Oh.

Right? And, and so what we did each fall before the hunting season is we, we used the helicopter and the net gun to catch bucks at random.

The, the pilot was instructed to not select bucks based on size or a- any criteria.

Instead, the first buck that he came to, to try to use the helicopter to herd that, that buck to an open road, a, an open field, and then shoot a net gun over it, right? And so the goal was to trap as many bucks as we could in a day on each of the two areas, and, and that allowed us to catch an average of, I don't remember the numbers, but I would guess 40 to 60 bucks per area per year, caught more or less at random.

And then we, once those bucks were on the ground, we looked in their jaws to give them an estimate of age based on tooth replacement and wear, and that was the a- ages, ages assigned to those bucks.

And then we implanted microchips.

We took a bunch of body measurements, antler measures, uh, photographs, DNA samples, it was a ear punch I think, and a, um, and released them five, six, seven minutes later they were turned out right at the, at the capture site, 'cause the capture crews followed the helicopters around.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm

... at Texas A&M Kingsville, right? And, uh, and in that capacity I was there mostly to do data analyses for a planned monograph publication.

And so I was looking at a lot of, uh, historic data that the professor that hired me had collected, right? But he also allowed me the latitude to start up my own research project, and I'd, I'd devised, I'd developed, thought of the, the process of the South Texas Buck Capture Project, right? I, and I had a light bulb moment when we were doing the captures for my PhD work on the Faith Ranch.

Dr. Charlie DeYoung was the person that tried to age every deer that we captured.

So we have a consistent observer across the board aging all the deer, so the same bias applied to every deer.

Well, there was a, there was a yearling buck that we captured, and he was somewhere else on the ranch and he couldn't be there to age it.

One of the few times that happened, and so I was the one that got to age it.

... stays on his feet all day.

Last night you were telling us about how when you got there, the requirements for what they were allowing guys to shoot as far as bucks and some of the problems that being a biologist coming in and seeing it that you saw and the changes that you made and where they are when you left, I suppose.

Yeah, I got hired on at King Ranch in late 1998.

And at that time, the ranch is split into about 40 different hunting leases, right? And those 40 leases make up about 700,000 acres of the 825,000 acres.

There's 60 or 70,000 acres in row crop agriculture.

And then there's...

The remainder is saved for family hunting and employee hunting only.

So it's not all leased, but a good chunk of it is.

Wow.