Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything, all right, Steve. I want you
Speaker 1: to do um two things, but you gotta do it
Speaker 1: in the in the order, in this order. Explain like
Speaker 1: what is the neutria and where are they from and
Speaker 1: all that, and then explain who you are and where
Speaker 1: you're from and all that. All right? Yeah? Sure. A
Speaker 1: neutria is a big semi aquatic rodent that's native to
Speaker 1: South America. At one time, it was highly prized for
Speaker 1: its fur, and it was introduced throughout the world and uh,
Speaker 1: fur farms and things like that to create a economic
Speaker 1: resource for rural folks. And similar to mink ranches and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. It's intermediate in size between a
Speaker 1: muskrat and a beaver. Uh. For those familiar with our
Speaker 1: North American semi aquatic how many pounds? The average is
Speaker 1: probably between fifteen and seventeen pounds for an adult man.
Speaker 1: You know, they're big, Yeah, and uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: guess if I were to equate it too, yeah, compared
Speaker 1: to something probably a raccoon, Yeah, raccoon bigger than a
Speaker 1: woodchuck similar size to a raccoon. I think the biggest
Speaker 1: female that we caught was about twenty one pounds. And
Speaker 1: you know, when they're gravit and full of little ones,
Speaker 1: they can tip the scales higher than the males do.
Speaker 1: So what's the word you used, gravit? Pregnant? Gravit? Am
Speaker 1: I getting all academic here? Pregnant is grab think, so
Speaker 1: get out my thesaurus app check check. Um. So they're
Speaker 1: really kind of an interesting animal too, though. Uh A
Speaker 1: lot of people don't know this, but they get fascinated
Speaker 1: when they hear that the nipples on a female nutrient
Speaker 1: are located along their back, so the young can actually
Speaker 1: suckle when they're swimming in the water either. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty fascinating. Um. You know, I have like a I've
Speaker 1: never laid eyes on a nutrient. You know, I hadn't
Speaker 1: either before I took this job that that I took
Speaker 1: to try to help eliminate them from the Chesapeake Bay.
Speaker 1: But they're a pretty pretty amazing animal, very adaptable. They're herbivores,
Speaker 1: as most rodents are. They dig up the roots and tubers,
Speaker 1: the underground parts of plants in the wetland ecosystems here,
Speaker 1: and in doing so, they expose it to tremendous erosion
Speaker 1: with the tidal influx of water and and what. So
Speaker 1: that's how muskrat feeds too, right, Yeah, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: muskrats will eat you know. One of the things that
Speaker 1: they're most known for is they'll eat cat tail roots
Speaker 1: and parts of cattails. But all I mean, they'll eat
Speaker 1: clams rarely, but mostly they eat aquatic vegetation and they
Speaker 1: when they're Yeah, the excavating from banks is what causes
Speaker 1: folks in trouble. With folks is their denning activities more
Speaker 1: than their feeding activities. Is they dig bank dens and
Speaker 1: make a under usually an underwater entrance, and then they'll
Speaker 1: burrow up into a bank and then make a big
Speaker 1: hollow in the bank. And then you know, some d
Speaker 1: to be like mowing his lawn and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden falls into a muskrat bank. Then that's what gets
Speaker 1: muskrats in trouble. Get free haircuts that I used to
Speaker 1: get free haircuts from some ladies that had a muskrat
Speaker 1: problem in their pond. That they're little haircuttery in Plattsburgh,
Speaker 1: New trapp mustgrats for haircuts. I've trapped muskrats. That was
Speaker 1: the muskrat man to them, and I got my haircut
Speaker 1: for free. So good. It's a bartery economy. So you
Speaker 1: all right, we'll get into this whole trap of things.
Speaker 1: So but now that now that you brought the subject,
Speaker 1: we're going to explore the fact you were trapped before
Speaker 1: you became a government trapper. I yes, I was. No,
Speaker 1: I guess now is the time you can tell us
Speaker 1: about who you are. I was wanted a little teaser
Speaker 1: about those back nipples. Oh yes, So I'm Steve ken Drott.
Speaker 1: I'm a wildlife biologist. I work for the U S
Speaker 1: Department of Agricultures Wildlife Services Program, so small agency, about
Speaker 1: two thousand people nationwide. That's it's UH within the Animal
Speaker 1: and Plant Health Inspection Service for UH in the US
Speaker 1: Department of Agriculture, and our primary mission is to provide
Speaker 1: federal leadership in the there resolving human wildlife conflicts. And
Speaker 1: our primary mission areas are to protect agriculture, human health
Speaker 1: and safety, property, and increasingly natural resources, which is how
Speaker 1: we're entwined with this whole nutrient eradication project to try
Speaker 1: to save the Chesapeake Bay marsh Lands. So I've been
Speaker 1: with that uh agency for about eighteen years now. I
Speaker 1: started out as a wildlife biologist at an airport, UH
Speaker 1: actually a military base in Virginia, and I also worked
Speaker 1: at two of the Washington d C. Airports. But in
Speaker 1: two thousand two I took this job in in Cambridge, Maryland.
Speaker 1: Hold on question, what's what's an airport needed biologist for? Well, so, uh,
Speaker 1: birds and planes both occupy the same airspace and uh
Speaker 1: oftentimes too great detriment to both the birds and the planes.
Speaker 1: So we actually have a very robust program throughout the country.
Speaker 1: Most of our major airports, we've got wildlife biologist station
Speaker 1: there working to provide guidance to the airport about how
Speaker 1: to minimize uh wildlife habitat and attractants on the airfield
Speaker 1: to keep them away from the runways and taxi ways. UH. Deer, coyotes,
Speaker 1: other mammals are also problems. They get on the runways
Speaker 1: and get hit by planes during takeoff and landing and
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. So it's uh a
Speaker 1: pretty big human health and safety component of our program. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because that could be like a lot of deaths all
Speaker 1: at once. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Yeah, the dude that had
Speaker 1: the dude that put the plane down in the Hudson. Yeah,
Speaker 1: several geese. Yep, miracle Alanna Hudson was the result of
Speaker 1: a bird strike with Canada geese. There's also a tragic
Speaker 1: air force accident back in Gosh, I don't even remember
Speaker 1: when that was now, it's been so long since I've
Speaker 1: worked on the airport stuff. But in elmendor Fell Air
Speaker 1: Force Base. Uh, a plane went down from that and
Speaker 1: killed quite a few service folks. So or Burkeley. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's you know, you know, not to scare the
Speaker 1: flying public. And now you guys will be on a
Speaker 1: plane soon. Not a lot to worry about. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a low risk but a high consequence kind of
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So, uh, it's something in our the
Speaker 1: airports take very seriously. The FAA takes very seriously. And uh,
Speaker 1: as a result, we've got a pretty robust program nationwide.
Speaker 1: Most biologists employed by your agency. Then, Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: our agency is kind of unique in that it's not
Speaker 1: it doesn't get a huge slug of federal appropriations or
Speaker 1: tax dollars to do the work we do. We work
Speaker 1: through cooperative agreements with other federal agencies, uh, municipalities, airports,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, private individuals. Uh. So it's very
Speaker 1: much a cost sharing type program where the recipients of
Speaker 1: the services that we provide are paying for at least
Speaker 1: some portion, if not all, of the service that we provide.
Speaker 1: So we're not a regulatory agency like some of the
Speaker 1: other uh federal agencies of Fish and Wildlife Service that
Speaker 1: enforced regulations about endangered species and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: We're very much problem solving service orientation UM. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's been a really interesting agency to work for.
Speaker 1: And this project in the Chesapeake Bay with the Nutria
Speaker 1: is funded by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the United
Speaker 1: States Fish and Wildlife Service, which is in the Department
Speaker 1: of Interior. Um, there are the folks that oversee the
Speaker 1: National Wildlife Refuge System. So so to jump into the
Speaker 1: new Tria, like just to lay the groundwork on the
Speaker 1: Nutria situation Chestpeake Bay, which is a pretty fascinating story.
Speaker 1: But how did it begin? Like when did they come
Speaker 1: in and why did they come in? So they were
Speaker 1: a side note, can they live? They can they adapt
Speaker 1: to northern climates or they like to have they or
Speaker 1: do they need warmer weather and not severe winters. They
Speaker 1: are limited in their northern distribution by by winter weather. However,
Speaker 1: here in Maryland is about the northernmost distribution on the
Speaker 1: east coast. But Neutria also they've been established in seventeen
Speaker 1: or eighteen different states in the US, introduced in a
Speaker 1: number more, but they haven't become established. A lot of
Speaker 1: people don't know that. Uh, your home city of Seattle
Speaker 1: and Portland, UM are home to the neutria as well.
Speaker 1: UM all over in the coastal wetlands and a lot
Speaker 1: of the lot of the parks in uh Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: people feed carrots and stuff like that. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: So you don't have to go fired. I've never seen one,
Speaker 1: as I'd always lived in the northern tier states. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now they're limited in the to the coastal distribution because
Speaker 1: the temporary climate. They Um, So where was I introduced?
Speaker 1: How and why did they come into how? And why
Speaker 1: did they come into the chess Chesspeake Bay like there
Speaker 1: for what reason? So the Nutria were brought to the
Speaker 1: chess Peak region in the nineteen forty three or thereabouts. UM.
Speaker 1: There was two entities that had nutrient brought in. The
Speaker 1: Blackwater actually had the refuge itself had a fur bear
Speaker 1: research station at one time, and they housed nutrient. They
Speaker 1: were doing uh nutrient research as well as muskrat and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. But there are also some private
Speaker 1: uh entrepreneurs that were bringing nutria in to farm them
Speaker 1: and for some reason UH there that never really took
Speaker 1: off economically, and eventually the farms either went out of
Speaker 1: business and they released their animals, or the conditions just
Speaker 1: became dilapidated and they escaped and whatnot. With the dropping
Speaker 1: fur prices, no, that was quite a bit I think
Speaker 1: before the dropping fur prices, and so nutrient didn't really
Speaker 1: become of an ecological impact in the Chestspeake Bay region
Speaker 1: until probably the late nineteen sixties nineteen seventies. And that's
Speaker 1: pretty typical for a lot of introduced invasive species, is
Speaker 1: that they'll they'll exist at fairly low levels for an
Speaker 1: extended period of time and then begin to grow exponentially,
Speaker 1: and once they hit that sort of critical mass and numbers,
Speaker 1: then that population can just like explode and go through
Speaker 1: the roof. And so that's what happened throughout the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, and they estimated at one point that
Speaker 1: blackwater was probably homed over fifty thousand nutrient and UM.
Speaker 1: That corresponded with a very significant decline in UH emergent
Speaker 1: marsh lands at Chesspeake UH at the Chestpeake marsh Lands
Speaker 1: National Wildlife Complex or Refuge complex. But that black water
Speaker 1: unit of at one point was about thirteen thousand or
Speaker 1: so acres of wetlands and they lost about five thousand
Speaker 1: acres of that over the course of well between nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight and UM nineteen ninety nine or so, almost
Speaker 1: a half. Yeah, it's very significant. You look at the
Speaker 1: aerial photographs of the core of the heart of black
Speaker 1: Water Refuge and you can see that it's just been
Speaker 1: converted almost entirely to open water. So huge ecological impact.
Speaker 1: And you said Emergent marshes, Yeah, Emergent marshes are those
Speaker 1: uh wetlands where the plants actually emerge out of the water,
Speaker 1: so you look out and you see vegetation basically as
Speaker 1: opposed to like a lily pad type environment or that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. UM. So the typical marshes that we
Speaker 1: have here in the coastal regions of the Chesapeake bay
Speaker 1: are characterized by uh three square bulrush um cat tails
Speaker 1: in some of the more fresher headwaters of the this
Speaker 1: sort of drainage system, and the closer you get to
Speaker 1: the bay and higher selinities, you'll get more needle rush,
Speaker 1: salt hay um, those different types of plant communities. So
Speaker 1: the one that's really critical, and then probably from a
Speaker 1: wildlife perspective, one of the most valuable habitat types is
Speaker 1: the three square marsh. It produces a lot of seeds
Speaker 1: that are fed on by migrating birds and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing and play showed yesterday all the swamp. So
Speaker 1: if you roll it between your fingers, it's got it's
Speaker 1: very triangular in cross section, so um it's it tends
Speaker 1: to grow in very organic based soils and it basically
Speaker 1: accumulates is you know, pete over years and years and
Speaker 1: years of rotting vegetation sort of builds up this peat layer,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't have a real solid foundation, and they're
Speaker 1: where it's very vulnerable to erosion when nutria come in
Speaker 1: and start carving up that route map. So well, muskrat
Speaker 1: do feed on the same types of plants. Three squares
Speaker 1: very important for muskrat as well. They feed a little
Speaker 1: bit differently. Um nutria tend to dig up the tubers
Speaker 1: of the roots of the plants um and do it
Speaker 1: in a very concentrated area. And even more importantly, what
Speaker 1: they'll do is they'll dig swim channels kind of like
Speaker 1: a beaver does, to get from the tidal waterways into
Speaker 1: their feeding areas. What they're essentially doing is creating a
Speaker 1: little stream bed for the tide to get in and
Speaker 1: out so it penetrates further into their marsh. And then
Speaker 1: when it comes out, all that material that they've dug
Speaker 1: up is gathered and swept out to see more or
Speaker 1: less or at least out to the bay. Um. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's it. In Yeah, because I was hard, I was
Speaker 1: having hard to have picture how what they were doing
Speaker 1: was causing someone trouble. That's an interesting perspective on it,
Speaker 1: not perspective on it, but like an interesting The way
Speaker 1: to explain what's going on is those canals, like the
Speaker 1: same canals beavers dig. I never thought that as being
Speaker 1: a way for water just to snake its way further
Speaker 1: up into stuff, so you get higher salinity water penetrating
Speaker 1: further into what are typically brackish or even fresh water marks,
Speaker 1: because beavers will dig those things. You'll you'll see him
Speaker 1: hud yards long sometimes to to go access willow right,
Speaker 1: So that contributes to this erosion problem. What actually happens
Speaker 1: is that organic muck that this route mat is sort
Speaker 1: of floating on uh gets eroded from underneath, and the
Speaker 1: marsh begins to sink. And despite the fact that these
Speaker 1: are wetland plants, they're very susceptible too and intolerant of
Speaker 1: changes in the hydrology of the system. So all they
Speaker 1: need is sink is just a few fractions of an
Speaker 1: inch necessarily, and those plants can no longer survive. It
Speaker 1: turns into a different community, and in many cases it
Speaker 1: sinks so low that no plants can survive, and it
Speaker 1: just turns into this kind of open water wasteland that
Speaker 1: really doesn't produce much good habitat. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: deep enough all the time for a fish community to
Speaker 1: be really supported by it, and most of the fish
Speaker 1: that we tend to see using those those open water
Speaker 1: areas are also invasive species, carved and things like that.
Speaker 1: So but you know, it's not solely the nutrients fault
Speaker 1: that we've seen such wetland loss in the Chesapeake Bay
Speaker 1: region because there are a number of threats to this ecosystem,
Speaker 1: and that includes sea level rise, UM, land subsidence, through
Speaker 1: the withdrawal of underground aquifers for human consumption, congregation, and
Speaker 1: all that sort of thing um and so there's all
Speaker 1: these sort of multiple factors impacting the marshes, which can
Speaker 1: be fairly resilient until you put nutrient into the equation.
Speaker 1: And there's sort of the catalyst that that little uh
Speaker 1: that you know, your grandma's sweater that she needed for
Speaker 1: you when you're a kid, and you get a thread
Speaker 1: pulled on it, and all of a sudden, the whole
Speaker 1: thing on ravels. The new tria is the one pulling
Speaker 1: that thread, and that's all of the other things sort
Speaker 1: of compound when nutria introduced to the equation. So they
Speaker 1: did some really neat research back in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: trying to figure out the role that neutria played. And
Speaker 1: what they did was they went throughout the black Water
Speaker 1: system and they put in a bunch of fences, basically
Speaker 1: UM thirty exclusion fences that they buried into the ground
Speaker 1: so that the nutria couldn't swim under it or dig
Speaker 1: under it, and then they made sure there were no
Speaker 1: nutria within them, and they just monitored the vegetation around them,
Speaker 1: and they very quickly could see a distinct difference. Uh,
Speaker 1: they put them in areas where there were compromised by nutria,
Speaker 1: and outside the fences continue need to degrade and convert
Speaker 1: to this muddy open water, and inside the fence the
Speaker 1: plants came back. So it was a good indication that
Speaker 1: if we could eliminate nutrient from the equation, that the
Speaker 1: marsh could possibly restore itself. No real quick here do
Speaker 1: they banked in or where do they sleep at night?
Speaker 1: That's a great question. Um, they don't typically bank then. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, many of the areas that they live in
Speaker 1: out in the open marsh don't have banks, so they
Speaker 1: just live on they don't And that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons we think that they're limited in their northern distribution
Speaker 1: because they don't have that thermal refuge from cold weather.
Speaker 1: So what we would see layout they'll build like a
Speaker 1: little nest, just a platform of vegetation, like a muskrat feedbed. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And I've seen those built almost on stilts. When we
Speaker 1: have high water events. We had a hurricane in two
Speaker 1: thousand and two, I think Hurricane Isabella brought a six
Speaker 1: foot storm surge over the whole marsh, and when the
Speaker 1: waters were seated, we found nutria beds that were made
Speaker 1: out of frag Mighty's the invasive reed that you've been
Speaker 1: seeing lately. Um four ft off the surface of the marsh.
Speaker 1: All folded over and made a nice little platform so
Speaker 1: they could get up out of the water. But that
Speaker 1: doesn't provide thermal protection. So what we see in the
Speaker 1: wintertime with these critters is that they're very susceptible the
Speaker 1: cold weather. They'll get frost bite on their tails and
Speaker 1: over over the course of several years of a big
Speaker 1: adult nutria might only have a stub six inch tailor
Speaker 1: or less even um because it just gets frost bit.
Speaker 1: Females under physiological stress from the cold weather will actually
Speaker 1: abort their females or their fetuses, and so that's another
Speaker 1: element of nutrient. Why there's such a difficult species to
Speaker 1: deal with is because they reproduce extremely rapidly. They Nutria
Speaker 1: come into heat and are ready to breed within four
Speaker 1: or forty eight hours of giving birth, and they become
Speaker 1: sexually mature at about six months of age. So once
Speaker 1: a neutria hits six months of age, she's virtually pregnant
Speaker 1: for the rest of her life. And in the wintertime.
Speaker 1: If they clarify that when you first said that, I
Speaker 1: thought you meant um that the young were. You're saying
Speaker 1: a female will have a litter, and then that female
Speaker 1: within within a couple of days is ready to breed again.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah. And if her in her offspring can breed
Speaker 1: win howld at about six months of age, so you
Speaker 1: get it's about a four month gestation period, three to
Speaker 1: four months, and so they can produce like three litters
Speaker 1: a year. You're producing generations in a year. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And in these northern climates where we do see these
Speaker 1: period of stress on the animals where the females will
Speaker 1: abort their litters if they're pregnant, they'll come into the
Speaker 1: heat immediately after that. So it forces this sort of
Speaker 1: cyclic and seasonality to the to the breeding pattern in
Speaker 1: these northern climates where we tend to see big pulses
Speaker 1: of reproduction. Uh, litters born in like May October in January,
Speaker 1: and then usually the January litter doesn't really survive because
Speaker 1: there's these young are born at at a time of
Speaker 1: year where it just isn't conducive to survival. What so,
Speaker 1: what year was it? Remind me again what year they
Speaker 1: first may have gotten introduced here from early nineties, and
Speaker 1: what year was it when the explosion, Like you know,
Speaker 1: when you you're describing how they're just kind of putter
Speaker 1: long and all of a sudden their numbers get to
Speaker 1: a point where you can have this like all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it's like exponential, right, you know, was the
Speaker 1: late nineteen sixties when they really started to notice, you know,
Speaker 1: nutrient and abundance, and then through the seventies and eighties
Speaker 1: that marsh lost really seemed to accelerate to the point
Speaker 1: where you could people were seeing it in their own lifetime.
Speaker 1: They were seeing the marshall. Yeah, definitely. I had employees
Speaker 1: on the project that were born and raised on the
Speaker 1: marshes of black Water, and they said when they were kids,
Speaker 1: they could have walked in tennis shoes from the Wildlife
Speaker 1: Drive on the black Water National Wildlife Refuge across to
Speaker 1: the property where they grew up. It's about a two
Speaker 1: or three mile distance probably, and the only place they
Speaker 1: would have gotten wet was where the Blackwater River coursed
Speaker 1: through that marsh. There's a high marsh, solid good, good
Speaker 1: ground and uh, that's a big lake. Now okay, yah,
Speaker 1: what year was it then that? Or let me ask
Speaker 1: this to how okay, what year was it when someone said, like,
Speaker 1: is there something we should be trying to do about this?
Speaker 1: And how many neutria werether at that moment? Yeah? Can
Speaker 1: you work in just like a general public perception into
Speaker 1: that answer to like, what was the public thinking and
Speaker 1: about it back then? Well? You know what, at first,
Speaker 1: I think that it wasn't perceived as such a problem
Speaker 1: because there was a fur market for for neutria, and
Speaker 1: people would go out in the wintertime and they would
Speaker 1: hunt and trap them and you know, get some money
Speaker 1: for their for their pelts. Um excuse me, but really
Speaker 1: from a wildlife perspective and from a local economy perspective,
Speaker 1: the muskrat is the king here and when you lose
Speaker 1: three square marks, you lose muskrat. And I think people
Speaker 1: started to realize that that, at least from the trapping community,
Speaker 1: that muskrat are much more desirable than neutria are. And
Speaker 1: so there was support even from you know, that element
Speaker 1: that we needed to do something about it. The big
Speaker 1: thing was the law some marshes at black Water in
Speaker 1: the surrounding Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area. So it was
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties that the various natural resource agencies
Speaker 1: that have a role in managing and conserving UH these
Speaker 1: important Chesapeake Bay resources got together and started thinking about,
Speaker 1: you know, what we could do to try to stem
Speaker 1: the loss and maybe even foster the recovery of the marsh. This,
Speaker 1: this whole project is not about killing nutrients, about restoring wetlands, UM,
Speaker 1: and that's the purpose of it. So it took some
Speaker 1: time to get all the people on board and to
Speaker 1: get congressional support for because this is a big initiative.
Speaker 1: You know, we're talking uh, you know, a quarter million
Speaker 1: acres of wetlands that we eventually have have treated across
Speaker 1: this uh, this landscape, so no small task. UM. They
Speaker 1: estimated population estimates UH somewhere in the vicinity of fifty
Speaker 1: thousand nutrient Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and they had some
Speaker 1: fairly good numbers to make estimates off through their trapping programs.
Speaker 1: Because black Water and Fishing Bay are both available to
Speaker 1: UH for trappers to to bid on. They control the
Speaker 1: the amount of trapping. Trappers can come in and bid
Speaker 1: on a lot like like like a chunk of ground
Speaker 1: within the refuge just to work for their own trap line, right. Um,
Speaker 1: And so they had harvest records and at one point
Speaker 1: they were paying uh not a bounty per se, but
Speaker 1: trappers that that did least the trapping units could turn
Speaker 1: in nutrient tails for a dollar fifty credit towards the
Speaker 1: total price of whatever they paid. So if a trapper paid,
Speaker 1: you know, fift undred bucks for a trapping unit and
Speaker 1: they caught what a hundred nutrient turn the tails and
Speaker 1: they could get a hundred and fifty dollars per tail
Speaker 1: and cover the cost of their least they couldn't they
Speaker 1: couldn't catch you know, five nutrient getting extra money. But
Speaker 1: that same guy would probably be that that same guy
Speaker 1: would probably stacking up muskrats in the hundreds. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. These whitelands support quite high densities and muskrats.
Speaker 1: And these are high quality muskrats around here. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: the chest Peake Bay region is renowned for the quality
Speaker 1: of the muskrat pelts. Yeah, I heard a guy, you're not,
Speaker 1: I mean, I were like in the early eight like
Speaker 1: the late seventies early eighties muskrats, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: got it's like, you know, extra large muskrats. You gotta
Speaker 1: imagine like the economic difference now and then like what
Speaker 1: it meant. But like seven or eight dollar muskrats in
Speaker 1: the late seventies early eighties, adjusted for inflation, is like
Speaker 1: a valuable animal for something that like an enterprising trapp
Speaker 1: or I mean, there was guys who would quite handily
Speaker 1: put um trap flesh and stretch upwards of a thousand
Speaker 1: or even more muskrats in a year. You can make
Speaker 1: a living trapping back then. Trapping muskrats. Now you're hard
Speaker 1: to press to make a living trap muskrats. You're hard
Speaker 1: press of paper, your expenses trap of muskrats. But at
Speaker 1: the time, it's just like an incredible thing. I caught
Speaker 1: the tail end of that, you know, I was coming
Speaker 1: into trap and just as the you know, I set
Speaker 1: my first muskrat trap and guys are already talking about
Speaker 1: the good old days. But it was still pretty good.
Speaker 1: It's not as good well, you know, in the market
Speaker 1: continues to fluctuate. We we've never seen prices like back then.
Speaker 1: But you know, in the time that I've been here.
Speaker 1: Muskrat pelts extra largess have have gone up to close
Speaker 1: to eight dollars and you know, five dollars with some regularity,
Speaker 1: and they you know, Peakin Valley over time. But there's
Speaker 1: also a market for the meats here as well. So
Speaker 1: by the time that surprised me to hear, yeah, by
Speaker 1: the time you sell the pelt and then you might
Speaker 1: get through four or five bucks for the meats as well.
Speaker 1: Uh uh, you're actually looking at ten or twelve dollars
Speaker 1: per muskrat. And there are people here that that make
Speaker 1: a significant part of their living off of muskrat. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a seasonal work. A lot of farmers will trapped
Speaker 1: during the winter when they're not tend in their fields
Speaker 1: and whatnot. A lot of waterman well trapped during that
Speaker 1: part of the year. So it's an important part of
Speaker 1: the local economy. And and you know a lot of
Speaker 1: people think that, you know, trapping is a anachronistic type thing,
Speaker 1: it's a dead art, and it's we don't need it
Speaker 1: in this modern society. But there's still folks here that
Speaker 1: that really rely on income for trapping. You know, Dorchester
Speaker 1: County is not a wealthy County. It's uh. The last
Speaker 1: time I looked, which was some years ago, that the
Speaker 1: media income was about two thous dollars a year. So
Speaker 1: someone's catching three four five thousand dollars worth of muskrat
Speaker 1: in a year. That's a significant chunk of their annual income.
Speaker 1: So it's important to people. It's not just a you know,
Speaker 1: a hobby or a pastime that people like to do.
Speaker 1: It's it's really important. And this is a point that
Speaker 1: I think is forgotten that those skills in the community,
Speaker 1: that understanding of the natural world that we live in.
Speaker 1: I think no one understands better than a trapper. You know,
Speaker 1: having a no one animal well enough and it's habitat
Speaker 1: well enough to be able to go out and catch
Speaker 1: it requires a certain amount of knowledge and know how,
Speaker 1: understanding and respect for the environment. And without those they're
Speaker 1: doing that ninety days in a role. Yeah, absolutely, a dedication.
Speaker 1: It's uh, it's hard work and having those skills, uh,
Speaker 1: I think are incredibly important to conservation today. And you
Speaker 1: can see it beyond what we did here, you know,
Speaker 1: are the nutrient eradication campaign that we mounted in conjunction
Speaker 1: with the Maryland d n R and the US Fish
Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service was essentially a systematic hunting and trapping
Speaker 1: program that we used paid employees to implement. So the
Speaker 1: problem was identified and funding was secured, and someone floated
Speaker 1: the idea of let's try to go kill all fifty
Speaker 1: thousand neutria, every last one of them dead. Yep, that
Speaker 1: was the goal. And what was the person if someone
Speaker 1: told me that, if if you asked me, if you
Speaker 1: asked me, like before I found out about this, if
Speaker 1: you'd ask me like, do you think in a not
Speaker 1: in an island, not in an island environment, but like
Speaker 1: in an open environment like this, do you think you
Speaker 1: could um mechanically remove an established population of a semi
Speaker 1: aquatic rodent? I would tend to say no, you couldn't.
Speaker 1: But people did it successfully accidentally with beavers in the
Speaker 1: on horseback, So so that was still would be daunting
Speaker 1: and would still be like, yeah, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you could really do it or not. And so wisely,
Speaker 1: the project began as a pilot study because we weren't
Speaker 1: sure if it was feasible or not, and certainly there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people, probably most people who thought
Speaker 1: it probably wasn't. But we were able to convince enough
Speaker 1: folks in the right places, uh, that it was a
Speaker 1: worthy endeavor, and we got the funding to to do it.
Speaker 1: It started with about a two year research project back
Speaker 1: in two thousand and At that time the project was
Speaker 1: being managed through the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where
Speaker 1: they had a cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. It
Speaker 1: was part of the US Geological Surveys Research Branch, and
Speaker 1: it's so it started looking at things like trying to
Speaker 1: answer questions like, if you is there a density dependent
Speaker 1: response of nutria reproduction in response to intensive trapping pressure?
Speaker 1: So in other words, if you trap nutria, are they
Speaker 1: gonna just make more nutria faster? And so that was
Speaker 1: one of the areas of research. Um which there's alway
Speaker 1: the problem people find with trying to get rid of coyotes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are examples of species that do respond by increasing
Speaker 1: their reproductive rates, whether it's on a per individual basis
Speaker 1: by an increase in litter size, or if it's through
Speaker 1: an increasing proportion of the population breeding, because you're destructing
Speaker 1: the social dynamics of that species. Um. And some do
Speaker 1: it by increasing dispersal too, right. When you get that, yeah,
Speaker 1: well that's that sort of ties into the disrupting their
Speaker 1: social thing, you know, especially with coyotes. You know, if
Speaker 1: you have a saturated population of coyotes, they tend to
Speaker 1: suppress breeding in the younger animals and they form more
Speaker 1: family groups. And if you get a lot of mortality there,
Speaker 1: then the family unit breaks up and the young disperse
Speaker 1: and then you've got freedom to breed. So um. But
Speaker 1: with Nutria, the other thing they're looking at was trying
Speaker 1: to determine if there are any sort of parasite loads,
Speaker 1: that sort of things, sort of some basic ecological research
Speaker 1: on how this species exists in the chest Peak region,
Speaker 1: but also trying to estimate populations. And they found it
Speaker 1: challenging uh to catch enough animals to test some of
Speaker 1: their hypotheses with these things, because any market capture study
Speaker 1: requires large sample sizes to come up with a reliable
Speaker 1: estimate of what that population is. And it got to
Speaker 1: a point where I think the folks that were providing
Speaker 1: the funding wanted to see us move into the eradication phase.
Speaker 1: You know, let's see if we can get this done,
Speaker 1: get to the kid right exactly. So in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: Wildlife Services was asked to get involved as the implementing
Speaker 1: agency to to sort of carry out this plan. And
Speaker 1: it was very much an adaptive management type plan. And
Speaker 1: we started at Blackwater. That's where you know the problem originated.
Speaker 1: And uh, we actually had three main study areas that
Speaker 1: were used during the research phase that we started out on,
Speaker 1: and one was at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, the other
Speaker 1: was on Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area, and the third
Speaker 1: was on a private conservation property that was adjacent to
Speaker 1: the Fishing Bay and Blackwater complexes. So that that first
Speaker 1: summer that we got engaged, you know, we worked on
Speaker 1: trying to trap out the study areas that they had
Speaker 1: started doing all this research on. And and those weren't
Speaker 1: like enclosed areas though, no, no, not at and they
Speaker 1: were iceolated. They were tied into the other population correct, correct,
Speaker 1: So they were as I remember, they were about six
Speaker 1: acres uh sort of plots within the black Water, Fishing
Speaker 1: Bay and Tudor Farm system and that's where they had
Speaker 1: done the bulk of the market recapture studies and and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So we tried to go in
Speaker 1: and work out our trapping techniques to sort of clear
Speaker 1: out those areas and try to give some closure to
Speaker 1: the mark recapture stuff so that we could get all
Speaker 1: those tagged animals and account for them. It would this
Speaker 1: be a good time to explain how the like, I
Speaker 1: have no idea when you just say you're trapping neutral, Like,
Speaker 1: what did that look like? Yeah? Sure, so we use
Speaker 1: some pretty conventional for trapping techniques. Uh. The core of
Speaker 1: our trapping toolbox was the two twenty counter bear, which
Speaker 1: is an instant kill uh body gripping trap. It's commonly
Speaker 1: pretty near, yes, submerge, it's fast, Yes it is. Um.
Speaker 1: So you know we bought thousands of those things too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had fifteen fold wilife specialists running like Victors or
Speaker 1: Northwoods or just whoever. Yeah, I think Sleepy Creek. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think we we had quite a few traps from them.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, body grip and traps coming like serious sizes
Speaker 1: so like there's like the one hundred series sizes which
Speaker 1: are making muskrat. Two hundred series sizes are generally used
Speaker 1: for raccoon, otter neutria fishers, guys who use one tens
Speaker 1: on dry land, one tens for Martin Did I say
Speaker 1: MANK I think I did. Then the three hundred series
Speaker 1: are usually just beaver, but guys used three thirties also
Speaker 1: for wolverines, and some guys liked, uh, some guys like
Speaker 1: three thirties for otters because otters are harder defense into
Speaker 1: a two twenty, but they don't work as good because
Speaker 1: sometimes the otter can pop out of one of the jaws.
Speaker 1: You know, some people like two twenties on those. So
Speaker 1: they make any bigger is that the biggest? Never heard
Speaker 1: anying bigger than three thirty series count of beer? They
Speaker 1: actually do make a couple uh what do they call them?
Speaker 1: Six sixties or something like that, and it's like two
Speaker 1: three thirties welded together, so it's still got the ten
Speaker 1: inch jaw spread from top to bottom, but they're twice
Speaker 1: is wide. Yeah, that's good to throw in the measurements
Speaker 1: because the two twenties or eight right, seven inches I
Speaker 1: believe seven in Okay. Yeah, when you set this thing,
Speaker 1: this looks like a little wirior box right right then.
Speaker 1: But it's got springs out in the three thirty you
Speaker 1: can break your arm, man your arm. Yeah, it's they're
Speaker 1: not pleasant to have your appendage cut in. So you
Speaker 1: guys went out and bought a mountain in the two twenties.
Speaker 1: We bought a mount into two twenties and quite a
Speaker 1: few foothold traps as well. And what what were you
Speaker 1: doing up with those? What size traps? Uh, A lot
Speaker 1: of one and a half coil spring traps, but we
Speaker 1: also use some bigger So Neutria have a much bigger
Speaker 1: hind foot than they do front foot, very much like
Speaker 1: a beaver. And so the uh, the one and a
Speaker 1: half coil spring trap, which has about a four and
Speaker 1: a half inch jospread I think nutrius foot can span
Speaker 1: the entire trap. So unless you catch them by the
Speaker 1: front foot, you run the risk that that they might
Speaker 1: just spring a trap and not get caught. So we
Speaker 1: did have some larger traps that we used, number twos
Speaker 1: and threes. I think that we sometimes set if you
Speaker 1: were set for the hind leg. Yeah, so just just
Speaker 1: for context for people, like a one and a half
Speaker 1: double coil spring is a foothold trap, and that's the
Speaker 1: size generally used. That's like v go to trap for
Speaker 1: raccoon fox. Yeah, right, that that size critter. So and
Speaker 1: it's important to have uh different tools and your trapping
Speaker 1: toolbox because sometimes animals become trap shy. You know, if
Speaker 1: they see a certain uh type of trap in there.
Speaker 1: You know, some animals are less tolerant of new novelties
Speaker 1: in their environment. They'll sort of steer clear of them.
Speaker 1: So foothold trap is easier to camouflage and sort of disguise. Um.
Speaker 1: So we tended to catch the bulk of the animals
Speaker 1: that we captured in the two twenty conno bear. But
Speaker 1: when we had animals that were clearly you know, avoiding
Speaker 1: the body grouping traps, we would set the foothold traps.
Speaker 1: And were you setting those two twenties in the channels? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we find those swing channels and paths through the
Speaker 1: marsh and just neck them down and stay in there.
Speaker 1: The perfect width, the size channel, perfect perfect width for
Speaker 1: the two twenty. It wasn't it wasn't quite rocket science
Speaker 1: to catch him. But would you guys use those uh
Speaker 1: those basically harness rigs to hold the two twenties so
Speaker 1: you can just stab it into the ground. No, we
Speaker 1: actually used bamboo poles mostly, So we wired the trap
Speaker 1: to a bamboo pole and then uh stuck it through
Speaker 1: the spring in the corner of the trap to provide
Speaker 1: some stabilization and also sort of a visual sort of
Speaker 1: guide to send the animal through. You're calling all this
Speaker 1: gear around what the canoe? A lot of it, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: mostly john boats actually, Um, there are the main waterways
Speaker 1: you can navigate through the marsh, but a lot of
Speaker 1: it was over the shoulder, just carrying stuff through the
Speaker 1: equipment through the marsh. The bamboo poles were kind of
Speaker 1: handy because you could you could uh spring the trap
Speaker 1: on the end of the bamboo pole and then gather
Speaker 1: you know, ten or a dozen polls up with traps
Speaker 1: on and throw him over your shoulder and carry him
Speaker 1: across the marsh. So and it's stuff like that kind
Speaker 1: of circle back to where I was going With the
Speaker 1: importance of maintaining these trapping skills in the community. We
Speaker 1: were very reliant on local knowledge and local trappers on
Speaker 1: this project to understand how to work in this marsh
Speaker 1: effectively and the techniques that that that work best. Because
Speaker 1: while trapping isn't rocket science, it's got a steep learning
Speaker 1: curve for a beginner and uh, you know, it can
Speaker 1: take people a long time to sort of figure things out, uh,
Speaker 1: and an experienced trapper can be very effective at selecting
Speaker 1: the species that they're trying to target and avoiding those
Speaker 1: other species that not but a novice trapper often is
Speaker 1: is uh not as selective. So having that expertise in
Speaker 1: the community, and this translates to much much beyond uh
Speaker 1: you know, nutrient eradication uh. For trappers were incredibly important
Speaker 1: to the restoration of a lot of uh endangered species
Speaker 1: in the United States, wolves being probably one of the
Speaker 1: most prime examples of that. You know, the last remaining
Speaker 1: Mexican wolves were caught by a trapper named Roy McBride
Speaker 1: and pulled into to captivity for a selective breeding program
Speaker 1: to build those populations up and restore them to the wild.
Speaker 1: The Yellowstone Wolf recovery effort was many of those wolves
Speaker 1: were captured and traps set by trappers. Soever some years
Speaker 1: ago some American fur trappers going down to help some
Speaker 1: governments in South America catch jaguars. Yep, yeah, they're uh,
Speaker 1: you know, a good trapper is a very valuable persons
Speaker 1: of the wildlife conservation community. Um. So were you a
Speaker 1: trapper before you got involved with he was trading muscratch
Speaker 1: for haircuts? Yep, Okay, yeah, I was uh certainly not
Speaker 1: a trapper in the sense that the folks here that
Speaker 1: you know, make a living off of But how I
Speaker 1: got started in it, and actually I had I grew
Speaker 1: up with somewhat of a negative opinion of trapping because
Speaker 1: my my grandfather was an avid bird hunter and always
Speaker 1: had bird dogs. Oh yeah, it was gays and he'd
Speaker 1: had a couple of dogs get caught in foothold trap
Speaker 1: there with the Humane Society trapping, So yeah, he he
Speaker 1: had sort of instilled in me this uh lack of appreciation,
Speaker 1: shall I say, for for trapping in general. But you know,
Speaker 1: I went to school for wildlife management, and I came
Speaker 1: out of that, Uh, I went into graduate school for
Speaker 1: uh wildlife ecology, and I was really dying to study carnivores.
Speaker 1: And I managed to land a position, a graduate research
Speaker 1: position at the State University of New York College of
Speaker 1: Environmental Science and Forest We're doing coyote research, and you know,
Speaker 1: for the first time I had to figure out how
Speaker 1: to catch an animal with this sort of traditional for
Speaker 1: harvesting tools. I've done you know, trapping with cage traps
Speaker 1: for pine martin and other critters like that, but I'd
Speaker 1: never for research. Yeah, but I've never set you know,
Speaker 1: foothold traps, and so I had to learn how to
Speaker 1: do it to catch study animals for my project. And
Speaker 1: when you're making, you know, a stipend of eight hundred
Speaker 1: bucks a month, it doesn't quite make ends meet and
Speaker 1: learning a trap. And I'm also driving through all of
Speaker 1: this probably muskrat country, and I'm seeing farmers with problems
Speaker 1: with beavers and all that sort of stuff. And so
Speaker 1: I just started learning. And I was very fortunate to
Speaker 1: have a renowned fur buyer and trapper in the community
Speaker 1: that I was living in in upstate New York, Paul
Speaker 1: Grimshaw Grimshaw, and uh, he didn't exactly take me under
Speaker 1: his wing. He's kind of a ordinary old guy, but
Speaker 1: once you sort of connected with him, he'd start sharing knowledge.
Speaker 1: And so I learned a tremendous amount from him. I
Speaker 1: just go and watch and his wife's skin and stretch
Speaker 1: muskrat pelts, and just learned, you know, the kind of
Speaker 1: tricks of the trade for catching some of these other furbears.
Speaker 1: And and I was able to supplement my income, you know,
Speaker 1: not tremendous. I wasn't out there buying cars or anything
Speaker 1: with it. But when you make a hundred bucks a month,
Speaker 1: an extra month's salary, and in the course of a year.
Speaker 1: It really helped out quite a bit. So I was
Speaker 1: telling you honest the other day about I used to sell.
Speaker 1: I didn't flesh and stretch my own raccoons. He's like,
Speaker 1: no one likes doing that, you know. And I would
Speaker 1: sell him to a fur buyer who would who would
Speaker 1: uh got named Abe sell salicina Um. He was a
Speaker 1: tomato enthusiast who grew tomatoes and bought fur. And you
Speaker 1: would go into his selling raccoons and he'd be in
Speaker 1: there and he'd heat his he'd heat his barn with
Speaker 1: raccoon fat, no kidding, he'd open that door and take
Speaker 1: a job with that raccoon in there like black smoke. Well,
Speaker 1: you know it was it was neat to be in
Speaker 1: such proximity to it, to Paul Grimshaw because you know,
Speaker 1: he was an expert in putting up furs and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So you know, I put up my own fur from
Speaker 1: when I was doing that, and I enjoyed that part
Speaker 1: of It's kind of like put you in your own meat.
Speaker 1: You know, you're kind of taking that process from start
Speaker 1: to finish, and you know, you get more money for
Speaker 1: for when it's when it's put up properly get less
Speaker 1: when it's put up poorly. But um, I think they'd
Speaker 1: rather buy green fur than than poorly put up for
Speaker 1: But that's like that like lingo is uh green fur
Speaker 1: would be skinned but not flash and stretched if you
Speaker 1: sold a muskrat like guys would also sell muskrats in
Speaker 1: the round, which would mean just pull up at the end,
Speaker 1: run your line and drive up and sell the guy
Speaker 1: muskrats in the round. You might be selling them for
Speaker 1: half what you'd get if you sold them stretched exactly.
Speaker 1: So that was a real uh learning experience for me,
Speaker 1: And the thing I liked about it is that it
Speaker 1: really makes you step back and take time to learn
Speaker 1: about animals you normally wouldn't even think about. You know
Speaker 1: who thinks about muskrats unless you're trying to catch them.
Speaker 1: And then so just I learned a whole lot about
Speaker 1: the ecology of the region and and the behavior of
Speaker 1: the animals, and the importance of different habitat types than
Speaker 1: what lives there through this process of learning how to
Speaker 1: trap and uh so when you call. But when you
Speaker 1: caught wind of the you had to go apply for
Speaker 1: the new Tria job or was it just like fall
Speaker 1: into your lap No, I had to apply for it. So,
Speaker 1: you know, when I was working in the Virginia Wildlife
Speaker 1: Services program, every state has Wildlife Services has a program
Speaker 1: in every state just about and so I was working
Speaker 1: through the Virginia Division of Wildlife Services and we would
Speaker 1: have these annual conferences where all the different states surrounding
Speaker 1: would get together and intermingle. And for a couple of
Speaker 1: years there I was hearing them talk about this Nutria
Speaker 1: eradication study that they were undertaking in Maryland. And at
Speaker 1: the time, Maryland Wildlife Services wasn't getting involved. We had
Speaker 1: a state director at the time that was close to
Speaker 1: retirement and I think it wasn't really all that keen
Speaker 1: to take on this sort of massive project. Um. But
Speaker 1: he retired and a new guy came in and jumped
Speaker 1: on the opportunity to work with a fish and wildlife
Speaker 1: service and UH put this vacancy announcement out there, and
Speaker 1: Jesus sounded interesting to me. I had no idea what
Speaker 1: a new trio was. I had to look it up
Speaker 1: and I put my name in the hat. And I
Speaker 1: don't know how I got picked, but I did experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess so, um, but I feel very fortunate to
Speaker 1: have been selected for that position because it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that that doesn't happen too often in your
Speaker 1: career where you get to work on a project that
Speaker 1: just has sort of profound impacts on conservation and ecology
Speaker 1: and results that you can see on the ground. And
Speaker 1: so the position was and it was everything you liked. Man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was able to take all of the skills that
Speaker 1: I developed through my personal passions hunting and trapping and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing and sort of devote them to
Speaker 1: solving a conservation problem. And it really was rewarding to
Speaker 1: be able to do that. And also, you know, I
Speaker 1: have to give full credit to the guys that and
Speaker 1: Gales that really got this job done because I was
Speaker 1: not the trapper out there. I did trap some, but
Speaker 1: I was a project manager, so I was supervising the team.
Speaker 1: Uh uh, We're developing the strategies to you know, how
Speaker 1: to work and devote our resources across the landscape and
Speaker 1: you know, when is it time to move from this
Speaker 1: area to that area? That sort of thing. Making sure
Speaker 1: that guy's had all the equipment that they needed, the boats,
Speaker 1: the motors, the waiters, the traps, all that stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: So that was sort of my role, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the opportunity to supervisor was link to me. I didn't
Speaker 1: think so when I first got into wildlife that I
Speaker 1: really want to be managing people, but you know, realizing
Speaker 1: how much more you can accomplished by harnessing the energy
Speaker 1: of others. Ah, it was a neat opportunity. So I'm
Speaker 1: getting backed up on questions. They had a couple of
Speaker 1: quickies out of context, out of order. Were you hiring
Speaker 1: trapper trappers or you hiring or did that not? That's
Speaker 1: not how it worked, Like, you didn't come in and
Speaker 1: hire existing for trappers, so do the physical trapping. So
Speaker 1: the research phase of the project had hired some local
Speaker 1: trappers as part of the team. And when we came
Speaker 1: to develop methodologies, yeah, well to implement the research study
Speaker 1: that they designed. So that was primarily using cage traps,
Speaker 1: um and some foothold traps. Uh. But they did reach
Speaker 1: out to the local community and got a handful of
Speaker 1: folks that were uh you know, born and raised in
Speaker 1: the chest Peak Bay, knew how to trap and how
Speaker 1: to handle animals and all that stuff, and so we
Speaker 1: inherited when the Wildlife Services program took over they wanted
Speaker 1: to provide a home for those you know, employment for
Speaker 1: those folks that have dedicated themselves to the research phase
Speaker 1: of the project, and so we were able to hire
Speaker 1: them when we came on board. Not all of them
Speaker 1: chose to come with us, so I had some vacancies
Speaker 1: to fill, and you know, we put out vacancy announcements
Speaker 1: and uh we tried to recruit locally, and we also
Speaker 1: tried to recruit uh young wildlife professionals that we're just
Speaker 1: getting out of college and starting their careers. And I
Speaker 1: always strove to have a sort of a balance of
Speaker 1: the two because those uh, those greenhorns don't know what
Speaker 1: they're doing and they need someone to kind of show
Speaker 1: them the ropes and whatnot. But they bring a lot
Speaker 1: of energy and passion to their their work as well, um,
Speaker 1: and it helps them in their career steppe. And then
Speaker 1: our our sort of uh I always call them our
Speaker 1: veteran employees. They weren't military veterans necessarily, but but the
Speaker 1: folks that have been with a project from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and our folks that were that were taught on the
Speaker 1: Chess Peak, they went to the School of the Chesapeake,
Speaker 1: you know, to learn their trade, and so those folks
Speaker 1: would provide kind of the stability and the long term
Speaker 1: institutional knowledge that we needed to keep the project going
Speaker 1: because this is a long term project. So okay, so
Speaker 1: the second quickie and then I'm gonna get into a
Speaker 1: longer question. Um, what what do you guys do with
Speaker 1: all the nutrita that you trap? You probably can't utilize
Speaker 1: them because it's part of the government project, correct, So,
Speaker 1: and there was no market for them or anything like that.
Speaker 1: There's no use for the meats or anything. So at
Speaker 1: first we were instructed to remove all of the carcasses
Speaker 1: from the field and we're gonna compost them or bury
Speaker 1: them or or do something. Pardon me, but uh, we
Speaker 1: quickly found and at this time that that sort of
Speaker 1: rule was put in place, we had expected that there
Speaker 1: would be tens of thousands of nutrient that we were
Speaker 1: going to be catching. And when reality said in we
Speaker 1: started doing the trapping, had been coome become clear that
Speaker 1: the population had begun to decline and we weren't catching
Speaker 1: nearly the numbers that we expected. Began to decline because
Speaker 1: of the trapping. No, not necessarily. I think the population
Speaker 1: on its own had started sort of dwindling. And part
Speaker 1: of the probably reason is probably that they had eaten
Speaker 1: themselves out of house and home in many of these areas,
Speaker 1: so there's habitat that was no longer there. They were
Speaker 1: estimated to reach densities of gosh I should have boned
Speaker 1: up on some of my my memory here um eight
Speaker 1: to nine six to nine per square acre or per acre.
Speaker 1: So at those densities, uh, which are tremendous densities. You know,
Speaker 1: you could have seen thirty five to fifty thod neutrient blackwater,
Speaker 1: but wipe five thousand acres habitat off the map and
Speaker 1: got significantly fewer. So we were bringing the carcasses back,
Speaker 1: but there weren't that many of them, and there's a
Speaker 1: big concern for removing them from the marsh was the
Speaker 1: potential for avian and avian batuli is um with all
Speaker 1: these rotting carcasses out there potentially being fed on by birds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just this massive carrying that that would potentially create problems
Speaker 1: for other wildlife. But it was very time consuming. They
Speaker 1: remove the animals from the field. You know, at fifteen
Speaker 1: pounds a piece, he gets four or five of them,
Speaker 1: you've got sixty pounds of carcasses that you're hauling around,
Speaker 1: So it was impeding our progress, and it didn't seem
Speaker 1: like there were numbers that would contribute to the kind
Speaker 1: of concerns that we initially had going into it. So
Speaker 1: we opted at that point to leave the carcasses out
Speaker 1: in the field, and very quickly the scavengers would would
Speaker 1: convert them back to you know, ashes to ashes, dust
Speaker 1: to dust, so it didn't turn out to be so
Speaker 1: much of an issue to have to remove them from
Speaker 1: the field, and that freed us up to you know,
Speaker 1: better to spend our time moving traps and carrying more
Speaker 1: traps out than carrying the exactly. So the longer question, no,
Speaker 1: I got that quickie. Uh, what was the public perception
Speaker 1: of the idea that we're gonna kill all the nutriments
Speaker 1: get rid of them wholesale? People like good idea or
Speaker 1: people like that's a horrible idea, not whether you can
Speaker 1: not whether it's plausible, but whether it's like advisable. Right, So,
Speaker 1: anytime you implement some sort of lethal management of wildlife populations,
Speaker 1: there's often a outcry of public sentiment that opposes that.
Speaker 1: But because of the ecological impact that these critters had
Speaker 1: and it was obvious to anyone familiar with this ecosystem. Uh,
Speaker 1: the ecological justification was so compelling that there was really
Speaker 1: very little backlash. Add to that that you know, it's
Speaker 1: basically a twenty pound rat doesn't generate a whole lot
Speaker 1: of sympathy, But that wasn't more. Yeah that that that's
Speaker 1: good information, And I like that you said it, but
Speaker 1: I meant I wasn't so much interested in those guys.
Speaker 1: I was interested in to people who actually liked the
Speaker 1: neutral But you no do both versions. I hadn't even
Speaker 1: intested you're you're talking about like the the animal welfare,
Speaker 1: because I'm talking about the guys who were out there
Speaker 1: perhaps hunting trapp and eating selling. So again back to
Speaker 1: muskrat is the king um Nutria had a pretty detrimental
Speaker 1: impact on muskrat populations, both and competition displacement competition, so
Speaker 1: Neutria UH would in the winter months in particular, dig
Speaker 1: into muskrat houses to try to seek refuge from UH
Speaker 1: cold weather or sit on top of them and basking
Speaker 1: the sun and whatnot, and they would basically destroy the
Speaker 1: muskrat house for muskrats. So, you know, we had a
Speaker 1: less valuable critter having a negative impact on a really
Speaker 1: important and so there was no opposition. So there was
Speaker 1: really no one who had any kind of reasonable widespread
Speaker 1: that you should We had, you know, one landowner that
Speaker 1: I worked with, and that's something I should mention too,
Speaker 1: is that this project would have been inconceivable without the
Speaker 1: support of private landowners because more than for the new
Speaker 1: tria that we eventually removed came from private land. So
Speaker 1: having their support was critical. Uh, as a federal agency,
Speaker 1: a non regulatory wildlife services can't just go on private
Speaker 1: property and conduct our work. We have to have their
Speaker 1: permission and blessing, and they have to prove all the
Speaker 1: methods that we use. So I had one farmer that
Speaker 1: we encountered who refused us access to his property because
Speaker 1: according to what he said was he liked to eat
Speaker 1: nutrient and I like to have him a little refrigerator
Speaker 1: out in the back forty where he could go and
Speaker 1: pluck some neutria for dinner on occasion. Um. Fortunately, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a big area and we were able to sort
Speaker 1: of trap around it and kind of pull the animals
Speaker 1: that were on his property off, so it didn't impede
Speaker 1: our progress in the long term. But what mostly come
Speaker 1: down to, I think is there's a fairly significant anti
Speaker 1: government sentiment in the community just about anywhere you go,
Speaker 1: but it's particularly noticeable here in Dorchester County. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of government regulations with you know, wetlands
Speaker 1: and and harvested animals, fish, commercial fisheries and crabs and
Speaker 1: all that sort of thing. So there's just this sort
Speaker 1: of general resentment to government intrusion and peoples right, So
Speaker 1: there wasn't that opposition, um and then from the animal
Speaker 1: welfare side there also wasn't opposition, which is interesting because
Speaker 1: at the same time that we were undertaking this eradication campaign,
Speaker 1: the Maryland Department Natural Resources was trying to deal with
Speaker 1: a rapidly expanding mute swan population had reached, another non
Speaker 1: native species that does an aquatic ecosystems very much what
Speaker 1: neutria do to these uh wetland ecosystems. So they feed
Speaker 1: on the mute swans feed on the subaquatic uh submerged
Speaker 1: aquatic vegetation that's really critical habitat for all sorts of fish, crabs,
Speaker 1: and you know, it provides a nursery for all these
Speaker 1: juvenile species and they'll go in imagine we're talking about
Speaker 1: imagine the most beautiful, picturesque swan that you would just
Speaker 1: want to protect and cuddle exactly, like take pictures of
Speaker 1: and cuddle with. Yep. And they had been a population
Speaker 1: master of the marsh. They had reached populations as close
Speaker 1: to and explain like their explain their impact on ducks.
Speaker 1: So they're very aggressive birds, and they will chase native
Speaker 1: waterfall and shorebirds and displace them off of uh, the
Speaker 1: nesting grounds and feeding grounds and stuff. So they're they're
Speaker 1: pretty uh yeah, they'll play nice, they don't play He's like,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna nest here, and no one's gonna
Speaker 1: nest within a hundred yards of my nest exactly. And
Speaker 1: so in response to that initiative that the Department at
Speaker 1: your Resources what's taking on, uh, there were animal welfare
Speaker 1: groups erecting uh billboards along Route fifty save our swans,
Speaker 1: and messages to the governor Andrew the ducks saved the
Speaker 1: swans manly. So to their credit, the DNR persisted and
Speaker 1: they have whittled that population down last I heard too,
Speaker 1: probably less than fifty. So that you know, we got
Speaker 1: to two big ecological problems that have been you know,
Speaker 1: dealt with in this region over the past, and a
Speaker 1: lot of that anti sentiment went into swans and not
Speaker 1: into roads. Yeah, it was perhaps a bit of a distraction,
Speaker 1: but you know, I I think that there's a an element.
Speaker 1: A lot of these groups are reliant on donations for
Speaker 1: uh their solvency, and people are much more willing to
Speaker 1: open their wallet for a big, beautiful white bird than
Speaker 1: brown twenty pound rat. But is it a weird because
Speaker 1: you're kind of defending I mean, it's not weird at
Speaker 1: all because people are people, and you look at things
Speaker 1: and you you know, we tend to like and admire
Speaker 1: animals that strike us as beautiful. But if you're if
Speaker 1: you're based on the idea that you're just defending sentient life,
Speaker 1: like you don't want to see damage come to sentient life.
Speaker 1: It shouldn't matter if it's a swan or a giant rodent.
Speaker 1: It's like it's a sentient being. Yeah, a man as
Speaker 1: a pig, as a dog, as a boy. But people
Speaker 1: uh really tend to um get very interested in defending
Speaker 1: things that are that are you know, instagram worthy creatures
Speaker 1: more sold than the ugly ones. Well in the cynic
Speaker 1: in me says, it's you know, it's driven more by
Speaker 1: money than it is by by commitment to the cause,
Speaker 1: because that's where you get funding. Who's gonna who's gonna
Speaker 1: pull out their wallet to save nutrient? Yeah? Um, So
Speaker 1: we were fortunate not to have to battle that sort
Speaker 1: of of opposition to the program. And much to our surprise,
Speaker 1: when we started reaching out to private landowners, when we
Speaker 1: kind of expected, given the government sentiments anti government sentiments,
Speaker 1: that we would have a hard time, people were opening
Speaker 1: their doors to us. Uh. You know, I can't tell
Speaker 1: you how many kitchens I sat in with my laptop,
Speaker 1: computer and a little slide show talking to farmers and
Speaker 1: other landowners about what we were attempting to do and
Speaker 1: why it was important for their assistance and whatnot. And hundreds,
Speaker 1: hundreds of landowners gave us access to tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of private acres of private property so that we could
Speaker 1: be successful in this, And a lot of them did
Speaker 1: it sort of begrudgingly. You know, they didn't think we'd
Speaker 1: be successful. Uh, maybe you could catch them all. No,
Speaker 1: hell no, you'll never get the last one. I don't
Speaker 1: even know why you guys are wasting all this government
Speaker 1: money on there. But as one farmer I remember distinctly said,
Speaker 1: but I'm not going to be the stick in the
Speaker 1: mud to keep you guys from from trying, so, you know,
Speaker 1: and we had a couple of key landowners that came
Speaker 1: on board early that sort of helped us set the stage.
Speaker 1: And you know, well, if if so and so let
Speaker 1: you on his property, I guess I'll let you on mine.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the most the biggest compliments
Speaker 1: I ever got working on this project over the twelve
Speaker 1: years that I was on it was from that farmer
Speaker 1: that said he didn't want to be the stick in
Speaker 1: the mud to stand in the way of trying to
Speaker 1: do this. But he had told me that there's no
Speaker 1: way in hell we were ever going to get the
Speaker 1: last ones or probably even make a dent in the population.
Speaker 1: And a couple of years after we had sort of
Speaker 1: swept through his area, um, I ran into him at
Speaker 1: a gas station. He came up to me and said,
Speaker 1: you know, I never thought i'd say this, but I've
Speaker 1: gotta I gotta eat some crow here. He said, I
Speaker 1: never thought you guys could have done what you did
Speaker 1: eliminating those New Tria so I've been out and he
Speaker 1: was a bird hunter and he would take his dogs
Speaker 1: and he used to take his labs out and and
Speaker 1: uh hunt new Trea in the marshes behind his house.
Speaker 1: And he said, I haven't seen a new tree in
Speaker 1: two years. And I don't know where they all went.
Speaker 1: But how you guys did it? But you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's an amazing thing that you've accomplished here. So and
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't like we just went out and
Speaker 1: trapped one time and removed. It was a constant effort
Speaker 1: of going back and sweeping through and looking and making
Speaker 1: sure that we didn't leave anything behind. We'll back up
Speaker 1: to how back up to the first when he first
Speaker 1: isolated a test area and went for it. How long,
Speaker 1: like like roughly, how big was the test area? And
Speaker 1: how long did it take to wipe out the test area?
Speaker 1: And then how did you monitor it to see that
Speaker 1: you've got them all? So the test area began with
Speaker 1: these original six acre parcels or study sites, three of each.
Speaker 1: I think they're a total of I can't even remember now. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were three study sites on each property, and so
Speaker 1: we went in and we we just intensively trapped them
Speaker 1: off We created a grid across the entire UH study site,
Speaker 1: and then we deployed our trappers in sort of rose
Speaker 1: and columns, like a checkerboard type thing, and then we
Speaker 1: trapped across and saturated the whole area with traps. But
Speaker 1: these were basically islands in a sea of occupied habitat,
Speaker 1: so we very quickly could tell that that just immigration,
Speaker 1: we were creating a big population sink, but that if
Speaker 1: we were really going to do this and test the
Speaker 1: feasibility of eradication on a landscape scale, we couldn't do
Speaker 1: it on these little six hundred acre plots. So we
Speaker 1: finished those out just to provide closure to that research project,
Speaker 1: and then we sort of reimagined the whole landscape, and
Speaker 1: starting at the western edge of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge,
Speaker 1: we created a huge grid over that entire landscape. Forty
Speaker 1: acres about four or yards per side was the size
Speaker 1: of these trapping units, and we would stack our trappers
Speaker 1: up in in these rows and they would work east
Speaker 1: to west or west to east across the marsh, sequentially
Speaker 1: trapping each UH, trapping each grid square. So we basically
Speaker 1: had a swath of intensive trapping activity that kind of
Speaker 1: moved across the landscape. We call it rolling thunder because
Speaker 1: it sounded cool, right, So how many how many traps
Speaker 1: was rolling thunder running per night? And how many how
Speaker 1: many new trew we were stacking up per day? So
Speaker 1: we had we sat pretty heavily at the beginning. Um,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of new tree to catch. We
Speaker 1: wanted to remove them as quickly as possible, and so
Speaker 1: we uh, we would have hundreds each employee. We could
Speaker 1: have a couple of hundred traps out at any given time.
Speaker 1: So with fifteen employees working on it, you know, we
Speaker 1: we had a couple of thousand traps out at any
Speaker 1: any given point of time. And so what we do
Speaker 1: is we set the first row or column of of
Speaker 1: trapping grids up and then once that was saturated and
Speaker 1: things started to catch, you know, you'll see a really
Speaker 1: uh you'll catch a lot of animals at first, and
Speaker 1: then it'll start to dwindle off and tail off. So
Speaker 1: when we started to see that dwindling in the first row,
Speaker 1: we'd start taking some of those traps and rolling them
Speaker 1: into the second row and getting that one set up.
Speaker 1: So we just kind of leap frogged ourselves along and
Speaker 1: it worked quite well. And what we did looking at
Speaker 1: the numbers is that and this was one of the
Speaker 1: things that we tried to do at the very beginning
Speaker 1: of the research phase was this mark recapture population estimate. Uh.
Speaker 1: We found it was actually much more accurate to just
Speaker 1: go out and remove all the animals and one fell
Speaker 1: swoop and count them all. Um. And what it turns
Speaker 1: out is that we could trap out a particular grid
Speaker 1: in about three weeks time, and you know, so we
Speaker 1: would catch looking at the numbers over time, we'd catch
Speaker 1: about of all the animals that occupied that plot in
Speaker 1: the first week of trapping. By the end of the
Speaker 1: second week we tried captured. By the end of the
Speaker 1: third week, we've trapped about and then we would continue
Speaker 1: to catch onesies and twosies for that remaining five percent.
Speaker 1: Over the it might take an additional four weeks to
Speaker 1: get all those. So if you rolled into a new
Speaker 1: area it was real hot, and you did a main
Speaker 1: set and you got a few hundred traps in the water,
Speaker 1: what might the first catch be, like what percent trap
Speaker 1: of traps would be full? It depended on the trapper.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of variability there. Um. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the more experienced trappers would set fewer and more targeted,
Speaker 1: and others would set more broadly and trying to catch
Speaker 1: them out once. And I honestly, I can't tell you.
Speaker 1: I remember anybody that had a double digit day was
Speaker 1: feeling pretty good about their efforts. You know. You know
Speaker 1: what's the thing that I think of him when I
Speaker 1: used to trap muskrats is that when you went into
Speaker 1: an area, you couldn't if you were being like forward thinking,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't run more than two or you'd never run
Speaker 1: more than two or three nights because if you went
Speaker 1: into a marsh and and ice trapped a lot of
Speaker 1: isolated Okay, so if you went into a marsh and
Speaker 1: set up it's like I got a good number of
Speaker 1: muskrats the first night, you might so the first night's catch,
Speaker 1: so you sat during the day, let them sit overnight,
Speaker 1: check them the next day. That night you might run
Speaker 1: six full traps. I mean, if you knew what you're
Speaker 1: doing right the next night, you're gonna go back. And
Speaker 1: that's gonna drop down to if you if you were
Speaker 1: like a smart guy thinking about next year's season, you'd
Speaker 1: pull at that point. I could imagine and I know
Speaker 1: you never did this because it just wasn't it wasn't practical,
Speaker 1: and there's no motivation to do it. But I could
Speaker 1: imagine just now here listening to you, just imagine like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you stayed in that marsh for two weeks, three
Speaker 1: weeks and kept running all those sets, you could absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1: But but there you're talking about isolated spots. It's hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, they obviously got there in the first place,
Speaker 1: but it's a you know, it's not it's not to
Speaker 1: matter them just swimming over to your area. They have
Speaker 1: to do it across land spring. You know, they'll migrate
Speaker 1: in the spring. But yeah, man, thinking about it now,
Speaker 1: I could totally picture you could just like but just
Speaker 1: for three weeks, nothing nothing, nothing. Oh here's another one,
Speaker 1: nothing nothing, there's another one. You'd eventually just probably get him.
Speaker 1: And so that is the most critical opponent. You know,
Speaker 1: there are a number of factors that you have to meet,
Speaker 1: criteria have to meet for eradication of any species to
Speaker 1: be feasible. So you know, in an eradication campaign like this,
Speaker 1: a trapping based eradication campaign, that's sort of like all
Speaker 1: the other kind of management things you hear about that
Speaker 1: eight percent of your energy is spent on this or whatnot.
Speaker 1: And what what we found out is that that like
Speaker 1: eight of our energy was spent capturing the last few
Speaker 1: animals in a population. They get trap shy on you,
Speaker 1: they get trap shy, and it's just, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it gets down to fewer animals leave less signs, So
Speaker 1: where exactly are they? Um? And then that's a lot
Speaker 1: of activity on the marsh, so their their behavioral change
Speaker 1: will change the way they use the marsh, and they'll
Speaker 1: move and different times of the year there, you know,
Speaker 1: in the summertime they can go anywhere they want because
Speaker 1: there's an abundance of food everywhere. So you know, you'd
Speaker 1: find a little pocket and you'd set traps and then
Speaker 1: you did not catch anything and find that they've moved
Speaker 1: two hundred yards and so you gotta go find them.
Speaker 1: And are you guys toting around twenty two as well
Speaker 1: into shooting when you see them. Yeah, in the winter
Speaker 1: months in particular, we would uh do systematic hunting. So
Speaker 1: when the marsh froze, yeah, I don't know what that means,
Speaker 1: but when the uh, when the marsh would freeze in
Speaker 1: the wintertime, if we were so lucky, to get that
Speaker 1: and a little dusting of snow we could catch and
Speaker 1: we could shoot a lot of nutrient a short amount
Speaker 1: of time just getting out on that marsh and hunt them,
Speaker 1: you know. So that the whole concept of all of
Speaker 1: this energy being consumed using you know, catching the last
Speaker 1: few animals really forced us to think about uh kind
Speaker 1: of different strategies to find those remaining animals. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that you mentioned earlier asked if there
Speaker 1: was any opposition, and there actually was a little bit.
Speaker 1: Um there were some folks that thought that we should
Speaker 1: just offer a bounty and that the local trappers take
Speaker 1: care of the problem if you off for a bounty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're only gonna they're not gonna chase after the
Speaker 1: last exactly. And so that was why we elected to
Speaker 1: we're essentially paying people to check empty traps, you know,
Speaker 1: the stuff they caught at the beginning. Well, that's that's
Speaker 1: the easy part. The hard part is catching the last few,
Speaker 1: and that's where we need to to keep that effort going.
Speaker 1: And so the the trick became how to find more
Speaker 1: efficiently those last remaining animals, And we tried a number
Speaker 1: of different things to do that. One of those was
Speaker 1: utilizing neutria themselves to find other neutria. So I had
Speaker 1: gone to some conferences and met with some folks that
Speaker 1: work internationally on invasive species eradication campaigns and whatnot. And
Speaker 1: in the gallopagus, they'd used Judas goats. So they had
Speaker 1: these goats that they captured and put radio collars on them,
Speaker 1: our gp S colors, and they let them go their
Speaker 1: social and gregarious creature. So they seek out other goats.
Speaker 1: And they would go up in a helicopter and find
Speaker 1: these Judas goats that they put out there, and then
Speaker 1: uh take out all of the other animals that all
Speaker 1: the new all the new friends that he'd made exactly.
Speaker 1: And so, knowing that nutria or social uh and sought
Speaker 1: out other nutria, I thought, oh, I wonder if this
Speaker 1: could work for us. So well, I'm pardon my ignorant ignorance.
Speaker 1: Where does the Judas um? What's like some kind of
Speaker 1: pagan household? You guessed it. That's how you do grow up,
Speaker 1: some kind of pagan household. So Judas betrayed Christ. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the in the in the Last Supper painting. He's
Speaker 1: the only one that won't look at He's the only
Speaker 1: one not looking at Christ. Yeah, betrayed to the room.
Speaker 1: I'm glad he's here as the historian to answer that question.
Speaker 1: I know it was biblical, but I don't like to
Speaker 1: go too deep into that biblical stuff. So thank you
Speaker 1: well you have providing that insight. But but yeah, so
Speaker 1: we can't you here fell about name of Moses. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know how deep we had dive here. So
Speaker 1: we we actually got a special grant to look at
Speaker 1: whether or not this concept would be feasible because we
Speaker 1: didn't want to sort of detract from ongoing efforts to
Speaker 1: trap and remove by diverting funds. So we got some
Speaker 1: additional grant funding to support this effort from the National
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Foundation and we captured a bunch of neutria.
Speaker 1: We had them surgically sterilized because we didn't want to
Speaker 1: be releasing animals that could then you know, escape us
Speaker 1: and begin breeding out there, and as quickly as they breed,
Speaker 1: we knew that could be a problem as as well
Speaker 1: as a perception issue. You know, here we are spending
Speaker 1: millions of dollars to so so they were all surgically sterilized.
Speaker 1: The males were vasectimized and the females had a tubal ligation.
Speaker 1: Had I had the former yeah, um, And then we
Speaker 1: put radio collars and in some instances they also had
Speaker 1: a GPS collar on them that stored the data that
Speaker 1: it collected on board. So at the time the technology
Speaker 1: was still pretty limiting that that we couldn't uh you know,
Speaker 1: these devices take a lot of power, and power means
Speaker 1: big batteries, and putting a big package on a smaller
Speaker 1: animal was especially one that's got the body confirmation of
Speaker 1: a nutrient, it's challenging. So we had these little devices
Speaker 1: custom made by a company in New Zealand that that
Speaker 1: made them recharge bowl and they would collect data for
Speaker 1: about a month and then it would store it all
Speaker 1: on board and we'd go back out and catch those
Speaker 1: animals and retrieve that GPS unit downloaded, and we could
Speaker 1: see everywhere that that neutria had been. Every ninety minutes
Speaker 1: it would collect the location. We could see where it
Speaker 1: had been over the past month. And he's an unfamiliar
Speaker 1: train when you turn them loose, correct we So the
Speaker 1: the intent here was to determine if we left nutria
Speaker 1: behind in areas we already tripped so we would release
Speaker 1: them into areas that we thought were devoid of nutria.
Speaker 1: Well o and behold, some of these animals started, uh,
Speaker 1: moving pretty widely across the landscape. They also, the color
Speaker 1: also had a standard radio transmitter, and so we could
Speaker 1: actually go out and track it on a day to
Speaker 1: day basis, so we would at least know the general
Speaker 1: vicinity they were in. And uh, we noticed, you know,
Speaker 1: after some wide movements across the landscape miles. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: some cases, uh, once they sort of sort of can
Speaker 1: elaborated into a smaller area, I thought, I wonder if
Speaker 1: there could be other nutrient there. You know, it's spending
Speaker 1: a lot of time in this one area. So we'd
Speaker 1: go out and we'd set our cage traps to try
Speaker 1: to catch these animals back and lo and behold, we
Speaker 1: caught a few animals that were not tagged. I was like,
Speaker 1: this could work in areas he thought you had trapped
Speaker 1: out right, So we knew there was a likelihood there
Speaker 1: are probably some animals. But you know, we had done
Speaker 1: the initial knockdown, uh, and we'd gone back through and
Speaker 1: it sort of mopped up. Those are kind of terminologies
Speaker 1: we used to describe the different phases of the eradication campaign,
Speaker 1: and so it wasn't a complete surprise to us, but
Speaker 1: it sure was handy to know where they were um
Speaker 1: from these critters. But the problem that we had tracking
Speaker 1: them on a daily basis with their radio collars is
Speaker 1: that because they moved so far, and because it's a
Speaker 1: thick vegetation environment and they're often in the water, so
Speaker 1: the signal from that device doesn't travel that far. You
Speaker 1: had to be pretty close to even to take the signal.
Speaker 1: So in cases where they might have moved two or
Speaker 1: three miles overnight, we would spend all day, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to find them. And so it turned out that
Speaker 1: while the technique worked to expose the existence of other
Speaker 1: nutrient in the environment, from an operational standpoint, it wasn't
Speaker 1: really practical. I mean the human resources that it took
Speaker 1: to just keep up with these animals. So what would
Speaker 1: have really been valuable was to have had a GPS
Speaker 1: collar that could, through either cell phone technology or satellite technology,
Speaker 1: relay that information to us remotely. And then so that
Speaker 1: exists for a lot of different species that it can
Speaker 1: carry that additional battery. I want to ask you questions
Speaker 1: not related to Nutria is related to tracking devices. So
Speaker 1: let's say, let's just say that, uh, you know that
Speaker 1: in your state there is a coloring program going on
Speaker 1: with elk, and you know there are some elk wearing collars. Um,
Speaker 1: what prevents a person who just likes to tinker with
Speaker 1: kind of stuff? What presents prevents a person from finding uh,
Speaker 1: from building up his own kid to go track that
Speaker 1: same to go track those same animals just to find
Speaker 1: out where elk hereds are so you can go on them.
Speaker 1: So a couple of things make it difficult. It's certainly
Speaker 1: not impossible, and that's been an issue in places, I'm sure. Um,
Speaker 1: But the FCC designates certain bandwidths for government research, and
Speaker 1: you know you can get these kinds of devices for
Speaker 1: hunting dogs and that sort of thing, So they sort
Speaker 1: of segregate the use categories of the different bandwidths, so
Speaker 1: that make it hurts or frequencies that that these things
Speaker 1: admit on. And so the the systems that are used
Speaker 1: for wildlife tracking, they're not generally available to the public. Um.
Speaker 1: And there it's fairly expensive too. So UM, it's it
Speaker 1: doesn't happen too often, but it's certainly can happen and
Speaker 1: there's no um so there would be like a there
Speaker 1: would be a component of law would come into it
Speaker 1: that you're using frequencies you're not supposed to use or
Speaker 1: is that just you know, I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: even I've never had anybody say to me that they
Speaker 1: were trying to do this. This just always puzzled me
Speaker 1: that right that you always more if you would be
Speaker 1: like breaking a law to go out with a receiver
Speaker 1: of some sort and be like and also sort of
Speaker 1: tracking collared animals the same way that the researchers tracking
Speaker 1: them well, And so we had actually an interesting thing there.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure about the legality of it, but researchers
Speaker 1: in general, uh keep it really tightly in on color frequencies.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not for me aastion that they share readily,
Speaker 1: so they keep that pretty close to the vest so
Speaker 1: that you don't have problems like that. But we had
Speaker 1: we talked to the reason I first started thinking about this.
Speaker 1: Remember your friend up in Fairbanks who had all those
Speaker 1: moves collared. And one day I made a joke being like,
Speaker 1: I bet there's a lot of dudes and Fairbanks that
Speaker 1: like to track those moves with you because you just
Speaker 1: had ones that were out in honorable areas, you know,
Speaker 1: so sorry, go ahead. Well, so the way the government,
Speaker 1: the FCC divvys up these bandwidths, so like the federal
Speaker 1: government gets you know, one six, four dot whatever, and
Speaker 1: private or academic institutions get a totally different bandwidth. So
Speaker 1: in theory, you shouldn't have all of this sort of overlapping. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, when when I call up a telemetry company
Speaker 1: and say order a little bunch of collars, I don't
Speaker 1: get to pick and choose my my frequencies. But I
Speaker 1: can be relatively assured that someone else who's doing research
Speaker 1: in the same area through a university is not going
Speaker 1: to be anywhere close to where I am because they're
Speaker 1: on a totally different bandwidth. But it turns out that
Speaker 1: you can get these errant signals. They're basically harmonics. I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how it works. But there was another
Speaker 1: study going on in the area where we were doing
Speaker 1: Judas project that was looking at seka deer and so
Speaker 1: they had whole bunch of collars on seekret here and
Speaker 1: we had a whole bunch of collars on on neutria,
Speaker 1: and we were working in the same general area, and
Speaker 1: so we were out there looking. One day we got
Speaker 1: a nice strong signal on one of our nutria and
Speaker 1: we're going through and it's an area that we trapped out.
Speaker 1: We had a beautiful frozen marsh, snow all over the place,
Speaker 1: and we're tracking this thing um and we kept bumping
Speaker 1: the secret here and were like, no tracks in the
Speaker 1: snow from neutria, and we were like, what the heck
Speaker 1: is going on here? And so we started doing a
Speaker 1: little more digging, and finally I called the graduate student
Speaker 1: that was doing that project up. I said, do you
Speaker 1: buy any chance to have a secret deer down in
Speaker 1: this area? And he said that he did, And I
Speaker 1: asked him what the frequency was, and it was way
Speaker 1: off and it shouldn't even have been detectable on our
Speaker 1: radio system, but as it turns out, it was. We
Speaker 1: were getting these weird harmonics that would even though it
Speaker 1: was the wrong system, it still came in on our radio.
Speaker 1: Oh man. We had a whole bunch of data we
Speaker 1: had to throw out because it just we couldn't be
Speaker 1: sure that what we were tracking was was neutrient versus
Speaker 1: secret deer. So it was a little bit of a
Speaker 1: learning curve there, but it was really neat to be
Speaker 1: able to see how these animals used the landscape. Um,
Speaker 1: different animals released in different areas would move across the
Speaker 1: Blackwater Refuge system and it was amazing how similarly they
Speaker 1: used the landscape. You know, there are certain points almost
Speaker 1: every animal that we released, no matter where we released them,
Speaker 1: would pass by. So it gave us some insights on
Speaker 1: how we might utilize those points as either trapping sites
Speaker 1: or detection sites. Um. That's yeah. So you're saying the
Speaker 1: way that that the that the animals would be somehow
Speaker 1: funneled by the topography or landscape and whatever they're looking
Speaker 1: for would would bring them by the Yep. What would
Speaker 1: those features be points of points of land or channels,
Speaker 1: influence of too, tributaries, um, any sort of point that
Speaker 1: sticks out of So yeah, it was you'd give you
Speaker 1: a good idea where to look in the future. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So did it did it start to have as the
Speaker 1: project went along and you started to sort of get
Speaker 1: the sense like like holy shit, we maybe are going
Speaker 1: to catch them all? Did it feel like a hard stop?
Speaker 1: It was? It just like the son of like gradual
Speaker 1: wine down. Well, we had a lot of real estate
Speaker 1: to cover, so you know, when it was winding down
Speaker 1: in one area, we would move to another area, so
Speaker 1: you know, we'd get these sort of peaks and valleys
Speaker 1: in our capture eates. And that helped keep the staff
Speaker 1: sort of motivated because you know, even though their job
Speaker 1: as eradication, most trappers evaluate their success by how many
Speaker 1: critics I catch, And when you're trying to catch something
Speaker 1: that's not there, it's a pretty frustrating and real busting.
Speaker 1: No I would be if I had that job, I'll
Speaker 1: be really excited every time we moved into new area,
Speaker 1: and then then the and the guys were But eventually
Speaker 1: we hit all the known populations and it became this
Speaker 1: this is just drudgery of of kind of looking and
Speaker 1: looking and looking. And so when you're relying on an
Speaker 1: observer based system to find an animal, it's like looking
Speaker 1: for Bigfoot. You know, you might never see him, but
Speaker 1: you can't prove he doesn't exists. Right, that's the problem
Speaker 1: we had with big Foot. Yeah, exactly. So no one
Speaker 1: will ever believe you because you can't prove something doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: So one of the problems with an observer based system
Speaker 1: is that people get fatigued, they get bored, they're looking
Speaker 1: for something that needle in the haystack, they don't find it.
Speaker 1: They get distracted that maybe their text goes off and
Speaker 1: they happen to look at their phone while they drive
Speaker 1: by a floating nutrient turn in the water and they
Speaker 1: miss it. Right, So we wanted to develop some other
Speaker 1: detection techniques that wouldn't be so reliant on a human observer.
Speaker 1: The human observer is incredibly important. You can't get this
Speaker 1: work done without people. But you've got to come up
Speaker 1: with techniques that that sort of compensate for the weaknesses
Speaker 1: in different systems of detection. And so one of the
Speaker 1: things we had worked on that actually evolved from a
Speaker 1: trapping technique was the guys would would use what they
Speaker 1: called false beds. So they'd make a fake nutria bed
Speaker 1: along a waterway, set a foothold trap or a counter
Speaker 1: bear on it, and then the Nutria would come along
Speaker 1: and see that, and they're like, oh, hey, there's any trip. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: just quick tech question, when you guys would set up
Speaker 1: a when you guys would set up a bed set
Speaker 1: like that, would you guys run a one way drown
Speaker 1: or locked down to a steak. Yeah, exactly. So we
Speaker 1: were required to check any trap that held an animal
Speaker 1: alive every twenty four hours, but we had an exemption
Speaker 1: that allowed us to go as long as seventies six
Speaker 1: I think, or maybe even ninety six hours if it
Speaker 1: was a killing trap. And so we did rely on
Speaker 1: the submersion sets to make sure that the animals were dead.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so we're talking about there is Imagine that
Speaker 1: you you got a trap set up at the surface
Speaker 1: of the water on a little better you could set
Speaker 1: set up just for illustrations sake. Imagine set on the Yeah,
Speaker 1: trap set on the bank of a river. That trap
Speaker 1: chain like the little tether of that trap has a
Speaker 1: thing called it one way slide on it. And then
Speaker 1: you drive a steak into the river bank right next
Speaker 1: to the trap and run a wire from that steak
Speaker 1: to another their steak that's driven down into the bottom
Speaker 1: of the river out in the deep water. And when
Speaker 1: the animal got hooked in that trap, especially aquatic road
Speaker 1: is instinctive, We're just gonna jump in the water and
Speaker 1: dive down to get away. So he runs that one
Speaker 1: way sliding lock down that wire, but it won't come
Speaker 1: back up right so that was an effective and important
Speaker 1: tool for us, and these these false beds became more
Speaker 1: and more important as a detection tool. So when we
Speaker 1: were going back through and and mopping up these areas,
Speaker 1: we didn't want to set traps if we didn't have
Speaker 1: good reason to believe there were new tria there. So
Speaker 1: we would just make these false beds and check them.
Speaker 1: But the problem is when the tide would come up
Speaker 1: and wash them away or the grass would grow up
Speaker 1: through them. So uh, one of the guys thought, well, hey,
Speaker 1: what if we put down a piece of plywood to
Speaker 1: keep the new grass froom growing up? And then well,
Speaker 1: that solved that problem, but it's still washed away on
Speaker 1: a high tide. So said, well what if we what
Speaker 1: if we put it on a little piece of styre
Speaker 1: foam and then so we we did that, and then
Speaker 1: we built a little rim around it to keep the
Speaker 1: wind and water from blowing stuff off the top, and
Speaker 1: we so he's this thing evolved into this detection platform
Speaker 1: that we would put these things out by the hundreds
Speaker 1: and check them for scat. And we wanted to get
Speaker 1: a sense of how nutrient interacted with these devices, so
Speaker 1: we put some remote trail cameras on them, and we
Speaker 1: got a couple interesting things, and they were staked with
Speaker 1: a fiberglass pul so if the water came up, they
Speaker 1: would actually float and they would so they would work
Speaker 1: all the time, whether the tide was higher down. And
Speaker 1: we got one video where to nutrient got on a
Speaker 1: single platform and they were twenty four inches square, so
Speaker 1: one it was already up there, and the second one
Speaker 1: got up and it was just too much weight and
Speaker 1: the whole thing kind of tipped sideways. Water swept over
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and then the first nutria got off
Speaker 1: and the second nutria got on and all the water
Speaker 1: and everything just kind of swept out the opening. We
Speaker 1: had one one side. It had an opening with a
Speaker 1: little brace on it that we could set a conterby
Speaker 1: trip out, so if we detected something, we could instantly
Speaker 1: turn it into a removal device. And so that got
Speaker 1: us thinking of like, man, we could be losing all
Speaker 1: these opportunities to detect sign if we're relying solely on
Speaker 1: the presence of scat to to do that. So one
Speaker 1: of the guys went back to the drawing board and
Speaker 1: came up with a really clever um use for snare
Speaker 1: cable or aircraft cable, and he took about a three
Speaker 1: or four inch piece of it and he frayed the
Speaker 1: ends of it, made a little tool to make it
Speaker 1: easy to do, and built it sort of bent all
Speaker 1: the little strands backwards, so it formed this like multi pronged,
Speaker 1: tiny little grappling hook. And then he built a little
Speaker 1: support wire like a snare support wire out of stainless
Speaker 1: steel welding rod and attached that to the platform and
Speaker 1: then made this little figure eight loop system on the
Speaker 1: end of the welding wire catch hair to put that
Speaker 1: snare in, and it would catch hair when the neutria
Speaker 1: brushed against it. So we we actually implemented that and
Speaker 1: then we used the cameras to determine what We actually
Speaker 1: did a little study looking at the detectability of neutria
Speaker 1: on these devices by the camera, by the presence of
Speaker 1: scat and by the presence of this hair snare, and
Speaker 1: the hair snare was like remarkably effective. It detected of
Speaker 1: the visits to the platform, whereas the was you don't
Speaker 1: know if he had reliable you don't know if he
Speaker 1: had to go or not exactly. So you know, all
Speaker 1: of these techniques sort of evolved out of necessity. And
Speaker 1: you know, this had never been done before using the
Speaker 1: tools that we had available to us anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: There had been one successful eradication of neutria in England,
Speaker 1: but it was all done using bated cage traps on rafts,
Speaker 1: and so you know, we had to sort of forged
Speaker 1: our our own path on this and uh so all
Speaker 1: of this creativity stemming from our local trappers, uh was
Speaker 1: critical and sort of evolving our tools as the needs
Speaker 1: of the program changed as we approached eradication. So how
Speaker 1: many years into it or how many years did it
Speaker 1: take to get there? So we began trapping out the
Speaker 1: Coral black Water in two thousand and two. We trapped
Speaker 1: out the last known infested watershed in twenty oh gosh,
Speaker 1: I think the White Comico River was the last one
Speaker 1: we trapped out, and so I left the project in
Speaker 1: to take a promotion. And so the folks that have
Speaker 1: continued on in my absence have continued to look and
Speaker 1: they did clean out a few animals in that White
Speaker 1: Comical watershed the following year. But it has now been
Speaker 1: uh two and a half years since we've to the
Speaker 1: nutria anywhere in this ecosystem that we've trapped. Now, we've
Speaker 1: had some struggles. Uh, you know, funding. Uh, one of
Speaker 1: the criterias for eradication. Institutional support has to continue throughout
Speaker 1: the length of the project. So you've got to have
Speaker 1: that commitment to provide the resources to get the job done.
Speaker 1: But beencounters like to look at, you know, results, and
Speaker 1: the easiest result for them to measure is how many
Speaker 1: neutria we're catching. When you're not catching neutria, it's a
Speaker 1: lot easier to start sort of pulling back some of
Speaker 1: that funding. So we've had some issues there. The staff
Speaker 1: is about a third of what it was at the
Speaker 1: peak of our efforts, but we've tried to combat that
Speaker 1: by also increasing our efficiency. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I had started before I left the project was this
Speaker 1: concept of using scat sniffing dogs to to help us
Speaker 1: find neutria and more importantly in helping us find nutria,
Speaker 1: because we had used dogs throughout the program. To eliminate
Speaker 1: Autria is a hunting technique, but when you're trying to
Speaker 1: prove they call it proof of freedom in the the
Speaker 1: invasive species Proof that an area is free of an
Speaker 1: invasive species UM is to layer multiple detection technologies and
Speaker 1: techniques on top of each other to give you enhanced
Speaker 1: confidence that that there's nothing there. You know, you can
Speaker 1: never prove that they're gone, but by building a strong
Speaker 1: case of circumstantial evidence, you can reach a conclusion that's
Speaker 1: that the nutrient have been eradicated. Like human observation, no
Speaker 1: one's seen any They're not showing up in your fur
Speaker 1: catchers on your floats. Dogs aren't finding their droppings exactly,
Speaker 1: And so the dogs true value here is not in
Speaker 1: really finding nutria, although it would be important if they did.
Speaker 1: Their true values and is enhancing our confidence that they
Speaker 1: are in fact on um because their sense of smell
Speaker 1: is remarkable and a human observer can just is going
Speaker 1: off visual cues and you know, you walk through this
Speaker 1: marsh and you you know, you were in it today
Speaker 1: hunting for secret here, and imagine would be a good
Speaker 1: we were moved to probably seventy or eighty neutria from
Speaker 1: that general area right in front of where you were hunting.
Speaker 1: That that was all prime neutria habitant. Yep, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff they liked. Yeah, So imagine having to
Speaker 1: cover like every inch of that marsh between where you
Speaker 1: were in that far wood line, and we had to
Speaker 1: scour that. And when you're down to maybe there's only
Speaker 1: one or two neutria left in there, what are the
Speaker 1: odds that that two, three, or even four people just
Speaker 1: walking back and forth they're actually gonna find that one
Speaker 1: little piece of scat or whatnot. So well, Steve had
Speaker 1: a dead deer d fifty yards from and you know,
Speaker 1: without GPS technology, hard to find that. Yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 1: I had to walk around here a little bit even,
Speaker 1: I like I shot away point from tree stand to
Speaker 1: where our thought he was, you know, just like bearing
Speaker 1: and in a distance. I walked over there and and
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know, he's gotta being here somewhere,
Speaker 1: and just yeah, you can miss a lot. So right now,
Speaker 1: if I like, do you think that, if you know
Speaker 1: within twenty mile radius where we're sitting right now, you
Speaker 1: don't think there's a single living neutrient or do you
Speaker 1: think there's got to be one that you've you've missed?
Speaker 1: You know that wouldn't be one, right one. There's no
Speaker 1: worry to one boy and one girl exactly. And so
Speaker 1: what we know about their ability to reproduce and their
Speaker 1: detectability when they reached some sort of critical mass. Uh,
Speaker 1: we would reasonably expect to be able to find them
Speaker 1: if over the course of two years that you know,
Speaker 1: we've been looking that if they had sort of rebuilt
Speaker 1: a small population, we probably have detected it. I'm pretty
Speaker 1: confident of that. If you talk about a small population,
Speaker 1: you have to get in there and just like rapid response,
Speaker 1: get it out as as quickly as possible. So I'm
Speaker 1: actually I had a lot of confidence in the crew
Speaker 1: that we put together, in the folks that have remained
Speaker 1: on the project are really committed and talented, and I
Speaker 1: think that the fact that they're not finding anything is
Speaker 1: an indication that there's nothing to find. So how are
Speaker 1: those people that are still working at how are they
Speaker 1: coping with the job anymore? Well, so, you know, about
Speaker 1: five of them now are detected dog handlers, and and honestly,
Speaker 1: part of my rationale for for getting that tool off
Speaker 1: the ground is a bit of a morayal boost. People
Speaker 1: love to work with dogs, and so even if on
Speaker 1: a daily basis they're not getting their own personal satisfaction
Speaker 1: by finding a neutria, they're getting some satisfaction of working
Speaker 1: with a dog and training the dog and making sure
Speaker 1: the dog is is still up on on the top
Speaker 1: of things. UM. But even then it's it's a challenge,
Speaker 1: you know. The the the guys that have been with
Speaker 1: a project from the very beginning talk fondly of the
Speaker 1: good old days, you know, and they miss it. Be careful.
Speaker 1: One of them might just keep their jobs to retirement.
Speaker 1: I wish I could tell the story we heard the
Speaker 1: other day, not about neutria, but question already I have
Speaker 1: it is, UM, because I got one more main question?
Speaker 1: Then can you mind away from one more main one? UM?
Speaker 1: Have so other places that deal with neutria? Okay, looking
Speaker 1: at like you know, they still deal with in Louisiana
Speaker 1: to like have our other places that are dealing with infestations?
Speaker 1: Are they looking to what you guys did. Are you
Speaker 1: in exporting the technologies or is it just like so
Speaker 1: regionally specific. No, Actually, that's a great question. And one
Speaker 1: of the one of the criteria that was built into
Speaker 1: the funding legislation that supported this program from beginning was
Speaker 1: that that one of our missions was to help to
Speaker 1: educate everyone else is dealing with nutria with tools and
Speaker 1: techniques that can be helpful elsewhere. UM. So we've we
Speaker 1: put a lot of effort into outreach and working with
Speaker 1: other UH folks that are dealing with nutria. We still
Speaker 1: get a lot of calls from from people dealing with nutria.
Speaker 1: There's been a new outbreak or invasion in California where
Speaker 1: they had previously there's been a small population that had
Speaker 1: been eliminated, so they didn't think they had a problem,
Speaker 1: but I think stuff is now moving down from from
Speaker 1: the Northern States there and UH just this past summer,
Speaker 1: I was invited to visit UH Holland where they have
Speaker 1: a problem with Nutria invading from Germany, coming across the
Speaker 1: border and in infiltrating their canal system which is critical
Speaker 1: to life as they know it in Holland. So you know,
Speaker 1: we've we've shared this technology, these techniques with other folks
Speaker 1: about the world. But I started to talk earlier and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure I ever finished the thought on the
Speaker 1: sort of the biological criteria have to be able to
Speaker 1: meet UH in order for oh, yeah, I got yours
Speaker 1: be feasible, and one of those is you have to
Speaker 1: be able to put every animal at risk. And that's
Speaker 1: why getting the private landowners on board was so important.
Speaker 1: UM and oh gosh, all these thoughts running through my head.
Speaker 1: I've forgotten all the things that I used to be
Speaker 1: able to rattle off in all my slide presentations. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been a little while. Um, so you have to
Speaker 1: have techniques that are effective. So we you know, work
Speaker 1: on all these different, uh, different techniques, techniques that are
Speaker 1: socially acceptable. So you know, they're toxic ins that could
Speaker 1: be applied to eliminate nutria, but they're probably also going
Speaker 1: to eliminate a whole lot of other species. So so, uh,
Speaker 1: that's an important feature. But when you start looking at
Speaker 1: those criteria and applying them to other areas, we were
Speaker 1: very fortunate in um Maryland. The del Marva Peninsula, which
Speaker 1: is that land spit between the Chespeake Bay and the
Speaker 1: Atlantic Ocean that's comprised of the state of Delaware and
Speaker 1: the eastern shore of the Chespeake portions of Maryland and
Speaker 1: Virginia is essentially an island, and the nutria that we
Speaker 1: had here were introduced. They didn't expand from somewhere else.
Speaker 1: It was an expanding population and they're limited in their
Speaker 1: northern distribution by winter weather. So essentially we had an
Speaker 1: island a big island, but it you know, it was
Speaker 1: an island that we could sort of get around and eliminate.
Speaker 1: So if you look at places like Louisiana, which have
Speaker 1: an almost identical ecological problem to what we have here,
Speaker 1: they have the same sort of coastal marshes, the same
Speaker 1: suite of plant species that are impacted, and the same
Speaker 1: effects of nutria, but it's orders of magnitudes greater than
Speaker 1: both in size and in numbers of nutria than we
Speaker 1: have here. They don't have a severe winners, so they've
Speaker 1: got more reproduction taking place, and they estimate in Louisiana,
Speaker 1: in the ten years the first ten years after nutria
Speaker 1: were introduced, as few as probably twenty animals had attained
Speaker 1: populations of twenty million UM. And they just they're everywhere,
Speaker 1: and they're in adjacent states. So there's there's just, uh,
Speaker 1: there's no way to get around the problem, you know.
Speaker 1: So that one uh, one of the other criteria is
Speaker 1: the risk of reinvasion needs to be near zero. So
Speaker 1: on the del Marva Peninsula we had that very low
Speaker 1: risk of reinvasion unless someone choose to bring one in Louisia,
Speaker 1: an unfortunately, uh, surrounded by a sea of Nutria, so
Speaker 1: they'll just had a constant influx. So they took a
Speaker 1: much different approach um and rather than hiring trappers to
Speaker 1: you know, trap down to a near zero population level,
Speaker 1: they looked at the history of Nutria trapping activities in
Speaker 1: relation to the firm market, and they established a bounty
Speaker 1: system based on historical PELP prices UH to encourage and
Speaker 1: incentivize trappers to UH pursue Nutria in the hopes that
Speaker 1: they could depress the population enough that they wouldn't see
Speaker 1: the amount of damage that they did. So they monitored
Speaker 1: that by conducting annual vegetation surveys and they take a
Speaker 1: helicopter fly these They had like miles of transax or
Speaker 1: something like that, and every time they reached a neutria,
Speaker 1: it's called to eat out. When they sort of destroy
Speaker 1: an area of marsh, that fly a circle around it,
Speaker 1: and they do that every year and measure the size
Speaker 1: of those circles and and if they were contracting, then
Speaker 1: they were sort of moving in the right direction. If
Speaker 1: they were getting bigger, they weren't taking enough neutria. So
Speaker 1: to put it in context with Maryland, over the life
Speaker 1: of the project, and you remember earlier I said, you know,
Speaker 1: as many as fifty thousand new tria on Blackwater Refuge alone.
Speaker 1: We've removed about fourteen thousand neutria over the lifespan of
Speaker 1: this project, far fewer than we anticipated at the beginning. UH.
Speaker 1: And if you compare that to Louisiana there uh incentive
Speaker 1: program they remove. Their goal is to remove about four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand new tria a year, and that seems to
Speaker 1: be enough the target that keeps that marsh damage at
Speaker 1: a somewhat acceptable level. So other places that have expressed
Speaker 1: an interest. UH. We've had visits from folks in South Korea, China, Israel. UM.
Speaker 1: We were invit did to participate in a big workshop
Speaker 1: in uh the Pacific Northwest if you probably ten years
Speaker 1: ago now um uh. But then it even crosses species.
Speaker 1: We were actually asked to come and consult on a
Speaker 1: beaver infestation problem in Gyodo, Fuego and Extreme South America,
Speaker 1: where they were introduced ironically about the same time that
Speaker 1: new trou were introduced here. We did a large ye
Speaker 1: you see cappy Barra yep, cav bar last winter man
Speaker 1: neutra actually pretty closely related to cappy bara. UM. But
Speaker 1: the Argentinian military brought North American beaver into establish of
Speaker 1: fur for military clothing. So they released them and they
Speaker 1: thought they'd have trappers go out, and well, it turns
Speaker 1: out they didn't have a trapping community. People didn't know
Speaker 1: what to do with them, and they expanded and proliferated,
Speaker 1: and now they're should have tried to introduce trappers too.
Speaker 1: Well that's cut a few cut a male and a
Speaker 1: female trapper loose over our Our agency has been approached
Speaker 1: about conducting some training activities down there to help kind
Speaker 1: of educate folks on how to effectively trap beaver and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But part of that is, you know, the goals eradication
Speaker 1: and and trapping for fur and trapping for eradication are
Speaker 1: two different for reasons we explored here tonight. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: a good story, man, Yeah, it uh, it was a
Speaker 1: pretty exciting chapter in my career. And yeah, the story
Speaker 1: starts to make its own grave. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: just got like a lot to it. Man. Yeah, yann,
Speaker 1: what was your what was your conservation through eradication? Steve
Speaker 1: first told me. Now I was like, man, that's a ringer. Um.
Speaker 1: Now you pretty much answered it. But I was gonna
Speaker 1: ask like where the closest next population is to the south,
Speaker 1: and then you know if it could become this way.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like you have that the barrier of
Speaker 1: the uh Chests Speake Bay that they're not going to swim.
Speaker 1: They are in relatively close proximity. In Virginia Beach is
Speaker 1: probably the closest place that we know about. Virginia Beach
Speaker 1: has something. Yeah, that whole stretch that's southeast southeastern Virginia
Speaker 1: and northeastern North Carolina, that whole complex down on the
Speaker 1: Eblemarle Sound and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, Madam Mesquite
Speaker 1: National Wildlife Refuge, and then right up into the intensively
Speaker 1: urbanized areas in Virginia Beach, all the the drainage systems
Speaker 1: and whatnot. There's a new Tria on the Naval Air
Speaker 1: Force bases down there. It's got alligators. Man. Well, in Louisiana,
Speaker 1: it is the h A lot of the the new
Speaker 1: tree trappers sell the carcasses to delligator farmers. So they
Speaker 1: get five bucks for the tail that they turn in
Speaker 1: and then they get a buck or two for the
Speaker 1: carcass that they provide. So so, but you know the
Speaker 1: Chestpeake Bay. The mouth of Chestpeake Bay is about fourteen miles. Why,
Speaker 1: that would be a pretty significant dispersal effort to get
Speaker 1: a nutrie to swim across that. Uh So, the narrowest
Speaker 1: point of the bay outside of the mouth of are
Speaker 1: the head of the bay where the Susquehanna River feeds
Speaker 1: into it is actually right here in Dorchester County. It's
Speaker 1: about four and a half miles across uh to Calvert County.
Speaker 1: And in the nineteen nineties they found a small population
Speaker 1: in a tributary of the Potomac River and the Maryland
Speaker 1: Department Natural Resources trapped about fifty animals out there and
Speaker 1: they've they've never seen a resurgence of that population, although
Speaker 1: occasionally we get reports. You guys need to move on
Speaker 1: the Norway rat eliminate rats. You know what interesting tidbit is.
Speaker 1: Uh My brother was telling me the anchorage is the
Speaker 1: world's largest port city with no rats. Interesting. And when
Speaker 1: they get a boat that comes in, if they if
Speaker 1: they inspect it, if they find rats on that boat
Speaker 1: does not touch shore. Yeah, well, you've been to New Zealand.
Speaker 1: Their biosecurity uh procedures are pretty remarkable. Fly in they
Speaker 1: put out literature about making sure your hiking boots don't
Speaker 1: have weed seeds and you're camping equipment. Yeah, did you
Speaker 1: get did you did you get messed with for having
Speaker 1: muddy boots coming in New Zealand. I don't know if
Speaker 1: we got. I can't remember now if we get it
Speaker 1: was a long time ago we got messed with, or
Speaker 1: if it was just protocol. But they basically took all
Speaker 1: my fishing gear, not not the flies and reels and
Speaker 1: polls themselves, but the you know, clothing type gear and
Speaker 1: all of our camping gear, and they took it into
Speaker 1: a room and I think you can actually watch it,
Speaker 1: and they basically fumigated it and then they put in
Speaker 1: a plastic bag to here you go have fun. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they take their invasive species stuff pretty seriously, and they're
Speaker 1: not that they don't have a thousand invasive and they're
Speaker 1: working aggressively to try to eliminate them as much as possible. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we saw traps all over the place for what they
Speaker 1: call stout, which is uh um Stevie. You any final
Speaker 1: things that fall so far out of context that you
Speaker 1: didn't get a chance to bring them up? Oh man,
Speaker 1: so much I was initially wondering if I could possibly
Speaker 1: talk about this for two hours, and but yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that the one thing I'd like to just
Speaker 1: reiterate as a concluding thought is is a plea for
Speaker 1: people to you know, recognize the importance of traditionally urban
Speaker 1: or rural values and activities and the contributions they make
Speaker 1: to modern day conservation. You know, this project would have
Speaker 1: been extremely difficult without the local knowledge we were able
Speaker 1: to tap into through the trapping community. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier, that crosses species, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's a segment of our society that's much maligned and
Speaker 1: in their routinely efforts to eliminate trapping and the the
Speaker 1: kinds of traditional wildlife management tools that that that we've used,
Speaker 1: and you know, they still have an incredibly important place
Speaker 1: in a modern society. And and uh, I guess that's
Speaker 1: something even I think, Uh, non trapping sports people uh
Speaker 1: often don't think about trapping that much and don't have
Speaker 1: the support very ill there's a very uh ill advised
Speaker 1: group folks um that tried to This is my concluding
Speaker 1: thought that the last year, during the last election cycle,
Speaker 1: I tried to get through an initiative in Montana to
Speaker 1: ban trapping on public land. And you know, I thought
Speaker 1: of you know, I had in my in my pocket,
Speaker 1: like a dozen reasons why I thought that was a
Speaker 1: bad idea. One of the things in my pocket that
Speaker 1: one of the things that my pocket did not include
Speaker 1: was the one the director of the State Wildlife Agency
Speaker 1: UM came out and said, why uh would we be
Speaker 1: putting ourselves into a situation to pay government people to
Speaker 1: do something that you have other people paying us to
Speaker 1: go do, Speaking of beaver removal, He's like, we do
Speaker 1: not have the budget right to take care of all
Speaker 1: of the conflicts agricultural road other all of just the
Speaker 1: beaver conflicts alone. Yep, you got a whole squad of
Speaker 1: people out there who you know, are running like little
Speaker 1: small businesses traveling beavers, and you want to take that
Speaker 1: away from someone's gonna those beavers gonna cause problems and
Speaker 1: then we're gonna have government guys doing it. M You know,
Speaker 1: it was that that matter was soundly defeated. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: actually had a second concluding thought. Concluding concluding, want to
Speaker 1: just make sure I emphasize the importance of sort of
Speaker 1: partnerships in tackling monumental conservation issues like this, and without
Speaker 1: the joint efforts of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
Speaker 1: the Maryland Department and Natural Resources, Tutor Farms, and the
Speaker 1: hundreds of private landowners that supported, as well as a
Speaker 1: ton of of several dozen of non governmental organizations like
Speaker 1: the Maryland Trappers Association and the Salesbury Zoo and other
Speaker 1: groups that were that sort of rally around the environment
Speaker 1: that that really helped to generate the support, to keep
Speaker 1: the funding in place, and and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Those partnerships are just critical for um the successive programs
Speaker 1: like this right, so be a good partner. That's my
Speaker 1: final concluder. Thank you for listening. Thank you