Welcome to the Jay Scott Outdoors podcast. Today we have my friend Mike Hancock of

Bert timber Outfitters on the line. Mikey how you doing?

I'm doing great Jay how are you doing good looks like you guys have been busy you've been

stacking them up this is a busy time of year for us it's been a pretty good 10 days so far.

That's awesome.

I guess let's start at the beginning.

Before the hunt started going into it,

what were the conditions, what was your anticipation of how the hunt was going to be and

you know rutting uh... buggling what have you before the hunt even started this year, you know, it's no secret. It's probably one of the worst

droughts that I've ever seen. Conditions were spotty in a lot of areas. We were spread out over four or five different units,

4B and 3C and 3B in unit 1. Obviously, unit 1 looked the best by far.

Upper 3B and some of that higher stuff in 3C looked pretty good, but the lower stuff was in dismal condition at best.

As far as antler growth goes, we were hoping it to be just an average year, but from what I've observed personally, it's been below average.

A lot of bulls that look to be 20% or so left.

There were some big bulls to be found.

You know, there's obviously not as many of them.

We're fortunate enough to live in Arizona

as long as you can hunt Arizona,

you're always gonna be able to find some big bulls just just not multiple

big bulls in these units and they're really hard to dig out this year I mean is

what I've observed but overall conditions have been fair at best.

Heavy monsoons was it real spotty in a lot of those units 3C4B1 heavy in some areas spotty in others?

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