Speaker 1: This is me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening. Don't either podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything presented by first light. Go farther,
Speaker 1: stay longer, moving out. We're gonna talk about a a
Speaker 1: controversial subject and that is um, the Mexican gray wolf,
Speaker 1: and I'll explain why it's kind of it's it's controversial
Speaker 1: from from the ground up. Uh, for a bunch of
Speaker 1: different reasons which we'll get into. But first I want
Speaker 1: to go around and have our guests and reduce themselves.
Speaker 1: We've got someone from the US Fishing Wildlife Service, Yeah, Steve.
Speaker 1: I'm John oakleyf with the Fishing Wildlife Service on the
Speaker 1: field programs coordinator, so out in the field working with
Speaker 1: various folks and been on the project since two thousand two,
Speaker 1: no project being the Mexican Wolf Project and then Forest
Speaker 1: Service USDA four Service be centers. I am the four
Speaker 1: Service liaison to the Mexican Wolf Project. They have me
Speaker 1: embedded with the biologists on the wolf program to try
Speaker 1: to help with the communication process. It's a complex, controversial,
Speaker 1: a lot of moving parts going on with this project,
Speaker 1: so they have me in place to try to help
Speaker 1: smooth those parts and keep them working smooth with communications
Speaker 1: with our forest users and try to reduce some of
Speaker 1: that conflict that's going on. And it matters to you, guys,
Speaker 1: because a lot of this is occurring on land administered
Speaker 1: by the Forest Service. Yeah, almost exclusively on Force Service land.
Speaker 1: The Force Services a land management management agency. We manage
Speaker 1: the habitat and fish and Wildlife Service does on the
Speaker 1: groundwork on dealing with the wolves. And then again, uh,
Speaker 1: becoming a frequent guest, doctor Carl Malcolm. That's accurate. Yea
Speaker 1: Carl Malcolm, Southwestern Regional Wildlife ecologist with the U. S
Speaker 1: d A for Service. How long have you been, Dr
Speaker 1: Carl Malcolm Fork. I finished my PhD. I defended my
Speaker 1: thesis in uh late two thousand eleven, so I'll be
Speaker 1: coming up on six years old timey doctor man, I
Speaker 1: don't know about that. Um here's the first question. So
Speaker 1: everybody knows gray wolves, right, gray wolves are gray wolves
Speaker 1: are gray wolves. They had an enormous range at the
Speaker 1: time of European contact. Is it like, is it legit
Speaker 1: because you know what tax on and you've got lumpers
Speaker 1: and splitters, right, Okay, as My brother said, you got
Speaker 1: lumpers and splitters and they know who they are. Um,
Speaker 1: how legit is it to say that that that that
Speaker 1: it's a subspecies when there was no when there was
Speaker 1: no break in the populations, they just like bled into
Speaker 1: each other. Yeah, so what they what they think going
Speaker 1: back in time is there was in terms of the
Speaker 1: gray wolf, it came over from Old World Europe across
Speaker 1: across the Baring Sea and there was several evasions. So
Speaker 1: there was three invasions of gray wolves that came over.
Speaker 1: The first wave basically was a Mexican wolf, so it
Speaker 1: comes over establishes on North America everywhere, Yeah, basically every time.
Speaker 1: The second wave then is Kenas Lupus nubilis, so that's
Speaker 1: basically Great Plains wolves, the wolves that are up in Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: those areas. And then the last wave is Kenas Lupus occidentalis,
Speaker 1: which is up in um Alaska, Canada now kind of
Speaker 1: coming down from that area right up to the United
Speaker 1: States border. So it's pretty widely recognized that that those
Speaker 1: three are subspecies of the gray wolf. And you say, like,
Speaker 1: so so distinct. These are distinct waves of distinct species
Speaker 1: coming down I mean, they were all subspecies in Europe
Speaker 1: at the time. They just represent different genetics, and then
Speaker 1: once they're isolated from each other, they start representing different
Speaker 1: genetics and you can really determine between them. And so
Speaker 1: you feel that a dude riding around on a horse
Speaker 1: and in if he if he started in, if you
Speaker 1: started at the Arizona Mexico border and rode due north,
Speaker 1: that he would have thought like man like as he
Speaker 1: got up into the Northern Rockies, he would have said, man,
Speaker 1: these wolves seem different than the ones that I was
Speaker 1: running into when I started my ride. Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean Mexican wolves down here at eighty pounds for a
Speaker 1: big male for instance, Uh, big female would be sixty
Speaker 1: pounds somewhere in there. When you go north, uh, and
Speaker 1: get up into the ones in Yellowstone and some of
Speaker 1: those areas that are there are now hundred forty pounds
Speaker 1: is a big male with about twenty pounds of meat
Speaker 1: and it's got so you'd say hundred and twenty pounds even,
Speaker 1: And then females are in the pound range, so even
Speaker 1: something like that. Northern Rockies wolves all the other subspecies
Speaker 1: are have black phases, white phases. Mexican wolves only gray,
Speaker 1: yeah only, So that's a distinguishing feature. So someone anybody
Speaker 1: can see the difference, the big differences that occur. So
Speaker 1: what what's up? Because it's one more, what's up with
Speaker 1: the red wolf? So the red wolf is a separate species,
Speaker 1: is what they So it's kenis rufous, So it's not
Speaker 1: even it's not a sub species, it's a whole separate species, right.
Speaker 1: And then there's an Eastern wolf that's out there that
Speaker 1: some people are debating whether it's associated with the red
Speaker 1: wolf or it's associated with gray wolves, and so there's
Speaker 1: a fair better debate about that Eastern did the did
Speaker 1: the red wolf come out of some kind of hybridization
Speaker 1: with with wolves and coyotes? Or It's interesting. Science isn't perfect, right,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of disagreements among scientists. And so
Speaker 1: there's two different hypothesis right now going on. In ones
Speaker 1: that it's a hybrid between gray wolves and coyotes, and
Speaker 1: the second is is that it's a North American just
Speaker 1: developed a bigger type of canaid and so this is
Speaker 1: a bigger type of canaid represented by the Eastern wolves
Speaker 1: and the red wolves. And then they subsequently read with
Speaker 1: some coyotes through time and so, but in terms of
Speaker 1: how they evolved, they evolved in North America as a
Speaker 1: big canus. So if you again going back in time,
Speaker 1: if you what would have been the pre contact like
Speaker 1: the pre European contact range of what of what we
Speaker 1: now describe as the Mexican gray wolf. So it'd be
Speaker 1: uh in Arizona and New Mexico south into into um
Speaker 1: Mexico and at that So if at that same time
Speaker 1: you were in the Texas Panhandle, what would you have
Speaker 1: said that wolf was, you would probably call it it
Speaker 1: would be a Mexican wolf as well. On over in
Speaker 1: Texas As primarily Mexican wolves. But there's bleed over right,
Speaker 1: subspecies breed with each other still, and so there's gradations
Speaker 1: that go on through it. It wasn't a sharp define line.
Speaker 1: You'll see maps that have here's a line, but in
Speaker 1: reality it was some big, fuzzy area transition zone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's similar to now when we look at um if
Speaker 1: you look at mule deer in black tail deer in California,
Speaker 1: we've conveniently decided that I five right, Yeah, that a
Speaker 1: deer can go from being a black tailed muled or
Speaker 1: just by hopping the highway because you have that, like
Speaker 1: I remember that an intercline of some there's some way
Speaker 1: to put it, like a steady intercline of grades or
Speaker 1: something like that. So so people like the clean line, right,
Speaker 1: So I like a good clean line. Yeah. It's a
Speaker 1: lot better than saying, hey, it's great Asians all over
Speaker 1: the place and stuff like that. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: go back in time, there are twenty four subspecies in
Speaker 1: North America of gray wolf, and so saying that there's
Speaker 1: three right now that you'd recognize consistently is right. That's
Speaker 1: that's the lumpers kind of going in there. And so
Speaker 1: review for me the three that are here, the three
Speaker 1: that are in North America. Now, so it's the northern
Speaker 1: Great Lakes. Yeah, so you have the Great Lakes, which
Speaker 1: is Canas lupus um. I'm getting goofed up here, but
Speaker 1: Kenas Lupus nucleus. So that's the Great Legs and it's
Speaker 1: stretched all the way across the Central Plains and all
Speaker 1: the way over into California and just big, big broad swath.
Speaker 1: And then Occidentalis was up north and it kind of
Speaker 1: was the last invading wave. And so when you see
Speaker 1: the common line depicted for Occidentalis, which is a big
Speaker 1: Alaska kind of wolves. It comes down into Montana just
Speaker 1: a little bit, and it's kind of this odd shape, right,
Speaker 1: so it kind of cuts out of shape of where
Speaker 1: a New Bliss was. So that's kind of evidence of
Speaker 1: this evasion happening that they're the last. They would have
Speaker 1: continued to take over range because they're bigger, tougher, stronger
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And then down south is cance Lupus BAILEYI,
Speaker 1: which is the Mexican wolf. So that's all the way
Speaker 1: down to Mexico City and kind of coming up into
Speaker 1: the mogi on Rim here in Arizona and kind of
Speaker 1: that's where the transition zone really was where wolves started
Speaker 1: getting bigger and and stuff. So if you go from
Speaker 1: the deserts all Phoenix and kind of that area where
Speaker 1: it's kind of desert e, there certainly was less dispersal
Speaker 1: as you got up into the mogi on Rim. Some
Speaker 1: people called those Bailey I and some people call them
Speaker 1: New Bliss. So somewhere in that range. So what was
Speaker 1: the last year? Um, they came damn near to dine
Speaker 1: out right, but not. But there was a point. There
Speaker 1: was a point in time right when the only ones
Speaker 1: that existed existed in captivity? What what year was at well?
Speaker 1: We so the Fish and Wildlife Service, right, they listed
Speaker 1: him Gray Walls overall and then um, we went to
Speaker 1: a trapper by the name of Roy McBride, and so
Speaker 1: that was seventy seventy nine eight time frame right in there.
Speaker 1: And he went down to Mexico and caught some Mexican
Speaker 1: wolves brought up to start the so there were none
Speaker 1: in the US. There was none in the US. So
Speaker 1: he goes down not even in captivity, not even in
Speaker 1: captivity yet, so they were so there was a moment
Speaker 1: when they're gone from the like what year? Okay, so
Speaker 1: that kind of now that I know that, that kind
Speaker 1: of change my question. What year were they gone in
Speaker 1: what's now the US? And so well, so a few
Speaker 1: kept on coming up in the seventies and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: but then they they were coming up from Mexico. So
Speaker 1: they're falling kind of trails and stuff across the border
Speaker 1: and coming up. Are you familiar with McCarthy's Border trilogy.
Speaker 1: I'm not you ever read that? How could you? I don't, Well,
Speaker 1: I told you I was impressed by your radian need
Speaker 1: to read, you need to read Cormett McCarthy's The Border,
Speaker 1: the Border trilogy, The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses. Okay.
Speaker 1: The Crossing is a kid who grows up on the
Speaker 1: New Mexico Mexico border. He there's some they're losing some
Speaker 1: cattle to a wolf. His dad says, catch the wolf
Speaker 1: and kill it. And he studies up and through trials
Speaker 1: and tribulations, catches the wolf and can't kill it, and
Speaker 1: he decides what he needs to do is bring it
Speaker 1: down New Mexico and let it go where, um, they
Speaker 1: won't be bothering anything anymore except for all the cattle
Speaker 1: in Mexico. Wolf. The wolf dies anyways, but but it
Speaker 1: goes it but uh, oh my god. Yeah, So anyhow
Speaker 1: there are Mexican grave You need to read The Crossing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you when you retire or something, well before that probably,
Speaker 1: So what was the year they were gone? So we're
Speaker 1: kind of gone. Well, let's just say McBride goes down
Speaker 1: there and he captures some wolves to start up the
Speaker 1: captive captive brading. So where where was he going to
Speaker 1: catch him? Oh, Duraning. He was going all over Mexico,
Speaker 1: but Durango kind of the Sierra Madre Occidental, which is
Speaker 1: all that kind of stretches all the way down the
Speaker 1: mountains ranges in the west, and they had good populations
Speaker 1: down there or not not really. There's about fifty left
Speaker 1: at the time when he was down yeah, and so
Speaker 1: so what was Mexico's relations what was their thought on this, Well,
Speaker 1: we signed an agreement to go get him down there,
Speaker 1: and they thought even though we got fifty, well, well, well,
Speaker 1: we're willing to cut a few for you, because the
Speaker 1: figuring was that they were going to be gone. Oh
Speaker 1: they were gonna lose those two. Yeah. Yeah, so pretty
Speaker 1: widely dispersed and probably gonna lose their populations as well.
Speaker 1: And and and uh so by about I mean Roy
Speaker 1: McBride was a guy who removed a bunch of wolves,
Speaker 1: killed a bunch of wolves before this, and then he
Speaker 1: was hired to go down and capture these wolves because
Speaker 1: he knew how to do it. He knew how to
Speaker 1: do it, and so he literally started up the recovery
Speaker 1: programmed by going down and doing this. Is what was
Speaker 1: his relationship to it to what do you feel that
Speaker 1: he just was interested in the money or do you
Speaker 1: feel that he was there was he like, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: was there something bigger going on or was it just
Speaker 1: like he liked to catch wolves? And if that's what
Speaker 1: catching wolves was like, now that's what he would do.
Speaker 1: He's more of a lion hunter. He's still alive. He's
Speaker 1: an interesting guy to talk to. Builds, traps and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. And so talk to him on the phone
Speaker 1: every so often, and he's a neat guy. Is he
Speaker 1: rooting for the wolves or not rooting for wolves? He
Speaker 1: but he's probably just he just recognizes him as a
Speaker 1: animal out there on the landscape. Doesn't hold him in
Speaker 1: this giant special regard. Right, He's been through both sides
Speaker 1: of it, and I want I want to step back,
Speaker 1: just to just to make sure all the context, Like
Speaker 1: um so, I keep trying to find ways of phrases.
Speaker 1: What year was it when when it would have been
Speaker 1: fair to say that they were like what was the
Speaker 1: last point at which they were still plentiful in Arizona,
Speaker 1: New Mexico their historic range in the lower forty eighth
Speaker 1: man the fifties, maybe the fifties sixties, there was some
Speaker 1: that were brought out fair number, but again most of
Speaker 1: those were still kind of coming up from Mexico. But
Speaker 1: that would be the time frame when there's still some
Speaker 1: and then by the seventies it was dismal, there's nothing.
Speaker 1: And then by the oh when we wrote up in
Speaker 1: n there was some surveys down in Mexico and there
Speaker 1: was no more Mexican wolves in Mexico. They did lose
Speaker 1: them down there. Yeah, so they were gone as well.
Speaker 1: And so what we got left with was, um, this
Speaker 1: captive population and uh, through genetics and stuff, we found
Speaker 1: a couple other animals that were pure Mexican wolves in
Speaker 1: captivity that have been long standing captive populations at different places.
Speaker 1: Just some hobbyist head. Yeah, so it was ghost French
Speaker 1: was one lineage that we refer to it now there
Speaker 1: and um and they proved to be that they were
Speaker 1: still genetically intact. Ye bread with dogs or whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so how many were there at this point in captivity, Well,
Speaker 1: so there was that that's the start of the captivity
Speaker 1: was seven animals. So that's what started our captive population.
Speaker 1: By the whole population bottlenecked down to seven. And they
Speaker 1: can they can withstand that kind of thing. Well, wolves
Speaker 1: are because they disperse a long ways. They do pretty
Speaker 1: good with genetics so if you can raise them up
Speaker 1: and so you can deal with the bottleneck like grizzly
Speaker 1: bears and Yellowstone bottle neck pretty severely when they shut
Speaker 1: down like the dumps. But then the population goes back
Speaker 1: up broadens back out pretty quickly, and then you get
Speaker 1: that they can deal with that. You don't lose as
Speaker 1: much genetic diversity. So once you start producing them in
Speaker 1: captivity and you do a fair better that, then it
Speaker 1: works out. Okay, it's less than ideal though, yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's better than none. Right, Blackfoot of Ferret's down to
Speaker 1: sixteen at the time, so that's when they came out
Speaker 1: of that. Yeah, they brought him in captivity and they're
Speaker 1: putting them mount in various areas, so Wyoming, Arizona, um
Speaker 1: all over the place. So when they were down to
Speaker 1: seven UM in the late seventies, um, what number did
Speaker 1: they hit in captivity? Well before we did, I mean
Speaker 1: eight two. I remember we did a recovery plan and
Speaker 1: it was they were saying it was around twenty or something.
Speaker 1: In captivity, they just go to Zoo Zoological Institute. So
Speaker 1: they kind of starts scattering them around all over the
Speaker 1: place just so like one bolt lightning couldn't kill them
Speaker 1: all one day. Yeah, that's a good idea, right, spread
Speaker 1: them out and then uh, when we started doing releases,
Speaker 1: there was about hundred and fifty. So we started doing
Speaker 1: releases up here and there was somewhere two hundred fifty.
Speaker 1: Now there's two fifty to three in captivity, all right,
Speaker 1: but that's okay, that's a huge jump. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: say that when we started doing releases, so how like,
Speaker 1: how did that all come? Like, lay that story out,
Speaker 1: how we started doing releases? No, like where who wanted
Speaker 1: to do it, who didn't want to do it? Where
Speaker 1: was it gonna happen? Oh yeah, I mean I wasn't
Speaker 1: here at the time. I'm not that old anyways. I
Speaker 1: think in general, when you look at releases and going
Speaker 1: to do reintroductions, a lot of people who are local
Speaker 1: in the area, who are raising livestock, who are hunters
Speaker 1: out there, are generally opposed to wolf reintroductions because it's
Speaker 1: another predator that's competing on the environment. And so when
Speaker 1: you when you lay it out like that, those were
Speaker 1: the folks who didn't want to do it at the time.
Speaker 1: New Mexico Game and Fish didn't want to uh do it.
Speaker 1: And so it's similar with the gray wolf reintroduction in
Speaker 1: the North where the States states, I mean, in a
Speaker 1: very general sense, the states were uneasy. Yeah, because it
Speaker 1: is or beyond uneasy, you bet, you bet. So it affects, right.
Speaker 1: Game populations are part of that equation. So if you're
Speaker 1: impacting game populations and stuff like that as a state agency,
Speaker 1: and where you can stituents are, which are broadly hunters
Speaker 1: and fishermen. Um, they when you're talking about retroducing a predator, right,
Speaker 1: that's not the most popular position for those guys to be.
Speaker 1: It wasn't gone that long from the landscape, right, So
Speaker 1: it was like for many adults, it was probably still
Speaker 1: in their memory that these wolves have been around. And
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that if you guys were breeding them, the
Speaker 1: plan was always to reintroduce them. It wasn't like you
Speaker 1: bread them up and then all of a sudden said,
Speaker 1: oh what about this thing? Yeah, so in two they said, well,
Speaker 1: we only got twenty animals in captivity. So all we
Speaker 1: can imagine is finding an area that's uh ten thousand
Speaker 1: square miles that we can get a hundred wolves to
Speaker 1: exist in the wild. And that's not recovery. But that's
Speaker 1: all that we can imagine. And so these guys that
Speaker 1: were writing it up, that was the extent of their
Speaker 1: imagination for the Mexican wolf. But that's what they envisioned. Rap.
Speaker 1: But that's what we'll get into this. But that's still
Speaker 1: kind of the plan. Now. Well, no, we've we've we've
Speaker 1: envisioned a little bit more, envisioned more. We've grown a
Speaker 1: little bit since. But but you're operating. So the agency
Speaker 1: that you work for is operating under, is operating under
Speaker 1: a sort of mandate for the legal framework of the
Speaker 1: Endangered Species Act, which signing the law by Nixon and
Speaker 1: seventy two. Right, So, I mean it's not real, it's
Speaker 1: not real gray about what that means for I mean,
Speaker 1: when a species gets listed, it means that we have
Speaker 1: a national priority two like work toward delisting to recover
Speaker 1: the species. Absolutely, and that so it's like in a
Speaker 1: in a way, it's it's not it's not so much
Speaker 1: like a guy decides to go out and do a reintroduction.
Speaker 1: Like it's a little more complicated than that. Sure, it's
Speaker 1: like a federal mandate. Well, right, and so you write
Speaker 1: and an environmental impact statement is what it's called, and
Speaker 1: so it's hundreds of pages. You put it out to
Speaker 1: the public, they have comments on it, and then you
Speaker 1: write a rule that says, here's a non essential experimental
Speaker 1: rule that kind of loosens up the restrictions over all
Speaker 1: the place from the Endangered Species Act. Well, because you
Speaker 1: did it as they did as an experimental herd here
Speaker 1: or experimental population, right, and they didn't do that. They
Speaker 1: didn't do that in the North. Well they did. They
Speaker 1: did it in um Yellowstone and Idaho with experimental status
Speaker 1: experimental status, no essential, experimental. But in uh, Montana they
Speaker 1: were endangered because they were naturally coming down from Canada
Speaker 1: into Montana. So there was already a population in Montana
Speaker 1: before those reintroductions ever occurred. So they kind of segmented
Speaker 1: out zones and most of it was experimental too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's tobacco. I just want to and correct me where
Speaker 1: I go around, and so I just want to explain
Speaker 1: it to people that uh trying to think of a
Speaker 1: good a good case scenario. So, um, I take the
Speaker 1: Bitterroot Mountain range. What when when grizzly bears were listed
Speaker 1: in the seventies listening under Dangered Species Act, protection of
Speaker 1: the seventies. Uh, they were focused on recovering some Mary's
Speaker 1: that had remnant populations of bears, and there was mountain
Speaker 1: ranges nearby the historically had them but didn't anymore. And
Speaker 1: the animals are treated differently if they naturally went into
Speaker 1: a mountain range than if they were put into a
Speaker 1: mountain range. So if they if they walked over there,
Speaker 1: they carried with them full e ESA protections. And if
Speaker 1: they let them go in there, there's so much like
Speaker 1: political pushback to letting them go that they would make
Speaker 1: compromises and declare them um an experimental status, which gives
Speaker 1: you a lot more leeway on lethal control of problem
Speaker 1: animals and other stuff. So I remember this debate raging
Speaker 1: among grizzly advocates being like, do we go with the
Speaker 1: sure thing and put grizzlies into the bitter roots right
Speaker 1: where they're gonna have only marginal protection, or do we
Speaker 1: play the long game and wait from the walk in.
Speaker 1: And I think that was part of the government even
Speaker 1: proposed that for grizzly barrass in terms of the Central
Speaker 1: Idaho Wilderness, doing a reintroduction from they're under non essential
Speaker 1: experimental because it gives you a lot of leeways. It
Speaker 1: gives you a lot of leeways for that leeway, it
Speaker 1: gives you a lot of leeway for controlling conflict. Sure
Speaker 1: for right so for right now, UM, people out there
Speaker 1: at they see wall's attacking cattle on their private land,
Speaker 1: they can shoot the wolf. And that's completely legal. It's
Speaker 1: within our rule that we put in place, UH, that
Speaker 1: they see on private land, UM wolves and the active
Speaker 1: attacking a dog right now, they can shoot the wolf.
Speaker 1: So they have certain measures that they can take in place,
Speaker 1: and then UH to mitigate cattle conflict. We can control
Speaker 1: wolves as well, either by removing them with traps or
Speaker 1: shooting them. And so all this is flexibility that isn't
Speaker 1: allowed understandard and endangered species stuff. The other thing is
Speaker 1: you have a Section seven consultations on any land management
Speaker 1: action and so that's where the like the four service
Speaker 1: comes into play. We don't have to do Section seven
Speaker 1: consultation with the wolf in the non essential experimental. So
Speaker 1: we're not restricting any land use activities out there because
Speaker 1: of the presence of wolves. So someone that wants to do,
Speaker 1: like if someone wants to do some mineral development on
Speaker 1: their land, they're not faced with that it's that it's
Speaker 1: gray wolf recovery area and that their permit process gets
Speaker 1: hung up. Right, Yeah, so now back up again. Early
Speaker 1: on it was like, okay, we need how many acres?
Speaker 1: It was ten thousand square miles ten thousand square miles
Speaker 1: and who how did how was that selected? Well, so
Speaker 1: it's the I S process. Um. They spent uh some
Speaker 1: time selecting between different areas. Arizona Game of Fish did
Speaker 1: a study in terms of different areas. One area was
Speaker 1: the White Sands missile range that fell out all that
Speaker 1: another area was a blue range area get rejected. Well,
Speaker 1: it was included in the final rules, so White Sands
Speaker 1: was there. We never did reintroductions. There was a backup spot,
Speaker 1: but really there's not a lot of prey in that area.
Speaker 1: It's not high by at the time hit. Most of
Speaker 1: the mule deer pretty low in terms of population sizes,
Speaker 1: and and so we did never choose to put wolves
Speaker 1: out in the area um in the HeLa and for
Speaker 1: fear that they would starve or for fear that they
Speaker 1: would just split. Yes, both they split or starve. The
Speaker 1: ones that survive would split and the ones that stayed
Speaker 1: would stark. So they couldn't live off Ibex on the
Speaker 1: that's a tough living man. Those orics out there or yeah,
Speaker 1: those are I wouldn't want to take down an orex
Speaker 1: with my mouth. So that area was within the area,
Speaker 1: but wasn't like everything you need. I've haunted that I've haunted.
Speaker 1: I ran lions with a body mine and the Blue Range. Yeah,
Speaker 1: every trailheads got signs about wolves, you know, right, and
Speaker 1: then well there's lots of elk there, man, there's a
Speaker 1: pile of elk. So right now you're talking to Heila
Speaker 1: twenty two thousand elk in the Greater HeLa National Forest
Speaker 1: and over on the Arizona side. These are the two
Speaker 1: forests where we did it to start with. On the
Speaker 1: Arizona side eight to ten thousand on the two little
Speaker 1: chunks that we did it on. So you might you
Speaker 1: probably know this that you know that at the time,
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know this. At the time, New Mexico
Speaker 1: had no elk, right, yeah, talk about a bottleneck, right,
Speaker 1: and you know zero to seventy elk. Hunters and fishermen
Speaker 1: set the stage for wolf recovery by reintroducing elk, by
Speaker 1: caring about the land, caring about these ungulates that are
Speaker 1: out there and and re establishing big herds of ungulates. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but now we're like that anyway, we did it, well,
Speaker 1: that's not why they did it, right, They did it
Speaker 1: for a hunting right, Uh? No, did it for Yeah,
Speaker 1: hunting has a very large umbrella turn. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: because you know, if you go and look like in Kentucky,
Speaker 1: which is engaged in a reintroduction of elk, the guy
Speaker 1: like the odds of drawing LTAG Kentucky are like u
Speaker 1: per cent. Like the guys that work on that reintroduction
Speaker 1: are never gonna draw elk tag, right, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just doing it for doing it. That's
Speaker 1: the land between the lakes out there. Is that where
Speaker 1: they're doing it at No, No, they're doing it Southeast Kentucky.
Speaker 1: All that recovered coal mine, you know, the mountaintop removable
Speaker 1: coal mine when they when they did uh you know
Speaker 1: the mitigation propor Now the what what's that remedi is
Speaker 1: the remediate mediation the remediation plan for a lot of
Speaker 1: that mountaintop coal mining basically has created a little prairie
Speaker 1: patches on top of those mountains and create all these grasslands.
Speaker 1: So I said in New Mexico had zero elk. At
Speaker 1: one point there were zero elk east of the Mississippi,
Speaker 1: and now there's elk herds in eleven states. Kentucky's got ballpark.
Speaker 1: The recovery plan was ten thousand. Now it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the semi official numbers fourteen thousand elk. Some people
Speaker 1: think it might be twenty thousand elk. It's the biggest
Speaker 1: herd east of the Mississippi, and it lives on those things.
Speaker 1: But the point being that, um, yeah, you might be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're just doing it because you want to shoot one,
Speaker 1: and people they're like, dude, I can tell you one
Speaker 1: thing that ain't gonna happen is me drawing out tag
Speaker 1: in Kentucky. But I still got involved in the process
Speaker 1: the same way. There's a lot of people involved in
Speaker 1: wolf recovery. They have no intention of shooting one. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'd ventured to say everyone involved in wolf recovery has
Speaker 1: no intention to shooting one. No, but I'd like to
Speaker 1: see you get there, right. You want to see it
Speaker 1: where it's a huntable species, where it's has populations robusting
Speaker 1: because of what that would mean. Yeah, because I mean
Speaker 1: you had a sustainable population. Yeah, so that's great then
Speaker 1: at that stage, and so it's a wonderful thing. I
Speaker 1: think if you go back to the thirties, so when
Speaker 1: they were doing the Elkare introduction or the forties, I
Speaker 1: wonder if there wasn't more focused on honey hunting and stuff.
Speaker 1: No making, Yeah, I think making a resource man, I
Speaker 1: know absolutely, And then he still had a cult. There
Speaker 1: was still a cultural memory of having hunted him too,
Speaker 1: you know. But yeah, No, it's it's when I say
Speaker 1: it's like a hunting as an umbrella idea, that that
Speaker 1: that pushes that kind of stuff. Cause I think it's
Speaker 1: not that someone goes down the path of doing that
Speaker 1: thinking like, oh, next year I'll be hunting them. You're
Speaker 1: playing a long game and it's not just like totally pragmatic. Now.
Speaker 1: A guy that goes and buys a truckload of bluegills
Speaker 1: to dump in his private pond is focused on a
Speaker 1: very near term future. You know. He's like a different
Speaker 1: fella than a guy who's like, let's go through all
Speaker 1: this hassle and catch a wolf down in Mexico and
Speaker 1: breed it up and then maybe in twenty years we'll
Speaker 1: have something. So when it came to be that that
Speaker 1: you were identifying land. When I say you, I'm using
Speaker 1: it loosely. It wasn't that you were going to find
Speaker 1: a ranch big enough to do this, oh now. And
Speaker 1: even so we set up on Forest service land and
Speaker 1: even that, uh, we had a rule where we would
Speaker 1: remove them if they if they straight outside of the
Speaker 1: HeLa and Apache National Forest. Yeah, so when they went
Speaker 1: outside of that, we removed him. But we just just
Speaker 1: brought him back into the middle, just brought him back
Speaker 1: in the middle. Or unless they're killing cows and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and that's a death sense killing cows, well
Speaker 1: not I mean if you kill quite a few of them, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a death sentence at that stage. But um so, anyways,
Speaker 1: even that size of an area, which is really big,
Speaker 1: was too small because wolves, you guys, really, I mean
Speaker 1: you realize that after the fact it was too small. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were outside the boundary. We spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time chasing wolves outside the boundary and that's kind of
Speaker 1: inconsistent with recovery. So right now we have a broader
Speaker 1: area that we put out. So right now wolves can
Speaker 1: range anywhere south by forty in New Mexico and Arizona.
Speaker 1: And being okay, yeah, what was what was the is
Speaker 1: the e s A is the Endangered species eggs so
Speaker 1: powerful that the Four Service had to say, okay, well sure,
Speaker 1: I mean that's part of our mandate. Also is a
Speaker 1: recovery or dangerous species. So we're partnered up with the
Speaker 1: US Fish and Wildlife Service to implement the Endangered Species Act.
Speaker 1: But the fun kind of comes into um, the work
Speaker 1: is when you have multiple use objectives on the Four
Speaker 1: Service land. You know, you've got livestock grazing, you've got
Speaker 1: timber harvesting, you've got recreation, you've got all these activities
Speaker 1: going on in public land. Plus now you're trying to
Speaker 1: re establish and recover predator. That's where the heavy lifting
Speaker 1: and work comes in. Yeah, I mean balancing out those
Speaker 1: interests I imagine the most. So the two big not compromises,
Speaker 1: the two big conflict areas that be hunters in a
Speaker 1: general sense and then livestock producers absolutely who hold um,
Speaker 1: who hold private property on the borders of this and
Speaker 1: who hold grazing leases on the inside of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: probably a lot of the heavy lifting comes with our
Speaker 1: livestock grazers and permitees trying to prevent the conflicts and
Speaker 1: reduce the conflicts, and providing the communications with those folks
Speaker 1: to let them better understand what's going on and what
Speaker 1: to expect. That's that's where all the real challenges lie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how might those challenges manifest? I mean, like on on
Speaker 1: a ground person level, what's the what's a common sort
Speaker 1: of conflict that happens? Well, you know, the big conflicts
Speaker 1: obviously is the direct depredation of livestock by the wolves
Speaker 1: and trying to first of all, trying to find ways
Speaker 1: to prevent that, and then when it does happen, UM,
Speaker 1: working with the compensation programs to hi to try to
Speaker 1: compensate these permitees that have losses and and there's some
Speaker 1: good uh compensation programs in place to help help recover
Speaker 1: some of those losses that do occur. Uh. Those compensations
Speaker 1: programs are far from perfect, but they do provide a
Speaker 1: way to compensate the permitees for losses that they could take. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, and going into you guys like you had
Speaker 1: to have known right the minute, like how many did
Speaker 1: you let go the first time you let him go?
Speaker 1: I was three packs and in the in march, and
Speaker 1: how many were in a pack, you know, around five
Speaker 1: uh some uh, well there was year LANs in some
Speaker 1: an adult pair, so standard at that time, they were
Speaker 1: getting ready to breed bread up, so they're gonna have
Speaker 1: pups in April May. And they had no institutional memory
Speaker 1: of hunting within that pack. They've been five they've been captive. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they hadn't hunted at all. It's interesting because some of
Speaker 1: the walls that came right out of captivity less than months,
Speaker 1: some of their answers are saying, yeah, they kills an
Speaker 1: elk right out of here, right out of the right
Speaker 1: out of the gate. So it's kind of just they
Speaker 1: just knew what they were up to. It's just programmed
Speaker 1: into him. Right, So when they hit the ground, how
Speaker 1: long how much time went by for someone's like, hey,
Speaker 1: all sons of bitches killed my a cow. I think
Speaker 1: we got through without an actual depredation. Yeah, so ninety
Speaker 1: eight was a good year, but certainly every year since then,
Speaker 1: how many been depredations? Well, so you kind of say
Speaker 1: it on a per hundred wolf basis, right, because you
Speaker 1: want to compare to other places, and you want to
Speaker 1: compare year to year. So as a population grows, you
Speaker 1: get more and more, so somewhere between twenty two fifty
Speaker 1: cows on per one wolves. So it's a fairly significant
Speaker 1: depending on prices, they're killing two dollars worth of yeah,
Speaker 1: twenty thousand dollars with the property. So how many, Like,
Speaker 1: what's the elk per hundred wolves? Elk per hundred wolves,
Speaker 1: So it's it's four wolves per thousand elk in our
Speaker 1: area right now that we're that we're roughly shooting for.
Speaker 1: So when we did the world change? I mean, how many?
Speaker 1: How many? Okay, I got I got to think about
Speaker 1: that one. But how many? And I remember this reading
Speaker 1: is recently in the Northern Rockies a wolf how many
Speaker 1: elk a wolf kills per year? So it's it's basically
Speaker 1: around twelve to sixteen A wolf kills twelve to sixteen
Speaker 1: elk year, and that's that's commonly referred to as cow
Speaker 1: elk equivalents. So a lot of those that's not the
Speaker 1: right number because a lot of them are calves that
Speaker 1: are smaller that they kill and so you're just trying
Speaker 1: to base them are bulls that are bigger, So you're
Speaker 1: figuring a four pound animal right right, So you're trying
Speaker 1: to get at standardized across something so uh, twelve to
Speaker 1: sixteen out per year, so around like sixteen hundred, around
Speaker 1: six hundred elk annually, Yeah, killed by wolves right now
Speaker 1: with the population of dred bols, how many how many
Speaker 1: elk year hunters killing out of that same area? I
Speaker 1: don't know. You would be a question for New Mexico
Speaker 1: game of fish, but a lot more. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean way way order magnitude more probably or seven Mexico's
Speaker 1: got seventy. Well find it out. We find that out. Um.
Speaker 1: So sort of an ironic point on that front talking
Speaker 1: about elk too and the relationship between livestock production and
Speaker 1: these different wildlife species that I think is worth dropping
Speaker 1: in here is that we have we have places in
Speaker 1: the state, including some of the producers around this border country,
Speaker 1: who have direct conflict or at least perceived direct conflict
Speaker 1: between cattle production and competition with wild free ranging elk.
Speaker 1: So um. On the one hand, you have some folks
Speaker 1: voicing up that, you know, the hunters who don't want
Speaker 1: to compete with wolves for the elk they're trying to kill,
Speaker 1: and you have ranchers who don't want wolves killing their cattle.
Speaker 1: You also have ranchers who don't want elk competing with
Speaker 1: their cattle. There's multiple angles. That's interesting. Have you guys
Speaker 1: had of of permit holders, of people that hold grazing
Speaker 1: permits on federally managed lands. Have you ever had someone say,
Speaker 1: I lose more I'm losing more pounds of beef to
Speaker 1: grass competition from elk. Then I'm losing pounds of beef
Speaker 1: to direct consumption by wolves. Has anyone ever made that calculation? No,
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever heard that argument. I've I've
Speaker 1: heard some ranchers say, you know, I don't tell anybody,
Speaker 1: but I'm just happy if they kill elk. That's great.
Speaker 1: I'm happy that the wolves are here killing elk, getting
Speaker 1: rid of them. But in New Mexico, right, they have
Speaker 1: a landowner tag things, so they get distributed elk tags
Speaker 1: based on how much land they own as well, and
Speaker 1: so that's kind of the the interchange. So lot of
Speaker 1: the livestock owners are also outfitters and guides or heavily
Speaker 1: dependent on the elk as well, And so I get
Speaker 1: into conversations with some of those guys in there, like
Speaker 1: I don't want the wolves eating anything. Wolves got to
Speaker 1: eat the same as worms. Right, all right, I gotta,
Speaker 1: I gotta. I'm getting to be questions in my head here?
Speaker 1: So does want to keep on ask? And that is behold,
Speaker 1: don't don't answer yet, because I want to do no
Speaker 1: one far. I forget. What all have they eaten that
Speaker 1: you know about to date? Okay? Like what are they eating?
Speaker 1: And while you sit on that one, what um? When
Speaker 1: the when the reintroduction occurred, how universal was disapproval among
Speaker 1: livestock producers who are running cattle on the recovery area
Speaker 1: or private lands surrounding the recovery area. You know, that
Speaker 1: was before my time. I've been in the program for
Speaker 1: about three years now, but I would imagine it's pretty
Speaker 1: consistent with what it is now. A general lack of
Speaker 1: support for the recovery of the general lack of support. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a competition for them. It's perceived that
Speaker 1: this large predator was taken off the landscape because it
Speaker 1: was problematic for them, and then now the government wants
Speaker 1: to put it back in. So it's it's hard for
Speaker 1: them to come fully on board on supporting that. And
Speaker 1: what would you say the same thing on the hunting community,
Speaker 1: general lack of support or is it more mixed. It's
Speaker 1: got to be more mixed. I would say it's definitely
Speaker 1: more mixed. I said, on both sides. I'm not from here,
Speaker 1: but I was in a state that had it. I said,
Speaker 1: on both sides of it. One, I think it's immoral.
Speaker 1: And I don't throw that word around very often, but
Speaker 1: I think it's immoral to drive species to extinction. I
Speaker 1: think it's like playing God with God's stuff, right, I
Speaker 1: guess like a grievous sin to know wingly eliminate a
Speaker 1: species from Earth. Okay. On the other hand, I used
Speaker 1: to hunt it. We hunted the area through its We
Speaker 1: hunted an area that we started hunting in the Northern
Speaker 1: Rockies the year of the reintroduction, and we within a
Speaker 1: handful of years we were hunting one third as many
Speaker 1: elk as we were when we started hunting it. Now
Speaker 1: we got better all the time. So my brother he's
Speaker 1: still he still hunts it. He still kills elk every year,
Speaker 1: even though he's hunting the third as many as he
Speaker 1: was before. But he's just like his knowledge of the
Speaker 1: area has kept pace with the diminishment of the herds.
Speaker 1: And of course you wait and hope that the elk,
Speaker 1: get used to it and figure out how to deal
Speaker 1: with him. Well, I think I think you can point
Speaker 1: to different management units, different areas, and the whole gamut
Speaker 1: of prey responses occurred with wolves being present there. So
Speaker 1: it's not universally all of a sudden will show up
Speaker 1: and you're driving out. That's different. That's the funny thing
Speaker 1: always bring out with people, man, is like the funny
Speaker 1: always bring out the people's like why does everybody Okay,
Speaker 1: dudes like me are always uh dudes, I merror eyes, like, ah,
Speaker 1: the wolves are killing everything, but every wants to go
Speaker 1: hunt in Alaska? Right, Alaska all the time? Alaska. Wolves
Speaker 1: in Alaska occupied the ninety five or ninety six percent
Speaker 1: of the historic range. So I'm like, if that's true,
Speaker 1: why does everybody want to go hunt Alaska? You guys
Speaker 1: should steer clear because it's full of damn wolves. Right.
Speaker 1: So so there is like it's a little more complicated
Speaker 1: than what people would have because everyone's waiting in line
Speaker 1: to go up there, right, and they hope they see
Speaker 1: a wolf, right, And so the area I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure the area of the year, but I worked
Speaker 1: up there on on wolves shortly after the reintroduction in
Speaker 1: Montana and then wyoming in those areas and kicked around
Speaker 1: and um, you know, there was an incredibly hard winter.
Speaker 1: There's wolves reintroduced, and they're harvesting the crap out of
Speaker 1: cows in certain areas because they want to reduce the
Speaker 1: number about so outside of Yellowstone. All three of those
Speaker 1: things happened simultaneously. So people look at it through these
Speaker 1: wolf colored glasses, right, So they're just, well, the only
Speaker 1: thing that's changed is there's wolves. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of things that changed in that particular their thing. In
Speaker 1: some areas wolves are there, elk are still high, same
Speaker 1: hunting stuff, and in other areas that's not the case.
Speaker 1: So the more predators, so grizzly bears, wolves, lions, coyotes.
Speaker 1: When you have the in humans, when you have the
Speaker 1: complete suite of predators, right, you have more chance of
Speaker 1: driving down populations of ungulets than you do. Uh, stay
Speaker 1: down here where you don't have grizzly bears as one thing,
Speaker 1: and you don't have heavy winter mortality is another thing.
Speaker 1: You have lions, you do have lions. We looked at
Speaker 1: some stuff they did out of Idaho where they figured
Speaker 1: they were losing pre wolves, they were losing thirty calves
Speaker 1: per hundred two lions, and when wolves came in, it
Speaker 1: was they were losing a total of probably forty calves perred.
Speaker 1: So they're losing ten calves per hundred for well, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like ballpark figures. But the way this is explained
Speaker 1: to me is people were very accustomed to thirty calves
Speaker 1: per It has always been that way, and they knew
Speaker 1: what that looked like and what it felt like and
Speaker 1: what it meant for harvest rates. But then when that
Speaker 1: little extra chunk got carved out of there, it was
Speaker 1: felt very acutely, and people then sort of blamed all
Speaker 1: forty calves per hundred on this new thing rather than
Speaker 1: looking at it as a little addition, right, And it's
Speaker 1: harder to recover, So it's you're a hunting If you're
Speaker 1: a manager out there, right, you're used to saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm harvesting cows because I want to drive down the
Speaker 1: olt population. I'm gonna drive it down. I'm gonna harvest cows.
Speaker 1: And then okay, I'm gonna stop my heart cow harvest
Speaker 1: because I wanted to go back up wolves predation. Predation
Speaker 1: in general can slow that increase, right, So it's harder
Speaker 1: to have this rapid rebound, rapid control kind of stuff
Speaker 1: that you're used to having. We're just working at valve
Speaker 1: and like right, right, So it's it's a different thing
Speaker 1: that people have to get used to as well, because
Speaker 1: the one thing you can control is is human harvest
Speaker 1: out there and so open the Northern Rockies are still
Speaker 1: shooting shiploads a cow out. Yeah, I like, I love hunting.
Speaker 1: I have conversations all the time with people and I'm like,
Speaker 1: if I if I thought reintroducing wolves was going to
Speaker 1: permit me from hunting, I would have been against it
Speaker 1: a long time ago. I love to hunt elk. I
Speaker 1: love to hunt dare. I love being out there and
Speaker 1: doing that stuff. So that's that's important part of who
Speaker 1: I am. But a thing that frustrates hunters, I think
Speaker 1: is that you have some people you gotta get your
Speaker 1: way that the extremes. Right. You got the guy who
Speaker 1: is like they they're gonna will every last elk and
Speaker 1: will be an elk left right, and then they're hand.
Speaker 1: You've got people who, I swear it, they're trying to
Speaker 1: tell us that wolves eat nuts and berries, right, you know,
Speaker 1: and I feel like I hear in each of my ears,
Speaker 1: I'm hearing from like these two people. Wolves eat elk cows.
Speaker 1: So I mean that's what wolves a little bit of deer,
Speaker 1: but the deer is a little bit a lot less
Speaker 1: taken at least down here and in the Northern Rockies
Speaker 1: where there's an elk deer. Why do they like elks
Speaker 1: so much? They're just a perfect package. Man, It's just
Speaker 1: they're in a good herd. You get to chase them,
Speaker 1: and there's something falls behind, something's weak in that group.
Speaker 1: So they they get them and they know where they are.
Speaker 1: They like being in flat areas where wolves like to
Speaker 1: be and hunt. They like hunting that flat train. Wolves
Speaker 1: like hunting flat train, sure, because it's you gotta run,
Speaker 1: you're chasing them down, you know, So, um, flat trains better.
Speaker 1: Lions like the steep stuff, right, because it's more of
Speaker 1: a of an ambush hunt. Yeah, you know. I think
Speaker 1: the one trend I have seen has the at the
Speaker 1: wolf population increases, the hunter community is becoming more involved
Speaker 1: in the issue and more concerned. Um, but more concerned
Speaker 1: about the increase of wolves. Are more concerned about help
Speaker 1: of wolves out well, No, more concerned about how the
Speaker 1: wolf population is impacting their choice of of of prey,
Speaker 1: the elk. So the one thing the program is doing
Speaker 1: is um studies to help really understand what what it's
Speaker 1: doing to the population and the impacts. And I don't
Speaker 1: know what what is it? What do you guys feel
Speaker 1: that it is doing? Well, look, John, kind of speak
Speaker 1: to that little bit more. Well right now, I mean
Speaker 1: so far we haven't. There's no detectable impact. So that's
Speaker 1: what the state agencies say all the time, there's no
Speaker 1: detectable impact. Well, that's that's a pretty significant change, right
Speaker 1: to detect when you're talking two acre ten alc. If
Speaker 1: you're talking Arizona or New Mexico. So you have you
Speaker 1: found it yet? No? Not unless I start going like
Speaker 1: by unit by unit, it's gonna be tough. I just
Speaker 1: haven't found it. You can't tell you tell me. You
Speaker 1: can't type in how many elk are killed in New
Speaker 1: Mexico and come up with a number. Well, and it's
Speaker 1: not all in New Mexico. It's just the greater HeLa right,
Speaker 1: a unit by units. So, Carl, you don't just know
Speaker 1: this in the like in your mind. I don't know
Speaker 1: that in my mind, and I think it's pretty hard
Speaker 1: to come up with an answer because and this this
Speaker 1: gets back to what you're saying about the mountaintop removal
Speaker 1: and remediation work happening and kind of painting a picture
Speaker 1: of what the landscape looks like. And for folks who
Speaker 1: aren't familiar with this chunk of ground that our experts
Speaker 1: here are referring to in southwest New Mexico and eastern Arizona,
Speaker 1: you're talking about some of the most remote, rugged country
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight. And it begins from the east.
Speaker 1: You've got all the Leopold Wilderness, which is about a
Speaker 1: quarter million acres, into the HeLa proper, which is somewhere
Speaker 1: five seventies some thousand acres, and you've got the Blue
Speaker 1: Range Wilderness west of that, and that butts up against
Speaker 1: the state line. But then the wild land continues because
Speaker 1: you have the Blue Range primitive area that I know, Steve,
Speaker 1: you're familiar with west of the New Mexico Arizona state line,
Speaker 1: which is kind of de facto wilderness um. And then
Speaker 1: that's surrounded by some of the still most remote and
Speaker 1: undeveloped National Forest System land. So you're talking about two
Speaker 1: different states. You're talking about a large number of game
Speaker 1: management units for each of those states, UM, And right
Speaker 1: off the top of my head, I don't have a number,
Speaker 1: but I think for folks to kind of get this vision,
Speaker 1: this image of how remote and wild the landscape is,
Speaker 1: and a little anecdote to that. To that end, UM,
Speaker 1: there's a place there at the western side of the
Speaker 1: HeLa wilderness. You guys maybe can help me fill in
Speaker 1: the details, But it's known for having the best night
Speaker 1: sky anywhere in the lower forty eight because you are
Speaker 1: as far as you can be from an anthropogenic light source,
Speaker 1: and the sky viewing is is deemed to be the
Speaker 1: best anywhere in the lower forty eight because you're so remote.
Speaker 1: So this is a chunk of country that UM is massive,
Speaker 1: you know, ten thousand square miles. It includes these different
Speaker 1: wilderness areas, UM. And it's a place where wolves have
Speaker 1: been hot and elk for a lot longer than uh,
Speaker 1: white dudes have been on the landscape. Yeah, they only missed,
Speaker 1: they missed, like what they missed thirty years of the action.
Speaker 1: And even then you still had these stragglers coming up,
Speaker 1: you know, like you were referring to, and that great
Speaker 1: Cormick McCarthy book. So, I guess the a good way
Speaker 1: to settle on it is so you're saying that the
Speaker 1: new Mexico fishing game, who and to generalize that as
Speaker 1: a as A as A as a state agency with
Speaker 1: the state that was generally uneasy with the introduction. They
Speaker 1: have said that they haven't they haven't noticed. Uh, certainly
Speaker 1: the Arizona game of fish has been they do, They've
Speaker 1: had a little bit more look at this, and they
Speaker 1: say they haven't noticed an impact from molds. But the
Speaker 1: wolves are a low number right now, so a hundred
Speaker 1: and ten. So they fluctuate around and it dips, it
Speaker 1: dips up and down with it. Johnny hovers around a hundred. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so well for the last three three years, three
Speaker 1: or four years, it's been around a hundred and you
Speaker 1: guys don't feel you do do not feel that that's sustainable.
Speaker 1: That's that's there can be more than that, And no
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying, like like minimum sustainability. Like for instance,
Speaker 1: we we we spoke with a guy um with the
Speaker 1: USGS who was working on grizzly bear recovery in a
Speaker 1: tri state area in the northern Rockies, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of debate about how many of there are.
Speaker 1: You know, I think the official number is six forty two.
Speaker 1: Everyone agrees that there's more because they their counting system
Speaker 1: is flawed and they all know it. So they're like,
Speaker 1: sixty two probably more, or whatever the hell the number is.
Speaker 1: And he says, in his opinion, he's like, you could
Speaker 1: have that number living in that patch of ground for
Speaker 1: a hundred years. He's like, that area and that number
Speaker 1: is a sustainable number in a sustainable area. Right, do
Speaker 1: you feel that? Do you guys feel that one where
Speaker 1: they are now that they're too vulnerable or do you
Speaker 1: feel that you could have that for a hundred years? Well,
Speaker 1: so are our rule that we just put out. We
Speaker 1: said that our goal was three five in that big
Speaker 1: area south of but they sold it in on. Our
Speaker 1: goal is to get to right now. Initially our goal
Speaker 1: was to get to a hundred, which was the initial
Speaker 1: thing that folks said wasn't recovery, and we were nice recovery. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm mixing up two different We can just throw out
Speaker 1: whatever random number three three is recovery. Uh, we haven't
Speaker 1: defined recovery yet. We're just we're redoing the role and
Speaker 1: literally the draft should come out in a couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: three or four weeks, and so you know, I can't
Speaker 1: talk about that right now, but you are some of
Speaker 1: the definitions we're talking about, because I guess what I'm
Speaker 1: referring to is well, in the case in the case
Speaker 1: of grizzly bears, um, when when looking at that number
Speaker 1: is you're you're sort of saying, like, have you achieved
Speaker 1: a sustainable population on a piece of habitat that seems
Speaker 1: stable where it's reasonable to assume that if we engage
Speaker 1: in business as usual, we would into the foreseeable future
Speaker 1: not running new problem. No, I think if you have,
Speaker 1: like with the Florida Panther, for a long time, we
Speaker 1: were in a position where someone said, can this continue?
Speaker 1: Can you have a population of twenty five lions in
Speaker 1: South Florida? And the people said, no, right, this will
Speaker 1: not like there's no reason to think that in one
Speaker 1: years will have twenty five lions in South Florida, or
Speaker 1: however bad it got in South Florida before they supplemented
Speaker 1: the population. So there's I mean, for recovery purposes, there's
Speaker 1: what we referred to as a three arts, which is
Speaker 1: a resilient population, which means there's enough of them out
Speaker 1: there too, you know, have Jeanette and to represent a
Speaker 1: population that's good and stable and all those kind of
Speaker 1: statings is gonna survive. And then there's um redundancy, which
Speaker 1: is there's multiple populations, so not all your eggs in
Speaker 1: one basket. So there's right now we have there's a
Speaker 1: reintroduction going on in Mexico the south of the border
Speaker 1: that just started, and so that's h that's the redundancy
Speaker 1: that you would see. One it's less controversial there right, no,
Speaker 1: so equally, I mean they still kill and stuff like that. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there's the representation is the third are which
Speaker 1: is genetically robust and um. You know it's across spread
Speaker 1: across the landscape to represent a fair amount of that
Speaker 1: historic landscape it's out there. So those are the things.
Speaker 1: So when you look at is that recovery, um, you
Speaker 1: would say that that population probably is pretty resilient. It's
Speaker 1: enough of them to live on that landscape, and so
Speaker 1: it maybe one population in the future that that works
Speaker 1: towards recovery. But there's more things that go into it. Right,
Speaker 1: So let me throw in a couple of additional details here,
Speaker 1: because you hear John using some of the qualifiers like
Speaker 1: probably and we think, and what we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: you know, the term for this is we run what's
Speaker 1: called the population viability assessment. And essentially you never can
Speaker 1: say with certainty that at any point in time in
Speaker 1: the future you will still have that species in that place.
Speaker 1: But you can be increasingly confident in the persistence of
Speaker 1: a species when you have more individuals and when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a shorter time frame. So it would be,
Speaker 1: for example, easier to say we are highly confident that
Speaker 1: we have a hundred wolves now, and if we keep
Speaker 1: a hundred wolves in three years, we'll still have a
Speaker 1: hundred wolves, as opposed to saying if we kept a
Speaker 1: hundred wolves on a landscape a hundred years from now,
Speaker 1: we're less confident. So the two things that really play
Speaker 1: into this risk number to throw out one hundred years
Speaker 1: because yeah, and a lot can change. I mean, a meteor,
Speaker 1: you know, you could hit something catastrophic could happen that
Speaker 1: would eliminate the animal. So there's never this certainty. So
Speaker 1: it's really a risk assessment and the degree of risk
Speaker 1: associated with extinction of a population. Um, you have more
Speaker 1: confidence in your assessment of security in the near future
Speaker 1: er than in the long future. And when you have
Speaker 1: more animals than less animals. Those are kind of some
Speaker 1: common basics. And then another point in this whole discussion
Speaker 1: of population ecology, Um, you're familiar with the Allee effect.
Speaker 1: All you ever hear about them? Heard the word but no,
Speaker 1: I'm not okay. So just for the benefit of listeners
Speaker 1: who take an interest in wildlife ecology and science, it's
Speaker 1: a good place to throw this in. There's a gentleman
Speaker 1: by the name of Warder Clyde Ali who came up
Speaker 1: with this notion that kind of flies in the face
Speaker 1: of one of the factors that we often take for
Speaker 1: granted and wildlife ecology, and that is the notion that
Speaker 1: as competition decreases, as the number of animals on the
Speaker 1: landscape of your species decreases, you do better. So we
Speaker 1: talk about density dependence, right. The higher the higher density gets,
Speaker 1: the tougher competition is, so the less well in individual
Speaker 1: animal will do. So the Allie effect, essentially is the
Speaker 1: inverse of that, the notion that if you drive a
Speaker 1: population Asian down far enough, and it's a social species
Speaker 1: or a species that benefits from the existence of con specifics,
Speaker 1: you can push that species towards extinction, like like what
Speaker 1: you see with past exactly you're gonna have a billion
Speaker 1: or none. It's a classic example. So with passenger pigeons,
Speaker 1: they think one of the key drivers was the fact
Speaker 1: that you needed these huge flocks in order to elicit
Speaker 1: normal reproductive behavior. And you had that last lonely passenger pigeon, Martha,
Speaker 1: dying in the Cincinnati Zoo I think it was September nine, um,
Speaker 1: and they tried, you know, they tried like hell to
Speaker 1: get that bird to breed when there were still other
Speaker 1: males around, but they lacked those massive flocks that elicited
Speaker 1: the breeding behavior. So that's a classic example of Alie effect.
Speaker 1: And this guy Ward or Clyde Alie, he did a
Speaker 1: lot of research looking at uh species that are a
Speaker 1: little less sexy than wolves or passenger pigeons. He did
Speaker 1: a lot of work with like goldfish, for example, where
Speaker 1: the regurgitation of food from one goldfish in the tank
Speaker 1: can be beneficial to the other gold fish and goldfish
Speaker 1: rooting up around the bottom like like carp are churning
Speaker 1: up food that's available. So if you think about wolves
Speaker 1: in their predatory behavior, there are another species where if
Speaker 1: you push them to the point where they're no longer
Speaker 1: able to locate pack members and function as that superorganism
Speaker 1: and find and kill prey through that social structure, you
Speaker 1: may have the potential to pushing beyond that point. In
Speaker 1: contrast to grizzly bears as we've been talking about, where
Speaker 1: you know, you need obviously two to tango in terms
Speaker 1: of reproduction. But the predatory behavior has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with depending on pack mads. In fact, they seem to
Speaker 1: kind of like a little loneliness the breeding age females. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're interesting. Part for wolves is they're good at finding
Speaker 1: each other, long long distance dispersals and that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And most of the packs just start out as two
Speaker 1: animals and then you have pops. It's just a family
Speaker 1: group in their offspring and so that's how the packs establish.
Speaker 1: That's what are Do you have any sense um? I
Speaker 1: guess we should finish this part of it up before
Speaker 1: we get I want to talk about what they eat
Speaker 1: and why they eat it, how they find it. Can
Speaker 1: I slip in a question that that's relevant here is
Speaker 1: that we and I figured we would hit on it,
Speaker 1: But that number jumping around or not jumping around, but
Speaker 1: being moved or reevaluated from a hundred and three, that's
Speaker 1: got I think that's probably one of the most contentious
Speaker 1: topics of of all with wools, isn't it. Well, at
Speaker 1: least I hear it a lot where they're like, well,
Speaker 1: at first it was gonna be fifty, yeah, moving to goal.
Speaker 1: But that's serious stuff, man, the gold poles moving is
Speaker 1: a real thing, right right, right, right, So I'd just
Speaker 1: like to hear like one especially, you've probably been sent
Speaker 1: how you guys handle that, Well, that's actually more of
Speaker 1: a Fish and Wildlife Service number that but yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so let me ask this like, like to what to
Speaker 1: what you're under staying when the first time when one hundred, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that wasn't like that they would d list at one, right,
Speaker 1: that was just a number, like an objective. That was
Speaker 1: just an interim goal. It was the wildest imagination. They said,
Speaker 1: that's not recovery, and so that's what we're trying to
Speaker 1: define right now. So that's the difference. You're trying to
Speaker 1: set the goal post for the first time, right for
Speaker 1: what d when d listing will occur. People misconstrued then well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because they that's one of the areas in which not
Speaker 1: not the agency, but it's one of the areas in
Speaker 1: which the public becomes obstructionist. Is when recovering populations reach
Speaker 1: what we all agree recovery was supposed to look like.
Speaker 1: Where all the you know that I was here this
Speaker 1: term so much, we're all the stakeholders have said, okay,
Speaker 1: we agree that that one hundred or you know, one
Speaker 1: thousand of X species. At that point, everyone here now
Speaker 1: agrees that they will be delisted and could go act
Speaker 1: the state management and they could be open to hunting
Speaker 1: whatever the states decided to do. And then it starts
Speaker 1: getting up to where there's a thousand of said animals,
Speaker 1: and people start filing shiploads of lawsuits and then prevent
Speaker 1: any dream of ever conducting the delisting. It's not the
Speaker 1: agency's fault because the agency could be petitioning for the delisting. Well,
Speaker 1: the agency very much wanted to de list wolves in
Speaker 1: the Northern Rockies, for instance, the fishing wildlife, So they
Speaker 1: wind up taking the blame for actions of people who
Speaker 1: are going to use who wind up using the e
Speaker 1: s A not for its intended purpose, but use it
Speaker 1: as the way to protect animals that they like to
Speaker 1: look at pictures of our natural geographic from any possible
Speaker 1: chance of human exploitation. But it's our job Fish and
Speaker 1: Wildlife Services to do a better job in the process
Speaker 1: so we don't lose on the biology. It's the process
Speaker 1: where we lose in court. So we didn't check some
Speaker 1: boxes there or something nick They nip pick horribly, and
Speaker 1: so that's where the agency can do better. But they're not.
Speaker 1: And oftentimes the lawsuits aren't even challenging. The lawsuits aren't
Speaker 1: challenging the the under the like the key principles. They're
Speaker 1: not saying like, oh, in fact, one thousand of these
Speaker 1: isn't enough. They'll go after like procedural things exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: That's where like oh, no, you need to file the
Speaker 1: you filed A, uh everyone, or you filed B first
Speaker 1: and you didn't file A and you're supposed to file
Speaker 1: A four B. So therefore we're gonna block this whole
Speaker 1: thing for a decade. Yeah. The big thing in the
Speaker 1: Northern Rockies was significant portion of range. So when they
Speaker 1: we first tried to do it, we tried to delist
Speaker 1: Washington and Oregon together with Idaho and Wyoming in Montana,
Speaker 1: and they said, well, you didn't analyze the wolves cover
Speaker 1: a significant portion of their range in that area and
Speaker 1: so their habitat range and so it went down on
Speaker 1: that among other things. And I don't know, no, but
Speaker 1: but I feel for you because that's one of the
Speaker 1: ways in which I feel that public um public blame.
Speaker 1: Right when when when again, like dudes like me, like
Speaker 1: hunting guys or whatever, when they look and they get
Speaker 1: pissed about how something's not going the way they want,
Speaker 1: they're not, they don't usually blame like obstructionist groups who
Speaker 1: are what I know this is you know, I'm not.
Speaker 1: This is not these guys in the room talking. This
Speaker 1: is me talking one obstructionist groups who are manipulating the law. Like,
Speaker 1: that's not who gets the blame. The blame often falls.
Speaker 1: I feel like in the wrong place. The government is
Speaker 1: good to blame. No, no usually questions, but but the
Speaker 1: uh SO is all right. Just to get back on track,
Speaker 1: is if the or whatever the hell number they're gonna
Speaker 1: come up with the number, is that gonna be the
Speaker 1: number that is regarded as an acceptable recovery objective? At
Speaker 1: which point it would be reasonable for people to expect
Speaker 1: the delisting process to occur very much. So, so that's
Speaker 1: the number that we're going through going through a p
Speaker 1: v A like what Garl talked about earlier, and it's
Speaker 1: it's reasonable to think it would fall somewhere in the
Speaker 1: range of around yeah, somewhere in that. I mean for
Speaker 1: one population, and there's consideration on where other populations are,
Speaker 1: and there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into that.
Speaker 1: How well the populations are connected, how well dispersal happens
Speaker 1: between those populations is a genetic component that you've got
Speaker 1: to think about. And so there's a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: things that go into that. And so me sitting here
Speaker 1: talking it would be a poor representation of the overall
Speaker 1: the overall plan. Yeah, that will come out and so
Speaker 1: it'd be much better to read it and really digest it.
Speaker 1: So down here, I know in other areas, um with
Speaker 1: other species that are going through e S A recovery.
Speaker 1: And we should point out that, uh, when something makes
Speaker 1: the list, when someone gets S, something gets e S
Speaker 1: A listing, that does not generally mean that they're like
Speaker 1: they got it. Made two of this two percent of
Speaker 1: species that get listed under the s A listing, only
Speaker 1: two percent get delisted because they recovered right now, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a long process. It's a long process to
Speaker 1: get them to that stage, for sure. I'm just I'm
Speaker 1: just saying, it's like there's been a handful. Like no,
Speaker 1: there's been some notable cases, and it's not even the
Speaker 1: fault of the people commissioned, but sometimes they've been uh,
Speaker 1: things have been listed and then it turned out that
Speaker 1: they were gone. Right, You've had things listed and then
Speaker 1: they find other populations or definition change and they get
Speaker 1: de listed that way. But it's only like a handful
Speaker 1: of things, only some normable examples, being like bald eagle,
Speaker 1: gray wolf, paragan falcon, American alligator. But if you look,
Speaker 1: there are I think over two thousand species they've gotten
Speaker 1: es A listing and a handful. What I'm getting at
Speaker 1: is my feeling is that when the e s A
Speaker 1: works real well and we get recovery, I would think
Speaker 1: people would be dancing in the streets I went to,
Speaker 1: but they generally, they generally don't. They generally want to
Speaker 1: say like, no, it's not you know, I went to
Speaker 1: a paragan falcon recovery party. So for the the listing
Speaker 1: of the Parragan Falcon, which my father was involved in
Speaker 1: that recovery, and yeah, yeah, that was we were excited.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was a great thing. So as biologists,
Speaker 1: as you celebrate that, you want nothing more in your career.
Speaker 1: I didn't get to go to a Northern Rockies recovery
Speaker 1: party because it took so many legal everyone was that
Speaker 1: was It was so sad the way that just everyone.
Speaker 1: It seems like everyone got burned. Yeah, it was. It
Speaker 1: was a tough deal going back and forth like that.
Speaker 1: And then I mean, but the good part was that
Speaker 1: Montana and Idaho were ready to manage wolves and their
Speaker 1: plans were acceptable. And so even though it went through
Speaker 1: Congress and it's not the standard way of delisting a group,
Speaker 1: as we were allowed to celebrate that and turn it
Speaker 1: over to the states earlier than uh some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that was holding back, so some the Wyoming Planet
Speaker 1: in particular, was just got to prave through courts this year.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's great. So now they're delisted up there, and
Speaker 1: that's your problem, no, buddy. Yeah, all the folks, all
Speaker 1: the folks that worked on it, though they're all retired
Speaker 1: moved away and stuff like that. So no, no party.
Speaker 1: So what like what let's say, um, let's say someone draw.
Speaker 1: Someone comes up this idea that oh god, there's no
Speaker 1: question do you guys use distinct population segments down here?
Speaker 1: So are you treating the current recovery area as a
Speaker 1: distinct population segment or isn't it far enough along because
Speaker 1: we don't have two segments. Wow, So we just listed
Speaker 1: the subspecies. So you can list a species, a subspecies,
Speaker 1: or a distinct population segment. So what we did is
Speaker 1: we listed the Mexican gray wolf as a subspecies. But
Speaker 1: you might later need to carve off a distinct population
Speaker 1: segment if this population hits recovery and then you have
Speaker 1: another population in infancy somewhere. You need to draw the
Speaker 1: distinction between the two. Well you could, you could, but
Speaker 1: the idea is to um recognize that in different ways.
Speaker 1: So part of the problem in the Northern Rockies says
Speaker 1: when they went to delist things, then they're drawing the DPS,
Speaker 1: so they're designating a species to be delisted. Right. The
Speaker 1: idea is that you designate a species, you go through
Speaker 1: recovery planning, and then you delist that species after it's recovered,
Speaker 1: so you want to designate it early on. You don't
Speaker 1: want to designate a DPS two D list. Well, I
Speaker 1: know that's a big that's a problem that's happening with
Speaker 1: the grizzly bear situation is they listed the species and
Speaker 1: then that's kind of where it will get hung up
Speaker 1: in court. Probably do list of the species and then
Speaker 1: later they said, man, we've achieved way above recovery in
Speaker 1: this chunk of ground the size of Indiana. Let's delist
Speaker 1: this chunk right And it's like that, you know, I
Speaker 1: got you on a technicality because you can't. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a problem with it. Right. So you want to
Speaker 1: have the foresight to create population to units are alternatives
Speaker 1: on how you can reduce it to threaten, So make
Speaker 1: it a threatened species and reduce some of the restrictions
Speaker 1: over range wide over a bigger area. And um, so
Speaker 1: that's you know, you want to plan and have that
Speaker 1: foresight into your plan on how you think you should
Speaker 1: d less area too and you avoid problems going forward.
Speaker 1: So how much suitable habitat? Um? How much suitable habitat
Speaker 1: is there? Like, because it's it's I think it's helpful
Speaker 1: on these kind of things to think about, where could
Speaker 1: they be? And so again, just to keep returning to
Speaker 1: the grizzly bear situation because I know it well and
Speaker 1: it sort of provides a parameter to think about. This
Speaker 1: is um. There are there are some people, well meaning,
Speaker 1: knowledgeable people who look at the grizzly bear situation and
Speaker 1: they and they feel pretty confident that as far as
Speaker 1: suitable habitat goes, we've filled it up in the great
Speaker 1: in the in in Idaho, well like areas of the
Speaker 1: g y E. They and some people argue like, well, no,
Speaker 1: because there's any more mountain ranges. But there's some people
Speaker 1: who say, like, um, anywhere else, conflict is going to
Speaker 1: be so high that this really is the suitable patch
Speaker 1: of ground. And we've filled the suitable patch of ground
Speaker 1: as full as it can fill. Right. If you look
Speaker 1: at the Mexican gray wolf, how much and I'm sure
Speaker 1: there's varying definitions of it, how much suitable ground could
Speaker 1: there be? Oh a lot? So there's enough to where
Speaker 1: it's not gonna limit recovery in terms of numbers to
Speaker 1: get to a viable population. So that between Mexico and
Speaker 1: and and the US keep forgetting Mexico. So between those
Speaker 1: two there's gonna be enough. And the other thing is
Speaker 1: wolves are pretty habitat generalists, so they're not as specific
Speaker 1: as grizzly bears are and they don't kill people. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a flaw. That's a flaw on the grizzly
Speaker 1: bear of pheno type. So uh so, I mean they
Speaker 1: can they can be closer to put there and kind
Speaker 1: of wiggle in and out of some of these areas
Speaker 1: and still be okay. So outskirts of Realm Italy, for instance,
Speaker 1: there's wolves. Um So, so the suitable habitat doesn't become
Speaker 1: as big of an issue. It's not because when you
Speaker 1: draw a suitable habitat for kyle's pretty much to draw
Speaker 1: a big circle around the whole country. Call like just
Speaker 1: follow the coastlines with your pencil and you kind of
Speaker 1: have drawn it. Wow, we don't want to go that far.
Speaker 1: But it's not it's not as much. Yeah, they're not.
Speaker 1: They're not as like prone to immediate trouble. Yeah when
Speaker 1: they fall outside of it. Yeah, because suitable habitat for
Speaker 1: the bears isn't a matter of where they'll find enough food,
Speaker 1: just where they'll have a reasonable chance to go through
Speaker 1: their lives without winding up in a in in in
Speaker 1: a direct, possibly catastrophic interaction with the human being. I
Speaker 1: worked on grizzly bears up in Wyoming outside of Jackson,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, bears of the true denizens of wilderness.
Speaker 1: So a lot of times it's tied to wolves. I
Speaker 1: would argue it's more bears because they need to be uh,
Speaker 1: you know, pretty limited in terms of people for that
Speaker 1: interaction with grizzly bears specifically, not black bears, but grizzly
Speaker 1: bears specifically. And so I always have a saucepart my
Speaker 1: spot for grizzly bears. I'll go up to Yellowstone and
Speaker 1: I'll see some wolves and it'll be like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I like watching that grizzly bears on top of
Speaker 1: stuff watching them. Yeah. Um, so you can't really it's
Speaker 1: impossible to say step will habitet. But when you draw
Speaker 1: the line, there's gonna be like a no go zone
Speaker 1: that'll probably always exist. Yeah, that's I mean, when you
Speaker 1: do a non essential experimental population, right you set up
Speaker 1: your rules in that area and it's actually area specific.
Speaker 1: So right now, are areas everywhere south of iforty. You
Speaker 1: have these things that you can do that you can
Speaker 1: you're out there. So north of I forty right now
Speaker 1: we say we'll go at those wolves because we don't
Speaker 1: want the wolves from the reintroduction being in this area
Speaker 1: or causing more not having those relaxed restrictions. But it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be okay for anyone just to run into one
Speaker 1: and shoot it. North to I forty. Now it's a
Speaker 1: fully protected and it's a fully endangered species north to
Speaker 1: I forty if it shows up there, it's based on
Speaker 1: where they carries full ees A protections. But you also
Speaker 1: have the ability to go round it up and bring
Speaker 1: it backward blocks. Yeah, through fish and Wildlife Service permits,
Speaker 1: but only really only we have that ability at that stage.
Speaker 1: Uh do you ever hang out with the trappers? I
Speaker 1: am a trapper? Where do you guys use padded padded
Speaker 1: like double long springs or yeah, we use uh number
Speaker 1: four's is a primary thing? Or fourteens? And what's your
Speaker 1: typical set that you make? Uh? Dirt hole flat? Any
Speaker 1: of them scotton yarn? Hey, it doesn't. It's more about
Speaker 1: where than than what. They're smart about it. The other hand,
Speaker 1: they on onto it yet. No, there's wolves are tougher
Speaker 1: than you catch a lot of coyotes and kyotes are
Speaker 1: generally considered the tougher ones to catch by trappers out there,
Speaker 1: and uh, wolves are tougher just because they're fewer of them,
Speaker 1: less dance. Right, So two square miles for a pack,
Speaker 1: and so you're trapping over a big broad area and
Speaker 1: trying to get them to step in one square inch.
Speaker 1: So what's your general like, what's your general approach on
Speaker 1: getting on one? Like you start out where you get
Speaker 1: a sighting. Yeah, so you just I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: howling looking on the ground, looking for tracks, looking for scat,
Speaker 1: just looking trails roads, just like you would with a
Speaker 1: coyote kind of thing, and and looking for those travel
Speaker 1: pass and eventually you do some sets you see where
Speaker 1: they're coming and going, both directional travel, and then that's
Speaker 1: that's where I'm gonna set a trap sets If you're
Speaker 1: trying to catch one, how many sets are you putting out?
Speaker 1: Just doesn't So it's not longlining because you care about
Speaker 1: each one. You want it to be. You're you're worried
Speaker 1: about your things. So we do a lot of things
Speaker 1: to make sure that that animals Okay, you're checking every morning.
Speaker 1: You're you're kinda you have drags on them, so and
Speaker 1: you have springs in line in the chain and so
Speaker 1: all those things. If it's too cold overnight, will monitor
Speaker 1: every hour with trap monitors. Yeah, so they don't freeze
Speaker 1: a foot or anything like that. So we're very careful
Speaker 1: with that because each one there's an endangered species. So
Speaker 1: what's your preferred bait when you go to do the
Speaker 1: dirt hole set? The dirt hole set like skunk kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, but there's also a bobcat kind of glandler
Speaker 1: round up ground up. Bobcat works really good. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a reason why wolfers and all the stories, right,
Speaker 1: they come back and they stunk, Right, It's because I
Speaker 1: got bait all over yourself back, dude. We used to
Speaker 1: make some crazy concoctions for bait, you know. We call
Speaker 1: it tainted bait. Where you take jar cubaut meat and
Speaker 1: put in a jar and leave it out in the
Speaker 1: sun and just at the right minute, like it's starting
Speaker 1: to smell a certain way and get like a coat
Speaker 1: of oil, and then you bury it in the ground,
Speaker 1: put glycerin in it to slow the decomposition, and bury
Speaker 1: it in the ground. Dig it back up. I hope
Speaker 1: there weren't any maggots in it. Yeah, crazy bait stuff
Speaker 1: man kind of an art form, but kind of a
Speaker 1: an early art form. So a quick anecdote here on
Speaker 1: the wolves north of I forty deal and this relates
Speaker 1: back to this blurry distinction among subspecies. Um, we had
Speaker 1: a we had a wolf killed in southern Utah that
Speaker 1: du yeah, by a hunter who mistook it for a coyote.
Speaker 1: And this was in early well about a year prior
Speaker 1: to that, that same wolf had been collared in Wyoming
Speaker 1: and it had been seen on several occasions in northern
Speaker 1: Arizona close to the Grand Canyon. And it's notable this
Speaker 1: is a female wolf in mind, covering hundreds of miles
Speaker 1: between Wyoming and the Rim. Yeah, I was trapping for
Speaker 1: that animal, trying to catch it, So trying for aware
Speaker 1: north rim of the Grand Canyon. So that was the
Speaker 1: first wolf known to be in northern Arizona and something
Speaker 1: like seventy years And maybe you could share some more
Speaker 1: of the details on that account. But I remember when
Speaker 1: that was kind of circulating and we were having meetings
Speaker 1: like at Arizona and people are like no, no, that
Speaker 1: that's probably just like a domestic wolf that got out somebody.
Speaker 1: Probably there's a wolf breeder up here who has him
Speaker 1: in captivity on lo and behold it was. That's the
Speaker 1: thing is. It's like we went up there and there's
Speaker 1: a single wolf. So a single wolf, you're trapping for
Speaker 1: one in a big wide area and you're like, oh, gosh,
Speaker 1: I got no shot. You got to get a step
Speaker 1: in tin square inches in somewhere between Wyoming and the
Speaker 1: North m So there was a pile of buffalo that
Speaker 1: we're run over by a UPS driver right on the
Speaker 1: entrance to the North Rim. They have an honorable buffalo
Speaker 1: population up there on the North Rim of also a
Speaker 1: little bit controversial, yeah, because they have cows in them
Speaker 1: and they have some cow DNA and and there it's
Speaker 1: the there is the park that doesn't like them, right,
Speaker 1: the park wants to get rid of They don't want
Speaker 1: them in the in the park because they aren't part
Speaker 1: of the natural system there, or maybe they are and
Speaker 1: all that. So anyways, say the UPS driver tried to
Speaker 1: do the park's work, it ran over about it, and
Speaker 1: this wolf landed in this area and so it'd come
Speaker 1: down and they walked by people, and he walked down
Speaker 1: the road, eat on this pile, giant pile of buffalo carcasses,
Speaker 1: and then walk back up to its betting area. And
Speaker 1: so people got photos of it. People were calling in
Speaker 1: and you're like, this just doesn't sound like a wild
Speaker 1: wolf that came all the way down from Wyoming through
Speaker 1: Utah and now landed in Arizona. Why didn't get shot
Speaker 1: somewhere along the way where it's this observed ruble. But
Speaker 1: we went up there because some of the photos were
Speaker 1: really convincing. In one of the photos actually showed a
Speaker 1: radio collar. We were pretty pretty clearly a radio collar
Speaker 1: from our stuff, and so, um, we went up there
Speaker 1: and we we saw the wolf. So you go up
Speaker 1: there and set up a camp. Yeah, well we went
Speaker 1: and stayed with the park Service, and and uh we were.
Speaker 1: We went up there and the first thing, we went out,
Speaker 1: like the first morning, really early in the morning, just
Speaker 1: to follow the pattern of people seeing it. And sure enough,
Speaker 1: there it was. And so we had two things. We
Speaker 1: wanted to get DNA from the wolf one way or another,
Speaker 1: either capture it or whatever. And so that first day
Speaker 1: it pooped and we went out there and scooped up
Speaker 1: a little bit of the from the outside of the
Speaker 1: intestinal cell walls. Sintestinal cells slough off on the Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we had the DNA right off the get go,
Speaker 1: and then we set traps right along the path that
Speaker 1: it kind of walked around, and we scattered out some traps.
Speaker 1: So we had a dark gun that if you get
Speaker 1: close to a wolf, you can shoot a dart at it,
Speaker 1: but wasn't the case that day. And so, I mean,
Speaker 1: it came close to our traps a couple of different times,
Speaker 1: but it's just a single wolf wandering. Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: we came really close. I remember one time I saw
Speaker 1: it in early in the morning. I saw it in
Speaker 1: exactly the same spot. So this is just after we
Speaker 1: had scattered out the track. So I was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna do exactly what I did the other day,
Speaker 1: and that wolf will wander right into our sets. So
Speaker 1: I turned around on the road and I'm just kind
Speaker 1: of watching it ways behind it and instead of just
Speaker 1: wandering that because that's what I did the day before.
Speaker 1: It turned around the offosite directions from all the sets,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, so, anyways, we never ended up catching it.
Speaker 1: So went up to Utah got shot and uh, but
Speaker 1: we did. It was the same wolf and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: What it helped us to catch it? Did you get
Speaker 1: the car because after the guys shot, Uh, our law
Speaker 1: enforcement does You didn't need it for anything? Nah, we
Speaker 1: didn't get it. So we we figured out what wolf
Speaker 1: it was and everything else from the DNA. Why do
Speaker 1: you think, like, why does the wolf start doing that?
Speaker 1: You know, it's just it's individuals, right. Some some people
Speaker 1: like to wander and see new ground. I think some
Speaker 1: wolves just kind of set out in the direction and
Speaker 1: keep going. This wolf got down all the way down
Speaker 1: to the Grand Canyon, went I'm not going across the
Speaker 1: Grand Canyon. So that is turned around, went the other
Speaker 1: direction right and went back up. And so you got
Speaker 1: a little window to catch the wolf. And while it's
Speaker 1: hanging out in a spot, and we just weren't able
Speaker 1: to some wels. Most of the time, wolves just you
Speaker 1: get to be two years old and you leave your pack.
Speaker 1: So you're leaving a big way. Well you don't have to.
Speaker 1: They just leave until they find an area where they
Speaker 1: can make a living or made mating opportunity and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. So most of dispersal is close,
Speaker 1: so it's pretty close range dispersal. And then a few
Speaker 1: of them are these abnormal, a really long range movement.
Speaker 1: Sit here out there ice and know a girl who
Speaker 1: I wanted to go out with real bad never did,
Speaker 1: but she was working on a project. Um, someone's looking
Speaker 1: at like the how the Grand Canyon did affect movement
Speaker 1: of animals, And they were setting hair traps for mountain
Speaker 1: lions on each side, and whoever was running this thing
Speaker 1: was was testing the idea whether there was no genetic exchange.
Speaker 1: But they don't care. Yeah, and lions, you know that
Speaker 1: they'd catch the same, they'd catch the same, like offspring
Speaker 1: of the same. Like the things that you perceive as
Speaker 1: being boundaries sometimes aren't. I was recently looking at some
Speaker 1: stuff with links in Alaska that, um, big swollen rivers
Speaker 1: every day, not that they used to be that they like,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't do it. And then they realized, well, not
Speaker 1: not only will they do if they'll do it without
Speaker 1: even thinking twice about it. Right, So the thought was
Speaker 1: a Snake river, some of the big rivers there in
Speaker 1: Idaho that wolves wouldn't cross very frequently to get to
Speaker 1: Washington across the Snake River canyon and that stuff. But
Speaker 1: every time you say something you're wrong, the wolves won't
Speaker 1: show up in northern California. Wolves are now in northern California.
Speaker 1: So wolf biologists pretty well even wolf biologists underestimate wolves
Speaker 1: pretty consistently. Is there a feeling in your in your community.
Speaker 1: Is there a feeling that instead of doing all this,
Speaker 1: it just would be that if you just wait, the
Speaker 1: map is going to fill in anyways? Well, I think
Speaker 1: I think that's the case in some places. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: then but not with Mexican wolves, because you're done the
Speaker 1: captive thing. There was none laugh, so you have to
Speaker 1: and then you have petic constraints because they started from
Speaker 1: seven animals. That's all you have. So captive represents that
Speaker 1: genetic diversity that's out there, and so there's some maintenance
Speaker 1: of that genetic diversity that you want to do out
Speaker 1: in the wild and do releases continuing through time. Have
Speaker 1: you guys ever looked at is it necessary to bring
Speaker 1: in even though you'd be like sacrificing the you'd be
Speaker 1: sacrificing the genetic integrity. Do you ever look at bringing
Speaker 1: in a northern gray wolf just to just to be
Speaker 1: like it will get deluded, but it will bring some diversity.
Speaker 1: So the that's one of those debates that goes on
Speaker 1: out there fair bed so like the Florida panther with
Speaker 1: the lions from Texas that came in and help rescue
Speaker 1: the Florida panther. Right now, we don't see the evidence
Speaker 1: where the genetic diversity is restricted, where it's limiting the
Speaker 1: wolves population growth and that kind of stuff. So as
Speaker 1: long as the population dynamics are, okay, you wouldn't you don't,
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't do that. But they don't. They're they don't.
Speaker 1: They're genes like they're not going through like genetic mutation
Speaker 1: on such a short span of time that they're increasing
Speaker 1: their genetic differentiation like they're they're like, genetic diversity isn't increasing.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's something that happens over tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of years, right right, But the Northern wolf, for instances,
Speaker 1: big hundred and twenty pounds, has black coat and has
Speaker 1: stuff in it that the Mexican wolves don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm saying, but that's the result of enormous amounts
Speaker 1: of time passing saying you don't get like once you
Speaker 1: get down to a population that had seven animals. Even
Speaker 1: if you grow that into three D, you still have
Speaker 1: like you're still feeling that very limited bottleneck of genetic
Speaker 1: diversity that you had when you had seven. Right, right,
Speaker 1: so we have we have frozen zoos, we keep frozen
Speaker 1: sperm and places and so artificial insemination, um, all those
Speaker 1: kind of things are still an impact. And wolves because
Speaker 1: they dispersed so far and travel so widely, genetic diversity
Speaker 1: is high among wolves and wild populations and everything else.
Speaker 1: So they're an animal that so even when you're down
Speaker 1: to seven, it still represents a fair bet of diversity.
Speaker 1: But uh, every year goes every generation that goes by,
Speaker 1: you lose some genetic diversity. So that's just a consistence
Speaker 1: of population size and how much is out there. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of a standard thing. So right now, the
Speaker 1: captive population that we have represents of the genetic diversity
Speaker 1: that was in those seven founding animals. So and then
Speaker 1: our wild population represents a percentage of our captive population.
Speaker 1: So you want to get that as high as possible
Speaker 1: to at least have all the genes that represented out
Speaker 1: there that we can. Is there any chance left? Is
Speaker 1: there any mystery left? Like might at all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: be that someone in Mexico. Oh, it's gonna be like, hey,
Speaker 1: we found a couple we didn't know about. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: we've had um. There was one that was in a zoo.
Speaker 1: It ended up being having a large part of dogs
Speaker 1: in it, so they would add us it looked enough
Speaker 1: from the Mexico colleagues, and we had it tested genetically.
Speaker 1: I was referring more in the wild. Yeah, they brought
Speaker 1: it in from the wild, though, they captured it in
Speaker 1: the wild and brought it and held it, held some
Speaker 1: dogs and tangled up with some dogs. Yeah. And so
Speaker 1: most of the ones that are left, because it's such
Speaker 1: a remnant population, I would guess you'd get into them
Speaker 1: and they'd have some dogs in them. Even if you
Speaker 1: found a pocket isolated somewhere that was but there's always
Speaker 1: that possibility, and in Mexico that there might be something
Speaker 1: down south and Durango or you know, some different places.
Speaker 1: But the best thing it find another wolves is wolves.
Speaker 1: So when you're doing a release, there's people who believe
Speaker 1: there'll be wolves. There are still wolves left out here.
Speaker 1: They would pop out of the woodwork. Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: release the wolves out there and you don't find any
Speaker 1: other wolves, and so there's nothing that doesn't track back
Speaker 1: to our wolves. So you know, there wasn't wild wolves
Speaker 1: that were out there in this junk of country here
Speaker 1: in the New Mexico and Arizona. And so they're doing
Speaker 1: a release now in Mexico, uh, since two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: So as these wolves dispersed out and go to different places,
Speaker 1: if they find other wolves, and you say, yeah, well
Speaker 1: there's probably other wolves, but they'll find them. How many uh,
Speaker 1: how many are guys poaching every year? Oh, that's a
Speaker 1: hard question, but I mean ten that we document, but
Speaker 1: there's other ones that are undocumented. They get shot and
Speaker 1: so some of them are So people are shooting ten
Speaker 1: percent of the population every year. Yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: in that in that range tend to t percent in
Speaker 1: a given year. What And I know we're getting into
Speaker 1: things that are hard to quantify. What percent or case
Speaker 1: is a mistake and identity and what percenter? Like dudes
Speaker 1: that are pissed, Uh boy, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: them are mistaken identity. Personally, I think you're down here
Speaker 1: and they're shooting kyote. Yeah. I mean we've solved some
Speaker 1: cases where people say that and they think it's a
Speaker 1: coyote that they shot and turned themselves in. And I
Speaker 1: always tell people, as long as you're honest with me,
Speaker 1: you'll get it. It's like if you shoot, you're out there,
Speaker 1: you're hunting, and you shoot a cow because you thought
Speaker 1: it you have a bull tag and you thought I
Speaker 1: had antlers that were massive there and it turned out
Speaker 1: it was a tree or whatever. You know, you won't
Speaker 1: get a ticket for that. But as long as you're
Speaker 1: honest about it and turn yourself in, then you get
Speaker 1: less of a fine than you would if you tried
Speaker 1: to hide it. By Yeah, I've never heard anything to
Speaker 1: contradict that from any game word I've ever spoken where
Speaker 1: they put a high premium on the guy that comes
Speaker 1: and says, hey man that I mess up and taken
Speaker 1: where you were having. Yeah. So if it's an honest mistake,
Speaker 1: I expect people to be honest about it, and so
Speaker 1: if it's nefarious, then I expect them to be secretive
Speaker 1: about it. So so some number of are are do
Speaker 1: you ever get people that are poaching them because they
Speaker 1: want them the hides or they usually poach them just
Speaker 1: because they want them dead. Everybody always does. Nobody wants
Speaker 1: the hides. So they're they're poaching them because because they're
Speaker 1: well the ones that are that are killing them nefariously. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're just they're killing them. And then how do you guys? Uh?
Speaker 1: When I say you guys, has anyone ever who prosecutes it?
Speaker 1: So it's a fish and wildlife fed Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: it goes uh they make the case our special agents too,
Speaker 1: so they do all the investigation and stuff like that
Speaker 1: with assistance from states sometimes in the whole wide network
Speaker 1: for service law enforcement. Everybody's involved in that. They have
Speaker 1: a network. But then it goes to district attorneys and
Speaker 1: federal kind of cases on have you even been prosecuted, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's been a couple here or there, they've been prosecuted.
Speaker 1: I mean there they come down on them hard or
Speaker 1: know well they can, but I don't think it depends
Speaker 1: on the circumstances. So in the one case that I'm
Speaker 1: aware of, I think they came down pretty arc as
Speaker 1: a person uh picked up the carcass and moved it
Speaker 1: from Arizona to New Mexico and so at that stage
Speaker 1: that's a Lacey Act violation because you crossed state lines
Speaker 1: as well, which is a felony, and so why do
Speaker 1: you move it just trying to hide evidence? You know
Speaker 1: it doesn't want it where it laid down and moved
Speaker 1: it away. And so I think that person that came
Speaker 1: down it was early on and I think he got
Speaker 1: a little bit of jail time associated with that. Other
Speaker 1: people that are really honest about it and call and say, hey, look,
Speaker 1: I thought it was a coyote. I shot it. Here's evidence.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing they you know, small civil Fine, so
Speaker 1: it's a range is all that level. Um, but we'll
Speaker 1: see how it goes on that stuff. Law enforcement is
Speaker 1: pretty you know how they say, uh, you have a case,
Speaker 1: any case. They don't like to talk about it too
Speaker 1: much until it's long past. Yeah, I got you. Ye.
Speaker 1: So do you think, um, like you know, if you
Speaker 1: guys look at this as like sociologists, do you think that, uh,
Speaker 1: there's a way in in the future that it might
Speaker 1: be a conversation where someone saying, hey, do you remember
Speaker 1: when everyone was all piste off about these wolves? Now? Ah,
Speaker 1: that was stupid because look they're here and everybody's so happy. Now,
Speaker 1: how's that working out? In Montana? For that hasn't happened there,
Speaker 1: But the blood still drying in Montana. Man, I don't.
Speaker 1: I think people will normalize it eventually, but it's a
Speaker 1: long ways down the road, and it's different from areas
Speaker 1: where they came down naturally. In areas where you do
Speaker 1: a reintroduction, because it's the government, it's kind of the
Speaker 1: government going against your values. So back when we were
Speaker 1: shooting all the wolves, I think there's probably people who
Speaker 1: are going, I don't agree with that this is wrong
Speaker 1: or whatever. They're absolutely yeah, all theough Leopold and various
Speaker 1: other things. And so the government is doing a program
Speaker 1: that's not favoring your personal beliefs, and so it's no
Speaker 1: different with reinroduction. In this case. There's people who are
Speaker 1: out there ranchers, hunters, There's people who this doesn't match
Speaker 1: with what their core beliefs are in terms of things,
Speaker 1: and it impacts them. So yeah, but I think that
Speaker 1: like nationally, um, nationally, the reintroductions have pretty enormous support,
Speaker 1: particularly among people who aren't affected by this. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: I think I've I've observed like in the areas where
Speaker 1: we've had the recovery effort going on for quite a while,
Speaker 1: there's more of acceptance there. People are understanding that, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is something we're gonna have to live with, so
Speaker 1: let's just start working together a little bit better. The
Speaker 1: challenges also comes where we start looking at new areas
Speaker 1: to expand, because then we start that whole process over
Speaker 1: of people getting used to wolves in new areas, and
Speaker 1: then that's gets tough again. So you have to build
Speaker 1: those relationships again in the whole new area and start
Speaker 1: building trust. But it turns it takes time. Do you personally, um,
Speaker 1: do you have to do you personally going and deal
Speaker 1: with people who are having a problem with wolves? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the things the program does is as
Speaker 1: the forest Service representative, I do a lot of communication
Speaker 1: with the permitees to try to help resolve the issues.
Speaker 1: But people have grazing permits, Yeah, grazing perm it's but
Speaker 1: the biologist on the ground from the Fish and Wildlife
Speaker 1: Service in the Arizona Gameing Fish do also quite a
Speaker 1: bit of contact with the permites and actually do the
Speaker 1: work with the wolves to minimize those impacts, and they
Speaker 1: do a pretty good job at trying to resolve those issues.
Speaker 1: What what's the process like when when a guy gets
Speaker 1: it he's got a cow gets killed. Um, what's his process, like, Like,
Speaker 1: what's he gotta do? So he calls us, calls us up,
Speaker 1: either US or Wildlife Services which is another agency under
Speaker 1: the Department of Agriculture as well, Um, and they get
Speaker 1: an investigation on it. So you skin it out and
Speaker 1: so what you're looking for underneath the hide is bruising.
Speaker 1: So when a wolf bites, it bruises underneath the hide,
Speaker 1: so it's like subcutaneous hemorrhagee. So it's the same as
Speaker 1: you or I. And then you're looking for attacks in
Speaker 1: the hind quarters and the armpad areas. That's kind of
Speaker 1: prototypical of wolves will tracks in the area. And then
Speaker 1: it gets confirmed and they send that in and get compensation.
Speaker 1: So they send in the confirmation from Wildlife Services and
Speaker 1: then they send that in. But and then and then
Speaker 1: then their conversation is some kind of fair market value
Speaker 1: for the animal. Yeah, it's set by right now. We
Speaker 1: have a Mexican Wolf Livestock Council that's working on on
Speaker 1: that and it's composed of ranchers and if you conservationists
Speaker 1: and so yeah, they do. They based it on the
Speaker 1: market value at the time, an average for the area.
Speaker 1: They also do a pay for a presence thing, which
Speaker 1: is um, when you're out in these big allotments, ranchers
Speaker 1: can't possibly find all the dead cows that happened from anything.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's what I was going to bring up,
Speaker 1: is that's the thing you here is they don't know
Speaker 1: they round them up and they got less than they had,
Speaker 1: and they can't go and find skeletal remains and make
Speaker 1: a claim on it, right right. So that's that's a
Speaker 1: hard things. So there is actually financial impacts two ranchers,
Speaker 1: real financial impacts and so um. So there's this pay
Speaker 1: for presence a thing which is based on a formula
Speaker 1: based on wolves being there and how many cows you have,
Speaker 1: and so that that's also part of the Mexican wolf
Speaker 1: live stock payouts. And then there that you're compensating someone
Speaker 1: without them needing to go and prove specific cases they
Speaker 1: lost animals, right right, so they Yeah, it's just based
Speaker 1: on wolves and pups, how many pups are raised with
Speaker 1: the wolves, so things that are good for recovery, and
Speaker 1: then how many livestock they have in an area, and
Speaker 1: then whether or not they implemented proactive things. So that
Speaker 1: stuff like proactive is like range writers being out there,
Speaker 1: extra range writers looking for dads, are moving cows away
Speaker 1: from wolves or different things that you can implement out
Speaker 1: there on the ground to try to avoid predation as well.
Speaker 1: And those things aren't of they aren't the golden they
Speaker 1: aren't the silver bullet, right, So there's still depredations that
Speaker 1: can occur despite those things happening out there, and some
Speaker 1: of them aren't found. How many individual animal payments get
Speaker 1: paid out in a typical year, Uh, it's pretty consistent
Speaker 1: that you know the number that are depredated to get
Speaker 1: paid out most years, So I I not most people
Speaker 1: put in for the twenty to fifty animals that are
Speaker 1: killed in terms of the livestock loss. And then there's
Speaker 1: some components that are missing and you never find. And
Speaker 1: now there are cases where um, I'm sure, I mean
Speaker 1: like isolated. Was it a common problem where you're not
Speaker 1: able to come to consensus that the livestock owner and
Speaker 1: the investigator aren't able to get down the same page
Speaker 1: about the cause of death. Yeah, some of that happens
Speaker 1: with the investigator, but the investigators trained been through a
Speaker 1: lot of different ones and and so that's why they're professionals.
Speaker 1: And what they do, and so that's where we go
Speaker 1: with is what the investigator does and it makes a
Speaker 1: call in the end. So um, so that's kind of
Speaker 1: the way it goes out there. There was one permittee
Speaker 1: a long time ago who decided that he didn't want
Speaker 1: to have Wildlife Services out there, who works on him
Speaker 1: with you know, coyote control all this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: works with the ranchers, and decided instead to have the
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service out there doing its investigations. And
Speaker 1: what I would tell them all the time is like, look,
Speaker 1: this is this would be the same exact call. Wildlife
Speaker 1: Services would make the same call that I'm making here.
Speaker 1: Wildlife Services would make the same call. There's no differences.
Speaker 1: So over and over and eventually he went back to
Speaker 1: Wildlife Services doing it. And so I that the evidence
Speaker 1: is evidence. Do you do do you make? Do you
Speaker 1: go on a lot of those calls? I do on some,
Speaker 1: but and I've been out there trapping for with for removals,
Speaker 1: with depredations and stuff like that with wolves that are
Speaker 1: out there, and so yeah, when there's big problems, then
Speaker 1: I get hauled out of my office. Occasionally I get
Speaker 1: I get to go out in the field when it's
Speaker 1: not fun like one, there is conflict. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: don't get the sense that you haven't, that you're like
Speaker 1: losing a ton of sleep at night about this whole thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's funny. I've had people come up to me
Speaker 1: and say, you're such a nice young man, John, Why
Speaker 1: did you choose to do this? Why did you doing
Speaker 1: something productive with your life? And so you know, and
Speaker 1: and how can you sleep at night? And I think
Speaker 1: what I try to do out there is relate with people.
Speaker 1: So I relate with the livestock producers out there fairly well.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of common out common values, uh
Speaker 1: land being out open land that they provide out there,
Speaker 1: the waters that are out there and maintained by them,
Speaker 1: that's good for hunting and and fishing. So all those
Speaker 1: common values are there. Now I'm choosing a lifestyle where
Speaker 1: you don't make a lot of money, but you enjoy
Speaker 1: being outside. So there's a lot of commonalities that are
Speaker 1: all over the place, and so you try to establish
Speaker 1: those commonalities with those guys. Aren't like, I know how
Speaker 1: I'll get rich on a candle in the day, right,
Speaker 1: There's no, that's not They do it because it's their
Speaker 1: family thing, and they love it and they love the
Speaker 1: land that they're on. So that's that's why they're they're
Speaker 1: in the business, most of them, yea. And you find
Speaker 1: common grown on that sure. And so the point is
Speaker 1: it's like if someone else is here who doesn't have
Speaker 1: those same values, are those same kind of working together goals,
Speaker 1: then it doesn't work out as well. So I think
Speaker 1: both can be there. Livestock can be on the landscape
Speaker 1: and a multiple use hunters. I'll still hunt. Wolves aren't
Speaker 1: gonna drive me out of hunting, and so U and
Speaker 1: wolves as well. There's there's enough room for all of
Speaker 1: it to be there out on the landscape. Would I
Speaker 1: guess probably not. But let's say let's say all of
Speaker 1: a sudden whatever have delisting occurred. Um, you'd probably never
Speaker 1: be like, hey, I'm gonna go on a wolf hunt.
Speaker 1: I probably wouldn't. I haven't hunted bears. I've been tangled
Speaker 1: up with wolves. Yeah, you've already caught a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of them. I haven't hunted bears or lions either, And
Speaker 1: that's just the person. I have nothing wrong with it.
Speaker 1: I have zero and zero problems with any hunting. But
Speaker 1: when you map out your year, you're like thinking about
Speaker 1: elk elk dear. Yeah, just I was kind of. It's
Speaker 1: just what I like to hunt turkeys. I really like
Speaker 1: calling things too. I like that interaction getting in close
Speaker 1: with things. So wolves too, hauling up bulls. Like if
Speaker 1: you go out and you're looking for a pack of wolves,
Speaker 1: Like early on, I remember looking for a pack of
Speaker 1: wolves in Montana and I got the tip from this
Speaker 1: ferrier guy shooting another guy's horses. He says, if you
Speaker 1: want to find wolves, you should go over here. So
Speaker 1: I go over there and I'm driving along and doing
Speaker 1: just howling at night, and then they all want to
Speaker 1: do how just straight out? Yeah? Can you let one
Speaker 1: rip right now? You don't want to as long as
Speaker 1: you do it right after me. No, I bet you
Speaker 1: got a good one. So but you need the moon
Speaker 1: up in the sky and you need to tip your
Speaker 1: head back right. That'll do it right there. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: something like what's that? What's that call? Saying I don't
Speaker 1: know they had into that. They haven't told me anything.
Speaker 1: I got a buddy that he thinks like I got
Speaker 1: a buddy that when he's doing wolf calling, he's it's
Speaker 1: like he's like, oh, yeah, I'm saying this, and he's
Speaker 1: saying that he's I'm answering him back this question. Do
Speaker 1: you think he's right? I don't know. I don't know either.
Speaker 1: So you don't have like you're not like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: throw the old roundup call at him. Well, no, I
Speaker 1: don't have non challenge caller. I just try to like
Speaker 1: hell to get him to respond, and I'm thankful when
Speaker 1: they do. So you haven't found like you're not. You
Speaker 1: haven't found that there's different. Well, I'm doing a break.
Speaker 1: How so when you hear my voice break from hill,
Speaker 1: that's a kind of a break how that? So would
Speaker 1: that be called like a locator call? Calls that? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean wolves are always looking for other wolves, so
Speaker 1: they're always it's just a just a hell you can
Speaker 1: do a flat how and you just you don't really
Speaker 1: do that break kind of in your if you can
Speaker 1: avoid it. I can't. But you don't feel that that
Speaker 1: sends a different message. I don't know. They just they
Speaker 1: just they respond. Well, So if you get them at
Speaker 1: the right time of year, pups love to talk. So
Speaker 1: if you get them in about August September time frame,
Speaker 1: the pups will all start yakking, and the adults will
Speaker 1: break in and you get although wolves howling out there,
Speaker 1: but anyways, just howling along in a new area and
Speaker 1: you get that response and you say, oh god, I
Speaker 1: just found a pack of wolves that's oncollared unmarked. Um,
Speaker 1: that's pretty cool. Yeah, you like the uncollared ones better.
Speaker 1: You like the wild ones. Oh yeah, that's that's near
Speaker 1: because that's a collar group. You go, bee bee beep
Speaker 1: on there it is, and now I'm gonna howl and
Speaker 1: sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't, and I'm piste
Speaker 1: off when they don't, and I'm kind of like, well
Speaker 1: I did what I should have got done if they do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean I like the real wild ones Alaska. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just I mean not that I'm down on the
Speaker 1: other ones, but want something, um, and it's important work.
Speaker 1: But once something gets caught, something and it changes. Man.
Speaker 1: You know. But I was pointing out one day and
Speaker 1: I was like, but then like, it's sweet when you
Speaker 1: catch when you shoot a bird, it's got a band
Speaker 1: on it, right, So it's it's like very inconsistent. Uh uh.
Speaker 1: They're all interesting. I mean catching them is interesting. You
Speaker 1: walk up to them, handle them, with nothing but a
Speaker 1: y stick, you know, so you're just kind of why
Speaker 1: stick them down and then you hand inject the drugs.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't do that with the lion Darta lion darta
Speaker 1: bear grizzly bears back in the day when I was
Speaker 1: handling them. You can why stick one of those things? Right?
Speaker 1: You have to make sure you're out of the path
Speaker 1: of the snare where it's destroyed around the tree. And so,
Speaker 1: I mean wolves are, but some of them are aggressive.
Speaker 1: Some of them will bark and howl and growl at
Speaker 1: you until you get them pinned down. Mainly the alpha's so,
Speaker 1: but it's it's tricking a getting them draft is hard.
Speaker 1: So every time I trap them, I handle them with
Speaker 1: a lot of respect and then uh, because it's I
Speaker 1: it's my responsibility at that stage, and I'm happy with
Speaker 1: myself because it's hard. Yeah, you can't be out killing
Speaker 1: them on accident nine. So wildlife work in general, you
Speaker 1: have some mortality that occurs with handling animals. That's a reality,
Speaker 1: so you don't you want to minimize that to an
Speaker 1: absolute smallest amount possible. So we take training every year
Speaker 1: with vets. Let go through stuff and try to minimize
Speaker 1: that to the greatest degree possible. So I can only
Speaker 1: think of a few instances where we've killed bowlves out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sure to some degree inevitable that once you handle
Speaker 1: a certain number of them, Yeah, you get enough, you
Speaker 1: have it and so um big horn, cheap captures. Some
Speaker 1: will die from that and so all the captures. That's
Speaker 1: a part of it. So you have to evaluate whether
Speaker 1: your goals of your project and whether your goals of
Speaker 1: handling that animal is worth taking that risk. And so
Speaker 1: that's that's always what you do out there with with
Speaker 1: these kind of projects. It's not just cool you just
Speaker 1: go catch one to see, just have some fun catching them,
Speaker 1: right right, there's a purpose behind everything. So al right,
Speaker 1: be honest, that was great. That was fantastic. Oh, I
Speaker 1: did find the number of New Mexico hunters killed last
Speaker 1: year fourteen and a half thousand, and wolves are and
Speaker 1: and know it's different because they're in New Mexico and
Speaker 1: Arizona and all that, but wolves kill how many in
Speaker 1: the in the chunk land they got right now? I
Speaker 1: think we put the estimate around sixteen twelve to six
Speaker 1: hunter So basically in order what percent of New Mexico
Speaker 1: is the wolf recovery area. Percent of the carry I
Speaker 1: don't know. There's a lot of elk up north um
Speaker 1: in New Mexico, so maybe the elk population probably is
Speaker 1: in wolf country. So you fellas that hun elk you Yeah,
Speaker 1: you are right, what's that there's some elk to get one.
Speaker 1: It's true. It is a tradeoff you're dealing with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're dealing with some elk that would wind up in
Speaker 1: your freezer, will wind up in the belly of a wolf. Right,
Speaker 1: it's competition. Right. But on the other hand, uh, do
Speaker 1: we have the right to dust off species off the
Speaker 1: face of the earth forever? That's a theological It's like
Speaker 1: it's a spiritual almost theological question. You get to say,
Speaker 1: now that one doesn't get to live anymore, it will
Speaker 1: be gone for eternity because it inconveniences me. Um and
Speaker 1: and I don't know, when you're out there hunting, you're
Speaker 1: in grizzly bear country, or you hear wolves, holland or
Speaker 1: any of that stuff. To me, it's just it makes
Speaker 1: it a little more interesting. Yeah, everybody. That's the thing.
Speaker 1: That's one of the weird things about it is people
Speaker 1: um when talking about wolves. People in the naturally are
Speaker 1: like it gets their hackles up because of they don't
Speaker 1: want to see their deer and elk resources diminished, and
Speaker 1: they're hard on moose in the north too, seriously hard. So, um,
Speaker 1: you don't want to see it diminished. But then there's
Speaker 1: you're almost not a human if there's some party that
Speaker 1: doesn't get a little tickled when you hear one of
Speaker 1: those things rip out of how sure? And some people,
Speaker 1: I mean ranchers, like they're out there there are a
Speaker 1: lot how means I could possibly having an impact on
Speaker 1: my wallet? Yeah, right tonight? And some of their answers
Speaker 1: get you know, at first I hated that sound, but
Speaker 1: then I was like, man, that's amazing. That's a neat
Speaker 1: sound to hear. So I gotta give him. I gotta
Speaker 1: give him that much, you know. And so I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the real key and this is easy to say,
Speaker 1: it very hard to do, but I think, like kind
Speaker 1: of the key from from my conversations and my exposure
Speaker 1: to a wide variety of people across the wide variety
Speaker 1: of landscapes, is that, um, a lot of people who
Speaker 1: are upset about projects like this, they're kind of what
Speaker 1: they're afraid of is being told half the story or
Speaker 1: to have the story change later. And I think that
Speaker 1: if there was um not that there's a lack of transparity,
Speaker 1: but there's it's difficult to project how these projects are
Speaker 1: gonna go and then what the legal processes are gonna
Speaker 1: be like down the road, and it leaves people feeling
Speaker 1: burned when someone told him recovery will look like this,
Speaker 1: but then it doesn't. And then it doesn't and you're
Speaker 1: like waiting for some kind of relief from maybe some
Speaker 1: of the sacrifices you're making, and the relief doesn't come,
Speaker 1: and it leads people with the real bad tasting their mouth.
Speaker 1: And what I hate to see is anyone who's old
Speaker 1: enough to remember like the spotted owl situation the Pacific Northwest,
Speaker 1: where an animal loses its like essence and just becomes
Speaker 1: a symbol for conflict. You know, It's like someday people
Speaker 1: will be able to hear spot of the owl again
Speaker 1: and visualize a burden. But for many people, when you
Speaker 1: hear spot it all, you don't visualize a bird. You
Speaker 1: visualize distrust and conflict and right and it's and I
Speaker 1: hate it when uh and I hate to see like
Speaker 1: other animals that I love a lot. I hate to
Speaker 1: see them become symbols for um uh, symbols for something
Speaker 1: besides just their their essence as a wild animal. But
Speaker 1: wolves have been symbol for something beside their essence of
Speaker 1: a lot more for a long time. You know what,
Speaker 1: it's very hard to find the animal. It's very hard
Speaker 1: for people to find the animal within the animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are just giant walking metaphors. I mean, it's been forever, right,
Speaker 1: Europeans coming over here, the whole thing. Yeah, No, you're right,
Speaker 1: they are. The owl did enjoy owlness about the wolf.
Speaker 1: It's been a long time since the wolf was able
Speaker 1: to enjoy his wolfness. I don't know what the caveman
Speaker 1: we're thinking about. It may go back that far. They
Speaker 1: felt something, they heard that when they heard that howl
Speaker 1: ripping h sitting by the fire, they weren't I bet
Speaker 1: they weren't passive about it. Why fire was invented? You
Speaker 1: need some comfort? Well, I appreciate you guys talking about
Speaker 1: this man. It's like, um, you know, I feel vested
Speaker 1: in it. And also it's just fascinating, right, and it's like,
Speaker 1: what a luxury that we're that that Uh, what a
Speaker 1: luxury that as a nation we're in a position where
Speaker 1: we could be talking about whether or not how many
Speaker 1: wolves we want. Right, there's a lot of nations trying
Speaker 1: to figure out if they're going to be a nation tomorrow,
Speaker 1: you know, and like it's like a real uh, it's
Speaker 1: a luxurious problem man, to be like how much wildlife
Speaker 1: do we want? First world problem? First world problem. And
Speaker 1: when you look at it in Mexico, they're reinducing them
Speaker 1: and so they have problems with they can't access particular
Speaker 1: areas because the drugs, right, they have people that are hungry.
Speaker 1: The wolves are competing with subsistent food right for people.
Speaker 1: So this is it's a bigger issue. The fact that
Speaker 1: they're trying to recover wolves down there too is is
Speaker 1: a fascinating thing. More social issues that are far more important.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna brush up by my Spanish and go talk
Speaker 1: to those boys. And it's all private land down there, right,
Speaker 1: So it's entirely private. You have some national designations on
Speaker 1: top of private lande. So ranchers where they're doing the reroduction,
Speaker 1: they have to get ranches to agree to reinduce wolves
Speaker 1: on their ranch. Those ranches, we me and Yanni have
Speaker 1: been fortunate to spend some time chasing around down there,
Speaker 1: and uh, those ranches are like wilderness area equivalents. Sure,
Speaker 1: there's you be talking to ranch. He's like, well, I
Speaker 1: haven't been over there in three years. I mean, just
Speaker 1: like you spend days up hunting maybe now and then
Speaker 1: you glass up some dude riding the mule, you know,
Speaker 1: off in the distance. But it's some wild country, man,
Speaker 1: it's some real wild country. Carl. You got anything, I've
Speaker 1: got a theme, and it's the theme of one way streets,
Speaker 1: all right. Things that are hard to take back. So
Speaker 1: the notion that, for example, preventing an extinction versus trying
Speaker 1: in the aftermath to respond to an extinction, we've talked
Speaker 1: about a bit um, the notion that this particular species
Speaker 1: and others have been so close to the brink. And
Speaker 1: your point about the the small percentage of species that
Speaker 1: have been listed and then delisted is de listed because
Speaker 1: of recovery, right, Well, your point is well taken. But
Speaker 1: this species, the grizzlies another example, are in far better
Speaker 1: straits now than they were when they popped onto that list.
Speaker 1: And I think it's important to remember this, this piece
Speaker 1: of legislation's only about forty four years old, um, And
Speaker 1: if you contemplate the amount of time it takes for
Speaker 1: a species to evolve and the amount of successful work
Speaker 1: from a conservation perspective that's been achieved during that short
Speaker 1: period of time, there's a lot to feel really good about.
Speaker 1: But some other one way streets that are relevant here.
Speaker 1: One is the loss of a way of life and
Speaker 1: the changing approach in rural communities to interacting with the land,
Speaker 1: and the challenges that some of these communities face just
Speaker 1: in terms of keeping these traditional uses on the landscape.
Speaker 1: And I love the way John talks about the the
Speaker 1: approach he takes interacting with those folks. And I know
Speaker 1: the Center has got a phenomenal skill set as well
Speaker 1: in terms of relating to these people. And it's not
Speaker 1: a phony thing. I mean, these guys understand the value
Speaker 1: of relating to people who are losing cattle, relating to
Speaker 1: people who are who are on you know, lifestyle occupation. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I know both of these gentlemen, and I very
Speaker 1: much value the fact that there are people out there
Speaker 1: contributing to the retention and of undeveloped land. And that's
Speaker 1: the last one way street that I'll leave you with
Speaker 1: is this notion that, uh, once you lose open be
Speaker 1: at public or private land to development. That's another one
Speaker 1: way street that is rarely undone. So I see, No,
Speaker 1: that's a very good point to bring up. I see
Speaker 1: these these concepts being in the same vein the notion
Speaker 1: that once something is committed, be at development, be at
Speaker 1: the loss of a species, be at the urbanization of
Speaker 1: a culture. It's a heck of a lot harder to
Speaker 1: bring that back than it is to preserve it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: point taken. It's good. It's better to yell at your
Speaker 1: kids when they're little than bail them out of jail
Speaker 1: when they get older. All right, YEA, Honestly, you didn't
Speaker 1: have anything. Oh, I gotta do you do you have
Speaker 1: you any final thoughts? I don't just thank you for
Speaker 1: bringing up this topic and allowing it to be discussed.
Speaker 1: Appreciate it. I got a final thought. Um a correction.
Speaker 1: We're talking sometime ago about um Custer Custer's last stand,
Speaker 1: and a lot of military guys wrote in that we
Speaker 1: were using brigadier general the wrong way. Custer, Uh, a
Speaker 1: breeder general has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: I was talking about when during the Civil War, when
Speaker 1: they had a lot of attrition of officers, they were
Speaker 1: promoting other officers into into general ships or into the
Speaker 1: general position on a temporary basis to make up for
Speaker 1: how quickly they were losing officers. That term, it's not
Speaker 1: brigadier is a breveted general like Custer when he was
Speaker 1: when he was a general, Custer was a breveted general,
Speaker 1: not a brigadier general. And when he died, he was.
Speaker 1: He died as I believe, lieutenant colonel. So a lot
Speaker 1: of dudes from the military wrote in um, not in
Speaker 1: a mean way, just wrote it into be like, dude,
Speaker 1: you're way off on what a brigadier general is a
Speaker 1: breveted general. Did they define the brigadier Yeah, I can't
Speaker 1: remember now what it has to do with like man, omn,
Speaker 1: just bear with me a minute. I'm just gonna give
Speaker 1: it right from the We're just gonna get right into
Speaker 1: it here. Oh you know this, give give this guy
Speaker 1: your headset Johnnie. No, No, we're gonna let's do We're
Speaker 1: gonna do it. Ah, you can say stuff from the background. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, So if you're not collortable, here we go. Uh.
Speaker 1: This this feller Alan is saying, uh f y, I
Speaker 1: just a point of clarification on the subject of bridgie
Speaker 1: brigadier gener gerals. Brigadier generals are not he's quoting me
Speaker 1: fake or quote temporary generals. Yeah, the term I called
Speaker 1: Custer fake general. Um, there are in fact full generals,
Speaker 1: but the brigadier is a reference to the type of
Speaker 1: unit they have traditionally commanded, brigades. I think the correct
Speaker 1: term you're looking for is brevet. Breveted generals were officers
Speaker 1: of a lower rank who are temporarily or honorarily given
Speaker 1: the rank of general Brevit's usually occurred during times of war.
Speaker 1: In this case, Brigadier General Brevett Custer was a regular
Speaker 1: Army lieutenant colonel who has temporarily promoted to brigadier general
Speaker 1: during the Civil War and later again to major general.
Speaker 1: He was actually a lieutenant colonel at the time of
Speaker 1: his death. So my apologies to uh all you find
Speaker 1: folks of service who uh who took offense to be
Speaker 1: talking about fake generals. Oh, that's it, right, that's it. Hey,
Speaker 1: thank you, Steve, appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to everyone.