Pheasant Hunting, Long Tailed Roosters, 16 Gauges and Double Barreled Shotguns

We sit down with Brad Trumbo and Troy Rodakowski to talk pheasant hunting, double barreled shotguns, trophy roosters, how to keep your dog from picking up burrs, reloading for the 16 gauge and planting forage blends for wildlife. To reach Troy Rodakowski email troyoutdoors@hotmail.com To find Brad Trumbo, visit https://bradtrumbo.com/

If you want to support free speech and good hunting content on the Information Superhighway, look for our coffee and books and wildlife forage blends at https://www.garylewisoutdoors.com/Shop/

This episode is sponsored by West Coast Floats, of Philomath, Oregon, made in the USA since 1982 for steelhead and salmon fishermen. Visit https://westcoastfloats.com/

Our TV sponsors include: Nosler, Camp Chef, Warne Scope Mounts, Carson, Pro-Cure Bait Scents, The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, Madras Ford, Bailey Seed and Smartz.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And now, here's Gary Lewis. Next, next on Fox. But I understood him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

In fact, I think he's better than he's ever been. Intellectually, um, analytically.

SPEAKER_02 0:57

Really steep, grassy, you know, river corridor stuff. Um, the the corridor itself was really thick, had plenty of birds in it, but the uh the pheasant are all smart and they roll out of that really fast and go up into the high stuff. And so um making a swing back on the top of the property with uh with my youngest dog, we ended up pinching a rooster up in uh like this great big bowl. And he sat close enough that it was it was good a good shot when he got up. So that was really exciting. Was that in Sagebrush then or what? No, actually, that was just a bunch of invasive common ryegrass. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Okay. But um they he got up out of out of the valley then probably when you guys started pushing, and then he thought he was gonna be safe up there because nobody swings through up there. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

There was there were there were at least 30, 30 pheasants that day. And I had I had shots at enough to put a limit in the bag, and but I just don't do so hot with pheasant, you know. This bird though was the closest bird. It sat long enough, and I was walking right up the bottom of this canyon, and my dog was about 20 yards up the right side of it and uh was just like paralleling me. And when she went on point the first time, I was like, okay, I know the bird's not here, but it's gonna be close. And ended up, I think he got up in front of her probably 15 or 20 feet um the last time that she went on point. So I didn't even have to bother to try to flush. You know, those wild birds late in the season are not gonna sit around. Fortunately, he stayed just long enough.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Oh, that's fun. All right. Well, we're we are recording. We've been rolling here. It's Brad Trumbo. Brad's from Washington. It's Troy Rodokowski. Thanks, guys, for being um willing to come on the podcast today. One of the things that we got we have in common, among many things, is we're all outdoor writers. And Brad, I wanted to ask you, what year did you publish your first article in a magazine or a newspaper? How did that happen?

SPEAKER_02 3:05

That was uh that was a great one. The first one was in 2017. I actually wrote it in 2016. It went to pointing dog journal, and I just don't know whim I got it into the subscriber forum, you know, because that was my first even dipping my toe in the water, so didn't know how that was going to work. Um, they they put it in the subscriber forum. It was a story about my middle dog who had was born with severe hip dysplasia. And so I wanted to tell a little bit about her and about our experience with that breeder uh and wove that into a pheasant hunting story where we got her first wild rooster, and that was in the snow in late season. Uh, and and so that actually the response I got from the the Upland bird community uh in regard to that article itself kickstarted my uh writing career. I knew I wanted to continue doing it.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Oh, that's cool, Brad. That's cool. I know you've you've probably told that story before, but it's fun to hear it that way. My first article I published in 1995, and that was about archery hunting and teaching a neighbor girl to shoot a bow and arrow, and and that was published in American Bow Hunter. And then from then I wrote about a fly rod, a custom fly rod that my friend Ryan Iker built for me. And then the newspaper editor contacted me after they published it and said, So, you know, we got lots of people who can write fishing articles. You know, do you do you do hunting stories? I said, Oh yeah, that's what I do. Nice. So that started 29 years newspaper column. Um Troy, what what year did you get your first article published?

SPEAKER_03 4:57

Oh, I think it was around 2010, and I'd been trying to get mm, I'd always wanted to write for outdoor magazines, and you know, I kept sending stories in and you know I love turkey hunting, and so I was trying to get somebody to publish a turkey story and and finally I had an editor say, Well, I don't I realize you want to hunt turkey hunting stories or write turkey hunting stories, but can you do the black tail story?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

And I said, Well, yeah, I I hunt black tails all the time, so my first story was something I didn't expect to have to write about, but I sure enjoyed writing about it, and ever since then it took off from there and it's kind of snowballed, so we're all members of the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association, and we have held various offices with the organization. We're looking forward to a conference coming up in the first weekend in May, and so I only bring that up on this episode just because it's it's a thing that people can get into. You know, if you're listening to this and you've always wanted to write and tell your stories, you can come to the conference too and join the Northwest Outdoor Writers Association and then hang out with people who make their living as writers, and then learn what it takes to make it. So, anyway, just that little little tidbit there. One of the things that I found myself doing a lot last year was pheasant hunting, pheasants and chucker and quail. And I think it's because I knew that it was gonna be a rough year for deer and elk, uh for deer and elk hunting in Oregon. And I had a trip planned to Missouri already for whitetails, so I just really committed with with a new dog who'd come to adulthood last fall. I just wanted to make sure that she had a lot of opportunities to have birds in front of her. And so, you know, writing everything down in a journal, it's really fun to go back there and and be satisfied that you know I did a bird season well, you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Yeah, that I really appreciate the journaling aspect, and and I've kind of started looking back on some of those years myself, partially because it seems like I put an awful lot of time in Miles End for very few pheasant each year because they're just such hard birds to hunt out here uh with this terrain and whatnot. But I also have found that I've shot a lot more wild birds than I than I remember just by reading the entries and actually finding capes and feathers that I've stashed around you know the place here. So it's really neat to see what dogs have done what and where back in the day.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Mm-hmm. Troy, do you have a rooster that stuck out from the last season that you you and Porter had to work pretty hard on and you accomplished it?

SPEAKER_03 8:17

Yeah, there's always that one bird that sticks in your mind, and you'd usually have one or two or a handful every year that you'll not ever forget. And yeah, we had one that would he just that rooster kept running and running, and Porter go on point, and that bird just kept running and running, and he knew. I mean, these roosters are smart, and especially late in the season, they know, and we finally came up to this big brush, brushy area, blackberry brambles, and he locked in, and I was like, There's no way that bird ran through those things. So I went stomping in there and he held pretty tight, but he got up, shot him, of course, and he went down, and he went down right in the blackberries. And I kid you not, I was like, We're never gonna get that bird. He's dead in the middle of the blackberries. And Porter, you know, he's gonna be turning 11 this spring, so he's up an age, and you know, I told him I said, Dead bird, and kept hollering at him, and he dove into those berries, and I I've never seen a dog that hungry for a bird. He dove into those berries and he was in there for literally five minutes, and dad was with me, and I said, I can hear that bird in there flapping around. And I said, I think he's got him because you could hear the bird's wings flap differently all of a sudden, and all of a sudden, boom, he busts out of these berries, and he's got that bird in his mouth, and it was a really nice, beautiful rooster, and I was so proud of him, and you know, he got all scratched up and tore up, but he he was bound and determined to get that bird, so I was a real proud papa.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

So my dog Lizel, she would stop after making a retrieve like that. She would stop and come and look at me, you know, and stand there and she would chatter at me like she was trying to tell me how proud she was that she was able to get that bird. And and those moments, I the first time it happened, I thought, well, that's cute. And then then I began to see that there were special roosters and the the ones that she worked really, really hard for, where the intensity was really ratcheted up, she would come and just tell me about it. And man, if none, I don't have any of those things on camera. None of those moments on camera, even though there was a camera there for some of them. For they just for some reason they just don't show up.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

But yeah, that's that that's the unfortunate same same. You don't have them. You don't there may be cameras around, but for some reason you never get the really special ones, it seems like on film.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

Brad, as you look back, is there is there one rooster over you know over the number of years that sticks out for you?

SPEAKER_02 11:26

Yeah, and if I had to pick that one, it would probably be when my first bird dog was about two years old. I had permission to hunt an old homestead that had just a ton of weeds and stuff growing out the backyard into a little draw. And this dog knew nothing about bird hunting. Uh, and and we just buttered around that little place and and you know, didn't expect to find a thing, but that dog went on point almost right on top of this huge wild rooster, and it's it's the biggest rooster I've ever shot. And uh I could see the bird when she stopped on point because the bird kind of like flinched, right? She was so close. And so I was like, we're doing this, you know. I had the gun ready, rolled right in, put that bird up. She stood for the shot, dropped that bird in a wheat field, and was like, holy smokes, like all the stuff came together where the dog was intentional, I shot well, I couldn't believe it all happened.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

That's awesome. I've been there in that moment for for other people too, when I've seen those special birds that like my friend Ryan Bales, I saw it in front of his dog Royal, and I had pulled up and stopped on the outside of this little patch of this wicked patch of marshy uh teasel and um willows and many of your steps. You weren't on the ground, you were standing in the junctions of willows, and and his dog pointed a big rooster and he killed it. It was really fun to see in that moment. Well, recently I've started keeping tail feathers from hunts, and I wish I'd done this years and years ago. I have the first tail feathers from the first wild rooster that Liesel was on, and I I looked at those downstairs just now. They're 21 inches, and but um these were from uh a place in South Dakota from last year, and so these are 22 and a half inch long. So I never really measured tail feathers before, but I'm gonna do that now. And so these are the current longest ones I have, and then I've got um a couple others from a different day on that hunt, and these are 18 inches long, and then these were 17 inches from a bird from Sherman County in Oregon. So that's that's what I some trophies, you know. It we're trophy hunters, you know. Our dogs also are trophy hunters, they just can't keep them on the wall, right? But you know, when you see it in their eyes when they when they make the retreat. So, what have you been hunting with lately, Troy?

SPEAKER_03 14:18

So my favorite gun of choice for upland is my 28 gauge CZ ringneck edition. And uh obviously, depending on what you're hunting, you know, that the that'll depend on what loads you're putting in it. But uh, I love that gun. It's smooth, it feels like it's just an extension of your arm. And that's I think that's the biggest thing is you know, you want to have a gun that you're really comfortable with, and I really enjoy that gun. I've killed a lot of birds with that gun. So that's that's the one I've been using recently.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

It's a beautiful side-by-side, very graceful. And you handed it to me one time and we swapped guns while we were shooting doves, and um, I couldn't hit anything with that gun either that day. Yeah, that was some of the worst shooting of my life.

SPEAKER_03 15:14

Well, me too. I mean, we I for some reason I don't know if we drank the wrong Kool-Aid before we hunted or what, but um we couldn't hit anything that day. We killed just a handful of doves, and we probably should have killed a couple limits of doves, but that's hunting. We have those days. These are hard.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yeah. They're hard. Brad, what have you been hunting with?

SPEAKER_02 15:34

They're hard. So I never thought that I would say that an over-under is my up and gun of choice. I I grew up with side by sides and used to think I shot pretty well with them. Uh, I then I inherited a few years ago a Ruger Red Label 12 gauge over-under from a friend who passed. And I've never shot a shotgun better. And uh, I recently shot a 28-gauge red label and shot just as well. And so I don't know exactly what it is. That gun, that style must fit me better than the others, you know, because I've got other guns. I've got a weatherby over-under and whatnot, and they feel like they fit about right, but I can't hit the broadside of a barn with them. So there's something about this red label that's magical.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I've been shooting all side by sides all season, and I've been rotating through five different guns, and it's been a lot of fun. And the oldest one is what I've been loading for this week. It's a 16-gauge, I mean, I'm sorry, this one, yeah, is a 16-gauge Remington 1900 with Damascus barrels. And I've gotten rid of all my modern shotguns, and I'm only hunting with these antiques. And when I think about turkey season, I think, yeah, okay, I am I really limited myself because I've I got rid of my most accurate um, you know, wet old weather be weather be um semi-auto. But anyway, so these are some loads that we made this week. Um, some lead number sixes. You know, a number six is pretty versatile. These are resting. These are some low pressure sixes that'll work in that in that um Remington. And I've learned so much over at my friend's house, Matthew McFarland, he's got a whole laboratory of reloading equipment and everything that you could think of, he's he's already got that tool to solve it. And so then this one, these are vintage turkey loads, and so these are suitable for shooting in my vintage 16 gauges, and it is number five bismuth, and then we filtered a buffer down through the shells. It's really interesting to actually take like a leatherman and cut open shotgun shells and see how they're manufactured and and so and then to put them together, and then this one I wanted to show you guys. Uh, we haven't tried this one out yet, but we took a clear um cheatite hull, and then I put um pelletized powder over the primer. So this is 50 grains of IMR White Hot and then um one and a half cardboard uh wads, waxed cardboard wads, with an ounce, uh well, two-thirds of an ounce of shot, and then an overshot card over the top of it, and I can see it settled in here, and then put a star crimp on the front. And so this should be an interesting little load. Uh it's probably more suitable for shooting starlings than anything else. It'll be quiet, and um it'll be it'll be kind of fun to see how that thing performs. But you know, you can do it, so why not do it? Right. And so that's a kind of weird one, you know. And then we made some. I gotta show you these. These are also gonna be super cool for shooting out of my 20 gauge. These are for TV, so all brass for the um shotgun, for the old shotgun, and black powder, and so it's uh 75 grains of Go X, triple FG, and then an ounce of shot, and then an overshot card, and then glue around the top. That's how you finish these off is with wow. So I've got a dozen of those. That's for a special day.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

So, Gary, how many times can you reload a brass shell?

SPEAKER_01 20:35

That's a good question, man.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

I don't know how um you you can you can get um a lot of use out of these all brass shells. That's all I know. I don't I am not deep enough into this thing yet to know, but the pressures aren't um extreme. So I'm sure I can use I can reload those brass shells a number of times. That's really neat.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:02

And there'll be a lot of smoke coming out of those barrels both ways, too. You know, when I open up the breach, you know, that smoke will come out. So yeah, those are TV shells right there. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Yeah, that's great.

SPEAKER_00 21:15

There's there's so much science in those things. What what are you guys working on now that maybe off the bird hunting topic stories that you're that you have in development right now? What do you what do you got in development, Troy?

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Uh I just uh well, I they're all bird hunting stories for the most part. I did uh let's see, I've done a couple turkey hunting stories. I actually did a chucker hunting story. The other one, let's see, that I was doing was uh oh, I did I did do a pronghorn antelope story. But yeah, the yeah, three of the four that I've been working on are birds. So um, yeah, that's what that's what I've got in the hopper right now. Brad, do you work it on? On anything at the moment?

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Yeah, and I'm all over the map. Since I've got a couple of newspaper columns, I try to write a wide variety of anything related. And I just published one in the Waitsburg Times that was called The Sporting Life Vernacular. And I had this ridiculous idea about um my mind combining words accidentally while I'm trying to think of whatever the word is I'm looking for. And I thought about I think it's seven or eight different words that I've done that for in like in hunting and fishing. And one of them is like improvise, right? So when something screws up, let's say you lose the turret or whatever on your scope and you've you've got a half decent range on this Tritter, and you're like, well, if I hold up here about you know three inches over the back, and like you know, that kind of thing. So it's it's meant to be a comedy. Um another one that should come out this week is on uh game preserves as old bird dog insurance policies. You know, so the old dog can't hunt uh the real steep, nasty wild bird trade anymore, but you can find a flat field in a in a on a game preserve and they can toddle along and find a couple of roosters out there. Um and then it's everything else from wildflowers to old pocket knives to whatever.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Cool. Interesting. I've been working on this story since Shot Show, and it's been consuming me. This is a Colt Walker replica, um commemorative to the Lonesome Dove series. And so on the back it's engraved Woodrow F. Call, which is the Tommy Lee Jones character in Lonesome Dove, and then it is uh a replica of the gun that was issued to the Texas Rangers in the Mexican-American War in 1847. So 400 of these were delivered to the Texas Rangers in Veracruz, and this was a game changer because prior to that, your gun was either a five-shot Colt Patterson in 36 caliber, which those things had to be taken into three pieces to load them. And if you can imagine doing that on a horse, and so what they wanted was to have two of these, one on each side of the saddle in a pommel holster, because they're so big, you know, this is four and a half pounds. And if you have two of them, then they're really weighing you down if they're on your body. But if you have them on your horse, then they're right there at the saddle where you can grab them if you are dismounting, or if you have to shoot from the horse, they're they're right there. And it holds sixty grains of powder in this cylinder, you know, in one chamber will hold 60 grains of powder. And so you guys know that 60 grains of black powder is gonna burn, you know, three to four feet out of the barrel. It's a lot of powder to fill this thing with. And so they would have ruptured cylinders because they would overload them. And also what would happen is if you were in a hurry and you didn't put bear grease around the edges or pig lard, you know, around the edges here, the charge could jump from this chamber to that chamber, and you could have uh um uh uh multiple explosions at once out of the same trigger pull. So these guns they would you were prone to rupture, but they were also a game changer in the Mexican-American War, and then as um the stuff heated up with the Comanches on the southern plains, the Texas Rangers you know used these quite a bit. And it changed the nature of the fight because where they had to shoot and then reload before while the Indians had as many arrows as they could and launching an arrow, you know, once a second, you know, out of a bow, because you could shoot that shoot a bow that quickly. This was a game changer. And so I shot it at uh the range last week, and I hit a man-sized target at 128 yards on my second try. Wow. And um anyway, I've got to I've gotta shoot it again in the next couple days, but that's for rifle and handgun magazine, so that's been consuming me. I've been right reading Texas Ranger stories and Comanche stories and learning about the Lonesome Dove TV series and books.

SPEAKER_01 27:06

Yeah. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Yeah, it it's fun.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Yeah. That was that was quite the era back then. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Yeah, and that's some of the best kind of writing is when you can take history or, you know, other information and and weave that into the story that that makes whatever your subject is that much more interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah. Now, Brad, has it been difficult to find good bird hunting in your part of the world?

SPEAKER_02 27:37

Yeah. The the best bird hunting I've found has been on the nastiest habitat you can find. And most of the time it's on private land with no access, you know. But uh Walla Walla County in particular is really short on public access uh with the Washington access program. Um, and if if there's a good area, you can bet that you and 50 other people know about it. So I try to get into my good spots once early and then just leave them alone because I know somebody else is going to push them and there's no sense in beating the birds to death.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

Yeah, and sometimes you'll find a place, and I've seen this happen with Hungarian partridge. A person can shoot out a whole covey of hunts just by loving them too much. And then the next season, those birds are all gone. There's no birds there because the hawk cleaned up the last one you left, you know.

SPEAKER_02 28:33

I've seen that on a very particular piece of property. It's it's a nice grassland strip on top of a canyon with a canola field across the road. And this one hun cubby spends plenty of time on this parcel, and everybody that hunts it shoots one or two birds. And you know, you can start with a 20-plus covey on in uh in September, October when you're first in there. And by December, you might see six birds in the covey. So I don't even hunt them after after a while.

SPEAKER_00 29:01

Yeah. It just it's it's like you need to have half a dozen places that you can go to once. That's probably w our our conservation imperative, you know. And we're we're not the only ones to figure this out. People figured this out 30 years ago, 40 years ago. We just have uh, you know, we just have to carry that tradition forward. And you know, maybe nobody told me, but that's what I saw from personal experience.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yes. What about quail, Brad? Did you get into quail a lot?

SPEAKER_02 29:45

Yeah. This uh the valley quail are one of my favorites because they are so prolific. You know, any stream corridor that has blackberries or elderberry or any kind of a tangle has quail in it around here. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what like Troy was talking about dropping a bird in the blackberries. I carry hand shears in my vest because of that. And fortunately, I've got one, my youngest little dog is just crazy, and she will go right into the blackberries to either bust up quail or bring one out. She won't retrieve any other time, but she'll go into blackberries to pull a quail out.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

And you're hunting with Llewellyn Cetters, isn't that right?

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

So you've got a not only budget hunting time, you've got a budget time to pull burrs out of your dog's coat, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Yes. Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 30:34

There's a there's a piece of property that uh um I've got an agreement with a landowner with Pheasants Forever. Like we do habitat work there and it's open to sportsmen, and it's this beautiful tract in in the middle of wheat fields that has usually it has wild birds in it, and I haven't hunted it in years because the hound's tongue has gotten so bad that if I go, if I just take the dogs 100 yards into it, we have to cross through the hound's tongue to get to anything else. And it'll it's 45 minutes to an hour per dog when we're out of there, and it's just not personal.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Do you have any trouble with that, Troy, with your German short hair?

SPEAKER_03 31:09

No, honestly. I mean, from time to time he'll get some burrs in him, or you know, just a few, but it's it's only a 10 or 15 minute project if it's and it's gotta be some really nasty stuff. He's so slick. That's what's so great about a German short hair. That the cleanup on those dogs is uh a lot less than some others, and that's that's one thing that I do appreciate about having that slick haired, short-haired dog. You know, it's kind of nice, it saves some time because when let's be honest, when you get home, you got birds to clean, stuff to clean up, and then you gotta clean your dogs. That's a lot of that's a that's a process, so for sure.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

So I stopped at the big R store in Burns um back in September, and I bought a tube of this stuff called Cowboy Magic. And so it's made for horses, and one tube is like 15 bucks, and I figure I've got three enough in that tube to really coat my dog well before we go into a patch of thick cover. And so I you know, there's some places I know that she's gonna pick up a few burrs here, so I'll just give her a really good coat of this stuff, and it works.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Really?

SPEAKER_00 32:31

Sometimes I'll put a vest on the dog, but the vest um is can make them overheat unless it's a very cold day. And so I don't like to put the vest on unless I have to. And then so this cowboy magic is made, it's in the horse department at your at your hardware store, your your animal supply store, but um it it's worked pretty good. And so I'll put on rubber gloves and then just give her a big good greasy coat. And they she looks good too. She she uh looks like she's ready to go to a show, you know.

SPEAKER_02 33:07

That's great. That is pretty good stuff. I end up using it with my dogs, but I I found that with this really soft police soil up here, that if it's if it's dry and dusty, I don't want to put it on ahead of time because if the dog gets burrs and gets a bunch of dirt stuck to them, they're even harder to get out. So depending upon the day, I'll just put it on at the end of the hunt.

SPEAKER_00 33:29

That helps too. That makes sense. Do you ever put boots on your dog, Brad?

SPEAKER_02 33:34

Only if there's cactus. But I do run a chest uh like a chest plate vest. I don't know if you all have heard of the Silmar vest. That's the one I've run on my dogs from day one, and it's been a really good deal. It keeps a lot of burrs out of them. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, there's there's some vests that are lightweight that'll keep that that off. We were in South Africa and my Ph had two German short hairs that he brought on that trip, and they both had Kevlar vests on while they were running. And so this is South Africa wintertime, it's in the 60 degrees Fahrenheit temperature range, and um they got attacked by a group of baboons that day, and they came back and they had been cut up, but they'd been cut through the vest by these baboons that had attacked the dogs, and um the dogs were fine, you know, other than a couple of cuts where they got them outside of the vest, but those those baboons must have really been a surprise that they couldn't kill the dogs easy. And uh, we killed some baboons the that week. We he was so bad, we went made sure that we got some payback.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

Well, those things have really sharp teeth, right? Oh, they're terrible. They're terrible. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

We've been really fortunate not to have dog accidents around here. I've I've been with some folks who have that have had some stuff other than a few minor cuts. We have we've been good.

unknown 35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

What's gonna be happening more and more on this side of the state is we're gonna have more and more dog and wolf interactions.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

And as soon as um a pack of wolves can spot a dog that's separated from the hunters or from other dogs, they will separate it out and then try to kill it. And uh, we have wolf packs not very far away from here that a person could get into if they're hunting rough grouse. So a person really needs to be um aware of that while hunting grouse. I mean, it could happen in some chucker country that I I know of that has wolves around it and Hungarian partridges. And you know, you may have hunted an area for 20 years and you didn't realize now there's wolves in it, and and you could, you know, your dog might be 400 yards out on point on uh covia chucker when when the wolves get there.

SPEAKER_02 36:31

Yeah. Yeah. I had a buddy just show me a trail camp photo. He's just a uh his property is just a few miles out of Waitsburg up in the blues, and um a month ago or so he had a wolf on his trail camp. So they're getting closer and closer to town every day.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:49

Um it is right here in the middle of March, and we're talking bird hunting, you know, because we have to, we want to, but it's also a good time, Troy, to put a forage blend in the ground. What what are you what are you recommending if if somebody wants to attract more turkeys, more deer to a site?

SPEAKER_03 37:13

Basically, this time of year, I mean, obviously it's a great time of year to put your new seedings out, uh, just because the soil temperature is warming up. I recommend, like, you know, a nice uh annual ryegrass, uh legume, either clover or pea, and uh brassica, like a turnip or a forage kale, and uh just kind of incorporate that uh, you know, as a mix this time of year, and it'll carry with the spring rains and the warmth, uh, it'll carry through the summertime and into the fall. And then uh a lot of those plants will actually, the perennial plants will actually go through fall and into winter. Um, and then you know, in the fall you can always overseed if you need to, but that's a good, really nice high protein, high sugar content, good spring mix for people. And um now's the time to be doing it. Between now and the end of April is the time to start thinking about your food plots.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

So is that something that people can reach out to you and get some help with?

SPEAKER_03 38:16

Yep, they can reach out to me at Bailey Seed or they can find your mix on your site that's that we do, that's the Frontier Unlimited, and we can do custom mixes. Um, you know, we're not set to one mix, you know. It's uh, you know, depending on your uh your area, you know, uh we can change up the different types of seeds that are available and uh suit that are suitable for your uh your climate and and your location. So um yeah, now's the time to reach out and get it going and get things started, and it will definitely help improve habitat for your your animals, then uh probably improve your hunting too.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

A little bit can go a long ways. Once I lived in town and I had I wanted to try this just on my own property in town and then observe what happened. So we had one third of an acre, and I two went outside with a rake, and I raked up a patch of ground that was maybe 20 feet by 20 feet, maybe a little bit longer than that, put the seed in the ground, it rained, and then that summer, a big buck camped on that feed, and he just would lay down in it and eat it, and then keep the other deer that would come around, he would keep them out of it. I thought, oh, okay. This is you don't even have to do very much work to make to make a change on a small piece of property.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

No, it doesn't. I mean, that's the that's the thing that people don't really understand is you don't need an acre or two acres. You just need a little block. You know, it's it's like going out to your garden, you know. If if you if you manage a couple small little blocks, and especially over here in Western Oregon, if you're trying to attract black tails or turkeys or whatever, you might only have, you know, some small little blocks inside the wooded area where the sunlight can hit or whatever. And most of these people that get trail camera picks of nice deer and other animals, uh, if you look at a lot of these trail camera pictures, where these animals are coming, it's not that big of a spot. It's just a spot where the sunlight and the uh water can reach. And um, you know, like you said, 10 by 20. And that's really all a person really needs.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Brad, do you do you actually lease property for bird hunting? I don't. I rely on public access for just about everything. You know, okay, we're we're getting close to turkey season. Yes. And um, I'm sure you're watching the turkeys, Troy. Uh does it look like springtime where you are in the at the end of winter?

SPEAKER_03 41:01

They're they're already str it's it's so funny to watch how they change and how they've been changing because the we had a pretty mild winter anyway, but once the daylight hours start increasing and these birds, you know, and and the temperature's warm, birds start going crazy, and you can tell when their hormones are starting to flow, and they're definitely already flowing, you know, and here we are in early to mid-March, and it's uh it's it's game on already. Those the big toms, they know what time of year it is. That's right. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 41:35

Yeah, okay, Troy, Troy, how can people find you?

SPEAKER_03 41:38

Uh, you can look me up at uh Troy Outdoors at Hotmail.com, or you can search Troy Rodokowski on Facebook or at Troy Outdoors on Instagram, and uh you should be able to get a hold of me somehow.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

And what magazines have you been writing for lately?

SPEAKER_03 41:55

Uh so let's see uh Western Hunting Journal, Oregon Hunter, Northwest Sportsman, and those are the ones off the top of my head that I can think of at this point. And Brad, how can people find you?

SPEAKER_02 42:08

So I'm on Instagram at TalefeatherZuppland and at Paloose Uppland Media, and uh I've got a website, Bradtrombo.com.

SPEAKER_00 42:17

Yeah, Bradtrombo.com. And then when you say Paloose Outdoor Media, there's a lot of people in this world who've never heard the word Palouse, so we'll spell it for them. P-A-L-O-U-S-E, and and it refers to a region in Washington State of uh long expanses and a few a few hills and some bad lands, and it's a beautiful part of the world, so yeah, it's blue stuff for media. Okay, and what magazines have you been writing for?

SPEAKER_02 42:50

The last three were uh covers with the Drust Router Society, uh American Field Journal, and uh factory.com.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

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