Ep. 670: The Secrets of Blacktail Deer

Summary

Podcast Summary: The MeatEater Podcast — Ep. 670: The Secrets of Blacktail Deer

Release Date: March 3, 2025

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Introduction to the Episode and Guests

In Episode 670 of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steven Rinella delves into the intricate world of Blacktail Deer, exploring their biology, conservation status, and the challenges they face in the wild. Joining Rinella are conservationist Jim Bates and wildlife biologist Jim Heffelfinger, both of whom bring a wealth of knowledge and firsthand experience to the discussion.

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Understanding Blacktail Deer: Biology and Genetics

Jim Bates begins by clarifying the taxonomy of Blacktail Deer, distinguishing them from their cousins, the Mule Deer. He explains, “They’re mule deer cousins” ([28:02]), emphasizing the genetic divergence that occurred during the last ice age, which led to the differentiation between Blacktail and Mule Deer populations. Bates references research by Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger, highlighting that Blacktail Deer in coastal refugia evolved separately due to geographical isolation caused by glacial movements.

Notably, Bates mentions a study by Charlotte Lindquist and her team at Buffalo, which utilized paleogenetics to confirm that ancient deer bones found in Southeast Alaska caves are indeed Blacktail Deer, containing a mix of Sitka Blacktail and Mule Deer mitochondrial DNA ([17:03]).

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Habitat and Conservation Challenges

A significant portion of the discussion centers around the impact of timber management on Blacktail Deer populations. Bates outlines how past timber practices, specifically clear-cutting and subsequent commercial thinning, have led to habitat degradation. He states, “On Prince of Wales Island, I believe the population of Sitka Blacktail is half of what it was when I got there in 1990” ([50:07]). This decline is attributed to the loss of forage due to stem exclusion, where overgrown forests limit access to food sources during harsh winters.

Bates underscores the importance of habitat restoration, advocating for a shift from old-growth logging to a young-growth management system that supports both timber production and deer conservation. He explains, “If we do the work we have right now… to make a meaningful impact on 360,000 acres of young growth…” ([86:35]).

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Hunting Techniques and Experiences

The episode also offers insights into effective hunting strategies for Blacktail Deer. Bates shares his personal experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding deer behavior and movement patterns. He recounts, “Every day I go to the woods, I try to go out and learn something... [he] kills blacktail with a muzzleloader” ([114:22]).

Bates discusses the use of traditional muzzleloaders and flintlocks, highlighting their challenges in wet Alaskan climates and the necessity of maintaining equipment to prevent moisture intrusion. He shares a memorable hunting story: “...I called for an entire hour... And when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine that round ball going clear through the target before I come out of my hold” ([136:00]).

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Impact of Predation and Population Dynamics

Predation, particularly by black bears and wolves, is another critical topic explored in the episode. Bates presents data indicating that nearly 50% of Blacktail fawns are predated within the first two weeks of life by black bears ([116:07]). He observes that predator presence can alter deer movement patterns, causing them to avoid certain areas and thereby impacting hunting success and population distribution.

Heffelfinger adds to the conversation by questioning the focus on predation, to which Bates responds, “There’s a balance between those two [habitat and predation]” ([97:17]). The hosts discuss how habitat quality can influence deer resilience against predation pressures, asserting that improved habitats can help maintain stable deer populations despite consistent predation rates.

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Conservation Efforts and the Blacktail Deer Foundation

The latter part of the episode is dedicated to conservation initiatives spearheaded by Jim Bates. He introduces the Blacktail Deer Foundation, an organization aimed at advocating for Blacktail Deer conservation through habitat restoration and research. Bates explains, “We actually have four projects in Southeast Alaska that will impact close to 2,000 acres of wildlife habitat improvements” ([94:08]).

He emphasizes the importance of targeted habitat work, stating, “We need to change to a young growth management industry... [to] improve deer habitat” ([86:33]). The Foundation seeks to collaborate with local communities, governmental agencies, and other stakeholders to implement effective conservation strategies that benefit both the deer and the broader ecosystem.

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Hunting Strategies and Tactics

Throughout the conversation, Bates shares various hunting tactics tailored to the challenging Alaskan terrain. He highlights the significance of patience and understanding deer rut cycles, advising hunters to be present during critical periods when bucks are most active. For instance, Bates notes, “These bucks that you have never seen… they are actively on a doe” ([82:37]).

He also discusses the use of calls and lures, sharing anecdotes about successful hunts and the techniques that lead to them. Bates underscores the importance of situational awareness and adaptability in the field, encouraging hunters to learn from each experience to improve their skills.

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Conclusion

Ep. 670 of The MeatEater Podcast offers an in-depth exploration of Blacktail Deer, blending scientific research with practical hunting insights. Through engaging discussions with experts like Jim Bates and Jim Heffelfinger, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the species’ biology, the conservation challenges they face, and the strategies necessary to ensure their survival. The episode serves as both an educational resource and a call to action for deer enthusiasts and conservationists alike.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jim Bates: “They’re mule deer cousins.” ([28:02])

• Jim Heffelfinger: “If it was specific to just birds. But one of the...” ([06:25])

• Jim Bates: “If you have great habitat and your habitat is functioning really well, it can take the pressure of predation.” ([61:24])

• Jim Heffelfinger: “They’re super focused on that fawn distress call.” ([120:28])

• Jim Bates: “We need to change to a young growth management industry.” ([86:33])

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Get Involved:

Listeners interested in supporting Blacktail Deer conservation can join the Blacktail Deer Foundation by visiting blacktaildeer.org. The Foundation offers opportunities to start or join local chapters, participate in habitat restoration projects, and contribute to ongoing research efforts.

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For more episodes and information, visit The MeatEater Podcast Network.

Transcript

[Stephen Rinella]

Hey, American history buffs. Hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith and John Colter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History The Mountain Men 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Jim Bates]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Stephen Rinella]

You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out first light.com f I r s t l-I t.com joined today by Jim Bates, who doesn't shoot unless he can shoot it with a muzzleloader.

[Jim Bates]

I know how to use a rifle. I just choose not to.

[Stephen Rinella]

When did you. When did you quit?

[Jim Bates]

1986.

[Stephen Rinella]

What happened?

[Jim Bates]

I decided I wanted to get close with a single shot.

[Stephen Rinella]

But you still get closer to sink. You wanted to force yourself to get closer to.

[Jim Bates]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

What'd you shoot prior to shooting? A muzzleloader.

[Jim Bates]

I got my dad's.30 06A.721 that he bought in 1950. Remington.721.

[Stephen Rinella]

Now's your gun?

[Jim Bates]

I still have it. I still hunt with it. I take my dad with me every year we go out and do a hunt together and then I put him away and I take the muzzleloader out.

[Stephen Rinella]

So you keep you house his gun for him.

[Jim Bates]

My father's passed away and so my.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, I'M not. I'm not.

[Jim Bates]

I made. I made a promise to him the day he died that him and I'd go hunting together every year.

[Stephen Rinella]

So you take it out?

[Jim Bates]

I take it out and we go hunting together every year.

[Stephen Rinella]

All right.

[Jim Bates]

Works.

[Stephen Rinella]

But then other than that, all muzzleloader all the time.

[Jim Bates]

I try to. Sometimes I falter. Some days it's really wet up in southeast Alaska.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

Makes it really hard to do flintlocks and percussion and stuff like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Because you live in the worst place to be a muzzleloader hunter in the world.

[Jim Bates]

Pretty much. But, you know, I figure all those. The people that came before us, the English and the Russian trappers and the natives who got muzzleloaders for straight items and stuff like that, they figured it out.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

And so I use a wool bag. I place my firearm in a wool bag and the wool swells up. Keeps the moisture from getting in there. And I think I've had one or two times in 35 years of being up there that that cap hasn't gone off.

[Stephen Rinella]

No kidding.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Our friend in common, Jim Heffelfinger, said if you look at the Alaska muzzleloader records, it reads like a Bashtel phone book.

[Jim Bates]

That's a great line. That's a great line.

[Unknown Speaker]

And they're all named Jim.

[Stephen Rinella]

So you submit how many state records do you have?

[Jim Bates]

Quite a few.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, well, just brag up for me. I asked you, so you're not bragging. I'm just asking a question.

[Jim Bates]

I think I have over 30 deer. I have the world record. Sick of black tail for a muzzleloader. And number two, somebody's got number three. And then I have 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and a bunch more. Oh, my goodness.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's incredible, man. And you shoot flintlock or cap?

[Jim Bates]

Cap. But I'm experimenting now with flintlock. That's where we've been talking back and forth. And so because I worked for Alaska Department of Fish and Game for so many years, the gentleman that was the wildlife biologist, Dave Person, was a master gun builder. And as a thank you for all the years of darting deer and following deer and stuff, he built me a beautiful, beautiful flintlock. And I've taken probably eight or nine deer with that flintlock. And I've got a couple smooth bore flintlocks that I've killed black bear and caribou and stuff like that with them.

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you have a fouling piece?

[Jim Bates]

I do.

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you shoot ducks with it?

[Jim Bates]

I have killed four turkeys and it doesn't have a choke. And so the best pattern I get is about 15 yards. So I set 20 yards as my maximum. I won't shoot beyond 20 yards when I call those birds in.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Jim Bates]

Gotta be close. Really close.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

There's a fouling piece which you call a shotgun. Shotgun.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

If it was specific to just birds. But one of the. During my back and forth with Jim. And it makes absolute common sense. So it's not like a big epiphany, but like the. The reason that the round ball and smooth bore stuck around for so long even when technology was readily available and far surpassed it is folks just could only have one firearm. So they'd take a smoothbore.58 caliber hawking or whatever it got bored out to. And they use that for small game birds.

[Stephen Rinella]

Like whether you're pouring shot down it or jamming a lead down it or.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yep, exactly. So using it for. With one piece of shot for big game, the big, big solid ball, or pouring a bunch of small shot down there.

[Jim Bates]

And it gives you tremendous versatility. I've. I've hunted moose with a smooth or flintlock in the interior. And it's a 62 caliber French Fusel fin. So if we would have been French voyagers, we would have been issued this gun. And you take the round ball and I stitch the patch on and I set it down on there. And in the morning I would go and hunt moose. And then I reached down and I pulled the round ball out and put shot down. And I went down along the river and shot a brace of grouse down along the river and put my round ball back on and hunted moose all the way back up to camp.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it.

[Jim Bates]

So I was like super, super, super flexible.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yeah, there's nothing more efficient than that.

[Jim Bates]

No, that's a joke.

[Stephen Rinella]

When we were doing all of our research for our Mountain man audiobook, we'd read, these guys at night would take. And at night they would put five buckshot in their gun and then they'd cap it with a. Or maybe vice versa. They'd take the rifles and put five buckshot in them, and then they'd cap it with a ball. Their nighttime home defense.

[Jim Bates]

Home defense thing.

[Stephen Rinella]

Home defense system.

[Jim Bates]

I'll tell you what, they must have been pulling that ball then come morning, because years and years and years ago, I was in the interior and I was hunting ptarmigan and I came over a ledge and there was a beautiful bull caribou 20 yards away. And I backed off and I had an ounce and a quarter of shot, number five shot. And I just Set a round ball down on top of that and belly crawled forward and shot that caribou. And I figured out later it about tore my shoulder off because that was like 700 grains when you did that. I didn't think about the equal and opposite reaction thing to recoil. I killed the caribou.

[Stephen Rinella]

You did?

[Jim Bates]

Yeah, actually. And I had like four or five pieces of shot in the heart, too. It penetrated deep enough. I could have killed him with a shot load. He was really close.

[Stephen Rinella]

You always worked as a geologist?

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Stephen Rinella]

Where'd you grow up?

[Jim Bates]

I grew up around Mount St. Helens country, southwest Washington. We had a small farm there, and my. We had about 120 acres of timber. That's where I disappeared into once my chores were done.

[Stephen Rinella]

How'd you get in geology?

[Jim Bates]

I was a kid. My folks decided we needed to have some kind of a family hobby. And they picked rockhounding or lapidary, where you go out and dig up petrified wood and agates and jaspers and opals and obsidian and other stuff and fossils. And somewhere, I don't know, 1112 years old, I got to thinking, this can't be random. We're finding this agate here because of a process. And we're finding this thunder egg here because of a process in the petrified wood. And basically that's geology. And so I always knew what I wanted to be. I'm still looking for those answers.

[Stephen Rinella]

How'd you come to be doing it in Alaska?

[Jim Bates]

Luck.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

I grew up listening to my grandfather. My grandfather on my father's side was in Alaska in 1919, 1920, and 21. And then he was back again in 37 through 42 2. And I heard all the stories of Alaska.

[Stephen Rinella]

What was he doing?

[Jim Bates]

He was a trapper. He soloed all the way down from, basically, the Yukon. He sold it all the way down the. The yukon drainage in 1919 and 1920. And ended up in Kotzebu in the winter of 1920, trapping along the Yukon river that had a canoe and was by himself going down there. And I grew up listening to all those stories and had a huge fascination. And so in 1990, there was a position opened up with the Tongass National Forest to be a geologist there. And I applied for it and luckily got it. Most Forest Service people kind of come for three or four years and move off on some other kind of thing. And I fell in love with southeast Alaska and realized that very little was known about the geology. They had mapped around the shoreline, but they'd never really mapped to the interior of the islands. And then I got into the whole cave and karst management thing up there that there's thousands of caves across vast areas of the rainforest. And there was a thing called a federal Cave Protection act and so we're supposed to protect caves on federal lands. And the, the more developed the cave areas were, the bigger the trees were. So they were direct conflict with timber management going on. So I was tasked with going out and finding those caves and mitigating the impacts of any proposed activity. So I got to explore all those woods all over southeast Alaska and I just fell in love with it, just fell in love with the place and the unknown things of geology, the things that you could map, the glacial history, the uplift history, the kind of geoarchaeology side of things like where were people on the landscape and how could I help define that?

[Unknown Speaker]

Why is that important to map that sort of stuff?

[Jim Bates]

If you have an idea of the geology, it's kind of like a soils map. It's a productivity thing. Where's the vegetation? What plants are there? Why are those plants there? How did the glaciers interact with the landscape? Why does landscape look like it does? And that's all controlled by the bedrock geology. And southeast Alaska is bits and pieces of continents that's been added on. So it's like this little pile up of pieces. I think we call it a terrain wreck. It's terrains are what this was in there. And so the geology is super varied as you kind of move northeast, southwest across the island, but as you. Or it's similar as you move northeast, southwest, but as you move towards the east across there, you're just going from terrain, terrain, terrain, terrain. They all have their blocks of rock that have a similar geologic history and how they were added onto the continent. So it's a fascinating geology that again, the original mapping was around the shorelines and wherever there were mineral deposits found. But kind of the rest of that had not been worked on very much. So I partnered with the U.S. geological Survey, a woman by the name of Sue Carl and I for 25 years have been trying to fill in some of those holes in the geologic maps and get that information out there.

[Stephen Rinella]

You and me were running around and I remember you showing me about how the trees grow extra big over the cave networks. But I can't remember what it was that you told me that, well, there's.

[Jim Bates]

Two in southeast Alaska. There's two incredibly productive forest areas. One is a alluvial fan or a riparian area down along a stream of gravels. Well Drained gravels, but nutrient rich. And the other one's on the carbonates. And so the fractures of the limestone are open down maybe 50ft. Little teeny hairline fractures. And the roots can get down into that and they access the non acidic waters then because the limestone has buffered the rainwater and the organic water that's very acidic. So you have nutrient rich water. That's basic in a well drained landscape. Much like a gravel pile is well drained, except fluctuates with rivers and streams. And so this is, this is another type of productive landscape. And the other thing is most of our big trees, our big spruce and stuff like that in southeast Alaska have a very shallow root system on top of glacial till. You've seen that. And they fall, when they fall over, you got a 30 foot diameter root mass that's like 18 inches deep.

[Stephen Rinella]

That always blows my mind when you see that and they tip and you're like what in the hell is it holding on to anyways? But just peels away. And then you look and there's a rock sitting there and it's got like a never ending disc of. That was a hand deep, hand deep.

[Jim Bates]

It's amazing.

[Stephen Rinella]

You wonder how it ever stood there.

[Jim Bates]

Anyways, so in the limestone it can get down in those fractures, grab on and it's holding on. And so you'll see instead of a root ball tip over frequently, you'll see it snapped off 40ft up. When the, when that sail in the top of the tree gets big enough that it can't take the wind pressure of our storms, it'll snap off instead of turning over the roots because it's still holding so tight. So a lot of the trees grew older and larger. So a lot of the original timber harvest in southeast Alaska was focused on the limestone areas.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Which makes total sense.

[Stephen Rinella]

Big trees.

[Jim Bates]

I, I explored those areas, locating the caves and the rivers going underground, the streams going underground and the vertical pits and that kind of thing. But then I also put together expeditions of folks who would come and explore those caves. And we had paleontologists and that. And we basically started when I got to southeast Alaska. Any published document that you read said we were a blanket of ice to the edge of the continental margin until 10,000 years ago and nothing lived there. And the first thing we did was find a cave full of bones that were 10, 11, 12,000 years old. That started challenging that. We kept pushing that back and so we changed that paradigm through time on when did the ice pull back and what was the environments like and who was living there and stuff like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

What was the old ass deer bone you found?

[Jim Bates]

Hecate island in a cave called Nautilus Cave. And what used to be a vertical pit coming into that cave that had filled with sediment. In a little alcove I found three. It was leg bones and those were basically 9200, 9500 years old. Somewhere in that vicinity right there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Black tailed deer.

[Jim Bates]

We now know they're black tailed deer. We didn't know what it was then because we'd actually found a bunch of caribou bones in the caves. So there were caribou on Prince of Wells island until 10,500 years ago. But recently working with Charlotte Lindquist and her students back in Buffalo, they did the paleogenetics. And it is a sycamore deer. Pardon me, it is a black tail deer. So the first deer to show up. So we have three bones. We have one out of that cave, one out of xena Cave that's 7,800 years old. And a bone out of a shell midden left by natives at a campsite. Their waist. Basically there was a deer leg bone in there. That turned out, I mean a bone that had been identified as a caribou bone. But when we did the genetics, it came out as a blacktail bone. Those three blacktail are definitely Sitka blacktail, but they contain a little bit of mule deer mitochondrial DNA.

[Stephen Rinella]

Which would be different to now.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. And so then we have, we have hundreds and hundreds of deer bones in caves.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you talk about how those bones get caught in the caves? I mean you may have the opportunity to go look just for people. Listen. When we were filming our show hunting History, we spent a day with Jim in caves. So Jim was able to show me how they, how they function. But can you tell people how the.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Caves trap shit and also just to. It'll come out in your thought process, I'm sure. But like when you find a bone in a cave versus like the shell midden bone, there's probably some conclusions that you jump to from one or the other.

[Jim Bates]

When you find a bone in a cave, you absolutely don't know how old it is. They usually turn slightly brown from the tannins. And the organic waters of Southeast, you've seen that many times around your place there. But the bone itself, a 20,000 year old bone will look like a hundred year old bone. You cannot tell by picking up the bone and just looking at it. And mostly what happens is either a predator was in a dry portion of a cave and Brought part of its meal in or. And a lot of times we have bones in one particular cave that had so many bones. It was arctic fox bringing bones in from a large predator and depositing in the caves. Or they're a vertical trap. So remember, as we came around from the flooded sinkhole, there was that vertical pit right off of the trail.

[Stephen Rinella]

That scared the shit out of me. I mean, we were safe looking at it. But I was like, man, I didn't know there's shit like that around here.

[Jim Bates]

We were on that boardwalk, remember, looking down that hole? So that was a hole that was roughly the size of this room. That the entrance was about three feet across. And that was an organic mat. So if we would walk on that, you'd go right through. Well, that's what the deer did.

[Stephen Rinella]

You would never know how on some of that stuff, you would never. If you were just out dicking around, you would 100% walk down in there and just gone, how many dudes must be laying in those holes.

[Jim Bates]

We've actually had a few vertical pits that have a little pile of bones, deer and bear and stuff right where they. One I can think of is 150ft deep. We called. We called Bears plunge because the entrance is about the size of this table, but at the bottom, it's 100ft in diameter and it just bells out. So when you repel into that, you're like a spider coming down off of a web. And here was this mound of bones at the bottom that had accumulated over several thousand years.

[Stephen Rinella]

What all was in that pile?

[Jim Bates]

That was mainly black bear and deer, but there was a few small rodents and stuff like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

No people?

[Jim Bates]

No. No people in that. So yeah, it's so either a vertical trap or somebody brings it into the cave. They can wash into the cave. Dang it. But it's really hard. The bones usually then get washed on through the cave. If they get into a stream course or something like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

I want to jump out of this a little bit to get to something different. After you. You retired from geology after 30 years, right?

[Jim Bates]

Yes.

[Stephen Rinella]

And then instead of just kicking it and hunting with your muzzleloader and everything, you got involved on a volunteer basis with Me deer foundation.

[Jim Bates]

I'm actually a contractor for the ME Deer foundation.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

But there's also some in. And there's. There, there is. I am kind of going out and getting other things. And so I'm not always working for him, but I'm still working for him.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep. Got it. And in particular, you became, like, particularly focused on black tail deer.

[Jim Bates]

So Miles Muridi was the CEO for years.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

And working. And I had, I had started going down in 2006 and I manned a booth at the Hunt Expo in Salt Lake City about Sitka blacktail on the Tongass National Forest, which is kind of funny. I was the geologist representing the Tongass National Forest talking about Sitka black tailed deer. They weren't sending biologists down there. I went down and so I kept saying, you know, like in your mission statement it says bule deer and black tailed deer in their habitat. That's what your focus is on the conservation of that. And, and I said, what can we do for blacktail? And so I was pretty relentless with that for years and years and years. And then Joel took over as CEO three, four years ago now. And he goes, what are we doing for black tailed deer? And about that time, Steve Belinda, a good friend of mine, called and said, it's time to pony up. Hey, do I just retired. And I said, what's going on? And he goes, we want to start creating a focus on black tailed deer. And I said I was really enjoying retirement. And I said, But I meant 100% because this is where we've always wanted to get to. And so we, we went to Leopold, put on and the Mule Deer foundation put on a black Tail summit that all of the agencies and a lot of the forest sent people to. And it was held at Leopold's headquarters in 22. In April of 22, we really realized that the conservation of blacktail is pretty much the same issues from Northern California to Alaska as related to habitat and how man has changed the landscape through timber management. There's different challenges, there's different things, different predation schemes and stuff like that, but the challenges were the same. And so we started putting a much larger focus in that and trying to get more chapter chapters established. There was no Mule Deer foundation chapters up there. And one of the biggest problems I had in Alaska was going into a community and sitting down with a group of people. And the first question was like, well, why does the Mu Deer foundation want to help us with blacktail? So I'd spend most of my time talking about that and finally get around to substantive things that we could do on the landscape.

[Stephen Rinella]

Chances are you are one of over 85% of people. Well, yeah, there's an 85% chance you are 85% of people who have at least one paid subscription going unused every month. Here's how that happened. I, I know because I've been there. You signed up for something, then you forgot about it. Or you signed up because there was a free trial period and you thought, well, I'll just cancel it later. But you didn't. And now you're getting charged for it every month and you ain't using it. If you think that might be you, you should think about Rocket Money. With it, you can see all your subscriptions in one place and cancel the ones you're not using. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending. It helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket money has over 5 million users, has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to 740 bucks a year when using all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscription and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com Meater today that's RocketMoney.com Meater RocketMoney.com Meater Hey, American history buffs, Hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Colter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times, violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interact with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men, 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella. Let's back up to that question, though. Why do people think of mule deer and like, like talk about the taxonomy of a blacktail, Right? I mean, it's, it's like they're like not brothers but cousins. Mule deer cousins.

[Jim Bates]

They're mule deer cousins. And so it was Emily Latch and Jim Heffelfinger who we talked about had did a genetic paper that showed that starting about at the beginning of the last series of ice age, the great last ice age is two and a half million years ago, probably because of snow levels and glaciers in the Cascade coastal mountain range there of Washington, Oregon, Idaho down to California, it separated whatever was a proto deer from what we now know as a mule deer. And in coastal refugia or coastal areas, blacktail developed separated from those mule deer.

[Stephen Rinella]

And so they got separated by ice.

[Jim Bates]

They got separated by ice and time. And they also was a slight divergence as you move north through Oregon and Washington, away from California. So if I remember that paper right, that the Californian blacktail are a little closer to mule deer are distinguishable, but they're still Columbia blacktail. So that's one of the separate subspecies. And then Sitka blacktail exists only from halfway up the British Columbia coast through Prince Rupert and then into the islands of southeast Alaska. And then they'd have been translocated in 1924 up to Kodiak and several places around southeast Alaska. And so there weren't any on Kodiak before.

[Stephen Rinella]

But they're native to Prince William Sound.

[Jim Bates]

No, they're not native to Prince William Sound. No, they were translocated to Prince William Sound. They were translocated to Yakutat. They were all the whole Prince William Sound area. And there were several other places they tried to plant sica blacktail that didn't take.

[Stephen Rinella]

So what was the northernmost? If you go back, I don't know what the hell, 200 years, whatever. Some, some time stamp, 200 years ago, what was the northernmost Sick of black tailed deer.

[Jim Bates]

It was probably in the Juneau areas.

[Stephen Rinella]

So I've been telling people the wrong thing.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. So Gus Davis this the Front Range of Glacier Bay national park around maybe up towards Skagway and Haynes a little bit up in there. I'm not sure how far they the historic range was. I know they were on Admiralty, Chichagov and Baranoff Islands and around.

[Stephen Rinella]

They were there naturally.

[Jim Bates]

Naturally around there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Why do they look like. So why do they have such a vibe? Like they kind of got to look like a little white tailed deer kind of.

[Jim Bates]

That's your badass. I love this deer.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, but what is it like why are they. Why are the sick of blacktails look different? Why do they? Because you look at them and you look like they look like they got some kind of like white tail deer influence. But that's not true.

[Unknown Speaker]

You're comparing them to a Colombian.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, they just like their antler configuration.

[Jim Bates]

I think it's environmental. I think it was that tight coast range force that they evolved in. And so overall body weights, they're not much different than Columbia and some of the other stuff. So like I did a study with Alaska Department of Fish and Game where I wage stuff with the state over a two year period and it was nothing to have a Sitka blacktail come in field dressed at 145 to 165. And there were a few big outliers. So I mean substantial deer. They're just a lot shorter and bulkier.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh little squatty little suckers, man.

[Jim Bates]

And their tail is not ropey at all. It is more white. A vead with a black top and that white. And they'll use it a flag just like a whitetail flag. Of course it's not quite as dramatic because it's not as long and they're just, they're. I think they're the perfect rainforest animal because their antlers are probably more close in because of that vegetation and stuff they. They evolved in.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. So it's not because of whitetail deer love making. It's just like it's convert. It's convergent evolution.

[Jim Bates]

Right.

[Stephen Rinella]

Rather than diverge or whatever.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. There was a. Val Geist years ago suggested that the blacktail were a function of mule deer and whitetail breeding or something like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

And that.

[Stephen Rinella]

You want me to tell you the whole idea that he had it was that. Do you remember this?

[Unknown Speaker]

You just offered this up. Not me. I don't remember that. I don't remember.

[Stephen Rinella]

It was that like there was some period in time he proposed this. So Yanni's a big Val Geist disciple because Yanni likes his shirker buck theory. Val Geist proposed this idea is he's still alive. He passed away. He passed away that whitetails have. Whitetail deer have been down in like the southeast for millions of years. Southeast US and at some time climatic conditions were such that white tailed deer spread all the way across the continent. Okay. And then the middle dried out and then you developed mule deer and whitetails. Then something happened and all of a sudden these whitetails came back out, made love with these mule deer and somehow maybe I'm screwing it up. And that produced like a black tail. It was elaborate. Yeah, it was elaborate.

[Jim Bates]

You're not far off. I actually had beers with Val one time and he. And he. And later years, he, through genetic analysis, he said, yeah, I had that wrong.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, he did?

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Do you know what his shirker buck Theory is. Yanni will tell you.

[Unknown Speaker]

No, you don't know. No, I think he said he applied it to any serve it but that. That a buck. There are certain bucks that he deemed as shirkers because they would shirk the responsibility of mating or rutting with the plan with the long term goal that if they shirked for three, four, five years, that the year that they decided to enter in their body mass and health and antlers would be so much bigger than any of the competition that they could then dominate the breed breeding period and thus spread their genes across the whole pool.

[Stephen Rinella]

He's like, I'm gonna lay low for a couple years. When I come down, I'm coming down.

[Jim Bates]

That's right. I'm gonna be bigger and better than everybody.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. It'd be like if you never went to the bar and you just worked out and did skin.

[Unknown Speaker]

Do any drinking?

[Stephen Rinella]

No, you said like skin treatments and worked out, worked on your hairstyle until.

[Unknown Speaker]

You were read a lot of books.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you were ready.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And then one night you go to.

[Unknown Speaker]

The bar just witty. Witty and pumped.

[Stephen Rinella]

Just lay waste.

[Jim Bates]

No, he didn't share that with me.

[Stephen Rinella]

Heffelfinger finds that theory. He. It's insulting to Heffle finger.

[Jim Bates]

I know it is. I could see. I could see Jim ask him how to pronounce coos or cows.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, real quick on Heffelfinger. I said we were somebody.

[Stephen Rinella]

Somebody in our.

[Unknown Speaker]

Again, somebody in our camp was using a. A app to predict deer movement.

[Stephen Rinella]

Sure.

[Unknown Speaker]

And was saying that this app was so good that it could be within minutes that when. When it said excellent time for movement, you just look at the watch and just start looking across the hillside and here they come. I didn't see it prove to be so good, but I asked he finger. I said, because he was talking about these pages of information that he produces about myths around wildlife. I said, I said, do you have anything about moon or lunar tables affecting deer movement? Do you have a page on that? He goes, no, because that would be real short. It'd just be one word. No.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's one of my favorites. I mean, I joke about the one that red squirrels bite nuts off big squirrels, but the moon thing is just never. You're never going to convince people otherwise. In fact, Mark Kenyon, you present all the evidence to Mark Canyon. Like Mark Canyon's. I don't know if he is now Mark Kenyon tradition was big moon guy. And you present all the evidence to Kenyon. Radio collar data from deer that don't change their groove because the Moon deer car collision data that doesn't show differences because the moon, like on harvest data, like on and on and on and on. And in Kenyon, he one day says to me, well, if it affects it by a minute, science, like, I'm paraphrasing. He's like, science might not be able.

[Unknown Speaker]

To capture or they capture, but they say.

[Stephen Rinella]

But to me, that minute matters a lot because it could be the last minute of daylight.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

There's also the what question are you asking or. Or solving for? Because Jim went on to say, he's like, now, if the moon's bright enough, deer may bed in a more open area or feed in a open area at night because there's increased light. He's like, but that's not the moon phase so much as it is a photovoltaic bioluminescence, I think is what he was saying. It's like, if it's brighter, they're more active. I'm like, well.

[Stephen Rinella]

We should do a body in the whole damn water. Up.

[Unknown Speaker]

We need to get back to Jim here, but we should do a podcast Corinne on and bring in Mississippi Deer Lab. They just recently processed a bunch of collar data. Speaking. Speaking to. You know, because so many people like, oh, these new believers were just continually emailing in and just being like, yeah, but you guys aren't asking the right questions. You guys aren't, you know, you're looking at your data, but you're not aligning the red moon with the blue moon and the wind and the underfoot and the barometric pressure, and you need to look at that specific point. They're like, all right, why don't you guys all tell us? We'll do a big survey and tell us exactly what we should look for in our data, and then we'll do it, and we'll look for it. And they did it. And of course, the conclusion is that it doesn't matter.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you guess? Produce this segment?

[Unknown Speaker]

Segment? We should do a whole podcast.

[Stephen Rinella]

Guest produce the whole episode.

[Unknown Speaker]

Sure. Okay, I'll help Corinne with it. I don't think she wants me just to take over.

[Stephen Rinella]

It'd be like a. Be like an internship. You'd be interning at your old job.

[Unknown Speaker]

All right, back in the.

[Stephen Rinella]

We'll call it Back in the Saddle, and it'll be the Yanni episode. All right, back to black tailed deer.

[Jim Bates]

Our black tail deer. Our black tailed deer don't even know there's a moon. That's awesome.

[Stephen Rinella]

One last thought on the moon thing. For a while. What I thought was this for A while I thought when it's bright out, you see a bunch of deer because it's bright out. And maybe that's where it came from. Meaning when it's pitch black, you can't see shit. When it's moonlit, you're like, oh, look at that deer. Right. Like, picture walking out. When there's snow on the ground and a full moon and you're walking out, you're also aware of all kinds of stuff. You didn't know what was going on. Yeah.

[Unknown Speaker]

There's no such thing as end of shooting light, you know.

[Stephen Rinella]

All right, back to black tail deer. So Columbia blacktail. Let me ask you this question about black tail deer, because this is something we've mused about a fair bit. I shot. I've shot one Columbia black tail deer in California. Dude. I mean, it looks like a mule deer. And I've often talked about just when in talking about the. The sort of arbitrary nature of certain classifications of wildlife, I've talked about how, according to the Boone and Crockett Club, if a. If a deer is standing on the west side of i5 in California, he's a black tail. If he were to run across i5, he's now a mule deer. But we have to be able to do a better job than that nowadays, right? Like, what is a Columbia blacktail and what is a mule deer?

[Jim Bates]

Actually, Boone Crockett is offering genetic tests that you can send in your deer and get that answer to get the real answer. And Jim and Emily Lansch and Jim Heffelfinger came up with a percentile graph looking at deer samples that they had, and they cut it off at 0.9%. In other words, if it's over 10% mule deer, they're not calling it a Columbia blacktail.

[Stephen Rinella]

So are they going to go in and start kicking all kinds of mule deer out of the Columbia blacktail record book?

[Jim Bates]

No, because it depends on location. So the record book is a line that comes down. It doesn't always follow i5. It takes off on one meridian and comes down to. Through Medford, Oregon and down in there.

[Stephen Rinella]

But there has to be a bunch of mule deer in the club.

[Unknown Speaker]

Like, there's got to be top end.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

There's got to be some fakes. There's got to be people that have record Columbia blacktails that they just shot a mule deer that happened to be on the wrong side of the road.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. And we, as. When I grew up in Washington, we used to purposely go up and we called them bench leg muleys. They. They Were these. We would shoot them, and they'd field dress at like 225 to 240. They were these beautif blacktail, little teeny racks and stuff like that with huge bodies. And we went up into the Cascades and targeted them. I mean, that's where we hunted because they were much larger deer.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you're saying that those were blacktails or they were mule deer?

[Jim Bates]

They were cross. Okay, I'm kind of across in there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it. But then a Sitka blacktail is, like, much more distinct. Right.

[Jim Bates]

Sick of blacktail.

[Stephen Rinella]

They don't have any exposure. Like, sick of blacktails. Don't bump up against any other kind of deer.

[Jim Bates]

Yes, they do.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, they do. Okay.

[Jim Bates]

There's mule deer moving into skagway. And in 1991, I took a photograph of a mule deer doe with a fawn inside of Alaska up by Hyder. And so there is the possibility of some contact. There's mule deer just outside of Prince Rupert, so they could come down the Eskina river in there and come out of the interior. So I think that's probably the first batch of deer that made it out to Prince of Wales Island. Probably it had some kind of a contact like that, an interbreeding between mule deer and that isolated population that became sick of blacktail. That's why they identified mule deer in that genome when they. In those three oldest bucks. That we have got to realize. We have a really small sample size, and researchers say that it's, you know, we're basing this on just a handful of samples, but that all of the older ones were very distinct, that they had a little bit of mule deer in them.

[Stephen Rinella]

So is it fair? Like, I know we were talking about Val Geist theory, sort of like pre genetics theory, but is it right that that at a time you just had these little pockets of deer that were bound in by glaciers and they survived along the Pacific coast?

[Jim Bates]

That's what the idea is. That was kind of what they refer to, kind of like a chain of pearls of habitat that wasn't overridden by ice, that if it wasn't so severe, if the winter's so severe and they could have existed there. Got to realize, too, we had much lower sea levels. Our sea levels were 400ft less than they are today. So there was a lot of land between 17,000 and about 13,000 that was exposed on the shelf out there. So. And you all. And so we have land ice interactions with the weight of the ice pushing down on the land and the land rebounding back up. And so there was some of that stuff going on and that's how.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Which means these deer could have existed in a landscape that we basically can't see it at all. Like you could have changed dramatically and they could have evolved to be like their high alpine tundra environment could be closer to what they evolved in as in flat brushy in areas versus any, any of the stuff that we hunt them on in the slopes. Like the rocky mossy, dark timber terrain.

[Jim Bates]

Absolutely. In fact it looks like this according to the. I've did a lot of coring with palynologists in lakes and looking at also at the speleothems in the caves hold a record of climate that somewhere at about 11 to 10,000 years ago, a very dry spruce and hemlock forest started to appear on the landscape replacing a herb dominated tundra that had willows and alders around stream courses and stuff and in disturbance areas. And you start seeing that and that fires were on the landscape in southeast Alaska till about 7,800 years ago. And then it got, then you start seeing cedar and skunk, cabbage and sphagnum and stuff dominate the pollen record and the wetter climate plants start showing up. So the rainforest that we all know and love today and hunt in up there is only maybe about 6,000 years old. That's relatively young. Those great big red cedars by your place there, they may be the 10th generation on the landscape kind of a thing when you think about that. So it's been a really dynamic vegetation change over a relatively short period of geologic time. And the topography, those, those humps that we fish halibut off the coast on were alpine ridgetops when the sea level was lower. I love that stuff.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So what does that mean? Like the overall picture of black tailed deer conservation? Right. So just, just as an example, we. This would be months ago, Right. We talked about Arizona offering moose lottery draws to hunt moose. And part of their reasoning is like moose aren't, they're a remnant of a remnant population in Arizona. They're, they're here right now, but long term they're, they're not going to be here more than likely is one of the arguments in regards to black tail deer when they're in a such a, you know, geologically speaking, like a very rapidly changing ecosystem, are they adapting well to that ecosystem? Is there anything that says there were a hell of a lot more blacktail in when a different environment was more prolific? Kind of. Where are we at.

[Jim Bates]

The biggest thing it controls? Sick of Black tail populations in my. Not that predation doesn't but it's bad winners. A bad winter can do more to wipe out a population. 2006 and 07 on Admiralty island and at Baihuna we lost like 85 or 90% of the deer. I was working with Dr. Sophie Gilbert on her PhD and we had a bad winter on Prince of Wells island in 2011 at Control Lake Junction right there where you split to either go to Thorne Bay or go north. There was five feet of snow May 1st. It was horrible. I followed those fawns that year. She went into the year that went into the winter with 50 fawns on the collar. We came out with three. So we basically lost a whole cohort of age class because of that bad winter. So I think about the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice age ended what, 300 years ago. There might not have been as many deer on the landscape. There's maybe more deer now than there was 300 years ago. And what was the winters like coming out of glaciation and as glaciers were more prominent and stuff. Even though we were in a WETTER Climate from 6,000 to the present, those first 5,000 years, the sick of blacktail may not have been prolific on the landscape as they are today. So. And I think that timber management, when it was super active and there was still a lot of good habitat left, was creating all that forage. Of course that forage wasn't available in a bad winter when those clear cuts get buried. So I have seen in just the 30 some odd years I've been on Prince of Wales. I believe the population of Sitka blacktail on Prince of Wales island is half of what it was when I got there in 1990. And that's not a result of predation in my opinion. It's a result of now all those older clear cuts have grown up and there's no forage. It's what we call stem exclusion that there's no light gets to the forest floor. It grows mosses and lichens and mushrooms.

[Unknown Speaker]

That was going to be a question of mine earlier. You mentioned, you know, timber management is generally, is it good for blacktails?

[Jim Bates]

As long as, as long as you maintain what they need to survive in a bad winter. They need to. So they're, they're an animal of the edge like all deer and they'll. They bedded their little knobs and stuff like that. And when it starts getting snowy and stuff they, they need to be able to access food. So they might be even on a steep Slope with a modest forest on there, you still got a lot of canopy interception because of the angle of the way the trees interlock. And they're getting around fine when the snow depth gets higher than their brisket. So basically on a cycle blacktail that's higher than about 18 inches, they need to be able to get to someplace to eat. So you have to have corridors for them to move either laterally or vertically. And you have to have something for them to go to that's got thermal cover and food. So the mosaic that's been created by pass forest, the challenge is going into that habitat and where should we be doing improvements and stuff like that. And that's what we're hoping to focus on is where are those. Where should we put those improvements on the landscape to do the biggest bang for the buck as it was.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, go ahead.

[Jim Bates]

For the deer.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you walk through what just as part of a broader conversation about timber management in harvest, can you walk through the sort of lifespan of a clear cut? Only in, like, in terms of deer. Because forage I. I've watched them where. I've watched them where they're fresh. Nothing's really going on. A couple years into it, they start getting loaded up with deer. And I've been fortunate now to see one get to the point where it's. There's nothing living in it. So lay out like. Like what it does as it grows. Because a lot of guys think the answer to more deer is more clear cuts. And. And where does that get complicated?

[Jim Bates]

The food that's produced is incredible. The amount of forage that's in those clear cuts at about year three. Okay, three and four and five, is crazy nuts like the blueberry. So the primary thing that the deer eats are the vaccinium. So your huckleberries and your blue. And especially the red huckleberry. They love the red huckleberry.

[Stephen Rinella]

And some eating the leaves and.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. And twigs right at the very end of the new growth. And you've seen that stuff in the clear cuts up there where it's browsed back to where it's a brush you can hardly push your legs through. So you start out, we don't have any of that for about two years. And then that finally starts really taking over. And then. So you got. From year. Let's say year three to about year 10 or 12, it's doing pretty good. And now your trees are getting up to the point that they're starting to shade out more patches and stuff, but there's still a lot of. Forage in between that continues to close in. So the bigger the trees are they get the less forage there is and that vegetation. So you. And you start getting maybe a little more salmon berry and stuff in there. And depends on the. Depends on the site. It depends on how much alders in there. There's a lot of variables, but we'll kind of do generalities. Forest Service test historically has gone into the stands. So by. I'd say by year 15 it's starting to get pretty closed in. You're starting to lose your forage. But of course a clear cut is not ubiquitous. Some of it regenerates really well and some of it regenerates more poorly. So there's places to eat out in there. Then the Forest Service goes in. Excuse me.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, take time.

[Jim Bates]

Somewhere between year 16 and year 20 and pre commercially thins. So there's so many stems per acre come back under natural regeneration that they need to drop that down to a certain spacing because of overcompensation by the trees that are growing back. And you've seen this. They go in and they follow those trees. And your slash load is enormous. It can be 1012ft deep. It releases sunlight, gets to that and the vegetation responds. But the deer access that under that slash.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

And if you're wondering listener, neither can a hunter. It's not fun to walk through.

[Jim Bates]

You can't go through that with a D8 cat.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Oh brutal.

[Jim Bates]

It is amazing stuff. And besides the fact because that was commercially thin, you've got all of the usually about 12 to 24 inches high. The bases of the trees that they cut like bungee stick sticking up through that stuff. So you fall through that. If you're up walking on that mess and you fall down. You got to watch where you land anyhow. But deer. Deer don't access that. The Forest Service has identified certain trails and left unthinned strips through some clear cuts to allow for deer movement vertically at which they use sometimes. If they were. If they were well placed spots that deer continue to use. If they were using them in the original clear cut. They use them post commercial thinning. Then 30 years in that's growing back shut again. And then that continues to get less and less and less light to the forest for that slash starts to rot and break down and you've got all of the. Then it's usually like maybe 18 inches thick with just the boles of the trees that were originally fell in there that might still. But then they won't support your weight. But they're up in there. But by that time, there's no forage until that stand gets up 100 years old or something like that and starts to naturally select and wind starts punching holes through it and you start to get some light filtering down in around the sides. You get light coming in, maybe that doing pretty good. But there's at least a period there of, you know, between 30 and 100, 150 years that there's just not a lot of forage for deer in that piece unless it's managed. Unless you go in and open that up.

[Stephen Rinella]

God. That doesn't speak well for the deer hunting around my little spot.

[Jim Bates]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

So I got an 80, 90 year dry spell coming up.

[Jim Bates]

Actually, what I did years ago is I saw this coming. I mean, it was the wave of green that was going to be there. And I stopped hunting any managed areas and I started moving out into the unharvested areas and learning how to hunt that. Yeah, because I knew this was coming. I mean, it was. And so what's happened?

[Stephen Rinella]

You want. You wanted to step outside of the clear cut system.

[Jim Bates]

Right. And good lord, I have killed hundreds of deer in harvested areas when they're productive. And it's crazy. We used to go into clear cuts in the early 90s and you'd blow out a deer call and 40 deer would stand up. It was totally different than you have today. And you virtually went out and selected what size of buck you wanted. Kind of a thing, that. Totally different thing. Yeah. Alpine areas you were talking about when we were first doing that in the 80s or 90s, it was nothing to crawl up onto a ledge and stop and glass 60 deer and like half of those would be bucks. Wow. It was amazing.

[Stephen Rinella]

With so much of the island that hasn't been logged or just not even. Not even that island that you happen to live on. But all through black tail deer range. Okay.

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Stephen Rinella]

A lot of it hasn't been logged. You got big wilderness areas. So why are blacktail numbers down?

[Jim Bates]

No, they're down in unit two. They're down where you. You and I both have explored.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you think that is because all those old clear cuts have entered the shitty period.

[Jim Bates]

That's right. And. But unit four, so Admiralty, Chichikov, Baranof island, They're doing really good. They haven't had a bad winter since 2011. That the deer population is going nuts and they're starting to get age class on bucks. I'm seeing four points being shot out of Sitka, which I never saw before. So they're doing good. Unit three, which is Qu Mitkoff and Kupernoff Island. 1972 was a killing winter. There was six feet of snow on the beach. June 1st in 1972. They stopped the hunts in unit three for years and years and years, decades and started it back up for a two, one week and then a two week period where you were allowed to take one buck. Those deer now are really rebounding and there's a camera trap thing going on right now out of Petersburg and Wrangell. Maybe not wrangle, maybe wrangle that's being conducted by the state. And the deer numbers are really up. In unit three, Ketchikan is responding and all of that area around Ketchikan is responding really well with deer numbers. So the only place that the deer numbers are down really is unit two on Prince and Wells Island. And that's not ubiquitous as you move south. So if you get down south of Craig and you move down island and stuff in some of those remote areas that's warmer and they have less effects of snow down there and stuff. And so there's areas that are doing a little bit better. Then there's pockets up in the. I kind of hunt mainly the north into Prince of Wales and central to north. Actually I hunt a lot in central and there's pockets in there that have deer numbers. And so it's not all been cut and it's not all gloom and doom, but it's definitely different. Just in my experiential time being on the island, it's definitely different. And it has been partially due to the state of Alaska having to walk a very fine line there for a number of years while the wolf was being suggested to be listed and limiting the amount of trapping that could go on for wolves. But the bottom line is I believe we all agree here that if you have great habitat and your habitat is functioning really well, it can take the pressure of predation. And right now we have a compromised habitat because of past management act? Not so much as past management, it's just right now we have not transitioned at all to a second growth harvest economy on the forest.

[Stephen Rinella]

Tell me what that means.

[Jim Bates]

We are. And we're not cutting second growth. We're not cutting. We're not going into those stands, commercially thinning those stands or doing patchwork of small clear cuts or we're just not cutting those trees yet. Some of them are ready to harvest. Now there's rules on how you can harvest, but most of it's going to reach critical mass in like 20, 30 and 2033 that there's going to be a bunch of stuff that could be ready to harvest. The problem is there's not the infrastructure to do manufacture of the wood on the island. Right now the one large male that's there really doesn't want to do anything with second growth. He's tooled for old growth and you have to have different saws and different processes and stuff like that to be. Karen, my wife works on biomass. Nobody is. There's only one place doing bio bricks on the island. You could be taking all of the slash of the non merchantable trees and grinding that up and making biofuels out of it. Bio brick, biopux, some kind of log or something like that or wood pellets. That infrastructure is not in place. So the only market is to export to Asia.

[Stephen Rinella]

For the little shit for.

[Jim Bates]

The young growth that could be harvested. And there's been a couple young growth sales but mostly it all was exported to Asia.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's the, what's the situation like? Go way down to California. What's the landscape look like right now? I mean like where do blacktail deer stand down there?

[Jim Bates]

I am by far no expert in the Columbia blacktail in Washington, Oregon and California. I will tell you from what we learned from that summit in Oregon and I'm going to. I won't do California because I don't have enough knowledge but what I picked up from the wonderful folks at Oregon Department of Fish and Game and they took us out on field trips, there's a lot of that is a checkerboard of ownership in Southern Oregon, central Oregon and stuff within the blacktail home range. And so you have timber industry blocks next to state blocks or BLM blocks. And if they want to do a habitat enhancement project or something on those, a block next to it is being intensely managed to produce second growth wood for, for lumber. And so the challenges are in the land ownership makeup with the Pacific Northwest. And I'm going to, I'm going to venture to guess that that slops over into Northern California.

[Stephen Rinella]

Like it makes it hard to have a cohesive plan.

[Jim Bates]

Cohesive plan. It also makes it hard when they're. They're trying to get of course this, I guess this is across everything is how do you do population estimates of a rainforest deer you can't fly over. They don't have winter ranges where they congregate and stuff like that. So doing population estimates on the landscape down in Oregon they were using deer pellet DNA and dogs to locate the piles of turds out in the clear Cuts. And so they had a contractor out there picking up samples, using the dog to find where the deer had pooped while it was feeding out there, and then doing a population estimate in southeast Alaska. Todd Brinkman developed this. He's a professor at University of Fairbanks up there. University of Alaska. And he developed a way of doing DNA. So he did transects. He did 1200 meters, one meter either side. He went and removed all poop from that. And then he started running that transect and picking up fresh pellets. And from that, you can get individuals and sex off of that. And after you do that time and time and time again through seasons, you can start to get an idea of how many deer are on the landscape, what the demography is, whether how many males per female, hundred females and stuff like that. And that's the only way we've been able to do population estimates. They're trying some right now. The one I was talking about, I think it's at Petersburg. They're trying to use both deer pellet transects and trail cameras to see if they can come up with a population estimate on the landscape. So it's really hard to estimate just how many deer are out there.

[Stephen Rinella]

What might be. What might be blacktails per square mile in southeast Alaska.

[Jim Bates]

I've heard things of 12 to 20.

[Stephen Rinella]

And that's just more than I would have figured, man.

[Jim Bates]

That's.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

That seems positive because holy shit.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can you go a long time and not see one?

[Jim Bates]

They're sneaky little guys. Yeah, I, I, you know, that. And 20 might be wider range where they get a little more compressed, you know, and stuff. So there's definitely areas that it's not 12 to 20. Oh, yeah.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Like those areas where within 100 yards you're crawling as flat as you can on your belly to get under a tree. And then you're also 15ft above other trees that are tipped over. Those areas might be a little hard for deer to travel.

[Jim Bates]

It's hard for us to travel. Yeah, it is. What it is probably the most challenging landscape that I have ever traveled. I have a particular place that I like to hunt that's super hard to get to. And when you get off on the beach to gain 1200ft in elevation a mile and a quarter from the beach, I've never done it in under six hours. Oh.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Oh, that's misery. So what's optimal or in. Is there an optimal. Considering just like the huge variance of.

[Jim Bates]

Optimal habitat density, I think you're probably in that 12 to 15 range like that. But they get, I mean they get. When you get into even yet today, when you get into really good alpine habitat, you may have 25 deer per square mile, but that's just a seasonal thing.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

And then they, as the snow comes and fills that up, they start moving down that slope. They get in those Crum Holtz trees where you can never find them.

[Stephen Rinella]

Mm.

[Jim Bates]

Just below the beautiful vegetation in the alpine. And so I've got, I've got a theory that every piece of alpine across the landscape, I know every piece of subalpine because alpine is going to define. It's. That's, that's those true highest peaks. But all those little muskeg ridges have the highest point on that ridge that's got the best Forbes and stuff that's around. And I think that the best buck of those watersheds goes to the best forage every year. And that's where you're going to find them. That every ridge has that spot.

[Stephen Rinella]

The best buck is on the best spot.

[Jim Bates]

Just like the best bear goes to the best fishing hole. You know that that best buck knows where that best stuff is. And I've, that's, that's the theory that I apply. And I fact I'm not hunting traditional alpine much anymore. I'm kind of hunting those lower ridges and stuff and finding those little pockets that's going to hold two or three really good Cracker Jack bucks.

[Stephen Rinella]

I want to get back to conservation work. But real quick, what percentage of the bucks you kill do you call and what percent do you creep up on?

[Jim Bates]

50. 50.

[Stephen Rinella]

And how are you creeping up on them? Just creeping.

[Jim Bates]

Alpine mostly.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Or dumb luck.

[Stephen Rinella]

No, I'm talking those low, those low, nasty. Those low nasty musket ridges. How do you hunt them?

[Jim Bates]

Hike up, put a tent up. Because if it's, if it's nice weather because we're not generally up there when it's really lousy weather by 7:00 in the morning. Those deer in the timber you've got between 4:30 in the morning and 7:00 in the morning. That's your window to get success. If you're not there, it's not gonna, if you're starting out at the truck at 4:30, you're not gonna be there at 7. You gotta be there when they get up at 4:30. They're already out feeding.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Bates]

And what I usually, I usually find them. They're either bedded right on the edge of the timber, kind of chewing their cuddle and thinking about the great night they had out there. Forging on those Forbes. And they're just taking those last few things before the sun gets too warm. And then they drift back into the timber. And so I usually hunt those edges at bedding areas that I know around those upper level muskeg, you know, like 23 to 2600 foot elevation ridges.

[Unknown Speaker]

Do you get an evening period of.

[Jim Bates]

Movement as well if you have an overcast day?

[Stephen Rinella]

Full moon.

[Jim Bates]

No. No. Yeah, full moon. Which we'd never see. No. Because I go up with my tent and I stay there and I glass and I don't see anything before I go to bed.

[Unknown Speaker]

Interesting.

[Jim Bates]

And bed then at those times. So our season opens up 24 July. So from 24 July through August up there, I'm up in those things and hell, it's light till 11, 11:30 or something like that.

[Stephen Rinella]

And I'm not seeing those deer and.

[Jim Bates]

I'm not seeing those deer. And I wake up in the morning and they'll be in the meadows.

[Unknown Speaker]

Interesting. Because knowing that most these deer get up every four to six hours, right?

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Unknown Speaker]

To do some sort of feeding, moving around, they must be then doing that down in the timber where you've got to be.

[Jim Bates]

Yep. Yeah. You just. I always take something good to read because you're going to have long days up there. You're just not going to have. There are some places I've found patches of snow and stuff like that where they'll go out and dig holes and they'll bed in the patches of snow if you got a snow that persists. But the last few years, since 2011, we haven't had snow in those. So it just hasn't been there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Earlier you talked about starting the blacktail deer foundation, right? That's what it's called.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. So we actually. We actually hadn't got to that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, no, we're.

[Jim Bates]

We were going towards that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is that what. We'll get to it?

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Stephen Rinella]

But you'd mentioned it and you'd said that the mule deer foundation had looked for a long time and they hadn't been doing black tail deer conservation work. If I had to take a guess, like a stab at why, I would picture that if you came to me and said, what can we do to improve mule deer habitat and mule deer numbers. I feel like you'd have a. You'd really quickly generate a list of projects. Meaning. Well, this place, we have a huge amount of highway deer collisions. This place, they like to move from this mountain range down into this sage flat. But there's a bunch of Fences and developments that are impeding the movement. So we can do some micro work to help the deer in that area or in this little basin. Some well timed predator control would help in May when they're dropping fawns, right? And you can kind of go and do these little distinct projects that improve mule deer in these funnel points or these focal areas of activity. But then you go and you look at this just seemingly never ending sea of timber that's very hard to access, very hard to tell what's going on. And someone says, well, generate me like a chore list for how to help blacktails. I feel like you, it'd be like pray for weather. Do you know what I mean? Like, like what do you. Like, where would you even put money if you had it right? That would be my explanation of why no one's doing anything on black tails. Because like, what do you, how do you, where do you begin?

[Jim Bates]

I think that there was a lot of truth to that. I think you'd hit the nail on the head. And you know, and you've got to look at it is absolutely quality of habitat driven. If there, if there is a lot of places out there, we don't need to do anything. The habitat is just fine. But because of past timber management and in Washington, Oregon, land ownership changes and stuff. But I'm thinking I'm very southeast specific, we have native lands where a lot of timber harvest on native lands and forest service lands with a lot of harvest on there and all of that has grown back into a dense forest with no forage under it. I think we have unlimited opportunity. But where to do it on that. So you have this great canvas, like a painter stepping up to a blank canvas. You want to pick the best place to do that habitat work that's going to get the best return to those deer. So anything you do in opening it up and creating forage, deer are probably going to find it and use it. But there's better places on the landscape to do it. And right now we're in the process of looking at that whole thing called southeast Alaska past timber harvest of X age. And where should we focus? The Tongass National Forest is going through a forest plan revision. We're looking at where should we focus our efforts. If we only have a small amount of money coming in and we only are going to be able to do so much per year, where should we go first and why?

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

And so that those are the challenges that we're looking at, right? We actually. There's a contract existing out there. Right now, where we've got. It's a GIS biology exercise to take a look at that landscape, taking in lidar, taking in slope aspect conductivity with existing habitats that's out there. Planned projects where, roads, where can we access? Now one of the things that at least the blacktail deer foundation has looked at too is if we do a treatment out there, if we create forage for deer and deer get back on the landscape, are those deer going to be accessible for hunters? Can, are they going to be proximal to a road or can they walk in easily into that? If you're going to put deer on the landscape, it'd be nice to know that that would also create additional opportunity to put meat in your freezer. The people on the island that I live, Prince of Wales, they rely on deer in their freezer. And I'm this is the first time in the last couple of years I'm hearing people that haven't been finding the deer, they normally would have to put meat in their freezers. So this is serious stuff, especially as prices go up.

[Stephen Rinella]

So what would be a thing you would do if you identify is this part of the project you're working on where you're running all those cameras?

[Jim Bates]

No, the camera thing started out with Sophie Gilbert and I had an idea. So the forest service would go in in the past and they would log most of a drainage, but they would leave where you'd have a huge bunch of creeks coming down and alluvial fans. They would leave those as a leaf strip in between clear cuts. Then they come back and they fell. They did the pre commercial thinning and created the slash that was 1012ft deep. And so the only vertical movement that could go on was in those leaf strips in between the clear cuts. So the deer were squeezed into narrow slots. So we had control areas. And so we had 20 control area cameras and 20 leave strip cameras. And we started that and then they went in and they wanted to harvest in there, so we had to move. So I moved over to where I'm at now. And so she. At that time, Dr. Sophie Gilbert was working for the University of Idaho in conjunction with Todd Brinkman up at Fairbanks at the University of Alaska. And we were trying to look at deer movement. And I had an idea and a concept in my brain. My working thesis was as it greened up in the spring, the deer were down in the lower elevations and they slowly moved up as it greened up. And they finally got up to the alpine when the forbs came out and they foraged up there. Then as it started to snow they moved, move back down in the landscape and I started monitoring these cameras 2018. So I've got 26 cameras out there right now. That's anything but the truth. The does and fawns above the lower elevation valley floor bed, 500 to 800ft above the valley floor. And they come down to feed daily in the dark, usually almost always doctorally and not always for the dose. And they move back up as, as the sun comes up in the morning. I do see the bucks in velvet as they're developing. Antlers will be milling around down, feeding in the bottom and then they go up, which I'm assuming they go up into that better forage up in the higher elevation because I don't see them for a long time until rut. So I didn't know there was a daily vertical movement of deer on the landscape.

[Stephen Rinella]

They're climbing 5, 800ft every time they want to eat.

[Jim Bates]

Yes sir. And you could almost set your clock by it. They're so nocturnally driven. And then as it comes into October about on where I have my cameras, this changes. So as you move north in the Tongass, Petersburg and Wrangell, they rut 12, 14 days before Prince of Wales. So the more higher latitude, little colder stuff rut a little bit sooner, probably moon ph anyhow, all of a sudden you start seeing much more fork and horns and spikes and they're starting to move vertically daily right before, right as soon as it's dark, 10 minutes after dark they're coming down. 10 minutes before daylight they're going back up.

[Stephen Rinella]

Down into what? The bottoms where all the lakes and ponds are and stuff.

[Jim Bates]

The females are feeding down in the, not completely in the valley floor but in the lower elevations of the valley. And those bucks are coming down that they don't know why they're doing it. They're too young to probably do much of the breeding. I also have found Sika blacktail do not make scrapes, but they have marking trees. They have hemlock, overhanging hemlock branches that they mouth and they push this, their preorbital gland in there and their secretions between their antlers and they urinate under those things. And I have 12 or 14 bucks coming to the same marking tree just day after day after day. And that progresses until about the 25th or 6th of October. And then the big bucks start showing up, bigger bucks start showing up, the more older age class bucks come up and they start showing up down in there. There's a frenzy between about October 25th and about the 6th or 7th of November, waiting for that first doe to come into estrus. And I'll have bucks all over the cameras. I mean, and they start showing up in the day. And I mean, it's just a progression of. And I've got this all plotted up because I'm really anal and weird about this stuff. And boom, the big bucks disappear. Nobody comes to the marking trees anymore. So the first does have come into heat and they're autumn. And that persists until about the 17th or 18th of November. And then they bucks start coming back and marking that thing again. And then magic happens.

[Stephen Rinella]

What's that?

[Jim Bates]

These bucks that you have never seen, these. Oh, my God. Bucks show up about the 17th or 18th of November and they persist on the landscape till about the 25th or 26th, maybe through Thanksgiving. And then they disappear. They vanish. And you've hardly see any of those other bucks when those. That's the guy that has been pumping iron for four years and shows up. But it's just like, whoa, where have you been?

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay, walk. Walk me through all that. No, I like it. But walk me through all. So. So you're saying that there's about three.

[Jim Bates]

Three days of the year that you should be in the woods.

[Stephen Rinella]

So they're running all around.

[Jim Bates]

Okay.

[Stephen Rinella]

You got does on your cameras. Then all of a sudden you start seeing bucks showing up because the rut's coming.

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Stephen Rinella]

Then you see all this buck movement.

[Jim Bates]

And the first bucks that show up are the spikes in the forkdoids.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Then you start. Then you see a bunch of buck movement.

[Jim Bates]

Then you have. Then you see the next age class.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

You see the 2 to 4 year.

[Stephen Rinella]

Old, their timing is a little better.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. They're closer to estrus. They have. They're not putting that much energy into chasing because they pretty much know when the first dough is going to come into heat. The moon phase that we never see.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Bates]

And then bang, they disappear and they're locked down.

[Stephen Rinella]

That means they're on a doe.

[Jim Bates]

They're actively on a doe until she's receptive.

[Stephen Rinella]

See, that's when I must be always hunt.

[Unknown Speaker]

Locked down.

[Jim Bates]

And that's a pitch. But at that moment. So that's the key thing for me. At that moment, her head is not switched from. Save the fawn. Save the fawn. If you're doing a fawn bleat call. He wants to chase her and you call her in and he's going to come in behind her because he thinks she's just Running away from him. Or you will have bucks coming to the call. There's no doubt about that. But at that moment that just before the estrus.

[Stephen Rinella]

And what date are you now?

[Jim Bates]

4Th, 5th, 6th, 7th of November.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

These are days I'm never not in the woods. You gotta realize this is Jim Bateschtul's belief system.

[Stephen Rinella]

Understood. Well, you're here, but you're here for a reason.

[Jim Bates]

I'm telling you there are certain days that you don't. You're there because magic can happen.

[Stephen Rinella]

All right, then tell me the next thing that happens. Now explain to me what happens. And all of a sudden all these big bucks are running around again for three days.

[Jim Bates]

So you have really good two to four year old bucks do the initial breeding. And I think there's. Up at the higher elevation, there's also a population of deer that don't come down. And I think the really big, huge, dominant four year old and better bucks are up there taking care of that. And as soon as they've taken care of everything on the rest of the landscape, they come down to see what was not taken care of at the lower elevations. And that tends to be the 17th, 18th, 19th of November through Thanksgiving.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you're in the woods, man.

[Jim Bates]

And I don't hardly ever carry anything because I am absolutely locked into. I know that the possibility of me and they actually become less nocturnal and a little more reliable that they're going to be out sometime during the day.

[Stephen Rinella]

I like it.

[Jim Bates]

I have this tattooed on my arm. No, no, but that transition time between estrus. No estrus right in there. That shifts seasonally. It might be slightly earlier. It might be 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th of November or it might be 8th night, 10th, 11th of November. I think I've killed more deer on the 11th of November than any other day.

[Stephen Rinella]

Now get back to how you'd fix the black tail deer problem.

[Jim Bates]

For real.

[Stephen Rinella]

When you got huge thousands of square miles, you know, I mean, like what are you going to do really?

[Jim Bates]

So just roughly on Prince of Wales, a ballpark, I think just on the forest Service, there's like 360,000 acres of young growth that's at or approaching stem exclusion phase. If you do the math with 12 to 20 deer per square mile, that's somewhere between 6 and 8,000 deer that ain't there. Pretty simple math.

[Stephen Rinella]

It won't be for 80 years or.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. Until something is done with that second growth. And so we need, this is my perfect world. We need a active young growth management industry. And that industry has to be Good enough. There's going to be some clear cuts made and they're going to go in and do some industrial larger scale logging and stuff. But we will have identified where we should, where the stands are that should be approached to a habitat point of view and make the decisions. Why those are important for habitat and those won't be intensely managed by clearcutting and stuff like that. We'll go in and do commercial, commercial thinning of those stands. Opening that stand up and getting daylight down in there. And there would be an industry that would locally manufacture that stuff and the biomass would be used that comes off of it.

[Stephen Rinella]

How in the hell are you going to create like if it's rare. When you say like for the conservation of a species and proliferation of a species we need to develop a timber industry. I mean how, like yeah, how do.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

You incentivize and industry and what specific like is it the, the heating fuel wood pellet camp chef Traeger industry? Right. Like what, what is the market for that growth that that is currently like being ignored, waiting for maturation or further maturation.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh Cal, I gotta share something with you. There's two things that have thwarted dirt's dad that he cannot make himself. Well, he can make anything himself. Making his own dip earwax, growing his own dip. Making his own dip and then making his own pellet grill pellets.

[Jim Bates]

There it is.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

So there's your opportunity.

[Stephen Rinella]

He just can't figure it out. It's killing him.

[Jim Bates]

We actually, because my wife works at biomass and I love it, we heat all of our house with wood pellets. But I'm shipping them up from Idaho.

[Stephen Rinella]

With all that red alder.

[Jim Bates]

I'll. I do the red alder firewood stuff. So we also have a fire wood stove and so I cut red alder. Fact I'll probably be cutting it if I can get out in the woods when I get back from this.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay, but you got a pellet. Yeah, yeah.

[Jim Bates]

So we have a timber industry that's an old growth timber industry and that industry needs to shift its. And we have several small mills that are actively milling and kill drying lumber and you can buy second growth lumber on Prince of Wales Island. They just can't take the volume that would be needed to make a difference in deer's lives.

[Stephen Rinella]

And the free market economy is not going to take care of this.

[Jim Bates]

I personally think if the, if the, if the management strategy shifted from the old growth strategy that occurred is on federal lands to a restoration economy based on we're going to do Better for the deer and water and streams and stuff like that. But we're going to also support some large scale timber management. And this is what we're going to be putting up. We're not going to be doing old growth anymore. We're going to be cutting second growth. That would allow people to know that there was a supply of second growth there that would be coming and then they could look for the capital to incentivize developing the plants to handle that. Then that would be both biomass and wood. I mean, there's no. You go to Home Depot, you're not buying old growth. Doug fir two by fours. Those are all second growth. And that's what we have. We just. We're still on the initial harvest of trees in southeast Alaska and we haven't transitioned over to young growth.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it. But that initial harvest is winding down, man.

[Jim Bates]

It is winding down. And do you think they ought to.

[Stephen Rinella]

Quit altogether logging old growth?

[Jim Bates]

I hope not because there's a lot of specialty mills that they don't need very much wood a year to produce an incredible product. So, you know, small old growth timber sales, I hope they continue and I think sustainably they could. But on large scale timber management that could be steered very focused towards improving deer habitat. We need to change to a young.

[Stephen Rinella]

Growth industry and they can do all that. Young growth on old infrastructure.

[Jim Bates]

Yes, because they've already got roads there. But see, so very selfishly, I don't want to take any habitat earmark dollars and rebuild roads and bridges and log transfer sites at saltwater and stuff like that. I would like to see a viable timber history that keep those roads and bridges and stuff in good working order that we can benefit from for deer. And that's why I think they need to be there together.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is any of the stuff we're seeing. Is any of the stuff we're seeing with the incoming administration and like the tariff wars and all this stuff that we might be starting in on. Is any of that going to have a positive or negative impact on getting the industry you want established established, or is this stuff play out too slowly?

[Jim Bates]

I think it's going to play out too slowly and I actually don't know what's going to come out of this because the agencies and funding and people and all that is in flux right now and we got to kind of let the dust settle here for a few months to find out where we're at before we could pick back up.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, but some well placed tariff isn't going to all of a sudden spur the Industry in the next few years.

[Jim Bates]

I don't know. I don't know what those answers are. I know what I'd like to do on the ground if I had the. If I was king. Yeah. Tell me what I'd do. I mean, that's habitat work focused habitat work in the right places. That there was a bunch of folks that have put a lot of thought into why we want to improve that place for deer. And what would we do there?

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you feel that you're going to be able to start doing this? Like, what does it take to start.

[Jim Bates]

Doing the work we actually have right now? We don't know. The Black Tailed deer Foundation and Mule Deer foundation does not know the status of the funding dollars that we had agreements in place for right now because of the changes that's happened in the last couple weeks. So we have to let that settle. And the people that we were working with inside the agencies. We hope that we are solid in the agreements that we have. And so we actually have four projects in Southeast Alaska that will impact close to 2,000 acres of wildlife habitat improvements. So we've already started down that road. We were going to do the layout this summer and award the contracts this fall for work in 2026.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

But to make a.

[Stephen Rinella]

That money might not be there.

[Jim Bates]

We don't know. To make a meaningful impact on 360,000 acres of young growth that are sitting there ready that that is going to stem exclusion phase. We're going to have to do several thousand acres a year to start making a difference on the deer population.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

It's a lot of work. A lot of cash.

[Jim Bates]

A lot of cash. A lot of work. But it can also. It can be. If the philosophy of management of the forest was such that it was focused on making those changes, we wouldn't be relying on habitat enhancement dollars to make that. That would be normal timber management practices and focus change in the way they're doing work on the landscape.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yep. And then they just have to sign on to adhering to some areas of exclusion or kind of like they did with like stream bank setbacks and stuff like that. Right.

[Jim Bates]

And a lot of. That's a lot of the early management. Virtually good. Not passing judgment. Walked right up the bottom of the streams with cats and removed all the large woody debris. So as we're doing this young growth management strategy, we could provide the logs that the stream actually Trout Unlimited and a few other folks with the foresters where they're putting them back in the streams to get those pools and the riffles and the stuff back there for salmon habitat and stuff. So we can, we can work to do repair and management thinning for deer, but providing the wood for the in stream restoration projects at the same time.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

And then we got to tackle. What about the Washington and Oregon folks?

[Jim Bates]

Yeah, so we've got a group of.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Folks and California, I guess.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. So we have a group of folks that are working for the Black Belle Deere Foundation, Mule Deer foundation. That's there. I just. And I know that there's some grants and some funding coming along. I just don't know what opportunities exist. I don't have a breadth of experience to know enough what's going on there. And that would be working with Oregon Department of Fish and Game, Washington Department of Fish and Game and stuff and state and BLM and forest. Yeah, there is forests that are on that side of the highway and the blacktail world on the coast range stuff. So I'm sure, I'm more than sure that these same kind of conversations and these same opportunity exist on those landscapes there. It's just again taking a look at where and why. Because there are places that are, they're, they're working great. We don't need to go in there and muck it up. There's stands on Prince of Wales island that have regenerated with a spacing of trees wide enough that there is forage underneath there. And it's not in that slim extrusion phase. We don't need to be dumping money into that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you feel that all the money. Do you feel that the habitat is the way to go? Or do you think that the. All the energy that people spend talking about predation, do you think it's a wasted energy?

[Jim Bates]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's a balance between those two. And I totally understand the predation aspects of this. And, and I've. One of the things I've learned from my trail cameras.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Is when wolves moves into that valley, the deer shut down. The deer don't come down to the lower elevations for two days. When the wolves go through, there is a definite impact on the wolves on the landscape. So there's a lot of people saying all I go out deer hunting, I don't find any deer. And I see all these wolf side. If you think about it. So if we went out hunting together at the time that the deer wolves were in there, the deer are all compressed in these smaller habitat blocks because of all of this older second growth out here. Where do we go? We go to where the deer are Compressed to. Because we know that's the best places to hunt. We go there and we find all these wolf sign. Let's say it's snowed and we see all the tracks and everything like that. We don't see any deer. Yeah.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

I mean no different than seeing a bunch of human boot tracks.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. So our conclusion that we draw is there's nothing but predators on the landscape and there's no deer there, when in fact there's probably quite a few deer there. They just for that time period have slowly changed where they're at on the landscape. So there's a definite impact. I mean I've got the graph. The rut was in full swing. I had wolves move into the camera area for a two day period. And when I finished plotting my rut, usually the rut is a big bell curve of activity. It starts up here. It goes crazy nuts. I have 50 bucks a day past my 26 cameras and it drops off to nothing. There's a little teeny bit for a second rut in the beginning of December. That rut split into two bell curves around that time that the wolves were there. It was a dramatic departure from the normal rut activity. It doesn't mean the rut was stopping, but it was stopping where my cameras were. It was still going on up higher. I'm quite sure they just weren't coming down and checking on and the does weren't coming down and stuff like that. In those lower elevation they're like, oh, I'm out of here.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

But I imagine there's like a more effective time of year for predator harvest wolf. And you guys are so they're right. Mountain lions are starting to creep in.

[Jim Bates]

And around a few more. I'll tell you one of the.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

So I went black bear.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. So I've been involved in three studies with telemetry collars where we monitored fawns right at birth through the first two weeks of their lives. And the last one that, that Sophie did and it. And it basically agreed not quite 50% but like 48% of all Sitka blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear. And what we didn't know is if a font Again, 48% of all blacktail fawns are taken in the first two weeks of their life by black bear. So okay, that is a lot.

[Stephen Rinella]

So one half the deer, boom. Buy black bear in two weeks.

[Jim Bates]

Two weeks we're gone. And what we found out was. Which we had no knowledge of because then we Got does on collar that had twins that were on collars. She would take a geomorphic, some kind of a structure like a ridge or a hill or a river or a road or something, and she would put one fawn over here, two to 300 yards away and one fawn over here two to 300 yards away. And she would live in between that and nurse both of those for that two weeks.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

That's amazing.

[Jim Bates]

So if she lost one, she lost only one instead of losing both of them. And so there's a natural. So there's always been black bear there. The deer have grown up with black bear on the landscape. The deer have changed their habits to reflect the predation that the black bear put on those deer. When there was a lot of Black Bear before 2004, when we were doing deer darting, there wasn't a day when I was calling to bring does in, to shoot them, to put radio collars on them that I didn't have one to two black bears smoke into me. And I've had them get closer than you and I are and had them look past me to see where the fawn was. They were so locked into that sound. They knew I wasn't the fawn and they didn't care about me. They just want to know where that fawn. I always thought, what would it be like if you set a fawn decoy out? It would be boom. It'd be gone. Oh, wow. They'd just bowl over it. So they're super focused on that fawn distress call. And most of the fawns, what we find is the black bears feeding. The female has left him. The black bear may not be actively hunting, but it's feeding and digging up skunk cabbage in the spring. You've seen all that stuff and all of a sudden it must get a scent or that fawn hears movement, thinks it's moms and lets out one little bleat and you see this acceleration and it's. It's gone.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yeah. So more effective from your. Based off of your research, more effective to target black bears in the ahead of time. Right. Early spring.

[Jim Bates]

Well, see, so this is what, why I get back to the habitat and the fact that we have a habitat challenge again. This is Jim Batestol's world. I moved there in 1990. We had tons of clear cuts, tons of food, young clear cuts of that 2 to 15 year age. We still had all kinds of old growth and we had good conductivity even though the landscape was fractured. Lots of deer, unbelievable number of bears. I can't even fathom to tell you how many bears were there. And wolves were numerous. I saw wolves weekly. I saw black. I would see my third day in the woods. I still have my journal entry. I saw 27 black bears working in the woods the first, the third day I was on the Prince of Wales island. I mean that's the kind of numbers you used to see. It became really popular to hunt black bear. And if you look at the graph it went from 70 bears per year to almost 500 bears per year. Coming out of unit two harvested bears. Harvested bears. Wow.

[Stephen Rinella]

That was one.

[Jim Bates]

Like the residents could take two.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. The whole era of like bringing in truckloads of dog food and hunting bait stations off the road system and. Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

And that crashed in 2005. Wonk and the state started managing it first with a registration and now with a draw. And they're actually, I think they're doing an incredible job. I'm starting to see those older age class bears. So the first thing we lost was the big boars. Then we lost the older females. And when we started losing the older females you start losing the knowledge of where to dead, how to den, where to fish and all that kind of stuff. And so there was an impact. Wolves I think have stayed relatively constant in that 300 to 350 estimate population in there. We've had another 20 timber sales since I got there on federal lands. And. And this young, young growth that was all this forage is growing up to be nothing. So now we have hardly any bears. But we're starting to see them come back. We still have wolves on the landscape. Why aren't we. And we haven't had a killing winter since 2011. Why aren't we seeing tons of deer? And I think the reason is, is because we're losing the habitat on the other end. And that's my take on the landscape there that you know that the, the wolves are still taking about the same number of deer that they always did. And the bears are too. But there's less bears. But the deer used to be able to. When there was tons of bears the deer could still absorb losing 50% back. So we see a reduced deer number not so much because of predation because the predation is probably roughly the same. It's just a lower number. But it's the fact that we just lost those deer that aren't in those older stands of timber anymore where they used to be. It doesn't bode well for us on Prince of Wales for the next few years. I Don't know. I don't know how to tell you this.

[Stephen Rinella]

Me, in the next 80 years, I'll be gone.

[Jim Bates]

You might still be there. But it's, it's, you know, so I, I moved to southeast Alaska and I grew up hunting Columbia blacktail in Washington state. And I moved up there and I just fell in love with these deer. And I realized like, nobody knows anything about these deer. Like they were, you know, there's tons of stuff written on whitetail and there's quite a bit of stuff written on mule deer and stuff. But like nobody knows anything about that. That was one of the reasons why in 2009 I bought the URL sickablacktail.org and in about 2013, Sophie and I and Todd created that webpage, sickablacktail.org, the Sicka Blacktail Deer Coalition. I wanted a place somebody could go find out information about Sikka Blacktail. So it's got all the stuff on translocations, it's got all the stuff in there about all of the written things, both peer reviewed publications and not peer reviewed publications and stuff that's been written. It's a place you could go find out about Sikka blacktail. And I'm excited to see this. The emphasis on black tail throughout their region, both Columbia and stuff through the Black Tail Deer Foundation.

[Stephen Rinella]

Are you going to roll sick of blacktail.org into black tail Deer Foundation? What you looking for?

[Jim Bates]

We know we might put it up on the page, but if you look at the Black Tail deer on the Black Tail foundation thing, that's what Sophie and I have on our webpage.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

We said they same photo though that know that drawing, the characterization. Oh, right up there. That, that right there, that's on our webpage. They needed something and Sophie, they agreed that that was a good thing to allow them to use that.

[Stephen Rinella]

So will the Black Tailed Deer foundation sit separate outside of Mule Deer foundation or is it just like a wing of the Mule Deer Foundation?

[Jim Bates]

It's within kind of like the difference between pheasants forever and quail forever kind of a thing. And so who's the director? Greg Sheehan came on as director. I don't know if you know Greg. No, he's awesome. He wasn't there very long. And Steve, Belinda called me one morning and said, you need to get out a call. Steve's got an idea. And Steve says, what do you think if we created the Black Tailed Ear Foundation? And I said, I said three years ago, I told Steve I would give him two and a half to three years on the emphasis that the Mule Deer foundation was putting on blacktail. And I was kind of getting ready to retire again and I said, I'll give you three more years. I'm all in. I want to see this thing be successful.

[Stephen Rinella]

So what will your role with Black Tailed Deer foundation be?

[Jim Bates]

To try to be an advocate for deer in Alaska, deer habitat work in Alaska and the work that we could do. We have a full time wildlife biology trained employee for the Black Tailed deer Foundation, Eliza Jr. Scott. Lenore. Scott's awesome. Scott has been working up with Alaska Department of Fish and Game to do the modeling thing to answer the where. So they're doing across all of the Tongass native and non native lands where if we get dollars to do things or if the agencies and the other landowners on a habitat restoration and a second growth industry, where should we be putting our efforts and work? And so they're working on that right now. And so I'm helping to develop chapters and be a spokesperson basically for the Black Tailed Deer foundation and to educate people on why. Why do we care? I love these deer. I just. Every day I go to the woods, I try to go out and learn something and I think every day I get schooled.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yeah. Which keeps you learning, right?

[Jim Bates]

No, it is, you know, like I like. Wow. I wouldn't have thought that, you know. And every once in a while I. The licking branch thing, there's not a lot of. I went out in the Snow to start GPSing trails because if you go out there, there's a hundred trails, hundreds of trails. You go out in the snow and.

[Stephen Rinella]

I found you put a camera on one of those trails and there's a trail there. But it doesn't necessarily mean something's going to come down that trail.

[Jim Bates]

But go out in the snow and GPS the one or two trails that are really ran and go to. And you'll see they go like this and they'll come to a node. Put your camera at that node. That's where three or four of the really used trails come together.

[Stephen Rinella]

They come together in the high spots?

[Jim Bates]

No, they come together. They just. Across the landscape, the deer trails will kind of mingle and sometimes they intersect.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh.

[Jim Bates]

And when they.

[Stephen Rinella]

So you're not saying they intersect at a particular type of feature? Just where they intersect and at that.

[Jim Bates]

Intersect, I'll almost guarantee you there's a licking branch somewhere right there.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

The licking branch really surprises me. Sorry.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Do you ever sit the licking branch?

[Jim Bates]

Huh?

[Stephen Rinella]

Do you ever set up and Just sit on a licking branch.

[Jim Bates]

Oh, yeah. If you go to. I got a YouTube channel. And if you go there, I have tons of videos I've put together of licking branches. You can watch buck after buck after buck come to these things.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Have you done like mock scrapes and mock licking branch? Have you set up a totally synthetic one yet?

[Jim Bates]

No, I've thought about it. Well, first off, it would have to be a synthetic lure because all natural lures are forbidden in Alaska. That's been outlawed because they're so worried about CWD getting up there. And so they're going to have to. It'll have to be something a deer attracted. I know several people that's used. I can't remember the name of the company that does the rope. Hemp rope and the. You soak it in some kind of a lure and I can't remember. Anyhow, they put that up and our bucks just beat the pee out of there. The problem is we have so much rain, you've got to put lure on it about every two days.

[Stephen Rinella]

Got it. You ever hear of a thing called Buckman Juice?

[Jim Bates]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

The urine from a man named Doug Dern?

[Jim Bates]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

Might be worth checking out. I could try to get you a bottle of Buckman juice.

[Jim Bates]

I could tell you that. 2013, I had a really beautiful 4x4 with eye guards coming through one muskeg between two and four for three days. And I hung a tree stand. And I'm not a patient man, I hate being sitting there, but I went in and hung a tree stand and I got out of that tree stand because I had to backpack it in three quarters of a mile. And it got cold. I got cold because I sweated. And after I hung it, I got down out of there. And the next day, my trail camera, 18 minutes after I got down, he pushed three does right by my stand. So the next day I got in there and I sat from 7:30 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon. And this doe came out. Well, I had peed out of the sand. And she came over and she smelled every place I had peed. And I had dropped the little rope that I had pulled the muzzleloader up by. And she mouthed that and stuff. And then she just slowly walked. She followed my tracks and smelled me and the frost. I could see she was exactly following my tracks. We don't have any predators that come from above. So she never looked up. I was only 12ft above her, but she never looked up. And she took off. And I cocked the gun and swung over to the opening. She come out and he comes smoking into that opening and I got that buck. Whoa.

[Stephen Rinella]

All right.

[Jim Bates]

In fact, I'm not this good. It was an accident, but my camera was set on a three shot burst and he ran by the camera and it set it off. I mouth gun him to a stop and I didn't know you could actually see me in the tree stand. And next thing you see is a big puff of smoke and he's dying on the edge of the picture. It happened that fast. That, that fast.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Unreal.

[Jim Bates]

Now we were told, but she did not. She was not wigged out by where I had peed at all. Just absolutely did not care. She was curious, really curious, but had not. She wasn't wigged out by that at all.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Jim, we were told that you end up shooting a lot of bucks head on in the chest.

[Jim Bates]

Yep.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

And then you. What's your aiming spot?

[Jim Bates]

The bottom center, the bottom throat patch. And you recover the round ball against the rear leg bone. Hopefully you'll find this out someday.

[Stephen Rinella]

I hope so too.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

I hope so too. But why? How's it end up head on so frequently?

[Jim Bates]

Because they're coming to the call.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Oh, God. Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah, they're coming to the call. The other thing is, I try to set up a blind call all the time. And if he's sneaking in, what I do is I try to set up. So if there's a ridge over here or a travel way that I think they might be using, I set up here knowing that the wind is blowing across me this way with an opening on this side so that he's going to come and he's going to try to circle behind me.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you catch them crossing that opening.

[Jim Bates]

And I catch them crossing that opening. And that's a lot of times they'll still turn and look at you. But you can get them broadside. If you're just dope, man, you could. Like when I start calling, I don't move because they're locked on. They know the minute you blow that call from 5, 6, 700 yards away, they know the stump you're sitting by. I've watched them across large open fast bus gig systems come at full tilt, run across there to that spot. I'm quite sure, because what I'm trying to do now is be a little more patient. I find that big bucks come in between 30 and 45 minutes. What? And I'm not that patient. I call for 10 or 15 and I want to go over there. I might do something different. I'm sure that There has been hundreds of bucks come to where I had just called and I'm no longer there. I'm off hunting something else. Or what I'll do is I frequently.

[Stephen Rinella]

When you set up to call, how long you sitting there?

[Jim Bates]

You should be there between 35 and 40 minutes.

[Stephen Rinella]

Can I give you a little bit of math? That Mercer long. There's a man named Mercer Lawing gave me what so similar situation. Call him bobcats predator. Call them bobcats. Bobcats will sometimes show up like 40 minutes later. So most guys that call coyotes, they'll sit for 15 minutes. That's kind of the rule of thumb, right? 15 minutes. Everybody gets bored and they want to leave. But a bobcat might show up at 40 minutes. And I was talking to my friend Mercer, who calls tons of bobcats and used to do it professionally. He's like, yeah, but I can hunt twice as many spots at 20. Sure. Some will show up at 40. Most show up before. Like, most show up before. So I'd rather hit twice as many spots than wait around for the one that might show up at 40. Like a calculated loss. So you're saying that when you run it, you don't sit there 40 minutes, but you should?

[Jim Bates]

I should or you could. If I time myself and make it happen. I have tended to kill better bucks at the 30 to 45 minute period.

[Stephen Rinella]

That is a long time. Which means, Steve, I call, look around, be like, man.

[Jim Bates]

So if. And you and I both know sometimes you call in there, boom, they're there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, that's what I'm looking for. The one that just is all of a sudden in your face.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah, and we love that. That's exhilarating. I mean, my God, you're talking to an animal and all of a sudden it's like smack in your face. Like at five feet, it's like crazy stuff 40 minutes later. Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

And you're calling it what? Like how often you calling?

[Jim Bates]

I usually start out with a really aggressive call sequence. I'm much louder. And I've been told that I'm too loud. Oh, no, that's half the volume. I really crack on it.

[Unknown Speaker]

But this is all the classic blacktail deer whistle that's sold in Alaska. That's what you're using?

[Jim Bates]

No.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, no.

[Jim Bates]

I don't know. Can I use brand names here?

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Oh, you don't have to give away any secrets.

[Jim Bates]

Oh, no, there's no secrets. You know the cow talk that was came out years ago, the first cow call that ever was made.

[Unknown Speaker]

Oh, yeah, the rubber band.

[Jim Bates]

Rubber band the plastic thing, that's what I've killed all my deer off of. I tighten that rubber band and you use it like the thorax in the back and can change my pitch. I start out really quiet.

[Stephen Rinella]

Just make the noise in your mouth.

[Jim Bates]

I start out really, really quiet. And then I crescendo to louder and louder and louder. I'm reaching out further.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know what? You just use crescendo, right? I've used it wrong my whole life. It's like, I thought the crescendo was the top.

[Jim Bates]

No, it's the build.

[Stephen Rinella]

The build. Someone told me that one time my whole life. I said when it reached a crescendo, meaning the cap, the apex. No, the crescendo is the climb. Good job, Jim.

[Jim Bates]

It's like throwing a pebble into a pond. Your sound waves go out. You never know how it's going to come back to you. And so I imagine that. I know in my mind every time I call, some deer hears it. It. They may not choose to come, but they are hearing it. And so I start with a really loud bang. I try to get them to stand up and start. Now, they may not complete it, but I try to get them to do that. And so I start that. Then I go back down and I build and build. And then if I'm doing a rattling sequence, I start out super loud and a roar grunt that they're our deer are when they're aggravated and they do the roar grunt. You'll hear that from 200 yards away. It is nuts how loud they are.

[Unknown Speaker]

This is getting me excited for a. Huh?

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yep. For sure.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, go on. Anyhow, now, that rattling stuff is interesting.

[Jim Bates]

The other part of that is when if a buck responds to a rattling sequence and you decide not to shoot him. Keep it going. Numerable times. I've had a smaller buck come in first and Mr. Holy Jesus. Walk in later like, oh, my God. It's just like five minutes later, you'll see these really big antler chips out in the brush moving around, and a lot of people will bang, kill that buck and go over and deal with it. And they didn't realize that there was a smoker buck coming in.

[Stephen Rinella]

Hmm.

[Jim Bates]

I had Sophie with another biologist there, and I called it a beautiful three point. And Sophie took that three point and she jumped up. And I said, no, no, no, no. Let's keep calling. And they went like, no, let's take pictures. And they ran out across the musket. And I was like, shoot. So I went over there and I stepped away from my gun, took my backpack off and I laid my muzzleloader down and I went over and I grabbed their camera and I heard snort and I turned around and there's this four by four with eye guards 20 yards away, steam just rolling off of me. And I looked at my gun, which was about 10ft away in that buck, and he took off and he ran down the edge of the muskeg and I grabbed my muzzleloader and I rolled out into the muskeg and he went down 60 yards and went in and stopped, but he stopped with a sweet spot between two trees. And he ought not to done that. But I mean, that was a classic example of a. He was hot and he looking for a fight, and he came in just virtually smoking.

[Unknown Speaker]

Little off topic, but 60 yards, blacktail broadside. Is that an offhand shot for you or do you look for a rest in that situation?

[Jim Bates]

I almost always try to take a knee. I try to. I don't care if they're five yards. I try to. I can do it. I've done it. I mean, 70 yards, 80 yards. Last two years ago, I killed a buck in the alpine. I had none to rest on it. I was like, suck it up, buttercup. And I aimed and just did a perfect shot on him. But aim small baseball. I'll tell you, you only got one shot. You're not going to reload in any kind of lifetime of that deer running off or anything else, you've got to make that one shot. That's the challenge. That's why I went to muzzleloading eventually, is just to challenge myself to make that one shot.

[Stephen Rinella]

You've been married a hell of a long time, haven't you?

[Jim Bates]

26 years. On the 14th, I think I asked.

[Stephen Rinella]

You, like your marriage advice. I can't remember what you told me. I did ask your marriage advice. Did you tell me that you always treat your wife like a princess?

[Jim Bates]

No, no, no.

[Stephen Rinella]

That wasn't you.

[Unknown Speaker]

No, that was Randy.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's right. But I did ask you in that parking lot on the island.

[Jim Bates]

We did, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

What would you tell me your plan was?

[Jim Bates]

Oh, I went through the whole thing about why we got buried in February. The fact that, you know, like trapping and bear season started in March, and through April, the trapping fell off. But then there was field season, and then it was hunting season for deer all the way down through into November. And then trapping season picked up again, and usually things were froze up in February and that was a good time. But it happened to be a three day Weekend that year with Valentine's Day on it. So we got married on Valentine's Day.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's cute.

[Jim Bates]

So I'd be home on anniversaries.

[Stephen Rinella]

So have you. Have you guys got all those years of marriages because good luck. Or do you got, like, a strategy?

[Jim Bates]

I think she's tolerable to me.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. She just got. You just got lucky.

[Jim Bates]

I got lucky. We got together. I said, I hunt. She says, I've known guys that hunt before. And I said, no, you don't understand. She does now. We get along good. She loves helping processing. She's got a few hunts with me and stuff like that, but mainly I go out and hunt by myself, and she does all the helps, all the cutting up and stuff when I bring it home.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay. Has she shot a deer?

[Jim Bates]

Nope, not even interested. She's watched me kill a bunch, but other than that.

[Stephen Rinella]

What'd she say when you get one? She get excited?

[Jim Bates]

Oh, yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

She doesn't feel bad for the deer.

[Jim Bates]

She'll point out every once in a while like, we don't have any elk in the freezer. Yeah, I love those kind of statements, like, go forth and kill elk.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know, like, hey, what's up with. You know how you're allowed to kill an elk on Prince Wales if you run into one, as long as you have a deer tag or something like that?

[Jim Bates]

I've seen tracks and I found.

[Stephen Rinella]

You haven't laid eyes on one?

[Jim Bates]

No.

[Stephen Rinella]

I had a guy that was feeding me a lot of intel about where it was somewhere, but I never looked into it.

[Jim Bates]

I can honestly tell you. In about year 2000, Karen saw a cow and a calf in the middle of the road just before you get to Goose Creek, Thorn Bay intersection there. Come to Thorn Bay. She came home and said, I just saw something, a deer that I don't know what it was. She had never seen a winter calf with their kind of that brushy mane. And I think I went to a bugle magazine and I held up, does it look like that? She said, yes. I said, let's get in the truck. And we drove back out there, and their tracks were there. I mean, I tracked it for 800 yards and I never caught up to them.

[Stephen Rinella]

So they swam over because Brushy and.

[Jim Bates]

Shrubby's not very far from Zarembo. And so they went from Atlanta to Zarembo, and then they can come straight across Brushy and Shrubby, across Snow Pass there and onto Prince of Wales. So there was dozens of sightings there. So they first planted Roosevelt elk over on Etland island and then they came back with Rockies and the Rockies went I don't like this stuff. And they would.

[Stephen Rinella]

So that's what was happening.

[Jim Bates]

So they expanded and there was a.

[Stephen Rinella]

There was a strike three year. The Rockies would strike off swimming.

[Jim Bates]

There was a three year period where we had a lot of elk sightings on Principal's Island. And I know three times during that period that I crossed trail tracks and I tracked them.

[Stephen Rinella]

But now those were the years put eyes on one.

[Jim Bates]

Those were the years that we were doing the deer darting and we were free ranging, darting and getting off the road system and calling deer in and processing deer and stuff. And during those years were the same expansion years of elk. And I definitely saw elk tracks in remote areas on Prince of Wales.

[Stephen Rinella]

So do you think right now there's none on Prince of Wales Island?

[Jim Bates]

I don't think so. I think they've kind of settled down and they have a population on Zerimbo now and they've all interbred and they're.

[Stephen Rinella]

Not striking off, I don't think anymore.

[Jim Bates]

They're striking off. I'm sure some young male thinks that there's a whole island over there that might be full of cows that I don't know about. So they might come over.

[Stephen Rinella]

But you know, buddy of mine, he one time. This is the same buddy was telling me about where to go look for elk. But he one time found two. He pulled two blacktail fawns out of the water. Couldn't find their mom anywhere. Little fawns, they were swimming. He got them both in his boat. One died right away. He got one wrapped in a space blanket, got it all warmed back up again, brought it up to the beach and it ran off. So some number of those things die like that.

[Jim Bates]

That and also when they're walking on the beach, a bald eagle will take them and they'll grab them and sometimes they let them go. But they've punctured their insides with their. I've found several that has the talon marks, you know. But I've also had like 12 mile arm down to the back road down towards your place down there. I've. I've saw where eagle was swimming across. You know how they'll get a salmon and they can't take off?

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Well, when it came out it had a fawn in its talons.

[Stephen Rinella]

No shit.

[Jim Bates]

There's a.

[Stephen Rinella]

Grabbing them out in the water and drowning them.

[Jim Bates]

So there was. There was quite a. There's quite. We don't know what percentage of fawns get taken by eagles. But it is a predator of fawns.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

Especially with those first two or three day wobbly leg kind of things. That's definitely a. Definitely a thing.

[Stephen Rinella]

You know what you get like, you get sort of this idea, you know, think about turkey hunt if you're a turkey hunter or not. But people you calling turkeys and people like, oh, you know, he's not going to want to cross the. He's not going to want to cross the ditch or you know, you're trying to calm through the fence, you won't want to try to cross the fence. So. And people talking about stuff like that, like these little perceived obstacles, you know, when you're trying to call something in. When you get up there, there's so much water and you think of like, you think of a bear deer coming down to the water and he's gonna like kind of psych himself up and get ready, you know, and then go for it. When you're watching them, it's like they don't even think, man, if you're a.

[Jim Bates]

Rutten buck, I'd watch.

[Stephen Rinella]

They just like, just like in the water, swim throughout. They don't, they're not like, you know, they're not like, whoo, I gotta build myself up for the swim. It's like they don't even. They, they seem as comfortable swimming as they do walking.

[Jim Bates]

I've had wolves swimming in front of my boat and get out on the beach, just shake off, sit down and howl at you, whatever.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, it's wild to watch deer like come down into the salt water and just fast.

[Jim Bates]

They're fast.

[Stephen Rinella]

You can't catch them in a canoe.

[Jim Bates]

They don't have little webby things or nothing. It seemed like they really go. Well.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, it's just. They don't give a. They just go. Yeah, they just swim. You'll see them on these dinky little islands now and then you're like, what the hell is he doing on that island?

[Jim Bates]

Actually, I think a lot of times right about the end of May, the does go to those little islands to have fawns because there's less predators out there.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I've seen that time of year you see black bears striking out for little teeny islands, you know, and I.

[Jim Bates]

Was wondering that's what they're doing.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah, Yep.

[Jim Bates]

I absolutely agree with that.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, how do people get involved with Black tailed deer Foundation?

[Jim Bates]

Go to the website blacktaildeer.org yeah, blackdale.

[Stephen Rinella]

Deer.Org you guys are going to start chapters. People can start chapters.

[Jim Bates]

We've Got chapters. I think we, we had a lot of the mule deer chapters. We went to them and said, do you want to become a black. A dedicated blacktail chapter. And I think most of them said yes. Some of them in California that have mule deer close in Washington and Oregon that also care about mule deer in eastern Washington and eastern Oregon and stuff like that. They were trying to figure out how to go both ways on that stuff, which is totally cool. In Alaska. It's a no brainer.

[Stephen Rinella]

Is there going to be a chapter in Craig?

[Jim Bates]

Yep, there is.

[Stephen Rinella]

Really?

[Jim Bates]

Yep. I'm the chairperson.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, can you join if you're just a poser from out of town?

[Jim Bates]

Yeah, we'd like you.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah. No, so you could go to the website. There's the. And that's the easiest way. There's several options on how many years you do it and what level of chapter and whether you're sponsoring and we'll eventually have a deal on there for life memberships and stuff like that. We've already done some chapter award stuff on Kodiak. We have a really functioning, really good chapter on Kodiak.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, is that right?

[Jim Bates]

And we're not going to do anything on Kodiak for habitat. The habitat's fine on Kodiak, but what we're doing is helping the research that Alaska Department of Fish and Game is doing on Kodiak on sick of black tailed deer. And that was the decision of the chapter up there that they wanted to help the area biologist and his assistant up there work on the projects that they're doing. And there's a bunch of camera traps going on and they're actually going to have the Black Tailed deer Foundation members run into the line of cameras and helping change out cars and batteries and stuff which will save money for ads.

[Stephen Rinella]

Oh, that's cool.

[Jim Bates]

Yeah.

[Stephen Rinella]

So there's, I mean, that'd be some good volunteer work and we're going to.

[Jim Bates]

Be doing that in other areas. So we got, we're going to have a chapter in judo. We've got a chapter in Sitka, Prince of Wales, Ketchikan, Palmer, Wasilla. We want one in Fairbanks. We got one in Anchorage. Trying to think I might be missing one. And of course those guys don't have deer, but they go to Kodiak or they care, you know, and that's what I tell people. We all have organizations that we support and we think about and it's your choice to put your money where you best see fit. And I, the folks that really care about black tail deer across the west and then Alaska. I hope they seriously consider Black Tailed Deer Fish Foundation.

[Stephen Rinella]

I know I got a lot of buddies that are in the interior that that's a part of their annual cycle is because things wind down.

[Jim Bates]

That's right.

[Stephen Rinella]

And so guys go to Kodiak, Prince William Sound, Southeast. It's part of the annual deal is to get like another hunt in, you know, every year, which for them hunting, November is very late season.

[Jim Bates]

Right. But they're also out of the. By that time, the weather's deteriorating up in interior. It's really cold. They can come down and be warm.

[Stephen Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jim Bates]

So, yeah, it's. I'm really excited to see the emphasis that Greg and the board on the Mule Deer foundation board and stuff. And Steve and his conservation group is putting on this because it's. To me, it's. It's where I wanted to get to starting in about 2006. And I think it's exciting. It's just for me, it's really exciting to see this focus on a. A deer that really had nobody focusing on him in the past. And I don't know what strides could be made. I don't know what landscape management policies can be changed or what, but I hope to be part of it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Well, I think that if you are able to promote, like, you can definitely promote research, you can promote awareness of issues. Right. And you can unify groups of people who love the animals to, you know, look out for their. The best interest of the hunting, even outside of the habitat work that you want to do. I think that doing those things and making a sort of like political body, so to speak, of like, of blacktail fans who are educated and aware. I think that in and of itself is valuable.

[Jim Bates]

One of the questions that come to us all the time, would you be supportive? Intensive management programs on predators and we focus on habitat. I want to be very clear about that. We don't take a stance on there unless some management would come down that would greatly negatively affect the deer population. But mainly we're looking at habitat and what can we do? Is there. Is there truly something that could be done for habitat? And I think there really truly is something that can be done for habitat. It's not going to be planting sagebrush, taking down fence. It's not going to be working on migration corridors and stuff. It's going to be working on conductivity of that animal on the landscape and where is it going to get its next meal. And can we do better in creating those salad bowls out there for those things to Go forage on and give.

[Stephen Rinella]

Them a way to get to the salad bowl.

[Jim Bates]

And I want people to be able to have access to the areas that we create those opportunities for deer so that they also can hunt those areas. I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave that rural resident or non residents or anybody else out of that equation.

[Stephen Rinella]

Okay, thanks for coming on, man.

[Jim Bates]

And you got to do it with a flintlock.

[Stephen Rinella]

That's the new rule. Don't let that rumor get out there.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Yeah, that's true.

[Jim Bates]

So I called for my best flintlock story is I called for an entire hour. I had trees like this that were being rubbed in this area. And I called for a whole hour. It was cold. It was like 15 degrees that morning.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

So you're 35 minutes past your usual tolerance.

[Jim Bates]

I timed myself for an hour, and at an hour, I was starting to get really cold. I stood up and I kind of brushed around and I put my backpack on and I reached down, I picked up my flintlock and I come around my tree and there's this huge five point walking down the trail right at me. He's about 85 yards out again, steam rolling off of him. I remember the steam out of his nostrils that morning. It was so beautiful. He was all vivid, vivid alder rubbed orange antlers. And he turns around, he goes back up the hill. I wasn't gonna, I. All I would have had was an 85 yard shot with a flintlock. Offhand, I'm not gonna take that on a sick of blacktail looking straight at me. Turns around, walks back over the hill. I run up the hill and I look and its tracks go off and it goes into this timber. And I had a can, one of the little long cans, and I reached.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Down, only it's never that loud.

[Jim Bates]

And I reached out and I flipped that can and he flew up out of the timber and came broadside at 50 yards, turned broadside with the morning sun sitting against him, steaming, reached back and scratched his butt with his antler. And I dropped to go to one knee and I couldn't see him over the curve. And I said, stand up. You do this at the range all the time. Focus, focus, focus. And when I shoot a flintlock, I try to imagine that round ball going clear through the target before I come out of my hold. And I reached up and I boom. And when I heard the smoke cleared, he was gone, just like he'd never been there. And I walked over and here's a chunk of lung laying on the sphagnum moss. And I'm like, all right, you're on the right track. But there I went aboard it. I wish I could play in my brain. The sun on his body and the steam rising off his body there at about 50 yards. That was, that was a special moment.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Heck yeah. I'm fired up. Sign me up for the Black Tail Deer foundation as well.

[Jim Bates]

All right, thank you guys, man.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thanks so much for coming out.

[Jim Heffelfinger]

Jim Blacktail deer.org that's right, that's easy to remember.

[Stephen Rinella]

Dudes.org Start a chapter, join a chapter.

[Jim Bates]

And go check out. Yeah, sitco blacktail.org that's Sophie and Todd Mind's web page.

[Stephen Rinella]

Learn about research is.

[Jim Bates]

Yep, got it.

[Stephen Rinella]

Thanks, dude.

[Jim Bates]

All foreign.

[Stephen Rinella]

History buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up. We're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition, titled the Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the west represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times, violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interact with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white tailed deer skin trade, which is titled the Long Hunters 1761-1775. So again, you can buy this wherever audiobooks are sold. Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men, 1806-1840 by Stephen Rinella.