The Blacktail Coach Podcast
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The Blacktail Coach Podcast
Agenda 23: A New Path For California’s Deer And Forests with Paul Trouette
If “more deer, more tags” hasn’t moved the needle in California, what will? We make the case for a better message—forest health and balanced wildlife management—and back it up with a rigorous camera trap study designed to deliver real numbers, not anecdotes. With blacktail deer as an umbrella species, we walk through how the right habitat mosaics lift the entire ecosystem, from neotropical songbirds to lions, and why timing burns and managing succession can make or break recovery.
We break down the science in plain language: how spatial and motion-triggered images capture both habitat condition and large-mammal activity, how AI speeds clean data, and how cameras fit alongside fecal DNA and historical surveys. Early results hint at lower densities than many expected across big landscapes, which is exactly why unbiased sampling matters. From oak woodland savannas to montane timber, we map what deer actually eat, how acorn-rich years change behavior, and why catastrophic fires can flip plant communities away from preferred browse if burns hit at the wrong time.
The conversation also celebrates the craft of hunting in Northern California—patiently aging bucks, respecting tight home ranges, and sticking with tough recoveries. Stories of non-typical giants and river mishaps meet a clear ethic: follow the science, tell the truth, and fix the habitat. Agenda 23 is our campaign to rally hunters, non-hunters, landowners, and agencies around shared outcomes: healthier forests, smarter regulations, and a revived outdoor heritage that welcomes new voices.
Want to dig into the data or get involved? Visit mcbadeer.com, check Wildlife Insights for our project dots, and reach us at mendodeer@yahoo.com. If this mission resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so others can find it.
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Welcome back to the Blacktail Coach Podcast. Again, I'm here alone without Dave this week, but we have special guests again, Paul Truett, John Wagonet, and Steve Watson, all Northern California hunters. And we're going to finish talking about the MCBA and a project that you guys were working on, just recently started, and then we'll get into hunting Northern California because people want to hear some hunting stories, I'm sure. Paul, tell us about this project that you guys are doing.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, so Agenda 23 started in 2023.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:And what it is, it's a new message. And it's it can be controversial because I believe after being in this industry over 20 years, that the message of we want more deer to kill more deer hasn't been working for us. And we got a lot of big polarization within the non-governmental organizations, wildlife foundations and stuff. So I decided that since we only represent less than 1% of the population of California, that's real small. And we just got done looking at in 1970 and was 760,000 licenses sold. Now it's 260,000 roughly. That's a big attrition. And why is that? Because people are and deer are not relevant to the departments. They're not relevant to the people anymore. It's a culture shift. So Agenda 23 is an attempt to re-couch our efforts and our conservation efforts instead of saying we need more deer to harvest. I came up with this idea that, well, that's not a message that Californians generally are going to accept.
SPEAKER_05:No, no.
SPEAKER_06:I think the message should be forest health and wildlife management initiative.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:That's a message that everybody can get behind, even people that are against hunting. So my goal is to reach California with a balanced approach to wildlife management and forest health, which is, I think, going to produce what everybody wants anyway.
SPEAKER_03:And you told me during one of our phone conversations a while back, and I didn't know this, and I actually passed this along to some other people about black tailed deer being an umbrella species.
SPEAKER_06:Correct. And that's what the scientists call it. If they're doing well, everything else is doing well.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Because they need early successional forage. They need late successional forage for canopy and cover and things like that, like we talked about earlier. And Steve knows this because he managed deer on the premier place of all time. So if you don't have good forest management and property management and habitat management, it's not going to benefit the deer. And guess what else? It's not going to benefit anything else, anyway, because when they're doing good, everything else is doing good. Lions, neotropical songbirds, they all thrive in seed banks from healthy ecosystems. You know, everything does well when you have that balanced approach out there where you have late successional forest, early successional food and cover and all that. So that's what the scientists talk about is umbrella species for black tailed deer.
SPEAKER_03:And so Agenda 23 is looking at all of that.
SPEAKER_06:That's exactly that's our focus is to get the land managers, which we call the house. The house is the forest, the occupants is the wildlife.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:If we don't have the house in order, nothing else is going to work.
SPEAKER_03:So what is the study doing? I know it's there's a lot of trail cam. So what is that looking for?
SPEAKER_06:Two things. Habitat condition, habitat, we're measuring habitat because we get four pictures off each camera. We get north, south, east, and west, a big view shed of what that habitat type is and what the condition of it is. Because you can see older habitat, it's just it's old, it's decadent, it's skeletal, it doesn't have dark green protein forage on it. So we can tell that by looking at it. So we're capturing the condition of the habitat at that time space, at that real time, real data. And then we're getting wildlife populations also within those cameras that are walking by. As they're going by. Yeah. We have two sets, data sets that we collect. One is a spatial study, and the other one is just motion. So spatial study takes a view shed from the camera, and when the camera goes off, it takes a picture of a view shed and that area. And the and so we measure that area in meters or yards.
SPEAKER_05:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_06:And so we get a collective area. Generally, each camera grabs about, I forget the exact number, but when all 30 cameras is how many we have deployed now.
SPEAKER_05:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:I think it's eight meters. Eight meters times eight is 64. So 30 times eight. It might be a little bit bigger than that. I don't remember the exact. So it takes a spatial picture, and then we extrapolate that space times the amount of cameras we have in our area of operation.
SPEAKER_03:And you're looking at the foliage year-round for well, no, for two months. Oh, for two months.
SPEAKER_06:But we already know what maturity that foliage is by looking at it.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:We can tell the condition it's in. But also what we're gathering is we're gathering the amount of animals, whether it's lions, bears, deer, elk, anything that's large enough to be seen in that camera, because these are cameras that are placed 39 inches above the ground. Okay. Okay, so they're not going to capture rats. They're not going to capture laggamorse, which are rabbits. Okay. They will if they're further out, but generally they this is a very specific data set that is only after big game, large mammals.
SPEAKER_03:And you're looking, it's I think you might have told me about this, that you're looking at just walks by. So you didn't necessarily put them in like a high-deer traffic area. It was no, no, no, no. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:These are these are strategically built into a camera a camera trap protocol that is unbiased. Because when we had this conversation yesterday up in Eureka with a couple of guys, they said, Well, I could place the camera in a place where we could get all kinds of photos. And I go, Yeah, that's not going to give us the information we're looking for. So if we have a 500-square mile area, that camera program looks at it and places those cameras randomly, but strategically and three miles apart from each other in a giant space that where we want to determine how many animals are in the that entire area that we're studying. Bear, deer, lions, again, you know, large mammals. So it's it points, it puts those cameras in locations that it chooses to keep us out of it. So we can't have any bias.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, does that make sense?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah. It does.
SPEAKER_06:So the only way you're going to get an accurate assessment measurably because it does it without us being there. And somebody said yesterday, well, are there anything by roads? Yeah, but we didn't place it there. The camera program did randomly, but systematically, so that we can get a spatial study. So now we take that view shed times that by 30 cameras, and it's about six acres of space that we've looked at entirely. And somehow this computer can figure out however many animals go by that camera with our spatial study, they're designed to go off once every hour. Okay.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:So one picture every hour, 24 hours. Okay. And then times 30. So I think it's 720 pictures every hour that we take. Or it might be in a 24-hour period. So whatever we see there, the mathematics is built into our program to where it can tell you systematically how many deer there are in that entire area of operation. And they use it, what's the term? But anyway, they can extrapolate out of that. Now the second data that we collect is motion. Anything that walks by any time of the day or night gets captured within that view shed. So that's utilized also with AI. And these methods of capturing these pictures are giving us a real-time idea, not an idea, but mathematical equation of how many deer would be considered in this area. The interesting thing was when we started, I called Steve and I called John and I did a survey. Because you have to know how many cameras do we want to place in this area, because we don't know. Yeah. Because you can have too many or you can have too few. If you have too many cameras, you're capturing over overlap.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:That's called slop. They the term is slop. So we're not actually getting the real close to the achievable goal, which is to find out literally how many deer are in this particular area we're studying. So when we started, you have to come up with a number of cameras to start. So we said, I have no idea how many deer are out there. We asked guys like these guys, people who spend every waking moment of their life out there walking around in the woods.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. And I picked guys like that because I'm going to get probably a very close idea of what we see out there. So the question was, how many deer are in the entire Mendocino National Forest, 990,000 acres? How many deer in 640 acres do you think there are in the forest? Not your little honey hole, not your little area you've been hunting, but the entire 990,000 acres, which is almost a million acres, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So it's 640 acres.
SPEAKER_06:How many deer do you think are in every 640 acres? What would you say?
SPEAKER_02:It depends on the location of the acres. It does.
SPEAKER_06:And a lot of that's not what we're looking for, but that's not what we're looking for.
SPEAKER_03:I would are you coming up with like two to three?
SPEAKER_06:Oh, that's interesting. So we had a lot of people give two or three.
SPEAKER_03:Really? Okay.
SPEAKER_06:We had some people give 60, some people give 25. I had one individual who rides cows and is out there every single day of his life on horseback, and we think that he was way off.
SPEAKER_02:Well, yeah, he's too busy cussing out the cows.
SPEAKER_06:So we started out and we took the number of all 40 individuals that I surveyed. We took the number of deer they guessed, divided it into that 40, and we came up with eight.
SPEAKER_02:And it depends on the locations, too. I could tell you a place called a bog hole that I went through one spring, there's 34 bucks standing right there. And then you go down the other side, and there might be two or three, but that place the deer like. Yeah. I mean, that's hard for people to believe, but it's true. And they it was a surprise to me, and it shouldn't have been because I've been doing it most of my life. But yeah, there was 34 legal bucks right alongside me.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. So we wanted to get an idea of over the entire landscape of what that looks like. Because then you're getting an average. Because, like Steve's saying, there's areas where there's no deer. They don't like that area. They don't, it's not suitable for them for whatever reason. And there's a lot of different factors that play into it.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, because it could be other elk might like or exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:So there's three habitat types: oak, woodland, savannah, which produce the highest deer populations. Those are the hills that you see here, right here. This is oak woodland savannah type. Then you have timber and mount montane habitat type, which is mountainous, which got hardwoods, it's got fir trees, and they don't eat fir trees. They don't eat hardwoods. Although I have seen them eat pepperwood.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:They love that.
SPEAKER_01:White thorn.
SPEAKER_06:Yes, and that's a shrub.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but that's a higher elevation.
SPEAKER_06:And it's in the timber. And they also like, I've seen them eat madrone leaves, dried madrone leaves. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And green ones.
SPEAKER_06:And green ones. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And if an oak tree loses a limb for too many acorns or the bears knock one down, deer eat every leaf.
SPEAKER_06:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:How about moss, tree moss?
SPEAKER_01:The old bucks eat the lichen.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. They eat the heck out of that stuff. The old bucks.
SPEAKER_03:What is the it's that hanging motion?
SPEAKER_06:Mistletoe. They'll kill to get mistletoe.
SPEAKER_03:Is that what it is? That's the long. Yeah. So I know the up Washington, they love that.
SPEAKER_02:Mistletoe, it's always a good thing. Those Brangus cattle, I'd pull up on them, they'd be on their hind legs trying to get to the eating that out of the oak trees. Wow. Yeah, they love that stuff. But then you get a Hereford cow out there, and it figures, what is this? But it's true. The Brangus were amazing in the pie country.
SPEAKER_06:So Agenda 23 is an attempt to bring a better message, a message that can capture Californians and not just the deer groups and the deer hunters, because that we are that message is gone. We've lost the war on that. Yeah. Because California doesn't, it's just not it's not relevant anymore. Deer hunting is not relevant in the entire state. And I think that if we did become bring the relevance of forest health and wildlife balanced wildlife management, I think that's a message that people in California can get behind. Even some of the anti's that don't like hunting.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and another thing is when I was young, they would let us off on Friday to go hunting opening a weekend.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, school. And the mill would shut down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the mill would shut down also. Yeah. Oh, and in Potter Valley, the store, we backed up for three-quarters of a mile trying to get, and then they go down to the general store, which is no more there, but that was a big deal.
SPEAKER_06:And remember all the years we spent up at the Soda Creek.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I know.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. We would drive down with the bucks. I purposely stuck all our buckheads on top of my Ford F-150, drove down and then I got pulled over. I don't remember what year this was, 98, maybe. I got pulled over on the dirt road, and the game warden said, Hey, what do you got going on here? I go, Oh, we got three four-pointers. And he goes, Oh, I see that, but you guys probably should put them underneath in the back of the truck. And I go, There's a reason.
SPEAKER_02:Why's that?
SPEAKER_06:And I go, Yeah, it's not, I don't know how to say that. I go, Oh, you mean people might be offended? And he goes, Yeah, and I go, good.
SPEAKER_02:Good, exactly. Well, I got drafted. I went to basic training at Fort Ord and I was headed to Fort Fort Ben in Georgia. And I had a 20-day leave. I had a 19 days. I didn't need that one day to get back to the airport. Yeah, right. But got your priority straight, that's for sure. But I killed two net Booner Crockett bucks. I lived out there. I just put my stuff there and my that's what I said. Hopping the old willies. Yeah, I had a willies my dad had built and had a 50-gallon tank in the back to welded it in. So I could go all week. All week. Yeah. And but yeah, that was the two of the best bucks that I'd taken. Well, that one 30-inch buck I took him. Yeah. 30 inch blacktail. August of 1970.
SPEAKER_03:30-inch black tail. White blacktail.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Oh yeah. I've got a picture of one on one of our videos. His name was Moose. And he was 20 minutes down the road from here on the grade. And somebody found him. Because I know the guy who picked up his sheds every year. And he was killed by somebody from another organization I won't mention. And they said it came from somewhere else. Those antlers went to Montana for to a taxidermist. The meat disappeared.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_06:But my friend, who I won't mention either, took the picture off Facebook, superimposed with the shed. And that was all it took for the game warrants to be all over that. And never got and never got prosecuted, but they poached him. Well, I don't think they poached him. They just, there's a story behind it. 30-inch block tail.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's a lot of stories about I'm learning, and I've mentioned I'm new to hunting. And so I'm hearing about this, and so through Dave and everything, getting more, I would say, connections with guys in the industry who are content creators. And that pressure to create content is pushing so many people to do just stupid stuff like that. Oh, yeah, it's terrible. And our big push is just your trophy is your trophy, and just whatever it is. We have one guy, Bud, who's on our team. He'd gotten a decent four-point, but then he got a really nice four-point up in Washington. Well, then he wanted a really big three-point, and then he wanted a really big mature forkid horn. Now he wants to find a regress spike, an old regress spike, and that is his goal. That is his trophy that he's working on next, just to find this.
SPEAKER_02:Good luck.
SPEAKER_06:That's yeah, that's a tall order right there.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:That's a tall order, an old spike.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_01:We don't look for that here. No, no, we're not. Not in California.
SPEAKER_03:But it's just one of those where just figuring out what your trophy is and going for it.
SPEAKER_02:The biggest black tails in the world come out of Northern Oregon. Oregon. Yeah, yeah. And the world records come out of Marion County.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. I think it's Marion County. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember the guy's name now, but the number, well, used to be the number five in the world came from Leightonville, California. And it's just 25 minutes up the road here. And that was killed by an individual who lived in Leightonville. The number four or five in the world.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. My guy named Dean Miller, if I got him on uh net 170.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And he was world record, SCI world record for quite a while. I don't know if he still is.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. So we're just trying to get the word out. We need stakeholders. So initi the initiative, Agenda 23, is a program that we're launched, we've launched to try to out to reach out of the dear circles to reach businesses. And I talked about this last. And so that program is targeting stakeholders who have a skin in the game, or maybe who don't have skin in the game, with conservation.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And that's really what we need. We need to get the land managers who own the house back into relationship with the regulators who own the regulatory framework, who see ups and downs, ebbs and flows of the population, and try to encourage the land managers to do projects and programs that benefit. And then to find out what's going on out there is the most important part of it. I'll read here part of my agenda 23, see if I can find it here. John Wagonett's dear, is it says the problem on this agenda 23 or the long-term monitoring project? Our strategy is to inventory the current conditions of the wildlife and habitat. That is, collect immediate data in order to directly make informed decisions about where to focus conservation efforts, including habitat enhancements and monitoring the wildlife. Once areas of need are identified, we will develop strategies and implement collaborative projects based on an ecosystem management approach to tackle the problems. Finally, we evaluated the outcomes of our projects to measure success and guide refinements moving forward. We believe that a program that addresses all of these aspects is the best approach that represents the entire public interest. What's the old thing says, oh, we have a problem, Houston? We've had a problem since I've been in this business forever, and we still we're still in catastrophic decline.
SPEAKER_01:There's something about wildfire suppression, but lately it's gotten so bad out there that you can't suppress them.
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_01:When a fire takes off now, it really destroys the canopy that the deer need for to overwinter.
SPEAKER_06:Well, it's eliminated. We saw areas where the original food source, which is brewer's oaks, or they would call them penn oaks. Those little skinny oaks on the table. The oaks burn. They do. Yeah. When you get nine million degrees coming through there in a 500 mile-an-hour wind.
SPEAKER_02:Like that. 86 fire didn't do that much damage. No. And it did the ground good. Yeah. But the next one destroyed it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And it bakes the ground and kills everything. And then the seedlings can't get started. And it burns all the grass seeds. So you just end up with sparse feet. I mean, it's trying to come back, but it's just not as good. No.
SPEAKER_06:No. And in order to have regeneration out there with fire, it has to be in the fall before it gets wet because you scarify the seed coat. Jack Booth taught me this. Yeah. And then it can regenerate when the fall rains come. If you come in and try to do habitat projects in the winter, you're steaming the seed and it kills the plants. It kills the entire seed bank. So any land managers that are doing burns in the winter, it's not as effective. And it you can actually convert habitats from one species of plant to another just by killing the entire seed bank by steaming those seeds and killing those seeds. When fire comes through, it causes regeneration. And then when the rains come after the seeds have been scarified, then that's when you get the same plant communities that were once there and predominantly there. Otherwise, you can actually change plant communities from good preferred brows like mountain mahogany, choke cherry, cyanothus, which is that deer brush that John's talking about, white thorn, all that stuff they love. Poison oak, they love poison oak. And you can convert that into chemise or manzanita, even worse. So we never eat manzanita.
SPEAKER_01:We just came out of a drought, and now we've had three years of rain, three plus, and things are actually looking pretty good. Feed-wise.
SPEAKER_02:That's one of the reasons I went out there yesterday. I always just check on some things that will determine whether we're gonna do very good or not. It was not great, but it wasn't bad. Yeah. So things are happening out there that kind of surprise me. So we'll just see how it rolls out. And we see what Mother Nature throws at us. That's one of the biggest keys.
SPEAKER_03:When does Agenda 23 wrap up?
SPEAKER_06:That's oh it's gonna it's gonna be ongoing. It's a message we will never stop. It's just gonna be but the the camera. No, that's a different, that's a different subject matter. That's just a yeah. Agenda 23 is getting people interested in the work again.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:And getting everybody involved through a balanced and wild approach to forest health and wildlife management initiative. That's what that is.
SPEAKER_03:And so the photos were just uh just it was a separate it was a it's a separate it's a separate thing.
SPEAKER_06:So part of that agenda 20, did you have something you wanted to share?
SPEAKER_01:I just wanted to ask you this one little point where you came up with that eight deer number, what was that relative to the acreage?
SPEAKER_06:Very good. 640.
SPEAKER_01:To 640.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, so I'm glad you brought that brought us back to that. So when we came up with that number, our camera trap, our camera project, which is the next thing we'll talk about, we had no slop. Oh no, we nailed it. In our estimation, we nailed we nailed it.
SPEAKER_01:So the average came out of the side.
SPEAKER_06:Well, I can't say that officially yet because our data has not been finalized and our but we think that we're extremely close because we have no slop. Okay. We don't have many deer in those photos. We have even less bears than we thought we were gonna have in those photos. So we're we just did the second year. So we determined, we guessed at how many deer per sk per 640 acres that we have in the entire forest, not just our honey hole or areas, because there are areas that are doing better than other areas. Because if fire happens in a good way in some areas, it does help and brings new forage. But if it's catastrophic in other areas and it ruins habitat, then those deer are going to be in trouble.
SPEAKER_01:So you mentioned the bears, and 10 years ago, I could go hunting and see 16 or 20 bears.
SPEAKER_02:Not a problem. Yep. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:This year and the last actually the last three years, I've seen four or five, which is kind of surprising. I don't know why that there would be a drop-off. Why I wouldn't see them hunting the same areas.
SPEAKER_03:I would think.
SPEAKER_06:No, no, no. They're not starving.
SPEAKER_01:Those guys can eat starving. Because we've had three good acorns.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they can eat decent. This has been the most acorns in a three-year time that I ever remembered.
SPEAKER_01:Every year, and this year is the absolute record.
SPEAKER_02:I've been around a long time, but I've never seen it like this.
SPEAKER_01:So I was just up in an area where I hunt east of here. Pigs, plenty of pigs, plenty of deer usually in this area. But late in the season, I could walk on the acorns and never touch the ground.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:And that's an area where they were all feeding.
SPEAKER_02:And you'd think the bears would be in there big time.
SPEAKER_06:There probably there's so many of them, there's so many acorns.
SPEAKER_02:The best I ever seen at one time was on the other side of where you're talking about first thing in the morning, just getting lightened. I've been sitting there for almost an hour, just kind of waiting. And I heard this noise. I go, what in the heck is that? Six bears in a tree. And it's amazed what they do. They can take a limb two inches around and snap it like it's a candy bar. It is. They sit there and throw it down and snap another one. Finally, I started laughing too hard.
SPEAKER_01:When I first saw an example of that, I was going through an area of large oaks, and I thought an airplane had crashed in the area.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And just and wiped out a bunch of oak limbs. Yeah. Oak limbs everywhere. Remember that?
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah. And you can just see, I mean, these are happy bears. And it was two sows and their pups. Yeah. And they're about 10 foot up in the tree. What blew me away? You tried breaking one of those limbs off as two and a half inches and see what they make it look like a peanut.
SPEAKER_03:So thinking about bears, is there have there been a decline more in the boars? The context of why I'm asking this is so we had someone who on the podcast who we did a series talking about bear hunting, and she talked about how the boars, they're the ones that need more of the protein. They're the ones that are more likely to be the ones eating the fawns, things like that. So when I'm in my mind, when I said they're starving, is it like the boars just aren't getting the protein level that they need? And this is just kind of speculating as to thinking about that problem of like why they might be disappearing. Because if there's not as many boars, there might not be as much breeding going on.
SPEAKER_06:Thinking there's territorial problems when you have high density of anything. Yeah. Even the does. I mean, how many times have we seen does kicking other does?
SPEAKER_02:How many times do you see a bear of the duff at Willis?
SPEAKER_06:Right. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of territorial brawls. And I know bears, I know grizzlies will eat black bears. Yes. I've seen them dig up black bear dens and eat black bears. Yeah. So I'm not a I'm not a bear expert. And anybody that wants to get an answer to that, I have a gentleman named Gary Alt, who is a bear expert, a world-renowned. Just look up anything, Gary ALT is his last name. And he's probably got a paper on this. So I'm not a black bear expert on that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But getting back to what we're doing now, Agenda 23 is the attempt to get stakeholders and more massive attention to and relevancy to the deer.
SPEAKER_03:It is the whole advocacy campaign.
SPEAKER_06:It's the campaign.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:The camera project is our scientific project now that is designed to piggyback off the mendocino study that we did in 2008 through to get back into long-term monitoring of our mammals, our large mammals in the forest to find out how many we got. Real, real numbers.
SPEAKER_03:Real numbers, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Now that's not the only method to use because we have aerial survey, aerial surveys. We used to do spotlight routes. We used to do winter range surveys, and we're still doing those, I guess. I don't know. I don't know if any of that's going on now. We're trying to get some answers to that. And then fecal DNA is where they will take a block of land, they will do a transect, which is a very detailed strat or a standardized method of covering that ground, and then they will collect pellets. Once they collect those pellets, it goes into a solution, they keep them, and then they go back to the lab, they get genomed, and they find out if a family, what families are involved in this particular area. Once they determine that, they that's called marking. Then they come back and recapture that later, three, five years later, and then they go through the exact transect again. And if they find new pellets that have different genome, they know that things are changing there and they know they can extrapolate population densities. So the camera trapping, it's real, it's in front of you. You see the animal.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And the more cameras you put out, or when you get that equation just set right, you're getting real data on how many animals are in that particular area of operation. And then those numbers get teased out, and these scientists are smarter than me. They know how to do all that math. Yeah. Because I didn't pass I barely passed high school. It's funny.
SPEAKER_03:So they do with clamming up in Washington. Oh, okay. They go to a portion of the beach and they flood it, and it, I don't know, it's like 20 by 20. And however many clams come up, they count them all, and they multiply that by the size of the beach in Washington, and that's how they determine seasons. So it's probably, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:It's simple. Well, that's exactly what happens. So we get hunters, and I hate to say this, but we got hunters saying, Oh, we have tons of deer. Okay, where?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. Okay, I like that. I like it. In my backyard. Because I don't hunt here. There you go.
SPEAKER_06:We got more deer here in Brook Trails than we have in the entire Yola Bolis. I'm teasing, but not really. No. Because it's favorable conditions here. Yeah. They supplementally fed, they're protected from predators. You got this dog out here running the cats off, you know.
SPEAKER_02:And they're smart. I had six that lived right behind my house. Yeah. And uh they're not going anywhere because they get too much. They don't need to. Yeah, they exactly the need, you know. Yeah. And it was amazing what they did. And I have my foot down, nobody muckied with them.
SPEAKER_01:So in a few weeks of setting a camera out here, 13 different bucks.
SPEAKER_06:And you can tell because they got antlers.
SPEAKER_01:Two weeks coming in for apples.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And I I may only see three of them. Yeah. But they're all in this very small area. My brother just got a video of a nice five by five. He lives a few hundred yards down the hill from me. Beautiful buck. He's got to be 20, 23, or 24 wide. Five by five.
SPEAKER_02:Especially up here.
SPEAKER_01:Very big for here. Nice bases. Healthy thing.
SPEAKER_03:Dave, when Dave listens to this, he's where does he live?
SPEAKER_06:Mendocino County. Again, three.
SPEAKER_03:It won't the exact address. Wait, I'm to judge from okay.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, that's funny because I get a lot of people saying, Oh, you're out there taking pictures. You got any GPS waypoints for me? Nope.
SPEAKER_02:Can't do that. Sorry. Every day I take a walk with, I got a new pup, a new Kelpie pup. Oh, nice. And so I'm trying to teach Frank. Frank. Yeah. And I don't know if you're familiar with Kelpies, but he has to have a job. Oh, yeah. He needs a job very bad. Otherwise, you've got a problem with your dog.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, you won't get a dog on welfare.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. But you won't get a kelpie on welfare. He's too busy.
SPEAKER_06:So we have two things going on. Our science and research is designed. And I was talking about hunters who say, well, I hope you guys aren't going to advocate advocate for removing more tags out of the area. I said, that's the wrong way to look at this. Because if the science says what it says, we follow the science. Yeah. And we follow what is the negative factors, what are the positive factors. And if we have a decline, how do we change that? What is the predominant factors that are taking that are causing us to be in decline? We talked about that earlier, forest condition, survivability of dose, and all those. So we follow the facts and then we're going to tell the facts. At the end of next year, we're going to have a paper put together that's going to actually tell us what we got going on. And then we're going to make regulatory recommendations to the state. Yeah. And that's what a peer-reviewed journal will provide us. And right now we're on Wildlife Insights. Anyone can go to wildlifeinsights.com. That's the largest portal of camera traps that's going on in the entire world. And Mendocino Blacktail is now we have a dot last year, and now we're going to have another dot this year. So we're in the area providing real data, real-time data. So our goal is to provide collect data to drive it to the decision makers.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And with the ultimate goal to improve the ecosystem.
SPEAKER_06:To find out what's going on and reverse that decline.
SPEAKER_03:Not more deer, not more improve the because once you if you have the and I like this. And as being a new hunter, I'm thinking more along these lines of how do we improve the ecosystem? Because then everything else will improve. Or those umbrella species. And if it's well, take away some of our tags. Well, if that improves the ecosystem, wouldn't you want to do that?
SPEAKER_06:Well, yeah, if that was the case, and we don't think that there's not enough deer out there now in certain areas, which a lot of people hunt, those areas that Steve talked about, B zones is our bread and butter.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:I spend my whole entire life in the B zones, the last 50 years in the B zones. And Steve's got combined hunting and habitat observational skills. We've got hundred and 150, what? Over 150 years. Over 150 years.
SPEAKER_02:Sadly. Yeah, sadly. Yeah, we don't want to mention that part.
SPEAKER_06:No. But that's just us. That's a B zone. That's a B zone. Yeah. Because that's all we do. Yeah. And that's so our goal is to find out what's the problem is, identify the problem, and then address the problem. And that's not an easy fix because if we don't have good habitat, we have to have new programs that address bad decadent habitat. Because no deer ever didn't survive because they had too much good food to eat.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Nope.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. And black tails, and Steve can attest, and so can John, we have harvested blacktails upwards of over 150 to 170 pounds, and sometimes even higher.
SPEAKER_02:But yeah, there's some that are big.
SPEAKER_06:I mean, that's big, but that's in optimum feed, genetics, all those things and age.
SPEAKER_03:One of the things I was going to ask, you can't there's no baiting in in California at all. Can you drop minerals? No. Is that considered that's considered baiting?
SPEAKER_06:Because there's back in the old days, there was this bag of stuff you could get at the farm supply called Mendo Salt. I heard about it for sheep, but I heard the deer hit it too. So it had selenium and had all these minerals where they you would get rid of that pile of salt, and they were back there all the time jamming on that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:They like that mendo salt.
SPEAKER_03:The goat stuff. I've anecdotally heard from several people while doing the shows that they go and buy the goat minerals at track display. Yeah, where they when they could. Yeah. And again, Oregons can still bait and drop minerals. We can't they just pass it where we can't bait or drop minerals either. The mineral part to me is interesting that we can't do that. And it's the same reason.
SPEAKER_06:But so you can't do minerals in Oregon.
SPEAKER_03:You can do minerals and baiting in Oregon.
SPEAKER_06:Well, if if you want a lot of, I mean, this is dangerous. If you want a lot of deer to look at, you don't want to drop that mendo salt because they like it. So be careful.
SPEAKER_03:But it was interesting. So this last year, and I've been doing this to be the third year that I'd done minerals because we were able, we put out minerals January, February, into March, we start them. And so before they banned them at the end of March, I went out because I was trying to do a little scientific study to see which minerals that they would consistently hit. And years past, it was like hit or miss. They might completely ignore minerals. And it depends on the habitat. If they're getting what they need out of their regular diet, they're not going to touch them. But this year, they hit everything. And I mean, they were eating, there were troughs in the dirt because they were just eating it down. And so, but it was interesting that this year, and I wasn't sure if it had to do with La Niña or what the difference was, but I had three different types of minerals and they just devoured everything. And they had in years past, it was hit or miss. Same spots, same brands of minerals. I introduced one new brand, but completely different results than years past.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I remember I was hunting in Oregon. The only time I ever hunted there, I bought a guided hunt, and we drove around the first three days looking at alfalfa piles. I was like, Yeah, let's change this up a little bit. Because I'm a hunter.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But it was legal there. So, but I was still obsessed with antlers at the time. And had I seen the kind of bucks that they were showing me pictures of on a pile of alfalfa, I would have got a shot in the neck.
SPEAKER_03:And I don't know, and this is one of the things we've learned when we were able to bait that, and we tell guys this all the time: big bucks don't ever touch the bait. In fact, if you get a big buck to actually eat the bait, you've got him game on. He's yours.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It brings in small bucks and it brings in the doughs, but the big bucks will follow the dough. So eventually you'll get him in there. But big bucks will, and I've seen this on camera, they will just ignore apples and bait that are sitting there on the ground. They just don't care.
SPEAKER_06:That's why we call them the ghost.
SPEAKER_02:One time down somewhere. Yeah, they wiped out Marcy's apple tree.
SPEAKER_01:They're opportunists just like everybody else.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:They they go for apples earlier in the year when the acorns come. I've got apples lying all over the ground. They're not interested. No, not at all. They are getting fat on acorns.
SPEAKER_06:There are so many acorns right now.
SPEAKER_02:And they do get fat. It's amazing how fat they get, especially the bears. Within two weeks, they gain maybe 50 pounds.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:Guaranteed. Yeah. No, they're dying.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they're walking down the road, they're throwing their front legs if they're too darn fat.
SPEAKER_03:Let's here's some stories. And if somebody is interested in California, Northern California in hunting, like maybe some advice that you would give them, you know, especially now that it's tough. But yeah, Steve, start with your story.
SPEAKER_01:Steve showed me a picture of a non-typical they got a while back. And I don't know how many on each side, I didn't count them.
SPEAKER_02:A lot.
SPEAKER_01:There were too many to count. Yeah. There were many on each side. It's a massive non-typical. And you don't see very many non-typical black tapes. I love you. You just don't.
SPEAKER_02:No, not at all.
SPEAKER_01:They're just rare. I consider that typical up there a non-typical because he has a seven-inch eye guard. That one on the left, seven-inch eye guard, and on the other side, his eye guard is a fork it horn. But that's not what Steve has. He's got something that looks like a manzanita bush on both sides.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that that deer, I knew that deer. And uh he made his own mistakes.
SPEAKER_06:They do make mistakes, huh, Steve?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, oh yeah. But some are more than others. And then because that Buck I'd seen for what, two years, maybe three. And he was a non typical when he was a baby. But he wasn't like he was when I decided he was gonna go home. He was good enough. Yeah. So how did he add just keep adding points? Yeah, yeah. But that third year was a lot different than the second year. The second year and first year were similar, but they were small. Not doing much, but after that third year, they don't come like that very often. I've been fortunate enough to hunt black tail for almost 50 years or over the 1970s when I took my first burner crockett. That was when I was headed back to Fort Benning, Georgia to go to jump school and ranger school.
SPEAKER_06:You don't even have any of those bucks entered, do you? Uh not no. Yeah. How many?
SPEAKER_01:I didn't enter.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. I've entered one only because my dad. I'm not paying money for them to put it in their book.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Sorry. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:We rest our case. Yes, exactly. But I did have the guy measure them. He measured that one.
SPEAKER_02:I too. What was his name? It was one from Potter. Oh yeah. He measured I got, I don't know, I probably got 10 or 15 of them, but he lived right there behind the golf course in Ukaya. And he had some flipping.
SPEAKER_06:Not Guy, it wasn't Guy Hooper.
SPEAKER_02:No, he was the guy who did all the.
SPEAKER_06:Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I remember. I know you're talking about.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:This has been too long.
SPEAKER_02:And then Jerry Shields took over, majoring for Bruno Crockett.
SPEAKER_00:That's right.
SPEAKER_02:And then I had everything to do SCI because I was hunting SCI people. And so I was I would score those SCI bucks. That's where I got that 172 for Dean Miller.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, I have a picture of that deer.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he's so perfectly he's the one you want to get. Everything was less than half an inch difference.
SPEAKER_06:There's another gentleman that I that you know and I know very well, who I won't mention their name. And they killed within 30 minutes as a crow flies, 172-inch black tail, and I got a picture of it here, and it looks like a white tail. Some of them do unbelievably looking.
SPEAKER_03:John and I were talking about that, how a three-point black tail will look a lot like a white tail a lot of times. But even you had some four-point on that one side that I thought that was a really kind of odd-looking small white tail that you had hanging up there. And then you showed me the other side. I was wondering about this one up here that I'm looking for.
SPEAKER_06:That's uh Willet's buck. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:That's crazy.
SPEAKER_06:172 inches. You know who that guy is. We won't just won't mention the name.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, exactly. I've seen that deer before. Let me see that.
SPEAKER_06:That deer's been mounted, and we can't get our hands on it to bring it to the show, unfortunately. There's a lot of people out there that have tremendous looking racks. Just great to look at. I mean, just you'll never get them to bring it to the show. It's not going to happen.
SPEAKER_02:Nope. That's too bad for the deer too.
SPEAKER_06:It is because it's what gets people excited. Yeah. Not just the variations that you find. I mean, that just looks like a white tail.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a white tail.
SPEAKER_03:If he got it a few years ago, it gives stretched out black tail. Newer hunters that hope that they're still out there.
SPEAKER_06:That's the whole reason we're doing what we're doing is because we want to inspire people to get back into this. Yeah. Get back into the heritage that we have. I mean, I grew up following my dad getting slapped from being on his heels too close, and then my uncle getting me lost, them coming back to the cabin and fighting each other. You know, just that's good times right there.
SPEAKER_01:And just a little point on the hunting. It's hard to pass up a decent four-pointer.
SPEAKER_02:It really is.
SPEAKER_01:It is. But you have to pass them up to get to the real book.
SPEAKER_02:To get to that deer to be in a real deer.
SPEAKER_01:What you're really looking for, or you want to come back three years later and look for that same buck.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. Because you know what?
SPEAKER_01:He's going to be there unless somebody killed him.
SPEAKER_02:And he will be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's what they are, black tails. From where they die or where they were born, you take a ruler and go half a mile out, and then you circle that, and that's where he lives. All of them. They also have these little things that go like this. And when you get in there, they go right out the door. They get don't get very far. And they'll let you cool up and then they'll go right back to where they were.
SPEAKER_03:I found that. And I showed John the picture. I'll show it after we're all done here. But a little palmated three-point one and a half year old. And I've been watching next year. He's four and a half. And so next year he gets hunted. And that has been the coolest thing for me as a blacktail hunter now. I know that they'll be there in three, four years or five years, their whole life. Yeah. It's just cool. Knowing that they'll be still be out there. You can still chase them.
SPEAKER_06:That's exactly my dad was 80, he passed away in 2016, and I got him for his birthday. I got the buck that he killed on the ranch that Steve managed before Steve got 1974. Were you on the ranch then?
SPEAKER_02:74? No.
SPEAKER_06:Okay, so my dad was on this ranch in 74. And every time we get together, he'd tell a story. He's driving down in this Willie's Jeep. They're on this ridge. I won't say where. And they went past this. They used to hang out in these willow patches. You could go to a willow patch and at least get something to come out of there. And so they were driving the Jeep, and then all of a sudden he heard this cloppity clop and he turned around and looked, and this big buck ran behind him and he was going mock two over the hill. So my dad gets out, he's running. And he gets out with his 270 Husqavara. And then he sees one shot, touch it, he gets down on the stump and touches it off, and the deer tumbles. And so he's like, Yeah, I got it. You know, so they go down the hill and they're looking and looking and looking. They saw where he stumbled. And uh he gets down way down there. They're looking for this buck. They don't find him. And they found six hairs and a drop of blood on a rock. He had to tell me six hairs. You know, so he goes down the hill and they lose him, they're just sick because this buck was a really, really big one. And so the next day they bring up another gentleman that we know, his dog.
SPEAKER_02:That's what you need. If you had TJ, you're never watching it.
SPEAKER_06:So they go down the hill, and if you ever heard a terrier bay, you know, it sounds like uh somebody getting killed. So they get down into the creek, and that buck, my dad shot his back leg off. Oh. It just that's where the bullet went through his back leg and busted it off. So he was on three legs, one one rear leg, and he crawled up under a root wad in the creek and he was laying in it. That dog found him. Oh, yeah. And that was 143-inch black tail, which is you know, respect. That's a great deal. If you kill a 140-inch deer in your lifetime, you're a big deal. And I still, to this day, have not beaten him.
SPEAKER_02:There you go.
SPEAKER_06:And I entered that on his birthday. That's the present I gave for him. I gave him the entry into the book.
SPEAKER_02:They used to have bullo dead and upper leg dead for the biggest deer, heaviest deer.
SPEAKER_06:That's right. We used to have buck contests all the way up here.
SPEAKER_02:I won seven years in a row.
SPEAKER_06:I could see that.
SPEAKER_03:We actually looked into that in Washington to do, because they have a called hunt wars, and where you have teams and you go out hunting and you can win prizes and all that. It was it's actually illegal to do a hunt in Washington based off of like raffles or games or prizes. Like just the biggest buck, yeah. And you win a prize. Yeah, yeah. You can't do you can't do stuff.
SPEAKER_02:You can't do it here either. In the day in Upper Lake, it was for the heaviest year. And uh, it was the widest spread of horns.
SPEAKER_06:I love it. We had so much fun back then, it was enjoyable and we had the kids, you know. I mean, it just was a much different day. I want to re-establish that.
SPEAKER_01:So with your yeah, with your dad's story, they stuck with it. They went back.
SPEAKER_06:They went back, yeah, and that they brought the dog, a good dog.
SPEAKER_01:I've done that twice. This year, I'm 75 years old, so it takes a lot to stick with one. You want to just go home and go to bed after a long day of money. So I shot a buck. I thought I made a pretty good shot on him. I tracked him. It was a rainy day. I knew it was gonna rain again. I tracked him for three hours down a hill, probably three-quarters of a mile, very hard to track. I got to a place where there was he would have to cross a jeep road, couldn't find any tracks in the mud. I crawled through the manzanita looking for him, couldn't find him. I lost his trail right in the last little meadow above the road. I called my wife, I said, You I've got to have my dog. I can't find his deer. So she dutifully drove him halfway. I met her, I came, I had to hike a mile out to get to my truck, drove down, met her halfway from Willetz to Hearst. Priorities. Took the dog back up, he threw up in my truck because he always that's why I don't take him, because he always throws him up in the got him out there, drove down the Jeep Road, and then I'm 50 feet from where I lost the trail. Took him up to the spot, sniffed the blood, took off up the hill, he's gone 10 minutes, came back, and I said, Now find a buck. You went, he went, he tracked the cold trail. I said, now find a buck. He looks at me, he looked down the hill, he went 35 feet around a manzanita, and there was a buck lying in the manzanita. I was 15 feet from that deer, standing on the road, looking in the manzanita, and I could not see him. I was that close, and I and it cost me all that time. It ended up being a 14-hour day. But that's okay. That dog found it, and I was proud of myself for sticking with it.
SPEAKER_02:That's TJ went everywhere with me until he got too old, but he never lost a deer at all the time we did it. Yeah, I had lots of hunters that they hunt five days a year. Some of them shoot their weapons, some of them don't. And you've got to go on what they tell you. And there's been more times now I've been to admit that different people have told me they could have done this or that, and then it comes dive down to it. Something's happened, and that's not the case. Some of them cav don't even have to put the bullets in their guns. Some of them shoot holes through the windshields in the Jeep.
SPEAKER_06:Or through the floorboards. Yeah, yeah. A lot of stories out there about stuff.
SPEAKER_02:That's that one guy.
SPEAKER_06:I had a buck one time. Well, he wasn't a great buck, but I was over my antler obsession.
SPEAKER_02:Not really, but I mean I will be over one of these days.
SPEAKER_06:I don't know. I see this buck, it's two weeks before the season starts, and he's laying in this river. He's laying in the river. And I figured, oh man, I'll get him. I'll come on the other side of the river from probab if the wind's right, and I'll creep up on him and get him. Because I couldn't shoot him from where I was at. So we come back two weeks later, and I'm on the other side of the river now. Same time of day, same weather. And here comes this little buck out of the willows, crosses the river in front of me. And I'm like, that's exactly what I seen last time. There was like three of them laying there. Now the next one comes. They're oblivious, they're not even looking. And he walks across the river, and he's a little bit bigger one. And I thought, that big one's right here. He's gotta be here. And I'm waiting 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 25 minutes, half an hour, 40 minutes, and I'm just fixed on this bush. I'm waiting, and I see a nose. And I go, Oh, guess who? Sure enough, he comes out and he looks down and he's just looking back and forth. I'm like, that's just that you get a mature deer. Well, he made a mistake. He got out in the middle of the river, and I dumped him in the middle of the river. And I made the mistake of gutting that deer, because I had to swim with that deer for about a half a mile to get through this canyon was just so knifey and rocky that I literally had to paddle with my gun on and I and my had to paddle down the river, and I shouldn't have got gutted him because when I got him down to where I needed to get him, he was full of sand. He probably done that.
SPEAKER_01:You should have gutted him though. Yeah. You don't gut him right away.
SPEAKER_06:You're well, I mean, I could have I could have taken me a couple of minutes, he would have been all a little bit more buoyant, but no, I haven't. Let him sit for a day. Oh, I don't know about that. So don't do that.
SPEAKER_02:Have a big diamond on it.
SPEAKER_03:Paul, why don't you tell us if somebody's interested in hearing more about MCBA, about your work, how they can find that information.
SPEAKER_06:So you just go online, mcba dear.com. That's our website. So they can go there and look at a bunch of different things there. And we're like building that new, we've got some new social media people that are really gonna do a lot better with that. So mcbadeer.com, they can find out how to get a hold of all of us, and we're available 24-7. They can get on if they want to send an email, mendodeer at yahoo.com, m-e-n-d-o-d-e-e-r at yahoo.com, and then our phone number is in there. And then if they want to talk, all of our Steve's on our board, John's close with us, they can reach if they have questions or anything they want to know, learn, or get consultations or anything like that. They can reach these guys every day. So we're available.
SPEAKER_03:Well, thanks for coming on, all of you guys. Appreciate it. Our listeners, I'm sure, will appreciate the stories and everything. And to all of our listeners, we will talk to you next week.
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