Chad Belding & The Fowl Life Require Tires for All Types of Terrain

August 26, 2022: Mickey Thompson Ambassador Chad Belding practices a simple philosophy on "The Fowl Life": Hunt hard, stay safe, respect the animals and share hunting lifestyles. Accompanied by his Fowl Life teammates, Belding works toward those goals while pursuing duck and geese across the U.S. and Canada. From preseason preparation, long road trips, tips and tactics, world-class footage and hunting-camp life, viewers experience each journey. Belding's Fowl Life brand includes a TV production company and a diverse line of hunting equipment, clothing and accessories. In addition to all of that, Belding is a brand ambassador for Mickey Thompson Tires & Wheels. We recently caught up with Belding to see what he’s been up to and what he plans to do next. Fair warning: if you’re not already itching for hunting season to start, you soon will be.

MT: Chad, the Fowl Life season 14 is airing now. What do you have planned for the next weeks and months for season 15?

Belding: Dove season is going to be a big part of our kickoff. Come the very end of August and beginning of September, we’re going to be all over Northern California for the opening week of the season, and we’ll have all of our crews engaged there. That’s the kickoff to most hunters’ and wing-shooters’ season. We’ll be cooking every day with our provider Rubs and our Traeger grills.

From there, September 7, we head down to South Texas, and we’re going to be kicking off the blue-wing teal season. That’s a big deal for duck hunters. Blue-wing teal are the first ducks that move through the migratory routes, and they get south the fastest. If you’re not going to Canada, a lot of duck hunters concentrate on that blue-teal season. We’ll be down there with one of our major partners, MOJO Outdoors out of Louisiana, and hunting with Rocky Point Kennels, Mr. Steve Biggers, for four days, celebrating duck season, camaraderie and friendship. We’ll have all of our trucks and trailers there. Mickey Thompson tires are going to be with us the entire route, from Chico, Calif., all the way across Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico into Texas and then all of the way south of Dallas. It’ll be a big trip for us.

From there, the rigs will take off, and we’ll head to the Northeast in Upstate New York where we’re going to be involved in a 9-11 hunt with a bunch of firefighters and police officers from New York City that either were involved in 9-11 or lost brothers and sisters on 9-11. We’re going to be hunting Canada geese for New York’s early season, so Mickey Thompson will be with us all over that part of the country.

It’ll be nonstop from there on out. We’re going to be in 16 or 17 different states chasing the migration, and our trucks and trailers go everywhere with us. We try to showcase the entire idea and culture of duck camp and hunting camp and what it means to be an outdoorsman and outdoorswoman living off the land. We truly believe in sustainability, farming, ranching, hunting and fishing and preparation of the wild game and how to share that bounty with friends and family.

We love the partnership with Mickey Thompson because it provides a comfortable, smooth, quiet ride across the country. We do spend a lot of time behind the windshield, so we have to be able to rely on our tires for great performance. It’s a big part of our success.

MT: From the Pacific Northwest to South Texas to the Northeast…that’s a lot of miles covering a great variety of terrain. How does the performance of Mickey Thompson tires help you and your crew cover all of that ground?

Belding: That’s an easy question for me to answer, because I brag about it all of the time. We’re mainly running the Baja Legend MTZs on all of our rigs, and we have more than a baker’s dozen. We’ve got them on our trucks in Tennessee, Georgia, New York, Wisconsin, and we’re constantly getting feedback on all of the different terrains that we access, from blacktop to highways and interstates to county roads, dirt roads, gravel roads to all of a sudden, you’re in a bean field or a corn field. That terrain can be really rough. It can be unbalanced and full of potholes with a lot of ups and downs. I keep telling people, these Baja Legends are unbelievable, the way they feel, the balance they have, the coverage, the quiet sound.

From highways to long treks across Interstate 80 or I-40 in the Southern part of the country to every corn field in Kansas or a pea field up in Saskatchewan to a bean field in Oklahoma or a peanut field in East Texas, we’ve done it all. We’ve driven on all of these different terrains. We’ve run through a ton of different muddy terrain too. If you picture waterfowl season in the fall and winter when we’re dealing with rain, hail, sleet and snow, you just never know if you’re going to be on two inches of ice or two-or-three inches of mud. These tires perform day in and day out regardless. We’re going to get a big test this year because as Covid begins to lay down, we’re able to get back to our regular schedule, and these Mickey Thompson tires are going to be with us in a lot more states this year, from Texas to Louisiana to Arkansas to Florida to New York, Idaho, Montana, California. I could keep going. We’re going to be in a ton of different parts of the country, and we absolutely love the way that these Baja Legends are performing.

MT: It sounds like you have been to just about every single state in the country and experienced all the variety of terrain that it has to offer. What has that journey been like?

Belding: The Fowl Life has taken us so many places. When we started it in 2008, we obviously never dreamed that we would be airing season 14 right now of Benelli’s The Fowl Life and also getting ready to hit the road for season 15. To have 15 seasons of the same TV show, I think that it took a lot of unorthodox, out-of-the-box thinking to create different stories. Just showing a duck hunt or a geese hunt, that’s one thing, and it’s been done. We didn’t want to showcase just the pull of the trigger. We have a lot of compassion for the animals we pursue, a lot of respect for the resources. We wanted to tell their stories and the stories of the hunters.

We hunted with a high-school janitor that whistles dixie every single time that he’s cleaning a bathroom or gym floor and has a ton of passion for what he does in life. We’ve hunted with fighter pilots and veterans that were wounded in war, Seal Team Six members who will not only never be allowed to go into war again, they can’t drive the family vehicle because they’ve lost their short-term memory from taking shrapnel. The time that we’ve gotten to spend in the blind with veterans, active-duty special forces, wounded veterans and more is incredible. It’s an amazing thought that a duck hunt has brought so many different people into our camp. Besides the veterans and military and folks from the everyday walk-of-life, we’ve also been able to break bread with celebrities in athletics and different realms of MMA, tons of country music artists, Zac Brown and Aaron Lewis and Jon Pardi and Drake White. It’s just good to know that hunting is the common denominator that brings all of these different walks of life together.

It is also the common denominator that gave me the ability to go sit down with Mickey Thompson Tires & Wheels and talk about business and partnering to showcase the quality and innovation of their products to hunters, fishermen, conservationists and outdoorsmen across the country. Hunters have to have gear, quality gear, like these tires. We spend the money because we have to be able to perform. We have to get to the hunt, and we have to get home to our families from the hunt. It’s not like we’re taking a boat everywhere we go. We do a lot of driving in our trucks. To have the ability, because of the show and the brands, to partner with Mickey Thompson, means the world to us. We don’t take it for granted.

We try to work hard every day to show how special this lifestyle is and how honored we are to live it, and we love bringing Mickey Thompson along with us. We drive all Ford Super Duty diesel trucks, heavy trucks pulling heavy trailers over all sorts of terrain, and we have never had an issue with the performance of this product. I don’t want to say humbling, because we always try to have humility, but it’s pretty awesome to look back and see how we’ve grown through the years and realize that we actually have a national partnership with an iconic brand like Mickey Thompson.

MT: Well said, thank you Chad.

To learn more about Chad Belding and the Fowl Life, tune in on the Outdoor Channel and follow him on social media.