Speaker 1: This is me e your podcasting a shirtless severely bug
Speaker 1: bitten in my case, underwear lessening past. You can't predict anything, Okay,
Speaker 1: Jim Williams and your your book Path of the Puma.
Speaker 1: We gotta talk about that name. We will, but I
Speaker 1: think I'll tell you. The thing that surprising most about
Speaker 1: that book, like the singular fact that I would have
Speaker 1: never imagined, is that you're saying in here that, like
Speaker 1: at the end of the last ice Age, so the
Speaker 1: place of seeing Hollo scene transition, when we lost all
Speaker 1: the crazy animals everybody likes to think about, like ma'am
Speaker 1: as the massodons, that the North America lost mountain lions. Yes, well,
Speaker 1: so the genetic work that's been done is that um,
Speaker 1: mountain lions and and other species retracted south for a
Speaker 1: little while and then recolonized a second time. So if
Speaker 1: you show if you had shown up, um, if you
Speaker 1: had shown up on the Great Plains or the Rockies
Speaker 1: or anywhere in what we now consider like the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight, there was a period of time nine thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, ten thousand years ago, whatever, when you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have found a mountain lion. Potentially, yes, but there were
Speaker 1: other species of cats here too. There was an American lion, yeah,
Speaker 1: but they went extinct cheetah. Yes, at different times. I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't know exactly, but with the fossil record and
Speaker 1: now with some of the genetic work with the cats, yes,
Speaker 1: there was a big retraction where perhaps they weren't there
Speaker 1: depending upon where you were, and then refilled in, like
Speaker 1: filled back in from South America. Well, yeah, you got
Speaker 1: the Central American and bridge and the conditions that were
Speaker 1: there that were conducive to not only cats, they need
Speaker 1: something to eat, they have to prey. So there was
Speaker 1: probably some mix of you know, is there food in
Speaker 1: the grocery store or are their shoppers you know, or both?
Speaker 1: And and yes that that that's the current thought and
Speaker 1: right now, so they refilled in. And is it true
Speaker 1: that now or was it true at the time of
Speaker 1: European contact or is it both? I guess that mountain
Speaker 1: lions are enjoy the widest distribution of any land mammal
Speaker 1: in the Western hemisphere. Yes, yes, you're correct on on
Speaker 1: on both counts. And if you think about it, um,
Speaker 1: you know, there was all always native cultures present and
Speaker 1: and mountain lions, and and that there's a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different names for mountain lions as humans, and depending
Speaker 1: upon on on tribal culture and ancestor stories, there's lots
Speaker 1: of different names, depend upon you're out in the United
Speaker 1: States and in which tribe they play a significant role
Speaker 1: in in pre Columbian civilization and in the Americas, and
Speaker 1: then of course, um, you know, as this country was
Speaker 1: settled by white Europeans for the most part. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: cats were here from coast to coast, and slowly but surely,
Speaker 1: you know, we were really effective at at reducing a
Speaker 1: whole host of species moving west. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about that project of a limit, like are very
Speaker 1: successful but not totally successful efforts to eliminate them from
Speaker 1: the face of the earth. But what so they can
Speaker 1: extend from you talk about in your book. That's why
Speaker 1: I set the table here a little bit. You talk
Speaker 1: about in your book there's an area in Patagonia where
Speaker 1: they prey on penguins, and then they're all the way
Speaker 1: up into southern Yukon. Yes, so they're like they're like
Speaker 1: it's a continuous it's like a continuous strand of them
Speaker 1: extending that distance pretty much. So it's fascinating to me
Speaker 1: and as a wildlife biologist and particularly working in Montana
Speaker 1: or you know, in the Western United States, per se
Speaker 1: to find you know, my colleagues down there picking cats
Speaker 1: up with penguins in their mouth. And these aren't the
Speaker 1: ice penguins you think of. These are the magillantic penguins.
Speaker 1: But they're very similar. They're a penguin and they they
Speaker 1: nest in these colonies like a peri dog colony right
Speaker 1: on the coast. And what you have to remember with
Speaker 1: a cat with a puma and and by the way,
Speaker 1: a mountain lion, a cougar of puma, it's all the
Speaker 1: same thing. You know, we'll talk about sub subspecies if
Speaker 1: you know, I want the subspecies and popular names are
Speaker 1: things I want to get quick. Well, So the back
Speaker 1: to the penguins though, if you think about it, this animal,
Speaker 1: it's a very efficient um stock and ambush predator and
Speaker 1: they typically and most of the research that's been done
Speaker 1: take the most vulnerable and abundant prey. And Kenny logan
Speaker 1: researcher in New Mexico, worked on cats for a long time.
Speaker 1: Um that was actually his quote, and it's it's it
Speaker 1: bears out in every single project. So if penguins are there,
Speaker 1: it shouldn't surprise us. But to me it looked very
Speaker 1: awkward to see penguin in a puma's mouth on a
Speaker 1: camera trap photo. And then you go north. You mentioned
Speaker 1: the Yukon, so you know, unlike a Lynx or even
Speaker 1: they're more similar to a bobcat at puma is. But
Speaker 1: unlike a Lynx, which is built for the cold, deep snow,
Speaker 1: they're light, they got thick fur um you know, the
Speaker 1: whole hair Lynx relationship amount lines kind of the sports
Speaker 1: car of the cats there for shorter. They need a
Speaker 1: lot of meat. They're gonna sink in the snow, so
Speaker 1: there you know where they can get around and where
Speaker 1: they can be effective at finding food. It's going to
Speaker 1: be limited a little bit moving north, So historically about
Speaker 1: central b c. Alberta, there's kind of a line. But
Speaker 1: as we've explored and opened up habitat for um oil
Speaker 1: and gas, there are strips of land that produce all
Speaker 1: of a sudden deer and elk food, and deer and
Speaker 1: elk can move north while on the backs of deer
Speaker 1: and elk, these cats have punched the north into the
Speaker 1: pretty far north and in fact, the furthest North was
Speaker 1: a cat that was found frozen in the back of
Speaker 1: a of an old car. And uh, I read about that,
Speaker 1: but I don't even understand it. Yeah, it probably curled
Speaker 1: up in there, probably thought it was you know the
Speaker 1: cats like cover. We can talk about that too, But
Speaker 1: probably I thought it was a great place to rest
Speaker 1: and starved to death. Cattle starve to death. Mountain lions do.
Speaker 1: And you know every year, depending upon where they're at
Speaker 1: and and there their plane of health and winter condition
Speaker 1: and pray abundance, they can starve. I mean, if they
Speaker 1: don't eat, they die. Didn't one turn up? I remember
Speaker 1: reading this years ago, that one turned up in the
Speaker 1: Mackenzie Delta, but its the years have been frozen off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty common. I've I've handled cats even here in
Speaker 1: Montana with you know, the tips of the tail, the
Speaker 1: tips of the years. Uh, you know, winters. We we
Speaker 1: we live a pretty cushy life. We're not out there nature.
Speaker 1: A friend of ours just how in Handler. I don't
Speaker 1: know if he killed her friend call, but they killed
Speaker 1: one that only had three toes And what do you
Speaker 1: think fight or do you think it could have been
Speaker 1: frost fighter? And lose it to that I'd be guessing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: all the above. Yeah, I found him. You know, I've
Speaker 1: had a cat. I talked about him in the book
Speaker 1: as a male. Yes, how Man named him, you know,
Speaker 1: and I call it cat number six or whatever. But
Speaker 1: it's just you know, as biologists, you're trying to name stuff.
Speaker 1: But you know, my Howman, they named every single animal
Speaker 1: because they know and they can relate to that. And
Speaker 1: he was missing an eyeball. I mean, probably lost it
Speaker 1: in a fight with another male, would be my guess.
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, that was an interesting story reading about
Speaker 1: old Hoss. Another cool story. Yeah, an rcle story in
Speaker 1: the book? Is it this? I know this wasn't you,
Speaker 1: but there's an eyewitness account of a lion we got.
Speaker 1: Let's the next thing we talked. I was, let's talking
Speaker 1: about names, and let's settle on a name. A lion.
Speaker 1: Mountain lion is on a mule deer. Someone sees this.
Speaker 1: The mule deer bucks the lion off and then they
Speaker 1: getting a scuffle and he actually sticks the line when
Speaker 1: his antler. That happened right out. If you look at
Speaker 1: your window here in Bozeman, on the top of the
Speaker 1: bridgers there was some muel deer researchers flying radio meal
Speaker 1: deer and they were spending and got to watch that
Speaker 1: whole scenario unfold up on the divide here, and then
Speaker 1: you got to witness from a helicopter lion bust to
Speaker 1: move on a big horn but then lost the big horn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind of our fault. You messed on up.
Speaker 1: We were doing an annual sheep survey and I had
Speaker 1: a graduate student down there. That's the chapter on ontary
Speaker 1: ink and the work in the gates of the mountains there.
Speaker 1: But we were my pilot was about to retire and
Speaker 1: it was one of his last flights and we were
Speaker 1: flying sheep and I had it just so happened, the
Speaker 1: capture crew and the graduate student coming down the hill
Speaker 1: for the morning. When you fly, you have to go
Speaker 1: with the cracking on where it's less windy, it's safer
Speaker 1: and the animals are out right. And so we're kind
Speaker 1: of going up this mountain slowly looking at you know,
Speaker 1: different sheep and um. Out of the corner of my eye,
Speaker 1: I could see a couple of hound boxes on trucks
Speaker 1: coming down along the baretooth gaming It's got long, muddy
Speaker 1: road but just you know, you just kind of see it,
Speaker 1: but you're back on the task at hand. We're looking
Speaker 1: at sheep and I see this flash going up below me,
Speaker 1: and I thought, and I took a look. And this
Speaker 1: is back before digital cameras. I had one of those
Speaker 1: thirty five milimeter pandas at my feet. It was a
Speaker 1: little more clunky, and I got that thing up and
Speaker 1: I yelled lyon and my pilot, you know, he was
Speaker 1: very good, and he was just on it in a second,
Speaker 1: and it was it looked like a big male just
Speaker 1: racing right up on a big horn ram. And of
Speaker 1: course the cat. The ram went one way and we're
Speaker 1: in the chopper, and the cat went to the other
Speaker 1: and stopped and turned around and he literally looked at us,
Speaker 1: almost in disgusted. But then then he you know, then
Speaker 1: it was like, what the heck is that? You know,
Speaker 1: we're in a chopper and noisy. The houndsman then treated
Speaker 1: the cat right. Well, it's kind of a funny story.
Speaker 1: So my my pilot was, you know, near retire. He
Speaker 1: was mature and uh and and I told him, I said,
Speaker 1: you know, the capture crews here, get back down to
Speaker 1: the headquarters where the old ranch buildings and the and
Speaker 1: the guys were just pulling in with the dogs and
Speaker 1: the tranquilizers and the gear, and so he took the
Speaker 1: helicopter and we just bombed down and landed and uh
Speaker 1: and I said, you know, I believe this is a
Speaker 1: cat right up there on the knoll. And they're like huh.
Speaker 1: And they get start yanking dogs and leashes out of
Speaker 1: boxes and um, and they got their gear and the
Speaker 1: grad students ready to go, and and off they go
Speaker 1: on foot up the drainage, you know, following the helmon.
Speaker 1: And we kept the dogs on leash or you just
Speaker 1: don't turn them loose until you get a track or
Speaker 1: they get a real good cent right kind of shortly
Speaker 1: leash them and uh, my pilot's like, let's just sit
Speaker 1: right here. He goes, We're I'm too old for this.
Speaker 1: He goes, We're gonna fly up there. So we you know,
Speaker 1: it was on the wildlife management area, so we waited,
Speaker 1: and sure enough, the cat um treat immediately. The dogs,
Speaker 1: you know, babe treat pretty quick. And it was kind
Speaker 1: of a grunt to get up there. And away they went.
Speaker 1: And as soon as we could hear those dogs barking tree.
Speaker 1: That's the term, the how man use the barking treede Um,
Speaker 1: we hopped in that top or I've never done this before.
Speaker 1: It almost felt guilty. And we flew up, landed on
Speaker 1: the top, turned it off, and I walked down and
Speaker 1: and uh, there's a cat in the tree. And we
Speaker 1: started to process and it was kind of a crazy
Speaker 1: day combination Big Horn Mountain lion day. Real quick, before
Speaker 1: we get into the names, um layout, how you spent
Speaker 1: your career, I mean, you spend your career immersed and
Speaker 1: wild boy, but just give us a quick sketch of that. Okay,
Speaker 1: so um, I guess what first, it's kind of it's
Speaker 1: kind of cheesy. But when I as a kid, you
Speaker 1: know when when color films and back in the early
Speaker 1: seventies and and no joke, my parents took me to
Speaker 1: an whole Disney movie called Charlie the Lonesome Cougar. I
Speaker 1: never knew then. Clearly they end up spending a career
Speaker 1: in and out of people and cats at that time.
Speaker 1: But to this day, it's still as cheesy as all
Speaker 1: get out. But I still love it. Those are inspirations
Speaker 1: that well, I mean, you know, I love like, that's
Speaker 1: a cool species, that's a cool animal. And I was
Speaker 1: born in the farm country of Iowa, and I always
Speaker 1: looked to the west, and I knew bears and moose
Speaker 1: and links were out there. And uh, but you know,
Speaker 1: we we're in Iowa. Pheasants and deer were not that
Speaker 1: common when I was sure. Man, I was born in
Speaker 1: sixty one, you know, and my dad was on the
Speaker 1: football team for the Hawkeyes and Ioa City and and
Speaker 1: but I get that for Fishing Game magazine as a kid,
Speaker 1: you know, random that was the greatest magazine. Remember, written
Speaker 1: a couple of stories and there years ago, and and
Speaker 1: but I get that, and I couldn't wait for it.
Speaker 1: And we had had a little muskrat trap line right
Speaker 1: got me out. But eventually, you know, farm country, you know,
Speaker 1: had some difficulties. My parents were a muskrat trapper. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I got a hat, little trooper hat. You know, some
Speaker 1: run around a bunch of Victor number one single long springs,
Speaker 1: no doubt, yes, and uh and and then you know,
Speaker 1: Connor bears weren't too popular until later. And actually had
Speaker 1: had a great time on a trap line. It freeze
Speaker 1: out here in Montana when I was a field biologist
Speaker 1: out a Great Falls um just thousands of muskrats there,
Speaker 1: and we had a just and I was lucky to
Speaker 1: get one one year and and although it was you know,
Speaker 1: minus zero, but yeah, it's it's you know, it's just
Speaker 1: another cool experience. But yeah. So I went from Iowa.
Speaker 1: I landed in San Diego with my mom and and
Speaker 1: I kind of everything I did and went a little
Speaker 1: too far south, but you know what, I loved it.
Speaker 1: I mean as four blocks from the beach and Pacific Beach,
Speaker 1: and I learned how to long board and and you know,
Speaker 1: kind of eventually a friend of mine give me a
Speaker 1: mask and I stuck that mask on and looked underwater,
Speaker 1: and wow, it was just the marine life inspired me.
Speaker 1: So that man, I got to get a biology degree.
Speaker 1: It was marine biology, was mindergrad. A lot of events,
Speaker 1: sea world and ocean world, a lot of different jobs
Speaker 1: I had, um eventually I was at I finished my
Speaker 1: undergrad at Florida. Stay started at San Diego State, finished
Speaker 1: at Florida State. My dad went there from Iowa, right
Speaker 1: and his wife Jedty, and so I got to Florida
Speaker 1: and I got my marine biology degree and I ended
Speaker 1: up working for another oceanarium called Ocean World. It was
Speaker 1: a very small nineteen sixties fifties looking really the kind
Speaker 1: of places they got like tanks with fish and tourists
Speaker 1: come look at them. Oh yeah, and and and I
Speaker 1: enjoyed people, and and I got hired. They knew I
Speaker 1: worked at Sea World, So I got hired to you know,
Speaker 1: do the dolphin show and a and a sea lion show.
Speaker 1: And they never had to wrestle alligators. Didn't tell me
Speaker 1: that when I got the job, but that was interesting.
Speaker 1: Um and and this was shan Oh yeah, I got friends.
Speaker 1: My nickname was Balona Jim and uh so, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: It was pretty funny. And in fact, in the alligator
Speaker 1: show they even had a had a little spiel that
Speaker 1: they'd say Jim was, you know, was abandoned as a
Speaker 1: child in the Everglades and raised by seminole. The terminal
Speaker 1: trial had to wrestle alligators, have blonde hair, blue wide right.
Speaker 1: It was kind of hockey, but nonetheless pay the bills.
Speaker 1: And that was in the mid eighties and right before
Speaker 1: Yellowstone Burn eighty eight. Um, I'll never forget. So I
Speaker 1: came back to my apartment in Fort Lauderdale, there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of bullet holes all over kind of the garage
Speaker 1: and had crack. This is that my m vice cigarette
Speaker 1: boat days and his apartments on Little Canal and some
Speaker 1: some kind of crime went bad and without enough and
Speaker 1: cable TV just came out, and I think it was
Speaker 1: out of Atlanta, the crash course in American history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I a TV came on and I saw that
Speaker 1: Nature I don't know what it was called Science Nature
Speaker 1: a Discovery. It was the first one. And they had
Speaker 1: the Craighead brothers working a bear in the park and
Speaker 1: the bear comes off the drug prematurely and both brothers,
Speaker 1: you know, they were putting a radio called they were
Speaker 1: experimenting with the first tranquilizers and radio callers. They jump
Speaker 1: in this old station wagon and Yellowstone and that bear
Speaker 1: just pile drives into it, charging it mad, and and
Speaker 1: I just remember thinking, wow, oh man, that's just really cool.
Speaker 1: I want to go out west. I still had that
Speaker 1: yearning to go out west. Right, and so I this
Speaker 1: is pretty Google pre compute. Well not the mainframe computers
Speaker 1: were around. We had punch cards. But so I got
Speaker 1: to the library to the card catalog, right, and I
Speaker 1: pulled out papers from schools around Yellowstone. Right away, I
Speaker 1: was inspired, and I landed on Bozeman. And that's how
Speaker 1: I found Huh who rode something on bears and big
Speaker 1: Game and Elk and Harold picked in Huh. Okay, So
Speaker 1: I went got home, called him and no, Joe, ok
Speaker 1: I just said, Hey, this is Jim. I want to
Speaker 1: go to graduate school. I want to work on you know,
Speaker 1: you know, bears, elk, deer sheep something. And he goes,
Speaker 1: where where are you calling from? And I said, well, Florida.
Speaker 1: What do you do? Mr Williams a gator wrestler. I say,
Speaker 1: I'm a dolphin trainers And I told him and there
Speaker 1: was this long, pregnant pause and he goes, do you
Speaker 1: know it's snows in Montana. I'm like, oh God. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he goes, you don't have a chance in hell unless
Speaker 1: you'd show up and get relationships. I got a line
Speaker 1: of students from here and all over the world. Bozeman's
Speaker 1: kind of the mecca for wildlife work here. You know,
Speaker 1: we're very lucky with the colleges here for wildlife and fisheries.
Speaker 1: So okay, I'd loaded everything into my jeep. Hung an
Speaker 1: old shark jaw on my mirror and drove out west
Speaker 1: and he eventually walked into his office and he fell
Speaker 1: out of his chair. And anyways, still a dear friend today.
Speaker 1: And he showed up at one of my book signings
Speaker 1: in Seattle, which was kind of heartwarming too. But that's
Speaker 1: how I got to Montana thirty years ago eight alright,
Speaker 1: when Yellowstone was burning, well, I came. He actually had
Speaker 1: me working on bighorn sheep, black bear moose, trying to
Speaker 1: create a funded study to get a master's degree. Right,
Speaker 1: it's got to be funded. You have have a stipend.
Speaker 1: And I had a lot of projects that were like
Speaker 1: really good, but then they stopped. And then one day
Speaker 1: I walked into his office. He called me in and
Speaker 1: he was sent out and he throws this Morris Horknock
Speaker 1: or he's kind of the patron saint of Pumas on
Speaker 1: the planet, did all the original work, and another dear friend.
Speaker 1: But he throws his monograph from Idaho, the first study
Speaker 1: ever done on on Puma's mountain lions, if you will,
Speaker 1: on my lap. And I looked at that, and I'll
Speaker 1: never forget. I looked at him. I said, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and he goes well, you gotta pass the test. I
Speaker 1: had to go up and meet the biologist in Augusta,
Speaker 1: and you know, I'm Florida in California. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: this will be good, and I drove up. Then we
Speaker 1: hit it off right away, and so yeah, then from
Speaker 1: then on, whether it was working on cats directly, supporting students,
Speaker 1: working on cats, working on hunting seasons for cats, you know,
Speaker 1: working with South Americans and cats, and thirty years goes
Speaker 1: buying a blank. All right, okay quick, So yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: say a name for one, and then you say a
Speaker 1: name for one, and then you say a name from one.
Speaker 1: We'll see how if we can get around twice. Paint painter, catamount, panther, cougar, Puma, Panji, mountain, lion.
Speaker 1: I'm out. Yeah, he's tapping out what would be miss?
Speaker 1: I mean think he wrote, um, you did catamount right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in back in Boone's day, Daniel Boone's day, they
Speaker 1: said painter, yeah, painters yea. And there's some South American
Speaker 1: names too. That's what I'm drawing a blank. Uh Puma,
Speaker 1: panti oh cis quick? My my, my colleagues, and and
Speaker 1: say the s and coutiney tribes and I'm mispronouncing that
Speaker 1: and and but then it's the word for mountain line.
Speaker 1: Why are there's so many names? I personally think that
Speaker 1: as as humans, you know, when we you know, you know,
Speaker 1: we you know, we evolved in and came out of
Speaker 1: ray data of Africa, right and you had hunt your
Speaker 1: hunter gatherers originally. And and I think that as humans
Speaker 1: around the planet, we hold these both prey species and
Speaker 1: predators or large carnivores in very high regard. And uh
Speaker 1: and we as because we're humans and typically not the prey.
Speaker 1: Now we associate with the predators. And I think when
Speaker 1: you do that, whether it's native cultures or or or
Speaker 1: around the world or even today, people kind of associate.
Speaker 1: If you're a deer hunter, you know, you realize how
Speaker 1: clumsy you you are versus own mount line and how
Speaker 1: they are not you know. And I just think people
Speaker 1: create folklore and stories and camp fires stories because we
Speaker 1: can associate and relate to them a little bit. You know,
Speaker 1: as a deer hunter, when you're pursuing deer, you're kind
Speaker 1: of doing what a what a mountain lions doing? Right?
Speaker 1: And I imagine three time snow lepperds, tigers cats the same.
Speaker 1: These different cultures around the planet all have different um
Speaker 1: folklore stories on how they relate to that fellow carnivore.
Speaker 1: It's kind of surprising in the name thing. I don't
Speaker 1: want to be it's death, but it's interesting me because
Speaker 1: uh mule deer, right, not a hell of a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, you know, most things there's not. But then
Speaker 1: you have these kind of like examples like that this
Speaker 1: thing that that carried so many titles with it, so
Speaker 1: many names with it, you know, wolverines, right, besides indigenous languages,
Speaker 1: but like in our popular vernacular, there's no option. But
Speaker 1: you'll be sitting around talking to guys that like mountain
Speaker 1: lions and people be calling them lines, cats, cougars the same.
Speaker 1: People will use the same different words then you would
Speaker 1: describe at the time of European contact. Let's just use
Speaker 1: that like a baseline. We kind of touched on that
Speaker 1: that there might have been a dark age for mountain
Speaker 1: lions prior to the arrival of Man or contemporaneus with
Speaker 1: the rival Man where they got knocked back and still
Speaker 1: had some strongholds in South America. But like European contact,
Speaker 1: coast to coast right coast to coast and lower forty
Speaker 1: eight side to side, top to bottom. How was it
Speaker 1: what enabled us to damage them so bad? Well, I
Speaker 1: think two things. You gotta We had kind of a
Speaker 1: um collectively um the settlers, um. You know, the European
Speaker 1: settlers are referred to as white visitors and strangers. If um,
Speaker 1: we had a kind of a colonial um oh method
Speaker 1: to our madness. It was pretty much eliminate anything. There
Speaker 1: was good animals and bad animals, and the good animals
Speaker 1: provided food into bad animals will compete with us for
Speaker 1: that food. And I think, um, not only mountain lions,
Speaker 1: but all carnivores, wolves included with poisons and bounties. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, we were pretty effective and and frankly we're
Speaker 1: pretty effective with onulets of well contradiction there as we
Speaker 1: eliminated a lot of good ones too. But you know what,
Speaker 1: we limited the good ones on accident, and we eliminated
Speaker 1: the bad ones like very intentionally. Oh yeah, and today
Speaker 1: that's still pervasive today. I mean it's human nature in
Speaker 1: my mind, if it's if a fellow hunter, whether it's
Speaker 1: a person or an animal, competes with us for our
Speaker 1: our groceries or what we like to do. You know,
Speaker 1: it sets up conflict to some degree. And but we yeah,
Speaker 1: we were collective collectively as a society, very effective using
Speaker 1: poisons and bounties and most of those were eliminated in
Speaker 1: about nineteen sixty. But there was a period, especially on
Speaker 1: the wildlife restoration days. You gotta remember World War two.
Speaker 1: Right after or it ended, the g I Bill was
Speaker 1: created and that created a lot of graduate programs for
Speaker 1: fish and wildlie biologists. Right, it was a big turning
Speaker 1: point um once they got here. It was it was
Speaker 1: restore big horns, it was restore mountain goats, restore elk
Speaker 1: believe it or not, restore whitetail, deer and mildeer and antelope,
Speaker 1: which are pretty common. Now. That's that's interesting. I never
Speaker 1: heard that that idea about that. So many guys coming
Speaker 1: in and get an opportunity to go to college. Yeah,
Speaker 1: created like helped create wildlife program some states, believe it
Speaker 1: or not. Stephen they there was a directive to come
Speaker 1: home and create more meat on the landscape, wild meat
Speaker 1: for our boys when they got home from the war.
Speaker 1: And so and then you have out a leopol creating
Speaker 1: this initial game management programs and others, and you had
Speaker 1: this kind of almost magical nexus. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it happened today, of creating the academic program, but most important,
Speaker 1: creating the funding mechanism of the Pittman Robertson Act where
Speaker 1: it's a user pay system, right, and and the creating
Speaker 1: the actual wildlife and fisheries management kind of programs in
Speaker 1: the country and a funding mechanism together, then wildlife was
Speaker 1: able to take off state by state? Do you know?
Speaker 1: Do you understand how? You know? I've read about the wolfers,
Speaker 1: who would who would poison wolves and how and I
Speaker 1: don't know, you know, idot like fact check this that carefully,
Speaker 1: but it just seems like to be a thing, you um,
Speaker 1: it just seems to be like generally accepted that as
Speaker 1: the as the market hunters eliminated bison, some of them
Speaker 1: transitioned quite smoothly into being predator guys. Wolfers, and I
Speaker 1: had read about how they would take a animal, take
Speaker 1: an ungulate they're buffalo or whatever, and kill it, but
Speaker 1: very quickly inject stryct nine into its circulatory system so
Speaker 1: that while it's heart still pumping, it would lace the
Speaker 1: entire body and then they would the wolfers would let
Speaker 1: that sit and then go out and look around and
Speaker 1: collect up poison stuff. Is that your understanding about, because
Speaker 1: everybody likes to talk about poisoning grizzlies, poisoning mountain lions,
Speaker 1: but what does the like, what was the actual delivery mechanism. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's good and I have not heard that although
Speaker 1: you know that makes sense, it's kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1: But poison lace bates. And again, we got to think
Speaker 1: about right now, we think about cattle on the landscape,
Speaker 1: and I'm talking the West primarily, but it was domestic
Speaker 1: sheep back in the day, right back when most of
Speaker 1: that and and domestic sheep can almost they're kind of fragile,
Speaker 1: especially when it comes to even small carnivores around coyotes,
Speaker 1: you know, bobcats, I mean domestic sheep, uh, And they
Speaker 1: all had herders. And protecting flocks of domestic sheep in
Speaker 1: mountainous areas is extremely difficult, more so than cattle even,
Speaker 1: And so poison was a common way to control predators.
Speaker 1: And again it was that whole concept of good animals
Speaker 1: and bad animals, lacing baits, lacing poison math. But what
Speaker 1: happened is it's indiscriminate killing. So not only do you
Speaker 1: kill the bear, but you kill the fisher at the martin,
Speaker 1: the wolverine, the eagle, you kill anything that comes around,
Speaker 1: depending upon the poison that was used at the time,
Speaker 1: So it's some it's it is indiscriminate, and even birds
Speaker 1: of prey and and so it was very effective. And
Speaker 1: then you throw a bounty on top of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: explain how those systems were well, depending upon the state
Speaker 1: and depending upon the government at the time. Um, trappers,
Speaker 1: hunters were paid for pelts, you know, to turn them
Speaker 1: in and and and frankly, that's probably created an economic
Speaker 1: activity in that point in time in our country to
Speaker 1: you go out and learn how to kill cats, kill bears, coyotes. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I assumes it probably was. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: there were some pretty tough times and some pretty rural
Speaker 1: remote places. I mean, Montana is still frankly remote now
Speaker 1: think about it. You know, Montana, Wyna, and Idaho, you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty years ago, it probably was good money
Speaker 1: for them, or it was survival. Yeah, probably not a
Speaker 1: lot observed, but there were still bounty systems up through
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, right, correct, Well, yeah, and and I
Speaker 1: think yes, and there was kind of a staggered rate
Speaker 1: of eliminating those And and again I'm going to go
Speaker 1: back to the field of wildlife management was created, right
Speaker 1: and World War two ended, the biologists got here, and
Speaker 1: then this whole concept of not just pure game management,
Speaker 1: but the whole notion of ecology and systems kind of
Speaker 1: came on board, and that some of the bad animals,
Speaker 1: which are predators talking about cats want of Manny had
Speaker 1: a role to play in the ecosystem and out on Leopold,
Speaker 1: you know, talks about it in Sand County Almanact, the
Speaker 1: the mountain and the green screen fire dying in the
Speaker 1: woolf side. But it took him a long time to
Speaker 1: get there, right, And so that's the thing I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people, well anybody's read his book knows,
Speaker 1: but you know, he went out, like when he moved
Speaker 1: out west, he went out to kill predators. It was
Speaker 1: he that's his day was spent, has burned his time
Speaker 1: up try to eliminate predators from landscape. And it has
Speaker 1: some epiphanies around that. Oh yeah, well, once by I'll
Speaker 1: just started looking at the habitat and the landscape as
Speaker 1: as a baseline versus the species that changed a lot.
Speaker 1: Then then that whole notion of systems um ecosystems came
Speaker 1: about and landscape ecology and and and what role carnivores
Speaker 1: play and that you feel that that thinking help usher
Speaker 1: out the bounty face. Yeah, well that a little bit.
Speaker 1: But if you want to go there, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: my thoughts on what happened. And I think I'm right,
Speaker 1: but arga. But because it's it's let me stack a
Speaker 1: question in there before you do that, okay, because I
Speaker 1: feel like it's gonna segue. Uh how bad did it get?
Speaker 1: Like like how loaded line numbers get very low? They were?
Speaker 1: And um more. Dr Morris Hornocker, who I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: is kind of the patron saint of poem as that's
Speaker 1: what I call him in my book. But he's a
Speaker 1: dear friend of bird hunting fool and he's even still
Speaker 1: hunting elk and you know, he's long retired, but he
Speaker 1: had to work in Idaho, in the largest wilderness area
Speaker 1: left in the United States to get a large enough
Speaker 1: sample to make it statistically valid to say anything scientifically
Speaker 1: about cats. That was the first study in the sixties
Speaker 1: and he couldn't find him anywhere. He couldn't find a
Speaker 1: population large enough, or that was or he didn't lose
Speaker 1: the sample every time he put some marks out. This
Speaker 1: is the early radio colors, right, and your ear tags
Speaker 1: they're all getting shot still back in the sixties. But
Speaker 1: then he had to go into the frank Church or
Speaker 1: something way back to find to find a reasonable population. Yes, big,
Speaker 1: absolutely so they were really knocked back. You've got landowner tolerance,
Speaker 1: you've got bounties, you had poisons, and there was this,
Speaker 1: you know, generations of thought of these good animals and
Speaker 1: bad animals, and it's hard eliminated from the Eastern US
Speaker 1: except Florida, as I understand it. Correct. Yes, um, that's
Speaker 1: interesting too. Yes, there's some there's some pretty remote country
Speaker 1: in Florida even today in central Florida, on those large
Speaker 1: swampy ranches, between the insects and the plants, they're pretty
Speaker 1: harsh for humans. You can be pretty tough to get
Speaker 1: in there. And you can see why there is some
Speaker 1: impenetrable areas. But so so basically, like for any like
Speaker 1: for any practical purpose, there any ecological for ecological viability, okay,
Speaker 1: never mind like like genetic extinction like ecological viability. Basically
Speaker 1: everything from the Rockies east excluding a small portion of
Speaker 1: Florida or Texas down in the very bottom, a little
Speaker 1: bit in the middle, but still in West Texas eliminated. Correct,
Speaker 1: that's a yeah, that's that's as I understand now. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that every odd year and mountain lands just
Speaker 1: like well, it's dispersed a long ways. Yeah, take one
Speaker 1: shows up, but for all that's what that's what I
Speaker 1: want to talk about. Is another thing I'd like to
Speaker 1: get to eventually, if you have time, is the what
Speaker 1: used to be dismissed in the early two thousand's, even
Speaker 1: dismisses every lion that showed up in a weird spot. Okay, Iowa, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: Michigan was always an escaped zoo animal, always an escape pet.
Speaker 1: But then I'd be like, man, it must be a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot of people letting full grown, clawed,
Speaker 1: seemingly very wild bellies, full of dear meat mouth lions loose.
Speaker 1: They show up in freak places. They just get up
Speaker 1: and go. So, so answer your question about what if
Speaker 1: you know, I was going to make sure that you
Speaker 1: hit this point. Yeah, because what you think, what I
Speaker 1: think but but I wanted people to know how bad
Speaker 1: it got in order to talk about what saved real bad.
Speaker 1: And so what I think happened. You had this tradition
Speaker 1: of it's very difficult to run cats, and that's a
Speaker 1: term where you turn a trailing hound loose, especially trained
Speaker 1: to smell the scent of a cat, which we're not
Speaker 1: capable as humans of doing that, right, But these dogs
Speaker 1: are their canets, right. They're like a bear. They see
Speaker 1: the world through their nose. And so they switched from
Speaker 1: bounties to some recreational chasing to train those and there
Speaker 1: became a culture of hound men and hound women, but
Speaker 1: hound men primarily. And as that culture and not occupation
Speaker 1: but recreational activity UM evolved and became more popular in
Speaker 1: each Western state. It's something to do in the winter,
Speaker 1: it's fun to go out. UM. You have all of
Speaker 1: a sudden people enjoying a mounta lion on the landscape,
Speaker 1: and the enjoying that relationship with the hound and the
Speaker 1: cat in the woods, because these hounds and cats will
Speaker 1: take you to places you've never been. And I think
Speaker 1: what happened that, well, I know what happened, and I
Speaker 1: know what happened in Montana is all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: with the with the science coming on in the biologists
Speaker 1: in the sixties and seventies were starting to study more things, right,
Speaker 1: But all of a sudden, you have a user group
Speaker 1: that is now not biologists. They're pretty earl in nature,
Speaker 1: they're pretty tough. It's extremely difficult to do advocating for
Speaker 1: a mountain lion, and that had never happened before outside
Speaker 1: of maybe someone just you know, thinking they're a cool animal.
Speaker 1: So now you have this culture and the culture of
Speaker 1: running cats with trailing hounds in Montana, particularly where I
Speaker 1: live in northwest Montana, goes back over a hundred years.
Speaker 1: We have a long winner and there are holman and
Speaker 1: families and hound women that have dogs and they'll tree
Speaker 1: and photograph cats all winter long for six months. I
Speaker 1: was hanging out with the houndsman yesterday morning. He's treated
Speaker 1: two hundred. Yeah, he's killed two in regrets that regrets
Speaker 1: the second one really and that that's what wishes he
Speaker 1: hadn't have done it. They they stephen and they you
Speaker 1: asked me the question. I think it was the helmand
Speaker 1: they carried the They punched above their weight politically, you know,
Speaker 1: with the regulators, whether it was state fish and wildlife commissions,
Speaker 1: household deep connection to the like, like their families had
Speaker 1: a long track record on the lands. I go in
Speaker 1: and make a common as a biologist, you know that. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm a biologist. Yeah, I'm you know, it's looking at
Speaker 1: science and papers and research. But if I go in
Speaker 1: there and I'm a how Man and I known and
Speaker 1: I I've known your family for three generations, and you're
Speaker 1: a legislator, and I'm a how Man and my family
Speaker 1: has been there, you know who they're gonna listen to more. Well,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, you got these tough very in
Speaker 1: the woods all winter long to you everything everything. Their loggers,
Speaker 1: they're miners there there there, you name it, their ranchers
Speaker 1: even in some cases in some states. But all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you have a user group that really treads
Speaker 1: theers the opportunity to have that dog cat relationship all
Speaker 1: winter long. Well, that's a game changer in my mind.
Speaker 1: Then they, along with the biologists in about nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one together to work the state commissions in each state
Speaker 1: to make them game animals. So you got rid of bounties.
Speaker 1: In the early sixties, for the most part, but that
Speaker 1: as soon as cats became a legally classified game animal.
Speaker 1: And this is a big deal because once that happens
Speaker 1: in a state, now you have a game warden to
Speaker 1: protects them with the law that any state can and adopts.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, they're treated like a deer and
Speaker 1: out of season. Take all of a sudden, it's illegal.
Speaker 1: That is a game changer. And it was the howman
Speaker 1: working with the Department biologists in these states that that
Speaker 1: was this wonderful relationship that that made that happen in
Speaker 1: my mind and to this day and in my country.
Speaker 1: You know, I write a little I have a whole
Speaker 1: chapter on season setting in there. It gets kind of wild,
Speaker 1: kind of western at times. But to this day, the
Speaker 1: hound men, the hound handlers, uh if you will, are
Speaker 1: the most stringent advocates for cats on the landscape. And
Speaker 1: they watch, they watch every move we make. If we
Speaker 1: think we're killing or prescribing too many females or too
Speaker 1: many cats in an area, it's the hound handlers that
Speaker 1: are front and center in Helen at the capitol or
Speaker 1: at a meeting and beating on the table saying, you know,
Speaker 1: listen to me. I'm in the woods all winner. This
Speaker 1: is important to me. That's why I think we have cats.
Speaker 1: You know, there there's a ceiling of natural density that
Speaker 1: they don't pretty much go above. But cats recovered because
Speaker 1: of its good science. It was done, you know, Morris
Speaker 1: Hornucker started a whole host of students and and we
Speaker 1: had advocates in the Helman that could influence the local
Speaker 1: legislators to not eliminate them. You probably get a lot
Speaker 1: of people that have a hard time believing that or understanding.
Speaker 1: So in my book tour, I was in Boston, New York,
Speaker 1: and Chicago, California, Vancouver, BC. I love telling that story.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's some dear friends that I would put
Speaker 1: them more in the mutualist their animal protection. They're not hunters,
Speaker 1: they'll never don't I won't say never, but they'll probably
Speaker 1: never ever hunt, you know, in a legal season, and
Speaker 1: they'd be more almost an animal rights kind of philosophy
Speaker 1: towards a cat. They just want to know they're they're
Speaker 1: you know, kind of almost a spiritual value. But when
Speaker 1: I telling that story and a couple of the friends
Speaker 1: have found out, you know, on their own, attending meetings
Speaker 1: and seeing it happen firsthand. They get it. And so
Speaker 1: it's this interesting conundrum of this user group that now
Speaker 1: and again we'll take the cat. They don't take a
Speaker 1: cat every year. I know. First people, the houndhandlers are
Speaker 1: the first people people the animal rights people go after
Speaker 1: when they want to attack the state's on and fision rights. Correct,
Speaker 1: So there's an easy cell. Yeah, shooting lines out of
Speaker 1: a tree? Yes, who would support such a thing? So
Speaker 1: as as biologists and and so you're pushing that button
Speaker 1: in me right now, we manage populations and habitat, not
Speaker 1: individuals as humans. It's so, I mean, it's natural. I
Speaker 1: I don't want to be if I was a white
Speaker 1: tail buck. I don't want to be the buck that's
Speaker 1: gonna get taken. We put human emotions on things, right,
Speaker 1: but science and data, you know, science, you know it
Speaker 1: is a method of investigation. Right, do you look at
Speaker 1: the data that's produced. It's heartless. It's population management. You
Speaker 1: can animals can die and the populations are fine and grow.
Speaker 1: But as soon as we put you know, then you
Speaker 1: get into fair chase and ethics and how do you
Speaker 1: find that a lot of personal values on it. That's
Speaker 1: when it gets wonky. And in the social realm that
Speaker 1: tends to be those fights. What always frustrates me is
Speaker 1: when those social values try to bleed into the rigorous
Speaker 1: data on a population management side and and can trumpet.
Speaker 1: And that's where you see sometimes in courts, and and
Speaker 1: that will never go away as long as there's people here,
Speaker 1: of course that's gonna happen. There was a quote from
Speaker 1: your book that I wanted to wedge in at an
Speaker 1: appropriate time, but I missed my chance. But I had
Speaker 1: to do with it. When we were deliberately trying to
Speaker 1: wipe them off the face of the Earth mountain lions,
Speaker 1: you had a quote where you said, uh, if we
Speaker 1: ranched worms, we declare war on robbins. And it kind
Speaker 1: of goes that that was a good line, man, because
Speaker 1: it really does like demonstrate um, it's like a thing
Speaker 1: about us, and it happens, and it happens in a broad,
Speaker 1: large scale way, like sort of a national agenda, right
Speaker 1: or you have codified, state sanctioned efforts that you talked
Speaker 1: about to eliminate them from the landscape. But it's also
Speaker 1: like really personal too. You go out and plant a
Speaker 1: garden and you see a rabbit getting that garden. It'll
Speaker 1: turn it turns any it will turn anyone into a killer. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: look at it was like we like to you know,
Speaker 1: we have a sense of the things that are ours
Speaker 1: that we're cultivating, and it's we take it in a
Speaker 1: real bad way. One wildlife steps in and then complicates
Speaker 1: the process. Yeah, it's it's human. Look at Bozeman, Missoula
Speaker 1: cow spell with deer in town and trying to grow flowers.
Speaker 1: You know, of course, you know you invest in it.
Speaker 1: That's it's it's part of us as humans. Can you
Speaker 1: real quick talk about we kind of don't like how
Speaker 1: bad things got and how things started to get better? Um,
Speaker 1: what happened with Florida with the like how could the inbreeding? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it gets complicated. And I'm less familiar with Florida
Speaker 1: because I've spent my career out here, although I had
Speaker 1: to live there. And yeah, you spend you I should
Speaker 1: point out the listeners you spent your career mostly here,
Speaker 1: but also you spend a ton of time now in Patagonia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well and in Florida. When I do, MI integrat at
Speaker 1: Florida State and actually have some some dear friends. We
Speaker 1: get to the Mount lion biologist. World's pretty small. We
Speaker 1: get together every three years at these workshops, and and uh,
Speaker 1: Florida's kind of fascinating. You look at the footprint of
Speaker 1: mankind on that state. It's giant, right and and so
Speaker 1: what's left, what's left is a pretty wild place. Since
Speaker 1: the middle of Florida there's kind of a corridor. I've
Speaker 1: seen there's some um conservation groups working on a connectivity
Speaker 1: corridor up and down the middle and on the coast,
Speaker 1: the Gulf coast, and then that Everglades up. You know,
Speaker 1: there's some St. John's River, there's some wild stuff there.
Speaker 1: But you get any population down to where it's effective
Speaker 1: reading size, it's just too few females, too few males,
Speaker 1: you know, inbreeding can be an issue. And with the
Speaker 1: modern tools we have with genetics, you can you can
Speaker 1: monitor that. And that's what happened there. They got into
Speaker 1: a biologists called bottleneck, a genetic bottlenecks. Somewhat. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: well I wanted I was gonna say fifty. But the
Speaker 1: good news is now, um My, my two buddies that
Speaker 1: run the program down there, Um, they're actually you know,
Speaker 1: transportation is a big problem. They still get to get
Speaker 1: hit on the road. But they're dealing with panther Florida
Speaker 1: panther conflict. Do we use that word earlier? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we did. Yeah. Yeah, now that we're back east,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm referring to them as panthers. But my two friends,
Speaker 1: they're they're dealing with some agg conflicts. That's actually a
Speaker 1: good science. It's more work for them, but they've had
Speaker 1: they've gotten up enough where they're back. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: still nowhere near recovered. Um. It depends on you define
Speaker 1: recovery and distribution and population. But they're starting to have
Speaker 1: conflicts and so that's a good sign. UM. But it
Speaker 1: took a lot of work and a lot of intervention
Speaker 1: and a lot of TLC down there. But but think
Speaker 1: about the future. Look at the traffic and the highways
Speaker 1: and the and the and the highway mortalities. They're always
Speaker 1: going to have that issue. And they're doing a lot
Speaker 1: of work with with UM underpass overpass situations. But you
Speaker 1: talked about that when I went through that bottle, and
Speaker 1: they because they they developed some irregularities that you can
Speaker 1: see with the naked eye, kinks, tails and cowards. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so different species are gonna exhibit. There's phenotypic traits, and
Speaker 1: you know, genotypically they're gonna how that how the genetics
Speaker 1: are expressed, you know on yourself. It's gonna vary with species.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they notice some um abnormalities that they attributed
Speaker 1: to the too few cats. And I remember in solving
Speaker 1: and I know this isn't your your area of expertise,
Speaker 1: but I remember trying to solve that problem, they brought
Speaker 1: in some lions from West Texas, and I remember that
Speaker 1: raised this question of okay, here, here's this distinct population
Speaker 1: has been genetically isolated, the Florida panther um. What makes
Speaker 1: the Florida panther the Florida panther when you truck some
Speaker 1: some cougars from West Texas and caught them loose? There
Speaker 1: is it? Now? Is a Florida panther just a pan
Speaker 1: there that lives in Florida or is it something else?
Speaker 1: I remember people were like, you know what, the debate
Speaker 1: at this point is silly, because if we don't do this,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have are gone. Yeah, they're gone. So
Speaker 1: you're gonna have a corrupted population. You're gonna have no population.
Speaker 1: So there are some brilliant cat geneticist O'Brien and Melanie
Speaker 1: Culver and I talk about Melanie in the book, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we can the geneticist can look at the
Speaker 1: composition of these and she so a fun story. Again,
Speaker 1: this is rolling it back. When I started grad school
Speaker 1: in in in nine um, there was I think thirtyso
Speaker 1: subspecies of mountain lions, right, and these are the museum
Speaker 1: biologists that measure all the skulls and they're kind of
Speaker 1: called splitters, right, And there's lumpers, right, there's lumpers and splitters,
Speaker 1: and you know when when it came to museum biologists
Speaker 1: and my brother says, there's lumbers and splitters and they
Speaker 1: know who they are. Yeah, well that's all fine and
Speaker 1: dandy until uh, you know, DNA technology came on board. Right.
Speaker 1: So I remember Montana had Felis concolour missou lensis. In
Speaker 1: Colorado had Felis concolor hippolestis. I believe there's no barrier between. No, Well,
Speaker 1: that's where they split it until they put radios on them.
Speaker 1: And then when Montana Montana cat got shot in Colorado
Speaker 1: and vice versa. Wow. Yeah, so then Melanie Culver Collard,
Speaker 1: you put a collared cat in Montana gets killed by Colorado,
Speaker 1: and yet they take from Colorado. So they're not even
Speaker 1: they're not even moving in the same direction. Now. Now
Speaker 1: it's just there. They distribute their their their DNA, and
Speaker 1: the landscape through dispersal, both males and females, males to
Speaker 1: a larger degree, and they can flat out boogie. And
Speaker 1: but when that happened, it kind of threw everything out
Speaker 1: the window with the skull traits and others, you know,
Speaker 1: and they were very well intentioned, but with d NA,
Speaker 1: Melanie Culver and her team, you know, got down to
Speaker 1: roughly six and that's still evolving today, by the way.
Speaker 1: But you know, all of a sudden you have all
Speaker 1: these subspecies and all of a sudden, okay, you got
Speaker 1: a patagony one one up north, and you know for
Speaker 1: maybe less in the middle. That's going to evolve as
Speaker 1: as science changes, the genetic technology and tools change, but
Speaker 1: it really shrinks it down a little bit. This is
Speaker 1: this is way beyond the scope of this conversation. And
Speaker 1: I wish my brother. My brother is an ecologist, and
Speaker 1: I wish he was here to articulate his annoyance. But
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to articulate his annoyance, which will be
Speaker 1: to his annoyance dragon. He's like, we're so in love
Speaker 1: with d n A right now, and we're so in
Speaker 1: love with genetics right now that we're we're taking this
Speaker 1: new thing. We used to have this like this Linnaean system.
Speaker 1: We used to name things on morphology or what it
Speaker 1: looked like to us or how it interacted with this environment,
Speaker 1: and that used to be suitable, and then we get
Speaker 1: this new shiny toy and we're and we're throwing away
Speaker 1: all of these ideas that made sense at the time
Speaker 1: in favor of this new shiny thing that we're like,
Speaker 1: this will be this is more important than all of that.
Speaker 1: And the a way that it kind of like, I
Speaker 1: guess the way that were it winds up having some teeth.
Speaker 1: Is this conversation around if you're from here in Alaska,
Speaker 1: they're trying to do a wood bison yes, reintroduction. There's
Speaker 1: a big debate about when they were there, where they went,
Speaker 1: and but it's like no, because there's planes bis in
Speaker 1: there that were brought in on a truck and they're
Speaker 1: thriving in four places. But they want to establish a
Speaker 1: new population of this other kind that kind of belong there.
Speaker 1: But geneticists look at it and they're like, it's it's
Speaker 1: all the same damn thing, Like they've gotten rid of that.
Speaker 1: There's bison, bison, bison, bison, bison, Athabaska bison, bison, pencyl
Speaker 1: venous whatever. And so you're using the splitting. You're using
Speaker 1: the splitting to sort of sell an idea to a
Speaker 1: population of people, where like, we need to do this
Speaker 1: because this is the right thing to do, because this
Speaker 1: is the right kind. We're gonna put the right kind
Speaker 1: in the right place and we'll get the bad kind
Speaker 1: out of the right place. I Meanwhile, these other people
Speaker 1: are whispering into other ear being like this is all
Speaker 1: mental masturbation. It's the same damn animal. Well, they can
Speaker 1: all breed. There's not enough genetic dissimilarity to even be
Speaker 1: engaging this conversation. But then it's also at the same
Speaker 1: time driving policy. It's kind of a mess. And I
Speaker 1: know this is beyond the scope conversation, but it's interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and no, it it actually relates to two cats
Speaker 1: and what we're talking about as well. But I think
Speaker 1: personally for me, and again, i'm kind of more you
Speaker 1: think where I came up, you know, thirty years ago
Speaker 1: almost and and where we're at now with these kids
Speaker 1: coming out of graduate school that are just top not
Speaker 1: not geneticist. I think we need both. I think you
Speaker 1: need the natural history, the relationships and the influence what
Speaker 1: what influenced this species and what drives its behaviors, And
Speaker 1: you also need to explain it, you know, look at
Speaker 1: the building blocks. You know, we we can look at
Speaker 1: DNA now, and we also have a traditional ecological knowledge,
Speaker 1: the tribal stories passed down from generation. I think we
Speaker 1: need to put all those in the vat personally. But
Speaker 1: I always try and do and look at it all
Speaker 1: as I try and make my own opinions, but to
Speaker 1: rely solely on on DNA, although you can kind of
Speaker 1: go to the bank with that science, but there is
Speaker 1: what does that mean in the environment, right, it's really
Speaker 1: easy to separate, you know, Alleles, it's not easy, but
Speaker 1: you can do it. But what's that mean in the environment?
Speaker 1: And and what should really what should be used more
Speaker 1: to in policy or court decisions or as biologists you know,
Speaker 1: so those questions are are kind of unanswered or you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that they're going to play out into the
Speaker 1: future as as we can um as as those tools
Speaker 1: are are improved. But what's exciting is it does answer
Speaker 1: some pretty paramount questions that we were making guesses at
Speaker 1: as as biologists years ago. But you're right, it's it's
Speaker 1: a balance. But you could go grab a line from
Speaker 1: the southern tip of Argentina and breed it with one
Speaker 1: from northern BC. Correct, they throw like viable offspring. My
Speaker 1: that would be my guess. Maybe wrong, but they probably happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're very similar. I mean phenotypically they look they're
Speaker 1: a little lighter in color down there, and they're a
Speaker 1: little larger, but they're a little more angular to me anyway.
Speaker 1: But they're very they're they look cats cats cat kind
Speaker 1: of even behaviorally, I want to I want to get
Speaker 1: into behavior a little bit. How does the line kill something?
Speaker 1: They're a stock ambush predator, you know, you think about
Speaker 1: a wolf or a coyote. Um. You know, they're gonna
Speaker 1: run their cursarial, they run their prey down, typical cursorial.
Speaker 1: They're gonna run. They're running cursorial they like like a courser.
Speaker 1: I don't know. We have to lick it up. Now
Speaker 1: you're gonna ask me something. I don't know, maybe I
Speaker 1: miss use the term. But they run their prey down.
Speaker 1: Now cats, they're they're bill to to you know, sneak
Speaker 1: in close a short rush of speed to ambush the
Speaker 1: animal and take it down typically by you know, uh,
Speaker 1: lethal bite to the trade of the windpipe area. And
Speaker 1: I know they'll approach front because I've seen video of it,
Speaker 1: but they prefer to come from the side or back right. Well,
Speaker 1: I think they'll do whatever they need to do so
Speaker 1: they don't their their avenue approach doesn't really matter to them.
Speaker 1: I think cover is really key. You know, there are
Speaker 1: many forms of stocking cover. You know, there's rocks and
Speaker 1: trees and grass, but also um light if it's dark, right,
Speaker 1: So the depending upon how when a prey species is vulnerable,
Speaker 1: you know, and in in different landscapes, what this habitat
Speaker 1: structure is. You know that they've evolved to figure out
Speaker 1: how to take down food. If they don't take them
Speaker 1: down their dead, you know, like mechanically, what are they
Speaker 1: doing when they kill something? Like what are they how
Speaker 1: do they how are they using their body to kill?
Speaker 1: So if you grab a mountain lion, the paw the
Speaker 1: front pond you press those digit pads, those claws, they
Speaker 1: detactable cloths are gonna come right out there. They're just hooks, right,
Speaker 1: and they're kind of like a mutch of little meat hooks,
Speaker 1: and so they'll make contact. And I've never witnessed it,
Speaker 1: and that's one thing I've always wanted to see. Very
Speaker 1: few people have. Frankly, you know now with cell phones
Speaker 1: you can see videos now and again. But um, there's
Speaker 1: tracks in the snow or even the even the decoys
Speaker 1: are I love the decoys when they have the the
Speaker 1: archery decoys of a buck and a lion comes in
Speaker 1: and smacks. I mean, it's pretty cool. But they're they're doing.
Speaker 1: You can see the tracks in the snow, um, and
Speaker 1: they typically make contact and either knock the animal over
Speaker 1: or even in South America you can watch on video
Speaker 1: and those open habitats in the parks where they're visible,
Speaker 1: they're gonna wrap around to the track in essentially close
Speaker 1: the limpipe until they stopped kicking. But they eat small
Speaker 1: mammals too. They've eaten birds, but primarily a deer sized
Speaker 1: animal up here, camel the wild camels down there. My
Speaker 1: friend Floyd Um, who's a houndsman, in Arizona. He's got
Speaker 1: quite a list of things when he's trailing lions, has
Speaker 1: seen where they go to get their food where they
Speaker 1: can and you talk about that they like to eat porcupines.
Speaker 1: Oh so yeah, actually, how do they? How do they
Speaker 1: do that? So it's porcupines are funny. You brought that up.
Speaker 1: So you know, we look at you know, grizzly bears.
Speaker 1: People are concerned about bears, loons, a lot of you
Speaker 1: could go through a list of species, right, caribou. But
Speaker 1: one that's flying under the radar, that is flat out
Speaker 1: disappeared west of the divide in Montana's porcupines. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was campaigns by timber companies to limitate him, you know,
Speaker 1: for tree damage, and yeah, but you get them low enough.
Speaker 1: Cats also eat them too. And back when I started,
Speaker 1: you know, in almost every cat you handled had porcupine
Speaker 1: quills in its mouth or and its nose. Rarely now
Speaker 1: we see him a little bit. But something happened to porcupines, disease, predation,
Speaker 1: poison's habitat, or a combination. We don't know. That's research
Speaker 1: that needs to be done. Frankly, west of the divide,
Speaker 1: you go east of the divide, in the coolies, you
Speaker 1: can find them everywhere, but in the deep green um,
Speaker 1: you know something's going to diminishing. There's no advocate, there's
Speaker 1: no Rocky Mountain Porcupine Foundation, no, and and they're actually
Speaker 1: they kind of have the life history and they're more
Speaker 1: similar probably to a bear. You know, they have a
Speaker 1: slow reproducing life history, so they're a little more vulnerable
Speaker 1: that way. But your question about cats and porcupines, you
Speaker 1: know they can take a claw on on the on
Speaker 1: the belt on the underside and and open them up.
Speaker 1: But oh yeah, every almost every cat you handled a
Speaker 1: while back had quills and its snows, smaller strange things.
Speaker 1: I've seen trail camp photos of lions carrying sandhill cranes. Like,
Speaker 1: just rattle off a little bit of the things you've
Speaker 1: seen to me. The funniest things that were happened to
Speaker 1: me is I was cleaning sketch. You'd float their their
Speaker 1: poop in the water and you separate different samples, right,
Speaker 1: and you floated in some water and then all these
Speaker 1: teeny little hookie claws. They were house cats, you know,
Speaker 1: they leat house cats. And and it turns out then
Speaker 1: I looked at the remember looking at the data way
Speaker 1: back as a student and it was right near some cabins,
Speaker 1: so it was eating cats, you know. But they'll they'll
Speaker 1: take whatever they can get. If a dog barks, it's
Speaker 1: typically safe, typically not always, but um, they'll they'll eat
Speaker 1: um whatever the most abundant and vulnerable prey. But I've
Speaker 1: had them do marmots. I've had them do grouse, you know.
Speaker 1: Over the years. Um. Uh, they've taken mountain goats, They've
Speaker 1: taken big horn sheep. They've even taken moose, domestic horses, uh,
Speaker 1: big males with There's been damaged cattle at times, although
Speaker 1: less often up here, it feels I found were one
Speaker 1: killed turkey one time. It wouldn't surprise me. Um, how
Speaker 1: much do they need to eat? You talk about this
Speaker 1: a fair bit. Well, most of the research, most of
Speaker 1: the literature right now is a is a is a
Speaker 1: deer sized animal a week typically and for a female
Speaker 1: and if there's lactation demands, they have kittens. You know,
Speaker 1: they're trying to provide nutrition for um at least that um.
Speaker 1: And for a male, I've seen him go a couple
Speaker 1: of weeks. And in the literature it varies, and every
Speaker 1: now and again you see little surplus killing. But typically
Speaker 1: a deer sized animal a week, and you can stretch
Speaker 1: that the two weeks in some cases, but right in there,
Speaker 1: so each one is good for about a deer a week. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and again they can be greater than a week
Speaker 1: as well. That could be two weeks, depends on the
Speaker 1: that nutritional plane of the cat as an a male
Speaker 1: or female as that kids are not. Yeah, but roughly
Speaker 1: if you had to pick a number, yes, yeah, you say,
Speaker 1: how they there's a variability between animals, Oh, yeah, their preferences.
Speaker 1: Talk about that. And also can you touch on something
Speaker 1: you explain the book about that they have that there's
Speaker 1: variability between animals, but then each individual animal has variability
Speaker 1: throughout the year. Yeah, so it's it's pretty pretty fascinating
Speaker 1: actually think of how um let's use the Sun River
Speaker 1: Wildlife Management Area out of Augusta as an example. In summer,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of out there. There's a few,
Speaker 1: but they're all back in the Chinese Wall in the
Speaker 1: middle of the Bob Martial Wilderness. Right, so the meat
Speaker 1: with feet, if you will, are dispersed and it can
Speaker 1: actually be a tougher time. And then and again I
Speaker 1: didn't have a sample size on that project large enough
Speaker 1: to make any determinations, but they tended to take these
Speaker 1: other species like rabbits and grouse. And yeah, when things
Speaker 1: are spread out everywhere in the winter you have all
Speaker 1: two thousand head elk would be down on that wildlife
Speaker 1: management area. Well, all of a sudden, it's like salmon
Speaker 1: and bears in Alaska, right, all the foods concentrated one area,
Speaker 1: and cats aren't as social cats per se. Although we're
Speaker 1: learning more. There's researchers and wyoming UM with cameras that
Speaker 1: are learning some fascinating things about behavior, but for the
Speaker 1: most part they avoid each other spatially and temporarily are
Speaker 1: temporarily but not spatially. They're sharing the same area but
Speaker 1: at different times. They're still not like African cast just
Speaker 1: you know, all the casts just grouping up. But there
Speaker 1: are familial relationships that are being discovered now in some
Speaker 1: projects by some UM researchers as we as we sit here.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, the time of the year,
Speaker 1: the winter, their food is concentrated. In summer it's dispersed
Speaker 1: only where in white tail deer systems like western Montana,
Speaker 1: you have a little more abundance and a little more
Speaker 1: less concentration in many areas because white tails are a
Speaker 1: little different, you know, they're more continuous in their distribution
Speaker 1: even within their yards. It seems like from looking at
Speaker 1: what you talk about and here, it seems that if
Speaker 1: presented with them, they really like white tailed deer. Oh yeah, way, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of meat out there. Are those are
Speaker 1: the perfect cougar fruit unit if you will. It's the
Speaker 1: perfect size, just the right size. And I think that's
Speaker 1: why in northwest Montana with white tail deer, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, cats were never eliminated. You know, there were
Speaker 1: still roll this areas in wild country with deer that
Speaker 1: weren't eliminated either. The deer that was a big deal.
Speaker 1: If you eliminate prey, you know, you're not gonna have
Speaker 1: the predators, right, and there was always deer and the
Speaker 1: West Montana white tells in particular. How are you doing?
Speaker 1: You are all your needs being met over there? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You're comfortable? Yeah, definitely. Um. Interesting thing you you said
Speaker 1: in your book too, that you said a lot of
Speaker 1: cats can have four or five kids. But but but
Speaker 1: they'll narrow it down and just raise two. Um, do
Speaker 1: they kill them. Now typically the average letter sizes too.
Speaker 1: It can it can be a little more, a little less,
Speaker 1: but you know you have that. It's interesting. So if
Speaker 1: for any mammal, you know you're gonna have lactation and
Speaker 1: there's gonna be you know, how much of the resource
Speaker 1: do you get that's going to determine how many in
Speaker 1: the letters survive? Plus a whole host of other variables.
Speaker 1: You got temperature of the winner and and other other competitors.
Speaker 1: You know, mail comes around and you know who. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of things that can happen wolves, um, now
Speaker 1: with cats, and and that's an interesting dance. Um. But
Speaker 1: at least typically it's two to two point five in
Speaker 1: the litter, in the literature and in every project I've
Speaker 1: known about her been involved with. So it's not like
Speaker 1: they're having ten kittens. So well, you do talk about
Speaker 1: some having four. It's been documented, yeah, but common most
Speaker 1: common you know as a couple, and even those cases
Speaker 1: with multiples, you see them wind up only bringing to
Speaker 1: to maturity. Well, no, like I showed a video last
Speaker 1: night and a presentation of this really gets what generates
Speaker 1: phone calls. But you had mom and she had four
Speaker 1: adult size twelvemonth old kittens. They look like adults. You
Speaker 1: can tell they're a little different looking. But all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, you've got five lions walking on your security camera.
Speaker 1: They're high deaf. That generates phone call and and so
Speaker 1: she's pulled off. And talk about a good provider and
Speaker 1: the prey of availability in that area and the tolerance
Speaker 1: that's a family of five and and that's not normal,
Speaker 1: but but that it happens, yeaheah, for it's a little
Speaker 1: bit at random two in terms of what are the
Speaker 1: resources available to feed those cats and how effective of
Speaker 1: a of a teacher is that mother for those kids?
Speaker 1: They have to take down life pray, you know, once
Speaker 1: they're that size, you know, and I know that there
Speaker 1: are a bunch of exceptions, what I'm gonna say, and
Speaker 1: you explore the exceptions, but there's kind of you talk
Speaker 1: about there's sort of a self limiting aspect to lion
Speaker 1: population demographics where they're not comfortable with a lot of overlap.
Speaker 1: And there they will you you and you go to
Speaker 1: great like pains to show the cases when they do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they're also and there's six of them together whatever,
Speaker 1: But like generally speaking, they're very they have like a
Speaker 1: place they hang out, and particularly the males are not
Speaker 1: real comfortable generally speaking with other males being in their zone.
Speaker 1: And it makes it that you can kind of use
Speaker 1: that to extrapulate populations in general, and that it also
Speaker 1: sort of like sort of sets the ceiling on how
Speaker 1: sets a ceiling to how many lions can exist? Anyways? Exactly, boy,
Speaker 1: you're your biologists at art book. I read a good
Speaker 1: book called okay good well, so yeah, I hear. I've
Speaker 1: heard my whole career from deer in all counters. You know, again,
Speaker 1: we're competing with them for for fun and for food.
Speaker 1: Right that. You know there's cats everywhere? Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, how did you come to that determination and
Speaker 1: where and in what areas? Because they animals leaf tracks.
Speaker 1: And it turns out in all of the telemetry studies
Speaker 1: virtually almost all of them from here, and the SAME's
Speaker 1: down in in Argentina and Chile, there's about two to
Speaker 1: four resident adults per hundred square kilometers. And now with
Speaker 1: DNA technology and camera zero, you can detect the fluid
Speaker 1: layer of transients moving around that don't stay and get
Speaker 1: a radio collar, but they're still in the landscape. Right,
Speaker 1: you can get up to about six. But that's the ceiling,
Speaker 1: used the perfect word. So they they're kind of to
Speaker 1: some degree behaviorally limited. So those fears about just having
Speaker 1: cat after Cat Africa, that that doesn't happen. It's never happened.
Speaker 1: They'll commit fratricide. Yeah, and well the males kill each other.
Speaker 1: Kittens can be killed, but particularly with males, and they starve,
Speaker 1: you know, if they get pushed into marginal habitats that
Speaker 1: don't have prey, or they'll get hit by a car.
Speaker 1: They're not tolerated and they get taken out. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a tough world for a stock ambush prettor you
Speaker 1: think about what's really cool about Mount Alliance and I
Speaker 1: like this. They unlike a lot of the other big cats,
Speaker 1: they take down prey that are their sizes are bigger.
Speaker 1: You know, all right, that's pretty hard to do a
Speaker 1: day in and weekend and week out. And and you
Speaker 1: don't do that, you die, you know. And so but
Speaker 1: there you're right, Stephen, there is a ceiling. So in
Speaker 1: most states then it boils down to okay, whether you're
Speaker 1: in a park or wilderness where the maximum is going
Speaker 1: to be in that higher range. Most state biologists are
Speaker 1: gonna go, Okay, where are we with our illegal hunting
Speaker 1: legally sanction hunting program? Are we close to a natural density?
Speaker 1: Are kind of the middle? Are we low? And that's
Speaker 1: where you go out and work with your deer hunters
Speaker 1: in your helmet and it becomes a little more social.
Speaker 1: But you gather these people are in the woods right
Speaker 1: and and you get the data you can as a
Speaker 1: biologist combined with what people see, and then what is
Speaker 1: your objective? Do you want them close to a natural dancy? Well,
Speaker 1: and this is a nice quick example, but in western Montana,
Speaker 1: where we have fewer cattle and ranches, you know, where
Speaker 1: there are helmn and and pretty remote areas you can
Speaker 1: manage closer to a natural density. You get into eastern
Speaker 1: Montana by the Dakotas, it's all private land and and
Speaker 1: and agricultural depredation on cattle and sheep are a big deal.
Speaker 1: You're kind of managing whether you like it or not.
Speaker 1: You don't have a choice to landowner tolerance. Right those
Speaker 1: ranches are huge, but that's the driving managing. You've got
Speaker 1: landowner tolerance out there. And here it's a different system
Speaker 1: because it's corporate timberland and forest. And in the middle
Speaker 1: look at the high woods, the little belts and some
Speaker 1: of these island ranges. It's a little bit in between.
Speaker 1: You get to kind of hit your beat. And so
Speaker 1: the science is easy here um. And and our timing
Speaker 1: of our seasons don't start until December. So the whole
Speaker 1: um concept of vulnerabile a younger cats and kittens. That
Speaker 1: is in some states, you know, we were kind of
Speaker 1: ahead of the curve there um. You know, it depends
Speaker 1: on what you want how as society, as as humans,
Speaker 1: what do we want on the landscape. And that's different
Speaker 1: if you're a rancher, you're a deer hunter, you're an
Speaker 1: animal advocate or you know, or a helmet you know,
Speaker 1: per se, it's just becomes social almost. You don't annoys me,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't annoy me bad about you because you
Speaker 1: don't really do it that bad, but annoys me about
Speaker 1: what some people do lying, like like lying advocates. And
Speaker 1: I could I regard myself as a lion advocate because
Speaker 1: like generally for me earlier talking about like you know,
Speaker 1: subspecies and ways we think about management and repopulating animals,
Speaker 1: I generally look at my baseline is where was stuff
Speaker 1: at the time of European contact, and my generally would
Speaker 1: like to see it put back that way, where like
Speaker 1: the like an unachievable goal would be to recover wildlife
Speaker 1: to where the current distribution matches the historic distribution. This
Speaker 1: is like if I had to put my personal goals
Speaker 1: in a sentence, that's kind of my goal, and I
Speaker 1: realized it's unachievable, real complicated, all that, But it's just
Speaker 1: a distinct way of thinking about it. But people that
Speaker 1: are are the other kind of line advocate where they're
Speaker 1: in there it really interested. They're they're very protective of
Speaker 1: individual lines. They don't want they're not they don't think
Speaker 1: population level. They just think like that, I don't want
Speaker 1: anything to happen to that one. Therefore people shouldn't hunt
Speaker 1: or whatever. They're always talking about lions as like the
Speaker 1: ultimate predators. You know, everybody uses that term. But then
Speaker 1: they're also they also want to simultaneously tell you that
Speaker 1: they have no impact on game animals. But then they
Speaker 1: also want to point out all because we got rid
Speaker 1: of the predators, now we have too many deer. And
Speaker 1: the same person will tell you all of these contradictory things. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've heard it. I've heard all those two all those
Speaker 1: and the bottom line is whether it's it's it's you
Speaker 1: or I, you know, chasing a white tail around or
Speaker 1: a cat or a wolf for a bit, we all
Speaker 1: have an impact. We all leave a footprint, right, that's nonsense.
Speaker 1: We all leave a footprint. And the question is, you know,
Speaker 1: how does that affect what we like and want? And
Speaker 1: that's what it boils down to. Cats impact prey, they
Speaker 1: have to they eat them. And there are some you
Speaker 1: know there there there are some isolated populations of bighorn
Speaker 1: sheep or or caribou that are relict populations where you know,
Speaker 1: cats are a significant concerned because and wolves because you're
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of it's kind of approximate ultimate thing.
Speaker 1: You know, Ultimately it was the hand of man in
Speaker 1: our footprint that kind of fragmented everything. But now that
Speaker 1: we want to save this little batch of caribou or
Speaker 1: bighorn sheep, you know, you gotta worry about the cats
Speaker 1: and the wolves that are there too, because every animal
Speaker 1: and a population of tan is a big deal. Right,
Speaker 1: But in the big picture, um, you just it's all relative. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, deer herd or an elk herd, and and
Speaker 1: hunters and hunting cultures. You know, what do we want
Speaker 1: to tolerate out there in terms of a natural system.
Speaker 1: And I would argue to both of you that Montana
Speaker 1: can your baseline that you kind of go to Montana
Speaker 1: and and and and Montana fish wife parks way back
Speaker 1: in the authorities they're way at other time, is closer
Speaker 1: to that baseline you have than any other state than
Speaker 1: the forty eight distribution and everything and not by accident,
Speaker 1: habitat conservation, carnivore systems, and it was organic. And I
Speaker 1: think this is real important um for your listeners. I
Speaker 1: think that because because in Montana way back in the forties,
Speaker 1: access was such a big deal, and it was for
Speaker 1: people that had money and that didn't had the same
Speaker 1: opportunity to play outside. And today it's still the same.
Speaker 1: There's issues, but whether you're rich or poor, in Montana,
Speaker 1: you have opportunity to participate in some unbelievable Whether you're wildlife,
Speaker 1: you were a wildlife hunter, doesn't matter, whether you're an angler.
Speaker 1: We have stream access, you have access, So why not roll?
Speaker 1: Why why are you not rolling all the other Western states?
Speaker 1: In this all because you don't feel the I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't feel idahole to some degree. But I I
Speaker 1: would submit, and I have lots of friends in both states,
Speaker 1: so they would challenge me perhaps on this, but I
Speaker 1: would submit to you that in Montana, way back, we
Speaker 1: were the first state to require a graduate degree to
Speaker 1: create when while when they when we transitioned from purely enforcement,
Speaker 1: that happened across the west and added biologists right and
Speaker 1: we added fish while fish biologists as well. You have
Speaker 1: never graduate degree in Montana when unlike Jackson Hole, where
Speaker 1: you concentrate thousands of elk and diseases an issue up
Speaker 1: here now as well. But um in Montana for game damage,
Speaker 1: we didn't just feed elk. They bought wildlife management areas well.
Speaker 1: What that did? You know what that did not only
Speaker 1: to provide access in their special places, it anchored winter migrations.
Speaker 1: They weren't well, maybe they were thinking about it in
Speaker 1: the forties, but you know the sun River olccurred, the
Speaker 1: Judith River, uh, the bear Tooth all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: by you know, alleviating putting elk on on buying a
Speaker 1: property and all the neighboring ranchers you have to be
Speaker 1: a partner with fences and weeds and grazing, but giving
Speaker 1: those elka place to go. Or dear you anchored a
Speaker 1: forty mile migration, which that's a big deal. Now everyone's
Speaker 1: looking at migrations and Montana started doing that in the forties. Um,
Speaker 1: block management, the public hunting concept and perfect, but you
Speaker 1: know we're the first one of the first to do
Speaker 1: that as well. Stream access. Show me another state that's
Speaker 1: got our stream access law through private land. If you
Speaker 1: added all together, UM, my colleagues at ft AP kind
Speaker 1: of look at as a Montana model. The North American model,
Speaker 1: you know, was coined not too long ago. I'd submit
Speaker 1: to you that in Montana long before you know, you know,
Speaker 1: we were we were born. For whatever reason, Montana's pretty
Speaker 1: progressive when it comes to fish and wildlife conservation, and
Speaker 1: that's why we enjoyed the diversity we have today. Now
Speaker 1: the whole world has discovered that in this outdoor recreation
Speaker 1: A to me we're gonna face challenges is more and
Speaker 1: more people want to enjoy what we have here, they'll
Speaker 1: destroy At least we have Colorado to look at an example. Yeah, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: And if you look at Colorado's Rocky Mountain Front. You
Speaker 1: look at even Alberta's Rocky mount Front some degree they're
Speaker 1: pretty developed, whether it's energy or homes. Look at Montana's
Speaker 1: Rocky mount in front. These ranchers have held these ranches
Speaker 1: and it's not easy and and these ranchers have made
Speaker 1: sacrifices to recover things like grizzly bears and tolerated out.
Speaker 1: So we have three quarters two thirds of Montana's private land,
Speaker 1: and there I found in my career they're very proud
Speaker 1: of the wildlife they have on it, you know. And
Speaker 1: that's different. In South America, it's all about cheap and
Speaker 1: so they tend to eliminate everything down there. Right, So Montana,
Speaker 1: we're live in a unique place. In my mind, we're
Speaker 1: very fortunate. So how far will how far? Will? Uh?
Speaker 1: We'll lie and travel? Okay, and I know some just
Speaker 1: probably hanging tight, right, but now you talk about some
Speaker 1: really striking out and doing some weird trips. Yes, So
Speaker 1: like how much room does he need to survive? He? She?
Speaker 1: And then what will they do to find their spot?
Speaker 1: So for females kind of in a fifty two eighty
Speaker 1: different projects kind of zone in on different home range
Speaker 1: sides and they move in a year, and and males
Speaker 1: have had them up to hundred fifty square miles. But
Speaker 1: you know it's very too but and it can be smaller.
Speaker 1: But but there's male home ranges are typically larger than females.
Speaker 1: And if you can picture, typically and most of the studies,
Speaker 1: the female home ranges are stacked in there with some overlap,
Speaker 1: right you have daughter, mother, granddaughter in different tolerance if
Speaker 1: they're hunted or not, all sorts of variables. But males
Speaker 1: have a larger polygon overlaid over the top, and they
Speaker 1: typically don't overlap as much. Typically. Now there are we're
Speaker 1: learning more with cameras on on group associations that are
Speaker 1: surprising people in some of the work in Wyoming right now.
Speaker 1: But males typically don't overlap. They're not that social. They're
Speaker 1: a little tallerant, but not that social. And they fight.
Speaker 1: So you have a layer of males on the landscape
Speaker 1: and a layer of female. So when a kitten is born,
Speaker 1: and if it's a male and you've got a resident
Speaker 1: mail there and you leave, you're gonna have to leave
Speaker 1: because that territory, that that area is claimed, You're gonna
Speaker 1: strike out on your own. And most of the radio
Speaker 1: collar work we've done the department didn't work in the garnets.
Speaker 1: It was fascinating. Virtually every cat dispersed male and female
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, males further. But I for instance,
Speaker 1: one time I marked a cat at the benchmark airstrip
Speaker 1: that had a crooked tail like electrical circuit symbol. It
Speaker 1: was damaged, probably frost bitten somehow, and so it was
Speaker 1: real identifiable. I put a radio on it. Never found
Speaker 1: it again. And and after the project was done, and
Speaker 1: I was working as a biologist in Great Falls, I
Speaker 1: got a call from the wildlife manager of Missoula and
Speaker 1: you got, you're missing a cat, you know, in one
Speaker 1: of his helmet had treated this cat, you know, near
Speaker 1: Missoula in the Blackfoot And that was a female. And
Speaker 1: but I mean she she went through the wilderness over
Speaker 1: the scapegoat. But the males there, how many miles did
Speaker 1: you travel? Oh, they can't go thirty miles. But typically
Speaker 1: they don't go as far as the males. We've had
Speaker 1: males go from bottom of the front to the north
Speaker 1: end of the front, from the Baretooth game range across
Speaker 1: the little belts Um. They one of the first ear
Speaker 1: mark before radio callers were available. We had howman marking
Speaker 1: and the eartagging cats up in the flathead and one
Speaker 1: would be marked in the flathead and would be taking leave.
Speaker 1: You get point of mark and point of death. That's
Speaker 1: all you get with an ear tag, right, and it
Speaker 1: would be shot in the Clark Fork by Thompson Falls,
Speaker 1: you know, and that was Those are males and so
Speaker 1: there's constantly hundred miles hundred mile John's perhaps, yes, what
Speaker 1: do you think triggers that? And maybe you guys have
Speaker 1: done science to show it, but I mean, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're just guessing that it's a young male and that
Speaker 1: somehow he knows that he can't survive because it's the
Speaker 1: territories taken. The kittens typically stay with their mother in
Speaker 1: that twelve to eighteen entranged typically and there's exceptions. So
Speaker 1: they'll stay with them for a year, year to year
Speaker 1: and a half. Yeah, because they have to learned how
Speaker 1: to kill and take down life prey. Right. It's not
Speaker 1: like a fawn where you know, you hop out and
Speaker 1: they're grazing right away. They got you know, it's a
Speaker 1: learning curve to be with mom and and if they're orphaned.
Speaker 1: At too young of an age, they're not gonna make
Speaker 1: it right. They don't know how to take deer down.
Speaker 1: But at about that twelve eighteen month age, sometimes longer,
Speaker 1: they take off and disperse and it's just you know why,
Speaker 1: that's what science knows. It's just that at that age,
Speaker 1: they just they go, they travel. The science that's in
Speaker 1: my brain. That's what I know. Yeah, they're probably there
Speaker 1: might be others to be able to answer that for
Speaker 1: you better, but that's to my knowledge. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the dispersal age. And they move and they crossed. They're
Speaker 1: crossing highways, going through towns, linear riparian highways. That's what
Speaker 1: I call like the sun River, the Titon, you know,
Speaker 1: the Mariahs or even the Yellowstone or the Missouri. That's
Speaker 1: how they get into the Midwest. And then you look
Speaker 1: at the Black Hill. So you've got these island ranges
Speaker 1: that have cats now and then you have the Black
Speaker 1: Hill that's pumping them out. That's a finite area. Every
Speaker 1: cat almost dispersed. That's kind of a jumping off point
Speaker 1: for some of these repairing areas. To get the Missouri
Speaker 1: in Iowa and some random numbers square east. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and they they are only gonna exist if we tolerate them.
Speaker 1: There a lot more roads, not a lot of wild
Speaker 1: country like here a little bit, but the further east
Speaker 1: you go, they're doing it on the backs of white
Speaker 1: tail deer typically, But you know, as soon as we
Speaker 1: know they're there, they tend to be eliminated. But he
Speaker 1: talked about in the book about how that is a
Speaker 1: key to their success, is how they can hide, they
Speaker 1: can be there. And we always heard stories of like how, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the game biologist knew that in some city park there's
Speaker 1: been a mountain lion for ten years, but nobody said anything.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if those stories. But a way
Speaker 1: to think about it is like you have, Okay, Idaho
Speaker 1: whelming Montana. You got eighteen hundred grizzlies. How many of
Speaker 1: those suns bitches? You see? Ye're not many? No, you
Speaker 1: see a boatload of them. You mean we saw seven
Speaker 1: and three days. But then you got you got exponentially,
Speaker 1: You've got exponentially more mountainins out there, and it takes
Speaker 1: you a lifetime to rack up seeing seven of them, right,
Speaker 1: just saying they're secretive, Yes, they're the ghost of the forest.
Speaker 1: They always have been. Now there's an exception down in
Speaker 1: Patagonia and those open parks you can watch them in
Speaker 1: the middle of the day. I'm not ready anyway that
Speaker 1: I just had to point that out, but for sure.
Speaker 1: So the other thing i'd say, when you're dispersal, if
Speaker 1: you you got to think from a species survival, how
Speaker 1: do you distribute your your DNA across the landscape? Dispersal
Speaker 1: for many species is a common mechanism, and cats, wolves
Speaker 1: go even further. Heck, here we have wolf biologists. You know,
Speaker 1: they show up in Alberta. We have by bamp from
Speaker 1: that originated Montana vice versa, two fifty miles. It's crazy,
Speaker 1: but that moves the DNA around the landscape, right, But
Speaker 1: then it has Florida's shown they are susceptible to not
Speaker 1: having good genetic exchange because some things can hack it.
Speaker 1: Seek a deer, damn sure came. We're just talking about
Speaker 1: how six of old spawned a population of fifteen thousand.
Speaker 1: I have the wild Horse Island in Sheepe. I mean
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's a pretty small founder population there,
Speaker 1: but it's fun fun to go out and see him.
Speaker 1: But what what does that say about us. This is
Speaker 1: a question for you too. What does that say about
Speaker 1: us as humanity if the only reason lions are expanding
Speaker 1: when all the other large cats are declining is because
Speaker 1: we don't know they're there. Yeah. Yeah, when people like
Speaker 1: you said, well, you know what I heard recently, Um,
Speaker 1: where I grew up. I grew up in a town
Speaker 1: called Twin Lake, Michigan. Was it was a lot different
Speaker 1: when I grew up there than it is, not like
Speaker 1: a lot of places in the country. But man, you
Speaker 1: did when I was a kid, you had to go
Speaker 1: a long way to find a black bear. And now
Speaker 1: a black bear just spend his whole summer around where
Speaker 1: I grew up. And I's talking to my mother about this,
Speaker 1: and I thought for sure the story was gonna be
Speaker 1: how right away the neighbor killed it, But everyone just
Speaker 1: loved it. They're real excited to have him run around,
Speaker 1: Like some people weren't, like scared and shooting at it
Speaker 1: all the time. She's like, no, it just became a thing.
Speaker 1: It was kind of cool if you were the one
Speaker 1: whose yard it was in. So it's like just a
Speaker 1: different change, Like there is some change in perception. You
Speaker 1: know that, and that you imagine at a time. I
Speaker 1: hate to say it, but I feel like even in
Speaker 1: my dad, I don't know. I don't want to say it,
Speaker 1: what would have happened in my time, but people would
Speaker 1: have been I think people as much as people freak
Speaker 1: out about lions and bears still and they have like
Speaker 1: irrational fears of them, I think there's also the the
Speaker 1: irrational fears of some individuals seems to go up. But
Speaker 1: then there's also this thing that's happening where people's like
Speaker 1: tolerance seems have been going up. These two things that
Speaker 1: there they they fight with one another, but they sort
Speaker 1: of happened in tandem. It scenes. Television and social media
Speaker 1: have played a huge role in bringing a lot of
Speaker 1: species into people's living rooms where they weren't before and
Speaker 1: you just had family culture. You know, in your book
Speaker 1: you talked about speaking of dispersal, you talked about putting
Speaker 1: a collar. I can't remember, as you were someone put
Speaker 1: a collar on a female and then right away she
Speaker 1: drowned in the river. Oh yeah, well that happens to
Speaker 1: They do swim um, but they have accidents. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: There are a lot more in drowning where there's predation.
Speaker 1: Drowning following to a lesser degree, you've had um you know,
Speaker 1: starving life stuff in the wild. You lose collared animals
Speaker 1: to predation. Collared lions will get Yeah, I had had
Speaker 1: a male kill another male actually um and a couple
Speaker 1: of times. That's pretty common in some studies with um
Speaker 1: colored animals taking males primarily. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: funniest things about your that's that the right word. An
Speaker 1: interesting thing that came to my mind about your book
Speaker 1: was right now, for the future of mountain lions in
Speaker 1: North America, there's like some good news and bad news
Speaker 1: where they don't do well, like as we increase the
Speaker 1: number of wolves and increase the number of grizzlies, lions
Speaker 1: don't do well with those things. But then lions seem
Speaker 1: to do well with climate change. So they have like
Speaker 1: a pro and a con right now, right more habitats
Speaker 1: opening up to them. They're sort of like rooting for
Speaker 1: their like rooting for global warming because it opens up
Speaker 1: more habitat for him. But increased like presence as we
Speaker 1: grow the presence of wolves and grizzlies is tough. You
Speaker 1: can take on either of those ideas and whatever or
Speaker 1: do you want, well, I think, first off, climate change.
Speaker 1: So it's a good and perhaps perhaps good and and
Speaker 1: definitely a bad news story depending on how you look
Speaker 1: at it. But some animals are winners, and carp are
Speaker 1: gonna do well typically here locally. The exotic species, you know,
Speaker 1: just by nature of their exotic and not native tend
Speaker 1: to be are adaptable because I mean they persisted here
Speaker 1: when they're not they didn't involve their right. But for
Speaker 1: climate change, it's a it's a big deal if their prey,
Speaker 1: you know, lions are driven by their prey. You know,
Speaker 1: if there are climate change impacts on mile deer and
Speaker 1: white tailed deer and elk, well then that's bad. But
Speaker 1: in terms of distribution, yeah, it warms up up north
Speaker 1: and temperature and and deer and elk can punch into
Speaker 1: the boreal fourth which is kind of a caribou wolf
Speaker 1: a moose system up there. After a certain point, the
Speaker 1: white tail deer elk system upcome the cats can come
Speaker 1: up on the back. So that's their frontier south. They've
Speaker 1: already got south taken care of. Their frontier is to
Speaker 1: the north correct and to the east, yeah, especially a
Speaker 1: lot of room. And then as there was the other
Speaker 1: question that was the climate change, talking about how they
Speaker 1: don't do well with wolves and grizzlies or it hurts them. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that just came up in a bunch of meetings where
Speaker 1: we have a new Mountlon management plan out. It's really good,
Speaker 1: by the way, talk about that later if you want.
Speaker 1: But behaviorally, let's use the North Fork of the Flathead
Speaker 1: Tony Ruth I talked about her in the book. Um,
Speaker 1: it's incredible biologists, credible field biologist. The North Fork is
Speaker 1: off the charts, North Fork. It's a western side of
Speaker 1: Glacier Park. It's off the charts, one of the wildest
Speaker 1: places in the lower forty eight. It has a natural
Speaker 1: density of grizzly bears, it has a natural density of
Speaker 1: black bears, as a natural density of wolves, and it
Speaker 1: has a natural density of mountain lions. Right, so after
Speaker 1: you read Jim's chapter about it, you will want to
Speaker 1: go there and check it out. When you want to
Speaker 1: get a hucklelar bear clot that in Polbers. I did
Speaker 1: see that, and that's I still to this day when
Speaker 1: I have a biologist wants to go up there, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking below. If that's open. We used to hunt, We
Speaker 1: used to chase black bears upon that neck of the
Speaker 1: woods there and always be swinging into Polberg on our
Speaker 1: way back home, the best bakery around I mean hands.
Speaker 1: But anyway, be that as it may. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: have what I call it. I referred to it as
Speaker 1: a predator party. But it's quite fascinating in terms of
Speaker 1: relationships that we're still going to learn more about. But
Speaker 1: take for instance, one of the biologists, I think she
Speaker 1: was a graduate student. Um, what was able to observe
Speaker 1: a grizzly bear that didn't DAN? Actually perhaps a couple
Speaker 1: because they were usurping mountain lion and wolf kills on
Speaker 1: the landscape. You know, it's a cost benefit analysis do
Speaker 1: you go into DAN? Is it worth it or is
Speaker 1: it not worth it? You know, as long as you
Speaker 1: can put fuel in the tank and you're in the black,
Speaker 1: you know you don't have to DAN. But bears typically
Speaker 1: evolved in the most of meat vegetation primarily. You know,
Speaker 1: when that disappears, they go in the hole right for
Speaker 1: six months and live off their fat. Right. Well, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you have all these carnivores that are
Speaker 1: recovered in the North Fork and there's meat out there
Speaker 1: where they had a bear that didn't Dan and and
Speaker 1: Diane Boyd was is my wolf is our wolfile? Just
Speaker 1: still today? And Tony Ruth was working on the cats,
Speaker 1: and I love that chapter because you can you imagine,
Speaker 1: as a mountain lion, you take down a deer. You
Speaker 1: gotta It's like, and I used the phrase, you're in
Speaker 1: a grocery store shopping looking for criminals over your shoulder.
Speaker 1: You take a deer down, and you've got to look
Speaker 1: over your head because wolves will kill a lion, a
Speaker 1: pack of wolves, and so they got meat down, and
Speaker 1: then you throw on grizzly bear on top of that.
Speaker 1: Then the poor cat's got to go make another killer starve.
Speaker 1: And indeed she had photos up there she shared with
Speaker 1: me and and I've seen it, but I have not
Speaker 1: seen the grizzlies out in winter. But you can have
Speaker 1: a wolf track and a lion track and a grizzly
Speaker 1: beery track in the snow in the same slide back
Speaker 1: in the Quota Chrome sixty four days, you know. And
Speaker 1: but that's crazy. I mean, imagine cross country skiing and
Speaker 1: middle of winter and there's a big mail grizzly you're
Speaker 1: not thinking about that, right, but you have wolves coursing
Speaker 1: the landscape looking for their food. They can use syrup
Speaker 1: a lion off their kill, and then you throw bears
Speaker 1: in the mix, and in summer they're all out. And
Speaker 1: then that relationship plays out in a different way, you know,
Speaker 1: because you've got kittens and cubs and vegetation. And but
Speaker 1: it's those those relationships. It's a are are fascinating, it's
Speaker 1: a there's no wilder place. Yeah. And then that and
Speaker 1: I think if you put that to a lot of
Speaker 1: hunters they would look and say, oh, so now the
Speaker 1: lions are killing even more dear no, yes, yeah, and
Speaker 1: in fact, which is obviously true, because they're losing their
Speaker 1: they kill it and they're losing. They kill no one,
Speaker 1: they lose it. They kill no one. Yeah. And and
Speaker 1: so you got up in the Northwark. What's interesting is
Speaker 1: half it's in the park, so that's not an issue,
Speaker 1: you know, And they get millions of dollars come to
Speaker 1: you know, to the park for people to watch wilife.
Speaker 1: That's a different economy. And you have the economy of
Speaker 1: hunting that frankly pays pays. If you hunt, you pay
Speaker 1: my salary. In Montana, I work for a state agency,
Speaker 1: right and not taxes, hunting licenses. So when I have
Speaker 1: hunters come up and say, boy, there's just too much
Speaker 1: being taken and in some areas, yeah, they have a point,
Speaker 1: and what can you do about it legally? And what
Speaker 1: can you do about it? Really? And because there's other
Speaker 1: variables too, you know, with hunting, you've got weather, you've
Speaker 1: got winter severity, you have forage conditions, summer drought. It's
Speaker 1: just this whole host of variables. But where they are
Speaker 1: right is yes, you know, if you have animals that
Speaker 1: are taking deer and elk that we want to take.
Speaker 1: Yet you know that's competition now is at a population driver?
Speaker 1: What is the level of impact? That's where the that's
Speaker 1: where the debate usually starts. You know, speaking of the
Speaker 1: you mentioned the park. You talk about Glacier as the park.
Speaker 1: You had an interesting statistic around Glacier that only one
Speaker 1: in forty two thousand visitors to Glacier National Park will
Speaker 1: have a lion encounter. Yeah, so that's seeing one one,
Speaker 1: which is amazing actually, And and we'll talk about some
Speaker 1: secretive critters man. Yeah, And the rangers have this lion
Speaker 1: information system they track and we looked at almost fifteen
Speaker 1: years of data. They're just kind of because you hear
Speaker 1: the rumors and they had done that another park, so
Speaker 1: we are curious and and we we looked at him
Speaker 1: and and the number one thing they do is just
Speaker 1: see it. The incidents and and and conflicts and attacks.
Speaker 1: It's it's off the charts slow point, oh one chance.
Speaker 1: But yeah, very few people even see them. Bears are
Speaker 1: a lot more. Oh yeah, man, they just care a
Speaker 1: lot less about your seeing them. It seeing you don't
Speaker 1: see them, but they see you. I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure. Um.
Speaker 1: You explained your book and we you don't need to
Speaker 1: explain how it came to happen, but you explain your
Speaker 1: book that through uh, through your career and in different
Speaker 1: projects and programs you were involved in, you had an
Speaker 1: opportunity to do some exchange work where you were going
Speaker 1: down to look at this animal that you know very well, pumas.
Speaker 1: You're going down to look at pumas in Patagonia and
Speaker 1: talk about lessons that we've learned around management and likewise,
Speaker 1: biologists from Chile and Argentina we're coming up to to
Speaker 1: work up here. Uh. And you talk about a lot
Speaker 1: of the differences down there, different challenges they face keep
Speaker 1: sketch that out a little bit because it's because no
Speaker 1: student would read your book. And then I read this
Speaker 1: article about the kind of mind boggling amount of predation
Speaker 1: on domestic sheep that happens in Chile and Argentina. And
Speaker 1: we're really fortunate in the United States to have that
Speaker 1: public land component that is for service BLM and school trust.
Speaker 1: We have national parks and we have private but we
Speaker 1: have that middle area of public land, and that's where
Speaker 1: a lot of us recreating hunt on in addition to
Speaker 1: private land. You go to South America, particularly Patagonia, it's
Speaker 1: either private or it's a park, right, so there's no
Speaker 1: in between. They don't have that culture of public hunting.
Speaker 1: They don't have that model of hunters paying for wildlife
Speaker 1: recovery that happened here conservation, and and that's the envy
Speaker 1: our system, Frankly's envy. You know, this North American model
Speaker 1: in Canada and the United States, it's the envy of
Speaker 1: many other countries around the world because it's it's a
Speaker 1: stable funding model. They don't have that down there. So
Speaker 1: parks are a big deal, and you go off the park,
Speaker 1: you're on giant ranches and most of them are domestic sheep. Right,
Speaker 1: it's like New Zealand big sheep ranches. There are cat
Speaker 1: populations down there that live on almost entirely on non
Speaker 1: native prey. That's that's That's why I couldn't believe is
Speaker 1: that it wasn't like here we view when a lion
Speaker 1: or some wolves. I got a question. I'm gonna interrupting foxes,
Speaker 1: so I want to ask, I forgot about have you
Speaker 1: do you encounter often where a lion will begin feeding
Speaker 1: on an animal before the animals dead or do they
Speaker 1: like them to be stone dead for the etam You know,
Speaker 1: I've never seen that act. And my assumption is and
Speaker 1: is that theyre that they you know, close that windpipe
Speaker 1: until they stopped kicking and they start eating. I mean,
Speaker 1: you never know. And then how do they enter a car?
Speaker 1: Because when it's dead, you know, it's interesting. So I
Speaker 1: always look at lions are pluckers. So if you know,
Speaker 1: we always with you have lots of carniverse. People want
Speaker 1: to know it's like forensic work, right, and most of
Speaker 1: our biologists go out there. Well, lions tend to just
Speaker 1: like a housecat. They kind of they grab some hair
Speaker 1: and spit had some hair in space. You'll see a
Speaker 1: big hair pile around where a lions on the bottom.
Speaker 1: So they start right in the caveat the heart the
Speaker 1: lung some of those little tasty things they'll get first.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they'll open up a hunch, but um, they'll open
Speaker 1: a chest cavity up right away. Um, and bears can
Speaker 1: peel hide back right and they screw around with a
Speaker 1: little more. Cats are gonna pluck around and then when
Speaker 1: they're done, they're gonna cover it up typically and and
Speaker 1: they'll use anything snow vegetation, um, and patagonia rocks. If
Speaker 1: there's no vegetation, they tend to and then you're gonna
Speaker 1: minimize all the other species that are come in and
Speaker 1: utilize that meat. Right, and you can stay unmolested and
Speaker 1: eat for a couple of days, or you'll drag it
Speaker 1: into a bush. But um, yeah, they I My guess
Speaker 1: is just just a guess that you know, because I've
Speaker 1: never seen him kill him as looking at the tracks
Speaker 1: and reading all the literature and friends that they're closing
Speaker 1: the track ya until they until they stop wiggling and
Speaker 1: then they can eat right Okay, back to while staying here,
Speaker 1: when one one will bearer line. Whatever kills livestock, it's
Speaker 1: generally considered like a typical you know, for the for
Speaker 1: the particular animal, like they don't just subsist on it. Correct.
Speaker 1: But that's really surprising that you talk about that. It
Speaker 1: seems like you have like there's lines. That's what they
Speaker 1: do for a living and that's their day in, day
Speaker 1: out food is livestock. Yeah. So there's these huge domestic
Speaker 1: sheep ranches. They're the size of national parks up here
Speaker 1: or larger. And that's millions of Yeah, they're huge, yes,
Speaker 1: and you and and that's and you'll see you know
Speaker 1: some of the park stories the creation in the book
Speaker 1: as well. That's the good news is you know, you
Speaker 1: make it. You make a change down there with a ranch,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a landscape change with one landowner. But
Speaker 1: um domestic sheep out there, and and they're very they
Speaker 1: eliminate the native winaco. And then wanaco is like a
Speaker 1: like a llama. It's a camel camel it and if
Speaker 1: you hybridizing domestic and you can kind of end up
Speaker 1: with a llama and a crickets it away. But the
Speaker 1: wild version is called a wan aco and it looks
Speaker 1: like a llama, right, yeah, it was. It was like
Speaker 1: an a llama wild olama and a wild version, and
Speaker 1: there's like an alpaca while Vicuna is the alpaca wild version.
Speaker 1: So those it's all camels and cats in Patagonia, right,
Speaker 1: that's and vicunas are the north end. Yeah, it's different
Speaker 1: than here. For when it comes to puma's right, it's same.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking mountalin up here, puma, they're the
Speaker 1: same thing, subspecies, right, So these pumas down there, and
Speaker 1: and I call him puma the second half of the book.
Speaker 1: I would call him mountain lions the first half because
Speaker 1: you know, we're here, and then I wanted readers to feel,
Speaker 1: you know, feel it. We switched to pumas for the
Speaker 1: second half. I thought that was yeah, I like that,
Speaker 1: and uh and I had to convince my editors that
Speaker 1: and and and they got it. But I think it
Speaker 1: adds a little here in South America. So yes, they
Speaker 1: eat non atid prey, European hairs and domestic sheet down
Speaker 1: there in some cases, and that's a problem. So there's
Speaker 1: generations of cowboys called gauchos. The gaucho culture that very tough,
Speaker 1: just like our cowboys. Are ranch hands, and they have
Speaker 1: been raised to kill every lion or puma they find,
Speaker 1: and other species as well, anything that can be a
Speaker 1: threat to sheep. And they run hounds down there too, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do now, but even I mean they they'll walk
Speaker 1: them down down there, they'll ride them down on a horse.
Speaker 1: It's crazy. They're very tough and they're very good at
Speaker 1: what they do. Um, So that's a problem. Tolerance isn't
Speaker 1: there on agricultural ranches for the most part. That's why,
Speaker 1: you know, I tell the story of Chris and Doug
Speaker 1: Tompkins buying these ranches, turning him into parks, giving him
Speaker 1: back to the government. Then all of a sudden, that's
Speaker 1: interest tolerated. Yeah, you're saying that because these ranches being
Speaker 1: so big that a single purchase can create what we
Speaker 1: would imagine to be a national park or larger, larger
Speaker 1: than Yosemite. One purchase and you do a few of them. Um,
Speaker 1: it's interesting. I just saw a statistic now because Doug
Speaker 1: passed away in a kayaking accent about five years ago,
Speaker 1: and Chris is carrying it on the legs his legacy
Speaker 1: and he Doug is now being celebrated in Chile and Argentina.
Speaker 1: They're accepting him. It's amazing the governments are accepting him
Speaker 1: when they didn't trust the process to begin with. But
Speaker 1: they have now donated to be public land that all
Speaker 1: of us native Chileans Argentinos can enjoy. U larger than
Speaker 1: the size of Switzerland. They took their personal wealth and
Speaker 1: put it all in the park. So where that's important
Speaker 1: is now you have you can rewild it. You know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have domestic sheep anymore. The one acos can recover,
Speaker 1: the pumas can recover. When mul dear they have an
Speaker 1: e they have a really interesting deer that looks like
Speaker 1: our mule deer with smaller antlers, a little more of
Speaker 1: a bulbous face. Yeah, when moul is how they pronounce it,
Speaker 1: and it's like a carib we just kind of stands there.
Speaker 1: They're very not afraid of anything. Domestic dogs can take
Speaker 1: them down and it's an issue, but they can recover,
Speaker 1: and so it has to be a park. There's no
Speaker 1: in between down there right now, although that could change
Speaker 1: someday with you know the concept of conservation easements like
Speaker 1: we of here in tax laws, but right now it's
Speaker 1: my understanding. You know, it's almost got to be a
Speaker 1: protected area or it's a ranch, So you work a lot.
Speaker 1: My friends that have been you mentioned that I've had
Speaker 1: twenty five years of exchange has been very fortunate from Argentina,
Speaker 1: scientists in Chilean going back and forth and get to
Speaker 1: share these stories, what works, what doesn't, and they invest
Speaker 1: in private land work like we do now down there,
Speaker 1: and you get landscape level change. With one family if
Speaker 1: they decide to, for instance, only kill the offending puma,
Speaker 1: so that happens up here, right, they will historically go
Speaker 1: out and kill every cat in the ranch. But if
Speaker 1: you tell them, you know, just kill the offending cat.
Speaker 1: The others are being good and eating the few winaco
Speaker 1: that are on the hill, you know, And and that's
Speaker 1: all of a sudden a landscape level change. But it's
Speaker 1: messy conservation. It's like drinking coffee and fixing fence up here.
Speaker 1: Down there, it's drinking mate and and talking to a
Speaker 1: sheep rancher in the gauchos. And but they're doing it.
Speaker 1: But what I couldn't gather from your book is the
Speaker 1: why or pumas aren't hurting down there, right? I mean,
Speaker 1: are they? Are? They not? Because it seemed like, on
Speaker 1: one hand you're talking about social tolerance and preservation, but
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you're painting a picture that seems
Speaker 1: like there's a puma behind every rock. You know, they
Speaker 1: were they were hurting kind of ad to that too,
Speaker 1: because it seems like if for hundreds of years the
Speaker 1: gouches have been trained and brought up to kill every line,
Speaker 1: how are there any left in protected areas? And that's yeah,
Speaker 1: you look at some of those government established parks before,
Speaker 1: you know, not talking to the Tompkins Parks that are
Speaker 1: now government parks. But it either had to be a
Speaker 1: European landowner that didn't you know, or a Chilean or
Speaker 1: Argentine landowner that didn't believe in that. But most of
Speaker 1: them was sheep. We're going to control the cats. They
Speaker 1: had to be protected areas. So what's happened here since
Speaker 1: the sixties has also happened down there, but on the
Speaker 1: backs of domestic sheep, and that in the protected area.
Speaker 1: They were even persecuted in protected areas to some degree.
Speaker 1: H there was differences in laws in Chilean Argentina still
Speaker 1: are today and they've becomes more of a conflict, a
Speaker 1: permanent conflict where the gauchos are constantly taken out the
Speaker 1: cats at the edge of these parks, you know, for
Speaker 1: fear of predation on their domestic sheet. And but they
Speaker 1: seem to be increasing in distribution down there. Based on
Speaker 1: my colleagues and and and and my experience listening to them,
Speaker 1: it's which is causing increased conflict, correct, correct, And therein
Speaker 1: lies either job security if you're a conflict biologist, or
Speaker 1: a big problem. You know, if you're a gaucho and
Speaker 1: a rancher and it's messy conservation, you know, how how
Speaker 1: do you how do you recover a native carnivore if
Speaker 1: that's your goal when there's no native prey and all
Speaker 1: the economic value, right, that's where that's where gets interested.
Speaker 1: It's awkward. And then European hairs are larger than our hairs.
Speaker 1: There are cats that almost exclusively exist on European hairs.
Speaker 1: They're a little more of a meat packet. And but
Speaker 1: it's a Patagonia unwrap raveled with these huge domestic biologically
Speaker 1: unraveled with these huge domestic sheep ranches. But slowly those
Speaker 1: biologists down there have these visions of rewilding, you know,
Speaker 1: ranch at a time, community at a time. That so
Speaker 1: my biggest thing my whole career. My my, I haven't
Speaker 1: been a research biologists my whole career. You know, I've
Speaker 1: I've done a little bit what I call both um.
Speaker 1: I was a management biologist. That's messy. That's where you
Speaker 1: set seasons and go to communities down there, same as
Speaker 1: up here. If conservation isn't accepted locally, it's not durable,
Speaker 1: flat out, it won't last. And so what they're doing
Speaker 1: down there is trying to make you know, how do
Speaker 1: you get a ranch to tolerate one acos when they
Speaker 1: think they're going to compete and eat the grass their
Speaker 1: sheep eat. But if they have oneacos, perhaps the pumas
Speaker 1: are gonna predate less on their sheep and do the oneacos.
Speaker 1: That's where they're going right now. And indeed, you know
Speaker 1: they're going to try and tease that out. But that
Speaker 1: that's how messy it is. It involves people and and
Speaker 1: and economic value. Do you regard yourself as an inflict biologists? No, Now,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of support staff at this point in my career.
Speaker 1: But my I, like you know, my Stephen might, I'm
Speaker 1: the way what I probably my my entire career on
Speaker 1: is I really like people. I enjoy people loud biologist,
Speaker 1: don't you know? Depends on what floats your boat, right.
Speaker 1: I like people I have like landowners, I have like
Speaker 1: how when I have like hunters, I like animal rights peole,
Speaker 1: I like them all. I love the relationshipship of people
Speaker 1: to conservation. And my bias is it's got to be
Speaker 1: very local, and when it's local, it's conflicts. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been involved in a lot of my staff. Bear
Speaker 1: conflicts in northwest Montana is a big deal. Right, we
Speaker 1: have phenomenal staff, but it will never go away. Lion
Speaker 1: conflicts actually are much um oh pretty much winter. Well,
Speaker 1: as soon as I say that, I can think of
Speaker 1: summer events. But where the residential footprint has been allowed
Speaker 1: to expand in western Montana into former dearnel cabitat, into
Speaker 1: the tree everyone wants a postcard, those conflicts are gonna
Speaker 1: be there forever. You would have to go scorch stirth
Speaker 1: on bears and lions and wolves to eliminate the conflict
Speaker 1: because the homes are in the wrong place, there where
Speaker 1: the deer are, there where they all are. So given
Speaker 1: that the homes aren't going to move. We have to
Speaker 1: constantly and my mind it will be multiple generations work
Speaker 1: with people the turn of turnover. How to live with
Speaker 1: these wild likee species that's here, it's all livestock down there,
Speaker 1: and we have more nationally Yea. In your book you
Speaker 1: kind of paint this picture of that it's going to
Speaker 1: require tolerance. You know when you talk about a lot
Speaker 1: of places that tolerance is growing, and you talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that um increasing populations of other predators.
Speaker 1: You know what put this as a negative just a
Speaker 1: matter of fact that you know, expanding populations of wolves,
Speaker 1: expanding populations of grizzlies, um can have a negative impact
Speaker 1: on lines that issues around you know, issues around climate
Speaker 1: can affect populations. But with all these areas of concern
Speaker 1: and that you point out, we have more now in
Speaker 1: more places than at any time in hundred plus years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they're like something clicked, well and they're just
Speaker 1: they're just showing up everywhere. Well, I'll get on my
Speaker 1: soapbox again. For hunters, legal hunters, UM hunters paid this
Speaker 1: country created a mechanism whereby hunters could pay for the
Speaker 1: recovery of the prey. And you recovery the grocery store,
Speaker 1: the cats are going to be whether we whether we
Speaker 1: like it or not, those shoppers are there because we
Speaker 1: can't see them. But it was Darnell hunters that put
Speaker 1: their money and still do, whether it's working with game
Speaker 1: damage or buying winter ranges as wildife management areas, or
Speaker 1: funding surveys. Once the prey were recovered in this country,
Speaker 1: then Carnivort. Do you feel that. That's what's huge, That's
Speaker 1: what's going on. It's huge. It's unique in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: you know in Canada. United States has that model of
Speaker 1: funding for conservation. You know, I've told the story of
Speaker 1: thousand times. I hesitate even tell again, but it's quick
Speaker 1: enough where I get away of it is. And even
Speaker 1: my friend Doug during and in Wisconsin, right, he talks abou.
Speaker 1: When he was a little kid, if you saw a
Speaker 1: deer track, you told your dad about it. And now
Speaker 1: they've got like in in a in an almost alarming way,
Speaker 1: they have the opposite problem. You know, they're talking seventy
Speaker 1: five deer for square mile, a habitat disease issues. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you'd go home there that's dear track dad and this guy,
Speaker 1: this isn't some old cadre. I mean, this guy is
Speaker 1: still kicking right along. I haven't got a daughter in
Speaker 1: college and he remembers that right. This isn't like some
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty year old dude telling your story. What
Speaker 1: worries me most is you get look at Canada geese,
Speaker 1: white tail deer to some degree, when they get to
Speaker 1: become almost a nuisance level, we take for granted, We
Speaker 1: take for granted what it took to recovery this incredible
Speaker 1: valued wild commodity that we enjoy in deer and elk
Speaker 1: and all the other species with them. That all happened
Speaker 1: by design, not by accident, and and and when they
Speaker 1: become nuisance levels, it's easy to kind of brush off
Speaker 1: what it took to get him here. So lions, bears, wolves, whatever,
Speaker 1: that all started because people funded the habitat work that
Speaker 1: supported the prey for these species. And we I don't
Speaker 1: think we can ever forget that. And it's not it's
Speaker 1: not common around the world. Yeah, what do you got?
Speaker 1: I'm done tapped? Oh man, I got a bunch. If
Speaker 1: we got time, rip a couple out, give me your
Speaker 1: best one. I don't know where to start. I'm gonna rate.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna rate your questions. I've been looking for for that. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll start off with the tolerance thing. I try to
Speaker 1: slip it in earlier but didn't get the opportunity. Um
Speaker 1: but do you feel like the tolerance We have some
Speaker 1: friends that are handlers in biology is and they feel
Speaker 1: like with the increased tolerance that we're having a little
Speaker 1: bit more um hard encounters as they call it, and
Speaker 1: being like the two that have happened recently in Washington
Speaker 1: in Oregon right where people are dying at the jaws
Speaker 1: of the line. Is that just coincidence or do you
Speaker 1: think they there there's something there? Personally? I think it's
Speaker 1: it's random. I think there are more people, and you
Speaker 1: look at where where there are more humans, and there
Speaker 1: are more humans playing outdoors, and we're encouraging people to
Speaker 1: play outdoors. It's a great thing. You're gonna get random
Speaker 1: stochastic encounters like that. I don't think there's personally that
Speaker 1: there's a relationship there. I think there's just more people
Speaker 1: playing outside. But it was uncanny for Washington to have
Speaker 1: its first ever or first the ninety four years person
Speaker 1: killed by the line, and then then it's neighboring state
Speaker 1: to have the first and state history within a couple
Speaker 1: of months of each other, and when it was quiet
Speaker 1: for like ten years in the country. It invites people
Speaker 1: to be like, oh, what's going on here? Well, it
Speaker 1: makes ways the recesses of our monkey brains fire off
Speaker 1: with great white sharks, lions, bears. When you know, I
Speaker 1: just saw a thing on TV. Beastings cause more deaths
Speaker 1: than you know. We're not afraid of bees. Really, the
Speaker 1: real killers domestic dogs, Oh my god. And and well
Speaker 1: I like to run it lunch and jog, and I'm
Speaker 1: terrified when the wrong dog is coming after me. But
Speaker 1: but drive around, Yeah, you drive around. You know, anyone
Speaker 1: who's out on the road Friday night around midnight, you
Speaker 1: know you wanna talk about sketchy time, sketchy encounters. And
Speaker 1: a lot of my journalist friends, you know, they write
Speaker 1: a story about grizzly bears or lions, it'll go a
Speaker 1: b because people love it. People love it. They write
Speaker 1: it about white tail deer. It's not but people in
Speaker 1: the different cultures and and with carnivores and our relationship
Speaker 1: to them. Um, it's always gonna be a big deal.
Speaker 1: Like a white shark, you know, Although that's that terrifies me.
Speaker 1: I used to longboards, you know, and not have a
Speaker 1: thirty foot missile below you with the brain that big. Yeah, listen,
Speaker 1: there are there are um when it comes to that,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of your rational fear, but there are
Speaker 1: high exposure activities, correct. I am not annoyed when surfers
Speaker 1: or abalone divers talk about great white sharks. When some
Speaker 1: person that like now and then we'll go take a
Speaker 1: swim on the coast and then talk about sharks. When
Speaker 1: a archery elk hunter talks about grizzlies, that doesn't annoy me.
Speaker 1: When someone who you know, drives a mile out of
Speaker 1: town and takes a little walk in the woods every
Speaker 1: few weeks and they talk about them, then I get
Speaker 1: a little annoyed. There are high exposure groups. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely correct, So like a northern California surfer from all
Speaker 1: years if you want to talk about sharks. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: your point is, I think it was I think it
Speaker 1: was random. Other than what isn't random is the human
Speaker 1: populations growing and that outdoor recreation economy. We're gonna that's
Speaker 1: how we market it in our communit He's here. It's
Speaker 1: big business more than agg even now the latest statistics
Speaker 1: that are being passed around, So you're gonna probably have
Speaker 1: more of these random events, you know. Good question is
Speaker 1: another one you're on a roll. Um, you can't get
Speaker 1: on a roll with just one. I appreciate the praise
Speaker 1: for the and how many times just in the last
Speaker 1: ninety minutes you've given praise to hunters for like helping
Speaker 1: this whole thing along to get to where we are.
Speaker 1: That's great to hear, right. We often hear that in
Speaker 1: now in the upcoming classes of young biologists. There aren't
Speaker 1: as many hunters in those classes. So one is that true?
Speaker 1: And then two do is that a perceived problem? By Yeah?
Speaker 1: I you know, you know I was a while after
Speaker 1: I left the field as a wildfe bologist. It was
Speaker 1: a wildife program manager for seventeen years up in northwest Montana.
Speaker 1: So I had to hire right, and I'd always go
Speaker 1: to wildlife stiding meetings like a coach doing a draft,
Speaker 1: you know, And yeah, you know the field is much
Speaker 1: more diverse. It was all white. It was all white males,
Speaker 1: you know, for the most Barton, Montana was the exception.
Speaker 1: We had a handful of professional women now in Montana
Speaker 1: are management biologist. And while it's probably almost fifty fifty
Speaker 1: men and women and and as whether they hunt or
Speaker 1: not um isn't as important as their relationship with people
Speaker 1: and working with them. I think, yes, perhaps I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't don't know the data. I'll be making it up.
Speaker 1: But um, when we when I used to hire, you know,
Speaker 1: what you're getting at is, you know, I want someone
Speaker 1: that can build relationships with everyone and translate that science
Speaker 1: into the communities for local conservations, so at lasts, whether
Speaker 1: it's seasons or habitat or research, you name it. You
Speaker 1: have to be willing to work with those groups. And
Speaker 1: if you can't work with hunters, you're gonna have a
Speaker 1: problem because that's paying your salary. But that doesn't really
Speaker 1: translate into whether your hunt or not. You know, how
Speaker 1: okay are you? With population management? And working with people
Speaker 1: is more important? Um? But perhaps yeah, you see, nationally,
Speaker 1: I think Montana's holding our own a little more with
Speaker 1: hunting recruitment than some of the areas where it's declining,
Speaker 1: and that whole farm to table movement has actually caused
Speaker 1: a spike and in our hunter red classes, more women
Speaker 1: are wanting to take their own meat, cut it up themselves,
Speaker 1: and serve it to their friends with only them having
Speaker 1: touched it. That's kind of cool. That's been a recent
Speaker 1: thing in the last five ten years. But but the
Speaker 1: but the national trips, I think you're right there, they're declining.
Speaker 1: And you see it in young biologists too. Then less
Speaker 1: less hunters coming through the well, not necessarily here. I
Speaker 1: think people come here because they in part because they
Speaker 1: know the the hunting is is pretty affordable and pretty
Speaker 1: the opportunities are here, and in the graduate school cultures
Speaker 1: that are there, most of them. I learned how to
Speaker 1: hunt in grad school. Big game. You know, I ran
Speaker 1: a muskrat trapline, but we didn't have deer when I
Speaker 1: was born and San Diego, and we're gonna hunt there,
Speaker 1: right you fish? But you know they're gonna they pick
Speaker 1: it up in grad school if they haven't already. Typically,
Speaker 1: and that's what I found. Hit them another one. Okay,
Speaker 1: still on a roll? Did you like that one? Well,
Speaker 1: you pointed out that you couldn't be on one or earlier.
Speaker 1: But like the first, um, the first one, eight, back
Speaker 1: to back to five, back to the sport of chasing
Speaker 1: cats with with dogs. Um, do you feel like there's
Speaker 1: any negative effect to the cats? Most? Yeah, yeah, most
Speaker 1: of the researchers is no. You may be you know,
Speaker 1: whether it's stress or behavior or affecting life history traits
Speaker 1: by pursuing them with a dog. And actually, if you
Speaker 1: think about it, you know those hound handlers have to
Speaker 1: raise those puppies, they have to follow them. But what
Speaker 1: it does allow you to do and it does it
Speaker 1: with the researchers, do we use the same dogs, same
Speaker 1: helman In most cases, it allows you to be discriminate
Speaker 1: the animals up there is at a male or female?
Speaker 1: How old is it, whether it's a legally sanctioned take
Speaker 1: where they can read. You know, when you kill an
Speaker 1: animal legal ease as you reduce it to your possession
Speaker 1: right that allows you to tell if it's a male
Speaker 1: season or a female season. To being up on the
Speaker 1: science are using, you know, to manage that population. You
Speaker 1: can actually see the animal and do that and as
Speaker 1: a biologist, you know, do you know? Do you you
Speaker 1: know the researcher, do you need a radio and a
Speaker 1: female or mail you can do that. You need hounds
Speaker 1: to see them. They're like ghosts. They magically appear with
Speaker 1: these dogs. Sometimes it's ten minutes, sometimes it's ten hours,
Speaker 1: and they say in there they take you to places
Speaker 1: you will never go. Ye experienced that on just a
Speaker 1: few catalants that we've been on. But yeah, for somehow,
Speaker 1: when you're out chasing looking for Alcolm, you'll dear you
Speaker 1: don't end up where you chase those dogs. Just never never. Um,
Speaker 1: what else did I have for you? Does that move
Speaker 1: one more? Um? Let's you're tapped out. No, I'm not
Speaker 1: tapped out. There was a line there where you said
Speaker 1: that killing um lions, this strupts the field, the field
Speaker 1: social order, killing lions, and then it may lead to
Speaker 1: more human cat conflict. So that's a concept that's come
Speaker 1: about with researchers UM relatively recently in the last ten years. UM.
Speaker 1: And it's that and I've seen it referred to as
Speaker 1: juvenile delinquent hypothesis. But it's a little more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: But picture a large male. You pull him out right,
Speaker 1: let's say, right out of Bozeman, and you have a
Speaker 1: large male that's very mature and he's he's king of
Speaker 1: his world right over here, and then you take him out.
Speaker 1: Whether it's a conflict you know, he killed a goat
Speaker 1: or whatever. All of a sudden, you've got two, three,
Speaker 1: four males temporarily until it sorts out in there. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden you have four miles instead of one.
Speaker 1: So you have this there's it's disruptive because they're trying
Speaker 1: to sort out whose territory it's going to be. You
Speaker 1: might actually have more teeth on the landscape temporarily by
Speaker 1: taking an old guy out. Now, I mean this is
Speaker 1: a very heavily haunted area. Yeah, everything around here gets pounded. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no way that you have a situation where you're
Speaker 1: able to You're gonna have some mail. It's gonna set
Speaker 1: up shop and rule the rules for five six years. Well,
Speaker 1: and again, i'd have to look at the data because
Speaker 1: I'm a data guy to see. But one of the
Speaker 1: one of the chapters in in my book that I'm
Speaker 1: frankly i'm very proud of. It's called locals Only, and
Speaker 1: it's how a season is set if you're a student,
Speaker 1: it is the I've rarely seen in any book, in
Speaker 1: any article, how biologists set seasons working with commissions and communities.
Speaker 1: Interesting and it's it could be a textbook in a
Speaker 1: class because we moved to limited entry on cats and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of issues because there was money
Speaker 1: involved with some of the We called a December dash
Speaker 1: for cash, you know, and that was happening, you know.
Speaker 1: So they're very valuable for non residents. But we couldn't
Speaker 1: shut the seasons down, you know, we couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: It was a supply and demand problem. So we went
Speaker 1: to limited entry. And we even have male female sub
Speaker 1: quotas to address tag dress. And that's random to the
Speaker 1: point of being cruel. You know, some people drop three
Speaker 1: years in a row, another won't draw one in three years. Right,
Speaker 1: it's just random. But what it allows us as biologists
Speaker 1: to do, as an agency to do is you can
Speaker 1: take the best science in the world. We've got this
Speaker 1: brand new mountain lion management plan that's out there. You've
Speaker 1: finly seen it circulating this two weeks. Best science, frankly
Speaker 1: on the planet doesn't get to what you want. But
Speaker 1: we can take that science on a density. Once you
Speaker 1: decide in an area what you want, and you can
Speaker 1: give a prescription of males and females that you think,
Speaker 1: depending upon your objectives, can be taken off the landscape
Speaker 1: to address that problem. That you mentioned, Steven, and that
Speaker 1: that took and it's unique where we're at. We could
Speaker 1: do it because they're mostly public land or corporate timberland,
Speaker 1: but that took a limited entry draw to to manage that.
Speaker 1: And now some areas with landowner tallerance clearly that wouldn't
Speaker 1: work right you you need Holman in there. But incidentally,
Speaker 1: that lion the management plan, guy named Jake Coolby wrote it.
Speaker 1: You got to meet him. He's a wonderful guy. He's
Speaker 1: a biologist now and white sulfur. He volunteered for me
Speaker 1: almost thirty years ago. Ben around there. He is this tall,
Speaker 1: skinny kid bandana but he had legs twice as long
Speaker 1: as mine and got he'd take off and go do
Speaker 1: anything we needed him to do. And here at this
Speaker 1: point in my career, he just wrote the line plan.
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of cool. And he's from I
Speaker 1: think he might be from Michigan somewhere back east. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we have this plan out now, very sharp brains whatever, whatever.
Speaker 1: But but here we know Montana again is at the
Speaker 1: forefront for mountain lion management. It's there's more science in
Speaker 1: that plan. We worked with the University of Montana than
Speaker 1: any other state, I'd argue or province in in in
Speaker 1: the country and North or North and South America. It's
Speaker 1: very good. Doesn't get to what you want. That's community,
Speaker 1: that's messy. That's what still has to be fought out
Speaker 1: at a local level. But it's got the science there
Speaker 1: so you can try. It's a privilege, you know. I
Speaker 1: always take hunting as a privilege. We have to have
Speaker 1: the best science to do it. And uh and this
Speaker 1: does that in terms of people, you know, being concerned.
Speaker 1: On the other side, I feel like they need to
Speaker 1: send that send some of that plan down and I
Speaker 1: don't want wanted to comment on this point. They need
Speaker 1: to send that plan down to Arizona. I feel like
Speaker 1: they're kind of approached it the wrong way down there.
Speaker 1: Man Um and I talked and that that's coming from hounds.
Speaker 1: Mean yeah, I hear that from hounds. Mean it. It's
Speaker 1: from what I understand, and I'm jumping into areas I
Speaker 1: know very little about, thank you. The cattle component is huge,
Speaker 1: and for whatever, there's a lot more cattle depredation down
Speaker 1: there and and historically in New Mexico. Yeah, and a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of it's a different systems, you know, and
Speaker 1: and that's when I'm very unfamiliar with so but yeah, interesting,
Speaker 1: I although you know, I did think this plan is
Speaker 1: something every state could look at because UM it's got
Speaker 1: some really cool UM population models in there that takes
Speaker 1: the data we can collect on cats. Again, they're like ghosts,
Speaker 1: You're limited on the data you can collect on them.
Speaker 1: And then and then UM uses the best scientific techniques
Speaker 1: to kind of chug out, you know, where your different
Speaker 1: scenarios could be depending on what you want on the landscape.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard the word, oh, no, keep going?
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard the word concluder? O you too early?
Speaker 1: Because check out this double segue? I got a double segue.
Speaker 1: Might might be the first time ever UM because speak
Speaker 1: of them being uh ghosts, not only do you don't
Speaker 1: see them, but you can't smell them. And as first Steve,
Speaker 1: the most interesting thing in the book was that he
Speaker 1: couldn't understand or he didn't know that they had completely left,
Speaker 1: you know, the North American continent for a time period.
Speaker 1: To me, the most interesting thing UM in the book
Speaker 1: was that I didn't know how actually little they smelled,
Speaker 1: and like why it would be avantageous and multiple um spaces,
Speaker 1: you know in their world. That's a double segue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I included you're like the most interesting thing about
Speaker 1: the book, and then as in the ghost likeness doubled up,
Speaker 1: you made an extra smooth I don't know about that,
Speaker 1: but I guess the question is, was there like an
Speaker 1: aha moment for you where I'm sure you learned about
Speaker 1: the fact that they didn't have scent, but did you
Speaker 1: ever just like have one in your train lines and
Speaker 1: stuck your nose in it and go, wow, Literally, you
Speaker 1: can't smell this thing. The only time I could smell
Speaker 1: him really is if you're climbing a tree and they
Speaker 1: you're you know, they're tranquilized and their stress, but it's
Speaker 1: a you know, it's a dissociated tranquilizer. They they kind
Speaker 1: of their muscles tightened, so they don't follow the tree, right.
Speaker 1: You have got to climb up in the ear and
Speaker 1: they you you can smell that. But the cats are
Speaker 1: really clean, if they're pretty clean, even bears are pretty clean,
Speaker 1: un less been rolling around in a coulvert trap full
Speaker 1: of of fit. But do you feel like they're so
Speaker 1: clean that they could be coming in up wind of prey? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't know, dear wind, how likely our dear to
Speaker 1: wind line. Yeah, I would probably say unlikely our lions
Speaker 1: would have went extinct, But I don't know. Yeah that
Speaker 1: you know, that's you know what you ought to do
Speaker 1: when you retire, to do a study or do a
Speaker 1: starty to see if they play the wind. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: before I want to be a technician when I retire,
Speaker 1: I want to roll back into the field, right, good idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: anything gets you outside too. That would be a tough
Speaker 1: study to do. I know you think about that one.
Speaker 1: So concluders. A concluder is an opportunity where you get
Speaker 1: you I don't even have one right now, but I'm
Speaker 1: still gonna invite you to. A concluder is an opportunity
Speaker 1: where like you come in and you're like, man, I
Speaker 1: hope these guys ask you about X, and then we
Speaker 1: never do. So a concluder gives you the opportunity to
Speaker 1: bring up something totally without prompt or it could be
Speaker 1: that you developed a concluder throughout the course of the
Speaker 1: conversation and you keep trying to wedge it in, but
Speaker 1: you can't find a good place to wedge it in. Okay,
Speaker 1: So now without even needing a segue, you can just
Speaker 1: bring up some random thought. Yeah, I think I think
Speaker 1: you know, for for both of you, I think you
Speaker 1: know we all and you hit on it real well.
Speaker 1: Is is how fortunate we are two in Montana to
Speaker 1: have the habitats primarily to support to even have the
Speaker 1: discussion about all these species and and uh, you know
Speaker 1: bison are still on the horizon. Is you know where
Speaker 1: we're going to tolerate them in Montana or not? But
Speaker 1: from the most part, Montana has been pretty amazing. Um.
Speaker 1: The one thing I think that and you you two
Speaker 1: are have covered pretty much everything in North America in
Speaker 1: particular that people realize it was Helmand that had such
Speaker 1: a role in protecting and bringing back and and and
Speaker 1: being watch dogs from Mountline Conservation. That's not intuitive for
Speaker 1: most folks, and they do and they still do today.
Speaker 1: And uh, and I guess I would add in the
Speaker 1: South American component, what Chris Tompkins is doing down there
Speaker 1: is off the charts different than anyone else on planet Earth.
Speaker 1: With her own personal wealth. She's doing, in my mind,
Speaker 1: equivalent to what Teddy Roosevelt did when he rated the
Speaker 1: Forest Service and the parks. She's doing it almost to
Speaker 1: that scale and still going strong, with local countries, local
Speaker 1: governments now celebrating and accepting those public lands, because that's
Speaker 1: huge because then people down there, rich or poor, those
Speaker 1: parks are going to be the great equalizers. People get
Speaker 1: married near him, the businesses and the economies are gonna
Speaker 1: thrive around the parks, and you're gonna have South American
Speaker 1: native species come back. And so we tend to be
Speaker 1: We're lucky here in Montana. But some amazing stuff is
Speaker 1: going on in South America with Christian Salcedos and all
Speaker 1: those chapter he's their conservation director, and I really liked
Speaker 1: profiling Christian. So it's if you read the book, I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoy uh some of the challenges they're facing
Speaker 1: there because their landscape is very similar to Montana. I
Speaker 1: kind of call Patagonia Montana on steroids. Yeah, just Dandy's
Speaker 1: are ments. But and the species are goofy from my
Speaker 1: perspective because they're so different from flamingos and flying by
Speaker 1: glaciers and camels, and it's just easy mix of biology
Speaker 1: down there. But that's what makes it kind of magical
Speaker 1: in my mind. And and and the food, the wine,
Speaker 1: everything's good down there, and I can't wait to go
Speaker 1: back there too. But you two have covered I'm impressed
Speaker 1: you've covered most all the real especially the complicated topics.
Speaker 1: So hit us with the name of your book one
Speaker 1: more time. In your name, So, Jim Williams, I'm the
Speaker 1: I'm I've been a while at biologist, my entire career.
Speaker 1: I'm the regional supervisor now for Montana, Fishwife and Parks
Speaker 1: kind of and a career, had a wonderful career. It's
Speaker 1: a unique state. My books called Path of the Puma
Speaker 1: and it half the books Montana Stories and the Northern
Speaker 1: Rockies and the other half Patagonia, Argentina and Chile. And
Speaker 1: puma is another wildlife and parks down there, alright. Where
Speaker 1: should they go buy it? Um? Yeah, of course it's available. No,
Speaker 1: it's available in all bookstores online. You can just go
Speaker 1: to Patagonia the So what's really cool too? Patagonia the
Speaker 1: clothing company actually uh published that and I know they
Speaker 1: be getting involved with backcountry hunters and anglers recently. You
Speaker 1: can get it on their website too, But they didn't
Speaker 1: cut any corners. What I'm so, I'm glad you have.
Speaker 1: Here's my concluder. So and double concluded, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: Is that you know, if you're going to write a book.
Speaker 1: And I've written a lot of science articles and popular
Speaker 1: magazine articles, but you know, I wanted to write one
Speaker 1: good book. Had been very fortunate they Patagonia said, what
Speaker 1: do you need as I want color photos, I want
Speaker 1: maps to geo reference readers. The photographs that book are
Speaker 1: stunning and and if you just read the photos and
Speaker 1: the captions from front the back, you'll learn something for
Speaker 1: those of that don't have any attention to the photos
Speaker 1: of like my kind of my favorite type class of
Speaker 1: photo is like predators eating dead stuff. It's a great
Speaker 1: it's a great flip through on predators eating dead stuff.
Speaker 1: They did it amazing. The same two women that did
Speaker 1: the Patagonia catalogs for twenty years did the thirty years,
Speaker 1: did the photos in the book and worked with me
Speaker 1: and and I and you and the ability to geo
Speaker 1: reference as you read in a map was very important.
Speaker 1: Um and so they had a young couple of maps
Speaker 1: for could create the six maps and it's it's I
Speaker 1: was really proud of it, and they surprised me. And
Speaker 1: I'll show you too here and of course I'm not
Speaker 1: a detailed person. I didn't pick up on it for
Speaker 1: about three weeks. But they embossed a puma print in
Speaker 1: the cover and that cool to scale, yeah, and that
Speaker 1: neat they spread. So it's a real quality book. And
Speaker 1: I'm I'm old fashioned. I like to hold a book
Speaker 1: in my hand still, and it's just feels good. You know.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty proud of it, so I appreciate YouTube, you know,
Speaker 1: allowing me on today to talk about it. Congratulations, no
Speaker 1: small feet, Uh okay, Jim Williams Path of the Puma,
Speaker 1: thank you very much.