Ep. 89 - Two in the Bush w/ Brad and Travis

This week on the Busted Knees and Pretty Trees Podcast, Brad and Travis keep each other company in studio while Patrick is on a family adventure in a distant land. To cope with the absence, the guys have a chat about their early summer adventures and new backpacking gear they've acquired. This includes Brads camera gear setup, Travis' newfound hobby for shabby nature cinematography, and the challenges of carrying extra equipment on the trail. 

Plus, Walt brings some news about one of the most bizarre and ancient creatures living among us today. It's not a crab!   

Please enjoy and thanks for listening! Keep on Sauntering.    

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:09

Hello! Welcome to Busted Knees and Pretty Trees. We appreciate y'all coming along. I am Travis J. White, and right over there is Bradley R. Greer. Hello. You guys have picked a great episode to jump on board because Brad and I are steering the ship today without the grounded and calming oversight of our river captain. Please join us in an arbitrary moment of silence for our overseas adventurer.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

That was very touching.

SPEAKER_04 0:48

What do you think, Brad? This may be our most intriguing episode yet.

SPEAKER_03 0:52

I think so.

SPEAKER_04 0:52

We don't have somebody to keep us on course. Could get a little dangerous. Nope. Because the cheese wheel champion, Paddle Daddy Patty, and Fam are all the way over there in the land of Austria. Uh Yddelehi Hoo, Richardson's. We miss you and can't wait to hear stories when you get. I'm gonna need a little more flourish on that. Uh, I'm not even sure if that's the right country. Like, I think I'm I'm getting that from the prices, right? Oh. What's that called?

SPEAKER_03 1:26

Yeah, where the mountain hiker goes up the hill. Yeah. I can't think of the name of it.

SPEAKER_04 1:31

Is well, I'm thinking the relationship between Austria and Germany and their culture, and I think that might be for another episode. Yeah. The lot backpacking is definitely in them. Yeah. That culture. Get your leader hose in. Anyway, Patty, don't worry. We're holding down the fort. Enjoy your vacation. In other news, friend of the show, Chad Fitzpatrick, and his family are in Wyoming exploring the Teton Mountains. Story is, Chad's lifeless is also climbing to new heights, and Brad is shaking in his new trail runners.

SPEAKER_03 2:09

Yeah, I've been looking for flights to the Galapagos. Are you kidding?

SPEAKER_04 2:14

How much money do I have in my bank account? I gotta keep this bird quick. Furthermore, Brad, our friend Brian, just got back from South Africa and he went on a safari. And he sent back some pictures of rhinos. Pretty wild.

SPEAKER_03 2:31

I think I that's all he had a giraffe. And he got a fresh set of bins to take on that trip. And I uh I got some minor consultation in on that. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:43

What do you know what branding bought?

SPEAKER_03 2:44

Oh shit. I can't think of the brand name, but I know he bought two different types to compare because it is hard to see when you go to local shops like dicks, they may only carry vortex.

SPEAKER_04 2:57

It's so confusing.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

Yeah, so there's not many, yeah, it is it is confusing. And we're starting we're gonna get into that a little bit today.

SPEAKER_04 3:04

Just so happened to be that we're gonna get into that a little bit today. Well, at least we know that Brian's binoculars are legal to take on a plane.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

Yeah, oh yeah. And yeah, so yeah, the busted, the busted, pretty extended family and family out there getting shit done, seeing the world.

SPEAKER_04 3:24

Everywhere, they're hundreds of miles away from us. It's pretty obvious.

SPEAKER_03 3:27

Come back. Pretty jealous.

SPEAKER_04 3:30

I myself have done some more traveling to my backyard. Um, and we had some storms that ran through here in Indiana uh just recently, a couple of them, and they brought, you know, some heavy downpour, some wind. And it seems about this time every year, in this, you know, earlier in the spring, I walk out, and because my gutters are loaded with sparrow and starling nests, sure as shit, there's gonna be some of those nestlings that wash out into the gutters.

SPEAKER_03 4:04

I like to think that your bronx is or your gutters are like the bronx of for birds. It's like where everybody they're just super packed in there tight.

SPEAKER_04 4:12

Dude, I'm telling you, these house sparrows are hard.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:17

Like they are not afraid of me. I open my garage door, they they fly in before my truck gets in there. Like they are not scared of me at all.

SPEAKER_03 4:26

Yeah, that's that's a tough life growing up in a gutter, literally.

SPEAKER_04 4:31

Yeah, and but regarding the the the flushing of the nests and the hatchlings that I find, like it's always a sad thing, like, gosh dang it. And uh, so I was kind of I got curious after I saw that. And I was like, well, what are the like there are there any statistics on like how many birds or nests are destroyed when a big storm comes through? And there was some stuff on it, and I text Jessica Merkling from the DNR about it, and she was just kind of like, yeah, that's pretty normal. Like, and it's just so normal, like it's n you really shouldn't worry about it. Is that what she said? Well, her reaction was just like not a big deal.

SPEAKER_03 5:21

Because she did say, like, if you could put it in a nest kind of place.

SPEAKER_04 5:25

Yeah, and I don't know if we want to get into that now because there are protocols if you find um uh a nestling, a hatchling, or a the a fledgling. There's differences.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

Yeah, there is, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

So and that that might be something for later. But I did do a little bit of research, and this one happens to be in Austria, and it's research uh effects of daily sum of precipitation on daily nest survival rate of great tits in Austria. Or uh, and as it shows, the more precipitation, the larger failure of nest.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

Yeah, it almost looks like an exponential decline. I can't I can't mathematically prove that.

SPEAKER_04 6:16

I mean that that line is bending.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

Yeah, the further the further in the positive X direction, the more negative in the y direction.

SPEAKER_04 6:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

Uh which is almost exponential.

SPEAKER_04 6:29

And I mean, for the obvious reasons, like just flooding out the nests, uh ground well, these birds had nests, but yeah, flooding them out of the gutters and the urban wherever the planters on the side of your house. But also, like if there's a lot of rain, you're not it could also deter um uh bugs like caterpillars and stuff. So it also could kill off um what they eat and everything like that. So there's a lot of factors that go into uh rainfall, and because it's actually I don't scratch that one. But uh, I thought it was really interesting, just like there has because I see it so often, it's gotta be a huge factor in um uh survival rates of urban birds. And also they said it could very well be like that one could be the one they just kicked out of the nest. Yeah. Because it wasn't it wasn't strong enough. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

Well, yeah, and we're gonna kind of get into it today with the news panther story that when something isn't surviving the nest, or even like getting to the point of having a nest, the knock-on effect of other species is a thing too. So if there's less house sparrows, there's like Cooper's hogs have less, or whatever it is that uses like eats their eggs, right? Anything like that.

SPEAKER_04 8:01

There's either more space for something else, or less food for something else, or they're every it's just everything affects everything next to it.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Yeah.

unknown 8:11

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 8:12

Oh, damn. Sometimes I play that a little too loud in person. What do you mean you play it? But you know, I gotta get oh yeah. I mean, Walt sometimes is a little too close to us. It's a little too close to the colour. I thought it was better this week. Uh, I don't like the uh not as aggressive intro. The hello.

SPEAKER_04 8:36

Yeah, it's really I feel like people would turn it off just right off the bat.

SPEAKER_03 8:43

All right, so today's story I read about on the National Park Travelers website, and it and it was written by journalist Monique Brulier Brulier.

SPEAKER_04 8:56

Monique Brulier.

SPEAKER_03 8:58

How would you pronounce this, Travis?

SPEAKER_04 8:59

It seems very French. Monique Brulier.

SPEAKER_03 9:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:05

That's I think that's right. Yeah, definitely right. There's no doubt about it.

SPEAKER_03 9:10

Uh what the article covered was the unlikely recovery of horseshoe crabs on the Cape Cod National Seashore.

SPEAKER_04 9:18

I didn't read through your notes, but I did read horseshoe crab. And they've always been very interesting creatures to me because they're very ancient creatures.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 9:31

And um, they're also very terrifying creatures.

SPEAKER_03 9:34

Yeah, have you seen one in person?

SPEAKER_04 9:36

Yeah, it's like a little, like it's I don't know, like a shell on top, and then you it has a tail, and you flip them over, and it has like a bunch of dangly legs.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

Yeah. Uh they would when I lived in Charleston, sometimes they would be on beaches, and then it made me realize that they're probably in the water that I'm currently standing in, and it would terrify me. That's why I don't like some I'll I'm gonna give you a little more background on the horseshoe crab and why they're important, you know, other other than like the obvious, like uh most natural indigenous animals are important. Like they're old as hell. Yeah. So they're actually anthropods and aren't crabs at all. They're just they're crabs in their name, is the only way that they're a crab. Anthropod? Yeah, they're actually more closely related to arachnids, like spiders and scorpions. Oh, no sh you were talking about the the legs that are creepy as hell. That's like a scorpion articulated jointed leg. Is that like a a lobster? Uh yeah, I think I think they're an artopod as well. I'm not 100% sure, but that sounds about right.

SPEAKER_04 10:49

Crabs are I don't want to go off on this tangent, but like there are crabs that look like crabs, but they're not. Like they've they evolved separately. Like they say everything wants to evolve to be a crab. Because he like there's been these like limbs from the tree of life that have branched off and then came back to basically uh look like crabs.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

Damn, so maybe the horseshoe crabs are on the long route to that.

SPEAKER_04 11:20

Well, they I think they're the like the number one, like the poster child. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:25

Damn. Well, like you said, the top of um a lot of people compare it to the like WW2, you know, World War II helmets that soldiers wear. Oh, yeah. And even the same color, they're like a uh olive drab greenish brown color. And that's like the that's what you see is that whole like helmet thing. Sometimes I think you can see the little legs sticking out from the sides, but that's what you see from the top. Like if they're on a beach, that's what you see. And then they also have a terrifying long, rigid, sharp tail that sticks out of it. It's completely harmless. The tail is just for steering in the water, it can't do anything. It looks terrible. That's that's what's menacing, is like you have this helmet looking thing with their long pointy tail sticking out of the back.

SPEAKER_04 12:17

I think the menacing thing is really just how alien they look. It's just like nothing else.

SPEAKER_03 12:24

Yeah, because if you pick them up and look at their underside, there's several pairs of the jointed legs, and they all kind of move in a wave pattern, and they're just constantly like flickering and going crazy. And they have clawed pincers that are used for walking and crushing food. And the males have a set of kind of claw things for when they're mating, they latch onto the female with these claws, and that's how they can kind of age females too is how many scars they have from the males latching onto them. Oh gosh. Yeah, and like on top of that, the males are smaller than the females, they're uh anphrodimorphic, I think is what they call it.

SPEAKER_04 13:06

So they need males to hell down, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:09

That makes sense. They can grow up to about two feet in length, and like I said, females are larger. So, like you said, they haven't really changed their overall appearance in around 250 million years.

SPEAKER_04 13:22

That's insane.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

That's like they've been in this form, and we like we fossil records are how we know this.

SPEAKER_04 13:29

So they found a fossil that's 250 million years old. Yeah. That is the exact shape and everything of the horseshoe crab name.

SPEAKER_03 13:40

Yeah, it's wild. That's and then crazy, but then similar looking fossils back as far as 445 million years. So that's like we can't even comprehend how long ago that is.

SPEAKER_04 13:54

If well, I don't know like species species-wise or whatever, but do you know your great-great-grandpa?

SPEAKER_03 14:01

And that was like 120 years ago or something, right? Like it's yeah, it's wild when you think of hundreds of millions of years. How long do these how long does an individual crab live? Well, not crazy long, like 20 to 40, I think, something like that. That's not bad. Yeah, it's a good run for sure. Real good. And they do have there's several different subspecies of the horseshoe crab, and they range. There's some in Asia, south like South Asia, Southeast Asia, and then along the Atlantic coast, North America, from Nova Scotia to the like northern Gulf of Mexico, there's some, but pretty much all down the eastern seaboard.

SPEAKER_04 14:42

So they're just they're a very common uh anthropod. But like humans what did you say anthropod?

SPEAKER_03 14:49

Uh yeah, anthropod, which I did lobsters are anthropods. Oh, they are, yeah. So, like a lot of animals, humans have given horseshoe crabs a hard time. We've we've kind of made their life a little more challenging.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

Yeah, like they initially just make me want to stomp them.

SPEAKER_03 15:06

Yeah, you know, well, you yeah, that's a perfect lead-in. Because in the 1950s in Massachusetts, they thought of these as a nuisance because they feed on like clams and mussels and stuff. That's what those pincers are for, is they crush the claws. Yeah, they're yeah, they're not in deeper waters. Um, so they were considered a nuisance, and mash Massachusetts towns put a bounty on their tails of three to five cents per tail. Like if you bring us a tail, we'll give you three to this range. Started in the 50s. And so that led to killing roughly a million horseshoe crabs a year.

SPEAKER_04 15:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Just for this bounty. Because think about it, you know, like you may think three to five cents, but if they're pretty easy to catch and there's hundreds of them, you know, that adds up.

SPEAKER_04 15:56

I mean, if I killed a million of them for three cents, I mean that's three million dollars. But the those bounties didn't officially end up. That yeah. That's three hundred, thirty thousand dollars. I'm not even gonna try.

SPEAKER_03 16:09

Uh I got a BFA, not a the bounties officially ended in the 1970s. So that's 20 years of them just decimating the populations. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 16:21

Wholesale slaughter.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

So why don't you have to get a permit? A permit. Nothing. You get paid to do it.

SPEAKER_03 16:30

I mean, then there are just kids out there just oh yeah, stabbing them in the 15-year-old summer job. Well, the main thing that I think a lot of people have heard about horseshoe crabs from is they're harvested for their blood that the biomedical industry uses. Do they have blue blood? Yeah, it's bright blue. Here I got a photo for you. So look this up if you've never seen if you've never seen what a horseshoe crab looks like and what their blood looks like. It's wild.

SPEAKER_04 17:01

Yeah, it's like a milky crab.

SPEAKER_03 17:02

It's like out of an alien movie or something.

SPEAKER_04 17:04

It really is. They're but they don't when they're milking them, they're not hurting them.

SPEAKER_03 17:09

Uh, I think they try to keep them alive as long as possible, producing the blood. Yeah, like I don't know the exact I I meant, like I tried looking into that a little bit. Like, do they keep them alive somehow for years?

SPEAKER_04 17:21

Like that looks like they cut their tails off.

SPEAKER_03 17:23

Yeah, that think there's something missing from these ones in the photo.

SPEAKER_04 17:27

That look that looks brutal.

SPEAKER_03 17:29

Yeah, but they've never been able to breed horseshoe crabs in captivity.

SPEAKER_04 17:36

Oh, no kidding.

SPEAKER_03 17:37

Yeah. So they think it's that we'll get into a little bit, but they think it's something to do with they have a specific sand or like type of soil that they breed and uh lay their eggs in. Because they they lay their eggs like on a beach, but during high tide, so it's as high up on the beach as possible. But I think the tide still kind of comes in and takes them out. Um, but yeah, so they've never been able to successfully breed them though in in captivity.

SPEAKER_04 18:02

That's crazy because like they seem to be very common throughout the world.

SPEAKER_03 18:07

Yeah. Yeah, it just it's one of those things. Like um, that's happened a few times. Like black rhinos, I think they have a try a hard time breeding captivity, and there's certain animals that they just they just can't get them to do it. Do you think vibe is an effector? Yeah, like they they need the whale sounds in the background. They need like I think it's it's hard to survive without vibe. It's but yeah, so what uh like I never knew. I knew that their blood was used for biomedical industry, so I looked up like what it is, and their blood has a powerful clotting agent called here's a it's a big one. Lumilus M Mibosite lysate, which is a clotting agent. Uh, and this stuff acts kind of as an alarm for biomedical agencies that are making drugs and uh vaccines. And so if they if they put this, mix this with the drug or vaccine and it instantly clots, that means there's a trace amount of bacteria in their in their like um batch or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 19:15

It only clots if there's a certain kind of bacteria.

SPEAKER_03 19:19

Yeah. And it almost seems like like they made it sound like it aggressively clots, like it's like oh, like you drop a sponge into a water and it just like sucks about it. Yeah. And so that's the like one of the main things it's harvested for is to test for bacteria. So I mean it's that's pretty important for humans. So like we want these things to stay around. And and they are uh considered a delicacy in Asia for eat for food, and they're they're eaten in North America as well.

SPEAKER_04 19:51

What like the the meaty parts, like a like a lobster?

SPEAKER_03 19:55

Yeah, yeah. So I didn't it is I didn't get into that. Like it is divided into three distinct parts, and the front of it, like it's the shell, and it's all a hard shell around it, but the front part of the shell is a U-shape, and that's what gives it its name, the horseshoe, because it looks like a horseshoe. And so, like the different parts of the shell contain different parts of its body, like the eyes, the organs, stuff like that. It it is if you haven't seen one, look it up because it's a crazy looking animal.

SPEAKER_04 20:23

It really is one of those, like it's even more alien to me than like those deep sea fish with like a light.

SPEAKER_02 20:34

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:36

It's yeah, it's just it doesn't it has crab like features, like little pinchy guys, and and it's wild, but yeah, it's just so strange. And yeah, I can understand why people wouldn't have any problem slaughtering millions of people.

SPEAKER_03 20:50

And they are completely harmless to humans, right? That's the case. So, like, don't if you see them, try not to be a little pinchy. I know it's hard, try not to be scared. I don't think so. Like, I don't think they go after humans.

SPEAKER_04 21:02

If I had one and I and you didn't have your shirt on and I put his little pincher up to your nipple.

SPEAKER_03 21:08

Oh, Jesus.

SPEAKER_04 21:09

How harmless is he now?

SPEAKER_03 21:10

Well, anyways, so back to what this story was about was it was a recovery in Cape Cod National Seashore. Where this is, I don't know, can you picture it, Travis, where Cape Cod is? So if you have you have Boston, Massachusetts. You have Boston, Massachusetts, right? Uh, you have that whole like eastern seaboard. It's like northeast of New York City. So then you go down Boston and there's a piece that jets like a piece of land that jets out into the water, then it curls back around onto itself. Yeah, and it creates a big bay.

SPEAKER_04 21:47

I think everybody's yeah, everybody would be very familiar with that.

SPEAKER_03 21:51

So if you saw a photo, you would definitely recognize it. At the very tip of the bay is Provincetown, just a little hook of land in Massachusetts. I looked up. See if there was a for some reason I thought there was a movie that was based in Provincetown, but I must have been I could I must have been wrong because I couldn't find anything. In this tip, there's a 750-acre lagoon named East Harbor, also known known as Pilgrim Lake. Because this is also the area where the Pilgrims first landed. Plymouth is on the part just south of Boston. So this is like that all that area. Like they had to navigate into Cape Cod Bay to get to Plymouth. So back in the day, we're talking before the 1800s or like mid-1800s, East Harbor was an open mouth that emptied into the Cape Cod Bay, and ships used to use it to protect their boats in the winter time. But Provincetown on the tip of it, the only way to get there was by foot or by boat. Like there wasn't a good way to build a road or like any way to get there. So what they did was build a thousand-foot dike across that East Harbor Bay connecting the two points of land and making East Harbor a lagoon separated from Cape Cod. And this was 1868. This was like right after the Civil War. Super long ago.

SPEAKER_04 23:17

What'd you say, Terry? You want to build a lagoon?

SPEAKER_03 23:22

Well, what's crazy is they built it to support a railroad. Not even like a walking path or a road, because they had built bridges for walking across the bay. Because it was, if you look at the map, you'll see the railroads were hot back then. Yeah, they were super hot. So if you look at it on a map, you'll kind of realize there's not a great way to get across this unless this jetty was there. But then it was also kind of like, well, why are you living in Provincetown then? But this was back, this was like more the first land that we were on.

unknown 23:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:54

Like it looks nice.

SPEAKER_03 23:56

So what happened when this got cut off from basically the Atlantic Ocean? It stopped the tidal currents, trapped water inside, causing it to become stagnant. Eventually it losed its salinity, lost any sea life that was in it. The water becomes super hot, oxygen, oxygen depleted, algae blooms all the time. You know, just they've been having the same problems we're having now. Yeah. Exactly. And like this used to be a nice little estuary, like calm waters off of the ocean where all kinds of things, it was like their breeding ground for all kinds of things. So over the next 140 years, this turned into like having no native salt marsh vegetation. The area, it seems like the area was just completely overrun with non-native species like cattails. So it just became cattails aren't native. Not well, at least not to this area. Just think it's like on the ocean. This thing's like a little strip of land out in the middle of the Atlantic. So it just had all kinds of things growing around this lake, and this lake because it lost basically became a freshwater lagoon. Because think if it just keeps raining over time.

SPEAKER_04 25:06

So it was cut off completely from the salt water.

SPEAKER_01 25:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:09

And then it just wasn't getting any uh I guess fresh salt water, fresh, good rotation in there.

SPEAKER_03 25:18

So it was just and that's what makes the the fix kind of interesting because something happened. I couldn't find a lot of details about this, but in 2001, I think there was an algae bloom that caused a huge oxygen depletion, and thousands of dead fish just washed ashore. And that's when the the National Park Service and the local town decided that they had to do something about it. So they started exploring options.

SPEAKER_04 25:46

Like, why is it so why don't they just tear down the dike and just let it be natural?

SPEAKER_03 25:50

Because it's still the only way to get back and forth from province town. Oh because it was a it was a railroad, now I think it's a road. Because the other side of the it's almost like a barrier island, so the other side of it's like a beach, so you can't really put anything underneath it, like make it a bridge. Probably not because you gotta think like you need for a bridge or a tunnel, you need a huge lead-in to get to a bridge or tunnel. Yeah. So that's a there's need a good approach. Yeah, exactly. It's something you don't think about. Because there's an island when I visited my brother in Corpus Christi, they have uh you drive up, like you drive your car onto a boat, yeah, and the boat crosses, and it's not it's like a hundred yards, it's longer than a hundred yards, but it's not that far at all, but it's too short for like a big bridge because you need a huge lead-in, and the island's not that wide.

SPEAKER_04 26:44

Sometimes the bridge is like longer on both sides than it is when you go over the water.

SPEAKER_03 26:51

Yeah. So that's what's going on here. So what they landed on was installing it was just an 800-foot-long pipe to open it back up to that sweet, sweet, salty water of the Cape Cod Bay, and the tidal changes. I think I think I saw that it was a four foot in diameter, so it's like a big pipe, and that's all it needs. So it can to get that water circulation, yeah, and it the tides come in, come in, and goes out.

SPEAKER_04 27:19

Oh, so it still pushes water in it. Does that water ever get lower than that?

SPEAKER_03 27:24

I don't think so. I didn't see anything about that. Because it does. I mean, in Charleston, it's nothing for like a seven-foot difference between high tide and low tide.

SPEAKER_04 27:34

So I imagine it is a big tidal swing, but so what have they discovered since they've got that circulation back?

SPEAKER_03 27:43

So this is where this article that I read on National Park Shovers come in. They interviewed Sophie Fox, who's a Cape Cod National Seashore biologist, and she's been studying specifically horseshoe crabs since they put this this pipe in. Because they are dwindling rapidly in population just worldwide. So they are becoming a species of concern.

SPEAKER_04 28:05

Is this more of a concern because of the financial?

SPEAKER_03 28:10

Probably both. Well, yeah, because not like we were talking before, the big thing with horseshoe crabs, too, is they lay a couple thousand eggs in their nest. So they're when they're doing well, the species and birds, like shorebirds that feed on their eggs, do well. Yeah. So there's knock-on effects to where now these birds are in danger, and then like you know, it's all right, something else is probably in danger because those shorebirds are endangered.

SPEAKER_04 28:36

It's like when I was earlier when I was talking about the heavy rains. Well, it's not just the flooding of the nest, but it's well the bugs that can't, you know, yeah, get out there because it's raining too fast.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

So that's one of the things they talk about too, with these, like, not only like is it uh very useful for humans and testing vaccines and drugs, like it's part of the circle of life, like they need nests out there for other things to eat, which is kind of it seems crazy just thinking like a natural sacrifice, like it's gotta happen. Like you need you gotta have it. But so Fox was talking about how so they put that that pipe in in 2002, and Sophia Fox, she was talking about how in 2010 she finally started seeing mature adults because she her her job was to tag them, like find 50 horseshoe crabs a year and tag them. And 2010, eight years later, she started seeing mature adults for her to tag, and that like the math adds up because it takes them seven years to become sexually mature. So once that lagoon started opening up, they started flooding into it and mating, uh uh having nests, leaving their nests sound weird. I I couldn't find good photos of it. I know there's gotta be some out there, but it sounds like they kind of leave it in a saltwater marsh area, or they lay it during high tide on a beach, and so they're like right on the edge of the high tide that comes and goes. And like right now, early summer is like their prime mating season. So that's when Sophia Fox was out there cap and they're easy to capture. She just dives down and picks them up. Like they're pretty easy to catch. If they're there, they're pretty easy to catch. She was out doing this at the time when this interview happened, and she said the 2020, like she talked about the 2024 mating season two years ago, and she said, she quoted, We had we had about a thousand crabs in a space the size of a bedroom everywhere you looked. It was extraordinarily exciting for us. So imagine like we're in a room right now, a thousand crabs. There's a huge orgy going on.

SPEAKER_04 30:52

Like they're already terrifying enough.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

Yeah. Just imagine them crawling all over each other. Yeah. That seems like the males riding the females like a cowboy, last dead.

SPEAKER_04 31:02

Is that what they yeah, they hold that's why they hold on because they don't really know what's going on.

SPEAKER_03 31:07

So she estimates now that there's if there's there's definitely hundreds that use this pilgrim lake, East Harbor. Uh there, if there's not hundreds, there's thousands that live in this 750-acre estuary. And it's like just adding this 800-foot pipe, which seemed like a simple fix, right? Yeah. Um, it's paying dividends already. It's like returning back, like we've been talking about forever. If you let like let something go, it's gonna return back. But now we're just kind of helping it return back.

SPEAKER_04 31:41

The uh the land wants to be forest.

SPEAKER_03 31:45

Yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:47

The water wants to be free and coral.

SPEAKER_03 31:50

If we give it back to the ocean, it's gonna turn back to doing ocean things.

SPEAKER_04 31:54

As soon as we stop fucking with it. Yeah. But that's not a possibility.

SPEAKER_03 32:00

Yeah. So it's yeah, so it's pretty cool. I remember seeing those for the first time. I don't know if I would know what they are if I didn't see them, but it's a crazy, crazy species of animal.

SPEAKER_04 32:10

Horseshoe crabs have always been one of those creatures that I've seen that I'm like, that's why I don't go into the ocean. And it's harmless. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

But um I've kicked, like I've hit one with my foot before underwater. You don't know, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:28

I don't know. May I'm sure if you're around it a lot, you know. No, it still freaks me out.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

But yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:35

Yeah, that's but it's cool to I've never felt the need to learn about them. Yeah. But uh yeah, it's cool to be forced to learn it here on the podcast. Yeah, I have a little more respect for the horseshoe crab, I guess, especially after the big slaughter of what, 1887?

SPEAKER_03 32:54

Yeah, shit. Yeah, congrats to the um Cape Cod National Seashore crew, biologist, a lot of good work bringing it back.

SPEAKER_04 33:04

Yeah, because they it seems like they are a very important part of not only the ecosystem they live in, but for human freaking health.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:16

So let's uh yeah, let's protect them horseshoe crabs. Wall. Yep. Calm down. We just last episode we talked about coming in like the Kool-Aid man. We need to I learned my lesson.

SPEAKER_03 33:29

Just because Patrick's here doesn't mean he needs to take over as the loud one. All right, Bradley, we got a little bit of a gear episode to get to. Yeah, we're gonna hit a little bit about taking optics on a trail, whether that be binoculars, cameras.

SPEAKER_04 33:47

Yeah, we've kind of ran into uh a couple months here where we've purchased some things. We're just like, how the hell are we gonna take this on our backpacking trips? And we're gonna talk about that a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 34:01

Yeah. Tonight. And some more of just our hot tips for the our summer gear that we've run into.

SPEAKER_04 34:06

Got plenty of hot tips.

SPEAKER_03 34:09

Yeah, so let's take a break, come back, get into it. Alrighty. I think we got a gear episode in front of us. Yeah, and we have the perfect lead-in, which we'll have to circle back with paddle daddy Patty to talk more about this, but we shared a canoe. And that canoe took on water at some point.

SPEAKER_04 34:42

We had a little trip we to what two weeks ago? We went to uh Pigeon River. Pigeon River. The name of the town, I can't Mongo. Mongo. Yeah, Mongo, Indiana. Which was I had never heard of it in in my life.

SPEAKER_03 34:58

Yeah, and me neither. And it's within an hour of us.

SPEAKER_04 35:02

Well, I found out later that my parents had also been down the Pigeon River around Mongo.

SPEAKER_03 35:09

Well, and that's what Sarah's parents were the ones I first heard about it from. And they used to go there a lot when she was growing up. I see why. It's it was awesome. It was so much fun. We stayed at um, it was a Mongo trading post, and they spotted us. We took Patrick's um historical world-renowned canoes.

SPEAKER_04 35:34

Yeah, he has one that's aluminum, 16-footer, one that's fiberglass, 16-footer.

SPEAKER_03 35:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:40

I know the aluminum's a Grumman.

SPEAKER_03 35:42

Yeah. From like the 40s or 50s.

SPEAKER_04 35:44

Yeah, and the reason well, the only reason I know that, because what? Um was it Northrop Grumman? Yeah, they're the military industrial complex. Yeah, that's where that came from. These canoes.

SPEAKER_03 35:55

Yeah, they started off, so it was hand riveted back when they were making airplanes, before they were making airplanes. And then they became an airplane manufacturer. Like Boeing made boats before they made airplanes. Was it like for World War II, they stepped her up? Yeah. And these were and these, because this canoe's hand-riveted aluminum was an airplane.

SPEAKER_04 36:14

And if you look at those old uh what, Mustangs and Spitfires or whatever, like you can see that it's looks just like those boats.

SPEAKER_03 36:22

The Boeing 737's hand riveted aluminum, exactly what the that canoe was. Like by a person? Yeah. Uh I mean, some of it's automated, but some of it's by person. Robot riveted and hand riveted. Yeah. Uh what's the robot Rosie name? Robot Rosie from I guess it is robot rosy instead of Rosie the Riveter. Uh what the The Jetsons? Oh, yeah, but I can't think of the Maid. Can't think of it. Yeah, no, Rosie. But so and but then his other one, I can't remember. He's gonna be pissed. We don't remember the name of it, but it's beautiful. It's like a it's almost like an Astor or like a British racing green. Oh, yeah. It's got like this wooden interior.

SPEAKER_04 37:08

The ladies had that one. You and I had the aluminum one, which I put uh on the top of my freaking radiant red truck. Yeah. And that Patrick and I probably both lost a few pounds of sweat getting that thing on the top because I did not want to scratch. But it worked out perfect. And then like I think my foot, my truck is 16 feet long and that boat is 16 feet long. It was like perfect. I still think that canoe's 18 feet. I don't I I saw a difference too when you put the there's something, there's a little bit of difference, but they both say 16 apparently. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Maybe there's some sailor shit where they're just like, well, you know, they're not actually a 16-footer.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Yeah, so we got in the water. We were uh I think the plan was it was 14 miles or somewhere around there back. They took us up river. Well, we dropped canoes upriver, we rented two kayaks, took them, they took them up river, and the plan was go get back to the campsite, pull out, pull out the campsite, and we're the camp.

SPEAKER_04 38:19

Uh Mongo Trading Post, yeah, the river goes right up to the campsites. So you once you go downstream, you take your boats however many miles.

SPEAKER_03 38:30

That's the one portage, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:32

And it's an easy portage. You pull up right to your campsite and you can just drag your boats up on shore and just be right next to the campfire.

SPEAKER_03 38:39

It's awesome. Yeah, it was really cool. And so if you've never been in a canoe before, there is a hierarchy in a canoe when there's more than one person. The person in the back pretty much is the captain of the canoe. That's paddle daddy Patty. You'll never catch Patrick in the front of a canoe. Yeah. Because that's very beneath him. You got the wide field of view. As as well earned, Patty, he can be my captain any day. Travis, you've never been in a canoe.

SPEAKER_04 39:15

Nope. Nope. Well, I've only I've never been in a boat outside of a pontoon or like speed boat or jet ski. Uh I did kayak maybe a quarter mile one time. It was it was pretty easy.

SPEAKER_02 39:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:33

Uh, but yeah, the canoe trip, that was a very uh different experience for me, but it was it's fun. It was so much fun, and uh I definitely want to get out there again.

SPEAKER_00 39:46

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:47

Yeah, so what we did was I've had a little bit of canoe experience, but I had the dozens of miles down the All Sable River on a kayak, so I thought, like, oh, I I got this.

SPEAKER_04 39:57

Yeah, you did like a manage a river.

SPEAKER_03 39:59

Swan dive into the river navigation, didn't you? So uh when we got there, they said the river was low, and so it was faster too. And those are pretty long canoes, so it it was fun for me trying to tell Travis how to steer, like where to paddle, and him not listening and just paddling.

SPEAKER_04 40:22

I had no idea what I was doing.

SPEAKER_03 40:24

So eventually I was just scared the whole time. So, like halfway through, we there's sandbars all along this river that you can stop and have a couple beers. And so at one point we stopped and swapped out, and Travis was the captain, and I was in the front. So I could say, like, that I want you to see how important it is for the front person to listen to the dad. That's what I was oh yeah, well, yeah, it was Patty was the dad. I was like the stepdad in that scenario. This is where you learn to be a man, Travis. Now you're on the river. We got into some precarious situations, but they were challenging conditions.

SPEAKER_04 41:03

I would say for somebody who's never done it before, it certainly wasn't rushing water, but it was moving and there were obstacles.

SPEAKER_03 41:11

And yeah, there were down trees where you only had three feet of width to shoot on a corner.

SPEAKER_04 41:17

There was one point where there was a log laying across where we were sitting too high on the surface of a water, so we had to push ourselves into the water and get underneath of the log. Yeah, which was pretty good. Yeah, so it was a lot of people cheering for us when we got because it seemed like every time we crashed, every time we did anything, there'd be a crowd of people watching us.

SPEAKER_03 41:43

There was people, yeah. And they would be and they would be watching it go down and knowing it's going. And we it happened to us too. We got to watch it a couple times. It's like slow motion watching somebody crash.

SPEAKER_04 41:56

Nobody who's known Pigeon River knows what they're doing.

SPEAKER_03 41:59

It's glorious. And yeah, there was a time where we were on uh uh sandbar sandbar, and all of a sudden we start seeing shit floating downriver and we don't know what's going on, and then we look upriver and somebody tipped and they're yelling, like, get our stuff. So we're out there trying to grab our shit. And then it's packages floating down the river. Yeah, like so. Me and Patrick are next to each other grabbing shit, and then here comes Travis, like fucking David Hasselhoff on Baywatch, ready out, splashes me and Patrick, and we don't know what the hell's going on, but Travis still manages to grab every single package in the river. I don't know. It was glorious.

SPEAKER_04 42:43

I just wanted to make sure that that poor lady had all of her shit. And Kirsten found her phone.

SPEAKER_03 42:49

Yeah, her phone was underwater at the bottom of the river. She was like, it's still playing music. Maybe we can hear it if you listen underwater.

SPEAKER_04 42:56

I'm pretty sure we saved all of her shit. Like she completely spilled over her what'd she have, a kayak? It was a yard sale for sure. Oh, yard sale, and I think all of us together grabbed everything she had.

SPEAKER_03 43:08

Yeah, it was awesome. It was pretty awesome. So, yeah, good trip. But then at one point we were going around a corner a little too hot. We hit a down tree front left quarter panel.

SPEAKER_04 43:19

And we weren't hot because we weren't in control of the boat. We were hot because we were overconfident.

SPEAKER_03 43:26

Yeah, and we were trying to catch everybody else. Yeah, we were trying to catch it because we had gotten stuck a little bit before that. We kept running into obstacles. And so before you know it, I'm thrown out of the kayak because we came in contact with a tree close to the shore. Your upper torso was thrown. I mean, I was pretty much I was out of it. I was I think I was out of it. But our but our cooler that weighed five hundred pounds full of beer and ice, I think kept us from tipping completely.

SPEAKER_04 43:57

Uh kept it kept us low in the water.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

So yeah, our center of gravity, like we were good all day. I jumped out to save it. So the canoe filled up a half with water. A third of the canoe was water in the bottom. And I remember us kind of dragging it up. And Kirsten was with us, saving the day for us, trying in case anything floated out, she was laying like a soccer goalie. Like it was nothing. Like she didn't even say anything.

SPEAKER_04 44:27

She's just like, I know you guys are just jacked up right now.

SPEAKER_03 44:32

So she was there helping us because then we had to take everything out of the canoe.

SPEAKER_04 44:37

And I remember dumped the water.

SPEAKER_03 44:39

I remember us kind of trying to drag it ashore a little and me looking back to the back of the canoe because Travis was in the back and all of his stuff was around him, and seeing an iPhone floating sunk in the bottom of the water, and seeing a pair of binoculars floating at the bottom of the water. A fresh pair of Air Jordans floating around in the beer slash river water. Meanwhile, all my shit's like double bagged in dry bags and then in a river bag.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

You know, I will I thought you would be far more angry because you did have your very expensive camera and your binos and all that stuff. I really didn't care. My equipment was disposable. Except for them Nikes, and I did save them. We're talking about this because this is kind of the point where, at least for me, I realized I need to be more prepared for this situation. Yeah. A boat situation. I've never done that before. On land, I'm pretty good with in a boat, it's different.

SPEAKER_03 45:49

But and this is where my meticulous year of planning and trialing paid off. And I was kind of vindicated and or not vindicated, but I realized I made some of the right choices and the shit that I pick out. You didn't lose anything. You didn't lose any equipment or nothing got wet. Nothing got wet. I spilled a couple beers, but that's about it.

SPEAKER_04 46:13

Yeah, you weren't even like even the face you gave me right after the crash was still like you had a little smirk.

SPEAKER_03 46:20

Yeah, it was pretty. And I was like, okay, we're it was half like you son of a bitch, and half like, I knew you would wreck us, you asshole. Well, you know. Yeah, it was fun. But we didn't, we can't, we we didn't flip. We definitely didn't flip. So we didn't, we we're still like, you know how they always say motor when if you get a motorcycle, it's a matter of time before you put it on its side. Yeah. We never No, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 46:46

We took on water, but we didn't we didn't sink it, we didn't lose it.

SPEAKER_03 46:50

It was like a code yellow emergency. Like we were under everything was under control. We're good. We were calling it nothing escaped our canoe and made it into the river.

SPEAKER_04 47:01

Nah, yeah. We left no trace.

SPEAKER_03 47:03

We were good.

SPEAKER_04 47:04

We put the water back in the river.

SPEAKER_03 47:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:07

And uh everything was good.

SPEAKER_03 47:09

Yeah, we gave it back with a little bit of beer. Yeah, we added extra. When I first got into photography, which February of 25, it's been a long journey in finding setup to go outside for hours on end, not knowing, you know, like what the weather's really gonna be. Right. Sunny, cloudy, mosquitoes, raining.

SPEAKER_04 47:32

Well, and if you're if you're talking about like longer trips, like backpacking, yeah. You already have enough shit that you're worried about. And you're carrying you got trekking poles, you got your water bottle, you got your phone bringing out, you add a camera, you add binoculars to that. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_03 47:51

Like, where the hell do I put this shit? And that's the thing, too. Like, the big thing is it's not just camera, a lot of the stuff in the optics world is pretty compatible. The the accessories of it, how you carry binoculars, how you carry a camera. If you have a monocl a mono monocular, is that what it's called?

SPEAKER_04 48:12

Uh what are they uh Periscope? Yeah, yeah, that's a submarine. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 48:18

Uh what a what a pirate uses. Or no. A monocle? Yeah. No, that's like Monopoly, man. But yeah, so whatever it is you're taking, I've even seen a lot of phone users using some of the stuff, but it's like it's even look, but I was in Kankakee Sands last week, which will we may talk about at some point, but I was at a Kankakee Sands a day where I know I'm gonna be outside all day. Like as soon as I get there for hours heading home, I'm outside all the entire day. I want to know that I have a backpack that I can put everything I need for that whole day in. But then also if it's like an hour or two, I'm just gonna hop out and do a quick hike. Um, so it's been just like going through so much shit. And I still don't feel like there's a I don't have a great solution to my per perfect ideal setup.

SPEAKER_04 49:20

I think what we're talking about is just we aren't necessarily going on a five-day backpack trip. We've done it long enough to where we're pretty confident in what we need to take and all that stuff. Yeah. But when okay, you're bringing her along, you want to do recording, you want to do pictures, and that I guess for five-day backpacking, it's kind of the same thing. It's all you're doing is adding.

SPEAKER_03 49:44

Yeah, but I've always looked at it as if it's like a setup that's good for backpacking, that will cover everything else. Yeah. Because you want to be ready for rain, you want to be ready for cold, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 49:57

Right. But then if you have, say you're just doing a couple days or a day trip, then there's so many factors that go into like what you're doing, how long you're doing it for, what you're taking, and all of that. And now that we're sort of because we've been doing the birding and we want to really observe what's going on out there, and we want to record it with cameras, so we gotta take this equipment with us, and that adds uh a little bit more nuance to uh the backpacking setup or even your day hiking setup.

SPEAKER_03 50:34

Yeah, like I I gave myself a list of certain items that not not for so much for backpacking, but a lot of it is transferable. But like certain things, if I'm if I'm gonna go out to my local nature preserve for two hours, what do I want to have on me in order of importance?

SPEAKER_04 50:54

Dude, I could take two days to make that decision.

SPEAKER_03 50:58

Like, do I want to bring this knife? Yeah. Like for my yeah, because for me, it's always like with bringing a knife, like, what if I need to dig a hole? I got a knife. Snap pops? I don't know. So here and and these will be pretty obvious once I say them. Number one, camera. Number one important thing, camera. Number two, most important thing is binoculars, three water, four a backup battery for my camera, five a second lens, and six bug spray.

SPEAKER_04 51:40

Like the this is your basic setup for like a day hike photography session.

SPEAKER_03 51:46

Yeah, if I'm gonna be out for 30 minutes to six hours, like that's my I would love to have all of these on me at one time. The hardest thing that I've come up with, and I know you've been getting into lately, is I want to carry my camera and my bins at the same time. Yeah. And there's not I haven't found a great combo to do that. And I know you are waiting you're waiting for your bins, right?

SPEAKER_04 52:13

Yeah. Um, well, going back to the the canoe incident, I had a pair of bushnels. I think I've got them for 60, 70 bucks. Like a nice introductory level, but they're not waterproof. So both of those, the barrels on that thing were just loaded with condensation.

SPEAKER_03 52:35

Well, and I think like now you can probably realize, or it's a safe statement that once you get above a certain dollar value, the quality of binoculars is pretty big.

SPEAKER_04 52:49

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_03 52:50

And it's like 100, 150 bucks. Like it's once you get up into that range.

SPEAKER_04 52:56

And it like the more you pay, the more durable they're gonna be. Because you have the uh Vortex, do you have the diamond bags?

SPEAKER_03 53:04

Vor uh Vortex Vortex 8x42 crossfires.

SPEAKER_04 53:09

Yeah, they're like the the be all of birding uh binos. And they are also waterproof and they're also shockproof. And they're like mid-Mine were not.

SPEAKER_03 53:22

And they're like mid to low range vortex. Like they're good. I mean, fuck, I I love them.

SPEAKER_04 53:29

They're awesome. Oh, I look through compared to the bushness I had, looking through yours is like I'm watching mine, we're like watching a movie in my living room. Like yours are like watching a movie at the theater.

SPEAKER_02 53:42

Like over the uh over the air.

SPEAKER_04 53:45

Yeah, the colors are so much more vibrant, you got a wider field of view. That's what I'm saying. Like you can find your because you know, the cheaper binos, you have to kind of you can't quite get the perfect picture. You have those circles that are kind of swinging around. But those are just like completely full and I think that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 54:04

Yeah, that's kind of what I mean. Like, if you there's like a very big jump, like once you hit a certain point of binoculars that are like, yeah, you can spend 50, 60 bucks on ones, but if you like spend a hundred, you're gonna get way better.

SPEAKER_04 54:19

That's why I'm freaking excited because I'm waiting on a pair of vortex vipers, which are wait, I guess are two levels above yours, which I love yours. Those are insane. So I yeah, I can't wait to get my eyes keeping through those bed boys.

SPEAKER_03 54:38

And it is like I've learned having a set of binoculars, like I always have them on me, and now I feel like I pull them out before I pull my camera out some like a lot of times.

SPEAKER_04 54:48

And the problem is now, well, how do you access them? Because you can't you know for a fact that anything you put in your backpack, you're not gonna get out until once or twice a day, right? Either at lunch or at the end of the day. So you can't be leaving your binos in your backpack, and you can't just leave them hanging around your chest because that's gonna or around your neck, because that's gonna put neck strain. And you don't realize like how you're doing mile after mile, that's gonna be pulling down.

SPEAKER_03 55:16

And like for me, I have my camera somewhere usually on the front of me, like on a sling, something. So that's just tangles everything up, yeah. Having a set of bins. Well, so I've tried a couple of different things, but it's it's kind of been fun on this journey because I've gotten quite I have quite a few backpacks now and fanny packs and all kinds of shit. So I got this one Osprey Hike Light 26 that it's kind of a cool backpack because it's is that like a day pack? It kind of it is, but it isn't. It's like a mini backpacking pack. Like it's just one huge compartment, a kangaroo pouch, and then like uh uh two mesh pockets on the side, like it's exactly like a backpacking pack, but really, really small. And so I didn't quite like that because it's one huge compartment, and the kangaro pouch is so big that putting my bins in it, they like drop way down. Yeah, so like I tried fanny packs, all kinds of shit. Like that never really worked, but I found the Osprey Daylight Plus, which I think Patrick ended up going with as well. And I think this is hands down the best hiking like day pack.

SPEAKER_04 56:33

What's the plus?

SPEAKER_03 56:34

Oh, dude, it's so fucking great. I I don't know what the plus is and the name, but this is like it's the best backpack. It's when I went to Costa Rica and balked on taking this. I was your I was regretting it the entire time. Like I wish I have had this pack on me. It's 20 liters total, so it's a small pack, but it carries so like what we're not a regular backpack for your thing.

SPEAKER_04 57:02

A regular backpack, like mine is uh 50, 50 or 55. I think mine's 55, my old one was 65 liters. So you're carrying a third of that.

SPEAKER_03 57:12

Yeah, this is like it's a small pack. Yeah, but um, like what I love about it is it has a kangaroo pouch on the front of it. So like I have my pack on. Bins are in the kangaroo pouch. The kangaroo pouch is shallow, so that it's like almost the height of a set of binoculars.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 57:33

So like I can swing my backpack around and just grab my bins and put them up, and I'm good. Little little yeah, like it's something to see. What's that? And doesn't even scare the birds off. Well, that's nice, but then it has like your normal pouches, uh, like you have uh the one that with the pen slots and the little like smaller pouches, and then one huge pocket. So I and that huge pocket fits my lens, like my back, my second lens. I can throw a rain jacket in there, yeah, and like it's a really big pouch, but I try to keep it clean just to you know keep that clutter out. But I can throw it's just so far, it's like the best pack I've had.

SPEAKER_04 58:26

I think a lot of it really comes down to like what your needs are. First, figure out what your needs are before you buy your pack. Like, are you going out there? What equipment are you taking? What you know, you are you a photographer?

SPEAKER_03 58:40

And I think like a kangaroo pouch can be used for all kinds of shit. Like that's not zipper closed, it's kind of open and like it has stretched fabric around it, so it stays tight.

SPEAKER_04 58:49

I love a kangaroo pouch because you just throw stuff in and out, it's not a hassle. It's perfect. I've been kind of eyeing the chest rigs for the binoculars. There's that uh well, there's several companies that make them. Like I think a lot of hunting companies make them. Yeah, um, but there's some that are pretty backpacker friendly where there's not a lot of stuff going on behind your back, so you can wear your your bino rig and still wear your backpack at the same time without having a lot of weird overlap and straps every and I know how that can get complicated over dec time, but if you add too much stuff, and I think you can even like integrate that into your straps. Oh damn.

SPEAKER_03 59:39

Um if you like find the right connectors and like instead of having the harness around the back, it just connects to the shoulder straps. Yeah, to your back. Yeah, that's pretty good.

SPEAKER_04 59:51

Which would be yeah, that'd be pretty sweet. So instead of like well, I guess you'd still have that chest strap that goes across, but just it'd be as easy as snapping those off. But also I would like it gets it's so complicated because when I get when we get to camp, I just want to have that chest harness with my binas, and you and if you like different companies, you can get little pouches and extra things to put on it. So you can have your water, your phone, or extra lenses or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:24

Yeah, that's what I liked. I think it was FHF. Yeah. They had a lot of good little add-on pouches.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:30

That's I think that's what I'm gonna go with, the FHF one. Their most basic one.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

Yeah, the I can't remember the name of it.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:38

Because I do like when we went just um, was it Sunday or whatever? We took a walk out at my family's uh woods out there looking for birds and just having a chest harness with vinos in it, that would have been a perfect situation for something like that. You're taking a short day hike, you don't need a whole pack.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:01

Even like being able to throw your phone in it so you can play Maryland and it catches it. Yeah, catches all the bird calls.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:08

Hell yeah. But I'm so I'm thinking like I always find myself like, do I really need this? Like, is it like all these accessories and all this other stuff? And uh with as much as we do, and like you with photography, yeah, and just trying to, you know, as we always say, get let's get content for the podcast. Yeah, which isn't it's not it's fun, it's fun to me to record that stuff. Go out. I mean, it's giving me an opportunity to go out into nature and do all that stuff, but I want to find the easiest way to do that, like the least cumbersome way.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:45

And one of the best things that I found for my camera that I also am, I think I'm gonna end up getting for my binoculars too, is the peak design capture clip. So this clip, it has like um something that can clasp against the surface, like a shoulder strap of a backpack. You can put it on your belt. You have this, don't you? Yeah, yeah. I have one, but I want to get a second one because I have one for my camera, and then I want to have one for my binoculars. Because then I can clip my binoculars to anything, and these things have like a quick release button, so like it's like a plate that slides in and clicks into place, and then it has a release button. But the cool thing is is that clip that's on your camera is the exact same kind of clip that goes on a tripod, uh, like a ball mount or like a monopod mount. So you can screw it in, or yeah, yeah, like it stays screwed in, but then you can go from the peak design clip, and then I also have the peak design crossbody strap. Like I think it's called um slide light, like the peak design slide light. Even the strap itself is good for binoculars, cameras, seeing people with phones on them.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:04

And this, yeah, this system, you can you basically put well, let's just say it's like a male-female connector system. Like you put you know, the female end anywhere on a strap, anywhere on your belt or whatever, and then you attach the male end to whatever device you're using, your phone, your camera, whatever, and they just click it. There's no bag. The thing that because I saw you using it, and you just had that camera just like floating there, and that it makes me so nervous, like because it's not in a bag.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:38

When I'm backpacking, I have my camera on my backpack shoulder strap with that clip. Yeah, and it's a like 400 millimeter lens, like along the lens hanging down. But I've done it enough, I've used that thing enough now that I totally trust it, and I know it's not going anywhere. That's the that was my issue right off the bat. It's like you trust that thing. They do have tethers, you can tether it to it, but yeah, I totally trust it. Like it's that thing's solid. That's cool. Everything I've gotten from Peak Design, because I I it's either that or their crossbody strap, which I use the same plate to mount the crossbody strap to, which is on the bottom of the camera. So it just like orients the camera better if you're carrying it on your hip.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:22

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:23

But I use it for binoculars too. Like I have one, I actually have two of the straps, one for my binoculars and one for my camera. So like they're great. And I've seen people use them for phones, your AirPod Pros. I imagine everything to that.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:37

Anything you could you want to it, it's like it's a great, it's it's really cool. I was thinking because I have a uh old Kevlar helmet, and it still has the um the night vision mount on the front. Like if I could find a way to mount my binoculars, and I just flip them down.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:59

That'd be awesome.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:00

And I don't have to worry about keeping them steady. That'd be awesome. Oh yeah. But I uh that'd probably be worse than warbler neck, I imagine, at some point.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:10

So yeah, we've been that's the cool thing about the chest straps you're talking about, too, is you can carry them like they don't interfere with backpacks. Yeah. But that's what you can get one of those straps that go with it. And they all make tethers too, six-inch tether straps. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:24

That's the thing, is now that um because in my notes here I had the gear. Since it is a gear episode, I guess I'll talk about I think I've talked about I changed my backpack. Yeah. I went from that North Face 65 to the uh six moons ultralight. Right. Which and then I also went from the North Face tent to the six moons lunar solo tent. Yeah, really swapping it all over there. Right. And that's total four point three pounds. My old North Face Rock thirty two tent. And my North Face Terra 65 backpack, 11.1 pounds. Holy shit. Yeah. That's like number 25 pounds saved, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:13

That's crazy. Just in two items. I'm not gonna do that math. Yeah, I think it's like five something.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:19

But that's a lot of weight. That's insane. And um, I'm thinking, like, oh man, like I got I got rim for everything like that. I got I got my can my uh camera gimbal now I can put on there.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:33

We don't need a hatchet.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:36

How do you know, Brad? Well, we never end up making a fire, anyways. We're too tired. It's because the trees are too big. We gotta cut them down. Oh man. That's crazy. That's a great, that's a huge improvement.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:51

What a huge freaking amount. And uh, well, that last uh hike we took, my knees felt amazing, and that was just replacing my pack. I still carried my old tent. Yeah, but now that I have the new tent, like I feel like I'm gonna be able to just sprint up the freaking mountain.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:11

It was nice.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:11

We did my hatchet.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:13

We didn't mention on the canoe trip or cut, yeah. We at a campsite, we were rocking, we were both rocking the North Face Rock 32s. Yeah, we had the exact same tent. When you don't have to worry about weight, you know luxury tents. Yeah, it's like having a mansion tent, but it's also caddelite. Yeah, it's badass. Have you set that tent up yet? I haven't yet. Oh man, I'm excited to see that. I need to get out.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:38

I've been so freaking busy.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:40

Is it it's like a trekking pole tent? Or does it have tent?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:43

It only needs one trekking pole. Oh but I uh the guy I bought it from, he also bought just the carbon fiber tent pole. That's the perfect length for it. So I don't even need to use my trekking poles.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:59

Something else, like uh kind of get into the new gear of the summer that we've been messing around with. One thing I've been going hard on is ticks. Getting keeping ticks off of me. Yeah, because they've been crazy this year. I've I think some of my stuff I've put in or like tried to do to keep them off of me is working. My number one thing is I have a set of clothes that I treat with permathen, permethrin, and it seems to work great for ticks.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:33

What is I've never done that before. Is that just a spray you buy at the sporting goods store?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:40

Yeah, they even sell it at dicks. Uh Sawyer is the main manufacturer of it, like the same company that makes the water filter? I think it is. I'm not 100% sure, but I think it is. And they say like you it it does seem like as you're spraying it, it can be hazardous. And this is all, you know, whatever, um, just recommendations. I mean, but the bottle says like do it in an open area, have uh I put a mask on, like one of the I wouldn't do it indoors, yeah. Like I do it out in my driveway with the mask on, spray it. Then as it dries, that hazardous, it's basically the dispersal agent that is dangerous, so it evaporates and dries. Yeah. And then you're just left with this plant derivative that is what the permanent comes from. That's what they say. It's what the military treats the uniforms with. It's not like the D, dude. No, it's not that shit.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:38

No. Is this something that they that's different from 20 years ago?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:43

I I don't think so. It's what I know it's what the like you and you can send these into places too, and they do a better treatment than what you can do by spraying it. Because spraying it by hand, I think the bottle says it's good for up to six washes, but if you send them in to get treated, they're good for dozens of washes, like 50 or so, like a way better treatment.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:05

I didn't I didn't know it got that deep.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:07

Yeah, so I have three sun shirts because when I go out, I'm I'm always wearing REI Sahara sun. That's my favorite, that's my go-to sun shirt. Yeah, they're awesome. And you know, I'm a pasty white boy. I get sunburned easily, so I gotta stay covered up. Um, so I do that and then my pants with permit then, and like that's the number one. But I still every now and then I still get ticks. Yeah. So I've been thinking about I started using blousing straps that you use in the military to bloss your pants with. But I've been thinking about getting gaiters to just cover my boot and ankles.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:45

Do those go do the gaiters go on the outside of your boot and pants? Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:50

Yeah, and they like cinch down over both of them.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:53

So it's like a like the the guys that stormed uh Normandy. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:59

Okay. Because it can sh it can keep bugs, but also snow. Um all sorts.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:06

I always try and like I don't I've I haven't had a lot of problems with ticks like in my life. Um I always try to be protected, I always, you know, boots, long socks and pants that you know cover the tops of my boots. I tuck my shirt in. My, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:28

Yeah, there is there is almost like it's funny because as I go deeper and deeper in tall grass, I go through levels of, okay, now I'm tucking my pants into my socks. Okay, now I'm tucking my shirt into my pants. I just keep getting more and more tucked in.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:43

Yeah, I don't know. I'm almost convinced that some people well, I guess like mosquitoes too, because mosquito I don't really get bothered by mosquitoes too often. Maybe I'm just a stanky ass dude that the bugs don't like. But I haven't had trouble with uh ticks or anything, but I did like it's still a concern. I always check myself uh after I come in.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

Before you wreck yourself.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:07

For sure. And but I bought those tick keys, which I honestly I've been kind of like hoping to get a ticket just so I can use it. That's not worth it.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:15

I'd rather never get a tick and not use it. Uh yeah, that's true. But I did get my first lone star tick on me at Kankiki Sands. Uh not throwing shade at Kinkiki Sands. There it's it's it it is what it is. But there's lone star ticks now, and I saw the first one climb, it was bright red with the like a speck on its back, and that's the one that makes you allergic to red meat. The real deal, yeah. That shit's scary, so well with that permit then. I've seen him this one didn't do it, but I've I see him crawl up my legs and they just curl up and die and fall off. So that's like I know that shit works.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:56

Like that for real.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:57

But it didn't work for this one, yeah. Yeah, for real. Like it's I was riding my bike once, and somehow one got on my arm, and I saw the same thing. So I could actually just sit there and watch it as I'm just coasting on my bike. Ticks are just falling off of you, dude. That's where it's crazy. I'd be sitting in my car having lunch at work, and a damn tick will like crawl across my leg.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:21

I mean, it's between you and Patrick. Like, I never see ticks.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:24

Mara's gotten so many guys see ticks all the time. I think it's just you gotta be out there. I don't know what you're doing, but in the city, maybe they don't have ticks.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:37

So what have you what else have you gotten this summer?

SPEAKER_04 1:13:40

Uh well, you were talking about sun shirts, and um I kind of came to the realization this summer how awesome sun shirts are. Oh, yeah. Uh like if you don't have anything underneath, even if it's a hot day, toss that baby on and that breeze will flow right through it and it'll protect you, and you still it feels great.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:04

Yeah, like most of them, if you get a medium, it's a big medium. If you get a large medium, they're gonna hang off your body, yeah. That's it, it's supposed to.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:13

Yeah, yeah. And they're yeah, they're so comfortable. I just bought a my first one, my uh brother-in-law Matt, uh, bought me for Christmas. I never considered sun shirts ever. I've seen you wear them before. Pat like wears them. Yeah, I was like, I'm not wearing that stuff. Dude, it's the way to go. But uh he got me that, and then slowly but surely I just kept wearing it on and off, and I was like, this thing is amazing. And I just bought uh a really nice one uh from Zero Foxtrot, uh, which is a veteran-owned company, and it's their kind of mission statement is to just kind of for veterans to just uh zero out. Oh, yeah. Like, don't get crazy about yeah, stay even keel. And that's what I like about them. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:04

Yeah, they're they're everybody makes them now. Like they're blowing up.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:08

You can get them in any freaking style, color, camo, design, whatever. Oh, there's one company that makes them the patterns of fish. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:18

Like there's like a rainbow trout one that I was like, oh, that'd be so cool to have. Yeah, because I think like I've I know I first started wearing them when I lived in Charleston. So I think like fishing is what started the trend.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:29

Because you're out there on the water, like you can't avoid the sun. There's no canopy. If you're doing anything out of it, bring a sun shirt, whether you need it or not, because it's just a great thing to have on a bright sunny day.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:43

So then I guess my last thing was I made the jump to getting a Garmin watch. Oh, yeah. I've always had an Apple Watch.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:54

And I wanna what's like Apple is very commercial. Yeah, Garmin, not so much. Garmin's obviously more utility. What's the difference and uh like why did you even compare it to Apple Watch in the first place?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:10

The biggest difference for me that I love about this Garmin watch is the battery life. Like I used to have to charge my Apple Watch every day, like every night when I go to bed, put it just like your phone, put it on the charger in the morning, put it up.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:25

We've been fighting against charging our watches for centuries.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:31

You know what I mean? It's been a never-ending struggle. We have solar powered watches, and we gotta charge our eye watches. Well, so that's the thing. That's what like when I first started looking at the Garmin watches, they do have solar-powered watches that are battery and solar, and it's like 30 days before you need to recharge it. They have solar too, yeah. Oh, even the watch that I got, so I got it's called the it's the Phoenix 7, which this is their high-end watch, but I got it refurbished. This is the previous model one, and it was a refurbished version, so I got it for a lot cheaper. And they make this with solar powered two, but mine's not, and I've had it for like three or four weeks now, and I've only charged it twice. It's incredible, it's crazy. But there are some things that it doesn't do as well, like the the daily comfort shit, like which I haven't really looked into because I but that's not what it's it's there for.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:36

It's not like I feel like an Apple Watch is more of a yeah, a posh kind of thing, I guess. Like that's more you'll get more use out of that outdoor. Yeah, and it is like in the wheel in your house.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:49

But I don't have to worry about charging it on any trips. Like it's the batteries, like I feel like it's it's crazy, it blows my mind the battery. Never charge it.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:58

So it's because I remember you took uh on one of our trips, you you took uh Garmin, was it a something? Just a pocket. No, I mean it had a message. It wasn't a watch. Yeah, is that what that is? What is that?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:13

You can send messages through satellite, yeah, basically. But you can use the app on your phone or or now on my watch to send messages and shit through it. It's just overall, I don't know. It's been a cool watch.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:27

Well, I'm glad you're getting that gear because I don't think Patty or I would buy any GPS devices.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:37

Well, yeah, and I was Patty was looking at him a while ago and he ended up getting a different watch. So Oh, he did, he was going for GPS. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is more like it does need to have a phone or some kind of service connected to it, whether it's like your SAP phone or your GPS phone or whatever.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:54

Uh lately I've been because I've been they had uh Amazon Prime deals was just going on. Yeah. And I could not find a good deal on a nice Lensatic compass. Uh damn. At least the quality rate. Yeah. Uh but wherever we go, I'm gonna start getting like a laminated map and taking my lensatic compass just in case the watch fails, the phones fail, the everything fails, and uh we'll still have that at least.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:25

You'll be the king. That finally my time is shut. Let's do some land now, guys. And you're like, fuck, how do I use this? I forgot. Oh shit. When Patty gets back, we'll have to get his two cents on. Well, we're definitely gonna hear about his trip, but then hear about what kind of new shit.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:47

Yeah, I wonder what kind of uh European gear he's been getting on to over there. They got some big mountains out there, steep ones, they might have some different gear.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:56

His uh his camera mount will have a fondue, or no, what's the cheese? Yeah, fondue the cheese dip dispenser.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:07

Cigarette dispersion.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:08

I think that's a switch. I think that's an Austrian thing, right? Fondue. I think Bardane had it when he went there on the show. All right. Well, you ready to get out of here, man? Yeah, let's get out of here.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:20

Yeah, I think uh I think we did pretty good without Patty. Yeah, I hope he's proud of us. I hope so too. I don't maybe we're a little bit drier without Patty, but um, I think it just goes to show you how much we need him. Yeah, we miss him, we love him. Can't wait to have him back. Yeah, get home safe. And uh, hey, listeners, thank you for listening and uh keep on sauntering. See ya.