The Blacktail Coach Podcast
We're here to share tips, strategies, and stories of hunting the Pacific Northwest.
Whether you're a seasoned hunter or just getting started, we'll help you turn preparation into achievement and passion into results.
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The Blacktail Coach Podcast
Inside Mendocino’s Blacktail: Habitat, Predators, And The B‑Zone Project with Guests Paul Trouette & John Wagenet
A number on a page says California holds 500,000 deer. Our boots say otherwise. We sat down with Paul Trouett and John Wagenet to map the ground truth of blacktail across Mendocino and the B‑Zones—why herds feel thinner, how habitats shifted, and what it takes to bring the Pacific Ghost back into the open.
We start with lived experience: families who learned safety by feel, close shots in thick manzanita, and the art of reading wind, seeps, and sign. From there we move to evidence. The Mendocino County Blacktail Association built a grassroots model—local dollars funding local projects—then partnered with biologists to study what really changed. The findings are blunt: decadent browse with low protein, vanishing canopy that once offered thermal cover, and heavy bear predation crushing fawn survival. Lions are present but less dense than rumor suggests, while kleptoparasitism and scattered enforcement complicate the picture. Add the fallout from years of illicit grows—poisons, pressure, and missing data—and you get decline by accumulation.
Hope looks practical, not flashy. Oak release and targeted thinning revive acorns and understory nutrition. Prescribed fire and mastication reset habitat quality. Water matters at micro-scale; hidden seeps and mud pockets support both deer and ethical ambush sites. Better bullets improve recovery. Better data reconnects policy to reality. And better access management creates small sanctuaries where a six-year-old buck can make it to seven. We share field stories, study results, and a blueprint any county can adapt: measure, fix habitat, understand predators, and keep the work local.
If blacktail hunting, conservation, and real numbers matter to you, hit play and join the effort. Subscribe, leave a review to boost the mission, and share this with a hunter or landowner who can help turn the next acre into healthy deer ground.
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Welcome back to the Blacktail Coach Podcast. Only airing this week because I'm with Paul Truett and John Wagon. And we're going to talk about California blacktail hunting. Paul, you are the founder and president of the Mondocino County Blacktail Association. And we want to talk a lot about what you're doing with that particular organization and blacktail hunting for California. So, of course, blacktail hunting, near and dear to our hearts, wherever it's at. So I'm actually really glad that we're able to come down and talk to you about California because being up in Washington, we get familiar with Washington. We're close to the border of Oregon, Washington and Oregon. Not as much information comes to us from California.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, all the habitats are different. I mean, you know, they're just different.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Different aspects of everything. And a lot of people make the mistake of lumping things into one large state. And it's impossible because we have too many ecosystems that are operating every day on different factors, mitigating factors, negative or positive. So you can't say there's this is this is what's going on. It's like a friend of mine said the word atheist. Now I want to get into that, but it's it's an absolute statement. No God. Well, you can't say there's no deer, because you don't have absolute knowledge, total knowledge. So when everybody makes statements out there about, oh, there's no deer, well, where?
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And there's a lot of that now, especially now. Where where are the deer at?
SPEAKER_05:A lot of speculation. The department right now is still saying there's 500,000 deer in the state of California.
SPEAKER_04:And it would that be all deer? And it's like, okay.
SPEAKER_05:Correct. So how do they know that? That's my that's my first question is how do you know that? Where did you collect that data? When did you collect the data? How did you collect the data? And that's how you prove that's called empirical scientific evidence. So that's what I work off of.
SPEAKER_04:And that's what you're doing. Yes. Yeah, with all of these. So why don't we talk backgrounds with hunting and especially hunting blacktail? So I actually we're over at John's house and I'm looking at some of your trophies on the wall. Incredible. Especially coming from Washington, where you know we have our it's probably like someone from Alaska who gets a sick of black tail and is thinking, wow, this thing's a monster. Yeah. And then comes down and sees ones in our area, and they're even bigger. And yeah, coming down here, it's like, okay, these look like mule deer to me.
SPEAKER_06:They do, they look like your average mule deer.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:A really nice big blacktail looks like a slightly above average mule deer, but they never get as big as those big old mule deer. Oh no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Those things are huge.
SPEAKER_04:But how did you guys get your start in hunting?
SPEAKER_05:Family ranch purchased in 1950 and change.
SPEAKER_04:And you're both local to your Northern California kind of coastal area, Mendocino County.
SPEAKER_06:Yep. To jump in here, my grandfather, well, actually his father, and then his father's father, my great-great-grandfather, they came over to Sandusky, Ohio in 1842, and they weren't there too long before they spread out and moved to Oakland. So we're longtime California since the 1860s.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. Wow.
SPEAKER_06:And my grandfather got my dad set up way back in the day in 1947 with a mill up here. So he went into mill work and then ran a mill till he retired in about 2004. But he bought a little piece of land up Sherwood Road, and it was a 2.8 acres, which he eventually expanded to a hundred acres by buying local ranch land. So we got our all us kids, there were four boys and a girl, we all got our start on this acreage. Basically, you start out hunting lizards with a bow and arrow and then work your way up. Yeah. That's it. BB guns. BB guns. Yeah, we didn't, he didn't like BB guns. And I have uh well, one a neighbor up the hill got his eye put out with a BB gun. And then when I was living, starting my family up in Brook Trails, a friend's son got a young son, like I think seven or eight, got one of his nuts shot off.
SPEAKER_05:I shot my first man at 11 years old with a pellet.
SPEAKER_06:You have to shoot a person before you know you don't shoot people. So my buddy and I, Bruce Burke. I shot myself. Well, with a small, with a small caliber.
SPEAKER_05:So we had a lot of 22 calibers, not small.
SPEAKER_06:I wasn't allowed to have a BB gun, but my friend had a BB gun. So we went out camping one day, and I had the BB gun, and I decided I'm gonna shoot him, as young boys do. So I shot him in the butt. And he made a huge scene about it. And finally it came down to okay, well, let me shoot you. If it wasn't so bad, because I was like, Oh, you're making a big deal out of it, let me shoot you. Well, I want to tell you, waiting for that trigger pull when you're facing away when expecting to get shot in the butt, not knowing what, because it was a pretty big howl from him, and then finally he pulls the trigger and he hit me in the back of the calf. And I'm telling you, I don't know if anybody out there's been bitten by a horse or a dog, but it was worse than that. It was really bad, and about a coffee cup size hematoma on the back of the leg, and it really hurt. And so from then on, I never shot anybody else.
SPEAKER_05:That's good. I wasn't that smart, I kept it going.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, you kept shooting people.
SPEAKER_04:Some kids are slow learners, you know.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:So, how'd you get your start into hunting?
SPEAKER_05:We moved from the Bay Area. We were born and raised down there shooting doves and catching stingrays and all that stuff in the San Francisco Bay. My parents' uncles and aunts had a restaurant for 65 years down there in San Francisco. And then we decided, my family decided to move up to the country. And so that's what we looked at a couple of different areas and we landed in Ukaya. And that's where it was very rural and just ranches and agriculture and all that stuff. So we began mingling with my dad's friends. They had big ranches around the county, and we would go to these private, beautiful ranches and be able to go out with his friends and stuff, and that's how we would drive in the back of the pickup trucks back then, just ride in the back of the truck with all the gear and go out to whatever ranch we were hitting and uh watch all the adults get trashed all night long. And we would lay in the back of the truck and listen to that. The deer were more plentiful back then, significantly more plentiful. So we would go out on a weekend on 250 acres and get three to five bucks every weekend.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So we just learned from my uncles and aunts and uh our my dad and uh all his friends on gun handling. You know, uh, you would get slapped in the face if you ever had that muzzle sweep somebody's face or body or anything. You would instantly get, you know, we were duck hunting one time, and I remember my dad, my brother swung to shoot these geese in a blind, and he crossed my dad's face with a barrel, and my dad beat him unmercifully.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, no, I mean not good.
SPEAKER_05:No, so I mean, you learn when you were a child that this is a tool. Yeah, this is a gun. And so back then, you know, it was uh it was just so we learned out in the field repeatedly, over and over and over, on tracking behavior of deer, areas that they've frequented, water holes, just all those things that you learn when you're out in the faith, you're learning that craft. And that's how we got started. And then it became a lot of fun was trying to go harvest the deer. You know, it was more plentiful. I was just talking to my uncle this morning and reminiscing on all the stories back in the day when he was the master black tail hunter, and that guy was amazing. He had a huge impact. One time we were at our cabin, and uh he said, You come with me. So my dad was going with my brother. So my uncle takes me up this canyon. I think I was about 10. He says, I want you to go straight up that hill right there, and I'll meet you on top over here at this area. We didn't have GPSs, we didn't have mapping programs, yeah, like we have anything. And so I take off with a white t-shirt and Levi's, because that was our official hunting gear back then. Was white t-shirts, a pair of boots, and maybe like an army belt with a little pouch for extra ammo and whatever. No water, nothing, nothing, no first aid, no little daddy snack.
SPEAKER_04:No, none of that. Yeah, none of that, no.
SPEAKER_05:So I get up to the top of the hill and I'm freaking out because I'm a little kid and I don't know. This is my first couple of times getting, I mean, going somewhere in this tall Shamise, which I'm I don't know where I'm at. So I I panicked and I came back down the hill. And he was up there, and when we got back to the camp, he was like ramroding me on why, you know, what are you doing? You were supposed to do this, and you're supposed to do that. Then the adults be in the studious and politically correct folks, they were back in the 70s. They let Red Mountain decide the fate of that argument. Red Mountain's a wine.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So they all got into it, and over, you know, so that was our life back then was just good, you know, healthy, growing up, learning in BB guns, 22s, shotguns, you know, just hunting all the time. Every waking moment, he was either riding in the back of the Jeeps in the vineyards, shooting, you know, jackrabbits, or it was these old Willie's Jeeps driving around. And you know, exactly.
SPEAKER_06:We all had the old Willie's Jeep. My dad had the old Willie's black jeep. And you get home from school, you pick up the 22 and head for the fields.
SPEAKER_05:So remember driving my bicycle down Perkin Street in Ukaya at 12 to 13 years old with my 870 Wingmaster shotgun across the handlebars, heading to the river to hunt ducks and dove downtown, riding downtown with my shotgun over the handlebars.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And nobody thought anything of it. I remember I was talking to, and I grew up in a small town, Port Orchard, Washington. And we were always out in the woods around there. And probably not quite as rural as here, but still fairly rural. But I remember telling my co-workers when I lived and worked in LA. So this one time, me and my friends, we went home and we got our hatchets, and then we went back out in the woods, and she said, Stop. Think about what you just said. You went home and got your hatchets. What kids own a hatchet? And I said, Every kid I knew, because that's where we grew up, and that's just what we did.
SPEAKER_06:That's what we did. We went home. We grabbed a rifle or we grabbed a fishing pole.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:And we were out there. And Paul talked about learning to read the sign, but you also learn how to read the deer.
SPEAKER_01:There you go.
SPEAKER_06:And I got I got one little quick story that occurred to me while he was talking about that. He kind of laid down the groundwork on looking for sign and knowing where the trails are and how they move. But I was up hunting in the mountains near here, to the east of here, and we're in the it was a place called Deep Hole, and we're in it's all thick.
SPEAKER_05:Was that Deep Hole Creek?
SPEAKER_06:Deep Hole Creek, the top of Deep Hole Creek.
SPEAKER_05:Okay.
SPEAKER_06:So it's on the north side of the mountain, and the deer come off the mountain. They move up and down, they never go down and stay down. But it was in the middle of the fall, and they were moving around and getting interested in the does. So there were three of us working through the woods, and I saw a little group of does just through the brush. I mean, it's all through the brush and through the timber. You're going to have one little window where you could do anything. So I spotted these does, and I went, well, you know, they're in the thick stuff here. They were all standing. Maybe there's a buck. So I kept looking. Sure enough, there popped up a nice buck. I couldn't tell how big, but he had plenty of antlers. So I watched him and I pulled up and I don't know what I did, but I tend to overshoot. So I think I overshot him and he took off into the thick stuff. Couldn't tell which way he went. But the does I could see, because there were several of them, they all went down the hill. So I figured the buck went in the opposite direction. So I went back, backtracked my trail, took a little wide berth on my own trail and hooked around and spotted him looking. I was looking straight into the sun. He was on a ridge, and there was a place where there'd been some brushing out for a trail as part of a logging operation at one time. So there was a little open window in all these trees with grass in it, and he was standing right in the middle of it looking back at me. And I dropped him. He was a real nice 23-inch four-point. Wow, that's a nice buck. But I had, and you can't see this because we're on a radio or being broadcast somewhere, but there's what my dad called a sun guard, which he read about when we were young hunters, and we were all required to put them on our sculpts when we got sculpts after the receiver sites. And it's just a piece of inner tube wrapped around the end of my sculpt. So when you shoot into the sun, you can just be like an inch off the sun, and you won't be blinded in your sculpt by the sun shining in. So I needed that when I got that buck.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, and if you can see, if you can see the rifle right now, it looks like a hillbilly rib. It's a hillbilly rib. But it gets the work done as John's wall can attest to.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, every one of those bucks was gotten with this Springfield 721 30 aught six.
SPEAKER_05:That's a 30-06.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:That's all I shoot.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Just model 7. Can't beat it.
SPEAKER_05:Remington model 7306.
SPEAKER_06:Except now I'm shooting those blue-tip 168 grains. I completely livered him. It wiped out two-thirds of his liver, but the bullet never left his body.
SPEAKER_05:No, they won't because they're designed to that polymer tip on the front. Yeah. Pushes that expands that lead or excuse me, copper.
SPEAKER_06:Don't even say that word.
SPEAKER_05:It used to expand the lead. The lead. See, I still get to use that because anyway. Not in California, though. Not in California. So we abide by all laws and regulations.
SPEAKER_06:Hey, you want to buy some lead ammunition.
SPEAKER_05:No, no, no copper jacketed bullets were harmed in the making of this.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Yeah. So I don't, you're giving me an understanding of that bullet because it just disappeared. It disappeared. I never even found the copper.
SPEAKER_05:You won't because it fragments. It's like a little hand grenade and it causes trauma. We call it trauma at the ER. And so the all the energy of that round never leaves the body cavity of that animal. And that's the ballistic terminal energy. It goes in, it's designed to push, that tip's designed to push back, expand that round, and it comes apart. So all the energy, yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But if you if you shoot a little bit low, as my my gun needs a little tuning up, but now I've been shooting a little bit low instead of high. So I livered the last buck that I got this year, and there was one-third of the liver was left. And that bullet took out two ribs. Generally, you're you take out one rib or you go between the ribs and you nick something. This broke two ribs.
SPEAKER_05:I quit using nozzle or partition ammo, particularly because there was a little hole in, little hole out energy all the way through out the other side. And they seal up, they would seal up. Not to say that those aren't good bullets for what they're designed to do, but I went to the ballistic tip and that stopped everything that I it wasn't always pretty.
SPEAKER_06:I'd haven't hit one in the meat, fortunately.
SPEAKER_05:I've shot a lot of bucks. And when I changed from that bullet, the partition to the ballistic tip was I had my first long-range shot. Deer was bedded, and it got up and ran off because it was not mortally wounded because of that that bullet. When I switched, nothing ever got away after that. I mean, I wouldn't say ever, but I've had really bad luck with bullets that don't expand properly.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. I experienced it last year. Yeah. Hole punched him. Yeah. So going back to gruesome here. Thinking about that track. So getting back to Mendocino County Blacktail Association. So what led you to starting that and your advocacy for black tail?
SPEAKER_05:Okay. Yeah. So I've never hunted mule deer. I've never hunted elk out of the state, except for the last couple of years. I've just been a blacktail guy my whole entire life. They just their ways are so secretive and elusive. We call them the Pacific Ghost. You guys have heard that term.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_05:I've made cartoons out of these things. I've had professional cartoonists make me cartoons based on what these animals do. For instance, they've always fascinated me because they're so smart, they don't work and play well with others. They can be patterned, don't get me wrong. But it's generally you just don't walk out and go kill a nice trophy class blacktail deer. It just doesn't happen. Watching and growing up and learning their ways reminds me of a guy named William Hurt out in Covolo. His funeral epitaph had a poem about the ways of the blacktail. And they're so mysterious. They've just always captured me. And so I've always felt that my duty when I got to the point where I actually thought that there was a decline that concerned me. Because we never had a concern. They were like rats, they were everywhere. And when that time came, it was about 1999. And I just noticed out in the old days, you could see these bucks in the summertime, two o'clock in the afternoon, laying in a bachelor group together underneath an oak tree on some of these bigger ranches, or even public lands, they were more apt to do that, probably more apt in private property because they were managed differently. Their pressure was different. But when you unleash the horde of hunters out into the forest, and a lot of people scouted back then, logging was going on back in the early days in the national forest. Timber was being harvested under the payment in lieu of taxes program to pay for school. There's a whole bunch of different things that came from that. But getting back to they just always were mysterious to me. And then when I decided that there was a what I would consider a major decline, because we weren't seeing it almost happened almost like within 1999 to 2007. Something happened. Yeah. And we just started saying, wow, where did the deer go?
SPEAKER_03:Where did they all go?
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. And that's about the time that the illicit pot growers were entering in the forest. And then it went from about 2003 all the way up to 2017, where we had this massive catastrophic scene going on out there where people were getting shot at. So I started seeing the decline about 1999 to 2000. And 2005 was that was the year I just needed to find out what's happening here. And I remember having a conversation with a buddy. Of mine named Dan Gibson, who runs who ran blacktailcountry.com, phenomenal site. Dan's just a really good dude. And we all started talking about it. And I was in my bedroom here in Willetz, and that's when it began to really get interested in why. Where'd the deer go? Where'd they go? Because it was back then, and even we still had more deer back then, but it wasn't like today. Today's even worse. So that's when it began, 2005. And that's when I actually started the concept. And then I spent about three years rubbing shoulders with all of the black-tailed deer gurus in Sacramento, who I considered gurus at the time, Craig Stours, Dave Cassidy, Eric Loft, Russ Moore, Dan Perigary. These guys cared about deer. And uh Kellogg, Jim Kellogg, was on the commission. And I just started reading everything I could get my hands on from UC Davis, from all their studies, Blacktailed Deer, The Chaparral was a really great older, older volume. A California survey of the California deer herds by Longhurst and Dasman and Tabor, all those old timers, Starker Leopold. And they wrote about deer and their science was boots on the ground, dedicated biologists in the field studying black-tailed deer in Northern California. And so once I got that understanding or that education, we began to form this organization. In 2008, it was incorporated, and that's when we began. That's when we said, hey, we're going to figure out what's going on here. And we started selling the brand of the B-zone project.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_05:And that was our brand. That's still our brand today. Local dollars, local projects. And we think that that's representing the public, you know, best interest is to. And we when we say local, I mean the B zones. Yeah. Because that's just the area. Originally we just decided to tackle Mendocino County. And the first dinner we had, we had uh over 380 people in that little community center in Willetz supporting and championing the cause. And we raised$47,000 that night, the first dinner we ever had. And we thought that that was just unbelievable. And it was all wives and kids and uncles and aunts cooking and making, you know, we we didn't even know what we were doing. But we had enough know what we were doing to get it done. And John's brother, big time. Yeah, yeah. Hal Waggon. Shout out to Hal. Hal was a major part of our board membership for a long time. John's been lending us his deer heads and his expertise. And so we just started grassroots right in that little town and decided let's get her done. And we've been doing that ever since. Our big focus is on who, what, why, where, when, and how. You can't have good blacktail management if you don't have good blacktailed data.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:And that's the lacking part of it. And we can go into that later, but that's what started our journey to bringing awareness, education, and projects to Colombian blacktail deer.
SPEAKER_06:You've expanded into the Central Valley.
SPEAKER_05:We're getting everywhere now. We're up in Eureka, we're in Lakeport, we're over in the the what would you call that?
SPEAKER_06:Well, I'd say Lake Port is Lake County, and then you then beyond.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, just this year, I've gone to every single fish and game commission on the Highway 5 from Reading all the way down and had personal opportunity to speak with them, tell them about the problem, tell them about what we're doing, solicit funding, giving them an education. And it's really important that you're with the people and you're talking to the people about the problems and solutions that we think that, you know, we think that are important to pay attention to. And our government officials have deer are not relevant to government right now. And they haven't been relevant for to government for decades.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:They're not relevant. Blacktailed deer are like the red-headed stepchild of whatever. Sorry about that.
SPEAKER_04:No, no. We've used that phrase quite a bit. It's they're the red-headed stepchild of the. Yeah, I got that from you guys. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:So they for some reason, but you can't get the grand slam of deer without harvesting a Colombian black-tailed deer.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So guess what? Mendocino County, I just checked a few months ago. They are still the top Boon and Crockett producing county in the entire blacktail range. That's a fact.
SPEAKER_06:Because blacktails know how to hide.
SPEAKER_05:Right.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Getting to that, we have a cartoon. It's on the back of one of one of our t-shirts, which I'll be happy to send out sure to anybody that wants it. It's a little scene of Shamise with three monster blacktails in the Shamise bush in the center of it, playing cards. And then on the outside is all hunters with the binoculars, and at the bottom of it says no when to hold them, no when to fold them. That's black tail.
SPEAKER_06:I have walked through a white thorn patch in the Mendocino County Forest up in the wilderness area, thrown a rock 15 feet away, and had three nice bucks explode out of the white thorn. That's how tight they stick.
SPEAKER_05:I know. I'm still looking at a scene over in your country where the same thing happened. I was fiddling around. I was in five foot tall, a manzanita, and I was just pooping around at a 3030. And my buddy Rick was on the other side of this patch. And I kept, I was talking to myself, where in the heck? This look at all this sign here. Where in the heck are and I didn't get out of my mouth. Boom, 15 feet in front of me, gets one jump, and I'm just seeing, I'm seeing boom crockets. Just slobbering boon a crocking. And he goes down again and he's out of sight. And I'm on him. He goes up one more time, and I'm on, and I, and it was he was to the left of me this time, so I'm swinging and I touch a round off, and I missed him, you know. Never seen him again. I seen him at Mach 2 later going down the creek bed about 180 yards. Well, I got a 30-30.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:We talk about that with our system two-bound rule. If they can't disappear within two bounds, they're not going to be there. Unless they're hard being stupid in the rut or they're in velvet.
SPEAKER_05:There is something I discovered, there's a weakness to them. And you probably already know this, John, but they do this almost, I wouldn't say every time, but they'll burst and then they'll turn and look back. Have you ever had them do that?
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Mule deer are really noted for that. They will take off and they will stop on the top of a ridge.
SPEAKER_05:Wherever they feel comfortable.
SPEAKER_06:Wherever they feel comfortable. But they're out there 500 yards. Yeah, right. And if you're comfortable with a 500 yard shot, fine.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But I'd say 90% of the black tails that I've gotten are under 100 yards, and probably 50% are under 50 yards.
SPEAKER_05:I would agree.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. And one buck was 25 feet lying in his bed, looking straight away with a strong wind from him to me. And so that's hunting the wind.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a really good that's actually probably the most important thing you'll ever learn.
SPEAKER_06:And I only had one target, which was the back of his head.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:But you better be be okay with a 20, 25-foot shot. Yeah, with it with horns flopping because he broke his head.
SPEAKER_05:I remember one time I was hunting on my horse over in Red Bluff on a private ranch. Came down the creek. My guide was a female named Crystal Burl, amazing guide. We're riding down, and we come to this confluence of this creek and then the Cottonwood Creek. I look down the creek in 75, not even that far. It was like 60 yards. There's this enormous buck standing there, looking away. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I get off my saddle, I grab my scoped rifle, and I'm leaning across my saddle with my scoped rifle. My horse was a marine handcock, nothing bothered him. I could shoot a bazooka off him until we got to the rodeos. And Crystal comes walking up to me and she goes, What do you got? I said, Oh man, look at that thing. I'm not shooting, right? Because I was obsessed with antlers back then. And this thing's 20, I estimated him at 26 wide.
unknown:Wow.
SPEAKER_05:25 to 26 wide.
SPEAKER_06:They always look bigger when they're looking away.
SPEAKER_05:And he's got his ears pinched back, like you're talking about. And I'm like, she goes, What are you waiting for? She's whispers and I go, I can't see what he is. She goes, shoot that. Shoot that right now. She's been on the ranch for you know 40 years. It's a 28,000-acre ranch. It's all she does. And I'm like, I can't see what he is. I'm whispering. She goes, shoot that deer. And doesn't matter, too. Like a little, actually, I did a fawn bleed. He never moved a muscle. Never did nothing but just got those ears working. And I didn't want a big symmetrical fork and arm because this buck was so symmetrical, I couldn't tell how many points he had. He was just would not move. Just stay in there. Straight away. And I eeped again and he didn't even didn't even move at all. And I had the crosshairs on the back of his neck, eeping, you know, doing my my my fawn bleep while I had his crosshair on the back of his neck. Piece of cake, chip shot. And I put my rifle away and he took off. And I never did see him. Three days later, another buddy of mine, Bruce Heitman from Red Bluff, said, Hey, we saw your buck yesterday. I said, Oh no. He goes, Yeah. I go, did you kill him? He goes, No, no, no, we didn't kill him. We killed the buddy he was running with. And I said, Oh, really? Well, how'd that go down? He said, He came out, the buck in the front came out of the flat and he was a booner.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_05:And my client drilled him. And then right after that, my buck came out. And the buck they got was 142. And the buck that came out that was my buck, because I described him to a T, was a 160-inch three by three, they estimated. Now, how do I know that? Because they have a hundred and sixty-one-inch three by three in their living room that they got from that buck from somewhere in that area or or on the ranch.
SPEAKER_06:Well, Paul, it's a good thing you didn't get him because you wanted a nice four by four.
SPEAKER_05:And you know what I ended up getting? I killed another, I killed a buck a couple of days later on the run. I shot him on the run. He was with two other bucks, and I thought his antlers were a four by four because they were tangled up together. And I waited for him to just get just enough ahead where I drilled him, and it was a forganorn. Yeah. Yeah. So I got a fork and horn for$3,800.$3,800 fork and horn. So yeah. I tried and tried and tried and tried. I was obsessed with antlers. And I I got I went on four very, very prestigious black tail ranches, and all I got was fork and horns. Or deer that I didn't, you know, it was it was really dumb. As a God teaching me a lesson about antlers.
SPEAKER_06:Oh. With a huge body. I bet. I was not shooting antler. I was shooting meat. And all these big bucks just came from experience. Not that I was necessarily hunting monster bucks.
SPEAKER_05:You're not like anybody else. You've got that thing figured out, and you know what you've got it figured out, and you spend a ton of time out there. That is the key, in my estimation, is time in the field.
SPEAKER_06:And the now we have these cameras, these trail cams. I have a small orchard out here. Set up the trail cam, and I had generally I say there are three or four bucks that I will see at night, 13 different bucks, one 23 or 24-inch high fork it horn. But just a beautiful beautiful deer. One really old guy. When the the older they get, the shorter their antlers grow, but the bigger the bases are. And you see these monster bases where the rosette is. That Paul's pointing to one of the bucks sitting up there. That has that's a seven and three-eighths around the base, not even not the rosette. Yeah. I don't know. The rosette's got to be over eight inches. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_06:That's a big heavy horned buck that I got. Good nutrition, good genetics. In the deep woods.
SPEAKER_05:And older older age, you know, you get into that six to eight year range.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah, they don't make it past nine, pretty much around here. Their teeth wear down.
SPEAKER_05:Interesting. When we did our study in Mendocino Forest, the average age of the does out there was 12. Oh wow. And we had some that were 22.
SPEAKER_04:22 years old. Bucks don't make it that long. So actually, I wanted to ask you about that. So you've already completed some studies.
SPEAKER_05:Yes. So when we initially started the organization, our goal was to do projects that were important, not just going out and doing things that didn't really have some kind of management objective. Our management objective was to find out why the deer are declining and get the answers to that and then fix it. That's that was, I mean, it's pretty basic. So when we decided the Fish and Wildlife Department or Fish and Game back then, we had conversations at 2006, 7 regarding what we can do. And they won't, and the original plan was to go to Hoplin Field Station, which was a, I think it's UC Davis, connected to UC Davis. It's a like an observation station where that's 5,000 acres. And they it's fairly wild, you know. And so they wanted to go down there. So we decided that we talked about it with uh Craig Stowers and some of the other staff there. And we wondered, what can we do? Should we go there? And my idea was no, we don't want to go there. We want to go into the public lands where it represents the public's interest and find out what's happening with the deer in the public land.
SPEAKER_03:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_05:And that and that's the one they adopted. They adopted the idea of doing that.
SPEAKER_04:So is most hunting done by hunters in California on public lands?
SPEAKER_05:Well, I don't know entirely, but I know that the B zones are mostly public land hunting. I think that'd be a fair thing to say. For A zone is different. There's a lot more private property on A zone. So that would be the only reason.
SPEAKER_04:And is it like BLM? Yeah, BLM, U.S.
SPEAKER_05:Forest Service, State Land, but mostly if it's public land in the B zones, it's going to be U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management.
SPEAKER_04:And timber company land?
SPEAKER_05:There's a lot of timber company land, yeah. And but that's all private. They will actually let people come on there. So it'll be like a Green Diamond up in the northern part of California that they allow people to hunt up there. And there's other companies that also allow people to hunt on their properties as good faith to the community.
SPEAKER_04:Okay. So but because when we talk about I don't know if Oregon is the same way, but Washington, when you say public lands, a lot of times you're talking about timberland.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And I know Warehouse are up there, you've got to have a permit to get on there.
SPEAKER_05:That's similar. So I we would consider that not public land, but you know, they do allow public access from time to time. And then you have other companies, other organizations that lease those lands and allow they make a hunting club out of it.
SPEAKER_01:You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. Sierra Pacific and I Port Blakely are a couple of larger ones up there that allow free access, but it's all gated. So you just got to watch it. Sure.
SPEAKER_05:You've got to walk in or bike in, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And when you bike in, you have to pedal bikes, not e-bikes. Some places you can use an e-bike, but I've heard that some of the upper echelon of some of these timber companies go hunting themselves, and they want those 30 mile back spots to themselves.
SPEAKER_05:There's some dignitaries in California in this area and a little south of here that get private access. And one of those individuals has the number two state, California state record blacktail.
SPEAKER_03:Oh wow.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. And I won't mention their name because they don't want to have, they probably don't want to be mentioned. But anyway, there is timberlands up here that allow their, you know, their cousins or uncles or you know, people that they're friends with or have relationships with to hunt those. So there's any number of possibilities. But in 1970, we the figure was about 700,000 licenses sold in California. 1970. I and I have all this data. You can find it on our website because I publish it. It's important for people to see the decline not only of the deer, but of the hunters.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Because we represent less than uh 1% of California population.
SPEAKER_06:Do you know the number this year?
SPEAKER_05:I don't, but it's going to be hover around 160,000 to 230,000. That's my guess. And we could look that up.
SPEAKER_04:It's like 0.5% or less. Yeah, exactly. So yeah.
SPEAKER_05:So if you want to wax eloquent on some more hunting stories, John, I'll look it up.
SPEAKER_06:There are so many.
SPEAKER_05:I know. All you got to do is pick one.
SPEAKER_06:I am writing this. This I think it's going to turn into a book right now. It's a bunch of stories strung together. But when I was just getting started, there was Timberland up here in an area called Brook Trails, which has be now become a subdivision. But when we were kids, we used to have free run of it. I think I was about 16. So I guess I was a young man, but very immature. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing, and most of my spare time. I went alone. I took our Jeep, went up into Brook Trails, got up there late. It's probably about 10:30, 11 o'clock in the morning. I was walking out an old skid trail, sun beating down. It's already about 85, 90 degrees. Hunting season here starts the second week of August. And as long as I can remember, the A season starts the second week of August, second weekend. And I just figured I'm going for a walk. I'm not going to see any deer. This is all logged over. It's thick brush, tan oak coming back from being cut, all the logs hauled out. So it's mostly madrone, tan oak, some manzanita, and various other kinds of underbrush. So I'm walking along and pretty soon Mother Nature calls. So I'm doing my business and I hear a sound down in the down in the madrone leaves, which are dry as a bone and probably six or eight inches thick. Every year the madrones lose their leaves. So I hear this little crackling down there. It's probably just a bird. So anyway, I'm starting to pull up my pants and I hear this sound again. So I listen, I listen, hear a little another little sound. So I think, shit, I better get my rifle. Might be a deer. Three pointer steps right out into the one little opening in this entire mess of brush. And I got him.
SPEAKER_01:Wow.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. So that's the black tail. He was curious. He stepped out and looked right at me.
SPEAKER_05:Another thing you don't want to do is get in. To hurry and be lazy and not be on guard because I had I was up at Sanhedrin one year with my bow.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Went down. I was done hunting. It was one o'clock in the afternoon.
SPEAKER_06:That we call that daydream hunting.
SPEAKER_05:Dumb dumb hunting. Yeah. Most of the big bucks, I did a study on this. Most of the larger mature bucks have been killed between 10 and 2 o'clock. Yeah. And at least that's just been, I don't even know if that's even legitimate, but that I've asked people, hey, what time of the day did you kill that big monster? Oh, it was 10:30 or 1 o'clock. A couple of my archery buddies. They could those deer come into their a secret that we've learned over the years, ambush hunting is to hunt over seeps. These are little tiny, I'm not talking like water holes. Yeah. These deer like mud holes. Yeah. And the big ones like to come into those secluded, nasty, out-of-the-way little depressions in the ground that have, and we would just sit in there and here they come, 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock. But they would always, almost always, come in late, sometimes, you know, quite often. So our numbers, according to AI, long-term decline in hunting licenses, with numbers falling from 1970, 760,000 licenses.
SPEAKER_06:You're right on that.
SPEAKER_05:Don't know exactly what those licenses were, deer or ducks or whatever, to 262,000 in 2021.
SPEAKER_04:So about a third of what they were. But the population, when you consider that, it's probably the population's doubled.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, that's a good question, too. What was the population?
SPEAKER_04:So it's gone from, you know, if it were 20 million, it's gone from 3.5% down to 0.5%, 0.6.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, you do the math. Yeah. I didn't pay attention in school.
SPEAKER_04:Something like that. That's a huge decline. So what did you like your initial studies? What were the what did you find out with those?
SPEAKER_05:So the first, when we did the Mendocino study, we discovered multiple mitigating factors of what we would consider the reasons for the decline at that time-space continuum, because that's all you can say. We didn't have data before that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:And we also didn't have data regarding the marijuana grows. Somewhere around 2011 to 13, there were 69 active grows in the forest that they identified that year. And they were at least five to 20,000 plantation plants. And those cover landscape, serious landscape. And they were everywhere out there. So we didn't during our study time, we didn't calculate that. We had no, we couldn't get into the forest because it was too dangerous. So when we started in 2008, we wanted to know what the population was and what were the leading factors. So things we we discovered were poor habitat. Okay. Poor habitat is bad.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Because poor habitat means you got it. It's like going to the grocery store and buying a 10, 10 month-old box of cornflakes. You're off to a bad start eating cornflakes anyway, given the fact that now it's decadent cornflakes. So there's no nutrition in old brush in old food sources that they so that's the most probably the most paramount thing. Now people will say, well, there's lots of food out there for deer. I like taking people for a walk and ask them, What is what does a deer eat? I don't know.
SPEAKER_06:Grass. That's what usually but it isn't.
SPEAKER_05:One of my favorite things to do is just take people out on a clinic and say, hey, anything around here you think deer eat? And most all of them don't really know what deer eat. They just think they eat everything out here.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:And it's not true. So if the only thing they do eat is decadent and it hasn't been burned or it hasn't been masticated or hasn't been enhanced, that means they gotta they're they gotta forage over and over and over and over to fill their room and and fill their gut so that they can process that. And if it's stuffed, it's 20, you know, 3% protein, it's not good. That means their birthing rates, their birthing weights, and everything out there is gonna cause them to have kids that are not optimum healthy kids. And they have to keep moving and moving and moving in order to fill their stomachs, and that means they're gonna be more susceptible to predation.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:Because they're on the move. Their their whole thing is secret equals life, you know, moving equals death.
SPEAKER_06:And their feed isn't in the deep woods.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_06:It's all on the margins where there are opens and where there's brush and where there are oaks. And the oaks are not dense ever. They allow sunlight in, so there is feed, and then they rely heavily in the fall on the mass crop, the acorns. This year you could walk on the acorns.
SPEAKER_05:I know, I just saw that today.
SPEAKER_06:Yeah. Very heavy.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So initial findings were habitat poor, poor body condition.
SPEAKER_04:Did you study anything about predators?
SPEAKER_05:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We we captured seven lions.
SPEAKER_04:Okay.
SPEAKER_05:And we we on camera. Yeah, no. No, we captured them.
SPEAKER_06:Oh.
SPEAKER_05:We actually captured them. We had a professional houndsman named Blue Milsap, one of the most premier guys in the field for hound lion hunting, and he was a part of our study. So, because we wanted to find out what kind of numbers do we have on everything out there? The bears were a huge problem with our fawns. We ear tagged 128 fawns, and all of them were devoured by bears, virtually all of them. In the natural sense, the fawns don't generally not all of them make it, period, anyway.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:There's a high mortality rate of fawns. I think David said 18% survival rate on fawns.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:That's in our study. So the study produced us many, many key factors of why our decline was poor habitat, low survivability with doughs. Anything under 85% survival is in decline. Anything above 85% dough survival is producing surplus. Okay. And then you have your carrying capacity, which is the habitat versus the amount of animal units that you have in there. And that can be problematic too. So we were finding that habitat, heavy, heavy bear activity and predation mortality on the fawns. And then also there's a fancy word cleptoparasitism, which is another word for a bear stealing the carcass, the deer carcass from a lion kill.
SPEAKER_03:Oh.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So that went on. And then we had normal stuff, coyotes, which wasn't really predominant. And the lions, we only found seven lions, and I want to say that was about 800 square mile study area over those five years. It was hard to find a lion. And one of the ones we found had the whole top of his nose gone. We called him Big Ugly and Big Male. He got in a fight with somebody. And then another one we called Dum Dum, he would get caught in the box trapping quite frequently. So cats have a lot of feline diseases. And if they here's the thing that really is very, I think, telling is if deer are not important to the state, then you're not going to have any lions because they eat deer. So areas where they have a hard time finding deer, will they eat alternate prey species like pigs that have been introduced in this area? Yeah, they will, but they like deer.
SPEAKER_06:Their favorite fruit is deer, and when the female is teaching its young to hunt, they get a deer a day. And they can't eat it. So it's just you might call that wanton killing, but it's part of the training. Yeah, there's a lot of training that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_05:So bear predation heavy, poor habitat, bad body condition, and low survival rate on our dose. Yeah, not healthy. And so there and then add into that poaching. We don't have any law enforcement in the Mendocino National Forest right now. And there hasn't been for a long time. Back in the 2012 to 13, we had a couple of guys that were in there during the marijuana stuff. But now you've got no tree canopy. That's thermal cover for animals to get out of the snow and the harsh sun because it gets to be 100 degrees out there.
SPEAKER_04:That's why you get some extremes down here.
SPEAKER_05:And we've got a Mediterranean climate that has no rain.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah.
SPEAKER_05:That's all bad for deer. So so those all and then add into that during 2000, about three till about 13 to 17, all of the poison marijuana out there that they were getting into and being ingested and then being shot and killed for you know for food for everybody that's out there living out there. And we didn't quantify that. I think there was a big part of that that we lost, a bigger part of the herd that we lost simultaneously all over that landscape because it was spread out all over the landscape. So we could not quantify that. So that might have been, and I say might because I can't prove it. I can prove that it happened because all the camps we went into, we would find carcasses, bear and deer carcasses all the time.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. And we talked off air about the chemicals they put on there, but that would make sense that deer would go there for yeah, green, lush, beautiful, new growth, high protein, brand new, dark green.
SPEAKER_05:What else is out there? Like nothing.
SPEAKER_03:Healthy.
SPEAKER_05:So they would make a chemical fence. And so anything in that area would die. Birds, snakes, raptors, rats, skunks, everything died. Everything would touch that stuff, and it would be dead. Bears got into ramock. I've seen them just squirting white diarrhoea out of them in the field because they got into one of those gross scenes and ate a big bucket of peanut butter-flavored anticoagulate.
unknown:Jeez.
SPEAKER_05:Yeah. So we don't even know what that did. And are we still in recovery from that period? Probably. But so all those negative factors, but the ones that we can fix, that's the ones we're looking at right now. We can't fix, we can't make new trees that have canopy density of 140 basal density. We can't create that overnight. So those poor deer right now, they're getting ready for winter, and there's nothing out there. And they still stay in their home range. They don't leave. I mean, I won't say that they don't travel out of their normal home range, but it's usually catastrophes or necessity. Push them out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah. So I think I'm going to hold us there because and I want to get into what the new studies that you're doing and that you're working on now and everything else. But we're kind of running long on time for this episode. Why don't you tell us real quick how, if someone is in this area who's listening, or maybe on the outskirts of this area, want to just for helping out, how can they reach out to M C B A?
SPEAKER_05:They can call me personally every day. They can just look online. They can look up our website, mcba dear.com. M C B A Dear dot com. They can email us at MendoDear, M-E-N-D-O-Deer at Yahoo.com. Find our publication, find our website, our all of our contact information is there. They can find us right there and just reach out.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, good.
SPEAKER_05:And we do a lot of consulting for private pro not a lot, but we do consulting for people who have problems with one of our scientists, Cassidy, is a PLM expert. So he runs PLM product. That's private land management stuff.
SPEAKER_04:And I know that that'll actually come in handy because we actually have a listener who asked about how he could turn he bought a 22-acre parcel of land and how he could turn that into good deer habitat. And so very small. Yeah, but you can you can very small, but it you he can you can at least do something with it. Oh, absolutely.
SPEAKER_05:You could always do something with it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I had a gentleman outside here one time said he had no deer left, 1,500 acres. We showed up, took a tour of that property, and knew within minutes what the problem was. He had no food. He had fir trees. No, there's no accessible. The winter range was in Medusa head and Star Thistle, which is what winter ranges have largely been converted to now.
SPEAKER_06:You could do a woodland conversion where you take out the furs and get the oaks going again. Yeah. And sometimes the oaks are struggling here and there. And if you take out enough furs, you get them to come back as fast.
SPEAKER_05:We called that oak release, the native oaks. And we've seen them, we've done a lot of that work projects where the furs are like weeds. They take out the oaks, kill them, basically. So when you get rid of the furs around those oaks, it releases them to be able to do their thing and produce fruit.
SPEAKER_04:Okay. Well, thank you everyone for joining us. And we will talk to you again next week.
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