Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict any of this. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought
Speaker 1: to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams,
Speaker 1: hanging deer stands, or scouting for el, First Light has
Speaker 1: performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check
Speaker 1: it out at first light dot com. F I R
Speaker 1: S T l I T E dot com. All right,
Speaker 1: we got more women in here than than normal.
Speaker 2: By a law.
Speaker 1: Normally it's just Krinn. Everybody knows how lame that is.
Speaker 1: Today we're joined by probably for the millionth time, Carmen
Speaker 1: van Bianki. How many times have you been on the show.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is number five?
Speaker 1: Okay, she's our resident wildlife biologist. We've tracked Carmen all
Speaker 1: through her career. Now she's she's a links researcher from
Speaker 1: Home Range. You guys founded Home.
Speaker 3: Range Wildlife Research.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: We've participated in all kinds of projects trying to raise
Speaker 1: awareness for your project. We did that thing trying to
Speaker 1: raise up money for snowmobiles, yep. And now you're back
Speaker 1: to give us a report yep. On what's going on now?
Speaker 1: We've been doing a little trapping, but different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got some beavers today.
Speaker 1: We called a raccoon the likes of which man has
Speaker 1: never seen. I don't know what he's doing out in
Speaker 1: that cold weather too.
Speaker 2: I don't know, he's just yeah, typically he'd be in
Speaker 2: a dentrey somewhere, but he was out in about last night.
Speaker 1: There was a spot by there's a spot by this
Speaker 1: rancher's place and there's a hole in the fence where
Speaker 1: kylets are coming through in that raccoon coming through there.
Speaker 1: Uh any tutament, guys, I canna tell you something before
Speaker 1: I introduce all our other women. Uh, this rancher is
Speaker 1: telling us how. So we get down there by the
Speaker 1: river by his place, down the river bottom and there's
Speaker 1: dead sheep carcasses. You can't tell what's going on. It's
Speaker 1: just dead sheep. Get to talk to him, and he
Speaker 1: had they had in the fall, they had a black
Speaker 1: bear and it's kind of unusual spot for blackbird. They
Speaker 1: had black bear come in killed, killed. He kept saying
Speaker 1: the bear killed five bucks. Okay. I was like, how
Speaker 1: do you know how many bucks? The bear? I thought
Speaker 1: he met like deer then I realized he's talking about
Speaker 1: buck sheep. These these are fifteen hundred bucks. Apiece killed
Speaker 1: five buck sheep, killed a goat, killed a goose. He
Speaker 1: calls fishing game. They're like, if you catch the bear,
Speaker 1: go and shoot it. So he tells us if we
Speaker 1: see the bear, to shoot it. And you can see
Speaker 1: his track in the ice like he'd been walking on
Speaker 1: a slew since it froze up. Then he says to
Speaker 1: this dude, he knows it looks for that tries to
Speaker 1: build stuff out of driftwood. And that guy is sniffing
Speaker 1: around this big driftwood pile down on the bank, and
Speaker 1: he finds the bear hiding in the driftwood pile the
Speaker 1: other day. So he tells me and Seth to go
Speaker 1: in there and look in that driftwood pile. And we
Speaker 1: haven't gone and looked yet, and he said, he said,
Speaker 1: he told me I'm scared to go looking there, but
Speaker 1: if you guys go looking there, then I'll call fishing
Speaker 1: game and you can get the bear. I'm like, I
Speaker 1: think I'm gonna have to personally speak with fishing I
Speaker 1: have to have a personal conversation with fishing game before
Speaker 1: follow through with this plan looking through this, but we
Speaker 1: looked at that log jam today, talked about having to
Speaker 1: look down in there, and we haven't gone down there
Speaker 1: and looked yet. Were hundred yards.
Speaker 3: From When you say hidden and there, you mean like, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Denn up in that log jam? I know, how do
Speaker 1: you know what bears what? That's what I'm saying. It's like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to get into that vigilanti justice, but
Speaker 1: I am going to go look into that log jam.
Speaker 4: I can't believe you get curious enough to go looking there.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm looking tomorrow.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be here right now if we got to
Speaker 2: looking in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're already half hour later, we're looking in there.
Speaker 1: You might not ever heard from this.
Speaker 2: Again, weird crunch for time.
Speaker 1: I couldn't said if I was gonna put a thermal in there,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that's gonna work. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: shine a light in there and see if he's in there,
Speaker 1: because I guess it's scared the hell out of this
Speaker 1: driftwood guy. I can imagine it was awake in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna see if he is. Well. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a weird little spot. I don't know how much
Speaker 1: I believe it could all be let myth Seth's here,
Speaker 1: Doctor Randall's here, Jen Lewis from FHF is here, and
Speaker 1: Jen Lewis's daughter, Brooklyn Stevens is here, and Brody Henderson now,
Speaker 1: Brooklyn's here for a very special reason, because you have
Speaker 1: recently got yourself into the skull cleaning business.
Speaker 5: Yep?
Speaker 1: How many? How many schools did you clean this year?
Speaker 5: Probably around twenty or thirty?
Speaker 1: Are you serious you did that many?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Ok, huh? You got interested in tax How old are you? First?
Speaker 3: Off?
Speaker 1: Seventeen seventeen? What got you interested in taxidermy?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 5: I show him my first dear. I walked into the
Speaker 5: text urmy shop and it just felt like home. I
Speaker 5: like creating or like saving other people's memories, so uh huh,
Speaker 5: I thought would be fun.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, And what do you have done with your
Speaker 1: first dear?
Speaker 5: Just a europe amount?
Speaker 1: Oh and then you got it back and thought I
Speaker 1: could do that better.
Speaker 5: Yep?
Speaker 1: What are your your How are you cleaning them?
Speaker 5: I just boil them and then bleach them.
Speaker 1: Okay, and then but you did it, but you didn't.
Speaker 1: But here's why it was such a careful job you did,
Speaker 1: because the sinuses are still good.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I usually wind up taking a drill bit and just
Speaker 1: like I get yeah, I get a little burned out
Speaker 1: on the whole thing, and eventually I wind up running
Speaker 1: a drill up in there to get all that garbage
Speaker 1: out of there. Cut cussy that again, the job you did.
Speaker 1: So Brooklyn's holding the buck that I brought to her.
Speaker 1: This year old warrior a little a little war here,
Speaker 1: he broke his beam off. So how do you how'd
Speaker 1: you get that so clean? Boiling it? What'd you do
Speaker 1: to eventually get it out of there?
Speaker 5: I sit with it for hours and hours, and I
Speaker 5: just pick on it with dental picks.
Speaker 1: That's what you're using.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Do you do any pressure washing every now and then? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I try and pick off all the meat though it's nicer. Yep.
Speaker 1: Well, gradient senior in high school? You're senior in high school?
Speaker 1: What are you gonna do when you finish high school? Tax ermy,
Speaker 1: you want to you want to go into taxi? Durm
Speaker 1: how much you're charging for a skull like that? Deer
Speaker 1: and one sixty for looks amazing?
Speaker 5: Thank you?
Speaker 1: That's a good price. See you're gonna think I'm lying
Speaker 1: if I told you I've never seen a uh like
Speaker 1: a boiled skull turn out like that. Really never Brody.
Speaker 4: It's good, it's great.
Speaker 1: I ring you Brody. I bring Brody because Brody boils
Speaker 1: up some skulls. That's the work art, Brody.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's really white, looks great.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I did fifteen this year and I went four
Speaker 4: or five past my limit of patients.
Speaker 1: You're not an aspiring skull cleaner, not an inspiring do.
Speaker 2: You pressure wash yours?
Speaker 4: I have, man, but I've seen that blow them apart. Yeah,
Speaker 4: especially like after they've been like if you really got
Speaker 4: to boil them.
Speaker 2: For a while, so you pick all the meat too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I mean, like she was saying, it's really
Speaker 4: just the nooks and crannies.
Speaker 1: You do it the right way.
Speaker 2: I have currently two deer skulls sitting in my garage,
Speaker 2: one one that my wife killed, one I killed, and
Speaker 2: it's like gotten to the point where all the ship
Speaker 2: is like dried on there.
Speaker 4: It'll never look right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, brook On, are people bringing you these with the
Speaker 1: hide on them or they skin in them?
Speaker 2: That's what I want to ask.
Speaker 4: Do you think do you think the ones that do
Speaker 4: you think they turn out better when they're unskinned or
Speaker 4: they've been skinned.
Speaker 5: It depends. The ones that are unskinned do come out
Speaker 5: I think better. But the ones that are skin I
Speaker 5: can get it good too.
Speaker 6: She just did a big ram, a big deadhead ram.
Speaker 1: Are you serious? Yeah? From where I don't know.
Speaker 5: The lady bought it from the FWP.
Speaker 1: She bought it the auction Yeah huh, and brought it
Speaker 1: to you. What condition was it in Turkey? It was
Speaker 1: really all dried out? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh, so you'll mess around with dried out stuff that's
Speaker 2: not You.
Speaker 1: Charge more if they don't skin it. You're in luck.
Speaker 5: Time to skin something.
Speaker 1: So see, I always think I'm doing people to favor
Speaker 1: When I skin it and pluck the eyes.
Speaker 5: Out, it's nice, but I don't wand skinning.
Speaker 1: So they'll bring you a hair on head, lower jaw.
Speaker 1: Their eyes there all desiccated, dried out, and you charge
Speaker 1: them the same amount of money.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you have a paide set up for your business? No?
Speaker 5: I just have Instagram and the Gmail.
Speaker 1: How do people find you to bring you some business? So, so,
Speaker 1: folks that are listening, Jen Lewis and Paul Lewis Paulus
Speaker 1: has been on the podcast a number of times from
Speaker 1: that FHEF and this is their youngster. So how do
Speaker 1: people find your business?
Speaker 5: Either on Instagram or word of mouth?
Speaker 1: No? But how like what do they what do they
Speaker 1: type up?
Speaker 5: Four h six bone Works?
Speaker 1: Four h six bone Works? Do you ever think about
Speaker 1: getting a beetle room?
Speaker 5: No? I don't want to mess with beetles.
Speaker 1: That's that's a smelly business right there.
Speaker 3: I want to get into.
Speaker 1: You'd have to get your own house probably if you're
Speaker 1: gonna get in. The man, that is a smelly business.
Speaker 4: I looked into it. You can order those beetles from Amazon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, at you can find them on the roadside. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that Amazon sold them, but you find them
Speaker 1: on the road side. So you're gonna stay with boiling Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you're gonna go to taxa during me school?
Speaker 5: I don't know. I like YouTube?
Speaker 1: Oh you like doing it that way?
Speaker 2: Okay? YouTube university? Are you going to get into like
Speaker 2: shoulder mounts or yeah? Nice? So you're going you're going
Speaker 2: all in?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So fours bone Works yep. And you'll clean people's skulls
Speaker 1: and do that immaculate. Did you do that nice job
Speaker 1: because you knew you were gonna use it as a
Speaker 1: piece of sales, and normally you just brutalize them.
Speaker 5: That's how they all turn out.
Speaker 1: They all turn out that nice. Yep, it's impressive.
Speaker 2: That is impressive.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty bucks.
Speaker 4: Yep, that's a deal.
Speaker 1: Have you done any elk?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What do you get for an ELK? Only forty dollars more?
Speaker 1: Three times as big?
Speaker 5: Sort of? I don't like to think, so.
Speaker 1: Though, how did you come up with your pricing strategy?
Speaker 5: Just what pro paane costs? And then a bleach? And
Speaker 5: then my time?
Speaker 1: How much are you making any money after all that?
Speaker 5: A little bit?
Speaker 1: Did you ever calculate what you make per hour?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 1: Do you want to or do you not even want
Speaker 1: to know?
Speaker 5: Oh? I really want to know.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty good skull. Now, Listen, I had a guy.
Speaker 1: You know what I paid this year? I hesitate to
Speaker 1: tell you know what I paid this year to get
Speaker 1: a moose cleaned?
Speaker 5: What's that?
Speaker 1: Take a guess?
Speaker 5: Probably two twenty five higher.
Speaker 8: That would have been nice, three twenty five higher, four
Speaker 8: twenty five higher, Oh my god, nine hundred and seventy five.
Speaker 1: Listen, I had someone doing mo moose gold this year
Speaker 1: six hundred. Kylie dropped it off and I come back
Speaker 1: and there's an invoice for six hundred bucks on my desk.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I think they Oh I dropped it off.
Speaker 1: Oh you dropped it off. Yeah, I talked you, I
Speaker 1: talked your text. Everybody mind said, dude, you're third the
Speaker 1: way to his shoulder.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I saw that. I saw the invoice when
Speaker 2: I dropped it off, because he gave it to me,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 1: Was like, never seen anything like that. That was a
Speaker 1: big moose.
Speaker 2: So I was like, I'm assuming cleaning the antlers.
Speaker 6: I think I saw you that day because you were
Speaker 6: at the shop and.
Speaker 1: He had a shock.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just assumed you knew what it was going
Speaker 2: to cost.
Speaker 1: No, how much would you done that for the problem
Speaker 1: with those is the way they're shape. You can't dip
Speaker 1: them in the tank. Real good. Yeah, process, you'd have
Speaker 1: done it for three. I could have got two done.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What's it called again? Four or six bone works? Four
Speaker 1: or six bone works? Get your skulls clean. You can
Speaker 1: do it next year too.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks for coming on and plugging the biz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be in school right now, I am.
Speaker 1: You're gonna hang tight though. Yeah, she's a links researcher.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can fill out when you when you're taxi
Speaker 1: during me slow, you can go chase links on a
Speaker 1: snow and bill for these guys. Sounds good, yeah, uh oh.
Speaker 1: You know what we were talking about the day mean
Speaker 1: Seth had to drive on icy roads and I was
Speaker 1: remembering this story I was telling them, is uh, we're
Speaker 1: talking about what it's real icing to go to pass somebody,
Speaker 1: how you're endangering everybody. I remember when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: I remember so vividly when I was a kid. We're
Speaker 1: driving down the road and this dude comes buy in
Speaker 1: one of those wood paneled station wagons with the cowboy
Speaker 1: hat on it kind of like blows passes in the
Speaker 1: way that made my dad irate, you know, And come
Speaker 1: around a few bends and there's this dude's car wrecked
Speaker 1: and he's standing out in the snow staring at his
Speaker 1: right car. In south of state, he had a guy
Speaker 1: blow past and then later found him up front and crashed.
Speaker 1: We did the same thing going up to a snowbowl.
Speaker 8: These kids in the car behind us passed and I
Speaker 8: just gripping the steering wheel and clenching my teeth for
Speaker 8: five minutes. After that, we get up to the top
Speaker 8: and there in the ditch.
Speaker 2: I have I've two separate occasions while I was heading
Speaker 2: to a hunting spot. One this year and one couple
Speaker 2: of years ago. I've had Ryan Callahan passed me on
Speaker 2: shitty roads. It's the same situation, but I haven't found
Speaker 2: him in a ditch, but I've had him pass me
Speaker 2: on on bad roads.
Speaker 1: Wait till you do, it's all worth it then.
Speaker 2: Especially one was this year in the dark. He passed
Speaker 2: me on a just a normal road. Haul on the
Speaker 2: trailer kale. Yeah, I called him. I said, you're gonna
Speaker 2: end up in the ditch.
Speaker 1: He doesn't seem like a reckless person.
Speaker 2: He's just confident on snowy roads.
Speaker 1: I guess so, Jen Lewis, you just said handed me.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell anybody what you just handed me.
Speaker 1: Be handing me a new backpack. I did that you're
Speaker 1: working on that I can put I'm not working on
Speaker 1: it that, y'all.
Speaker 6: Paul is definitely working.
Speaker 1: Paul's working on you guys invented the world's greatest duffel bag,
Speaker 1: which is not available like that. What's that called the
Speaker 1: pit devil?
Speaker 2: Dude?
Speaker 1: That is the best. Like, I'm sort of a Duffel
Speaker 1: bag connoisseur. That is the I used to think that
Speaker 1: the best Duffel bag ever made. PATTIGOONI had one called
Speaker 1: the Shuttle Duffel. I have one after they quit making
Speaker 1: it a million years ago. I used to go now
Speaker 1: and then on eBay trying to find a used one.
Speaker 1: Is how much I liked it. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 1: new best Duffel bag.
Speaker 6: It's pretty sweet. I think you got the new one
Speaker 6: with the new fabric sailcloth, which is yeah, same fabric
Speaker 6: that they make sailboat sails out of. Oh really yeah,
Speaker 6: so highly durable.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Paul was messing around with different ones over time.
Speaker 1: He gave me one and the baggage handlers would ruin them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd send it back to him and be like, no
Speaker 1: baggage handlers ruined it. He finally got a fabric of
Speaker 1: the baggage.
Speaker 6: Handlers should be like nearly indestructible.
Speaker 1: Yea. Some of the material he was using was great
Speaker 1: in real waterproof, but it would get when it gets
Speaker 1: when things get stuck in the baggage carousel. It would
Speaker 1: have braid it because it was kind of catchy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we're gonna do a few sizes of that.
Speaker 1: Well, I hope so, because that needs to be medium, right,
Speaker 1: Well he knows, okay, Well, I mean I told I
Speaker 1: told him that's what I think. I think it should
Speaker 1: be medium and there should be small and large.
Speaker 6: I think that's the direction we're going.
Speaker 1: Because that one's a little for carry on. It's a
Speaker 1: little it's a little sketchy.
Speaker 6: Too big, too small.
Speaker 1: No, no, you could carry it on, but it'd be
Speaker 1: like if you stuffed it two of the gills, you're
Speaker 1: not gonna be able to use it as a carry
Speaker 1: on bag. I'm afraid there's a smaller one and then
Speaker 1: and then a big giant Yeah, I mambo johnbo bag.
Speaker 6: Because we had a different bag kind of in the
Speaker 6: works that I think you had, but I think this
Speaker 6: is replacing that, and so there will be a larger size.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, good, good, big enough?
Speaker 6: I mean the guy stuck me in it, so oh
Speaker 6: that big? It's big.
Speaker 1: Wow, I've seen that. I have a cooler that two
Speaker 1: people can fit in.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't know, how would you know?
Speaker 5: That?
Speaker 1: It's funny story. I had a buddy of mine who's
Speaker 1: a kind of a lawyer. He's like a lawyer, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't do any law dogging. So I'll try to
Speaker 1: do I don't you know, that's a great question. So
Speaker 1: he uh, I needed some paperwork drawn up for like
Speaker 1: a thing I owned with some other like our cabin.
Speaker 1: I need this paintwork drawn up. And he's like, I'll
Speaker 1: do it because you just gotta get me a cooler
Speaker 1: for my boat. And he tells me, what's that cooler
Speaker 1: I got sitting outside? Any racer Britney got in it?
Speaker 1: One time?
Speaker 4: We were able to I don't know what side they
Speaker 4: I mean for those blue water boats that we'd have
Speaker 4: to look it up.
Speaker 1: Takes two people to move it. It's like a four
Speaker 1: I don't know eight. I don't know. Two people can
Speaker 1: lay down length wise in it to shut the door.
Speaker 1: My body says, I'll do the legal work if you
Speaker 1: get me a cooler for my boat. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's fine. So he says, this is the cooler I
Speaker 1: want and it's a giant, the biggest yettie cool ever made.
Speaker 1: That's not a fit on your boat. Oh yeah, I'll fit.
Speaker 1: I get the cooler delared in my house. He comes over.
Speaker 1: It's not a fit on my boat. So I still
Speaker 1: have that thing. Uh, I used to store like bird
Speaker 1: seed and stuff in it and like charcoal.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just what it was designed for.
Speaker 1: What it was designed for. What else is coming up?
Speaker 1: So that when will that Duffel bag be for sale?
Speaker 5: June?
Speaker 6: I think it'll be June. We've got just a couple
Speaker 6: of launches this year. So much New Year came out
Speaker 6: last year in the spring. The rest of our Apex
Speaker 6: Belt system, hydration pack that'll come out in February, and
Speaker 6: then the pit Defell and a couple other small items
Speaker 6: will be coming out in June that I can't talk
Speaker 6: about yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's no problem. Un Turkey's all spring in the
Speaker 1: Apex Belt.
Speaker 6: Did you like it? Kind of a game changer that
Speaker 6: it's great.
Speaker 1: So the Apex Belt is like what they like. Paul
Speaker 1: calls it like he hesitates to use the term, but
Speaker 1: it's similar to a battle belt. So that's kind of
Speaker 1: different words. I don't know what the help.
Speaker 6: Yeah, make a tactical like load bearing belt or battle belt.
Speaker 6: Obviously years of Swat Team he had, you know, a
Speaker 6: similar belt. It's kind of actually what guy him sewing
Speaker 6: is he had to buy a battle belt and he
Speaker 6: was too cheap, so he said, I bet I could
Speaker 6: make one, and that's what got himself. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 6: how he got into sewing, but ended up making belts
Speaker 6: for a few different guys. Obviously we've come a long way.
Speaker 6: This is a three piece belt, so different than what
Speaker 6: you would typically find, and it's a structured belt. So
Speaker 6: the other colorways of that product will be launching with
Speaker 6: some accessories like box called pouch, a few other turkey stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, you put well, like everything at FHF always
Speaker 1: fits together, so you put the belt on. There will
Speaker 1: be a hybridration bladder that goes on that functions as
Speaker 1: a backpack. There's a fanny pack thing. There's pockets for
Speaker 1: pot calls. There's what I call the morel bag.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the dump pouch.
Speaker 1: There's this dump pouch bag that rolls up to the
Speaker 1: size of like if you make the okay symbol. You
Speaker 1: can't really do that. For a long time, people thought
Speaker 1: you were making a mm hm. Now you remember this
Speaker 1: that this was real bad to do.
Speaker 2: That's still that's still a thing. It's not listening.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you something I don't want a name names.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you.
Speaker 2: Something, the turkey call incident.
Speaker 1: You can tell us the best story I've ever heard.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: I witnessed it in the height of all the paranoia.
Speaker 1: Okay about don't say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing.
Speaker 1: We're down in South Carolina and I we're turkey hunt
Speaker 1: and we're on a dirt road that crosses a railroad track. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's a stop sign because it's a rail track. I stop,
Speaker 1: and I see a dude stop coming my way in
Speaker 1: South Carolina on dirt roads. I see that he's got
Speaker 1: his hand draped over his wheel, holding a turkey diaphragm
Speaker 1: call to the point where I comment on it to
Speaker 1: my fellow passengers, and it's blaze orange and I'm even
Speaker 1: trying to wonder whose call it is. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: that guy's hunting turkeys too. He's holding it between his
Speaker 1: thumb and the okay symbol. He's got it the turkey
Speaker 1: call and his thumb and pointer finger, his palm rested
Speaker 1: on the wheel. Some of our camera guys are behind us.
Speaker 1: I drive past, he waves, They drive past. Apparently he
Speaker 1: waves too. Later they get all excited that he had
Speaker 1: given them, the white supremacist single symbol.
Speaker 2: Excited because it was a novel, fun thing to witness.
Speaker 2: I hope I was like.
Speaker 1: That gentleman Fellas was holding a turkey call between his
Speaker 1: thumb and forefinger, and that is why he had to
Speaker 1: wave that way. During the height of that excitement, too,
Speaker 1: A dude won three. A dude won three, like, uh
Speaker 1: jeopardies mm hm. And so they're announcing that he won
Speaker 1: three jeopardies and instead of going like, when I want
Speaker 1: to do three, I do like, I guess thumb to pinky,
Speaker 1: how do you do three?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it's a whole plot pointing in Gloria's Bastards.
Speaker 2: The yeah, the three or the three.
Speaker 1: Or so he throws a three like he's doing Okay.
Speaker 1: So they're announcing his name third time champion, and he
Speaker 1: does this next day in the news White Supremacist. He's like, no,
Speaker 1: I think it was I won three times? So what
Speaker 1: was I getting at? Why was I talking about that?
Speaker 1: There was uh the pouch. Oh yeah, that has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with that story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're you're talking about the size of the pouch.
Speaker 1: And you I don't know small that if you make
Speaker 1: a what was formerly known as an okay symbol. You
Speaker 1: know they still use this in diving. M hmm, some diving.
Speaker 1: Some his thumbs up, some is okay. So all day
Speaker 1: long and you're like, there's no white surface, white supremacy.
Speaker 1: So you make the okay symbol, and this pouch would
Speaker 1: fit like through the okay symbol, but it rolls out
Speaker 1: to be like a I don't know the size of
Speaker 1: an Algeaene bottle. So when you find Morel's, which is
Speaker 1: what I did, undid it and it's the perfect moral
Speaker 1: pouch hanging off your belt, it's really comfortable. And then
Speaker 1: it's got a seat too for turkey hunt. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: I've always been. I've always been a reluctant user of
Speaker 1: turkey vests. This thing is far, far, far better than
Speaker 1: any turkey vest I've ever done. And when you sit
Speaker 1: down and you open the call pouch outchel pouch, you
Speaker 1: open that out, it kind of opens up, so your
Speaker 1: strikers and your pots are sitting right there, your scratch
Speaker 1: pads sitting right there. Then you zip back up. Youn't
Speaker 1: be leaving everything laying out in the woods, which is
Speaker 1: my problem.
Speaker 4: Oh man, I've left calls laying on the ground, So
Speaker 4: many times.
Speaker 1: I remember calling Doug Darren being like, hey man, you
Speaker 1: know that one tree way at the bat, Like, can
Speaker 1: you look onto their front? You go there and learn
Speaker 1: for my stuff. Uh So that's a good deal. And
Speaker 1: some of that's out now and some's coming out. It'll
Speaker 1: kind of roll out right, Yep.
Speaker 6: Most of it's out now, just in a couple of colors,
Speaker 6: and then the rest of it will launch in February.
Speaker 6: We've got a box call pouch that's launching, the dump
Speaker 6: pouch that you just talked about, and then a couple
Speaker 6: other small accessories like suspenders. If you really want to
Speaker 6: load it up, you can buy suspenders. But the nice
Speaker 6: thing you can use everything independently.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and you can tie it into your biny
Speaker 1: harness if you want. Yeah, absolutely no, it's a sweet system.
Speaker 1: I use a lot for too. Fishing in the summer, yeah,
Speaker 1: wading creeks.
Speaker 6: That's definitely what I use it for. So we spend
Speaker 6: a lot of time this fall. We went down to
Speaker 6: Sedona and did flyfishing, and I worked the whole time.
Speaker 6: And it was great.
Speaker 1: You did fly fishing, yep, went I went fly fishing.
Speaker 1: I did it. Did that? Anything else we should know about.
Speaker 6: Lots of exciting stuff coming in twenty five, so we'll
Speaker 6: probably start leaking some of that out in the next
Speaker 6: six months.
Speaker 1: Oh, I don't want to show this. Let's say I
Speaker 1: like this would be available, that'll.
Speaker 6: Be out in twenty five, right.
Speaker 1: Away, in the future. Yeah, all right, thank you for
Speaker 1: letting me try one out.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: Do we want to get into this now, krin Does
Speaker 1: it take too long to get into I.
Speaker 5: Mean, you can feel free to skip any of the things.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk about this because we spent a bunch
Speaker 1: of time on this talk about already we got in
Speaker 1: a big old argument. Yeah, this will be the end,
Speaker 1: this will be We're gonna have to bring back that song, Kriinn,
Speaker 1: we've done beat this horse to death?
Speaker 4: Are you going to bring Col's email? While you're at it?
Speaker 1: Cal's email?
Speaker 4: I remember he got all.
Speaker 1: We're talking about this. So we got a little bit
Speaker 1: of a fight here in the studio one day about
Speaker 1: the Ornithological Society's decision to rename sixty birds. I felt
Speaker 1: was obsessive in a in a in a media grab. Nowadays,
Speaker 1: it's like you just give a quick recap. Nowadays, it's
Speaker 1: bad form. Have you ever named a species or been
Speaker 1: involved in naming a species. Carmen, No, no, well, but
Speaker 1: it's not like you think, like I know people that
Speaker 1: have got to name them because you know, they split
Speaker 1: so much in taxonomy. If you worked with invertebrates or
Speaker 1: catfish or something, you get to be involved in all
Speaker 1: kinds of species naming because everybody's like, you know, you
Speaker 1: go down to South America and everybody's like, oh, you
Speaker 1: know that little brown catfish. Then one day you go
Speaker 1: to another river and you realize that whatever, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this one has eight rays on its tail. But next river, rover,
Speaker 1: it's got nine rays on its tail. Then you get
Speaker 1: to name it something new, so that those guys get like,
Speaker 1: if you were in Beatles, you'd be naming something every day.
Speaker 1: Naming worms in South America you probably name one every day,
Speaker 1: But in your business of the cat business, you probably
Speaker 1: don't stumble across the whole hell of a lot of
Speaker 1: new cats. Uh. So it used to be that you
Speaker 1: name stuff your last name, and then the sample we
Speaker 1: always use is stellar. So Steller has the Stellar Sea Lion,
Speaker 1: Steller's j Steller's Eagle. He just ran around naming everything
Speaker 1: after himself. Turns out I didn't know this. He was
Speaker 1: a hell of a nice guy. Uh and also is
Speaker 1: very that's not true Randall's laugh And I don't know
Speaker 1: if he's a hell of a nice guy. He's got
Speaker 1: a random Will you not laugh if I say he's
Speaker 1: got a hell of a resume? No, keep it straight face,
Speaker 1: hell of a resume. And also, really, here's the clip,
Speaker 1: here's the here's the here's the kicker. At a time
Speaker 1: of weren't very interested in this, Stella really went out
Speaker 1: of his way to study, understand, and record the life
Speaker 1: ways of Native Arctic peoples. Do you know that I
Speaker 1: read the same doc Randall's on fire Day? You know
Speaker 1: if you just if you smile, you know these people
Speaker 1: won't know listening. Yeah, that's true. Normally Randley used to
Speaker 1: be a good guest. Remember that. Oh I thought I
Speaker 1: thought I was just doing well? There, No, no, this
Speaker 1: is about Remember who was a real good guest that
Speaker 1: we didn't realize was Max. You should maybe get rid
Speaker 1: of Randall and bring Max in more often. That's the
Speaker 1: hell of a guest, right there. Have you ever been
Speaker 1: in a room in Max? Some maxes I don't know
Speaker 1: which Max Max? Oh, yeah, he's a great guest. You know,
Speaker 1: reinds me of you when you were back, when I
Speaker 1: was back a month ago. So it used to be
Speaker 1: common to name things after oneself. That that has fallen
Speaker 1: out of favor. So what these guys at the Ornithological
Speaker 1: Society are doing is they're saying the hell that they
Speaker 1: want to rename sixty some birds to eliminate anything offensive
Speaker 1: and eliminate anyone's last name, so the stellars j would
Speaker 1: become you know that one purple J or you know right,
Speaker 1: just get rid of it. And this guy wrote in
Speaker 1: who's actually involved in naming a species? And he this
Speaker 1: guy's like, listen, none of this matters different than calch.
Speaker 1: He's interested in it as an intellectual exercise. But he's
Speaker 1: a researcher. What's he work on. He's a taxonomist bees,
Speaker 1: and he works on native bees. Now let me ask you, guys,
Speaker 1: are true or false? The honey bee is no native? False?
Speaker 2: False?
Speaker 1: Is that wild? He works on native bees and deals
Speaker 1: in which means he deals in the nomenclature of native bees.
Speaker 1: And he says, I want to start off by saying
Speaker 1: that the push to not name new species after people,
Speaker 1: even ones who aren't well known, like Stellar, etc. Is
Speaker 1: one that's very strongly felt in the scientific community at
Speaker 1: the moment. And I've been questioned a couple times on
Speaker 1: some of my species names by people who didn't like
Speaker 1: the fact I was naming them after folks, presumably not himself.
Speaker 1: I had a friend that got to name some catfish
Speaker 1: species in South America, and she named them all after
Speaker 1: the indigenous tribes in that area, which is reasonable, He
Speaker 1: points this out. He says, but it's important to note
Speaker 1: that the changing of names after the fact is unheard of.
Speaker 1: There remains to this day a species of beetle named
Speaker 1: after everyone's least favorite Austrian painter. And how would you
Speaker 1: pronounce that, Carmen, Oh, god, you're asking me. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: probably good on Latin.
Speaker 3: School.
Speaker 1: What'd you say?
Speaker 3: I would say, hitler reiah.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no no, the first word.
Speaker 3: Oh, and of Thalmas.
Speaker 1: Hitlerai Hitlarai. So here we are. He's got a beatle
Speaker 1: named after him. Uh, And he says, which stands as
Speaker 1: a testament that scientifically, we don't change names for any reason,
Speaker 1: no matter how offensive. It's worth noting this is him
Speaker 1: still talking. It's worth noting However, with this whole situation
Speaker 1: that the Ornithological Society is in trumpiann ot all Capital
Speaker 1: is not the authoritative body on nomenclatural acts of animals.
Speaker 1: That is solely the domain of the Board of the
Speaker 1: i c z N, the International Code of Zoological Omenclature.
Speaker 1: They are not changing the actual names of these birds,
Speaker 1: but they're changing their own meaning the Ornithological Society. They're
Speaker 1: not changing the actual names of these birds, they're changing
Speaker 1: their own suggestions for common names, which is fun, as
Speaker 1: the person writing in then editorializes and says, which is
Speaker 1: fundamentally meaningless. It would be the equivalent of pheasants forever
Speaker 1: deciding that they're going to call the bird the American
Speaker 1: ring necked pheasant. So okay, right now, if you look
Speaker 1: up a pheasant right now, you know, do you know
Speaker 1: what the pheasant is called? Chinese ring neck face? Its
Speaker 1: official name is the Chinese ring necked pheasant. He's saying,
Speaker 1: the pheasants forever could one day say from now on,
Speaker 1: it's the American ring neck pheasant, Like, oh, you'll you'll
Speaker 1: find this interesting, Brooklyn. I got sick of people calling
Speaker 1: skulls European mounts because I just didn't see what's so
Speaker 1: European about it? Like Native Americans used cleaned up skulls
Speaker 1: in the Sundance seapoint, did they called a euro amount?
Speaker 1: They didn't. So I started calling them freedom mounts in
Speaker 1: memory of when we had to reban French fries during
Speaker 1: the Iraq invasion because the French didn't want us. The
Speaker 1: French thought that that was not a good idea, stupid,
Speaker 1: That was how dumb they were, and so in retaliation
Speaker 1: they proposed that French fries become Freedom fries, and then
Speaker 1: I think promptly went back to French fry after that debacle.
Speaker 1: Uh So, he says if the if the pheasants forever
Speaker 1: all of a sudden came out and said, hey, you
Speaker 1: know what, we're gonna call it the American ring neck pheasant,
Speaker 1: the rest of the world would be like, call what
Speaker 1: you want, buddy. At the end of the day, it's
Speaker 1: still Phasianus cole chicus. He says this is a sense
Speaker 1: especially true for birds like Steve's favorite Stellar's j. The
Speaker 1: Ornithological Society can change the name to the anti Stellar's
Speaker 1: J all they want. The species name will still be
Speaker 1: Cyan Nordica stellary which means that Stellar's j remains the
Speaker 1: technically correct name, and if I've been paying attention to trivia,
Speaker 1: it seems being technically correct is Steve's favorite kind of correct.
Speaker 1: He goes on, Overall, this move by the Ornithological Society
Speaker 1: seems strange to me, as someone whose literal job is
Speaker 1: to assign and assess the validity of species names once
Speaker 1: in place, provided they remain valid. Scientific names never change,
Speaker 1: no matter how offensive, and they certainly don't prevent people
Speaker 1: from entering the scientific fields associated with those names. So
Speaker 1: the suggestion that some birds may feel excluded by the
Speaker 1: fact that a J is named after Stellar holds about
Speaker 1: as much water as changing its common name does. Dirk
Speaker 1: and also our beloved friend Pat Dirkin, also wrote an
Speaker 1: article about that covers on the changing of bird names
Speaker 1: and also gets into mainly focuses in on a movement
Speaker 1: this is this is gonna sound like a joke, but
Speaker 1: it's not a movement to coin the term bob kitten
Speaker 1: for a bobcat kitten. There's even a there's even like
Speaker 1: a change dot org petition, and he tracks how the
Speaker 1: media has picked up on bob kitten, which really, I
Speaker 1: guess irritates the hell out of bobcat researchers. So watch
Speaker 1: out for the word bob kitten. You ever throw that around? No,
Speaker 1: you ever heard it. Pat might be trying to make up.
Speaker 1: Pat might be doing that thing they do on Fox
Speaker 1: a lot, or they take a thing that isn't really
Speaker 1: a thing but make it like it's a big thing
Speaker 1: to be worried about. M hmm.
Speaker 4: I read the article. It seemed legit.
Speaker 1: You'll think pass doing that. No, he had a lot
Speaker 1: of cases of people trying to say bob kit. Pat
Speaker 1: does not like that one bit. This is up in
Speaker 1: your neck of the woods, Carmen, you're ready for this
Speaker 1: news item? Yeah, US government wants five hundred thousand barred owls.
Speaker 1: Cold cal told me this, and I thought that cannot
Speaker 1: be true. But I didn't know that bard owls aren't
Speaker 1: native to the Pacific Northwest. No, No, those dudes are
Speaker 1: everywhere now.
Speaker 3: Yep. They're kind of like white tails. They can just
Speaker 3: creep on in and they they do better and can
Speaker 3: out compete spotted owls.
Speaker 2: Yeah, remember the ones at the fish Act.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I never ever at our fishack in Salt East Alaska.
Speaker 1: Never heard them. They're up there ripping all spring of there.
Speaker 3: It makes some freaky noises.
Speaker 1: Seth will show you do it, Seth, they do the Yeah,
Speaker 1: well do the main one.
Speaker 3: There's a screechy, screaming one too, then.
Speaker 1: Seth can rip it. They say.
Speaker 2: They sound like a pack of monkeys sometimes, like up
Speaker 2: in the trees.
Speaker 1: I had no idea they weren't from around. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel like, like, just anecdotally, if you just said
Speaker 1: to me, do you hear more barred owls than you
Speaker 1: used to? I would have said, like, definitely, Yeah, But
Speaker 1: I never ever knew that they weren't from there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they're creepers.
Speaker 1: So this is the news article from this was covered
Speaker 1: in Newsweek. I'm not sure where else was covered. The
Speaker 1: US Fish and wild They Service wants more than a
Speaker 1: half million barred owls to be shot dead lively language,
Speaker 1: not just shot my gunfire, not just shot, not just
Speaker 1: shot and wounded, shot dead in a coal to help
Speaker 1: protect other native species. These barred owls are an invasive
Speaker 1: an invasive species in the Pacific northwest from the east coast.
Speaker 4: That's where I have a question.
Speaker 1: Though.
Speaker 4: If something makes its way there naturally.
Speaker 1: It's not invasive.
Speaker 4: It's not like we dumped them there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this brings up a really interesting language thing, and
Speaker 1: we've talked about this a million times. That'd be because
Speaker 1: if you move somewhere on your own, are you invasive?
Speaker 1: Because you would never say, like like, possums used to
Speaker 1: not extend outside of the Mason Dixon line, but they
Speaker 1: do now. But no one says possums are invasive. They
Speaker 1: just moved. Javelinas have gradually moved northward, but they're not
Speaker 1: invasive in the northern end of their range in Texas.
Speaker 1: You would never say that humans who move themselves out
Speaker 1: of Africa all around the entire planet, you would never
Speaker 1: say humans are invasive. Some people would, but I get yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right.
Speaker 3: I think the spirit of it, though, is that these
Speaker 3: are species that have have moved into places because of
Speaker 3: changes in the habitat and the ecology that that humans
Speaker 3: have brought around.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I get that. That's a good point, indirectly indirect to
Speaker 1: human Yeah, meaning if a monkey hop down a plane,
Speaker 1: two monkeys who were in love hop down a plane
Speaker 1: and started a new population somewhere, you wouldn't go, well,
Speaker 1: they moved themselves around by hopping out of the plane,
Speaker 1: you would they would be very readily labeled invasive species. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I guess if you're paving the way from them
Speaker 1: exactly like how white tailed, like how mild you are
Speaker 1: coming into Alaska, they're coming along the highway corridor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. Count back to being mad at
Speaker 1: bart I was mad at them, Now I'm back to
Speaker 1: being mad. This is so in areas where bard owls
Speaker 1: are present higher numbers, Northern spotted owl populations are declining rapidly.
Speaker 1: They are now listed as a threat as threatened under
Speaker 1: the Endanger Species Act, with populations having declined to buy
Speaker 1: between thirty five percent and eighty percent over the past
Speaker 1: twenty years due to bar owls karma. You do having
Speaker 1: to know the karma is not an ALLA biologist. What's
Speaker 1: going on? How are they all competing? Is for nesting
Speaker 1: cavities or what are they arguing about.
Speaker 3: I don't know the exact mechanism, but when you get
Speaker 3: bart owls out of there, if the habitat suitable, you're
Speaker 3: getting spotted owls back. And this is Yeah, this isn't
Speaker 3: a new Controlling bart owls isn't a completely new thing.
Speaker 3: I've got a wonderful friend and colleague and she's a
Speaker 3: great biologist, total badass, and she her job for a
Speaker 3: long time was going out hunting bart owls at night.
Speaker 1: That's the question shooting to kill?
Speaker 4: Yep, that's a quick question I had about this whole thing,
Speaker 4: because they're planned to kill half a million.
Speaker 1: Over Actually we should point out here, Yeah, it's over thirty.
Speaker 4: Years, right, because it's like gonna go out and shoot
Speaker 4: a couple of hundred of them at night. They're like
Speaker 4: what I read is they call them, they use you
Speaker 4: know whatever.
Speaker 1: Theremore and Clay could have got four or five in
Speaker 1: Florida calling.
Speaker 4: Right, but four or five a night.
Speaker 1: Two dudes like going to take that good math. I know,
Speaker 1: if we get to five hundred thousand, it just yeah,
Speaker 1: do you know who's who's going to do it? They're
Speaker 1: going to do it.
Speaker 3: Themselves, the government.
Speaker 1: Like citizen shooters.
Speaker 3: I have no idea. I have no idea. I mean,
Speaker 3: you you know, you want to trust somebody that they're
Speaker 3: good at their owl id Right, they're.
Speaker 1: About horns, got the northern spots like every owl I saw.
Speaker 3: It's a it's a careful operation.
Speaker 1: Uh. Long time ago we were having uh we were
Speaker 1: covering this thing in the news it was it the
Speaker 1: this involves Dirk and has to do with like whether
Speaker 1: you could ever give someone You could ever say to someone,
Speaker 1: kill bar owls, but don't kill all the other owls.
Speaker 1: But think about what you're saying. Though we were laughing
Speaker 1: about their inability to do it. How come you can say, okay,
Speaker 1: you can get seven drake mallards, two hen mallards, one
Speaker 1: hen northern pintail, no scop but on and on some
Speaker 1: canvas backs, but no scoffs, redheads, okay, right, Like people
Speaker 1: are capable of some pretty specific identification. We were covering
Speaker 1: this push where they're trying to get in Wisconsin northern
Speaker 1: pike spearing legalized. I had no idea until this happened
Speaker 1: that you couldn't spear a pike in Wisconsin. And they
Speaker 1: were like, well, anglers won't be able to tell the
Speaker 1: difference between a northern and a muskie. Dirk and rolled
Speaker 1: it in and be like, well, how can you be
Speaker 1: trust to tell the difference between you know, a sharp
Speaker 1: tail grouse and a greater sage grouse and a hen
Speaker 1: pheasant and the male you know, on on and on,
Speaker 1: or all the duck stuff you're trusted to tell the difference,
Speaker 1: but you can't trust tell the difference between these two fish.
Speaker 1: And someone rode in to say, you don't know how
Speaker 1: drunk these people are and talking about the ice fisherman
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin. So we'll see what happens there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. I mean, I got I have
Speaker 3: lots of thoughts about invasive species control and all that,
Speaker 3: and I think it's I'm not an invasive species manager,
Speaker 3: but I can appreciate what a difficult job that is
Speaker 3: because on the one hand, you know, crowdsourcing this or
Speaker 3: using you know, the community to help out, I mean,
Speaker 3: that's that's an obvious way to get more shit done.
Speaker 3: But you're weighing all these other things. You're saying, Okay,
Speaker 3: what are the consequences of, like government sanctioned hunt where
Speaker 3: we've got people out at night who are not just
Speaker 3: telling two birds apart, but trying to tell an evasive
Speaker 3: species at night from spotted owl, which would be a
Speaker 3: big bummer.
Speaker 1: How big is the spotted owl? Same size?
Speaker 3: Not the same size? Yeah, I mean, they're not wildly
Speaker 3: different creatures, you know, it's it's a that's a higher risk,
Speaker 3: and when you've got a population of owls that is
Speaker 3: is really low like spotted owls. You want to make
Speaker 3: sure people are getting it right.
Speaker 1: Got it. You're pro big government. Here's a good SEGUEU.
Speaker 1: What's the most ready way can you be? In a
Speaker 1: links researcher, you have to have a lot of people
Speaker 1: who tell you they saw links. Yes, and it's a bobcat.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was dogging on my sister. I was dogging on
Speaker 1: camera guys a minute ago about that dude holding the
Speaker 1: turkey call. So I don't want to dog on them again.
Speaker 1: So I'll tell you that I can't remember what type
Speaker 1: of person does happened to. There's one of these types
Speaker 1: of people. I can't tell you what type. Swear always
Speaker 1: swears me up and down about the links he saw
Speaker 1: and just by where it was. I'm like, no, you
Speaker 1: just didn't. It had toughs on its ears. I'm like
Speaker 1: it did, but not that kind.
Speaker 3: The way I handle that is I hate bursting people's bubbles,
Speaker 3: and so I try to do it pretty gentle. Plus,
Speaker 3: links go weird places, and when there's invasions of links,
Speaker 3: or one has gotten kicked out of its its own
Speaker 3: home range because it's an old links or whatever, they
Speaker 3: end up in strange.
Speaker 1: But they do. Oh yeah, so maybe this guy's right.
Speaker 3: There's always a chance, And so I will usually say something.
Speaker 1: Like, I know you're out there. If you took offence,
Speaker 1: i'd take it back.
Speaker 3: I would say something like for where that was, I
Speaker 3: would be very surprised. But links go weird places, you
Speaker 3: never know. So that's pretty.
Speaker 1: Cool, that's what you'll say. Yeah, you'll throw them a
Speaker 1: little bone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And because I keep the dream alive exactly, Yes,
Speaker 3: I don't want to be a dream smasher.
Speaker 1: I've laided my eyes on one LINX. I know it
Speaker 1: was a link because it was in the Arctic.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's pretty solid.
Speaker 1: It was just on the south slope of the Brooks Range.
Speaker 1: It stepped out into the pipeline road and twenty feet
Speaker 1: off the bumper, and it was like looking into another planet.
Speaker 1: It was the first links I saw. I'm convinced I
Speaker 1: was the first person it saw. It looked at me
Speaker 1: with like uttered, like disinterest, but also no sort of
Speaker 1: preconceived notion of what that I might be trouble as
Speaker 1: I opened the door and then he just walked off.
Speaker 1: Never that has on another one.
Speaker 3: That's pretty special.
Speaker 1: How many people for the one?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'll get to see another one,
Speaker 1: but that was the one I saw, and it was
Speaker 1: it was like they have a face like it's like
Speaker 1: they have a human baby face.
Speaker 3: That's funny. I always say they have an old man
Speaker 3: face the same.
Speaker 1: You know, Phil lost it. It was one of my
Speaker 1: favorite things I owned. Phil lost it. I used to
Speaker 1: have responsibility. I used to have this quote. It was
Speaker 1: framed in our old studio. You might have read it.
Speaker 1: It was a guy talking about on seeing his children born.
Speaker 1: It was an Irish writer talking about and seeing his
Speaker 1: children born that when they come out, how ancient they are.
Speaker 1: And he said, like Egyptian pharaohs, like with their features
Speaker 1: smoothed by time, traveled across this immense journey to be here,
Speaker 1: and he goes and then in an instant they become young.
Speaker 1: So meaning it can be an old man in a
Speaker 1: little baby like a human baby.
Speaker 3: The same page.
Speaker 1: Human babies come out, they look like crazy old men
Speaker 1: for a couple of seconds. What else are you looking
Speaker 1: at when you're looking, Just to verify, when someone says,
Speaker 1: oh my.
Speaker 3: God, a Lynx, the feet they got kind of a
Speaker 3: jacked up back end, meaning that their their butts are a
Speaker 3: little higher than.
Speaker 1: Their Now you say that, that's a good point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then they're there are tails, so bobcats. The
Speaker 3: tip of the of a bobcat tail is black on
Speaker 3: top and the sides and then white underneath, whereas a
Speaker 3: bobcat it's like their tail was back or sorry, a
Speaker 3: lynx is dipped in ink like it's black all the
Speaker 3: way around on the tip yet white. Okay, bobcat white
Speaker 3: on the bottom links the end of their tail completely
Speaker 3: black all the way around. No white on the bottom.
Speaker 1: Oh, I mean if he turned his tail up, yeah.
Speaker 3: Or if you can you can see it from the side,
Speaker 3: even on a bobcat, that's that's one of the.
Speaker 1: Under So the underside of a lynx's tail.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, if you're saying about a lynx's tail and
Speaker 3: there's the tip of it and the top of it
Speaker 3: and sides are are black there, but on the bottom.
Speaker 1: Is white on a lynx.
Speaker 3: Nope, bobcat, you'll get it. You'll get it.
Speaker 1: No, I'll get there. Okay, let's start with a bobcat.
Speaker 1: Tell me about a bobcat's tail. Bobcat's tail and people know,
Speaker 1: just so you know, people, this is helpful people that
Speaker 1: send us in photos wondering what they're looking at.
Speaker 3: This is a good one for photos.
Speaker 1: Bobcat, it has a It means it's a cat with
Speaker 1: Bob's tail.
Speaker 3: Yes, which a links also has a.
Speaker 1: Has a bobtail. So Bobcat's tail looks like this.
Speaker 3: Looks like this black. Okay, we're talking about the end
Speaker 3: of the tail, a tip of the tail. It's black
Speaker 3: on top, white on the bottom.
Speaker 1: And I wouldn't have been able to tell you that
Speaker 1: that mean I've handled him, and I wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to tell you that's true. I believe I just never looked.
Speaker 3: At Yeah, and so even from the side, So if
Speaker 3: you're looking at trail camera pictures and you can see
Speaker 3: the tail, this is really really helpful because you'll see
Speaker 3: some white on a bobcat. Even from the side, you
Speaker 3: can you can see that the bottom is white, whereas
Speaker 3: a lynx, the entire end of the tail looks like
Speaker 3: it was dipped into black ink.
Speaker 1: No kidding, Yeah, just funny about links is I want
Speaker 1: you to talk about the range of links. But are
Speaker 1: you familiar with the comedian Jerry Klower. He's dead. No,
Speaker 1: he was a storytelling He used to get up at
Speaker 1: the Grand Old Opry between musical acts and tell hunting stories.
Speaker 1: Different time. He has a story about a guy that uh,
Speaker 1: he has a story about Some of his characters are
Speaker 1: out raccoon hunting that night in Mississippi, Okay, and there's
Speaker 1: a guy they're hunting with who won't let anyone shoot.
Speaker 1: He thinks it's disrespectful to shoot a raccoon out of
Speaker 1: a tree. He thinks the only respectable way to do
Speaker 1: it is you got to climb up into that tree.
Speaker 1: And Cloward talks about how they their dogs tree a
Speaker 1: raccoon in the quote biggest sweet gum tree of all
Speaker 1: of Amax County, and this dude, John new Banks. They're like,
Speaker 1: I bet you can't climb up that tree, John, because
Speaker 1: he'll climb them up and knock them out with a
Speaker 1: stick and then let the dogs fight him. So he says,
Speaker 1: you got to give a coon a sporting chance. So
Speaker 1: he Cloward talks about how he takes off his brokenne
Speaker 1: shoes and digs his toenails into the bark of that
Speaker 1: sweet gum tree and is able to climb into the
Speaker 1: sweet gum tree and then all hell breaks Lewis and
Speaker 1: Clower says that it was a lynx up in that
Speaker 1: tree in Mississippi.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm gonna say no, But here's the name.
Speaker 1: That always bothered me because everything with Klour is so precise.
Speaker 1: I think he meant to say a mountain lion.
Speaker 4: You know what. I bet you wasn't because in Durkin's
Speaker 4: article he lists a bunch of common names, like semi
Speaker 4: common names for bobcats, and there was a couple of
Speaker 4: different versions of Lincoln.
Speaker 1: But Clower says this, but it wasn't no coon. This
Speaker 1: is a quote, but it wasn't no coon. It was
Speaker 1: a lynx, a souped up wildcat.
Speaker 4: I'm just telling you. They had like some Southern Yeah,
Speaker 4: it was like vernacular kind of names for that's God.
Speaker 1: This was all my faith back into Clower.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can have that back, because that's one of
Speaker 3: the difficult things about figuring out the historic range of
Speaker 3: Links in the lower forty eight We're relying on trapping records,
Speaker 3: and people were not consistent with calling bobcats bobcats and
Speaker 3: links links. There'd be Linx cat and you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: You'll sometimes look at Mark Ferbear market reports and I'll
Speaker 1: see links cat. Yeah, that means a bobcat or lynx.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure. People, it's this common name thing, right,
Speaker 3: people can call them whatever they want.
Speaker 2: Kind of what's the most southern links that's like confirmed
Speaker 2: that you're aware of.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, Colorado maybe down into Utah every once in
Speaker 3: a while, but like as a resident population Colorado.
Speaker 1: Let's say European contact. Huh, let's say a good stab
Speaker 1: where Oh yeah, like give me a good stab. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the distribution is it isn't changed.
Speaker 3: Remarkably, right, Yeah, we don't think the distribution has changed much.
Speaker 3: It's just how many animals are in those spots.
Speaker 1: Density has changed. Yeah, got it. So they'll follow the
Speaker 1: rock he's down into Colorado, maybe Utah. By the time
Speaker 1: you get into how far into Canada are they across
Speaker 1: the whole top of Canada.
Speaker 3: Not much further north than the border. Oh, across all
Speaker 3: of Canada.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta get way up or.
Speaker 3: I no, you don't have to get well wherever there's
Speaker 3: boreal forest, that's what they are. So you know in
Speaker 3: places like Alberta, where there's there's more prairie and stuff
Speaker 3: like that, they're not going to be down in that.
Speaker 3: But they get pretty ubiquitous in the boreal forest.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 1: I've read that the boreal forest is the largest biome
Speaker 1: on Earth.
Speaker 3: Yep. It's a cool space.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, lay out the work you work layout where
Speaker 1: in what work you're doing right now currently?
Speaker 3: Okay, with just a LYNX project. Okay, So let's see,
Speaker 3: we're starting on year two of of our field effort,
Speaker 3: uh for our LINX and wildfire project. So in in
Speaker 3: the lower forty eight we were just talking about their distribution.
Speaker 3: There's five resident populations of Links. There's Washington, there's Idaho, Montana,
Speaker 3: there's Minnesota and Maine, and then Colorado.
Speaker 1: Minnesota has lynks. Yeah you know that Brony I did
Speaker 1: not You got that wrong.
Speaker 8: Yeah, are to have the NBA team, isn't it the
Speaker 8: Minnesota Lynx?
Speaker 1: Yeah? But the Michigan Wolverines.
Speaker 4: Dude, but it makes I mean you think about that
Speaker 4: North Country stead They got fishers and Martin not a
Speaker 4: spruce forest, and they got links there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So in Minnesota, don't lie, no, doctor, Ana. I didn't
Speaker 2: even know Maine had them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, good population.
Speaker 1: Maine had Caribo until the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 2: There's a I think the furthest North City or town
Speaker 2: Town in Maine is called Caribou. It could be wrong.
Speaker 1: Mm hm, anyway, I don't know that good job.
Speaker 4: I want to hear some common Bobcat names.
Speaker 1: Bobcat or Lynx names.
Speaker 4: Bobcat well like vernacular names Lynx Rufus.
Speaker 1: Well Link Rufus, scientific.
Speaker 4: Include bay Linx Bard, Bobcat, Catamount, Cat of the Mount,
Speaker 4: Lynx Cat, Pallid, Bobcat, red Linx Wildcat, and shot Savage.
Speaker 1: When they get into those lists, I feel like they're
Speaker 1: starting to throw in stuff that some dude said once.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know. I'm just saying Klower was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm back to love and clour. Anyone interested in
Speaker 1: Jerry Klower? Besides listening to Jerry Klower, you could go
Speaker 1: listen to the Bear Grease episodes about Jerry Klower. He's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite people. My kids like Jerryklower. You
Speaker 1: never heard Jerry Klower? Go type up? Will you promise
Speaker 1: me something? Type up? Jerry Klower A coon hunting story
Speaker 1: that's the one that has the Lynx cat in it.
Speaker 1: All right, Brooklyn track and all this. Yeah, how would
Speaker 1: you get how would you if you had one on
Speaker 1: one to ten? How interesting? This is? What would you give.
Speaker 5: It like six?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 1: That's that's a reliable That's what you need around man,
Speaker 1: someone that gets it to you straight. Yeah, because you
Speaker 1: can see her being yeah, you can see her being
Speaker 1: like oh yeah nine and being in your head like
Speaker 1: yeah right, she might have been like three, but I
Speaker 1: can't say that. No, it's encouraging. There's room for improvement,
Speaker 1: but we're not as bad as it could be. Yeah right, Okay,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I mean it's like, like, do
Speaker 1: you have rough ideas? Oh, you were doing the five
Speaker 1: so Washington? Yeah, now why is it not Washington? Oregon?
Speaker 1: Organs too far too far south?
Speaker 3: So in Washington, our our links range is is interesting
Speaker 3: because we've got the North Cascades. Yeah, and they quickly
Speaker 3: start to transition into more southerly forest types. Links rely
Speaker 3: on snowshe hears, there's predator. Eighty five to ninety percent
Speaker 3: of their diet is snowshoe hairs. That's what they're built for.
Speaker 3: That's that's what makes them different from from bobcats. And
Speaker 3: big part is there.
Speaker 1: You sent me the coolest photo of brand new snowshoe
Speaker 1: hair tracks. Oh yeah, both of them run.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is that is their thing is there. They
Speaker 3: rely on snowshoe hairs, and they've snowshoe hairs. Obviously because
Speaker 3: of their name. Uh, we all know that they've got
Speaker 3: those big feet and that makes them able to get
Speaker 3: around in these deep snow environments. Links same thing. It's
Speaker 3: like the armswar thing. They've they've evolved with big giant
Speaker 3: muppet feet and they're they're really light framed and they
Speaker 3: can just walk on the snow same way, so they
Speaker 3: they're like built to pursue snowshoe hairs and live in
Speaker 3: these deep snow environments boreal sub boreal forests. So in
Speaker 3: Washington it's we're in this place where this boreal forest
Speaker 3: is starting to transition into more southerly forests and they
Speaker 3: they so we're right on the range edge of Lynx
Speaker 3: because they're habitat's about to just peter out. So we've
Speaker 3: got a naturally small population because of that, because their
Speaker 3: habitats just sort of marginal. Now we're getting megafires, which
Speaker 3: are fires that are over one hundred thousand acres. Warmer, drier,
Speaker 3: windier summers, we're snowpack in the winter. We're just having
Speaker 3: more frequent, bigger, hotter, high severity fires, and that is
Speaker 3: not good for links because snowshoe hares rely on a
Speaker 3: forest that's got a bunch of branches down low, a
Speaker 3: lot of horizontal cover, so like stuff that you wouldn't
Speaker 3: maybe want to bushwhack through. That's what snowshoe hares love
Speaker 3: because they eat those bras branches, and everybody wants to
Speaker 3: eat a snowshoe hair, So those branches and that understory
Speaker 3: gives them some protection from predators. So, because snowshoe hairs
Speaker 3: need that kind of forest, that's where links are. When
Speaker 3: a huge, high severity fire, and high severity means like
Speaker 3: it's killing almost all of the trees in that patch.
Speaker 3: When a big fire comes through like that, there's pretty
Speaker 3: much no trees left. Its match sticks. And so there
Speaker 3: goes the snowshoe hairs, there goes the lynx. And so
Speaker 3: Washington is in this unique place where we are just
Speaker 3: getting hammered by these fires, partially because of our changing climate,
Speaker 3: but also because we just have kind of a unique
Speaker 3: and I don't know why this is, but we get
Speaker 3: a ton of lightning strikes and so from starting in
Speaker 3: the year two thousand, we just started getting hit boom
Speaker 3: boom boom by these giant fires to the point where
Speaker 3: now you look at a map of Lynks habitat and
Speaker 3: it looks like it's mostly burned recently. And so this
Speaker 3: has put a big herd on our links population.
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, How many links are in Washington there? I mean,
Speaker 1: no one knows, nobody in thousands?
Speaker 3: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, around sixty maybe, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's bad, it's really really bad.
Speaker 1: Sixty in the state. And then and I know we're
Speaker 1: a lot of secret, but I when to revisit something Washington,
Speaker 1: and you said Idaho, Montana, Okay, and that that's what
Speaker 1: not thousands?
Speaker 3: Hundreds, maybe hundreds in Minnesota. I don't. I don't know
Speaker 3: about Minnesota. Main is hundreds as well, hundreds. But all
Speaker 3: you know, all.
Speaker 1: Of these you're the population you're toying with. Is it's
Speaker 1: sub one hundred?
Speaker 3: Yes, it's We're.
Speaker 1: How certain are you that it's sub one hundred?
Speaker 7: Mmmm?
Speaker 1: On a scale of one to five.
Speaker 3: Four and a half. But I like to be optimistic.
Speaker 3: Maybe we've got one hundred.
Speaker 1: But you don't have three hundred.
Speaker 3: We don't have three hundred.
Speaker 8: No, no, And if you go back twenty five years,
Speaker 8: how many are you talking about, Like, what's the.
Speaker 3: Reasons get really sketchy on estimates. Yeah, it's not a lot,
Speaker 3: it's maybe, Oh, I know, I've read this summer somewhere
Speaker 3: maybe maybe between one hundred and fifteen two hundred.
Speaker 1: Sure, So.
Speaker 4: When a fire happens in one of the like the
Speaker 4: snowshoe hair population just gets nuked, is it like an
Speaker 4: immediate precipitous decline for the bobcat, I mean for the
Speaker 4: Lynx or like are they such specialists they can't like
Speaker 4: adjust and be like I'm going to go after squirrels
Speaker 4: or I'm going to go after birds or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the the I think the answer is it
Speaker 3: kind of depends. So when a fire burns. So for example,
Speaker 3: two thousand and six was our first big burn. It
Speaker 3: was called the Tripod Burn, and it burned most of
Speaker 3: what was considered the best links habitat that we had
Speaker 3: in Washington and that let's see, the winter following that burn,
Speaker 3: we started or a Lynx project started, and we got
Speaker 3: callers out on cats that were living right adjacent to
Speaker 3: that burn. And what we found was that it's just
Speaker 3: a habitat. It's a bunch of habitat lost and so,
Speaker 3: you know, we don't know exactly what happened to those
Speaker 3: links that we're living right there. Maybe they dispersed, which
Speaker 3: that's you know, that's a dangerous thing to do because
Speaker 3: you might not find another home range. Maybe they went
Speaker 3: up to Canada and found something. Who knows, but that
Speaker 3: becomes largely unusable habitat.
Speaker 1: Presume a lot burn up, right, I.
Speaker 3: Think less animals burn up than we think, really. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean you were able to.
Speaker 1: But like take something like pine squirrels, there's no way
Speaker 1: pine squirrels are getting away from a fire.
Speaker 3: I think they've got some time. I have found burned
Speaker 3: up pine squirrel so, but I.
Speaker 1: Think links are just moving ahead of it instead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think they'd have to get
Speaker 3: cornered or trapped.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I did have a friend find a how he
Speaker 3: described it was barbecued cougar after a big fire that
Speaker 3: we had. It got trapped in a little canyon. But
Speaker 3: I don't think they're burning up. I think they're getting
Speaker 3: out of there. They've they've evolved with fire.
Speaker 4: Have you found like other things links have killed, like
Speaker 4: deer or do they feed on they cannibalize themselves or like,
Speaker 4: have you found anything that was surprising?
Speaker 3: Right, I haven't found anything surprising. They'll eat so Litstene.
Speaker 3: Let me back up. They rely on snowshoe hairs to
Speaker 3: the point where there's this sort of classic ecology lesson
Speaker 3: that in the northern part of their their range, where
Speaker 3: there's lots of snowshoe hairs and lots of links, there's
Speaker 3: a cycle where links slightly lagging behind snowshoe hairs. Population
Speaker 3: numbers will increase as snowshoe hairs increase, and then as
Speaker 3: snowshoe hairs start to decrease, links start decreasing. And so
Speaker 3: this it's this this cycle. It's more than just links
Speaker 3: driving that cycle. There's a whole suite of predators. Every
Speaker 3: Like I said, everybody wants to eat a snowshoe hair.
Speaker 3: That's just like it's a it's a.
Speaker 1: Great friends friends in Alaska to have told me who
Speaker 1: trap links have told me that it's almost immediate the
Speaker 1: boom buss that goes along with snow because like down
Speaker 1: here we don't have the snowshoe hair cycles.
Speaker 3: Right, they're they're either you know, just we're kind of
Speaker 3: at a constant low or just really dampened amplitude.
Speaker 1: We don't have those like the insane swings, right, have
Speaker 1: you ever seen that stuff where they went through Hudson
Speaker 1: Bay Company links records and they're able to see a
Speaker 1: seven your swing on how many links pelts the Hudson
Speaker 1: Bay Company was dealing with, like in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds whatever, and they're able to kind of correlate
Speaker 1: that to the to the calculating population yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so that's those fur records are where sort
Speaker 3: you know, people started to notice, oh, this isn't like
Speaker 3: a steady, perfectly balanced ecology here. You know, things things fluctuate,
Speaker 3: and so the yeah, the cycles about every tennis years
Speaker 3: booms and bus and so anyway, that's just to illustrate
Speaker 3: how reliant on snowshoe hair's links are and.
Speaker 1: They're chasing them in the summer when there's no snow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they still the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. When there's a low, they will rely more
Speaker 3: on red squirrels. And so there is some of that,
Speaker 3: but it's it's it's rarely a significant part of their area.
Speaker 4: I've seen that. It was a fairly viral video of
Speaker 4: a links killing a caribou.
Speaker 1: It's wild.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's cool. I think it might be in Europe though.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a record of one killing a there's
Speaker 1: a record of a lynx killing a doll sheet. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 1: a witness.
Speaker 3: In North America in Alaska.
Speaker 1: It was in a book by a bilegist from fair
Speaker 1: who's at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks for a book.
Speaker 1: And then there's a person watched it happen.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's cool. There's I've never seen it, but there
Speaker 3: are records of you know, a big links, which when
Speaker 3: I say big, I mean like thirty thirty one pounds
Speaker 3: taking down a deer if it's you know, mired and
Speaker 3: snow or something like that, held back by the snow,
Speaker 3: but really it's snowshoe hairs or where it's at for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everybody knows, like bears eat honey dying now and
Speaker 1: then besides honey, yeah no, no, no, eat your buck sheet,
Speaker 1: they like honey.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So back to the fires. Links are listed as threatened
Speaker 3: all across the lower forty eight. In Washington, they're listed
Speaker 3: by the state is endangered, and that's in large part
Speaker 3: because of this blow up of fires that we've had,
Speaker 3: and so what we're trying to do because it's really
Speaker 3: it's a whole paradigm shift of what we think we
Speaker 3: know about their habitat. Here in Washington, all the or
Speaker 3: many of the habitat studies that were done earlier on
Speaker 3: were on a landscape that was largely unaffected by wildfires
Speaker 3: because it was the suppression era when the Forest Service
Speaker 3: was doing a really good job of putting out starts.
Speaker 3: Now we're to the point where climate conditions are such
Speaker 3: and our fuels out there are so loaded and contiguous
Speaker 3: because we were excluding those small fires that would naturally
Speaker 3: happen and so to break up the fuel bed now
Speaker 3: they just blow up. Are often beyond our firefighting capabilities.
Speaker 3: So we can't we can't rely on suppression, and nor
Speaker 3: should we if we want to try to get our
Speaker 3: landscape back to a place where it's it can have
Speaker 3: somewhat of its own negative feedback loop with fire, where
Speaker 3: little fires are sort of dampening the effects of future fires. So, anyway,
Speaker 3: what we know about habitat was largely based on that
Speaker 3: that really fire unaffected landscape. Now we've we've flip flopped.
Speaker 3: Now most of our landscape is affected by fires, and
Speaker 3: not just fires, but really big fires that burned with
Speaker 3: a high severity, so killing a lot of the trees.
Speaker 3: And so we need to get in there and figure
Speaker 3: out how links are using this new novel landscape. They've
Speaker 3: got a whole new menu, the regrowth, the different Let's
Speaker 3: see when we talk about boreal forests. Yeah, there's forest,
Speaker 3: but if you really think about.
Speaker 1: That, can you describe bore So it's.
Speaker 3: More ubiquitous up in Canada and Alaska. It's that that
Speaker 3: spruce and fir lodge pole pine forest that's you know,
Speaker 3: in mountains. It's sort of that that sub alpine right
Speaker 3: before you get at a tree line. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 3: that ecosystem that spruce f like you'd see up in
Speaker 3: Alaska or Canada.
Speaker 1: Here and there you'll see aspens, which doesn't rule out sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't rule out it being boreal forests.
Speaker 3: Right right right? Where was I going with that? Oh,
Speaker 3: boreal forest we think about, Okay, a forest, we can
Speaker 3: picture a forest, but with we can think a little
Speaker 3: more thoughtfully about that and realize that there's all different
Speaker 3: structure types within that. So what I mean by that
Speaker 3: is there's little short regenerating forests, there's you know, older
Speaker 3: growth forests, there's forty year old forests. That's you know
Speaker 3: sometimes when you come across a patch of lodgepole pine
Speaker 3: and it's it's maybe you know, the the trunks of
Speaker 3: the size of dinner plates, and it's just the canopy
Speaker 3: is so thick that the understory is totally parked out
Speaker 3: and you could just stroll through there, no problem. So
Speaker 3: there's that type of structure. There's all these different structures,
Speaker 3: and again for snowshoe hares, it's about that understory. It's
Speaker 3: about that dense structure. And so for links, it's about
Speaker 3: that dense structure. And so while we've still got boreal
Speaker 3: forests out there, there's all different structures of it. There's
Speaker 3: just freshly burned, there's regenerating, there's that parked out understory,
Speaker 3: when there's sort of middle aged and there's old growth.
Speaker 3: There's different shapes and sizes of those patches of forest
Speaker 3: after a burn that are left. And so we need
Speaker 3: to figure out what are those structures and shapes that
Speaker 3: Links are using, because that's what we need to be
Speaker 3: focusing on now, because that's what we've got and these
Speaker 3: mega fires are not stopping, and so that we just
Speaker 3: need to learn the basics of this new habitat that
Speaker 3: they're using. And so that's what we're trying to learn
Speaker 3: about and focus on, is burned habitat. So we were
Speaker 3: working in that burn. I was talking about that tripod
Speaker 3: burn the burned in two thousand and six, and we're
Speaker 3: going in there, we're getting links, callers on links, and
Speaker 3: we're backtracking, and we're using a whole bunch of cameras
Speaker 3: to figure out how they're making that burn work. Because
Speaker 3: they are making it work. This is something that's really
Speaker 3: hopeful and cool that's happened in the last seven years
Speaker 3: is it's gone from we'd go out there looking for
Speaker 3: links tracks and see nothing, not even very many snowshoe
Speaker 3: hair tracks, to all of sudden are starting to see
Speaker 3: links tracks and seven years, yeah, not very much time
Speaker 3: to now one of those.
Speaker 1: So in your time out there, you've seen a difference.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, big time. Yeah, yeah, Okay. One of the
Speaker 3: cool things we're seeing now is right after the burn,
Speaker 3: when we had those GPS callers on cats back in
Speaker 3: two thousand and six, seven eight, there were cats that
Speaker 3: were living right next to the burn, and if there
Speaker 3: were nice places in that burn that had skipped fire skips,
Speaker 3: so places where the burn went around for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: they'd junt in there and use those for hunting. And
Speaker 3: so we learned from that study that if there is
Speaker 3: some structure, there will be snowshoe hairs, and the links
Speaker 3: will make the most of them.
Speaker 1: They'll find those spots.
Speaker 3: They'll find those spots. But those spots in the immediate
Speaker 3: aftermath of a fire where were places like fire skips,
Speaker 3: and they'd they'd preferentially use lighter area burns, you know,
Speaker 3: where there was still some live tree, just a little
Speaker 3: bit of cover to get to those spots. I mean
Speaker 3: you've probably tried.
Speaker 1: You like to have overhead cover.
Speaker 3: They like to have something. If you've ever followed any
Speaker 3: kind of cat tracks, they are so meticulous about hugging cover.
Speaker 3: They'd really rather not be out in the open. I
Speaker 3: think that's I mean, I don't know what a cat's thinking.
Speaker 3: I'm not a lynx, but I think that's probably a
Speaker 3: mixture of just protection, but also if there's in a
Speaker 3: little bit of cover, there's a little chance there's some food,
Speaker 3: and they're just they're always looking for food, and so
Speaker 3: you'll see them do things like preferentially, you know, walk
Speaker 3: between two trees rather than just you know, going alongside them.
Speaker 3: They're just they're cool like that that they're really using
Speaker 3: that cover.
Speaker 1: How big is their home range?
Speaker 3: That really varies.
Speaker 1: Probably like how much food is around exactly.
Speaker 3: So in Washington from our previous collaring, we had home
Speaker 3: ranges that were as small as like seven square miles
Speaker 3: all the way up to you know, ninety or one
Speaker 3: hundred square miles.
Speaker 1: They can be bigger. I mean that that a male
Speaker 1: female thing. Largely the personalities.
Speaker 3: Males tend to be have larger because I want to
Speaker 3: overlap several females. But it's also what how much space,
Speaker 3: how much habitat do I need to make a living?
Speaker 3: So the you know, the theory is if the habitat
Speaker 3: is less PRODUCTI if you're gonna need more of it,
Speaker 3: you're gonna have to cover more ground.
Speaker 1: So one snowshoe hair paradise, he doesn't need to.
Speaker 3: Go right, It could be a really small home range.
Speaker 1: Did you see that study years ago, maybe five or
Speaker 1: six years ago, I don't know if you call it
Speaker 1: a study, but this observation from some years ago where
Speaker 1: there's guys looking at They used to these researchers used
Speaker 1: to wonder about rivers and how links related to rivers,
Speaker 1: thinking that big rivers like the Tannana right in Alaska,
Speaker 1: that the tan and aw would be an obvious barrier
Speaker 1: for links. But they'll swim back and forth across that thing.
Speaker 1: There's not much that they had come up in those areas, dudes.
Speaker 1: And it's just so it's be so weird to think
Speaker 1: you'd be coming down the river and having a link
Speaker 1: swim across something like the they would they would just go.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they those things scooped. They will go long distances,
Speaker 3: they'll disperse long distances.
Speaker 1: And no one ever sees them.
Speaker 3: Well now I'm about callers on those.
Speaker 1: No I'm saying, but it's like when you see that,
Speaker 1: like how could you never see? What I mean? I
Speaker 1: think of them always tolled up with some little thicket
Speaker 1: because you just go your whole life and don't lay
Speaker 1: eyes on sure.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, I mean they when they in my experience,
Speaker 3: unless you, you know, sort of come up right on
Speaker 3: them and you jump them, they'll just stand there and
Speaker 3: kind of look at you and hunker down. And it's
Speaker 3: it's really easy to miss.
Speaker 1: Them, so you you've approached them wearing the collar. When
Speaker 1: you've approached your collared cats.
Speaker 3: Not the ones that we have collared right now, but
Speaker 3: just being out there so much, have come across a
Speaker 3: lot of links, I mean a lot for seeing a link.
Speaker 1: So you okay, this is outside of ones that you've caught,
Speaker 1: and outside the ones that you were guided to because
Speaker 1: you knew where they were because they have a collar on.
Speaker 1: You've bumped into links?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: How many times?
Speaker 3: I don't know a handful of times I bumped into them? Yeah,
Speaker 3: I bumped into collared links, not using the telemetry, not
Speaker 3: trying to, but bumped into them. I summer before last,
Speaker 3: I had a cool sighting where I was. I was
Speaker 3: hiking into the wilderness to scout for deer season, and
Speaker 3: I got to our camp and looked up and there
Speaker 3: was a links jumped away. Yeah. It was very cool
Speaker 3: and it was actually no, no, it was actually special
Speaker 3: too because this was in I was in a new
Speaker 3: Burn area, but I was in a fire skip and.
Speaker 1: Scouting for deer and there you saw one. Nothing to
Speaker 1: do with your research, no, No, yeah yet.
Speaker 3: Positive, I got I got the rear view and I
Speaker 3: saw that tale.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you know what you're looking at in an
Speaker 4: area where they got plenty of food, Like, what's a
Speaker 4: good lifespan? Like if they don't have some unfortunate thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe seven years, seven or eight years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how are you guys trapping them?
Speaker 1: This is good?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is this is what I like.
Speaker 1: Can you put in whether Mercer Longing ever told you
Speaker 1: anything helpful?
Speaker 3: We've been talking a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he gets excited about catching cat.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, Yeah, it's fun to talk with him
Speaker 3: because we both do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, lay it out how you catch one?
Speaker 3: Okay, let's see. So, like I said, there are maybe
Speaker 3: sixty in Washington. Our study area is I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe one hundred thousand acres. So that's a lot of space.
Speaker 1: How many are in that study area? If you had
Speaker 1: to take a ballpark.
Speaker 3: If I had to take a ballpark, I mean last
Speaker 3: year this time when I was on the podcast, we
Speaker 3: hadn't started trapping, and I would have been hopeful that
Speaker 3: there were maybe four.
Speaker 1: Or five in one hundred thousand acres.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Now that we've got some links on air and
Speaker 3: spent you know, I've spent three months tracking them out
Speaker 3: in that landscape. We know our collared links are content
Speaker 3: tray to what we thought might be happening, making their
Speaker 3: entire home range, their entire living within the burn. Which
Speaker 3: that's really cool because that says to us, there's something
Speaker 3: about the configuration of this burn where there are fire
Speaker 3: skips where there aren't, or maybe it's that there's places
Speaker 3: that are regenerating enough that that's actually, at this point,
Speaker 3: really rich habitat. Whatever it is, which is what we're
Speaker 3: going to find out, is making it so that links
Speaker 3: are living entirely within the burn.
Speaker 1: God instead of just ducking in there now and then exactly,
Speaker 1: So one hundred thousand acres. Yeah, and you're going to
Speaker 1: take a You're going to take a like, do you
Speaker 1: can do this too? You can be I'd be surprised
Speaker 1: if it was more than what.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'd be surprised if it was more than sixteen,
Speaker 3: but I'd be surprised if it was less than.
Speaker 1: Nine, because you guys trapped your asses off from collegn trapped.
Speaker 3: We caught four in two months, and then we got
Speaker 3: a bonus cat this fall, which was super exciting. Well, okay,
Speaker 3: so I'll explain how we normally trap. So this is
Speaker 3: what we're doing to our official season, and this was
Speaker 3: how I was tied to traplinks and have how I've
Speaker 3: always done it. It's snowmobiling. Every single day we're out there,
Speaker 3: we're riding around one hundred miles a day. We're covering
Speaker 3: ground and we're we're looking for tracks. You get really
Speaker 3: good at snowmobiling and tracking at high speed. We're looking
Speaker 3: for track.
Speaker 1: You know what you want to.
Speaker 3: See exactly, and you start getting you know, an idea
Speaker 3: of all right, I see tracks here regularly, or I
Speaker 3: see and and they're crossing you know, a saddle here,
Speaker 3: or crossing down a drainage here, crossing the road here,
Speaker 3: or they're just using this road as a corridor, or
Speaker 3: maybe this is good habitat, and you can see where
Speaker 3: they're hunting along. They like to use roads, and then
Speaker 3: they'll they'll sort of pop over to the edge of
Speaker 3: the road. You'll see where they put their little butt
Speaker 3: down and sit, and then you know they're they're they're
Speaker 3: looking for snowshie hairs and they'll do that a lot
Speaker 3: on the road, so you know where they're hunting too.
Speaker 3: Once you find little honey holes that you think are
Speaker 3: gonna be good, then we set a trap, and our
Speaker 3: traps are they're box traps. We made them ourselves. They're
Speaker 3: made out of This is not our invention, but it's
Speaker 3: it's just a cheap er, cheap ish way to do this.
Speaker 3: But it's a PVC pipe frame and then we wrap
Speaker 3: it with chicken wire. I had a local welder welds
Speaker 3: up some some just thin metal frame doors and that
Speaker 3: goes into a PVC pipe frame. It slides up and down,
Speaker 3: so it's a guillotine type door. Here's where it gets
Speaker 3: a little wacky. It sounds like a Rube Goldberg, but
Speaker 3: it works. It works really well. We've got in the
Speaker 3: back of the trap a little fishing line trip line,
Speaker 3: so it's in the back quarter of the trap. That
Speaker 3: fishing line goes spans spans the let's see, it's such
Speaker 3: that when an animal goes in there and reaches for
Speaker 3: the bait that's behind it, they're they're going to hit it. Now,
Speaker 3: that goes up to the top of the trap. That
Speaker 3: fishing line, where there's a mouse trap wired onto. The
Speaker 3: traps get very yeah, tied mouse traps with the little
Speaker 3: fake cheese tied. Yes, well, you tie the fishing line
Speaker 3: to the fake cheese the door has paracord that is
Speaker 3: holding it up. That para cord goes back to the
Speaker 3: mouse trap. It's got a loop in the end blade.
Speaker 1: Yeah, glue to the mouse trap bail.
Speaker 3: It's not quite that bad. The loop goes over the
Speaker 3: arm of the mouse trap so that when you set
Speaker 3: the trap, it's it. It doesn't make it go off.
Speaker 3: The the the door is being held up by the
Speaker 3: rope that is being held in place by the set trap,
Speaker 3: and when linx or a bird or anything hits that
Speaker 3: that trip line, it pulls the cheese down. Trap goes off,
Speaker 3: releasing the door and it drops.
Speaker 1: Is that door weighted so it drops quick?
Speaker 3: It weighs enough just because it's got that metal frame. Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 3: Everything in the design of our trap is also geared
Speaker 3: towards really making sure our animals are safe. So we
Speaker 3: don't want a super heavy door that should it go
Speaker 3: off early, it could. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what what what are you baiting and luring with?
Speaker 3: Oh, we're using all kinds of different lures, but I
Speaker 3: like to have Well, let's see, we're using road killed deer.
Speaker 3: And the reason we're using road killed deer is that
Speaker 3: it's usually readily available right now we're hurting for bait.
Speaker 3: We are desperate.
Speaker 1: Well, not beaver meat.
Speaker 3: I've used that in the past, and I love using
Speaker 3: that because it's got a nice smell, but our state
Speaker 3: vet advises not to just in case of disease transfer.
Speaker 1: And so we're we're using We're going to get in
Speaker 1: and eat that bait.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and so yeah, so I use that for yeah,
Speaker 3: deer meat. So we're constantly on the lookout for roadkill.
Speaker 3: We've got a whole routine.
Speaker 1: I think every better roadkill.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well we've but we've got our whole community
Speaker 3: is looking out for us because we're we posted it everywhere.
Speaker 3: We're desperate because like here in Bozeman, we haven't gotten
Speaker 3: a ton of snow, so the deer haven't all pushed
Speaker 3: down to the valley bottom.
Speaker 1: You ever find anyone who's a little too good at
Speaker 1: getting meat I have, I don't know. I just let
Speaker 1: the other one jumped out in front of my truck.
Speaker 3: No, we're getting so desperate that I'm like, good people,
Speaker 3: they need to drive faster something. Yeah, so we're we
Speaker 3: get calls right now and right now we're doing We're desperate.
Speaker 3: We're going at any time of the day because it
Speaker 3: is cut throat right now.
Speaker 1: We've had competition.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, we've had calls where somebody's like fresh
Speaker 3: road killed corner of blah blah blah, this creek. We
Speaker 3: zoom down there and it's gone. People are salvaging for
Speaker 3: the meat.
Speaker 1: And so there's so few of the researchers out there.
Speaker 3: Well, there are some other researchers that we're that we're
Speaker 3: competing with. They're a wolverine project. We've got to compromise though.
Speaker 3: They can have the head because that's not super meaty.
Speaker 3: But they like that for the wolverines because they can't
Speaker 3: just a little more of a puzzle and they have
Speaker 3: to work harder to get it that so it lasts longer.
Speaker 4: I was going to ask that, like what other predators
Speaker 4: are in the area that might be attractor of those
Speaker 4: like wolverines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bye, catch for sure, but let her finish the bait.
Speaker 1: And I want to get the bobcatch by caatch using flagging.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, CDs wings, what do you use?
Speaker 3: Let's see, so we always do a little a little
Speaker 3: eye catch. I've used CDs. I like what we usually
Speaker 3: use now just because it's super easy. Is that flashing
Speaker 3: bird tape for like you put up in an orchard.
Speaker 3: You just hang a little of that. It flutters in
Speaker 3: the breeze. Really nice.
Speaker 1: You know someone told me recently drives them crazy, bobcats crazy?
Speaker 1: Is uh. He takes peacock feathers. This guy lives in
Speaker 1: a state where you can't use game bird parts. He
Speaker 1: takes peacock feathers and sticks them just in because it's
Speaker 1: got that iridescence and the way they blow, he says,
Speaker 1: like a magnet. You picture that little eye, that eye
Speaker 1: shape on a peacock feather, just flickering in the breeze. Says,
Speaker 1: it's like irresistance. They got to come. What they wonder
Speaker 1: what that thing is?
Speaker 3: Well, we got new this year some little I think
Speaker 3: there must be Christmas decorations or something. But it's shaped
Speaker 3: like an icicle, but it spins, so it's flashy and
Speaker 3: it spins.
Speaker 1: Try those turn you on to a new product, you
Speaker 1: might like, Oh please do are you aware? Tom Miranda
Speaker 1: and someone else they make this thing that you're not
Speaker 1: they're not legal here. It's a mouse emitter, a mouse
Speaker 1: noise squeaker. Have you tried squeak?
Speaker 3: Got squeakers? Got squawkers? When you've got nine maybe ten
Speaker 3: links some ten thousand acres that you're trying to catch.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, big time.
Speaker 1: Do you ever worry that gets a little too busy
Speaker 1: around your set?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah I do.
Speaker 1: Are using a commercial lure too, Yep.
Speaker 3: We buy lures so the because to use for lure.
Speaker 3: We've got all kinds of stuff because but but I
Speaker 3: always like to have because we're using deer, I like
Speaker 3: to have some castor in there. And then to appeal
Speaker 3: to you know, territory reality or breeding. We've got you know,
Speaker 3: squeez bottles of Lynx p cat nippy stuff. We've got
Speaker 3: a whole drawer. It's I'm a huge well we had
Speaker 3: to move, so the long distance lures were like something skunky,
Speaker 3: we'll put that up over the trap and you know,
Speaker 3: like a lot of people Gusto is a great brand
Speaker 3: of that, but it is poke ten. Oh hell yeah,
Speaker 3: I've used that. I mean universally that stuff is great.
Speaker 1: But huh, it can be. You're all you're like, you're
Speaker 1: like all checked out. Oh my god, there's nothing you
Speaker 1: know all the like all the I just hear all
Speaker 1: like I'll talk to cat trap bobcat trappers and this
Speaker 1: is all stuff they bring up. So it's funny that
Speaker 1: you're like, onto all these.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, a little a little skunk is good.
Speaker 1: But we.
Speaker 3: That you can just you can order all these things
Speaker 3: online and it's usually not a problem. But the gusto
Speaker 3: you can smell. And I did have the post office once.
Speaker 3: Be like, hm, next time you order that, it'll be
Speaker 3: on the back porch. You're gonna have to go around for.
Speaker 1: That if you want. I have it here in the
Speaker 1: parking lot, and I'll happily give it to you. I
Speaker 1: have a bottle of skunk essence and beaver castor blank
Speaker 1: together to fly or drive.
Speaker 3: I flew, Yeah, we had. We get so used to
Speaker 3: the smell that we don't smell it.
Speaker 1: But oh, you know what, can I can I tell
Speaker 1: you something real quick that I didn't mention? How do
Speaker 1: I miss this? Krinn? We were recently telling a story
Speaker 1: about the world's greatest tsa agent who instead to stealing
Speaker 1: people's knives, we couldn't tell where what states happens in.
Speaker 1: Instead of stealing people's knives, she instructs them to put
Speaker 1: them in the drop ceiling of the bathroom. And someone
Speaker 1: went up there to get their knife back and there
Speaker 1: was several other knives up in the drop ceiling. This
Speaker 1: guy was talking about moving from Australia and he's moving
Speaker 1: from Australia to the US. So he's trying to bring
Speaker 1: guns and AMMO. I don't know why I didn't buy
Speaker 1: a new ammal when he got here or new guns
Speaker 1: when he got here, but he's trying to move guns
Speaker 1: and AMMO from Australia. And in Australia they somehow tell
Speaker 1: them to put the ammal in a carry on and
Speaker 1: he's like that can't be right. To the customs people like, no,
Speaker 1: you had to put in the carry on. So he
Speaker 1: gets in the Australian version of TSA has to confiscated
Speaker 1: from to be destroyed. He later gets to the US
Speaker 1: and one of his bags is missing. One of his
Speaker 1: bags didn't make it, so he files for a lost
Speaker 1: bag and then when the bag turns up, it has
Speaker 1: all his AMMO in it. Oh, someone had taken pity
Speaker 1: on him, pulled his bag, put his ammal back in it,
Speaker 1: and send it alongest way on a later flight rather
Speaker 1: than destroying the guy's animal. Wow, very civilized. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like you know on Christmas to do happy stories in
Speaker 1: the news good news. Where I buy gas, they'd have
Speaker 1: a thing the pump plays you happy news stories, cheddar news.
Speaker 4: You find yourself just standing around.
Speaker 1: Watching us for a while. I mean, I'm annoyed. But
Speaker 1: there used to be this person called like Eva Menendez
Speaker 1: or something. I should tell you how to make like
Speaker 1: get like a jar and put some marbles in there
Speaker 1: for decoration or whatever, and then or how to not
Speaker 1: be so stressed out. But today it was some dude
Speaker 1: telling happy news. It's called good news.
Speaker 8: I've just never noticed that there was a I've never
Speaker 8: paid enough attention to notice that it's.
Speaker 1: All good news. It's called good news.
Speaker 2: I've just never paid enough attention.
Speaker 1: We scooped him because this would be good news about
Speaker 1: the guy's ammo, that's all. Yeah, this reminds me of
Speaker 1: that sure you taking my skunk sent home?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could be probably remind me of that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to do that. Well, I mean, you
Speaker 1: know that thing that happened in the Laska Airlines flight
Speaker 1: there night.
Speaker 3: I heard about that as I was.
Speaker 1: They have to ground all them planes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we we have an official office now right in downtown.
Speaker 3: Winthrop was just the town we live in, and we
Speaker 3: were told we needed to put the the gusto outside
Speaker 3: because you walk in and it smells like straight up
Speaker 3: a hot box.
Speaker 1: How do you get links? You're in F and T
Speaker 1: or so it must be trappers up in the far North.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: So we got all as a bottle of links. You're
Speaker 1: in really expensive.
Speaker 3: It's not well in the mounts that we're using it.
Speaker 3: It adds up.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be like a really limited supply.
Speaker 3: I don't know how limited is. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: See, buy it comes in a bottle.
Speaker 3: Comes in a bottle. Gotta make sure. They often don't
Speaker 3: have good lids, and so we everything usually smells.
Speaker 1: Like the piece here, uh huh.
Speaker 3: And yeah, so we've got score bottles of that. Mix
Speaker 3: a little glitcering so it doesn't freeze.
Speaker 2: You need to do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's good.
Speaker 1: I got some glitier on my counter.
Speaker 2: Keeps freezing, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 3: It keeps it from freezing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like let's say you got you know how they sell that.
Speaker 1: Your pea comes in those bottles like, yeah, ten ounces?
Speaker 1: How much glister are you putting there?
Speaker 3: I don't know. No, No, you just buy it and
Speaker 3: you can mix it up.
Speaker 1: I'm saying, how much glister do you shoot in there?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: I have a tablespoon.
Speaker 3: No more than that, I don't Yeah, just depend you
Speaker 3: just yeah, I don't know the other.
Speaker 1: So you go to a trappers supply house and buy
Speaker 1: glitcering too?
Speaker 3: You can, Yeah, you can order it.
Speaker 1: I have a bottle. I'm just curious how you guys do.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, we just order it.
Speaker 1: Do they ever wonder what you guys are doing when
Speaker 1: you're ordering all this equipment?
Speaker 3: No, but we order enough that they write us nice
Speaker 3: notes and give us free hats.
Speaker 1: And stuff, and they're never like why are you do
Speaker 1: you know you're not? Did they never let you know?
Speaker 1: Like you know you're not allowed to trap links where
Speaker 1: you're at?
Speaker 3: Like, does you know we're trapping links? I mean they
Speaker 3: do you use F and T or Minnesota trap line?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. We just go on there and try new
Speaker 3: things and all those I'm such a sucker, all those descriptions,
Speaker 3: you're like, this is the magic bullet they make them.
Speaker 1: You'll read those lure descriptions.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and they all feel like this is the one.
Speaker 3: I'm a total sucker. So we got all kinds of yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: I'm like, great, that's what I need. So we've got
Speaker 3: all of our lures and we try to change those up.
Speaker 3: But yeah, always a caster, some pe or links.
Speaker 1: Glands are using cameras on your traps too.
Speaker 3: We uh, sometimes not very often. We're just beating cheeks
Speaker 3: and running a gun and so much out there that
Speaker 3: we it would the camera to Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: You probably don't have cell service anyway, so you can
Speaker 1: sell you their cas and do you get links that
Speaker 1: work the set? But just never committed.
Speaker 3: Oh that's the norm.
Speaker 1: Really, Oh my god, what do they want to do?
Speaker 3: Not go in the cave?
Speaker 1: They'll circle down wind or they'll even come up to
Speaker 1: the door or what like, what's the hang up for him?
Speaker 3: Various things? I mean, they'll let's see, for example, we
Speaker 3: had a cat last year that we could not catch.
Speaker 3: We tried everything, We threw all sorts of things at him.
Speaker 3: We you know, just just different variations in our sets.
Speaker 3: And he would often twice a day, so we'd come
Speaker 3: on the line in the morning, there'd be fresh tracks
Speaker 3: of him walking by the traps. You could tell he
Speaker 3: was spending enough time around there that he was checking them,
Speaker 3: he was checking out the scene. He certainly was not
Speaker 3: going in and poking his head in or anything like that,
Speaker 3: but it close nod.
Speaker 1: So he knew that that thing was bad news.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I like to so when we we we
Speaker 3: put our trap in the snow, we s you know,
Speaker 3: we pack snow around it. I like to make sure
Speaker 3: there's plenty of snow in the bottom so they're not
Speaker 3: feeling that chicken wire or anything funky. And then we
Speaker 3: put boughs along the side just to give that sort
Speaker 3: of tunnel look kind of you know, like a cat
Speaker 3: likes a paper bag or something that's gonna be sort
Speaker 3: of exciting, but it also just keeps snow from blowing
Speaker 3: in and piling up in your trap, gives them a
Speaker 3: little thermal protection if they're in there. And then on
Speaker 3: the top, we've got a piece of clear plastic and
Speaker 3: that's again to protect the cat in case there's a
Speaker 3: thaw and it gets wet. We don't want to getting wet.
Speaker 3: And then we pile boughs on that and I like
Speaker 3: to make it so it would be unattractive for a
Speaker 3: cat to jump on top because that would set off
Speaker 3: the trap. And worst case scenario would be, say there's
Speaker 3: a mom and kitten and mom's going in the trap,
Speaker 3: and then a kitten jumps on it and the door
Speaker 3: you know, closes and spooks her, and then you're ten
Speaker 3: steps behind where you were. So yeah, I try to
Speaker 3: to make it unattractive for them to jump on top
Speaker 3: of the trap, but this cat would just sort of
Speaker 3: check it out. Mosey on. We got, you know, camera
Speaker 3: footage of him just walking right past, just breezing on by.
Speaker 1: We not even stopping. He just comes through but then
Speaker 1: takes off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like he's just walking by, maybe looks at it,
Speaker 3: but keeps going. And he was driving us nuts. I
Speaker 3: got a little obsessed. And he would. Then we'd go
Speaker 3: out to the rest of our line, be out all day,
Speaker 3: be coming back, and there'd be fresh tracks. One of
Speaker 3: our a couple, oh yeah, a couple of our trappers
Speaker 3: saw him just sauntering down the road right by one
Speaker 3: of our traps. Never could get him. That brings me
Speaker 3: to our bonus cat. This fall, we had maybe a
Speaker 3: little bit of a vanditta and we were like Moby Dick.
Speaker 3: He was our white whale. So we decided to do
Speaker 3: just a little bonus trapping. And so this fall, before
Speaker 3: the snow even flew. I went out there, and I
Speaker 3: wanted to condition him to the traps. And this is
Speaker 3: a technique that is used in career trapping and bobcat
Speaker 3: trapping for research, but I'd never used it for length.
Speaker 3: And so I took a full quarter, so a nice
Speaker 3: big chunk of meat. I drilled a hole in the bone,
Speaker 3: cabled it and staked it down so nothing could come.
Speaker 3: Wolves couldn't come and take it.
Speaker 1: Cable it through the bone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't want because bears were still out. I
Speaker 3: didn't want somebody dragging it off. So I staked that
Speaker 3: sucker down. Then I set a trap maybe six feet away.
Speaker 3: Not the door was tied open, it was just there
Speaker 3: and ready to go. So the idea was a Links
Speaker 3: could come start nibbling on that bait, get a little
Speaker 3: taste for what we've got, and get used to the
Speaker 3: trapp being there. And we had a camera on it.
Speaker 3: So I set four of those stations in this area
Speaker 3: where I knew this this Links went a lot. Three
Speaker 3: nights later, I checked the camera and he'd come and
Speaker 3: started eating that bait, and so great, Jay's nothing else.
Speaker 3: So I moved it closer to the trap, so the
Speaker 3: part it was partly in the door. Waited he didn't.
Speaker 3: He came back ate some of that. I was like, oh, buddy, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's on and uh, within a week. We probably could
Speaker 3: have done it faster, but we were. It just worked
Speaker 3: out that within like a week and a half, he
Speaker 3: was eating bait that was in the middle of the trap.
Speaker 3: And then once I saw that, that night I put
Speaker 3: at all the bait stations meet in the back of
Speaker 3: the trap and he came that night and we caught
Speaker 3: him just the first night that the traps were actually set.
Speaker 1: Mature cat.
Speaker 3: Oh, beautiful, biggest cat we've caught in Washington.
Speaker 1: He was thirty one.
Speaker 3: No, he was a beautiful, just really nice cat. I mean,
Speaker 3: just holding him, he wasn't that old, maybe three to five.
Speaker 3: It's really hard. We age him just based on how
Speaker 3: much where they have on their teeth, but it's it's rough.
Speaker 3: It's really hard to tell. But he wasn't an old
Speaker 3: grandpa by any means. Put a collar on him and
Speaker 3: he's out and about.
Speaker 1: Did he just get the hell out of town when
Speaker 1: you let him go?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: No, he So we let him go. He jumped out
Speaker 3: of the trap and then just stopped and then just
Speaker 3: sauntered off.
Speaker 1: But his ass is never going back in a trap.
Speaker 3: Now, well, here's the thing. The first links will and
Speaker 3: and other animals too, will get trap happy where they realize, Okay,
Speaker 3: I can yeah, exactly, I can go in that trap,
Speaker 3: get a pound or two of free meat. They'll come
Speaker 3: and let me go in the morning. So we had
Speaker 3: the first no they I mean, it's it makes sense.
Speaker 3: The first hat that we caught.
Speaker 1: I imagine how scary it's got to be. A person
Speaker 1: shows up.
Speaker 3: It's worth it, apparently. I mean, that's a lot of meat,
Speaker 3: and it's there every night, and if you let them
Speaker 3: out early, they can go to another trap for that afternoon.
Speaker 3: We've had that happen.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 4: That cat was real hard to catch. Is there are
Speaker 4: other cats you've just caught over and over again.
Speaker 1: Right, So the first one you can't keep away, right right.
Speaker 3: The first links that we caught last winter, he was
Speaker 3: like that. He he was his personality was such that
Speaker 3: he was just not as cautious and he went right
Speaker 3: in the trap. I think probably the first time he
Speaker 3: saw one of our traps, he went in. He ate
Speaker 3: the bait. We came the next morning, we processed him,
Speaker 3: We let him go and I don't remember how long later,
Speaker 3: but he figured it out and then from then on,
Speaker 3: it was almost every morning he'd be in a trap
Speaker 3: and we have to let him go. Here's our snowmobile
Speaker 3: come and he's like, oh, they're sending a trap over there.
Speaker 3: I got to check that out. So we we had
Speaker 3: to just start ripping traps out of his home range
Speaker 3: as fast as seriously, yeah, because.
Speaker 1: It was something might happen to him eventually.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, I guess there's could be some risk of that,
Speaker 3: but we're really careful. But he was, I mean, he
Speaker 3: was just banging up our trap line and because he's
Speaker 3: collecting data now, so he was he was ruining his data. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if we run an analysis, would be like, well link
Speaker 3: select trap lines and traps. So yeah, so we tried
Speaker 3: not to let it come to that, but he's he's
Speaker 3: kind of putting a wrench in our game this year
Speaker 3: because there's a female that it overlaps with that we've
Speaker 3: gotten on camera that we'd love to trap, but it's
Speaker 3: kind of a no go zone because.
Speaker 1: We know he's just going to be, oh, he'll just
Speaker 1: plug it all up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Have you ever Okay, there's by there's bycatch, So I
Speaker 1: want you to do bycatch, I want you to do
Speaker 1: what the different says you see and how these things
Speaker 1: move and what they're doing once you get a collar
Speaker 1: on them. There's a thing I want to ask.
Speaker 4: I want to know what they got to worry about,
Speaker 4: like as far as oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. So bycatch, how they're acting.
Speaker 1: And then when you get them, when you get a
Speaker 1: collar on, they die. Where are they dying from?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Do you have collared right now?
Speaker 3: We have three on air?
Speaker 1: Okay, on air collared.
Speaker 3: Collared callers are functioning. They're giving us data. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: where did you get the first one?
Speaker 1: By catchy catch, it all turns up in your traps.
Speaker 3: We get a lot of Grade.
Speaker 1: J's still walking area.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah. And then once they find a trap, they
Speaker 3: can be kind of a pest. But that that is
Speaker 3: one of the drawbacks of our trigger system, that mouse
Speaker 3: trap system, is that it's so sensitive that uh, you know,
Speaker 3: a Grade J goes in there and they're setting the
Speaker 3: trap off. Weasels go in there, certainly, but they can
Speaker 3: get out. There's enough, you know, they can just squeeze out.
Speaker 1: They throw the door first.
Speaker 3: Sometimes they're also so short they often go under under
Speaker 3: the trip line. We got ssh hairs I've.
Speaker 1: Had after just whatever.
Speaker 3: Well, they'll eat the boughs off of our traps, but
Speaker 3: they also just it's a little hiding spot, so they'll
Speaker 3: go in there. I've caught a snowshoe hair in a
Speaker 3: trap and then it was just being circled by a
Speaker 3: lynx trying to get it. Yeah, so that is that
Speaker 3: makes me want to vomit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a rough night, man. Yeah, so did you
Speaker 1: add him to the bait pile? Did you let him go?
Speaker 3: We let him go? Yeah, let's see. But more exciting
Speaker 3: by catch. We caught a bobcat last year, which I
Speaker 3: was surprised it didn't break out of that trap because.
Speaker 1: They're That was what Mercer was saying, because he's used
Speaker 1: to bobcats. I remember he was saying when I first
Speaker 1: connected you guys, he was saying that he was worried
Speaker 1: that that wouldn't hold them, and you were saying, well,
Speaker 1: links are chill compared, like they don't fight the trap.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, and I so bombcats and links are pretty
Speaker 3: pretty different personalities for lack of a better word, where
Speaker 3: bobcats are just like go them flying demons, because especially
Speaker 3: in like a foothold, they are just going nuts. Their
Speaker 3: stress response is the fight or flight, and in a
Speaker 3: box trap, you know, they're all over the place and
Speaker 3: they'll I've had a bust out of you know, manufactured
Speaker 3: all metal traps.
Speaker 1: They put a collar on the bobcat you caught, no
Speaker 1: want that.
Speaker 3: Links tend to go into freeze as their stress response.
Speaker 3: They'll they'll test the walls of the trap a little bit,
Speaker 3: but they're not they're not working hard on getting out,
Speaker 3: and so they'll tend to just sort of hunker down
Speaker 3: a little bit more in the trap. So that's why
Speaker 3: we can use these traps. I would not use them
Speaker 3: for any other type of cat.
Speaker 1: Wolverine's gonna be out of there in a second.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a fisher would be out of there in a second.
Speaker 1: Have you caught those?
Speaker 3: We actually did so we you know.
Speaker 1: We're almost caught one or whatever.
Speaker 3: Well, I've caught them a lot links trapping in other
Speaker 3: areas in Maine. Here very surprising because we don't have
Speaker 3: technically on the east slope of the Cascades in our
Speaker 3: area a population of fisher. But we did catch one.
Speaker 3: Luckily it wasn't in one of our chicken wire traps.
Speaker 3: We were borrowing some some manufactured traps and it was
Speaker 3: in one of those, so that was pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Definitely, Not what about Martin.
Speaker 3: I have caught lots of Martin. Either we're not catching
Speaker 3: Martin in our traps or they're getting out. I think
Speaker 3: we're not catching them because again we're in a burned area,
Speaker 3: so there's not a ton of Martin.
Speaker 1: Got you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, let's see other by catch that's red foxes. Nope,
Speaker 3: we also barely if any have those no coyotes, no
Speaker 3: a cane, it is going to be they're not They
Speaker 3: do not want to go into a box trap. They're
Speaker 3: way too wary.
Speaker 1: They might pass through, but they're not going to put
Speaker 1: their head in there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I've had now bobcat trapping I've had I've
Speaker 3: had cougars go into the traps, but they're so big
Speaker 3: that the doorge just falls on their butt. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: they just back out. But they can be a problem.
Speaker 4: And you're doing most of you're trapping after the bears
Speaker 4: have denned up, so they're not trash in your traps.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a big part of why we trap in winter,
Speaker 3: so we're not having to deal with that now this fall.
Speaker 3: I was willing to sacrifice a trap or two if
Speaker 3: if we were going to catch this, We're going to
Speaker 3: catch this links.
Speaker 1: So what are you seeing on like anything surprising and
Speaker 1: how they're used, how far they're going, or like that
Speaker 1: you let them go and they kind of hang out
Speaker 1: in the immediate vicinity, they go to the next state,
Speaker 1: or what do they do.
Speaker 3: I mean, what's been surprising to me is like I
Speaker 3: said that they're not moving that far, that they're making
Speaker 3: home ranges entirely within this burn and so far, I
Speaker 3: mean it's we only have three you know cats on air,
Speaker 3: but so far they are not giant home ranges, which
Speaker 3: could indicate that it's decent habitat. They're not having to
Speaker 3: go super far. This this burn is big enough that
Speaker 3: as we sort of move our trap line north, maybe
Speaker 3: the conditions are different up there and maybe it won't
Speaker 3: be the same story. But at least the links we
Speaker 3: have on air right now are making a pretty tight
Speaker 3: home range.
Speaker 1: When do they rout what's their previous season.
Speaker 3: Uh, March February and then they have kittens May June.
Speaker 1: Have you maybe probably doesn't work. If you had a
Speaker 1: female and then at that time and you knew where
Speaker 1: they were, it might be plausible that there'd be like
Speaker 1: multi like more males in that area. Or is that
Speaker 1: not that that's not something really factors in.
Speaker 3: Oh, like if we see she's like a.
Speaker 1: Jewdas, she winds up being like a Judas animal, right
Speaker 1: like that with her, you know that in her zone
Speaker 1: there's gonna be cats coming through.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean they all move so much. If I
Speaker 3: knew where a female was, I'd certainly be setting traps
Speaker 3: there anyway, because we want to get female cats on air.
Speaker 1: You want to have males, all males on air right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, right now. The males are more apt to
Speaker 3: go in a trap in general.
Speaker 1: In general, So, have you had any cats get immortality signal?
Speaker 1: Have you had any cats die while while collared?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And that was a bummer because it was the
Speaker 3: one female that we caught last year. So we caught
Speaker 3: a female and it was a really cool handling. It
Speaker 3: was just you know how some times when you're hunting,
Speaker 3: there's there's a deer you get that just feels special
Speaker 3: because of everything around it, the scenery, the day, the whatever.
Speaker 3: This was kind of one of those those moments with
Speaker 3: this cat. We we caught this female lynx and she
Speaker 3: had a kitten with her, and this was in March.
Speaker 3: And so this kitten is you know, pretty almost full grown.
Speaker 1: It's almost the kittens outside of the trap.
Speaker 3: It's outside of the females in Yeah. And so I
Speaker 3: was right in my snowmobile checking the line, checking the line,
Speaker 3: and I'm looking up at the next trap and I
Speaker 3: just see it wiggle a little bit, and I just
Speaker 3: jam on the brakes and I go up there and
Speaker 3: there's this female links in the trap and I can
Speaker 3: see kitten footprints around it where he's been, you know,
Speaker 3: trying to be close to her. And as I was
Speaker 3: waiting for the rest of the team to meet me
Speaker 3: to do the handling and collaring, I heard and saw
Speaker 3: that that kitten was kind of checking in with her
Speaker 3: and he was just sitting up on a hill above her.
Speaker 3: Plus it was just.
Speaker 1: This making what noise.
Speaker 3: It's like a little sort of bird, little.
Speaker 1: Make the noise. I'll do it till I get it.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, No more like uh, we're like yeah, got
Speaker 3: it now. They make some real ugly noises. This was
Speaker 3: probably one of the cuter noises they make, but in general, no,
Speaker 3: in general, they sound like they're throwing up or something.
Speaker 3: They kind of make this yowling demon noise, the cornered Nope,
Speaker 3: just talking to each other.
Speaker 1: You hear it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, yeah, anyway.
Speaker 1: So hit me with the demon noise. It's like that,
Speaker 1: oh is that right? Like that that weird?
Speaker 3: It's weird. It's not. It's not a cute cat noise.
Speaker 1: Like someone wouldn't be like that must be a lynx.
Speaker 3: No, you'd be like, what was that. There's some some
Speaker 3: cool YouTube where you can hear them.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, uh.
Speaker 3: Anyway, So I'm sitting there, I'm alone with this, with
Speaker 3: this cat. I'm at a distance. We like to try
Speaker 3: and keep them as calm as we can because it
Speaker 3: just it's a better experience for them. The drugs works better,
Speaker 3: everything just goes better if they're calm. So I'm a
Speaker 3: distance away. But it's this cold, beautiful, snowy high mountain day,
Speaker 3: this sort of meadow with a creek in it, and
Speaker 3: then these you know, trees and burnt trees along the
Speaker 3: side of it. It's snowing. It was. It was just
Speaker 3: one of those moments and then we you know, crew arrived,
Speaker 3: we processed this cat, and.
Speaker 4: You just for the audience, can you go like quick
Speaker 4: rundown of what processing is?
Speaker 1: Stretchy.
Speaker 3: So, when we're handling any wildlife species, it's our professional
Speaker 3: responsibility and our our ethics to do it in the
Speaker 3: most humane way possible.
Speaker 1: And you're dealing with you're dealing with a feederally, yeah, threatened.
Speaker 3: Speed exactly, And so we baseline whenever, no matter what
Speaker 3: species we're trapping, we have a really high bar for
Speaker 3: how we do things and how we try to minimize
Speaker 3: stress and obviously minimize risk and all of that because
Speaker 3: it's I.
Speaker 1: Interrupted real quest. A friend of mine was doing doc banding,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to tell you who said this,
Speaker 1: but he was doing doc banding and his boss told him,
Speaker 1: if you're not killing birds, you ain't working hard enough.
Speaker 1: That's doc I was going to tell you that in
Speaker 1: your links area. It was just a funny thing that
Speaker 1: he remembers being told because he was like, very they're
Speaker 1: doing those nets and everything was very dainty, and the
Speaker 1: guys like, listen, we gotta get some birds banded here,
Speaker 1: Like there's going.
Speaker 3: To be some Yeah, I mean I think I get
Speaker 3: the gist of what he was saying. But I think
Speaker 3: there's a little bit of a tide change.
Speaker 1: No, no, I'm not giving you professional advice, was I
Speaker 1: was just observing that.
Speaker 3: I was just remarking on that and standing up for
Speaker 3: the wildlife profession. I think that we're getting a little
Speaker 3: as we're getting more thoughtful yeah about these things and
Speaker 3: refining techniques. So anyway, we have a really high bar
Speaker 3: of how we do things and animal safety and all this.
Speaker 3: So everything we do is geared around minimizing stress. So
Speaker 3: when we do a handling, it's it's all whispering, it's
Speaker 3: it's all reading the cat's body language, using our body
Speaker 3: language to seem as minimally aggressive and threatening. And so
Speaker 3: when we've got a cat in the trap, first thing
Speaker 3: we do is we put a big sheet over the trap.
Speaker 3: That just helps calm the cat. It's just cuts down
Speaker 3: on visual stimulation. Obviously, we have to drug the cat
Speaker 3: or we can't handle it. So the way we're doing
Speaker 3: that is we've got it's called a syringe pole. It's
Speaker 3: it's a pole and on the end of it is
Speaker 3: a plunger and you you put your your drugs in
Speaker 3: a syringe. But the pole is now the plunger, if
Speaker 3: that makes sense. So that when you so.
Speaker 1: That when you a little bit yep.
Speaker 3: You you wait until the cat's in the right position.
Speaker 3: You want to get it ideally in the it's butt
Speaker 3: right and it's haunched and that meat there, and you
Speaker 3: just you slowly bring it in the trap and you
Speaker 3: just poke it in the butt and just push a
Speaker 3: little bit and that's it.
Speaker 1: And what's that drug.
Speaker 3: We are using a mix of ketamine and metatomitine. So
Speaker 3: what that does is the but you don't want to
Speaker 3: use your straight ketamine because it's a really it makes
Speaker 3: them really rigid. There's risk of seizure and different side effects.
Speaker 3: It's it's a very safe drug. But we can do
Speaker 3: a little bit better and give them a more relaxed sedation.
Speaker 1: They out or just grog.
Speaker 3: They are out out. You want them out out. I
Speaker 3: mean think about if if you're going to get an
Speaker 3: ear tag and be handled by you know, this alien species,
Speaker 3: you'd want to be out out, no memory, Yeah, you
Speaker 3: want to be out. So we we drug them and
Speaker 3: they are unresponsive. You know you could you could you know,
Speaker 3: do surgery on them if that's what you were doing.
Speaker 3: Obviously we're not. You drug them, you bring them out
Speaker 3: of the trap once they're ready. Again, it's always just
Speaker 3: minimizing that stress. And so we put an imask on
Speaker 3: them and we're minimizing even like touching it, because that's
Speaker 3: just more stimulation. And if they are more stimulated, the
Speaker 3: drugs don't work as well. They've got to burn through
Speaker 3: more stress. And so the last thing you want is
Speaker 3: your cat waking up before you're ready. And so we're
Speaker 3: doing everything to just make that a smooth, calm ride
Speaker 3: for the cat. And so the handling what we're doing
Speaker 3: is the primary goal is to get this GPS caller
Speaker 3: on them. They're little callers that will take a GPS
Speaker 3: point on collection days every thirty minutes and that shoots
Speaker 3: up to space and then shoots down to my computer
Speaker 3: and so every couple of days I'll get an update
Speaker 3: of what that cat's been doing. So that's our primary goal.
Speaker 1: But and that thing eventually falls off or what.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they have a little release mechanism that you can
Speaker 3: program that does a tiny, tiny, little explosion, but on
Speaker 3: a micro scale, and it just parts the piece SIT's
Speaker 3: holding it together and it'll drop off. Really yeah, So
Speaker 3: February you could go grab it if you want to, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so February second, hopefully that's what we'll be doing. That's
Speaker 3: when our our colls will drop off.
Speaker 1: Really coming right up, coming right up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's getting the collar on, but you're also
Speaker 3: you're you're you've got this cat that needs you know,
Speaker 3: it doesn't that the drugs can depress their respiration and
Speaker 3: temperature and things like this, and so you're having to
Speaker 3: regulate and make sure that that the cat's safe.
Speaker 1: And so is that collar valuable? You need to go
Speaker 1: get it because it's valuable, or you just go get
Speaker 1: it because of.
Speaker 3: We will theoretically have had all the data on it.
Speaker 3: But it's just another way to get it. You can
Speaker 3: have them refurbished, doesn't save you that much money, but yeah,
Speaker 3: they are expensive.
Speaker 1: But but going and getting it doesn't. It's not like
Speaker 1: a financial reason to go get it, not really.
Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, anyway, so during the handling, a really important
Speaker 3: job is to be monitoring temperature, respiration, heart rate, you know,
Speaker 3: these sorts of things, so that if things start to
Speaker 3: drift out of you know, a the correct zone of temperature,
Speaker 3: heart rate, and respiration, we can correct that.
Speaker 1: And you have a drug that helps with that. Like
Speaker 1: let's say you oded it on an.
Speaker 3: Accident, that's really unlikely. The drugs we use have a
Speaker 3: they have a huge safety margin. We're not gonna do it, yeah,
Speaker 3: but there are drugs it. You know, there's there's different
Speaker 3: things that could happen. For example, I had a bear
Speaker 3: and this is more common embarrassed for whatever reason with
Speaker 3: some drugs where the breathing got a little too shallow
Speaker 3: and interrupted for my comfort. I had a drug with
Speaker 3: that just gave it a little bit of that boom
Speaker 3: started breathing well. So we have tools for these common
Speaker 3: things that might go wrong. We've got drugs for if
Speaker 3: they have a seizure, things like that, or I mean,
Speaker 3: if it's temperature, it's it's putting snow in its armpits,
Speaker 3: or if it's hot, Yeah, if it gets too hot,
Speaker 3: if it gets too cold, we've got we've got we
Speaker 3: always have them in blankets on a on a foam
Speaker 3: pad we have If they get really cool, we have
Speaker 3: socks and we can put little handwarmers in there and
Speaker 3: put socks on all of its feet. So we're prepared
Speaker 3: for for a lot. But these things, you know, hopefully
Speaker 3: by keeping that stress level down. That's one really good
Speaker 3: way to make sure things are just smooth and steady.
Speaker 4: Are you also taking samples for like DNA, genetics, disease, stuff.
Speaker 3: Like that, or we're not taking blood. We're not, we're
Speaker 3: not looking at disease. If we had a cat that
Speaker 3: something seemed wrong, we'd certainly take a lot of notes
Speaker 3: about that. If it had an unusual parasite load, we'd
Speaker 3: probably collect that.
Speaker 1: We just know that from scat analysis. Like, how would
Speaker 1: you know if we had a parasite load, Well.
Speaker 3: If you see them they sometimes have tapeworms, or if
Speaker 3: they had an exorminant amount of ticks or fleas or
Speaker 3: lice or something like that, we'd probably collect that. Right,
Speaker 3: We do collect DNA, So when we give them a
Speaker 3: ear tag, we first rather than just jamming the ear
Speaker 3: tag through, you take a little biopsy punch and it
Speaker 3: makes a little hole and then we've got that little
Speaker 3: tissue sample. So call her a couple of DNA samples.
Speaker 3: No tattoos, no tattoos, no need for that. We're not
Speaker 3: pit tagging.
Speaker 1: What's the ear tag for?
Speaker 3: The ear tag is so that if it shows up
Speaker 3: on a camera, you might be able to read that number.
Speaker 3: It's also got my phone number on it, so if
Speaker 3: somebody finds its carcass, they could call us and we'd
Speaker 3: know what was going on years down the road. You know,
Speaker 3: if it's the callers come off and we retrap it,
Speaker 3: we know who it is.
Speaker 1: Well, you never finished what you were saying the female
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you don't have on it's no longer on air.
Speaker 3: Right right, so right, yeah, So I was describing what
Speaker 3: a cool handling that was, and we let her go
Speaker 3: and there was this just incredible moment of getting to
Speaker 3: watch her and her kitten reunite and and you know,
Speaker 3: go off. And we're ecstatic about this because now we've
Speaker 3: got a female links using the burned area, and to
Speaker 3: know what habitat of female links is you us is
Speaker 3: really that's just gold because they're the ones reproducing. And
Speaker 3: so if if if there are things we can learn
Speaker 3: about how to support a female links, all the better.
Speaker 3: So we're really excited about that. We're really hopeful that
Speaker 3: maybe we'll see where she's detting and and be able
Speaker 3: to learn about that type of habitat. Anyway, a month later,
Speaker 3: these callers, if they stop moving for eight hours will
Speaker 3: give a mortality signal, and and that pushes an email
Speaker 3: to me. So I wake up Sunday morning, check my
Speaker 3: email and there's a there's a mortality email.
Speaker 1: What's the subject line?
Speaker 3: It might have been the number and mortality or something.
Speaker 3: Something comes in an email and just makes your Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a right, yeah, it's not when you want. I mean,
Speaker 3: mortalities are fascinating.
Speaker 1: Just the delivery mechanism of an email.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they don't. They don't sugarcoat it or pack no. No,
Speaker 3: So I I shoot out there. Our season has ended,
Speaker 3: but there's still a ton of snow, and I went
Speaker 3: out there with a biologist colleague and friend and it
Speaker 3: was this kind of a harrowing adventure to get to
Speaker 3: this spot. But once we got there, we were a
Speaker 3: little bit hamstringed because her caller was not transmitting a
Speaker 3: v h F, which that's the little radio beep beep
Speaker 3: that you can hone in on. It wasn't it's not
Speaker 3: worth explaining, but it wasn't on that day. So we
Speaker 3: we get to the area where we know.
Speaker 1: She is ish and how big How big is this.
Speaker 3: Maybe a two hundred meter radius, But if there's snow
Speaker 3: on top of her or if she's in a hole
Speaker 3: or something. Those GPS points that that she was spitting
Speaker 3: could be pretty off. Plus it has just snowed that
Speaker 3: night into the morning, and so we get to this spot.
Speaker 3: We'd had a hike a bunch on the snowmobile trail.
Speaker 3: She's not very far from the snowmobile trail, but she's
Speaker 3: down in a little metal with a creek in this
Speaker 3: burned area. And like I said, there's a fresh blanket
Speaker 3: of snow, and that right there is devastating for mortality
Speaker 3: site investigation because so much of the of what you're
Speaker 3: learning is from track and sign that you're seeing around.
Speaker 3: We're not going to have that. We start hiking down
Speaker 3: this creek and there was a kyote that had gone through,
Speaker 3: and it must have been sometime that morning because there
Speaker 3: wasn't much snow in its tracks. Those are only tracks
Speaker 3: we're seeing, and we sort of note that. We get
Speaker 3: to the area where we think she is ish and
Speaker 3: and it's just there's zero sign of anything. I put
Speaker 3: my bag down, sort of rummaging around, and the guy
Speaker 3: I'm with he is thinking about those kyot tracks and
Speaker 3: he's starting to circle and he sees those kyoutracks. He
Speaker 3: cuts some of these things, I should just follow those tracks.
Speaker 3: And within very quickly he saw where those tracks had
Speaker 3: gone up to where a big log had fallen. But
Speaker 3: picture feet and feet and snow of snow, and they're
Speaker 3: stow on the log and stead of draping over the log.
Speaker 3: And so it's the snow cave with a little crack
Speaker 3: of space along the side of it, and then the
Speaker 3: front of it you could see down into the snow cave.
Speaker 3: The coyote had come and stuck its head down in
Speaker 3: that little cave opening, and so that prompted him to
Speaker 3: also look at that cave opening, and that's where she was.
Speaker 3: So he saw what he saw was the lynx I
Speaker 3: wouldn't say curled up, but sort of flopped over a
Speaker 3: bit dead. Yeah, dead, And it looked as though she
Speaker 3: had intentionally gone under there to die. And so we
Speaker 3: we pulled her out and she was completely frozen, and
Speaker 3: we did an examination there. There was a slight abrasion
Speaker 3: on her face. That was all we saw. And so
Speaker 3: we and and like I said, there were no other
Speaker 3: track inside. We couldn't backtrack to see, you know, just
Speaker 3: looked in there and moved on. That was it. So
Speaker 3: we thought nothing obvious here. This isn't a predation event.
Speaker 3: You know, we're not there. We have no clues other
Speaker 3: than she seemed to intentionally go under that log, and
Speaker 3: that always makes you think disease when they, you know,
Speaker 3: have sort of curled up in an intentional spot and
Speaker 3: just died. So we put her in my backpack, hiked
Speaker 3: her out, and then I shipped her to a lab
Speaker 3: to do a knee cropsy because they can do all
Speaker 3: the pathology and you know, test for different diseases. Turns
Speaker 3: out they didn't have to do that. They they skinned
Speaker 3: her out and then their amination found that cause of
Speaker 3: death was blunt force trauma and so she had some
Speaker 3: broken ribs and some bleeding internally and that's all we know,
Speaker 3: and we can speculate about how that may have happened,
Speaker 3: but we don't know. One idea is that, because this
Speaker 3: was only about, you know, four hundred yards from the
Speaker 3: snowmobile trail, she could have been hit. They're not. That
Speaker 3: has happened before in other states that we know of.
Speaker 3: They get hit by cars. People you know, rip around
Speaker 3: up there. So that's one idea, or you know, you
Speaker 3: can come up with any number of other sort of
Speaker 3: freak accidents that.
Speaker 1: Could not got hit by not bit.
Speaker 3: There are no puncture wines, no puncture winds. I don't know,
Speaker 3: snow corn is broke that it was standing on and
Speaker 3: it fell on a rock or I don't know, kicked
Speaker 3: by a moose, which seems really unlikely to me. But
Speaker 3: that's been floated.
Speaker 1: That's not that wild.
Speaker 3: Some people, well, I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I just you know one time we uh killed a
Speaker 1: meal deer and its whole underside was totally infected and
Speaker 1: it was full of porcupine quills. Oh yeah, like what
Speaker 1: is the scenario? It was jumped, it walked over porcupine
Speaker 1: and the portpine fo Yeah. Probably, so just weird, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, weird to only being that, like who
Speaker 1: knows Mayne, Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3: I've seen some weird stuff out there, So yeah, you
Speaker 3: don't it could have been anything. But anyway, that's all
Speaker 3: we'll know. So she so we got a month of
Speaker 3: data from her and that was it. Unfortunately, I'm hoping.
Speaker 3: Let's see. Later that season, we caught a Lynx kitten.
Speaker 3: And when I say kitten, you know, it was almost
Speaker 3: a year old. But it was. It was too small
Speaker 3: to call her, so we gave it an ear tag
Speaker 3: and sent it on its way. I don't know for sure,
Speaker 3: we don't have the DNA yet, but it was in
Speaker 3: her zone. That may have been her kitten, and so
Speaker 3: it will be interesting to see if he shows up
Speaker 3: this winter, if he made it through you know, the
Speaker 3: rest of his his year having prematurely lost his mom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll see, man, I could see that having a
Speaker 1: female and finding out what she does around danding season
Speaker 1: be cool as hell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, dens are Linkstons are really cool and that's what.
Speaker 1: They like, cracks and rocks or.
Speaker 3: They will use a lot of different things. They often
Speaker 3: are in mature forests where there's lots of down logs,
Speaker 3: just total jackstraw, and they'll find a gnarly spot in
Speaker 3: there because that's going to protect him from cougar or
Speaker 3: probably not cougar's but wolves. And so they'll find a
Speaker 3: gnarly spot in these just giant piles of logs and
Speaker 3: going to there. I've seen them in hollowed out stump
Speaker 3: rock crevices, slash piles in cut areas, upturned Well, they
Speaker 3: just they need a nice bit of cover.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cool to have that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, how much do they got to worry about cougars
Speaker 4: and wolves?
Speaker 3: They have to worry about cougars. Ye, they have to
Speaker 3: worry about cougars places where there's lots of fishers. That's
Speaker 3: been the mature ones I've been.
Speaker 1: Fisher can outduk.
Speaker 3: They can, I mean, come on, Yeah, they're reasels.
Speaker 1: Man losing a lot of respect for links. Here a fisher,
Speaker 1: a fisher can whoop a Lynx.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. I've been to several more links mortalities where
Speaker 3: it was a fisher and one I can remember in particular.
Speaker 1: They can whoop porcupine.
Speaker 3: Yep, so can the links or a bobcat.
Speaker 1: The links will be all to do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's not a normal prey item, but they can
Speaker 3: do it. Yeah. I've seen where Lynx was curled up
Speaker 3: in the snow and then you see the fisher tracks
Speaker 3: come and it basically just jumped it in its bed.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: They are when you see them and they see links
Speaker 3: look big. A lot of that's just linky ness and
Speaker 3: there they're so fuzzy, especially in the summer. Their average
Speaker 3: weight is the same as a bobcat pretty much.
Speaker 2: They're just lankier.
Speaker 3: There's lankier and fuzzier.
Speaker 1: They look like something if it got a little bit
Speaker 1: of blunt force trauma, it's not gonna live. Yeah, cause
Speaker 1: it's just like they're like they're just so spread out
Speaker 1: and slender.
Speaker 3: And yeah, they're they're they're not meant to take a hit. Yeah,
Speaker 3: when you pick one up, it's like, whoa, this is
Speaker 3: like a little bird. I mean, they're meant to float
Speaker 3: on the snow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they're not climbers, Like, they don't go into trees much, right.
Speaker 3: Don't go into trees. But it's not like a daily
Speaker 3: thing by any means. Yeah, Yeah, they're more of they'll
Speaker 3: just bed right in the snow and some cover and.
Speaker 1: They don't throw it. They don't throw any claw mark
Speaker 1: on a track, right, it's just like a regular cougar bobcat.
Speaker 1: Like their claws are retracted.
Speaker 3: Well I mean like any feelid. Yeah, they're their claws
Speaker 3: retract and so often most often probably you're not going
Speaker 3: to see their their claws register. But if they're in
Speaker 3: slippery substrate and they need an.
Speaker 1: Electra grip, they'll pull see it come out.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. In fact, that that track, that picture you were
Speaker 3: talking about earlier, where there was a snowshoe, hair tracks
Speaker 3: and the links going after it. It was going up
Speaker 3: a steep bank and you can see it's it's closed.
Speaker 1: Click them out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like that guy in his toils climbing up
Speaker 3: John new Banks.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: You use them when you need them.
Speaker 1: So what, uh? Where? Tell me where Home Range Wildlife is?
Speaker 1: Right now? So you have a nonprofit and this is
Speaker 1: all done as a nonprofit. The nonprofit has employees. You're
Speaker 1: one of the employees of nonprofit. Yeah, what is uh?
Speaker 1: You know, we've kind of followed you through your career
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, are you guys like in in
Speaker 1: We're gonna make it? Is it? You don't know what
Speaker 1: you're gonna be doing in five years?
Speaker 3: We know what we want to be doing in five years.
Speaker 3: We've got, you know, all sorts of plans.
Speaker 1: I mean, is Home Range Wildlife viable?
Speaker 3: We are according to the little like non start you're
Speaker 3: starting a nonprofit. Take this quiz with your board to
Speaker 3: see where you're at you're starting. Yeah, yeah, we are
Speaker 3: still in the struggle phase, which basically means we are
Speaker 3: I mean, it's hard work. We are having to hustle
Speaker 3: big time. Yeah, oh yeah, big time. So we're it's
Speaker 3: not like we're just cruising financially. We're in the hustle phase,
Speaker 3: but that is not stopping us. So right now there's
Speaker 3: three of us that are full time, so co founder
Speaker 3: and I and a super badass woman who who started
Speaker 3: on the Links project and we've just we've kept her on. Uh.
Speaker 3: And then we've got seasonal texts, so we've got some
Speaker 3: seasonal texts. We wrap community scientists into our work, so
Speaker 3: we've got community scientists that will go out and help
Speaker 3: with the backtrack portion, so we part of the study
Speaker 3: is not just coloring, it's also going out and tracking
Speaker 3: links and recording their exact really bind scale habitat use.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you explain that backtracking because you don't want to
Speaker 1: bump them exactly. Backtracking ain't as fun as forward track.
Speaker 3: Well, if you're less likely to see the animal, it
Speaker 3: is still fun.
Speaker 1: Picture, but you know you kind of want to be like,
Speaker 1: let's just go after it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, but then we're messing up the data, right,
Speaker 3: and then you spook it exactly.
Speaker 1: It starts evading you, right.
Speaker 3: And so part of what we're looking at also is
Speaker 3: from reading the tracks what they're doing behaviorally, because that
Speaker 3: can help us figure out, Okay, of the habitats that
Speaker 3: they'll use for various things. Where are they hunting, where
Speaker 3: they trying to hunt, where they're actually making kills, where
Speaker 3: they're hunting and they're successful. That is like the best
Speaker 3: of the best.
Speaker 1: When they kill a snow issue, do they mop that
Speaker 1: whole thing up or do they leave something behind?
Speaker 3: They will usually mop it up, except maybe a foot
Speaker 3: or two the guts and for whatever reason, a patch
Speaker 3: of the of the hide from the back. And then
Speaker 3: I'll often have like hemorrhaging in it. You'll see where
Speaker 3: it was I see. Sometimes usually they'll eat it, especially
Speaker 3: if there's not a lot of snowshoe hairs around. They
Speaker 3: may cash it to save something for later, but usually
Speaker 3: they're just eating it.
Speaker 1: When you find a link scat and the winter, is
Speaker 1: it white because the snowshoe hair hair.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has white hair in it, but it's not
Speaker 3: like it's still yeah still dark. Yeah, that meat, the
Speaker 3: meat makes a really dark scat, especially the organ.
Speaker 1: You'll be on the tofts. You'll see that it's white.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can. If you picked it up and looked
Speaker 3: at it, you'd see it was white hair.
Speaker 1: White hair inside there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little chunks of bone, little chunks of bone
Speaker 3: toenails and stuff.
Speaker 1: So explain again where you guys are at on like
Speaker 1: the long term viability. You're struggling the struggle phase results
Speaker 1: kick out struggle.
Speaker 3: But I would say it's clear that we're We've got
Speaker 3: a lot of momentum and a lot of support from agencies,
Speaker 3: our community. We're partnering with the university on the project,
Speaker 3: so we've got a master's student on the project. But
Speaker 3: it's just it's hard to raise money for a nonprofit
Speaker 3: and we're not like the normal This isn't the normal path.
Speaker 3: Usually wildlife research is done by universities or the agencies,
Speaker 3: and so this is there are there are other organizations
Speaker 3: that do it, but this is somewhat unique and so
Speaker 3: we're really lucky that we are partnering with agencies and
Speaker 3: the universities. But a large part of our money also
Speaker 3: comes from fundraising, and so that's that's kind of a
Speaker 3: whole new.
Speaker 4: Who's using all the data you're collect Are you turning
Speaker 4: it over to the US Fish and Wildlife so's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's a huge part of our mission is
Speaker 3: to be doing research that is address seeing what we
Speaker 3: see is really urgent conservation issues in our area. And
Speaker 3: so this whole project is geared towards having results that
Speaker 3: can inform land management and LINKS conservation because for LINKS,
Speaker 3: a large part of LINKS conservation is habitat conservation.
Speaker 1: But can home range wildlife exists as just a LINKS
Speaker 1: research org or at some point you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: jump into something else.
Speaker 3: I could. I would love to make this a really
Speaker 3: long term project because there's a lot of value in
Speaker 3: those long term data data sets. And that's also another one.
Speaker 3: A part another part of our values is to be
Speaker 3: an organization that is really boots on the ground and
Speaker 3: have our research and biology be really based in the
Speaker 3: naturalist skills that we have. This is not universally true,
Speaker 3: but there's a trend towards a lot more modeling and
Speaker 3: the sort of you know, office based research, which is
Speaker 3: really valuable, but it can't be at the expense of
Speaker 3: people who are out there on the landscape and who
Speaker 3: are good naturalists and who are there long term.
Speaker 1: Well, the model with without your work, the model is
Speaker 1: the modelers don't have anything to do. I mean, your
Speaker 1: work is what's going to tell them is the home range.
Speaker 3: Of a female It compliments, right, It compliments, but there's.
Speaker 1: Also like they have to have something to plug in.
Speaker 3: They have to have something to plug in. But there's
Speaker 3: a lot out there that can plug plug in, and
Speaker 3: there's a lot out there like right now, like I
Speaker 3: was saying, this is sort of this whole new habitat
Speaker 3: habitat paradigm with all the burns, and so it is
Speaker 3: so important that we're not only building models based on
Speaker 3: what we think we already know, but we're going back
Speaker 3: to the drawing board and learning from the landscape and
Speaker 3: the links and again long term, that's that's a I
Speaker 3: think something that's also being somewhat lost in wild life
Speaker 3: is there's so much turnover and people are hopping around.
Speaker 3: That's sort of through line for an area where you've
Speaker 3: got bios that have been there for decades and have
Speaker 3: seen changes and been noting things. We're losing that somewhat
Speaker 3: and we do not want to see that happen in
Speaker 3: the met how we're sort of the generation of biologists
Speaker 3: that have been there for decades and know that landscape
Speaker 3: intimately and have seen it change and are just good
Speaker 3: naturalists that like to be out there, and they're the
Speaker 3: ones that are going to notice I'm not hearing as
Speaker 3: many X y Z bird or you know, we're not.
Speaker 3: They're just noticing those changes. And that takes being out
Speaker 3: there and being there long term. And so that's what
Speaker 3: we want home range to be because we're losing some
Speaker 3: of these these long term bios. They're retiring, and so
Speaker 3: we want to make sure that there's somebody always watching
Speaker 3: there in the value.
Speaker 1: You know what I could use some help with. I
Speaker 1: was telling you, Mike Gright before we started recording. They
Speaker 1: have everything south of us. They have as this Lynx
Speaker 1: recovery area, okay, and there's all these separate trapping regulations
Speaker 1: in the Links recovery area. Now, I've had furbear biologists
Speaker 1: tell me that most of the stuff in the Lynx
Speaker 1: recovery area has never had a lynx and never will
Speaker 1: have a lynx. It's completely wrong. Habitat.
Speaker 3: Are you talking about like Yellowstone that area that well, no,
Speaker 3: it's everything around that.
Speaker 1: It's huge, everything south of town everything, Okay. A friend
Speaker 1: of mine in the four Service who's doing a lot
Speaker 1: of Links work, he even said, you know, our understanding
Speaker 1: of what Link's habitat is has gotten very refined since
Speaker 1: that went into effect. He pictures sometimes down the road
Speaker 1: that could be eased up because it's just not representative
Speaker 1: of Link's habitat. He said. If they go to do that,
Speaker 1: that'll get the hell litigated out of it. When they
Speaker 1: come out and say, you know what, we were wrong.
Speaker 1: This is Link's habitat, that's not Link's habitat. It'll get
Speaker 1: litigated because people will want to keep restrictions in place.
Speaker 1: The debate will get weaponized. I would love if you
Speaker 1: guys came in collared a couple links so people could
Speaker 1: see where they hang out and where they don't because
Speaker 1: they're not down in the juniper in rock piles. Yeah
Speaker 1: you agree or don't?
Speaker 3: I mean, let me explain that with a little more nuance.
Speaker 1: So links, we'll, kay, I give you one more tidbit,
Speaker 1: let's get it. I have a friend who's a lion hunter.
Speaker 1: He's been hunting lions here twenty years. Okay, hunts all
Speaker 1: over the state in twenty years. He's yet to cut
Speaker 1: a LINKS track in this area.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, unless you think he doesn't think there's any links.
Speaker 1: When he goes to Region one, he sees more LINKS
Speaker 1: tracks than bobcats and mountain lions. Combined. So this is
Speaker 1: not a guy that doesn't say there's no links tracks.
Speaker 1: He's like, the Links Recovery area ain't got links.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I was talking earlier that there's five populations. There's
Speaker 3: six areas that have been designated as by Vision wild
Speaker 3: Life Services critical habitat, and that one is not. There's
Speaker 3: not a known population there. Now there have been intermittent sightings,
Speaker 3: you know, but there's not a known breeding population there.
Speaker 3: It's possible that in the future there could be. It's possible.
Speaker 3: The other thing is that wild links are fairly specialized
Speaker 3: in their habitat, meaning boreal forest. They move so much
Speaker 3: that they'll they'll use just about anything to move through. So,
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm not a land manager down there. I
Speaker 3: don't know the area and all that, so I can't
Speaker 3: say too much about it, but I.
Speaker 1: Could say this. I could say, Hey, you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to set certain kind of traps because little children
Speaker 1: generally aren't lost. But a little child could get lost anywhere,
Speaker 1: and you shouldn't have that set because how can we
Speaker 1: say that a little child wouldn't get lost and get
Speaker 1: caught in that set. I don't know. Maybe I've heard
Speaker 1: of little children getting lost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know. You have to take it up
Speaker 3: with fish and wildlife.
Speaker 1: That's no, I'm taking that with you because you got
Speaker 1: to go collar some links and even though there aren't
Speaker 1: you there, maybe cut one loose and see what it does.
Speaker 3: All right, I'll try trapping anywhere.
Speaker 1: That's all, Okay, good? This is I have a huge
Speaker 1: list of gripes that I'd like to get addressed. This
Speaker 1: is like low you know. My first one is Universal
Speaker 1: Hunter's orange policy. Just a hat somewhere below that is
Speaker 1: his links for covering unit issue. But it's some day.
Speaker 1: I'm going to get to all this. All right, I'm
Speaker 1: going to take it up.
Speaker 5: Look for your letter.
Speaker 1: I have a problem. I think I know where that
Speaker 1: letter is going to wind up. Where's the recycling been?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: How do people find you and support your organization? I
Speaker 1: love I love what you guys doing. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like and it really resonates with listeners who love it
Speaker 1: that people are out on the land, find it out
Speaker 1: studying wildlife. Right, everybody's got their like myths about stuff
Speaker 1: and what lives were and what don't live where, and
Speaker 1: to have someone come and say here's what lives there
Speaker 1: here's how many, here's what they do. It's valuable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's information, right, yeah, like real.
Speaker 3: Information exactly, and it's well. Yeah, So the work that
Speaker 3: we do is research, and so that I think sometimes
Speaker 3: is hard for the broader public to connect with because
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel like I'm directly this organization is directly
Speaker 3: helping that animal. We're doing the research. That's one step,
Speaker 3: but a really important step in knowing how to manage
Speaker 3: and conserve species. That's slightly more abstract. But I feel
Speaker 3: like in my short experience running a nonprofit that and
Speaker 3: after last year's experience with doing the Traffic Cat fundraiser
Speaker 3: with you, I feel like I just have so much
Speaker 3: gratitude for the hunting and fishing community because I feel
Speaker 3: like you guys get it, and that that fundraiser was
Speaker 3: such a success because people really put out and saved us.
Speaker 3: You guys really saved us last year from having just
Speaker 3: her old ass LEDs just completely die and that would
Speaker 3: just shut us down. That's such crux equipment. And so
Speaker 3: the fact that this audience just gets that research and
Speaker 3: learning about wildlife populations and managing the populations is really valuable,
Speaker 3: not just saving an individual animal.
Speaker 2: Is.
Speaker 3: That just gives me a lot of hope that there's
Speaker 3: there's this audience that really understands that.
Speaker 1: Can I tell you something. My brother, who's a he's
Speaker 1: a fisheries researcher in Alaska told me he was one
Speaker 1: time describing me the difference between Alaska and the Lower
Speaker 1: forty eight, as he said, in the Lower forty eight,
Speaker 1: you're kind of you're in conservation phase, preservation phase, right,
Speaker 1: he said. One of the things that makes me in
Speaker 1: research and Alaska different is we're still in how discovery
Speaker 1: phase in a lot of ways, like where are sam
Speaker 1: you know, you know, like where are salmon? How many
Speaker 1: salmon are there? You know? What are these things doing?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And what's cool is you're in a case of you're
Speaker 1: facilitating discovery. Right. It's like there's this thing, there's this
Speaker 1: cat that lives here. How many I don't know, where
Speaker 1: do they live? I don't know, how do they use
Speaker 1: a landscape? I don't know. It's like discovery science, right,
Speaker 1: it's not sort of you know, it's not specifically saving something.
Speaker 1: It's just trying to like understand our world, you know.
Speaker 3: But I would I mean, I would say, especially in
Speaker 3: this case, it is how do we save this species?
Speaker 1: It leads to that. Yeah, it leads to that. Granted
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to blittle it, but I'm saying it's
Speaker 1: like you're discovering things about right, You're discovering about how
Speaker 1: animals relate to their environment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2: It is. It's this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, things have changed out there in the last twenty years,
Speaker 3: and so we're trying to catch up and learn that.
Speaker 4: As far as saving them goes, if you had to
Speaker 4: make a prediction like state of the links in the
Speaker 4: lower forty eight whatever, like twenty years or fifty years,
Speaker 4: like what would you be comfortable saying like.
Speaker 1: They needed to burn more stuff in two thousand and six.
Speaker 4: Like are they gonna? Are they doing well? Is it
Speaker 4: bad news?
Speaker 2: Is it good news?
Speaker 3: It all depends on what we do. If we do nothing,
Speaker 3: it's not looking great. Especially for Washington, it is not
Speaker 3: looking great. Yeah, because of these I mean these just
Speaker 3: sweeping fires are just The worry is that they burn
Speaker 3: enough in a short enough time frame. Then that's skewing
Speaker 3: the landscape towards that recently burned there's not much of
Speaker 3: that structure that we need type of landscape. Whereas if
Speaker 3: we can just have patches that burn here, patches that
Speaker 3: burn here, then you've always got some of something out there,
Speaker 3: and you've got enough of that structure, that forest structure
Speaker 3: that links and hairs need that you're supporting the population,
Speaker 3: but you've got enough burning going on that you are
Speaker 3: reinstilling some resilience onto that landscape because all those those
Speaker 3: little burns are acting like little speed bumps for subsequent fires.
Speaker 3: And so if we can figure out ways to if
Speaker 3: we understand how links use burned habitat, then we know
Speaker 3: how much of that they need and how much we
Speaker 3: can spare for reinstilling that resilience to fire or yeah,
Speaker 3: because it's it feels like opposing objectives when you talk
Speaker 3: about conserving links habitat because they need that thick forest.
Speaker 3: That's a lot of fuels. And so when you're trying
Speaker 3: to trying to save links habitat that short term while
Speaker 3: simultaneously slow fires just for the ecology of the area
Speaker 3: to bring that that that fire resiliency back and to
Speaker 3: save links habitat over the long term, it feels like
Speaker 3: you're in a rock and a hard place. But if
Speaker 3: we can find that sweet spot where we've got enough
Speaker 3: habitat for links now and we've got enough firebreak and
Speaker 3: resiliency out there to save it long term, Well, then
Speaker 3: that's going to be progress for Links.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. Back to how people can find out information and
Speaker 1: be supportive. We got the traffic cat thing.
Speaker 3: Well hell yeah yeah. Well so if you want to
Speaker 3: find out more just about home range in general, and
Speaker 3: like I said, we've got we've got this research, but
Speaker 3: we also want to help address the issue in wildlife
Speaker 3: research where young, you know, new biologists are sort of
Speaker 3: a lot of the culture of this field is that
Speaker 3: you just sort of get thrown out there and you're
Speaker 3: having to learn on the job, and that does a
Speaker 3: couple of things. It's not safe. It's often costing a
Speaker 3: project equipment because you're out there snowmobiling and trying to
Speaker 3: keep up with the rest of the crew and you've
Speaker 3: never done it and you're just more likely to wreck
Speaker 3: things like that. So that's safety and equipment, and it
Speaker 3: means if you're trying to learn just how to do
Speaker 3: the basic skills, then you're you're not maximizing how much
Speaker 3: data you're getting in and it's not going to be
Speaker 3: as quality. So we're trying to offer or we are
Speaker 3: offering field skills courses and so those are offered in
Speaker 3: the summer and they're they're really cool. They're mammals focused
Speaker 3: right now. But for example, you can sign up for
Speaker 3: a course where you're doing everything from how to set
Speaker 3: cameras to mammal or any animal track and sign. That's
Speaker 3: such an important skill, just being able to read animals
Speaker 3: sign and the tracks and knowing your scat things like that.
Speaker 3: Oh it's yeah, I love.
Speaker 1: One of our guys of visual identification of no any
Speaker 1: just animals.
Speaker 3: Animals. We're starting there. Okay, that's doable, and then that
Speaker 3: that session culminates with we get road killed deer and
Speaker 3: we mock up mortality sites from different predators. Because a
Speaker 3: lot of mammals, there's a lot of work in research
Speaker 3: that involves being able to go to a mortality site
Speaker 3: or kill site and know what happened, who killed it,
Speaker 3: all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: Do you guys do snowmobile recovery and stuff like that too.
Speaker 3: We've done a winter skills course that had snowmobiling, trailering,
Speaker 3: avalanche awareness, that sort of thing really, and then we're
Speaker 3: doing a a trapping course coupled with a chemical immobilization,
Speaker 3: so all that drug stuff that we were talking about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, small classes, I'm going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah about you know, ten to twenty people. So
Speaker 3: those those are a way that people can learn those
Speaker 3: skills before they're on the job.
Speaker 1: And have you had agencies send out students ever.
Speaker 3: Yeah really yeah, yeah, we've had everything from you.
Speaker 1: Guys, probably got a lot to teach. When it comes
Speaker 1: to the wintertime, like time trapping, winter time, snowmobiling, when
Speaker 1: time survival. Yeah, it's just it's like an arena of
Speaker 1: consequence in the mountains.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, stuff can go bad.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah quick, yep, real quick. So anyway, so there's
Speaker 3: that sort of education part, and then we've also got
Speaker 3: our community science angle, which is sort of built around
Speaker 3: the knowledge that we can do all this research, but
Speaker 3: if we're not communicating it to the public, especially the
Speaker 3: communities that are going to be impacted by any possible
Speaker 3: management outcomes, If people don't understand and support it, then
Speaker 3: that's going to really decrease what you can do out
Speaker 3: there as far as management and conservation. So we want
Speaker 3: people to understand what we're doing and to sort of
Speaker 3: help facilitate that. We've got like a bear co existence
Speaker 3: program and some research going on that community scientists are
Speaker 3: helping with. So we've got kind of those three different prongs.
Speaker 3: All that is to say, if you want to learn
Speaker 3: more about that, you can go to home range dot org.
Speaker 3: All right, and we have an Instagram which is home
Speaker 3: range Wildlife Dot or is there a dot? I don't
Speaker 3: know home.
Speaker 1: Range Wildlife you'll find it. Yeah, and then are you
Speaker 1: to explain for the last thing, explain traffic Cat And yeah, So.
Speaker 3: I eluded it because I'm it was. It saved our
Speaker 3: asses last year, and I am so grateful that this
Speaker 3: community gets it. So we've got a fundraiser and we're
Speaker 3: doing it again. A because it's super fun and b
Speaker 3: because we find ourselves again with some desperate needs. People
Speaker 3: who hunt and fish know how important equipment is and
Speaker 3: how fast it can break down when you're using it hard,
Speaker 3: and we use our equipment really hard. Just as an example, we,
Speaker 3: because of traffic Cat, bought two new snowmobiles last year.
Speaker 3: That meant we weren't riding twenty year old held together
Speaker 3: with baling twine and duct tape snowmobiles and we were
Speaker 3: using two new snowmobiles. And that just that is that
Speaker 3: is everything being able to get out there in the winter.
Speaker 3: We had those for one month and they each have
Speaker 3: two thousand miles on them, so they're getting a lot
Speaker 3: of use. So we're thinking ahead about just our fleet
Speaker 3: management and that this year a loan, those sleds are
Speaker 3: going to get another six thousand miles on them. But
Speaker 3: we've also expanded our crew and so some of our
Speaker 3: crew is back to using the old sleds and I'm
Speaker 3: just sort of crossing my fingers every day that nothing
Speaker 3: happens there, and so we desperately need a new sled
Speaker 3: so that it's the backtracking crew that we've got a
Speaker 3: separate crew that's in charge of the tracking so that
Speaker 3: they're not fifty miles out and having a snowmobile issue.
Speaker 3: Not only would that be a bad day, but then
Speaker 3: that part of the study just kind of shuts down.
Speaker 3: That's how important these are. We also find ourselves happily
Speaker 3: in need of more callers. You're going into this, we
Speaker 3: thought maybe we'll catch one links this season, maybe we'll
Speaker 3: catch two. Well, now we've deployed all four of those callers,
Speaker 3: and we know that there are more links that we
Speaker 3: had hoped living in our study area, and so we
Speaker 3: need more callers because more callers more information. It just
Speaker 3: makes the study that much more confident in what we
Speaker 3: can say. We just we every one of these callers
Speaker 3: we learned so freaking much from so we need to
Speaker 3: get more callers. Our trailer is a sad story. That
Speaker 3: thing's falling apart. I mean, it's just it's just this
Speaker 3: basic equipment that allows us to do what we can
Speaker 3: do and gets us the information that we need that
Speaker 3: we find ourselves needing to fundraise again. And so we're
Speaker 3: we're redoing Traffic cat. The game here is that over
Speaker 3: the next three months of our trapping season, so we'll
Speaker 3: be trapping starting well today, they're out there checking our
Speaker 3: first bait. Through March, we'll be trapping where if you,
Speaker 3: let's see, for every one hundred dollars that you donate
Speaker 3: to Trafficict, you get a trap set in your name,
Speaker 3: and we'll keep track of all that you get that
Speaker 3: trap set, and then throughout our season you'll be getting
Speaker 3: like behind the scenes content and so every week we'll
Speaker 3: be sending out videos and stuff of just what it's
Speaker 3: like on the trap line, any cool camera footage that
Speaker 3: we get, stuff like that and that's super fun. Then
Speaker 3: if your set catches the links, you win fame and glory.
Speaker 3: We're gonna have two hundred and fifty dollars first Light
Speaker 3: Gift Certificate and Steven Manila will announce winners on his
Speaker 3: social media will announce it. That's where you'll get your
Speaker 3: fame and so it's it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Oh and I'll send you a video. It'd be like,
Speaker 1: what's that service that they have where you send videos?
Speaker 1: You buy them?
Speaker 2: Cameo?
Speaker 1: Cameo. Yeah, you know, dude, the guy what's the name
Speaker 1: for New York Congress Santos? Santos got voted out and
Speaker 1: the next day it turns up on Cameo. It's a
Speaker 1: good it's a good grift if you can get it.
Speaker 1: I'm not on Cameo, but I'll send them a video.
Speaker 1: I'll be like, hey, thanks someone that.
Speaker 3: Okay, there you go, folks. How cool is that?
Speaker 1: Soethill record perfect.
Speaker 3: The other cool thing we've got this year, we've got
Speaker 3: little in pats that we can make a pop print
Speaker 3: from the from the.
Speaker 1: Oh really yeah you can?
Speaker 3: Yeah that's great, man, which is mostly just gonna look
Speaker 3: like a fuzzy mitten.
Speaker 1: But Spencer can get that tattooed on him, then there
Speaker 1: we go. He's like looking for something to get tattooed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I get a links pop friend. Yeah. So winning's fun.
Speaker 3: It makes a really cool gift. We had a lot
Speaker 3: of people getting it for their kids and it just
Speaker 3: it It means so much for our project, and it's yeah,
Speaker 3: we we rely heavily on this fundraiser and so yeah,
Speaker 3: we just appreciate everybody.
Speaker 1: So people don't want to get involved in Trappic Cat,
Speaker 1: go where same home range.
Speaker 3: Go to home range dot org and there's a banner
Speaker 3: up on the top of the website. You just click
Speaker 3: that and it'll give you a little more information and
Speaker 3: you can donate there and you'll get put into the
Speaker 3: trap cat system and start getting videos and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Excellent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty fun.
Speaker 1: This is the fifth time you've been on Yeah, okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: better have some adventures for the sixth time. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: when you come back next year, Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1: And then we'll start talking about my little problem south here,
Speaker 1: which might not be a problem. If you go and
Speaker 1: find that there's all that, you know, it's all habitat,
Speaker 1: I'll be like, cool, I understand. I'm all for it,
Speaker 1: But if it winds up being that it was a
Speaker 1: little willy nilly, a little reflexive, then that then then
Speaker 1: that's an annoyance to me. And in the meantime we'll
Speaker 1: work on that letter.
Speaker 3: Maybe I think willy nilly is probably not it.
Speaker 1: Maybe over ambitious over or or just.
Speaker 3: Overlate, more cautious than you would do. Not sure, not
Speaker 3: willing nilly, though, I don't think they're willing nilly.
Speaker 1: Okay, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Sentiment, Yeah you are,
Speaker 1: uh you love them links?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I do.
Speaker 5: I do.
Speaker 3: I just sometimes for you know, for women in wildlife,
Speaker 3: the stereotype is, oh they love wolves, they're obsessed with wolves,
Speaker 3: or they.
Speaker 1: Love links, and you know, is that a stereotype.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1: Like that you're not able to look at it like
Speaker 1: a cold meanness.
Speaker 3: I guess a little bit. Not not that anybody wants
Speaker 3: to be looking them with a cold meanness, but I
Speaker 3: think for women sometimes that is seen as the inspiration
Speaker 3: behind Yeah, I've had it. I've sort of experienced that
Speaker 3: myself or somebody they hear, oh you're working with wolves,
Speaker 3: Oh you love like you know they're picturing you as
Speaker 3: a little girl drawing wolves on your binder at school
Speaker 3: and stuff. I would say that links are cool animal.
Speaker 3: It's also they're a hard animal to study, and that's
Speaker 3: intriguing to me. I love the mountains, that's where I
Speaker 3: have to be. I love the boreal force ecosystem, and
Speaker 3: I'm fascinated by the problem of how we can conserve
Speaker 3: them in the face of increasing megafires. And i love
Speaker 3: wildfire wildlife ecology. So it's not as Yeah, I just
Speaker 3: like to be clear that it's not just that I
Speaker 3: love links or something.
Speaker 1: Thank you for coming in, Thanks for having me home Range.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Wildlife Traffic Cat program, get into it. We're gonna do
Speaker 1: big announcements about who wins the traffic Cat Okay.
Speaker 4: Will you still do a video?
Speaker 1: If it's my kids, Oh yeah, I'll t to tell them.
Speaker 1: Let's tell him. At first, they'll be like, what really
Speaker 1: is you only got to send me a video? Brooklyn
Speaker 1: Nicks coming down? You're still gonna make it back to
Speaker 1: school or did you get some bag it for the day?
Speaker 5: Now I can make it back.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, class, you gotta get.
Speaker 5: Early grad English early what early grad English. It's like
Speaker 5: my other English classes. I'm graduating early.
Speaker 1: Why are graduating early?
Speaker 5: Is it all like school?
Speaker 1: Oh? They're letting you the cutting you loose early? How early?
Speaker 5: I get out in five days for good?
Speaker 1: Really? Whoa, that's graduations fantastic. Oh that's cool.
Speaker 2: Then you go right into taxi army full time.
Speaker 1: So you need these schools kind of Yeah, you should
Speaker 1: have put that into your pitch. Oh, okay, that's cool.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna enter the workforce? Yep, congratulations, good all right,
Speaker 1: Well thanks for coming down. Four six bone works. Yep,
Speaker 1: all right, thanks, good luck. Keep us posted on what's
Speaker 1: going on. I got another skull hanging in a cherry
Speaker 1: tree in my yard. You'll see it by the front
Speaker 1: door if you get by there and needs a good cleaning.
Speaker 1: I skinned it. Unfortunately it's okoduse.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna here's a question before we leave, will
Speaker 2: we do any skull like coyotes? Beaver's yeah, Pine Martins,
Speaker 2: lynx links.
Speaker 1: I'm a joking. I want When Karma was on before
Speaker 1: I was talking at how bad I wanted a Lynk skull,
Speaker 1: and someone from Canada sent me a link. Skoo. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to give it to Carmena for her collection.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: Cool, I don't want to. Uh, it would take a
Speaker 1: very trained, astute observer to tell that from a Bobcats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you could just say it's whatever. Yeah. I sent
Speaker 1: my buddy has he's a science teacher in Michigan. I
Speaker 1: send him a huge box of schools and he had
Speaker 1: his kids do the what do you call it? You know,
Speaker 1: like the there's a the idea. Yeah, but there's like
Speaker 1: a thing you what's the term, man, you key it
Speaker 1: or something?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like using a key to to figure out which
Speaker 3: school is which.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then we did where the ones that got
Speaker 1: it right got a prize. They were fun. Oh, they
Speaker 1: were phenomenal. He had like twenty some students and like
Speaker 1: I don't know everyone it was toms of them got it right,
Speaker 1: like a whole box of schools by using the key.
Speaker 1: Like I would just look at like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it looks like a.
Speaker 3: Well if it's a good key.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 1: I was impressed. Man, I'm gonna so I'm going to
Speaker 1: keep supplying little schools or to his students so they
Speaker 1: can check them out, all right, So you'll do any
Speaker 1: kind of school ye, all right, Okay, thank you very
Speaker 1: much for coming down.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Good luck with your business. I'm going to keep sending
Speaker 1: your business. I'm not using Brody services anymore. Nothing not
Speaker 1: hacking Brody. I just want to support. I want to
Speaker 1: support the business over here.
Speaker 4: I might start sending to her. I think you should
Speaker 4: raise your prices just a little bit.
Speaker 1: Also, yeah, it sounds like it, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that price right there. Now,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you envoys? Are you going
Speaker 1: to send? Uh? You know you could do? That's really convenient.
Speaker 1: I had someone I bought something near day from someone
Speaker 1: that sends you a a like a little scan code,
Speaker 1: and then that scan code pulls up Venmo. Have you
Speaker 1: tried something like that?
Speaker 5: No, if I use Venmo, you need.
Speaker 1: To get this whatever the hell he's got. I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is. It made it so easy.
Speaker 6: I think she's waiting for her business manager.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it was just like, man, I don't have vembo.
Speaker 1: By grabbed my wife's phone and open that code up
Speaker 1: and was able to just hit a couple of things
Speaker 1: and payment over. Super easy, super convenient. I don't know
Speaker 1: what it is, but trust me, just the thing out
Speaker 1: there that makes payment a breeze.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's probably Venmo.
Speaker 1: No, it is out yeah it is. But I don't
Speaker 1: know how they did this thing. It was great because
Speaker 1: I don't have them much of my wife's annoyance I
Speaker 1: had not. All right, thanks, everybody, talk you soon.
Speaker 10: It's a story of a man the steward of the
Speaker 10: land fixed on griev So I'll try to be brief.
Speaker 10: He's written Forefield and streaming all the other magazines. Kids
Speaker 10: more about truth than common believe about already know this
Speaker 10: buddy Astricken noses from beating the meat of a uncooked
Speaker 10: bear about already know. Then you can find him and
Speaker 10: Bozeman or hunting some mountains somewhere here. That's Seemingnella. He's
Speaker 10: a fine fella. It's dreading middle of like a shaggy
Speaker 10: Manson mellow. He's not very in the sing. Aka fella.
Speaker 10: I've been reads like no time, No fella.
Speaker 1: He's got some.
Speaker 10: Good folks under them media the umbrella. He's a fine
Speaker 10: fella that he's written half a dozen bucks. He's a
Speaker 10: pretty good cook, married to a fence that won't seem
Speaker 10: to mope. Loves his home, steak tails, from Twins Lake, Michigan,
Speaker 10: where they picked up those quoats in Alaska on a
Speaker 10: skiff for with Doug and the Drifts with his main
Speaker 10: man Gianni's food tellers on the mountain, trying to score
Speaker 10: in a double Remy Warren or Old Chalcey and Lady
Speaker 10: Bears Smellings. That's Steven mmella. He's a fine fellaw's dreading
Speaker 10: the love like a shaggy Maine's a fella. He's not
Speaker 10: not afraid to sing at a fella. His lie it
Speaker 10: reads like can no time, no fella. He's got some
Speaker 10: good folks into the media umbrella. He's a fine fellow
Speaker 10: that manella, Dude, I want to talk dip, get him
Speaker 10: stop fast. Hell, that's half the content of the media
Speaker 10: to podcast classing from a knop trying to clear out
Speaker 10: his head going from the meet you. He could have
Speaker 10: been dead, but that's the story for another day.
Speaker 1: That's Deephen Mellow.
Speaker 10: He's a fine fellows spreading a little love like us
Speaker 10: shagging fans the mellow. He's not afraid to sing.
Speaker 3: Got the fella.
Speaker 10: His lif fit reads like I can no time, no fella.
Speaker 10: He's got some good books under them umbrella he's Vambela,
Speaker 10: that HeLa. He's Fambelddela Doo doo doo
Speaker 3: Do