steven Rinella?

  They just swim. You'll see them on these dinky little islands now and then. You're like, what in the hell's he doing on that island?

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  Actually, I, I think a lot of times, right about the end of May, the does go to those little islands to have fawns because there's less predators out there.

• 2:22:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, I've seen, that time of year, you see black bears striking out for little teeny islands, you know?

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  I, I think that's what they're doing. Yep. I absolutely agree with that.

• 2:23:01Steven Rinella?

  Well, how do people get involved with, uh, Black Tail Deer Foundation?

• 2:23:06Speaker 03

  Go to the webpage, blacktaildeer.org. Yeah, blacktaildeer.org.

• 2:23:11Steven Rinella?

  You guys are gonna start chapters? People can start chapters?

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  We've got chapters, uh, I think we, we had, so a lot of the mule deer chapters, we went to them and said, do you want to become a black, a, dedicated blacktail chapter? And I think most of them said yes. Some of them, in California, that have mule deer close or in Washington, Oregon, that, that also care about mule deer in eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and stuff like that. They were, they were trying to figure out how to go both ways on that stuff, which is totally cool. In Alaska, it's a no-brainer.

• 2:23:42Steven Rinella?

  Well, is there gonna be a chapter in Craig?

• 2:23:44Speaker 03

  Yep, there already is.

• 2:23:46Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  Yep. I'm the sure person.

• 2:23:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh. Can you join if you're just a poser from out of town?

• 2:23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'd like you.

• 2:23:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, so you could go to the website, uh, there's a, and that's the easiest way. Uh, there's several options on, on what, uh, how many years you do it and what level of chapter and whether you're sponsoring and, and we'll, we'll eventually have a deal on there for life memberships and stuff like that. We've already done some chapter award stuff on Kodiak. We have a really functioning, really good chapter on Kodiak.

• 2:24:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 2:24:19Speaker 03

  And we're not going to do anything on Kodiak for habitat. And habitat's fine on Kodiak. But what we're doing is helping the research the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is doing on Kodiak on sick of black-tailed deer. And that was the decision of the chapter up there that they wanted to help the area biologist and his assistant up there work on the projects that they're doing. And there's a bunch of camera traps going on, and they're actually going to have the Black-tailed Deer Foundation members run into, run into the line of cameras and helping change out cars and batteries and stuff, which will save money for.

• 2:24:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:24:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:56Steven Rinella?

  That'd be some good volunteer work.

• 2:24:57Speaker 03

  And we're gonna, and we're gonna be doing that in other areas. So we got, we're gonna have a chapter in Judo. We've got a chapter in Siska, Prince of Wales, Ketchikan.

• 2:25:06Speaker 03

  Palmer was Silla. We want one in Fairbanks. We got one in Anchorage. Trying to think. I might be missing one. And of course, those guys don't have deer, but they go to Kodiak or they care, you know? And that's what I tell people. We all have.

• 2:25:27Speaker 03

  We all have organizations that we support and we think about, and it's your choice to put your money where you best see fit. And I, the folks that really care about black-tailed deer across the West and then Alaska, I hope they seriously consider Black-tailed Deer Foundation.

• 2:25:43Steven Rinella?

  I know. I got a lot of buddies that are in the interior, that that's a part of their annual cycle, is because things wind down.

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:25:52Steven Rinella?

  And so guys go to Kodiak, Prince William Sound, Southeast. It's part of the annual deal is to get like another hunting, you know?

• 2:25:59Speaker 03

  Every year.

• 2:25:59Steven Rinella?

  Which for them, hunting November is very late season.

• 2:26:02Speaker 03

  Right. But they're also out of the, by that time, the weather's deteriorating up in interior. It's really cold. They can come down and be warm.

• 2:26:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:26:11Speaker 03

  So. Yeah, it's a.

• 2:26:16Speaker 03

  I'm really excited to see the emphasis that Greg and the board on the Milder Foundation Board and stuff and Steve and his conservation group is putting on this because it's, to me, it's where I wanted to get to starting in about 2006. And I think it's exciting. It's just for me, it's really exciting to see this focus on a deer that really had nobody focusing on him in the past. And I don't know what strides could be made. I don't know what landscape management policies can be changed or what, but I hope to be part of it.

• 2:26:53Steven Rinella?

  Well, I think that if you are able to promote, like you can definitely promote research, you can promote awareness of issues, right? And you can unify groups of people who love the animals to, you know, look out for their, the best interests of the hunting. Even outside of the habitat work that you want to do, I think that doing those things and making a sort of like political body, so to speak, of like of black tail fans who are educated and aware, I think that in and of itself is valuable.

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  One of the questions that come to us all the time, would you be supportive of intensive management programs on predators? And we focus on habitat. I want to be very clear about that. We don't take a stance on there unless some management would come down that would greatly negatively affect the deer population. But mainly, we're looking at habitat and what can we do? Is there, is there truly something that could be done for habitat? And I think there really truly is something that can be done for habitat. It's not going to be planting sagebrush, taking down fence. It's not going to be working on migration corridors and stuff. It's going to be working on conductivity of that animal

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  on the landscape and where's it going to get its next meal? And can we do better in creating those salad bowls out there for those things to go forage on?

• 2:28:22Steven Rinella?

  And give them way to get to the salad bowl.

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  And I want people to be able to have access to the areas that we create those opportunities for deer so that they also can hunt those areas. I don't want to leave, I don't want to leave that rural resident or non-residents or anybody else out of that equation.

• 2:28:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:28:48Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:28:49Speaker 03

  And you gotta do it with a flintlock.

• 2:28:52Steven Rinella?

  That's the new rule. Don't let that rumor get out there.

• 2:28:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true. No.

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  So I called for, my best flintlock story is I called for an entire hour. I had trees like this that were being rubbed in this area. And I called for a whole hour. It was cold. It was like fifteen degrees that morning.

• 2:29:11Speaker 04

  So you're thirty-five minutes past your usual tolerance.

• 2:29:14Speaker 03

  I timed myself for an hour, and at an hour, I was starting to get really cold. And I stood up and I kind of brushed around and I put my backpack on and I reached down, I picked up my flintlock and I come around my tree and there's this huge five-point walking down the trail right at me. He's about eighty-five yards out. Again, steam rolling off of him. I remember the steam out of his nostrils that morning. It was so beautiful. He was all vivid, vivid, alder rubbed, orange antlers. And he turns around and he goes back up the hill. I wasn't gonna, I, all I would have had was an eighty-five yard shot with a flintlock offhand. I'm not gonna take that. I was sick of Blacktail looking straight at me. Turns around, walks back over the hill. I run up the hill.

• 2:29:59Speaker 03

  And I look and his tracks go off and it goes into this timber. And I had a can. One of the little long cans. And I reached out.

• 2:30:08Speaker 04

  Only it's never that loud.

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  And I reached out and I flipped that can. And he flew up out of the timber and came broadside at fifty yards. Turned broadside with the morning sun sitting against him, steaming. Reached back and scratched his butt with his antlers. And I dropped to go to one knee. And I couldn't see him over the curve. And I said, "Stand up. You do this at the range all the time. Focus, focus, focus." And I, when I, when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine that round ball going clear through the target before I come out of my hold. And I reached up and I, boom! And when I got the smoke cleared, he was gone. Just like he'd never been there.

• 2:30:50Speaker 03

  And I walked over and here's a chunk of lung laying on the sphagnum moss and I'm like, all right.

• 2:30:57Speaker 04

  You're on the right track.

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  But there I went aboard and it was, I wish I could play in my brain, the sun on his body and the steam rising off his body there at about 50 yards. That was, that was a special moment.

• 2:31:10Speaker 04

  Heck, yeah. I'm fired up. Sign me up for the Black Tail Deer, uh, foundation as well.

• 2:31:19Speaker 03

  All right. Thank you, guys.

• 2:31:20Steven Rinella?

  Man, thanks so much for coming out, Jim.

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  Blacktaildeer.org.

• 2:31:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:31:26Steven Rinella?

  That's easy to remember.

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  It is.

• 2:31:28Steven Rinella?

  Blacktaildeer.org. Start a chapter, join a chapter.

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  And go check out SikaBlacktail.org. That's Sophie and Todd and mine's webpage. Learn about Sika Blacktail.

• 2:31:38Steven Rinella?

  Yep. Got it. Thanks, dude.

• 2:31:40Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:32:08Steven Rinella?

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• 2:32:52Steven Rinella?

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• 2:33:58Steven Rinella?

  Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you, and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area, so you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life,

• 2:34:39Steven Rinella?

  so use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall.

• 2:34:45Speaker 00

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