00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to ONEX Hunt for their support of this podcast. I’m your host, Lake Pickle, and if you remember when we last spoke, I said that in this episode we would be learning about some life altering conservation work. My friends, this is the kind of wildlife conservation story that makes me want to stand up and start cheering. This is the kind of story that you’ll want to tell your friends about. And believe me when I say, if you have ever had the privilege of hunting, hearing, or watching wild turkeys in the springtime, which we are quickly approaching, I dare say this story and conversation will send shills down your spine and make you even more thankful for every turkey you hear, see, or take. From here on out, let’s get into it.
00:01:07
Speaker 2: Yeah that’s good.
00:01:11
Speaker 1: Come on in, sir, Hey, how are you good morning? I’m Lake. Nice to meet you, Lake, Yes, ma’am. Yeah, okay, yes I can. It’s early February and I’ve driven a few hours north from my home in central Mississippi to meet a man named mister Benny Herring to talk about his involvement in one of the greatest wildlife conservation wins in the country’s history.
00:01:43
Speaker 2: Oh, just now, what what do you need to do? You want to just sit down and visit or how do you want to do this?
00:01:48
Speaker 1: I was, now, yes I do. Steve said, I need to ask you about your turkey room.
00:01:55
Speaker 2: This is my room. Yeah, that’s fifty something years.
00:02:02
Speaker 1: Of junk junk.
00:02:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I have been pretty fortunate. I’ve been able to hunt a lot of places, and yes, been pretty well about as blessed as you can be, as far as being able to hunt and go with your wife, being very supportive and had quite a career. And I’ve just been fortunate. Yeah, I can tell you.
00:02:32
Speaker 1: I followed mister Benny to his office in his house. The room is lined all the way around with turkey beards, various wildlife and hunting photos of him and his friends taken from all around the country and other parts of the world. I see pictures of buffalo hunting in Africa, wingshooting in Argentina, along with deer, elk and antelope skulls, and some of the longest turkey spurs. I have ever laid eyes on. It became very clear to me that this man has seen and done a lot lot quite a collection of beards and spurs, and I’ve been lucky.
00:03:05
Speaker 2: Of course. I’ve been hunting turkeys a long time, A long time.
00:03:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, you got some long spurred turkeys.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: Mike, Well, yes, I’ve got some pretty good ones they olly my goodness.
00:03:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, thank you for doing this.
00:03:21
Speaker 2: Well, you’re welcome. I always try to bene fifty turkeys best again, you know, work with them for years, and when you’re about it, you don’t never really quit being one.
00:03:35
Speaker 1: Can you this chair?
00:03:37
Speaker 2: Yeah? Move it, do whatever you need to do. Just you know, I’m following your lead. You just the way you want to.
00:03:45
Speaker 1: Mister Biddy possesses a rare quality. Truly, that’s not blowing smoke. The zeal And adoration for wildlife, and particularly the wild turkey, was so evident in the first few minutes of meeting this man. I was just so excited to set up my podcast gear and get this interview under way. I knew before the formal conversation even got started that this man was going to have some incredible things to share with all of us. And believe me, he did.
00:04:13
Speaker 2: I started turkey hunting in nineteen seventy. Okay a Tyler County, which is the county just south of Montgomery County, opened their turkey season in nineteen seventy and my friend Won O’Neill lived in Caraziesco. And he and another fella were about the only two turkey hunted in Tyler County. And I got invited down there to go turkey hunton. And that was in nineteen seventy, the first time I ever went turkey hunting in my life.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: Did you had you heard of anyone doing it prior to that? Was there anybody around that was turkey hunt not.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: Here in this county. Now One O’Neill of course lived at Carazisco. He had turkey hunted some in the southern part of the state. And I did not know anybody personally that turkey hunting. Now later on, of course, we opened aparts from Montgomery County the following year and there was about three of us here in the county that turkey hunted. Yeah, it was just you know, things were different then you could turkey hunt anywhere in the county and never see another individual. Uh so about three of us and that was about it, and of course it changed as time went on.
00:05:41
Speaker 1: I wish there was three turkey hunters in the county I live in now.
00:05:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I understand it, I really do.
00:05:50
Speaker 1: There’s a few key things we can pull out from this first little bit mister Benny has shared with us. In that one short story, he made mention of several things that demonstrate how different turkey hunting and turkey hunting culture was back in nineteen seventy when he started Number one, the county he started turkey hunting in opened their season in nineteen seventy, as in turkey hunting wasn’t allowed before then. Think back once again to the Fanny Cook episode and the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission being established in nineteen thirty two. One of the first things that commission did was start protecting game species that had been grossly over hunted, turkey’s being one of them. Mister Betty started hunting turkeys right at the very beginning of some hunting starting to be opened back up in a very limited manner. Number two, did you hear him say that he was one of three turkey hunters in the entire county and that he didn’t know of anyone not a soul that turkey hunting in the county that he lived in at the time. My friends, if that alone does not screen that we are talking about an entirely different era. I don’t know what does These days in Mississippi you can throw a rock and hit three turkey hunters. It’s a different time. But mister Benny was coming up in a crucial part of turkey conservation history, and we’re gonna fully dive into that, but before we do, I want to hear the last bit of this story so that we can really appreciate how much this man loves wild turkeys.
00:07:18
Speaker 2: That first year was fruitful, and of course after I shot that first turkey, it was all over.
00:07:23
Speaker 1: I should see you were able to call a turkey in that first year?
00:07:27
Speaker 2: Sure was?
00:07:27
Speaker 1: What was that? Like?
00:07:29
Speaker 2: Unbelievable? You know, nowadays, when you see a turkey approaching in full strut and gobbling, you’ve probably done it a good bit and you don’t, I reckon, you kind of take it for granted. But that first time, now, you don’t ever recover from that. If you really really love turkey, Yeah.
00:07:53
Speaker 1: That’s a good way to put it. You don’t ever recover and never recover. Mister Benny Herring loves wild turkeys. That much is clear. So now let’s get into the meat of this conversation and learn about his work as a wildlife biologist. How did you get into the biology side of it?
00:08:12
Speaker 2: Well, I graduated from Delfas State with a BS and biology, and I thought I might want to be a teacher, but I soon found out that with a BS you could hardly live on what you’d get paid as a teacher. And at that time I heard about a wildlife school at Mississippi State University, and I went over there and applied and was accepted and got my master’s degree in wildlife in Mississippi State, and immediately went to work for the Game and Fish and I spent thirty two years there with him, and I had numerous probly that I was involved in. I was involved in Morning the project where we increased finally got to increase in the bag limit UH. And then our turkey biologiest at that time was named Champ Clark, and he was killed on one of our wildlife managineers when he fell off of a tractor and the disk ran over him. And I had been working with Champ a good bed at that time, and uh, it just somehow another failed my lot to start doing the turkeys restoration. And so for the next ten years I was heavily involved in that, and we trapped turkeys in numerous locations throughout the state.
00:09:47
Speaker 1: As mentioned earlier, this was an important time in wild turkey conservation history. You heard mister Benny just make reference to trapping turkeys. This was a huge part of the restoration process, trapping turkeys and then relocating them to where there were none and then allowing them to repopulate. I want to ask him more about this, and just the heads up, you’re going to hear him mention something called cannon netting, also sometimes referred to as rocket netting. It’s a bird capturing technique used to safely catch large numbers of birds, and it’s carried out by using cannons to fire a large net over the top of a group of birds. How far along had turkey restoration been going on when you got put in that position?
00:10:31
Speaker 2: Of course, the restoration of the turkey and in Mississippi and the Southeast really began in the late med the late sixties when they realized that cannon netting, which was used to trap waterfowl first could also be used to trap wile turkeys for restoration, and that’s when things begin to really take off and improve. Up to then, you know, they had been all kind of f it’s made of raising turkeys and releasing them, and of course it was ineffective, sure, but when you took the wild turkeys and put them into good habitat, they flourished real quick.
00:11:13
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:11:14
Speaker 2: So it started in the late sixties and in the in seventies up until the mid eighties. Yeah, it really well. In fact, we repopulated the state of Mississippi. Yeah, yeah, there it did.
00:11:30
Speaker 1: That’s why. Well, one you really were in at the beginning of it then.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: Right close to the star.
00:11:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s so you know, talking to folks that hunt around the southeast. Now, I mean there’s counties that don’t have a lot of turkeys, but I don’t know if there’s any counties that don’t have any.
00:11:48
Speaker 2: I think I think I’m correct on this, and that in Mississippi all are parts of the county has some type of turkey sea.
00:12:00
Speaker 1: And hearing you know, hearing you and other folks talk about these times were because there were counties back then that didn’t have turkeys, correct, none the different world.
00:12:10
Speaker 2: Well see, at that time, of course, it wasn’t just you go catch turkeys and turn them loose. You had to go through a process. You’d have a munch of club of joining landowners that would get together and they would request from the Game and Fish of a far my wildlife to be put on the list to receive a release of wild turkeys. And course when we got their requests, of biologists went and evaluated the property to be considered and back and then you know, we thought, okay, if you got ten thousand acres under agreement, you can provide good protection and the birds will do well. We have since learned that it didn’t have to be that large, okay, yeah, but at that time we did right. And of course at that time we didn’t think that you could drivive in pine plantations. See the turkeys that we were familiar with were in good hardwood block September Man.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: That’s wild. Yeah, well, I mean, because I mean, just thinking about today, it’s like not i mean not a mismanaged pine plantation, but a pine plantation that’s taken care of and you know, burned and such a turkey be all in there, all in there, But back then they all didn’t know. That’s right, different world. Yeah, absolutely, that’s fascinating. Yeah yeah, man. I cannot tell you just how much I love these old school conservation stories, just thinking about those men and women with little more than a love for wild things and wild places and determination to figure out how to keep that kind of stuff on this landscape. Just those tiny little details like not knowing a turkey could survive on a pine plantation. Heck, these days, a turkey gobblin in the pines goes together like a worm on a brim hook. But it does is because these wildlife conservationists that came before us picked up the torch and they figured it out. So let’s learn how they figured it out when y’all started canning that and how did you figure how did you determine a location? I mean, I mean, I’m having to think that there was a little bit of like, how do we even do this? You know?
00:14:20
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, if like on Friest Point Refuge, you had a fairly good population of birds there, so what we would do? Wayne Shrider the main one, he was the main trapper, and I helped him every all I could of course, first thing he would look for was an opening or a space big enough that you could fire the net in. And it was about sixty B sixty, but you could get along one of those roads or junction of roads. And what we would do we would prebate using wheat most of the time, and we would string a bait line, probably a quarter mile each direction down that road. And then you go to checking it, see what kind of usage you’re getting. And then when they get at the main location and they’re taking it, cleaning it up every day, you sit you in it. And when they come to feed the next time, you catch them.
00:15:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, And what do you so you get these turkeys in the net? How do you get them and get them into a place where you could transport them?
00:15:27
Speaker 2: Okay, what you do prior to catching the turkeys? We would buy a bunch of pasteboard boxes and we would put them together, tape them together, and we’d cut a flap in the bottom of that box that we could stick the turkey in and then turn it upside down with a flap down on the ground with a turkey standing on it, and we would take them all out of the net, put them in a box and then we would load them in a truck. And most of the time we would have people from the area that the turkeys were going to station somewhere within two or three miles of us, and we would either call them to come to us or we’d carry the turkeys to them. And we tried to and we didn’t ever get it exact, but we wanted to have ten hens and five goblers per release sight.
00:16:22
Speaker 1: Ah.
00:16:23
Speaker 2: Sometimes we’d have more hens than that, sometimes less. Sometimes we’d have more gobless and sometimes less. Sure and then they would go and release the birds. And when they release them, of course they’d take them out of that truck that they were transported in, put them on the ground, open all of the flaps, cut the tape at the flaps and open them at the same time so all the birds could go simultaneous.
00:16:50
Speaker 1: Ah, Yes, they’d be together.
00:16:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, And then we would do the best we could monitor those birds. And under most circum stances it would be five years and we would open short seasons. That’s how fast they would respond to good habitat. Yeah, yeah, man.
00:17:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, How did you monitor them well?
00:17:13
Speaker 2: Of course, first off, if you consulted with the conservation officer in that county, and he had contacts with the clubs that had requested and they would keep records and tell him when they saw poles and hens here, gobblers here. And also we used county mail carriers, the local mail carrier that he had a world of information.
00:17:37
Speaker 1: Just seeing them.
00:17:39
Speaker 2: Where did you see turkeys? How many did you see? So you’ve put all of that together, and you assume that you’ve had pretty good reproduction for four to five years, and if you did, then you opened a short gobblers only season.
00:17:55
Speaker 1: What would the season look like sometimes when you open the season up, what would you say?
00:17:58
Speaker 2: Sometime it would be two weekends, sometimes short, fair short? Yeah, always started off fair shot. Yeah, and if you know you could if you had success and things went well, then just like the rest of the state in the deer season, turkey season and everything, you gradually increased.
00:18:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. What was the attitudes like if you know, in an area where you’ve done one of these relocations, four or five years later, y’all open up a short season and folks get to go out and hunt these turkeys a little bit. How were they just drilled? Thrilled?
00:18:35
Speaker 2: Thrilled?
00:18:36
Speaker 1: When mister Benny shared this part of the story with me. I caught myself trying to get in the headspace of one of those county residents that had watched or at least known about turkey relocations and then after five years, got to experience an actual spring turkey season. They were watching wildlife conservation and restoration happen right in front of their eyes back then. And seriously, how cool would it be to track down one of those mail carriers from that time period and talk to them about their job as an official turkey observer man. That is just too cool. Seriously, if anyone out there has any connection to someone who was a mail carrier at that time and help the Game Commission back then, please let me know. I would love to talk to them. Okay, so we have a good idea about the actual process of how they caught these turkeys and released them. But I now want to move into what I believe is one of the most important and also really cool parts of this story, and honestly, enrolling the mail carrier’s help is a good example of the direction we’re going now. The Game and Fish Commission at the time was one small agency to be able to carry out this turkey restoration at the statewide scale that they wanted to, they would have to have help. Like I’ve said before, I’m interested in the relationship that we as humans have with our wildlife and the impacts that we have never ceased to amaze me, and this part of the story is worth highlighting.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Probably the premier place that we trapped turkeys was on Friar’s Point Refuge, which is in Kahoma County on the river between the river and the levee. There’s a family over there that still own land over there, a name of McKees, and mister and mus McKee set up about four thousand acres as a refuge for us to trap and transplant turkeys on.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Were these people so they own this land, yeah, and they set it aside. They didn’t hunt it at all. Were they turkey hunters themselves?
00:20:47
Speaker 2: I don’t think so.
00:20:49
Speaker 1: What was their motive for?
00:20:51
Speaker 2: I think that I never met mister McKee, but I met Ms McKee later on, and they had such an indust in the promotion of wildlife conservation in the state of Mississippi. And at that time we called them game warders back then, but there was a game warder who’s a conservation officer now by the name of Wayne Striter that lived in Kahoma County, and he was very good friends with the McKees. Yeah, and he was instrumental in that refuse being set up. And he was also instrumental and catching no telling how many turkeysh for restoration in the state of Mississippi. Yeah, very few people ever heard of Wayne Strid but he that’s a name you should remember. He was a real good conservation auser. He was a better turkey trapper and I got to know him real well and spent a lot of time with him trapping and releasing turkeys.
00:21:56
Speaker 1: I just think it’s I mean, I knew from just doing some research. I knew a good bit of the trap and for relocation took place somewhere along the river. I had no idea. It was some private landowners that set it aside for y’all to do that.
00:22:09
Speaker 2: Well, that was the main place. There were other places like middle Point Home Club, Catfish Porn hung Club. They allowed us to trap turkeys at various times for restoration, and other private individuals around Columbia. Mister Bill Walker allowed us to trap on his place. And it was just a lot of private people that knew that they had good turkey populations, and they wanted to see them all over the state.
00:22:37
Speaker 1: So really it was a collective effort.
00:22:39
Speaker 2: It was Oh, yes, man.
00:22:41
Speaker 1: Yes, I love that.
00:22:42
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh it’s it’s great.
00:22:45
Speaker 1: I’m gonna once again refer back to the Fanny Cook episode to a quote that we pulled by out of Leopold when he was talking about the wildlife challenges that the state of Mississippi was up against. This is what he wrote. There’s one office to all of these defects, a widespread and intense popular interest in game and hunting. In this respect, Mississippi excels any other state so far surveyed by me. Leephold then goes on to say in so many words that leveraging this popularity of hunting by using education at agencies was going to be the only way to maintain a game supply in the state. And we found out back in nineteen thirty two that they were seeing very clear lines connecting hunters and conservationists as the clear pathway to saving wildlife. Fast forward to the late nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. To win the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission, individuals like Wayne Strider, Benny Herring, and several private landowners such as the McKees who on the river property, the hunting clubs such as Catfish Point, Bill Walker down in Columbia, and several others that I wish I could mention. And we’re seeing this play out in a real tangible way. If you’ve listened to this podcast long enough, you know that we focus on the impacts that we as humans have on wildlife, and we all likely know that we can make some real negative impacts. But my friends, if you don’t remember anything else from this episode, remember this. If we turn our efforts for wildlife towards the good, the positive impacts that we can make on wildlife and wildlife habitat are truly limitless. And if you want further proof of that, let’s keep listening to mister Bennie.
00:24:28
Speaker 2: I never will forget Lafayette County. You know that’s where Oxford’s located.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: Yes, sir, the.
00:24:33
Speaker 2: Time we were doing restoration, Lafayette County had tremendous habitat. We’ll all northeast Mississippi had tremendous habitat, but no Turkish. But at any rate, of course, Lafette County has a lot of public land in it. To the National Forest, and so we will begin to do some release not only on national forest but on private land. And Harold Aine Prestige was Cornstavation aust Up there at that time, and he asked me one day, he said, Benny, you think that’ll ever mount anything. I said, well, Harold an, I’m pretty sure it will. It’s been successful in other places, and all you got to do is give them a little protection. He says. Well, I can do the best I can do. He says, but now the hunting clubs are the landowners and the ones that’s gonna give us the real protection. I says. That’s exactly right, and that’s your job to make sure that they understand it that they are most important in this protection stage. So in about five years he told me, he said, boy, you were right this turkeys ever were up here. So yeah, yeah, it responded that quick.
00:25:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s incredible. Yeah, I love the I can’t get over how cool it was that the landowners and the agency working so closely together.
00:25:55
Speaker 2: Well, think of it like this, eighty percent of the land Mississippi’s private owned. So if we didn’t have good cooperation with the landowners concerning wildlife, we’d being a mess. Now. You can do so much on public land, but when you only have twenty percent in public land, that’s not going to cover the whole state. You’ve got to involve private landowners.
00:26:22
Speaker 1: At what point had you all been doing these restoration efforts were did you or other people in the agency start to be like, man, this is really gaining some momentum statewide.
00:26:35
Speaker 2: Probably probably within probably by seven nineteen seventy seven seventy eight. We knew then that we had seen enough success releases that it was going to be successful statewide. The habitat was there, provided a little bit of protection, and the turkeys will take care of the rest of it.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: Imagine how cool it was for all involved when they came to the realization that it was gonna work. I mean, really think about it. They had been on a mission to restore wild turkeys since the nineteen thirties and now it’s all coming to fruition. What was it like from you, just as a turkey hunter as you were doing this to start seeing, you know, going out I’m assuming that as the years went on, you were going out and hearing more turkeys, seeing more turkeys.
00:27:31
Speaker 2: Best failing in the world, you know, it’s just amazing. Of course, I began to expand my area of hunting, sure Tyler County, Carroll County, Montgomery County. We’d go to South Mississippi hunting, and we’d go to Georgia, and we’d go to New Mexico. And it’s a tremendous failing to know that you were involved in it in your home state, but you also saw the same thing happening in numerous other states right all over the United States. You can go turkey in.
00:28:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, did you have contact with any of the other biologists well the states?
00:28:10
Speaker 2: And yeah, we had, of course at that time. The National Wild Turkey Federation was formed seventy one, I believed when the first meeting was held, and you went and to a conference in every state in the southeast and other parts of the country had biologists there, and you rolled ideas off of one another, and you got made contacts, and then you got well, you know, I believe I want to go to hunt the real Grand. So you called your buddy that worked for the Texas Parks and Wildlife says, I chold like to come out there and hunt real grand Can you help me out. Most of the time, he’d give you a contact.
00:28:53
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:28:54
Speaker 2: So, yeah, and it just I got you know, I went, didn’t still go to Florida once a year? Oh de Yeah that’s great. Yeah, and so I need Florida, Georgia. I’ve killed well, I hadn’t been goos are oscolated? You know, I’ve gotten to the age that travel is pretty hard to do right now. Look, I’ve killed I don’t know how many slams you Yeah, sure, yeah, sure, Florida’s Eastern real men and the Merriams. Yeah.
00:29:29
Speaker 1: I just love how genuinely mister Benny answers these questions. It leaves no doubt about how he feels about this subject. He also pointed out a very important part of this story when he makes mention of the types of turkey restoration efforts and results happening all across the country. I know that we’re highlighting Mississippi here, but that’s just because I’m close to this story. Similar things were happening all over. The conservation history of the wild turkey in the United States is one of the best wildlife wins we as a hunting and conservation community have to hang our hats on, Which brings me to one of our final points with mister Benny that we just can’t go without talking about. We were talking early on about you know, you knew of three other turkey hunters in a county. From your point of view, how did you see the hunting community change? I mean because just from then till now, I mean, I feel like everybody’s a turkey hunter now.
00:30:27
Speaker 2: I did not anticipate such a rapid explosion in the turkey hunter numbers. I did not. I don’t know why I didn’t, because it was so good to me and the two or three other people that hunted them. If it was so good to us, why didn’t we think it’d be that good to everybody else. But as time grew, you know, you begin to see more people, more people going, more people here. You’d go to somewhere you’d never seen a turkey hunting, there’d be a truck sitting there, and it just exploded. Yeah, right along with the turkey population, which is really a good thing, even though it may be aggravating to us at times. You know, as long as you’ve got people interested in something like turkey hunting, they gonna support it and do what it takes to make sure they just there.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more now, because I know today a lot of things. A topic that you hear come up today is you know, people talk about overcrowding or too many hunters, and I’m like, man, like you said, I know it can be frustrating, but yeah, if you got hunters, you.
00:31:40
Speaker 2: Got turkeys every time. Every time, they’ll support the programs to make sure that they’re there.
00:31:47
Speaker 1: Look, I know the feeling all too well of a hunting spot getting crowded or pulling up to a gate and seeing a truck parked where you’ve never seen one before, and I would never deny that that could be frustrating. It is, but sometimes it is important for all of us to keep things in perspective. I’m going to quote mister Benny directly here. As long as you have people interested in something like turkey hunting, going to do what it takes to make sure that it’s there. While turkey’s are proof of that, the attempt at public land sell from last summer is proof of that, and there’s a whole lot more proof of that in our country. Thankfully. I want to round this episode off by getting mister Benny to share with us a good old fashioned turkey hunting story, one that means something to him, one that involves his friend Wendell Neil that introduced him to turkey hunting back in nineteen seventy. Originally I told Clay I would give him this story to use on a bear Grease turkey story episode. But then I like the story so much I decided to keep it for Backwards University. Sorry, Clay, you’ve been coppled. That’s an inside joke. If you listened to the render about the CBS special with Ted Copple, you know what I mean.
00:32:56
Speaker 2: Well, I’ve been fortunate. I’ve herst it a lot of turkey.
00:33:00
Speaker 1: I can tell.
00:33:03
Speaker 2: That a lot of turkey has been hunting them a long time. But of course the first one always stands out sure without it, you know, you know that for anybody. I can’t imagine how the first one is not paramapple. But along the way you develop some special ones. Yes, and my special one, the most special after my first one, was my friend Wendell O’Neill. He’s been turkey hunting. It killed a lot of turkeys, and he began to have health problems and he lost his hearing, and he could if he was close enough to a turkey. He could hear it, but he could not course it no way. So the last turkey that he hearsted, he went with me right here in Montgomery County, and we heard the turkey gobble and the big black swam. We went off of a ridge. He was roosted over a beaver pond. We got situated and I pointed and told Wonder where the bird was, and he’d been again to call, and shortly the bird flew down to him and he killed him. Well, that ain’t the end of the story. That was as good as he gets right there. Yeah, But we picked that turkey up, and you know how you do when you look at him and admire all of the colors, and fan his tail out and look at his wings and look at the beard, looked at the spur. He picked him up and we started back upon that ridge. And when we crested that ridge, he looked down on the ground and there was a perfect araw head lived there.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Wow.
00:34:49
Speaker 2: And he picked that air head up. And he course had a good friend that was a paleontologist archaeologist, I’m sorry, and uh, he kid it to him and it was what was called a Clovis point, which meant that it came close New Mexico said it had been traded amongst tribes and he had that made into a necklace. And every time I saw him and he had that on, it clicked on me that that was about it special of turkey hunts. You now, yeah, that’s so cool. That was great.
00:35:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, mister Benny, if you only knew how excited Clay Newcombe is going to be when he hears your friend picked up a Clovis point after a successful turkey hunt. You do you know where that necklace is?
00:35:38
Speaker 2: Now, here’s what a still has it.
00:35:41
Speaker 1: That’s cool. Yeah, that’s really special.
00:35:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:35:44
Speaker 1: Some of the I think, man, I mean some of the closest friendships I got were formed over a goblin turkey.
00:35:51
Speaker 2: Sure, I understand that completely.
00:35:54
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I mean there’s just like experiences that you get out there in the spring chase those birds that you just.
00:36:01
Speaker 2: You don’t get anywhere else. No, yeah, you know.
00:36:04
Speaker 1: And I just think, man, speaking just I guess personally with you, I think about why doing these episodes are so important to me, is it’s it’s easy. I mean you talked earlier about you know, if you’ve seen a turkey come in and you’ve hunted a long time, you can start, you know, even if you don’t mean to, you can start to kind of take it for granted, right right. And so I think about the younger generations of hunters coming up, even folks my age are a little bit older. You know, we have it so good.
00:36:35
Speaker 2: Right now, as good as you.
00:36:37
Speaker 1: We have it so good right now.
00:36:40
Speaker 2: Well, that’s pretty easy to take things for granted when they’re good.
00:36:43
Speaker 1: I know, And it’s it’s it’s just important for me to try to tell the story of what happened and what the work that you and so many others did to put these turkeys on this landscape to where we can go enjoy them and make these.
00:36:59
Speaker 2: You know, thanks to me. Realize, I don’t know why I was lucky enough to fall in that gap where I was involved in it, but it you know, I couldn’t have had a better life.
00:37:12
Speaker 1: Yeah see, you loved what you did.
00:37:14
Speaker 2: Ooh with a passion. Yeah. Wayne’s trying to would call me and I was living right here and he was living at Bringer Laura and call the county and he said, well, I got something. I think we ready to catch Benny, he says, But now we’re gonna have to get there pretty early. I said, Wayne, you tell me what time, be your wife. It didn’t make any difference. That was not an.
00:37:38
Speaker 1: Option you wanted to go.
00:37:40
Speaker 2: I was gonna be there. Yeah, And consequently we developed a strong friendship because I was as dedicated as Wayne was. Yeah, and he soon realized it.
00:37:50
Speaker 1: You still you still? I mean you told me you still go to Florida every year. I’m assuming you still hunt them pretty much a lot around here.
00:37:56
Speaker 2: Oh yes, just most of the time. If the water is favorable, I’ll go somewhere. Sometimes I hear a turkeys, now I want every time. Sure, So if I don’t have one, I go back to the house and you know, if getting the work in the garden, do the yard work or whatever. But if the sun comes up the next morning, I’m somewhere listening.
00:38:21
Speaker 1: It can’t help it. No this spring, whether it’s your fiftieth turkey season or your first turkey season, my advice to you would be this, just be thankful. Thankful for the bird, thankful for the habitat that they live in, and me personally, every time every time I hear a turkey goble this spring, I’m gonna think about the people that paved the way for folks like you and me to be out there enjoying such an incredible resource. The Fanny Cooks of the world, Fox Hayes, Colonel Tom Kelly, Wayne Strider, Benny Herring. We owe all of them our gratitude, we really do. And keep that in mind going forward and think about what you can do to help the generations of turkey hunters coming behind you. It’s so important. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease in this Country Life. If you like this episode, share it with someone this week that you know is fired up to hear a turkey gobble this spring, and stick around because if this podcast was a turkey hunt, We’re set up about one hundred and twenty yards from one gobbling on the limb, but it sounds like he is covered up in hens. We’re just getting started. There’s a whole lot more on the way.
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