Anthony Ballard (Mississippi), Spencer Daniels (Arkansas), and John Hanks (Louisiana) join the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast for a rare three-state bear program roundtable.

Arkansas has over 5,000 bears and has had a hunting season since 1980. Louisiana just held its second bear season after coming off the federal threatened species list in 2016. Mississippi's bear population is continuing to expand. These three biologists explain where each state is, how their seasons work, and what Mississippi biologists are watching closely as its bear population continues to grow.

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Melanie Boudreaux, assistant research professor at Mississippi State University, joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to share what may be the first study to put hard numbers on how wild hogs and deer interact, and what it means for chronic wasting disease in Mississippi.

Her team used GPS collars that could track when animals were near each other, trail cameras at bait sites, and aerial surveys across the state. What they found: hogs move between deer social groups like a bridge, connecting populations that would otherwise stay separate.

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Mississippi's turkey season is running 72% above the five-year average, and MDWFP's new Turkey Program Coordinator Caleb Hinton joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to explain why — and what comes next.

Caleb talks about where turkey stamp money goes, how the new physical tag system works, and what a wild turkey research lab at Mississippi State will mean for the future of turkey management in Mississippi.

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Stafford Shurden has been a farmer, a duck guide, a county judge for 14 years, a restaurant owner, an author, and is now one of Mississippi's most recognized faces on social media — all from eating gas station food off the tailgate of his truck.

He also tells the story of the Delta Wings Festival — a duck call competition on a floating duck blind in the dead center of the Delta — and how he convinced Governor Haley Barbour to name Drew the Waterfowl Capital of Mississippi.

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Mississippi State environmental historians Jim Giesen and Mark Hersey join the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to talk about something every hunter and landowner should understand — the history of the land they're on.

They walk through how the Mississippi Delta went from dense forest to farmland after the Civil War, how whitetail deer nearly went extinct in Mississippi, and how the shift from cotton to soybeans quietly became one of the biggest factors in the state's deer population explosion. They explain why most federal forests in the South are actually worn-out cotton fields the government reclaimed, why feral hogs were intentionally brought to Mississippi in the 1940s, and what the weedy edges of old cotton fields had to do with bobwhite quail.

It's a different kind of outdoor episode — but one that will change the way you look at every piece of land you hunt.

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Malcolm Reed of How to BBQ Right and Killer Hogs BBQ joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to talk about how he built one of the most recognized barbecue brands in the country — starting from a trailer in Southaven and his wife's kitchen bowls.

Malcolm shares the full story: competitive barbecue in the Memphis area, a leap of faith with six months of severance money, making seasoning by hand and selling it out of his house, and eventually shipping Killer Hogs products all over the country. He also talks about his 140-acre farm in Rankin County, the Buck Junkie channel, and wild game cooking — including a bear shank over cheesy shrimp and grits that he says tasted like the best beef pot roast he'd ever had.

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