In this Episode of the Epic Outdoors Podcast we sit down in the office with representatives of the Utah DWR, Josh Pollock and Phil Tuttle. We discuss a large variety of topics related to game management including telemetry, the Brianhead fire, migration routes, management, and many other topics of interest. if you have any interest in hunting this episode will be worth listening to.
Disclaimer: this podcast has been transcribed from the original audio and likely contains errors. This transcription does not reflect the views and opinions of Epic Outdoors LLC. Please consult the original audio with any concerns.
00:00:02:05 –> 00:00:05:17
We started off with catching fawns that were day old. Tell
00:00:05:17 –> 00:00:09:08
Us a little bit about the fire, the scope of it, and what we’re learning from it
00:00:09:08 –> 00:00:12:04
And that fire burns well, that bear had moved up into where the fire was.
00:00:13:02 –> 00:00:14:11
Anything to do with Western Big Games.
00:00:17:22 –> 00:00:18:06
Welcome
00:00:18:06 –> 00:00:21:09
To the Epic Outdoors Podcast, powered by Under Armour.
00:00:22:12 –> 00:01:08:18
Hey everybody, Jason Carter and Adam Bronson here with the Epic Outdoors Podcast today. We’ve got some special guests with us here today, actually, right here in the studio. We got the Utah Division of Wildlife Representatives, Josh Pollock and Phil Tuttle. And so anyway, these guys do a lot of different things within the, within the Utah dws. We’ll let them introduce themselves here in a minute and, and of course, you know, work down here in the southern regions, which is where Adam and I reside. So anyway, we’re super excited to get into it with them. But before we do, we wanna thank Under Armour for sponsoring these podcasts, as well as working with us on a lot of different ventures we’ve got going on here at Epic Outdoors. So we really appreciate them and their support of the hunting community and as well as the other sponsors we have, you know, with the magazine and different things that we’re doing.
00:01:08:23 –> 00:02:29:09
So it’s time to do a little giveaway here on the Epic Outdoors Podcast. Just wanted to let everybody know we’re gonna give away a free phone scope adapter for your phone that attaches to whatever optic you have. So anyway, you’ll be able to video with your iPhone, Samsung, whatever you got through, whatever you got, whether it be Vortex, ro, zeis, like a, whatever it is. It’s your glass and through. So anyway, we’re gonna give one away with this particular episode. To win, you would go to epic outdoors.com/podcast. And there is a podcast giveaway entry form on the right hand side of the page. The podcast code for this particular giveaway will be phone scope, P H O N E, SS, K o P E. Put that in there. Put your name, email, phone number one entry for everybody. Get on there and do it. We’ll give it away here in one week. So, appreciate ton Davis, one of the owners there at Phone Scope and for being able to sponsor this. And it’s kind of exciting. It’s kind of fun to give away a few prizes for our loyal listeners and guys that are out there, hardcore hunters listening to some of these podcasts. So anyway, thanks for all you’re doing and again, can’t wait to give this away. So get on to epic outdoors.com back slash podcast. Anyway, with that, welcome Josh. And Phil. Phil, thanks
00:02:29:09 –> 00:02:30:16
For coming in guys. How you
00:02:30:16 –> 00:02:31:15
Guys doing? Doing good.
00:02:31:15 –> 00:02:32:26
We’re doing well. Surviving.
00:02:33:28 –> 00:02:36:09
Surviving. Yep. Are you guys getting ready for the hunts?
00:02:36:19 –> 00:02:38:08
Oh yeah. Always, always.
00:02:38:12 –> 00:02:39:28
Do they let you guys hunt? Of
00:02:39:28 –> 00:02:40:02
Course.
00:02:40:18 –> 00:02:43:24
You guys are taking tags from the general public if you guys hunt. Yeah,
00:02:44:05 –> 00:02:49:09
No, we, we get to, you know, all the, all the benefits. We draw all the tags. You know,
00:02:49:23 –> 00:02:50:28
There’s a special I know better.
00:02:51:13 –> 00:02:51:23
At least
00:02:52:10 –> 00:02:54:09
Somebody admits it. Yeah, there’s a special pool set aside.
00:02:54:09 –> 00:02:56:02
Everybody knows it, but now you’ve admitted it.
00:02:56:23 –> 00:03:00:28
Something must have changed. ’cause I had to quit the D W R to draw any tax.
00:03:01:02 –> 00:03:01:11
Yeah,
00:03:01:28 –> 00:03:03:02
I had to quit before I drew,
00:03:03:07 –> 00:03:07:19
So. That’s right. I feel like the Lone Ranger here. I’m, I’m surrounded by Utah. D w R guys,
00:03:08:11 –> 00:03:08:24
That’s
00:03:09:06 –> 00:03:09:28
Long time ago.
00:03:10:14 –> 00:03:10:20
Oh
00:03:10:20 –> 00:03:32:26
No. But no, thanks for having you guys here. And, and maybe just to get us up to speed, Josh, maybe we’ll start with you. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are. I know we’ve had you on in the magazine at least with an invited guest article earlier in the year. But tell us, Josh, where you come from a little bit about your background and what your, what your job responsibility lies and what part of the state you cover. Yeah, you
00:03:32:27 –> 00:03:45:25
Bet. Appreciate you having a saw and I, that magazine article you refer to, you know, I wrote it and my graciously I’ll give it to you guys and you’ll put it in your magazine and then you throw it in the same magazine with the cover of a buck that I was not good enough to kill.
00:03:46:22 –> 00:03:47:19
Not good enough. He just
00:03:47:20 –> 00:03:51:24
Keeps stabbing. Now he, now he has to my, he has to sta at it
00:03:51:24 –> 00:03:56:10
Was not intentional. It was, it wasn’t intentional, but it was a giant deer. Yeah.
00:03:56:16 –> 00:03:57:10
So I’m like, I
00:03:57:10 –> 00:03:58:10
Wanna read the article I wrote,
00:03:58:10 –> 00:04:02:00
But I have to look past this article that should have been mine on the other side. But
00:04:02:00 –> 00:04:05:12
Anyway, I just wanna know if you found that Deer on Company time. That’s all I want to know. No,
00:04:06:28 –> 00:04:07:20
No I didn’t.
00:04:08:05 –> 00:04:11:29
I’m just giving you grief. Well, good. Yeah, that was the deer’s referring to Ron
00:04:11:29 –> 00:04:12:16
Sawyer’s
00:04:12:16 –> 00:04:27:29
Book. Yeah, yeah. February. Yeah, officially. Yeah. Officially scored there in my, in my house at 2 29 and changed net. So anyway, congrats to him. It’s such a giant and you were awesome about it. Like it wasn’t, there was not, it was just good old competition. That’s what it is.
00:04:28:02 –> 00:04:31:01
General season public land. Hunting’s
00:04:31:01 –> 00:04:36:11
How it is. I mean, I figured it was gonna be him or I and that deer was gonna come out to one of us and it came out to him, you know? You know.
00:04:36:19 –> 00:04:54:07
So that’s what, it’s funny, I guess we’ll just talk about this deer for a sec. But what’s interesting is that, you know, you always think the traditional, the gon the Henrys, these are kind of the places where these giants come from, when in reality our general units are producing some of these absolute monsters and they’ve got the genetics. Yeah, yeah. Like where this deer came from. And
00:04:54:08 –> 00:05:10:07
I think, I think that’s just it. I think almost all of our general season units we killed a 200 inch buck off of last year. I would dare say at least, you know, in the southern region for sure. Yeah. Yeah. They’re definitely, definitely getting better. And so, you know, for guys out there wanting to kill good bucks, they’re there. They’re
00:05:10:07 –> 00:05:23:12
Definitely there. Well, and and I think a lot of that goes, kudos to you guys for listening to the general public and to, you know, the, there’s just guys out there that want quality and then how to bring that quality back and, and, and the general public has to go without being able to draw every single
00:05:23:12 –> 00:05:31:26
Year. Yeah. It was a major just like in 92, 93 when we went to the draw. Yeah, yeah. That was like taking away firstborn children for all people.
00:05:32:01 –> 00:05:32:10
It was
00:05:32:10 –> 00:05:36:19
Brutal. ’cause you always went to sporting goods store, bought your deer tag and you went hunting and you had
00:05:36:20 –> 00:05:37:28
Deer camp. Everybody had deer camp.
00:05:38:00 –> 00:06:20:12
Yeah. And so that, you know, capped it at 97,000 or something tags. That was a big, big change. And then, I dunno, five or six years ago when we went to the individual unit by unit versus whole southern region, you know, 20, 25,000 tags in region hunt wherever you want. You know, just lack the control in our opinion to really, when something started getting good, everybody knew about it. Buck door ratios to get hammered. And it just was hard to have sustained momentum. Now, you know, little bit of growing pains for people it seems like, you know, nobody’s really happy. ’cause a lot of these individual units are on borders. You live in a town in a valley and you both sides, you can hunt both sides. And now you gotta pick one of the other. Now you’re
00:06:20:12 –> 00:06:24:02
Picket like, well anyway, a lot of our little towns right here, even
00:06:24:02 –> 00:06:24:28
Us southwest, even
00:06:24:28 –> 00:06:27:22
Us, we used to be able to hunt Cedar Mountain and go out west. We can’t now,
00:06:27:28 –> 00:06:31:10
We’ll take right here in Cedar. I mean there’s what, four units? Beaver
00:06:31:11 –> 00:06:31:29
Southwest,
00:06:32:04 –> 00:06:34:08
Right. Together. Right, right in town.
00:06:34:19 –> 00:06:50:00
Yes. And so, and, and so, and what’s interesting and, and kind of somewhat funny, I mean we basically went to unit by unit management, but we’re still calling it general ’cause we’re trying to appease everybody. Yeah. But for all intents and purposes, they’re a bunch of limited entry units with
00:06:50:08 –> 00:06:51:07
Higher number tax,
00:06:51:29 –> 00:06:58:11
A little higher number of tags and a little bit different variables on what you guys are shooting four buck door ratio wise and age wise. Well,
00:06:58:11 –> 00:07:33:11
And that, and that’s just the thing, you know, when I, I was just looking back, you know, I started, we had to, when I was 14 years old, I could start hunting deer and it was 94 range. I went back and looked at some of that data, you know, and we were rocking nine buck or nine bucks per hundred dose, you know, back then on most of these units. And even like the gon those years where now we have 50 bucks per hundred dose, it was 25 bucks per hundred dose on, on a unit like the gon. And so now you fast forward to 2017 and we’re at 18 to 20 bucks per hundred dose on our general season units and you know, 50 bucks per hundred dose and, and more so on the Henry’s of Pon
00:07:33:16 –> 00:07:44:24
Spain. And so while, while people may argue it’s not as good or this or that, and they may still, you’re gonna get criticism no matter what. Of course it really is from a tr from a trophy perspective, it is from an opportunity perspective, you can’t draw, you
00:07:44:24 –> 00:07:51:17
Know, and you can’t please everybody. You know, that’s the thing is you’re always gonna have the opportunity guy, you know, throwing that, that flag. But
00:07:51:26 –> 00:08:04:07
You’d have to be either ignorant or just have a chip on your shoulder. Something for, to really take the stance now. Yeah. That the general seasoned deer hunting isn’t as good as it was 20 years. Right. You have to just have a burr against the world.
00:08:04:13 –> 00:08:05:26
Well, we’ve tried a lot of different things,
00:08:06:13 –> 00:08:07:19
The DWR stuff,
00:08:08:29 –> 00:08:09:13
Whoever,
00:08:09:13 –> 00:08:11:01
Because it is, I mean, those
00:08:11:01 –> 00:08:12:16
Are the bad guys. There’s no question know.
00:08:13:15 –> 00:08:42:05
But, and, and that’s just the thing, you know, although we’ve had a somewhat of a degrees decreased opportunity in like say permit numbers, a lot of guys, you know, you guys have kids that are hunting age now and probably not drawn those permits. And that’s where I get some complaints from, you know, hey, my kid, it’s, he’s now, he’s 15, he hasn’t drawn a tag yet. Yeah. And I want my kid deer hunting and, and yeah, that’s, that’s tough. And I, I don’t have that yet. My oldest daughter, she’s nine, gonna be 10. So I’m not at that point yet. Yeah. But I look at the opportunity now that we have kids can hunt when they’re 12. Yeah. You know, back, back when you guys were, it
00:08:42:07 –> 00:08:52:00
Was probably was 16. It was, it was 16. And that’s what’s frustrating Adam, I were actually discussing this yesterday, but you know what our response to them is, is well, you know, you could give them your tech. Yeah.
00:08:52:01 –> 00:08:53:29
Now we have a mentoring program, plus we have,
00:08:54:02 –> 00:08:57:12
If you really want your kid, if you really love your kid, you give up
00:08:57:12 –> 00:09:06:00
Your buck tag. Exactly. Exactly. And that’s, and that’s just it. I mean, I look at the amount of opportunities that, that the division has come up with Yeah. With these decrease of permits. You know, we have these elk,
00:09:06:00 –> 00:09:16:28
Well elk hunting, we didn’t have, we had such limited elk numbers in Utah back then. Now you can general season elk tag. Yeah. Cow general season. It kids, kids for kids, they just want to shoot something.
00:09:17:01 –> 00:09:22:02
And if they draw a rifle deer tag, they get a hunt like a dedicated hunter all three seasons. You know, so I, I, you know, look
00:09:22:02 –> 00:09:48:17
Back, how awesome is that dedicated hunter, but being able to kill three deer in three years instead of two and three. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a pretty great opportunity. And they don’t need to do the service hours or anything like that. So I think it’s a great opportunity. I think there you might see a slight change where maybe first year hunters do get the do get a tag. Yeah. You know, I can see game and fish at some point recognizing that there’s first year hunters not getting a deer tag. Right. Right. Maybe they are showing preference somehow. Yeah. But other than that, the system seems to be working really, really well.
00:09:48:17 –> 00:10:29:11
But when you get one, the other, the other argument we had, and we had this, I remember back in the racks five, six years ago, is that well, if you cut the tags more and, and we’re managing for better quality, if you can call that on general season, sure. More people are gonna sit home. You’re not gonna get, get to go hunting. Well, my contention was is as if we’re nine to 10 bucks per hundred dose, and you take kids out hunting and there’s orange everywhere, they’re not gonna have an awesome experience anyway. And they’re not gonna wanna say, Hey, let’s do that again. You know? Yeah. Right. You give them an opportunity where they have a better experience. See, some game don’t always have to kill one, but your odds of killing are way higher. The odds of them getting hooked are way better now than they were when the shotgun approach was going on.
00:10:29:11 –> 00:10:35:17
Yeah, I see, I see. Kids now you’re running into people in the field and the kids, I mean, they’re getting their first tag and they’re like, I’m not gonna kill anything unless a four point, it’s a
00:10:35:17 –> 00:10:35:22
Four point,
00:10:36:14 –> 00:10:36:20
My
00:10:36:20 –> 00:10:36:24
Kid
00:10:38:05 –> 00:10:38:23
Yesterday,
00:10:39:09 –> 00:10:48:19
My boy’s 12 this year, and all year long I come home from scouting Henry’s and this and that, and I’m showing em, and he’s like, ah, shoot. That that on the, on the general, I’m like, you better,
00:10:49:26 –> 00:10:52:24
It’s 195 inch deer. Huh? That’s, that’s a
00:10:52:24 –> 00:10:55:22
32 inch four by three. Yeah, you better shoot that. We’re
00:10:55:22 –> 00:10:55:28
Not gonna
00:10:55:28 –> 00:10:56:01
Shoot
00:10:56:10 –> 00:10:58:29
Henry four, but you, you better shoot that. But
00:10:59:24 –> 00:11:00:18
I don’t know what I meant for,
00:11:01:05 –> 00:11:10:17
And I think a lot of it’s just social media and Yeah. They’re, they’re, they’re exposed to pitcher after pitcher after picture and truck cams and they think these deer just grow on trees and Yeah.
00:11:11:04 –> 00:11:11:11
How
00:11:11:11 –> 00:11:13:22
Hard it is. Oh gee. But
00:11:13:25 –> 00:11:14:07
Anyway,
00:11:14:09 –> 00:11:37:13
And so that goes back, I guess, you know, where you’re saying, like, with my background, I, you know, I, I go back to my hunting experience, the same thing. I, I grew up in Pengu, you know, just over the mountain, so local here to Southern Utah and went to school, went away, moved away for a time just trying to get through school, ended up working for the B l m, the Forest Service, doing wildland fire stuff, you know, kind of thought that’s what I want to do, you know, I didn’t really have a,
00:11:38:09 –> 00:11:41:07
Are we talking late nineties, early two thousands? When are we talking? Yeah,
00:11:41:07 –> 00:11:52:04
Yeah. Late nineties, early two thousands. Okay. I started, you know, like I said, I started turned 14 on in like 94. Okay. You know, that was my first deer tag that year. Actually drew a ponag rifle deer tag my first year. Huh.
00:11:52:07 –> 00:11:53:13
Oh, that’s awesome. One of those
00:11:54:02 –> 00:12:19:26
Wish I never would’ve way too much pressure for a kid. Yeah. I, you know, my first job I was working for a local taxidermist over there in pen, which I was, you know, that was my first job. And so basically from the time I was a kid going hunting and luckily, like with my job and personal life, I, there’s literally not a day where I don’t spend at least half of it thinking about hunting in some, some regard. Yeah. It’s just a part of my life. And if I didn’t have it, I don’t know, man, I don’t know what else I would be, and
00:12:19:26 –> 00:12:22:25
So you go to school, you’re going to school doing these jobs on the side, gaining
00:12:22:25 –> 00:13:16:11
Experience and, and so I, I get in and, and I just started looking around. I first, I, I went and did a, a ride along actually with one of the game fish and game officers over here and the conservation officers in Cedar. And I thought, you know, that’s a, that’s a pretty cool job. And so I liked it. I had fun. And so I, I actually did, went that route, went finished school and actually started working for the division. I actually had a job as a game warden. I was hired before I even finished school. It was, I’d, I’d kind of worked seasonally a little bit for the biologist over in the Pengu area doing some depredation counts, that kind of thing. So I had a little bit of experience with the division, started going that route and started as a game warden for five years. I worked as a game warden for the division and, and then just worked my way into this position while a position came open. And, and you know, you talk about hunting as a game warden, I didn’t get to hunt as much as I wanted. And it was a, and it’s a huge part of my life. That’s
00:13:16:11 –> 00:13:17:22
Why you did this job, that’s why you went into
00:13:17:22 –> 00:13:31:29
This. Yeah, because I, I just, I love wildlife and it eventually things worked out for me. So I started working that route and I was like, man, I’m not getting able to hunt as much as I want. You know, I’m out there checking guys and, and just as I, I go out and work all day and get home thinking I got a few hours to go hunt in the evening, and then I get a call from
00:13:32:11 –> 00:13:32:22
Somebody’s spotlight.
00:13:33:23 –> 00:14:01:17
Exactly. So I got a bus back out to go do it. Exactly. And, and so I was like, man, I’m not getting the time I want. So anyway, I got this biologist position back in 2013 and Okay. And continued on from there. And, and I, the units I cover, I, I cover Pengu Lake, Mount Dutton, Ponson, and some of the Katts, a couple of the Katts east and west sheep units. So I would say your home probably the best else. And it’s your home, right? Yeah. And I, I’m back in Pengu, so back a home where I grew up and there’s another’s really nothing there. So
00:14:01:17 –> 00:14:11:08
How does it compare to being law enforcement? Did you like law enforcement? Was it, I mean, it’s gotta be a little bit tough people, you’re not people’s, you know, favorite person to see in the field. Yeah, yeah.
00:14:11:10 –> 00:14:53:19
You know, and, and that’s my thing, you know, I think naturally when people see a game, or it’s just like when you’re driving down the road, whether you’re going 50 or 90 patrol and you see how patrolman you slam the brakes, you know, because you’re just like, oh, what am I doing? And it’s kinda the same thing. People have that reaction and I tried to wanna change that when I was a game warden, you know? Yeah. ’cause we weren’t always out and look, look for, you know, we’re looking for bad guys, but not everybody’s a bad guy, but everybody just gets nervous, you know? Yeah. So, anyway, I kinda got to a point though, and I, I think it happens in, in law enforcement where you, you know, you start to distrust people, you know? Yeah. You get lied to so much. Oh, I’ve got my fishing license, it’s in the truck and Yeah. And then you go look ’em up and they haven’t had one for five years, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I kinda got to a point where I was like, man, you know, this is, this isn’t me. I’m
00:14:53:19 –> 00:14:55:10
Seeing too much negative going on here.
00:14:55:29 –> 00:15:02:01
Well yeah. You come home and your wife’s like, really? You’re ornery. You know? Well, well I checked 10 people and 10 of them hate me. Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:02:14 –> 00:15:03:12
And so for me
00:15:03:27 –> 00:15:06:00
Got three death threats and somebody shot at me. Yeah,
00:15:07:12 –> 00:15:34:07
Exactly. And so it was kind of a, to me it was just like, you know what, it was a good start and I liked it. And, and trust me, like there was nothing more rewarding than catching a bad guy doing bad stuff for wildlife. I mean, you catch a guy who’s been poaching things and doing stuff and robbing opportunity from, from guys like the rest of us. You know, it, it was real fulfilling. I liked it, but it was more of a, you know, I was dealing more with people than wildlife and, and I didn’t get into it for that. I wanted to deal with wildlife. So when the biologist position came open, took
00:15:34:07 –> 00:16:04:20
Care. I think where some of these law enforcement guys, you know, they get a bad reputation. Like you said, you start to think that everybody’s bad and you look for the bad. And everybody that when you get a guy that made an honest mistake or something, some of these guys have a tendency to throw the book at ’em just because they don’t know that it’s an honest mistake. They assume it’s a, you know what I mean? Everybody. Right. And so you get guys that are a little heavy handed out there and, and so, you know, guys like us don’t wanna see you, you know, but it’s really nothing against you personally. It’s just we assume you’re gonna, and
00:16:04:20 –> 00:16:25:16
It’s hard to know, you can try and use your discretion, but you just meet some guy in the mountain for the first time. Yeah. You know, know who he’s, so, but we’ve got a lot of great officers and, and they do a lot of good catch a lot of bad guys. A lot of times we don’t even hear or see about it. I wish they would do more for kind of getting out what they’ve doing information. Yeah. ’cause they catch a lot of bad guys doing a lot of bad things and, and they’re, they’re great. You know? Yeah.
00:16:26:06 –> 00:17:35:19
Well, and I know you alluded to it one earlier, Josh, for me, when I, when I chose to be a biologist versus a conservation officer, it came down a lot to Yeah. My, I wanted to hunt too. Yeah. And my personal hunting schedule. And I knew that working majority of the hunting seasons as well as weekends as a conservation officer, because that’s when people are out all summer long fishing or hunting or whatever. I knew. Right. So I finished, I went and got a master’s. ’cause I knew that is not gonna last for me. And, and nothing against, it’s just me and my personality. And, and I know a lot of conservation officers that hunt and they are get creative and they have to get creative hunt different seasons or different things like that. Maybe they’re not the most popular in different states. But yeah, that was, that was my case. I I, I knew And there’s still things as a biologist, as we all know, that, that make you wanna pull your hair out. Oh yeah. You know, you’re dealing with people and social issues, not, it’s not just all, Hey, you’re, you’re watching, you know, calf calves and fawns be born every day and transplant sheep and helicopter rides. It’s not all that. No. But it’s, but it’s at least, yeah. More, more of what I would I wanted. And so I, I definitely hear you there. So, well, that brings
00:17:35:19 –> 00:17:43:16
Us to you, Phil. I, I mean, you know, just a, a little bit of an introduction. You killed an absolute monster bowl that everybody salivated over. It’s not
00:17:43:16 –> 00:17:47:05
As big as Josh’s. Yeah, let’s get that. Let’s get that on the table. Let’s get that right
00:17:47:05 –> 00:17:58:02
Now. Adam, Adam and I were discussing, so you two have both killed 400 inch bulls, right? Yeah. Yeah. And Adam and I neither have killed 400 inch bulls and we’re just, it’s not, doesn’t feel right. Just
00:17:58:02 –> 00:18:01:04
Doesn’t feel right. That was that special d w r tag like we’re talking about.
00:18:02:03 –> 00:18:05:04
Yeah. I mean, I drew that with one point, you know, that’s, how
00:18:05:04 –> 00:18:06:16
Old were you Phil? How were you a, a teenager?
00:18:07:00 –> 00:18:07:29
I was 16. Wow.
00:18:08:03 –> 00:18:11:12
And this was the Longmore Pav, right. What year would that have been? That
00:18:11:12 –> 00:18:12:01
Was 99.
00:18:13:06 –> 00:18:15:23
Well, and that’s kind of when Utah’s bulls got really, really,
00:18:15:23 –> 00:18:15:29
Were
00:18:15:29 –> 00:18:17:06
Cranking. Really cranking. And so
00:18:17:06 –> 00:18:18:16
From there at about oh seven or,
00:18:18:20 –> 00:18:25:25
And you almost, it almost feels like your bulls set it off. It just feels it did from then on. We had a few four hundreds being taken each year. Yeah.
00:18:26:15 –> 00:18:31:08
Yours was like, wasn’t it a state record or something at the time? It was, was it straight six Phil or little? It
00:18:31:08 –> 00:18:32:02
Got one little extra wall
00:18:32:03 –> 00:18:33:13
Style. What? Basically straight six.
00:18:33:20 –> 00:18:36:26
It grosses 4 0 8 and five eights. And that’s 3 95. Yeah.
00:18:36:26 –> 00:18:37:29
Okay. That’s a typical,
00:18:38:07 –> 00:18:42:00
That’s unbelievable. That’s what I want straight up, you know, straight up
00:18:42:01 –> 00:18:48:07
6, 406 is what we dream about. Which those are, those are hard to come by. But, but anyway, that’s, well,
00:18:48:07 –> 00:18:57:17
So that’s how I knew of you and actually didn’t know you had, you know, major involvement in the D W R since I haven’t followed you. Right. You’ve been up north and so anyway, yeah, tell us.
00:18:57:22 –> 00:19:17:24
So, I mean, I went to school here at SS u U and did my undergrad down here. And I fell in love with Southern Utah and, you know, hunted some of the units around here. I mean, even before that, growing up on the Pavan, you know, that was my backyard every day. It was, you know, hop on the four wheeler and Yeah. Run up with a little video, well not lid, little video camera, big, big video camera, shoulder, vhs,
00:19:18:29 –> 00:19:20:12
Big shoulder mount shoulder,
00:19:20:25 –> 00:19:26:17
And, you know, and, and that, that was my life was just film and deer and elk. I don’t, I just absolutely loved it. So good
00:19:26:17 –> 00:19:27:24
Place to grow up. Yeah, for sure. Did you do that
00:19:27:29 –> 00:19:29:08
Just on your own time? Yep.
00:19:29:11 –> 00:19:46:04
Yep. I just, for fun. Yep. I mean, I’m not kidding either. It was like an everyday ordeal, you know, just run up film elk and deer on the pavan. But anyways, yeah. So fast forward, ss u u school fell in love with southern Utah and then I was actually planning on being a dentist.
00:19:47:08 –> 00:19:52:05
No, you and I both. I’m serious. You were too. Yeah. Oh, about two years into that. I’m like, no, I can’t.
00:19:52:07 –> 00:19:56:16
So do you have any dentistry at all when you’re in your blood? Like, could I come with you and you get a feeling,
00:19:56:29 –> 00:20:07:12
You know, I pulled teeth, I pulled a lot of teeth on deer and sheep and things, so I could probably pull away. So that’s as close as I could hear. No anesthesia training or anything like
00:20:07:12 –> 00:20:07:16
That.
00:20:08:23 –> 00:20:11:13
Gimme some pliers and a knife and I’ll make something happen.
00:20:11:13 –> 00:20:12:05
Oh geez. Alright.
00:20:12:05 –> 00:20:17:04
That’s, that’s me too. That’s about the, the, you know, the, the range of my dental experience. But, well, dude,
00:20:17:18 –> 00:20:45:17
I just realized, I, I just, I, I can’t do this. I gotta do something that I’m more passionate about. And it was actually my wife that kind of noticed that I wasn’t, you know, I was coming home just kind of, eh, you know, and she goes, you know, let’s, let’s do a 180. And I honestly hadn’t even considered it. And, you know, next thing I knew, I was at Utah State getting a master’s degree, you know, in natural resources. And, and I actually went the route of aquatics because of how much I love to hunt. Yeah. And I, you know, this same dilemma. There’s a lot
00:20:45:17 –> 00:20:46:05
Of guys that
00:20:46:05 –> 00:20:48:07
We’re talking about the same dilemma we’re talking about, about,
00:20:48:17 –> 00:20:52:01
So you’re deficient so you can go into hunting. Well, well hunt, I’m about hunt
00:20:52:03 –> 00:21:04:29
Exactly. Like, I don’t, I didn’t want to, to be dealing with working on, on weekends. I didn’t wanna be working during the hunts. I wanted to be able to take that time off. And that was, at that time, that was my number one motivation for going into aquatics.
00:21:06:02 –> 00:21:09:24
So then after that, you got on as a fisheries or aquatics biologist somewhere?
00:21:09:26 –> 00:21:26:16
I did, yep. So then I started working for the D W R as a native aquatics biologist in the northern region. I worked there for five years. And at the same time I was, I basically started a a, a media company with a couple buddies and we’ve been producing On the side. On the side. Yep, exactly on the side. Because
00:21:26:16 –> 00:21:28:11
If you work for Game and Fish, you’re gonna have to work on the side
00:21:28:17 –> 00:21:32:05
E Exactly. You know, we, my kids eat bread and milk and that’s it.
00:21:34:13 –> 00:21:37:22
Had a little bit of meat and maybe a fish or two. Yep, yep.
00:21:38:08 –> 00:21:42:18
We literally live on elk meat. Killed an elk last night, had my kids with us cow.
00:21:42:18 –> 00:21:45:04
You did Depredation? No, just, oh, this, this, this,
00:21:45:04 –> 00:21:47:14
This gun plateau cat.
00:21:47:14 –> 00:21:48:06
I remember that. Wow.
00:21:48:08 –> 00:21:55:00
Yesterday. It’s opening day yesterday. Yesterday. We’re hunting hot, but, well, good. Congrats. Yeah. First Elk of the year that I’ve heard died. Yeah. That’s
00:21:55:00 –> 00:21:56:24
Awesome. Kids were there. You know, needless
00:21:56:24 –> 00:21:59:04
To say, a division employee killed the first Elk. Yeah.
00:21:59:11 –> 00:21:59:19
Good.
00:21:59:26 –> 00:22:00:24
Alright, keep
00:22:00:24 –> 00:22:13:19
Going. One of the benefits of the job. That’s true. You know, back to back to those, that’s No, just kidding. But yeah, I worked as aquatics biologist for five years, started the media company, been producing films for film festivals for a few years now. A lot of
00:22:13:19 –> 00:22:16:10
Outdoor hunting type related stuff or anything Fishing,
00:22:16:12 –> 00:22:29:02
Just fly fishing. The films, the films have been just fly fishing Right now. We’re, we’re, we’re starting to look to crossover into doing some, some film hunting films for the hunting film festivals and that sort of thing. Wow. So we’re,
00:22:29:05 –> 00:22:53:19
I know there’s some, I’m not a huge fisherman. I’d like, when, when my buddies, some of my guides in that call and tell me like, paling or places are off the charts. I know I can go there and probably catch fish. Sure. So I do that, but I’m not one of those guys that probably because of the hunting stuff and scouting, I don’t have as much time to do both. But I know there is a cult following when it comes to fly fishermen around Utah at least, and probably everywhere. It’s a, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal.
00:22:53:23 –> 00:23:01:11
Yeah. It’s, you got an amazing fly fishery up there. I’m sure, you know, with your job you probably got some little honey holes, you know. Yeah. Good fishing up there.
00:23:01:14 –> 00:23:12:17
Yeah, yeah. No, it, it was, it was really good. And yeah, it’s, it’s been fun, you know, it’s allowed me to, to travel. I’ve, I’ve gone all over the place and fished all over and, and, and that’s been great. I hear
00:23:12:17 –> 00:23:17:08
You’re world class fishermen. I mean, let’s just, just, just tell us No, Josh tell us He is. He
00:23:17:08 –> 00:23:17:25
Is. Oh yeah.
00:23:18:20 –> 00:23:27:07
He goes to film festivals and guys are throwing their underwear on the stage and taking off their waiters. Notice those guys are throwing their underwear to you guys. I mean,
00:23:27:07 –> 00:23:28:01
Listen to this guy.
00:23:28:25 –> 00:23:29:01
Wow.
00:23:29:15 –> 00:23:34:28
Wow. Thanks. Thanks for that. He’s our household. I’m gonna, I’m gonna take that as a compliment, I think. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
00:23:35:06 –> 00:23:39:12
I wouldn’t, we’ve a few. I’d probably walked right out of the room, so
00:23:39:26 –> 00:23:49:24
Mic drop. But yeah, so, so I, you know, I’ve kind of had my eyes on a position down here in southern Utah, if anyone knows Lynn Chamberlain, he was the outreach manager for the southern region for quite some
00:23:49:24 –> 00:23:50:12
Time. He worked
00:23:50:19 –> 00:23:52:19
A long, long time. Yep. And which for
00:23:53:01 –> 00:24:00:29
Lay people, that’s kind of like public relations. You, you deal with media or, you know, photo shoots or if you have wildlife viewing events or Yeah.
00:24:02:09 –> 00:24:08:05
All of our, all of our volunteer services coordination. I, I supervise the dedicated hunter program. Yep, exactly. People
00:24:08:05 –> 00:24:15:07
That work under you that do that, but you’re that. Okay. Exactly. So anything that deals more with the public and the image and public relations within southern region, that’s you.
00:24:15:09 –> 00:24:22:20
Exactly. So honestly, like that job, it, it’s just a perfect merge of all of my passions, you know, media, film. Well,
00:24:22:25 –> 00:24:24:02
You got hunting, you got fishing,
00:24:24:08 –> 00:24:25:06
You got people. Yeah. And how
00:24:25:17 –> 00:24:33:20
Jill decide to make the move from, from the fisheries to this. Was it coming back to southern Utah? Was it just the fishing was exploring that? That
00:24:33:20 –> 00:24:47:20
Was a big part of it. You know, honestly, the hunting in northern Utah for me, I kind of struggled up there. You know, I hunted a lot outta state a lot. I mean, I still hunt a lot outta state, but, you know, I, I wasn’t hunting at all. Was
00:24:47:27 –> 00:24:52:16
That the distributor that subdivision unit didn’t do for you the hunting December? It just didn’t work?
00:24:52:20 –> 00:24:56:04
No, it just didn’t work. So, but I, I mean, I tried it and everything, but you know, I just deer hunting
00:24:56:04 –> 00:24:59:29
Deer one week and the next week you’re trapping ’em to move ’em to save their life somewhere
00:24:59:29 –> 00:25:00:01
Else.
00:25:00:07 –> 00:25:02:26
Yeah. And then you’re up there where you lease them.
00:25:04:04 –> 00:25:20:19
So yeah, it was, you know, I wanted to get back to, to southern Utah, which is home, you know? Yeah. I don’t blame you there. And public lands for me was a really, really big deal, you know? And so, so here we are, you know, I, I like to say I have my dream job. I’m really happy where I’m at and
00:25:20:27 –> 00:25:21:26
You’re videoing and
00:25:21:26 –> 00:25:26:29
Everything we’re, and yeah, now we’re, we’re back in the, the hunting game more than we were up there.
00:25:27:17 –> 00:25:28:22
Do you still have your side job?
00:25:29:14 –> 00:25:34:28
I do, yep. We’re actually in just a couple weeks headed up to the Arctic circle to, to film a video up there. No way.
00:25:35:17 –> 00:25:35:25
Yeah.
00:25:35:26 –> 00:25:36:18
Fishing. Fishing or
00:25:36:19 –> 00:25:53:26
Fishing. Wow. Yep. Geez. We tried to make it a, you know, a combo throw a caribou or muskox or something. Polar bear. Yeah. We couldn’t, we couldn’t make it. Couldn’t make it happen. But that’s, that’s gonna happen. Cool. You know, we’re, we’re, like I said, we’re trying to, trying to get it a little mixed up. So are
00:25:53:26 –> 00:25:58:29
You still hunting now? You’re cranking, you’re, you’re back home. How long you been here in southern Utah?
00:25:59:05 –> 00:26:12:02
So, I’ve o I’ve only been down here in, I actually live in Peran, but I actually just moved down last August, so it’s only been a year that I’ve been back down here. So Southern. Cool. Yep. Lynn Lynn left the division about a year ago and I, I was able
00:26:12:07 –> 00:26:12:13
Got
00:26:12:13 –> 00:26:13:23
His position job. Yep. Cool.
00:26:14:13 –> 00:26:40:00
Well that’s a great introduction for you both. You guys are, it’s obvious that you have a passion for hunting. Not always a given throughout the Western US when it comes to gaming, fish biologist or employees. It’s refreshing. Great to hear. And you guys can obviously, you know, relate to a broad spectrum, you know, not just a conservation mentality like some states get and like, but you know, cons, consumptive users,
00:26:40:14 –> 00:27:17:17
And I think that’s a, you know, a kudos to the Utah game and fish for, you know, trying to, trying to hire hunters slash biologists and guys that can really relate to the hunting public. You know, there’s a lot of game and fish agencies that we know around, even here in the west, you know, whether it be Washington or whatever, some of these places that, that’s not big on their priority lists, they’re just biologists. You’re just a biologist and, and do your job and and whatnot. But you, there’s a social aspect to it Yeah, yeah. Of being able to relate to hunters and you’ve gotta be a hunter to relate to hunters and Yeah. And to get that respect. And we do need to work together, you know, as, as public and as well as game and fish. And
00:27:17:18 –> 00:27:31:29
I mean, to me as a biologist, I, it’s important to me to try and hunt the units that I manage. I feel that that’s important. I, you know, I put in for an elk tag that probably last year that people was say, what are you putting in for that? For, you know, it was a gon archery elk tag. Yeah. I had a couple points and I looked at it and I thought, you know, not
00:27:31:29 –> 00:27:32:29
Gonna kill a Phil Tuttle bull.
00:27:33:00 –> 00:27:34:02
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
00:27:34:05 –> 00:27:50:28
But he’s already got a four 18 or whatever. What is that bull? Yeah. Once again, his bull is bigger than mine. You, yeah. And on a late hunt, a late Pengu lake, I mean, we might as well just get to that right now. Get the 400 inches outta the way so we don’t have to talk about ’em anymore. Jason, I’m tired of talking about him, Phil, already.
00:27:51:05 –> 00:27:51:19
I’m sick of it.
00:27:51:23 –> 00:27:55:29
But it was a late hunt. You drew a late season thousand Pengu lake.
00:27:56:13 –> 00:27:57:01
2007.
00:27:57:10 –> 00:27:59:29
It was in the heyday, but Yeah. In your backyard.
00:27:59:29 –> 00:28:43:02
Yeah. It was a late tag. Yeah, it was, it was right at home. I was actually living in Cedar, going to school at the time, and I drew this tag. I was wanting an early rifle. I wanted to hunt a bull during the rutt, all that stuff. Finally got sick of waiting and I could looked at my, my odds and said, you know what? I can kill a late bull. And, and you know, with this experience and stuff, knowing where some of those bulls go, there’s, there were some great bulls and, you know, I can have just huge a chance of killing maybe even a better bull. There’s some of these units. That’s the thing about with Utah’s, there’s so many opportunities out there. Like yeah, if you wanna look at your points, look at the hunts. There’s some of these units, a unit like the Pengu lake, well, pre fire, I guess you could say. The late hunt actually can be a better hunt sometimes. Yeah. You know, you’re not hunting bugling bulls, but, but you’re hunting bulls that are actually seen. They’re out more, they’re not up in the thick timber. And Well,
00:28:43:02 –> 00:28:54:11
It’s interesting you bring that up because we know a lot of the guides down here are now kind of pushing clients to that late hunt. Yeah. They’re bastard up. They’re gable. A lot of this country people are figuring it out. And you, you, you figured it out back in 2007.
00:28:54:11 –> 00:29:03:26
Yeah. And I mean, it’s just, it’s like the Dutton, you know, Adam knows that it’s the same thing. You get some s elk that move in and it’s, it’s a great late hunt. I would take a late hunt tag on that unit as well, because others,
00:29:03:26 –> 00:29:04:17
Because you have beaver bowls
00:29:04:17 –> 00:29:38:14
Or Yeah. Bowls. The boulder bowls, mobile, Monroes moving around everything. And so you get all these units and, and so that’s something that, that I would encourage people to do is look at, look what the demographics of the unit and what it holds, you know? Yeah. You got a Dutton unit that’s a seven year old unit, but it’s getting bulls from units that have eight year olds, seven in each class, you know, so they’re moving on there and hunting. Anyway, so I kind of did that and, and drew this bowl and, and lucked into him. You know, I ended up, it was my dad and I were there, my dad, it was kind of funny. We were hunting another bull in this thick, thick, nasty hole with mahogany. You had to be on the same hillside as that bull. And it just was not working, you know, in that mahogany.
00:29:38:29 –> 00:30:15:28
So we kind of gave up, spread out for a little bit, said, all right, let’s recharge. And, and my dad actually takes the dogs for a ride in the truck and he’s like, literally five miles from town stops at this water trough to see if there’s elk tracks looks up and the dogs run around in this bull’s feeding right up there. Oh my gosh. And this was kind of pre soda? Pre pre cell phone soda. Pre pre pre cell phone. I mean, we had ’em, but my dad didn’t have one. Probably had a radio caller on it. Yeah. I’m calling foul. And so he, he couldn’t call us, you know, we weren’t there with him. And he’s just like, oh. So we get home that night and he’s acting all kind of weird and Oh, I saw a good bull. And I’m like, well, what is he?
00:30:15:28 –> 00:30:50:14
And he’s like, he’s big, he’s got extras. He’s a big bull. I would say he’s three 70 plus. I’m like, well, we need to go check him out. Yeah. Yeah. Tried to go look for him the next morning. It was really foggy, kind of rainy, cold. Jumped a couple bulls, but we just pulled out. ’cause like I know, I don’t wanna bump him. Let’s pull out. Yeah. It looks like the weather’s gonna get better. Long story short, my wife had just had a a, a baby just a few days beforehand, so you might as well throw that on top of things. Was poor time bomb on your heart? Yeah, it was terrible timing. Really poor. I tried to do better these days with that, but so she, she just has this baby. Well, she’s having trouble, so I need to take her back to Cedar to the doctor.
00:30:50:28 –> 00:31:24:22
I’m like, man. And that was back when the late hunt was only a five day hunt. And so, you know, we’re already three days into it and I was like, I’m, I’m done for, you know, I’m just gonna be shooting the first bowl I see. Or eating this tag, I guess because I’m just not gonna have the time. So can’t call Uber. Yeah. Hey, come get her. Yeah. So I have to run her clear back to Cedar and I leave Cedar with like literally an hour of light left. And I told my dad, I said, meet me up there. We’ll just get up there. Yeah. And do some glass and see if we can find him. Just off chance. We get up there, we look around not finding anything and, and we’re joking. I told my dad, you know, if I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.
00:31:24:22 –> 00:31:57:29
Yeah. We’re, we’re, we’re literally just going down the road and see this bull track, lone bull track coming out. It had been raining, so it was muddy. This lone bull truck comes out and we’re like, man, I wonder if that’s him. Literally go around the turn and he’s standing out there. Oh my God. And a bull hog, four inch tall sage brush and grass. Oh my God. And I didn’t, and and my dad by himself. Yeah. By himself. Just feeding. And my dad’s like, my dad puts up binoculars up and he’s just like, yeah, that’s him. Don’t look. Just shoot. You know, because I, I didn’t even look at him. I just saw it was a bull. And so I was at the point where I was like, you know, if he’s a decent bull, I’ll gonna kill him. Yeah. Yeah. So I I, I get over there and get all ready and I’m not even looking at him.
00:31:57:29 –> 00:32:41:19
I’m literally just, you know, the scopes on his shoulder and my dad’s like, yeah, that’s him. Don’t look, just shoot. ’cause I, he knew what he was, you know? Yeah. And he started to walk away from me and I was like, I’m gonna shoot, I’m gonna shoot. And he finally, he stops and turns and when he did, I could see like his fronts coming out, you know? And I was like, oh, he’s a monster. Big bull. And so I shot him, didn’t know how to hit him, he ran over into the trees, it got dark on us. And anyway, walked up on him and it was like when I saw I wasn’t expecting 400 when, when I shot him, you know, we were thinking three eighties range and Ona walked up. It was just like immediate, like that’s a 400 inch bull. My life changed forever. But yeah. So what he officially scored just for, he was four girls, four 17 and seven eights. And, and then he netted 4 0 8 what
00:32:41:19 –> 00:32:41:28
A SB
00:32:41:29 –> 00:32:47:02
4 0 8 net non non-typical. Non-typical. Yeah. So you got a book non-typical and a book Typical in the
00:32:47:02 –> 00:32:51:19
Room. In the room and I, from guys that don’t care about ’em and slopped onto ’em. Yeah,
00:32:51:24 –> 00:32:52:08
Exactly.
00:32:52:17 –> 00:33:00:28
Alright. All down. That’s the stretch. That’s a stretch. So now we’re fills as much. Right. You’re just back to who cares? I’ll kill anything. I’m happy. Yeah.
00:33:01:01 –> 00:33:48:10
But, but so, you know, I, so I draw this tag last year and, and I just knew that the reason why I wanted to do it was because I knew that I could, you know, I know I could kill a good bull, wanted to kill a bull with my bow. So I chose to do an archery thing and basically from hunting that unit. And then, I mean we, part of my job is we go out in the summertime classify elk antelope and those kind of things from the ground. And so basically from my personal time out there, spent scouting and stuff and, and, and work time classifying. I feel like I’m a better biologist from it because I learned a lot of stuff and went into some places that I normally didn’t go as a biologist, just trying to count. ’cause it was kinda like, I know there’s a big herd of cows up here. I need to go catch, I know there’s a big herd over here. I gotta go catch. You kinda learn those things. And so I went into some areas that, that I got to learn and, and became, I think I feel like a better biologist and I feel better well-rounded on. Well, and
00:33:48:10 –> 00:33:53:01
It’s gotta help you like an aerial surveys and all kinds of things when you have on the ground experience, like, you know.
00:33:53:08 –> 00:34:13:02
Yeah. And that’s exactly it. We, we later flew that unit last, last winter and to classify it and we went and flew some of the parts of the unit where I was hunting that we probably said, well, there’s less likelihood a chance of seeing some elk out there. But it was like, no, I, I know there’s some milk out there and we need to go check it. Wow. And so, so it’s, I think as a biologist you need to hunt your units
00:34:13:02 –> 00:34:15:11
Almost should be mandatory. Yeah. It should be a requirement. Yeah.
00:34:15:17 –> 00:34:16:24
That you hunt. I i
00:34:17:06 –> 00:34:20:14
I mean if you’re gonna manage for hunting, right? Yeah. You know, you should be, you should be a
00:34:20:14 –> 00:34:28:07
Hunter. ’cause you learn a lot and, and when people come to you with a complaint and, and you don’t and you’re not hunting that unit, you know, if you come to with a complaint and you’re kind of like, no, I don’t know, the numbers don’t show that he’s
00:34:28:07 –> 00:34:28:19
A minor, you
00:34:28:19 –> 00:34:50:13
Know, know the numbers don’t show that. But, but you get in there and you hunt it and, and you know, when you get hunt like the pengu lake for deer and we get some crowding kind of complaints and stuff, you know, and I’m hunting it too. And so it’s like I, I feel those crowding, I feel that I feel that same pressure and those same complaints. And so I know it’s kind of a valid thing. Whereas before it’s kinda like, oh yeah, you just think it’s crowded, you know? And, and so it helps validate some of the things you do.
00:34:51:12 –> 00:34:51:17
Absolutely.
00:34:51:17 –> 00:35:19:14
When you have, well, sorry, excuse me. So, you know, there’s kind of this mentality with a lot of guys that just don’t really understand, you know, the D W R, they don’t understand management. They’re kind of, they’ve got this, you know, d w R shoots from the hip mentality. Yeah. You know, and this is a perfect example of, you know, the biologists going above and beyond, in my opinion, to make sure that they’re not doing that. Yeah. That they’re using sound management, sound science, sound data. And I think we’ll get into a little bit more
00:35:19:26 –> 00:35:21:12
Later on the ground and on the ground. Personal
00:35:21:14 –> 00:35:30:00
Well, exactly. Experience. Yeah. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s more than just data. I mean, this guy, he’s passionate about it. Yeah. He, he, he feels all those pressures that he talked about. And I,
00:35:30:23 –> 00:35:55:08
I can’t say nothing that, well I about hundred percent agree with you. A hundred percent agree with you. We have, and then there’s the flip side at times where, you know, a guy’s hired, he doesn’t care as much or his values and, and, and the road, you know, the road he’s going down as far as biology is concerned and management tactics maybe don’t align with the majority of SS sportsman. Yeah. And so you, you do butt heads at times and so Sure. But in this case, we a hundred percent agree with you and
00:35:55:08 –> 00:36:27:06
We’re, we’re lucky in the southern region, like all the big game biologists that I know, they all, they’re all hunters. They all hunt their units so they know what’s going on. Obviously with the unity unit thing, I can’t hunt all of my units, but I try and hunt when I can where I can, even if it’s a, a spike elk tag on a, on a unit, you know? Yeah. ’cause I can get that tag try and hunt just so I can learn more and get like boots on the ground. Because a lot of times with our jobs, we’re jumping from sage grouse to bears to, to elk, to deer, to antelope, to all this stuff. So I don’t oftentimes get to spend as much time as I want in there. Even like the sheep say the caparros, I mean, it’s a multi-hour
00:36:27:13 –> 00:36:27:22
Out there
00:36:27:22 –> 00:36:47:10
Journey to get out there. And you can only spend certain times of a year because you about die if you do, you know, we had to go pick up a sheep collar out there the other day off a, a sheep that had had died and we got out there and I mean, it’s 108 degrees and, and you just, you just die doing it. So there’s some of those areas that you, that you’d like to get into and by trying to draw a tag, you know, and that it gets you into it and it helps.
00:36:48:06 –> 00:36:48:16
I like it.
00:36:48:20 –> 00:37:07:18
It’s, it’s, it’s great. It can’t, it’s only gonna help, it’s only gonna lend credibility to you when you have to then stand up in rack meeting in November when they’re recommending seasons and hey, we need to, we’re gonna add a separate season here. You have something to base it on. It’s not just a, well my computer model says we should do this, so that’s what we’re gonna do.
00:37:07:25 –> 00:37:30:02
You know, and the hunters will back you. Yeah. You know, the hunters, it gets, word gets around that you guys are hunters and that you care about it and you’ve got the same goals and aspirations as they have. Yeah. Yeah. And so, well, I’m gonna listen to you, you’re telling me what now, and then you go ahead and present your program. And then they’re like, okay, that makes sense. Whereas if you’re not a hunter, even if you’re right, they’re gonna shut you out. Yeah. Even if you’re right. Because, because he’s not a hunter. He’s not one of us. We’re against him.
00:37:30:03 –> 00:37:30:26
What would he know? Yeah.
00:37:31:08 –> 00:37:44:24
And so, and I think same thing with the law enforcement. It’d be nice if all law enforcement officers were hunters so they understood Yeah. What from a hunter’s perspective, what’s going on in the field, a 24 hour check law trap check law or whatever. They understand what they’re imposing on people.
00:37:44:24 –> 00:37:53:28
Yeah. And that’s, and that’s one of the things I always tried to do as an officer is go trapping. Yeah. Just to see, because it was tough. And so it’s like, man, I’ve gotta check my, I’m out at two o’clock in the morning.
00:37:54:14 –> 00:38:11:02
S is it realistic or 48 hours? Is it realistic? Yeah. It’s tough. And if it’s not realistic, you know, how can we fix it? So it is realistic And, and, and that was, I just, you know, threw a for instance out there. I’m not saying anything or advocating one way or another. It’s just nice that when you guys are hunters and gives you
00:38:11:02 –> 00:38:11:20
A lot of perspective,
00:38:11:22 –> 00:38:32:06
Our language and, and work, you know, as, as the division. I think it’s important too. I I, I look at that opportunity in law enforcement as, as all experience for me now. It helps me as a biologist because I’m like, I think if things that maybe other biologists don’t think about when I’m like gonna make a recommendation and I say, I don’t put that this is a law enforcement thing ’cause I make a recommendation and law enforcement guys wanna come and, and cut me. You know, don’t, why did you do that?
00:38:32:11 –> 00:38:38:13
You don’t wanna put two hunts on top of each other. One a bow hunt and one a rifle and then you got rifles out going on with Bo or whatever.
00:38:39:01 –> 00:38:46:13
And then you’re doing something in the southern region that now the nor northern region wants to do. And if those biologists go, Hey, why’d you do that? You’re causing me grief up here. You know? Yeah. Yeah. But
00:38:46:24 –> 00:39:28:26
So, so it’s good. But I, you know, like, like Phil talked about, you know, as the division, we, I think we’re in a great place and we have such a good system. You know, we have management, we have management plans, you know, we don’t just, oh, our deer from year to year, we change it up. We do one thing or another. You know, we have a multiple year, five years, seven years, 10 years, 20 years depending on the species Yeah. Of these management plans where we set and these management plans, their set up is literally we get in a room of guys with interested people. There’s hunters, there’s livestock guys, you know, there’s non-consumptive people. They have several meetings, you know, when we do the elk plan or the Mule deer plan, it was a year long thing. Multiple meetings, 7, 10, 8 meetings, whatever, where just lot of stakeholders hashing all this stuff out.
00:39:28:28 –> 00:39:56:06
And it was just people from the general public got together and set these management plans and said, and said, you know, we’re, this is kind of how we want it. So it wasn’t just the D W R coming out and saying, this is what we are. And then we take that management plan and we take it through a rack and our board process, which is literally, it’s, it’s amazing. I mean, you get, you get the average Joe Guy can come to a meeting and give his input. Yeah. And, and, and it can and it can get passed. It can affect
00:39:56:26 –> 00:40:02:23
The whole meeting can steer that direction from then on. Something that you guys didn’t propose is now being in enacted.
00:40:03:00 –> 00:40:37:05
I, one thing exactly one, back when I was an officer, I went to Iraq meeting once and I remember it was back when we were dealing with the five day, nine day kind of deer hunt stuff. Yeah. You know, and it was, we go to go a five day, well this guy in the audience stands up at this rack meeting and says, Hey look, I’ve got kids. And he says, we, we get Saturday to hunt. He says, we don’t hunt on Sunday and we get Monday and then my kids go back to school. Yeah. And I can’t hunt. And so he’s like, I wanna propose five days for adults, but nine days for kids. Yeah. And it was like, and when he first said it, I was like, oh geez, that’s not gonna fly. If voted on it, it went to the board. I mean, because one guy stood up and said something.
00:40:37:14 –> 00:41:03:07
It was the next year, it was in, in season. And I was like, that just happened. You know, and so it’s a good example that how, how one voice can be heard or your voice. And, and there’s a lot of times where guys come to rack meetings and they, they get discouraged ’cause they feel like their voice isn’t being heard. But, but you know what, it’s a, it’s a great process. It’s a very public process. We give our recommendations, bring it out there, and oftentimes the, the rack or the board, because of a public process changes a few things. Yeah. Tweaks. Usually
00:41:03:08 –> 00:41:04:28
There’s compromise somewhere. There is
00:41:05:04 –> 00:41:22:00
And i’s say you’ve come in the office a couple of different times and you’ve brought up certain individuals, not that, you know, just randomness, the people that have made suggestions to you. Yeah. And so I know you’re thinking about it and I know you’re cognizant of it, even though they may not feel like they’re being heard, you know, and they need to get nasty about about Right. And
00:41:22:00 –> 00:41:26:29
It doesn’t come in and they don’t see it in the regulations next year. Yeah. You’re still weighing it all out. You’re
00:41:27:00 –> 00:41:34:00
Weighing it out. You are listening. And, and we appreciate that. And I know we’ve seen that we’ve, we actually can vouch for that and personally seen that here in our office.
00:41:34:03 –> 00:42:04:26
But I was just gonna say that, you know, that’s, that’s something that, that we would probably want to emphasize today as a message for us, is that, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of stakeholders that are involved in these, in these decisions that are made. And we’re, you know, we have to play the part of public servant and we, we’ve gotta try to find compromise there. So we’re, you know, we can’t, you know, appease everyone, you know, one guy’s gonna be mad about the decision that’s made, but we really are trying to do our, our very best and our hardest at, at, at, at weighing in on all of those. Yeah.
00:42:04:26 –> 00:42:22:04
Well, and biology’s tough. You’re managing, if you just managed for the game, you, it would, you’d see a different program out there than, than bringing in the social, bringing in the ranchers, bringing in the political, all the political climate. So there’s, there’s, exactly. And then you come out with something that’s, okay, this isn’t perfect for the game, but it’s the best for, you know, the,
00:42:22:17 –> 00:42:25:22
The broadest spectrum. Maybe the majority, if you wanna call it that or whatever.
00:42:25:26 –> 00:42:46:28
Well, there’s one thing I wanna go back to on, you know, Josh, what you were talking about as far as choosing the late season rifle up That’s interesting here in Utah, you know, it’s been, we’re spoiled. We love to hunt rifle, rutting, bulls, bugling with a rifle in my hands, and I can shoot a thousand yards and I want to kill anything. I see. You know, and so anyway,
00:42:47:07 –> 00:42:56:19
Probably I’m, I’m thinking of other states quickly, we hunt every day in September with some weapon. Yep. Most states, like Wyoming does a 30 day archery season.
00:42:56:27 –> 00:42:57:24
Most states it’s,
00:42:57:24 –> 00:43:07:23
But, but you don’t. September with the rifle, Arizona. Utah, we hunt the first two weeks roughly with a bow. It ends, then it’s the rifle hunters prime, and then a muzzle loader and
00:43:07:23 –> 00:43:45:06
Then muzzle loader, which is, could be pretty prime construed as prime rut. And so where archers actually have less than prime rut. Yeah. You know what I mean? But, but we’re spoiled here in our state. And so which also comes, comes into play when you guys are managing, when you’re hunting one tag, prime rutt might equal two tags late season, you know, to kill that or to keep that age class, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. Because you are targeting prime age bulls with the once in a lifetime quote, once in a lifetime. You know, guys tough to draw tags that take 20 plus years. Yeah. You know, and so it’s an interesting dynamic when you’ve, you’re not supposed to hunt running bulls with a rifle. You’re not management wise, but we like it. Yeah. Oh
00:43:45:06 –> 00:43:46:22
Yeah. We still do it. And
00:43:46:22 –> 00:43:48:05
It still, still the hardest tracks to draw,
00:43:48:11 –> 00:44:11:18
But look what you killed on a, on a late season November season. Yeah. Late season. And so I think that’s awesome. I think that’s a one thing that, that’s good that comes out as far as, you know, you don’t have to just have the prime 20 year type tag or 25, 30 year plan to kill that one bull. And then most people go on that hunt and are somewhat disappointed. It’s a tough year. There’s not bugling, whatever. And I’ve wasted 25 points on, you know, this particular
00:44:11:20 –> 00:44:11:26
Tag.
00:44:12:06 –> 00:44:36:14
Yeah. That’s why I get a lot of calls from guys and they’ll call me up, well, what’s it looking like? Should I keep my tag, should I turn it back in? And all this kinda stuff, you know? And it’s, I can’t tell you that, you know? Yeah. I’m not one to, to really turn a tag back, you know, I draw it and it’s like, you know what, I drew it, it’s my turn to hunt and I’m gonna go have a good time Yeah. And find the best thing I can and try and hunt him and kill him. And, and, and do it. And it might be the worst one of your life, you know? Yeah. Somebody could shoot the bull right out from under you as you’re watching him, you know? I mean,
00:44:36:29 –> 00:44:40:06
Lock your road, who knows, right? Yeah. I mean, you never know what,
00:44:40:14 –> 00:44:41:22
What could happen. It’s,
00:44:41:22 –> 00:44:46:22
It’s hunting. It’s hunting and you gotta do it. Alright, well let’s, let’s move. What were you gonna say about
00:44:46:22 –> 00:45:22:11
Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, you guys have mentioned a couple of things today that I know we’d like to maybe dive into now. Some of the, I guess we’d call ’em special projects or higher profile issues within this, I guess we’ll just talk about the southern region. Let’s talk about some of those. I know one of them, Josh, we’ve talked a little bit about failure probably in involved as well as this, some of this deer telemetry study that’s only within about the last year that’s been going on. But let’s talk about some of that, the purposes behind it, what you guys are trying to learn. And then maybe let’s talk about some of what telemetry is teaching about some of these
00:45:22:11 –> 00:45:24:24
Deer Yeah. How that affects biology management. I tell
00:45:24:24 –> 00:45:38:22
You what, in the last, I don’t know, in the last, I would say seven years, maybe 10, I mean, I’m sure Adam, when you were a biologist, they had v h f callers, you know, I mean, and, and tracking things. But you’d have to listen for ’em, go out and get ’em, fly this big
00:45:38:22 –> 00:45:39:10
Old long antenna.
00:45:39:12 –> 00:45:51:19
Yeah. You know, you’d have to get an airplane and fly around and, you know, you just put a bunch of deer out on a unit and then you’d go flying and it’s like, man, we didn’t find six of ’em. Are this caller not working? Are they gone? And who knows? And you never find ’em again. You never know what happens
00:45:51:24 –> 00:45:53:06
When really they just walk 60 miles.
00:45:53:07 –> 00:45:54:10
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You
00:45:54:10 –> 00:45:56:06
Didn’t fly over that 30 mile square. Yeah. Yeah,
00:45:56:06 –> 00:46:32:02
Exactly. And so it’s, so we’ve moved from a, a day of v h f callers into g p s callers and, and it has helped our management immensely. And, and I think ’cause we’re at kind of god’s root was, I think, I, I wanna say don’t, I mean, don’t quote me on it, but some of the first G P Ss callers we put out, were on Mount Dutton elk, cow elk in the wintertime, we knew that we had this influx of elk. You see ’em crossing the road. Yeah. And it was like, we’re constantly over objective on our elk, on the Dutton. We’re trying to kill ’em. We can’t kill ’em no matter what we do, we can’t get too objective. All this kind of stuff. And so the biologist that was there just before me, he’s like, you know, I wanna put some collars on these elk and see where they’re going. And goodness. I mean, we had, we
00:46:32:02 –> 00:46:35:28
Had elk Come find out you’re managing Dutton for elk, that they’re, they don’t, they don’t live. Exactly. Yeah. We had elk
00:46:35:28 –> 00:46:51:00
Going the gon we had elk going to the Dutton or to the Monroe. Boulder. The boulder. The fish went to the fish lake. Some went to the beaver. I mean, every unit they just explode and go all these other units. In the summertime it was, it was something like 65% of the elk weren’t even on the Dutton in the summertime. Wow. You know, they,
00:46:51:16 –> 00:47:00:22
So these tags you’re managing for tags were hunting in September. Archery rifle muzzle. Exactly. The dates were all and the resident herd. Yep. And we still have these elk showing up here in the winter
00:47:00:22 –> 00:47:20:08
Range. Yeah, exactly. So, so from that we were able to learn, you know, what we need to do. And so from that, we’ve taken it. And when we manage those units now on a mega unit type thing for cows, we actually have an objective for all those units. We have a 10,500 objective for elk saying, okay, each of these units have a little bit of a sub objective, but we want to keep this at 10,000.
00:47:20:17 –> 00:47:59:02
Yeah. We’re not gonna have a hard line in the sand if at 1500 as much as we maybe did initially. Yeah. When we said, Hey, and, and that you, you’re playing with politics and cattlemen and all that because that guy only grazes on Mount Dutton. Yeah. So he says, I don’t care about this metapopulation that you’re talking about, you know, kill 500 right here, right now on Mount Dutton. But, but at least it gives you some, some ammunition, if you will, to say, Hey, they’re here for three months. Yeah. In the winter your cows aren’t even on that mountain. Yeah. For those three months. And or things talking points like that to say, Hey, in the summertime when the grass is growing, your cows are there, we’re down to 800 or thousand, whatever.
00:47:59:05 –> 00:48:40:04
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so that kind of started this whole process of, man, we’ve got a lot to learn about these elk. You know, you, you know, things, you see things out there. But when you can have ’em point on a map and say, yeah, this is what’s happening, it’s so much better. And so from there, basically we stem to Utah’s been doing a, a huge deer project throughout statewide where we’re working with, with some professors from B Y U that are just phenomenal guys. I mean, they’re hunters themselves, but they’re, they’re 10 times smarter than I am, you know, and, and they’re, they’re out there taking this data and helping us. And so basically we started off with catching fawns that were day old, you know, on the Monroe unit and putting a collar on ’em and see how long they lived, what was, what was killing ’em, what they’re, what they’re doing, that kind of thing.
00:48:40:04 –> 00:49:23:08
And, and so it kind of started there to where now we’re, we’re doing this big deer project pretty well statewide, where on several units we’re, we’re going out and catching deer in the wintertime. And we actually catch ’em in December as soon as they kind of hit their summer, their winter range. And they do a, a body condition score on ’em where, you know, there’s a, a loin thickness, a rump fat measurement. There’s all these kind of things we’re doing to get this equation to say how good a shape is that deer in. And, and then we turn around and catch those same deer in March. You know, we get the helicopter crew, they come out and we say, here’s what that deer is. They go out and they catch that same deer, bring it back to us. And we do those same exact measurements on it from December to March to see what they’ve done over the wintertime. And it’s taught us a lot of things. I mean, some of it’s common sense, but a lot of it is stuff that you, you find stuff that you don’t know. I mean, well,
00:49:23:08 –> 00:49:25:17
And it might vary from year to year, depending on drought conditions or
00:49:25:26 –> 00:49:34:22
Whatever. Exactly. We saw winter, we just got a report our, our deer for some reason last year seemed like they were all across the board lighter. You know, they weren’t as heavy. Yeah. Winter
00:49:34:22 –> 00:49:34:28
Going
00:49:34:29 –> 00:49:37:19
Into the winter year. Going into winter as they were the winter before. You know, and I’d
00:49:37:19 –> 00:49:55:29
Like to know like, how does that transition to antler growth? Yeah. You know what I mean? And be like, alright, survival. You know, just what our feel is on quality that year, you know, and so they went into the winter light and there wasn’t as good antler growth. They went in heavy fat, healthy. Yeah. And we have phenomenal antler growth. I wonder if there’s something, some kind of correlation. Exactly.
00:49:55:29 –> 00:50:02:23
And so there’s, we can go, I mean we, we get this kind of a core thing and it just can blow up and go anyway, which way you’re talking. So you can, can look into any many things.
00:50:02:26 –> 00:50:12:02
What units in the southern region at least, maybe you have some in all, but what units have you, I guess, focused on or keyed in on for some of this deer telemetry stuff? You know,
00:50:12:03 –> 00:50:38:28
They started off with like the Monroe and the Pine Valley. And basically we, we get that. And the thing that’s cool about it is, Adam, you were talking about a model earlier on a computer model. We model our populations for Deere in a model as far as the population to know what they’re doing. And it doesn’t really affect tag numbers per se, but it just gives us an idea of our deer if they’re growing, if they’re, they’re declining or if they’re stable. And so we can use that data. We can say, look, 40% of the, the, the fawns that we had colored on the Monroe died. So we know we can, can
00:50:38:28 –> 00:50:39:08
Adjust, put that,
00:50:39:15 –> 00:50:40:14
We can put that in, we adjust. You
00:50:40:14 –> 00:50:44:06
Need to be adjusting that model because the model will go crazy and the end figure doesn’t
00:50:44:06 –> 00:50:48:10
Match match after 10 years. If you’re off 10% over 10 years, you’re way off, way off
00:50:48:10 –> 00:50:48:20
After 10 years.
00:50:48:20 –> 00:51:00:24
Exactly. And so we’re, we’re putting in real time data that we know from a neighboring unit, that kind of thing. Okay. So that’s one of’em just recently we’ve kind of come on board with, with the gon the gons been a unit that for, for
00:51:01:04 –> 00:51:01:28
We all, they
00:51:02:27 –> 00:51:18:17
Migratory migratory herd. And, and we know they do. In fact, there was a study done in the late eighties, early nineties that that kind of did that. But it was the v HF callers, you know? Yeah. And so it was kind of, they’d have to fly and maybe they’d lose some deer. Maybe they’d say, well, some here went here. But it was, it was good data and it kind of gave us base. Well I think
00:51:18:17 –> 00:51:39:01
Part of that, they’re, they’ve gotta be effective in the air, whatever. And so when you, you know, they, they have a feeling of where they’re summer and they go up there and they go up to the upper end of the north, end of the gon and find the, a good portion of them and assume the others died or something. What we’re not finding out, they never flew over summers. Right. They never flew over this other country. Which is, well we’re gonna dive into some of this, some of the more
00:51:39:01 –> 00:52:04:14
Extreme movements, which are some of the most interesting ones. You know, for me, one of the things that’s the very most interesting is not the okay winner here. Holy cow. It ended up over here. But it’s all those data points between, in between that we get from the GPS callers because now we’re going, holy cow, like this group of deer instead of, you know, they Sure. They end up, they end up over here and we know that. But now we’re seeing the route that they’re taking because we’re getting data points.
00:52:04:16 –> 00:52:05:17
How many points are these callers
00:52:05:24 –> 00:52:06:02
More
00:52:06:02 –> 00:52:07:29
Often take? How many times a day are they taking a
00:52:07:29 –> 00:52:14:07
Hit? It kind of depends. You can program, usually it depends on how they, they get ’em from the company hit a day one, one to three. One to three
00:52:14:07 –> 00:52:21:23
A day. A day. So Yeah. During a migration period of a couple weeks, you know, or a week. Sure. You’re getting, you’re getting a,
00:52:22:07 –> 00:52:23:10
A line breadcrumb.
00:52:23:26 –> 00:52:24:11
Exactly.
00:52:24:11 –> 00:52:38:22
And it’s, and all the new callers that we’re, that we’re gonna start working with are gonna do even more, more data points in the day. Storage even. Everything gets more because even with, even with some of these cars we have right now, we’ve got like, you know, an overnight 14 mile
00:52:39:02 –> 00:52:41:05
Pope. That’s what blew, that’s what blew my mind.
00:52:41:07 –> 00:52:43:01
Yeah. So, you know, they’re moving, we’re
00:52:43:01 –> 00:52:44:08
Going when they’re not even stopping a
00:52:44:08 –> 00:52:48:05
Drink. Not just 14 level miles. We’re talking up over a plateau plate.
00:52:48:05 –> 00:52:52:24
Exactly. So, so we want to know even more detail. And we’re, and we’re working to, they move
00:52:53:09 –> 00:52:58:04
All day long, all night long. Do they even bed during that 24 hour period or they just literally
00:52:58:04 –> 00:52:59:11
Walking, they wanna know everything. What
00:52:59:11 –> 00:53:00:20
Trying. They’re walking, you know, they’re walking,
00:53:00:29 –> 00:53:10:02
Going. Yeah. What, so what are, so just give us a summary really quick. You’re finding Saigon deer just gon deer. All of these units are interconnected to a degree.
00:53:10:05 –> 00:53:36:05
And it’s almost exactly like the cow elk thing we’re finding Yeah. We knew some ponant deer would show up on the penguins, the Zion, some of these other surrounding units and they would Yeah, they would go. We knew that. But the extent how much, we didn’t know what their routes, some of those kind of things were. Yeah. And so we’ve got deer. I mean, I think our, our farthest deer that we’ve got, she, she was out there, we caught her out on the buck skin. Those aren’t familiar. It’s 25 miles east right near Arizona border. Yeah. Arizona border. 25 miles east of Could
00:53:36:05 –> 00:53:38:05
Be a ca up deer for all intents and purposes. When you caught
00:53:38:05 –> 00:53:58:05
Her, you didn’t know. Yeah, exactly. So we, we catch her and she takes off, she’s winters out there and there’s a, there’s a fence, a my, a fence that they put up a 13 mile stretch of fence that covers up highway 89. Highway 89 out there on the way. There’s several of these crossings they have to do. It’s been up for about four years now. And first year those deer hit it. They struggled to get through it. They did. You know,
00:53:58:17 –> 00:53:59:24
And we were all concerned. Yeah. Oh
00:53:59:24 –> 00:54:15:06
Yeah. Everybody was, everybody was just crazy. ’cause you’d have all these deer stacking up. And it was funny seeing those deer, I guess. Not really funny. It could’ve been sad, but like they, they’d hit that fence and they just thought they were gonna die. I mean, they’re, every, every little opinion Juniper was just like, like they got there. Like, oh, we’re dying. They started and eventually
00:54:15:09 –> 00:54:20:12
Once you get ’em trained and then the mama’s trained the fss. Yeah. And once you get a training going, so three or four years is
00:54:20:26 –> 00:55:11:23
A lot less problems. It’s just they’re breezing through it now. They’re, they’re blowing through it like it’s nothing now. Okay. I mean, they don’t even, it doesn’t even slow ’em down. But anyway, so they come up, kind of hit the fence, go through the fence, and literally it seemed like the 1st of April was when they started moving back up into March 1st of April. And they start, they start going and they just go, go go. And literally it was within, you know, two to three days there from a winter range to a sum range. That’s crazy. I, and, and I’m talking, we’re going, we’re we’re talking 30, 40 miles. Yeah. 30, 30, 40 miles from, from that for some of those deer. And, and they’re going from 5,500 feet up to 9,000 and then back down off. And that was one of the interesting things that we found was there’s kind of that the, the end of the gon plateau kind of points off at the end. Yeah. Just above Alton. And I thought, okay, most there’s gonna be bucks. Those buck skinned deer go up over to the Alton area and they probably hook around the end of that go to out and, but no, they’re crossing the top up the top, this 9,000 foot going
00:55:11:26 –> 00:55:13:04
Straight up straight. They’re not even thinking straight.
00:55:13:08 –> 00:55:14:04
And this year we had some,
00:55:14:09 –> 00:55:17:11
We had somebody needs to teach ’em. It’s a lot less energy. Yeah.
00:55:17:13 –> 00:55:18:22
Just walk around the corner. Let me
00:55:18:22 –> 00:55:22:24
Show you the route. Let me show you mom’s mom, they’re route and then we’ll get these ponds going. Yeah.
00:55:22:24 –> 00:56:04:22
And so they’re crossing up over the top of this mountain and there was still snow up there. I mean there was still significant three to four feet in some spots. Wow. Where they’re walking through the 1st of April where they’re walking not through snow. And if they would’ve hook the corner, they wouldn’t walk through snow. But for some reason they walk over the top and then they go down and they hung out. Well, a lot of those deer stayed there and it was so it was like a migration, a two or three to migration. And they’re done for. But then we found, there were a few of ’em that came up and they, they moved up and then they just, they stayed there for a while and they stayed there for six to eight weeks in some of this country. And my guess is they’re just kind of chasing the green. They kind of went up to the end of where the grass was good. They’re, you know, the Forbes are good. They’re coming up and they’re hanging out there and they’re just, they’re, they’re munching. And then all of a sudden, the 1st of June we had three deer
00:56:04:22 –> 00:56:05:18
Following time. Yeah.
00:56:05:18 –> 00:56:21:18
1st of June they take off and, and they went another, there was another deer that went another 30 to 40 miles. So she, oh my gosh. She leaves there along Highway 89, just south of Hatch. She leaves there and goes up over the top of the penguin unit, another nine, 10,000 foot over Cedar Bridge
00:56:21:18 –> 00:56:22:01
Country.
00:56:22:04 –> 00:56:27:24
Yep. Yep. And crosses up over near p which lake goes down and almost, I 15 hits, I 15 by
00:56:27:24 –> 00:56:29:05
Summit. Right there by your house. Right there
00:56:29:05 –> 00:56:29:28
By summit, by your
00:56:29:28 –> 00:56:31:23
House. She missed me. She
00:56:32:13 –> 00:56:35:16
She came past wan crazy turns and goes up on the hill. Just crazy.
00:56:35:16 –> 00:56:36:26
So, and how’s a fa has her fun?
00:56:37:00 –> 00:57:12:06
Well, it was, it was a fawn. It was actually last year’s father. She, she’s a yearly deer. Okay. So she’s one of the deer that, one of the deer that I’m, I’m excited about. I’m hoping she comes back. We have seen with some of these that there is a little bit of a dispersal, which has its own awesome. You know? Yeah. Interesting to think about. Yeah. Because, so let’s say she doesn’t come back and, but she has genes from the coba the pons and gone. Yes. Something. Now she, if she decides not to come back, ’cause she was a fawn, because we’ve seen, like if she followed her mom up and her mom said, look, I’m gonna have a new fawn. You gotta get outta here. Yes. And so maybe that’s why she left or maybe she followed her mom to that point
00:57:12:17 –> 00:57:16:14
And lost her mom. Or she thought her mom went this way and she really went that way and she kept walking.
00:57:16:20 –> 00:57:20:05
So it’ll be interesting to see if she comes back or not to the buck ski if she does. Well
00:57:20:05 –> 00:57:29:14
And from year to year to year. Yeah. If you can, if they hold onto these collars that long, you could see, like, like you said, did they just chase the greenup? ’cause green ups different each year. Yeah, sure. You know what I mean? And so how does this
00:57:29:14 –> 00:57:33:08
Light, light winter, they might just blow all the way to the top in, you know, end of April. Yeah,
00:57:33:08 –> 00:57:58:19
Sure. And we, and we had another deer that was an eight year old doe, you know, she was a seasoned veteran and she comes up and does the, almost the exact same movement. She goes from there up to like Brian Head. Yeah. But when she got up there to where April 1st or that April time, there was still significant amount of snow Brian Head. And so where she was gonna go, fawn, she couldn’t get there. There was nothing for her to eat. So she hangs out and waits, waits for it to get green up there. She bolts up in there in a matter of one or two days, has her fawn. You know.
00:57:58:27 –> 00:58:03:07
So Did you have any do that went back to the, the opposite direction?
00:58:03:09 –> 00:58:03:26
We didn’t. No.
00:58:04:03 –> 00:58:06:07
So pretty much buck skinned deer went
00:58:06:07 –> 00:58:07:02
Back. The ones you caught in
00:58:07:02 –> 00:58:17:25
You The one we caught. And so, but, but that’s the interesting thing. So we found that, we went back and looked at the other study of the V HF study and, and the ponant deer. I, I think we missed some of those deer. The goat Arizona, we didn’t have, because
00:58:17:27 –> 00:58:20:18
You know, they do goat airs, they do some, some are obviously.
00:58:21:08 –> 00:58:25:10
So we’re gonna try to call her some deer in Arizona this year to just, you know, and
00:58:25:18 –> 00:58:25:26
That
00:58:26:02 –> 00:58:38:07
Or catch some deer in Utah a little earlier. ’cause from what my memory, those deer that left the ponson and went into Arizona from that old study, by the 1st of November, roughly those deer that were gonna go there, they were in Arizona.
00:58:38:14 –> 00:58:55:10
Yep. They were there. And so we’re gonna try and we’re gonna try and catch that group, but we’ve gotta do ’em early enough because they found that those, the ponson deer were actually getting into Arizona before the ca baab deer came down. So there was about a month lag. So we’re gonna try and get in there and hopefully catch those deer. If we catch a Kay Baab deer, we lose a deer to gold to them. But at the same time, it still learn. That would be great
00:58:55:10 –> 00:59:02:14
Information. Well, we, we need to know. So will they let you, you know, put actually do put collars on in Arizona. We’re
00:59:02:14 –> 00:59:09:06
Gonna work with Arizona to try and get that. I think it’s gonna happen. We’re not gonna have to go too far just, you know, a few, five to nine miles or whatever Arizona.
00:59:09:06 –> 00:59:14:05
So theses collars have advanced. Tell us a little bit about maybe some of the pictures or anything like that. That’s, yeah,
00:59:14:14 –> 00:59:29:11
And it’s, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s real time. When we did those Elk callers, we’d have to wait for three years to get that caller back off of elk and download and download it. Now I literally go get online and I can, I can get onto that website, log in, put in that caller data and I can see where that deer was standing yesterday. You
00:59:29:11 –> 00:59:31:28
Can name it. Say I’m typing in, you know, deer number
00:59:32:10 –> 00:59:33:29
28, Joseph Josie. Yeah. Yeah.
00:59:34:08 –> 00:59:40:05
And I can, I can look and see where she was standing yesterday. And so it’s pretty, pretty amazing. And the new are coming out now.
00:59:40:13 –> 00:59:47:25
Now if she’s dead, you know Right then versus hey, a monthly telemetry flight Yeah. That you get now you might get weathered out. So now it’s two months and you’re going for a flight dead by the time
00:59:47:27 –> 00:59:49:20
You go back, back over what she died from. She’s
00:59:49:21 –> 00:59:50:06
Just a pile
00:59:50:06 –> 00:59:54:00
Of bones. That’s the, that’s a cool thing. You know, we get a mortality signal and it sends an, an email
00:59:54:12 –> 00:59:54:20
Send,
00:59:54:20 –> 00:59:57:19
Sends an email and it says, Hey, this, there could be dead. Go check it out
00:59:57:22 –> 00:59:58:10
Stationary
00:59:58:10 –> 00:59:59:14
For however many
00:59:59:14 –> 00:59:59:25
Hours. And
00:59:59:25 –> 01:00:05:13
You got, so we got one last night, says the deer could be dead this afternoon. When we get on here, I’m gonna bust over there and go see.
01:00:05:20 –> 01:00:08:02
And so what were you saying about these new callers and advancements?
01:00:08:03 –> 01:00:18:12
Yeah, the new callers we’re gonna be able to set up like some geofence type thing. So with this migration, it’s gonna be a pretty amazing, we’re gonna, we can say, hey, when they hit 89, it’ll start sending us emails so that we know when they’re going the
01:00:18:12 –> 01:00:19:10
Migration’s kicking in.
01:00:19:10 –> 01:00:31:17
Yeah. So and likewise we can, we can kind of do it. And we’ve only been doing this study for, for just a half a year now. So I’m excited to see what it’s gonna be when they come back and, and when that timing is and you know, we kind of know, but we will know now, you know,
01:00:31:26 –> 01:00:41:11
We’ve also got a, a caller that we’re gonna be working with maybe more in the future that actually has a camera Yeah. Right on it. And that’ll, that’ll be pretty neat
01:00:41:11 –> 01:00:42:13
To see. Take a picture a day or something.
01:00:42:13 –> 01:00:43:07
Take a picture of the poachers,
01:00:43:23 –> 01:00:44:17
Right? Yeah.
01:00:45:10 –> 01:00:47:06
Hey, I’m just throwing that out there. No, sure.
01:00:47:16 –> 01:00:48:25
The thing, I mean, it’ll film too. That’s
01:00:48:25 –> 01:00:49:28
A 500. It’ll
01:00:49:28 –> 01:00:55:14
Shoot, it’ll shoot video. So it’d be, it’d be pretty interesting to see, you know, a chin view of Yeah.
01:00:55:16 –> 01:00:58:22
Of what that dose maybe a lion lying on her back. I don’t know. Yeah.
01:00:59:02 –> 01:01:01:18
Any, it’s anything but probably, probably a lot of grass. I dunno. One.
01:01:01:18 –> 01:01:01:25
Yeah.
01:01:02:00 –> 01:01:02:24
Well I just want propose
01:01:03:00 –> 01:01:03:17
Probably a lot of boring
01:01:03:17 –> 01:01:12:24
Pictures. I, I wanna propose something, and I know Adam will be on board with this, but we Epic would like to sponsor some of these callers on particular bucks
01:01:14:22 –> 01:01:15:05
Of a
01:01:15:05 –> 01:01:16:10
Particular trophy status.
01:01:16:20 –> 01:01:16:23
Yeah.
01:01:18:00 –> 01:01:20:00
Yeah. And so anyway, you only
01:01:20:05 –> 01:01:26:20
Re you only require login. Just all it needs the password to log in. That’s just a simple,
01:01:27:02 –> 01:01:30:29
And it’s in the name of biology is some point we we’re gonna have a harvest this. That’s awesome.
01:01:31:14 –> 01:01:31:20
And
01:01:31:20 –> 01:01:37:14
That’s that. But that gets us to a great point though because we’re, that was something that we normally just call doughs and fawns. Yeah. You know,
01:01:37:25 –> 01:01:38:19
I wanna know about the bucks.
01:01:38:19 –> 01:01:44:11
Yeah. And that’s what I do as a biologist. You know, I say I wanna know, and as a hunter as well, you know, you’re just like, I wanna know what the bucks are doing because
01:01:44:11 –> 01:01:46:12
Are they doing the same thing as the d Are they laser
01:01:46:19 –> 01:01:48:18
Well as the a hunter, you know, they don’t Yeah, you
01:01:48:18 –> 01:02:24:26
Don’t, they move a lot more. Right. Especially in the rutt. And especially with these dynamics with kay ba and ponson deer and year to year. It’s interesting to know a, a dear summer on the penguin lake. Yeah. But he’s crossing 89 wintering on the ponson that year. Does he, is he always going back? And I know that’s hard ’cause you gotta, I don’t know the battery life of that caller or do you gotta catch that deer that buck every year and put a new one or every two years? So to get five or six years of data, it’s not as easy as it sounds. But, but does he, is he have high site fidelity and go right back to there or hey know I’m going to the coral pinks this year because I’ve heard those dos are nicer.
01:02:27:05 –> 01:02:30:16
Right? Not me. Well, nicer. I picked,
01:02:30:18 –> 01:02:32:00
I picked a radio friendly term
01:02:32:07 –> 01:03:00:29
Business. So, and there’s some things like I know like the pre-app plateau, for example, you know, has a resident desert herd of maybe a hundred total deer. Yeah. And then lions come in, wipe ’em out, feels like they’re down to 15 or 20 and then their population bounces back. Do we have Chiba deer for example, that would go, that go out there normally and come back, go out there and come back and then at some age they’re too lazy to go back or the feed’s good enough, they stay. Yeah. And that’s what Adam’s getting at is after, you know, a six year period, three year period of deers six to nine years old, matures
01:03:00:29 –> 01:03:01:20
And doesn’t wanna
01:03:01:20 –> 01:03:14:26
Make, there’s deer that, that summer on the buckskin. Yeah. You know what I mean? And like, and so were they migratory deer and then at some point they just stay, or you know, is a deer born in the desert, stays in the desert, doesn’t migrate, but breeds the migrating dose. Yeah. You know what I
01:03:14:26 –> 01:03:33:22
Mean? And that’s, and that’s what we, that’s what we want to try and find. So, so, you know, with a lot of petitioning and, and hazing of Salt Lake and the guys up there. Yeah. I’m like, you know, we gotta we gotta continue this and keep it going because I’m talking It’s every deer on the unit. Yeah. It’s not like a matter of a couple of ’em. Stay, I mean it’s, it’s a mass migration. Every 60 of those deer that we call, are they left? They went somewhere
01:03:33:27 –> 01:03:34:18
All 60 of ’em.
01:03:34:18 –> 01:03:37:29
Yeah. Every one of ’em. Not, there wasn’t a single resident here. I guess you what you would call a resident
01:03:37:29 –> 01:03:40:05
Here all gon summer range. You’re talking They didn’t
01:03:40:05 –> 01:03:47:11
Stay there. Yeah. The only one that was, that didn’t have a big significant migration was over on the east side in that cannon area. Yeah. Over there. Which we knew that there’s a lot of
01:03:47:13 –> 01:03:50:22
That’s a over there that’s a mid-range. They could summer, winter and
01:03:50:22 –> 01:04:19:01
They, they, she’s moved like three miles her whole life. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so it’s not, you know, it’s not the entire unit but a portion of it. And so what we’re gonna do is, is this fall, possibly even this summer, we’re gonna try and catch some of those deer hopefully that could go to Arizona. Yeah. We have a good idea from the, the previous study when we’re gonna go Yeah. Gonna get some help from the C W M U and and and those guys there and hopefully catch some of those deer that are gonna move. But we’re gonna, we we’re slated to get 30 buck collars, which I don’t know that we’ve ever collared a buck in Utah. That was one of the things I want to do.
01:04:20:00 –> 01:04:20:12
There was
01:04:20:12 –> 01:04:23:02
Some pushback. We’re managing bucks and shooting bucks. We should be collaring bucks.
01:04:23:05 –> 01:04:30:00
Yeah. And there’s and there’s some pushback there. I mean even even simple things like, like Cape, oh, you’re gonna ruin a cape, you’re gonna
01:04:30:00 –> 01:04:31:23
Put a collar on it. Their neck swell in the route.
01:04:32:13 –> 01:04:34:02
You gotta have expand collar for that.
01:04:35:00 –> 01:04:36:16
There’s factors and they, but you
01:04:36:16 –> 01:04:36:18
Know,
01:04:37:01 –> 01:04:39:00
But you’ll learn something. You don’t learn from dose. No.
01:04:39:02 –> 01:04:43:00
A hundred, a hundred percent. And you know, if there, if there is a cape that’s easy to come by, it’s,
01:04:43:03 –> 01:04:43:17
It’s a meal there
01:04:44:02 –> 01:04:44:28
And we’re talking 30
01:04:46:08 –> 01:04:46:17
And if
01:04:46:17 –> 01:05:00:02
That be quiet for a minute, it’s gonna help management, it’s gonna actually help your hunts. Yeah. We’re gonna be able to manage better. And so we gotta give up a little bit. And if it’s, you know, a little bit of hair loss, you know, and the width of a collar, alright. You know, we gotta do it. So
01:05:00:02 –> 01:05:30:12
We’re gonna do 30 bucks. We’re gonna do an additional 30 dough. We’re gonna do 20 Fs. We’re actually gonna do, we, we kind of half did it, you know, those b y u guys came down and said Yeah, while we’re calling ’em, we’ll kind of do a, a for this fat, this body conditioning score on the fawns. And we’re gonna do it again this year, actually ramp it up. So we’ll probably for the next three years we’ll do do 20 fawns every year because we, they’re the ones that we see die the most. Yeah. You know, there’s a higher fawn mortality than there is in adult mortality. So we’re gonna throw some more fawns. And then the cool part is we’re actually gonna get 10 collars that are slated just to go on cactus pucks or stag
01:05:30:12 –> 01:05:31:28
Pucks. That’s whatever you want. Call. That’s awesome.
01:05:32:02 –> 01:05:33:24
You know, I wanna see if those deer, they’re, it,
01:05:33:29 –> 01:05:35:26
The, it’s the, it’s, yeah. Yeah.
01:05:36:05 –> 01:05:48:00
And some people, you know, we, we’ve seen, we’ve actually got some trail camera bugs where they, they’re a normal buck and then do they turn stag at a certain point in their life? You know, ’cause their antler configuration, right. I mean you can’t always see their, is
01:05:48:00 –> 01:05:55:08
It environmental? You know what I mean? Is it something that they’re, the pump are gone, as we all know, it’s, there’s no fire prevalence than Yeah. Full oft there’s
01:05:55:23 –> 01:05:56:01
In that
01:05:56:01 –> 01:05:58:12
World what’s causing in the world. It’s, it’s interesting.
01:05:58:13 –> 01:06:39:13
And so one of the things we actually went and did last year, we actually, I wanted to know, because the thing is with the biologist as the biologist I, those deer, there’s a lot of guys out there that see one of those deer and they just wanna throw up all over their shoes. ’cause they’re like, what? This is such a waste. So I wanted to look at it and say, why do we have, because we have a higher number on the pon gun. I mean, I go to classify a hay field and Yeah. And there’s 20 of those cactus bucks out of 200 deer, 300 deer in a field, you know, and you see it. And so it’s like, I wanna figure out what it is. And we actually, so last year we actually called up, we had 10 hunters come down. We, we, we helped ’em, we killed five in September. We killed five more in November. Basically what we found was testosterone levels, those kind of things are what affect ’em. It doesn’t appear to be a genetic thing. They’re not passing it on because these deer,
01:06:39:27 –> 01:06:40:23
So they might don’t breed.
01:06:40:27 –> 01:06:46:23
They might turn stag as they get to nine years old or something. All of a sudden they’re just, it’s like an old man. Kinda like these
01:06:46:23 –> 01:06:50:02
Commercials in the humans we see on tv. You know, we might need to give
01:06:50:02 –> 01:06:50:23
Testosterone
01:06:50:23 –> 01:06:52:22
Object. You, you suffer from low teeth.
01:06:53:28 –> 01:06:58:06
Two, two bathtubs. Take two bathtubs on a hill with a couple deer sitting there, you know,
01:06:58:29 –> 01:07:05:01
You need help. There you go. Hey, the purp the, the blue pill for deer. Yeah, exactly. Purple.
01:07:05:10 –> 01:07:08:04
Whatever. Rocket does not recognize testosterone injected deer.
01:07:09:13 –> 01:07:17:02
But basic, basically that’s what’s happening to these deer. But we’re thinking that’s what’s causing it is is they’re catching a virus similar to like e h d blue to, or something like that.
01:07:17:05 –> 01:07:18:25
It affects te size or
01:07:18:25 –> 01:07:43:12
Something. So basically they get a high fever when they’re young. And depending on when that, when that fawn gets it, and there’s been some studies done, it’s almost zero, but there has been something they’ve looked at and they say if a fa gets it when he is zero to two months, basically he’s just gonna grow stuff that looks like Marge Simpson. You know, just so some balled up nasty looking stuff. Or if he gets it when he’s like a year old, maybe he’ll get some mantler configuration. Maybe he’ll shed, there’s a possibility he could shed his antlers every year you see him guys will
01:07:44:01 –> 01:07:45:17
Big and you see all that combed in,
01:07:45:17 –> 01:07:45:26
You do
01:07:46:06 –> 01:07:48:29
Variation. There’s big variation of that. You see that. Yeah.
01:07:49:09 –> 01:08:00:25
So we did this and basically we found out that’s the thing, they, they all had, I mean I’m talking like peanut sized test, that’s stack. They were president, they were, or they were present there and they, they were on them. But those boxes we watched
01:08:00:25 –> 01:08:02:00
Enough a function like real
01:08:02:00 –> 01:08:06:22
Bucks and, and they’re, their their, their testosterone was so much, it was basically not even rotary.
01:08:06:22 –> 01:08:17:00
And so at some point, does that teach you that there’s nothing you can do about it? It’s a virus. It’s something we can’t control. Yeah. In a sense it’s the climate. It’s, it’s a mosquito. I don’t know. Well,
01:08:17:01 –> 01:08:34:18
And if they get it, they’re not gonna recover from it. It doesn’t sound like they’re either, you might as well do these hunts that you enacted lasts year where you tag stack tags. Stack tags where you, you know, I don’t know, guided them if that’s the right word. But you went out. Yeah, we took ’em out. Targeted right there and said that’s the buck to shoot. Yeah. You know, ’cause in September you gotta be careful ’cause everything’s in Vet
01:08:35:11 –> 01:08:36:00
September. Hey, that’s
01:08:36:00 –> 01:08:36:26
A stag. Oh nevermind. It,
01:08:37:08 –> 01:08:42:20
It was a 34 inch stag. I’m telling you. Look at his nuts. Half inch smaller than it should be. Yeah.
01:08:43:08 –> 01:08:53:05
So we, we, and that was the thing too, is we killed, we killed during that time and we, we asked people that we had a management bot going on where they were killing normal bucks and these were pre-up bucks. I mean they’re coming. Yeah. This
01:08:53:05 –> 01:08:53:18
Is November.
01:08:53:18 –> 01:09:15:08
That right? It seems. Yeah, we’re we’re talking 1st of November and down there it seems like they rut just a little early. Yeah. On the ponson. Yeah. And so those bucks, we were sitting there watching these fields with these hunters just waiting for these cactus bucks to come in and the normal bucks come off the hill, come down to the fields and they’re going around checking all the dough. None of the dough are ready yet. So they just lay down and start eating. But these cactus bucks didn’t have care in the world. No, they’re just, I mean they’re just out. They’re
01:09:15:08 –> 01:09:16:05
All and happy. Yeah.
01:09:16:11 –> 01:09:18:20
I could pre is the velvet, they’re,
01:09:20:01 –> 01:09:22:04
There’s Jim, he’s harassing Mar so nice.
01:09:22:29 –> 01:09:26:29
They got guts like this on ’em, this much fat on their back because they don’t, that
01:09:26:29 –> 01:09:47:02
Was the crazy part. We found these deer, these deer were bumping. There was a couple that were bumping 300 pounds. I mean wow. Nothing goes in antler growth. It’s just all in their body. Yeah. And they’re, you go to hold onto one. Mean, the first kid that we, we shot one with, he and I go walking out there to grab it and I’m like, we’ll just grab it back, drag it over to the truck. We both go to latch onto it. I was like, no, we gotta bring the truck. This deer like just giant. You know, because we were
01:09:47:07 –> 01:09:48:17
Like, are you even pulling someone?
01:09:49:19 –> 01:10:03:25
We had, we had the guts left in and we, we pulled ’em, we take ’em out. We took a sample of every single organ. Blood samples. I mean Yeah, exactly. We did everything we could. And basically that’s kinda what we came up with. We had a pretty small sample size. We only had 10 stag bucks. But it was the same across the board. Follow?
01:10:03:26 –> 01:10:05:24
Well if it’s a hundred percent, it’s a hundred percent. Yeah.
01:10:06:03 –> 01:10:13:19
So, so we’re, we’re actually in the process of 2018, you could see a tags stack only tag on the gon. Wow.
01:10:13:25 –> 01:10:28:20
Wow. Well what’s interesting too is you got these trophy units and people wait forever to get those tags. They don’t want, unless it’s a giant sta and you know, contracted this virus, it’s cer you know, later on in life, pretty much people aren’t gonna shoot ’em. So then you get this inordinate amount of
01:10:28:23 –> 01:10:29:20
’em, it’s a waste of space
01:10:31:13 –> 01:10:37:18
Passed every year. 11, one of the deer came back 11 years old. So that deer’s been on there for 11 years. Basically not contributing
01:10:37:18 –> 01:10:38:22
To anything. Wasting Yeah. Wasted.
01:10:38:25 –> 01:10:39:28
I would rather have a big fat,
01:10:40:17 –> 01:10:41:12
Even a d Yeah.
01:10:41:21 –> 01:10:44:23
Especially if you’re up against objectives, population objective
01:10:44:23 –> 01:10:53:13
Stuff. Yeah. And especially, you know, nobody wants to count those as bucks and the buck to dough ratio. Yeah. ’cause they’re really not, they’re not, you know, contribu not breeding and things like that. So that’s very interesting.
01:10:53:16 –> 01:10:56:14
So if you don’t have enough, not nuts, you’re not a buck. Right.
01:10:57:16 –> 01:10:58:23
I think that’s a pretty good definition.
01:11:00:25 –> 01:11:01:08
Tell us
01:11:01:08 –> 01:11:09:06
About, you know, that’s, that’s all awesome. And we look forward, we’ll probably have you guys back on to talk more about that migration study maybe during the winter, things like that. Because,
01:11:09:10 –> 01:11:11:28
So this, at some point you’ll affect management. Yeah.
01:11:11:28 –> 01:12:06:28
It’ll in fact management, you know, you’re already talking about the stag tags, things like that. But other things in the southern region. Tell us, we’ve had a big, a big wildfire here on the Pengu Lake unit this summer. The Brian Head fire, which is not maybe just well known here in Utah, maybe across the west. It’s been all of the news. It’s, it’s out pretty much now, I think all the way for all intents and purposes. But give us a little bit, Josh, you’re the biologist there, obviously Phil, you’ve had to deal probably with a lot of maybe media calls. There’s been people, you know, finding deer, things like that, orphaned, which, you know, things like that. So you’ve had to deal with things on your front. Tell us a little bit about the fire, the scope of it and what we’re learning from it. Maybe had some telemetry animals within there and you know, then we’ll get into the long term. In my opinion, this is only gonna be good. There’s obviously some devastating effects Yeah. For cabin owners. And now every tree around my cabin’s black, what do I do? And
01:12:06:28 –> 01:12:22:13
That’s, well we know a lot of property owners up there and we fill for ’em. It’s close to home. It’s not, it’s not pretty anymore. You know, in a lot, a lot of the cases. But from a hunter’s perspective, you know, this could be phenomenal. Yeah. And, and we were super excited if you, if there’s a positive side. Yeah,
01:12:22:19 –> 01:12:32:19
No, that, and that’s the thing you gotta think about, like you said, the the private private land owners and stuff. That’s, that would be frustrating. I’d be frustrated if I, if I had my land up there and it’s looked like this for X amount of years, it’s never gonna look the same. No. There’s
01:12:32:19 –> 01:12:34:06
Just, we won’t, there’s not a life tree
01:12:34:06 –> 01:12:37:19
On. We’ve got burns, how old? We got some of these burns that are 20 years old and they’re still a burn. Yeah.
01:12:37:23 –> 01:12:56:04
Know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. They’re always gonna be a burn. But in our lifetime, whenever we see it. So it was, it was what it started the end of June. It was a human caused fire started up over in Brian Head. It kind of burned around for a couple days and then it looked like it was gonna be out. And then all of a sudden we had this heat wave that hit,
01:12:56:04 –> 01:12:57:00
Got ahold of some people
01:12:57:02 –> 01:13:22:20
Winds, some winds, some heat, some of the, the fuels that was up on that mountain and it exploded and it, it ended up going 70,000 acres. I actually work on just like the volunteer fire department there in Pengu, which they called us up that night when it blew up from Brian Head going to Pengu Lake. They’re like, we need everybody up here we can to try and protect cabins. And that fire was making noises and burning like I had never seen, I mean, it was, it, it went, you know, it blew, it was blowing 10,000 acres overnight kind of thing,
01:13:22:21 –> 01:13:31:18
You know. Well, and part of that comes from, you know, there’s quite a little bit of a controversy is poor management in the forest where, you know, you have a lot of standing dead trees, beetle kill. And, and we weren’t allowed by
01:13:31:18 –> 01:13:33:12
Anti anti logging environmental
01:13:33:12 –> 01:13:39:08
Groups, junctions basically. Or lawsuits of not being able to manage the forest. Yeah. Not being able to take care of our own forest. You
01:13:39:08 –> 01:13:45:17
Had, you had dead standing stuff down standing stuff. Yeah. And then new stuff that had grown up in between these 20 inch spruce and fur.
01:13:45:19 –> 01:13:48:22
Yeah. You had a, a fire ladder at every elevation. Yeah.
01:13:48:22 –> 01:13:50:12
And you couldn’t Exactly. You couldn’t,
01:13:50:12 –> 01:13:52:26
You could have, and it could’ve burned several directions over
01:13:52:26 –> 01:13:57:22
The same. And had the forest been managed at some point it’d been easier to, not saying it wouldn’t have been big, but
01:13:57:22 –> 01:13:59:04
Broken up a little bit. Yeah. It
01:13:59:04 –> 01:14:00:23
Would’ve been, I had a better chance managing that
01:14:00:25 –> 01:14:07:19
Fire you saw when it, when it, it basically burned itself out. I mean, the firefighters did an awesome job and, and not taking anything away from them. I mean, things
01:14:07:19 –> 01:14:11:22
They did, you had to stand back. You had to stand back at that point. There was nothing, nobody was gonna do anything.
01:14:12:04 –> 01:14:14:00
At some point. You’re just doing managing structures
01:14:14:01 –> 01:14:42:22
When there’s 300 foot flames coming off of that thing. And it was running. It was, it was pretty amazing. And, and so, but the thing is that fire eventually kind of burned itself out. They put this big huge fire line ahead of it that was five miles. And they’re like, we’re gonna hold it here. And it hit, you know, less, you know, thick fuel and stuff and kind of just moved around, burned itself out and then the monsoons started hitting. Yeah. Fortunately. So it, so it put it out and, and unfortunately that fire, you know, I’m not a fisheries biologist, but that’s probably gonna be one of our long-term effects that we’re gonna see fisher. That’s gonna be hard as a fisheries, you know, we’ve already lost
01:14:42:23 –> 01:14:43:17
Even Pengu Lake.
01:14:43:24 –> 01:14:45:10
Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s very possible.
01:14:45:14 –> 01:14:52:26
Tell us about, I mean, for people that don’t know why that is, what, what’s gonna happen, Phil likely or happening right now with these monsoons?
01:14:52:26 –> 01:14:55:12
Yeah. The, the big thing is just ash flow, you know,
01:14:56:04 –> 01:14:57:10
Can just water contaminants,
01:14:57:10 –> 01:14:58:29
Chokes the deer. Yeah. Or chokes the, the
01:14:58:29 –> 01:15:06:06
Shine, right? Yeah. I mean it can literally like clog gills. But you know, the bigger things that, you know, right now we’ve got kind of an algae bloom starting, you
01:15:06:06 –> 01:15:06:23
Know, in the lake
01:15:06:26 –> 01:15:16:16
Up at Pengu Lake. And it, if it gets heavy enough when, when that all dies off and that starts decomposing, then it just takes all the oxygen right outta the water and wow. It
01:15:16:16 –> 01:15:16:22
Can kill
01:15:16:22 –> 01:15:20:24
All fish. Is that because all of a sudden you have an influx, influx of all these nutrient nutrients in there from the
01:15:20:26 –> 01:15:21:06
Ash, the,
01:15:21:29 –> 01:15:26:07
All that. Exactly. And there and then all of a sudden, boom grows like a pond in your backyard and
01:15:26:19 –> 01:15:28:06
It sucks oxygen to grow.
01:15:28:15 –> 01:15:31:19
If you’re not replacing fresh oxygen at a fast enough rate, the fish will just
01:15:31:19 –> 01:15:38:05
Die. Yep. And that’s the tough thing with pen, which lake is, I mean, we can’t, like, we can’t drain it, you know what I mean? Like it’s, it’s, it’s,
01:15:38:07 –> 01:15:39:11
You need to go up there and narrate it.
01:15:40:14 –> 01:15:40:20
Get
01:15:40:20 –> 01:15:41:12
A straw blowing it,
01:15:41:12 –> 01:15:41:26
Phil. Yeah.
01:15:41:29 –> 01:15:43:19
That’s, that’s a 500 idea.
01:15:44:19 –> 01:15:45:06
So I know that.
01:15:45:12 –> 01:15:53:17
Then the streams too, you know, same thing. You know, we’ve got a lot of, you know, little streams that just have, you know, they’re smaller fish, but a lot of guys enjoy going up and catching ’em with their flat rods
01:15:53:19 –> 01:16:07:19
Or whatever of cutthroats and whatnot. And I seems like I’ve seen on the news or in the news release, probably to your credit, you guys have, and maybe it’s already happened, you had a fishing contest or, or it’s still going something to Right. Encourage people to come in there, take fish, might as well
01:16:07:25 –> 01:16:09:22
Take the resource fish. Right. Might as well take the resource.
01:16:09:26 –> 01:16:20:07
Yeah. We’ve, we’ve got tagged fish contest going on right now at pen, which lake fishing has still been good, you know, in spite of, of what’s going on. So that’s that’s good. There’s,
01:16:20:09 –> 01:16:22:24
Is that in part to help the economy too and
01:16:22:24 –> 01:16:53:19
Then say fish? Yeah. You know, yeah, it was, it was in, in collaboration with, with Garfield County, you know, and, and there’s, you know, the fish are still there. The fish are doing good and I think that they kind of took a hit, you know, from the fire and no one really wanted to go into that area and they couldn’t go into that area. Roads were closed and so yeah, people can go up there now, catch a, a tagged fish, get a prize, get entered to win a rifle. And there’s the, there’s a big fish component too. So if you catch a fish over 24 inches, you’re also in another
01:16:53:21 –> 01:16:55:00
Drawing or something, you get a
01:16:55:06 –> 01:17:07:04
Just same thing, you get a prize and you get entered to, to win that rifle as well. So either a tag fish or a 24 inch fish. And I think that runs through till, I wanna say Labor Day.
01:17:07:15 –> 01:17:18:13
So how does this work? Will it work itself out to where at some point it, it, it works itself out and you basically have to restock everything and start over and it’ll, at some point it’ll be fine? Or is this a 20 year,
01:17:18:18 –> 01:17:21:08
First year or two or three or what’s anticipation?
01:17:21:13 –> 01:17:31:12
You know, that’s, that’s really hard to say. It’s all speculation, but, you know Yeah. That there definitely is a, I will say there is a chance that it, it could be kind of a long-term problem really. Yeah, yeah. In Pengu Lake. Yeah.
01:17:31:14 –> 01:17:52:10
So just depends on how severe some of these major rain events are right off the right off the bat. And if healing, if you can use that word on the landscape and forage vegetation, grass. Yeah. You know, comes in at a, at a quick enough rate that, that it stabilizes. You don’t get as much ash continually year after year after year. You might save it
01:17:52:17 –> 01:18:04:06
And there’s a lot of guys, you know, crying, you know, sky’s falling. We’re we’re toast. It’s, it’s going, it’s gonna be gone for 10, 15 years. And then, you know, there’s a lot of people that are optimistic too. A lot of biologists are thinking it’ll be okay. So who knows.
01:18:04:06 –> 01:18:04:13
So as
01:18:04:13 –> 01:18:05:26
Far as, it’s hard, like I said, it’s hard to spend
01:18:05:29 –> 01:18:10:04
As far as from the wildlife side, you guys had, it sounded like collars on what, six cows or
01:18:10:04 –> 01:19:00:11
Something like that? Yeah, we had, we had a few cow elk and, and actually a few deer, a couple deer that there was a bear from the ponant. We had a bear as well. Wow. The bear was a crazy thing. Just one of those things. I mean, this bear was collared by some B Y U students last year over by tropic. Okay. And this bear comes up, crosses the top of the mountain, hangs out on the gon dens in hatch last, last winter. It’s a young, young male, two year old boy dens in Hatch. And all of a sudden this summer he gets up and he takes off and he works the whole rim of the Zion unit all the way down like Webster’s flat, all that stuff come on. Works literally dried over to the front door of your office out here. Come, come on. Mean, comes to, comes to mouth of Cedar Canyon. Yeah. Comes to the mouth of Cedar Canyon turns and the crazy part is, is him that that door or that fawn I was telling you about and that bear literally crossed paths at one point come same time mean I’m talking probably within a hundred yards of each other. Like they, their dots, I mean they points are just like, these are
01:19:00:11 –> 01:19:03:08
Two random animals out of You only have Yeah.
01:19:03:10 –> 01:19:05:08
10 one’s colored here, one’s colored 50 miles
01:19:05:11 –> 01:19:15:06
Away. Yeah. So anyway, that bear works its way up. Gets up into like Red Creek Reservoir. We’re actually trying to catch a few bears. And so one of the biologists over here had a bait there. He hits the bait, which is kind of cool. He hits the bait. We
01:19:15:06 –> 01:19:15:29
Have pictures of him.
01:19:16:05 –> 01:19:16:25
We got this bear
01:19:17:05 –> 01:19:17:29
Actually was the bait registered?
01:19:20:02 –> 01:19:21:16
We had a valid seal or, alright,
01:19:22:00 –> 01:19:24:08
Good. So orange card was in the tree
01:19:25:05 –> 01:19:39:29
And so it hits this bait and then the fire takes off and the fire comes through and it’s okay for a little bit. And that fire burns without bear hood moved up into where the fire was. Yeah. And his, his response was, he’d like literally go to the fire line every day. Come on. Yeah. He would go up, he
01:19:39:29 –> 01:19:41:05
Wanted to go through it, he
01:19:41:05 –> 01:19:59:01
Wanted to go through it up. He’d get up and he’d hit it and then he’d go back, go up and hit it, go back, go up and hit it, come back. He finally got into a spot where he stayed and I thought, I thought actually it was a mortality. The collar maybe wasn’t giving a mortality signal. He was hanging so tight in this one little hole. And I don’t know if it found a dead elk, something like that. It got onto a kill or something like that. Or it caught
01:19:59:02 –> 01:19:59:08
One.
01:20:00:27 –> 01:20:03:25
He was, that’s what he was doing was playing line after easy
01:20:03:25 –> 01:20:04:04
Picking.
01:20:04:11 –> 01:20:10:14
He was picking off, he was picking off elk calves as they were stumbling outta the fire, you know, and just swatting them left and right.
01:20:10:26 –> 01:20:27:17
And so he hangs out there for a little bit, we think he’s mortality loss and he starts moving again. And because it’s a study that that bear came from the ponant, we wanted it to happen. The, the caller that was on their B Y U that they said we want it back. And so it actually has a remote release on it from the computer. They log in and say when release.
01:20:27:19 –> 01:20:28:08
When did they do that?
01:20:28:19 –> 01:20:29:25
Two weeks ago. A couple weeks ago.
01:20:29:25 –> 01:20:31:04
Oh, after the fires out? After the fire,
01:20:31:06 –> 01:20:40:24
Yeah, after the fire. We kill somebody. No, we wanted, we wanted to wait until the fire was out, first of all, we couldn’t get in there. Yeah. And so, so I told him we’re gonna have to hold off. So it was pretty cool information. Anyway, they released the caller. I went in and got,
01:20:41:02 –> 01:20:43:28
So did the fire ever surround him or did he make it
01:20:44:11 –> 01:20:45:11
Just kind of stayed in
01:20:45:11 –> 01:20:50:29
Front of it? Yeah, he just stayed right on the edge of it. Off of this red crick, above Peruna, that kind of stuff over there.
01:20:51:04 –> 01:20:56:01
I mean, come on, they’re a collar. Yeah. Leave it on there. Yeah. It takes so much to put a collar on an animal.
01:20:56:19 –> 01:20:58:01
So anyway, we see, and then
01:20:58:01 –> 01:21:02:13
They, what the, how’d the, I know it was a small sample, but how’d the deer and the elk
01:21:02:18 –> 01:21:36:17
Behaved? So the elk, there was an elk that was actually literally ground zero when that fire blew up and came over from Brian Head to, to pen, which lake was literally right back in the back of Clear Creek. There’s some properties that are back in there that they actually manage Four Elk, you know, there’s some private lands. Some guys have some, some ranches back in there that they, they like hunting. And anyway, that elk just got into the meadows, I guess, and just let the fire burn around it around. You know, I, I talked to some of the landowners that were up there. They have trail camera pictures of, of the fire burning all around and there’s elk out in the metal feeding Wow. While the fire’s burning around ’em, you know. Yeah. And so’s it burned around her and it’s
01:21:36:23 –> 01:21:56:26
Interesting. Yeah. ’cause these elk have never seen a fire this magnet in their lifetime. Never. But it’s almost like they somehow inherently know, oh, this, we somehow programmed it one day this might happen. And don’t, don’t fret. Just go about your way. Gotta eat grass. Yeah. Eat. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because they’ve never seen it before. Yeah. You know, they don’t know how to behave Fast
01:21:56:26 –> 01:21:59:02
Forward. These elk are standing in the burn now.
01:21:59:02 –> 01:22:13:12
Yeah, they’re standing there now. They’re fine. And we had moisture yesterday was, that was, wow. That was bad as far as, we had some rains with some flooding and that kind of stuff. Some of the ash flows, but it couldn’t have happened at a better time. I drove through, oh, you got little through there yesterday. It’s probably a little,
01:22:13:12 –> 01:22:13:24
There’s
01:22:13:29 –> 01:22:20:07
Course’s aspens that are foot tall already. Really? The fire aspens, the fire’s only been out three weeks. Two weeks. Aspens. Yeah. Aspen, they’re already
01:22:20:07 –> 01:22:21:14
Growing suckering up like crazy.
01:22:21:14 –> 01:22:28:19
Yeah. At some point it’s gonna, those little, they’re gonna be 10 feet tall and it’s gonna, it’ll make it tougher to hunt. But this year should be phenomenal. You
01:22:28:19 –> 01:22:58:13
Know what? Honestly, it really will. I, you know, it worries me as the biologist. I, I have a feeling we may have lost a significant amount of, of some fass and some Mel Calss, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s where it’s gonna hurt us. And we won’t see that till, till down here. So maybe, you know, we might see a dip in the buck D ratio in the next couple years where we just kind of like have a bad winner. Didn’t add this year. Sure, yeah. Just like having a bad winner. We could see a dip in that as far as adults, you know, I don’t think we lost a few. There were a few. I mean, I remember I saw a picture of some firefighters found a mature bull elk dead. Yeah. Didn’t make it outta the fire.
01:22:58:14 –> 01:22:59:23
You know, that’s gonna happen. And
01:22:59:23 –> 01:23:19:06
It, and it’s gonna happen, but I don’t think it’s gonna be a significant amount. But those elk, the deer, basically, the elk never left. The deer never left. There was a deer that was right on the edge of the fire. She was doing the same thing that Bear was on, she was on the Sydney Valley Road and the fire was on the east side of the road. She was on the west side of the road the whole entire time. She never left, had her, probably had her fawn with her. Yeah. And she’s, she’s still there now.
01:23:19:16 –> 01:23:33:28
Well, what’s crazy, I know they’ve had this fires in Arizona, some of those bigger fires and, and you know, we’re working with the different outfitters and stuff and a lot of those elk would just stand in that black. Yeah. We didn’t even know what they were eating. Yeah. I mean, it was black, you know, but they lived, they, they thrived. Thrived.
01:23:33:28 –> 01:23:37:08
Yeah. The two to three years after. It’s, you’ve got giant phenomenal.
01:23:37:08 –> 01:23:40:08
You’ve got giant, giant elk and, and same thing. What we were gonna see up
01:23:40:08 –> 01:23:41:08
Here, high nutritious feet,
01:23:41:11 –> 01:23:48:28
Giant elk. And you can glass ’em. Yeah. It’s gonna open up it’s mosaic. It’s got a lot of topography. They’ve got some escapement. It’s gonna be, it’s gonna be good, huh.
01:23:49:12 –> 01:23:51:14
Honestly, it’s what the unit needed. Sadly. And sadly,
01:23:51:27 –> 01:23:53:25
It really did. We knew it was a ticking time bomb for a lot of years.
01:23:54:07 –> 01:23:56:13
It really was. Well, it still is. The parts that aren’t burned on this,
01:23:56:22 –> 01:23:59:01
It could have doubled in size. It still, I mean,
01:23:59:03 –> 01:24:01:17
It’s only a matter of time. This other country, this other country,
01:24:02:15 –> 01:24:11:28
It was scary if it would’ve jumped the highway in Castle Valley. Like, I mean it did. And they caught it. And that’s where, like I say that, you know, kudos of the firefighter catching it there. It could’ve burned the entire unit from there
01:24:11:28 –> 01:24:15:29
To 14. Highway 14 was as thicker or thicker than anything that did ditch
01:24:16:03 –> 01:24:19:16
True. It could have been well over a hundred thousand acres and been doubled in size.
01:24:20:07 –> 01:24:25:10
It would’ve started south and gone. You know, ’cause the winds is what pushed it, you know, to the northeast there had it started
01:24:25:10 –> 01:24:35:08
Some, if it have kept going the direction it was going when it first crew, 20 or 30,000 acres in two days. Right. If it have kept going there, it would’ve crossed it, it’d have been on the Zion unit and still going Yeah, yeah.
01:24:35:14 –> 01:24:36:00
You know? Yeah.
01:24:36:06 –> 01:24:40:10
Let’s say you got a changing winds, you got a north wind, south wind, you know, and it, it
01:24:40:10 –> 01:24:42:25
Pushed it to the more, the more broken stuff to the north. But
01:24:43:02 –> 01:24:59:28
Anyway, and we see that it’s kind of an ecological reset, I guess you could say. You know, that’s one thing we’ve been working on furiously is rehab stuff. You know, trying to get all this, all this stuff reseeded, you know, they’re, there’s a, a bear team they call it that, that’s coming in. They’re, they’re more worried now about infrastructure necessarily than say like wildlife habitat
01:25:00:17 –> 01:25:02:14
With them. Stream banks, erosion, big protecting,
01:25:02:14 –> 01:25:25:20
Protecting the resources. You know, there’s, there’s city watersheds, you know, city app, WANs, water’s up there paying, which is water is up in there and that kind of thing. So they’re trying to protect those things. But we’re worried about the wildlife side of things where we’re gonna be doing some baille bombing, they call it, where they’re gonna go drop some hay bales, hay, big straw, hay bales. We’re probably gonna put in some, if we can, the forest service, they, they like to use, use native, you know, kind of grasses and species to replace that, unfortunately.
01:25:25:23 –> 01:25:27:24
So you’re gonna reseeded, you are gonna ree fortunately
01:25:27:28 –> 01:25:37:06
Lot of this, it’s this. Oh yeah. But unfortunately, a lot of this is at higher elevation con contrast. A lot of the burns in, out west of here where you’ve got such a high cheatgrass of
01:25:37:06 –> 01:25:38:05
The desert country that up
01:25:38:05 –> 01:25:43:19
Here you’re at an elevation where you’ve got a good understory in places where you have dense spruce fir
01:25:44:06 –> 01:25:48:04
We’re talking about Aspen. I never hunt aspens, you know, you know what I mean? In the desert stuff.
01:25:48:06 –> 01:26:14:07
Exactly. And so aspens, they kind of take care of themselves. They need fire, really. I mean they, that’s their reset. That’s the best thing for it. Even even some of the ponderosa fire, I mean the ponderosas, they’re the same thing. They’re a fire resistant tree that need it to get, need to open up their cone and the bark saves ’em. So really it’s, it’s gonna be a great thing forward. We’ll go and, and re-seed. We’re probably gonna put some stuff down, like some, I mean we’re talking trica. Yeah. You know, grain, that kind of stuff to hold, help hold the soil for this year. Ster. It’ll
01:26:14:07 –> 01:26:15:12
Be this year. Sterile, sterile stuff that Right.
01:26:15:14 –> 01:26:16:25
And it’ll be dead next year. I add
01:26:16:25 –> 01:26:36:13
Some little alfalfa and whatnot. High protein stuff. That’s honestly, we were talking about that some of the deer we’ve killed and stuff has been, you know, as a result from, from reseeds and, and a certain mixture of seed that’s put in there. And, and we know the groceries are amazing and, and that’s been, you know, a contributing factor to like Brutus growth, you know? Exactly. Yeah. You’ll
01:26:36:13 –> 01:26:37:10
See a buck blow up,
01:26:37:16 –> 01:26:38:28
You know, over one year.
01:26:38:28 –> 01:27:01:17
Especially if you’ve some age. It’s living in an area like that. Right. That was deer can live in about any, a wide range. Oh yeah. He was living in That’s pretty marginal when it was thick cedars. Yeah, yeah. Compared to you. You burn it up and ree one chain it and re-seed it. Yes. That deer’s like, I’m in heaven and no hunters are normally hunting that thick cedar. And all of a sudden Jason Carter shows up and he’s end up on a wall,
01:27:02:28 –> 01:27:14:08
Him and his buddy. And That’s right. And you know, and that’s the thing. You get a little bit of age, but then that feed, and you know, of course big deer, big elk, they require feed amongst, you know, same thing with age and genetics. And so if you can, you can, anyway,
01:27:14:20 –> 01:28:03:00
I liken this a little bit, not to digress and keep going too far, but the Mount Dutton unit in 2002. Absolutely. I was a biologist there. You’re you’re from over that way. Much, much the same. And that it was, I don’t remember the acres, but it was very comparable. It burned half the unit at least. Yeah. Oh yeah. And you know, it was more than you would want and a one and a one burn event. Yeah. No question. Had a lot of watershed issues. You had, I think it was Bonneville cutthroat trout fil I mean, a lot of concerns there. Fast forward 15 years, you fast forwarded six months after that fire. It was my first year there. And the, the, the reputation of Mount Dutton solid unit, rough, rugged, never produces the kind of bulls that Boulder Beaver Monroe produce that fall 2003, 2002. And on that unit was on the map. And it, and it was there for, you know, well,
01:28:03:00 –> 01:28:07:24
And you had a escapement six, eight years wilderness type country. Still rough, really rugged. A lot of, lot of, you know.
01:28:07:27 –> 01:28:23:18
But I think that probably contributed to, to, as these, you know, that unit’s got a lot of up and down south exposure canyons that contribute to his outcome from other units. That Boulder doesn’t have a lot of great elk winter ranges. No, it doesn’t. And when they find that, they’re like, that’s where I’m going every November. Yes.
01:28:23:20 –> 01:28:25:01
That’s when you change habits, you
01:28:25:01 –> 01:28:55:02
Know, 15 years and, and it’s been great for elk. It’s, you know, and deer deer as well. We’ve got mountain goats on it. We, I fully, that’s when they found the first mountain goat on Mount Dun was during the fire survey. They’re like, what does that white thing stand on the rock? Exactly. Oh, that’s a mountain goat. And so, you know, then they, you know, killed the trees, you know, through time. More goats pioneered off the beaver. Now you guys have brought goats off of Willer down there. We have a huntable population. And that fire, I, I would dare say we wouldn’t have it, just like the Oak Creek up in your neck of the woods filled,
01:28:55:02 –> 01:28:56:01
Changed that unit.
01:28:56:23 –> 01:29:12:29
That unit. We brought California Big horn there. It finally made it fully maybe suitable back to maybe what you’d want historically. You know, they were sheet there historically. So speaking of the hay bales, I’ve seen those straw bales up in canyons on the Oak Creek that I’m like, how’d this get here? They had to drop it from there just to stabilize it. Who’s game
01:29:12:29 –> 01:29:13:26
And fish baiting? I’ve
01:29:14:24 –> 01:29:15:08
Telling
01:29:15:08 –> 01:29:17:00
You, hay bales and flower sack. We’re gonna,
01:29:17:11 –> 01:29:18:17
We’re gonna find out who’s baiting.
01:29:18:21 –> 01:29:26:14
Well they make good spots to sit in glass ’cause they are soft. And when it’s hot, I mean, you’re just sitting there in a, in a pile of, of straw. It’s pretty nice. It’s pretty soft.
01:29:26:20 –> 01:29:51:28
So there’s a lot, a lot that goes on in fact, you know, and, and we’re, we’re pretty much outta time. But it’s been, you know, we did want to get into, you know, how like, like for example, you know, we’re talking about the Pengu Lake unit and how maybe they got the rifle season later. But a lot of those deer, and this goes back to that study, those deer are migrating outta there. Maybe the rifle season isn’t as good as the archery and the muzzle and there’s Oh yeah. There’s a lot. You know, and I don’t know how this fire’s gonna affect it. Maybe it’ll hold ’em a little longer. Maybe. Yeah. Some of the habitat, I don’t know. That’s,
01:29:51:28 –> 01:30:00:17
That’s the only thing that I wish is I wish we would’ve had 30 collars, 60 collars on there before the fire for having two years, three years worth of data. And all of a sudden the fire comes through and now we can see what couch
01:30:00:17 –> 01:30:03:04
Changes used to leave. Now don’t leave. Yeah, exactly. Just like what Adam was talking about.
01:30:03:05 –> 01:30:09:00
So that’s what’s gonna be awesome. And we’re trying to get callers statewide almost every unit because we can learn so much from ’em.
01:30:09:23 –> 01:30:51:26
What, you know, as we’re wrapping up here, is there anything that you guys would like to bring up? We’re the projects maybe we haven’t, we haven’t brought up or any bright spots, you know, any bigger deer we need to manage for bigger deer, right Adam? Yeah. Yeah. Bigger elk. Yeah. I need to kill 400 inch bull. Adam and I both, we’ve killed some nice bulls. We’ve killed three eighties, but we’re just, we need to break that. And so anyway, maybe this fire will help us. Maybe we’ll be applying for Pengu. I’m telling you it’s gonna change. It’s gonna change. They’ve killed giant bulls up there anyway. You know that. Yeah. But you know, having said that, you add a good fire on top of that, you know, and keep the tag, keep the tags managed. Can’t hurt. Can’t hurt. Yeah. So,
01:30:52:04 –> 01:31:34:24
No, I just, I think honestly Utah’s in a really good spot. You know, deer, you know, elk, we’ve, we’ve readjusted, you know, the duttons, some of those kind of things. The last year we did the management plan, adjusted that age, you know, unfortunately, anytime you adjust an age to try and get a little better quality, you have to lose some permits. And so there’s some guys that are taking longer and to draw. But I think when you get there, it’s gonna be a better experience for you when you get there and have a chance. Yeah. And not necessarily to kill a bigger bull, but, you know, just a better chance I guess all. And so I look back, like we were saying from the time I’ve been hunting 9 94 when I started, you know, I, it’s as b gets as good as it’s ever been. Yeah. I mean you look at the, the buck do numbers, all that kind of stuff. You know, maybe back well before that, I don’t know. You know, I don’t, I don’t know. But
01:31:35:00 –> 01:31:51:26
I, I would agree. I would say it’s as closest to when I was, we were in high school. Yeah. We, we went to high school in the early nineties and I played football and had I known that the deer were gonna taper off like they were right from then on you quit football, I probably wouldn’t play football. Yeah. Because that, that, that affected hunting season. And, but back
01:31:51:26 –> 01:31:53:01
Then, back then you
01:31:53:01 –> 01:31:54:07
Just thought, hey, this is the way it is forever.
01:31:54:11 –> 01:32:02:18
We were muzz loader, deer hunting, rutt over the counter type, you know what I mean? We were hunting November with muzz loaders and you couldn’t do anything to hurt the deer. You were hunting big deer each year.
01:32:02:20 –> 01:32:18:05
Yeah. We thought they were bulletproof to some extent. And that’s, this’ll be what it is. I mean, I remember vacillating over buying a lifetime. Do you need to buy a lifetime license? That a good thing. I’m glad I did that because wish I would’ve, you know, it was like, hey, I just buy one every year. Why would you buy that? That’s 500 bucks
01:32:18:05 –> 01:32:19:08
Now you’re guaranteed a deer tag.
01:32:19:08 –> 01:32:34:10
Yeah. Every year. So anyway, it’s about perspective. But, but I would echo that, that I think right now, general season units and we, even in our Epic Outdoors magazine, we, we have a section now for general season Utah Deer Options. That wouldn’t be something we would’ve done five years ago. No,
01:32:34:20 –> 01:32:34:28
I don’t.
01:32:35:20 –> 01:32:46:19
And because a lot of people we talk to and residents are gonna hunt Utah, but non-residents now it’s a viable option for you to consider coming to hunt a deer. I mean, you get to do limited entry deer, general seasoned deer,
01:32:46:21 –> 01:32:47:17
And you get points for each,
01:32:47:17 –> 01:33:00:20
And you get points for each. They’re separate. Oh yeah. So anyway, you’re, you’re spot on. I believe it’s, things are looking good. It’s a good time. And we appreciate you guys coming on and we’ll definitely have you on again because you know, you always are studying. We didn’t even talk about sheep today,
01:33:02:08 –> 01:33:03:06
Just scratching the surface.
01:33:03:08 –> 01:33:07:23
There’s so much to talk about. You guys are long-winded on subjects that don’t matter. Sorry.
01:33:07:23 –> 01:33:12:20
Exactly. Like cactus bucks, testicles. Really, we
01:33:12:20 –> 01:33:38:17
Spent 10 minutes, spent 15 minutes on that. Well, anyway, yeah. On behalf of Epic Outdoors, Adam and I, we really appreciate you guys. Josh and Phil, wish good things for you. Appreciate all you’re doing for wildlife and everything you’re doing for the hunters here in Utah. So anyway, thanks for spending a little portion of your day with us. Hopefully, you know, go find those dead animals. I know you’re gonna do for the rest of the day. Tell us what you find. But anyway, keep us posted and we’d love to have you guys back on. So thanks for
01:33:38:17 –> 01:33:38:20
Having
01:33:38:22 –> 01:33:39:12
Us on. I do, thanks a lot.
01:33:39:12 –> 01:33:40:13
Okay, all guys.
Recent Comments