← Legends of the Wild, A Field And Stream Production | Hunting, Fishing and the Outdoors
Legends of the Wild, A Field And Stream Production | Hunting, Fishing and the Outdoors
Episode 16 - Why Grasslands Matter for Wildlife; Native Habitat with Kyle Lybarger
01:05:29
Grasslands built wildlife abundance long before food plots, timber cuts, and fire suppression changed everything.
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This is Legends of the Wild presented by Field and Stream. Let's get into it. Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Legends of the Wild here with Field and Stream. Today I've got Kyle Lieberger on here. Lieberger. Lieberger. Lieberger.
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C
Liebarger. Yeah, livebarger.
- [01:22]
B
God. Messed it up. I just asked you to make sure I didn't get it wrong and I got it wrong. But I've got Kyle here with me and I stumbled on Kyle's stuff, like most of us through social media and he's now has giant accounts. But I was just telling him right before we started recording what I appreciated about everything he was doing. It was finally somebody who was highly intelligent, intelligent about all of the grassland stuff, could speak to it at a very high level and make it interesting for everybody to listen to. So we're going to dive into like kind of how you got into this whole thing. But just first of all, welcome to the podcast. Pumped to have you on.
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C
Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd say highly intelligent, but I, I was, I know, I know a lot of things from experience, but.
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B
Yeah, well, I mean like in your like space, in your niche, like I have been super impressed like every time I see a video pop up of you just out like on a project you're working on or in a grassland or you know, on something that you've been, or doing a fire burn or whatever, like the way you break it down for the audience, it's like a lot of times when it, especially when it comes to the world of conservation, it's a, it's a lot of, there's a lot of fear mongering. Right. And I think that's A bad way to go about it when you're trying to recruit people into the fold. And so everything I've ever seen you put out has constantly been like, hey, this isn't good, but these are the steps we can take to fix this type of stuff. So before we get too deep into it, I'm sure people have no idea what I'm talking about. Why don't you give everybody a rundown on kind of your background and what you're up to?
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C
Yeah. So. Well, I. I don't know how far back you want to go, but far back as you want to go, education wise. I graduated from Alabama A and M with a forestry degree. And at that time, this is like 2017, I had been working for the state Fish and Wildlife in Alabama as like a laborer for two or three years. And so I had a lot of experience out in the field and doing a lot of prescribed burning, both, both in our, in our forestry program and witness state. And so I was also a big hunter, always had been. And, and I wasn't really. I wasn't really into plants per se. In college I knew my trees, but I mean, it was, it wasn't until after I graduated that I really started diving into stuff because I realized, you know, hey, I've graduated, you know, from college, and I still don't know everything that's around me and, and I really, really wanted to. So I kind of took. Took the time like every, every day when I was out working. I. I started after graduation, I guess, in 2017. This probably took about a. A year for me to find a job. And I just started working as a, as a procurement forester, buying timber for a mill or for several mills in north Alabama and southern Tennessee. So I was on. I had a lot of access to a lot of different properties. Every day I was on multiple properties. And so I was. It was a little different than working on a WMA where I'm just on at one location every day. I was, you know, you kind of get used to the plants that are on that place, but when you're seeing a bunch of different stuff or different properties, you end up seeing a lot of different plants. And so when I would see something new, I'd take a photo of it and, and I'd post it. And I did. I posted on Facebook, I started doing that like a weekly thing, you know, photo downpo, the plants I had seen that week, and then a bunch of other hunters and myself who, who were, you know, big into not just food plots, but actually Managing native ecosystems. We were in Facebook groups on, you know, Facebook, like habitat managers and stuff like that. And, you know, it. I was big into food plots when I was in college. Uh, like, I learned. I learned everything I possibly could about them. And. And then I got more into managing native ecosystems. And there's just, I don't know, five or six of us guys may have got up to like eight to 10 of us at one point. We had all kind of formed a group message and we were like the. The native habitat manager guys out of the other habitat groups. And so we started our own. I think I started it in. In 2020, we started Native Habitat Managers on Facebook. And it was really just a place for. For hunters who were interested in managing their properties for wildlife, but, you know, kind of on a more natural level, like, you know, encouraging biodiversity over anything else. It was a place for those guys, but also foresters and, you know, birders or botanists, like anybody who is out there managing native ecosystems to kind of go to one spot and. And talk to a bunch of other people who are also trying to do the same thing. And so. But it really, really took off and, you know, kind of. We kind of found a community of folks. I think there's 60, 70,000 people on there now. But it's become a great resource for. For, you know, people who are starting out and, you know, want to learn how to get rid of invasives or promote certain native ecosystems. And. And then, you know, after that, I was like, I'm gonna start making. Making videos about stuff. And so it was like 20, 21. I just. As soon as things started greening up that year, I was like, I'm gonna make the. Make some videos about the first thing I see blooming this year. That's kind of. To me, that's the easiest way to learn the plants that are around you. You know, every. When you're. When you're blind to it all, everything's green. You know what I mean? Like, everything you see is just a green. A green plant. You know, like, hey, that's. That's a grass maybe. I don't know. It could be a sedge. I don't know. But like, you can usually like, tell the difference between a grass and a. And a. Enough, you know, forb. Well, when you're looking for things that are flowering, that really makes a plant stand out. And so that's kind of how I learned each week you. You go to a property, and each week there's going to be something new flowering. So there's like always, you know, I don't know, it kind of spaces it out to where you can kind of consume.
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C
You know, what's there. And so one week I'll learn a new plant because it's flowering. The next week, I'll see another plant flowering and learn it. And so I was like, I'm gonna do the same thing and, you know, in videos and start recording it this year. And so 2021, I did that. As soon as things started blooming, I just made. Started making videos about it. And it, like, it was like three videos in it. Like, I got like 10,000 views. And I was like, man, this is. This is pretty cool. I'm able to reach people who aren't. Who aren't just the folks who are interested in it, like on the native habitat managers page, you know, now, now we can reach people who never even heard about native plants, you know, or never heard about, you know, hey, there's a. You can learn more about what's, you know, outside your house, like in, you know, in the woods. Like, people just don't think about that stuff. And so it was kind of a new. I think TikTok probably did that for a lot of things. So not, not just, not just in our world, but for just about everything. There's a lot of information out there now. And so I kind of got in early. I think I was the one of the first people making native plant content on TikTok. I didn't know of anybody else doing it. And back then, it was just dancing and. And skits like Vine. You know, it was like nobody was on there to learn about plants, but it took off. And so that's kind of what we continue to do. And during all that time, I was managing a bunch of properties, coming across rare plants. Like, if I was out on a property looking at timber and I came across a rare plant, or I was driving around and saw a rare plant on the side of the road, I'd go talk to the landowner and, and ask them if I could manage it, because, you know, you know, most cases, if you just let it go, it's going to get taken over by trees or invasives. So I started managing these places and burning them and like seeing these plants not just like, not just barely surviving on the side of the road or on a property. They started like taking off and reproducing and there'd be more of them next year. And so that I kind of got hooked on that for a while, managing dozens of properties when I should have been out buying timber as a forester, but it kind of became a hobby of mine. And then the mate we started Native Habitat Project and that's kind of what we've continued to do is manage rare ecosystems and bring, you know, while it's nice because while you're doing it, I can also bring some attention to these issues and these plants and try to, you know, make them more well known to people. And so that's kind of become the goal. It's still kind of hard to describe what it is, but that's, that's what I do and try to, you know, use our platform to, to raise awareness around certain issues and promote, you know, promote what's here, what's, what should be here. And, and I, I feel like that's the, that's the correct way for us to manage the landscape is try to work with. Work with it instead of work against it.
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B
So, yeah, I think one of the cool things that I appreciated early on, I think I, I probably found you on TikTok 2021, 2022, really early on when you were started posting. And I think one of the cool things is you constantly talk about how the landscape, what the landscape looks like right now, especially like in your area is not what the landscape has always looked like and like how much it's changed in the last 100, 200 years from, you know, like now you have a lot of really big blocks of timber where there used to be these more, way more broken like grasslands and timber kind of rolling through instead of just like a solid block of one thing. And so I've appreciated that and you know, like just the education part of it and helping people understand, like it's going to be better for all things like wildlife, hunting, ecosystems, you know, runoff, like all the things. If we can go back and try to like, like you said, manage these properties to like help these native species, like revitalize. I guess. So are you, so you said you're, you're. Are you still managing a bunch of properties? Are you like, are people.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Hiring you to come in and manage these properties?
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C
That too. We've kind of Got to the point where we've got to, we prioritize the, the rare sites, the things, the places that are kind of, I don't know, like, have less common species. They may have some common species, but they have a lot of rare stuff as well. Like the places that if we don't manage them and we lose them, then they'll be gone forever. Those kind of, those are the kind of places we try to focus on. So yeah, we, we still manage properties. We do a lot of prairie installations now. We have a large team doing that across, across the country, but mostly the Southeast and Midwest right now we, we, we do large, you know, up to a hundred acres, a hundred acre prairies on different sites. Like we'll do bigger than that if we, if we do, if we need to. But we, we kind of tailor those prairies to what, you know, ecoregion they're in and what species should be there and kind of restore places back into, you know, biodiverse ecosystem. And so that's something else we, we do a lot of. But, but yeah, it's, it was interesting seeing I was out in Nebraska this year is interesting seeing that there we had to go out to a lot of different properties and their landowners are all talking about, well, this, this was wide open. Prairie went, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Now it's solid cedar tree. You know, it's like, just like that. The flip is, you know, it's, it's like the flip of a switch. It went from one ecosystem to another. And I'm like, this happened, you know, this happened 200, 150, 200 years ago in the Southeast. Oh, it's still happening. You know, if you don't mow a field or if you don't burn a field or graze a field, I mean, in two years, it's a, it's a forest. I mean, it's, it's. So that's, that's what's happened to the Southeast. A lot of those ecosystems have changed just because.
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B
Without having some form of disturbance.
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C
Yeah.
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B
To kind of bring that back.
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C
Yeah. It's not because we did something, it's because we remove something. It's. We, we took away, you know, grazing animals, large herbivores. We took away fire. And, and so it's, it was pretty drastic across the landscape. You can look at old survey records and stuff from the 1810s and, and, and those surveyors really describe the landscape and it was, it was way more open than it is now. So it's pretty crazy.
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B
Do you think it was Fire suppression that caused like the biggest change, or do you think it was fences and you know, like basically getting rid of large herbivores that were grazing the landscape?
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C
Yeah, I think it was probably. Yeah, it's probably all like, you know, it's like the, the story of the quail or any other, you know, it's like death by a million cuts. I think that's it. But. But really the most drastic probably was removal of fire. And so, I mean, they, like the early descriptions in Alabama were saying, you know, these, you know, wide open prairies, they'd called them like pastures back then, they were calling them pastures. But in 1810 it was all native grasses. There weren't introduced species here yet. So what they called a pasture was just all native grasses. And they're like, so these wide open pastures, you know, sparsely covered in trees. Like they'd. There'd be some here and there, low and gnarled due to the annual fires lit by the Native Americans. And so they were talking about yearly fires. And then, you know, I gotta find this, this statistic somewhere. But it was talking about the amount of lightning strike fires that were put out in Alabama in like 20, 22. And it was like 790 lightning strike fires that were put out. But before firefighters, like before we had fire departments, like, those fires just kind of ran their course. And so even just lightning would have burned most of the state. And now we put a stop to it with. And we have roads and everything that kind of stop things from traveling from creek to creek, from river to river, whatever.
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B
And so, and I've seen old maps like this would be out west, but similar concept where you'd have lightning strike fires. And because they were so common, you wouldn't have like a lightning strike fire that would burn a hundred thousand acres because they were consistent. You'd have a bunch of small fires. And so you'd have these break, these natural breaks of like grassland or like, you know, open meadows or whatever in between, you know, what would burn. And so it would just kind of like shift over time where you'd have like, okay, this chunk of trees would burn and then a meadow would kind of take that over and there'd be trees growing up here and but like it had like natural fire breaks built in until same thing we started doing, you know, a hundred years of fire suppression and now we've got, you know, we got one dry wear in the mountains and you get, you know.
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C
Yeah.
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B
However, there's fires that burn thousands and thousands of acres.
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C
Yeah, now there's a ton of fuel on the ground, and it's really going to go. Yeah, it's. It's crazy. I don't know, that whole story of fire suppression and. And what people think of it nowadays, it's a. I don't know. Fires, I guess people probably have always been scared of fire, but I mean, even European settlers, like, some of them were burning back, you know, over in Europe, and they were burning when they got here, and they, you know, some of them were just copying what they saw the native people doing. But now it's like most people are scared of it and. Because all you see are just the craziest examples of it, you know, like, you know, the Smokies even. Like, that's an example on the, you know, over here, east of Mississippi, where fire, you know, fuel was built up for 80 years because there was no fire. And then all it took was one dry summer and somebody dropping a match, and it just like, instead of just burning through the understory, just burned so hot it killed every. Every tree. And it's just crazy. So we just created a recipe for disaster. And, uh. And I don't know, I think the only way to fix it in the future is going to be to bring back some, you know, some of that good fire during the times of the year where there. Those fires will. Will be more manageable.
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B
But for sure. Yeah. I mean, obviously, we're going to have to expend, you know, lots of resources and money to make that happen. And it probably starts with stuff like you're doing with education about, like, what fire actually does for an ecosystem. I've never had any land of my own or stuff that I'm like, people, you know, that I can manage where I could burn it. But, man, like, I have a bunch of friends who have done this, and they're, you know, they constantly talk about fire in the spring and what that does for all, like, ground nesting birds and all the habitat. But, like, you know, it's like, hey, you know, you see somebody's story, it's like, hey, we burned this this morning. There's already turkeys scratching in there in the after. So that kind of stuff gets me fired up. So, like, at some point in my life, I'd love to get a big enough chunk of ground where I can, like, start to do those things and see those results and share. Yeah, because that's just. It's cool stuff.
- [19:23]
C
Yeah. Well, I do it on my three acres behind the house all the time. So my neighbors, I live in the county so I'm able to. But even just back there, I saw a picture the other day of my. Of a deer my dad shot. That would have been 2015, you know, and it was in behind her house. It was the first deer I've ever seen on our property. And it just happened to be a 10 point. And my dad was down at our barn filling up his. He had a, his truck around, ran on propane and he had a propane filling station and he was filling it up and I was down there talking to him. And I looked down, I was like, that, that's a deer down there. I was like, dang, I think that's a buck. So I like ran to the house and got a rifle and came down and handed it to him. And then we walked down closer to it, put a big tree, big oak tree between us and the buck, and he shot it. And it was a, it was a nice, you know, ten point. And he. The first deer we ever saw in our place. And, and looking at our field back then, it's like solid fescue. Like it's unrecognizable to what it is now. And I just saw that a couple of days ago. I was like, man, I need to do a video about that. Like seeing what that pasture looked like then with just nothing but, you know, fescue and what it looks like now. And now there's deer in our. Down there every day. Like, yeah, you know, a bunch of them and, and, and the amount of wildlife and that's using our property now versus back when it was a cow pasture is crazy. But yeah, it's, it's a. You can, you don't need, you don't have to have a ton of land. I mean, you can do it on small stuff too, if you're. As long as you're able to burn in your area and, and even small chunks make a difference. And. But that's. I don't know, that's probably the best way for people to start is start small too. That's. You get kind of built up to being able to burn large acreages and for sure and kind of get comfortable with fire and how it works.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. So what would you say? Like, I mean, you talk obviously a lot about like native plants and habitat. How did like, where did the big shift come? Where did all these invasive species like, stem from? Like, did it come over with cattle? Was it. Or what was like, what was the influx of non native species across the landscape?
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C
Well, if that's. There's a lot of ways, just about any way possible you can imagine invasives have come over that way. But I mean the most eye opening thing for me was when I was trying to buy native plants. Like I was trying to buy something native to plant at my house and every garden center, every feed store co op, like in my area, I couldn't find anything native. Every, every seed they sold, every plant they sold was non native. Like, so that's, that's where a lot of it originated from. I mean it was a lot of, a lot of, you know, what we're selling in nurseries and selling in garden centers. But, but also like, I mean even hunters, like we were planting like bicolor lespedeza for, and Ceresia lespedeza and stuff for, for quail back in the day. And, and, and like the WMA why I worked on, they planted private and autumn olive and I mean actually everything they planted, you know, is sawtooth oaks and, and Chinese chestnuts. So like their entire program for planting things on the WMA for wildlife was 100 non native. None of it was native. And so I don't know, that is crazy to think about. Like that's something I, I was real passionate about. Starting out is as. I don't, I don't want hunters to catch the blame for any of this in the future. You know, we already have and we have already have enough to fight for. We don't need, we don't need any, anything else going against us. Like another excuse for people to say hunters don't have any business being out here managing. So yeah, hopefully that's that. Those days have, you know, started coming to an end and we're promoting more natives now. But, but yeah, like Japanese stiltgrass is a common one that's taken over a lot of the Southeast and it was brought in, they use it as a packing material. The straw they use as a packing material when they brought, brought chinaware over from Asia. And so when people were ordering their china ware from Asia and they'd get home and take their plates and bowls and dishes out and throw out all the straw out in the yard and then now we have Japanese stilt grass everywhere. So it's crazy how a lot of this stuff showed up, but I think even if we just stopped intentionally or unintentionally introducing invasives now, we'd, we'd have so much to fight off for the next, you know, 100 years. I mean it'd take us. Yeah, we'd just still be constantly fighting invasives all the time. Even if we just stopped intermittent now. So, yeah, it's. It's crazy.
- [24:24]
B
It's probably, like you said, you know, about fire. It's probably going to be like starting small, kind of, you know, as many places as we can where you have, like, these small sections of ground that are recovered in native species, you know, because I don't know if you'd ever get ahead of it. It's like trying to fight hogs down south. They're reproducing so fast. The amount that you'd have to take care of every year, like, you're never going to get ahead.
- [24:48]
C
Yeah, it's. It's overwhelming a lot of times. And that, like, that Japanese stiltgrass is like, super overwhelming because it's an annual and it just creates so, so much seed. Like, just one year of it seeding out is enough to, like, I mean, enough seed to keep you busy for a decade. I mean, it's just some of them are just really overwhelming. So it's kind of hard to figure out how do I tackle this? And that's kind of. I don't know. That's kind of what, you know. Luckily, we don't have to figure that out on our own anymore. Like that group that we started on Facebook, you can get on there and type in any invasive species in that group, and then you have posts of people who've been fighting it, and you kind of can learn from other people's mistakes and things that they've had to, you know, challenges they've had and salute, you know, tips and tricks they've learned to try to get rid of a species. So that's kind of, that's one good thing nowadays is we have. We have a lot of platforms where we could really, really educate ourselves enough.
- [25:46]
B
Yeah. A collection of people who have been dealing with this stuff for a long time.
- [25:49]
C
Yeah. Because each, each invasive is. You're gonna have to tackle it a different way. Each one has their weakness that you have to figure out. And so that's, that's one plus to, to the, you know, just the world we live in these days. So.
- [26:03]
B
Yeah, I don't know if you have any of the stats off the top of your head, but it, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong too, but isn't it grasslands? Like, we're losing grasslands at, like, as far as, like, ecosystems and habitat go, it's grasslands we're losing at the highest rate across the board.
- [26:19]
C
Yeah. 100%. Like, it's out of all the ecosystems in the world. Like, the grasslands are the Most endangered. And, and I mean, we have, we have grassland ecosystems here in Alabama that are still like, undescribed. Like, we, they've never been studied by science. Like, this year I, I had, I brought botanists from Southeastern Grassland Institute to several ecosystems that were undescribed new to science. Never been, never been studied. Like, so we still, we're still finding new, you know, grassland ecosystems. So one's like this calcareous fin that's actually behind my house. Like, that's. It has federally endangered Tennessee yellow eyed grass on it. And it's a fin, is like a calcareous bog, and a bog is like more acidic. So, you know, that's what separates a bog and a fin. But, you know, those are grass and ecosystems that we know nothing about. And 35 acres of it next door to me was destroyed last year, covered in federally endangered species. And they had, they did, they did three surveys out there, three environmental surveys, and none of them caught it because, you know, I don't know if they don't know their plants or sure if they turned a blind eye to it or what, but either way, we failed. We failed that ecosystem by not catching it. You know, you know, with the, with the regulations we have now. And, and so it's like, it's. I mean, there's still huge threats to grasslands, like, every day. And so, like, what's. It's just crazy to me that we're, like, worried about the Amazon, but, like, we have the rarest ecosystems in the world here in Alabama, and we just destroy it without even a thought about it. You know, like, it's, it blows my mind. And that's where, that's where you were talking earlier about trying to educate in a positive way. That's where that becomes pretty difficult for me because it just, it's so easy to get angry. It's so easy to get angry, like, and frustrated. And you're like, you know, y' all know this is here. Like, you knew this is here before y' all even broke ground. I, I told y' all, and y' all knew it was here and it didn't. Didn't matter. Like there was, you know, they didn't care whatsoever. They still don't have. They just dozed it for no reason two years ago. Like, they're still. There's still nothing built there. They, they don't even have anybody lined up to build there. They just dozed it for no reason. And it's like, how much sense does that make, you know?
- [28:43]
B
Like, about zero.
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C
Yeah. Yeah, we're destroying places that are, like, know, the only one of their kind, like the only ecosystem of their kind, and we're destroying it, you know, so our future generations can't see it before we even know what. Know anything about it before it's ever even been studied. And that's just blows my mind. So, yeah, grasslands, that's. That's kind of why I started as a. I was a forester. That's why I started speaking up for grasslands, because they're the ecosystem that's really at need here or really in need here in the Southeast. And that's where all the rarest plants are for the most part. And that's where. That's where we can make the biggest difference. And. And none of our public lands in north Alabama really reflect that. Like, all of our public lands are heavily forested. No fire, closed canopy, lots of invasives. And so, like, the grasslands are our rarest ecosystem. They were also our dominant ecosystem back in the day. And now none of our public lands represent that. They're all forested. And if there is any opening on them, they're crop land or. Or planted in, you know, mowed or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So it's. It's kind of. That's why what got me fired up and started talking about it is I think it's the. It's the. That's where we can. That's where we need the most change.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah. You know, I think maybe that's part of the reason that I was so interested in listening to you talk about all this stuff, like, because, you know, being not from the Southeast, you know, I just kind of always assumed that it was basically just forest from the Mississippi east, you know, for the most, like, a lot more forested areas because of growing up in, like, the prairie pothole region. Like, I just live in the grasslands, you know, and so I see it here every single year. I mean, stuff getting, you know, tilled under or drained or, you know, developed or whatever. Like big swaths of land that used to be prairie grasses. And, you know, a lot of that isn't native prairie grass anymore. It's brome and all sorts of, you know, stuff that just takes over, like, all of, like. Like, you know, instead of a diverse, like, native habitat species, like you just have like a. Basically a monoculture, like, across these big swaths of land. And so, you know, kind of going into all this stuff, like raising money for the duck stamp and doing, you know, stuff like trying to protect habitat for the ducks. It's like when you started talking about having eating and having grasslands in the Southeast. I was like, oh man, it's super interesting that that is just as important in all of these places where, you know, you think of just being heavily forested, you know, and here it's, it's open as far as the eye can see.
- [31:20]
C
Yeah, well, we, we planted a lot of, A lot of like, I think Alabama is like 73% forested or something like that.
- [31:27]
B
Yeah.
- [31:28]
C
And I think. Or 70. We, we. We planted most of that in. Most of that. A lot of that's loblolly plantations. But then, you know, a lot of that was just areas that were allowed to grow up and whatever. And so it's, that's what it is now. But back in the day, it was longleaf savannas and shortleaf savannahs, you know, oak, pine, oak, hickory savannas a lot. And then like down in your ravines and your north slopes, your bottomlands, that's where you would have had your actual forest. But places where fire wouldn't have naturally wanted to burn because there was more higher moisture levels, that's where you would have had your forest. And then everything else would have been more of open savannas, woodlands, or wide open prairie. But the prairie was targeted because whenever we kind of depleted the soils in South Carolina in the early 1800s, like, you know, almost 200, 230, 250 years ago, whatever.
- [32:28]
B
Yeah.
- [32:28]
C
We were looking for more places to grow cotton. And every wide open property in Alabama that was a prairie got turned to cotton for the most part. Yeah. And so that's why a lot of these remnants I find are like on roadsides or power lines or. Or little woodland openings with a lot of rocks around, because they couldn't till over those rocks. And so they didn't. They never grew cotton on those spots.
- [32:51]
B
So those are a modern day Aldo Leopold, because in like Sand County Almanac, he talks about a, like an endangered species that was growing at the edge of a cemetery, but the only reason it was still growing was because the mower couldn't get to that very, like, corner. Yeah, it's like when you started talking about finding these rare species, like in these little pockets, it made me think of that little story in there.
- [33:13]
C
I rediscovered a species called porter's goldenrod and, and the city limits of the town I live in. And at the time it was only known from one location in Tennessee. It was an S1 G1, which is like the rarest plant ranking you can have. Like, it's the rarest plant I've ever seen. I rediscovered it in. In the city limits of my town. And it was. There's 15 plants growing in between two big oak trees where the lady couldn't get her lawnmower, in between the oak trees. And so on either side of this lot were just houses in every direction. It was like the last lot that was never built on.
- [33:47]
B
Yeah.
- [33:47]
C
And in between the two oak trees, you have a. The rarest plant in. In the state. Like, one of the rarest plants in the world growing. And she's mowing over half of them every time she mows.
- [33:58]
B
You know, it's pretty wild like that. You know, they're that resilient that as long as they're not getting chopped down, like, they're figuring out a way to survive, even if it's tiny little pocket. So what were you able to do with that? Were you able to, like, expand that at all?
- [34:12]
C
Yeah, we've been growing those and. And reintroducing those to similar sites in our area. And so that's. That's one it's growing in. Like, the Birmingham Zoo has some growing. Birmingham Botanical Gardens. And so, like, we've got other places that are kind of growing it now as well. So we'd be. We've been able to multiply those seeds out and grow other plants. And Waterworks, an outdoor education place here in my town, has a gigantic one growing right by their front door that we planted this past fall. And so now when kids go there, they can walk past and see the. One of the rarest plants in the world. So that's gonna be pretty cool.
- [34:50]
B
That's really cool.
- [34:51]
C
You know, you're talking about mowing, like, that's the biggest thing. Like, we. We oftentimes mow these plants before they're even able to. To make seed. And so that's like, I don't, like, if you're into food plots, it'd be like you grow in a food plot. I don't know. It's like you planting a dove field. And right as that seed head has started to make seeds, you're like, nope. And you come in and mow it.
- [35:18]
B
Down, chop it down.
- [35:19]
C
Yeah. And you're like, I wonder where. Where's all the wildlife? You know, like, well, you. You mowed it down before is even able to make seeds.
- [35:27]
B
Yeah.
- [35:27]
C
And. And so, like, that's. That's what really, really got me into natives is, is you look looking at a food plot, you have to plant it every year. You have to fertilize, like, you have to, like, make this spot Right. For all these plants that aren't supposed to be here to grow here. And it costs you money every year. It costs you time, and it's all for what, like, max of, I don't know, you.
- [35:58]
B
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- [36:17]
C
Probably somebody's having 10 species in their food plot mix or whatever, but like, yeah, it's hardly anything compared to what should naturally be there. And, and then you have, you have a native area next to it that has like, hundreds of species and they're all throughout. They're not just working deer in deer season. Like, they're working throughout the year. In the spring as they green up. All these species are greening up at different times. They're all becoming palatable to deer at different times. They're all creating seeds and dropping them at different times. Some of those seeds blow away. Some of them, some of them immediately drop to the ground when they're ripe. Some of them hang on to their seed heads and like, over the entire winter, when the wind blows, they slowly drop seeds or a turkey can come up to it and just eat it right off the seed head.
- [37:04]
B
Right.
- [37:04]
C
And, and you don't have to. Like, they're perennials, so they come back every year. They don't cost you money. Like, it's, it's just the way things are supposed to be. And it's not just, it's not just benefiting, you know, deer, it's benefiting quail, turkey, songbirds, pollinators, things we still don't even know. You know, there's things that, that these plants are doing that we probably don't even know they're doing. So it's like, I don't know that. To me, it's more of a shotgun, you know, approach than, you know, food plots. You, you're. We're setting, you can set this field up to, to be really, really good for your kids one day, you know, compared to setting them up to have to continue to add a soil amendments to a spot and can, you know, continue to come out there and every year and work on it. And you still can get out there and work on your property. Just, you can use fire and stuff, and there's other ways to do it.
- [37:58]
B
But yeah, I mean, honestly, it would be nice to do a little more like set it and forget it type stuff. Like once you get it going, you know, if you're, you got to burn it off every couple years or whatever the maintenance schedule would be. But to not have to, like you said, be laying down fertilizer or treatment to the soil, I mean the amount of money that you have to spend a lot of time to get, you know, something random to grow as a monoculture across that or a small mix or whatever, you know, compared to if you can get a native blend like put back on the landscape would, you know, just for the long term, like, it seemed to me like I would rather do that where I'm like, you get it going and you then you don't have to really like work on it all the time.
- [38:37]
C
Yeah, yeah. And that's what I've almost 100% switched over to doing now. And, and it's, it's, it's pretty cool to, pretty cool to see and walk around and see what, you know, there's a lot of food there available for deer and, and, and, and, and it's not like deer are hard to feed. Like. Yeah, they can survive just about anywhere. Yeah, yeah. It's, that's, if that's our goal is to feed deer, that's not a very hard goal to reach because you can, you can put them in the hoa and they're going to survive just fine. You know, so that's, I try to try to set the bar a little higher and try to make habitat that's going to be beneficial for turkey and quail or you know, other things. And, and then deer are always going to benefit from it. So.
- [39:24]
B
Yeah. Do you have any like large scale projects you've got on the horizon like that you're, you know, I said, I know you said you got like people kind of all over the country working on certain stuff, but do you have any like big acreage stuff going on down there that you guys are working on?
- [39:39]
C
Yeah, a lot of them. A lot of it's on you know, like ground that, that is like previously been like farmland or whatever. So we like, we work. So one of the things that, you know, our biggest threat I guess to, to a lot of our ecosystems now is development. And so I feel like that's, that's where we need to try to get our foot in the door and implement native ecosystems along with this development. So it's not just, you know, they don't buy, you know, a 200 acre farm isn't bought and then you know, 70 acres of it is, you know, or 100 acres of it is, is concrete and buildings and then the other hundred acres is turf grass and, and you know, whatever or stormwater retention areas that are just mowed turf grass. It can be, you know, it could be, you know, development, but also a hundred acres of ecosystem that's better than what was there before. So you know, it's not 200 acres of gone of ecosystem, it's not 200 acres gone, but it's also not 200 acres of the ecosystem that was there 200 years ago. Yeah, but it's better than, it's better than it being just a building and, and turf grass. And so that's a lot of the projects we're working on now. It's like we're, we did like 100 acre prairie in Georgia. Like we're, and, and like all across the Southeast and you know, probably eight to ten different sites like this this past year and, and moving forward. And so that's a lot of what we're trying to do is, is trying to incorporate that into some of these developments because hopefully that becomes the thing to do and, and it's easy to sell to them because they, this is, this is, it's saving them from having to bow a spot every other week. And so it's, there's some cost savings there, but also I hope that it kind of can become the standard for future development too. So.
- [41:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, I mean there's been kind of a gradual movement of people that kind of rewilding their yards, whatever. But do you think like when it comes to development, are there incentives out there for those developers to do that? Like are there programs where they get, you know, not a kickback but like, like some cost savings or tax incentives or something for them to like put native habitat back in?
- [42:11]
C
Not, I'm not that I know of yet. They're probably there, there probably is if they really tried hard, but a lot of them are doing it. You can just talk them into doing it because it's going to be cheaper than their other, other options though. Yeah, there's incentives there already.
- [42:26]
B
Yeah.
- [42:27]
C
And plus it just, it's, you know, it's, it looks good, like it looks good that they're doing this and, and not doing, you know, just doing turf grass. So it looks good for them to do this and, and I, I'm hoping that catches on. Like that's, that's what's so hard for me is like right now like trying to be positive and like, trying to. Like, it's so easy to just be mad at developers and development and all this land being lost, because there, you know, there goes our way of life of like. Like it's always the land that somebody grew up hunting on. Like, it's there, you know, with. It goes away of life. But so it's so easy to just be angry and angry and angry. But, like, if we don't get involved, if we don't step up, then it's going to be even worse. Like, it's going to just be. It's going to be a hundred percent loss for wildlife as well. And so if we do get involved, we can at least get some native ecosystem installed with it, and then maybe. Maybe that'll be less of an impact on wildlife. But then, you know, I see like, near us, we have Wheeler Wildlife Refuge, and there's kind of like a peninsula of a prairie that comes down and is surrounded by swamp. And this swamp is just full of waterfowl and whooping cranes and sandhill cranes. And. And then, you know, right through this peninsula goes that I65, goes right through it, crossing over the river. And that was put there in the 70s. But as you're. It's kind of like one of the most iconic views coming through Alabama because you. You go across the river, you see the river, and then you see all this wetland with all these. This waterfowl. And then you come up, you know, and you see all these wide open fields that used to be prairie. They're cotton fields now, but you see these wide open cotton fields. But this may. One of those cotton fields on the right side is going to be. It's 400 acres. It's going to be. There'll be 500 people living or 5,000 people living there. But also like. Also like shopping centers and stuff like that are going to be installed on this site too. And it's right next to, you know, some of the most important habitat in. In our state for waterfowl. And it's gonna. It. It will directly affect them, and there's no question about it. And. And it's. And then they're advertising that this is gonna be green space. They're gonna have green space in this community. But you look at the drawings and there is no green space. The green space are advertising. Are our public lands next to it that it borders.
- [45:05]
B
So they're claiming green space. That drawing peoples.
- [45:07]
C
Yeah. And then they're. And then they're making statements like, we're going to work with Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge. To preserve the land surrounding it. And I'm like, this land is already preserved. It was. It's been here since, like the 30s.
- [45:19]
B
The land surrounding, you know.
- [45:20]
C
What do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean you're going to preserve something that's already preserved? Like, and so it's. It's hard not to be frustrated about that. Um, so that's like. I don't know. That's something I struggle with, is how do I stand up for sites like that while also working with developers to try to do better. Because if we don't, then. Then it's going to be. Then it's going to be really bad. So. But. So I don't know. That's something. That's something I struggle with. But I think. I think the answer is, with. When it comes to that kind of stuff is we. We need some sort of system in place where we. Where we can. Where we can, I guess, address sensitive areas. And there needs to be some sort of ranking system. Like, yeah, this is cotton field. It's not. It's not a super diverse ecosystem. It used to be. It has a lot of history there.
- [46:19]
B
Because of that again, but.
- [46:22]
C
And it could be again, but it's next to a super important, you know, piece of public land. So. So how do you rank that on a scale of, like, is, should we develop it or should we not? I mean, I feel like it would be right up there with something that's, you know, the last prairie in north Alabama or something, you know, with plants that grow nowhere else in the world. Like, I don't know, there needs to be some sort of ranking system on how we utilize land and how we protect land moving forward. But that's. I don't know. We. We don't have the public land like y' all do out west. We have like, 7% of our state is public land. Where I think out of a percentage system, we're like 38 out of 50 on the amount. On the percent of public land we have in Alabama, yet we're like, one of the most biodiverse states in the country. We have some of the. We have the most freshwater diversity in the world for, for, you know, mussels and, and freshwater fish and turtles and crawdads and. And snails like. And pitcher plants or carnivorous plants. Like, we have the most diversity of all those things and we have the least amount of public land or like, some of the lowest amount of public land in the country. So it's a. It's got. That's kind of something Else I think needs to be addressed, hopefully in the future. But that's, that's always a question. How do you stay positive and how do you find that balance and create a positive message.
- [47:51]
B
Yeah.
- [47:52]
C
While all this is happening? And it's, it's. So that's something to. I don't know, because it's not. And it's not just, it's not just the ecosystem, the biodiversity like that land. You can't tell me that once they put 5,000 people here next to it that I, I'm still going to be able to take my kids over there and squirrel hunt, you know, right in somebody's backyard, like, you know, like I have since I was a kid. And so, I mean, it's going to affect hunters, I think, in the long run as well. Like, we need to be protecting our public lands that, and make sure that they stay huntable for future generations because it's going to be harder and harder to find public or private places to hunt in the Southeast. So I don't know, it should, I think it should get. Have everybody fired up. But also we, we shouldn't get our, our torches and our pitchforks. I think figure out.
- [48:41]
B
See, there's some times where you need to have, you know, torches and pitchforks. There's certain issues, certain things you gotta, you know, really rally the troops.
- [48:49]
C
But yeah, I'm all, hey, I'm always, I'm always for breaking out some fire and you know, and, and, and put, get some torches, go in. Uh, I'll be, I'll be marching along with my drip towards Raleigh. But, but, yeah, that's, but it's also. We gotta be smart about it. And I don't, I don't know how that's. I'm just making it work day by day, so hopefully.
- [49:11]
B
Well, I think the, I think, you know, for people who are, whatever, fired up about certain issues or whatever, I think the, the hard part is like, it's, it's important to have a stance on stuff like that, but it's easy for people to discount you if you go in, you know, too aggressive right off the bat. It's, you know, because all of a sudden, you know, they just shut you down without even a conversation. Like, you know, we get to sit here and talk for an hour about this stuff and, and hopefully the people listen to this can be like, I've got a chunk of land that was just like that, you know, a place that I grew up hunting or fishing or whatever. And now like, I get, you know, the cops get called If I walk through and go try to do the same thing, you know, there's a complaint, you know, somebody says it gone or whatever. And so. And protecting public lands is a major issue. Like we've seen that in the last year, you know, like, kind of across the board, like protecting it, you know. And then I think the next thing is figuring out, okay, what's that next frontier? I mean, with land prices soaring, you know, it's, it's very expensive for state agencies or federal agencies to try to purchase land to become public lands. And so, you know, kind of that next frontier is opening up private lands, you know, to public access. And our states are starting to do that. Um, but no, I think you've done a good job of trying to be positive about it all.
- [50:23]
C
Yeah. And it's getting harder for people to hang on to their private lands as well. Like, and then, then it gets sold out to, you know, private equity or whatever and you know, a bunch of investors and, and then, you know, they're, they have no feelings for that land, like, you know, somebody who's had it for couple of generations or whatever. And so they're, they'll. They'll easily sell it to some, you know, somebody to be lost forever. And so that's, I think people. And it's getting harder for people to hold onto the land, their land too, because of, you know, you know, there's so many things, timber prices and like, there's just. Everything's going against private landowners. But that's. I think if you own private land, like hold on to it. I think that's so important to hold onto it and it stays for it to stay in the land, in the hands of people who care about it and because one day, you know, money's not going to be able to buy that kind of, you know, that back and it's all going to be in the hands of, you know, investors and, and it's all going to be developed and it's. And then, you know, I don't know, everything, everything's at, at risk right now. So it's like, I don't know, we got to be smart moving forward. And I think it's going to be really important for hunters and fishermen in the future to, to. To, I don't know, have access to land and, and especially in states like mine where most of it is private.
- [51:48]
B
So without get, you know, you know, still being able to door knock and get accessed and, you know, because access is a huge hurdle anyway, and it's a shoot, man.
- [51:58]
C
Every. I I worked. When I worked as a private forester, I was knocking on doors every day, and I talked to hundreds, maybe thousands of landowners, and I think I only ever got two properties that I. That I could hunt. And. And it's not. I'm not saying it can't happen.
- [52:15]
B
It's not easy, man.
- [52:16]
C
It was. No, it is not. It is not easy anymore. And I was very. I thought. I considered myself very good at door knocking, and it was very difficult. But, yeah, hopefully. Hopefully. I don't know, it. It won't always be like that.
- [52:32]
B
But, yeah, I was just protecting that for. I mean, the biggest thing is we need to continue to hold on. You know, there's people that are against the R3 movement, people recruiting more people into the hunting and fishing fold, which doesn't make any sense to me. Why you would be against that? Because we need to have a collective voice. Like, because when an organization or, you know, like, let's say you. You have a Facebook group of 75,000, you also, you know, you have a TikTok following of X number of thousands, however many it is at this point. But that carries weight. Where you can be like, when you go lobby for something or against something, you can be like, you know, especially conservation organizations, like, they can be like, I'm here on behalf of the 250,000 members that believe this. And so we just have to continue to kind of like, recruit people that understand that protecting these things and enhancing and improving access is incredibly important for the voice of sportsmen and women across the country. Yeah.
- [53:31]
C
So, yeah, that's. It's gonna be huge. And, And. And I don't know, I've traveled around a lot this year and hunted and fished in a lot of different states. And I think. I think that's important too, is. And I'm. I'm taking my kid out out in the Midwest this next week to. To try to get on some birds. So we'll see how that goes. But I think that's so important to invest in the future generations and. And also spend our. You know, I'd rather spend money on some license fees and then other things. So it didn't call. It cost me a lot of money to hunt my grandpa's place in Oklahoma this year or this past year. Like, a lot more than I was ever willing to spend. And. But it's. I don't know. I think it's so worth it. I think. I think we. I don't know, we need to. We need to get out there and use a resource even if we don't end up, which usually in my case I don't end up actually harvesting anything or that much anyway. So it's like, but still like I'm not too sad about where that money's gonna go.
- [54:41]
B
I have no, I have no reservations when it comes to applying or buying tax because I know that money's gonna pay for biologists and pay for state agencies, they pay for improved access, all that stuff.
- [54:54]
C
I think I spent like 80 bucks in North Georgia this year to like go fly fishing one evening and like my wife sat in the car and read a book with the dog and, and I was stood out in the middle of the, this river fly fishing for three or four hours and didn't catch a single fish. But it was, it was. So yeah. Still worth it. It was still worth it. It was still. I'm gonna remember it forever not catching anything out there. So.
- [55:19]
B
But yeah, I've tried to explain know hunting and fishing licenses, you get a lot of people that complain about especially non resident license fees. Right. It's, it's expensive in certain, especially for big game, 10 and whatever. But I always look at it as, you know, it's, it's, it's above and beyond entertainment value. But if you look at it from purely entertainment value, you know, if you're willing to spend three to $500 on a good concert and you get three hours of music, like I have no qualms about spending 250 to 700 on a deer tag because I'm gonna get a week, 10 days, a whole season of entertainment value. Not to mention the good it does for my mental health, my freezer like you know, and all of the other auxiliary benefits. But from a, from an entertainment value alone like hunting and fishing licenses is just to me it's just a no brainer. Like I know the money's going to a good spot.
- [56:14]
C
Yeah.
- [56:14]
B
And I get to go out and spend time on the landscape. So it's easy. Yeah.
- [56:18]
C
For sure. I, I think I, I hunted for three days of my grandpa this year in Oklahoma on his place. And I hadn't hunted it since I was man, since probably 2015, 2016 or something like that. It'd been almost 10 years since I've been out there. Yeah. And because I couldn't afford, I couldn't afford to and I still couldn't. But also I was like, I can't afford to not go hunting with my grandpa, you know, and he's 85 and, and so those, man, it's so hard to Beat. It's just the whole, the whole. I don't know, like the whole hunting camp vibe is like, with. They're my uncles and, and, and my grandpa and we're, we like sleep in a refrigerated trailer that's, that's like got four inch thick walls. Like, you get, you get four grown men in there. We have to crack the door because it gets so hot. But it's. You can't beat it, man. It's. It's. I don't know. It's just. I never like 100 acres in Oklahoma. I mean, it's like not, it's not huge, but it's like I, if, if one day it's in our family and there's 15 people out there on 100 acres hunting, like I'm still, We're still doing it. Like, we're still doing it, it's still going to be worth it just to. Just to hang out with the family and enjoy the outdoors. And so I got to. I shot a deer out of the stand that I shot my first deer out of. It was my dad's stand off this. In Oklahoma, they like hunt the same spots every year. Like, everybody has their own shooting house or their own tree. That's where you go and that's where you always go. That's where you always go. And so my dad's stand was off the back of the hills and all the back of the mountain. And so that's where I shot my first deer sitting next to my dad. And then he shot a deer there and like, I don't know, 15 years ago and, and he passed away eight years ago now. And the first two hours of me sitting there, the biggest deer of my life walked out and it was like the best. Oh, man, it was the, the most like, special hunt ever. And then I got to drag it out with my uncle and then I got to go up to the shooting house and wake my grandpa up because he's. He just. That's all he does is sleep when he goes up there hunting him. I'm like, I'm looking up there in the shooting house and my uncle pulls up right in front of the shooting house and it's side by side. And my grandpa's still like, you know, got his hat down, he's just snoozing and he's like, you see any deer? Nope, didn't see any deer. He never does. He never sees them because he sleeps. But it was the coolest thing ever experienced that with my grandpa. And, and man, I, you Know, I would have it have been just as fun if we didn't. If I never. If I didn't shoot a deer. But for that to happen, man, it's just priceless. And, like, I just can't imagine a world where, you know, kids weren't able to be raised around you know, with or never doing that.
- [59:18]
B
I mean, that's really what it's all about, is just, you know, making sure that these experiences are available for people, you know, 100, 200, 300 years down the road.
- [59:29]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So that's. I don't know. I. I'm excited for my. My. My boy to get old enough to start, you know, doing some of that. He. I think we went this year and sat in the shooting house for 20 minutes, but that was. He threw a bunch of acorns out the window, like, just feeding the deer with acorns, like, and we sat in there for 20 minutes. He's like, I'm ready to go. And so we left. But you. You can't beat it, man. It's awesome.
- [59:53]
B
Well, you said you have a podcast coming out soon?
- [59:59]
C
Yeah, yeah, we'll be bringing back the Native Habitat podcast. We. We had it up and going for, like, a year, and then the three guys that were on it, we all had our. All of our wives had babies within, like, two months of each other.
- [60:15]
B
And so, yeah, the time gets.
- [60:16]
C
That'll kill a podcast real fast.
- [60:19]
B
Yeah.
- [60:19]
C
Yeah. So we're. We're bringing it back, and we'll be, you know, with Mossy Luke. So that'll be. It'll be fun. Those guys are great, and we're excited. It's gonna. It'll be sometime in the beginning of this year, so I'd say by March.
- [60:36]
B
It'Ll be rolling again.
- [60:39]
C
Bus. Yeah, pumping up. We already have a bunch of episodes recorded, but we'll be pumping them out by then. So we're. We're excited. We'll be talking a lot of native habitat stuff, mostly, and talking with. With hunters and fishermen, but also botanists and foresters and. And people who are. Yeah. So Native Habitat podcast that will be coming out hopefully this week, in the next few months. And so keep an eye out for it and. And I post videos. Try to post a couple videos a week. So as soon as spring gets here, that's when I'm busy posting a lot, which is coming.
- [61:11]
B
Which will be here faster. I mean, one thing I wanted to ask is somebody wants to, like, start learning, like, the plants around their property or whatever. Is there an app that's good for that. Is there? Or like, is there one that's way better than the rest?
- [61:24]
C
Oh, yeah, yeah. Inaturalist is probably the best. And I would suggest like watching a YouTube video on how to use Inaturalist before you just jump into the app because a lot of times it'll overwhelm you. But you can also get on there and just like explore and see what other people are observing around you. Yeah, and that's pretty fun too. So I use it all the time and it's. And then what happens is if you upload it and upload, you can upload the photos and the location or you can make the location obscured. Sure. Where like the public can't see it. But either way it's used for science. Like that all that, all the information you share on there, all the plants and animals and insects, mushrooms, whatever you take photos of, it all gets used through science, which is really cool. So. Yeah, and it's free app, just does a lot of good. So I use it all the time. It's a. That's. That'd be the place I'd start. And if you own property, try to make a goal of this year to inventory as many plants as you can on. On your little piece of land and, and see what all's out there. Or, or you know, go to nearby hiking trails and try to identify as much like it's a. It's. It's a fun goal to do and, and I think it's cool to be able to document some of the things that are on your property and for future generations to see. And I don't know how cool would it be to have. Buy a piece of land and somebody.
- [62:54]
B
Hand you over they found on it.
- [62:56]
C
You know, here's the 200 species we've seen on it. Yeah, like, that would always be my dream. So I think it's really cool and it's a, it's going to connect you to the outdoors in ways you, you, you never would imagine. So. And do it with your kids. Get your kids involved too.
- [63:12]
B
Well, Kyle, tell everyone where they can find you before we sign off.
- [63:15]
C
Yeah, Native habitat project on most platforms. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. So you can find, find me at any of those places.
- [63:25]
B
And, and yeah, hey, thanks again hopping on with us today and just, you know, going through all that stuff that you love to talk about. Anyway, so thanks again for hopping on.
- [63:36]
C
Yeah, anytime. We'll see you later.