Mm-hmm.

Anyway, my dad, um, had a chainsaw kick back, an old HomeLite chainsaw.

It doesn't have a chain brake on them or anything, right? Hits him in the chest, and drives himself into town.

His life is saved.

He, them, they med flighted him from the same, [laughs] from the same hospital emergency room to Madison where he got sewed up.And that chainsaw is idling down there in the tail So it's like we've got chainsaw ghosts too.

Whoa.

So this bird has a pronounced limp, hence the name.

Uh, and I think I saw him for the first time, this will be the third season.

Like-

As opposed to when you have, [clears throat] like, um, last week when I was hunting with my, my friend Adam, we sat out two mornings, and we had interactions with gobblers.

We had hens come into the decoys.

But those same hens end up going to the gobblers who, that we could see 150 yards away gobbling and strutting and walking back and forth, and you're watching the natural order of things happen, which is those hens are going over to him-As opposed to coming, it came to my call to come in and be a part of the turkey group, I guess, but then turn around because that's the, there's the guy standing up there doing this and watching them do their thing.

It's like, there's nothing I'm going to do to reverse this or is there?

So I mean, I guess we'll say if you don't know about the Driftless area, Doug Dern is the perfect person to tell you about the Driftless area, specifically in the spring, what it looks like, how it feels, how it sounds.

The Driftless area of Southwest Wisconsin and areas of the surrounding states, um, unglaciated, so devoid of glacial drift is how it was formed.

I told James this earlier, we were talking about how it was formed and, and the, the hills were, here were formed by erosion, not eruption.

Uh, Doug, what do you have for us?

So three years ago, four years ago, um, a couple of friends of mine and I, [metal clanks] uh, started experimenting with an idea, tried to prove this concept that was built off of Aldo Leopold's Rye Game Cooperative.

In that, Leopold and some buddies did, uh, conservation work on a farmer's property in exchange for access to that property, and, um, the conservation work they did is, uh, much of it is still there.

It's really kind of a cool place to go and, uh, visit.

It's called the Rye Game Cooperative.

About the same time I met, uh, Steve Rinella, I was doing a bicycle trip out in that area, saw the sign, and, um, it inspired me to eventually come up with this idea, just really stealing Leopold's idea, um, to start a private land access initiative.

That's as old as time, right? That you trade, um, work for, for access, but what we try to do is expand it to be mostly about conservation-

So you've got a few, uh, permanent blinds on the farm?

and so uh we're here to welcome of course doug back but he's like he's another co-host at this point but uh um uh lindsey and brock who you will have heard their names of course at the beginning of this episode but people who have been with sharing the land really since the beginning isn't that right doug

absolutely have been um I can't even remember the Genesis story of how Lindsay and I started working together and how with our other friend, Aaron Holmes, how we really decided, well, let's see if we can do this.

or explore the possibilities, but Brock, as an example of sharing the land, I've known for a little over a decade now, and before we started sharing the land, as an entity, Brock and I met at a Wisconsin Conservation Congress annual meeting.

Now, Wisconsin Conservation Congress, some people would say was Leopold's worst idea because it really involves the public with science and management.

His point was, Leopold's point was, is that in order for conservation to take hold, you do need to involve the public.

And you know whenever that was 75 years ago well 90 years ago when he when it was all coming to fruition it made sense right and that was that era of Compensating for over harvest and really extirpation of near extirpation of species And now it's sort of become Sort of the opposite, like only the hunting community seems to be involved with the Wisconsin Conservation Congress and makes me think about hunting and conservation and how those things should work cooperatively, but it ain't necessarily

IHAP in Iowa,

yeah.