Stay ConnectedListen to the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast, hosted by Matt Wyatt. We’ll dive into fascinating conversations about Mississippi’s rich outdoor life, where each episode brings new knowledge about wildlife, the outdoors, and unique local experiences. Join us for diverse stories all aimed at shaping the state’s cultural outdoor narrative.
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Copyright: © Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks
Sharks stealing your fish off the Gulf Coast? You're not imagining it, and marine fisheries professor Marcus Drymon joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to explain exactly why it's happening and what you can do.
Marcus breaks down the science behind shark depredation, which species are most responsible (sandbar, bull, and blacktip), and why anglers have been dealing with more of it over the past 20 years. He also explains why healthy shark populations are actually a sign that the Gulf Coast fishery is doing well — and why that's a harder message to deliver to a fishing guide who just lost a red snapper to a shark.
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Eddie and Becky Briggs of Mississippi are two of the best helice shooters in the world, and most people have never heard of the sport. They join the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to explain everything.
Helice uses spinning plastic targets launched from five machines in a baseball diamond layout. You don't know which machine will fire. The targets spin at 5,000 RPMs, fly unpredictably, and you have to knock the white center cap inside a two-foot fence ring — with two shots. Eddie is the current U.S. senior champion. Becky's team finished second at the World Championship in Italy.
They talk about what it feels like to compete overseas with Team USA, how to get started in the sport, where to try it in Mississippi, and why every shooter they've introduced to it calls it addictive.
Mississippi Outdoors is produced by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks.
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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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Have you ever walked through the woods and wondered who figured out what all those plants are — or who's still out there finding new ones? In this episode of the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast, Matt Wyatt sits down with Dr. Mack Alford, botanist and professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, to talk about plant discovery, rediscovery, and why Mississippi is more botanically interesting than most people realize.
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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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If you've seen Mississippi's 2026 turkey stamp, you've seen Johnny Granberry's work. The retired homebuilder and lifelong hunter from southern Holmes County joins the Mississippi Outdoors Podcast to talk about winning the stamp contest, his painting process, and 55 years of time in the woods that shows up in everything he paints.
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