EP 39: Big Game Management with Utah DWR

We started off with catching fawns that were day old. Tell us a little bit about the fire, the scope of it, and what we're learning from it. And that fire burns, well that bear had moved up into where the fire was. Anything to do with Western Big Game.

Welcome to the Epic Outdoors podcast, powered by Under Armour. 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've got the Utah Division of Wildlife representatives, Josh Pollock and Phil Tuttle. Anyway, these guys do a lot of different things within the Utah DWR, so we'll let them introduce themselves here in a minute. And of course, work down here in the southern regions, which is where Adam and I reside. Anyway, we're super excited to get into it with them. But before we do, we want to 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,

as well as the other sponsors we have, you know, with the magazine and different things that we're doing. So it's time to do a little giveaway here on the Epic Outdoors podcast. Just wanted to let everybody know we're going to 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, Swarro, Zeiss, Leica, whatever it is that you're glassing through. So anyway, we're going to give one away with this particular episode. To win, you would go to epicoutdoors.com backslash podcasts, 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 PhoneScope, P-H-O-N-E-S-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 Cheston Davis, one of the owners there at PhoneScope, 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 epicoutdoors.com backslash podcasts. Anyway, with that, welcome, Josh and Phil. Thanks for coming in, guys. How are you guys doing? Doing good. We're doing well. Surviving. Surviving. Are you guys getting ready for the hunts? Oh, yeah. Always. Always. Do they let you guys hunt? Of course. You guys are taking tags from the general public if you guys hunt. Yeah. No, we get all the benefits. We draw all the tags. There's a special pool. At least somebody admits it.

Yeah, there's a special pool set aside. Everybody knows it, but now you've admitted it. Something must have changed because I had to quit the DWR to draw any tags. I had to quit before I drew. That's right. I feel like the Lone Ranger here. I'm surrounded by Utah DWR guys. I'll say that a long time ago. Oh, no. No, thanks for having you guys here. 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 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 job responsibility lies and what part of the state you cover. Yeah, you bet. Appreciate you having us on. That magazine article you refer to, I wrote it and 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. I'm not good enough. He just keeps stabbing. No, no, no. Now he has to. He has to stare at it. That was not intentional. It wasn't. It wasn't intentional, but it was a giant deer. Yeah, so I'm like, I want to read the article I wrote, but I have to look past this article that should have been mine on the other side. I just want to know if you found that deer on company time. That's all I want to know. No, no. No, I didn't. I'm just giving you grief. Well, good. Yeah, that was the deer he's referring to. Ron Sawyer's buck, yeah. Yeah, it was officially scored there in my house at 229 and change 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.

It is what it is. Yeah. General season, public land hunting. Yeah, that's how it is. I mean, I figured it was going to be him or I, and that deer was going to come out to one of us, and it came out to him, you know. You know, it's funny. So that's what it is. 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 Ponsagon, 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, like where this deer came from. And 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. They're definitely, definitely getting better. Yeah.

And so, you know, for guys out there wanting to kill good bucks, they're there. They're definitely there. And I think a lot of that goes, kudos to you guys for listening to the general public and to, you know, that 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 year. It was a major, just like in 92, 93, when we went to the draw, that was like taking away firstborn children for all those people. It was brutal. Because you always went to a sporting goods store, bought your deer tag, and you went hunting. And you had deer camp. Everybody had deer camp. Yeah. And so that, you know, capped at 97,000 or something tags. That was a big, big change. And then, I don't know, 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 a 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. Yeah. Yeah. But the dough ratio was to get hammered, and it just was hard to have sustained momentum. Now, you know, a little bit of growing pains for people, it seems like, you know, nobody's really happy, because 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've got to pick one of the other. Now you pick it. Like, well, anyway. A lot of our little towns right here, even us. Even us. We used to be able to hunt Cedar Mountain and go out west, and we can't now. We'll take right here in Cedar. I mean, there's what? Four of us. Four units. Beaver, Southwest. Right together. Right in town. Yes.

And so, and what's interesting and kind of somewhat funny, I mean, we basically went to unit-by-unit management, but we're still calling it general, because we're trying to appease everybody. Yeah. But for all intents and purposes, they're a bunch of limited entry units. Yeah. With the higher number of tags. Right. The little higher number of tags, and a little bit different variables on what you guys are shooting for buck-to-do ratio-wise and age-wise. And that's just the thing. You know, when I was just looking back, you know, I started, 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 bucks per hundred does, you know, back then on most of these units. And even like the Poncagant those years, where now we have 50 bucks per hundred does.

It was 25 bucks per hundred does on a unit like the Poncagant. And so now you fast forward to 2017, and we're at 18 to 20 bucks per hundred does on our general season units, and, you know, 50 bucks per hundred does, and more so on the Henry's, the Poncagant. And so while people may argue it's not as good, or this or that, and they may still, you're going to get criticism no matter what. Of course. It really is. From a trophy perspective, it is. From an opportunity perspective, you can't draw. You can't please everybody. You know, that's the thing is you're always going to have the opportunity guy, you know, throwing that flag. You'd have to be either ignorant or just have a chip on your shoulder or something for it to really take the stance now that the general season deer hunting isn't as good as it was 20 years ago. You have to just have a burr against the world.

Well, and we've tried a lot of different things. The DWR. Again stuff. Whoever, because it is. You guys are the bad guys. There's no question. Yeah. And that's just the thing, you know, although we've had somewhat of a decreased opportunity in, let's say, permit numbers, a lot of guys, you know, you guys have kids that are hunting age now and probably not drawing those permits, and that's where I get some complaints from. You know, hey, my kid, now he's 15, he hasn't drawn a tag yet, and I want my kid deer hunting. And, yeah, that's tough. And I don't have that yet. My oldest daughter, she's 9, going to be 10, so I'm not at that point yet. But I look at the opportunity now that we have, kids can hunt when they're 12. Back when you guys were, it was probably 16. It was. It was 16. And that's what's frustrating. Adam and I were actually discussing this yesterday.

But, you know, what our response to them is, is, well, you know, you could give them your tag. Yeah, now we have a mentoring program. If you really want your kid. If you really love your kid, you give up your buck tag. Exactly. Exactly. And that's just it. I mean, I look at the amount of opportunities that the division has come up with, with these decrease of permits, you know, we have these. 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, you can general season elk. Yeah. For kids, they just want to shoot something. And if they draw a rifle deer tag, they get a hunt, like a dedicated hunter, all three seasons, you know. How awesome is that? Dedicated hunter, but being able to kill three deer in three years instead of two in 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 you might see a slight change where maybe first year hunters do get a tag. 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. But when you get one, 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 we're managing for better quality, if you can call it that on general season, more people are going to sit home. You're not going to get to go hunting. Well, my contention was is if we're nine to ten bucks per hunter does and you take kids out hunting and there's orange everywhere.

They're not going to have an awesome experience anyway, and they're not going to want to say, hey, let's do that again. You know, 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. I see kids now, you run into people in the field and the kids, I mean, they're getting their first tag and they're like, I'm not going to kill anyone unless it's a four point. My kid. 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 him, but he's like, I'd shoot that on the general. I'm like, you better.

195 inch gears, huh? That's a 32 inch four by three. Yeah. You better shoot that. We're not going to shoot that on the Henry's, but you better shoot that. I don't know what I'm in for it. These kids, and I think a lot of it is just social media and they're exposed to picture after picture after picture and trail cams and they think these deer just grow on trees. I don't know how hard it is. Oh, geez. It's unbelievable. Anyway. So that goes back, I guess, you know, where you're saying like with my background, I, you know, I go back to my hunting experience, the same thing. I, I grew up in Panguitch, 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 BLM, 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. Are we talking late nineties, early 2000s? When are we talking? Yeah. Yeah. Late nineties, early 2000s. Okay. Um, I started, you know, like I said, I started turned 14 on in like 94. Okay. That was my first deer tag that year. Um, actually drew a Poncagant rifle deer tag my first year. Oh, that's awesome. Wish I never would have. Um, way too much pressure for a kid. I, you know, my first job, I was working for a local taxidermist over there in Panguitch. I was, you know, that was my first job. And so basically from the time I was a kid going hunting and luckily with my job and personal life, there's literally not a day where I don't spend at least half of it thinking about hunting in some, some regard. It's just a part of my life. And if I didn't have it, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what else I would be.

So you go to school, you're going to school doing these jobs on the side, gaining experience. And, uh, so I get in and I just started looking around. I first, I went and did a ride along actually with one of the fishing 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 actually did, went that route, went, finished school, um, 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, um, I'd, I'd kind of worked seasonally a little bit for the biologist over in the Penguich area doing some depredation councils, that kind of thing. So I had a little bit of experience with the division, started going that route and, um, started as a game warden for five years.

Um, I worked as a game warden for the division and, and then just worked my way into this position while it's a position came open. And, and, uh, 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 why you did this job. That's why you went into this. Cause I, I just, I love wildlife and 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 go out and work all day and get home, think I got a few hours to go hunt in the evening. And then I get a call from somebody spotlight. Yeah, exactly. So I got to bust back out to go do it. Exactly. And, uh, and so I was like, man, I'm not getting the time I want.

So anyway, I got this biologist position, um, back in 2013 and, and continued on from there. And, and I, the units I cover, I cover the Penguich Lake, Mount Dutton, Ponce Gaunt, and, uh, some of the comparoits, a couple of comparoits, East and West sheep units. So I would say probably the best. And it's your home. Yeah. And I'm back in Penguich. So back home where I grew up and there's, there's really nothing. So 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. Yeah. Yeah. You know, 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 and you're by a patrolman, you slam the brakes, you know, because you're just like, Oh, what am I doing?

And, uh, it's kind of the same thing. People have that reaction. And I tried to want to change that when I was a game warden, you know, because we weren't always out to look, look for, you know, we're looking for bad guys, but not everybody was a bad guy, but everybody just gets nervous, you know? So anyway, I kind of got to a point though. And I think it happens in law enforcement where you, uh, you know, you start to distrust people, you know, you get lied to so much. Oh, I've got my fishing license. It's in the truck. And then you go look them up and they haven't had one for five years, you know? And so I kind of got to a point where I was like, man, you know, this is, this isn't me. I'm seeing too much negative going on here. Well, yeah. You come home and your wife's like, really? You're ornery. Well, I checked 10 people and 10 of them hate me. Yeah. Yeah.

And so for me, it got three death threats and somebody shot at me.

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 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 rob an 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 I didn't get into it for that. I wanted to deal with wildlife. So when the biologist position came open. 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 in 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 them 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 want to see you, you know, but it's really nothing against you personally. It's just, we assume you're going to. And 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. You know who he is. 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 been doing. Information education. Yeah. Because they catch a lot of bad guys doing a lot of bad things. And, and they're, they're great, you know?

Yeah. Well, and I know you alluded to it 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 because I knew that is not going to happen. It's not going to last for me and nothing against it. It's just me and my personality. And, and I know a lot of conservation officers that hunt and they get creative and they have to get creative, hunt different seasons or different things like that. Maybe not the most popular different States, but yeah, that was, that was my case.

I, I knew, and there's still things as a biologist, as we all know, that, that make you want to 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, but it's, but it's at least, uh, yeah, more, more of what I would, I wanted. And so I definitely hear you there. So that brings us to you, Phil. I, I mean, you know, just a little bit of an introduction. You killed an absolute monster bull that everybody salivated. It's not as big as Josh's. Let's get that. Let's get that. Let's get that. Adam and I were discussing. So you two have both killed 400 inch bulls, right? Yeah. And Adam and I neither have killed 400 inch bulls. And we're just, it's not, it doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel right.

That was that special DWR tag like we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I drew that with one point, you know, that's how it works. How old were you, Phil? Were you a teenager? I was 16. Wow. And this was the Fillmore Pavant, right? What year would that have been? That was 99. Well, and that's kind of when Utah's bulls got really, really cranking. From there to about 07. And you almost, it almost feels like your bull set it off. It just feels like from then on, we had a few 400s being taken each year. Yeah. It was like, wasn't it the state record or something at the time? Was it straight six, Phil? It's got one little extra on one side. What are the basically straight six? It grosses 408 and 5.8 and that's 395. Okay. That's a typical. That's unbelievable. That's what I want to straight up, you know, straight up six. 400 inch six is what we dream about, which those are hard to come by.

Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that's. Well, so that's how I knew of you and actually didn't know you had, you know, major involvement in the DWR since I haven't followed you. Right. You've been up north. Yeah. And so anyway, yeah. Tell us. So, I mean, I went to school here at SUU 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 Pavant, you know, that was my backyard every day. It was, you know, hop on the four-wheeler and run up with a little video, well, not little, little video camera. Big, giant one. Big video camera. Shoulder mount. That's it. Big shoulder mount. Yeah. And, you know, and that was my life was just filming deer and elk. I don't, I just absolutely loved it. Good place to grow up. Yeah. Did you do that just on your own time? Yep. Yep. I mean, 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 Pavant. But anyways, yeah. So fast forward, SUU school, fell in love with Southern Utah. And then I was actually planning on being a dentist. You and I both. I'm serious. You were too? Oh, about two years into that, I'm like, no. So do you have any dentistry at all in your blood? Like, could I come with you and you get a feeling? You know, I pulled teeth. I pulled a lot of teeth on deer and sheep and things. So I could probably pull one. So that's as close as I can do. No anesthesia training or anything like that. Give me some pliers and a knife and I'll make something happen. Oh, geez. All right. That's me too. That's about, you know, the range of my dental experience. But I just realized I just, I can't do this. I got to 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, you know. And she goes, you know, 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 I actually went the route of aquatics because of how much I love to hunt. Yeah. And I, you know, this same dilemma we're talking about. There's a lot of guys that do that. The same dilemma we're talking about. You're going to do fishing so you can go into hunting. Well, well. Or hunt. Well, hunt. Exactly. Like, I didn't want to be dealing with working on weekends. I didn't want to 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.

So then after that, you got on as a fisheries or aquatics biologist? I did. Yep. So then I started working for the DWR as a native aquatics biologist in the northern region. I worked there for five years. And at the same time, I basically started a media company with a couple buddies. And we've been producing. On the side. On the side. Yep. Exactly. On the side. Because if you work for Game and Fish, you're going to have to work on the side. Exactly. You know, my kids eat bread and milk, and that's it.

And a little bit of meat. And maybe a fish or two. Yep. Yep. All right. We literally live on elk meat. Killed an elk last night. Had my kids with us. You did? Depredation? No. Oh, this early market. Yeah. Plateau. I remember that. Wow. I remember yesterday. It's opening day yesterday, right? Yeah, we're hunting. Well, good. Congrats. Yeah. First elk of the year that I've heard has died. Yeah. That's awesome. Kids were there. Needless to say, a division employee killed the first elk. Yeah. Good. All right. Keep going. One of the benefits of the job. Yeah. Back to those. No, just kidding. But, yeah. Worked as aquatics biologist for five years. Started the media company. Been producing film festivals for a few years now. A lot of outdoor hunting type related stuff. For anything. Fishing. Just fly fishing. The films have been just fly fishing.

Right now, we're starting to look to cross over into doing some films for the hunting film festivals and that sort of thing. Oh. So... I know there's some... I'm not a huge fisherman. I like... When my buddies, some of my guides in that call and tell me Lake Palineter places are off the charts, I know I can go there and probably catch fish. 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. Sure. It's a... Yeah. It's a big deal. It's a big deal. Yeah. It's been cool. Well, you've got an amazing fly fishery up there. I'm sure, you know, with your job, you've probably got some little honey holes, you know? Yeah. Good fishing up there. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was really good.

And, yeah, it's been fun. You know, it's allowed me to travel. I've gone all over the place and fished all over, and that's been great. I hear you're world-class fishermen. I mean, let's just... Just tell us. No. Josh, tell us. He is. Oh, yeah. He goes to film festivals and guys are throwing their underwear on the stage and taking off their waders. Notice guys are throwing their underwear to you. Guys. I mean... Listen to this guy. Wow. Wow. Thanks for that. He's a household name. I'm going to take that as a compliment, I think. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We've removed a few barriers. I'd have probably walked right out of the room.

Mic drop. But, yeah. So, 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 time. He worked for... For a long, long time. Yep. Which, for lay people, that's kind of like public relations. You deal with media or, you know, photo shoots or if you have wildlife viewing events. Yeah. Press races. All of our volunteer services coordination. I supervise a dedicated hunter program. Yep. Exactly. You have people 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. Exactly. So, honestly, like that job, it's just a perfect merge of all of my passions. You know, media, film. Well, you've got hunting. You've got fishing. Yeah.

And that was the other thing. How did you decide to make the move from the fisheries to this? Was it coming back to southern Utah? Was it just the fishing was boring? That 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 out of state. I mean, I still hunt a lot out of state, but, you know, I wasn't hunting at all up there. The December Wasatch subdivision unit didn't do for you. The hunt in December. It just didn't work. No, it just didn't work. But, I mean, I tried it and everything, but, you know, I just couldn't. You're hunting deer one week, and the next week you're trapping them to move them to save their lives somewhere. Yeah. And then you're hunting them up there where you released them. So, yeah, it was, you know, I wanted to get back 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 here we are, you know, I like to say I have my dream job. I'm really happy where I'm at. And now you're videoing and everything. And, yeah, now we're back in the hunting game more than we were up there. Do you still have your side job? I do. Yep. We're actually, in just a couple weeks, headed up to the Arctic Circle to film a video up there. No way. Yeah. Fishing or? Fishing. Wow. Yeah. We tried to make it a, you know, a combo. Throw a caribou or musk ox or something. Polar bears. Yeah. We couldn't make it happen, but that's going to happen. Cool. You know, like I said, we're trying to get it a little mixed up. So are you still hunting now? You're cranking. You're back home. How long have you been here in southern Utah? So I've only been down here in Seattle.

I actually live in Parowan, but I actually just moved down last August. So it's only been a year that I've been back down here. So, yep, Lynn left the division about a year ago, and I was able to do this job. Cool. Cool. 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 U.S. when it comes to game and fish biologists 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, but, you know, consumptive users. And I think that's a, you know, kudos to Utah Game and Fish for, you know, 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 list. They're just biologists. You're just a biologist and do your job and whatnot. But there's a social aspect to it. Being able to relate to hunters and you've got to be a hunter to relate to hunters and to get that respect. And we do need to work together, you know, as public and as well as game and fish. And to me as a biologist, it's important to me to try and hunt the units that I manage. I feel that that's important. You know, I put in for an elk tag that probably last year that people say, well, what are you putting in for that for? You know, it was a Poncagon archery elk tag. Yeah. I had a couple of points and I looked at it and I thought, you know. Not going to kill a Phil Tuttle bull. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But he's already got a 418 or whatever. What is that bull? Yeah.

Once again, his bull is bigger than mine. Yeah. And on a late hunt, a late Penguich Lake. I mean, we might as well just get to that right now. Get the 400 inches out of the way so we don't have to talk about them anymore. I'm tired of talking about them. Yeah. Already. I'm sick of it. No, it was a late hunt. You drew a late season Penguich Lake. 2007. It was in the heyday, but yeah. Yeah. In your backyard. Yeah. 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 rut and all that stuff. Finally got sick of waiting. And I looked at my odds and said, you know what? I can kill a late bull. And with experience and stuff, knowing where some of those bulls go, there were some great bulls. And I can have just a huge chance of killing maybe even a better bull.

There's some of these units. That's the thing with Utah is there's so many opportunities out there. If you want to look at your points, look at the hunts. There's some of these units. A unit like the Penguich Lake, well, pre-fire, I guess you could say. The late hunt actually can be a better hunt sometimes. You're not hunting bugling bulls, but you're hunting bulls that are actually seen. They're out more. They're not up in the thick timber. 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. They're bastard up. They're glassable. A lot of this country, people are figuring it out, and you figured it out back in 2007. Yeah. I mean, it's like the Dutton. You know, Adam knows. It's the same thing. You get some migratory elk that move in, and it's a great late hunt.

I would take a late hunt tag on that unit as well. Because you're hunting beaver bulls or bulls. Boulder bulls, boulder bulls, everything. And so you get all these units. And so that's something that I would encourage people to do is look what the demographics of the unit and what it holds. You know, you've got a Dutton unit that's a seven-year-old unit, but it's getting bulls from units that have eight-year-olds. Seven-year-old. H-class, you know. So they're moving on there and hunting anyway. So I kind of did that and drew this bull and lucked into him. You know, he ended up, my dad and I were there. My dad, it was kind of funny. We were hunting another bull in this 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. So we kind of gave up, spread out for a little bit, said, all right, let's recharge.

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 bulls feeding right up there. Oh, my gosh. And this was kind of pre-cell phone. So dumb. Pre-cell phone. I mean, we had them, but my dad didn't have one. Probably had a radio collar on it. Yeah. I'm calling foul. Yeah. And so 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? And he's like, he's big. He's got extras. He's a big bull. I would say he's 370 plus. I'm like, well, we need to go check him out. 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.

He's like, I don't want to bump him. Let's pull out. It looks like the weather's going to get better. Long story short, my wife had just had a baby just a few days beforehand. So we might as well throw that on top of things. That was poor timing. Yeah, it was terrible timing. Really poor. I try to do better these days with that. So she just has this baby. Well, she's having trouble, so I need to take her back to Cedar to the doctor. 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 done for. You know, I'm just going to be shooting the first bull I see or eating this tag, I guess, because I'm just not going to have the time. Can't call Uber. Yeah. Hey, come get her. Yeah, so I have to run her, clear her 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 and do some glasses. If we can find him, just off chance. We get up there. We look around, not finding anything. 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. 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 track comes out. And we're like, man, I wonder if that's him. I'm going to 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. By himself. Yeah, by himself, just feeding. And my dad's like, my dad puts the binoculars up, and he's just like, yeah, that's him. Don't look. Just shoot, you know. Because I didn't even look at him. I just thought it was a bull.

And so I was at the point where I was like, you know, if he's a decent bull, I'm going to kill him. So I get over there and get all ready, and I'm not even looking at him. I'm literally just, you know, the scope's on his shoulder. And my dad's like, yeah, that's him. Don't look. Just shoot. Because he knew what he was, you know. And he started to walk away from me, and I was like, I'm going to shoot. I'm going to shoot. And finally, he stops and turns. And when he did, I could see, like, his front's coming out, you know. And I was like, oh, big bull. 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 him. I wasn't expecting 400 when I shot him. You know, we were thinking 380s range. And when I walked up, it was just like immediately like, that's a 400-inch bull. My life changed forever. Yeah.

So what he officially scored just for the. It was gross, 417 and 7.8s. And then he netted 408. What a slob. 408. Non-typical. Non-typical, yeah. So you've got a book non-typical and a book typical in the room. In the room. And from guys that don't care about him and slopped onto him. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All right, all right. Just all down. That's a stretch. That's a stretch. So now we're hunting spikes, right? Yeah. You just back to it. Who cares? I'll kill anything. I'm happy. Yeah. But so, you know, so I draw this tag last year. 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, 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 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 because it was kind of like, I know there's a big herd of cows up here. I need to go catch. I mean, there's a big herd over here. I got to go catch. You kind of learn those things. And so I went into some areas that I got to learn and became, I feel like a better biologist and I feel better well-rounded on. Well, and it's got to help you like in aerial surveys and all kinds of things. When you have on-the-ground experience, like you know. Yeah, and that's exactly it. We later flew that unit 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 likely hit a chance of seeing some elk out there. But it was like, no, I know there's some elk out there. We need to go check it. And so I think as a biologist, you need to hunt your units. It almost should be mandatory. It should be a requirement. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to manage for hunting, you should be a hunter. Because you learn a lot. And when people come to you with a complaint and you're not hunting that unit, you know, and you come to them with a complaint and you're kind of like, well, I don't know. The numbers don't show that. You know, the numbers don't show that. But you get in there and you hunt it. And, you know, when you get like the Penguich 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 feel that same pressure and those same complaints. And so I know it's kind of a valid thing. Whereas before it's kind of like, oh, yeah, you just think it's crowded, you know. And so it helps validate some of the things you do. Well, absolutely. 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 DWR. They don't understand management. They're kind of they've got this, you know, DWR shoots from the hip mentality, 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. That they're using sound management, sound science, sound data. And I think we'll get into a little bit more of that later. And on the ground personal experience. Well, exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's more than just data.

I mean, this guy, he's passionate about it. He feels all those pressures that he talked about. And I can't say enough about that. Well, we 100% agree with you. 100% 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 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 sportsmen. And so you do butt heads at times. And so. But in this case, we 100% agree with you. And 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 unit-to-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 spike elk tag on a unit, you know, because I can get that tag. Try and hunt it 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 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 caperilates. I mean, it's a multi-hour journey to get out there. And you can only spend certain times of the 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 sheep that had died. And we got out there. I mean, it was 108 degrees. And you just got to die doing it. So there's some of those areas that you'd like to get into. And by trying to draw a tag, you know, on that, it gets you into it. And it helps.

I like it. It's great. It's only going to help. It's only going to lend credibility to you when you have to then stand up in a rack meeting in November when they're recommending seasons and, hey, we're going to 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 going to do. And the hunters will back you. You know, the hunters, 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. And so, well, I'm going to 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 going to shut you out. Even if you're right. Because he's not a hunter. He's not one of us. We're against him.

What would he know? And I think same thing with law enforcement. It would be nice if all law enforcement officers were hunters. So they understood from a hunter's perspective what's going on in the field. A 24-hour trap check law or whatever. They understand what they're imposing on people. And that's one of the things I always tried to do as an officer is go trapping just to see. Because it was tough. And so it's like, man, I've got to check my amount at 2 o'clock in the morning. Is it realistic? Or 40 hours. Is it realistic? And if it's not realistic, you know, how can we fix it so it is realistic? And 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 when you guys are hunters. And you're talking our language. And working, you know, as the division, I think it's important, too.

I look at that opportunity in law enforcement as all experience for me. Now it helps me as a biologist because I'm like, I think of things that maybe other biologists don't think about when I'm, like, going to make a recommendation. And I say, oh, this is a law enforcement thing because I make a recommendation and law enforcement guys want to come and cut me. You know, they're like, why did you do that? You don't want to put two hunts on top of each other, one a bow hunt and one a rifle. And then you've got rifles out going on or whatever. And then you're doing something in the southern region that now the northern region wants to do. And if those biologists are like, hey, why did you do that? You're causing me grief up here, you know. So it's good. But, you know, like Phil talked about, you know, as the division, 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 owe our deer from year to year. We change it up and we do one thing or another. You know, we have a multiple year, five years, seven years, ten years, 20 years, depending on the species of these management plans where we set. And these management plans, their setup 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, seven, ten, eight meetings, whatever. A lot of stakeholders. And it was just people from the general public got together and set these management plans and said, you know, this is kind of how we want it. So it wasn't just the DWR coming out and saying this is where we are.

And then we take that management plan and we take it through our rack and our board process, which is literally it's amazing. I mean, you get the average Joe guy can come to a meeting and give his input and it can get passed. It can affect the whole meeting and steer that direction from then on. Something that you guys didn't propose is now being enacted. One thing exactly. Back when I was an officer, I went to a rack meeting once. And I remember it was back when we were dealing with the five-day, nine-day kind of deer hunt stuff. You know, and it was we go to 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 get Saturday to hunt. He says, we don't hunt on Sunday. And we get Monday. And then my kids go back to school and I can't hunt. And so he's like, I want to propose five days for adults but nine days for kids.

And it was like, and when he first said it, I was like, oh, geez, that's not going to fly. It voted on it. It went to the board. I mean, because one guy stood up and said something. It was the next year. It was in season. And I was like, that just happened, you know. And so it's a good example of how one voice can be heard or your voice. And there's a lot of times where guys come to rack meetings and they get discouraged because they feel like their voice isn't being heard. But you know what? It's a great process. It's a very public process. We give our recommendations, bring it out there. And oftentimes the rack or the board, because of a public process, changes a few things, tweaks a few things. Usually there's compromise somewhere. There is.

Well, and I want to say you've come in the office a couple of different times and you've brought up certain individuals, not the, you know, just randomness, the people that have made suggestions to you. 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 it. And it doesn't come in face about it. And they don't see it in the regulations next year. Yeah. You're still weighing it all out. You're weighing it out. You are listening. And we appreciate that. And I know we've seen that. We actually can vouch for that and personally seen that here in our office.

I was just going to say that, you know, that's something that we would probably want to emphasize today as a message for us is that, you know, there's a lot of stakeholders that are involved in these decisions that are made. And, you know, we have to play the part of public servant. We've got to try to find compromise there. So, you know, we can't, you know, appease everyone. You know, one guy is going to be mad about the decision that's made, but we really are trying to do our very best and our hardest at weighing in on all of those. Well, and biology is tough. You're managing. If you just managed for the game, you would see a different program out there than bringing in the social, bringing in the ranchers, bringing in all the political climate.

So there's – 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 situation. It's the broadest spectrum, maybe the majority if you want to call it that or whatever. Well, there's one thing I want to 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 1,000 yards, and I want to kill anything I see. You know, and so anyway – Probably – I'm thinking of other states quickly. We hunt every day in September with some weapon. Most states, like Wyoming does a 30-day archery season. Most states it's bug. But you don't catch September with a rifle. Arizona. Utah, we hunt the first two weeks roughly with a bow at ends.

Then it's the rifle hunters and then a muzzleloader. And then muzzleloader, which could be construed as prime rut. And so – where archers actually have less than prime rut. Yeah. You know what I mean? But we're spoiled here in our state, and so – which also comes into play when you guys are managing. When you're hunting, one tag at prime rut might equal two tags late season, you know, to kill that – or to keep that age class. You know what I'm saying? Because you are targeting prime-aged 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. But, you know, and so it's an interesting dynamic when you've – you're not supposed to hunt rutting bulls with a rifle. You're not management-wise. But we like it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And we still do it. And we do it. And it's still the hardest tags to draw.

But look what you killed on a late season. Yeah, late season. And so I think that's awesome. I think that's one thing 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. They're not bugling, whatever. And I've wasted 25 points on, you know, this particular tag. Yeah. That's why I get a lot of calls from guys, and they'll call me up. What's it looking like? Should I keep my tag? Should I turn it back in? And all this kind of stuff, you know. And it's – I can't tell you that, you know. I'm not one 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 going to go have a good time and find the best thing I can and try and hunt him and kill him and do it. And it might be the worst hunt 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, you don't know. Lock your road. Who knows, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you never know what could happen. It's hunting. It's hunting, and you've got to do it. All right. Well, let's move. What were you going to say, Brandon? I was just going to 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 them 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, Phil, you're probably involved as well, is 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 us about some of these deer. How that affects biology, management. I tell you what, in the last, I don't know, in the last, I would say, seven years, maybe ten, I mean, I'm sure, Adam, when you were a biologist, they had VHF callers, you know, I mean, and tracking things. But you'd have to listen for them, go out and get them flights. This big old long antenna. 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 go flying, and it's like, man, we didn't find six of them. Are this collar not working? Are they gone? And who knows? And you never find them again. You never know what happens. When really, they just walk 60 miles. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you didn't fly over that 30-mile square. Yeah, exactly. And so we've moved from a day of VHF callers into GPS callers, and it has helped our management immensely. And I think where it kind of got its root was, I think, I want to say, I mean, don't quote me on it, but some of the first GPS 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 them crossing the road, and it was like we're constantly over-objective on our elk on the Dutton. We're trying to kill them. We can't kill them.

No matter what we do, we can't get to objective, all this kind of stuff. And so the biologist that was there just before me, he's like, you know, I want to put some callers on these elk and see where they're going. And goodness, I mean, we had elk. Come to find out you're managing Dutton for elk that they don't live there. Yeah, we had elk going to the Poncegon, we had elk going to the Dutton, or to the Monroe, to the Boulder, the Fish Lake, some went to the Beaver. I mean, they just explode and go all these other units in the summertime. It was something like 65% of the elk weren't even on the Dutton in the summertime. Wow. You know, they would have had it. And so these tags, you're managing for tags who are hunting in September, archery, rifle, muzzle. Exactly, the dates are all messed up. Smoke in the resident herd. Yep. And we still have these elk showing up here in the winter.

Exactly. 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. We're not going to have a hard line in the sand at 1,500 as much as we maybe did initially when we said, hey. And that, you're playing with politics and cattlemen and all that because that guy only grazes on Mount Dutton. So he says, I don't care about this meta population that you're talking about. You know, kill 500 right here, right now on Mount Dutton. But at least it gives you some ammunition, if you will, to say, hey, they're here for three months in the winter.

Your cows aren't even on that mountain for those three months. 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 1,000, whatever. 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 things, you see things out there, but when you can have a point on a map and say, yeah, this is what's happening, it's so much better. And so from there, basically, we've stemmed to Utah's been doing a huge deer project throughout statewide where we're working with some professors from BYU that are phenomenal guys. I mean, they're hunters themselves, but they're 10 times smarter than I am, you know. And 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 them and see how long they lived, what was killing them, what they're doing, that kind of thing. And so it kind of started there to where now we're doing this big deer project pretty well statewide where on several units we're going out and catching deer in the wintertime. And we actually catch them in December as soon as they kind of hit their winter range and they do a body condition score on them or, you know, there's 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 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 find stuff that you don't know. Well, and it might vary from year to year depending on drought conditions or whatever. We saw, we just got a report, our deer for some reason last year seemed like they were all across the board lighter. You know, they weren't as heavy last year going into winter as they were the winter before, you know. And I'd like to know, like, how does that transition to antler growth? You know what I mean? And be like, all right, well, you know, just what our feel is on quality that year. Yeah. You know, they went into the winter light and there wasn't as good antler growth.

They went in heavy, fat, healthy, and we had phenomenal antler growth. I wonder if there's something, some kind of correlation. Exactly. And so we can go, I mean, we get this kind of a core thing and it just can blow up and go anyway, which way you're talking. You can look into many things. 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? You know, they started off with like the Monroe and the Pine Valley. And basically 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 deer 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 if our deer, if they're growing, if they're declining, or if they're stable. And so we can use that data. We can say, look, 40% of the fawns that we had collared on the Monroe died. So we know we can put that in. You need to be adjusting that model because the model will go crazy and the end figure doesn't match. After 10 years, if you're off 10% over 10 years, you're way off after 10 years. Exactly. And so we're putting in real-time data that we know from a neighboring unit, that kind of thing. Okay. So that's one of them. Just recently we've kind of come on board with the Poncegont. The Poncegont's been a unit that for 30, 40 years. We all know they migrate. Yeah, and they're migratory herd. And we know they do. In fact, there was a study done in the late 80s, early 90s that kind of did that.

But it was the VHF collars, you know. 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 good data, and it kind of gave us pace. Well, I think part of that, they've got to be effective in the air or whatever. And so when you, you know, they have a feeling of where their summer in. They go up there and they go up to the upper end of the north end of the Poncegont, find a good portion of them, and assume the others died or something. What we're not finding out, they never flew over summers. They're right. They never flew over this other country, which is why we're going to dive into some of this. Some of the more 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, it wintered here. Holy cow, it ended up over here.

But it's all those data points 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, sure, 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 more often. How many points do these callers take? How many times a day are they taking a hit? It kind of depends. You can program them. It depends on how they get them from the company. A hit a day. One to three. One to three a day. Once a day. So, yeah, during a migration period of a couple weeks, you know, or a week, you're getting a breadcrumb. A line. A dog of a whole way. Exactly. And all the new callers that we're going to start working with are going to do even more data points in the day.

Because even with some of these callers we have right now, we've got, like, you know, an overnight 14-mile poke. That's what blew my mind. Yeah. So, you know, and we're going. When they're moving, they're not even stopping to drink. Not just 14-level miles. We're talking up over a plateau. A major plateau. So we want to know even more detail, and we're working to do that. They move in all day long, all night long. Do they even bed during that 24-hour period? Or are they just literally walking? I want to know everything. They're walking. You know, they're walking. So what are you? Yeah. So just give us a summary really quick. You're finding poncegant deer aren't just poncegant deer. All of these units are interconnected to a degree. And it's almost exactly like the cow elk thing we're finding.

Yeah, we knew some poncegant deer would show up on the Panguitch, the Zion, some of these other surrounding units. And 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. And so we've got deer. I mean, I think our farthest deer that we've got, she was out there. We caught her out on the buckskin. Those aren't familiar. It's 25 miles east of Canada. Right near the Arizona border. Yeah, Arizona border, 25 miles east of Canada. Could be a caiba deer for all intents and purposes. When you caught her, you didn't know. Yeah, exactly. So we catch her, and she takes off. She's winners out there. And there's a fence, a fence that they put up, a 13-mile stretch of fence that covers up 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 the first year those deer hit it, they struggled to get through it. They did. And we were all concerned. Yeah, oh, yeah. Everybody was just crazy because you have all these deer stacking up. And it was funny seeing those deer. I guess not really funny. It could have been sad. But they'd hit that fence, and they just thought they were going to die. They lose their minds. Every little pinion juniper was just like they got there, like, oh, we're dying. They started. Once you get them trained, and then the mamas train the fawns. And once you get a training going, they're there. So over three or four years, there's a lot less problems. It's just they're breezing through it. They're blowing through it like it's nothing now. I mean, it doesn't even slow them 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 going, and they just go, go, go. And literally, it was within, you know, two to three days there from a winter range to some range. That's crazy. I mean, and I'm talking. We're talking 30, 40 miles. Yeah, 30, 40 miles from that for some of those deer. 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 end of the Poncagant Plateau kind of points off at the end, just above Alton. And I thought, okay, there's going to be those buckskin deer go up over to the Alton area. And they probably hook around the end of that, go to Alton. But no, they're crossing the top of this 9,000 foot. Going straight up straight. They're not even thinking straight up.

And this year, we had some. I mean, somebody needs to teach them. It's a lot less energy. Just walk around the corner. Let me show you the route. Let me show you mom the route, and then we'll get these fawns going. Yeah, 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. It's where they're walking through the 1st of April, where they're walking not through snow. And if they would have hooked 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 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 them that came up, and they moved up, and then they just 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. You know, the forbs are good. They're coming up, and they're hanging out there, and they're just munching. And then all of a sudden, the 1st of June, we had three deer. Fawning time. Yeah, 1st of June, they take off. And they went another. There was another deer that went another 30 to 40 miles. Oh, my gosh. So she leaves there along Highway 89, just south of Hatch. She leaves there and goes up over the top of the Panguitch unit, another 9,000, 10,000 foot. Over Cedar Bridge. Yep. And crosses up over near Panguitch Lake, goes down, and almost I-15. Hits I-15. By summit. By your house. Right there by summit. By your house. She missed me. She came past Parowan. Crazy. Turns and goes up on the hill. Crazy.

And has her fawn. Well, it was a fawn. It was actually last year's fawn. Oh, yeah. She's a yearling deer. Okay. So she's one of the deer that I'm excited about. Well, 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, things if you think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Because let's say she doesn't come back, but she has genes from the Caio Bab, the Ponce and gone, something. Now, if she decides not to come back because she was a fawn, because we've seen, like, if she followed her mom up and her mom said, look, I'm going to have a new fawn. You've got to get out of here. And so maybe that's why she left. Or maybe she followed her mom to that point. And lost her mom or she thought her mom went this way and she really went that way. And she kept walking.

So it'll be interesting to see if she comes back or not to the buckskin if she does. Well, and from year to year to year, if the whole lawn of these collars is that long, you could see, like you said, did they just chase the green up? Because green up's different each year. Yeah. You know what I mean? And so how does this change? In the winter, they might just blow all the way to the top in, you know, end of April. Yeah. 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 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 a significant amount of snow up at Brian Head. And so where she was going to 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. So did you have any does that went back to the Kayvap, the opposite direction? We didn't. No. So pretty much buckskin deer went back. The ones you caught in Utah. The ones we caught. But that's the interesting thing. So we found that. We went back and looked at the other study, the VHF study. And the Poncagant deer, I think we missed some of those deer that go to Arizona. We didn't have. Because you know they do go to Arizona. They do. Some are, obviously. And so we're going to try to collar some deer in Arizona this year to just, you know, add to that deer. Or catch some deer in Utah a little earlier. Because from my memory, those deer that left the Poncagant and went into Arizona from that old study,

by the 1st of November, roughly, those deer that were going to go there, they were in Arizona. Yep. They were there. And so we're going to try and catch that group. But we've got to do them early enough because they found that those, the Poncagant deer were actually getting into Arizona before the Kayvap deer came down. So there was about a month lag. So we're going to try and get in there and hopefully catch those deer. If we catch a Kayvap deer, we lose a deer to go to them. But at the same time, that would be great information for us. We need to know that. So will they let you, you know, actually do, put collars on in Arizona? We're going to work with Arizona to try and get that. I think it's going to happen. We're not going to have to go too far, just, you know, a few five to nine miles or whatever. So these collars have advanced.

Tell us a little bit about maybe some of the pictures or anything like that. And it's amazing. I mean, it's real time. When we did those elk collars, we'd have to wait for three years to get that collar back off of that elk. And download it. And download it. Now I literally go get online and I can get onto that website, log in, put in that collar data, and I can see where that deer was standing yesterday. You can name it. I'm typing in, you know, deer number 128. Josie. Yeah. And I can look and see where she was standing yesterday. And so it's pretty amazing. And the new collars are coming out now. And if she's dead, you know right then versus, hey, a monthly telemetry flight that you get. Now you might get weathered out. So now it's two months and you're going for a flight. Now she's been dead. You don't know what she died from. She's just a pile of bones. That's a cool thing.

You know, we get a mortality signal. And it sends an email. It sends us an email and it says, hey, this deer could be dead. Go check it out. Stationary for however many hours. And so we got one last night. It says this deer could be dead. This afternoon when we get under here, I'm going to bust over there and go see. And so what were you saying about these new collars and advancements? Yeah, the new collars, we're going to be able to set up like some geofence type thing. So with this migration, it's going to be pretty amazing. We can say, hey, when they hit 89, it'll start sending us emails so that we know when they're going. The migration's kicking in. Yeah. And likewise, we can kind of do it. And we've only been doing this study for just a half a year now. So I'm excited to see what it's going to be when they come back and when that timing is.

And, you know, we kind of know, but we will know now. We've also got a caller that we're going to be working with, maybe more in the future, that actually has a camera right on it. And that'll be pretty neat to see. Take a picture a day or something. Take a picture of the poachers. Right? Yeah. Hey, I'm just throwing that out there. No, sure. The thing, I mean, it'll film, too. That's a $500 idea, by the way. It'll shoot video. So it'd be pretty interesting to see, you know, a chin view of what that doe's doing. Maybe a lion lying on her back. I don't know. Yeah. It's anything. Probably a lot of grass. I don't know why. Well, I just want to propose. Probably a lot of boring pictures. I want to propose something. And I know Adam will be on board with this. But Epic would like to sponsor some of these collars on particular bucks. Of a particular trophy status. Yeah. Of a particular. Yeah.

And so, anyway. You only require login. Yeah. Just all we need is the password to log in. That's right. Just a simple. And it's in the name of biology. At some point, we're going to have a harvest this buck. That's awesome. And that gets us to a great point, though, because that was something that we normally just call our does and fawns. Yeah. You know. I want to know about the bucks. Yeah. And that's what I do. As a biologist, you know, I say I want to know. And as a hunter as well. You know, you're just like, I want to know what the bucks are doing. Are they doing the same thing as the does? Are they lazier? Well, as a hunter, you know they don't. Yeah. They don't. They move a lot more. Yeah. Right. Especially in the rut and especially with these dynamics with kaybab and poncegant deer. And year to year, it's interesting to know a deer is summering on the Panguitch Lake. Yeah.

But he's crossing 89, wintering on the poncegant that year. Is he always going back? And I know that's hard because you've got to, I don't know, the battery life of that caller. Or do you've got to 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 does he have high sight, Vidal, and go right back to there? Or, I know I'm going to the Coral Pinks this year because I've heard those does are nicer.

Right. Not me. Well, I picked a radio friendly term. So there's some things like, I know like the Priya Plateau, for example, you know, has a resident desert herd of maybe 100 total deer. And then lions come in, wipe them out, feels like they're down to 15 or 20. And then their population bounces back. Do we have Kaibab deer, for example, that would 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. And that's what Adam's getting at is after, you know, a six year period, three year period of deer, six to nine years old. Matures. There's deer 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 does.

You know what I mean? And that's what we want to try and find. So, you know, with a lot of petitioning and hazing of Salt Lake and the guys up there, I'm like, you know, we got to continue this and keep it going. Because I'm talking, it's every deer on the unit. It's not like a matter of a couple of them stay. I mean, it's a mass migration. Every 60 of those deer that we call her, they left. They went somewhere. All 60 of them. Every one of them. There wasn't a single resident deer, I guess, what you would call a resident deer. The only one that was that didn't have a big significant migration was over on the east side in that Cannonville area over there, which we knew that there's a lot of residents over there. That's a mid-range. Yeah. They could summer, winter. And she's moved like three miles her whole life. Yeah.

And so it's not, you know, it's not the entire unit, but a portion of it. And so what we're going to do is this fall, possibly even this summer, we're going to try and catch some of those deer, hopefully that could go to Arizona. We have a good idea from the previous study when we're going to go, going to get some help from the CWMU and those guys there, and hopefully catch some of those deer that are going to move. But we're going to, 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 wanted to do. Maybe, but if we're managing bucks and shooting bucks, we should be collaring bucks. Yeah. And there's some pushback there. I mean, even simple things like cape. Oh, you're going to ruin a cape. You're going to put a collar on it. Well, their neck's swell in the rut. Well, we need to adjust for that. Yeah.

There's factors, and they, but you'll learn something you don't learn from does. Oh, 100%. And you know, if there is a cape that's easy to come by, it's a mule deer buck collar. Well, and we're talking 30. Yeah. And of that 30. Be quiet for a minute. It's going to help management. It's going to actually help your hunts. Yeah. We're going to be able to manage better. And so we've got to 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, all right. Yeah. You know, we've got to do it. So we're going to do 30 bucks. We're going to do an additional 30 does. We're going to do 20 fawns. We're actually going to do, we kind of half did it. You know, those BYU guys came down and said, yeah, while we're collaring them, we'll kind of do a, for this fat, the body conditioning score on the fawns.

And we're going to do it again this year, actually ramp it up. So we'll probably for the next three years, we'll do 20 fawns every year because we, they're the ones that we see die the most. You know, there's a higher fawn mortality than there is an adult mortality. So we're going to throw some more fawns. And then the cool part is we're actually going to get 10 collars that are slated just to go on cactus bucks or stag bucks, whatever you want to call them. That's awesome. You know, I want to see if those deer. The it's. The it's. Yeah. And some people, you know, we've seen, we've actually got some trail camera bucks where they're a normal buck and then do they turn stag at a certain point in their life, you know, because their antler configuration. Right. I mean, you can't always see it. Is it environmental? You know what I mean? Is it something that they're doing?

And the Ponsagon, as we all know, there's no higher prevalence than there. And there's a world in that. What's causing that? In the world. It's it's interesting. 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 want to throw up all over their shoes because they're like, what if 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 Ponsagon? I mean, I go to classify a hay field 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 want to figure out what it is. And we actually so last year we actually called up. We had 10 hunters come down. We helped them.

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 them. It doesn't appear to be a genetic thing. They're not passing it on because these deer. So they don't breed. They might turn stag as they get to nine years old or something. All of a sudden, they're just like an old man. Kind of like these commercials we see on TV, you know, you testosterone. Are you surfing from low T? Yeah. Two bathtubs on a hill with a couple of deer sitting there, you know. You need help. There you go. Hey. The blue pill for deer. Yeah, exactly. Purple, whatever. Boone and Crockett does not recognize testosterone injected deer. Yeah. But basically, that's what's happening to these deer. But we're thinking that what's causing it is they're catching a virus, similar to like EHD, blue tongue, something like that.

It affects testicle size or something. So basically, they get a high fever when they're young. And depending on when that fawn gets it, and there's been some studies done. It's almost zero, but there has been some they've looked at. And they say if a fawn gets it when he's zero to two months, basically, he's just going to grow stuff that looks like Mark Simpson. You know? Wow. Some balled up, nasty looking stuff. Or if he gets it when he's like a year old, maybe he'll get some antler configuration. Maybe he'll shed. There's a possibility he could shed his antlers every year. You see them. Shed the belt. You see all that. There's big, coned in. You do. Variation. There's a big variation of sag. You see that. Yeah. So we did this, and basically, we found out that's the thing. They all had, I mean, I'm talking like peanut-sized testicles. They were present there, and they were on them.

But those bucks, as we watched them. Not enough to function like real bucks. No. And their testosterone was so much, it was basically not even rossering. 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 a mosquito. I don't know. Well, and if they get it, they're not going to recover from it. It doesn't sound like. No. So you might as well do these hunts that you enacted last year. Stag tags. Stag tags. Stag tags. Stag tags. Where you, I don't know, guided them, if that's the right word. But you went out and targeted right there and said, that's the buck to shoot. Yeah. Because in September, you've got to be careful, because everything's in velvet. Well, I think what we're having here. Hey, that's a stag. Oh, never mind. It was a 2-10.

It's a 34-inch stag, I'm telling you. Look at his nuts. They're a half inch smaller than they should be. Yeah. So we, and that was the thing, too, was we killed during that time, and we asked people that we had a management buck going on where they were killing normal bucks, and these were pre-rut bucks. I mean, they're coming. This is November. You'd see them. Yeah, we're talking first of November. And down there, it seems like they rut just a little early on the Poncegont. 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 does. None of the does are ready yet, so they just lay down and start eating. But these cactus bucks, they didn't have a care in the world. They're just out there.

They're outcasts. Yeah. I could care less. Pre-ending their velvet, making sure they're looking. There's March. There's Jim. He's harassing March. So nice. They got guts like this on them, this much fat on their back, because they don't burn it off. And that was the crazy part. We found these deer. These deer were bumping. There was a couple that were bumping 300 pounds. I mean, nothing goes into antler growth. It's just all in their body. And you go to hold on to one. I mean, the first kid that 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've got to bring the truck to this deer. Like, just giant. You know, because we were keeping there. You're like, are you even pulling something? Yeah. We had the guts left in them. And we pulled them. We'd take them out.

We took a sample of every single organ. Blood samples. I mean, we did everything we could. And basically, that's kind of 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 for all of them. Well, if it's 100%, it's 100%. Yeah. So we're actually in the process of 2018. You could see a stag only tag on the Poncegon. Wow. Well, what's interesting, too, is you've got these trophy units. And people wait forever to get those tags. They don't want it. Unless it's a giant stag. And, you know, contracted this virus later on in life. Pretty much, people aren't going to shoot them. So then you get this inordinate amount of them. It's a waste of space. It's just sitting there. They're going to get passed every year. One of the deer came back 11 years old. So that deer has been on there for 11 years.

Basically not contributing to anything. Wasting. Yeah. Wasting. I would rather have a big, fat, sassy doe on there. Dough. Even a doe, yeah. Especially if you're up against objectives, population. Yeah. And especially, you know, nobody wants to count those as bucks in the buck-to-dough ratio. Yeah. Because they're really not. They're not, you know, contributing, not breeding, and things like that. So that's very interesting. If you don't have a nut, you're not a buck. Right? I think that's a pretty good definition. But tell us about, you know, that's all awesome. And we look forward, and we'll probably have you guys back on to talk more about that migration study, maybe during the winter, things like that. So this at some point, yeah, will affect management. Yeah, 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 wildfire here on the Penguins Lake, you know, this summer. The Brian Head Fire, which is not maybe just well-known here in Utah, maybe across the west. It's been all over the news. 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 you had some telemetry animals within there. And, you know, then we'll get into the long term. In my opinion, this is only going to be good.

There's obviously some devastating effects for cabin owners, and now every tree around my cabin's black. What do I do? Well, we know a lot of property owners up there, and we feel for them. It's close to home. It's not pretty anymore, you know, in a lot of the cases. But from a hunter's perspective, you know, this could be phenomenal. And we're super excited if there's a positive side. Yeah, right. And that's the thing you've got to think about. Like you said, the private landowners and stuff, that would be frustrating. I'd be frustrated if I had my land up there and it's looked like this for X amount of years, and it's never going to look the same. No, there's not a live tree on it. We've got burns held. We've got some of these burns that are 20 years old, and they're still a burn. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're always going to be a burn. But in our lifetime, we're going to see it.

So it was, well, it started at the end of June. It was a human-caused fire. Started up over at Bryan Head. It kind of burned around for a couple days, and then it looked like it was going to be out. And then all of a sudden, we had this heat wave. Got a hold of some heat. Some wind, some heat, some of the fuel that was up on that mountain, and it exploded. And it ended up going 70,000 acres. I actually work on just like the volunteer fire department there in Pengwich. They called us up that night when it blew up from Bryan Head going to Pengwich 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 went, you know, it was blowing 10,000 acres overnight kind of thing. Well, and part of that comes from, you know, there's quite a little bit of a controversy,

is poor management of the forest where, you know, you have a lot of standing dead trees, beetle kill, and we weren't allowed to. And by logging, but environmental groups or whatever. You know, court junctions, basically, or lawsuits of not being able to manage the forest. Yeah. Not being able to take care of our own forest. You had dead standing stuff, down standing stuff, and then new stuff that had grown up in between, these 20-inch spruce and fir. You had a fire ladder at every elevation. Yeah. And you could have. Exactly. You could have. And it could have burned several directions over the same. And had the forest been managed, at some point it would have been easier to, not saying it wouldn't have been big, but broken up a little bit. Yeah, you would have had a better chance of managing that fire. You saw it. It basically burned itself out.

I mean, the firefighters did an awesome job in not taking anything away from them. I mean, some of the things they did. You had to stand back. You had to stand back at that point. There was nothing. Nobody was going to do anything. At some point, you're just managing structures. When there's 300-foot flames coming off of that thing, and it was running, it was pretty amazing. 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 going to 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 monsoon started hitting. Yeah. So it put it out. And unfortunately, that fire, you know, I'm not a fisheries biologist, but that's probably

going to be one of our long-term effects that we're going to see that's going to be hard as a fisheries. You know, we've already lost. Even Penguish Lake. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's very possible. Tell us about, I mean, for people that don't know why that is, what's going to happen, Phil? Like they're happening right now with these monsoons. Yeah. The big thing is just ash flow, you know. Just water content. Chokes the deer. Yeah. Or chokes the fish out, right? 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. In the lake? Up at Penguish Lake. And if it gets heavy enough, when that all dies off and that starts decomposing, then it just takes all the oxygen right out of the water. Wow. And it can kill all the fish. Is that because all of a sudden you have an influx of all these nutrients in there?

Exactly. The ash, the potassium phosphate, all that in there, and then all of a sudden, boom, grows like a pond in your backyard. And it sucks oxygen to grow. If you're not replacing fresh oxygen at a fast enough rate, the fish will just die. Yep. And that's the tough thing with Penguish 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. You need to go up there and aerate it. Get a straw, blow on it. Phil? Yeah. That's a $500 idea. So I know that. And 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 them with their fly rods or whatever. Cut throats and whatnot. And it seems like I've seen on the news or in the news release, probably to your credit, you guys have, maybe it's already happened.

You had a fishing contest or it's still ongoing. Something to encourage people to come in there. Might as well take the resource. Might as well take the resource. Yeah. We've, we've got a tagged fish contest going on right now at Penguish Lake. Fishing has still been good, you know, in spite of, of what's going on. So that's, that's good. Is that in part to help the economy too? Yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah, it was, it was in, in collaboration with, with Garfield County, you know, and, and there's, you know, the, 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, uh, get entered to win a rifle. Um, and there's the, there's a big fish component too.

So if you catch a fish over 24 inches, you're also, you get it. And another drawing or something. You get it. Just same thing. You get a prize and you get entered to, to win that rifle as well. So either a tagged fish or a 24 inch fish. And I think that runs, uh, through till I want to say Labor Day. 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. It, or is this a 20 year effect? But this first year or two or three or what's anticipation? How long? That's, that's really hard to say. It's all speculation, but you know, yeah, there definitely is a, I will say there is a chance that it could be a kind of a longterm problem. Really? Yeah. In Penguish Lake. Yeah.

So it 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, you know, comes in at a, at a quick enough rate that, that, uh, stabilizes. You don't get as much ash continually year after year after year. It might save it. 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 going to 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, so as far as it's hard, like I said, it's hard to spend. As far as from the wildlife side, you guys had, it sounded like collars on what, six cows or something? Yeah, we had, we had a few cow elk and, um, and actually a couple deer that there was from the Pont de Gaunt.

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 BYU students last year over by Tropic. Okay. And this bear comes up, crosses the top of the mountain, hangs out on the Pont de Gaunt, dens and hatch. Last, last winter. It's a young, young male, two year old boar. Dens and 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 right over the front door of your office out here. Come on. 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, that fauna I was telling you about, and that bear literally crossed paths at one point. Come on. I mean, I'm talking probably within a hundred yards of each other.

Like, they, their dots, I mean, their points are just like. These are two random animals out of, you only have ten. Yeah, one's collared here, one's collared 50 miles away. 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 have pictures of him. Like, we got this bear. I just, was the bait registered. Yeah. We had a valid COR. All right. All right. Good. Orange card was in the tree. 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. Well, that bear had moved up into where the fire was. Yeah. And his response was he'd like literally go to the fire line every day. Come on. Yeah. He would go up.

He wanted to go through it. He'd get up. He'd get up. 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 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 one. Yeah. Yeah. He was sitting there. Maybe that's what he was doing was playing linebacker. Easy picking. He was picking off elk calves as they were stumbling out of the fire. You know, just swatting them left and right. And so he hangs out there for a little bit. We think he's a mortality. All of a sudden he starts moving again. And because it's a study that that bear came from the Ponce County, we wanted it to happen.

The collar that was on there, BYU, they said we want it back. And so it actually has a remote release on it. What? So from the computer, they log in and say release. When did they do that? Two weeks ago. A couple weeks ago. After the fire was out. After the fire. Yeah. I'm ready to kill somebody. No. We wanted to wait until. First of all, we couldn't get in there. Yeah. And so I told him we're going to have to hold off. So it was pretty cool information. Anyway, they released the collar. I went in and got it for him. So did the fire ever surround him or did he make it? He just kind of always stayed in front of the front. Yeah. He just stayed right on the edge of it off of this red creek above Paraguna, that kind of stuff over there. 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. So anyway, we. And then they. How did they.

I know it was a small sample, but how did the deer and the elk behave? 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 Pengwich Lake, was literally right back in the back of Clear Creek. There's some properties that are back in there that they actually managed for elk. You know, there's private land. Some guys have some ranches back in there that they like hunting. And anyway, that elk, it just got into the meadows, I guess, and just let the fire burn around it. You know, I talked to some of the landowners that were up there. They have trail camera pictures of the fire burning all around. And there's elk out in the meadow feeding while the fire's burning around them, you know? And so it burned around her. And it's interesting. Yeah.

Because these elk have never seen a fire this night in their lifetime, 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. 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 forward. These elk are standing in the burn now. Yeah. They're standing there now. They're fine. And we had moisture that was, that was, 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 there yesterday. It's probably a little golf course. There's aspens that are a foot tall already. Really? Aspens? The fire's only been out three weeks, two weeks. Aspens? Yeah. They're already going.

Suckering up like crazy. At some point it's going to, those little, they're going to be 10 feet tall. It's going to, it'll make it tougher to hunt, but this year should be phenomenal. You know what? Honestly, it really will. You know, it worries me as the biologist. I have a feeling we may have lost a significant amount of some fawns and some elk calves. You know, that's, that's where it's going to hurt us. And we won't see that till, till down the year. So maybe, you know, we might see a dip in the buck to doe ratio in the next couple of years where we just kind of like having a bad winter. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. Just like having a bad winter. 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, some firefighters found a mature bull elk that didn't make it out of the fire. That's going to happen.

And it's going to happen, but I don't think it's going to 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. Probably had her fawn with her. And she's still there now. Well, it's crazy. I know they've had those fires in Arizona, some of those bigger fires. And, you know, we're working with the different outfitters and stuff. And a lot of those elk would just stand in that black. We didn't even know what they were eating. I mean, it was black, you know. But they lived. They thrived. Thrived. Two to three years after, you've got giants. Phenomenal. You've got giant, giant elk.

And same thing, what we're going to see up here. Young feed, high nutritious feed. Giant elk. And you can glass them. It's going to open it up. It's mosaic. It's got a lot of topography. It's got some escapement. It's going to be good hunt. Honestly, it's what the unit needed. Sadly and sadly enough, it really did. We knew it was a ticking time bomb for a lot of years. Well, it still is. The parts that aren't burned over there on this. It could have doubled in size and still. I mean, it's only a matter of time this other country. This other country is going to burn too. It was scary. If it would have jumped the highway in Castle Valley. I mean, it did. And they caught it. And that's where, like I say, the kudos of the firefighters for catching it there. It could have burned the entire unit. From there to Highway 14 was as thick or thicker than anything that it did turn.

It could have been well over 100,000 acres and been doubled in size. So it had started south and gone. Because the winds is what pushed it to the northeast there. And had it started. If it had kept going the direction it was going when it threw 20,000 or 30,000 acres in two days. If it had kept going there, it would have crossed it. It would have been on the Zion unit and still going. Yeah, yeah. You know. Yeah. Let's say you've got a changing winds. You've got a north wind, south wind. You know. And it pushed it to the more broken stuff to the north. But 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 stuff reseeded. You know, there's a bear team, they call it, that's coming in.

They're more worried now about infrastructure necessarily than, say, like wildlife habitat. Stream banks. We're working with them. Yeah. Erosion. Protecting the resources. You know, there's city watersheds, you know, city of Paraguans. Water's up there. Panguishes. Water is up in there and that kind of thing. So they're trying to protect those things. But we're worrying about the wildlife side of things. We're going to be doing some bale bombing, they call it, where they're going to go drop some hay bales. Hay big straw, hay bales. We're probably going to put in some, if we can, the Forest Service, they like to use native, you know, kind of grasses and species to replace that. So you are going to reseed. You are going to reseed. Unfortunately, a lot of this is at higher elevation. Contrast a lot of the burns out west of here where you've got such a high cheatgrass issue.

Some of this desert country. Up here, you're at an elevation where you've got a good understory in places where you have dense spruce fir. We're talking about aspens. I never hunt aspens. You know what I mean? In the desert stuff. 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 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 the heat to open up the cone. And the bark saves them. So really, it's going to be a great thing for it. We'll go ahead and reseed. We're probably going to put some stuff down like some, I mean, we're talking triticale, you know, grain. That kind of stuff to help hold the soil for this year. Sterile. Sterile stuff. Yep. And it'll be dead next year. Add some little alfalfa and what else.

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 reseeds and a certain mixture of seed that's put in there. And we know the groceries are amazing. And that's been, you know, a contributing factor to, like, Brutus' growth, you know. Yeah, you'll see a buck blow up, you know, over one year. Especially if you live 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 seeders. Yeah. Compared to, you burn it up and one way chain it and reseed it. Yes. That deer's like, I'm in heaven. And no hunters are normally hunting that thick seeder. And all of a sudden, Jason Carter shows up and he's ended up on the wall. Him and his buddy. 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. I liken this a little bit, not to digress and keep going too far, but the Mount Dutton unit in 2002. I was a biologist there. You're from over that way. Much, much the same in 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 in a one burn event. No question had a lot of watershed issues. You had, I think it was Bonneville cutthroat, trout, filth. 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 reputation of Mount Dutton, solid unit, rough, rugged, never produces the kind of bulls that Boulder, Beaver, Monroe produce. That fall, 2002 and on, that unit was on the map. And it was there for, you know, six, eight years. Wilderness type country. Still rough stuff. Really rugged. A lot of, you know. But I think that probably contributed to, as these, you know, that unit's got a lot of up and down, south exposure canyons. That contributed to his outcome from other units that Boulder doesn't have a lot of great elk winter range. No, it doesn't. And when they find that, they're like, that's where I'm going every November. That's when you change habits. You know, 15 years. And it's been great for elk. It's, you know, and deer as well. We've got mountain goats on it. We, I fully, that's when they found the first mountain goat on Mount Dutton. It was during the fire survey.

They're like, what is that white thing sitting on the rock? 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 Willard down there. We have a huntable population. And that fire, I would dare say we wouldn't have it. Just like the Oak Creek up in your neck of the woods, Phil. Change that unit. Change that unit. We brought California bighorn there. It finally made it fully maybe suitable back to maybe what you'd want historically. You know, they were sheep 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 gaming fish baiting? I've seen it. We're dropping hay bales and flower sacks.

We're going to find out who's baiting. Well, they make good spots to sit in glass because they are soft. And when it's hot, I mean, you're just sitting there in a pile of straw. It's pretty nice. It's pretty soft. There's a lot that goes on. In fact, you know, and we're pretty much out of time. But it's been, you know, we did want to get into, you know, how, like, for example, you know, we're talking about the Penguins 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 out of there. Maybe the rifle season isn't as good as the archery and the muzzle. Oh, yeah. There's a lot, you know, and I don't know how this fire is going to affect it. Maybe it'll hold them a little longer. Some of the habitat. I don't know.

That's the only thing that I wish is I wish we would have had 30 collars, 60 collars on there before the fire for having two years, three years worth of data. And all of a sudden a fire comes through and now we can see how it changes. Elf that used to leave, now don't leave. Yeah, exactly. Just like what Adam was talking about. So that's what's going to be awesome. And we're trying to get collars statewide, almost every unit, because we can learn so much from them. You know, as we're wrapping up here, is there anything that you guys would like to bring up? Noteworthy projects. Maybe we haven't brought up or any bright spots, you know, any bigger deer. We need to manage for bigger deer. Right, Adam? Yeah. Bigger elk. Yeah. I need to kill a 400-inch bull, Adam and I both. We've killed some nice bulls. We've killed 380s, but we're just, we need to break that.

And so, anyway, maybe this fire will help us. Maybe we'll be applying for penguins. I'm telling you, it's going to change. It's going to change. They've killed giant bulls up there anyway. You know that. But, you know, having said that, you add a good fire on top of that, you know, and keep the tags managed. Can't hurt. Can't hurt. So. I just, I think, honestly, Utah's in a really good spot. You know, deer, you know, elk, we've readjusted, you know, the Dutton, some of those kind of things. Last year we did the management plan, adjusted that age, you know. So, unfortunately, any time 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 to draw. But I think when you get there, it's going to be a better experience for you when you get there and have a chance.

And not necessarily to kill a bigger bull, but, you know, just a better chance, I guess. And so, I look back, like we were saying, from the time I've been hunting, 1994, when I started, you know, it's as good as it's ever been. I mean, you look at the buck to doe numbers, all that kind of stuff, you know, maybe back, well, before that, I don't know. You know, I don't know. I would agree. I would say it's as close as to when I was, we were in high school. We went to high school in the early 90s. And I played football. And had I known that the deer were going to taper off like they were right from then on, I probably wouldn't have played football. Because that affected hunting season. But back then, back then. You just thought, hey, this is the way it is forever. We were muzzleloader deer hunting rut over the counter. You know what I mean? We were hunting November with muzzleloaders.

And you couldn't do anything to hurt the deer. You were hunting big deer each year. Yeah, we thought they were bulletproof to some extent. And this will be the way it is. I mean, I remember vacillating over buying a lifetime. Do we need to buy a lifetime license? Is that a good thing? I'm glad I did that. I wish I would have. Yeah. You know, it was like, hey, I just buy one every year. Why would you buy that? That's $500. Now you're guaranteed a deer tag. Yeah, every year. So anyway, it's about perspective. But I would echo that. That I think right now, general season units, and even in our Epic Outdoors magazine, we have a section now for general season Utah deer options. That wouldn't be something we would have done five years ago. No. I don't know. And because a lot of people would talk to, and residents are going to 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 season deer. And you get points for each. And you get points for each. They're separate. So anyway, you're spot on, I believe. 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. There's so much to talk about. You guys are long-winded. On subjects that don't matter. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. Like cactus bucks. Testicle size. I mean, really? We 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 don't go find those dead animals that I know you're going to 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. Thanks for having us on. Thanks a lot. All right, guys.