Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show everybody. Today, We've got news
Speaker 1: about my unfortunate, regrettable criminal past. Damn removals in Maine,
Speaker 1: stranded Wales on the Pacific coast. Anti Buffalo politicians are
Speaker 1: generally winning, but they suffered a minor setback. And you've
Speaker 1: heard of earn a buck. Well, welcome to earn a
Speaker 1: second buck. And you won't believe this one. Wolves eat cows.
Speaker 1: But first our news, and to open up our news,
Speaker 1: we have a special guest here. The special guest's name
Speaker 1: is John Jersek. He is a retired Michigan conservation officer.
Speaker 1: Some folks call him game wardens, but in Michigan they
Speaker 1: call him conservation officers. And I got to give some
Speaker 1: background here. We're going back in time to around my
Speaker 1: guess would be ninety three or nineteen ninety four. I
Speaker 1: was parked in my truck on Mannisseee National Forest where
Speaker 1: Cedar Creek crosses underneath M one twenty, checking mink traps.
Speaker 1: In behind me pulls a game ward and a conservation officer.
Speaker 1: He gets out we're talking. He asked me have you
Speaker 1: been setting snares? Which alarmed me because I had and
Speaker 1: they were illegal in that area, and it wasn't my fault.
Speaker 1: I'll explain how it wasn't my fault. I'll explain right now.
Speaker 1: There was a game There was a fur buyer named
Speaker 1: Abe Salasina, and I would sell some fer to Abe Salacene,
Speaker 1: and Abe Salacena would always be pushing snares on you
Speaker 1: when the snow got deep. Abe b You know what
Speaker 1: guys do in other areas is they sat these snares
Speaker 1: and fur keeps coming in all winter. So it was
Speaker 1: my fault, but it was very alarming to me, and
Speaker 1: I lied. I lied. This this is all terrible. I'm
Speaker 1: just being upfront about my behavior. I lied, and then
Speaker 1: the game warden, the conservation officer goes to my annoyance,
Speaker 1: goes through every trap in my truck, checking the tags
Speaker 1: you're legally obligated to have a tag on there, checks
Speaker 1: them all. We converse. He leaves. Now I have written
Speaker 1: about this, I've talked about it. I told the story
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. My good friend from back home,
Speaker 1: Ronnie Bain, is talking to a retired conservation officer. The
Speaker 1: retired conservation officer knowing where Ronnie's from. He's from the
Speaker 1: same twin Lake ask him, do you know a guy
Speaker 1: Steve Ranella who I checked for whatever back in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, And I thought to myself, why in the
Speaker 1: world is this on this man's mind? Now? Ronnie suggested,
Speaker 1: I ask him here he is, thank you for coming
Speaker 1: on the show thirty years later.
Speaker 2: Well, well, I'm glad we've had this chance to sit
Speaker 2: down and talk. And I'll tell you, you know, even though
Speaker 2: it's spent a long time, you're gonna feel a lot
Speaker 2: better getting us off your chest.
Speaker 1: Okay, I've gotten it off my chest. I just need
Speaker 1: to hear from your perspective because at the time I
Speaker 1: didn't ask you what you're thinking and what you're doing.
Speaker 1: To walk me through your recollection of this.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting that you know how you get caught
Speaker 2: with a snapshot in your brain of a spot, you know,
Speaker 2: in an incident or a time. I can see that
Speaker 2: I can picture you know, these eyes a good spy.
Speaker 2: You know there was a sand trap there and you
Speaker 2: could work trout fish right along that piece of ground.
Speaker 2: And you know, we get trapped a little bit too.
Speaker 1: Right, everybody, everybody set mink traps.
Speaker 2: There right right, real comments spy, this right along a
Speaker 2: busy road. Yeah, so anyways, and you know, I've been there,
Speaker 2: of course, dozens and dozens of times in my career
Speaker 2: when I worked around here, and I can't remember, you
Speaker 2: know what. You know, I think we approached this incident
Speaker 2: from two different perspectives. I may have simply just hey,
Speaker 2: here's a guy trapping, right, I'm gonna check them, uh,
Speaker 2: and then going through traps and mentioning about snaring. The
Speaker 2: bottom line the end to this whole story is I
Speaker 2: I was clueless that you had any snares?
Speaker 1: How does he know I have snares? Though?
Speaker 3: John? Did you know that?
Speaker 4: Did you know that this fur buyer was out there
Speaker 4: pushing young trappers to use snares?
Speaker 3: Did you know that the name?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I know the name, know who that was?
Speaker 2: Didn't know it was being pushed, so to speak. But
Speaker 2: but here here was. And this is probably why I
Speaker 2: threw a and asked the question. Right, that was at
Speaker 2: a time when it was it was growing an interest
Speaker 2: locally sneering and you know, and I knew for sure
Speaker 2: it was going on, but it wasn't at the time
Speaker 2: legal It is today, but at the time it wasn't legal. So,
Speaker 2: you know, just like any other, you know, game more
Speaker 2: not a phishing expedition. I'm going to ask a few
Speaker 2: questions and see what he says.
Speaker 1: You know, but you started right out with that question.
Speaker 2: I don't so I don't know if it was this part.
Speaker 2: I don't honestly remember. Did I was was Did I
Speaker 2: have some knowledge that maybe you, as a local guy,
Speaker 2: were doing it? I don't remember that part one. Let
Speaker 2: me add this. When I was playing out paperwork when
Speaker 2: I retired back in nineteen you know, remember we had
Speaker 2: the old report all poaching complaints, the rough complaints.
Speaker 5: I had found one from.
Speaker 2: You, and it was the best I can recall again
Speaker 2: is it was Cedar Creek, No, no goes Bear Creek,
Speaker 2: Bear Creek, okay, and uh, somebody had come across, or
Speaker 2: you had come across maybe untagged traps or something like that.
Speaker 1: But I got in huge trouble with this from Abe Salasina. Okay.
Speaker 1: I had found where a guy was trapping before season.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 1: And even though even though I was, you know, as
Speaker 1: innocent as it was, even though I was a violator,
Speaker 1: I didn't want anyone else violating, and I thought that
Speaker 1: that violation was a bad violation. So I called and
Speaker 1: reported a guy for trapping. Before season, some informant told
Speaker 1: Abe Salasina. Abe Salasina ripped into me that you would
Speaker 1: ever report a trapper for anything, And where do you
Speaker 1: get off and you take that man to man, you
Speaker 1: do not call the state? Wow, Okay, well.
Speaker 2: A whole on. That's a good that's a good story
Speaker 2: right in among itself, that in the trapper world, things
Speaker 2: do get settled out on the road. You know, if
Speaker 2: if people are stealing traps, if they're stealing fur from traps,
Speaker 2: if they're trespassing, or even you know, if if one
Speaker 2: guy gets on another guy's turf, that that little war
Speaker 2: usually gets settled somewhere out there along the stream bank
Speaker 2: or in the woods or wherever. And of course we
Speaker 2: never heard about it. There was a number of local
Speaker 2: trappers though, that I got to be pretty decent friends with,
Speaker 2: and that you know, they were pretty good. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't even want to call them informants. They just tended
Speaker 2: to do the right thing and wanted to see things
Speaker 2: done right. We're getting about four stories down the road now,
Speaker 2: But on that rap complaint, it looked like I can
Speaker 2: of remember the the verbiage on it is. I ended
Speaker 2: up finding a young kid, you know, a teen or
Speaker 2: something like that, and I had gotten back a hold
Speaker 2: of you, and you wondered if I could just handle
Speaker 2: it with a warning, which I did.
Speaker 5: Oh, and that's how that n did.
Speaker 1: That's probably after I got in trouble with Abe Salsino,
Speaker 1: and it.
Speaker 2: Could well be. But the yeah, that was the whole deal.
Speaker 2: And then going back to our Cedar Creek contact, I
Speaker 2: don't know, you know, don't I don't recall that I
Speaker 2: specifically remembered I was after you or I had solid
Speaker 2: information that you were doing it. But the whole thing
Speaker 2: about snares at the time is kind of everybody was
Speaker 2: starting to do it. You know, it was something that
Speaker 2: people were doing wasn't legal yet it was so easy.
Speaker 2: You could cover a lot of ground, you could trespass easy.
Speaker 2: What people were doing. It was even using it along
Speaker 2: the thirty one corridor on the highways, like in the fences.
Speaker 5: Yea doing stuff like that, And we.
Speaker 2: Probably didn't have an there are coyotes at that time
Speaker 2: that we do now, but you know they were growing
Speaker 2: in numbers too, and people were working at and you know,
Speaker 2: as a trapper, anytime first starts going higher than normal
Speaker 2: right man. The incentive to cheap ends up there, whether
Speaker 2: it be trespassed another guy's turf, stealing some traps. And
Speaker 2: I know I recovered quite a few stolen traps for
Speaker 2: area trappers, you know, either out of the Whitehall Marge
Speaker 2: or Muskegan marsh Yep.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you why it always stuck with me. What
Speaker 1: I was doing is I was snaring red fox down
Speaker 1: in the thickets, right, And when you said that, I
Speaker 1: knew you knew, But I thought, why did he not
Speaker 1: take it? Why did he not take it? Or why
Speaker 1: did he not just steak one out or do some
Speaker 1: kind of stuff to catch me? Right? And then I
Speaker 1: was paranoid and quit for a while.
Speaker 2: Oh one time, one time on another local trapper. I
Speaker 2: won't use a name though, but it was out at
Speaker 2: the wastewater. Okay, real, real common wastewater trapper out there.
Speaker 1: Oh, can I take a s. Did his first name
Speaker 1: start with a B and his last name start with
Speaker 1: the F? No? Was it b C?
Speaker 5: We should have this conversation.
Speaker 2: So anyways, the point was is he had a few
Speaker 2: words with me out on the out on the dirt
Speaker 2: road in the middle of the wastewater, like you know,
Speaker 2: why are you eyes after me?
Speaker 6: And all that.
Speaker 2: I concluded the conversation by turning around, getting back in
Speaker 2: my truck and said, you know, Parenoia is a mighty
Speaker 2: powerful tool, isn't it?
Speaker 5: And I just drove away.
Speaker 1: So, man, all right, My last question for you, John,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate you doing this, My last question for
Speaker 1: you is, since it was a nothing thing and you
Speaker 1: didn't get me a ticket and you were just throwing
Speaker 1: that out there as a fishing expedition, why did it
Speaker 1: stick in your mind? Because I wasn't like a known
Speaker 1: figure at all. I was. I had never been in trouble,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 5: Right right right, Yeah, let's clarify to the audience.
Speaker 2: You weren't anybody that I had on the radar or
Speaker 2: was following around or anything like that, or he had
Speaker 2: as best I can recall any specific information, you know,
Speaker 2: on you doing anything. So I don't know, why does
Speaker 2: it stick in my mind? You got me, you know,
Speaker 2: I know I dealt with a number of local trappers
Speaker 2: over the years, good and bad.
Speaker 5: I don't know some of them. You know, you were
Speaker 5: just around for so long.
Speaker 2: You sort of got to know these guys, and you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's nothing, nothing real specific, nothing evil.
Speaker 5: I don't remember again.
Speaker 2: I think this was just a chance meeting out out
Speaker 2: on the side end one twenty and I thought, hey,
Speaker 2: I'll throw a darts, see if the guys got snares,
Speaker 2: you know, and you know, as a trapper, finding people
Speaker 2: snares and that sort of thing not an easy task.
Speaker 2: And well, yeah, and that's one of the things if
Speaker 2: you talk to people that run a lot of snares,
Speaker 2: I don't think they recover them all every year, you know,
Speaker 2: because how do you simply remember if you got out
Speaker 2: a hundred of them, you know, where are they all?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, they were all.
Speaker 2: Snaring was also starting to gain in popularity, like in
Speaker 2: those uh you know, sort of the edge of the
Speaker 2: skiing and Grand Haven Grand Rapids, those edges like the
Speaker 2: fringe urban areas ye you know, you know, places where
Speaker 2: you might have fox and stuff like that down in there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there you go, man, I sure appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 1: This is going to add significant color to the story.
Speaker 1: It's going to it's a hot tip for game wardens
Speaker 1: just to throw out wild stuff, just through a wild accusations,
Speaker 1: just to see if someone if it hits, and also
Speaker 1: to induce paranoia and poachers.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, the whole nature of the job is
Speaker 2: quite a bit of smoking mirrors. You know, a lot
Speaker 2: of times you're covering a county by yourself or more
Speaker 2: you know, and vast areas. You know, you might be
Speaker 2: an hour to the other side of the area you
Speaker 2: cover or more so, Like I say, it's smoking mirrors,
Speaker 2: trying to make everybody feel that you're everywhere at once
Speaker 2: twenty four to seven, right, which is impossible. So to
Speaker 2: chum the waters with a little bit of information out there,
Speaker 2: you know, and ask some questions. Yeah, never know.
Speaker 5: Sometimes you get lucky and they say something.
Speaker 1: Well, it worked on me. I'd formed the opinion of
Speaker 1: you that you knew all things that you were, like
Speaker 1: you have like godlike omniscience about the woods. So thank
Speaker 1: you very much for coming on, John, I appreciate it. Man,
Speaker 1: enjoy it. Enjoy the rest of your retirement, all right,
Speaker 1: thank muchav Oh buddy, take it easy.
Speaker 3: Thanks John.
Speaker 1: Thanks, it's great, Oh, Nate, pull up where it all happened?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for you people watched on YouTube, here's where
Speaker 1: it all went down.
Speaker 6: What other game wardens can we interview that you've ran
Speaker 6: into in the past.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a great story. Uh, we were one
Speaker 1: time here in Montana. We're hunting ducks and we had
Speaker 1: our decoys in the canoe. We weren't in the canoe.
Speaker 1: We were using the canoe to drag our decoys. Opening day,
Speaker 1: I get a ticket for no life jackets. I try
Speaker 1: to seventy five dollar ticket. I try to explain, but
Speaker 1: we're not in the canoe. He's like, come on. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm serious, man, it's just we're just using the drag decoys.
Speaker 1: Still a ticket the next year, I'm not kidding you.
Speaker 1: A year later, opening day, same boat launch, same canoe,
Speaker 1: full of decoys, different game. Warden pulls in, writes me
Speaker 1: a citation.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 1: I'm like, but we're not in the canoe. Me and
Speaker 1: the same buddy, seventy five dollars ticket.
Speaker 3: Again, I think you would have learned.
Speaker 1: But that's not as good of a story. All right,
Speaker 1: what's next? Max is right in, Oh, this is more
Speaker 1: our news. This is more our news here.
Speaker 4: Oh, I'd like to preface this with, uh, well, the
Speaker 4: text chain started at four fifty seven am.
Speaker 1: He's got a new baby.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but it also must have gotten fired up to
Speaker 4: be texting another guy at four fifty seven am.
Speaker 3: It's a little bit early.
Speaker 1: I feel like I think he's up all night with
Speaker 1: that new baby, so he's probably got nothing to do
Speaker 1: changing diapers.
Speaker 4: You can think about it, he says. Drake's don't quack
Speaker 4: like a hen, and I'll stand by that till I die.
Speaker 4: I said, yeah, the cornell that proved that, but also
Speaker 4: proved that they do quack like a drake. What I'm
Speaker 4: calling a quack is pretty specific. I think ducks make
Speaker 4: a lot of sounds, I said, depending on how discerning
Speaker 4: the ear is. And since in quotes Max, they make
Speaker 4: a lot of sounds, you can see how the two
Speaker 4: could be conflated.
Speaker 3: Ha ha. But a drake doesn't quack.
Speaker 4: Even Rocky knows that that is not the nickname or
Speaker 4: name of his uh new son. But okay, so that's
Speaker 4: just just pumping the tires up here a little bit
Speaker 4: because I'm excited to see what Max came up with.
Speaker 7: All right, clearing the air here a little bit. Drake
Speaker 7: mallards do not quack, simple as that, and I'll take
Speaker 7: that to my grave.
Speaker 1: They don't quack.
Speaker 7: Yes, they make a sound out of their mouth, but
Speaker 7: it's more of a buzz or a whistle, just not
Speaker 7: a quack. I pulled up the same website yawning sever
Speaker 7: listening to that is drake whistle. That is a hen quack.
Speaker 1: He is splitting hairs a little bit.
Speaker 7: Yeah, whistle, just two different things.
Speaker 1: Sort of like music.
Speaker 7: There is different pitches, and I think in duck calls
Speaker 7: there's different pitches as well. A hen mallard can do
Speaker 7: a high pitch and a low pitch quack. A drake
Speaker 7: can also do a high pitch whistle and a lower
Speaker 7: pitch whistle. What I think Yanni is getting confused is
Speaker 7: that low end whistle. It's not a pure.
Speaker 1: Wheat.
Speaker 7: Is just like a little more sharper, a little more crisp.
Speaker 1: I'll pull up.
Speaker 3: It sounds a lot like a quack.
Speaker 1: No, hear him out, hear him out. He's getting his
Speaker 1: calls out, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 7: Drake whistle standard. This is gonna be my high pitched.
Speaker 6: M M.
Speaker 7: At the end you can almost hear like a t
Speaker 7: and then this can be my low end.
Speaker 3: MP.
Speaker 7: Nowhere near a quack. Simple as that. I am so
Speaker 7: confident in my opinion. I'm gonna make a T shirt
Speaker 7: that says drakes don't quack.
Speaker 1: That's confidence.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So there you have it. There's my opinion, there's
Speaker 7: my stance on it. Drakes don't quack, they don't quack.
Speaker 3: I think he just wanted to show off his turkey fan.
Speaker 1: Put that in your pipe, smoky yohanni.
Speaker 6: Wasn't there somebody on the crew who saw a hen
Speaker 6: turkey gobble?
Speaker 1: But that happens, but they don't gobble gobble? Right?
Speaker 6: But like I mean, if if you were to say
Speaker 6: the kind of gobble but not really gobble, could you
Speaker 6: not apply the same thing here? Like a drake will
Speaker 6: quack but not really quack, just kind of a quacky.
Speaker 1: It's not quiet.
Speaker 4: And I think I wish that Max would have been
Speaker 4: able to do a better drake whistle. That sounded like
Speaker 4: that drake quack that we heard from the Cornell Lab
Speaker 4: of more Orthology.
Speaker 1: Drake quick, all right, spend tell us about the oartion
Speaker 1: house Bodies.
Speaker 6: Auction house has one week left. Everything has been bid on.
Speaker 6: We appreciate everyone throwing their money at this good cause.
Speaker 6: There's one item though, that does not have a bid yet.
Speaker 6: That is the boat motor. It's a Honda one fifty
Speaker 6: V Tech outboard outboard motor. You got to pick it
Speaker 6: up in Bozeman. We haven't listened at eight k right now.
Speaker 6: That's that's like the first bid that's going to be made.
Speaker 1: Can I talk about that? Tell why that is? Yep?
Speaker 1: This this money all goes This is a fun This
Speaker 1: is a fundraiser like a nonprofit venture. All this money
Speaker 1: goes to land Access Fund. We know that we can
Speaker 1: take that one hundred and fifty outboard Hondo.
Speaker 6: Marketplace, we'd get ten to fifteen kit.
Speaker 1: Because it's worth twice what's got it's got. The only
Speaker 1: hours that has is the hours that we used to
Speaker 1: film Doss Boat one season of doss Boat, which is
Speaker 1: filmed over the course of a few dates.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the episode I was involved in, we floated that
Speaker 4: boat with no engine, then we put the engine on
Speaker 4: and fished for four hours.
Speaker 3: So my episode only had four hours.
Speaker 1: And so it's it's worth twice if you went and
Speaker 1: bought it new, which it is, it's worth twice that.
Speaker 1: So we put the minimum at eight grand because we
Speaker 1: could just go sell it on Facebook marketplace, or probably
Speaker 1: just take it to Townsend and bring it to an outboard
Speaker 1: dealer and sell it to him. For eight thousand bars.
Speaker 6: This is the rare example in our auction house where
Speaker 6: you could get something at a good deal and no
Speaker 6: one's been of Dan, no one's been a day. So
Speaker 6: we got the auction house going for another week. We
Speaker 6: also have listed my box rocks. I don't feel like
Speaker 6: that description does it justice, though, so I want to
Speaker 6: tell you about my five favorite rocks. There's seventeen different
Speaker 6: rocks I have in here that I've collected over the years.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna give you my five favorite ones. First one
Speaker 6: here is wonder Still from Nevada. We had the Mediater
Speaker 6: Live tour in twenty twenty four. We spent the night
Speaker 6: in Reno. I got up at five am. I went
Speaker 6: and got a rental car. I drove out into the
Speaker 6: desert about ninety minutes to a place car remember Rainbow Mountain.
Speaker 8: Was everyone like PRIs Spencer going.
Speaker 6: Steve threatened to come with me. Yeah, Steve threatened to
Speaker 6: come with me, and I was like, I'll get you
Speaker 6: up at five am, and you're like, eh, eh, maybe not.
Speaker 1: I was already up.
Speaker 6: So that that was formed by layers of volcanic ash.
Speaker 6: It's a popular rock among artists who do mosaics because
Speaker 6: you know, it's got a bunch of layers of color.
Speaker 6: It's one of the prettiest rocks I own. So that
Speaker 6: is wonderstone, also known as Ryo Light.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 6: This one's kind of an eyeball shit.
Speaker 3: A few of these I have.
Speaker 6: I have a few pieces.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: There it is when I found it on the mountain.
Speaker 6: And then the next picture is my suitcase going home.
Speaker 6: I took them plenty plenty of Ryo Light Wonderstone with me.
Speaker 6: The tour bus got heavier after that day.
Speaker 3: That's a big one.
Speaker 6: Next one obsidian from Oregon. I found this at the
Speaker 6: Glass Butte in or Again, that's one of the biggest
Speaker 6: obsidian deposits in the world. Ancient humans were spreading this
Speaker 6: stuff all across the continent. Obsidian trace back to here
Speaker 6: has been found in Ohio that ancient people's carried their
Speaker 6: traded their way there. So we got a big old
Speaker 6: piece of obsidity. You could keep it raw just like that,
Speaker 6: or if you're a flint napperor you could turn into something.
Speaker 3: That's what I was gonna do.
Speaker 8: You ever just get the urge to break some of
Speaker 8: the rocks.
Speaker 1: I got some of this and I did bust it
Speaker 1: all up? Yeah, it's so nice. You hit that with
Speaker 1: a hammer, dude.
Speaker 6: Yes, this is a raw piece. You do whatever you
Speaker 6: like if you're gonna break it up, like put a
Speaker 6: towel around it and then smash that thing with a
Speaker 6: hammer and.
Speaker 1: Then watch your ask. This stuff is sharp, the sharpest
Speaker 1: natural substance.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's it's very sharp. This is a raw piece.
Speaker 6: It's about the size of a softball, all right. Number
Speaker 6: three is a leaf fossil from Idaho.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 6: There's this landowner there who was building a dirt bike
Speaker 6: track back in the seventies. And as he's building this
Speaker 6: dirt bike track, he starts excavating the side of a
Speaker 6: mountain and he uncovers a fifteen million year old lake bed.
Speaker 6: And that lake formed when there was a volcano nearby
Speaker 6: that went off and it dammed up this river and
Speaker 6: just like in the blink of an eye, it it
Speaker 6: totally flooded this valley and it put all these trees
Speaker 6: and plant life under some really deep cold water. And
Speaker 6: so this is one of those leaves looks like probably
Speaker 6: from an elm.
Speaker 1: How old is that?
Speaker 6: Fifteen million years old? Likely from an elm tree? Really
Speaker 6: delicate rock When you go to this guy's place and
Speaker 6: you find him just on his property somewhere, like I
Speaker 6: found him driving his tractor around. He's like, you here
Speaker 6: for the dirt bikes or the fossils, and then you
Speaker 6: pay him like ten bucks or I don't remember what
Speaker 6: the what the fee was real cheap. It was like
Speaker 6: ten dollars and.
Speaker 4: You found all that, all that and you can for
Speaker 4: ten bucks. That's you pick which one you want.
Speaker 6: I don't remember what the dirt bike fee. My my
Speaker 6: rock hounding fee was real cheap. It was only me
Speaker 6: and my wife. And then there was one other group there.
Speaker 6: It was somebody from China who was doing a research project.
Speaker 4: All that.
Speaker 1: All that.
Speaker 6: Didn't ask any quot Russian. You just said knock yourself
Speaker 6: out and the ten dollar feet. So this is one
Speaker 6: of those fossils that I found there. Damn yeah, I
Speaker 6: don't know, probably like six inches long. Looks like it's
Speaker 6: probably from an from an elm tree.
Speaker 1: Number two.
Speaker 6: This is a fish fossil from Wyoming. It's from the
Speaker 6: world famous Green River Formation. It's a really amazing place
Speaker 6: called American Fossil. You book your dig like way in
Speaker 6: advance and then you get to go there. This is
Speaker 6: a video of what a successful one of these would
Speaker 6: look like. Wow, this is a nidea.
Speaker 1: You that's me.
Speaker 6: That's the state fossil of Wyoming. It's an extinct type
Speaker 6: of herring. It's like one of the coolest places on
Speaker 6: planet Earth.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 6: You get to go to this giant quarry. You take
Speaker 6: home anything you find there. It can be absolutely anything.
Speaker 6: Fish is the most common, but there's mammals, insects, birds,
Speaker 6: There's been like a three toed horse that was discovered
Speaker 6: there and you could find something worth millions of dollars
Speaker 6: you get to take home. So this is one of
Speaker 6: those fish that I found that day.
Speaker 1: People do this up. They can go to hell.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 6: And then the last one here is a dino bone
Speaker 6: that I found in Montana with the famous and infamous
Speaker 6: Jack Horner.
Speaker 1: I've been on the show him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I put him in a real tough spot when
Speaker 6: he was on that show and I asked him if
Speaker 6: I could come with on a dino dig. And how
Speaker 6: does he say?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 6: You know when there's microphone.
Speaker 9: That's what happened, Yeah, on the show, and that's all
Speaker 9: you got in Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 6: So, So I'm like okay, And I emailed him the
Speaker 6: next day and like, Jack, when when can I join you?
Speaker 6: And so like three months later, I was on a
Speaker 6: dino dig with Jack in northern Montana. And this is
Speaker 6: a a duck bill dino, a type of duck bill
Speaker 6: that Jack actually discovered. Uh. And and if we were
Speaker 6: doing this news show back in February, we might have
Speaker 6: talked about Jack, huh, because he was in the Epstein Files.
Speaker 6: So that's why I say the infamous also infamous for
Speaker 6: other reasons. I never told this story, but I feel
Speaker 6: like it adds something to this.
Speaker 1: Oh, just be clear, being in the Epstein Files doesn't
Speaker 1: in and of itself mean anything.
Speaker 6: Yeah, to add context for for Jack's involvement, he went
Speaker 6: to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico to look for dino bones,
Speaker 6: and then I think they talked about him joining the
Speaker 6: ranch in Wyoming to also do some excavating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's just important.
Speaker 6: Yes, right, There's some more Jack Horner background about his
Speaker 6: one of his wives that he had.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he married a student.
Speaker 6: When I go to this dino dig, this was twenty
Speaker 6: twenty two, I believe as a volunteer, I'm teamed up
Speaker 6: with a paleontologist, and then you're like given a job
Speaker 6: and a paleontologist to work with. Our job was prospecting,
Speaker 6: meaning we got to just like wander around the badlands
Speaker 6: and look for possible fossils or like big big deposits
Speaker 6: of fossils. And I'm asking this woman some questions, and
Speaker 6: all of a sudden I elbow my wife. I'm like,
Speaker 6: I think this might be Jack's wife, that the student
Speaker 6: that he married. And then it comes out a little
Speaker 6: bit later that it was so I found this rock
Speaker 6: with Jack's famous x Y and Jack they split up
Speaker 6: the case they split up, Yeah, but they're still friends.
Speaker 6: They're great friends. And she's like, I love Jack. Jack's
Speaker 6: one of the most important people in my life. We're
Speaker 6: great friends. We still work together. So like the only
Speaker 6: people have touched his bone or Jack Horner, Jack Horner's
Speaker 6: ex wife me, my wife's that's the fossil you're getting
Speaker 6: from a type of dinosaur that he discovered back in
Speaker 6: the seventies that put Jack on the map.
Speaker 1: Duck Bill done got what a box of fossils?
Speaker 6: Seventeen of them?
Speaker 3: Those are five of.
Speaker 1: My that's just five. That's the worst five.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we got petrified wooden here, clam fossils, snail fossils, agots,
Speaker 6: all kinds of.
Speaker 1: Stuff ingot of gold, No, damn love it? Okay, on
Speaker 1: on the your news now. Your News today has brought
Speaker 1: to you by banished suppressors, which I'm holding in my
Speaker 1: hand here. What I'm holding my hands specifically is the
Speaker 1: meat eater banish collapse suppressor, which has the equivalent of
Speaker 1: like a little adjustable muzzle brake apparatus on the end.
Speaker 1: It's thirty cow. Can you can run on anything? I
Speaker 1: run one of these on my twenty two creed more
Speaker 1: on a rocky by that. Okay. The your News is
Speaker 1: a guy that rode in today. He comes and looking
Speaker 1: for life advice and he's gonna get it. He says
Speaker 1: he was at a.
Speaker 10: What was he at a state sale?
Speaker 1: He was out in a state sale. I don't know
Speaker 1: how he got there, and Randall wasn't there, but he
Speaker 1: was at in the state sale and he sees that
Speaker 1: there's a beaver pelt for sale. Winds up that there's
Speaker 1: two beaver pelts. Once he gets to asking about it,
Speaker 1: the old lady wants twenty five bucks for both of them.
Speaker 1: He somehow gets her down to twenty bucks, So he
Speaker 1: gets two beaver repelts for twenty bucks. He bought him
Speaker 1: because they seemed cool. He didn't want him to get
Speaker 1: thrown away. And he bought him because, quote, you guys
Speaker 1: have talked a lot about fur as such an interesting
Speaker 1: and high quality material. He goes on to say it,
Speaker 1: but having them, I don't really know what to do
Speaker 1: with them. Have a hat made, but it's not that cold here.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't get to use it hardly. Ever. My wife, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's hard for me to say this about crying. He says,
Speaker 1: my wife is unlikely to allow them as the core.
Speaker 8: I feel like he should have gone a little further here,
Speaker 8: and like, actually, like he hasn't even asked her yet.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean? We should wish it. I
Speaker 3: know we need that.
Speaker 1: I sometimes need to ask my wife about something for
Speaker 1: three months, just waiting for the right moment. I am
Speaker 1: the other I'm petrified. Anyway, I thought you guys might
Speaker 1: have some suggestions. Happy if you want to discuss on
Speaker 1: the pod or even drop me a line or email.
Speaker 1: Thanks in advance. I got a ton of suggestions. There's
Speaker 1: all kinds of stuff you could do with it. Nate
Speaker 1: pulled a picture here or my feet are resting on
Speaker 1: a beaver fer ottoman? How does a guy like this?
Speaker 1: How does a guy make something like this? I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: We had an ottoman and it had a little pad.
Speaker 1: I went and got some super thin so scrap a
Speaker 1: super thin plywood, put the plywood on the bottom, wrapped
Speaker 1: the beaver hide around the pad, and took a staple
Speaker 1: gun and there you have it. It still started making
Speaker 1: my back too sweaty. There was always a beaver repel
Speaker 1: over this chair I'm leaning on. You could take your
Speaker 1: two beaver repelts and have a hat made and send
Speaker 1: it to a person that lives in a cold place.
Speaker 1: You could just have it laying over a piece of furniture,
Speaker 1: and when people come over, you go see that that's
Speaker 1: a beaver repelt.
Speaker 8: Well, he's got his wife to contend.
Speaker 1: The biggest problem he's got. The biggest problem he's got
Speaker 1: is what do you mean your wife won't let you like?
Speaker 1: What does it? It's not even none of her business. When
Speaker 1: I'm talking about not asking my wife something for two weeks,
Speaker 1: it's not about something like that.
Speaker 8: Right. You would just lay it across the couch and
Speaker 8: be done with it. Oh yeah, I mean what I want?
Speaker 1: Nothing else is there? You don't want to be in
Speaker 1: a happy marriage.
Speaker 8: No, I would do the same thing.
Speaker 1: And it was like I was at my dentist the
Speaker 1: other day. Yes, she does at my dentist.
Speaker 8: Dennis, are problems you know?
Speaker 1: You telling me his wife's out of town. He hung
Speaker 1: a bunch of taxs during me up in a certain
Speaker 1: place in the living room. His wife comes back out
Speaker 1: of town. Doesn't like it, he said, But she can't
Speaker 1: even climb up there.
Speaker 10: Dude, I got my wife just built these shelves and
Speaker 10: there's twenty four nooks. Guess how many nooks I am allocated?
Speaker 3: Twelve?
Speaker 1: One, No, twelve, that's what I said.
Speaker 3: And you're not. No, You're gonna let it slide.
Speaker 8: I'm trying my best, but dude, all you do is
Speaker 8: you build your own thing with thirty nooks.
Speaker 3: Put that want give her one? Yeah.
Speaker 1: Man, there's all kinds of bad stuff about my wife,
Speaker 1: but the one thing like she never there's certain things
Speaker 1: she just does not mess with me about. She would
Speaker 1: never mess with me about something like this at home
Speaker 1: decor about skulls and all that kind of stuff. Never
Speaker 1: messes with me about it. That's gift, and like never
Speaker 1: messes with me about doing stuff in the kitchen. I
Speaker 1: could take a roadkill moose and put it on that
Speaker 1: counter and she's not gonna mention it.
Speaker 8: I feel like unless someone was like a vegan or
Speaker 8: seriously anti hunting or something like a beaver, pel's not
Speaker 8: offensive in any way.
Speaker 1: No, my wife is always mad at me, but like
Speaker 1: she doesn't mess with me about some things. She's perpetually
Speaker 1: mad about some stuff, but this is just not an
Speaker 1: issue I have to deal with, so it's hard for
Speaker 1: me to even empathize.
Speaker 8: Can we make that a regular segment like things that
Speaker 8: she's mad at you about?
Speaker 1: Oh yeh?
Speaker 4: She can Hosted's your House, Spencer Around Home Decort.
Speaker 6: I have a pretty good guess by now as to
Speaker 6: like what my wife would approve of and not approve of,
Speaker 6: and so I don't get that one wrong too often.
Speaker 6: But also if there's something I really want and she doesn't,
Speaker 6: I'll be like, this is really important to me. I
Speaker 6: really want this buck up in here that I killed. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And then I that that usually wins it for me,
Speaker 6: and I think that, But that's also like a powerful
Speaker 6: sentence to say, like this is important to me, so
Speaker 6: I don't use that one often either. I think you
Speaker 6: could tell your wife that these beaver pelts from this
Speaker 6: estate sale are very important to email her. That might
Speaker 6: just do it.
Speaker 1: If not, try to get a new one. I'll call
Speaker 1: him on the news.
Speaker 4: You didn't even mention getting them turned into a pillow.
Speaker 4: Those are some of my favorite things.
Speaker 1: Problem, So why didn't I think of that? You're gonna
Speaker 1: turn this into a win for your wife. I hadn't
Speaker 1: thought of that. I'm gonna give you a hot tip
Speaker 1: sewing by so My? Should we even say that? Should
Speaker 1: we bleeped that out?
Speaker 3: I'm sure she'd loved the business.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna give you a hot tip sewing by
Speaker 1: so My.
Speaker 3: How you spells some ice s O A.
Speaker 1: M I that's your hot tip. Say you want a pillow,
Speaker 1: leather backed pillow your wife. Your wife will be praising you.
Speaker 1: This is gonna turn all your marriage around. You're gonna
Speaker 1: become a household hero when.
Speaker 8: She she'll ask you to start trapping beavers.
Speaker 1: When you get that leather back beaver fur throw pillow
Speaker 1: in that house, she's not gonna get off it. You're
Speaker 1: not gonna see her in your bedroom anymore, because she's
Speaker 1: gonna be sleeping with her head on that couch pillow.
Speaker 1: Onto the news.
Speaker 8: Earn a buck is back, except now it's earn a
Speaker 8: second buck.
Speaker 1: Yeah that sounds that I like it. That's got more
Speaker 1: of her, that's got more of a bring.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it will give you the first one, you gotta
Speaker 8: earn the second one. In New York State this time
Speaker 8: h Beginning this year, UH, New York hunters MSS harvest
Speaker 8: and report an antlerless deer, dough or antlerless buck before
Speaker 8: becoming eligible to shoot a second antler buck or antler deer.
Speaker 8: It's a statewide rule. It replaces the previous system that
Speaker 8: allowed many hunters to harvest two bucks without taking an
Speaker 8: antler list deer. Every licensed hunter will still receive an
Speaker 8: antler deer tag, and they'll earn that second antler deer
Speaker 8: tag only after legally harvesting and reporting an antler list deer.
Speaker 1: Can you back up minute, yep and explain to people,
Speaker 1: why why is this even a thing?
Speaker 8: That's that's all next. So New York State's got a
Speaker 8: million white tails, five hundred thousand hunters. Deer hunters annual
Speaker 8: harvest is around two and twenty five thousand deer, but
Speaker 8: only one hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: Of those are dose.
Speaker 8: So in a lot of wildlife management units, the deer
Speaker 8: population is greatly exceeding objectives. And they're starting to see
Speaker 8: that excess browsing is creating poor habitat, nutritional stress on
Speaker 8: the deer that are there, and it slows down forest regeneration.
Speaker 8: They're also seeing crop damage, more deer vehicle collisions. So
Speaker 8: the dough harvest is the rate is too low, and
Speaker 8: in fact, only about thirteen percent of New York deer
Speaker 8: hunter's harvest one antlerless deer only three percent for harvest
Speaker 8: and two or more. Really, yeah, I don't so, I
Speaker 8: don't get it personally, Like it was never a big
Speaker 8: like we always were all about harvesting. Does you know,
Speaker 8: I don't know why it's a big deal these days,
Speaker 8: but de EC Department of Environmental Conservation.
Speaker 1: Can you look that up? A Department of Environmental Conservation.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So they did like focus groups and surveys and things,
Speaker 8: and they had input from biologists all over the state.
Speaker 8: But before they came to this like this idea for
Speaker 8: harvesting more, does actually something that came out in that
Speaker 8: same the same surveys. Is a lot of hunters preferred
Speaker 8: going back to a one buck limit, but uh DC concluded,
Speaker 8: you know, that's not going to do anything to increase
Speaker 8: antler list harvest, So there was no reason to do that.
Speaker 1: But at its inception to earn a buck concept was
Speaker 1: you they were going into to try to control deer numbers,
Speaker 1: and particularly around c w D. They were going to
Speaker 1: places where you traditionally would just get a buck tag. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were going to hunters and saying, no longer
Speaker 1: can you just get a bus. You gotta you have
Speaker 1: to kill a dough to get a buck, and that
Speaker 1: wound up being in some areas exceedingly unpopular. Wisconsin did
Speaker 1: it and undid it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we'll get well, I'm gonna get to all that stuff.
Speaker 8: So the regular season deer tag is now called the
Speaker 8: antler deer tag. And you and you qualify for that
Speaker 8: second buck by using you know, just a rifle dough
Speaker 8: tag of bow, muzzleoader, whatever you get the dough with,
Speaker 8: it doesn't matter. You'll get that second buck tag after
Speaker 8: you prove that you've killed that dough. And this was
Speaker 8: this was some interesting stuff here. The state's gonna implement
Speaker 8: verification measures to prove to make sure hunters prove that
Speaker 8: they actually killed the deer, because there was some concern
Speaker 8: around people just like filling out a tag and saying,
Speaker 8: you know, I killed one and then they get straight
Speaker 8: to that second buck. They were never interested in shooting
Speaker 8: a dough So they're they're gonna do field checks. Hunters
Speaker 8: may be required to sign an attestation verifying the report
Speaker 8: they if requested, hunters must provide proof of the harvest
Speaker 8: within a week, and that could be a photograph, it
Speaker 8: could be a like a receipt from a deer processor.
Speaker 8: They're just trying to like dissuade people from fake in it,
Speaker 8: and if they do get caught fake in it, it's
Speaker 8: and fifty dollars per fence up to two grand, possibly
Speaker 8: one year in jail.
Speaker 1: I imagine that. What are you in for? Yeah, but
Speaker 1: this is what do you I'm in for? Murder? What
Speaker 1: are you in for? It's like, well, you know the.
Speaker 8: Program, Yeah, Like New York's going big on proving this.
Speaker 8: Michigan also just like they just came out with a
Speaker 8: new proposal for a similar earn a second buck program.
Speaker 8: They're they're looking to do a pilot program in five
Speaker 8: counties in southern Michigan. And their proof is just like
Speaker 8: the tag. They're just like we kind of looked at
Speaker 8: proving it all these different ways. It was too expensive,
Speaker 8: so a tag's good enough. So Michigan's going a much
Speaker 8: different direction.
Speaker 3: Tag as in I bought a tag.
Speaker 8: No like you like like you know, they just looked
Speaker 8: at like dealing with photos and and like game check
Speaker 8: stations all that, and it was just too much more.
Speaker 1: But that was the that was the accusation I heard
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin. When Wisconsin did earn a buck. I would
Speaker 1: hear from guys saying that a group of guys that
Speaker 1: get a dough and everybody'd use it right, Yeah, for
Speaker 1: sure to go get their buck.
Speaker 8: Take now like this, like white tail populations are like
Speaker 8: going through the roof in a lot of places. They're
Speaker 8: like Steve mentions, there's concerns with CWD, but still like
Speaker 8: it's it hasn't This program has not been popular in
Speaker 8: the past, Like hunters feel like it delays their opportunity
Speaker 8: to kill a buck. If you're a hunter who can
Speaker 8: only you know, maybe hunt one day on the weekend
Speaker 8: or two days on the weekend. It's it's like limited
Speaker 8: time trophy. Hunters that aren't interested in shooting dose at
Speaker 8: all aren't interested in it. And this, this last one
Speaker 8: makes some sense because the regulation can tend to treat
Speaker 8: low density and high density deer areas of the same.
Speaker 8: For example, in New York, the Northern Zone the Adirondacks, Like,
Speaker 8: that's an area with really low deer density, So you
Speaker 8: know it's gonna make it harder to get that dough
Speaker 8: and then get that second buck. The DC's DC says
Speaker 8: it's to incentivedvise, not punish hunters. If they do want
Speaker 8: a second buck, they can travel to one of the
Speaker 8: wildlife management units where there's a lot of dos and
Speaker 8: do it that way. For those hunters that like don't
Speaker 8: like it, maybe question whether it works, Like there's proof
Speaker 8: that it does work. You control populations by shooting dos.
Speaker 8: Wisconsint pioneered the Earner Buck program in the late in
Speaker 8: the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3: It ran a.
Speaker 8: Little more than a decade before it got shut down
Speaker 8: just because of a hunter dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the program,
Speaker 8: but it increased dough harvest rates by twenty to forty percent,
Speaker 8: reduced deer densities and it helped improve forest regeneration the
Speaker 8: wildlife management in Wisconsintly, they concluded it was like a
Speaker 8: very successful program, but it's just like the hunters didn't
Speaker 8: like it. Doug Dernill tell you it is the most
Speaker 8: effective white tail heard management strategy ever created. There's a
Speaker 8: few other states that have experimented with it, not like
Speaker 8: on a state wide level. Iowa and some other Midwestern
Speaker 8: states have run like localized earn a buck regulations with
Speaker 8: the same results like higher dough harvest and faster population reductions.
Speaker 8: So like it does work. We'll see if the New
Speaker 8: York hunters embrace it or not. I'm not sure how
Speaker 8: it's going to go. Like I'm all for it, but
Speaker 8: I've never like really done it or experienced it.
Speaker 1: YEP. I would say, if you were a state and
Speaker 1: you had a rigid you like in a rigid one
Speaker 1: buck state. Yeah, okay, we're in a like we live
Speaker 1: in a one buck state. Rigidly one buck.
Speaker 6: In New York is a two buck state. They're not
Speaker 6: going from one to two. I'm not saying it too.
Speaker 1: I'm saying but let's say Pennsylvania two bucks state or
Speaker 1: a one buck state, ye. I think the way to
Speaker 1: do it is you got to you'd be like, let's
Speaker 1: say you're a one buck state. You say, you still
Speaker 1: get your one buck same as normal. You got to
Speaker 1: kill two does and then you earn an unprecedented yeah,
Speaker 1: second buck opportunity. An opportunity that would be people feel
Speaker 1: like they're getting more, not like they got to jump
Speaker 1: through hoops to get what they've always had, because that's
Speaker 1: when you wind up with discontent. Yeah.
Speaker 8: But I mean it's like falling dough harvest is like
Speaker 8: a problem all over the country.
Speaker 1: These yes, people don't because people are pains these they
Speaker 1: don't want to eat deer meat. The Yeah, here's the
Speaker 1: like in twenty years, this has become more clear. Maybe
Speaker 1: to be fifty years have become more clear. Of the
Speaker 1: two conversations, there's two conversations happening about deer white tail
Speaker 1: deer in America. Conversation one, there's too many white tail
Speaker 1: deer over vast of the range. There's too many white
Speaker 1: tail deer by someone's measure, yep, okay, landscaping tics, agriculture,
Speaker 1: highway collisions. By someone's measure, there's too many deer. The
Speaker 1: other major conversation happening around whitetail deer in America is
Speaker 1: that we have that chronic wasting disease is spreading, and
Speaker 1: ultimately chronic wasting disease is going to have population level impacts.
Speaker 1: Some people projected it's going to have catastrophic population level impact.
Speaker 8: And they're seeing falling populations in places already.
Speaker 1: I know, but these two stories, you're right, well, yes,
Speaker 1: you can argue it. Yeah, these two stories at some
Speaker 1: point are going to need to reconcile with each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these two narratives are not in sync. Nope, And like
Speaker 1: and I don't know, is it twenty years? Is the
Speaker 1: fifty years when it becomes clear where one of the
Speaker 1: narratives was wrong or or something, or they come together
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, we're talking about there are
Speaker 1: no deer anymore.
Speaker 8: Yeah, hopefully it's not that. Hopefully it's like a management
Speaker 8: strategy that everyone agrees works. You know, like here in
Speaker 8: Montana they have special CWD hunts, like late in the
Speaker 8: season where it's you know, he doesn't matter if you've
Speaker 8: already shot a buck. You can get these CWD tags
Speaker 8: and go in and kill a buck or a doe.
Speaker 8: You just got to be prepared to deal with a
Speaker 8: deer that might be CWD positive.
Speaker 10: In the same season, I hunted two different earn a
Speaker 10: buck programs in two different states. One was you could
Speaker 10: shoot a buck. It was exactly like this, you could
Speaker 10: shoot a buck and then you had to shoot a
Speaker 10: doe in order to shoot a second buck. And the
Speaker 10: other one you had to shoot a dough before you
Speaker 10: were allowed to shoot your one buck.
Speaker 1: I shot.
Speaker 10: I was way more motivated to go out and kill
Speaker 10: that first dough I traveled to. I traveled probably eight
Speaker 10: hours to go hunt over a Halloween weekend, shoot a dough,
Speaker 10: came back home, then went two weeks later to shoot
Speaker 10: a buck. The other program, where it was shoot a buck,
Speaker 10: shoot a dose, shoot a second buck, was my home state.
Speaker 10: I shot a buck peak Rut and I was like, cool,
Speaker 10: I'm good. I didn't go out and shoot another dough
Speaker 10: and I wanted to. It's not like I was like, oh,
Speaker 10: screw these guys. I wanted to go shoot out another dough.
Speaker 10: It was not a high enough priority for me to
Speaker 10: get out there and do it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I don't get the like not wanting to go
Speaker 8: hunt and shoot a deer and eat a deer like
Speaker 8: you're eat something you're hunting too and learning.
Speaker 3: But I still here.
Speaker 4: There's still people out there, and it might have something
Speaker 4: to do with just the you know, high density, low
Speaker 4: density areas. But there's people that have memories of years
Speaker 4: where there were more deer in their area and they
Speaker 4: long for those times when they would see twenty deer
Speaker 4: a sit instead of just two.
Speaker 3: And well, I.
Speaker 8: Mean that was me when I was a kid. We'd
Speaker 8: see forty deer and one was a spike.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but people miss those days, you know, they like
Speaker 4: target rich environment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, yeah, all right, moving on to the to
Speaker 1: the Wild Buffalo Reporting Desk story about American Prairie. Some
Speaker 1: of you might know it as American Prairie Reserve. It's
Speaker 1: now American Prairie for reference sake, if you want to
Speaker 1: go back into our library. We recently did an episode
Speaker 1: with the CEO of American Prairie about their mission. To
Speaker 1: summarize real quick before you get into the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: on this one, American Prairie is a is a conservation
Speaker 1: land preservation organization that operates out of north central Montana.
Speaker 1: Their objective is to buy land on the open market. Okay,
Speaker 1: willing seller willing buyer. They just bid and buy land
Speaker 1: on the open market and then try to restore it
Speaker 1: to you know, as pristine as possible of a landscape.
Speaker 1: But they own outright deeded land. They own about one
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty seven thousand acres of deeded land. They
Speaker 1: sit on grazing leases. They sit on more grazing lease
Speaker 1: land than they sit on deeded land. So to the
Speaker 1: tune of it, they have grazing rights either because they
Speaker 1: own it or they lease it on about a half
Speaker 1: million acres. Okay, I'm throwing out some big numbers, and
Speaker 1: some people maybe not be able to picture this. All right.
Speaker 1: America Prairie again, they own one hundred and sixty seven
Speaker 1: thousand acres, all right, The biggest ranch in the state
Speaker 1: of Montana, four hundred thousand acres, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Speaker 1: Ap America Prairie owns more acres than Ted Turner's Flying
Speaker 1: d So this is a big ranch. Very controversial. I'll
Speaker 1: get into that in a minute, but I'm on before
Speaker 1: saying that it's very controversial, I'm clarify all of that
Speaker 1: land is all public. So the one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: seven thousand acres they own is open to the public.
Speaker 1: You can walk across it, you can walk your dog
Speaker 1: on it, you can go around looking around. The deed
Speaker 1: of land is state and federal public land. So the
Speaker 1: fact that they least grazing rights on it does not
Speaker 1: make it that you can't hunt it. It's totally open
Speaker 1: in public. They just have the right to run cattle,
Speaker 1: buffalo whatever, to graze the grass, all right. Part of
Speaker 1: the controversy of AP, there's a rallying cry to the
Speaker 1: opposition to AP, which is save the cowboys, Stop American prairie.
Speaker 1: It's this idea that if you buy up ranch land
Speaker 1: and just use it for wildlife, you are creating an
Speaker 1: existential threat to the American cowboy because he's supposed to
Speaker 1: be out rope and cattle, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: now it's just deer and elk.
Speaker 6: It's a popular sign, you see, the way you'd see
Speaker 6: a politician sign.
Speaker 8: And I'll point out that on a lot of AP's
Speaker 8: property there's till graising cattle.
Speaker 3: That a lot of.
Speaker 1: Them, I'll point out too. AP owns, as I going
Speaker 1: to get into, they own about nine hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: buffalo there are two million cattle in Montana, So the
Speaker 1: existential threat that these animals provide is a little bit.
Speaker 1: You gotta take it with you know, you gotta think
Speaker 1: of the numbers here. Okay. I find American Prairie to
Speaker 1: be controversial. Why do I think they're controversial? My concern
Speaker 1: with American Prairie, as I've told everybody I know that
Speaker 1: works there or runs the place, or is on the board,
Speaker 1: my concern is that their commitment to public hunting is tepid.
Speaker 1: And when I put that in my notes, where I
Speaker 1: don't think anyone's ever said the word tep it on
Speaker 1: this show, I don't recall means lukewarm.
Speaker 8: I was just gonna say, I'm concerns.
Speaker 1: That their commitment to public hunting is lukewarm.
Speaker 6: What do they say to you?
Speaker 1: They say, of course not, we have this and this
Speaker 1: and this, but they put restrictions. They put hunting restrictions
Speaker 1: above and beyond what the state puts, and they basically
Speaker 1: not basically they put a mildier hunting moratorium on their land,
Speaker 1: but the state is not eye to eye on that. Right.
Speaker 1: And then even like you go ask like deer researchers,
Speaker 1: like a limited buck harvest, limited meal. Your buck harvest
Speaker 1: has zero impact a mild your populations, right, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: But and that's what it would be. So that's that's
Speaker 1: why they're controversial to me. But I'll try to look
Speaker 1: at things. In this case, I look at the good
Speaker 1: and the bad. This is just the story of what's
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 6: On the hunting thing. Like I would point out that
Speaker 6: Montana is block management, which is like private land open
Speaker 6: to public. It's not uncommon for those pieces to be
Speaker 6: open to hunting, but have restrictions, right, Like you can't
Speaker 6: kill an elk here, correct, you can't duck hunt. They're right,
Speaker 6: you can't drive these roads, so like we see that
Speaker 6: in other parts of this yet. But they have a
Speaker 6: lot of acreage. Again, I would say this, I did
Speaker 6: say this. I would say this with them sitting right
Speaker 6: here because I'm like sympathetic to the mission.
Speaker 1: I support the buffalo part of the mission. I think
Speaker 1: that they would be doing themselves a strategic favor by
Speaker 1: being more open, putting, more lands open to hunting, less restrictions,
Speaker 1: more agage of hunting, because you're going to create all
Speaker 1: the hunters are going to be your allies. But instead
Speaker 1: you're creating an impression in people's minds. They don't want
Speaker 1: me around, and if they buy up more land, it's
Speaker 1: more land that I'm not welcome on. It's just it's
Speaker 1: this is way beyond what I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: What I want to talk about here is politics. Their buffalo.
Speaker 1: They run their buffalo as was called a conservation herd.
Speaker 1: It's not a production herd. They're not running buffalo in
Speaker 1: order to produce highe leather meat, right, They're running it
Speaker 1: as a restoration project.
Speaker 8: It's the native They're categorized as livestock, aren't they.
Speaker 1: They have to be in this state. Okay, these are
Speaker 1: ear tagged counted animals, not because they necessarily want them
Speaker 1: to be, but they're not regard even though they're a
Speaker 1: native land mammal, they're not regarded as wildlife in Montana.
Speaker 1: They have to be regarded as livestock. So yes, out
Speaker 1: of necessity they have to like count them, manage them
Speaker 1: like livestock. But the objective is this is the dominant
Speaker 1: native land mammal on that landscape historically, and they're trying
Speaker 1: to put them back on the landscape. So they're doing
Speaker 1: this by buying ranchland and letting the buffalo roam on it.
Speaker 1: And they're doing it by doing leases, paying the lease fees,
Speaker 1: and letting their buffalo run on state and federal grazing leases.
Speaker 1: All right, what's a grazing lease. Well, a grazing lease
Speaker 1: is the West is full of it. A grazing lease
Speaker 1: is you got a chunk of land. Let's say it.
Speaker 1: Let's just say for easy's sake, it's a thousand acres
Speaker 1: you strike a deal with if it's Bureau of Land Management,
Speaker 1: federally managed public land, Bureau of Land Management, they open
Speaker 1: up a grazing lease for a thousand acres, they will
Speaker 1: tell you you can graze blank number, blank cowcaff pairs
Speaker 1: for blank months. And that's how it's like measured in
Speaker 1: animal units.
Speaker 6: And if you're in a very lush place, that'll be
Speaker 6: a high number, yep. And if you're in the bad
Speaker 6: lands where it's all brown for you know, ten months
Speaker 6: of the year, it's going to be a really low number.
Speaker 1: Exactly. It's tweaked according to an assessment of the productivity
Speaker 1: of the land. And you get a deal, you sign
Speaker 1: a lease, you pay a fee. American Prairie has This
Speaker 1: is a quote from AP. There's pointing this out in
Speaker 1: terms of this grazing lease debate that I'm going to
Speaker 1: explain as American Prairie says, America Prairie has lawfully grazed
Speaker 1: bison on b LM lands for more than twenty years,
Speaker 1: complying with every rule, regulation, and permit requirement. There have
Speaker 1: been no grazing violations, and the administrative record contains objective
Speaker 1: evidence showing that range land conditions have improved over the
Speaker 1: last two decades with bison on the landscape. However, right now,
Speaker 1: after twenty years, for reasons I'll get into the state
Speaker 1: of Montana, and the Feds are tag teaming American Prairie.
Speaker 1: They're coming at American Prairie on state leases. They're coming
Speaker 1: at American Prairie on federal leases. Under the direction of
Speaker 1: Secretary of Interior Bergham, the Department of Interior is pulling
Speaker 1: American Prairie's federal leases. That's one fight. It warrants a
Speaker 1: ton of discussion. But since this is a news show,
Speaker 1: the news right now in this moment is about the
Speaker 1: state leases that American Prairie has. Okay, America Prairie is
Speaker 1: aiming to graze bison on five thousand acres of lands
Speaker 1: owned by the State of Montana. They already have the permit,
Speaker 1: they're just looking to put the animals out there. The
Speaker 1: state manages one point four million acres of grazing leases.
Speaker 1: So to put this another way, America Prairie is asking
Speaker 1: to graze buffalo on point zero one percent of the
Speaker 1: state's grazing acreage a tenth of a percent, okay. In
Speaker 1: seeking permission from the state to do this, the state
Speaker 1: slow walked them for seven years, would not process the request. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the state Supreme Court steps in and says, that's just
Speaker 1: bad government. You gotta process their request. So what happens
Speaker 1: now The state now is saying we're not going to
Speaker 1: let permits out to people that want to graze buffalo
Speaker 1: and a conservation herd. One of the perspectives on this
Speaker 1: is a stock grower, a stock grower's organization opposed to
Speaker 1: them putting buffalo out a discretion. A discussion is that
Speaker 1: they're saying grazing leases were intended for what they call
Speaker 1: production livestock grazing, meaning grazing leases were intended to be
Speaker 1: used to produce a food product, and if you have
Speaker 1: a conservation herds, that's outside of the intention of grazing leases. However,
Speaker 1: this intention was never adequately codified by law. It's an
Speaker 1: interpretation of past intention. So the state fought them by
Speaker 1: just slow walking their permits. Okay, while all this is
Speaker 1: going on, they've had all these different debates. At one
Speaker 1: point the state says, well, we can't do it right
Speaker 1: now because our state land order borders BLM land and
Speaker 1: we need to hear from the BLM what they think
Speaker 1: about these dastardly buffalo grazing BLM land. BLM comes back
Speaker 1: at the time. They come back and says, well, nothing
Speaker 1: bad happens. It's kind of a non issue. So rather
Speaker 1: than the state than saying, okay, we've heard from the BLM,
Speaker 1: they say it's not a problem. We'll accept that. No,
Speaker 1: they go, we're going to appeal your decision. That is
Speaker 1: not a big problem. Then the state gets into this
Speaker 1: kind of goofy debate. They start obfuscating what their objectives are.
Speaker 1: They get into this goofy debate about whether one bison
Speaker 1: actually equals one cow. Okay, Now, Montana State University has
Speaker 1: research suggesting that you can few there an equivalent. See
Speaker 1: if you put a buffalo onto grass it's the same
Speaker 1: as putting a cow onto grass, okay. And since the
Speaker 1: state sets the stocking ray shows anyways, they can say
Speaker 1: how many are permitted to be out there, but that's
Speaker 1: not what they're after. They just don't want them out there.
Speaker 1: And then they put out this thing like, hey, we're
Speaker 1: not trying to obstruct buffalo being on the ground. It's
Speaker 1: just we're just trying to protect the grasslands. And it
Speaker 1: kind of gets in this thing like omet so you're
Speaker 1: trying to prevent the West from turning back into that
Speaker 1: real dump that it was back when thirty million buffalo
Speaker 1: were grazing around and vast herds of elk occupied the
Speaker 1: American Great Plains, and like Lewis and Clark were staggered
Speaker 1: by the abundance of wildlife, and whole cultures were existing
Speaker 1: off of this wildlife for ten thousand years. Like, let's
Speaker 1: not revisit that shit show, right, that's the argument. Finally,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court says, you gotta deal with these people's permit.
Speaker 1: So then the State Land Board comes and directs the
Speaker 1: Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation saying, don't renew
Speaker 1: buffalo leases, don't give out buffalo leases. Just to they
Speaker 1: change the rules. Okay, they're saying it has to be
Speaker 1: production agriculture. So America Prairie takes them to court and
Speaker 1: a judge just puts in an injunction. No, you think
Speaker 1: I forgot to mention. Meanwhile, America Prairie canceled all their
Speaker 1: public hunts. They do public raffle hunts. They had to
Speaker 1: cancel all their hunts because of this whole shit show
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 3: For bison.
Speaker 1: They canceled their public buffalo hunts. They do buffalo hunts
Speaker 1: for veterans. They canceled it because of all this uncertainty
Speaker 1: about their hurt. They want an injunction, but to me,
Speaker 1: it feels very tenuous. Their argument is that the that
Speaker 1: the Land Board and the d d NRC didn't do
Speaker 1: the normal rule making process before changing the rule. So
Speaker 1: we're saying you didn't you know, you didn't open it
Speaker 1: up for public content and all that, And so the
Speaker 1: judge put an injunction and says they don't need to
Speaker 1: clear their animals out yet. It's a it's a very
Speaker 1: minor victory. But like I said, it has a very tenuous,
Speaker 1: a very tenuous feel to me. It is not like
Speaker 1: a conclusive finding. It's just an injunction on something while
Speaker 1: something else gets sorted out. The federal land thing which
Speaker 1: still lingers. That all hinges on the intent and definition
Speaker 1: of something called the Tailor Grazing Act. But again, the
Speaker 1: Federal BLM part of this is a whole other story.
Speaker 1: The state and the Feds are tag team and this
Speaker 1: organization around their buffalo herd. What's funny about this, the
Speaker 1: irony of this is a lot of this is taking
Speaker 1: place against the backdrop of all this hoopla about the
Speaker 1: Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening up in Medora, North Dakota,
Speaker 1: and they tie the opening of the library for the
Speaker 1: July fourth celebrations of our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
Speaker 1: All these political figures converge on North Dakota for the
Speaker 1: opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library over July for
Speaker 1: a weekend because the political figures all want to align
Speaker 1: themselves with the vision and mission of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Speaker 1: What is that legacy? Tr is a It's like TR
Speaker 1: just is a conservation president people that when people think
Speaker 1: of tr today, they don't think, they don't think about
Speaker 1: him storming San Juan Hill. They don't think about him
Speaker 1: being an advocate of Panama Canal. He's a conservation president.
Speaker 1: I'm on the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
Speaker 1: When people hear that, they don't think I'm talking about
Speaker 1: conserving Panama. The guy is a conservation president.
Speaker 6: The conservation president.
Speaker 1: The just let me do it like a little year
Speaker 1: by year run through on an issue. In December nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four, President Roosevelt urged Congress to authorize that the
Speaker 1: government set aside portions of forest reserves as refuges for bison.
Speaker 1: Nineteen oh five, in his annual Message to Congress, Theodore
Speaker 1: Roosevelt described the buffalo as the most characteristic animal of
Speaker 1: the Western plains and addressed the importance of the remaining
Speaker 1: small herds. He also acknowledged the economic advantages associated with
Speaker 1: the value of the buffalo herd. He recognized Wichita Reserve
Speaker 1: in Oklahoma as a forest reserve that could aid in
Speaker 1: buffalo preservation. The next year, he becomes the honorary president
Speaker 1: of the American Bison Society. The next year, we're now
Speaker 1: in nineteen oh six, Rosevel we congratulated Senator John F.
Speaker 1: Lacey of the of Lacy Act, Infamacy of Lacy Act
Speaker 1: Fame not Infamous Fame congratulated Lacey forgetting the Senate Committee
Speaker 1: on Agriculture to order an amendment to an appropriation bill
Speaker 1: that approved money for the Wichita Reserve, which would house Buffalo.
Speaker 1: The next year, nineteen oh seven, Roosevelt supported reintroductions of
Speaker 1: Buffalo win Cave National Park the National Bison Range Wichita
Speaker 1: Mountain Reserve. The next year, nineteen oh eight, the American
Speaker 1: Bison Society, of which Theodore Roosevelt is the honorary president,
Speaker 1: successfully petitioned petitioned Congress to pass a bill that would
Speaker 1: establish a permanent bison range in Montana. So there's nineteen
Speaker 1: o four, nineteen oh five, nineteen oh six, nineteen oh seven,
Speaker 1: nineteen oh eight. I could go on and on. So
Speaker 1: when these people are coming there and like and like
Speaker 1: tying themselves to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt at the
Speaker 1: same time trying to attack the restoration of the animal,
Speaker 1: like what are you tying yourself to? It's because so
Speaker 1: much stuff, so much stuff is just like perform You
Speaker 1: could get the same people in the same room and
Speaker 1: they acting like they're talking about the same thing, but
Speaker 1: they're not talking about the same thing, Like, what are
Speaker 1: they talking about?
Speaker 8: It looks good to stand in front of a portrait
Speaker 8: of tr.
Speaker 1: That's what I always say. Every politician in America would
Speaker 1: like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. But what
Speaker 1: the guy wanted is so damn clear. Yep, And they don't.
Speaker 1: It's just maddening. Or are you yannie?
Speaker 4: He's kind of an environmentalist by today's terms. Oh, he
Speaker 4: was a radical radical.
Speaker 1: That's the other thing people don't realize is how much
Speaker 1: people hated that guy for doing all this stuff. They
Speaker 1: hated him.
Speaker 6: Steve would hate him because he liked national parks so much. Yes, yes,
Speaker 6: you'd have disagreed with him back the guy.
Speaker 1: That shot at him had that little booklet in his chest.
Speaker 3: He likes parks.
Speaker 1: No, I'm joking, Yeah, I would disagree with my on Matt.
Speaker 1: I would have done a new show about that. I've
Speaker 1: been like, Teddy, you're misguided.
Speaker 6: You know, the like journey for that. It was just
Speaker 6: folded up speech that saved his life when he was shot.
Speaker 6: It was it was said that that can trace all
Speaker 6: the way back to his early years when he was
Speaker 6: a president and he was really into boxing, to the
Speaker 6: point where those in his cabinet where like, Teddy, you
Speaker 6: can't be boxing with the interns anymore. Like, it's just
Speaker 6: a bad look when you show up in some public
Speaker 6: space and you've got a black eye. So he'd like
Speaker 6: kind of started secretly boxing with people in his universe.
Speaker 1: One and ran with that. But he wasn't boxing.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, othery're bad physical contact. Uh, Teddy gets lit up.
Speaker 6: One day, he gets knocked in the head. That messes
Speaker 6: with his vision. He has to start wearing glasses. So
Speaker 6: when he goes to give speeches, now the font is
Speaker 6: so big that he like has to have more paper
Speaker 6: physically to do his speeches. So for that speech, he
Speaker 6: had a lot more pieces of paper. It was wadded
Speaker 6: up in his pocket where he was shot. And so
Speaker 6: like you can go back and say his little underground
Speaker 6: boxing ring saved his life because he had more paper
Speaker 6: in his pocket.
Speaker 1: That's the honest.
Speaker 8: Do you do a thing called mediator experiments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great idea. Yeah, he finished his speech, but he.
Speaker 9: Did put a speech in your pocket. Start cutting loose
Speaker 9: at you speech. Yeah, it was bad ass. It was
Speaker 9: It was bad ass that Trump had to wear with
Speaker 9: all the raises fists. But imagine how bad ass it
Speaker 9: was to finish your speech.
Speaker 1: Yeah, after a dude shot at you.
Speaker 6: Teddy definitely knew that. He's like, oh, look at all
Speaker 6: the points I'm going to win here by doing this
Speaker 6: speech after just getting shot.
Speaker 4: We have to really do some historical digging on you know,
Speaker 4: like powder loads bullet. Yeah, you know, because you can't
Speaker 4: nice acubond and try.
Speaker 1: A couple of years ago, there was a story. I
Speaker 1: think it was a boyfriend girlfriend. We're messing around with that,
Speaker 1: and I think one of them killed the other one
Speaker 1: holding books up.
Speaker 6: We just used like these bean backgrounds shooting books.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about Maine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll get into it.
Speaker 1: Not fat but because I'm not gonna talk about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, here's a here's a conservation win story.
Speaker 3: Inside Climate News.
Speaker 4: I need to get since we're doing the show all
Speaker 4: the time, I got to get up on my subscriptions.
Speaker 4: You boys must have a lot of subscriptions to all
Speaker 4: these different news uh sources?
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: It's got a lot of people that send me stuff.
Speaker 4: I need more of those people arger cover a couple
Speaker 4: of them, just a couple. Inside Climate News reported that
Speaker 4: because of damn removal. Main's alewives are making a significant comeback,
Speaker 4: And like me twenty four hours ago, you might be like,
Speaker 4: what's an alewife?
Speaker 1: Which is really.
Speaker 3: Yanni? You're from Michigan. How could you not know what?
Speaker 3: How did you pronounce it alewives? Al wives?
Speaker 4: Okay, I thought you said something different early earlier. Well,
Speaker 4: I'll get to why I should know about it. As
Speaker 4: a michigander, It's an anadromous herring averaging twelve inches but
Speaker 4: can be as big as sixteen. Not considered a game fish,
Speaker 4: although some folks smoke them and eat them. Ale wives
Speaker 4: are most famous. This is why I should be embarrassed
Speaker 4: as a michigander, for.
Speaker 1: You embarrassed for not knowing this.
Speaker 4: The welland canal to bypass Niagara Falls and invade the
Speaker 4: Great Lakes, causing the extension extinction of several Cisco species.
Speaker 4: They've also had negative impacts on yellow perch and whitefish
Speaker 4: populations in the Great Lakes. And how they do that
Speaker 4: is that they either outcompete them for the the zoap plankton,
Speaker 4: or they eat the fry of the yellow perch and
Speaker 4: cod and other fish like that. But this isn't about
Speaker 4: how they got famous. Maybe they're gonna get famous because
Speaker 4: of this conservation when because for their native range, which
Speaker 4: is like South Carolina up to Nova Scotia and the
Speaker 4: western Atlantic, they are not doing as well.
Speaker 3: Do you have a picture of that al Wi?
Speaker 1: I just had it on the lakes nearly that big?
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 1: The Great Lakes Ones were small?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Oh they were. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I think it's like a food thing, you know, plankton, Yeah, stuff.
Speaker 1: Like that went on twelve inches man.
Speaker 6: And those those Great Lakes one they do not get
Speaker 6: back to the ocean, right, they're just staying there.
Speaker 4: No, yeah, yeah, there's both populations that just are fresh
Speaker 4: water and then the saltwater.
Speaker 1: They exploded there to the point where they would like there.
Speaker 1: How many would die during temperature changes that that beaches
Speaker 1: would be uninhappy, like people would go to the beat.
Speaker 8: Listen to this old time Old time Southsiders still call
Speaker 8: the little tenants hearings all wives. For those summer days
Speaker 8: in nineteen sixty seven when a billion pounds of the
Speaker 8: dead fish wash up ashore beach goers.
Speaker 4: You know, lots of them. Sounds stinky. Why are alwives
Speaker 4: al wives important?
Speaker 3: Or what do they do with them?
Speaker 4: I guess the most common use, which was interesting, I thought,
Speaker 4: is for bait for lobster fishing. Okay, that's why people
Speaker 4: are like to commercially harvest them. Like I said earlier,
Speaker 4: people do smoke them for human consumption. But really, most importantly,
Speaker 4: I think for all all of us and the stories
Speaker 4: that it's a keystone species that provides food, you know,
Speaker 4: all along through the food chain, and you know it
Speaker 4: provides food for the bigger fish that we like to catch,
Speaker 4: like stripe, bass and cod.
Speaker 3: Did you change my font size, Nate? I don't think so.
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I'm like Teddy Man. I can't. I can't
Speaker 3: be having this smaller fond size.
Speaker 1: I need.
Speaker 3: I need my readers. Now you can you can zoom
Speaker 3: in on your own. I know, I know.
Speaker 8: This is all staying in Well, your honest is doing that.
Speaker 8: You know why they're called ale wives?
Speaker 4: Yes, well they have are They got a big old
Speaker 4: belly on them and so they were, uh they're they
Speaker 4: were compared to an ale wife, which is basically a
Speaker 4: which is a.
Speaker 1: Portly like a lady drinking too much beer.
Speaker 4: No one that one that would have one that would
Speaker 4: run a a ale. I don't know what you call.
Speaker 6: It's a bartender at a tavern.
Speaker 3: Well, no more than that. Back in the I can
Speaker 3: go way way deep.
Speaker 1: The tavern gave you a little belly. You don't say,
Speaker 1: I'm asking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would think so anybody was around.
Speaker 4: So this goes so far back. This goes like the
Speaker 4: first mention of al wife. I think was like thirteen
Speaker 4: hundred something. Back when ale was more were commonly consumed
Speaker 4: than water in a lot of places because it was
Speaker 4: safer to drink it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people consume like a leader a day on average.
Speaker 1: Right, were scared. The Pilgrims were scared of American water.
Speaker 1: They drank ale for like.
Speaker 4: Every one hundred and forty people. You had to have
Speaker 4: a place that made ale. Back then, it was a
Speaker 4: It was a thing that women did.
Speaker 1: And if a dude owned that and his wife worked there, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he would develop a beer belly.
Speaker 3: That's the thing.
Speaker 4: It was run by women, and they were called ale wives,
Speaker 4: and they tended to be rotund.
Speaker 6: Holy man, I don't know, that's tough name nomenclature.
Speaker 1: Okay, huge Someday they'll get around to change in that one.
Speaker 3: Man, huge conservation Betsy Ross.
Speaker 1: Or they'll call them like the who's the suffrage person.
Speaker 10: On the oh Anthony, they'll call him like the Susan
Speaker 10: being Anthony because they'll rebrand them because.
Speaker 4: I think go on unprecedented population recovery. The number of
Speaker 4: migraine fish in Benton, Maine jumped from fewer than eight
Speaker 4: hundred eight thirty five years ago, yes, to nine million
Speaker 4: last year.
Speaker 3: That's pretty sweet.
Speaker 1: And that's just their math. I try to figure out
Speaker 1: what percent increase that was when.
Speaker 8: They were real low like that they were just cut
Speaker 8: off from their spawning grounds by dams.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, and so they've done all kinds of things
Speaker 4: to help them get back up in there, which I'll
Speaker 4: tell you about in just a second. Like I was saying,
Speaker 4: it brings, you know, nutrients up into the mainland, kind
Speaker 4: of like salmon in Alaska, right, these alewives bring It's
Speaker 4: a vital food source for eagles, seals, otters, and uh yeah,
Speaker 4: just makes the place nutrient rich.
Speaker 1: Want me to hit you with something, please. It's a
Speaker 1: one million, one hundred and twenty four thousand, nine hundred
Speaker 1: percent increase, so base that in my head. It's a lot.
Speaker 6: It's like going from the people in these buildings connected
Speaker 6: to new York City.
Speaker 4: Starting in the seventeen hundreds, the construction of industrial dams
Speaker 4: blocked the fish from swimming upstream to spawned, trapping them
Speaker 4: downstream and causing populations to plummet. Intensive commercial fishing and
Speaker 4: mid twentieth century farther decimated populations, and by nineteen ninety
Speaker 4: four harvests collapsed to a fraction of their historical highs,
Speaker 4: where the federal commercial fishing The FEDS basically put a
Speaker 4: moratorium on fishing form in twenty twelve. So the population
Speaker 4: rebound is driven by removing aging dams or building bypass systems.
Speaker 4: The systems that they do are they do a bunch
Speaker 4: of different things. One is high tech fish elevators were
Speaker 4: literally they basically have just like a channel that kind
Speaker 4: of comes out off the dam and then at the
Speaker 4: end of it there's a bucket and when that bucket
Speaker 4: goes down into the water, it creates a current as
Speaker 4: you can imagine that, it sucks it in and those
Speaker 4: al wives are literally attracted to it and they swim
Speaker 4: right in there. The bucket picks them up, puts them
Speaker 4: into the raceway, and then on they go. Then they
Speaker 4: also do on smaller creeks, they basically just build little
Speaker 4: you know steps, Yeah, where a fish can just jump
Speaker 4: up and go up through the rocks and get on
Speaker 4: up there.
Speaker 3: Let's see.
Speaker 4: Twenty twenty five, Maine saw a booming migration of over
Speaker 4: twenty million ale wives. Unfortunately, in contrast, states south of
Speaker 4: Maine continue to experience declining or depleted populations. Internet says
Speaker 4: likely due to warming oceans and different ocean fishing pressures.
Speaker 4: Maine is one of only five states with federal approval
Speaker 4: for sustainable river herring fisheries, and as of last year,
Speaker 4: five main municipalities have regained the right to harvest locally
Speaker 4: under strict state limits.
Speaker 3: They actually have to right now.
Speaker 4: A lot of people don't like this, but right now
Speaker 4: they have to monitor their fish returns for ten years
Speaker 4: and produce that they have the stocks in these ponds
Speaker 4: where where they do the reproduction like an average return
Speaker 4: over Yeah, until they can start a commercial harvest. My
Speaker 4: big takeaway here was I just thought it was so cool.
Speaker 4: We've heard this over and over on these shows that
Speaker 4: we do, and we hear I think it was. We
Speaker 4: recently had some tribal members from the Northwest on They
Speaker 4: just talked about the wonder that you can achieve from
Speaker 4: nature when you see like I think we were talking
Speaker 4: about the size of some giant chinooks. That was the
Speaker 4: conversation we were having, and I think the same thing here.
Speaker 4: There was a lot of locals that were interviewed that
Speaker 4: can remember like seeing some of these fish swimming up
Speaker 4: you know, these small creeks and Maine as kids, and
Speaker 4: then they went through a period where there were literally
Speaker 4: none and they have you know, put their own hard
Speaker 4: work effort into it, and now they're seeing them return
Speaker 4: and it's pretty cool. And now they're getting to pass
Speaker 4: that on to the next generation. And people just say
Speaker 4: it's like it's an amazing thing to stand there at
Speaker 4: a small oat creek and literally see so many fish
Speaker 4: swinging along where you can just stick your hand in
Speaker 4: and fishfield.
Speaker 1: The points of the resiliency of my nature, if you like,
Speaker 1: give it room to do what it needs to do.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there's something about Maine though, like that state compared
Speaker 8: to a lot of other states when it comes to
Speaker 8: knocking down dams, like they're all about it. I feel
Speaker 8: like they they tend to do it at a higher
Speaker 8: rate than a lot about it.
Speaker 4: Yes, I was talking about this on a run recently
Speaker 4: with the fella and I was telling them I was
Speaker 4: researching for today, and he was saying that this is
Speaker 4: a big thing topic in northern Michigan. We're gonna have
Speaker 4: to probably discuss that at some point. Yeah, because there's
Speaker 4: a lot of people that are enjoying like the pontoon
Speaker 4: boat lake life culture. And when you take that dam out,
Speaker 4: that little reservoir you've been pumping around on might not
Speaker 4: be around anymore. And it's a it's a trick right
Speaker 4: now to try to sell people on saying, hey, the
Speaker 4: river version of this might be as good or better
Speaker 4: than the sure than the reservoir.
Speaker 1: Yeah. We used to pound salmon and steelhead where they'd
Speaker 1: all get backed up on the sixth Street damn on
Speaker 1: the Grand River, And if that wasn't there, it'd be great,
Speaker 1: But then everybody'd have to figure out how to catch
Speaker 1: them when they're not on a roadblock.
Speaker 3: Yeah, did we cover that?
Speaker 4: How they're putting the rocks back in in Grand Rapids
Speaker 4: to put the rapids the rapids back in Grand Rapids?
Speaker 1: Are they tearing the dams out? Yeah? Oh good for them?
Speaker 1: Pretty cool.
Speaker 6: Wales Wales whale strandings have been tracked for over fifty
Speaker 6: years in Washington. The record for grey whales was set
Speaker 6: in twenty nineteen when thirty four of them washed up dead.
Speaker 6: We are only halfway through twenty twenty six and we
Speaker 6: already have thirty of them this year. So the record
Speaker 6: is thirty four. Six months in we have thirty of
Speaker 6: them this year. I talked to John Callum Bokitis, he's
Speaker 6: the founder of the Cascadia Research Collective in Washington, to
Speaker 6: find out why. First, I asked him about twenty nineteen,
Speaker 6: what caused that mass mortality and how did biologists react.
Speaker 6: Then John said that the twenty nineteen hevelt felt normal
Speaker 6: and it really didn't raise any cause for alarm. Biologists
Speaker 6: had seen this before in ninety nine, in nineteen ninety
Speaker 6: and in all three of those cases nineteen ninety, nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety nine, twenty nineteen, they felt as though grey whales
Speaker 6: had approached their global carrying capacity and so this was
Speaker 6: just a natural cycle where they, you know, self reduced.
Speaker 6: And the biologists just said, like, this is what a
Speaker 6: grey whale boom and bus cycle is.
Speaker 1: Can I can I comment on your graph? He's got
Speaker 1: a graph up. One line is strandings. Is that stranding.
Speaker 6: Nope, the global population.
Speaker 1: I read it wrong. Never mind, Sorry, we've got.
Speaker 6: A chart looking at the global population and the calf recruitment.
Speaker 6: Oh but anyway, he said in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen, they're like, this is actually a good thing.
Speaker 6: You know, the oceans have plenty of gray whales and
Speaker 6: so they're just like naturally having some reduction. As for
Speaker 6: twenty twenty six, biologists don't think this is a normal
Speaker 6: mortality event like the other ones.
Speaker 1: Sixteen to the.
Speaker 6: Whales that have had knee cropsies done, all sixteen were
Speaker 6: determined to be malnourished, and of those sixteen, ten of
Speaker 6: them had blunt force trauma from vessel strikes. So one
Speaker 6: hundred percent of the knee cropsies said the whales were
Speaker 6: starving and sixty three percent said that the whales were
Speaker 6: starving plus struck by a ship. John said that a
Speaker 6: starving whale is a delirious whale, So it's just more
Speaker 6: likely to swim in front of a cargo ship. It's
Speaker 6: a lot like when we talk about CWD with deer.
Speaker 6: The CWD doesn't kill them, it's that that they don't
Speaker 6: have their mental faculties anymore, to the point where they
Speaker 6: wander in front of a semi they walk out in
Speaker 6: front of a hunter. They don't smell a coyote anymore,
Speaker 6: and that's what kills a CWD pop po deer, not
Speaker 6: the CWD itself. It's a similar thing. That's why all
Speaker 6: these starving whales are getting struck. So what's going on
Speaker 6: to cause the whales to starve? John's direct quote was this,
Speaker 6: there has been a profound change in the Arctic. Here's why.
Speaker 6: He says that about ninety five percent of the world's
Speaker 6: grey whales migrate to the Arctic. The other five percent
Speaker 6: are these unique populations that wind up in Russian waters,
Speaker 6: or they stay on the Pacific coast, or they go
Speaker 6: into the Puget Sound. Those ones are called sounders. That
Speaker 6: five percent grey whale population is not currently experiencing the
Speaker 6: mass die off. The biologists who observe that five percent
Speaker 6: say that they're doing just fine. It's the ninety five
Speaker 6: percent that are going to the Arctic waters that are struggling.
Speaker 6: John said, clearly there's been some sort of collapse in
Speaker 6: the food in the Arctic. The grey whales they feed
Speaker 6: by rolling around on the bottom and they scoop up
Speaker 6: a bunch of mud and they fill throughout the tiny
Speaker 6: shrimp in the worms. And he pointed out it's a
Speaker 6: statistical fact that the Arctic is heating up faster than
Speaker 6: any place else in the world. Loses ten percent of
Speaker 6: its floating sea ice every decade, so obviously there's been
Speaker 6: an impact to the microscopic food that the gray whales
Speaker 6: are feeding on in the Arctic. And now it's like,
Speaker 6: shine some new light maybe on the twenty nineteen population
Speaker 6: to collapse. Maybe this is, you know, a whole decade
Speaker 6: long thing that's happening. Here's some other tidbits from the
Speaker 6: interview with John to believe that about fifteen percent of
Speaker 6: dead whales wash up on the shore. The rest of
Speaker 6: them sink to the bottom. Whale strandings for humpbacks and
Speaker 6: orcs have been totally normal this year. I asked him
Speaker 6: what happens to a dead whale that washes up on shore.
Speaker 6: He said, there's three common solutions. It's buried nearby, it's
Speaker 6: towed out to see where it sinks, or it's just
Speaker 6: left to decompose. I found a juvenile dead hump back
Speaker 6: last year in California. This one was just left there
Speaker 6: to decompose. The smell was so intense on that thing,
Speaker 6: you can smell it from like a mile away. I
Speaker 6: wish I could have just like showed people that smell
Speaker 6: like he to take a whiff of this thing.
Speaker 4: You want to talk some maggots, Well, why didn't you
Speaker 4: just get a little ball jar and take a chunk.
Speaker 6: I don't think I'd be in jail, But that's auction
Speaker 6: of boy smelly whale air. I also I noticed that
Speaker 6: eighty one percent of the dead whales have been male,
Speaker 6: and I asked him if that's normal. He said, no,
Speaker 6: that that's a new phenomenon they're noticing. Asked if he
Speaker 6: had a theory as to why. Here is his hypothesis,
Speaker 6: which has not been tested. Calf reproduction has been very
Speaker 6: low in recent years, and John thinks that maybe some
Speaker 6: of the females are foregoing reproduction due to a lack
Speaker 6: of resources. Therefore, the fields the females are more resilient
Speaker 6: to the current conditions because they're not spending that extra
Speaker 6: energy breeding and carrying a baby and caring for a calf.
Speaker 6: So that's just his initial guests, you know, as to
Speaker 6: why they've been seeing this for the last six months.
Speaker 6: Something else John brought up. The thirty four dead gray
Speaker 6: whales in twenty nineteen was a lot less concerning because
Speaker 6: that time we were just coming off at an all
Speaker 6: time high for their population. So thirty four dead whales
Speaker 6: out of a population of twenty seven thousand is very
Speaker 6: different than if this year, if this pace continues, that'd
Speaker 6: be sixty dead great sixty dead gray whales out of
Speaker 6: a population of seventeen thousand. So just like some really
Speaker 6: problematic numbers there. I asked him what he thinks the
Speaker 6: short long term solution is. Short term, he said, to
Speaker 6: prevent vessel strikes and entanglement and fishing gear because those
Speaker 6: are often happening closer to shore. Just feels like we
Speaker 6: have more control of that thing long term, just like
Speaker 6: helping the grey whales in the Arctic. That probably just
Speaker 6: means with research right now, And John said this. I
Speaker 6: don't know if it's something John has been told from,
Speaker 6: you know, the federal government, or if it's just like
Speaker 6: a known thing among biologists, but he said that if
Speaker 6: you're like funding ask mentions climate change, that it's just
Speaker 6: like got no chance of getting off the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's funny though, is four years ago, if it
Speaker 1: didn't mention climate change, had no chance. Yeah. So John,
Speaker 1: four years ago, you had to take your research and
Speaker 1: make it about climate change, or else you'd never get
Speaker 1: your research done.
Speaker 6: So for this as people would just.
Speaker 1: And I know many researchers, you would take what you're doing, yeah,
Speaker 1: and just impose a climate spin on it. Even to
Speaker 1: the point of, let's say you were just trying to
Speaker 1: work in public lands acquisition, you would need to say,
Speaker 1: as the earthworms, right, and as stress from climate change increases,
Speaker 1: people will need more outlets. Yeah, how will they find
Speaker 1: relaxation on public lands? Therefore, as a climate mitigation plan,
Speaker 1: we would like to create more public lands. You have
Speaker 1: to play this dumb game. Now, you just go back
Speaker 1: in and take it out and just keep doing the
Speaker 1: work you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 6: The problem is, John says, if you want to study
Speaker 6: grey whales in the Arctic, it's impossible not to mention
Speaker 6: climate change. I find a way for the next two years,
Speaker 6: you know, probably just not happening for them. Last thing,
Speaker 6: I asked, what you think the Macas tribe request to
Speaker 6: hunt gray whales. Here's a brief timeline, so you're up
Speaker 6: to speed. The nineteen twenties, the Macaw tribe quits whaling
Speaker 6: because populations are so low. Nineteen seventy gray whales low.
Speaker 6: I couldn't find that number. I don't know if they
Speaker 6: even have one that exists. It's not just like a guess.
Speaker 6: Nineteen seventy gray whales are put on the endangered species list.
Speaker 6: Nineteen ninety four.
Speaker 1: What population.
Speaker 6: I don't have the answer for you there.
Speaker 1: It'sn't real let down.
Speaker 6: Nineteen ninety four. Grey whales are removed from the endangered
Speaker 6: species list nineteen ninety five. Don't have the popular list
Speaker 6: nineteen ninety four, well, actually the chart probably does. Nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety five, so this is one year after they're after
Speaker 6: off the endangered species list, the Macaw tribe notifies the
Speaker 6: government that they want to start whaling again.
Speaker 1: Oh whale, I don't.
Speaker 6: Know if that was the number.
Speaker 8: We get to.
Speaker 6: Nineteen ninety nine, the tribe kills one gray whale on
Speaker 6: an approved hunt. This is a picture of one of
Speaker 6: the harpoonists pursuing a whale at the time, So they
Speaker 6: do kill one that year. That brings us to today.
Speaker 6: The tribe has not been given the green lights since,
Speaker 6: and the case is sat in limbo for twenty six years.
Speaker 6: So they killed one gray whale in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 6: have not killed one since.
Speaker 10: The at that point, they're Historically the caring capacity was
Speaker 10: about twenty five hundred grey whales and they sit now
Speaker 10: on thousand, twenty five hundred, okay, and then the optimum
Speaker 10: sustainable populations about thirteen hundred.
Speaker 1: That doesn't think you're missing a zero.
Speaker 6: Something's missing looks like a specific grey.
Speaker 10: Whale population versus Western Wales global one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have some maca coming up the show to
Speaker 1: talk about their whale. They're coming out up on an
Speaker 1: upcoming show to talk about whaling.
Speaker 6: How many have stranded thirty four, No, thirty this year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this tribe killing oh whale doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: So I I That's what I'm asking John about. They've
Speaker 6: killed one since nineteen ninety nine. The government has not
Speaker 6: given them the green lights. Since John is fully on
Speaker 6: board with the McCaw tribe hunting, he cited this it's
Speaker 6: the only treaty between the United States and a native
Speaker 6: tribe that specifically mentions the right to hunt whales and seals,
Speaker 6: and it was signed back in eighteen fifty five. Therefore,
Speaker 6: John feels we should honor that as the only treaty
Speaker 6: that has that specific language. Here's a direct quote from
Speaker 6: Article four of the treaty. The right of taking fish
Speaker 6: and of whaling or ceiling at usual and accustomed grounds
Speaker 6: and stations is further secured to said Indians. So John
Speaker 6: said he's also seen the management plan that the Macaw
Speaker 6: tribe has for the gray whales. He said he feels
Speaker 6: as though it's responsible and it makes reasonable requests regarding harvest,
Speaker 6: So if they want to go kill one tomorrow, he's
Speaker 6: cool with it.
Speaker 1: The only thing I'd have to know here I would
Speaker 1: want to see. I would love to see a century's
Speaker 1: worth of population dynamic information, sure, because what I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if anybody knows this is if
Speaker 1: you look at over one hundred years, how dynam is
Speaker 1: this population and how unusual is the trough? Right? And
Speaker 1: if they're in a population trough right now? Are they
Speaker 1: in this trough every thirty years? Are they in this
Speaker 1: trough every century? Have they never been in this trough?
Speaker 8: What I'm seeing is Pacific grey whale population lowest populations
Speaker 8: thirteen thousand whales, lowest population level since the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 6: Okay, so we'll see in the fifty years of tracking.
Speaker 6: He feels as though this is like the most serious
Speaker 6: it's gotten for the grey whales.
Speaker 1: Not good news.
Speaker 10: What's interesting is like in ninety nine when they did this,
Speaker 10: it was huge public backlash is insane. It's become so
Speaker 10: much more tolerated. Which is the only thing I can
Speaker 10: think of in the hunting world that people are now
Speaker 10: more excited about today than they were twenty five years ago.
Speaker 6: You know, the grey whale strandings they could stop and
Speaker 6: like you know, maybe thirty is the number they sit
Speaker 6: on for the rest of the year, and then all
Speaker 6: of a sudden, it's not so alarming, but it doesn't
Speaker 6: seem likely. If that trend continues, this is going to
Speaker 6: be like a real, like global topic. Politicians are going
Speaker 6: to talk about this.
Speaker 1: Well, they'll be back to being the next time there's
Speaker 1: the next democratic administration comes in and they'll be reconsidering
Speaker 1: them for endangered species at connections.
Speaker 3: Ain't gonna happ now tell you that, thanks Spencer, so.
Speaker 1: Wolves eat cows crazy can't be true.
Speaker 3: It is little baby cows or big cows.
Speaker 10: Primarily baby cows. On average between three hundred and six
Speaker 10: hundred pounds. Okay, so for almost one hundred years there
Speaker 10: were no wild wolves in California. Today there's about ninety
Speaker 10: individuals in twelve packs, and new genetic testing that came
Speaker 10: out just the other day shows exactly what they're eating
Speaker 10: and it's mostly cows. If you want to pull up
Speaker 10: that map pill. This just gives an idea of where
Speaker 10: the study is going on. We're going to talk about
Speaker 10: the Lassen pack as well as the Harvey pack.
Speaker 1: What pins are we looking at here? That just that
Speaker 1: wolf one? Oh not the test.
Speaker 10: Steve wants to know about the ten. That's where I
Speaker 10: camped for sheep show last year.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm with you anyhow.
Speaker 10: So last and Pack trickled in in twenty eleven, naturally
Speaker 10: from Oregon, formerly identifying twenty sixteen as the first breeding
Speaker 10: pair at the time of the study. Here in twenty
Speaker 10: twenty three and twenty twenty four, there's fifty individuals and
Speaker 10: about six packs. And as I've become the scat study
Speaker 10: guy around these parts, this study is a scat pickup.
Speaker 10: It covers, like I said, Last and Harvey packs, which
Speaker 10: covered is about twenty wolves through the summers of twenty
Speaker 10: twenty two and twenty twenty three, which is defined by
Speaker 10: June through October because of the overlap with grazing on
Speaker 10: public land. And in this study there were eighty six
Speaker 10: percent of the SCAP samples picked up had cataly in them,
Speaker 10: compared to in the teens and twenties for mule deer
Speaker 10: or any other wild man.
Speaker 1: But I got so many dude questions. But keep going late, No,
Speaker 1: la bammy, We'll keep going. Is it embryo like are
Speaker 1: they is it after birth? No, we'll talk. Yeah, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about it.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 10: This scat pickup method, as opposed to the iguano method
Speaker 10: that was just purely counting, they.
Speaker 1: Did a very very rigorous.
Speaker 10: Extremely scientific methods, the first being mitochondrial sequencing to confirm
Speaker 10: the species that was eaten, micro satellite genotyping which confirms
Speaker 10: the identity of individual wolves, and DNA metabor coding to
Speaker 10: identify the prey DNA in that scap. And then the
Speaker 10: researchers through those methods were able to measure the exact
Speaker 10: the biomass of what was actually eaten, so they could
Speaker 10: tell in this scat eighty percent of that is cattle,
Speaker 10: even though there might be seven different things that are
Speaker 10: that are in that in that, and so it's not
Speaker 10: just how often a prey showed up, it's relatively how
Speaker 10: much that prey was eaten. And then through that so.
Speaker 3: They can tell you how many pounds of meat roughly.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's it's pretty insane, and I could not get
Speaker 10: into the specifics of how it works, but there's a
Speaker 10: long section about that. And so when you when you
Speaker 10: look into the biomass, which is which is kind of
Speaker 10: what we're talking about, cattle averaged fifty five percent of
Speaker 10: the biomass consumed versus twelve percent of mule deer and
Speaker 10: fifteen percent of small mammals, So they're just chowing on cattle.
Speaker 10: The you cannot determine what's distinguished from predation versus scavenging,
Speaker 10: which which makes the data kind of interesting. But free
Speaker 10: range calcalf operations traditionally have mortality around one or two percent,
Speaker 10: So researcher state it's reasonable to think that a meaningful
Speaker 10: share of this cattle biomass reflects actual kills.
Speaker 1: Not just scavenging. And there are a few that.
Speaker 10: Were confirmed to be actual kills, but generally it's so
Speaker 10: remote and so dispersed you can't figure out what's what's
Speaker 10: the scavenge and what's killed. Then I looked at a
Speaker 10: meta analysis of this of like how does this compare
Speaker 10: in California to wolves worldwide and how they're predating on things,
Speaker 10: and you see that livestock are hit the hardest where
Speaker 10: herds are grazing unattended and small dispersed groups. When when
Speaker 10: you look at the occurrence of this compared to natural
Speaker 10: game or that I should say that the game species
Speaker 10: there actually seems to be a preference towards game species
Speaker 10: as opposed to livestock. But the higher those higher rates
Speaker 10: don't it's not the same when those cattle are dispersed
Speaker 10: and when the prey goes down proportionally.
Speaker 8: Was it. Did you come across anything about like whether
Speaker 8: like introduce populations of wolves or like new emerging populations
Speaker 8: of wolves, like do they prey on livestock more than
Speaker 8: like escablished population.
Speaker 10: Yeah, this idea that like maybe there's these coweaters that
Speaker 10: were brought in that have been been talked to like.
Speaker 8: Or it's just like they go for the easy stuff
Speaker 8: because they're like in a new environment.
Speaker 10: No, I didn't find that specifically. There's definitely a learning
Speaker 10: curve associated with with like prey and a new species.
Speaker 10: It seems that the prey have the learning curve rather
Speaker 10: than the predators. But this meta analysis you look at,
Speaker 10: it looks like two hundred different packs across the world,
Speaker 10: and there's so some of we're going to be introduced,
Speaker 10: some have been there for a long time, and this
Speaker 10: is India, Europe, Us, and there's really not a preference
Speaker 10: for cattle across the board. But when you compare that
Speaker 10: to what's going on in California, they have no other
Speaker 10: forms of ungulates, They have small populations of elk that
Speaker 10: currently their ranges don't overlap a whole ton, and their
Speaker 10: mule deer are in significant decline, So from a peak
Speaker 10: of about a million in nineteen seventy to about five
Speaker 10: hundred thousand today. What it shows is that as prey
Speaker 10: species than free ranging cattle specifically get targeted by these wolves.
Speaker 1: So a problem with that, yeah, is that there weren't
Speaker 1: wolves there in nineteen seventy for the mule deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the wolves are just there now. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: for someone to say that wolves have switched from deer
Speaker 1: to cattle in California, they weren't there when there was
Speaker 1: a million deer.
Speaker 10: But in other places there's been there's like there's there's
Speaker 10: a study in India where there's plenty of different.
Speaker 1: Species and see where you see ungulate declines. They pick
Speaker 1: up on cattle. Yeah yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: And if there was no cattle there, they'd pick up
Speaker 1: on whatever's next dogs exactly exactly.
Speaker 10: And so it's like, so what you know, I think
Speaker 10: the big thing I came out of here with is
Speaker 10: there there really isn't a thing of cow eaters. You know,
Speaker 10: that was a big That was a big narrative in
Speaker 10: the in the Colorado introduction. They're gonna eat what's convenient,
Speaker 10: you know, they're gonna eat. They seem to have a
Speaker 10: preference for wild game.
Speaker 8: Wait a minute, Yeah, there's not a thing. There's not
Speaker 8: packs that just like over time it becomes a learned
Speaker 8: behavior that the pack leaders teach the rest of the pack,
Speaker 8: and then it becomes.
Speaker 10: A at larger scale. It only seems to happen when
Speaker 10: praise species are at at are significantly lower than what
Speaker 10: they could be, like the low carrying capacity. So they
Speaker 10: I mean, they'll go hit the cows, they'll go hit
Speaker 10: the cattle, but only when praise species are hurting a.
Speaker 1: Little bit of that feels off to me, but only
Speaker 1: kind of off how.
Speaker 8: So well, like I'll give you an example, like the
Speaker 8: wolves that were introduced in North in the North Park
Speaker 8: area of Colorado that kept hitting cows and cows and cows.
Speaker 8: There's shiploads of elk around there, there's moose around there.
Speaker 8: There's like they're not in a game poor environment, sure,
Speaker 8: you know.
Speaker 10: They're So that's a good thing that you'll hear all
Speaker 10: the time. And I talk to someone who is intimately
Speaker 10: involved with that reintroduction effort, and a lot of that
Speaker 10: report from his perspective was that there were individual landowners
Speaker 10: who were intentionally causing conflict because they didn't like that's
Speaker 10: a big man.
Speaker 1: I know statement.
Speaker 10: And so there's there's two things at plays that There's
Speaker 10: one the reimbursement portion of it, which in Colorado's management
Speaker 10: system was very generous. Like it, you know, it's kind
Speaker 10: of like your climate change things like, oh my cow died, but.
Speaker 8: What one's gonna they're not going to go kill their
Speaker 8: own calf to be like.
Speaker 10: Give me but a cow, a calf might have died,
Speaker 10: and they said wolf did that well.
Speaker 8: But they have investigators.
Speaker 1: But then you can't it's hard to splay.
Speaker 8: I don't want to distract.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. I don't have a total problem with
Speaker 1: I have a because there's there's there's inverse questions. There's
Speaker 1: this thing that wolves when you have when you have
Speaker 1: a early we were talking about buffalo, when you have
Speaker 1: a buffalo population on the ground, there's kind of this
Speaker 1: magic number at which wolves will start to pay attention
Speaker 1: to it. I can't remember what it is. You gotta
Speaker 1: have a thousand of them, or you gotta have two
Speaker 1: thousand of them. At that point the packs will start.
Speaker 1: It's sort of somehow something clicks and it becomes worthwhile
Speaker 1: in their mind to learn to kill it. And once
Speaker 1: they learn to kill it and develop the techniques to
Speaker 1: kill it, that's what the pack likes to hunt.
Speaker 10: It would see again based on a couple of studies,
Speaker 10: but these studies are globally. It seems that that data
Speaker 10: is not born out. It seems that they'll eat what's there.
Speaker 10: It's not like they learn to attack a certain thing.
Speaker 10: Maybe in like localized populations that could happen, but across
Speaker 10: the board you're not seeing it.
Speaker 1: They have a debate about this. Not you and me,
Speaker 1: we should not you should get all over people me,
Speaker 1: but like other people versus other people.
Speaker 8: I've also heard something that the larger a pack gets,
Speaker 8: the more likely it is to turn to live.
Speaker 1: Because it's big and hard to kill. Big, Pa Kyle,
Speaker 1: it's hunt deer. Go on. Just know I'm sitting over
Speaker 1: here skeptical. Okay, well you'll you'll like this.
Speaker 10: Then there's a companion study that's happening at the same
Speaker 10: time with basically the same wolf herd in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 10: and they're measuring the stress response of cattle in this area.
Speaker 10: And so this is getting at the landscape of fear idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm getting interested again, yep.
Speaker 10: And basically, if wolves are present, whether or not they're
Speaker 10: actually killing an individual cow, are they impacting the ranchers
Speaker 10: operations because they're less because there's a boarded cattle, because
Speaker 10: they don't lacktight as well because of all the other
Speaker 10: things that cortisol can lead to. So you'll see in
Speaker 10: as you compare these two herds, Traditionally, cortisol levels drop
Speaker 10: as summer temperatures rise. You know, it's like a more
Speaker 10: favorable growing season and the stress goes down, and wolf
Speaker 10: exposed herds, that drop is fifty eight percent weaker. So basically,
Speaker 10: the cattle when wolves are around, they stay stressed out,
Speaker 10: whether they're getting.
Speaker 1: Eaten or not, whether they're getting eaten or not. It's
Speaker 1: so like if you went to your own house and
Speaker 1: scared the hell out of your dog and chases all
Speaker 1: around but never killed it, the dog is gonna suffer.
Speaker 10: Old taste is good, you'll have a red cutter. And
Speaker 10: so that raised cortisol is linked tenuously at this point
Speaker 10: to lower fertility, weakened immunity, disrupted milk, or colosstrum transfer.
Speaker 10: And the takeaway from this researcher is living among wolves
Speaker 10: for cattle is a chronically stressful experience and that could
Speaker 10: ultimately have production related impacts on both the short and
Speaker 10: long term. However, it's yet, it's not proven yet. This
Speaker 10: is an idea that people like to talk about. It
Speaker 10: makes sense just when you think about it, but more
Speaker 10: research is needed to see how much that's going to happen,
Speaker 10: which gets back to the Colorado thing, because you look
Speaker 10: at compensation and how do you prove compensation that my
Speaker 10: cattle are not producing as much because there's a general
Speaker 10: air of fear in this area and different different different regions,
Speaker 10: different countries, different places have looked at that problem in
Speaker 10: different ways because ultimately this conversation like wolves are going
Speaker 10: to come back, we through ballot box biology or just
Speaker 10: walking around, like wolves are going to enter landscapes that
Speaker 10: traditionally have had cows that don't have large predators. And
Speaker 10: so you look at three different types, three different methods.
Speaker 10: There is a soul a pure India which I'm sure
Speaker 10: I pronounced wrong, Wisconsin and then Colorado had basically three
Speaker 10: different ways of compensating these ranchers in India, and they're
Speaker 10: pretty similar, like they're pretty similar agricultural economies and whatnot
Speaker 10: growing cattle or growing livestock, I should say. And India,
Speaker 10: the wolves have always been there, Like people get it,
Speaker 10: they've been there. They're cool with them, and claims are
Speaker 10: managed by the government. They have very low rates of
Speaker 10: claims of livestock predation claims in that area.
Speaker 1: What are they running goats and sheep?
Speaker 10: Yeah, because they're not slaughtering cattle in India. I think
Speaker 10: it's all goats and sheep In Wisconsin. The original funding
Speaker 10: mechanism was donations from pro wolf advocates given two ranchers
Speaker 10: who or I should say agricultural folks who had claims
Speaker 10: of wolf predation. Yep, that method lasted not long. It
Speaker 10: is not the way they do it anymore. And then
Speaker 10: in Colorado's they've introduced wolves. They pulled from the general
Speaker 10: fund and they have a very generous scheme of paying
Speaker 10: out basically predation permits. But it's tough. It's like, how
Speaker 10: do you go about doing this? How do you determine
Speaker 10: did that die by you know whatever, COVID or something
Speaker 10: and got eaten by a wolf.
Speaker 1: Let me save someone at home a mean letter. I'm
Speaker 1: just going to express their opinion now, so they don't
Speaker 1: have to write you a mean letter. If you turn
Speaker 1: out one thousand coles on range, okay, and they're up
Speaker 1: doing your thing, and then the fall comes and you
Speaker 1: go to pull them off range and you count them
Speaker 1: up and you got nine hundred and ninety, you're never
Speaker 1: gonna know what happened to them. So someone's gonna come
Speaker 1: and tell you, like, oh, the wolf mitigation thing, just
Speaker 1: show us like I don't know, I don't know where
Speaker 1: they went. They're just they're gone, right. You can't then
Speaker 1: go like, hey, I'm missing ten and someone's gonna cut
Speaker 1: you a check. Yeah, So that's part of the frustration
Speaker 1: is you got to be there and do like you
Speaker 1: got to be there here it is, it's got this
Speaker 1: tooth mark pattern on it and it leads to I'm
Speaker 1: not saying it's undoable. They lose coles for all kinds
Speaker 1: of reasons, like cows die, they got a way of dying.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this is the lead cause of death,
Speaker 1: but that is a frustration. Is the it's like it's
Speaker 1: on you, the burdens on you to show what happened
Speaker 1: to get the compensation. So that's one of the pain
Speaker 1: points around compensation. Sure, so someone doesn't need to write
Speaker 1: you that letter.
Speaker 4: Thank you you guys, so that no one has to
Speaker 4: write this letter as well. Common livestock in India includes cattle, buffalo's, goats, sheep,
Speaker 4: and poultry, and India has one of the world's largest
Speaker 4: cattle populations. But according to just quick AI search here
Speaker 4: is that it's that's mostly for the milk.
Speaker 3: Everything else.
Speaker 4: The buffalo's, the goat, sheep, poultry, pigs they eat those.
Speaker 1: Just support tough tough nut.
Speaker 10: I started this thinking I was going to hear all
Speaker 10: about how wolves are evil and their cow eaters.
Speaker 1: It's so complicated. Yeah, you got in over your waiters
Speaker 1: on that. There's a thing that no one, there's a
Speaker 1: thing that just leads to fighting wolves. Wolves. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know they say, never talk about politics or religion at dinner.
Speaker 1: Don't talk about wolves.
Speaker 8: The water rights is another one.
Speaker 6: We should just stock more elk where these wolves live.
Speaker 10: That's what I'm stud We need healthy ungulate populations.
Speaker 1: At dinner. When you go like, no, I don't want
Speaker 1: to get political, you know, then you say something real political,
Speaker 1: like I don't want to talk about wolves, but tight
Speaker 1: something about wolves. Huh? Is that it?
Speaker 3: I think that's all we got for today.
Speaker 1: That's we're gonna talk about one thing we're not gonna
Speaker 1: talk about anymore. It's about California. Here's one we were
Speaker 1: gonna coll but we're not gonna. In California, there's an
Speaker 1: area where they ban dudes from the peer fish and
Speaker 1: sharks for fear that they'd hook a shark and then
Speaker 1: swim over and bite someone who's swimming.
Speaker 3: That's what they say.
Speaker 1: If I was the mayor, I'd be like, no swimming
Speaker 1: because if a guy's fishing sharks, and his shark's tangled
Speaker 1: up on you. He might lose it. You can read the.
Speaker 3: Mediator dot com We'll see you next week.
Speaker 1: You can read about me do.
Speaker 6: Better than the Mayor and Jaws The Mediator dot com
Speaker 6: slash auction, Go buy something.
Speaker 3: Oh that's right, check out that model cow killers.
Speaker 7: Come on