Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything brought to you by first Light. When
Speaker 1: I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds,
Speaker 1: no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer,
Speaker 1: no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at
Speaker 1: first light dot com. That's f I R S T
Speaker 1: L I T E dot com. All right, Join today
Speaker 1: by Mike Bowdenchuck professional wildlife biologist forty five years professional
Speaker 1: experience and private, state and federal government services.
Speaker 2: Are you recently retired from.
Speaker 1: APHIS that's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Services.
Speaker 2: That's right, yep, you spent how many years doing that?
Speaker 3: I've been plenty four years with APHIS. I've spent about
Speaker 3: ten in the private sector and four with state government
Speaker 3: before that.
Speaker 1: Okay, and currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist.
Speaker 1: That's correct. But your area of expertise, and this is
Speaker 1: how you were recommended to us by many people, not
Speaker 1: only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in
Speaker 1: predator prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management.
Speaker 3: You bet Aphis does a lot of predator control around
Speaker 3: the state, or predator predation control. Actually, we don't control
Speaker 3: numbers as much as we do the ones that are
Speaker 3: actually killing.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: But I've done that really my whole career.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: But besides, when you were a DJ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that was a long time.
Speaker 2: What was up with that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been in high school. I had a job.
Speaker 3: I think they just needed somebody who could read and
Speaker 3: talk and I could do both.
Speaker 1: So so you were a DJ. I was a DJ
Speaker 1: for a couple of years. Yeah, what stage?
Speaker 3: You grew up in New Mexico. I lived in New
Speaker 3: Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country
Speaker 3: after that.
Speaker 1: So as a kid you cut your teeth like hunting
Speaker 1: and trapping.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did actually growing up. I got to hunt
Speaker 3: deer back when we had a lot of deer right
Speaker 3: in New Mexico in the seventies. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of deer, and I got to do that. I started
Speaker 3: trapping when I was eleven years old. So what year
Speaker 3: to that had been, oh, man sixty eight? Oh okay,
Speaker 3: So yeah, so I've been trapping for a long time and.
Speaker 2: Then eventually got into that kind of work professional.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. When I went to college, that's all
Speaker 3: I wanted to do was become a wildlife biologist. I
Speaker 3: wanted to work outdoors, and that's when I graduated college.
Speaker 3: Jobs with game Department were on a hiring freeze, and
Speaker 3: a job came open with the predator control program in
Speaker 3: New Mexico, so I started with that outfit. After four years,
Speaker 3: I was getting hunters on the side and went into
Speaker 3: the private sector, guiding and managing ranches in Texas, doing
Speaker 3: some consulting work down in Old Mexico and Sonora. Well
Speaker 3: you did, yeah, yeah, there was a center for desert ecology.
Speaker 3: We built a zoo down there in Norma, seou and
Speaker 3: moved some animals into it, captured pronghorn in San Lui.
Speaker 1: Suppos.
Speaker 3: Did a lot of a lot of work in Mexico
Speaker 3: over the years. After my kids were born, I decided
Speaker 3: maybe I needed a job that had health insurance.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: I came back to government work in Mississippi as a
Speaker 3: beaver trapper, and then South Dakota. Spent thirteen years in Utah,
Speaker 3: mostly predator management. The deer herds crash there in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety two ninety three, and I moved in there just
Speaker 3: after that, so we started doing preader control for domestic
Speaker 3: sheep protection, but also from you deer pronghorn protection, big
Speaker 3: horn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep
Speaker 3: into it, studying predator pray relationships.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me hit you with one that wasn't expecting
Speaker 1: to ask you about. But I was just reading about
Speaker 1: it yesterday. Have you spent much time working in Alaska.
Speaker 3: I've been up to Alaska several times, but never never,
Speaker 3: you know, a month at a time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of weeks here and there. There's a
Speaker 1: little there's a it was a constantly a brew hanl
Speaker 1: ask about predator management around coyote stuff. But I was
Speaker 1: reading about some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bear
Speaker 1: control to try to re establish a caribou herd that
Speaker 1: had gone through like a ninety four percent decline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that it is a worldwide phenomenon. I was an
Speaker 3: invited speaker at the first European Trapping Conference and they
Speaker 3: were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer.
Speaker 3: But what do we do with that? Yeah, I'm working
Speaker 3: with a group in Alberta that's trying to to standardize
Speaker 3: predation management to protect wildlife. That that deal in Alaska
Speaker 3: is a long brewing controversy going way back. But but
Speaker 3: predators can put prey in a predator pit. When the
Speaker 3: prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't
Speaker 3: drop off, that's when we have a predator pit. And
Speaker 3: that's what they're trying to reverse in Alaska. It's interesting
Speaker 3: because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually
Speaker 3: support subsistence use yep. And so it's a real tussle
Speaker 3: between our well, are you eating caribou or can you
Speaker 3: eat a bear?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I got it, got it.
Speaker 3: But in those areas they are doing bear removals and
Speaker 3: some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time.
Speaker 3: The bears are hard on them and it's working right.
Speaker 3: We've seen some of those caribou herds and will chatting
Speaker 3: the herds up about twenty five percent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1: That was the one that had the ninety four percent
Speaker 1: decline and now it's kind of coming out of it.
Speaker 1: And there's a naturally cyclical element to it. But I
Speaker 1: think you can probably take you can probably take the bottoms,
Speaker 1: You can probably round the bottoms off with control or
Speaker 1: decrease the timeline.
Speaker 3: Right in Wyoming, prong horn will die in a severe winter.
Speaker 3: We know that that's the limiting factor winter. But do
Speaker 3: we want to wait seven years for them to come
Speaker 3: back up or do we want to bump them up
Speaker 3: in two or three years? You know that's when we're
Speaker 3: talking about predation management on wildlife.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what pratory have you spent the most time on
Speaker 2: in your.
Speaker 3: Career, without a doubt, coyotes, right. I actually trapped coyotes
Speaker 3: and hunting coyotes for fur when I was in college,
Speaker 3: back when college was cheap and fur was valuable, And
Speaker 3: I spent most of my time around coyote management and
Speaker 3: all the rest. But I spent a lot of time
Speaker 3: with mountain lions. I did postgraduate work on mountain lions
Speaker 3: in New Mexico and had hounds for thirty years, So
Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time online work.
Speaker 1: You know you had spent college, being when college was
Speaker 1: different amounts of money.
Speaker 2: I always tell people that this is no joke.
Speaker 1: Man. When I got out of high school, I didn't
Speaker 1: think I was going to go to college, got kicked
Speaker 1: around going to the army and then like decided to
Speaker 1: go to college. And I remember we had a community college.
Speaker 1: We called it thirteenth grade. And I went down there,
Speaker 1: and I'm not kidding you, man, I went down there
Speaker 1: and wrote a check for six hundred dollars at like
Speaker 1: a cashier window, Yeah, to pay my tuition. Yeah, my
Speaker 1: tuition was six hundred dollars for a semester, and I
Speaker 1: like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all
Speaker 1: talking about putting our kids going to college, knowing how
Speaker 1: expensive it is, I'm like six hundred bucks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, semester Ice little to Bob gat In in the
Speaker 3: spring of seventy nine for three hundred bucks and walked
Speaker 3: across campus with that check and paid off the last
Speaker 3: of that semester's mill.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's Those days are gone now,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: On Kyle's Man.
Speaker 1: Here's the conversation I have people all the time, is, uh,
Speaker 1: you get a guy, you know, you get a well
Speaker 1: meaning landowner, right, farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself,
Speaker 1: the ranch manager himself, the ranch himself, whatever, and they
Speaker 1: have the idea that like they want to help their
Speaker 1: dear population now, they want to increase their turkey population
Speaker 1: or whatever. And they'll occasionally in November shoot a kyo,
Speaker 1: right because they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: help out help Yeah. Or you'll say to a farmer
Speaker 1: you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there,
Speaker 1: we saw a couple kyles. You didn't shoot them, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you have this conversation You're like like, listen, man,
Speaker 1: I don't have any problem with you doing whatever you
Speaker 1: want to do. But that doesn't matter, right, Like, like
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff is so it's it's like timing
Speaker 1: and intensity dependent. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can you explain that a little bit from a professional
Speaker 1: perspective of when, like how do people kind of view
Speaker 1: predator control and what does predator control look like when
Speaker 1: it's done in a professional sense? Sure?
Speaker 3: And it's it is very very comp I don't want
Speaker 3: to go too far down a rabbit hole, but it's
Speaker 3: a deep rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: Sure, man, That's what I'm asking about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Predators impact prey in one of two different ways.
Speaker 3: The first one is how many get eaten? Right, And
Speaker 3: that's what we'd studied for fifty years. How many deer
Speaker 3: fons get eaten by coyotes and a deer adult deer
Speaker 3: get eaten by mountain lions and no kidding, decades of research.
Speaker 3: The very first wildlife monograph is about the Pants basin
Speaker 3: and they followed deer radio coolor deer followed them around
Speaker 3: Pants basin northwest Colorado. And if a deer starved to death,
Speaker 3: they said, see it's habitat related. And if a deer
Speaker 3: was killed by coyotes, they said, see it's predation. And
Speaker 3: that's what we understood about predator management or predator impacts
Speaker 3: for a long time. Really, when we started putting wolves
Speaker 3: in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts. And
Speaker 3: the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those
Speaker 3: prey animals to avoid predation. So wolves didn't eat elk
Speaker 3: on the Northern deer herd or northern elk herd near
Speaker 3: as much as they change their behavior. Instead of them
Speaker 3: being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want,
Speaker 3: they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation,
Speaker 3: but they're starving to death in what we used to
Speaker 3: consider a mild winter. I got it, and that secondary
Speaker 3: impact is probably as important as the primary impact. So
Speaker 3: shooting a coyote in the fall is that going to
Speaker 3: help anything. If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down,
Speaker 3: then maybe very small.
Speaker 1: Maybe.
Speaker 3: If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a specie, and
Speaker 3: they can come back from any kind of pressure up
Speaker 3: to sixty five percent removal. You'll have them back within
Speaker 3: a single.
Speaker 1: Remove.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they bounce back in a single breeding season. And
Speaker 3: this is this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic
Speaker 3: systems to look at predation because they can't leave, right,
Speaker 3: fish can't.
Speaker 1: Get all that.
Speaker 3: And so there's been a couple of studies where they had,
Speaker 3: you know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it,
Speaker 3: and the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and
Speaker 3: they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring.
Speaker 3: And they put in just a couple of predatory fish
Speaker 3: in that system and all the algae eaters go to
Speaker 3: the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have
Speaker 3: any algae eaters in it, and you have an algae bloom.
Speaker 3: And think about that. If you understand food pyramids and
Speaker 3: all the rest, that's the basis of life being directed
Speaker 3: by a predator species because.
Speaker 2: They can't do what they want no more.
Speaker 3: They can't they can't safely go out there. They change
Speaker 3: their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment,
Speaker 3: and I love this one, they had snails in an
Speaker 3: aquarium with with growing plants, and the snails will feed
Speaker 3: up and down the stock of that plant, including the
Speaker 3: terminal bud at the tip of the plant. They eat
Speaker 3: it and they keep the plants crop back. They didn't
Speaker 3: introduce snail predators, they introduced the smell of snail predators.
Speaker 3: They had its snail preadors another aquarium. They circulated that
Speaker 3: water over there.
Speaker 2: Really, what's the snail predator?
Speaker 3: Some other kind of fish that that'll crunch the shells?
Speaker 3: And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the
Speaker 3: plant and the plants grew up and choked out the systems.
Speaker 2: They can smell those sons of bitches.
Speaker 3: They can smell them. I may not be giving snails
Speaker 3: enough credit for their thought process, but that's an evolutionary thing, right,
Speaker 3: It's yeah, that was it. That's it. That's evolution, and
Speaker 3: that's the that's the ying and yang of predation, right.
Speaker 3: It shapes the predator, It shapes the prey. When things
Speaker 3: get out of whack, when people interfere, then then predators
Speaker 3: can have an impact on them. Yeah, another fascinating deal.
Speaker 3: When I was in Utah, they asked me to identify
Speaker 3: why predators have an impact and what would we do
Speaker 3: to manage that impact. And I started looking at mountain
Speaker 3: lions and deer, and mountains kill deer, that's their job,
Speaker 3: that's how they evolve. Deer evolved feeding mountain liones. That
Speaker 3: that's that's the relationship. But mountain lions kill bucks in
Speaker 3: greater percentage than the percentage in the population. If bucks
Speaker 3: are twenty percent of a population, it might be thirty
Speaker 3: thirty five percent of what lines killed. And the reasons
Speaker 3: for that are multiple. But bucks are solitary, Bucks move more,
Speaker 3: so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups,
Speaker 3: so it's you know, they don't have a defensive of
Speaker 3: a lot of eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you would think just on that point, I've
Speaker 1: seen that before, yeah, and heard that before. But you
Speaker 1: would think in some ways, the fact that it's for
Speaker 1: much of the year it's armed with antlers, you would
Speaker 1: think in some ways that would offset that, and maybe
Speaker 1: it does. Maybe it'd be maybe if they didn't have
Speaker 1: if they didn't have antlers, to be even worse. But
Speaker 1: you'd see in some ways, I feel like I'm surprised
Speaker 1: that doesn't turn a cat off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't turn a cat off.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 3: They're they're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders
Speaker 3: and biting where they need to bite.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, you'll need the antlers or no.
Speaker 3: I've seen them kill adult bull elk, you know, with antlers.
Speaker 3: So mountainin z O will killed dozen fawns and relative
Speaker 3: abundance to each other. And and so if there's a.
Speaker 1: Hundred songs, explain it again.
Speaker 3: They killed dozen fawns and relative abundance to each other.
Speaker 3: So you take the buck mortality out of it. If
Speaker 3: you got a hundred phones per one hundred doze, which
Speaker 3: we never have, half a wood a lion kill is
Speaker 3: going to be fons and half will be doze if
Speaker 3: you had that ratio.
Speaker 1: They don't care, right because you don't know what's in
Speaker 1: his head. But that's what you see.
Speaker 3: That's it's just availability. They're equally vulnerable to predation, so
Speaker 3: it's just whatever he comes on the closest one to
Speaker 3: the bushes, right. What we found out though, is that
Speaker 3: when predator or when fall numbers are down, lion mortality
Speaker 3: is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age dos
Speaker 3: and that can drive a population down.
Speaker 1: I explain that's me and I got confused there.
Speaker 2: The model that I had when numbers are down.
Speaker 3: When fall numbers are down, when you get below fifty
Speaker 3: falls per one hundred dos, what a lion's killing is
Speaker 3: two thirds of what the non bucks are adult breeding
Speaker 3: age doughs. Only one third is fonts. If they're killing fans,
Speaker 3: it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still
Speaker 3: got some that are coming up to be breeding.
Speaker 1: Age I got you.
Speaker 3: If they're killing breeding age dose, you can see the
Speaker 3: whole population depressed because they're the ones that are that
Speaker 3: are feeding in, you know, young into the system.
Speaker 1: Like that's when it's happened, like a sort of a
Speaker 1: greater population level impact.
Speaker 3: Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official line
Speaker 3: population was about three thousand based on densities and all
Speaker 3: the rest. The official deer population was three hundred thousand,
Speaker 3: or about one line for every one hundred deer. When
Speaker 3: faun ratios got blowed fifty falls per hundred doze. The
Speaker 3: population was declining because lions were killing does yep. Lions
Speaker 3: aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The
Speaker 3: reason the faun ratios were low was because coyotes were
Speaker 3: eating the falls.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: So when we started doing predator management in the book
Speaker 3: Cliffs in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after
Speaker 3: the coyotes. We tried to get our fahone numbers up
Speaker 3: above fifty falls per hundred doze. We get above sixty
Speaker 3: seventy falls per hundred doze. Lions can eat whatever they
Speaker 3: want to eat and you don't notice the difference. So
Speaker 3: you got two predators working on the same population, but
Speaker 3: they're hitting different levels of the population. One's eating fams
Speaker 3: and the others eating adult dose. It can depress that
Speaker 3: population as.
Speaker 1: Well, got it.
Speaker 3: So there's all kinds of factors. We identified eighteen factors
Speaker 3: that affect predation rates. Give me some more linear habitat.
Speaker 3: So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can
Speaker 3: find every duck nest if they have to nest on
Speaker 3: the edge of you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up, because this is
Speaker 1: in our notes. This linear I've never heard this concept before.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so what's more linear than a beach? A beach
Speaker 3: sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach,
Speaker 3: and one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that
Speaker 3: beach can find one hundred percent of the nest. Got it,
Speaker 3: Which also gets to what do you do about it?
Speaker 3: You can remove ninety percent of the coyotes, but one
Speaker 3: still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat's
Speaker 3: you've got to be really really intensive other factors like
Speaker 3: herd size and age. Right when wolves were killing elk
Speaker 3: and Yellowstone, the average age of the elk that were
Speaker 3: being shot by hunters cowilk was about five, but the
Speaker 3: average age that the wolves were eaten was like eleven.
Speaker 3: That's because they're at the back of the herd. The
Speaker 3: eleven year olds are the slower ones at the back
Speaker 3: of the herds. That's the one the wolves you're sharketing
Speaker 3: and pulling down, so they're not equally distributing that predation
Speaker 3: effort over the whole population. You can lose some eleven
Speaker 3: year olds, you start losing your five year olds, and
Speaker 3: your population is going to decline because that's the reproductive
Speaker 3: capacity of that herd right there.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating, fascinating picture. Some of the some of
Speaker 3: the factors involve the predators, coyotes. You probably know this,
Speaker 3: but coyotes don't breed till their second year, So right
Speaker 3: out on the landscape, you've got the current year's pups,
Speaker 3: which are like fifty percent of the population. Numerically, you've
Speaker 3: got the last year's coyotes, the yearlings that are out there,
Speaker 3: transient coyotes between territories trying to stay out of everybody's
Speaker 3: way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial
Speaker 3: coyotes are like twenty percent of the population. Two year
Speaker 3: olds and up. Those coyotes are the ones that are
Speaker 3: doing most of the killing of wildlife. Bose are the coyotes. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you got a four year old pair that's been on
Speaker 3: that territory for three breeding seasons. They're going to know
Speaker 3: where to go hunt. Phones they're the ones that are
Speaker 3: the most active at killing.
Speaker 2: Just think they got the most experience.
Speaker 3: They've got the most experience, and they're feeding pups. In
Speaker 3: experiments with livestock predation, when when you remove the pups
Speaker 3: from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days.
Speaker 1: Got it visioning.
Speaker 3: Those pups and you think about it. Kyote pups are
Speaker 3: born right around April fifteenth, deer phones hit the ground
Speaker 3: the end of June, first of July. Those pups got
Speaker 3: to eat meat. Those kyotes are killing as fast as
Speaker 3: they can to provision their pups.
Speaker 2: You know, I gotta just keep your train of thought.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But the idea of buddy of mine, who's a songwriter,
Speaker 1: he says, hey, I got a kyote question for you.
Speaker 2: And I don't know where he's got I don't even know.
Speaker 1: He didn't even I didn't even ask him that this
Speaker 1: has to do with something he's writing. But he happens
Speaker 1: to be a songwriter and he happens to have called
Speaker 1: me and asked me this question, but no explanation of
Speaker 1: why he was asking. But he said, do you ever
Speaker 1: see And I didn't have great answer for him. I
Speaker 1: could just tell him anecdotally, or I could just tell
Speaker 1: my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said,
Speaker 1: do you ever see a kyote take a step to
Speaker 1: dispatch something? Or do they just kind of like grab
Speaker 1: it and start eating it. She's talking about, why do
Speaker 1: you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still
Speaker 1: looking around. You know, I mean like some things. If
Speaker 1: you think of like a terrier, right when if a
Speaker 1: tarrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing. A lion,
Speaker 1: like a terrier, sinks his teeth into the neck. You
Speaker 1: actually see him seat his teeth into the neck and
Speaker 1: shake it. Right. A lion is like a lion is thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm going to kill this thing, and I know how
Speaker 1: to kill it, and I know where, like I know
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do in top priority is it's going
Speaker 1: to die. But a kyote just seems to not be
Speaker 1: interested in dispatching something, and for his sake, what's the answer.
Speaker 3: Coyotes. Coyotes do kill them. They're they're a coursing predator mostly,
Speaker 3: and this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're
Speaker 3: a coursing predator. They chase down their game and when
Speaker 3: they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They
Speaker 3: don't have thumbs. That they're not like a lion that's
Speaker 3: got claws, so they grab it with their mouth. Once
Speaker 3: they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done.
Speaker 3: They don't have to kill it right away. In fact,
Speaker 3: they're not going to kill it till they're ready to
Speaker 3: eat it sometimes.
Speaker 2: So it is like it's not their instinct make it
Speaker 2: no huh.
Speaker 3: They they're they're gonna grab it, they're gonna pack it off,
Speaker 3: you know. With with baby lambs, they'll they'll shake them once,
Speaker 3: maybe bite the top of the head. But they're they're
Speaker 3: moving food, is what they're doing. If food's still alive,
Speaker 3: if they're taking it back to a to a den,
Speaker 3: the pups will kill it.
Speaker 2: You get around to kill it later.
Speaker 3: Red foxes can't do that, right. Everything that red fox
Speaker 3: eats is small, and so when they grab it, it
Speaker 3: dies and they take it back, and red foxes will
Speaker 3: cash their food around a den. Kyotes don't. They just
Speaker 3: go back and either puke it up if if that's
Speaker 3: if they ate meat, or just drop it and the
Speaker 3: pups will tear it into it. But it's it's it's
Speaker 3: a difference just in size and what they're trying to
Speaker 3: do at the time.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: In the winter time, when they grab something, they'll eat
Speaker 3: it right away. Yeah, in the summertime, they may be
Speaker 3: packing it back to the den site, and that's what
Speaker 3: they're trying to do.
Speaker 1: What do you guys, see when you look at with
Speaker 1: coyotes with fawn predation versus adult Let's just stick to
Speaker 1: white tail deer for a minute. Yeah, like what do
Speaker 1: you see when you look at And maybe I'm wrong,
Speaker 1: but it seemed if I had to take a guess
Speaker 1: at it, thisrom when I picked up And there's so
Speaker 1: much false information about this floating around out there, and
Speaker 1: so much myth and legend. But like that, in the
Speaker 1: North they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer.
Speaker 1: In the South they don't. They don't seem to kill
Speaker 1: adult deer as much. Like what of that is true
Speaker 1: and not true?
Speaker 3: So we talked about the eighteen factors, and one of
Speaker 3: those other factors is alternative prey.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: I lived in Mississippi for two years and trap beavers
Speaker 3: down there and worked on some problems when I was there,
Speaker 3: And I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a
Speaker 3: rabbit call. I could hal them up and they'd come out,
Speaker 3: but I never called one with a rabbit call. And
Speaker 3: I think the answer is they don't know what rabbits are.
Speaker 3: They're living in such a food rich environment in Mississippi
Speaker 3: and Mississippi Delta, they can eat grapes, they can eat
Speaker 3: per simons, they can eat all this other food that
Speaker 3: they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that
Speaker 3: grows in the South. I talked about them being a
Speaker 3: coursing predator. Not in Mississippi, not in South Texas. I
Speaker 3: wondered for my whole career until I moved back to Texas,
Speaker 3: how you can have six coyotes per square mile and
Speaker 3: still have white tailed deer in South Texas.
Speaker 2: Well, you sure come do a rabbit in South Texas.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they do. But coyotes in South Texas are
Speaker 3: more like an ecologically, more like a fox. They're a
Speaker 3: pounce predator. They go up and down the cinderos and
Speaker 3: and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it. Cotton rat,
Speaker 3: they'll pounce on that.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote,
Speaker 3: all they have to do is turn left and go
Speaker 3: out through the through the brush, and the coyote can't
Speaker 3: seem anymore.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: So we've got white tails in South Texas, But the
Speaker 3: coyotes are twenty pound coyotes and they pounce. We've got
Speaker 3: all that other alternative prey. I see, So at your issue,
Speaker 3: you know what else is going on out there? Are
Speaker 3: the packs larger because they have to hunt, because they
Speaker 3: have to hunt deer, whereas elsewhere the packs are kind
Speaker 3: of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating
Speaker 3: jack rabbits and that's only a meal for one.
Speaker 2: And you feel that that's true.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't need like if they have tons of stuff,
Speaker 1: they don't need to pack up.
Speaker 3: They don't need to pack up. Their territories get smaller.
Speaker 3: They tolerate more overlap in territory. Huh. We've got territories
Speaker 3: in South Texas where we've got radio call on kyotes
Speaker 3: three hundred acres.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Acres?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah really Yeah, it's fascinating and other kyotes right on
Speaker 3: top of them, huh, because everything they need is on
Speaker 3: that three hundred acres.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so they they don't. They're more leaning about other
Speaker 1: ones coming in because there's enough food. There's enough food.
Speaker 3: Yeah, another coyote territory thing, but I'm going down different.
Speaker 1: This is great.
Speaker 3: In the sixties, there was a coyote study with VHF. Collars,
Speaker 3: and they mapped out where the coyote territories were based
Speaker 3: on all the locations, and they had had a picture
Speaker 3: of what that looked like in the whatever the decade
Speaker 3: we're calling it. After two thousand, forty years later they
Speaker 3: went in there with GPS collars and did the same study,
Speaker 3: and the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me,
Speaker 3: they had the same boundaries. Oh really, Yeah, they didn't
Speaker 3: left over. When one coyo pair disappeared, another coyo pair
Speaker 3: would pick it up, and whatever they were seeing out
Speaker 3: there on the landscape, they maintained the same. Kid huny
Speaker 3: forty years, that's twenty coy generations.
Speaker 1: Now, I wonder, like, there's no way to answer this, probably,
Speaker 1: but picture that you had.
Speaker 2: Somehow magically we're able.
Speaker 1: To pull them all out, okay, like the shake of
Speaker 1: a wand and they're all out, and then you replace
Speaker 1: them with totally different ones. Then I wonder would they
Speaker 1: find those same? I mean, yeah, like, is the territory
Speaker 1: thing inherited? There is there some logic to it that
Speaker 1: a kyo understands that we don't under say.
Speaker 3: Coyotes sees it the landscape differently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we tend to think of like fence lines.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fence lines and roads because I could.
Speaker 1: Talk about, oh, he came off the neighbor's place, as
Speaker 1: though the deer has some comprehension. I mean, like as
Speaker 1: though like he's like, yeah, I'm going over to the
Speaker 1: neighbor's place.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: You know. It's just like the way we like view
Speaker 1: you know, isn't how they see it, doesn't how they
Speaker 1: experience it.
Speaker 3: We talked some about not only the pack size, but
Speaker 3: individual animal size. Right, they get larger as they go north,
Speaker 3: you know, away from the equator or south away from
Speaker 3: the equator, but their prey also decides their individual size.
Speaker 3: I've been working with wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and and
Speaker 3: wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that
Speaker 3: eat white tailed deer in the same place, in the
Speaker 3: same place. What just a few miles apart? Fifteen miles apart?
Speaker 2: Your kidding?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: No, h So wait, what are you doing with wolves
Speaker 1: up there?
Speaker 3: Radio collars? We're handling wolves, putting radio collars on them.
Speaker 3: Are you catching them foothold drafts?
Speaker 2: No? What draft you use?
Speaker 3: I'm using MB seven fifty on wolves the Alaskan with
Speaker 3: a bigger offset.
Speaker 1: We had another wolf researcher on and I asked her
Speaker 1: that question. She said, MB seven fifty two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a good stout trap.
Speaker 3: It's kind of for years yeah, backfoot Yeah yeah, huh.
Speaker 1: But and you just and you're out like you just.
Speaker 1: They kept walking me through going out and catching a
Speaker 1: wolf in Michigan, like, what are you doing?
Speaker 3: Well, we're working in wilderness area. Yeah, so we're doing
Speaker 3: this out of a backpack. Okay, you don't pack twelve
Speaker 3: of those traps on your back and go for a walk.
Speaker 3: You know, take four or five of them out there,
Speaker 3: and there are traditional places where they walk. But if
Speaker 3: i'm if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting
Speaker 3: a trap. You're just wasting a lot of time setting
Speaker 3: hoping that something's going to come by here. Because we're
Speaker 3: putting radio colors on, we're running those traps every day,
Speaker 3: got it. So you can only have so many traps
Speaker 3: out in a day and still get to that wolf
Speaker 3: before noon and getting processed and out of the trap.
Speaker 1: Let me sets you guys, roam when you're doing that
Speaker 1: a dozen okay, you know, and then you get it,
Speaker 1: we get the wolf, you call the biologist or whoever.
Speaker 1: Are you working it up yourself?
Speaker 3: We're working it up ourselves. It's a team effort. I
Speaker 3: mean just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work
Speaker 3: the wolf up. It's it's usually two to three person team.
Speaker 2: What month are you doing to them?
Speaker 3: May? Usually we'll be doing some this late this.
Speaker 1: Month, and you'll be up there this month.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the end of this month and the first
Speaker 3: part of gins.
Speaker 1: And what are you finding with those collars? Are you
Speaker 1: analyzing the data too? Are you just collecting it?
Speaker 3: I get to see it, but we've got other biologists
Speaker 3: that are analyzing the data. They've got territories. They make
Speaker 3: some pretty good extra territorial movements. They'll go over here
Speaker 3: and try and poach a girlfriend or come back. We
Speaker 3: caught a pair of wolves one night. It was a
Speaker 3: male and a female, three year old male and two
Speaker 3: year old female, and I felt like they were pack mates.
Speaker 3: We put collars on both of them, and as soon
Speaker 3: as we turn them loose, they split and one went
Speaker 3: back to another pack's territory. He was a member of
Speaker 3: that pack, and he was a they're trying to poach
Speaker 3: your girlfriend?
Speaker 2: You're kidding me? Really, No, it just happened.
Speaker 3: We just happened to catch them on Date Night. Yeah really, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that was fascinating. I'd never guess that if we didn't
Speaker 3: put the collars on.
Speaker 2: What are you seeing that nowadays?
Speaker 1: With I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's
Speaker 1: Upper Peninsula a long time ago. But what are they
Speaker 1: seeing nowadays at those populations there.
Speaker 3: I think they're kind of stable. I mean they've they've
Speaker 3: filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers
Speaker 3: are kind of low, so there's not a lot of
Speaker 3: groceries left. You don't see I think every breeding pair
Speaker 3: is still having a litter, but you don't see a
Speaker 3: lot of young wolves coming up there.
Speaker 1: They filled in, Yeah, they filled in. You know, here's
Speaker 1: the thing I'd like to talk to you about about
Speaker 1: predator prey relationships. So you might maybe familiar with this
Speaker 1: story where you a the Hudson Bay Company. Oh yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So Hudson Bay Company and it was like the oldest
Speaker 1: corporation you know dissolved now right, you know for a while,
Speaker 1: like the oldest court operation out there. Just for listener's sake,
Speaker 1: what used to have it is like in Canada, and
Speaker 1: this would happen in a minor way in the US
Speaker 1: and Canada. They would give these sort of charters or
Speaker 1: commissions to company, basically corporate charters yep. And they would say,
Speaker 1: you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in
Speaker 1: such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company and it
Speaker 1: had all these different names over time, but Hudson Bay
Speaker 1: Company was was they had them. They had a monopoly
Speaker 1: to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in
Speaker 1: Hudson Bay. And they kept meticulous records, so you're familiar
Speaker 1: with like that snowshoe hares follow this up down cycle
Speaker 1: of seven to ten years, seven years. There's all these
Speaker 1: different debates about what drives it, like it seems to
Speaker 1: be like I think the consensus nowadays what drives it
Speaker 1: as plant toxins that as plants get over consumed, they
Speaker 1: produce more toxins, they produce more toxins, the rabbits lay off,
Speaker 1: and so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson
Speaker 1: Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go
Speaker 1: back through time and track the link cycle and see
Speaker 1: that the link cycle follows the snowshoe hair cycle. And
Speaker 1: you see like how many links are coming through their
Speaker 1: trading posts, right, And they look and it's like it's
Speaker 1: spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down, kind
Speaker 1: of in line with rabbits, but or hairs. Here's my question,
Speaker 1: how long is the delay mecause I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't
Speaker 1: They would look like predator management doesn't matter because if
Speaker 1: all the deer are dead, right, if there's no deer left,
Speaker 1: then the predators will die.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, that's what I was taught when I went
Speaker 3: to college in the seventies. Yeah, so prey drives the
Speaker 3: predator numbers, and and we were shown those very grass,
Speaker 3: those very data. There's another famous study Paul Arrington did
Speaker 3: with muskrats and mink when when muskrat mink numbers go up,
Speaker 3: when muskrats crash, mink numbers crash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they can't beat those lines aren't traveling like this,
Speaker 1: They're about a year behind. Okay, that's what There has
Speaker 1: to be a delay.
Speaker 3: And it has to do with kitten survival for links,
Speaker 3: so that the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and
Speaker 3: kitten numbers don't survive in the downswing, death and dispersal.
Speaker 3: If you look at non target links, take in Idaho,
Speaker 3: for example, they're catching links out in the deserts where
Speaker 3: there aren't any links, and Bobcat sets when you have
Speaker 3: a snowshoe hair crash and the links have to disperse, they.
Speaker 1: Leave, got it.
Speaker 3: So it's not not always dying, ye, And that's what
Speaker 3: we were all taught, and that that actually works in
Speaker 3: a single predator, single prey system. Okay, I don't get
Speaker 3: to work in those systems. I've got I got mountain lions,
Speaker 3: i got all kinds of predators.
Speaker 2: So single predators, single prey.
Speaker 1: Let's take like, just to help you understand what we're saying,
Speaker 1: we've we've talked about this on past shows.
Speaker 2: Like Isle Royal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in Lake Superiors is kind of famous example
Speaker 1: of it's like you basically there's moose, and there's wolves
Speaker 1: and beaver.
Speaker 3: Okay, you got you got beaver, but only half the year, right,
Speaker 3: they're under.
Speaker 1: Ice the rest of the year, So that's not even
Speaker 1: single predators.
Speaker 3: They whacked the heck out of the beavers too, Okay, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: beaver's are a favorite food to wolves.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so continue that thought though, like that that the
Speaker 1: situations where you don't have single prey, single predators.
Speaker 3: So so in the famous line study that Hornocker did
Speaker 3: in Idaho, that the lions didn't kill elk okay because
Speaker 3: there weren't many elk. Back then, there were hundreds and
Speaker 3: hundreds of deer and almost no elk. Now that total
Speaker 3: systems changed, there's very few deer and a lot of elk,
Speaker 3: and the elk are buffering the lions to where the
Speaker 3: lions can still find something to eat and keep the
Speaker 3: deer numbers low.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: In a study on the Spider Ranch in northern Arizona,
Speaker 3: lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought.
Speaker 3: The lines didn't cause the crash, but a couple of
Speaker 3: years of no phone survival and the deer herd's way down,
Speaker 3: lions just switched over to cattle.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: All the lions on the study area that weren't killing
Speaker 3: cattle when there were a lot of deer switched to cattle,
Speaker 3: every single one, and so the line numbers didn't go down.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: So that's the actual system, right that we're worried about
Speaker 3: is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick
Speaker 3: on the one that's depressed enough to keep them in
Speaker 3: that predator pit. That's when we have to get step
Speaker 3: in and remove them. And it's got to be very specific. Right,
Speaker 3: you go out there and kill a bunch of yearly
Speaker 3: in coyotes and and not deal with the pair that's
Speaker 3: raising those pups, you haven't done a darn thing. I'll
Speaker 3: go one further. We do a lot of predator management
Speaker 3: around pronghorn YEP, very well documented. If you've got pronghorn
Speaker 3: herd that might have twenty five fons per one hundred dos,
Speaker 3: if you do kyote removal effective chyote removal, you can
Speaker 3: get up to about fifty fonts. You can about double
Speaker 3: that phone survival if you do it well. One state
Speaker 3: insisted that we do that work at the first of
Speaker 3: May because that's when the phones start dropping in May,
Speaker 3: so they only wanted coyotes removed in May. If you
Speaker 3: go out there with an airplane, you go out there
Speaker 3: with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes
Speaker 3: in May, you're going to find male coyotes that are
Speaker 3: provisioning pups. The female was right there tied to the den. Okay,
Speaker 3: if you get it, she's in the hole with those pups,
Speaker 3: and you're out there killing males you have no impact whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 3: You got to get the reproduction. The time to get
Speaker 3: those is before she has the pup and if you
Speaker 3: can remove her, another capital take her place. But they
Speaker 3: won't have pupps in that territory that year. That'll be
Speaker 3: a safe low for prong horns to fawn.
Speaker 1: My buddy does that work for an imperiled prong horned population.
Speaker 1: And he goes down to his camp. I feel like
Speaker 1: he's in his camps. There's like the peak day when
Speaker 1: they drop fawns. Yeah, I feel like he's in his
Speaker 1: camp six weeks yeah, prior six weeks post something like that.
Speaker 1: Some schedule like that, right, like, well in advance, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, you that's the time I'd like to see it.
Speaker 3: We did aerial removals on deer fawning range between January
Speaker 3: and March and removing it, especially here in the mountains.
Speaker 3: Kyotes that live above seven thousand foot in January are
Speaker 3: the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down with the groceries.
Speaker 3: But you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain
Speaker 3: that time of year.
Speaker 2: But why are they up there though they.
Speaker 3: Can't afford to leave? If they leave somebody else is
Speaker 3: going to take their place.
Speaker 1: You think, so, oh, I've seen it. I've seen so
Speaker 1: much where you be up so high and like the
Speaker 1: snow's crusted. Yeah, and you're like, why what are they doing.
Speaker 3: They're digging down to old kills. They're I don't know,
Speaker 3: eating juniper. I have no idea, but about seven thousand
Speaker 3: foot and above, it's all territorial kyotes. So you go
Speaker 3: up there in January, February, March, territory bonds are established,
Speaker 3: the pair bonds are there. You get fresh though, you
Speaker 3: can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes,
Speaker 3: and livestock losses that year cut in half. Really, fawn
Speaker 3: losses are cut way down. Other coyotes will take their place,
Speaker 3: but those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any
Speaker 3: pups born in that territory that year. Yeah, and you're golden.
Speaker 3: If you did it in November, there'd be another pair
Speaker 3: of coyotes in there by January and you'd still have pupps.
Speaker 3: So the timing is critical to when you get that.
Speaker 3: The coyotes you remove are critical. It's it's literally got
Speaker 3: to be the adult female. If you can get her
Speaker 3: out of there before shee whelps. You've got a pretty
Speaker 3: clear sailing all all through falling season. But if you
Speaker 3: kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's
Speaker 3: gonna kill just as bad as if they were both.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What do you see? Do you ever see a
Speaker 1: situation where, let's say you have like good high deer numbers? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So if you have a long historical trend.
Speaker 2: And you kind of know, like what what.
Speaker 1: You have data over decades, and you know like what
Speaker 1: low looks like for deer out numbers, say white tail deer,
Speaker 1: you know what low looks like, you know what high
Speaker 1: looks like, and you're plugging along in good stable country.
Speaker 1: In those cases, do you generally feel like there's no
Speaker 1: there's no point in doing predator removal?
Speaker 3: Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some
Speaker 3: relationship to carrying capacity and carrying capacity changes over the years, right,
Speaker 3: I mean things dry out, you get a fire, and
Speaker 3: you have to reshuffle the whole deck because you don't
Speaker 3: know what the carrying the right carring capacity is. And
Speaker 3: this is in aside, but agencies have to decide every
Speaker 3: year where are we going to spend our money, and
Speaker 3: we're going to spend it on habitat work. We're going
Speaker 3: to spend it on predator control and the world. According
Speaker 3: to Mike, you do habitat work all the time. You
Speaker 3: do habitat work for next year, for five years down
Speaker 3: the road. If you're pushing junipers to create more brows
Speaker 3: for deer, you still got to do that. You do
Speaker 3: predator management. If you have unused habitat today, got it.
Speaker 3: If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah,
Speaker 3: we had a three step process to decide if a
Speaker 3: predator plan was necessary.
Speaker 1: Okay, if we were fifty.
Speaker 3: Percent of our hurt objective or less, and had fifty
Speaker 3: phones per one hundred dos or fewer, and had a
Speaker 3: three year stable to declining trend, then that would be
Speaker 3: a unit that we would consider for predator management. Okay,
Speaker 3: if you had an increasing trend but you still met
Speaker 3: the first two, you could let it go. You could
Speaker 3: see if they'd get there on their own.
Speaker 1: You would put.
Speaker 3: Your resources someplace else. But if it met all three
Speaker 3: of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management.
Speaker 1: What cases in your career have you seen where, like
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, Buddy mine is working on a pronghorn deal.
Speaker 1: I mean they have like he's working. I don't want to, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want I just didn't ask him if I
Speaker 1: could talk about you know, yeah, I don't know how
Speaker 1: much he wants yapping about this. But he's an area
Speaker 1: with the numbers are exceptionally low, right, so he's doing
Speaker 1: work timed removals in hopes of lifting them up. How
Speaker 1: often in your career have you seen where you had
Speaker 1: where nothing was working, okay, and you're seeing like a
Speaker 1: desert big horn population collapsing, you're seeing a meal deer
Speaker 1: population collapsing, whatever, and you come in and do the work,
Speaker 1: and then you see immediate benefits from from predator removal.
Speaker 3: Immediate.
Speaker 1: Do you ever do it where you come in and
Speaker 1: you do predator removal and you realize it was something different,
Speaker 1: Like it it doesn't move the needle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it can be something different. And predators aren't the
Speaker 3: only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor
Speaker 3: like it's a single issue, but everything else is working
Speaker 3: on them at the same time. When we start predator
Speaker 3: management for let's say, prong horn or mule deer, white tail,
Speaker 3: I told the agencies, I'm not going to do it
Speaker 3: for less than three years. The fawns I save in
Speaker 3: year one won't contribute their own farms until year three.
Speaker 3: They get bread as yearlings, and they drop it the
Speaker 3: beginning on their second birthday, if you will. So we've
Speaker 3: got to see any kind of moving the needle. It
Speaker 3: takes at least three years. With a species like that,
Speaker 3: got it.
Speaker 1: We see it a little bit quicker.
Speaker 3: In waterfowl, you know, the Bear River Refuge in Utah
Speaker 3: used to produce eighty thousand ducklings. Most of the flyways
Speaker 3: cinnamon teel came out of that particular system, and they
Speaker 3: had a flood in the eighties that completely put the
Speaker 3: refuge under water. When they came back the floodwaters receded,
Speaker 3: they built dikes again that linear habitat to control the
Speaker 3: water to prevent the refuge from flooding, But all the
Speaker 3: nesting habitat became dikes at the same time. Raccoons and
Speaker 3: red fo just came in. Neither of those were native
Speaker 3: predators in that system.
Speaker 2: Will cause those to come in like that.
Speaker 3: I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People
Speaker 3: brought them into chasing with hounds. The red fox.
Speaker 2: I know that Hans the pigs, but I know I
Speaker 2: didn't know that has.
Speaker 3: Well, that's how we got rabies in the northeast. It
Speaker 3: was Florida coons being moved up there. The red fox.
Speaker 3: You could actually watch their march across across the landscape.
Speaker 3: In fact, there's an out of Leopold wrote a book
Speaker 3: called Game Survey. He dedicates several pages in that book
Speaker 3: to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got
Speaker 3: maps in years in all the rest. So it's been
Speaker 3: going on since the forties. But red fox has just
Speaker 3: naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems.
Speaker 3: But they produced nothing. For two decades after that, they
Speaker 3: were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had
Speaker 3: high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance. We radio collared
Speaker 3: stuff and watch them. And when we started removing the predators,
Speaker 3: the duck numbers came up. Okay, but ducks have like
Speaker 3: an eighty percent fidelity to the site they were born at. Okay,
Speaker 3: So we went twenty years without producing any ducks. What
Speaker 3: are the chances we're going to go from zero to
Speaker 3: eighty thousand in one year?
Speaker 1: Yah? None God.
Speaker 3: We had to have some ducks that were raised there
Speaker 3: come back and start raising their own ducks. And so
Speaker 3: it's a it's a long term process. If you're saving
Speaker 3: sea turtles, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: Man?
Speaker 3: It might take fifty years before you actually see the
Speaker 3: sea turtle population rebound because because they got to be
Speaker 3: twenty years old to breed.
Speaker 1: In the first place.
Speaker 2: Have you ever worked on sea turtles?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we did feral hog removals for sea turtles.
Speaker 1: And what'd that look like again?
Speaker 3: Sea turtles nest in may. You kill hogs, they'll still
Speaker 3: swim out to the islands or get to the beaches.
Speaker 3: We would go in there at the end of April
Speaker 3: and aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could,
Speaker 3: all though that had access to those beaches. And it's
Speaker 3: kind of easy in a saltwater ecosystem because the pigs
Speaker 3: have to drink fresh water. You know where the fresh
Speaker 3: water is, you can go get all the pigs around that.
Speaker 3: But hogs would reinfest the island by the next year.
Speaker 3: But all we had to do is give it forty
Speaker 3: five days worth a protection, got it, And those those
Speaker 3: little eggs would hatch and make their way back to
Speaker 3: the sea.
Speaker 1: That seems to me like the one predator control project
Speaker 1: you work on where you're not going to get sued
Speaker 1: my Like's Center for Biological Diversity or something, because they're
Speaker 1: all going to agree that sea turtles are cute and
Speaker 1: hogs are and they're probably going to agree that hogs
Speaker 1: are bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but any other thing they're like, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes
Speaker 3: down there, and they said, you know, their controversies aren't
Speaker 3: should we do it? Their controversies are how do we
Speaker 3: do it?
Speaker 1: Humanly?
Speaker 3: Know they're there. Red foxes are invasive and they're impacting.
Speaker 3: The native hairs are invasive. Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody
Speaker 3: talks about should we it's just the arguments over do
Speaker 3: we use poison?
Speaker 1: Well, they had that little problem where they had school
Speaker 1: kids out getting house cats and that caused like a
Speaker 1: little bit of age.
Speaker 3: But yeah, the cat people are a little crazy, Yes
Speaker 3: they are.
Speaker 1: Sea turtle work, yeah, yeah, So what was the sea turtle?
Speaker 3: Uh, there's a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle that's being restored
Speaker 3: in Texas, Okay, and so but uh, there's work done
Speaker 3: in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's again raccoons,
Speaker 3: it's coyotes, it's it's a farrel hogs.
Speaker 1: Now, I know what I was gonna ask about. It
Speaker 1: seems that I hesitate to use the word fashion Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it seems fashionable right now. Like I wish my
Speaker 1: buddy Yanni was here because he's he's all.
Speaker 2: Up in this right now.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that
Speaker 1: want turkeys on the ground more turkeys are real hip
Speaker 1: to like reducing raccoon numbers, right yeah. And I've paid
Speaker 1: attention to this because if you look at when fur
Speaker 1: prices are high. Okay, so let's say you go back
Speaker 1: to seventy eight to eighty two, right there is there
Speaker 1: is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance. Like if I
Speaker 1: go back to the county, the counties where I grew up,
Speaker 1: raccoon abundance in like eighty four, nineteen eighty four, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty six. I mean, you'd get excited if you found
Speaker 1: a raccooned entry because everybody is running raccoons because they're valuable.
Speaker 1: Everybody's running them with dogs, and everybody's trapping them because
Speaker 1: you're trapping in those days, dollars like twenty dollars raccoons,
Speaker 1: thirty dollars raccoons, forty dollars raccoons. There were no raccoons,
Speaker 1: and you go, I shouldn't say there were no, but
Speaker 1: it was like competitive to get them.
Speaker 2: You go there now, man, I mean.
Speaker 1: It's nothing but raccoons, right, It's just like the rolls
Speaker 1: are littered with raccoons a raccoons all over because those
Speaker 1: fur prices, people.
Speaker 2: Aren't out getting them.
Speaker 1: And so it seems like more and more guys now
Speaker 1: are interested in trying to go out and put all
Speaker 1: kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down
Speaker 1: to help their wild turkeys. So that's what they feel
Speaker 1: like they're doing. Are they being impactful?
Speaker 3: Sure they are if they if they do it on
Speaker 3: a big enough scale. So we looked at not to
Speaker 3: not to leave turkeys, we come back to it, but
Speaker 3: we looked at pheasants in Utah, and pheasants are farmfield birds, right,
Speaker 3: They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down
Speaker 3: in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas,
Speaker 3: one in northern Utah, one in southern Utah and southern Utah.
Speaker 3: We went from sagebrush on the east to sagebrush on
Speaker 3: the west and just picked the valley floor had some
Speaker 3: natural choke points where roads or rivers came in where
Speaker 3: we could and to say this area is a study
Speaker 3: unit sixteen seventeen square.
Speaker 1: Mile, Yeah, where you could sort of block it off
Speaker 1: with some kind of natural feature.
Speaker 3: And after the first year we mapped where we caught
Speaker 3: all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest.
Speaker 3: And after the first year we would get red foxes
Speaker 3: still back in the center of the area, but raccoons
Speaker 3: and skunks were all on the edges. They were coming
Speaker 3: in from the boundaries, and so we made a difference.
Speaker 3: We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas, in those treatment
Speaker 3: areas compared to the no treatment areas.
Speaker 1: We had foresights by going after foxes.
Speaker 3: Raccoons, and skunks. Those were our three nest predators, and
Speaker 3: foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the
Speaker 3: same study in northern Utah, but our study areas were
Speaker 3: on section lines four square miles, okay, and we had
Speaker 3: six three no treatments, three treatments. We kind of stabbed
Speaker 3: them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four score miles,
Speaker 3: it's two by two. The center of that unit's only
Speaker 3: one mile from the edge. And we did not change
Speaker 3: the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our
Speaker 3: catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per
Speaker 3: one hundred trap nights, it was the same at the
Speaker 3: end of the project as it was at the beginning.
Speaker 3: We would kill a raccoon and another one show up
Speaker 3: for the funeral, Right, Okay, that's it's good coon habitat.
Speaker 3: Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in
Speaker 3: an area as you've got groceries. Okay, Skunks aren't territorial.
Speaker 3: So if it's good habitat, had you have to work
Speaker 3: bigger than that. When the fur was valuable, trappers were
Speaker 3: all over the place. There was competition, like you say,
Speaker 3: not just for the animals, but for the space to
Speaker 3: go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made
Speaker 3: a difference.
Speaker 1: So if my body, Yannie, is doing raccoon work on
Speaker 1: forty eighters.
Speaker 3: He might help one nest.
Speaker 2: It's just they're coming from everywhere, and they're finding.
Speaker 3: Coming from everywhere, and he'll probably remove as much at
Speaker 3: the end as he does at the beginning.
Speaker 1: So tell me again, like, what is the center of
Speaker 1: the circle, Like, what is the what is the radius
Speaker 1: of the circle need to look like? Meaning, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to restore turkeys in the Okay, there's a forty
Speaker 1: acre area, you have a forty acre area of great
Speaker 1: turkey habitat, you got roost trees, you got nesting cover,
Speaker 1: you got food. What is the radius need to look
Speaker 1: like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure
Speaker 1: at the center of the circle.
Speaker 3: So if we're talking about rio grand turkeys in there
Speaker 3: in the valley, okay, I would do the valley and
Speaker 3: I would have I want to have seven ten miles
Speaker 3: of valley that you would be working up and down
Speaker 3: because the turkeys are going to pick. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 3: might be a meaningful management area. Forty acres isn't going
Speaker 3: to get it. Huh. And this is I mean to
Speaker 3: me again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you
Speaker 3: have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory
Speaker 3: may impact a few deer, but the deer also select
Speaker 3: where they're going to go fall. The turkeys select where
Speaker 3: they're going to go nest based on the abundance of
Speaker 3: predators or that secondary risk. We had one of the
Speaker 3: PhD studies that was done on ducks at.
Speaker 1: Bear River Refuge.
Speaker 3: They built predator exclosure forty acre exclosures and outside the
Speaker 3: exclosure where the predators were going. They had no nesting
Speaker 3: Inside the exclosure, they had a nest for every two acres.
Speaker 3: The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing
Speaker 3: was it's fin it's a fenced exclosure. They would still
Speaker 3: try to dig underneath the fence, so we had to
Speaker 3: kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed
Speaker 3: more predators per acre protected there than we did out
Speaker 3: on the outside. We're still we're still finning the outside predators.
Speaker 1: Really, but the.
Speaker 3: Cost in predators was higher simply because it attracted the animals.
Speaker 3: They picked their nesting site, and that's what might be
Speaker 3: working for Yanni. We biologists do studies like dummy nests. Right,
Speaker 3: you put out a bunch of eggs, you put out
Speaker 3: you make a fake nest and then monitor it with
Speaker 3: a camera or go back and see if it gets
Speaker 3: attacked and you know, did ravens get it or did
Speaker 3: who's doing what? Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it.
Speaker 3: A turkey lays an egg today and walks away, and
Speaker 3: tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it,
Speaker 3: and she walks away, and she comes back a third day.
Speaker 3: And if a predator got those two eggs, she's got
Speaker 3: to go find a new place to nest. She doesn't
Speaker 3: just keep putting them in the same place, okay, And
Speaker 3: so her body's gonna tell her when she's had enough,
Speaker 3: But she may do that four or five times if
Speaker 3: nest predators are getting those eggs while she before she
Speaker 3: even starts incubating.
Speaker 2: I got it. I didn't know this about them. Totally
Speaker 2: makes sense.
Speaker 1: And I know that that habit of that they don't
Speaker 1: incubate until they get their whole, until they get the
Speaker 1: whole clutch.
Speaker 2: I never knew that she would abandon.
Speaker 3: She'll abandon that site. And so nest sites selection is important.
Speaker 3: Quail are a big thing in Texas.
Speaker 1: Right Santa Texas.
Speaker 3: Bob Boy. Quail have to have their nest within ten
Speaker 3: feet of bare ground because those chicks are an inch
Speaker 3: tall when they're born, they can't walk through the thick grass.
Speaker 3: They lead them out into the open where they grab
Speaker 3: grasshoppers as baby chick that they don't feed them, they
Speaker 3: have to feed themselves. Well, if that hen gets bumped
Speaker 3: by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quailed make
Speaker 3: a difference at all. But she gets bumped by coyotes.
Speaker 3: If her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to build
Speaker 3: that clutch, then she's going to select less attractive sites
Speaker 3: for nest success just because of that secondary predator impact.
Speaker 3: And so when we talk about coyote control for quail,
Speaker 3: it's they don't need enough to make it worthwhile. Well,
Speaker 3: maybe if the nest site selection is being affected in
Speaker 3: the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got
Speaker 3: to do raccoon control. You got to do gray fox control,
Speaker 3: because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators
Speaker 3: may start chilling up. So you do total predation management
Speaker 3: if you're trying to do quail ness protection.
Speaker 1: In Texas, some time ago, over a year ago, we
Speaker 1: had a researcher on about quail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, about just the general.
Speaker 1: I don't know shittiness of the nation's quail population right now, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are bright spots, there's far more. There's
Speaker 1: far more dark spots than bright spots. You got states
Speaker 1: that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states
Speaker 1: that used to be good at quail hunting, now it's not.
Speaker 1: You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting.
Speaker 1: Now there's no quail. Right. This story is just all
Speaker 1: over the Bob White quails territory. We had a research
Speaker 1: around from Texas and he'd been working on he'd been
Speaker 1: working on a FDA approved I'm failing to think of
Speaker 1: the right word, man, Like, what would you call like
Speaker 1: a treatment for a parasite?
Speaker 2: Yep, I worm, that's right, yep.
Speaker 1: Okay. So he was working on a medicated feed and
Speaker 1: there was some superlative around it. If I remember right,
Speaker 1: it was the first time the FDA had approved a
Speaker 1: medicated feed you could put out for a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, an anti parasite.
Speaker 1: And he had found in some areas that this was
Speaker 1: you could have a positive impact.
Speaker 2: Okay, Now this upset.
Speaker 1: This upset all kinds of quail people because in their
Speaker 1: minds like habitat, habitat, habitat. Membory said, like Mike's rule,
Speaker 1: always habitat, And they were insulted or put off, but
Speaker 1: by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to
Speaker 1: talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail, right,
Speaker 1: because anything else is a band aid, right, right. So
Speaker 1: on the quail question, if you look across the Bob
Speaker 1: White quails territory, do you feel that predation is if
Speaker 1: it's death by a thousand cuts, is predation one of
Speaker 1: those cuts?
Speaker 2: I'm Bob White qail.
Speaker 3: I think nest predation in many cases and the secondary
Speaker 3: predation impacts.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in
Speaker 3: the private sector for quail, okay, and we removed all
Speaker 3: the nest preaderors, We removed housecats, we removed bobcats, everything,
Speaker 3: and we got quailed to one to two acres wild
Speaker 3: bob whites. You could flush twenty covees in in the morning.
Speaker 3: It is a good deal.
Speaker 2: Were you doing the parasite treatment too?
Speaker 3: No, No, we didn't. I don't think we had them
Speaker 3: at that time. I never noticed eye worms in any
Speaker 3: of the birds that we harvested. But it it it.
Speaker 3: We had good habitat too, right.
Speaker 1: Yep, it was the empty you had empty good habits.
Speaker 3: You had empty good habitat. I don't know that I
Speaker 3: could have got them any higher than one to two acres.
Speaker 2: When are you saying one to two acres?
Speaker 1: What do you mean one.
Speaker 3: Bird to every two acres of habitat on the rand?
Speaker 2: So what's that come out to? Like covey per acre?
Speaker 3: A covey of birds might use ten acres. And we
Speaker 3: had some places where we had overlap in covees yep,
Speaker 3: And there's there's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We
Speaker 3: had birds that would leave this covey and go join
Speaker 3: the whening back and forth. Oh yeah, No, they're not
Speaker 3: all the same all the time.
Speaker 2: But they'd get sick of their bodies and go join
Speaker 2: a new covey.
Speaker 3: Yeah. If you look at some of the research that's
Speaker 3: done on that, it looks like a wiring diagram for
Speaker 3: an old Toyota radio, you know, wires going everywhere. This
Speaker 3: game went over here for three days and then came
Speaker 3: over here and oh yeah, and intact if they're if
Speaker 3: they're dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that
Speaker 3: shuffling that goes on. I see, But yeah, that that's you.
Speaker 3: I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did
Speaker 3: predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah, And what
Speaker 3: we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what
Speaker 3: we used to consider shitty habitat just they would start
Speaker 3: going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage,
Speaker 3: and do just find out there in the absence of
Speaker 3: a million predators. But what we know about sage grouse
Speaker 3: is in the present predators they have to have this
Speaker 3: tall sage, and they have to have this and that.
Speaker 3: And of course we got a huge number of ravens
Speaker 3: in the west right, so that's a changing factor. But
Speaker 3: when you do that work, they'll start picking their own
Speaker 3: nest sites based on what's good. We see that with
Speaker 3: turkeys too. I wanted to come back to turkeys. Turkeys
Speaker 3: will pick their nest site based on the presence or
Speaker 3: absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study,
Speaker 3: but we did it the way a turkey does. We
Speaker 3: went and put cameras out let the wildlife get used
Speaker 3: to the cameras. They went out and put one egg
Speaker 3: in front of it, and came back the next day
Speaker 3: and put a second egg. And we even went so
Speaker 3: far as as to use a golf ball retriever to
Speaker 3: place the eggs. So we weren't leaving tracks in and
Speaker 3: out to this nest them. We had fifteen nests. We
Speaker 3: studied them for fifteen days, putting the eggs in one
Speaker 3: day at one at a time, and we only had
Speaker 3: one nest survived that without getting predated.
Speaker 1: Really one of the fifteen.
Speaker 3: The rest of them got whacked. Some of them got
Speaker 3: whacked multiple days, you know. Yeah, so the turkey would
Speaker 3: quit and go somewhere else, and then quit that place
Speaker 3: and go somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators
Speaker 3: may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest
Speaker 3: site selection and that doesn't always favor the chick survival.
Speaker 2: Yep, you've done a lot of work on wild hogs.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was considered a predator expert for a long time.
Speaker 3: Now I'm a hog expert, and that's not a promotion
Speaker 3: yet I'm going the wrong direction.
Speaker 2: Your hog expert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, let me ask you a super like wide
Speaker 1: general question. Are we at a point in this country
Speaker 1: where hogs have gotten where they're going to get? Yes,
Speaker 1: you think so.
Speaker 3: I mean there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them
Speaker 3: in a truck. Yeah, they would, they would, they could
Speaker 3: set up shop. But but we've eliminated hogs. The government
Speaker 3: has eliminated hogs in number of states where they had
Speaker 3: new populations. We've got some resolve to keep them out
Speaker 3: of those places, and we're never going to eliminate them
Speaker 3: in some states. Texas is one of those. We're never
Speaker 3: going to eliminate them there.
Speaker 1: What did you make of in the north and they're
Speaker 1: talking about did you follow this story in the door
Speaker 1: like this whole like this whole Canadian super hog deal?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: The guy who coined that term, what do you tell
Speaker 1: everybody what that was?
Speaker 2: Well, that like bullshit to me.
Speaker 3: There are hogs that can winter in Canada and I
Speaker 3: can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me,
Speaker 3: so I don't know how.
Speaker 1: But here's the deal about that, Like, just just for
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you something you already know. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you go look at if you go just google
Speaker 1: up images of hogs in Siberia, there's endless images of
Speaker 1: hogs walking around in deep snow.
Speaker 3: And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for
Speaker 3: a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian
Speaker 3: wild boar as a farm animal to be raised in
Speaker 3: that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs.
Speaker 2: So that's what they were doing.
Speaker 1: They're trying to span agricultural They were production, yeah, but.
Speaker 3: The market collapsed on that, and so a lot of
Speaker 3: those pigs are just releases from the farms. They're highly
Speaker 3: genetically linked to Eurasian pigs and and that's the super
Speaker 3: pig part, right. They can survive in that environment. They'll
Speaker 3: make snow caves and stuff like that, and and they
Speaker 3: do well. Eurasian pigs only breed once a year. Eurasian
Speaker 3: pigs are smaller.
Speaker 1: Litters, so you're Eurasian like the Eurasian pigs on native habitats.
Speaker 1: When you're talking about a pig in his endemic range,
Speaker 1: he breeds once a year like a deer, right, huh.
Speaker 3: And that's probably, you know, again, evolutionary, right.
Speaker 1: They don't they don't want to drop young in the
Speaker 1: middle of the.
Speaker 3: Winter, that's right. If they did, they didn't survive, And
Speaker 3: so those pigs didn't.
Speaker 1: Breed, so the drop them when food was a bunch. Right.
Speaker 3: The wild hog that we have in the US is
Speaker 3: a mixture of Eurasian blood and domestic strains and and
Speaker 3: what we call heritage breeds. Back back when Hatfields and
Speaker 3: McCoy's were feuding with each other, that was over actually
Speaker 3: a pig, and they turned them loose, they ear notched them,
Speaker 3: they'd turn them loose, and then they'd gather them in
Speaker 3: the fall when they could smoke the meat, smoke the
Speaker 3: bacon and preserve it.
Speaker 1: You hear the War the Pig, I think it was
Speaker 1: called the War the Pig out on San Juan Island. No, No,
Speaker 1: same thing. Yeah, I can't remember the details. Shot somebody else.
Speaker 1: People had pigs running around and the kind of there
Speaker 1: was an understanding who owned water or whatever. And yeah,
Speaker 1: some American shot some Brits pig, or a brit shot
Speaker 1: an American's pig.
Speaker 2: Now big foss broke out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and and and so our pigs we see
Speaker 3: in the wild in Texas at least we see three
Speaker 3: litters every two years, about seven month interval between litters,
Speaker 3: and we see upwards of six pigs per litter in
Speaker 3: those litters. So you could see the difference between Canada's
Speaker 3: pig problem and our pig problem is mathematically that's why
Speaker 3: they haven't caught up to us yet. But Canada has
Speaker 3: learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and meetings with
Speaker 3: Canadians and they said, we don't want to be Texas.
Speaker 3: We want to get on top of our pigs early on.
Speaker 2: So one of your former colleagues we both know, Parker Hall. Yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: I remember I was putting a similar question to Parker
Speaker 1: Hall about pigs and pig management, and he had an
Speaker 1: interesting perspective, he told me, and to if you disagree
Speaker 1: or disagree with this, but the way he put it
Speaker 1: to me is he said, if it was up to
Speaker 1: the pig right, the whole country's pig territory.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But he said, but in a lot of areas were
Speaker 1: just able to get them right. You know, a lot
Speaker 1: of it's like if they were there, they would be
Speaker 1: vulnerable to people getting them to finding them right, like
Speaker 1: meaning in open like in more open country without certain attributes.
Speaker 1: And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas
Speaker 1: where it's possible to go and take care of an outbreak.
Speaker 1: And that could be messing up some of his perspective.
Speaker 1: And he said, in some places, the terrain vegetation is
Speaker 1: such that you just can't get them.
Speaker 3: And there's there's public resolve, right, I mean, you've got
Speaker 3: to actually have the will to get them. When the
Speaker 3: government had the what we called the Farm Bill program,
Speaker 3: there's a far wild pig eradication control pilot project that
Speaker 3: was created by the last Farm Bill. They said, show
Speaker 3: us some demonstration areas where we can really make a difference.
Speaker 3: And in Texas we said, yeah, we think we could
Speaker 3: do this. We had one area right up on the
Speaker 3: Oklahoma border, and Oklahoma had a site on the other side.
Speaker 3: So we're working on them from both sides of the
Speaker 3: Red River. And even with a free program, even with
Speaker 3: all the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about
Speaker 3: thirty percent of the land was signed up. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: there are landowners who want to keep their hogs.
Speaker 1: Oh and.
Speaker 3: Unless we're gonna say there's a foreign animal disease and
Speaker 3: we're gonna come on your land whether you like it
Speaker 3: or not, we're never going to eradicate pigs in those areas.
Speaker 2: This is a hobby of mine.
Speaker 1: A hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I
Speaker 1: know to complain about pigs or that let us hunt
Speaker 1: pigs or whatever. Yeah. I'm was like, if you could again,
Speaker 1: if you could wave a magic wand and have all
Speaker 1: the pigs be gone forever?
Speaker 2: Would you do it?
Speaker 1: And I don't think I've met anyone who is yet
Speaker 1: said to me, I would wave it. The thing is
Speaker 1: usually I just wish there weren't as many.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's it. And I've worked in Texas the
Speaker 3: first time. When I was in the private sector, there
Speaker 3: are about a million pigs in Texas. When I came back,
Speaker 3: there was about three million pigs in Texas. And the
Speaker 3: difference is remark Yeah, you know, if we could get
Speaker 3: them back to a million, we could, we could tolerate
Speaker 3: the damage that they do. We could manage those numbers.
Speaker 3: At three million, the pig bomb has gone off. It's
Speaker 3: it's it's a critical mass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but something weird culturally has happened.
Speaker 1: There's I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in
Speaker 1: taxes around pigs, meaning there's an industry.
Speaker 2: Now there's there's like a hog hunting industry.
Speaker 1: Sure, you know, yeah, I think that there are a
Speaker 1: lot of people in Texas that are sort of that
Speaker 1: are justifying behaviors, motivating behaviors around pig removal, but they're
Speaker 1: rooting for the pigs.
Speaker 2: Sure, because they've built an economy around.
Speaker 3: Them, cropping them. Those helicopter operators will come in there
Speaker 3: until the landowner. We're helping you. But they're selling the
Speaker 3: seat at fifteen hundred dollars an hour. They got to
Speaker 3: have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat.
Speaker 3: So they're not coming back there next week to shoot
Speaker 3: them again, and they're going somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Yeah and so, but but it's but the narrative to
Speaker 1: the to the would be hog hunter going down to
Speaker 1: Texas is, Oh, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do
Speaker 1: that because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But
Speaker 1: then you look at the guys running the outfits. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. Is he's built
Speaker 1: the whole business around pigs. So the guy with the
Speaker 1: cornfield wants the pigs gone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs
Speaker 3: are living. The habitat's over here on his neighbor. And
Speaker 3: they're coming out of a canyon or they're coming out
Speaker 3: of a swamp and hitting the corner and then going back. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that guy is selling hunts. This guy has the damage.
Speaker 1: Ye. Another thing I remember learning about pigs and maybe
Speaker 1: you know if this is still happening or not, is
Speaker 1: you'd see now and then a state would would seemingly counterintuitively, yep,
Speaker 1: a state would come in and say no pig hunting.
Speaker 1: Pig hunting is not allowed, right right, No one's allowed
Speaker 1: to hunt pigs. And he'd be like, well, why would
Speaker 1: they I want them to hunt the pigs if there's
Speaker 1: because wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the
Speaker 1: pigs because you don't want the pigs. But what they're
Speaker 1: finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home.
Speaker 1: They have such a hell of a good time in
Speaker 1: Texas that when they go back to Missouri, they like
Speaker 1: throw a couple of hogs in the trucks. And that
Speaker 1: was the area of spread.
Speaker 3: Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog
Speaker 3: season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains book.
Speaker 3: When they opened it up statewide, populations started popping up everywhere,
Speaker 3: got it. When they closed it on the western side
Speaker 3: of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving hogs.
Speaker 1: For that.
Speaker 3: I got to preface my next statement with this, I'm
Speaker 3: a hunter. Yeah, First and foremost that's at the core
Speaker 3: of who I am.
Speaker 1: Good to meet you, that's.
Speaker 3: I'm a hunter. My wife was a taxidermist her whole
Speaker 3: She made a living that way. I was an outfitter
Speaker 3: for ten years full time. My first born child is
Speaker 3: named Hunter.
Speaker 2: Okay, that can backfire.
Speaker 3: Hunting has never capped a wild pig population anywhere in
Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, okay, they can outproduce bullets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I understand.
Speaker 3: So anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine.
Speaker 3: But if you get to the kind of damage that
Speaker 3: we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck,
Speaker 3: one thing hitting another hitting another, there's got to be
Speaker 3: some level of control.
Speaker 2: Like recreational hunting is not going to dig out of it.
Speaker 3: And we can't barbecue our way out of the problem. Right,
Speaker 3: We've got We've got a big problem down there. It
Speaker 3: takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple
Speaker 3: landowners and work at the same time. They can make
Speaker 3: a difference, but it's it's the problem gets big. Yeah,
Speaker 3: banning hunting Kansas has done at Missouri went through quite
Speaker 3: a bit. Even in banning hog hunting is to reduce
Speaker 3: the incentive to go move pigs that's what they're trying
Speaker 3: to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs,
Speaker 3: but how Berta's got a bounty on pigs and they're
Speaker 3: using it as a way to gather data on where
Speaker 3: they are. God, if there was a bounty, then nobody
Speaker 3: had report the pigs and they'd start to get up.
Speaker 3: So somebody's gonna shoot one of those hundred dollars pigs
Speaker 3: and now we know where they.
Speaker 2: Got a little pocket maybe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's there's all kinds of approaches, whether you're
Speaker 3: a high density state or a low density state. And
Speaker 3: we killed all the pigs in Washington like three different times,
Speaker 3: is that right? We killed them all, somebody went and
Speaker 3: got them again and brought them back, and they went
Speaker 3: to the same source. Because the genetics.
Speaker 1: Map, those maps that show source areas that the area
Speaker 1: I think the area around I can't remember if it
Speaker 1: was around Dallas or around Austin seems to land a
Speaker 1: lot of pigs in certain places around the country. And
Speaker 1: there's a couple other little hot spots where you can
Speaker 1: tell like where guys are sourcing them and bumping them
Speaker 1: out of state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, both genetics and disease wise too, right, got pseudo rabies,
Speaker 3: and we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona being moved.
Speaker 1: To Colorade because they carry that ravee pseudo rabies. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't understand.
Speaker 3: Rabies is the technical name it's or the common name
Speaker 3: Azyuski's disease. It's a virus. It's a herpes virus that
Speaker 3: pigs have, so once they get it, they've always got
Speaker 3: it the rest of their life. Got it, they got
Speaker 3: antibodies to it, but they shed that virus for like
Speaker 3: a ten to fifteen day period after they contract it,
Speaker 3: build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three
Speaker 3: weeks of age. It's it'll cause abortions in South but
Speaker 3: adult pigs, even little pigs will get over it. It's
Speaker 3: fatal to dogs. Have hunting dogs that encounter pigs that
Speaker 3: are shedding the virus that die from the disease. It's
Speaker 3: it could be fatal to wildlife.
Speaker 1: You want to talk about public will start killing off
Speaker 1: people's dogs or be public will Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no. There's some dog owners, even hog dog owners,
Speaker 3: who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog.
Speaker 2: I got a friend in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: She listened like La La, Yeah, and uh, she's always
Speaker 1: send me Like the other day she sends me a
Speaker 1: picture where she's got her shoes outside her door, you know,
Speaker 1: but she sends me pictures just one shoe outside her
Speaker 1: door and out in her yard as.
Speaker 2: A chewed up shoe. Like, are you shoot a coyote?
Speaker 1: She sends me pictures, you know, I mean, she said, no, dude,
Speaker 1: these kyotes are all over And she says, used to
Speaker 1: come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man,
Speaker 1: I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed, trapped.
Speaker 1: Kylets in LA And she goes, no, because people like
Speaker 1: their pets, yea, more than they like. She says, it's flipped.
Speaker 1: It's flipped where now that I feel the threat to
Speaker 1: their pets. So she said, all that goodwill to kyotes
Speaker 1: is kind of going out the window.
Speaker 3: Well, And I worked a case with the Salt Lake
Speaker 3: Police Department. They were working with a Denver police department.
Speaker 3: They thought there were some cereal cap mutlaters that were
Speaker 3: that were you know, cutting cat that's in half and
Speaker 3: the skin was cut with a sharp deal And it
Speaker 3: was a year long investigation and they finally came and
Speaker 3: asked me, what do you think? And I said, well
Speaker 3: that that. They showed me a picture, said what killed this?
Speaker 3: I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or
Speaker 3: lungs and it's been fed on by a bird that
Speaker 3: how do you know? We'll see where the furs removed.
Speaker 3: They took me to a veterinarian's office where we thought
Speaker 3: out a cat and I said, it's going to be
Speaker 3: crunched on the brisket, not on the back. Why when
Speaker 3: a cat gets attacked by a coyote they roll over
Speaker 3: on their back and try to scratch the face. Sure
Speaker 3: enough had puncture marks. They over a year they were
Speaker 3: looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes
Speaker 3: doing it the whole time.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I got three areas. Three more areas. I
Speaker 1: want to ask you about cattle mutilations. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I spend much time on it. I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about sort of the what maybe is a myth
Speaker 1: like so the old like the old kind of westerns
Speaker 1: and stuff where there was a specific wolf, a specific grizzly,
Speaker 1: a specific lion that's wreaking havoc through the county yep
Speaker 1: and then lastly a little bit a philosophical question. But
Speaker 1: let's start with let's start with the myth or not
Speaker 1: of the individual animal.
Speaker 2: Okay, right, how often do you see that?
Speaker 3: Not often anymore. But when we were in the business
Speaker 3: of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard
Speaker 3: to get, okay, and they became somewhat mythical. They you know,
Speaker 3: they brought in multiple people after him. I went to
Speaker 3: Australia in two thousand and three and worked on dingoes
Speaker 3: down there, and they took me to one place and
Speaker 3: they said, this dingo's been killing.
Speaker 1: Sheep for two years.
Speaker 3: And the way they trap is they they bring their
Speaker 3: dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure, and
Speaker 3: so the dog would go over and peel on a.
Speaker 1: Rock and scratch at it.
Speaker 3: And they put a set right there, and they said this,
Speaker 3: every time we set traps, the thing moves out and
Speaker 3: go somewhere else. And so I looked at it and said,
Speaker 3: this is an old male. They said, he's eighty kilometers
Speaker 3: from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence, you know,
Speaker 3: and he's eighty kilometers from the next known dingo, but
Speaker 3: we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's
Speaker 3: an old male, and your dog's coming in here and
Speaker 3: peeing on that rock is a territorial challenge. He's leaving
Speaker 3: because of that. Oh they said, okay, wise guy, well
Speaker 3: what is going on?
Speaker 1: What would you do?
Speaker 3: And I couldn't think of it right off. I don't
Speaker 3: know what you feed a dingo in Australia, Yeah, grind
Speaker 3: up a kangaroo, give him food something. But it came
Speaker 3: to me at night. All canines like horse hoof. If
Speaker 3: you're around a ferrier, get some horse hoof and take
Speaker 3: it home to your dog.
Speaker 1: They go crazy.
Speaker 3: So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make it
Speaker 3: a little paste out of it, and put in a
Speaker 3: dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by.
Speaker 3: Oh really, Instead of using a territorial marker they were using,
Speaker 3: they use something else, and they caught him right away.
Speaker 3: And he was an old male.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Those old legendary animals are kind of like that, right,
Speaker 3: An old wolf that's just traveling the country looking for females.
Speaker 3: And if you go in there and you give them
Speaker 3: a cow to eat, they're not going to eat the cow.
Speaker 3: They're they're looking for another female, or they've been kicked
Speaker 3: out of a territory, they're one hundred miles away from
Speaker 3: another wolf pack, got it, And they're afraid of their
Speaker 3: own shadows, so they're particularly hard to catch.
Speaker 1: Do you ever see a situation where when you have
Speaker 1: those like the mythic animal and he's got a name
Speaker 1: or whatever, you know, and no one can catch him,
Speaker 1: and everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you see do you ever see those real differences
Speaker 1: in behavior, meaning that, let's say you're working a there's
Speaker 1: a desert big horned recovery project going on somewhere and
Speaker 1: you're losings. Does it ever wind up being that it's
Speaker 1: like a cat without a question, like a lion is
Speaker 1: doing that without question.
Speaker 3: The individual behavior is the hardest thing to account for.
Speaker 3: We put California big horns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah,
Speaker 3: and there weren't many lines there. They'd had a pretty
Speaker 3: aggressive season, but we knew there was a tom up
Speaker 3: there that we knew there was a female up there
Speaker 3: looking at the tracks. Put radios on every big horn,
Speaker 3: and we had kind of a three strike in your
Speaker 3: out rule or two strikes in thirty days in you're out.
Speaker 3: And the tom killed almost immediately. Within the first week,
Speaker 3: he killed a you and we could tell it was
Speaker 3: him where the sheep died. He was gone for about
Speaker 3: five days. He came back and killed another one. That's
Speaker 3: two strikes in thirty days. We started after him. He
Speaker 3: actually got a third sheep before we could catch him.
Speaker 3: And the day we caught him with the hounds, he
Speaker 3: was traveling with a female side by side. I think
Speaker 3: he bred her that day because she had a little afterwards.
Speaker 3: But that line we removed after three kills in like
Speaker 3: fourteen days. She lived in the middle of those sheep
Speaker 3: and for the rest of the collar life.
Speaker 1: She never killed a bigness, is that right?
Speaker 3: And she's raising kittens, she's got high nutrition.
Speaker 1: And she had the physical capability, physical capability.
Speaker 2: She killed Kyle el because she wanted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just the individual behavior that Tom knew where to
Speaker 3: go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd
Speaker 3: go get a line or go get a big horn.
Speaker 3: But we also see the opposite, right for in those
Speaker 3: lone wolf deals. You know, this wolf's been killing here
Speaker 3: for twenty years. I bet he hadn't.
Speaker 2: Oh they don't.
Speaker 1: Live that long, right, That's what's funny. But that's kind
Speaker 1: of what I was getting at with the mythical animal too.
Speaker 2: You see these be my buddy Brody.
Speaker 1: We've looked at somebody these narratives, you know, where there
Speaker 1: was like this old bear frame or whatever. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it'd be that that for forty years he terrorized his valley.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like, I don't feel that that's the
Speaker 2: same barrier.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: You know he'd been that might be his grandson, Yeah right, yeah,
Speaker 1: uh okay, I want to ask you about that, Oh,
Speaker 1: cattle mutilations you were talking about, the reason I brought
Speaker 1: that up is you were talking about having people come.
Speaker 2: To you with dead animals.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and they're like, hey, what happened here?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And there's some forensics.
Speaker 1: You know, it'll be like it was a drug up
Speaker 1: under a bush and buried, what was eaten? How did
Speaker 1: the animal? You know, where did the predd or enter
Speaker 1: the animal? What did it go after first? All that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff can tell a tale, right, do you
Speaker 1: when when people come up with these these inexplicable carcasses,
Speaker 1: uh where they're like, you know, you get a rancher
Speaker 1: and he's like, I never see anything like this, you know,
Speaker 1: and it was cut this way or whatever.
Speaker 2: Have you ever seen have you ever seen carcasses.
Speaker 1: Where and I don't want to get I don't want
Speaker 1: to get in like I'm not in any way inviting
Speaker 1: if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation.
Speaker 2: I'm just generally annoyed by the paranormal world.
Speaker 1: But have you ever seen carcasses where you just like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea what to have done that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the ones that I have been called to, we
Speaker 3: could explain, and it's usually a multi pronged explanation. Right,
Speaker 3: this cow was killed by lightning and fed on by
Speaker 3: a bear, and so there's two different things going on,
Speaker 3: and you're not getting the same signal that you know there's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's that.
Speaker 3: But there are things in cattle mutilations that I read
Speaker 3: about that I've not seen, like the tongue missing, just
Speaker 3: the tongue missing, you know, rigor mortis sets in pretty
Speaker 3: fast and it's hard to get in that. How did
Speaker 3: that happen? I don't know that I can explain that,
Speaker 3: but that's not what I've seen. I investigated a suspected
Speaker 3: wolf kill right on the Utah Wyoming border in the
Speaker 3: cow and that cow had himmer gene right above her hawks. Okay,
Speaker 3: yearling uh halfer come off the mountain and big hole
Speaker 3: in it, and and and when we skinned the cow,
Speaker 3: that's the only bruising that we found. I think the
Speaker 3: darn thing was killed by team ropers all, you know,
Speaker 3: and some cowboy was out there practicing and jerked her
Speaker 3: down too hard or something.
Speaker 1: But there was there was just no other bruising. When
Speaker 1: you were saying like hamrhaging there, I didn't know if
Speaker 1: you meant like bid up, you mean just under skin bleeding.
Speaker 3: Skin bleeding, but it was in a straight line on
Speaker 3: both legs at the same point of going, oh with me.
Speaker 1: But someone fun and got a little rough Yeah, yeah, no, kid.
Speaker 3: So there's there's you know, everything I've seen I've been
Speaker 3: able to explain is as multiple most cases, multiple explanations,
Speaker 3: you know, carrying fed on his carrying, but killed by
Speaker 3: something else. Lightning gills are the hardest ones to explain
Speaker 3: because they'll be four of them dead under a tree.
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, you know earlier I mentioned you something.
Speaker 1: I made a joke about if you're doing wild hog
Speaker 1: work for sea turtles, you're going to have you're going
Speaker 1: to have a high level of buying public buying, sure,
Speaker 1: you know, because people I don't want to use the
Speaker 1: word fetishized. I'm not thinking the right word, but there's
Speaker 1: you know, there's strong public sentiment about turtles sea turtles, right,
Speaker 1: like people being like I don't want to use a
Speaker 1: drink and straw because it might get a sea turtle.
Speaker 1: People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then
Speaker 1: pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog
Speaker 1: removal to saving dangered sea turtles, you're going to find
Speaker 1: like high public acceptance, not universal, but high public acceptance.
Speaker 1: I would say in other cases where you have you know,
Speaker 1: an imperiled or an eesa protected species and you're doing
Speaker 1: predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle
Speaker 1: where where you're still gonna have a high level of acceptance.
Speaker 1: You know, for me personally, people will say, well, you're
Speaker 1: just killing coyotes so you can have more analope to hunt,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, my response to that is, yes, there's
Speaker 1: more to it, but yes.
Speaker 2: I'm okay with that, right, I'm okay with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm okay with the idea that if we have
Speaker 1: a big game species that people like to hunt, rely
Speaker 1: on has cultural value and if it's going down and
Speaker 1: you can do predator work to help recover it and
Speaker 1: bring the numbers back up because there's a strong social
Speaker 1: interest in having high numbers and you're not having long
Speaker 1: term negative population impacts. I'm the predator in my mind.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yes, guiltiest charged. I don't think that that
Speaker 1: is bad. Yeah, a negative thing to do. What has
Speaker 1: been your view on that through your career? If you're
Speaker 1: doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work,
Speaker 1: you know than you would and helping a guy out
Speaker 1: that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked
Speaker 1: at it throughout your career?
Speaker 3: Somebody once famously said, if public opinion is all that mattered,
Speaker 3: California would have nothing, but predators in North Dakota wouldn't
Speaker 3: have any. Yeah, public opinion is just part of the equation.
Speaker 3: You've got to have the social license to do what
Speaker 3: you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context
Speaker 3: of habitat. So if there is available habitat, and if
Speaker 3: we as a group, through our game department, said we
Speaker 3: want ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline, then we
Speaker 3: should work towards getting ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline.
Speaker 3: That's an objective that's set through a public process and
Speaker 3: all the rest. I've had people in Texas ask me
Speaker 3: to protect their deer and their ranch is overgrazed and
Speaker 3: they're feeding deer to keep them alive. And that's not
Speaker 3: the problem, right God, protecting their deer might be the
Speaker 3: reason it's so overgrased, or they got a brows line.
Speaker 3: And so if it's in the context of the habitat,
Speaker 3: and if we have the social license, our game department
Speaker 3: has said we want this, or we have a landowner
Speaker 3: who's conscientious about meeting their objectives, absolutely we should be
Speaker 3: deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal.
Speaker 3: We had a internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in
Speaker 3: West Texas. They had to do transplants to bring them
Speaker 3: back in, and the first couple of years of transplants
Speaker 3: were horrible because the predators were eating all the fonts.
Speaker 3: We went in there and started removing those funds, removing
Speaker 3: those predators. Bobcats actually were a big predator on problems
Speaker 3: picture in the flats, but they're pretty good at it.
Speaker 3: And once we did that, we got the herds back up.
Speaker 3: We talked about when do you start predator management? You
Speaker 3: got to have an exit strategy too, when do you stop.
Speaker 3: If we do it for five years and we haven't
Speaker 3: moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else. If we've
Speaker 3: done it and we get to where we're eighty percent
Speaker 3: of carrying capacity or eighty percent of our objective, then
Speaker 3: maybe we can leave that hurt alone and go somewhere else.
Speaker 3: So you got to have an exit strategy for this too.
Speaker 3: And that's that's you know, should be done in the
Speaker 3: planning process. We'll do this for this long or until
Speaker 3: we see these results.
Speaker 2: And you're.
Speaker 1: You're you work in the private sector now, yeah, yep,
Speaker 1: and who are your clients?
Speaker 3: So I'm working on a research project with Saphari Club
Speaker 3: Foundation right now. We're putting radio callers onlines and putting
Speaker 3: cameras out in West Texas, trying South Texas as well,
Speaker 3: trying to get a handle online populations.
Speaker 1: You know the reason subscriptive what's out there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, distribution in abundance. Basically, lines in South Texas are fascinating.
Speaker 3: They just use the riverine corridors. So I'm going to
Speaker 3: pick a number and I guarantee it's wrong. But we
Speaker 3: might only have one hundred lines in South Texas, but
Speaker 3: we may only have habitat for one hundred lines in
Speaker 3: South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution and habitat
Speaker 3: fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else.
Speaker 3: Oil fields and power lines, everything tends to disrupt some
Speaker 3: of that. Landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's a problem. I'm working with the Outfitters Association of
Speaker 3: Canadian Province try and get some of the predator management
Speaker 3: back into their wildlife management scheme. Whether it's stuff that
Speaker 3: the outfitters themselves are doing, is individual outfitters. You know
Speaker 3: they've got they've got regulated territories. Not everybody can go
Speaker 3: to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey,
Speaker 3: look I want I want more elk, I want to
Speaker 3: reduce my wolves. Well what does that look like? Just
Speaker 3: again shoot one in November? Are you actually going to
Speaker 3: go out there and target the panic? So so we're
Speaker 3: building some some strategies there. I'm working for some individual
Speaker 3: landowners in Texas that that have got mostly high fence
Speaker 3: properties and the predators are impacting their genetics selection. These
Speaker 3: guys are farming deer.
Speaker 4: Essentially, they're outside, they're inside the fence, but they're they're
Speaker 4: they're free roaming inside the fence, but they've invested in
Speaker 4: the genetics.
Speaker 3: And that's that's a little different than just the capacity.
Speaker 3: We still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got eighty
Speaker 3: ninety phons per one hundred doze. You better be shooting
Speaker 3: a lot of does this fall because we can't feed
Speaker 3: that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the
Speaker 3: genetics and letting them decide rather than the kayitch decide
Speaker 3: which fonds to get.
Speaker 2: How do people find you?
Speaker 3: Uh, word of mouth a lot. I mean I had
Speaker 3: a pretty good following move when I was with USDA.
Speaker 3: A lot of landowners know who I am, so I
Speaker 3: work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers
Speaker 3: on some of that, So some of those landowners already
Speaker 3: know me.
Speaker 1: So if there was some dudes, some landowners somewhere and
Speaker 1: he wanted to talk to you about a problem you had,
Speaker 1: or if you're trying to figure out if he has
Speaker 1: a problem, he just type in Mike Bowdenchuck and he'd
Speaker 1: find you.
Speaker 3: He probably would. Yeah, there's there's a lot there on
Speaker 3: the not all of those flattering either. The animal rights
Speaker 3: activists know how to find.
Speaker 1: Jam Yeah yeah, yeah, Well man, I sure appreciate you
Speaker 1: coming on top of all this stuff.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, No, predators are my life's work, and understanding
Speaker 3: how it works is probably important. You know, a lot
Speaker 3: of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do
Speaker 3: is is critical.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's all fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I like to have you back on in the future.
Speaker 1: Good. Yeah, well, we'll just you got to keep a
Speaker 1: little running tab of stuff to talk about when you
Speaker 1: get up to six or seven let me know, okay,
Speaker 1: all right, all right, Mike Bowden, Chuck, Michael Buden, Chuck,
Speaker 1: Where do you go bout Mike, Mike, Mike Bowden Chuck.
Speaker 1: Thanks man, great