Some people have changed deer hunting forever and Ron Wilmore is one of them. Larry Zock, a very well-known artist, has a picture of old rivals. When Larry was there, I showed him the deer and I said, I told him then I said, you need to do some kind of a print on this deer, well, an art print on this deer. And he was responsible is, boy, it's so big, it's going to be hard to make it look realistic or whatever. For decades, he managed Clinton Lake, transforming it from a mess into a Poppe and Young producing hot spot for all to enjoy on public land.

And it took two or three years, but it finally started kicking in over the period of the whole hunt,

75% of the bucks killed on that hunt made Popin Young.

That's got to be one of the most successful management practices documented for whitetails.

In this episode, Ron takes us inside 50 years of bow hunting history, deer management, and never before seen footage.

We were driving around and came around to pick cornfield, and that buck and another buck were getting ready to fight

It was the first time we'd ever done anything with the camera and nobody knew what we were doing at all and we videotaped them for like five minutes trying to kill each other If you love white tails this one is a must watch here we go there's two things that I always hear on the biggest bucks killed number one it came from some kind of refuge where it had a chance to get an extra year or two older

and number two that's the first time I hunted that stand that year.

Ron, I've been looking forward to this. A mutual friend made an introduction. And you have,

it was hard to research you because I like to research people. And then, you know, I've picked up

pieces and we've got a chance of chat here, and I'm extremely excited for this.

For folks that don't know who you are, which if they've been reading magazines, they know the name.

But in my age and demographic, I'm pretty much all digital.

So who are you, Ron?

Well, basically, I'm retired right now, but I've worked my whole life as a biologist of some type.

After I got out of college, I actually lived in Florida for three years and worked on the whole chain of lakes between Orlando and Okachovie doing bioassays and things like that.

And then got the opportunity to move back to Illinois which I

preferred because I really don't like hot weather that well and went back to

Illinois and at that point in time got a job offered at Illinois Power in Decatur

and they were just starting to build the Clinton power station nuclear power

station and when I started there I started there running a water treatment plant, basically. And the lake was not even there when I started. Wow. So it's... What year was that? Like 1976. Okay. And then I went through the whole thing there. And then later on, they built a biology, built a chemistry lab and a biology lab. And I ended up, you know, later on, I worked in the chemistry lab for a while, and then I ended up being a supervisor with a biology lab. And so I've done all kinds of different work. I did all the fisheries work, a lot of fisheries work for years on Clinton Lake and water quality work, algae, everything else on Clinton Lake for years and I just I like the

you know doing a lot of different types of biological work yeah and how long have you been

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