Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underware.
Speaker 2: Listening past, you can't predict.
Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
Speaker 1: I need gear that won't quit. First light builds, no compromise,
Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
Speaker 1: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
Speaker 1: t E dot com. Today we're joined joined by uh
Speaker 1: what I say? Joined joined by George Buman, who's a
Speaker 1: sculptor of bronze artists. He's a naturalist. But here's the
Speaker 1: main deal for our for our purposes here, he's an
Speaker 1: animal language and animal intelligence expert. Teaches courses on the
Speaker 1: intelligence of animals. We'll go to those things in Yellstone
Speaker 1: National Park. Leads seminars there of helping people understand what
Speaker 1: they're hearing, what they're seeing, about how animals do their business.
Speaker 1: He's got a new book called Eavesdropping on Animals. What
Speaker 1: we can learn from wildlife conversations. We're gonna dive in
Speaker 1: on all that. But just as a little tickler hit
Speaker 1: me with, you don't need to say a word. Okay,
Speaker 1: now listen, listen, this is this is George Buman. No
Speaker 1: brody verify, yeah, no diaphragm in his mouth.
Speaker 3: No, no animals in the studio.
Speaker 1: No animals in the studio. We have some bronze pete.
Speaker 1: We have a bronze piece. We have like the makings
Speaker 1: of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey
Speaker 1: right there, Tap that turkey so people realize that's not okay,
Speaker 1: that's not that turkey is not making this noise.
Speaker 4: Okay, hit us with okay, hit us with the note.
Speaker 1: Hit us with some turkey vocalizations. No, no, this is
Speaker 1: just just flat out okay, all right, okay, hit us
Speaker 1: with some kyotes.
Speaker 4: Way off? You got a good wolfall Oh yeah, let's
Speaker 4: hear a wolf. Oh dude, can you do a good
Speaker 4: elk way off bugle?
Speaker 1: Yanni does a good bugle, but his Yanni's bugle is
Speaker 1: miles away.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeahn might be miles away.
Speaker 1: Hit me with a good mile away off elk. That's
Speaker 1: a lot closer than Yannis. Yannis is like, you can't
Speaker 1: even tell.
Speaker 4: If you heard it.
Speaker 1: You're wondering you've got any good magpie vocalizations? Ravens anything
Speaker 1: of the Ravens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, one of my favorites. They've got a lot
Speaker 2: of a lot of range, a lot of meaning there.
Speaker 1: Let me, I want I want to talk a bunch
Speaker 1: about those guys, because man, it makes some crazy ass.
Speaker 4: Noises and it can't be just that making noises for
Speaker 4: no reason.
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: Okay, here's a real challenging one. And just just telling me.
Speaker 1: If you can't do it, I wish I could. Can
Speaker 1: you like this tests your whistling skills? Can you hit
Speaker 1: a black can you do black cap chickenye?
Speaker 2: Not to mind action. Yeah, there's they're certain to do
Speaker 2: it now too.
Speaker 4: Good.
Speaker 1: That's a tough one, but you know how good it works.
Speaker 1: So yeah, because people that can do it can bring
Speaker 1: them in like crazy.
Speaker 2: That's pretty good. Yep, damn yeah.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, we're gonna get it off and
Speaker 1: now that but what like, like, here's the main thing
Speaker 1: I want. One of the main things I want to
Speaker 1: talk to about when we get to I got to
Speaker 1: do a couple of announcements is not just the noises,
Speaker 1: but like.
Speaker 4: There's the what like what they're talking about?
Speaker 2: It means stuff. Oh, I can show you things you
Speaker 2: would never ever have found.
Speaker 1: They obviously mean stuff, but like because they're not doing
Speaker 1: it for fun. No, I mean, it might be fun,
Speaker 1: but they're not you know what I mean. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: it all means. One of the main the first thing
Speaker 1: to so you know what's gonna come. One of the
Speaker 1: first things I'm gonna ask you about is you know
Speaker 1: a pine squirrels pissed off noise or whatever his noise is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't do it real good, but there's a
Speaker 2: ton of meaning in that.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Ton, Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: He's pissed at his body.
Speaker 2: Fisted at the bobcat.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, real quick.
Speaker 1: So there's a new YouTube. The Bear Grease YouTube channel
Speaker 1: is becoming its own thing. A little behind the scenes
Speaker 1: thinking here, Clay Clay started a YouTube.
Speaker 4: Channel million years ago and it was like the.
Speaker 1: Bear Journal or because when Clay owned Bear Hunting Magazine,
Speaker 1: he had had a YouTube channel, So it's always been
Speaker 1: kind of lurking around there. That YouTube channel is going
Speaker 1: to stay like that's Clay's baby. But Clay and Bear
Speaker 1: Nwcomb are going to build out the Bear Grease YouTube channel.
Speaker 1: So all about them making them little bows out of sticks.
Speaker 1: Hunting content, Mule content cooking stuff okay, And they're also
Speaker 1: launching their own Instagram page, Round Bear Grease and I'll
Speaker 1: tell you we haven't gotten it. I might be the
Speaker 1: first guy ever mentioned this. Clay's book that's coming out
Speaker 1: in a long time from now is exceptionally good.
Speaker 4: It's good. I mean, I've only read the first five chapters.
Speaker 4: It's it's a book. It's a it's a book. It's
Speaker 4: like a history of the black bear. It is good,
Speaker 4: including a large chapter on the circumpolar bear culture. I
Speaker 4: don't know if I can. I'm allowed to. Yeah, why not?
Speaker 1: Clay just he's turning his booking right now. There's circumpolar
Speaker 1: bear culture.
Speaker 4: Is crazy because there's like a latitude.
Speaker 1: Band all around the continent, so it touches North America, Europe, Asia,
Speaker 1: around the northern hemisphere. It's yeah, it's a band of latitudes,
Speaker 1: northern northern latitudes all around the globe. And if you
Speaker 1: think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around
Speaker 1: the world, these are people that split. There's people within
Speaker 1: this that split apart way long ago. Like meaning if
Speaker 1: you imagine, like imagine it's human's column, like humans are
Speaker 1: kind of in.
Speaker 4: The Middle East. Humans are in Africa.
Speaker 1: You know, humans are up in Spain wherever, and eventually
Speaker 1: some of them come around and wind up in Siberia
Speaker 1: and some come around and wind up in northern Europe.
Speaker 1: Now by this point they haven't been hanging out together
Speaker 1: for tens of thousands of years, right.
Speaker 4: But.
Speaker 1: You look at their religious structures and sort of like
Speaker 1: spiritual understandings of bears, and you have this circumpolar bear
Speaker 1: culture where people that wouldn't have no interaction with each
Speaker 1: other develop or no interaction with each other for thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of years, develop the same sort of religious
Speaker 1: understandings of bears and how bears fit into their culture
Speaker 1: and the shamanistic aspects and like motivations that are assigned
Speaker 1: to bears. And you cannot explain it how some dude
Speaker 1: in Siberia, some dudent America, some dude in Europe have
Speaker 1: the same concept of like how you treat a bear
Speaker 1: when you hunt for a bear? What are your obligations
Speaker 1: to the bear? That you definitely don't want a bear
Speaker 1: to see you once it's dead, So if you kill
Speaker 1: a bear, you approach it from behind.
Speaker 4: Like these dudes are on the same trip all over
Speaker 4: the do you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: No, it's so weird, man. I hope he's not pissed
Speaker 1: that I'm bringing that up.
Speaker 2: Does he have no bear Mother story in there? Is
Speaker 2: that that one that goes all over Northern Hemisphere?
Speaker 4: It's all over, It's in there. He's got every damn
Speaker 4: thing in there. Yeah, that's neat.
Speaker 1: No, it's a super cool book available long time from now.
Speaker 1: So the Beary's YouTube channel be run by Baron Clay nukeomb.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh February eleventh, two days before I turn fifty two,
Speaker 1: very auspicious days.
Speaker 4: Here's a great correction.
Speaker 1: We're gonna start a thing where you win a prize
Speaker 1: for you know, we're trying to, like in an age
Speaker 1: of disinformation, shady information.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're trying to. We're gonna have a weekly prize
Speaker 4: called Correction of the.
Speaker 1: Week for the biggest fib so no rewarding people who catch.
Speaker 4: Us being wrong.
Speaker 2: Ah, that's a good thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, check this out.
Speaker 1: For instance, there dam made a comment and that was
Speaker 1: this is when we talking about stuff I didn't know. Well,
Speaker 1: he even has the thirty seven minute mark. Episode eight
Speaker 1: twenty six, was that episode called Skunk Smells Her First?
Speaker 5: No, that wasn't it how skunks can ruin a marriage?
Speaker 1: Okay, I said, oh, to my defense, I'm still this
Speaker 1: is still a correction. To my defense, I said, I
Speaker 1: don't think that a human operating word here being I said,
Speaker 1: I on the subject of skunks and skunk essence, I said,
Speaker 1: I don't think that a human can make.
Speaker 5: That.
Speaker 1: I didn't finish quite then, I okay, I.
Speaker 4: Said, I don't think that a human can make.
Speaker 1: I don't think in a lab you could make as
Speaker 1: pugnacious or resilient of an order in a laboratory. Guy
Speaker 1: wrote in He's like, you're way wrong.
Speaker 4: They can't. Humans can and have, And he gets into
Speaker 4: some of these odors.
Speaker 1: While the skunk order is due to fields mercaptains sulfur
Speaker 1: containing compounds, he says, there are other compounds, both synthesized
Speaker 1: and isolated in laboratories that samel much worse.
Speaker 4: I like this one. They have a.
Speaker 1: Lab ba odor called cadaverine, which is a lab produced
Speaker 1: odor of decaying flesh. They have pyridine putressine, and what
Speaker 1: he regards to be the worst smell of all time,
Speaker 1: thio acetone order, so potent it causes nausea. Vomiting and unconsciousness.
Speaker 1: There was a lab leak. There was a lab leak
Speaker 1: in Germany where they had they had a lab leak
Speaker 1: of thio acetone and Germany and for a half mile
Speaker 1: radius around the lab people reported nausea, vomiting, and unconsciousness
Speaker 1: from a leak.
Speaker 2: Powerful and what do they use that for?
Speaker 4: Usually I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they justif either way, I don't
Speaker 1: know how. That's a great question. This would be one
Speaker 1: of those things we talk about ridiculous maybe when you're
Speaker 1: like hacking on science, like the dumb stuff they spend
Speaker 1: money on making bad smells.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, so I'm staying corrected.
Speaker 1: That's a good correction right there, man, I said, this
Speaker 1: is the kind of correction.
Speaker 4: What will be the prize when you get correction in
Speaker 4: the week, It's gotta be something good. But it's we
Speaker 4: have a lot of it.
Speaker 5: We're gonna maybe.
Speaker 4: We gotta fifty two of them.
Speaker 5: Maybe this will excite people more.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 5: We will have a segment sponsored by to Cova's. To
Speaker 5: Covas is.
Speaker 4: Well, They're gonna do the they are.
Speaker 5: Kickers Correction of the week and we will choose the
Speaker 5: winning correction of the week. For We'll do this for
Speaker 5: about a month first to see and the correction of
Speaker 5: the week winner gets a pair of takovas.
Speaker 1: Oh, so we're gonna start out you get a pair
Speaker 1: of ship kickers, and then but we'll come up with
Speaker 1: something comparable every time.
Speaker 5: Sure that's phenomenal corrections.
Speaker 1: This would be this would be a great This would
Speaker 1: be a great one, I say, And again I said, think.
Speaker 1: I say, you can't make something worse than that in
Speaker 1: a lab. Guys say, hey you can. Here's another correction.
Speaker 1: He calls it a craction by omission, but I'd like
Speaker 1: to correct him. It's not a correction, bio missions, just
Speaker 1: a correction. So I don't think he'd win because like
Speaker 1: he's saying, hey, here's a correction by omission, and then
Speaker 1: when I tell you the craction, you realize it's not
Speaker 1: a correction, it's just a correction. He's just trying to
Speaker 1: soup it up. I said. We were talking about retrieval laws.
Speaker 1: We're talking about that in different states you have these
Speaker 1: different governing laws about whether you can go and get retrieve.
Speaker 4: Game. Okay, so picture that you're sitting there.
Speaker 1: You're sitting there and you you you shoot a duck,
Speaker 1: you know, ducks flying overhead, and you shoot a duck
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden he like sails off and
Speaker 1: plump lands overund the neighbor's place. States clarify. All states
Speaker 1: have clarified, Like what are you allowed to do? Some
Speaker 1: states you just flat out go get it. There's a
Speaker 1: state where you can leave your gun behind and go
Speaker 1: fetch it. And there are states like the one I'm
Speaker 1: sitting in right now, you have no right or authority
Speaker 1: to go fetch it. You'd have to go take it
Speaker 1: up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I
Speaker 1: sailed to duck over around your place.
Speaker 4: Can I go grab it?
Speaker 1: And as terrible as it sounds, I mean I'm totally like,
Speaker 1: I'm like totally fine with that rule, but I would
Speaker 1: like to think that most landowners would, when approached, facilitate
Speaker 1: the recovery. I understand. I'm not condemning the rule because
Speaker 1: I understand that there are situations is where someone could
Speaker 1: set up in a way where they just basically know.
Speaker 4: That that's going to be the outbum.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it could be abused for sure, especially
Speaker 3: with big game.
Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, where you're hunting in a spot
Speaker 1: where you're just if you're sitting there going like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know it's going to run on in the neighbor's place,
Speaker 1: but I'm allowed to go get it, so that doesn't
Speaker 1: matter like that, that's probably that could be potentially problematic,
Speaker 1: he points out. So I say, in South Dakota, how
Speaker 1: it's legal to retrieve upland game such as pheasants without
Speaker 1: land owner permission? Okay, but yetta be unarmed. We clarified
Speaker 1: that meaning you hit a pheasant, you hit a pheasant,
Speaker 1: he sails off. On the neighbor's place in South Dakota,
Speaker 1: you lean your shotgun whatever, set your shotgun down, you
Speaker 1: run over and fetch it, he pointed out, And he
Speaker 1: says that it was correction by omission.
Speaker 4: He points out, you can't do that with big game.
Speaker 4: Isn't that weird?
Speaker 3: Strange? But I think it might be. South Dakota has
Speaker 3: that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside roads.
Speaker 3: It's like a right away. So I think a lot
Speaker 3: of those birds that get shot end up ten yards
Speaker 3: onto you know, where you're not permitted to go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're doing it because of the rule.
Speaker 1: You can ditch hunt Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you can't. Yeah, so just you can't. You can't.
Speaker 4: You can chase a pheasant, but you can't chase the deer.
Speaker 4: But if a buck sprung up out of that ditch.
Speaker 1: And you are allowed to have your dog run over
Speaker 1: and fetch it.
Speaker 4: But check this out.
Speaker 1: Let's say your dog runs over to fetch it flush
Speaker 1: is a pheasant. This is what this guy's saying. If
Speaker 1: he's wrong, sending a correction, and he'll have to give
Speaker 1: you a prize for correcting him. If your dog runs
Speaker 1: over onto a private Let's say you're hunting your ditch
Speaker 1: hunting and your dog runs onto some dude's place and
Speaker 1: flushes a bird off that dude's place, and that bird
Speaker 1: then flies over you on the right of way. You
Speaker 1: can't shoot the bird because your dog can go retrieve,
Speaker 1: but he can't go hunt.
Speaker 4: And that's basically having a dog with a shotgun. Here's
Speaker 4: a nurse skunk story that was a bad segue.
Speaker 1: This guy says this, this last week, I had been
Speaker 1: skinning a skunk that caught the coyote trap. I wasn't
Speaker 1: really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in it.
Speaker 4: Sent gland.
Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime. Oh, we're done with corrections,
Speaker 1: not right, Yeah, this is this is this is a story.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime I had just committed, I
Speaker 1: put the skunk outside to let things air out, so
Speaker 1: he was skinning an inside. An hour later, the cop
Speaker 1: showed up. Well, the local police showed up in my
Speaker 1: house to inform me that there was a terrible smell
Speaker 1: coming from my house, to the point that the local
Speaker 1: middle school had to go into lockdown because they thought
Speaker 1: kids were smoking massive amounts of weed.
Speaker 4: He's the word marijuana.
Speaker 1: They even had the fire department come to the school
Speaker 1: to test the air for toxins. Now, my whole town
Speaker 1: has been talking about me and infern to me as
Speaker 1: skunk boy. I don't think the smell was that bad,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure what to do because I make
Speaker 1: a homemade skunk based lure that I used to catch
Speaker 1: all my predators. Here it goes into a question. This
Speaker 1: becomes like a like a advice advice. This is becoming
Speaker 1: an advice column.
Speaker 4: Do I stop making it and risk being less successful?
Speaker 4: He's leading the witness.
Speaker 1: He asked, do I stop making it in risk being
Speaker 1: less successful on the trap line, or do I keep
Speaker 1: making it in secret and hope there isn't another incident.
Speaker 1: I think that there is a middle ground Hunter Gregory.
Speaker 1: See here's the evidence. The name of your kid Hunter
Speaker 1: doesn't backfire. Yeah, his name's Hunter, didn't backfire. No names
Speaker 1: their kid fishermen angler.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they probably don't.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I've never heard it.
Speaker 1: No names are kids, sportsperson outdoors? A person his name's Hunter.
Speaker 1: It didn't backfire. Obviously he's obviously he's like neck deep
Speaker 1: in the disciplines he's from. I'm not gonna give his
Speaker 1: last name. I think you got to take this whole
Speaker 1: operation elsewhere if it depends you have the right. Well,
Speaker 1: what's that machine we want to get the founder of
Speaker 1: this machine on the.
Speaker 4: Nasal raider nasal radar.
Speaker 1: We're calling the raider, but the nasal there's a machine
Speaker 1: that they use that quantifies bad smells. You know about this,
Speaker 1: called the nasal radar. I would say nasal raider, but
Speaker 1: I was misreading it. That's a correction.
Speaker 4: The nasal radar.
Speaker 1: It's like when you get a oh, nasal ranger, sure, okay,
Speaker 1: nasal ranger. When you get a smell complaint, like some
Speaker 1: dude skin and skunks. It's so subjective.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, it's like why not bother you?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad.
Speaker 1: The guy over here, he doesn't think it smells that bad,
Speaker 1: So it does it smell that bad. The nasal ranger
Speaker 1: is a machine that you put on your nose. It
Speaker 1: looks like an elk bugle with contraptions coming off it.
Speaker 1: Can you pull this up, Phil, just so people can
Speaker 1: see it? To me again, you don't have a little
Speaker 1: computer over there, and.
Speaker 5: What was to do it?
Speaker 6: I do, but I don't have a picture.
Speaker 2: I guess I could just google it.
Speaker 3: It tells you how bad you think it should smell.
Speaker 4: The nasal Ranger. I watched this whole video, but it.
Speaker 2: Just looks insane.
Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, Like.
Speaker 1: Let's say someone's like, dude, the hog farm next to
Speaker 1: my place is killing me.
Speaker 4: It smells so bad.
Speaker 1: And it winds up being like, well, according to who
Speaker 1: the nasal ranger you.
Speaker 4: It looks like an Eler bugle that hooks to your nose.
Speaker 1: There's a little nose coup, but it's got filters and
Speaker 1: shit coming off. Okay, you go out there and there's
Speaker 1: a meter that shows like what it.
Speaker 4: Okay, right there, it looks like if a cop was, yeah,
Speaker 4: clocking you radar.
Speaker 1: You would think that if you saw this, you would
Speaker 1: think a cop is smelling how fast your car's going.
Speaker 4: Okay, there's a.
Speaker 5: Whole article in the New York Times, like.
Speaker 1: I'm getting to that, but I want to tell you
Speaker 1: I want one so bad because I want to be
Speaker 1: able to use it in arguments of my wife.
Speaker 3: Yeah, be like see it's not so bad.
Speaker 1: She sends me one of her like twice a year.
Speaker 1: I can't live like this.
Speaker 5: Okay, oh yeah we can. We can invest in one,
Speaker 5: just like we did the Warner Bratsler's Sheer Force.
Speaker 4: They're less expensive.
Speaker 1: That's good, Like we bought that and I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe we spent too much money on that thing for
Speaker 1: how much we needed it.
Speaker 5: We're gonna keep trying to get our money's worth.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's here's my here's the other day, here's my wife.
Speaker 1: My wife has this to say to me.
Speaker 3: She's gonna have a lot more to say to you
Speaker 3: after you put this in a podcast.
Speaker 5: Wife says, two thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: By the way, there's two thousand bucks little background of
Speaker 1: my wife. My wife all has always worked. She worked
Speaker 1: all through having babies. She's taking time off of work
Speaker 1: and now she's like, now that she doesn't have baby,
Speaker 1: she's not working. She just know what people do with themselves.
Speaker 1: So it's great. She started to trying.
Speaker 4: She's not play tennis totally great, started baking.
Speaker 1: I am at tennis and can't figure out why my
Speaker 1: ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on
Speaker 1: both ankles. If you brought fleas into our house because
Speaker 1: of the things you trapped, you need to figure that
Speaker 1: out now, like before work. I am not going to
Speaker 1: live like this, soie right.
Speaker 4: I get these all the time.
Speaker 1: A lot of times they have to do with defensive odors.
Speaker 1: And if I had a nasal ranger, I would be
Speaker 1: able to be like, well, let's check you could avoid
Speaker 1: cons I would be like, let's see is it offensive
Speaker 1: or not.
Speaker 4: Let's take the subjectivity out of it.
Speaker 5: We need to make content out of it.
Speaker 4: Let's measure.
Speaker 5: I'm going to talk to our CFO about getting.
Speaker 3: The subjectivity is the hard part.
Speaker 4: Man, That's what the ranger.
Speaker 2: So you can you can put any kind of ranger
Speaker 2: on that you want.
Speaker 1: I'll be like, well, you know what, it's actually not
Speaker 1: offensive because I hit it with the nasal ranger and
Speaker 1: it's in it's inemptible living.
Speaker 4: So now then ranger, you hook it to your nose.
Speaker 1: And so let's say someone's like it comes to you
Speaker 1: with their complaining about how something smells, and they go
Speaker 1: just smell. Yeah, Well people don't breathe that way, right,
Speaker 1: That's that's not fair.
Speaker 4: You know, no one comes around going.
Speaker 3: Not Just last week, I was, uh, I had already
Speaker 3: boiled this coyote skull, but it needs a little touch up.
Speaker 3: There was some things that were still hanging on there,
Speaker 3: and my wife laughed. I was like, I'm just gonna
Speaker 3: do it on the stove. Sure I didn't smell a thing,
Speaker 3: but when she got back she smelled it, yeah, and
Speaker 3: I was just like, it smells a little like boiling meat.
Speaker 4: That's all exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'd clean out the whole university building that way.
Speaker 1: That's that is its own kind of that is a
Speaker 1: crazy odor. The nasal ranger you put it up to
Speaker 1: your nose and there's a little meter that shows that
Speaker 1: you're inhaling normally, So you can't go in and not
Speaker 1: breathe and say like, I don't smell nothing because you're
Speaker 1: not breathing and you can't go in and over smell.
Speaker 1: It makes it that you're hitting like a baseline normal breathing,
Speaker 1: and it's got these contraptions on it that are sucking
Speaker 1: in the air and it's throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement.
Speaker 4: So you can apply a number to when something reeks.
Speaker 4: I love it. So let's say someone in.
Speaker 1: The summer, some guy hits deer and stop by your
Speaker 1: house or whatever, and it's chromnell maggots and someone's like,
Speaker 1: my god, that smells. Imagine if you can go, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a five, yep, and apply a number to a
Speaker 1: thing that is just entirely subjective.
Speaker 6: I have a feeling that with fifty years of a
Speaker 6: life lived, you know, breaking down animals, smelling everything there
Speaker 6: is to smell, I have a feeling that the nasal
Speaker 6: Ranger will skew towards the gen pop and probably I
Speaker 6: think everything you are completely deadened to will read as
Speaker 6: offensive to most people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I need a nasal ranger.
Speaker 3: Tweak the settings a little bit so it comes out
Speaker 3: in your favor, Like.
Speaker 1: Hack into the software or whatever to make it like
Speaker 1: not because yeah, because what if it backfires in Your
Speaker 1: wife is like, no, dude, this is a high as
Speaker 1: it's an eleven.
Speaker 4: Yep, it's an eleven anyway.
Speaker 1: So this guy making this lure, and I understand, but
Speaker 1: I don't know why in the world you're making that
Speaker 1: next to the school. It's like, I feel like you
Speaker 1: have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he did puncture the gland, which I'm
Speaker 3: sure made it. Oh well, he a hundred times worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he probably knows if he's making this lure.
Speaker 4: He knows that.
Speaker 1: You go down to Murdochs and you go into the
Speaker 1: veterinarian care aisle and you get one of them large
Speaker 1: gauge hypodermic needles. I mean the kind of needle you
Speaker 1: can look through the son of a bitch, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. You get one of those heavy gauge
Speaker 1: veterinarian needles that they use inject cattle with, put that
Speaker 1: into there and.
Speaker 4: Suck that smell out elsewhere yep, not at home.
Speaker 1: Then you mix it in with your vasoline or your
Speaker 1: petroleum jelly or whatever you're putting in New so you
Speaker 1: got a skunk based paste elsewhere out in the woods.
Speaker 1: Here's another tip he might want to know about. And
Speaker 1: I was turned on to this one that works very well.
Speaker 1: Get yourself a big sack of kitty litter. Get yourself
Speaker 1: one of those small action packers or everyone.
Speaker 4: He was, I don't care.
Speaker 1: This tough five gallon bucket whatever, Fill it with kitty litter.
Speaker 1: Once you make your lure, deep six it in that cat.
Speaker 4: Litter, deep six the lure in there.
Speaker 1: Store it incaste. I got store it in a in
Speaker 1: a container deep down in kitty litter for your offensive odors.
Speaker 1: That won't escape that no, And when I get a
Speaker 1: nasal range, I'll prove it.
Speaker 4: I'll prove it.
Speaker 1: We'll take a draw off some skunk and then we'll
Speaker 1: put it down in a bottle and kiddy lure and
Speaker 1: take a draw off it.
Speaker 4: And you won't.
Speaker 1: That naise range is not going to pick it up.
Speaker 1: Another guy wrote in about skunks. He's in the nuisance
Speaker 1: wildlife removal business. They do with a lot of skunks
Speaker 1: in the spring and summer. You can picture this skunk
Speaker 1: gets in your house, living under your porch. Someone gets upset.
Speaker 1: They they catch them in cage traps and they kill
Speaker 1: them with in a CO two chamber for euthanasia. Do
Speaker 1: you guys remember we were talking earlier. Do you remember
Speaker 1: during the pandemic when they had to like in northern
Speaker 1: Europe they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of mink.
Speaker 4: Which they pelted, you know, they pelted those all out,
Speaker 4: they did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that it would like make mink prices
Speaker 1: skyrocket because they killed all these branch or whatever. But
Speaker 1: someone's like that all went to market anyhow. Why I didn't
Speaker 1: realize they got these little gas powered rigs they drive
Speaker 1: around in on those mink farms, and there's a box
Speaker 1: on the rig and it's harvesting its own CO two.
Speaker 1: So like you're driving this little golf cart around and
Speaker 1: it's harvesting its own emissions. To youth, the whole thing
Speaker 1: sounds just like not a good line of work, like
Speaker 1: a tough business to.
Speaker 4: That's how they do that. They're killing him like that.
Speaker 1: So this dude is saying, when they get like a
Speaker 1: problem skunk, they euthanize it with CO two. Well anyways,
Speaker 1: and then they throw him in a freezer, which I
Speaker 1: don't get. But they had a guy in there, and
Speaker 1: he says, I'll put it delicately and say he lacked
Speaker 1: attention to detail. He pulls a skunk out of the
Speaker 1: CO two chamber too early and places it into a freezer.
Speaker 1: A half hour later, a different guy comes along and
Speaker 1: opens the freezer and there's a skunk. Bam, fine no oh,
Speaker 1: shuts the freezer real quick. I got you, makes a
Speaker 1: plan on how he's gonna deal with this, but then
Speaker 1: the skunks waiting for him the next time.
Speaker 4: He opens the freezeropp nailed them. He says, you can't
Speaker 4: get that smell out of that freezer.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 4: Lastly, oh so you do want to say this. You're
Speaker 4: back to wanting to say this. Okay please? Uh one
Speaker 4: more launch.
Speaker 1: We got a thing coming out called twelve and twenty six,
Speaker 1: So that means in twenty twenty six we're gonna.
Speaker 4: At least like twelve outdoor films.
Speaker 1: Each episode showcases a hunt from a different Meat Eater
Speaker 1: crew member. The first episode features Yanni's archery black Bear
Speaker 1: Hunting Manitoba, which is out now, so stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more and check out these hunt episodes of twelve and
Speaker 1: twenty six series all Right.
Speaker 4: George hit me with, let's don't know, I want to.
Speaker 1: Get into the animal communication stuff here, and I want
Speaker 1: to talk about brown sculptures, but I want to dive
Speaker 1: into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think
Speaker 1: about from your career and your study of animals, what
Speaker 1: and let's let's keep to what lives around here? What
Speaker 1: animal do you think lives around here? Has the or
Speaker 1: not doesn't need to be around here? What American animal
Speaker 1: that people would be familiar with in your who in
Speaker 1: your mind, has the greatest vocabulary.
Speaker 2: Land critters, you know, probably the one that's been studied
Speaker 2: that way most. And that's probably because it's only because
Speaker 2: that's the one that's been studied that I detail is
Speaker 2: prairie dogs. They have an incredible vocabulary that goes down
Speaker 2: to the level of there's a guy walking through the
Speaker 2: colony with a green shirt on and he's tall. No, yep,
Speaker 2: he's walking fast, he's walking slow. It's another guy. He's
Speaker 2: got a red shirt on or a yellow shirt. There's
Speaker 2: a badger, there's a hawk hawks flying fast, on and
Speaker 2: on and on. Yeah, this guy called what yeah?
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They went down to the level of saying, you know
Speaker 2: it at a certain level they needed to analyze it
Speaker 2: with computers because you just can't hear prairie dog at
Speaker 2: that level. Okay, so they slow it down. You can
Speaker 2: see all the bumps and blips in the spectrogram on
Speaker 2: the computer, and these differences are parsing out with their
Speaker 2: experimental design here. And they even went to the level
Speaker 2: of let's put something in there they've never seen. So
Speaker 2: what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout
Speaker 2: or maybe you apply with painted black, put it on
Speaker 2: wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled it
Speaker 2: through the colony. They came up with a new word,
Speaker 2: something they'd never heard him say before. They put it away.
Speaker 2: Instead of an oval like the first one, they put
Speaker 2: out a square, they say something different. They pull it
Speaker 2: back out a little while later, they use the same
Speaker 2: word for the oval. Same words. Yeah, yeah, And that's probably.
Speaker 1: All like permutations of that what we would just when
Speaker 1: we hear it's just an alarm call.
Speaker 2: It's just like like, all right, I'm not getting much
Speaker 2: out of that. But when you start listening with like
Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff, you're like, oh, there is
Speaker 2: a little difference there. And if you could listen with
Speaker 2: the ears of a ground squirrel or a pocket gopher
Speaker 2: or any of these things. You might hear it too,
Speaker 2: but some of those they can, like the researchers. It
Speaker 2: was so funny. They were so accurate that they had
Speaker 2: different vocalization for dog versus kyote. No really, So they're
Speaker 2: sitting there and the researchers can hear this difference and
Speaker 2: they're hanging out and this this prairie dog says, uh,
Speaker 2: there's a kyote coming, and clearly the researchers can see
Speaker 2: it's a dog, and they're like, ha, they messed up
Speaker 2: this time. It's like one example, and it gets closer
Speaker 2: and it's a kyote. They're like, what the heck.
Speaker 4: Hand and say that to me again.
Speaker 2: So they identified this thing right, it was a coyote.
Speaker 2: They gave the kyote alarm. But the researchers not knowing
Speaker 2: their language real well, well, they knew the language enough
Speaker 2: to say, hey, they're alarming for kyote. Through their eyes
Speaker 2: they're seeing what they think is a dog.
Speaker 4: Oh, so the research is like, oh, it's a domestic dogs.
Speaker 2: It's a domestic dog. It looks like a kylet. They
Speaker 2: just messed up. And it gets close, they're like, sound
Speaker 2: a gun it's a coyote, So that stuff is actually everywhere, isn't.
Speaker 2: But prairie dogs have been the best studied that way.
Speaker 2: Their vocabulary. They even say that they they have these
Speaker 2: sound bites that are like phonemes. They're basically like ba
Speaker 2: duh at, you know, sound fragments that we recombine into
Speaker 2: making words in sentences, paragraphs. They have sounds that function
Speaker 2: the same way, so they can recombine these sounds to
Speaker 2: say dog, kyote, hawk, badger guy, short guy, tall guy
Speaker 2: coming through the colony.
Speaker 1: I was reading this thing long ago. It's like one
Speaker 1: of the dirtiest tricks I've ever heard in science. I
Speaker 1: don't know where they were doing it. I don't know where.
Speaker 4: Where's the vervet monkey live? A vervet monkey?
Speaker 2: Verbets are African.
Speaker 1: They were looking at the vocabulary of verbant monkeys and
Speaker 1: they were getting this idea that they had and it
Speaker 1: might be more nuanced than this, but they're like, there's
Speaker 1: a thing that says threat from above, okay, and maybe
Speaker 1: like certain avian predators.
Speaker 4: And they had a noise that they realized it.
Speaker 1: Meant thread on the ground, and they thought specifically it
Speaker 1: was about leopards.
Speaker 4: That's what it was leopards. So they.
Speaker 1: Would record these vervet monkeys making these vocalizations and you
Speaker 1: could play it and get the response. Meaning, if there's
Speaker 1: a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree.
Speaker 1: If there's a threat from the air, the troop all
Speaker 1: seeks overhead protection. Then they recorded a monkey, they recorded
Speaker 1: his threat call, and they would play it and everyone
Speaker 1: would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where
Speaker 1: he became the boy who cries wolf. Poor guy, and
Speaker 1: they burned him out where they're like, he always does
Speaker 1: that and he's wrong, to the point where if he
Speaker 1: did vocalize, they would ignore it because they're like, that
Speaker 1: dude makes that noise all the time because they have
Speaker 1: been playing it to everybody, and they burned the dude
Speaker 1: out on it. Yeah, but this is like, well, you're
Speaker 1: talking about way more I mean like way more than
Speaker 1: hey on the ground, Hey in the air.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like a.
Speaker 3: Deer camp with the kids, Like when you and I
Speaker 3: walked through the Prairie dog Town. Those things are like eh.
Speaker 3: But when they see Jimmy, they're like.
Speaker 4: Holy kid, they probably.
Speaker 2: Do and he's got a gun. He's got a gun
Speaker 2: against that one kid. Yeah, totally yeah, it's so, I
Speaker 2: think you're referring to that chaining safer. I did a
Speaker 2: lot of that work in Abaselli National Park where they're
Speaker 2: looking at those vervets. And yeah, they had a different
Speaker 2: call for something in the air, those Marshall eagles, I
Speaker 2: think they were. That's different one for leopards, and they
Speaker 2: had a different one for snakes.
Speaker 4: Okay, I remember that now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, and there's that's a tuughy with these
Speaker 2: animal vocalizations, like how do you know you don't speak
Speaker 2: that language, So they have these really clunky, sometimes really
Speaker 2: you know, mean ways of figuring out. All right, at
Speaker 2: least it's this level, this is what they're meaning. But
Speaker 2: in between, like for me, into a ton of ravens.
Speaker 2: I just fascinated by ravens and the stuff they say
Speaker 2: just blows me away. They've got accents, they've got dialects,
Speaker 2: they've got stuff you can't even imagine.
Speaker 1: At what point did you first start getting interested in
Speaker 1: in the just like the vocalizations of animals.
Speaker 2: Well, I grew up like you guys did. I hunted
Speaker 2: and fished and trapped for you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: my youth because that was you know, the culture I
Speaker 2: grew up in so I grew up learning call turkeys
Speaker 2: and ducks and gear, and but like it wasn't enough
Speaker 2: for me, just me being me, I was like, I
Speaker 2: want to know more. You know, what are they doing
Speaker 2: outside of hunting season? What do they say when this happens?
Speaker 2: What are they doing when nobody else is watching? And
Speaker 2: you needn't watch birds like nobody. I didn't know anybody
Speaker 2: that watched birds until I went to college and they're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: we're going to birding.
Speaker 1: Really, you know, mile Man he had an interesting bird taxonomy,
Speaker 1: like as a as a hunter, you now, it was like,
Speaker 1: there's this huge chunk of birds that were tweety birds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they meant like the ones like like outside of my
Speaker 1: there's intensely interested in game birds. There's a handful of
Speaker 1: other birds that catch my interest, but then there are
Speaker 1: the tweety birds.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. My friend has a system. He has it's
Speaker 2: arts and narts for hawks. Arts are a redtail, narts
Speaker 2: are not a redtail. Was like Jason not, you know,
Speaker 2: it takes redtails to get a couple of years under
Speaker 2: their belt before they get a red tail. He's like, God, damn,
Speaker 2: it throws a whole damn system off.
Speaker 1: I was reading and I think it was in Barry
Speaker 1: Lopez's Arctic Dreams where I think it was in that
Speaker 1: book where he's talking about into Its map drawing m
Speaker 1: This is early like he was relating for early like
Speaker 1: early contact with certain Into It hunter groups and they
Speaker 1: would draw maps and they wouldn't do the maps would
Speaker 1: be to the scale of interest. So if they're mapping
Speaker 1: an island and there's a bay where they hunt ducks,
Speaker 1: when you draw the map, the island gets really small
Speaker 1: because they don't do it doesn't matter and the bay
Speaker 1: ocky is the map. Yeah, And it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: here's the part on something, here's the part of interest,
Speaker 1: and then I'll just kind of rough in something to suggest.
Speaker 4: The rest of it.
Speaker 1: Right, And I feel like with a lot of wildlife stuff,
Speaker 1: it's like Elk right, the bugle, you know, because it's
Speaker 1: useful in hunting, and you can probably hunt Elko whole life.
Speaker 4: And never be like, what really is going on with
Speaker 4: that thing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: You know, like it works or don't work, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of you You sort of have a like we'll
Speaker 1: map it from a hunter's perspective, will map its vocalization
Speaker 1: pattern and it'll only go as far is what I
Speaker 1: need to know to satisfy my like base plan.
Speaker 3: You're not really interested in what you might be saying
Speaker 3: to them, right it works or don't?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah right. And that's to human nature, like we're
Speaker 2: we're simplifying machines. That's what our brains are designed for,
Speaker 2: is after sensory stuff like problem solving, figuring out what
Speaker 2: those patterns are. You know, what does that mean? And
Speaker 2: I only pay attention to the stuff that affects me,
Speaker 2: you know, But when you start paying attention to what
Speaker 2: affects them, then the world opens up.
Speaker 4: What was the first What was the first animal? Was it? Turkey's?
Speaker 1: Like, what was the first animal? You kind of dove
Speaker 1: into and started realizing you were finding out things that
Speaker 1: maybe other people didn't know.
Speaker 2: Well, I was obsessed with turkeys, like I was like,
Speaker 2: my career was going to be making turkey calls, going
Speaker 2: around calling contests and all that stop upstate New York.
Speaker 2: And they just recognized that area. So I was taking
Speaker 2: every spare minute. You could only hunt till noon, but
Speaker 2: I was going out before school every day during the season.
Speaker 2: This is a funny one. The disciplinarian principle. The vice
Speaker 2: principal when my folks were in that school had retired
Speaker 2: by this point, and I called well enough that he's like,
Speaker 2: can you come with me, you know, skip school? Come
Speaker 2: with me on Monday and Tuesday. My mom's like, hell no,
Speaker 2: Frank Dunhald wants you to skip does vice principal wants
Speaker 2: you to skip school so you can go turkey call
Speaker 2: for him?
Speaker 5: Jam up.
Speaker 2: I was like, that's a gent right.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 3: Were you mouth calling back like no, no call? Or
Speaker 3: were you using calls?
Speaker 2: I was doing it. I was building wingbone calls, I
Speaker 2: was building slate calls, box calls, using my voice. Was
Speaker 2: doing all of it, you know. And but it was
Speaker 2: interesting because sort of like we're talking about in that
Speaker 2: hunting scene, you know, there was a there's a core
Speaker 2: palette of sounds that you use and they do the job.
Speaker 2: But I hit a certain point. It was actually when
Speaker 2: I went to my first calling contests, I'm like, wait
Speaker 2: a minute, this is what the guy there's a guy
Speaker 2: behind that curtain over there, and he's like telling me,
Speaker 2: if I sound like a turkey, there's no turkeys in
Speaker 2: this contest. And there's certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying, yeah,
Speaker 2: that sounds like a turkey, you know. I was like, hmm,
Speaker 2: what you know? And there was even I found an
Speaker 2: article when I was working on the book, this guy
Speaker 2: who is a judge. He said, you know, if you
Speaker 2: hear a lot of really bad calling, you know, it's
Speaker 2: it's a wild turkey. If a lot of really good calling,
Speaker 2: it's a guy. You know, turkeys make a lot of mistakes.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, wait a minute, dude, mistakes. I think
Speaker 2: it cost them. It cost them. You make a sound,
Speaker 2: the predator's got to beat on you, right, you make
Speaker 2: a sound. It cost energy to make the sound. Like
Speaker 2: they're not doing it for no reason. Just because we
Speaker 2: don't know the reason doesn't mean it doesn't have one.
Speaker 1: But there's the I get the point. There's no no
Speaker 1: like the point.
Speaker 4: Would be this.
Speaker 1: There's there's a there's a YouTube video I love and
Speaker 1: it's a hen, like a wild ass hen in the
Speaker 1: woods and she has the most.
Speaker 4: Raucous bad box call yelp, which.
Speaker 1: She stands there and does twenty seven times in a row,
Speaker 1: twenty seven times in a row.
Speaker 4: If you heard that, there's no way he'd be like,
Speaker 4: that's a hen.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, that is some twelve ass year old
Speaker 1: kid with his dad's box call and he's just gonna
Speaker 1: stand on that ridge and do that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would one say that that's what that was.
Speaker 1: I'm like some kid up there. It's a hand stander
Speaker 1: twenty seven times in a row.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, but so, like if you could interview her, You're like,
Speaker 4: OMETT are you doing this on accident? Is this all
Speaker 4: a mistake?
Speaker 1: She would probably tell you no, No, what I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Is I'm You should have seen the last time I
Speaker 2: did this. Yeah, you know what happened.
Speaker 4: But like I don't know, like what is she doing?
Speaker 4: You know what is she doing? Yeah?
Speaker 2: How much variability is in there that's acceptable for purpose X?
Speaker 2: Like how are you doing a lost call? It does
Speaker 2: go on twenty plus notes, but like within there, how
Speaker 2: much stuff's coded in there beyond I'm lost or where
Speaker 2: the heck are you? That's where they're find with some
Speaker 2: of these new studies on songbirds and stuff, because they
Speaker 2: hear differently than us. They're hearing into these sounds stuff
Speaker 2: that hey, either happens way too fast or as in
Speaker 2: frequency ranges that we don't register real well. So it's
Speaker 2: like it almost seems in some cases, like the side
Speaker 2: of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life
Speaker 2: is coded to their communication. So like there was a
Speaker 2: study where they actually took sperm whale clicks. Let me explain. So,
Speaker 2: like sperm whales, huge animal communicating, these clicks travel real
Speaker 2: well underwater, and somebody had the bright idea. You know,
Speaker 2: they're trying to figure out what the heck these things mean,
Speaker 2: you know, whe are the using this in this and
Speaker 2: they've since found out a whole bunch. But somebody had
Speaker 2: the bright idea to go in and delete all the
Speaker 2: spaces in between the clicks, and lo and behold, it
Speaker 2: sounds like a songbird. Like you hear all the rising
Speaker 2: and falling of this, you know, and we're used to
Speaker 2: listening to humans birds they're communicating so fast. But maybe
Speaker 2: those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolic whatever
Speaker 2: it is that makes them them, they're able to, in essence,
Speaker 2: from our perspective, slow down that sound of the winter
Speaker 2: ren or the magnolia warbler, and here into little tweaks
Speaker 2: of individual notes, let's say, and get more information out
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 1: I remember what I was reading somewhere or some guys
Speaker 1: saying that, like when you go to like you're gonna
Speaker 1: you see a fly and you're just gonna smack them.
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean that?
Speaker 1: To the fly he might be like, in a minute,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna move because there's this thing coming toward me.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Like his trip, his like trip through life is just
Speaker 1: the perception is so different than what we think. So
Speaker 1: we think we're going wow, you know, and he's like, no,
Speaker 1: it's going totally is just going ape shit crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like what yeah, something else might be like oh, he's saying,
Speaker 1: oh kinds.
Speaker 2: Of yeah, yeah. It just there's a great essay written
Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirties I think is early forties about
Speaker 2: the title is what It's like to be a bat
Speaker 2: and the clue. You know, even if we could take
Speaker 2: the best ai and all these models and figure out
Speaker 2: their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn't
Speaker 2: have a clue what they're talking about. You know this
Speaker 2: when you go to a different country or even if
Speaker 2: they're speaking English, there's culture. There's that culture behind and
Speaker 2: underneath all that language that when you make a joke
Speaker 2: among friends, like everybody knows in that group what the
Speaker 2: hell you're talking about. But even if we could know
Speaker 2: that language for a bat, for a bird, it takes
Speaker 2: being able to hear like a bat. Yeah, breathe like
Speaker 2: a bat. You know, all these things that contribute to
Speaker 2: them being what they are that factors into how they
Speaker 2: interpret what they hear and say.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like we've long, I mean, like forever have known
Speaker 1: that there are decibels the animals communicate in that we
Speaker 1: flat out don't hear. So it's like sort of you
Speaker 1: started with that, like one hundred. There's things we don't
Speaker 1: hear that we know we don't hear. There's research about
Speaker 1: the way birds proceed. You know, there's so much iridescence
Speaker 1: and birds there's probably something in their eye when they
Speaker 1: see iridescence. It just reads fundamentally different than what we
Speaker 1: see when we see iridescence. They take it in and
Speaker 1: the idea that there are like you're saying that when
Speaker 1: you're at a turkey calling contest, what we're going when
Speaker 1: we're saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey
Speaker 1: could be tons of gibbers to a turkey.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Great, example is like when I do a hen yelp,
Speaker 2: I found over years, I wouldn't get the same response
Speaker 2: as if I used a box call or slate and
Speaker 2: I the only thing I could come to is that
Speaker 2: it sounded good to me, but there was things in
Speaker 2: my call. Maybe it's missing frequencies or something that made
Speaker 2: it sound plastic or fake ors or something just that
Speaker 2: didn't get the same response. Literally, just go to a
Speaker 2: box call. You know, you got incidentt response, like what's
Speaker 2: up with that? You know?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 2: You know, certain frequencies like high frequency drops off real fast,
Speaker 2: so over distance, you know, whether it's an elk call
Speaker 2: or what have you. You're generally picking up the low
Speaker 2: frequency sounds that travel better. But when you're right up
Speaker 2: close to something like holy cow, you hear that elk
Speaker 2: bugle right next to the car. If you're in Yellstone
Speaker 2: or something, you're like, whoa, I'm missing a ton of stuff.
Speaker 4: There's a lot more going on here.
Speaker 2: What you know, what are they hearing? You know? They
Speaker 2: you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes,
Speaker 2: they can hear, you know. Dave Meach found that in
Speaker 2: open terrain wolves can you're up to ten miles an
Speaker 2: open train and max I think for me, unless wind
Speaker 2: conditions and other things are going on. The max is
Speaker 2: about three miles from me. So this is where often
Speaker 2: with students and stuff, I'm like, look, you can't ever
Speaker 2: hear that. You won't ever smell that, not even with
Speaker 2: the nosearranger. Just can't do this. But if you start
Speaker 2: watching these animals closer, you're like, hey, wait, all of
Speaker 2: a sudden, they're starting to gather up their face in
Speaker 2: one direction and then they howl hmm instantly. You know, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm looking at half of this story. The other half
Speaker 2: of the book is I've had this happen. You know,
Speaker 2: friends with radios, they're six miles away. Yeah, yeah, we
Speaker 2: got the I got well packed there howling to the east,
Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, I'm watching the druids or they're listening
Speaker 2: to the west and they're going back and forth having
Speaker 2: a conversation for hour two hours. We can't hear anything
Speaker 2: but the individuals standing in front of us. There's so
Speaker 2: many animals doing stuff like that that we're like getting
Speaker 2: these fragments thinking that we know what's going on, and
Speaker 2: when they're having conversations over space and in terrain that
Speaker 2: we don't even know are happening.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll move away from Turkey's in a minute.
Speaker 1: But you've obviously been super close to hens like all
Speaker 1: the like, I don't know what.
Speaker 4: I don't know what.
Speaker 1: I can't think, Like what distance you become aware of it?
Speaker 1: But they're always making noises.
Speaker 3: Yeah, those little noises you wouldn't hear from one hundred
Speaker 3: yards away, but in ten yards you can hear it, right,
Speaker 3: you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what.
Speaker 1: Let's I'm taking it in the wrong direction. Let's not
Speaker 1: talk about ones people aren't familiar with. Let's just take like,
Speaker 1: let me ask some real simple Do you feel that
Speaker 1: a gobble.
Speaker 4: Is just a gobble.
Speaker 1: Or do you feel that there are there are different
Speaker 1: gobbles that mean different things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there are different gobbles. And I I
Speaker 2: had thought for years that gobbles just a gobble, and
Speaker 2: a young tom makes not as good a gobble.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the idea. Right. He sucks at it.
Speaker 2: He just sucks. He hasn't learned how.
Speaker 4: To do it because he aspires them one day be.
Speaker 7: Like exactly just blow your hair back, but in fact
Speaker 7: he's It was in grad school I was talking with
Speaker 7: a friend who's he's really sharp on bird behavior and
Speaker 7: all things, you know, research wise and scientific question answering
Speaker 7: kind of wise, and he turned my mind on it,
Speaker 7: and I thought for years, you know, a young tom,
Speaker 7: you know, full on gobbler.
Speaker 2: It looks like a big, full long and then you
Speaker 2: hear a Jake, you know, it's like it's just chunked
Speaker 2: up and he's He's like, no, you got to understand
Speaker 2: they're gobbling in context to who's around them. And then
Speaker 2: I started noticing, son of a gun, he's right if
Speaker 2: it was just that Jake had many times, or that
Speaker 2: Jake would actually give a full armed gobble because he
Speaker 2: was by himself, he didn't know the big guy was
Speaker 2: over that ridge, and Holland asked over to kick his
Speaker 2: butt mm so he could say whatever he wanted to.
Speaker 2: And of course he wants to sound like the big
Speaker 2: guy on campus, right, And I'm like, son of a gun.
Speaker 2: Then I started seeing in the field and I'm like,
Speaker 2: a gobble isn't a gobble?
Speaker 4: Maybe he's like a subservient gobble.
Speaker 2: I'd love to, you know, correct me and add to it.
Speaker 2: If listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more,
Speaker 2: I'd love to learn more about that because that you know,
Speaker 2: my Turkey days are a little further back than some
Speaker 2: other stuff that it's fascinating with Just to think of that.
Speaker 3: If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh,
Speaker 3: that gobble, he's like, I'm coming now that gobble he's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I heard you all.
Speaker 2: Maybe you get a double gobble, you're like, oh, he's
Speaker 2: really liking that call, you know, triple gobble. You'll he's
Speaker 2: got to be coming.
Speaker 4: Do you think he's loving the call when hears a
Speaker 4: double gobble?
Speaker 2: That always, to me seemed like a good barometer to
Speaker 2: how excited they were. Yeah, they gobble off the roost
Speaker 2: and they hit the ground and gobbling and kind of
Speaker 2: gobble along. But once you get them fired up, many
Speaker 2: they're double triple gobbling repeatedly, and you're like, get ridy,
Speaker 2: get ready, get ready, here they're come, you know.
Speaker 4: So hey.
Speaker 2: You know, if you look at it, the more I
Speaker 2: started looking at it from the turkey's perspective, the more
Speaker 2: I started understanding from my human perspective.
Speaker 1: Uh, you say, you think about do you spend more
Speaker 1: time on crows around ravens?
Speaker 2: We just have more ravens around home, so I spend
Speaker 2: more time listening to them.
Speaker 4: Okay, the other day, it wasn't too long ago.
Speaker 1: I was watching one and he just seems to be like,
Speaker 1: from my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy.
Speaker 1: He's flying along, just raising hell, just making racket.
Speaker 4: Yeah right yeah, at a high way out mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, he's not with anybody, he's just like
Speaker 1: making racket. Like, give me some insight into what like
Speaker 1: what they're capable of conveying. Sure, yeah, and there's got
Speaker 1: to be something like I found something to eat, like
Speaker 1: that's pretty clear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's stuff that it'll blow your doors off. And
Speaker 2: I you know, I've only scratched the surface. I've found
Speaker 2: stuff that researchers haven't found. I've corroborated for myself things
Speaker 2: that they've found that yeah, that that holds here too.
Speaker 2: And it's to me, it's always about starting into these conversations,
Speaker 2: listening to what's most common. You pick the most common
Speaker 2: thing close to you, and pick the most common thing.
Speaker 2: It says, Okay, so it's like I only have pigeons around, great, awesome,
Speaker 2: use pigeons because the lessons you learn through the pigeons
Speaker 2: actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the raven,
Speaker 2: the coyote, all those kind of other things because you
Speaker 2: start sensing ties in your own nervous system to it.
Speaker 2: And so when we were living in the park, I
Speaker 2: purposely i'd finished my graduate work. I was like done
Speaker 2: with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper,
Speaker 2: and in that case, I just wanted the ravens to
Speaker 2: teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot
Speaker 2: more So. The most common thing they were saying was.
Speaker 4: Yep. They like saying that. Yeah, like on a lit.
Speaker 2: It took me the longest time to realize the ones
Speaker 2: that were doing that were the ones that were right
Speaker 2: next to our cabin, and it was two. It was
Speaker 2: the resident pair. I'm like, oh, this is their song.
Speaker 2: This is their territorial call that they used to keep
Speaker 2: the riff raff out. Their largest songbird in the world,
Speaker 2: even though it's not melodic, that's their no trespassing sign.
Speaker 4: The largest songbird in the world.
Speaker 2: Yep, common ravens. And so I was like.
Speaker 4: The least melodic, you're the largest songbird.
Speaker 1: But the people you could like so that that that's
Speaker 1: funny because I ever thought about that classification.
Speaker 4: They'd be classified as a songbird.
Speaker 2: They are, OK, Yeah, they're in the passerine order, which
Speaker 2: is the all the perching birds corvidaet family, you know,
Speaker 2: which is Jay's crows, Jackdaws, Magpies stuff. But that that
Speaker 2: gave me a hook. I was like, okay, I I
Speaker 2: think I know what that three note thing is now
Speaker 2: and then the key and I always stress this. The
Speaker 2: folks is start listening for where it varies. So there's
Speaker 2: one day I was out and you know, the ravens
Speaker 2: are out there to.
Speaker 1: Hit me with the hymn, sitting on a post, being like,
Speaker 1: this is where I hang out.
Speaker 4: This is my song.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is my turf.
Speaker 4: Give me the noise, okay.
Speaker 2: Right, And in this kind of group, you know, your
Speaker 2: listeners like making animals is cool, like in pop culture,
Speaker 2: Like you meet somebody at the dinner party and they're
Speaker 2: speaking to one person in Korean and one person in
Speaker 2: Italian and another person in French, and you're like, dude,
Speaker 2: who is this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like he must have all this you know,
Speaker 2: worldly experience. But you make an animal sound and they're like, like,
Speaker 2: you know, so I always trying to prematice. I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: that betrays our bias against animals as stupid and under us.
Speaker 2: You need to start seeing them as those creatures that
Speaker 2: look into the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear in
Speaker 2: an ultrasonic and subsonic sounds, and those creatures that smell
Speaker 2: it parts per trillion, like they best us in so
Speaker 2: many ways. So listen from that perspective when I make
Speaker 2: animal noises, because it's a crowd pleaser, but the value
Speaker 2: in there is starting to get people to listen beyond okay,
Speaker 2: that common call just counting. There's more notes and it's faster,
Speaker 2: and I discovered that's a simple thing alone. Was happening
Speaker 2: when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the
Speaker 2: road right below the corral fence and popped out the
Speaker 2: bag of Cheetos, like they see food, they know it's
Speaker 2: in their territory. I'm gonna get it if anybody is,
Speaker 2: and you sure as hell better not come in here
Speaker 2: and think you're gonna steal it from me. So like
Speaker 2: that extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a
Speaker 2: more emphatic mine, mind, mind, mind, mind mine, hmmm. Right.
Speaker 2: You know, you know we'd walk into an area, you know,
Speaker 2: as a group to go sit down and listen and
Speaker 2: watch and just us being there, those ravens would jump
Speaker 2: off their perches and start flying over doing that, like.
Speaker 4: But they're not talking to you.
Speaker 1: They're talking to other ravens, Like, whatever's going on here
Speaker 1: is in our turf.
Speaker 4: We're on it.
Speaker 2: If food, that's that's what it seems like.
Speaker 4: I got a question for.
Speaker 3: So that was a situation where there's people involved and
Speaker 3: they recognize that that's potential food source. Would you hear that?
Speaker 3: Did you ever hear that same noise like when they
Speaker 3: were like out in the back country when there was
Speaker 3: a carcass around?
Speaker 2: That's an awesome question, Brodie, because that I've seen that,
Speaker 2: so it's corroborating. Mind Like, the one I think of
Speaker 2: most is there was a spot in Slew Creek Big Flats.
Speaker 2: This bison had died, had been dead for a long time,
Speaker 2: pretty much eaten up, but the resident ravens every time
Speaker 2: another raven came within like half a mile, they were
Speaker 2: up in the ka count and if not flying over
Speaker 2: toward them to perch and you give them another cussing
Speaker 2: from within the turf. So it's both, Yeah.
Speaker 4: What is they like? What are they doing vocally around?
Speaker 1: Like we know all these sounds, Like to go back
Speaker 1: turkeys for a minute, We know all these sounds that
Speaker 1: in our human understanding, we've kind of got it like
Speaker 1: these are sounds of courtship. Okay, the same way we
Speaker 1: might look at it, elk, But you can be like,
Speaker 1: that's a sound of courtship. What like when you hear
Speaker 1: a raven, you're just hearing raven noise. You don't understand
Speaker 1: what is a What are they doing in the breeding season?
Speaker 1: Like what kind of things does a raven want to
Speaker 1: communicate in the breathing season? What would be the equivalent
Speaker 1: of how we at least how we perceive to be
Speaker 1: a gobbler going through the woods, goblin, you know, trying
Speaker 1: to draw hens in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's it's different for raisins because they're
Speaker 2: just socially different. You know, Turkeys are flock creatures. You know,
Speaker 2: toms are hanging out together, but the hens and the
Speaker 2: poults are hanging out together. They mix and mingle in places.
Speaker 2: Ravens are very much territorial with you know, kind of
Speaker 2: a slew of travelers and non residents filtering in and
Speaker 2: around through there. Except times when somebody kills a bison
Speaker 2: got our way or an elk and those big foods
Speaker 2: has become big attractions. We know now from the research
Speaker 2: in the park that some of these birds are coming
Speaker 2: from Bozeman, flying to my house and gardener and Yellstone
Speaker 2: over carcas to feed on carcasses during the bison cause the.
Speaker 3: Word spreads down the valley somehow.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's wild you know what, man, you know what? Like,
Speaker 1: we were hunting the area with my kids. We were
Speaker 1: hunting area this year where like there's a lot there's
Speaker 1: a big cow elk harvest in a certain area pretty annually.
Speaker 1: I was even coming to my kids like I'm like,
Speaker 1: these things know what goes on here, and they're like
Speaker 1: in town for it. I didn't know they were in
Speaker 1: town from far away. I meant I thought they were
Speaker 1: in town from the other side of the valley or something.
Speaker 2: That's what I used to think. No way in hell.
Speaker 2: These suckers are traveling twenty to thirty miles in the morning.
Speaker 2: So you think of a Yellstone bird, You're like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park.
Speaker 2: Now they come up, they're either feeding at the dumping
Speaker 2: gardener or West Yellstone or out Cody flying back at midday.
Speaker 2: They're commuting, literally commuting in the morning off the food source,
Speaker 2: flying back in the day to maintain their terror.
Speaker 4: Potentially thirty miles away.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's daily, you know, saying.
Speaker 1: No, they somewhere have their own place they would regard
Speaker 1: as their hangout, their house as territory.
Speaker 2: So to get back to that, the call that I
Speaker 2: learned next in sequence with Ravens was this, And before
Speaker 2: I even saw them, I knew that they were moving, right.
Speaker 2: That's the sound they make when somebody's violated the no
Speaker 2: fly zone in their turf. So they have to be
Speaker 2: back there on their territory to hold that space for them.
Speaker 2: So when the tour season rolls back around and everybody's
Speaker 2: got frozen pizza and baloney sandwiches, they don't have to
Speaker 2: do any fighting in border control. They're good to go
Speaker 2: because everybody knows that's their turf. But we're to close
Speaker 2: the loop on the mating season stuff. Like I think
Speaker 2: a lot of these big food source locations end up
Speaker 2: being like the bar the dating scene for Ravens, and
Speaker 2: so you will see them displaying. They aren't vocalizing as
Speaker 2: much that we can hear if you're close and you
Speaker 2: hang out at the dump for the ravens like I
Speaker 2: do sometimes and not for the trash, you hear all
Speaker 2: these crazy soft sounds that probably I don't know if
Speaker 2: we'll ever figure out what they mean.
Speaker 4: You know, like.
Speaker 2: You know, you probably heard those like a water drop
Speaker 2: and stuff, and they use them in context of getting
Speaker 2: know each other. And you can tell at times when
Speaker 2: they display they're not fanning like a turkey, but they'll
Speaker 2: puff their throat, they'll hold their beak up. You've probably
Speaker 2: seen them, especially around a like a gut pile or
Speaker 2: something where the birds converge. Look real close. Because in
Speaker 2: a general sense, when you see those birds that kind
Speaker 2: of drop their wings a little bit, they're proffing up,
Speaker 2: they drop their flank feathers, those are your residant birds.
Speaker 2: Those are the territorial ones who own that space, so
Speaker 2: to speak. The others are interlopers, and they'll be trying
Speaker 2: to run them off. In fact, when I did start
Speaker 2: reading back into the literature on ravens, it confirmed what
Speaker 2: I had seen in Yellowstone where what bren Heinrich, one
Speaker 2: of the world's leading authorities on ravens, had found near
Speaker 2: his cabin in Maine. Was this dead moose. One dead moose,
Speaker 2: and one raven finds it, it lands and gives this call,
Speaker 2: and ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding
Speaker 2: on it with it. And he's like, that makes no sense, right,
Speaker 2: You like, make a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and
Speaker 2: your family, and before you eat, you have the high
Speaker 2: school football team come over and dine first, like biologically
Speaker 2: behaviorally like that didn't make sense until he started studying
Speaker 2: him and marking them, And what he figured out was
Speaker 2: the ones doing that were younger ones and non territorial birds.
Speaker 2: And that call, which is a great way if you
Speaker 2: ever injure an animal, or you've got a downed animal
Speaker 2: and train you can't track him on, you got to
Speaker 2: listen to the ravens. Because that call doesn't mean food
Speaker 2: in a generic sense any food. It means meat really,
Speaker 2: So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted
Speaker 2: by the residents who own that turf. So if that
Speaker 2: bird who found the moose was caught by the residents,
Speaker 2: it'd be run out and it wouldn't get any food.
Speaker 2: But by going it brings in an overwhelming number of
Speaker 2: other ravens, and everybody ends up getting some.
Speaker 1: That I can think of an analog that a friend
Speaker 1: of mine was accidentally trespassing and found a mammoth jaw,
Speaker 1: so he had to go over and say, sir, I
Speaker 1: was accidentally trespassing on.
Speaker 4: And lo and behold up on a mammoth jaw. What
Speaker 4: are we gonna do about this?
Speaker 2: And that bunny called in all his buddies is standing
Speaker 2: around him to make sure he got the right answer.
Speaker 1: Because he's like, he's like that raven. He's like, dude, like,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm on your place. It's a big elk you.
Speaker 1: I just would like to know what happens with the
Speaker 1: thing and just try to be part of this, you know,
Speaker 1: admitting that I'm on you.
Speaker 3: And what I'm gonna do is calling a bunch of
Speaker 3: my buddies to help me pack it out there?
Speaker 4: You go, no way? Yeah, hit me with the meat
Speaker 4: call again.
Speaker 2: So let me qualify. It sounds very similar to what
Speaker 2: young birds do when they're still on the nest and
Speaker 2: they're fledging. So if you've ever had a raven or
Speaker 2: a crow nest near your place, they never you know,
Speaker 2: they never shut up, like they just talk, and a
Speaker 2: lot of that is which just grates on your nerves,
Speaker 2: and it's supposed to because in essence, what they're saying.
Speaker 1: Is mom, Mom.
Speaker 2: Hey mom. Right. So, if you see an adult bird,
Speaker 2: and the way you tell on a lot of birds,
Speaker 2: and certainly for corvids, is if you see them, call,
Speaker 2: pick up your binox and look in their mouth. If
Speaker 2: the lining of the mouth is black, it's an adult.
Speaker 2: It's three years or older. We can't agent beyond that.
Speaker 2: We just know that after about two years, the mouth
Speaker 2: lining is all black. If it's a red pink, it's
Speaker 2: a juvenile. So if you hear a juvenile going on
Speaker 2: like that in August or September, you're like, eh, stupid kids,
Speaker 2: I'm trying to get the parents to still feed them.
Speaker 2: But if it's a black mouthed adult doing that, you
Speaker 2: want to start looking. You want to start looking for
Speaker 2: the magpies going in and out. You want to see
Speaker 2: there it seeing if that there's a coyote coming over
Speaker 2: the hell Oh you know, it's just the corroborating evidence
Speaker 2: that there's something there that you're missing. That the eyes
Speaker 2: in the sky picked.
Speaker 4: Up and do the noise again, and you don't have.
Speaker 2: To hear it once like I've had guide friends They're like, Hey,
Speaker 2: there's a new bison in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 2: I don't tell me anymore. I'll go in the park
Speaker 2: and i'll hang out. I'll go to a real good viewpoint,
Speaker 2: prominent point, and I'll close my eyes and I'll listen
Speaker 2: for the first time I hear that call. And often,
Speaker 2: because we often bias our other senses, sometimes I'll point
Speaker 2: in the direction I think it is and then I'll
Speaker 2: open my eyes and there it is, almost without fail.
Speaker 4: Because he's making that racket.
Speaker 2: He's making that racket because it found the food, and
Speaker 2: it's calling in buddies to make sure the residents don't
Speaker 2: run them out. You can, that's one of the best
Speaker 2: ways to find that there.
Speaker 1: Also, what he I got mixed up bout what he's
Speaker 1: saying or what you're he's being like, if I go
Speaker 1: down by myself, I'm gonna get her ass and run off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So he's basically calling in reinforcements.
Speaker 1: So the thing going and feed and they're not and
Speaker 1: they got enough people there where it's not going to be.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a smoke screen, feathered smoke screen to
Speaker 2: give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting
Speaker 2: beat up. And you'll hear it too, Like, there's an
Speaker 2: awesome reference. Do you ever read any of Richard Nelson's
Speaker 2: ethnography work from Alaska? In Prayers to Raven there's a
Speaker 2: passage on there book it's awesome and there's like a
Speaker 2: one sentence description in there that I just like, I
Speaker 2: just want to know what he's talking about. There he said,
Speaker 2: when the native hunters quitchen find a fresh bear track
Speaker 2: in the snow, they hide and they make the calls
Speaker 2: of a raven to draw the bearon. And I'm like, oh, really,
Speaker 2: what is that all like? And then he just keeps going.
Speaker 2: I'm like, no, you know, come back that. There's two possibilities.
Speaker 2: One is that non territorial bird saying right, that's possible.
Speaker 2: The other one, which I think is probably more likely,
Speaker 2: is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on
Speaker 2: the ground at a carcass fight.
Speaker 4: Oh, and they're all duking it out, duking.
Speaker 2: It out, tolding you that like, we got a good
Speaker 2: deal here.
Speaker 1: Interesting, man, you'd go and get a bunch of guys
Speaker 1: that could do that and start making that noise and
Speaker 1: see what shows up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know how effective it was, but it's
Speaker 2: effective enough apparently in their culture that they're that's a
Speaker 2: known thing.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things, and make make prayers of
Speaker 1: the raven One of my favorite things that he learned
Speaker 1: from those guys he's hanging out with, is you know
Speaker 1: they'd like to.
Speaker 4: Then dig bear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and their take is like, man, anybody can you know,
Speaker 1: because we look at that like, you know, most people
Speaker 1: look at that like a cowardly act, you know, unsportsmanlike.
Speaker 1: Their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear
Speaker 1: walking around, Go climb in there and drag.
Speaker 2: Them right right, And the old days they're doing it
Speaker 2: with a lance. Yeah, they let the bear charge them.
Speaker 1: You know, go climb in there and drag them out,
Speaker 1: and tell me about how easy it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Woosy, that's.
Speaker 4: A good book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he spends a lot of time on I mean
Speaker 1: obviously that that thing of like the significance of that bird,
Speaker 1: which is probably in some way motivated by it's just
Speaker 1: incredible intelligence.
Speaker 2: And I could totally see like people will often ask
Speaker 2: questions of like, you know the wolves around, you know,
Speaker 2: are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as
Speaker 2: we can see. No, Like there might be one or
Speaker 2: two instances in the last thirty years where somebody can
Speaker 2: say I'm pretty sure the ravens were maybe goaded those
Speaker 2: wolves over a friend of mine was watching a brown.
Speaker 4: Tap into the carcass or something.
Speaker 2: But yeah, or you know, here's a weak animal. There's
Speaker 2: a carcass right here. You know it's more there just
Speaker 2: like parasites to the wolves. They're just taking advantage of
Speaker 2: the wolves killed. I've seen times where wolves will be
Speaker 2: feeding on the back end of an old wear out
Speaker 2: bull elk, and the ravens are literally an antlers like
Speaker 2: waiting their turn. Come on, man, give us, give us
Speaker 2: a little space about it.
Speaker 1: But you don't see that there's like a legitimate like hey,
Speaker 1: come quick, this thing's will no no.
Speaker 2: But like the northern cultures all over the globe were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's how we find the caribou. And I think a
Speaker 2: lot of those signals are as much behavioral, Like, for instance,
Speaker 2: because we live on the edge of the National Forest
Speaker 2: right north of the park, there's a lot of hunting
Speaker 2: that goes on, and I can go out for a
Speaker 2: walk with a dog and I'm like, uh, somebody killed
Speaker 2: something over by the travertine two miles away, just by
Speaker 2: the continual unidirectional flight of every single raven going that way.
Speaker 2: So I think a lot of those early cultures probably
Speaker 2: were not just picking up on sound, but they were
Speaker 2: picking up on directional flight, flight altitude. If you see
Speaker 2: arab back, you know, acrobatics in the air, they probably
Speaker 2: you're close. There's a certain I don't know number of
Speaker 2: hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you'll see ravens
Speaker 2: chasing each other trying to get food away from each other,
Speaker 2: and you know, like so you know you see that,
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, we're within a couple hundred yards of
Speaker 2: that food source.
Speaker 1: I was in Tanzania this summer. In the trackers use
Speaker 1: what oxpeckers do.
Speaker 4: In the morning.
Speaker 1: It's it's like it's diagnostic. I mean they don't look
Speaker 1: at like, oh, maybe maybe there's something over there that
Speaker 1: it's going to. Yeah, they're like he's up in the morning,
Speaker 1: when he flies out, he already knows.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he knows where they're at the buffalo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like he knows where they are because he was
Speaker 1: with them before or whatever, and he's going there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and so yeah, in that way, and those
Speaker 1: messages they might they might not go there because of
Speaker 1: whatever factors.
Speaker 4: But they're like at daybreak when.
Speaker 1: Six of them go yeah and disappeared down somewhere, like
Speaker 1: that's not for something else.
Speaker 2: And the bugs do that. You know, you probably read
Speaker 2: Boyd Vardi's you know, line Tracker's Guide to Life or
Speaker 2: something like that. One of his mentors was finding found
Speaker 2: a lion kill from watching the.
Speaker 4: Flies No same deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I interviewed a guy from the book
Speaker 2: and he didn't It didn't end up making it into
Speaker 2: the final cut, but he and his buddy hunted a
Speaker 2: lot in California, really rocky ground.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: The first time it happened, they shot a bucket, ran
Speaker 2: off somewhere, could kind of see, you know, ran out
Speaker 2: of blood, didn't know, just kind of gave up almost
Speaker 2: sitting on this this hill or next to this trail
Speaker 2: and start seeing. He called him meat bees, you know,
Speaker 2: el jackets that you're trying to avoid if you're processing
Speaker 2: game from getting stung. Yellow jackets keep going up this trail.
Speaker 2: So he followed him, and he's used that for years
Speaker 2: thereafter to find down game God in places he couldn't track.
Speaker 4: You know Tom Petty, Late Tom Patty.
Speaker 1: He once said in one of his songs, he says,
Speaker 1: I can track a single bee to its hive, which
Speaker 1: is like how these define Yeah, staying there, starms and
Speaker 1: standing there way till one goes by, see as far
Speaker 1: as it went, go.
Speaker 4: There, standing there, wait for.
Speaker 1: The nuther one to go by, and you'll find your
Speaker 1: buck like that. Man, Yeah, badass, you can.
Speaker 2: And it's it's all that's to me. And I don't
Speaker 2: hunt anymore. And that's a whole different conversation. But just
Speaker 2: paying attention and trying to see the world through these
Speaker 2: other creatures, you start picking that stuff up a lot more.
Speaker 2: And this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors
Speaker 2: knew this animal language stuff in far better detail than
Speaker 2: I do. Like a friend of mine's hung out with
Speaker 2: the San people in the Kalahari. They are unfreaking believable
Speaker 2: in interpreting non human communication. And the ones are the best.
Speaker 2: You would think are the hunters. He's like, no, actually
Speaker 2: it's the women. The women are out in the bush
Speaker 2: digging roots. They've got kids with them, they got old
Speaker 2: people with them, all these people that are very vulnerable.
Speaker 2: If the hyenas or leopard or the lions come through,
Speaker 2: so they are ultra peaked. And he went out with
Speaker 2: them one day and they're digging away and these women's
Speaker 2: are spread out. You're like, dude, that's not safe right
Speaker 2: from our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women
Speaker 2: with the children, digging roots and things like that. And
Speaker 2: he'd walk up to any of them, We're the closest lions.
Speaker 2: Without even stopping, they point, how far about this far?
Speaker 2: Walk to another one, Hey, where are the closest lions?
Speaker 2: They point, go around and visit multiple women, doing this
Speaker 2: just effortlessly as part of their day. They are absorbing
Speaker 2: this information as they go. And in that particular case,
Speaker 2: they went over a couple hours later in a vehicle.
Speaker 2: There's the fresh lion tracks, got it, and even on
Speaker 2: down really specific stuff, like he told me this story.
Speaker 2: They were in this It was small plot of forest
Speaker 2: and they hang out there in the day because it
Speaker 2: gets really really hot. And they said to them, the
Speaker 2: white guys, the tourists, do not leave this patch of forest.
Speaker 2: There's Mama's out here, there's cobras, there's hyenas. The whole
Speaker 2: laundry list, but one of the guys with him. There
Speaker 2: was one of his students in animal language bird language,
Speaker 2: and this student of his comes over. He says, Hey,
Speaker 2: I know we're not supposed to leave, but I'm hearing
Speaker 2: this bird do something that I think might be talking
Speaker 2: about a snake. Can you come listen to it? So
Speaker 2: he goes over there with him at the edge of
Speaker 2: this little patch of trees and he's like, yeah, I
Speaker 2: think you're right, but you know, we're not gonna go
Speaker 2: out there. Let's but let's go get the one white
Speaker 2: guy and he's got a gun. We will check it out.
Speaker 2: So he comes over. The three of them walk out
Speaker 2: and he's like, yeah, I think I think you're right.
Speaker 2: I think it's I think it's a snake. But let's
Speaker 2: go get aasi Quah. You know this this native guy,
Speaker 2: his name literally translates into cobra, he'll know. So Isakulah comes.
Speaker 2: The four of them then walk within I'll say sixty
Speaker 2: eighty yards and he's like, yep, there it is. It's
Speaker 2: a it's a black mamba. Don't go over there. So
Speaker 2: my friend says to his student who were originally found
Speaker 2: this whole deal, he's like, now watch this. They go
Speaker 2: back into the trees and there's like five women sitting
Speaker 2: around making beads with ostrich eggs shells and they're just talking.
Speaker 2: Kids are playing around, people are working on tan and highs,
Speaker 2: just the usual stuff of a community. So they stand
Speaker 2: their patient and finally there's a break in the conversation
Speaker 2: and the translator says, you want to ask the question.
Speaker 2: So my friend says, yeah, do you ladies hear any
Speaker 2: alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them
Speaker 2: point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away,
Speaker 2: says there's a mamba over there. Don't go over there.
Speaker 4: Hmm.
Speaker 2: So not only through their regular routine were they hearing it,
Speaker 2: they also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even
Speaker 2: seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on,
Speaker 2: Like that's the level that not just Native Africans, not
Speaker 2: just Native Amazonians, like our ancestors knew that. And it's
Speaker 2: like so cool that we're discovering it now. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: it's neat, but this is really old and it was
Speaker 2: used because it was so useful. It was retained because
Speaker 2: dinner was on the hoof, and you need to know
Speaker 2: it was in there before you even went in there
Speaker 2: to just limit the chaos that that life brings at you.
Speaker 2: So and for me, it's like I was guiding a ton,
Speaker 2: you know. So like people are paying you to find
Speaker 2: the bear. Well, ha, Well, if there's anybody on a
Speaker 2: carcass that's out there, it's probably gonna be a bear,
Speaker 2: you know. So you got to listen to the raven.
Speaker 2: You got to watch the duck. So I don't I
Speaker 2: want to see a wolf, you know some people I like,
Speaker 2: I don't care. You gotta watch everything here because everything
Speaker 2: has a response and a relationship with everything else. And
Speaker 2: the more you pay attention to that, the more you're
Speaker 2: gonna see all those connections start done, just blossom. And
Speaker 2: what's even more cool is when you see the position
Speaker 2: you yourself hold you're being talked about. They respond to you,
Speaker 2: Steve different than you, Brody different than you can and
Speaker 2: they respond or eating our dogs dog has a different
Speaker 2: bark for the ups guy because he gives them snacks.
Speaker 2: Definitely different bark for the FedEx guy. No snacks there,
Speaker 2: different bark for the neighbor knows that guy pretty well.
Speaker 2: Different bark for or behaviors when one of the family
Speaker 2: comes home so we're not in isolation of this, you know,
Speaker 2: as it's seen in the wild world, like we're doing it,
Speaker 2: our pets are doing it. It's just paying attention a
Speaker 2: little bit more so that you start seeing in the
Speaker 2: places that you want to know more.
Speaker 1: Our dog has a greeting for people whose house she
Speaker 1: has stayed at before.
Speaker 4: What is it? Just a level of like swirling around,
Speaker 4: make the wine. You know, it's like rolling over on
Speaker 4: her back. That means she's like been dog sat by them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, the crazy thing is like if you haven't done that,
Speaker 1: she's not gonna do it right.
Speaker 2: It's true. It's so true. And like literally three mornings ago,
Speaker 2: my wife and I are working at the dining room
Speaker 2: table and our dog, We've got a black lab Hobbs.
Speaker 2: Hobb starts going bananas like ape shit. I'm like, what
Speaker 2: he only does that level of craziness for the ups guy,
Speaker 2: or if the neighbor's dog comes in the yard because
Speaker 2: he wants to go play, right, I'm like, what is it?
Speaker 2: He's just like bouncing. It almost looked like a coonhound.
Speaker 2: You know, it's babe, you know, treat to a raccoon
Speaker 2: bouncing on his front feet. Bark and barking, barking, And
Speaker 2: I look out the front door before I let him out,
Speaker 2: and here's a bobcat walking up the stairs from the
Speaker 2: lower yard into the upper yard, twenty feet from the
Speaker 2: from the door, and then just veers off and through
Speaker 2: the yard. You'd see those tracks. You're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that bobcat came through the night, Like, no, dude, it
Speaker 2: was ten thirty in the morning. We were working and
Speaker 2: we would have missed it had hobs or in other cases,
Speaker 2: we've seen lines in our yard because the magpies told us.
Speaker 2: You know, we had a line with four kittens in
Speaker 2: our yard this spring and they disappeared after a while.
Speaker 2: Didn't think we'd see him again. And we're sitting on
Speaker 2: the porch, my wife and I and Jenny says hear that.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, magpies. Magpies. When they are social and
Speaker 2: just hanging out together, they'll go yeka, can hear it
Speaker 2: in different places they're just checking in. But when it
Speaker 2: goes down ye yah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like that's what we heard. And she says there's
Speaker 2: something down there. I'm like, I know, and she no
Speaker 2: more than stands up walks less than the distance from
Speaker 2: here to Brody looks over the railing into the lower
Speaker 2: yard and she says, fucking lion. And because of the
Speaker 2: fore warning, he had enough time running the house, grab
Speaker 2: her camera and got this killer footage of the cat
Speaker 2: walking like thirty feet from the corner of our deckoree
Speaker 2: in the afternoon, when you least expect it. It's like
Speaker 2: when your life is on the line, like a magpie
Speaker 2: who might be whacked by a wild cat, or a
Speaker 2: raven who might get whacked by an eagle, like look
Speaker 2: to those things that their lives depend on most, and
Speaker 2: then you just start seeing this, this whole scene open up.
Speaker 2: Is that's why they're talking that way, and you're just
Speaker 2: you're just an eavesdropper listening. I was like, oh, whoa,
Speaker 2: Like ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Some
Speaker 2: things seem generic, but some things are extremely specific. And
Speaker 2: this one and it can take a while, Like this
Speaker 2: one took me about five years to figure out what
Speaker 2: the heck it meant. I'd heard it. I'm like, WHOA,
Speaker 2: that's different. I can't figure it out. Flying high just
Speaker 2: making noise right, No, No, that's what happens when there's
Speaker 2: a golden eagle?
Speaker 4: What is that noise?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: So it's a very consistent, uniform series of notes to
Speaker 2: just go on and and it's it's serious. And I
Speaker 2: was having lunch with a guy who runs the bird
Speaker 2: programs in Yellstone. I'm like, hey, Dave, you did you
Speaker 2: graduate working on golden eagles?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. He's like, you know this raven call. I've
Speaker 2: been hearing this raven call. I'm pretty sure it's just
Speaker 2: for goldens. He's like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we
Speaker 2: listened for to know to get the eagle traps ready
Speaker 2: because one's coming.
Speaker 4: Oh really, why are they tuned into goldens?
Speaker 2: They're killers?
Speaker 4: So goldens will kill them off of those.
Speaker 2: I've only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but
Speaker 2: it's really infrequent.
Speaker 4: But he wants he wants to eat it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they're eating them. It's like a difference between
Speaker 2: a wolf killing a coyote versus a lion. Lion will
Speaker 2: eat you. Wolf just kills you, you know, till the
Speaker 2: their level of response is different. That line is gonna
Speaker 2: hunt you. That wolf is gonna opportunistically kill you because
Speaker 2: you're filching off. It's kill and they know these variations.
Speaker 2: So I asked Dave and Likes to have, you know,
Speaker 2: a variation for bald eagles, because I think I have,
Speaker 2: and he's like, nah, you know, he wasn't doing research
Speaker 2: on them, so he didn't. But on the spectrum of
Speaker 2: raven chasing another raven off versus raven chasing a golden
Speaker 2: eagle off back from that golden eagle, end of the
Speaker 2: spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it,
Speaker 2: a few more bits of inflection. And it's hard because
Speaker 2: you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape
Speaker 2: because I only get maybe half a dozen of these
Speaker 2: in a lifetime, some of these behaviors and calls. But
Speaker 2: if you've got one hundred other people who listen for
Speaker 2: exactly the same thing for a couple of thousand years,
Speaker 2: and you're telling the stories, yeah, you see why the
Speaker 2: bushmen are so damn good. But I've been able to
Speaker 2: call it on bald a few times. You know, you
Speaker 2: hear and I don't know if you can hear the
Speaker 2: differences in there. It's not that and it's not the
Speaker 2: raven chasing another raven. There's a little more insistence to it.
Speaker 2: There's a little more uniformity, but compared to the Golden Eagle,
Speaker 2: there's still more inflection, there's more spacing in there, and
Speaker 2: they're doing those things for a reason.
Speaker 3: It's all this stuff like are you doing all this
Speaker 3: just kind of based on memory and things you're hearing
Speaker 3: repetitively out while you're out are like, are you recording
Speaker 3: it all to like listen to this stuff and get
Speaker 3: nuance out of it?
Speaker 2: Or is it just for years? For twenty plus years,
Speaker 2: it's been me just listening in ways other people haven't
Speaker 2: been and making some connections and missing most right. But
Speaker 2: what's really cool right now is my friend's kind of
Speaker 2: at the center of initiating a bioacoustics project in Yellstone,
Speaker 2: which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle
Speaker 2: wolf language. You know, can you sense this a wolf
Speaker 2: population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves
Speaker 2: out of a place by playing certain types of howls
Speaker 2: in an area to keep them on of cattle? Right?
Speaker 2: So they're doing more or less the basic research, though
Speaker 2: it's just based you're putting out all these recorders and
Speaker 2: recording twenty four by seven, three hundred and sixty five
Speaker 2: days a year. But you're not just getting wolves. You're
Speaker 2: getting everything. You're getting all the ravens, you're getting all
Speaker 2: the bis in conversation, You're getting everything. And we've got
Speaker 2: one of them in our yard a part of this project.
Speaker 2: So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my
Speaker 2: phone where I see a raven chase a golden eagle over.
Speaker 2: I just make them time and date stamp and a
Speaker 2: note of behavior in my phone. And now I can
Speaker 2: actually go back because you're you all have this. If
Speaker 2: you're trying to take a photo of something, you're trying
Speaker 2: to record something, it's over before you're done, especially these things.
Speaker 2: I only have a few data points ever, but this
Speaker 2: is but.
Speaker 4: This is not always running.
Speaker 2: It's always running. So I can now make a note
Speaker 2: and I'm like raven being you know, chased by this
Speaker 2: or raven chasing that I can go back to the
Speaker 2: sound recordings and listen to it over and over and
Speaker 2: it's context totally. That's where this AI stuff is really
Speaker 2: cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other behaviors,
Speaker 2: but you still need the field time. You still need
Speaker 2: somebody who's died in the wool in the field, and
Speaker 2: that's all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise just
Speaker 2: it's just noise. So that's the part I really enjoy,
Speaker 2: and I like, I'm really wanting to figure out. I
Speaker 2: have a strong suspicion of what the alarm coyotes use
Speaker 2: for when they encounter a cougar. It's different than when
Speaker 2: they find a wolf because they're bad dudes, and they're
Speaker 2: going to tell everybody about it. They want them known
Speaker 2: and they want to avoid them themselves and their families.
Speaker 2: But I've only had four instances where I can verify
Speaker 2: that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else's observations,
Speaker 2: that kyote was barking at a cougar one data point.
Speaker 2: And I hope this bioacoustics stuff is allow us to
Speaker 2: then go in because like he and I hooked up
Speaker 2: with a high school honors student kid wanted a project
Speaker 2: on wildlife. So we're like, great, we need to train
Speaker 2: the AI model. So we had him go listen to
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say,
Speaker 2: this is a howl. It's not an airplane, This is
Speaker 2: a howl. It's not a truck. This is a howl
Speaker 2: of a wolf, not a coyote, so that then you
Speaker 2: can let the machine listen to a year's worth of
Speaker 2: recordings without you having to sit there for a year
Speaker 2: for every single unit, and you know, isolate all the
Speaker 2: right And you know, there's been an explosion in the
Speaker 2: amount of info out there in the research world about
Speaker 2: this kind of stuff in the last fifteen years. Like
Speaker 2: a friend wrote a book in h came out in
Speaker 2: twenty twelve called What the Robin Knows by John Young.
Speaker 2: They had they had to scratch and dig to find
Speaker 2: any documentation that talked about any of this stuff. You know,
Speaker 2: everybody's got the app now, like here's the Song of
Speaker 2: the Robin, you know, here's the Song of the Phoebe.
Speaker 2: You know all these What they don't tell you and
Speaker 2: they can't is what the hell that actually means.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: And so there's been a lot more research in that
Speaker 2: field recently, which is just it's pointing to the complexity
Speaker 2: that we've been ignoring as modern humans for a long
Speaker 2: darn time. And as it's fun. You know, you don't
Speaker 2: need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff. You just
Speaker 2: you don't even need binoculars. Just listen. Well, I don't
Speaker 2: have good hearing anymore. I shot too many guns or
Speaker 2: like me, you know, power tools and guns, and you know,
Speaker 2: I got compromised hearing. But it's not about what you
Speaker 2: can hear or can see. It's what you do with
Speaker 2: what you can hear and see. Like I noticed a
Speaker 2: friend of mine who's had a lot of the same history.
Speaker 2: We pick up on cars on dirt road, a lot
Speaker 2: further off than our wives do. Get the dogs, Get
Speaker 2: the dogs in out of the road, Like, what are
Speaker 2: you talking about. There's a car coming. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: car coming. I don't hear it. Well, just give it
Speaker 2: a sec you know, and there it comes. So each
Speaker 2: of us comes to the to the game with a
Speaker 2: slightly different set of superpowers, if you want to put
Speaker 2: it that way. And we're tuning into things in ways
Speaker 2: that you aren't, or you're tuning in stuff that I don't,
Speaker 2: which is in some ways, like I don't like to
Speaker 2: give a lot of instruction on this stuff because I
Speaker 2: want to hear what you find. And if I tell
Speaker 2: you what to look for, that's all you're going to see.
Speaker 2: You follow me, you know, So I really it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna tell you some cool stuff to get you
Speaker 2: started plant that seed, but man, I really want you
Speaker 2: to do this on your own and te me what
Speaker 2: you find. Oh yeah, the lions, you know, the Kyle's
Speaker 2: do that at the lion, but it's when the lion's
Speaker 2: behaving like this. So like when that bobcat came through
Speaker 2: the yard the other day, I did get a small
Speaker 2: recording of the magpies, and it was nothing like what
Speaker 2: I would point out and say, bobcat over there. And
Speaker 2: what you start to realize is there oftentimes talking about
Speaker 2: Sure they're talking about the animal specifically, but as well
Speaker 2: in that mix as them talking about that animal's behavior,
Speaker 2: it's intention, you might say. So when a cat is hunting,
Speaker 2: those alarms go through the roof, they'd light up the woods.
Speaker 2: But if the cat like this one the other day,
Speaker 2: it was just kind of like walking through the yard.
Speaker 4: You know, it.
Speaker 2: Drops off the retaining wall, sits down on a log
Speaker 2: in the little cops of cottonwoods. Yeah, yeah, there's a trouble,
Speaker 2: but we're not ratting it out like crazy, you know.
Speaker 2: So in many cases you can you can actually read
Speaker 2: into the behavior. You can read into the direction in
Speaker 2: the animals moving. Like so when the kyote is alarming
Speaker 2: at something like us. Naturally, they'll often shadow it as
Speaker 2: it progresses, so you'd be like, Okay, there's a there's
Speaker 2: a wolf over there, and it's going right to left
Speaker 2: at a trot, I think, and if we want to
Speaker 2: see it, we're going to have to go over on
Speaker 2: the hill here where we're down wind. You can start
Speaker 2: doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately
Speaker 2: because they're hunting with rocks and sticks, need everything, and
Speaker 2: this is one of those tools that helps you on
Speaker 2: that razor's edge of survival. It's like the you know
Speaker 2: the crow Indian, you know Crow tribal folks here, they
Speaker 2: had to know Crowfair. I don't know if you guys
Speaker 2: have been to Crowfair, but they were just a few
Speaker 2: years ago. A twitter with the fact this one elder
Speaker 2: was coming out of the mountains to tend and this
Speaker 2: photographer friend of mine got to meet him, and you know,
Speaker 2: he's very low key asking questions, and the elder asked
Speaker 2: this friend of mine, He's like, so, you know what
Speaker 2: do you do. I'm a photographer? You so, oh, what
Speaker 2: do you like to photograph? Bears and wolves and otters
Speaker 2: and stuff like that? You want to know where every
Speaker 2: bear is, every wolf is. He's like, yeah, he's like
Speaker 2: getting his notebook out. He's like, you know, thinking he's
Speaker 2: gonna draw map, and he's like, he says, no. He says,
Speaker 2: you listen to the birds. He says, they're like our women,
Speaker 2: the gossip about everything.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know that's some deep wisdom right there, because
Speaker 8: it's going on all the time, but we just don't
Speaker 8: give it the credit it's due.
Speaker 1: What ah, What other animals that people that people listen
Speaker 1: would know would have a familiar familiarity with the with
Speaker 1: the vocabulary already?
Speaker 2: Yeah, great ones likerels. Okay, well in North America at least,
Speaker 2: you know, gray squirrel is a great one. They're in Europe,
Speaker 2: you know, they've been introduced to Europe and there a
Speaker 2: plague over there. But again, nature doesn't care whether you're
Speaker 2: non native or native. Everybody's contributions to this community conversation
Speaker 2: is equal and listened to. So gray squirrels. If you
Speaker 2: spend time in the woods, you know something's coming through
Speaker 2: when you hear what what what?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: Which is in contrast to.
Speaker 4: Does it ever hear that one? But without the yes.
Speaker 2: Exactly look up? That is typically for a threat from
Speaker 2: the air.
Speaker 4: He leaves off the couple like whatever.
Speaker 2: The chucks or chucks. The chucks are typically something on
Speaker 2: the ground. Same with red squirrels.
Speaker 4: That's him, that's something tally.
Speaker 2: On the ground. There's some there's some debate in the
Speaker 2: scientific community over what that actually means. And no, it
Speaker 2: doesn't mean that. It means this, and we don't know.
Speaker 2: And the bottom line is the squirrels. Now listen to
Speaker 2: the squirrels, spend time with the squirrels, because when they got.
Speaker 4: That one, what does that mean? Because there got a
Speaker 4: version that just means I'm mad at another squirrel.
Speaker 2: There is that. Yeah, you can't discount that, that's for sure, Like, dude,
Speaker 2: get out of my midden.
Speaker 1: I wish, I wish I could isolate the one because
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in the one where he sees something.
Speaker 4: But then a lot of times you'd be watching him.
Speaker 1: From a fire and he'd be like he's fired up
Speaker 1: because he's fired up at that squirrel. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: he's not telling about some elk coming down the trail.
Speaker 4: He's like pissed at a squirrel.
Speaker 2: And what's really crazy cool is not only is are
Speaker 2: most of these things innate in these species. So like
Speaker 2: those vervet monkeys, they are wired from birth to yell
Speaker 2: at the leopard like they do you think, so we know.
Speaker 2: So what they don't always have, well, yes and no.
Speaker 2: What they need is refinement of how to use that.
Speaker 2: So like young ones they've seen in those verbts, like
Speaker 2: adults basically like cuff the kids like, shut up that
Speaker 2: it's a root. It's a tree, root, it's not a snake.
Speaker 4: Oh all right.
Speaker 2: So there there are these innate tendencies, there's these innate alarms.
Speaker 2: But then there's also training that comes with the social
Speaker 2: arrangement that that helps them refine it so that the
Speaker 2: group can agree. Right, And that's also where you end
Speaker 2: up with these dialects. You know, the ravens on Vancouver Island, like, dude,
Speaker 2: they say stuff I've never heard before from here, Okay,
Speaker 2: totally different accent in California. Dude, he's on my surfboard.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like Manaier's you know, those ravens have
Speaker 2: different sounds, same in Alaska. Like you can see. Then
Speaker 2: it's like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they're talking about things in pretty complex ways. They're
Speaker 2: talking about us too, which I don't think a lot
Speaker 2: of people realize they're talking about us in ways that
Speaker 2: these wild communities are actually across species, not just across species,
Speaker 2: across genera family, order of organism that are all listening
Speaker 2: to each other simultaneously. So the mink is listening to
Speaker 2: the frogs, The frogs are listening to the owl, the
Speaker 2: the you know, the the owl is listening to the
Speaker 2: jet going overhead. You know, there's this this whole hierarchy
Speaker 2: of of order that.
Speaker 1: They have a great point that, like as much you're
Speaker 1: talking about trying to like sort figure out what the
Speaker 1: noises make, there's all these different noises that have to
Speaker 1: mean something. It's interesting to get into it, Like what
Speaker 1: are other animals? So here you are a human. Here
Speaker 1: you are one specie hearing an elk bugle, drawing conclusions
Speaker 1: from that, But that elk is listening to a pine squirrel,
Speaker 1: drawing conclusions from that.
Speaker 2: None of them are in isolation. We are the ones
Speaker 2: in isolation.
Speaker 4: We're the ones.
Speaker 2: And it's not like you got to go into a
Speaker 2: wild place to hear this. No Like, literally, I'm gassing
Speaker 2: up here and bows before I got here, and the
Speaker 2: chickeny is pissed off at something. I didn't see what
Speaker 2: it was, but I at least knew something's going on
Speaker 2: over there. I've done enough times walk over and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: I bet nobody in this neighborhoods seen that owl. Mmm,
Speaker 2: it's been sitting there, probably lived there its whole life,
Speaker 2: years and nobody's known that it's sitting right there.
Speaker 4: We had one hanging dead in that tree there today,
Speaker 4: din't you really?
Speaker 2: Yeah, what happened to it?
Speaker 1: We emailed or our texted one of the game wardens,
Speaker 1: and you said, there's so much avian influenza right now,
Speaker 1: and it's sitting the owls hard enough where they don't
Speaker 1: even they're out even testing all the birds anymore, that's said,
Speaker 1: And that's he was going to come by and grab it,
Speaker 1: but he was like, he's like, there's a lot.
Speaker 2: Pretty sure of it. Yeah, overwhelmed.
Speaker 4: And that's yeah, that's there's too many to check them
Speaker 4: all right now.
Speaker 2: That's what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking
Speaker 2: around the globe, is we're losing these informants. We're losing
Speaker 2: these community members who are more than happy to welcome
Speaker 2: us in and share information with us. If we slow
Speaker 2: the hell down. Like something I do with the students
Speaker 2: that I have done for years is I'll take him
Speaker 2: out somewhere in the park and I said, everybody puts
Speaker 2: your phones, your watches, everything in a bag. Pull out
Speaker 2: a notepad or a piece of paper and a pencil.
Speaker 2: That's all you're allowed to have. Spread out, you know.
Speaker 2: So we all have everybody spread out for you know,
Speaker 2: a few yards between everybody over a let's say an acre,
Speaker 2: and we're going to sit for an hour, sixty minutes.
Speaker 2: That's it, sixty minutes and then and I just want
Speaker 2: you to look for any animals, you see, any sounds
Speaker 2: you hear, just jot them down, and we come together
Speaker 2: at the end of that. And I keep time, and
Speaker 2: they have a crude way for them to keep rough
Speaker 2: time stamps of when we're out there, so they can
Speaker 2: correlate certain things. And I'll say to them, what did
Speaker 2: you hear? Nothing?
Speaker 4: Man?
Speaker 2: There was nothing for like, I don't know, I thought
Speaker 2: I heard a chickadee like maybe minute, you know, around
Speaker 2: minute forty or when you made the signal for the
Speaker 2: fourth quarter or something like. There was nothing, and then
Speaker 2: there's stuff all over. I'm like anybody else notice that, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: actually the nutatge came down the tree, I saw coyo.
Speaker 2: Like all these things start happening. I said, do you
Speaker 2: think us going in there screwed things up? Did they
Speaker 2: know we were coming? And you see the wheels starting?
Speaker 2: The answer to that is absolutely yes. The same signal
Speaker 2: system that's ratting out the Cooper's Hawk coming through the
Speaker 2: neighborhood or the owl perched up in this spruce is
Speaker 2: the same system that's telling everybody else about us.
Speaker 3: That's it super interesting from a hunting perspective because like
Speaker 3: you could be Glass and some mule deer that are
Speaker 3: saying a thousand yards away and you're like, they have
Speaker 3: no idea we're here, But maybe they do and they're
Speaker 3: just not worried about it yet.
Speaker 2: You know, they know the proximities, they know the priors.
Speaker 2: They know that squirrel isn't going to do that until
Speaker 2: it sees something of trouble. But they're three hundred four
Speaker 2: hundred yards down.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: If we see the Kyle Hall and ass up through
Speaker 2: this meadow past us, we know that trouble's gotten about
Speaker 2: another one hundred yards closer. You know that ghost buck
Speaker 2: that nobody could ever harvest they at a very fine level.
Speaker 2: At that age had to be half to be tuning
Speaker 2: into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment.
Speaker 2: And every species has a different threshold, you know, so Toey's,
Speaker 2: for instance, they're out of there so fast, or like ninjas,
Speaker 2: you just notice like they're gone, like where the hell
Speaker 2: they go. The sparrows, you know, pay attention and they
Speaker 2: make a couple of chip notes and then they take off,
Speaker 2: you know, and a couple of minutes later, here comes
Speaker 2: the dog has followed your trail into the woods.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you're sneaking along thinking that the thing that's
Speaker 1: alerting stuff is you crunch and leaves and if you
Speaker 1: think about and you's like like the forest is alive
Speaker 1: with bird calls and whatever and squirrels and stuff. But
Speaker 1: you think it's like you step down a twig. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good point. They might have been taught about
Speaker 1: you for forever.
Speaker 2: Man the turkey step on twigs, elk break brand, big break,
Speaker 2: big stuff. So like why aren't they alarming?
Speaker 4: At that?
Speaker 2: I was like so pissed as a kid, like watching
Speaker 2: these birds on my grandmother's feet are like a woodpacker
Speaker 2: come in and flush everybody, or a jay or you know,
Speaker 2: squirrel sidles up, I walk out. Everybody off. I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm not bad.
Speaker 4: I'm not bad.
Speaker 2: Guy, Like, come on, let's you know, hang out, show
Speaker 2: me some stuff. And no, it's like you screw the
Speaker 2: least common denominator as a hiker, a dog walker, a
Speaker 2: beach comber, and you scare everybody. That's the piece we
Speaker 2: don't get is if you scare the robin, you've already
Speaker 2: been blown for everything. You scare the brown creeper, you
Speaker 2: scare the mink.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like and then there's this beautiful this is like
Speaker 2: gourmet level stuff where you start getting into secondary alarms.
Speaker 2: So like, as you slow down, I'll back up just
Speaker 2: a second, so that one exercise of making everybody sit
Speaker 2: for sixty seconds or sixty minutes, I'll say, how many
Speaker 2: times have each of you gone out in the woods
Speaker 2: or somewhere just wildish and sat for sixty minutes and
Speaker 2: done nothing but pay attention? You ask that yourself, like
Speaker 2: you know hunters some.
Speaker 4: But yeah, archery, whitetail hunters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how I learned it a lot.
Speaker 1: That's when you see everything, well, you got it. Like
Speaker 1: you gotta go sit there. At like an hour in Alston,
Speaker 1: You're like, where is all this stuff?
Speaker 4: Normally?
Speaker 2: Bingo?
Speaker 4: You know, it's like stuff everywhere.
Speaker 2: It's normally exactly like you see after that hour. And
Speaker 2: that's what this lesson conveys them, is like I've never
Speaker 2: said anywhere for an hour. And so the result is
Speaker 2: the reason we don't pick up on so much of
Speaker 2: this stuff is we have never ever seen the environment
Speaker 2: we live, our home, the place we think we know
Speaker 2: the best, in anything other than a state of alarm
Speaker 2: and disruption, alarm and disruption that we have created ourselves.
Speaker 2: But the beauty is as you start to pay attention
Speaker 2: to that, they recognize it in you. And it's very simple,
Speaker 2: slow down, walk without an intention. Photographers, you know, even
Speaker 2: the photograph for not hurting anything, doing anything. The behavior
Speaker 2: most people take on when they're trying to get a photo,
Speaker 2: it's predator like I see you, I'm focused on you.
Speaker 2: I'm That is scary as hell to wild animals. What
Speaker 2: it's saying is I'm going to get you. I'm getting you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like I'm acknowledging that you're there, right, So
Speaker 1: like if you're yeah, coming up and you tell people
Speaker 1: if you're trying to get up on a cotton, ta'll
Speaker 1: be like last thing you do. Don't look at it exactly,
Speaker 1: look at it out of the corner, your eyeballs at it,
Speaker 1: because when you aim your eyeballs at it, it knows you're
Speaker 1: aiming your eyeballs.
Speaker 2: At it exactly exactly. It's that language. So as you
Speaker 2: slow down and as a friend calls it, I love
Speaker 2: this term that the honoring routine. You start to honor
Speaker 2: their space, you very quickly can tell what the squirrel's
Speaker 2: personal space extends to you respect that you give them
Speaker 2: a little bit of room. Ah, you know, I'm just
Speaker 2: trying to get to the store, like I'm not walking
Speaker 2: around every pigeon, Well, that is the barrier that's going
Speaker 2: to stop you from moving through the woods, Like that ghostbuck,
Speaker 2: like that lion. Do you follow me? They are paying
Speaker 2: attention to the signals in the environment and working around
Speaker 2: them and using environmental components to their advantage. So there's
Speaker 2: some places there are worthless to try to hunt until
Speaker 2: it's a south wind, right, You got to wait till
Speaker 2: the wind's right. You see, certain birds and predators hunt
Speaker 2: when it's pouring down rain, their survival is so narrow
Speaker 2: on that razor edge, and they've got this huge neighborhood
Speaker 2: watch trying to disarm them and keep them from killing
Speaker 2: their prey. And so they're doing all these different things
Speaker 2: to try to subvert the community of communication. That's busting them,
Speaker 2: that's busting you, that's busting you. You step like, literally,
Speaker 2: you got two minutes. Usually this is a fun one
Speaker 2: to play with. Tell everybody to meet me at this
Speaker 2: trail intersection at eleven o'clock, let's say, except you get
Speaker 2: in there at ten, So it means you leave your
Speaker 2: car or you know, do whatever you have to do
Speaker 2: to be sitting down by ten and let things go
Speaker 2: back to normal m h.
Speaker 1: And then which is thirty minutes whatever, Yeah, yeah, to
Speaker 1: lease at least it's usually more like forty to sixty minutes.
Speaker 2: And then as you're sitting there and the birds are
Speaker 2: feeding and they're preening and they're singing, you hear the
Speaker 2: most common alarm in the woods, what is it? Silence?
Speaker 2: Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in
Speaker 2: nature that exists. So you just might think there's nobody
Speaker 2: singing over there anymore, and then you see a couple
Speaker 2: of birds like hauling ass going from the park lot
Speaker 2: area past. You set your watch two minutes, so you
Speaker 2: got two minutes to figure out do you want to
Speaker 2: scare the tart and my buddy, do you want to hide?
Speaker 2: Or do you want to you know, go to somewhere
Speaker 2: else where I can watch them and screw them.
Speaker 4: This is one about the quietness, man.
Speaker 2: This is what the lion or the deer knows of you.
Speaker 1: Is.
Speaker 2: It's got two minutes through the robins, through the sparrows
Speaker 2: to do a wide loop out, listen about your progress
Speaker 2: through all the other birds and animals, and then you've
Speaker 2: had I know you, guys, if you spent any amount
Speaker 2: of time in the woods, you come back the same
Speaker 2: trail you went in on. You're like, son of a bitch,
Speaker 2: there's bear tracks right on my tracks, or wolf tracks
Speaker 2: or coyote tracts or the deer. You know, it's because
Speaker 2: they walk around you. They're listening and monitoring you through
Speaker 2: the animal language in the environment, so they're like, oh, yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: he's still going. He's going on left over that ridge.
Speaker 2: And this stuff is is of such high utility that
Speaker 2: it's one fella I mentioned in the book interviewed him.
Speaker 2: He was training special ops crews and he had a
Speaker 2: guy he trained in bird language as well as tracking,
Speaker 2: and they had a Humbye ran over an ied you know,
Speaker 2: in the road, just made a mess of this thing,
Speaker 2: and they sent him, this student of the the fell
Speaker 2: I I knew, in to find the bomb layer. And
Speaker 2: he does a few loops around the Humby site, you know,
Speaker 2: just chaos, bleeding guys, screaming guys, smoke fire. He picks
Speaker 2: up a single set of tracks leaving same set. Came
Speaker 2: in one way, left another. So he starts sign cutting.
Speaker 2: You know, some of you might know that term. You're
Speaker 2: moving fast, but you're you're periodically rechecking that you're on
Speaker 2: the prints.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: He broke a branch over there, you know, just trying
Speaker 2: to catch up. And he gets to a certain point
Speaker 2: where he's this is Afghanistan. There's this waddy is little ravine,
Speaker 2: and he hears the alarms. He's like that guy's he's
Speaker 2: over in there. And as he's standing there trying to
Speaker 2: figure out what to do, he starts hearing the bird
Speaker 2: alarms go up this ridge beyond the wadi, and based
Speaker 2: on what he learned, he want the opposite direction, so
Speaker 2: he get it over on to another point, get a
Speaker 2: clear view of that ridge and ends up taking the
Speaker 2: guy out. Never saw him up until that point, but
Speaker 2: he was clearly delineated in his movements and direction and
Speaker 2: speed even through the bird conversations. And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: He didn't know any of the birds. You don't need
Speaker 2: to know any of the birds. You learn the birds
Speaker 2: at home, and the patterns you find anywhere you go
Speaker 2: are the same. They're going to be filled by different species.
Speaker 2: But like I've heard so many people say, hey, you know,
Speaker 2: I never would have seen that at Mongoose. We're in Africa.
Speaker 2: But it's responding exactly the way the sparrows do at
Speaker 2: my place along the river when the mink comes through.
Speaker 2: The painted dogs, oh my gosh, Like we never would
Speaker 2: have seen them. But those birds, whatever they are, are
Speaker 2: the height off the ground. They're excited in the same
Speaker 2: way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor's
Speaker 2: dog gets loose and comes over yep. So that's the
Speaker 2: universality of that concept. Is fascinating to me that we
Speaker 2: all are operating on this same level of awareness and
Speaker 2: use of sound to know what's going on. Sometimes miles
Speaker 2: beyond our own sensory abilities, Like I know there's wolves
Speaker 2: in the park two and a half miles away. If
Speaker 2: I'm walking my dog, I hear, oh yeah yeah. At
Speaker 2: this point, it's not even a if, it's just where
Speaker 2: so I'll find that that signal maker or the coyoteor wherever.
Speaker 2: And I just set up the scope and from the
Speaker 2: deck of the house, you're like, oh, yep, you know
Speaker 2: there they are. It seems like mad to people, but
Speaker 2: it's not. It's just paying attention better people. And when
Speaker 2: you pay attention better, you get treated different. That's the
Speaker 2: real beauty to me is you start getting to know
Speaker 2: individual wild animals and they at the same time they've
Speaker 2: always already known you.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like why certain people can be out in their
Speaker 1: yard and have stuff come into it.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that kid is the one when he comes to
Speaker 2: the prairie dog community town, he's freaking popping our buddy's off.
Speaker 2: That guy he doesn't even care. And they remember real
Speaker 2: well whether you've been nice or especially if you've been naughty.
Speaker 2: So there are times like even pigeons, let's go back
Speaker 2: to pigeons, like they remember hundreds of people faces. You
Speaker 2: can change your clothes, and the pigeons remember you. There's
Speaker 2: some there's a study done in Paris to that effect,
Speaker 2: one done in Philadelphia where they guessed that the pigeon
Speaker 2: and rocked up might know and remember thousands of people
Speaker 2: remember who's a regular, who's a tourist, you know, and
Speaker 2: log all this stuff. We are being patterned all the time.
Speaker 4: There's probably some dude listening who's thinking like.
Speaker 1: I am that there's probably some like if you think
Speaker 1: about like trying to call mallards or something that like that,
Speaker 1: there's like some code that you could crack, do you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like that to a duck when
Speaker 1: duck comes over and it's clearly looking for other ducks,
Speaker 1: and it's like the ducks like I know that that's not.
Speaker 4: Right, Like I don't get the problem.
Speaker 1: Right, there's some thing that's not right. Yeah, you're doing
Speaker 1: something that's not right.
Speaker 2: Everybody's just bothering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's something like there's something you could say, you know,
Speaker 1: there's something you could say that would just make it absolutely.
Speaker 4: That duck would have to come down.
Speaker 1: But you'll never well, you'll never learn it, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, You'll never learn Like when he goes
Speaker 1: like no, not buying it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That speaks to another point where I don't sometimes
Speaker 2: share too much because what these animals offer you when
Speaker 2: you are let into their world is to see their strengths,
Speaker 2: their incredible talents, but vulnerabilities. But you see their achilles
Speaker 2: heels too, and that I don't. It's thrown around so
Speaker 2: cliche but sacred. That to me is there's a sacredness
Speaker 2: in what they have shared to then betray that. Like
Speaker 2: a great example. You probably know this from your bison work,
Speaker 2: is bison have this achilles heel of following the matriarch. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and those bison hunters and partly annihilated them because of
Speaker 2: their allegiance to the matriarch. They don't move anywhere.
Speaker 4: I watched the exploit that.
Speaker 2: So she can't move, and everybody meals around, and you
Speaker 2: just mow the rest of them down. Anybody else tries
Speaker 2: to take off and charge a new course, you bust
Speaker 2: them through the guts. Everybody mills around, and you you know,
Speaker 2: you in one stand you can get a dozen or
Speaker 2: a hundred. I think there's one record of like a
Speaker 2: hundred or something bison in one stand.
Speaker 4: Guy named Vick Smith got over a hundred one time.
Speaker 2: So to me, when you're let in, it's it's changed
Speaker 2: the way I There are things I couldn't reconcile hunting,
Speaker 2: And part of that was.
Speaker 1: There there are things about hunting you couldn't reconcile, or
Speaker 1: there are animals that you couldn't reconcile hunting.
Speaker 2: For it was the former, like I didn't know what
Speaker 2: it was, but there was an honoring piece, a recognition,
Speaker 2: a sacredness that got cloud out. It over and me
Speaker 2: trying to get that turkey, that tom, that specific tom there,
Speaker 2: that buck or something like that that I'm I missed
Speaker 2: I've found now and for me this is just me.
Speaker 2: It took me stepping away from hunting to really soak
Speaker 2: into their world on their terms if you follow me,
Speaker 2: and that you know, and so they share things like
Speaker 2: there's a there's a mule deer dough model mother, model
Speaker 2: mama just we called her Mamma Deer and she she
Speaker 2: always brought off funds. She was amazing. In one year
Speaker 2: she had triplets, actually no, no, I think it was tried. Quadruplets,
Speaker 2: which for meal dr almost never happens, like she knew
Speaker 2: or to feed build up those reserves could handle that
Speaker 2: many kids and love behole. We start into that winter
Speaker 2: and it's a bitch, and one by one we start
Speaker 2: seeing those fawns not show up on the yard, and
Speaker 2: pretty soon it's down to just one. And then we
Speaker 2: don't even see Mama deer. They're gone. I'm like, what
Speaker 2: the hell? And we had years with this deer, like
Speaker 2: we had enough understanding that I would walk with at
Speaker 2: that time, our two black labradors, each about seventy pounds,
Speaker 2: and I'd go to get the mail the mailbox like
Speaker 2: tenth of mile up the driveway, and she'd be there grazing,
Speaker 2: you know, off a distance. But in the meantime she
Speaker 2: might come like right along the driveway and I would
Speaker 2: put my hands on the shoulders of dogs. Not they
Speaker 2: weren't even they weren't leashed, you know, our dogs run.
Speaker 2: But to her, this was my gesture of it's okay,
Speaker 2: they're with me, and I'm not going to let them
Speaker 2: bother you. And there are times we could walk within
Speaker 2: twelve feet of her and the fawns, like I go
Speaker 2: sit in the yards sometimes and she was so comfortable
Speaker 2: that she would walk between me, sitting on the edge
Speaker 2: of the retaining wall and the edge of the decking,
Speaker 2: which was like at most thirty feet she'd walk through
Speaker 2: like we had an understanding. It wasn't she wasn't my pet.
Speaker 2: I didn't, you know, but we gave each other the
Speaker 2: space and understanding of each other's boundaries. Well, that hard
Speaker 2: winter that she disappeared, we assumed she was just gone.
Speaker 2: And lo and behold, like mid February, maybe early March,
Speaker 2: who shows up on our deck but Mama, dear, and
Speaker 2: she's just emaciated. She had this huge patch of hair
Speaker 2: missing on her back right side, like a Lombard vertebra.
Speaker 2: I don't know if she'd been hit by a car.
Speaker 2: You could see her ribs. And what does she do?
Speaker 2: She came up embedded down on the welcome mat to
Speaker 2: our front door. She came up on the deck, which is,
Speaker 2: you know, like a eight inch step up, and she
Speaker 2: bedded down there every night for I think it was
Speaker 2: three or four days until she eventually went under the
Speaker 2: deck and died.
Speaker 4: Because she knows it's nothing going to get her there exactly.
Speaker 2: She and I and our family had put in the
Speaker 2: time for her to see us, as in her worst hour,
Speaker 2: her worst time, she knew she could find refuge with
Speaker 2: that with us. Like to me, that was like one
Speaker 2: of the most crushingly heartbreaking but also beautiful things at
Speaker 2: the same time, that we had made enough of a
Speaker 2: connection that she felt that she could live out her
Speaker 2: last hours in our company, and that I can't now
Speaker 2: look at another deer and not offer them that same
Speaker 2: capacity to reproduce what Mamma deer did. Yeah, not that I,
Speaker 2: let's say, wouldn't hunt again, but the way I would
Speaker 2: hunt and view that is. And the author Joe how
Speaker 2: to put it, really succinctly nicely this way, it's not.
Speaker 4: Not the dude did all that work with turkeys.
Speaker 2: He did my life as a turkey, and buc did,
Speaker 2: and he wrote, he did a great film and book
Speaker 2: called Touching the Wild on these Mulier down in Lander,
Speaker 2: and uh, Joe, still he is. He moved back to Florida.
Speaker 2: You know, I keep touching now and then, and he's
Speaker 2: such a wealth of show.
Speaker 4: Some time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I been some stuff going on, So I don't
Speaker 2: know how he's doing right now, but I would he's
Speaker 2: He's another one that's put in the time to see
Speaker 2: all these other facets that most of us overlook when
Speaker 2: we say, oh, look a deer, you know, And in
Speaker 2: the way he sort of described what I'm I feel
Speaker 2: is like, yeah, I'm going to go hunt again, but
Speaker 2: now I have to reckon with the fact that it's
Speaker 2: not what I'm killing as much anymore. It's who ye,
Speaker 2: who am I? Who am I choosing to take out
Speaker 2: of this population? Is this the matriarch, mama? Is this
Speaker 2: a fawn, a fawn that has a certain spark and
Speaker 2: talent that none of the others do. You know, It's
Speaker 2: it'd be very hard for me to go into hunt
Speaker 2: the way I used to when I was younger, and
Speaker 2: when I did kill something, if I did kill something,
Speaker 2: I would it wouldn't be with high fives anymore, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean, like get that big buck or
Speaker 2: something like that. It would be you know, silence, silence,
Speaker 2: with that understanding that.
Speaker 4: That it was a who who.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And just every single day of our lives
Speaker 2: is enriched by paying attention of these conversations and having
Speaker 2: these individuals come in and out of our world because
Speaker 2: they are our best teachers. When you have a shit
Speaker 2: day at work and your family is pissed about something,
Speaker 2: or you know, it's like you can always look to that.
Speaker 2: Look at that. You know, that kid over there is
Speaker 2: it's got a broken leg, you know, and it's it's
Speaker 2: not making excuses. It's still keeping up with the pack.
Speaker 2: Be it a little slower, you know. Listening to nature
Speaker 2: at that level is you start seeing issues and trends
Speaker 2: that magazines and the pop popular media want to make into,
Speaker 2: you know, the save the whales kind of approach where
Speaker 2: it's like top down, big stop. You know, It's like,
Speaker 2: to me, this is the groundswell of where caring for
Speaker 2: your environments, real stewardship, real conservation takes places you through
Speaker 2: these conversations and over overhearing what matters to them lets
Speaker 2: you into their world to know what you're doing that
Speaker 2: is harmful that you weren't even aware of. Like, oh shit,
Speaker 2: I guess I shouldn't mow the grass there now because
Speaker 2: those that's where the bunnies, that's where that's where the
Speaker 2: litter is coming off as that hole underneath that long grass. Okay,
Speaker 2: I won't mow there for a month. More like simple stuff. Sometimes,
Speaker 2: don't cut down that dead tree that's the woodpecker nest
Speaker 2: site or that is the sentinel location for the principal
Speaker 2: players in your neighborhood wildlife alarm system. You take that
Speaker 2: one seemingly useless dead tree out, and all these animals
Speaker 2: can't get a view now of what's coming before it's
Speaker 2: on them. You know, It's like, so you have a
Speaker 2: true bottom up level of appreciation and interaction that makes
Speaker 2: you a better neighbor. I think I feel that way.
Speaker 2: I still feel like a fool. I still feel ignorant
Speaker 2: and like I'm making so many mistakes, but I feel
Speaker 2: and I know when you enter into those spaces with
Speaker 2: that sort of humility, nature's pretty resilient. It gives you
Speaker 2: more latitude than you would have otherwise. Like people ask me, well,
Speaker 2: should if I'm should I make animal noises when I'm out?
Speaker 2: You know, I see some deer when I'm out for
Speaker 2: a walk, or I see the fox, Do I make
Speaker 2: fox noises?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: No, do not. I don't imitate animals in the wild
Speaker 2: anymore because the reason is I want to see them
Speaker 2: do what they naturally do. And once you inject yourself,
Speaker 2: it's game over. It's like pulling the trigger. Almost you
Speaker 2: change the entire equation. I've been with people, we've actually
Speaker 2: killed animals through making noises and interrupting the situation. I
Speaker 2: want to see them do what they naturally do, so
Speaker 2: I have a better sense of what they have to
Speaker 2: teach me and your own voice. A lot of indigenous
Speaker 2: cultures will say, when we talk to the animals in
Speaker 2: our native tongue, they treat us like family. And so however,
Speaker 2: people are like, well, only American, I speak English, and
Speaker 2: you know, like you speak in the most expressive language
Speaker 2: you have and be sincere, and you'll start having experiences like,
Speaker 2: you know, the deer jump up on the morning walk
Speaker 2: with a dog and say, hey, wait, wait, it's us,
Speaker 2: it's us, And they stop and they go back to grazing.
Speaker 2: They might even bed back down like that. But if
Speaker 2: you bring a friend with you to watch, huh huhm,
Speaker 2: it doesn't work because they're always responding to the lowest
Speaker 2: common denominator. You bring in somebody that's not paying attention,
Speaker 2: and we give off infinite amount of micro signals and
Speaker 2: they know whether you're paying attention or not. There's stories
Speaker 2: of like the horses that can do math and tell
Speaker 2: time and read calendars and stuff, and they find out
Speaker 2: they can't do that stuff. What they're doing is queuing
Speaker 2: off of their handlers at such a fine minute level
Speaker 2: that it gives the impression that another member of this
Speaker 2: you know, another species has these capabilities when they're just
Speaker 2: it's called the kluger Hans effect. They're paying attention to
Speaker 2: you so well better than most humans pay attention. It's like,
Speaker 2: how are we missing these cues? Well, your life doesn't
Speaker 2: depend on it. When it does, you start paying attention
Speaker 2: to stuff. You know, we all have the capacity like oh,
Speaker 2: the furnace shut off, you know, look to the things
Speaker 2: that are important to us. We still have those capabilities,
Speaker 2: we just have directed them other places right right, like
Speaker 2: something there's something screwed up with that trailer got pull over,
Speaker 2: pull over, we got to check the change. There's a
Speaker 2: bearing going out or you know, like we are laser
Speaker 2: focused on those kind of details. But the power of
Speaker 2: our brain to do that can be used then to
Speaker 2: go back into the natural world like our our people
Speaker 2: did in deep time and know stuff that is magic seeming.
Speaker 2: But in ways that's really damn fulfilling, you know, when
Speaker 2: you get you know, it's like I'd love to see
Speaker 2: about in line at all, Like well we get we
Speaker 2: get photos of them, you know, it's like that it
Speaker 2: changes the whole equation. You do, you have opportunities that
Speaker 2: you wouldn't have otherwise.
Speaker 4: Tell me about the artwork you do real quick, you know.
Speaker 2: I always say my artwork is kind of my tourist
Speaker 2: trinkets or my souvenirs from living. So every piece is
Speaker 2: not just done to make a turkey or make a bear.
Speaker 2: It's done to tell an individual story that I've been
Speaker 2: let in on. Some of these animals I've known for
Speaker 2: an hour or two, some of them I've known for years.
Speaker 2: Some of them I've known for generations. And so I
Speaker 2: feel that the artwork, to me, is the a focal
Speaker 2: point to spend a ton of time figuring out what
Speaker 2: the heck that experience meant to me, if that makes sense,
Speaker 2: and it forces me to see details I would miss otherwise.
Speaker 2: And she noticed that that bowl has a knot in
Speaker 2: his lower you know, metatarsal. He broke that, you know
Speaker 2: at some point or oh there's people will say, oh,
Speaker 2: there's that that cow elk is you know, walking across
Speaker 2: the lawn and mammoth she's in she's limping. No, that's
Speaker 2: actually part of the normal gait. But that one over
Speaker 2: there she's got she's got a tooth infection. Look close,
Speaker 2: see that little swell here. No, no, not the bulge.
Speaker 2: That's the mass of r muscle or the bucinator muscle
Speaker 2: in her cheek. But right below that, it's a little
Speaker 2: you know, it's like it deepens further still. My my
Speaker 2: experience with.
Speaker 4: The wild, so that turkey is a turkey.
Speaker 2: That's a specific one inspired by I gave it a
Speaker 2: couple of talks at a nature center in Utah, and
Speaker 2: they had three toms, Tom, Tommy and Thomas. And after
Speaker 2: I was done with my obligations, I just followed him
Speaker 2: around with some clay and sculpted, and you know, it's
Speaker 2: just I was just so taken with that dexterity in
Speaker 2: their tail. It's like a geisha, you know. They waved
Speaker 2: that tail back so beautiful, you know, And when you
Speaker 2: enter into these spaces you find that words don't really work,
Speaker 2: And I guess that's I grew up around sculpture, tried
Speaker 2: like hell not to do it, but it came back
Speaker 2: around in a way that I could do it my way,
Speaker 2: And for me, it picks up where the words sort
Speaker 2: of trail off like that, just that curve of the
Speaker 2: Achilles on the bear or that shin bone, that line
Speaker 2: of always loved bones and skulls, and it's like it
Speaker 2: was a place to put it. My love of that stuff,
Speaker 2: like knowing every bone, every muscle from the inside out,
Speaker 2: then seeing the overlay of the behavi behavior and when
Speaker 2: they do this, how that bone articulates this way. So
Speaker 2: I don't use photos. I don't use video. I used
Speaker 2: to take a ton of that stuff I found, I
Speaker 2: didn't use it. I got a roadkill kit. I got
Speaker 2: a tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and
Speaker 2: rubber gloves, and my own data sheets. I made up
Speaker 2: one for birds and one for mammals. So I find
Speaker 2: a moose or a grizzly bear that something's illegal to have.
Speaker 2: I can take a full set of measurements and have
Speaker 2: that archive in my studio to go back to. But
Speaker 2: more accurately, what it does for me is on an elk,
Speaker 2: I find a dead elk, I might take fifty measurements,
Speaker 2: but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers, that
Speaker 2: number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on that
Speaker 2: animal at least one hundred different ways. So when I
Speaker 2: go to work on a sculpture. I'm working from more
Speaker 2: of a felt sense of the creature. I see just
Speaker 2: a momentary pose that a fox or a bad or
Speaker 2: an otter might do, or something like. I can freeze
Speaker 2: that in my mind and I can fill in all
Speaker 2: the details of what was where to make that happen.
Speaker 1: Does most of your income come from the art or
Speaker 1: from your work as a naturalist and guide?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the art by far we're starting to do.
Speaker 4: You're like occupationally an artist.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, But when you just kind of follow your interests,
Speaker 2: you kind of start screwing up the ability to be defined.
Speaker 2: Like I love I love since as the time of
Speaker 2: the kid loved stone tools and ancient technology. You know.
Speaker 2: It took me thirty years and flew to Clovis Point.
Speaker 2: But like always as a kid, there was just the
Speaker 2: time I was young, a desire to have a felt
Speaker 2: sense of what it meant to to make that.
Speaker 4: I was able to do it because I had to
Speaker 4: teed up for me.
Speaker 1: I give it the final little flap. I know it
Speaker 1: was all teed up. Yeah I did, but I took
Speaker 1: a dirty way to get there.
Speaker 2: That's dirty, dude, because the if whoever made the pre
Speaker 2: form for you will tell you the flute's nothing, little.
Speaker 1: Thumb off right, sounds like I'm done. I could do
Speaker 1: a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's what's you know that sort of stuff
Speaker 2: as well. I just has always turned my crank and
Speaker 2: I find a flake of obsidian on the ground near
Speaker 2: the house or something like. I know almost exactly what
Speaker 2: that what size and dimension that thing would have been
Speaker 2: off of. I know what direction the blow came from.
Speaker 2: I know what it was trying to do to take
Speaker 2: off that lump on whatever the pre form like, just
Speaker 2: that's always really been gratifying to me to have that
Speaker 2: bottom up, inside out kind of look at things, and
Speaker 2: the art and the educational programs, they're just kind of
Speaker 2: you know, the little venier at the top.
Speaker 4: And then hold on, when when is the book out
Speaker 4: and available? Right now? It is.
Speaker 2: It's available now wherever books are sold. You can find
Speaker 2: them all over Amazon and beyond your local bookstores. Can
Speaker 2: order it through Graystone Books.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: The title is Evesdropping on Animals What we Can Learn
Speaker 1: from Wildlife Conversations by George Beuman, got a forward by
Speaker 1: John Young.
Speaker 4: Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, thanks for coming on.
Speaker 2: Man, thanks for having me. Can I give one plug.
Speaker 2: What do you mean for something other than the book
Speaker 2: we're doing right now. It just went live. We got
Speaker 2: an online event that's where some of our education is No,
Speaker 2: oh no, that's fine. We have an event for people
Speaker 2: who love nature and Yellstone Park called the Yellstone Summit,
Speaker 2: and it brings together. We have this year over thirty
Speaker 2: world expert speakers, as we have for the last five
Speaker 2: years on Yellowstone talking about everything from filming mountain lions,
Speaker 2: the history of beavers in the park, to population census
Speaker 2: of moose, geology, Native American history. If you are thinking
Speaker 2: of coming to the park and want some insight on
Speaker 2: what to do and think about, join us. If you
Speaker 2: longtime yellow Stoner want more deep stuff, join us. If
Speaker 2: you're from the region. There's nothing that thrills me more
Speaker 2: than run into somebody from Billings or Beed or you know,
Speaker 2: Idaho Falls or something. There's like, oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: Is that like an ongoing thing or is it so
Speaker 3: time or yeah.
Speaker 2: It's online, so anybody with internet can get involved watch
Speaker 2: it anywhere in the world. It's registration just opened, so
Speaker 2: by the time this airs, registration will still be open.
Speaker 2: It goes live on February nineteenth through the twenty second
Speaker 2: of this a year. And yeah, it's cheap. We try
Speaker 2: to make it affordable. For fifteen bucks. You can get
Speaker 2: to access for forty eight hours. Oh to all those
Speaker 2: programs where if you want all access, which which means
Speaker 2: you can like it's great because it's one.
Speaker 1: There's a live component too, you can watch. You can
Speaker 1: get a ticket watch online.
Speaker 2: So like Deputy Superintendent Mike Trannelle of Yellstone will be
Speaker 2: given a park update and you can show up and
Speaker 2: ask him questions yourself, so like, yeah, since the flood,
Speaker 2: you know what actually is going on with the road
Speaker 2: and things like that. We've got folks who use it
Speaker 2: for homeschool curriculum. We've got folks who use it to
Speaker 2: train their park guides, so this is a training tool
Speaker 2: for them. We got park service people who watch it
Speaker 2: for their own training. So it's a very high level
Speaker 2: but also has entry level basic stuff for anybody interested,
Speaker 2: whether they actually ever make it here or not. And
Speaker 2: just to check it out at Yellstone Summit dot com.
Speaker 1: Got it so Yellstone Summit dot com and eavesdropping on
Speaker 1: animals what we can learn from wildlife Converse stations with
Speaker 1: George Buming.
Speaker 4: Thanks for coming on man
Speaker 2: My pleasure guys, thanks for having me