Welcome to the Vortex Nation podcast, brought to you by lovers of hunting, shooting, public lands, the Second Amendment, and good food.

What is up, everybody? Mark on the mic, my good friend, Mr. Ryan Muck and Herne to my right.

And Meadow, Calfield, across from us, virtually, Ryan, this might be your dream come true.

We chat about grouse occasionally. You are a grouse fanatic.

And we were talking about we should do a podcast about grouse. And you said, I have just

the person. And that's Meadow. Meadow, welcome to the Vortex Nation podcast. We appreciate you

joining us today. If you can, give us a rundown of who you are, your background, you know, your business

things that you do. And then we're going to jump into all of our grouse questions.

Sounds good. Well, as you guys said, my name's Meadow Calfeld. I'm here in Minnesota, so Grand Rapids,

North Central. And originally I'm from California, but I've been here about 17 years.

So I think this is actually my 17th year here.

I moved to Minnesota for graduate school.

It was where my best opportunities came from when I was looking into research opportunities.

And it just happened to be rough grouse that brought me to Minnesota.

And so that was

what my research thesis was based off of for my master's. It was actually habitat selection in

north-central Minnesota. So it's been a fair amount of time studying birds, looking at a lot of

different drumming logs, right around like 890 of them. And so I knew a lot about drumming logs.

And then after that, I worked for Wisconsin

DNR, Minnesota DNR, the Rough Grouse Society. It taught at the college here in town for a bit. Now I'm a

senior ecologist at a consulting firm. So my career trajectory in wildlife, like most wildlife biologists,

has been a lot of different positions and a lot of different skill sets that had to be developed. So in addition to that, I'm an outdoors person. I love to fish,

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