But the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become.

I can't even make this up, he starts walking, I draw back, and he's down, he's right there.

Oh no!

Alrighty Zach, welcome to the podcast man, how you been?

I'm good, thanks for having me, I appreciate the opportunity, I'm always down to talk habitat, talk about what's done and what I've been cooking here for the last couple years.

I'm excited about it because this conversation has come up, I don't know how many times, people message me, they want to go into wildlife biologists, do that whole thing, and then they're like, I don't know if it's for me.

I always get this question of like, hey you think there's a potential to go private.

That's essentially what you've done, we're going to talk about that, we're going to talk about pros, cons, mistakes, good, bad, ugly.

We might talk about some deer management stuff, all of that.

So yeah, give us like 30,000 foot view, you're in Nashville, is that right?

Yep, yep, I'm just outside of Nashville, Lebanon, Tennessee.

So yeah, I'm a wildlife biologist, I went to school at West Virginia University, starting out my career, I kind of have the same goals as everyone else in wildlife management, I wanted to be outside, I wanted to work outside,

and I wanted to have an impact on the landscape, I didn't get into wildlife management because I thought I'd be rich one day, nobody does that, it's a poor plan, if that's your end goal.

Going through school, I just kind of became fast, I was always a kid just fascinated with wildlife and being outside, and when I get to school and I started doing some labs outside, and I had my first internship, I kind of caught the bug and installed that there was something there.

Like the habitat side of wildlife management, even as small of a little corner as it is, as far as natural resource management as a whole goes, that's kind of where my heart fell was in the habitat side of things.

So I mean, starting out, I graduated, I was just like everyone else trying to get a full time job anywhere I'd have been happy with the full time job, but the truth of the matter is, if you're going to go this route, you're not going to get a full time job right off the bat.

So you're stuck either kind of getting a masters program and specializing in something, or you're taking the route I did and working different seasonal jobs, kind of bouncing around the country trying to scratch and claw your name until you're eligible to pick essentially to get these full time jobs.

So I did that for years and years and years.

Yeah, and as to say, nothing of the fact of like getting any time off during the fall is like, you're the bottom of the roster because everyone who goes into that field is kind of like, you know, yeah, they all love hunting.

They love me and outdoors and you know, it just seems like it's really hard, you know, everyone's kind of battling for those that time off and to get to do what they want.

And so, yeah, it's, I think it's like the easy career path for a lot of kids are like, man, deer elk love it.

Want to like, you know, maybe they have like a property that they're kind of like managing or whatever, you know, to some degree, like even I was that way, like I grew up, we had, you know, bucks and deer all over the property and, you know, like, you know, making stands or whatever, planting food plots.

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