- Hello, everyone.

Welcome to "Michigan Out-Of-Doors."

We're so glad you're here this week 'cause we've got a brand new show headed your way.

I'll take you out on a nighttime coyote hunt with a couple of guys from Lapeer County who really know their stuff when it comes to predator hunting.

You won't wanna miss that hunt.

And Jimmy's gonna sit down with the DNR to discuss their proposed license fee increases and Michigan's plan to install solar farms on our state land.

You won't wanna miss that.

Lots of great things headed your way on this week's show, so you stay tuned.

I'm Jenny Silek and it's time for "Michigan Out-Of-Doors."

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(water gurgling) - [Jenny] Nate Sadler and Mike Smith have a passion for predator hunting and it shows.

They call their crew SNS Predator Impact, and a quick look at their Facebook page confirms that these guys are great at hunting coyotes.

Last week I met them for a hunt on a farm where my husband and I deer hunt and I asked them how they got started with this pastime.

- So it's been about seven years now.

We were just talking about that the other day.

So we met through, Nate, put a, I started hunting coyotes about a year before that and I was hunting pretty much by myself and learning, struggling, and Nate threw a thing out on Facebook.

He's like, "Hey, I'm looking for somebody around the area that's serious about coyote hunting.

Wants to get together and do some hunting together."

And I answered that.

- [Jenny] How long have you been hunting, Nate?

- I've been hunting since I was probably nine years old total.

Predator hunting since I was about 13 or 14, starting with red fox and coyotes and the old Johnny Stewart callers with the tape player on it.

Those were the fun days.

- Yep, and I started hunting coyotes when I was 50, so I had a bucket list and I had on the bucket list to build a gun, to shoot a coyote, call in and shoot a coyote.

Just one, that's all I had on my list, but once I shot the first one, fire kinda got lit.

- Yeah, I was just wanting to hunt coyotes with somebody.

- He didn't know what he was getting into.

- I got this guy over here, he's got bucket lists and stuff.

- [Jenny] Matt and I took Mike and Nate down the road to our friend's farm where we occasionally see coyotes while deer and turkey hunting.

They have thermal imaging scopes that record their successes, and as they got ready, we talked about a budget for first-time coyote hunters.

- [Mike] Depends on what what you want to do.

It could be as cheap as simple budget with a .22 mag.

- [Nate] Yep.

- [Mike] A glass scope and a red light and sticks for tripod and you can start going out hunting, but it's gonna be really difficult.

So when you wanna get more successful, we jumped into night vision scopes.

We had AR .223 rifles and we were hunting with I think tripod sticks, just little handheld sticks.

And then we jumped into thermal monoculars with the infrared scopes, night vision scopes, and then our success went up a little bit then.

And then we switched, then we got the thermal monoculars and the thermal scopes and our success jumped dramatically, like 60 coyotes one year to 160 the next year.

What's the first answer?

If somebody says, "What's it take to get into cow hunting?"

- [Nate] What's your budget?

- [Mike] Open your wallet up or forget about it.

- [Nate] Yeah.

One thing that we always say is buy once, cry once, and the great thing about it- - [Mike] We didn't learn that way though.

- [Nate] No, we didn't because I didn't follow the buy once, cry once.

I bought three of everything and just got better as I went, which was not the right way to do it, I guess.

- [Mike] Yeah, your success hinges on the quality of the equipment that you buy and then the quality of the equipment goes with price.

- [Nate] And that's why, you know, we partnered up with Predator Hunter Outdoors because, I mean, Paul and Blake over there, they have every option you could possibly want for coyote hunting gear.

- Yep.

- Predator hunting gear.

As far as you want an actual number for price range that we have in our gear?

- [Mike] Sitting out in that truck is probably 20,000 plus.

- [Nate] Yeah, between the guns, the optics, the callers, the sounds.

- [Mike] The sounds alone.

- [Nate] Yeah, the sounds alone.

- [Mike] I've got $1,500 in sounds alone.

- Yep.

- Just MP3 that you buy online and you download in your caller.

- [Jenny] It's interesting, and a little intimidating, to hear just how much you can spend on a high-end predator-hunting setup, and fun to see some of those clips of past hunts with Nate and Mike.

As we headed out to a field edge here at the farm, these guys talked about why they love hunting coyotes.

- [Nate] My big thing and why I like to do this stuff is, number one, the adrenaline rush.

Every coyote that comes in is the 10 point buck that the serious deer hunter is after.

There's something about being able to call in one of the smartest animals in North America, and fooling that animal to the point of within range of a rifle.

- [Mike] It's not easy.

Sometimes a dumb one comes walking in.

- [Nate] It's the adrenaline rush for me.

Number two, it's helping with the predators.

A lot of these farmers have problems with their cattle or sheep, their chickens.

- [Mike] Yep.

- [Nate] And we get to help with that as well, so that's my thing.

- [Mike] And well, that's kind of where I'm at with it too.

It's just the excitement of it.

You can get out at night and you can do this after the kids have gone to bed.

You can do it when, you know, instead of sitting around watching TV, the rush, the exercise, you know, for a 50-year-old guy, it was pretty good for me to get up and go out walking every night getting some exercise.

And then, you know, along with it was helping out the people that had problems.

We have taken coyotes that we have known that they killed cows, ducks, sheep, goats, chickens.

- Let's try that one right here.

Here we go.

(coyote call howling and barking) (zipper zipping) (scope rustling) Give her a little.

- [Mike] There's one right there.

- Where are we at?

- Down there.

Down the trail.

- Down the trail.

- See it?

- [Nate] Got it.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it.

Come around this side.

Come around this side.

Come around this side.

There you go.

Safety's off.

- I'm gonna hold him.

- You on him?

- I'm on him.

- You sure?

- Yep.

- Okay.

I'm gonna stop him.

- Yep, stop him.

(coyote call howling) (rifle fire banging) - He's down.

- Got him.

- [Nate] Dead coyote.

Dead coyote.

- Nice job.

Yeah!

(Jenny laughing) - Real sweet.

- That was awesome.

- You saw it coming?

- Yeah.

That's the area I expect them to come in from.

That's where I always see 'em back in that creek bottom down there.

- Perfect.

Shout out to MFK game calls on that one.

That was strictly playing with the territory stuff.

We threw a howl out there.

Hey, I'm over here, anybody want to come out?

And that coyote never made a sound.

Never made a sound the whole time we were out here.

So back to the same tip from earlier.

Just because you don't hear 'em does not mean they're not here.

Sometimes they just don't wanna talk.

That's probably a transient male coyote, I'm guessing.

- Looked pretty good size.

- He looks like a pretty good sized coyote.

- All right.

- Oh, that's awesome.

- I know.

- That's awesome.

- So we got one down out there.

Nate did a great job calling.

- Thank you, sir.

- Fox Pro did a great job with the sounds on that one and MFK, so we tried a couple more things.

We tried a little bit of rabbit after that and nothing came out, so we're gonna grab this one.

We're gonna go to another spot.

We're gonna put Jenny on the gun, see if she can get a coyote.

- [Jenny] Oh, boy.

- Male.

- Got a male.

- [Nate] Called that one, huh?

- [Mike] Well, he might not be running through the brush or the dense.

It's not a young dog he's got a- - [Nate] But look how healthy he is.

Look at the teeth on him.

Beautiful canines, nice and clean.

- Yeah.

- That's a healthy dog.

- [Mike] Yeah, this is a couple year old dog.

- So with a .243 rifle, you don't see an exit hole in this coyote.

- Both bullets hit.

- Both bullets hit.

There's no exit hole.

It's just, you have to have the right bullet.

- The right speed.

- The right speed, and you don't blow the coyotes up.

You can't even tell where this coyote's hit.

There's no blood.

- [Jenny] The small bullet holes will make this coyote hide a lot nicer for a fur collector.

We hit the next farm and called for a half hour or so without any action, so we called it a night.

There is so much more that goes into planning a successful hunt and Mike and Nate shared a wealth of knowledge with me tonight.

We don't have time to touch on all of it here, but we will spend more time with them down the road here in "Michigan's Out-Of-Doors."

- Well, in our next story, we are gonna sit down with the Department of Natural Resources and learn a little bit more about a proposed license fee increase that kind of surfaced towards the end of last year and kinda let you know where that's at.

And we're also gonna talk a little bit about solar panels on state property.

We're able to sit down and get some more information on these hot topics and how it affects you as sportsmen and women.

(gentle upbeat acoustic guitar music) Well, we're here today down in Lansing and we are with Taylor Ridderbusch and Taylor, before we talk about license fees and all that kinda stuff, just kinda give me your background, how long you've been with the department and what do you do around here?

- Sure, so I'm the Executive Policy Advisor for the Department.

I've been with the agency for three years now.

I grew up hunting, fishing, camping, being outside.

I grew up in Northern Wisconsin up by the UP, so- - Nice.

- Really familiar with that and was able to find a career where, you know, I got paid to talk about and think about hunting and fishing, so I'm pretty happy with that.

- Nice, well, we wanted to get together because right at the end of last year, we're into the new year now, there was a proposal for a license fee increase, so let's just start with where are we at with that process when it comes to license fee increases here in Michigan?

- Sure, so we did have some bills introduced last year, right at the beginning of lame duck.

They did not make it through that legislative session, so we'll have to start over this year, so those bills are effectively dead for the time being, but we are having conversations with legislators and leadership in the legislature about what we might be able to do moving forward to make sure that we have appropriate conservation funding in the state of Michigan.

- Yeah, so let's just start with where does the bulk of the DNR funding come from?

- Sure, I mean, the largest part of that is coming from our deer hunters and from our anglers.

Those are the two biggest categories of our licensed purchasers.

So they're paying the bulk of the way in, so just a real brief overview of our budget, about 86% of our budget comes in through restricted funds, so that's either through our license sales, our camp nights, recreation passport sales, those kinds of things.

And then 13% of our budget is state general fund.

Those are the general tax-based dollars that come into the department.

- [Jimmy] Okay, so a big hunk of it is dollars from hunting and fishing licenses.

- Correct.

- Okay.

And did you guys go to the legislature saying, "Hey, we need more money."

Is that something that they pick up on their own?

How does that even start as we get into the new year if you're gonna kind of go down that path again?

- Sure, yeah, it's a combination of the two.

Historically the legislature has taken a look at our license fees about every 10 years and the last time that they had done a fee increase for us was back in 2014, so we've reached that 10 year mark.

And as you can imagine, in that time, just inflation has had an impact on the value of those dollars and the buying power.

And then of course, the hyperinflation that we saw through Covid exacerbated that and so that's a conversation that we've been having here at the agency, but then also with legislators about the need to make sure that we're making sure that our agency and that natural resources and conservation are funded.

- Now, would Joe Blow sportsman recognize, so if there is a fee increase this year, what would that actually go towards and how would people see that on the, would they notice on the ground some differences in what they're currently getting?

- Yeah, absolutely, so over the last 10 years, we have had a reduction in staffing, which has had an impact on what we're able to do.

So I'll give you an example.

Our lake surveys, where right now if you wanted us to come out and do a survey of a lake or a stream with the current staffing levels that we have and the demand that we have to provide that service, it'd be 87 years before we would get back to your lake after we survey it.

- Wow.

- And we know that that's not helpful to people, right, but in a lot of cases, conservation takes people to accomplish these things, to do those kinds of surveys so we wanna make sure that we're staffed appropriately to do that, but that also you're able to see that in the habitat work that's going in on the ground, whether that's dam removals for better trout streams, those kind of things.

That's what we wanna do with the revenue that we hope to raise with the fee increase and we wanna make sure that it's right size in the agency to provide the services that people want from us.

- Okay, and so where do we, I'm sure I could find this online, but hopefully you know these numbers a little bit, but where do we stack up as far as license, for a deer license for me here in Michigan versus somebody in Ohio, Illinois?

Are we competitive currently or where are those numbers at?

- Yeah, we're towards the bottom of that price range in our region, especially on our resident licenses, our non-resident licenses, we tend to be a bit on the higher end, so we feel like we're in a pretty good place with non-resident license fees.

There's always a little bit of room to work on those, but right now our resident fees are some of the lowest in the region.

And we believe that we have a ton of access, a ton of opportunity here with 4.6 million acres of state land, we've got the Great Lakes, thousands of miles of rivers and streams, so you're getting a lot of bang for your buck when you buy a license here in Michigan in terms of opportunity and being able to access the outdoors.

- Did you guys get a lot of blowback from people unhappy about a fee increase, or have people been pretty, "Yeah, we can see the value of that," or... - Yeah, I think it's been a mixed bag.

I think people across the state have felt the impacts of inflation in their everyday lives, right, and so I think there is concern about how expensive are things getting, but if you look at the proposal that we had put forward for any given license type, we were in a 10 to $15 increase from the previous price, and for me, that's a small price to pay for the reinvestment back into the resource.

And I also know that that's probably gonna be the cheapest part of my trip for that day, right, whether it's compared to my decoys or my boat or my dog, the $30 to go out there that day is probably gonna be the cheapest part of my trip.

- Now, some of the feedback we've been getting too, that was a little on the negative side was seniors saying that they're not getting the same kind of discount under the new proposal, potentially.

Is that true?

What kind of a feedback are you getting from seniors that are not happy about seeing their discount not be maybe as big as it used to be?

- Yeah, and I certainly hear that concern.

That was something that we had put forward and knew that it was gonna work its way through the legislative process.

I think that what we would do this time around would probably be to stair step that discount down so it's not a big jump initially, but we have seen that seniors have become a much larger portion of our licensed buyers.

When you have a large discount like that, on top of inflation, it is hurting the revenue that we have to be able to reinvest back into the resource.

- So as we look at this upcoming year with you guys kind of bringing this proposal forth, again, what's a timeframe on that and when would people kinda look for that?

- Sure, yeah, I mean, I can tell you that we are having conversations with legislators right now.

We have draft legislation.

I think that any version of that would probably be a little bit different this time around because it's gonna have some more legislative input right up front from the beginning, so it's hard to say exactly what form that's gonna take.

One of the pieces of that proposal that we had included was tying our license fees to the consumer price index, so in years of inflation they would go up with inflation.

Maybe that's something that doesn't make it in this time or not, those are the kind of the minutia that we're having discussions about right now.

- [Jimmy] Is that something you'd like to see?

I mean, that kinda makes sense that it would step up on a periodic basis.

- Yeah, we think that that's a really smart way to do it, actually, so that we don't have to come back to the legislature every 10 years and then you have these big 10 or $15 jumps in your license fees.

We would like to tie it to the consumer price index like we have the recreation passport where, you know, on average we've seen that go up about a dollar every three years.

And so, you know, in terms of a fishing license, you're talking about 27, 28, $29 over nine or 10 years, as opposed to a big $10 jump in one year.

- Okay, so if you could speak to the Michigan sportsmen out there who is like, "Oh, it's another $10 or $15, whatever."

Why is that, in your estimation, something that sportsmen should pay a little bit more this this next yeah?

- Sure, well, you know, I think a lot of it is tied back to, you know, the hunting and fishing heritage that we have here in Michigan and across the country in that we operate within the North American model of conservation and hunters and anglers users have paid their way to ensure that we have fish and game for the next year and for the next generation.

And so I can certainly understand the concern with paying more next year, but at the end of the day, this is an investment into our natural resources to make sure that they are there for the future.

- Awesome.

Just before we go, something that's been kind of a hot topic, is the right word, over the last at least several weeks, month, has been the idea of potentially putting solar panels on large hunks of state land.

Just where are we at with that whole process?

- Yeah, so, that got some headlines when we were talking about the project that was being proposed up in Gaylord.

You know, and this I think really does kind of fit with what the department has historically done.

We've had all sorts of different development and uses on state land over the years that, as they are brought to the department, we review them and then put them out for public comment, so that's what happened in this case.

We were approached by a solar developer about leasing state land for that kind of use, which is right in line with other uses like oil and gas development.

State land, at one point or another, in the history of the state has been used for prisons and other things and so development on state land isn't totally unique new.

- Yeah.

- But I can certainly understand the concern with folks about what the future of Michigan's forests might look like.

We wanna be really selective about where we might place any kind of solar array, and we've done a really extensive review.

We've had projects moving forward on places like degraded mine sites, old mine sites.

In this case, this was a place where we didn't have a lot of contiguous state land.

It was a number of parcels kind of one-offs and that were already being pretty heavily managed for timber, and so it seemed like a good place, especially with transmission lines right there, but with the public outcry, you know, we're gonna continue to take public comment on that and we'll run it through the regular RFP process and we'll see where things end up after that process plays out.

- And so the one that people are aware of, at least in Northern Michigan, was a potential about a 400-acre site in the Gaylord area.

That one is the one everybody's talking about, but I think some of the worry for a lot of us who, you know, hunt and fish in Northern Michigan, I guess it would be potentially Southern Michigan too, but is this a trend for the department or they're gonna be looking for large hunks of land to put solar panels on, or is that kind of conspiracy theory stuff, or kind of where are we at with that?

- Sure, yeah, I mean I think as the largest landowner in the state, we probably do have some role to play in making sure that we get to 100% renewable energy by 2040.

I don't know that there's any clear pathway to doing that all on state land.

Obviously that's gonna take a lot more than just what the department owns, but with that being said, there likely are spots where the department owns lands that are not high productivity in terms of timber, in terms of having recreation on them, and are close to transmission lines that could help put renewables on the grid, and with that being said, those leases that are generated from that, much like oil and gas revenue, can be reinvested and can be used to purchase other properties around the state or do other enhancement in other areas.

- But one thing that I think was surprising to me before I started working with the television show and we were talking with more DNR people, how much public ground the department is actively buying around the state.

Like, can you speak to that at all?

Like that's something I don't think people realize.

Some of this land is sold by the department, but they buy a lot too.

- Yeah, when we do our annual review, so we review 1/10 of all of our ownership every year.

So within 10 years we've reviewed every parcel that we own in the state, and that's where we go around and take a look and say, "Okay, does this have restricted access?

Is it water access only?

And is it a irregular shape?"

Maybe it's something that we could sell and reinvest that money into a more ideal property that creates a contiguous block that might be, we will get more use and more bang for its buck.

So yeah, I mean we use the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund all the time in acquisitions.

We're working right now up in the UP and the Keweenaw to try and secure another 20,000 acres up there in the peninsula, so yeah, we're trying to provide access to people everywhere we can, and especially when we have big tracks of land that we wanna make sure stay open to the public, we wanna be able to go after those.

- [Jimmy] Awesome, well thank you for your time.

- [Taylor] Yeah, thank you.

- Well, hey everyone, thank you so much for watching "Michigan Out-Of-Doors" this week.

As you can imagine, these are really hot topics here in the state of Michigan.

Anytime you're talking about a license fee increase, that is a big deal.

And when you talk about putting solar panels on state property, that's probably even a bigger deal.

When it comes to a license fee increase, the fact that we haven't seen one in 10 years, and the fact that the price of everything is going up, I would imagine we will be seeing a license fee increase in the not-too-distant future.

We'll keep you posted on that.

And the idea of putting solar panels on state property, well, I think it's safe bet to say that nobody wants to see that and we'll definitely keep you posted as that moves along as well.

And the reason we sit down with the DNR and do these kinda stories is that you can kind of hear from them some of the why behind what they're doing, even if you don't agree with it.

I think it's important for us to talk with the department and try to work with them as best we can and we'll keep you posted as all this stuff moves along and how it affects you as sportsmen.

Thank you so much for watching "Michigan Out-Of-Doors" this week.

Hopefully we'll see you right back here next week on your PBS station.

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(gentle upbeat music) ♪ When I wander far away ♪ A dream stays with me night and day ♪ ♪ It's the road that leads to my home state ♪ (bright music)