Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming in you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely vote bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast.
Speaker 1: You can't predict anything? Okay, all right? Our guests Diane
Speaker 1: boy A carnivorre and wolf specialists, but kind of mostly wolves, right,
Speaker 1: that's your thing. So let's just let's just dispatch with
Speaker 1: the other one real quick. What we're like. Let's say
Speaker 1: we're not Let's say we weren't talking about wolves. What
Speaker 1: would you be a subject matter expert on? Um? Well, wolves,
Speaker 1: but I also end up taking the lions, otters, bobcats,
Speaker 1: you know, other fur bears that come in bears. Let's
Speaker 1: do my colleagues, but I do a lot of it.
Speaker 1: But I've mostly researched wolves all my life. But I've
Speaker 1: I've done a few other things to some a little
Speaker 1: bit of game big game work, um, but mostly wolves.
Speaker 1: Do you remember what was your first Did you have
Speaker 1: a wolf? An initial wolf experience that became kind of
Speaker 1: your personal genesis? Do you know what I'm saying? Like
Speaker 1: people like to later, it doesn't even feel like it's
Speaker 1: happening in real life, right in real time. Oftentimes you
Speaker 1: later look back and you realize that there was like
Speaker 1: a moment, right, did you have a moment? There are
Speaker 1: a couple of things I ended up. Um, I was
Speaker 1: really fascinated by wolves growing up in the Twin Cities
Speaker 1: because Minnesota was the only place in the seventies that
Speaker 1: had wolves in the whole lower forty eight. Really, yep,
Speaker 1: there were none in Wish Michigan, or Wisconsin the last stronghold,
Speaker 1: and there were none anywhere in the United States anywhere else.
Speaker 1: So is that really that's true? Yes, you can read it.
Speaker 1: Look Google. I didn't know that. But but but what
Speaker 1: about like the Ile Royal head wolves in two they
Speaker 1: came in. Yeah, there were wolves in IOLs Michigan. There
Speaker 1: was a handful starting nineteen fifty. But so you're saying
Speaker 1: that Minnesota never ran out, they never lost him. No,
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, I think they got down
Speaker 1: as low as somewhere like seven hundred or eight hundred.
Speaker 1: And when I left Minnesota in nineteen seventy nine to
Speaker 1: come here to start wolf work, there were about a
Speaker 1: thousand in Minnesota then, and there was just a handful
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin. And I don't even know you p had
Speaker 1: any back yet. I had him because they were stuck there.
Speaker 1: But actually, I was just in yellow Stone this week
Speaker 1: with tick Tale and his wife, and Dave Dick was
Speaker 1: the first guy. He has been studying looking for wolves
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin since he was like fifteen, and he told
Speaker 1: the story over dinner just last night. He found his
Speaker 1: first confirmed wolf tracks in Wisconsin in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: There weren't wolves there before that he was looking, and
Speaker 1: then over the years eventually they got critical mass and
Speaker 1: they had the first pack. I think it was like
Speaker 1: in seventies seven or seventy eight, the first pack. They
Speaker 1: were just coming back, so it's pretty recent recovery, much
Speaker 1: like us here in the West. I feel as though
Speaker 1: you can correct me if I'm wrong. I feel as
Speaker 1: though I cut my first wolf track in Michigan in
Speaker 1: ninth and it would have been October or November of nineteen.
Speaker 1: They're there, yeah, I know. They was when they started
Speaker 1: sending ways out from Minnesota with a Recovery and Endangered
Speaker 1: Species Act, and that's what allowed them to come back
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin and Michigan. There's you know, they've got hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds now in Wisconsin and Michigan. I'm sure you
Speaker 1: did see wolf tracks in ninety four, but he wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been nineteen seventy, so you grew up in you
Speaker 1: grew up in the last bastion of of lower forty
Speaker 1: eight wolves. Yeah, and as a kid, I was pretty
Speaker 1: fascinated by him. And Dave meach was on campus University
Speaker 1: of Minnesota. He is um uh, he is the guy
Speaker 1: for wolves. I mean he is Dave meach l David
Speaker 1: Meets University Minnesota. He's actually I think he's employed by
Speaker 1: the federal government at the university. But he started doing
Speaker 1: wolves in the sixties. He was early on Aisle Royal.
Speaker 1: He was the first one of caller Wolf in northern Minnesota.
Speaker 1: I believe close to it. Um and he is now
Speaker 1: he's the authority for the world. He's he's he's a
Speaker 1: amazing guy. He's eighty and he's still working full time
Speaker 1: because he loves what he does. He loves and he's
Speaker 1: he's consulted from people over the world. And he's very
Speaker 1: he's very uh. He's publishes constantly. He's the consummate scientist
Speaker 1: and he's he accepts every viewpoint, looks at every viewpoint.
Speaker 1: His brain is like a computer. When you asked him
Speaker 1: a questions like off the goalist and spends on all
Speaker 1: these realms. This is delightful, Okay. So I started y
Speaker 1: asked how did I get involved? So he was on
Speaker 1: campus where I was a student. He started in school's
Speaker 1: pre veterinary medicine student. There also was a place called
Speaker 1: Como Park Zoo in St. Paul which had this was
Speaker 1: a new concept and the teen seventy three to put
Speaker 1: out pens with wild animals that looked wild that was
Speaker 1: you know, not everything else was like concrete. That So
Speaker 1: they built a wolf exhibit and I think it was
Speaker 1: five acres inside something like that, and I was fascinating.
Speaker 1: I would go there all the time because it was
Speaker 1: close to campus, very close to campus, and um I
Speaker 1: would go to look at the wolves and sometimes you'd
Speaker 1: see them and sometimes you wouldn't because it was all
Speaker 1: forced and would it much like outside. And one day
Speaker 1: I brought my arm folks dog, just a little pound mongrel,
Speaker 1: really sweet little guy, and we were looking and the
Speaker 1: wolves came up to the fence and he was sniffing
Speaker 1: noses with the fence. So I can show you how
Speaker 1: naive I was. Right, single chain link fence, single, no
Speaker 1: double barrier. There was sniffin noses through the fence, and
Speaker 1: then my little dog, being a mail he went up
Speaker 1: to urinate bras leg mark on the fence because he's
Speaker 1: a male, and that little foot it was just smaller
Speaker 1: than the dimension of the diamond in this cyclone fence.
Speaker 1: And the wolf is there anyone, And he got his
Speaker 1: leg and he drug his legs to the cycling fence
Speaker 1: and they were tearing his leg off. This is my
Speaker 1: first wolf experience, you asked. And I was screaming, and
Speaker 1: some guys came running over from the parking lot and
Speaker 1: they threw themselves against the fence, and my dog got
Speaker 1: his leg back was still attached, and we had some
Speaker 1: pretty major surgeries and stuff. But you asked, that was
Speaker 1: kind of my first wolf experience. Really, I was fascinated
Speaker 1: much as I was sorry for my dog. But he survived,
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, he did fine. And then I started
Speaker 1: volunteering on these studies. Each was over many studies in Minnesota, UM.
Speaker 1: The graduate students study at a preserve not far o
Speaker 1: the Twin Cities. And then in nineteenth summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven, I had an opportunity Dave me to offered
Speaker 1: me his internship up in northern Minnesota by Eli where
Speaker 1: he had his wild wolf study. And I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this is it. It's like my dream.
Speaker 1: And I just I didn't have I thought, how am
Speaker 1: I going to pay for this? I'm not gonna get paid.
Speaker 1: So I had to sell my motorcycle, show you how
Speaker 1: important this was to me, kind of motorcycles. I had
Speaker 1: a Yama already three fifty bright orange, just a little
Speaker 1: hot ring ding ding, but sold it. And you mentioned
Speaker 1: a cyclone fence. I call him cyclone fences, and no
Speaker 1: one knows the hell I'm talking about. Just I know,
Speaker 1: I know, damned your motorcycle and fences, but no one
Speaker 1: knows what it's like. No one uses that word anymore. Work.
Speaker 1: How do you know that word? Did you grow up?
Speaker 1: Call them cycle and fences? What? I think? Everybody else
Speaker 1: just calls him chain link. I know when I say
Speaker 1: something about a cycle and fence, people look at me like,
Speaker 1: what do you what kind of fence you're talking about?
Speaker 1: Go on, you sell your motorcycles yea. And so my
Speaker 1: next wealth experience was I was so excited. I was
Speaker 1: so thrilled to go for the summer and study. We're
Speaker 1: going to trap and call her and study wild wolves.
Speaker 1: And I was driving up in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 1: and this this is seventy seven. How many wolves are
Speaker 1: up there at that time, Well, that was probably when
Speaker 1: there was close to a thousand, nine to a thousand.
Speaker 1: So I'm driving on the highway at night. I borrowed
Speaker 1: my parents car to get up there because they had
Speaker 1: sold my motorcyle coal their second car. And I'm driving
Speaker 1: along this windy highway and I'm really sleepy and it's
Speaker 1: totally dark, and all of a sudden, out of the side,
Speaker 1: no kidding, a wolf shoots out into my headlights and
Speaker 1: I nearly rented over a jam on the brakes, and
Speaker 1: I come to rest and I feel kind of sick
Speaker 1: to my stomach. The adrenaline thing. It's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: my first wild wolf when I nearly killed it. But
Speaker 1: that was my next experience, and then from then then
Speaker 1: we were out working with wild wolves all summer, and
Speaker 1: I was thrilled right up by the Boundary Water Canoe
Speaker 1: area up in northern Minnesota Elie Babbitt area. You guys
Speaker 1: are trapping them, putting collars on them. Yeah, how are
Speaker 1: you guys catching them? Back then Foothold traps, modified foothold traps,
Speaker 1: like you laminate the jaws so they're thicker. Not back then.
Speaker 1: We do know when you say modified modified, how they
Speaker 1: had well back then and back now. It's not a
Speaker 1: whole lot different. But the traps we had springs in
Speaker 1: the bottom side. We checked them twice a day, so
Speaker 1: they didn't sit there very long. Um. Some of them
Speaker 1: had rubber jaws, not back then, but now we have
Speaker 1: a rubber serrated jaws, so it's more kind of their foot. Um.
Speaker 1: Then you use it like a serrated like a toothed
Speaker 1: rubber jaw. Now it's not tooth. I mean that gives
Speaker 1: an ugly image. They're kind of square flattened, but it's
Speaker 1: hard rubber like a tire. And they that's the thing
Speaker 1: you put over the jaw, you know, it's it's part
Speaker 1: of the jaw there there. I don't know how they
Speaker 1: make them one piece, but you boil it drops and everything.
Speaker 1: It doesn't come off. It's on their permanently. And when
Speaker 1: you say springs underneath, you mean like double coil spring
Speaker 1: traps springs in the chains. Your double long spring spring
Speaker 1: under the pan and a spring going to the tensions.
Speaker 1: So if the wolves pulling, they're not hitting a hard end.
Speaker 1: And and now we didn't back then, but now we
Speaker 1: have underpan tensions spring devices to keep all their bycatch down.
Speaker 1: So you can set that weight. We set it with
Speaker 1: a measured scale and you can set it for two
Speaker 1: pounds or twenty pounds or whatever. Do you wolves ten
Speaker 1: pounds of pressure? That's a red fox? Walk right over? Fox?
Speaker 1: Coyotes blinks, yeah, walk right over. Well, you think about, like,
Speaker 1: how much is your average kyote? Pounds? Maybe and it's
Speaker 1: four ft, So you divide their weight by four for
Speaker 1: the amount of weight on a roughly, if you had
Speaker 1: a huge coyot, you maybe catch it. And then how
Speaker 1: would you so you'd go into a likely wolf area?
Speaker 1: And would you just make set like dirt hole sets
Speaker 1: on roads and stuff where they're traveling or you're asking
Speaker 1: me secrets in my trade, you're really pushing the arms tea. Uh,
Speaker 1: we don't. I hardly ever use a dirt hole set
Speaker 1: because that's what everybody else does. You sent post sets
Speaker 1: some what do you like? You really don't want to
Speaker 1: tell how you catch blind sets? Some really what the
Speaker 1: what's a blind set? I don't know? Lure no attracting right.
Speaker 1: You have to know where the animals are, right, So
Speaker 1: then you're just working there a trail or a path
Speaker 1: and you don't do it or you're gonna get a
Speaker 1: out of bike catch. So you have to know where
Speaker 1: the wolves are are, like a Runde bows site or
Speaker 1: something where they're using a particular trail a lot, and
Speaker 1: you know from like if it's winter, you know they
Speaker 1: use a certain trail system a lot. In the spring
Speaker 1: you can look in the mud and if they're still
Speaker 1: using it, you know, you know where they're danned, or
Speaker 1: you know where the round site is. You've you've snagged wolves,
Speaker 1: trapped them, trap, you've trapped travel hooks, you've trapped wolves,
Speaker 1: no lure, no bait, no nothing, just said where he
Speaker 1: wants not most you have done that. I have not. Actually,
Speaker 1: there was one pack in um in the Swan Valley
Speaker 1: that had a lot of trapping pressure for a lot
Speaker 1: of years. There was a guy who was really good
Speaker 1: trapper there and he'd take his limit every year and
Speaker 1: so these wolves were very very hard to catch. We
Speaker 1: put out traps. My first year, we trapped, we trapped
Speaker 1: in trapped. We never had any luck. We did every
Speaker 1: turk I could think of everything I could think of,
Speaker 1: and finally and they were actually avoiding him, walking around
Speaker 1: him digging them. They knew they were there. I finally
Speaker 1: went to doing a blind trail set, which I don't
Speaker 1: like to do because you chance catching deer or anything
Speaker 1: that comes by. But I knew where the randevousite was.
Speaker 1: I said, okay, I'm going to tiptoe. Can you explain rendee? Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, sure, And then I want to get back
Speaker 1: to Minnesota. So when wolves have pups, they have the
Speaker 1: den and they dan. I like to tell people, oh,
Speaker 1: when did they dan? And when did they breat breeding?
Speaker 1: Pika breeding is about Valentine's Day, Pika danning is about
Speaker 1: tax Day. Okay, so those are just dates to remember.
Speaker 1: They use the den six seven weeks maybe eight. But
Speaker 1: they start moving them away from the den, and they
Speaker 1: move them to a rendezvous site. And it's generally um
Speaker 1: a more open area meadow that has thick cover around
Speaker 1: it that they can escape to safe terrain and their
Speaker 1: water nearby. And so wolves can't hunt with a bunch
Speaker 1: of goofball pups dangling along, So they leave them at
Speaker 1: the rendezvous site. The wolves go out and hunt and
Speaker 1: they bring food back, and they generally leave an adult
Speaker 1: at the on site, so it's gets to be this
Speaker 1: like a pat it's just a pack down area with
Speaker 1: toy wolf toys and bones and chewed up antlers and scats,
Speaker 1: and you know, all summer they're there and they move
Speaker 1: around a few times or not. Some packs move and
Speaker 1: use different rounde bous sites. Some stay pretty station. They
Speaker 1: most of them change round. It was site. But there's
Speaker 1: spokes coming off from these rendezvous sites like a wheel.
Speaker 1: And if you can find that in the summer months,
Speaker 1: that's the spot you don't want to catch it. Usually
Speaker 1: you won't because you've got that spring tension set. So
Speaker 1: to catch this one wolf. And how come the rendezvous
Speaker 1: site doesn't go into the fall because it pups become
Speaker 1: mobile and they start traveling with the adults. They're just
Speaker 1: station periods only three months, two months. It's iganical to
Speaker 1: a dog sixty two days. Yeah, two months. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: I wasn't in my math. That's a cancer. Early February
Speaker 1: Valentine's at tax day. Yeah, okay, give her take a
Speaker 1: little it and it's latitude oriented. So yeah, so anyway,
Speaker 1: that's how I caught the wolf, was finding the rondevousite
Speaker 1: and putting a blind sin in on a trail leading
Speaker 1: into it. And I never walked down the trail again ever.
Speaker 1: I was checked it with binoculars and it was like
Speaker 1: a little stick or something that had to step over
Speaker 1: so a place. It's foot in the right place every time. Yeah, alright, Minnesota,
Speaker 1: there you are. You almost run over one and you
Speaker 1: set the trap on them. Did you guys have some
Speaker 1: with collars on him at that time in Minnesota? Yes?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. His study had been going on for years
Speaker 1: in the Superior National Forest. What were you guys primarily
Speaker 1: interested in looking at everything? Because at that time, I
Speaker 1: mean you gotta remember, this is the late seventies, and
Speaker 1: there was there was VHF callers, and there was airplane
Speaker 1: flying to see them, but that was it. And it's
Speaker 1: in the thick, thick Superior National Forest with a lot
Speaker 1: of water and bogs and forest. You never saw them never.
Speaker 1: It's not like yellow Stone where I just came from
Speaker 1: you going down and have your theramisic offee and you're
Speaker 1: you know, muffins and you sit and watch wolves. It
Speaker 1: just it just wasn't that way. So um yeah, and
Speaker 1: so we would learn what we could by following them
Speaker 1: in the airplane. In the summer, you can't follow tracks.
Speaker 1: So a lot of what I did from ment to
Speaker 1: my career was tracking wolves on skis in the snow
Speaker 1: when you can see every place they step, everything, they sniff, everyplace,
Speaker 1: they mark, scent mark whatever. So this was a lot
Speaker 1: of interpretive stuff. And you guys were interested in what
Speaker 1: how far they move, what they eat, what they eat,
Speaker 1: their ecology were they done, what kind of habitat that use,
Speaker 1: how many there are, how many what happens when two
Speaker 1: over packs overlap? Do they kill each other? In trespassing issues?
Speaker 1: I mean just everything you couldn't see behavior. You could
Speaker 1: interpret a little bit, you know, but you couldn't see it.
Speaker 1: I read an interesting thing out go ahead. I was
Speaker 1: just gonna ask what those wolves were eating. Mostly mostly
Speaker 1: white tailed deer and a few moose. And actually wolves
Speaker 1: in the Midwest eat a lot of beaver. That's all
Speaker 1: going to bring up I read a good already. A
Speaker 1: thing is they were doing a scat analysis, and you
Speaker 1: know how you know, beavers disperse after ice out, and
Speaker 1: it would be that you know, something like and in
Speaker 1: May and June, nine percent of wolf scats would have
Speaker 1: beaver remains in them, but then it would taper off.
Speaker 1: But they would really nail them when they're dispersing. Sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think about a beaver, a lot
Speaker 1: of fat in a beaver, very good and slow. If
Speaker 1: you can get them not in the water, catch them
Speaker 1: on land, you're pretty vulnerable. I mean, wolves aren't there
Speaker 1: swimming for looking for beaver. They're not bobbying for beaver
Speaker 1: in the ponds, catching them on the damns or or houses.
Speaker 1: Remember the track, the track I saw nine, The first
Speaker 1: like wolf track I ever laid eyes on in the
Speaker 1: wild was skirting the edge of a beaver day. And
Speaker 1: bobcats would hunt those things a lot, and then then
Speaker 1: they would ice up, and the bobcats and hunt the ice,
Speaker 1: just going trying to catch them out where they come out. So,
Speaker 1: you know, over my area we don't have so many beavers,
Speaker 1: so it's not as much of a diet. So wolves
Speaker 1: are strictly opportunists. They'll take whatever they can get. They're
Speaker 1: not out there selecting, well, we're going to go look
Speaker 1: for a nice fat cow elk to I mean, that's
Speaker 1: not how they hunt. Whatever they catch is what they catch,
Speaker 1: you know, people think they can kill it will They can't.
Speaker 1: If they had, I mean, they wouldn't work. What do
Speaker 1: you mean people think they can kill it will Well,
Speaker 1: I've heard people say, well, wolves killed just for fun,
Speaker 1: or they can kill whatever they want. And the truth is,
Speaker 1: if if they were that efficient, they wouldn't be living
Speaker 1: in packs. A mountline is a really efficient, very effective
Speaker 1: killer because they have all the teeth, and they have
Speaker 1: sets of sabers on every pond. They can hunt alone
Speaker 1: and they can jump on a milk's back and kill it.
Speaker 1: Wolves don't have that advantage. Every time a wolf has
Speaker 1: to eat, they have to catch a fleeing hoofed mammal
Speaker 1: with their mouth. Think about it, if you had you
Speaker 1: want to get a milk steak, you had to catch
Speaker 1: that elk with your teeth. How successfully you think you
Speaker 1: would be you'd want a lot of buddies. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: why they're they're cooperative, obligatory hunters. They're obliged to cooperate
Speaker 1: to eat, and their prey base determines the size of
Speaker 1: the pack. If they were mostly praying on white tailed deer,
Speaker 1: the packs maybe smaller. If they're praying on mooser elk,
Speaker 1: the packs maybe larger, but it actually just came from
Speaker 1: ill the stone and um Erk mcintaro showed me this
Speaker 1: amazing photo that Doug Smith took of wolf nine eleven.
Speaker 1: It was a clean jock because the wolf was killed,
Speaker 1: but he had broken his jaw completely in half, disarticulated,
Speaker 1: most most likely got kicked. They saw this massive fight.
Speaker 1: This wolf tried to kill an elk and it nearly
Speaker 1: got killed. And the wolf was underwater for a long
Speaker 1: time and the elk was stomping it, and it finally
Speaker 1: came up out of the water and crawled away. Four
Speaker 1: months later, I get back to the jaw. Four months later,
Speaker 1: this wolf by itself had killed an elk in the river.
Speaker 1: They had photos of this interaction. And while it was
Speaker 1: there with this elk, a pack of eight wolves came
Speaker 1: along and killed the wolf. The wolf stood his ground
Speaker 1: to defend the milk, and it was killed by this pack.
Speaker 1: So after they had killed it, they got the skull
Speaker 1: back this jaw from the first elk, and counter was
Speaker 1: broken completely in half, and it healed and was all
Speaker 1: gnarly in kelcifite and completely separate, completely separate, and they
Speaker 1: watched it pulled out and kill this elk by itself.
Speaker 1: People don't think that wolves suffer. I just think. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you had a broken jaw that you could never
Speaker 1: heal and you had to catch things with your mouth, man,
Speaker 1: I'd beat starved very quickly myself. They have that, and
Speaker 1: lots of wolves that are flying turn up dead. We
Speaker 1: had this discussion again over dinner last night. Things was
Speaker 1: a great dinner conversation. Things you find in dead wolves? Wow,
Speaker 1: we were talking all these glary stories. But they suffer
Speaker 1: a lot of injuries in a daily life. So the
Speaker 1: eight that killed them, they were not affiliated. They were different,
Speaker 1: a different pack, So yeah, did they were? They cannibalize
Speaker 1: them when they kill them. They don't know. I it's
Speaker 1: very very very rare that you ever hear that they
Speaker 1: kill them And Durham, I mean it. They're not so
Speaker 1: different from us. They defend their home turf, they defend
Speaker 1: their terror tory, and when trespassers come in, if they
Speaker 1: can catch him, they'll kill them. Some most times sometimes
Speaker 1: they drive them out. It's kind of depends on the
Speaker 1: leadership of the pack that's larger might mix right, and
Speaker 1: it depends on if it's if hormones, it tends a
Speaker 1: breeding season depends on if they're missing an alpha breeder.
Speaker 1: I mean this is how packs form. They do allow
Speaker 1: other wolves, and sometimes, obviously because they have genetic exchange,
Speaker 1: packs are not in bread. But most times when a
Speaker 1: pack encounters a trespasser, they will chase it vigorously and
Speaker 1: if they catch it, they'll kill it. Most times, did
Speaker 1: the you know? Oftentimes I see that the people who
Speaker 1: are who research and work on the Yellowstone Wolves, they
Speaker 1: get very upset if a Yellowstone wolf leave the park
Speaker 1: and gets killed by a hunter outside of the park.
Speaker 1: Do they get really upset one one of their wolves
Speaker 1: gets killed by wolves? Does that bother them? You have
Speaker 1: to ask them. You never had that conversation with anyone.
Speaker 1: I don't work down there, You're just there. I went
Speaker 1: down there as a as a guest record. I mean
Speaker 1: I watched there's a lot of wolves. Wolves die. The
Speaker 1: biggest cause of mortality in Yellowstone Park is wolves killing
Speaker 1: other wolves. Oh vast majority. Because there's no there's no
Speaker 1: hunting or trapping within the park. They get killed by ungulates,
Speaker 1: they drawn, they starve, they get parbo iristes temper. But
Speaker 1: the biggest cause of mortality, and said Yellowstone Park is
Speaker 1: wolves killing wolves and these usually these trustpass or inter
Speaker 1: territorial strife things. Oh my goodness, yeah, packs come apart.
Speaker 1: Packs form all through mortality. Do they mostly when wolves? Uh?
Speaker 1: Like when wolves commit frature side? Is it mostly? Um?
Speaker 1: Does it mostly occur as in fanticide? Like? Is it
Speaker 1: mostly killing young? Or is it mostly killing old? Or
Speaker 1: is it just nondiscriminate? First of all, I wouldn't put
Speaker 1: the term fracture side on. I would say because they're
Speaker 1: not friends. They're they're simply defending the resources, much like
Speaker 1: we do in war, or much like you would defend
Speaker 1: your home, or much like Chicago defends its people for
Speaker 1: the police force or whatever. They defend their resources, whether
Speaker 1: it's food or at home or whatever. There's no malice.
Speaker 1: It's not done with usually forethought, although there have been incidences. Um,
Speaker 1: they're generally not going to den's and digging out each
Speaker 1: other's pops and killing them because the dens are They
Speaker 1: generally do not do because the dens are protected by
Speaker 1: the resident wolves. Why would you try and go in
Speaker 1: and take on a pack with its pops, You'd be
Speaker 1: you'd be killed. They do do that with coyotes. They
Speaker 1: o coyotes and killer pops. That's done with forethought, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a plan. But wolves just wolves, like any other
Speaker 1: carnival remoteline. They dispatch each other's competitors, that's all it is.
Speaker 1: That's why they don't generally eat the carcass. They just
Speaker 1: kill them and move on. And I think you know people,
Speaker 1: I give it, so it's nondiscriminatory. It's not like they
Speaker 1: target the young because they're easier to kill, or the
Speaker 1: old because they're easier to kill. It's just like opportunistically,
Speaker 1: like do you have the advantage and you take a
Speaker 1: take a vantage of the advantage. And I think this
Speaker 1: is a question you have to ask the folks in
Speaker 1: Yellowstone because they study this intimately. And I don't want
Speaker 1: to be miscoded or lead people of stray. Sometimes the
Speaker 1: alphas are killed because they're out front of the charge.
Speaker 1: And I don't know the ratio of the percent of
Speaker 1: animals are killed at home, anyam are young of the year, yearlings,
Speaker 1: two year olds, alpha's I don't know that you have
Speaker 1: to ask them. But that's the leads, that's the lead
Speaker 1: cause inside the inside Yellowstone Park wolves, yes, they published
Speaker 1: on that and outside of Yellowstone like where I live
Speaker 1: over in western Montana. The lead causes human variety of
Speaker 1: human causes, from hunting to vehicles, everything yep, or complaints yep.
Speaker 1: Do you count livestock complaints as human Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: you would. Sure, Yeah, I mean wildlife services, UM trains, vehicles, hunting,
Speaker 1: trapping trains. Yeah, they get by trains occasionally, and I
Speaker 1: think in those cases they're probably feeding on animals have
Speaker 1: been hit on the track. There's a cost. So let's
Speaker 1: let's back up and pick up your biography again. So
Speaker 1: you work up in Minnesota. I did, And what happened then?
Speaker 1: You were just like you were a grad student, right,
Speaker 1: So it was really pretty interesting point in my life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was a young undergraduate and I just graduated. I
Speaker 1: was still a student when I took on in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven working for Dave Beach, and then the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy nine, I just finished goal graduated. I
Speaker 1: was working for Steve Fritz up in northern Minnesota in
Speaker 1: a very very tiny, very conservative, little small farming community.
Speaker 1: I was hired as a federal trapper do trap and
Speaker 1: remove livestock depredating wolves. So federal with Wildlife Services, US
Speaker 1: Fish and Wilife Service would be like wildlife services. Okay,
Speaker 1: So for me, I mean growing up a little bit storry,
Speaker 1: I didn't really interested in research. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I was thrust into this world of wolf conflict and
Speaker 1: management and mitigation. And wolves were still they were threatened,
Speaker 1: so the landowners couldn't take it into their own hands
Speaker 1: like we can here, but they had to call in
Speaker 1: the game warden like that. When you say threatened, they were,
Speaker 1: they were, Yet there were any yes, listed as a
Speaker 1: threatened species, and so um I was be called. The
Speaker 1: game weren't to be called. I'd be called, and we
Speaker 1: go out to the farm. They weren't called ranches. They
Speaker 1: were called farms, and it was dairy cattle and beef.
Speaker 1: We would look at the carcass and determine if wolves
Speaker 1: had killed it or not through tracks, the nature of
Speaker 1: the bite, wounds, wed skin the cow and whatever. You
Speaker 1: could tell what it killed it? What would you what
Speaker 1: was the most? Uh? Tell me a couple of telltale
Speaker 1: signs that it was wolf? Um tracks? Uh? Leading to
Speaker 1: with the chase scene with bites the bite marks. I
Speaker 1: mean you can't just because wolf tracks are there, doesn't
Speaker 1: mean they killed it, but you go on, you'd skin
Speaker 1: out the cow and you'd see the bite marks in
Speaker 1: various places. And if they had hemorrhaging around them, the
Speaker 1: animal was alive when it was bitten, no hemorrhaging. They
Speaker 1: were feeding on a dead call. So you look for
Speaker 1: that um scats full of cow hair, but you have
Speaker 1: to find the bite wounds. So that was tough because
Speaker 1: if they took a small calf, there wouldn't be any
Speaker 1: thing there, there'd be nothing. Sometimes they take it apart
Speaker 1: and it would be gone overnight. What's the window of opportunity? Um?
Speaker 1: How many how many hours days do you have before
Speaker 1: it becomes too late? Well, it depends on if it's
Speaker 1: a you know, a thousand pound cora eighty pound calf.
Speaker 1: So as soon as you get the call, you go
Speaker 1: out there. And because they were smaller operations, they generally
Speaker 1: could see their livestock. But we're in the West, we
Speaker 1: have allotments and you know, you don't see your stock
Speaker 1: sometimes for weeks um. So people were pretty on top
Speaker 1: of it, but it was it was a really interesting
Speaker 1: turning point for me and my education that you know, yeah, Diane,
Speaker 1: wolves or do cause problems and people don't really love them.
Speaker 1: And just because you had this wonderful research experience, you's
Speaker 1: a whole another world out there. So it was really
Speaker 1: important for me growing in my career. And I had
Speaker 1: to drop these wolves that were killing stock and we
Speaker 1: hauled them down to ground rapids where they were euthanized.
Speaker 1: Um really, yep, Why why would you move them to
Speaker 1: euthanize them? Because at that point in time, we weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to shoot them, So how would you transport them?
Speaker 1: I drugged them. I'd catch them, I sedate them and
Speaker 1: put them in a crate at home to Grand Rapids,
Speaker 1: which was very close, and then they would be a
Speaker 1: Grand Rapids Minnesota. Yeah, okay, that all right? That was
Speaker 1: confusing Minnesota. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. How many when
Speaker 1: you're doing that work? Howming did you catch that summer? Oh?
Speaker 1: If you are handful, I don't know how many. It was.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a lot, but it was enough that I
Speaker 1: could do my job. There wasn't a lot of complaints,
Speaker 1: to be real honest, And Steve Fritz, my boss, had
Speaker 1: told me, well, when you have times when there aren't complaints,
Speaker 1: then I want you to call it in radio collar
Speaker 1: for research. So I was dropping all summer. So I
Speaker 1: don't know ten fifteen wolves. I mean, it wasn't that
Speaker 1: just wasn't that much problems, to be real, honest. But
Speaker 1: if you were the particular farmer that was having the problem,
Speaker 1: it was pretty significant to you. And certain farms chronically
Speaker 1: had problems, in certain farms never had problems, and they
Speaker 1: could be four miles apart. You might not be comfortable
Speaker 1: answering this, but go back to those days, das, Okay,
Speaker 1: those days in that place. Um, if you run cattle
Speaker 1: or have cows, they die from all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: They died during they died during birth, Okay, they just
Speaker 1: get hung up in fences and die, They hit by cars,
Speaker 1: all kinds of plants, poisonous plants, there's another one. Did
Speaker 1: you find then, that for a farmer or rancher to
Speaker 1: lose an animal to a wolf seemed to weigh on
Speaker 1: them more heavily or inspire more rage in them than
Speaker 1: if they were to lose one too poisonous plants, or
Speaker 1: lose one to getting hit by a car because it
Speaker 1: jump the fence, or any number of other causes. Did
Speaker 1: you feel that it was that there was an imbalance
Speaker 1: about how people perceived that death. Yeah, and some people
Speaker 1: there definitely was. And I think a big part of
Speaker 1: it was because they had no ability to control those
Speaker 1: wolves legally, so they couldn't do much about it. So
Speaker 1: when they had the wolf was recovering because they were
Speaker 1: protected and they couldn't do anything, and they might have literally,
Speaker 1: they might literally be seeing wolves in their pen tearing
Speaker 1: some calf or cow apart, and legally, you know, they
Speaker 1: weren't supposed to be doing anything about it, so that
Speaker 1: that sense of helplessness made it worse. Now Here in
Speaker 1: the West Montana, I mean, if a rancher's got to
Speaker 1: wolves and the pan are about to chase cows or whatever,
Speaker 1: they don't even you know, they can take care of it.
Speaker 1: They can shoot them legally and they just call and
Speaker 1: report it. It's called a Senate built two hundred. They're
Speaker 1: legally protective. They can't keep the hide or anything, but
Speaker 1: we go pick it up and it's over and it
Speaker 1: helps diffuse animosity. What was your next move from So
Speaker 1: you did that one summer? So while I was there,
Speaker 1: I just you know, graduated, like I said, I applied
Speaker 1: to graduate schools, and while I was working in northern
Speaker 1: Minnesota on this wildlife services job. I got accepted at
Speaker 1: the University of Montana for graduate school in the fall.
Speaker 1: So when I departed Minnesota, I packed at my little
Speaker 1: car and I drove to Missoula, where I had the
Speaker 1: graduate project. And it was really interesting because I just
Speaker 1: came from all this whirlwind of two years of intensive
Speaker 1: wolf research and university college ecology classes and and now
Speaker 1: this new world of this conflicts going on, and we
Speaker 1: had this opportunity in Montana. In nine was there was
Speaker 1: one wolf outside of Minnesota, west of Mississippi, and we
Speaker 1: had the university to put a collar on it, just
Speaker 1: north of Glacier Park, like six seven miles and that
Speaker 1: wolf tiptoed down occasionally into Glacier Park, and that was
Speaker 1: the only wolf in the west and the only one
Speaker 1: they tried to come down female, And Bob Ream named
Speaker 1: her Kishnina after a creek that was just north of
Speaker 1: Glacier And so people don't realize those wolves walked down
Speaker 1: out there seventy nine and so she came down into
Speaker 1: the northwest corner of Glacier Park and a few wolves
Speaker 1: have been trickling down me and wolves here and there.
Speaker 1: He had a wolf shot you're on Montana occasionally, but
Speaker 1: they never stuck. They're just they weren't allowed to stay
Speaker 1: at the wolves walking in on their own from camp.
Speaker 1: They absolutely walk. So for me to do a master's project,
Speaker 1: I had to think of some kind of an interesting
Speaker 1: project so we can monitor this wolf and still have
Speaker 1: enough data. So what I did was, they decided I'm
Speaker 1: going to look at because I was a good trapper,
Speaker 1: I decided I would look at this wolf and compare
Speaker 1: her food selection, at rice selection, and habitat use with
Speaker 1: coyotes within her territory and outside of her territory. So
Speaker 1: I caught and call it a lot of coyotes. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, I kept trying to catch more wolves, and
Speaker 1: there weren't any. So that was the core of my
Speaker 1: master's thesis. But I was fascinating how they were interacting
Speaker 1: on the landscape. Now, when you were doing that, you
Speaker 1: you presumably had like a course load you had to do. Yes,
Speaker 1: how did you balance that with being in the class
Speaker 1: Like one hand, you're in some classroom with a bunch
Speaker 1: of ding bat students, right, and then the next in
Speaker 1: the other hand, you're up trapping wolves. I alternated with
Speaker 1: queer in the order system. Then so I do a
Speaker 1: quarter in the field and then a quarterer in school
Speaker 1: in the quarter in the field, and go back and
Speaker 1: forth through around through two and a half years. So
Speaker 1: I had to read the classroom part. No, I didn't.
Speaker 1: Actually it was interesting to me, and great professor's back
Speaker 1: then class I'm not hacking. I went to graduate school
Speaker 1: Jouncle Barto Gara, Bobbery and all these old wonderful guys
Speaker 1: who were real good mentors. So no, but I was
Speaker 1: always Jones and to get back, always Jones, going to
Speaker 1: get back up the North Fork. And that Collard, the
Speaker 1: Collard female that you had that was coming down. You
Speaker 1: guys are getting data off that it was still a
Speaker 1: good college. Yeah yeah, and um it's it died out
Speaker 1: in about a year and a half. It should have
Speaker 1: lasted longer, but it didn't. But we continued to see
Speaker 1: tracks of a female because you can tell by the
Speaker 1: yur nation and the snow through her territory throughout the
Speaker 1: winter and using the same travel routes. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sure it was her. And then the next she met
Speaker 1: a mate the next year and they produced the first
Speaker 1: litter in mate in what country Canada, of course, so
Speaker 1: just north the glacier. They did, just north the glacier.
Speaker 1: How many miles outside of how many miles north of
Speaker 1: the border, seven or eight? And she's flirting with the border.
Speaker 1: She's flirting. Yeah, she crossed occasionally. So um her died
Speaker 1: that summer and she it was captured inadvertently in a
Speaker 1: barret trap in Canada. They were researching trap research. So
Speaker 1: this female raised she had seven pups, half for gray,
Speaker 1: half for black, with no help. We were worried about
Speaker 1: her their survival because she was really remarkably um proficient,
Speaker 1: apparently because no one was feeding her. I mean this
Speaker 1: was out where their oil gas exploration and log trucks
Speaker 1: and wilderness and wild things and lots of game. And
Speaker 1: by that winner we would still see tracks in snow
Speaker 1: of eight wolves. So they all made it. And then
Speaker 1: about two years later another female came in and the
Speaker 1: next letter was born in five. And then in nighties
Speaker 1: six they moved more down to the park a lot
Speaker 1: and an eighty six the first pack was born in
Speaker 1: Glacier Park in over fifty years first litter, so that's
Speaker 1: the progression kind of went from like one to two
Speaker 1: to seven to fourteen and then they just kept expanding.
Speaker 1: But all of those wolves, all of those wolves prior
Speaker 1: to reintroductions in the bark in Idaho, they all walked
Speaker 1: down and nobody brought them. Nobody brought those wolves. And
Speaker 1: it's so hard people don't grasp that I was there.
Speaker 1: I know that there were many of us hard, you know,
Speaker 1: volunteers and students and starving technicians, following these tracks around,
Speaker 1: and we know that they were not brought there did
Speaker 1: so I didn't know that. I know that people like
Speaker 1: are up there up in arms about the Yellowstone wolves
Speaker 1: being brought there, but there are sort of I guess
Speaker 1: would you'd call them a conspiracy theorist that people think
Speaker 1: that those wolves up there were brought into and they
Speaker 1: didn't walk in. I don't know what you'd call it,
Speaker 1: because I'm not a believer in it. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: the factual check fact checker there. I was there, and
Speaker 1: they were native. And the interesting thing was, while we
Speaker 1: were killing off her wolves down here, there was a
Speaker 1: big program in southwestern Elbird in southeastern BC to poison
Speaker 1: off wolves. So in the sixties, by the late sixties,
Speaker 1: there basically was kind of a wolf free zone, right
Speaker 1: around the international border. So when Kishnina arrived, she had
Speaker 1: to come some distance, maybe Jasper, but at least mamp
Speaker 1: She had to run that gauntlet down through all these
Speaker 1: hazards and she made it. Yeah. Well, a mountain lion
Speaker 1: you know about this recently left the Black Hills of
Speaker 1: South Dakota and got hit by car and Connecticut it's nothing.
Speaker 1: And so when my tracking, so I call her this
Speaker 1: one little wolf in Glacier and we had her in
Speaker 1: the area for a year and a half and I
Speaker 1: caught her again and I replaced her. Call her. She
Speaker 1: was not very big, and she was an average small
Speaker 1: female And like, what tell me this eight pounds? What's
Speaker 1: a big male? So the biggest wolf I've ever caught pounds,
Speaker 1: which is almost as much as I weigh. So it's
Speaker 1: pretty amazing when you see hundred and fifty pound is
Speaker 1: like the two and I'll yes, I'll get there. But
Speaker 1: what I want to say about this one wolf is
Speaker 1: she she was collared and then she floated around again.
Speaker 1: She'd been for a year and then she just disappeared
Speaker 1: and we couldn't find her. And that happens with these
Speaker 1: VHF collars because they're not GPS collars and you have
Speaker 1: to physically go out and listen for the signal with
Speaker 1: airplanes and ground whatever. She was shot seven months later
Speaker 1: at Poosh Push Poosh Coupe, which is up very in
Speaker 1: northern Alberta b C area, which is north of where
Speaker 1: some of these wolves to Mellowstone were captured to bring down.
Speaker 1: So the moral of the story is that wolf was
Speaker 1: connected with wolves further north than these wolves were taken
Speaker 1: for reintroduction. They are one species here, one population. They
Speaker 1: are not different. Okay, Okay, you're getting That's great, You're
Speaker 1: getting ahead of me a little bit. I'm just sorry.
Speaker 1: I want to back up hit a couple points. Okay, No,
Speaker 1: I want to get to that. I want to get
Speaker 1: to the super Bowl thing. I want to we hat
Speaker 1: to like set the table for that one a little bit.
Speaker 1: The urination pattern females between their legs, males and female
Speaker 1: like a spade female dog will razor leg, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't go up high on it tree, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. They mark a little snow bank or something
Speaker 1: spade female does. So you can tell from the urine
Speaker 1: pattern from the tracks relative to the where the piss lands.
Speaker 1: You can tell somewhat age of the female, not age,
Speaker 1: you can tell if she's dominant or not dominant, meaning
Speaker 1: within her social structure. And an old female doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: the dominant one. So what does the dominant one due
Speaker 1: to raised leg your nation. But it's just you know,
Speaker 1: the squat and raise their little leg up because you
Speaker 1: don't off to more of an angle, just a little
Speaker 1: to the side. It's not quite between their legs. Is
Speaker 1: she There's no way to know. But is it that
Speaker 1: she's mimicking a male? Like? What is that? Like? Why
Speaker 1: does a dominant female raiser leg a little bit? You
Speaker 1: ever seen a spade female dog do that. I've had
Speaker 1: spade female dogs that do that, and they had a
Speaker 1: Spade female dog. But I just I feel like she
Speaker 1: would just squat. Okay, well, she probably wasn't a very
Speaker 1: dominant dog. No, I was dominant man, see, as should
Speaker 1: be with dogs. But so the dominant thing, it's just
Speaker 1: it's a higher mark, higher in the leanscape, more visible,
Speaker 1: more detectable. They may have a higher androgen level in
Speaker 1: their body. It's like a female dog doesn't have much estrogen.
Speaker 1: They tend to start raising their leg. It's just that way.
Speaker 1: It's just behaviorally, but more dominant the mark, the more
Speaker 1: dominant the animal. Okay, I know this isn't the most importance.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen where a female was dominant and
Speaker 1: then lost dominance and stopped raising her leg or once
Speaker 1: they start they never stop. I never. I didn't get
Speaker 1: to see the wolves in the North Fork of the
Speaker 1: Flathead like Minnesota, because it's so forced. That's a question
Speaker 1: for Yellowstone where they can actually see them out in
Speaker 1: the I'm sure they published papers, they're probably documented. I
Speaker 1: don't know. The male, of course, raised like urinates, and
Speaker 1: a dominant male will make a very high mark and
Speaker 1: tail flag and just be like, oh, I'm just the
Speaker 1: boss up. So they'd like to they like to urinate
Speaker 1: on a on a poster or tree. Yeah, in a
Speaker 1: in a real subordinate mail might actually squat urinate when
Speaker 1: he's younger, especially, but yeah, the higher the mark, the
Speaker 1: higher the status. Nice. Um, then that was behind on
Speaker 1: another thing too. Oh, let's not get into the superwolf
Speaker 1: the suit. No, we're gonna get there the superwolf conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1: If that I don't know that that's a conspiracy theory, right, Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna get into that see. You know what's
Speaker 1: funny is you might learn from us. You might learn
Speaker 1: um besides us just learning everything from you, you might
Speaker 1: learn from us about what sorts of thing creep around
Speaker 1: in the ether among hunting and fishing type folks. So
Speaker 1: I try to heard it all though I am a
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing type of I have not heard at all.
Speaker 1: But do you? But do you ever spend time undercovered?
Speaker 1: Do you ever just sitting in the bar and act
Speaker 1: like you're not who you are? Just absorb what people say?
Speaker 1: I am. What you see is what you get. I
Speaker 1: am who I am. Okay, So you never just like
Speaker 1: get into a wolf conversation bait the person along to
Speaker 1: try to get to try to find out what they're thinking.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I didn't do that when I was younger,
Speaker 1: but I don't do it now. Before you just sit
Speaker 1: there go you don't say, you don't say so, Um,
Speaker 1: what's the big Okay, tell me in your career the
Speaker 1: biggest wolf you've ever weighed on? We're talking certified scales
Speaker 1: right like you do it where you're getting the actual
Speaker 1: real weight. So the biggest wolf I've ever caught was
Speaker 1: a pounds. He was the breeding male of the Headwaters pack.
Speaker 1: What's the biggest weight, um that you've like, do you
Speaker 1: know the highest acceptable way? Because I know they've gotten
Speaker 1: some bigger weights and Alaska, for instance, a little bit
Speaker 1: the high We were asking this of the Yellowstone folks.
Speaker 1: So the biggest wolves they've ever weighed there, and those
Speaker 1: are very you know, they're doing pretty well. Um. I
Speaker 1: think it was close to like a hundred and forty
Speaker 1: seven pounds or something like that, which is more than
Speaker 1: I wait, that's a really big yeah. And I've also
Speaker 1: heard that when you get those high end weights, it's
Speaker 1: typically something with twenty pounds of meat in its belly typically,
Speaker 1: which you know can really yeah, really like tip it
Speaker 1: to the high end. So in my career, considering starting
Speaker 1: with Minnesota, and I've I've worked in the Canadian National Parks,
Speaker 1: I've colored wolves in British, Columbia, Alberta, Montana, Royal, Romania.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've had a huge Romania in Minnesota. So
Speaker 1: the wolves on average in the West where we are,
Speaker 1: because your audience is the Western audience, we got them
Speaker 1: all over places. Some Minnesota wolves are on average twenty
Speaker 1: maybe smaller. Far more people will listen to this who
Speaker 1: aren't in the West than are on the West Saks.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Okay, So they're smaller the Midwestern wolves.
Speaker 1: It's a smaller and it's called the Eastern wolf. It's
Speaker 1: slightly different. Our wolves in the West are slightly larger. Again,
Speaker 1: it's prey based. The wolves in the Midwest live on
Speaker 1: deer and beaver and occasionally almost Wora wolves live predominantly
Speaker 1: almost The wolves out here live primarily deer and elk
Speaker 1: occasionally most, but they have a larger prey that they
Speaker 1: go and the ones that came from Canada they may
Speaker 1: have bread and caribout which again are larger and more
Speaker 1: most so they are what they eat, just like us.
Speaker 1: And if you're you know, if you're if you're taking
Speaker 1: down a hundred forty pound deer, that's your diet. Does
Speaker 1: not behoove you toway a hundred forty pounds because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of you they're gonna eat. So just being
Speaker 1: smaller that just works out. It just if you need
Speaker 1: take down a really big, a thousand pound animal, you
Speaker 1: need a lot of real big beefy animals. So, okay,
Speaker 1: super wolves, are you ready to lay out? I don't
Speaker 1: even want to do it. I'm not even do it.
Speaker 1: Lay out what lay out the super wolf, lay out
Speaker 1: the super wolf. It's been a while since I have
Speaker 1: had to do this or even think about it. But
Speaker 1: I think that the theory goes that I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know the reason why or the proposed reason why.
Speaker 1: But the theory is that for some reason, they trapped
Speaker 1: a bunch of wolves. And we even talked to a
Speaker 1: trapper told us who told us that, and he that
Speaker 1: he had an evidences this was true that because he
Speaker 1: knew the trapper that trapped these wolves in Canada. It's
Speaker 1: it's okay, go ahead. But there's there's two there's two
Speaker 1: competing wisdoms about the super wolf. Okay, well, either way,
Speaker 1: that they they picked out and they they picked out
Speaker 1: the biggest, baddest, nastiest, meanest wolves, and those are the
Speaker 1: ones that they brought down and put into els on
Speaker 1: that sational park. I bet again, I don't know why
Speaker 1: or well, okay, and there's that, and we were told
Speaker 1: that by a fella. Yeah, and there's another one that
Speaker 1: they took the wrong wolves, the long species of wolf, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're sober, the wrong variety. Yeah, from way too far north.
Speaker 1: And the ones that were here, the native wolves here
Speaker 1: where these little rinky dinky plant very like mild mannered,
Speaker 1: polite little wolves. And they went and got these big
Speaker 1: northern savages that are two fifty pounds, and they cut
Speaker 1: those loose down. As soon as they got here. They
Speaker 1: just reigned holy hell on the north Yellowstone Elkerve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the heard went from twenties some plus thousand all the
Speaker 1: way down to four because biologists, can you remember to
Speaker 1: within this. I'm just gonna let you run. Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna let you run. Be careful. How much time do
Speaker 1: you let you run? But but I we're gonna see
Speaker 1: how good you are. Um as you run on this,
Speaker 1: however you see fit? Can you also touch on the
Speaker 1: idea and I think this comes from you, the idea
Speaker 1: that the reintroduction maybe it was not necessary. You just
Speaker 1: give me four hours with some materials recover, so I
Speaker 1: will start. Let's do it. Let's start with the super
Speaker 1: wolf first. So the wolves that they captured up in
Speaker 1: a Hinton and for in St. John's are within dispersal
Speaker 1: distance of our wolves here? Where are those places? Tell people?
Speaker 1: Where those places? So? Um one is in Alberta and
Speaker 1: one is in BC. They're close to the Alberta BC line.
Speaker 1: Um there about. One is about three miles north or so.
Speaker 1: One is about five miles north or so of hair
Speaker 1: of Glacier Park the border give you a take. And
Speaker 1: so the crew went up there and they just had
Speaker 1: guys who are trapping bringing you know, call and they
Speaker 1: went out put a radio collar on them to have
Speaker 1: a judice wolf, so then they could go out and
Speaker 1: fly and catch more wolves and dark than whatever. They
Speaker 1: just took the whatever wolves they could get. There was
Speaker 1: not a selection for bigger, meaner, badder, uglier, beautiful whatever wolves.
Speaker 1: They just random sample those locations. I don't need to
Speaker 1: have to ask somebody from Yellowstone. I think it's because
Speaker 1: the Canadian government says, we're really glad to give you
Speaker 1: all the worlds you want. They're free, come and get
Speaker 1: them serious. Because out there they still aerial gun them,
Speaker 1: don't they in certain places. I don't think so, not anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't think so. I'm not sure, but I don't
Speaker 1: think so. Maybe back then they were they were killing them.
Speaker 1: I mean, they economically valuable pelt they have, and so
Speaker 1: they kept them in the wolves that they could catch
Speaker 1: as a family group. Were the wolves that they put
Speaker 1: into Yellowstone and the holding pens with the hopes that
Speaker 1: they would stay together as a pack. And the young
Speaker 1: teenage kind of age wolves that would be potentially good
Speaker 1: dispersers or unassociated with other wolves. They caught those and
Speaker 1: they put them in Yellowstone because the idea wasn't in
Speaker 1: I mean in Idaho. They caught those and put them
Speaker 1: in Idahole. The idea was they wanted family groups to
Speaker 1: stay in the park, but when they dropped him off
Speaker 1: with the wilderness Boundary and Idaho, they wanted them to
Speaker 1: just blow like dandelion fluff in the wind and disperse
Speaker 1: and find each other and pair and form new packs.
Speaker 1: So they were tartly. Oh yeah, So the ones that
Speaker 1: they put in Yellowstone was called a soft release because
Speaker 1: the ones by Frank Church, they wanted them to split.
Speaker 1: They didn't put packs in there, they put in individuals.
Speaker 1: They wanted them. They dropped what wolves there over two years,
Speaker 1: and they wanted them to just go go high and
Speaker 1: wide and find each other. Hot hot release, hard hard release,
Speaker 1: herd release. And was that to so they can monitor
Speaker 1: sort of two different versions of releases and research too different. Yes,
Speaker 1: because you've got to realize prior to the Yellowstone wolf introduction,
Speaker 1: this had never been done anywhere in the world ever,
Speaker 1: and so they didn't know how it turned out. It
Speaker 1: was like, this is our best guest. So we'll build
Speaker 1: these pans with cycle and fences, like we will hold
Speaker 1: them for through breeding season, and just before they're gonna welp,
Speaker 1: we're gonna cut them loose. And those pregnant females aren't
Speaker 1: going to probably go very far. And they've got their
Speaker 1: pack mates now they've made it, and we're gonna hope
Speaker 1: they stick together and stay in the park and Idaho
Speaker 1: it's like, you guys, better run your tails off and
Speaker 1: get the heck away from people and go find each
Speaker 1: other and disappear in the wilderness and mates. So it
Speaker 1: was a totally different starter, and they were literally the
Speaker 1: doors are opened up, the wolves were kicked out, and
Speaker 1: they're gone in idahol it's totally different. So both worked,
Speaker 1: and yeah, they both worked. Interestingly, I had a wolf
Speaker 1: that caught and Glacier Park and he hung around for
Speaker 1: a while and then he ended up going over to
Speaker 1: the Kelly Creek area in Idaho wild Area and he
Speaker 1: stayed there, and the fish and game would keep drag
Speaker 1: of him, and we'd see him occasionally, and he was
Speaker 1: there with a radio collar, and he just bided his
Speaker 1: time by himself up in the Great Burn country. And
Speaker 1: I mean it's a big wolf by himself. He was
Speaker 1: a hundred eleven pounds on e cottom, pretty big male.
Speaker 1: He lived by himself, killing whatever you could do. And
Speaker 1: when they let those wolves kicked him loose in seven
Speaker 1: at the edge of the wilderness, this little black young
Speaker 1: female found her way up to Kelly Create and paired
Speaker 1: with that collared male from Glacier Park and they formed
Speaker 1: the Kelly Creek and he lived to be eleven. He
Speaker 1: lived a long long time. That's an old wolf, very
Speaker 1: very very old. Average life expectancy of a wolf. They've
Speaker 1: calculated it in Yellowstone four point six years, I believe,
Speaker 1: and in Minnesota four point one average life expectancy in years.
Speaker 1: You make it to five, you're doing really well. Eleven
Speaker 1: is very old. So you've only seen a handful over
Speaker 1: ten years. Yeah, I can count him on one hand. Huh.
Speaker 1: They just don't live very long. I had one brought
Speaker 1: in for checking this fall that a trapper caught over by.
Speaker 1: Libby was really interesting because it had been trapped in
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve. Was an adult already and he
Speaker 1: was brought in so he think he was about nine,
Speaker 1: and that's a really old wolf. The trapper brought him
Speaker 1: in dead. Yeah, he caught. He harvest I didn't know
Speaker 1: if he meant like trapper, like you were a trap. No,
Speaker 1: harvested him for for and um he yeah, he lived
Speaker 1: on that landscape all that time and avoided Oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: I can't tell you how many times he'd probably you know,
Speaker 1: had experiences with humans that he should have died and
Speaker 1: he didn't. So actually he had a bullet, a small
Speaker 1: twenty two caliber lodged in the base of the skull
Speaker 1: that healed over. Really, I'm telling you these wolves he did.
Speaker 1: He sent me the photo. They don't have it easy.
Speaker 1: So back to the super wolves. Yeah, we're digressing. So
Speaker 1: the should I repeat about the glacier wolf, about the
Speaker 1: one that I caught that dispersed. You could remind me
Speaker 1: because you're making because now I think the connection will
Speaker 1: have more potent. So all these people are concerned about
Speaker 1: these wolves not being the same wolf. So this little
Speaker 1: female that I dropped in Glacier Park at about age two,
Speaker 1: and she dispersed in nine seven. This is one of
Speaker 1: the ones that walked in original. Yeah, she was born
Speaker 1: in Glacier Park. I know because we caught her as
Speaker 1: a pup. I know she was born there. Anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: she went up and dispersed and disappeared, and she ended
Speaker 1: up being killed by a farmer. And she was traveling
Speaker 1: with other wolves in July and called it in because
Speaker 1: out of the radio color a phone number. Game Warden
Speaker 1: called me and this is where she was shot. And
Speaker 1: it was north where most of the Yellowstone wolf were
Speaker 1: taken from. It was equally far north as the furthest
Speaker 1: north Yellowstone what was were taken from. So clearly that
Speaker 1: range that she traveled, it's all one set of jeans.
Speaker 1: It's one wolf population. And I can tell that to
Speaker 1: people time and time again. And she's not the only one.
Speaker 1: She was the first one that we documented. She spirst
Speaker 1: five and forty miles straight line. No, I don't know.
Speaker 1: She may have gone further past that. When they do that,
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in the anomalies. What is it that
Speaker 1: made her do that? Because she's a wolf, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is she's not unusual. It's just that it's really
Speaker 1: hard to document it, and not that we have GPS colors.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, they are all over the place. We
Speaker 1: had wolves and Yellowstone go to Colorado and Utah. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is not unusual now that we know, we just
Speaker 1: didn't have the tools to detect it. Average wolf dispersial
Speaker 1: instance is probably average including all habits, probably around fifty miles.
Speaker 1: But there are those that gos and in Canada where
Speaker 1: they're following migratory hurts, Oh my god, they'll go thousand
Speaker 1: miles easily. Remember that we're on Remember what you spose
Speaker 1: you're talking about. Let me let me sidetracking from Matt
Speaker 1: Have you have we yet had um? I'm sure we
Speaker 1: have introduced wolves intermingle with wolves that came in on
Speaker 1: their own. Yes. So originally we had the native wolves
Speaker 1: that walked down from Canada that colonized northwest Montana and
Speaker 1: started spilling at Idahole a little bit. The introductions were winters,
Speaker 1: and those populations in Idaho Yellowstone in northwest Montana were
Speaker 1: separate for quite a long time genetically, and they didn't
Speaker 1: begin to successfully not just dispersed, but dispersed land and
Speaker 1: breed that's the sign of success when they're only inter England.
Speaker 1: And now we have shown through genetics and radio collars
Speaker 1: their one population Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, you know, Wyoming.
Speaker 1: It's one about the ones in northern California just came
Speaker 1: from Oregon, which came from Yellowstone. Yeah, I mean nobody
Speaker 1: put them there, and you could say, well, they were
Speaker 1: put into Yellowstone? Yeah? Or seven? The thing? Why did
Speaker 1: they not come out of the frank Church. They may have.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think. I'm pretty sure that our seven,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure it came from yellow Stone. But sorry,
Speaker 1: I don't actually remember. Okay, so now maybe it came
Speaker 1: from I'm feeling good on the stup. Maybe it can't.
Speaker 1: It probably came from Idaho. You're right, not the one
Speaker 1: that wou or seven's the number. Um, I'm feeling good
Speaker 1: on super wolves? Are feeling good on super wolves? Yeah? Okay?
Speaker 1: Now what about the idea? Well, the other thing is
Speaker 1: I've heard that wolves have eight canines. These super wolves
Speaker 1: were a hundred seventy pounds and they have double canines
Speaker 1: with eight canines too. I hear it. You really have
Speaker 1: heard that public meetings, and you can't laugh at a
Speaker 1: public meeting. Someone told you that at the meeting that
Speaker 1: they're super heavy and got extra teeth. I've heard a
Speaker 1: lot when you point out when what are you getting at? Am?
Speaker 1: I I'm right that you observed that we would have
Speaker 1: landed We would have eventually landed in the same place
Speaker 1: had we not done the Yellowstone in Idaho reintroductions, that
Speaker 1: we would have gotten there. Anyways, do you just point
Speaker 1: that out as an interesting idea or do you point
Speaker 1: that out because you feel that there's a lesson there
Speaker 1: or did you feel that there was a mistake made.
Speaker 1: This is a very complex question, so I'm going to
Speaker 1: start with complex show. I'm going to start with data
Speaker 1: because I'm a scientist, so I believe it was there
Speaker 1: were two wolves that showed up, one inside Yellowstone Park
Speaker 1: and one south of Yellowstone Park two years at least
Speaker 1: two to three before the reintroductions, might have been ninety one.
Speaker 1: There was a filmmaker here from Bozeman, right Panovich. He
Speaker 1: was in Hayden Valley filming for Bush Productions filming, and
Speaker 1: he was he was out monitoring a bison kill and
Speaker 1: he was filming this. The grizzlies and the grizzlies and
Speaker 1: the coy its interacting and just just as was getting
Speaker 1: too dark to film, he's packing up his camera, this
Speaker 1: form comes out of the dark and he's going, oh
Speaker 1: my god, I think it's a wolf. And it steps
Speaker 1: up to the kill with the grizzlies and the wolf
Speaker 1: like it belonged there, and they're all tearing at this
Speaker 1: feeding on it. It was too dark to film, so
Speaker 1: he got up like three o'clock the next morning. It
Speaker 1: makes his way back out. Um. I believe it was August.
Speaker 1: It was a summer month and he goes right at
Speaker 1: sun before the sun is there, and he's there waiting
Speaker 1: and as the sun comes up, there's this wolf feeding
Speaker 1: on this kill. Before years before the introduction, he was
Speaker 1: so excited about it. All the whiologists saw the video.
Speaker 1: I know him. It was a real thing. That wolf
Speaker 1: was around. It disappeared, never seen again, and then it
Speaker 1: was black and silver, kind of your classic wolf that
Speaker 1: we see here in this equo system. Now it's like
Speaker 1: an older, middle aged animal. Unlike the rest of us,
Speaker 1: they get gray hair as they get older. What was
Speaker 1: the word you just said, You said, we see here
Speaker 1: in the like we see here now. The classic Sorry
Speaker 1: too much Catheine. And then in September and that fall,
Speaker 1: that same fall, a black pound wolf was shot at
Speaker 1: Fox Park Fox Creek, just south of Yellowstone Park, and
Speaker 1: it was shot by somebody who claimed they thought it
Speaker 1: was a kaya. It was unds in black, but who knows,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't be in that case, It wouldn't be
Speaker 1: in their mind that it would be anything other. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but it was not the one that was
Speaker 1: filmed because this was black. So I was doing my PhD.
Speaker 1: We got the genetic sample. I worked with the Fish
Speaker 1: and Walife Service. We the genetics were done on all
Speaker 1: of those introduced wolves and then about a hundred wolves
Speaker 1: that I had samples from collected over the airs, from
Speaker 1: road killed colored animals, wolves from Canada. We had many
Speaker 1: collaborators contributing samples. That wolf that was shot south of
Speaker 1: Wyoming Genetic Lab in Nason Organ said it was most
Speaker 1: closely related to wolves from nine Mile, Montana. It walked
Speaker 1: down there. It wasn't native wolf too. So there were
Speaker 1: two animals that got down there prior to reintroductions, so
Speaker 1: they were getting there, but they both disappeared overre dead
Speaker 1: and it's kind know where we were at in seventy
Speaker 1: nine and the North Montana we had one wolf that
Speaker 1: made it for a couple of years and finally phoned
Speaker 1: one other and it was just at that threshold. So
Speaker 1: in the early years when this reintroduction was being planned,
Speaker 1: Bob Riem and I keep mentioning Bobby was the father
Speaker 1: of the wolf research here in Montana, fabulous man. Neither
Speaker 1: of us supported reintroduction because we've seen the natural recognization
Speaker 1: work so well. They were making it on their own.
Speaker 1: And when they when they run or trond the gauntlet
Speaker 1: down the rocky mountains, those wolves that are too bold
Speaker 1: or bothers, somebody shoot shovel and shut up, they're gone.
Speaker 1: So it kind of selects for wolves that are a
Speaker 1: little more shy and and there it's more accepted by
Speaker 1: the local people. If the wolves aren't put there, because
Speaker 1: I'm in the controversy here, most of it's because these
Speaker 1: wolves aren't native. So we were against reintroduction for those reasons.
Speaker 1: And then the reintroduction moved forward and it was it
Speaker 1: truly has been, like I cannot think of a more
Speaker 1: successful recovery story anywhere in any dangerous species. It's phenomenal
Speaker 1: because they took over it and they gone everywhere. And
Speaker 1: I just came from a listen to watching wolves. I mean,
Speaker 1: I love to watch them, but I still think that socially,
Speaker 1: it would have been more acceptable if our wolves from
Speaker 1: northwest Montana could continue spreading and they weren't reintroduce. However,
Speaker 1: would it take five years fifty five d That was
Speaker 1: the factor time and the window of opportunity opened through
Speaker 1: the Administrations in charge Center McClure from Idaho, owns from Utah,
Speaker 1: Simpson from Myoming. They've introduced bills to reintroduce wolves because
Speaker 1: they wanted them reintroduced as non essential experimental under the
Speaker 1: Dangerous Species Act instead of really endangered. And that's how
Speaker 1: it moved forward because because you feel that they did
Speaker 1: that because they knew they like you, knew that it
Speaker 1: was going to happen anyway, and it would be better
Speaker 1: for management if it happened experimentally, because it gives you
Speaker 1: greater latitude and lethal control. That's what the reasoning would
Speaker 1: lead one to conclude. I don't know what's in their brain,
Speaker 1: but I would think so. You have to ask that,
Speaker 1: but I would assume so because it would make sense
Speaker 1: as a as a person in charge of conservative states
Speaker 1: that you would want to have some control, especially for
Speaker 1: your live stock constituents, to be able to manage these wolves.
Speaker 1: And if they were fully endangered, you couldn't do anything.
Speaker 1: So they're thinking, you're the constituents. Wolves reproduced rapidly have
Speaker 1: great resilience, they can take it, and they have. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is there's wolves. We in the West have almost
Speaker 1: two thousand wolves across scattered across all of the West
Speaker 1: now from one I mean I was there with the
Speaker 1: first peop don't realize that there's so many more in
Speaker 1: the Upper Midwest and the Upper Great Lakes and the
Speaker 1: Great Lakes has another. So we have almost two thousand here,
Speaker 1: not quite the Great Lakes, there's a four thousand one.
Speaker 1: We have like six thousand wolves now in the lower
Speaker 1: forty eight states connected to one population with Canada. It's
Speaker 1: a vast meta population is no more isolated. Worry they're
Speaker 1: going to go extinct, that is not even a concern anymore.
Speaker 1: When they were kicking around the idea, When when when
Speaker 1: they were um building a plan to do the reintroduction
Speaker 1: and you felt that it was not necessary. Were you
Speaker 1: coming from the perspective of someone who wanted to see
Speaker 1: wolves return, or were you coming from some of the
Speaker 1: perspective of someone who was ambivalent about whether or not
Speaker 1: it happened in terms of like who you were cheering for.
Speaker 1: I was coming to the perspective of coming from Minnesota,
Speaker 1: where they success successfully dealt with conflict issues to resolve
Speaker 1: them where they're still protected but only threatened, not fully endangered.
Speaker 1: To minute to hear where there was one wolf, and
Speaker 1: now we're seeing this wave of wolves coming out that
Speaker 1: we're not bothering a lot of people and the ones
Speaker 1: that were being bothered while life services going to remove.
Speaker 1: So I saw a good window of opportunity for wolves
Speaker 1: to be on the landscape and resolve the conflicts. It
Speaker 1: wasn't so much of a concern with the hunting community
Speaker 1: at that time. Was more live stock at that time,
Speaker 1: because there were so few wolves. I saw it as
Speaker 1: a great opportunity and I wanted them to succeed where
Speaker 1: they could be welcome, where there weren't conflicts of livestock
Speaker 1: that were in conflicts with hunting. There's so much game
Speaker 1: on the landscape. They had plenty of food, they had
Speaker 1: plenty of refugia to live in, landscapes where they could
Speaker 1: be unbothered. They don't need wilderness. Wolves would live in
Speaker 1: Bozeman if they could. And they don't need a wilderness area.
Speaker 1: They just need to have someplace where they can raise pups,
Speaker 1: find wild ungulates to eat, and live long enough to reproduce.
Speaker 1: They can live anywhere. I mean, the wolf lives from
Speaker 1: the Arctic Circle down. There's wolves in the Gaza Strip.
Speaker 1: They can live in any biome. They can live in
Speaker 1: the desert, they can live in a temperate force, they
Speaker 1: can live in the Arctic. They are really adaptable. So
Speaker 1: it's just matter where we will tolerate their presence. And
Speaker 1: I knew all that, and I could see him successfully
Speaker 1: making it. That's why I thought we would be better
Speaker 1: off holding off in reintroduction, allowing the social landscape to
Speaker 1: evolve as wolves slowly made their way down the landscape,
Speaker 1: because it's a social issue. It is not an ecological issue,
Speaker 1: never has been with wolves. So at the at that
Speaker 1: time when there was this very controversial plan to to
Speaker 1: to do a reintroduction, Um, did you sort of feel
Speaker 1: that were you ostracized by the superpro wolf community for
Speaker 1: for for not wanting, for not uh advocating or condoning
Speaker 1: the reintroduction, or was it that you all felt like
Speaker 1: you were kind of striving for the same thing, you
Speaker 1: just had different approaches to get there. I don't know
Speaker 1: that I really would care, because I hear both sides
Speaker 1: all the time. I mean, I'm always I'm I like
Speaker 1: the wolves the middle of the road. We have to
Speaker 1: live in the middle. We can't live out on either end.
Speaker 1: And I've worked a lot with hunting groups and ranters
Speaker 1: and wolf conservationists and wolf protectionists. I'm a scientist and
Speaker 1: I'm driven by science, and US science says that there
Speaker 1: is place on this landscape for wolves and it's not
Speaker 1: going to be Nebraska, and probably it's it's not gonna
Speaker 1: be Boulder, Colorado. But there are places where they can
Speaker 1: be in and and as long as we can handle
Speaker 1: and manage the conflicts, there'll be anywhere we want them
Speaker 1: to be. And as a scientist, I was seeing it happen.
Speaker 1: So that's why I was against reintroduction. And I imagine
Speaker 1: there where people that would slap me upside the head
Speaker 1: if they could, saying, well you should love wolves and
Speaker 1: have them everywhere, or what the hell is what are
Speaker 1: you thinking? They're gonna wipe out all the deer. Knilk.
Speaker 1: I don't listen to that. I'm doing what the science
Speaker 1: shows me and they can do. But here's here's where
Speaker 1: you're not. Here's it's not where you're wrong. But it's
Speaker 1: a little bit where you're like misleading because it's not
Speaker 1: Science isn't telling you. Science isn't telling you that we
Speaker 1: need wolves or that we need grizzly bears. Right, you
Speaker 1: can make the people make these claims. Nod, I said need.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. It's a decision. It's it's a
Speaker 1: decision that we that society makes. It's totally a social
Speaker 1: fabric thing. Yes, yes, so. And I'm not even wanting
Speaker 1: to push you too. I'm not trying to push you
Speaker 1: into a thing because I feel like you know, I'm not,
Speaker 1: because I feel like you and you and me are
Speaker 1: like very much aligned. I them around. Okay, you haven't
Speaker 1: said this, but I'm assuming you do. Like I enjoy
Speaker 1: them being around. It just comes with um. I have
Speaker 1: certain requests that come with them being around, about conflicts,
Speaker 1: like how we control conflict and how we weigh out
Speaker 1: and value the interests of different stakeholders. And I feel
Speaker 1: that the ranching perspective is valid and important, and I
Speaker 1: think the perspective of big game hunters is valid and important.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that these people are being hysterical
Speaker 1: when they point out that there are some things that
Speaker 1: need to be resolved in order for them to get
Speaker 1: comfortable with this. I didn't. I know, I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I feel like we're on the same team. But what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, like when you talk about whether or not
Speaker 1: wolves would have recolonized the lower forty eight on their own,
Speaker 1: or whether we needed to do a recount, or whether
Speaker 1: we need to do a reintroduction to bring them back,
Speaker 1: I don't accept that you had no sense of what
Speaker 1: you hoped would happen. You had to have hoped something
Speaker 1: would happen. I can tell you when it came out
Speaker 1: here in seventy nine and there was one wolf, I
Speaker 1: thought of it as an interesting and novel idea and
Speaker 1: experimental to see if if it would make it or not.
Speaker 1: If you would have asked me in nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 1: if we'd be harvesting three hundred wolves a year in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eighteen, and he said, are you oh
Speaker 1: to your mind? I mean I never would have believed
Speaker 1: would have been this far along. So, I mean, I
Speaker 1: think wolves are pretty amazing creatures. I think that elk
Speaker 1: are pretty amazing creatures. I think cougars are amazing creatures.
Speaker 1: I mean, I like all wildlife. I'm trying to think
Speaker 1: there's an exception, maybe not quite so fun of skunks,
Speaker 1: but I could have a bird dog. But I mean,
Speaker 1: I like to see all the full complement of all
Speaker 1: the predators and all the prey in the landscape. And
Speaker 1: the thing that I would think back you've read Lewis
Speaker 1: and clark Journals, Undaunted Courage. They came out here. They
Speaker 1: are uncountable hundreds of thousands of game animals. Right. It
Speaker 1: was like to Saren Jetty and there was pray animals
Speaker 1: and they were predator animals everywhere, and nobody was shooting
Speaker 1: or controlling any of them, and they were just fine.
Speaker 1: And when people really push me on an issue, but
Speaker 1: we have to manage this or that, Yeah, we're doing
Speaker 1: pretty well managing wolves in Montana. We harvest a lot
Speaker 1: of them. They're still adequate wolves hair, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of them, They're very resilient. We can go on like this.
Speaker 1: But if you want to say, you have to manage
Speaker 1: predators or they'll eat all the game. If they ate
Speaker 1: all the game, they'd be dead, right, there'd be no
Speaker 1: more wolves. There'd be no more game. So what I'm
Speaker 1: just saying before, when Lewis and Clark came out, nobody
Speaker 1: managed anything. We barely had firearms at that time, right,
Speaker 1: limited in scope. Yes, animals manage themselves. The wolves in
Speaker 1: Yellowstone they kill each other off and the population took
Speaker 1: off rapidly when they were first introduced. It went up
Speaker 1: to a peak of about hundred sixty animals in two
Speaker 1: thousand eleven. It dropped down after that to be about
Speaker 1: a hundred and it's been about that level for a
Speaker 1: long time. This year there's less I heard there was
Speaker 1: about wolves. Now nobody's shooting those wolves. They are regulating
Speaker 1: themselves based on the prey. Prey populations go up and down,
Speaker 1: the predator population goes up and down. It's it's a
Speaker 1: leg time just slightly. That is the normal. And we
Speaker 1: as humans and I'm a hunter, we like to see
Speaker 1: something always at a level that we're used to, and
Speaker 1: when it drops below that way panic. If it goes
Speaker 1: above that, it's like, oh good, it's getting back to
Speaker 1: the good old days. The good old days is the average,
Speaker 1: but we don't look at that. And I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that if we didn't, if we didn't manage elk or
Speaker 1: deer wolves, and my department may have an issue with
Speaker 1: differences of opinions, but animals manage themselves in the landscape,
Speaker 1: and if there's too few. We had after the big
Speaker 1: winter of seven, there's a huge record amount of snowfall
Speaker 1: in northwest Montana and Yellowstone. When they die, not and
Speaker 1: our white tail died in Montana that one in northwest
Speaker 1: Montana that spring. The wolves are doing pretty well feeding
Speaker 1: on carcasses until they had these pups. And then there
Speaker 1: weren't any fonds in June as alike, as most of
Speaker 1: the dose died, we had a huge pop mortality. That's
Speaker 1: how wolves reached fond They don't know the food. The
Speaker 1: pups don't make it. Meantime, the next winter neew was
Speaker 1: milder and the prey populations built up, and then the
Speaker 1: wol was built up. Just this leg cycle, but we
Speaker 1: always want it right here on the average in the
Speaker 1: middle um. Two things, a thing that I've always laughed about.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of friends who are just like
Speaker 1: rapidly anti wolve. Hey wolves and it's the end of hunting,
Speaker 1: but they all want to hunt in Alaska. I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: it must be great to hunt Alaska. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't like it. Bro these wolves running around, the
Speaker 1: grizzlies running around, why would you want to go up there?
Speaker 1: But it's like people view it as they don't. I
Speaker 1: don't know because people like things to be static. And
Speaker 1: on that point, my wife's reading this book right now.
Speaker 1: Uh buyout Buddhist monk and he talked about one of
Speaker 1: the greatest challenges for people is to accept that there
Speaker 1: there is no static line that every year you intercept
Speaker 1: everything in life. You intercept everything in life amidst radical change.
Speaker 1: And there's something that makes you want to hit something
Speaker 1: a relationship, whatever, a place you'd like to go on vacation,
Speaker 1: that you want to act like you hit it in
Speaker 1: stasis and that that's normal. And then you watch as
Speaker 1: everything changes and it's disappointing to you. But you hit
Speaker 1: everything mid change. There's no there's no place to feel
Speaker 1: comfortable or you have to be comfortable with the idea.
Speaker 1: There's no place to be comfortable that the only constant
Speaker 1: is change. Yeah, and I see in the literature now,
Speaker 1: I mean the terms equilibrium is going away. It's nothing
Speaker 1: is ever in the uniquilibrium things that are always changing.
Speaker 1: Are you comfortable doing? Uh? We like to play a
Speaker 1: little game called looking through the crystal ball. I don't know,
Speaker 1: not looking through it into it? What's your Colorado? What's
Speaker 1: your Colorado do? Right now? Do you think it's inevitable?
Speaker 1: Will you ask? Okay, a minute ago, you asked me
Speaker 1: about how I felt about the change in the Lower
Speaker 1: forty eight, because Colorado may be affected by that. Okay, ahead,
Speaker 1: so we'll start there. So this this change of the
Speaker 1: taking away in and protection of wolves in Lower forty
Speaker 1: it will have no impact on the Western States essentially,
Speaker 1: and because we're already harvesting them and managing them. It
Speaker 1: may have a little impact in the Midwest because the
Speaker 1: states there haven't had their hands on the management for
Speaker 1: a couple of years. But what's your perspective on that,
Speaker 1: the harvest and trap like we do at some at
Speaker 1: some level they did for a little bit. We're just
Speaker 1: her jerky over there. It's litigation stuff. But in the West, weird,
Speaker 1: you know, Montana Idaho, Wyoming harvesting wolves. It's hard to
Speaker 1: say exactly where're at because it's really hard count wolves.
Speaker 1: It's very hard. Is it very hard? Yeah? You never
Speaker 1: see them. Their secret to them, they're elusive. Is it
Speaker 1: harder to count wolves and grizzlies? With grizzlies they've been
Speaker 1: doing DNA work care work. Bears are large there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't disperse us far. I would say, yes, it's
Speaker 1: harder to count wolves, and we weren't doing DNA work
Speaker 1: and sampling everyone. We just know that there's this range
Speaker 1: of this many wolves out there, and there still seem
Speaker 1: to be a lot and three hundred wolves sounds like
Speaker 1: a lot. We don't know how many illegal marks are,
Speaker 1: how many natural marks, but there's still quite a few
Speaker 1: wolves out there. Motity sorry, mortalities. Yeah. Well, I always
Speaker 1: say if we start pushing the wolves too hard, people
Speaker 1: are going to be less able to harvest them because
Speaker 1: there'll be that much smarter and they're hard to see anyway,
Speaker 1: and the harvest level will go down. We'll have to see.
Speaker 1: This is kind of new wolves coming back in the
Speaker 1: West with a big harvest. We'll just see how it
Speaker 1: works out. Um. Then your question again, sorry, what's gonna
Speaker 1: happen in Colorado? Colorado? Because Colorado is like Colorado right
Speaker 1: now is in other states too. Um. I think the
Speaker 1: writings on the wall Oregon, Washington is sort of like
Speaker 1: you're now very like you are in a wolf state
Speaker 1: and you're gonna see more wolves, um and there because
Speaker 1: the political leanings of those states, it's less likely that
Speaker 1: you're gonna see in any time in the near future.
Speaker 1: It's less likely you're gonna see the kind of control
Speaker 1: that I think the hunting and ranching communities would like
Speaker 1: to see. California never gonna see any control probably. And
Speaker 1: then but Colorado kind of on the fence politically, on
Speaker 1: the fence state, UM used to be maybe that changed
Speaker 1: in recent years. Um. And they're gonna have wolves are
Speaker 1: there's documented wolves showing up there. And there's also a movement,
Speaker 1: like a social movement of people wanting to move a
Speaker 1: little faster and put wolves on the ground. Um. Based
Speaker 1: on the things that you've seen that we've learned from
Speaker 1: the experience and Northern Great Lakes, the experience in the
Speaker 1: Northern Rockies. Uh, what do you think will end up
Speaker 1: happening in Colorado? And what would be your advice two
Speaker 1: managers in Colorado. Is that a fair question, it's a
Speaker 1: fair question. I don't. I don't. I don't have the answer.
Speaker 1: I would say, if they want wolves and landscape. So
Speaker 1: there's a talk of reintroducing Mexican wolves up to southern Colorado,
Speaker 1: and there stock of wolves, allowing wolves to migraty and
Speaker 1: remain on the landscape from Yellowstone. Those are different gene pools.
Speaker 1: The Mexican wolf is distinctly different genetically, behaviorally, morphologically from
Speaker 1: all the rest of the wolves in North America. So
Speaker 1: it's a little different animal which I don't care to
Speaker 1: get into. But the gray wolves will get there, and
Speaker 1: I would The best advice I could give about Colorado
Speaker 1: would be, don't panic there. There's gonna come in. You've
Speaker 1: got plenty of time to set up a management plan,
Speaker 1: a system, and get wildlife services in place, get you know,
Speaker 1: get input from hunters, get all your public input, get
Speaker 1: people as aligned as you can. It will never be
Speaker 1: perfect because people are just very controversial either side, but
Speaker 1: be prepared, and um look at other states. I mean
Speaker 1: in Montana. I don't have figures on other Western states,
Speaker 1: but an hour Montana I hear a lot Oh, the
Speaker 1: wolves have killed all the darren elk, and I hear
Speaker 1: that a lot from some segments. Is that true? No,
Speaker 1: That's where I'm gonna go. So we have our harvest data, fish,
Speaker 1: willife and parks, and we can show through the harvest,
Speaker 1: the check stations every fall and the spring green up
Speaker 1: council where we can't recruitment, number, number of funds or
Speaker 1: cabs per female b darren elk or sheep or whatever,
Speaker 1: and our numbers. Wolves have been on the landscape for
Speaker 1: quite a while, though it's not like they've changed greatly
Speaker 1: in ten years there except that we had one show
Speaker 1: up at buildings, but otherwise they're kind of it full.
Speaker 1: The landscape is full of wolves and deer. Nelk numbers
Speaker 1: at present are in the long term average. They've slightly
Speaker 1: to the high end. The last two winners are slightly
Speaker 1: down because we've had pretty long winters um and we
Speaker 1: haven't had the recruitment. But they're not they're not off
Speaker 1: the scale in the black hole. So when people say,
Speaker 1: I used I've hunted this area for thirty eight years
Speaker 1: and I used to be able to go up there
Speaker 1: and get an elk and the wolves. Since the wolves
Speaker 1: have come back. They've killed all the elk, and I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about that, and our numbers don't support that. The
Speaker 1: game struct stations in the spring count showed the animals
Speaker 1: are in the region, But maybe the habitat has grown
Speaker 1: up there, maybe there's more road access, maybe there's more
Speaker 1: competition for people going after those animals. There's a variety
Speaker 1: of things. There's wildfire, and I just say, well, if
Speaker 1: if you're hunting the same area for thirty years and
Speaker 1: the animals aren't there anymore, maybe move ten miles or
Speaker 1: fifteen You don't so you don't accept, like take for instance,
Speaker 1: the Idaho Panhandle or the Northern Yellows don't hurt. You
Speaker 1: don't accept that those elk populations were reduced by two thirds.
Speaker 1: I don't know about the Idho Panhandle situation. I don't
Speaker 1: follow it. I can only tell you from Montana. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that's just my limited scope of my job. So I
Speaker 1: do know. I'm just saying the harvest data shows the
Speaker 1: animals are still out there, but they may be using
Speaker 1: the landscape differently. They may be moving during hunting season differently.
Speaker 1: We do have climate change. Things are changing differently. I
Speaker 1: don't have an answer to all for it. I'm just
Speaker 1: saying numbers show that the animals are still out there,
Speaker 1: and if people aren't seeing them, maybe the animals are
Speaker 1: becoming more nocturnal. I don't know. I don't know, and
Speaker 1: I've hunt darn up too, and I'm able to get
Speaker 1: dar nol and i live where there's a lot of wolves.
Speaker 1: So um I have in the past. UM. I don't
Speaker 1: have an answer except to say that wolves can drive
Speaker 1: population is really low, they can keep some bear. If
Speaker 1: that happens, the wolf numbers decrease, they gotta have food.
Speaker 1: How long does that cycle play out depends in the habitat.
Speaker 1: I mean you've orout up earlier about the Northern Netherland herd.
Speaker 1: I think, honest, you brought it up. Was it twenty
Speaker 1: thousand or so? And then wolves came back and they
Speaker 1: went down to four thousand. I think this year. I
Speaker 1: just heard the number of this week when I was
Speaker 1: down there, it's up like six thousand. Now there's a
Speaker 1: lot of bison. Yeah, I'm reading right now about the
Speaker 1: Northern herd, and it's the last count in seventeen was
Speaker 1: five thousand, threety nine, so it has been so that's
Speaker 1: two seventeen yeah, and it's been stable like that. We're
Speaker 1: increasing for four years. It so the northern herd. So
Speaker 1: the wolves went in the winter nine seven. I think
Speaker 1: they put thirty one wolves in half each of those years.
Speaker 1: We had that enormous winter. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: guys were here in n seven. The snow at my
Speaker 1: out house was five ft deep. That's what killed the
Speaker 1: elk in one winner. I mean thirty fifteen thirty one
Speaker 1: wolves over two years. Do you think the eighteen was
Speaker 1: an elk or fifteen elk in two years? Think about it.
Speaker 1: I mean the numbers dropped off really fast, and then
Speaker 1: they've been kept low, and I can't say if the
Speaker 1: wolves kept him low or not. Probably has something to do
Speaker 1: do it. There's wolves, there's grizzly bears, there's lions there
Speaker 1: and the wolves. It's interesting they have switched. There was
Speaker 1: printed and primarily an elk grocery store when they first
Speaker 1: got there, and now they're switching to bison because there's
Speaker 1: more biomasso bison. It's a lot harder to kill a bison.
Speaker 1: There's less wolves. But I don't want to do. Why
Speaker 1: do you have shirt written on your hands? Reminder? Something
Speaker 1: I had to do later today there are Okay, they
Speaker 1: eat seven pounds of meat a day. They can eat
Speaker 1: more maintenances, like eight pounds per day. So you have
Speaker 1: several hundred of something eating pounds of stuff a day.
Speaker 1: There's has to be there has to be an effect.
Speaker 1: I thought we had this conversation with one of your
Speaker 1: colleagues who works mountain lions, where I find that, um,
Speaker 1: I find that you have these two extreme views. You
Speaker 1: have the perspective of people who again feel that they
Speaker 1: annihilate the prey base and eliminate ungulates from the landscape, which,
Speaker 1: as you pointed out, is counterintuitive because then you would
Speaker 1: also lose the wolves to die and maybe gone. And
Speaker 1: then you have the perspective of the ardent apologists who
Speaker 1: want to tell you that there is no population level
Speaker 1: impact from wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, what have you, and
Speaker 1: that they somehow subsist on nuts and berries. You you
Speaker 1: hear from these you hear from these different views. And
Speaker 1: when someone tries to sell me on one of these
Speaker 1: two perspectives, I get frustrated. There there there is I
Speaker 1: feel like you're tiptoeing around, tiptoeing around it. I feel
Speaker 1: like you're trying. You're suggesting that there's not a population
Speaker 1: level impact from having hundreds of wolves on the landscape.
Speaker 1: I didn't say that, but you kind of. That's I
Speaker 1: trying to get you. I want you to say it.
Speaker 1: I want you to say what you think is So,
Speaker 1: what I'm telling you is that fish wife and parks
Speaker 1: harvest data data and the spring count data are still
Speaker 1: within the norm range and a little on the high end,
Speaker 1: except the last two years where the winter has been
Speaker 1: bad and there are hundreds of wolves in the landscape.
Speaker 1: That's for deer. Now do you feel that winter do
Speaker 1: you feel that winter is more? Is more of a
Speaker 1: driver of Absolutely is more of a driver. One winter
Speaker 1: like this es it came in and killed in the
Speaker 1: white tails. You could have sauce and wolves and the landscape.
Speaker 1: They're not going to kill forty percent of the white tails.
Speaker 1: Winter is the ultimate driver. And the when people when
Speaker 1: wolves look where wolves are gonna live, they say, oh,
Speaker 1: where are they going to live? They're going to live
Speaker 1: in place where the winter ranges. They're not going to
Speaker 1: live up in the snow and rocks in the Wilderness
Speaker 1: series like some people think they do. It's like, what
Speaker 1: the hell are they gonna eat in december, there's nothing
Speaker 1: up there. They come down in the valleys, they come
Speaker 1: down in the winter ranges, they come down to where
Speaker 1: people are in calves because it's the valley bottom and
Speaker 1: they're loud as lousy with deer and elk were starving
Speaker 1: along with the calves that are being born this time
Speaker 1: of year. It's you know, there's conflicts set up. Potentially
Speaker 1: some wolves have conflicts and don't you know, it's in
Speaker 1: back to this things. So I'm not saying it was
Speaker 1: all winter. I'm just saying there was a really So
Speaker 1: if you know, if you saw Yellowstone in the sixties,
Speaker 1: they were paid people to go out to kill mule, deer,
Speaker 1: and elk because the landscape was so devastated by the overgrazing,
Speaker 1: because there was no predators. That's a fact. You can
Speaker 1: look it up. People gunners were paid to shoot deer
Speaker 1: and elk on the landscape. So now we're up to
Speaker 1: it is never Historically it wasn't that high. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you look at you could go down to the
Speaker 1: Old Stone knowledge still see major impacts on the brows.
Speaker 1: You can look at the exclosures, defenses. You know, the
Speaker 1: story down there it's not new to us and maybe
Speaker 1: new to your listeners. Wolves him on the landscape. We
Speaker 1: had this massive hard winter. He died like flies. Additionally,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of what it has been termed
Speaker 1: naive elk that had never seen a wolf, and the
Speaker 1: wolves come running up to him and they just kind
Speaker 1: of stand look because they don't know what it is. Boom,
Speaker 1: they're dead. They had fat city, those those wolves the
Speaker 1: first few years, and they definitely helped take the numbers down.
Speaker 1: There's no doubt about it. Um, So, is five thousand sustainable? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is it socially acceptable some circles know. Is socially acceptable?
Speaker 1: You bat? Is it ecologically sustainable? No? So you kind
Speaker 1: of have to think about what is realistic to be
Speaker 1: on the landscape. Yeah, that we weren't going to hold
Speaker 1: that as a norm, correct, That's what I'm saying. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that that's a really good point because nobody ever,
Speaker 1: everybody always loves that twenty thousand number. Nobody ever says
Speaker 1: what it was five years prior. That's when we that's
Speaker 1: when we came into the country. Man, me and my
Speaker 1: bro started hunting that herd and how many what was
Speaker 1: the Oh? Yeah, when they were at there. I remember
Speaker 1: where I was standing, I remember where I was staying it,
Speaker 1: and I could figure I could sit and figure it
Speaker 1: out by year. I remember where I was staying when
Speaker 1: I heard the first wolf hole down there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know what we thought it was. I heard it
Speaker 1: rip out. I thought it was a bugle. Oh sure,
Speaker 1: because it's just like you know what it was? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought I thought it was some kind of crazy bugle.
Speaker 1: And they we're like, holy ship, that's wolves, man, and
Speaker 1: all this extreme viewpoint on the yellow Stone or all
Speaker 1: I can see is just kind of let the rhetoric
Speaker 1: go in the BS drop and kind of think about
Speaker 1: the sustainability and maybe you want to see the herd
Speaker 1: at ten thousand. Oh, that would maybe happen, but it
Speaker 1: probably won't. It's probably gonna stay about where it is
Speaker 1: unless there's some huge campaign to kill off lions and
Speaker 1: wolves and bears, and then you know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have your jump up and they're gonna starve
Speaker 1: again like they were doing. Uh, what's going on with
Speaker 1: Isle Royal National Park? So Iole Royal. The two Wolves
Speaker 1: came out in about ninety or so. Back up, back up,
Speaker 1: because I gotta say something first. It's an island and
Speaker 1: Lake Superior belongs to Michigan, right, yeah, yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: only little free standing national park and it's not very big.
Speaker 1: I think it's oh my gosh, I think it's only
Speaker 1: two square miles or something. Okay, our country wolf territories
Speaker 1: are bigger than that. For one pack. Oh that's interesting,
Speaker 1: take it away. I just wanted people know what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. Midwestern wolves, smaller groups, smaller wolves, they have
Speaker 1: smaller territories. So anyway, Ile Roil has never been colonized.
Speaker 1: Initially in the fifties, they've had a couple of the
Speaker 1: wolves that have shown up when the lake is frozen,
Speaker 1: but it's a rare thing. The lake freezes about once
Speaker 1: every decade, allowing genetic exchange potentially. But they've determined through
Speaker 1: genetics the wolves have not had outbreeding and they're all
Speaker 1: very closely related and so by now they've been in
Speaker 1: breeding for seventy years. So the the original ones that
Speaker 1: showed up, they kind of made Ile Royal like a
Speaker 1: wolf place walked across the ice in Canada. Correct, they
Speaker 1: were not put there either, They walked and frozen when
Speaker 1: they documented it, and they showed up and just had
Speaker 1: and had the running place because there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of moves, oh heck yeah. And there's
Speaker 1: nothing to eat the most except ticks. The biggest predator
Speaker 1: tick on the Royal Moost is a winter tick. It
Speaker 1: was more more wolves than than wolves, I think so. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so the wolves make it out there, and they're all
Speaker 1: in bred now. And the last surviving two wolves as
Speaker 1: a father and a daughter, and they were down to
Speaker 1: two two there don't inter breed and they're wolves don't
Speaker 1: do well when there's not a lot of exchange. No,
Speaker 1: they're just so in bred. They've got they've got through
Speaker 1: the four genetics. Are like siblings. All them are like
Speaker 1: siblings now. And of course they are not gonna they've
Speaker 1: been in a breeding for too long, and they've got deficiencies,
Speaker 1: physical deficiencies. They're not resilient to disease. They got screwed
Speaker 1: up tails, they got screwed up spines. Anyway, they're kind
Speaker 1: of a mess. They're done. So then this reintroduction efforts
Speaker 1: just happened and as of this morning, hot off the press,
Speaker 1: they have brought fifth They brought thirteen new wolves to
Speaker 1: Ile Royal to add to the two they calmed legacy wolves.
Speaker 1: The two that are remaining, they aren't going to be
Speaker 1: breeding unless they could mix it up with some of
Speaker 1: the new ones, which is the whole they're bringing in
Speaker 1: super wolves. They're bringing in those little tiny midget Great
Speaker 1: Lakes wolves from So they got some from a little
Speaker 1: island called Coton, which is in Lake Superior, but it's
Speaker 1: in the Michigan portion. They've gotten some from the mainland
Speaker 1: Ontario there, and they've taken some from Minnesota close by,
Speaker 1: and they may now try and get a few more
Speaker 1: out of you, Michigan to keep the genetic stock variability.
Speaker 1: They added thirteen. That's the number as of this morning.
Speaker 1: They just brought some more in this week to mingle
Speaker 1: with the two that are there. So they have a
Speaker 1: total of fifteen now it's about half male and half female.
Speaker 1: They how can such how can two square miles support
Speaker 1: fifteen wolves because they're so dang many moose there, they
Speaker 1: can't possibly can't eat them all, I find it. So
Speaker 1: this is this question about We were just talking about
Speaker 1: this last night again at dinner. But so the wolves
Speaker 1: on Ile Royal can eat beaver, and they can eat moose,
Speaker 1: and there's a few fox and that's that's it. That's
Speaker 1: their food source. But there are so many moose. And
Speaker 1: because wolves are territorial, the population of the island, I
Speaker 1: think that its highest point. I'm trying to remember the numbers.
Speaker 1: You're really pushing me on this. It might have been
Speaker 1: about fifty or so that many wolves around them, multiple packs,
Speaker 1: and then it dropped back down and then it's been
Speaker 1: lower and now we're down to two and they're gonna
Speaker 1: they're gonna go to extinction. Driven to extinction, clearly, but
Speaker 1: it's not due to lack of food. They did never
Speaker 1: kill the moose up. They never got you. They never
Speaker 1: did it. But that is different from what we have
Speaker 1: most other extinction extrapation, well extrapation indicates to me human
Speaker 1: cause I don't know anyway, a regional, okay, like regional,
Speaker 1: like very specific regional extinction, the island island would be
Speaker 1: free of wolves once again. And my thoughts on that
Speaker 1: are probably over e ens of time and glacial periods
Speaker 1: and whatever. Ile Royal has had multiple colonizations and disappearances
Speaker 1: of wolves over time, and interestingly, I was talking to
Speaker 1: a biologist day Mates who worked on there early, and
Speaker 1: he said the people who were there around nine ten,
Speaker 1: they were out there early and they were miners and trappers.
Speaker 1: Around the turn of the century, the island had caribou
Speaker 1: and links and there were no wolves, caribou and a
Speaker 1: few most but remember the ratio of moost to caribou.
Speaker 1: But the caribou and extinct. And Dave said he saw
Speaker 1: what was probably the last links track on the island
Speaker 1: when he arrived there about nineteen sixty sometime in the sixties.
Speaker 1: And now there's not so things constantly changed. So we
Speaker 1: want our window to be the right window. So if
Speaker 1: you look at Isisle Royal nine hundred, there were no
Speaker 1: wolves and not and there's tons of caribou links and coyotes.
Speaker 1: There was coyotes and there was no fox. It's a
Speaker 1: totally different ecosystem now and that's not because we've changed it.
Speaker 1: The wolves have changed it. But moose got out there
Speaker 1: and they caribou went away. I mean, there's a brain
Speaker 1: worm that goes for most to carible. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: why the caribl went away, if they were overhunted or
Speaker 1: or died from brainworm or whatever, but it's a completely
Speaker 1: different ecosystem in a very short lifetime that we can
Speaker 1: document that happens all over. Are you gonna blame somebody
Speaker 1: or a species or a fire or whatever. It's everything
Speaker 1: is so complex. You asked me these black and white answer.
Speaker 1: I want to know what you have, and it's like,
Speaker 1: I can't. It's kind of like the change in Big Game.
Speaker 1: If you aren't seeing Oak, or you've been seeing him
Speaker 1: for thirty eight years, go someplace a little different. There's
Speaker 1: places in Montana where they just so bloody overrun without
Speaker 1: they're giving away to permits, and they're having shoulder seasons either.
Speaker 1: And it's like if you're living someplace and you want
Speaker 1: to get to go to one of those areas, I mean,
Speaker 1: you don't have to go five miles, but the animals
Speaker 1: are out there. They may be using the lanski differently,
Speaker 1: they may be more nocturnal. There are some areas where
Speaker 1: there's more hunting pressure than there used to be. Go
Speaker 1: someplace where there's less. We were hunting one time and
Speaker 1: met a guy. I didn't actually talk to him. Do
Speaker 1: you remember who actually talked to him? We're hunting with Remy.
Speaker 1: I was there, Yeah, and uh, Pat and uh I think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was hunting deer, and he was on his way out,
Speaker 1: and he had been hunting following tracks and ran into
Speaker 1: wolf tracks and just said that that was the norm
Speaker 1: now there that always his deer tracks always end in
Speaker 1: wolf tracks, and therefore there's no deer around. He's not
Speaker 1: killing any deer. He left in a huff, but you're
Speaker 1: seeing deer tracks and parts of the same place. So
Speaker 1: I have to tell you the most incredible. I thought,
Speaker 1: I've kind of heard all the wolf stories, but this
Speaker 1: is kind of a fun one. I just heard from
Speaker 1: a friend who had talked to somebody about wolves a
Speaker 1: few years ago. I said, you know who was really
Speaker 1: pushing the wolf for introduction. Don't you choose a government employee?
Speaker 1: She said, no, who, she says, the insurance companies. Why
Speaker 1: is that? Because the rate of white til der and
Speaker 1: car collusions is so high in northwest Montana that they
Speaker 1: want to the wolves there to take down the number
Speaker 1: of deer, so they pay outlish insurance. I thought, I've
Speaker 1: never heard that one before. That was a new and
Speaker 1: unique story for Yeah, please, I heard that it was
Speaker 1: the Clintons. The Clintons, and let me tell you why,
Speaker 1: Because if the Clintons could bring in wolves. The wolves
Speaker 1: would kill all the game, and then people in the
Speaker 1: Rockies wouldn't own guns anymore because there's nothing to hunt
Speaker 1: and there would be less resistance when it came time
Speaker 1: to seize everyone's gun. That's why we have wolves. Wow,
Speaker 1: you did one up me on that one. I mustn't
Speaker 1: anyone that's crazy anyway. Okay, well, what did we miss?
Speaker 1: I've got a couple. Just follow black and white. I hope,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't like them. They're challenging to
Speaker 1: answer because it's not black and white. Do wolves kill
Speaker 1: more bulls versus cows? Do they care one way or another?
Speaker 1: Do they tend to pray? There's a lot of literature
Speaker 1: out there, and then it depends on species and geographic area.
Speaker 1: But wolves will take whatever is most vulnerable. And what
Speaker 1: I can tell you is that is the young of
Speaker 1: the year. I don't care if it's an alcor fun
Speaker 1: wolves go into winter. Yeah, they could be a fawner calf.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you're going into winter, they're the smallest,
Speaker 1: they're the weakest, they're the slowest. Most of the animals
Speaker 1: you take are young of the year. Then beyond that,
Speaker 1: a big fat cow is not very vulnerable if she's
Speaker 1: middle aged or you know, a good age, but it's
Speaker 1: snow conditions. They're right. So what I say when people
Speaker 1: people say they take the oldest sick in the week,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, that's kind of the outcome, but
Speaker 1: that's not really the selection factor. They take what's vulnerable.
Speaker 1: So you could take a seven year old prime fat
Speaker 1: cow elk and you put her in this crusty four
Speaker 1: ft deep snow out there, and she's breaking through and
Speaker 1: the wolves aren't. There's nothing wrong with that elk. She's
Speaker 1: just vulnerable, and most situations she's not. She's the strongest one,
Speaker 1: and she might be in the major cow. You know,
Speaker 1: So it's vulnerable, and it's generally the old the sick
Speaker 1: in the week. But they're not doubt they're still electing
Speaker 1: for him, liking for what they can catch. A very big,
Speaker 1: huge buck or bull elk that goes into the rot
Speaker 1: and ruts his brains out, they can lose like of
Speaker 1: the body weight. They go into the winter in really
Speaker 1: terrible shape. They don't eat while they're breeding. In a
Speaker 1: couple of months, they hardly anything. They're skinny as are all.
Speaker 1: They're punched up. They might have puncture skewers that are
Speaker 1: bleeding from the other bulls. They're pretty vulnerable. You know.
Speaker 1: We think those are great trophies because they've got bigger acts.
Speaker 1: But reality is it's maybe it's even at the end
Speaker 1: of its life. It's done a lot of breeding. But
Speaker 1: it makes people really angry when they see wolves kill
Speaker 1: a big bull out. But they aren't selecting for the bulls.
Speaker 1: It's just that they're vulnerable. What I find really interesting
Speaker 1: is they helps still have their antlers now too. You
Speaker 1: will rarely ever, I'm trying to think of I've ever
Speaker 1: seen in videos. Bob Landis has taken the most amazing footage.
Speaker 1: Rarely ever, if ever see a bull elk with antlers
Speaker 1: swing as antlers as a defense tool. They are strictly ornaments.
Speaker 1: So why do they hang on to all that weight
Speaker 1: all winter because they're done breeding in October? Why do
Speaker 1: they pack forty or fifty pounds on their head that
Speaker 1: slows them down if they aren't able to use them
Speaker 1: for either sexual selection because breeding is done, or predatory defense,
Speaker 1: why do they do that? I can your hunters, I'm
Speaker 1: just asking, I mean amusing ecologists like trying to think
Speaker 1: about this. Why would they do that? Anyway? I'm just
Speaker 1: saying the stuff out there. We don't know. Maybe somebody's
Speaker 1: answered that question. I haven't read on it. I read
Speaker 1: not long ago that a dear biologist was saying that
Speaker 1: if you could, if you can take deer in and
Speaker 1: manipulate him through photo periods, you could create to create
Speaker 1: no deer that would throw two racks a year. Huh,
Speaker 1: why would you want to do that? You wouldn't He
Speaker 1: just we're just talking about when you take a deer
Speaker 1: from let's say you take a deer from the northern
Speaker 1: hemisphere or taken out from deer. Let's take a deer
Speaker 1: from the northern hemisphere and put it in the southern hemisphere.
Speaker 1: How long does it take that deer to adjust to
Speaker 1: start right, to want to flip flop when it drops
Speaker 1: and girls antlers. And he's saying they do it very quickly.
Speaker 1: And he said, not only that, UM, not on if
Speaker 1: this has been done, or he suggested that he thinks
Speaker 1: it could be done. He said, not only that, I
Speaker 1: think you could put a deer in a an artificial
Speaker 1: situation and do photo periods and you could make it.
Speaker 1: You could trigger it to produce two racks a year.
Speaker 1: Mother nature doesn't do that because it would be really
Speaker 1: hard on the animal. Yeah, but he but you could
Speaker 1: point being this point being that it's it's linked to
Speaker 1: photo period, not not art, not the Gregorian calendar, whatever, right,
Speaker 1: whatever we live under here. Uh what you put a
Speaker 1: lot of miles on in the winter in the snow?
Speaker 1: What do you wear for boots? Uh? These days, I'm
Speaker 1: not doing it so much too Moore, but I did
Speaker 1: for most of my other research work. I were I've
Speaker 1: had snay boots, I've had sorrows. I'm mostly yeah, mostly
Speaker 1: just ski boots. I mean when I'm talking was, I'm
Speaker 1: mostly in skis, big heavy, back country three pin boots.
Speaker 1: I don't like I said, I don't and that's not
Speaker 1: part of what I do. Know, it's not part of
Speaker 1: my job to do that winter work anymore. Which is
Speaker 1: back and you were hard at it. You did most
Speaker 1: in ski boots. Yeah, yeah, hard hard plastic ski boots, leather,
Speaker 1: old marrows and uh yeah solos or oslos, depending on
Speaker 1: how you pronounce it. I got a pair of their
Speaker 1: sneakers on right now. Um got that question for you
Speaker 1: and I and other question for you. Let's say you're
Speaker 1: Emperor of the world. Okay, you control the world. Empress
Speaker 1: of the world. Sorry, you didn't want to be, but
Speaker 1: you are. Now you have to make all of the
Speaker 1: humanity's decisions. Um. Do you do you feel that would
Speaker 1: you allow wolf hunting and trapping to continue? Um? In
Speaker 1: areas that have sustainable populations of wolves? Empress of the
Speaker 1: world of the world. Yeah, so we're outside of profession
Speaker 1: right now, and now we're talking about the King of
Speaker 1: the world, Queen of the world. I don't live outside
Speaker 1: of my profession. Come on, you do too, There's no
Speaker 1: way you don't. I have the same problem my brothers,
Speaker 1: who are both ecologists. I'll be like, what do you
Speaker 1: hope happens? They don't like it. They don't like it.
Speaker 1: But come on, your Empress of the world. And someone says, oh,
Speaker 1: first thing, first quick issue we have to take care
Speaker 1: of is do we let the hunting and trapping seasons
Speaker 1: continue for wolves? And you have to make a quick decision.
Speaker 1: You have decide here. You are emers of the world.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna let the people down by lack through
Speaker 1: lack of leadership. Don't come on, really, really, wolves wolves
Speaker 1: can live anywhere that we tolerate them. In order tolerate them,
Speaker 1: we have to have some kind of a management plan.
Speaker 1: In a perfect world, wolves would never kill a coward
Speaker 1: of sheep and wolf, and unulate populations will never go
Speaker 1: up and down. There wouldn't be any controversies, right because
Speaker 1: that was a perfect world. Then he would need to
Speaker 1: remove them. But that's never gonna If there's not a
Speaker 1: perfect world, undulated population to go up and down, people
Speaker 1: get livestock taking their horrible and cheap that can happen.
Speaker 1: So in order for social tolerance to create possibilities for
Speaker 1: wolves to be you have to do that stuff. Let
Speaker 1: me hate with another personal one. Well, I just want
Speaker 1: to add that the perfect world is just perception. It
Speaker 1: might we might be living in the perfect world right now,
Speaker 1: but I do I'd say not. Look what's going on
Speaker 1: across our country, in the world, in the world. But
Speaker 1: it's been crazier in the past too. Oh yeah, we
Speaker 1: just have this thing called the Civil War. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but kind of on that note, you hear a lot
Speaker 1: from the people that think that they could just survive,
Speaker 1: But I don't know if those are people that think
Speaker 1: they can just survive on nuts and berries. But anyways,
Speaker 1: that when some of these packs have a member of
Speaker 1: their pack that's killed by a hunter that you know,
Speaker 1: you have a dog wolf, it leaves the park and
Speaker 1: get shot and then it really disrupts the pack and
Speaker 1: it's like going to be the end of the pack.
Speaker 1: How true or false is that? Like have you seen
Speaker 1: have you been able to document and research that and
Speaker 1: see like what it does or doesn't do. You'd have
Speaker 1: to ask Yellowstone people specifically, because that's the concern down there.
Speaker 1: I know, when wolves or whatever, when they leave the
Speaker 1: pack and they get killed at Cook City or around
Speaker 1: Comin or Basin, it's it's very painful for some people,
Speaker 1: very painful. They common glued. That's tragedy beyond belief. They're
Speaker 1: very attached to these animals. As an ecologists looking at
Speaker 1: the population level, it's a loss of an animal. And
Speaker 1: as a breeder, it's it's more of an impact on
Speaker 1: the pack. The pack might split up, the pack might
Speaker 1: get a new breeder, the pack might fade away, they
Speaker 1: might have two breeders the following year. They there's this
Speaker 1: dynamic that goes on all the time, and death is
Speaker 1: part of it. She said, We as social people put
Speaker 1: judgments on the animals taken. And I know early in
Speaker 1: my career when there was only three packs of wolves
Speaker 1: in Montana, I knew those animals, not by name or anything,
Speaker 1: but we followed them enough in the snow on the trail.
Speaker 1: I flew once a week. It was very sense of
Speaker 1: kind of like here, except you didn't get to see them.
Speaker 1: And it was hardship early on because every one of
Speaker 1: those animals was critical to them coming back at all.
Speaker 1: So if you lost, if you had twenty animals and
Speaker 1: four were killed or something new, you kind of felt
Speaker 1: it and you saw the adjustment. But it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: well there's an adjustment, and that wolf's gone, and g
Speaker 1: where did this one come from? And none? Next year
Speaker 1: they got Pops. That one is gone. They move on,
Speaker 1: they don't think about it. They're wolves, and we put
Speaker 1: those values on it. And it is hard for those people.
Speaker 1: I know, they're friends and them are friends of mine
Speaker 1: from Yellowstone, and it's difficult. And that system has the bonus.
Speaker 1: I tell these people, my friends, you guys have a bonus.
Speaker 1: You live in a research bubble here. It's amazing. You
Speaker 1: can see these animals. You sit on the I just
Speaker 1: came from there. You sit on the side of the
Speaker 1: road with your service, then your apple pie or something,
Speaker 1: and you can watch these of That is not the
Speaker 1: real world wolves live in. They live where I live,
Speaker 1: and they're shot and hunting, trapping around over by cars
Speaker 1: and trains and whatever. That's the world wolves have to
Speaker 1: live in. And when one gets killed, it is not
Speaker 1: a tragedy. We don't, you know, it's just different. Yellowstone
Speaker 1: does like it does so much good. I know it
Speaker 1: does harm well, I would venture to say that. I mean,
Speaker 1: like I said, when I first was out there, I
Speaker 1: was against their introduction for all those reasons. We talked
Speaker 1: about most of the social fabric and the natural selection
Speaker 1: of wolves coming down blah blah blah. But now that
Speaker 1: they're there, I go there a couple of times a year.
Speaker 1: I so enjoy seeing them because they're they're not they're
Speaker 1: not remove. If they're they're pretty visible, and it's a
Speaker 1: different energy down there. Everybody goes watches those wolves, is
Speaker 1: very in love with seeing them and the experience, and
Speaker 1: it opens a lot of people's eyes. But that is
Speaker 1: not where the wolves live in of the world. But
Speaker 1: they lay the problem is is it? Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: ecological has done so much good for recovering species. It's
Speaker 1: not a lot of good um. But the psychology of
Speaker 1: the place and its advocates is that they they they
Speaker 1: lay claim and take ownership of anything that touches it,
Speaker 1: so that a herd of elk, say that spend the
Speaker 1: bulk of the year not there, become the Yellowstone elk
Speaker 1: of grizzly that passes through becomes a Yellowstone grizzly. Um.
Speaker 1: And if something occurs outside of the park within some
Speaker 1: number of miles, it's a travesty because it was only
Speaker 1: a mile, only a five miles out of the park,
Speaker 1: as though it's footprint is inadequate, and it needs to
Speaker 1: sort of extend this psychological energy that reaches out like
Speaker 1: the tenles tentacles of an octopus to grab in anything
Speaker 1: ing around it. And I think that out of that
Speaker 1: that mentality drives a lot of creates a lot of
Speaker 1: like contentiousness and people who are competing over management of things.
Speaker 1: So when I say it causes harm, I think in
Speaker 1: that way where people become that The wildlife politics in America,
Speaker 1: like wildlife in America, is very complicated and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of factors at play, and a lot of
Speaker 1: people who need to be heard. And I think that
Speaker 1: when people are introduced to American wildlife through the lens
Speaker 1: of Yellowstone, they get a very distorted perception of what
Speaker 1: is actually what actually happens in the way people's lives
Speaker 1: are impacted and the different concerns going on. And I
Speaker 1: think that there's certain agencies like National Geographic is a
Speaker 1: big driver of this, The Smithsonian is a big driver
Speaker 1: of this. The people that push this thing that that
Speaker 1: wildlife just lives in this little protected place. Um, it's
Speaker 1: only there. It's surrounded by horrible people who want to
Speaker 1: do horrible things, and it's just by the grace of
Speaker 1: God that we have this little gem in which in
Speaker 1: which wildlife can exist. And they push that narrative, and
Speaker 1: it's it's frustrating. It's like, it's difficult to watch that happen.
Speaker 1: It is difficult. And when people got to realize, say
Speaker 1: there's say there's eighty wolves now, and this spring there
Speaker 1: will be several litters of five to six born who
Speaker 1: knows how many letters ten and there will be that
Speaker 1: many more wolves. The population will at least double or
Speaker 1: trouble based on reproductive and every year. This happens every year,
Speaker 1: and then by this time next year it'll be back
Speaker 1: down to every year. So a certain number of wolves,
Speaker 1: and they don't have percentage, but twice as many as
Speaker 1: there will disperse, get killed, die of disease, drowned, get
Speaker 1: killed by an get killed by the wolves. It happens
Speaker 1: all the time. But when it's a wolf that is
Speaker 1: seen often and as a number in a radio color
Speaker 1: and then it's killed by human, that is a beaut
Speaker 1: as a very large tragedy. And I wish people would
Speaker 1: I wish people would be more concerned about connectivity and
Speaker 1: linkage is out on the landscape. I wish people would
Speaker 1: be more worried instead of Scarface being killed illegal, the
Speaker 1: big grizzly bear that was killed supposedly illegally, and it
Speaker 1: was seen for twenty five years and yellow So I
Speaker 1: saw him and he's very identifiable. People identified with this
Speaker 1: bear for a long time. And he goes outside of
Speaker 1: the park and I believe he was illegally killed or
Speaker 1: killed anyway, but it was outside the park. If people
Speaker 1: put all the energy and money into thinking about well,
Speaker 1: let's work on the connectivity linkage between yellow Stone and Montana.
Speaker 1: Those landscapes between McDonald Pass and you know, the Gallatin Valley,
Speaker 1: so that bears are are more free to maintain viability,
Speaker 1: so that it doesn't become this still pretty isolated. That's
Speaker 1: a bigger concern than the scarface being chop, much bigger
Speaker 1: in my mind, especially putting all this emotional energy into
Speaker 1: these single wolves, as you just said, for them to
Speaker 1: live to be I was a big deal. To big deal.
Speaker 1: And I I mean, I I love seting and I'm
Speaker 1: taking in and I love listening stories about who we
Speaker 1: got who, and I have I have ultimate respect for
Speaker 1: these people out there every day at like five in
Speaker 1: the morning. They're out there all day and they know
Speaker 1: these animals and they dedicate their life to it. And
Speaker 1: I you and I I mean benefit. I can pull
Speaker 1: up in my car and get out and ask what's
Speaker 1: going on. They tell me. I'm very appreciative, But I
Speaker 1: don't have that attachment to those animals, to the singles.
Speaker 1: You're interesting in population not down there, But I can
Speaker 1: understand the passion and they they're very passionate about It's
Speaker 1: like maybe me and my bird dog. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: very passionate about bird hunting and training dogs and when
Speaker 1: dogs die, it's a tragedy. But the wolves are not
Speaker 1: my dogs. I don't know how to answer that. It's
Speaker 1: just challenging. Is there a time in like scientists education,
Speaker 1: where someone sits you down and says you you don't
Speaker 1: call animals by names. We do numbers and this is why?
Speaker 1: Is that like a very strict point thing or does
Speaker 1: that just naturally come along. That's a really good question, honest,
Speaker 1: because when we started the wolves, you know, in search study,
Speaker 1: and the first one was Kishena, and then we had Phyllis,
Speaker 1: and we had these wolves because there were so few,
Speaker 1: and yes, we were going down the same path and
Speaker 1: we saw him a lot. And the park services you
Speaker 1: can't name those wolves, and the fishing life services you
Speaker 1: can't name them because what happens when Phillis goes and
Speaker 1: kills a column. We've gotta take Phillis out. Okay. Every
Speaker 1: wolf had a number anyway, Some of mad names early
Speaker 1: on semed numbers. And people would be funny because you'd
Speaker 1: be talking to something the park service about wolf eight five,
Speaker 1: fifty and they say who is that, Well, that's Phillis, okay,
Speaker 1: or fifty three? Who's that? That's mohabb okay, but they
Speaker 1: knew the name, so it was kind of a trade
Speaker 1: we played. But and I know within fish Wife and
Speaker 1: parks they don't want us to name wolves, but all
Speaker 1: of the grizzly bears that they tag are everyone is named,
Speaker 1: every one of them. What's the difference? And I don't
Speaker 1: feel like if if I knew you boy so security number,
Speaker 1: you can give that to me later I'll follow up.
Speaker 1: But you are you so security number? I wouldn't when
Speaker 1: feeling different if you were like the fourteen oh seven
Speaker 1: versus Jannice, I mean you could and the other thing
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm turning to a scientist. Our papers are
Speaker 1: very technical and factual and models and statistics and all that.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the things that we need
Speaker 1: to do better is is scientists biologists, and I don't
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear the input, but I think that
Speaker 1: we don't do a very good job in reaching out
Speaker 1: to the general public who has concerns and thinks about
Speaker 1: being outside and enjoys all aspects of wild life, but
Speaker 1: maybe it doesn't really know how to predators and prey relay.
Speaker 1: When do they kill or not kill everything? And we
Speaker 1: don't put it out in a format that's very user friendly.
Speaker 1: People just see these papers with his Latin and figures
Speaker 1: and numbers, and it just gone. I think it's there
Speaker 1: for people that want it. It's hard. I mean, I
Speaker 1: go do a lot of public presentations and different groups,
Speaker 1: different people grasp different things. But I find a lot
Speaker 1: of groups as soon as you start talking data, this
Speaker 1: light goes out and I have to ask you, because
Speaker 1: how do how can I be a better communicator to
Speaker 1: the public about these very important issues, Like when we
Speaker 1: do some of these meetings and people say, oh, that's
Speaker 1: not right, those numbers are wrong, you know you blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. Well they are what we have. And but
Speaker 1: but I don't think that you're asking something that can't
Speaker 1: be answered, because I think that the people have. But
Speaker 1: that same problem exists everything, with every subject. It exists
Speaker 1: with every subject. Care if you're talking about if you're
Speaker 1: trying to explain social services, if you're trying to explain
Speaker 1: um climate, I'm trying to explain wildlife populations, trying to
Speaker 1: explain the mility, the budget for the military or whatever.
Speaker 1: You're gonna always run up against people who um cannot conceptualize,
Speaker 1: can't make sense of data. There's people that can't look
Speaker 1: at them, that that can't understand the landscape um from
Speaker 1: having lived on it and travel across it and occupied
Speaker 1: it for their entire life. Then you represent that landscape
Speaker 1: to them in an aerial image, or you represent that
Speaker 1: landscape to them as a map, and they cannot they
Speaker 1: can't make that jump. So I think that to say, like, how,
Speaker 1: because I hear this from wildlife professionals all the time
Speaker 1: who wring their hands about they're perceived inability to articulate
Speaker 1: complex ideas to the public, and they're like, well, how
Speaker 1: do we fix it? There's probably some things you can do,
Speaker 1: but I think that you would say, well, we're gonna
Speaker 1: have to tackle it through our public education system at
Speaker 1: the elementary school level, because I don't know, when you
Speaker 1: see someone take something that's complicated and beautiful and then
Speaker 1: you see attempts to like strip it down and dumb
Speaker 1: it down, it gets really ugly and it becomes not
Speaker 1: satisfying anymore, and you almost feel embarrassed for the person
Speaker 1: that stripped it down. I'm not gonna say what it
Speaker 1: was by recently read an attempt to take something counterintuitive
Speaker 1: um to take this like counterintuitive idea and demonstrate it
Speaker 1: to the public, and and and it happens to be
Speaker 1: a point that I desperately want to see demonstrated to
Speaker 1: the public. But when I saw it stripped down to
Speaker 1: its barest, most easily digestible form, I looked at it
Speaker 1: and all of the wonder and beauty was gone, and
Speaker 1: it was just stupid. So I don't really know that
Speaker 1: you're going to get there. I think that, uh, it's
Speaker 1: just from the ground up, trying to invite people to
Speaker 1: be invite people to like being surprised. My father was
Speaker 1: very resistant to any discussion about human evolution. Okay, his
Speaker 1: resistance to discussions about human evolution is that they change
Speaker 1: the story too much. It used to be this, Now
Speaker 1: you're telling me it's this. So what he wanted to
Speaker 1: see was he wanted to see an explanation that was
Speaker 1: the end all, be all, final answer, that this is
Speaker 1: what happened. If someone failed to give him that the
Speaker 1: absolute thing that in twenty years will not change, he
Speaker 1: wanted to discard the whole thing because he didn't want
Speaker 1: to take the energy, the mental energy to follow a
Speaker 1: constantly evolving narrative that had new inputs in the upset
Speaker 1: old understandings. It was frustrating to him. So the minute
Speaker 1: you changed it too many times, he became suspicious of
Speaker 1: the entire body of knowledge. How do you change that?
Speaker 1: He was a smart dude, very smart, but some things, um,
Speaker 1: he wasn't Like there's certain aspects of learning that he
Speaker 1: didn't enjoy. The journey. You had to give it to him.
Speaker 1: And if next year you came and told him that,
Speaker 1: you know what, we're kind of thinking this, but now
Speaker 1: it looks like this, he's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: forget everything you've ever said to me. So that's maybe
Speaker 1: what's hard about wildlife issues because it's always in flux
Speaker 1: and there. And by learn you learn more. I mean
Speaker 1: the tools they're using now with the remote cameras and genetics,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the tools are non invasive monitoring. We're
Speaker 1: learning things, amazing things that you can't see even with
Speaker 1: the radio caller. Dear biologists just last week tell us
Speaker 1: that now the amount of data he can pick up
Speaker 1: in one day it might have taken him years twenty
Speaker 1: years ago. Great, And I don't know that it's necessarily better,
Speaker 1: but it sure is helpful and trying to look at
Speaker 1: some things, but it opens up a lot more questions
Speaker 1: looking at Yeah, genetics is an especially powerful tool. I
Speaker 1: I'm very amazed with what can be or no by
Speaker 1: picking up a scat temple or urine sample, even from
Speaker 1: an ungulate and looky whatever it is, but usually a
Speaker 1: terror or scat and learning, you can glean enormous amounts
Speaker 1: of information about where this animal came from, how it lived,
Speaker 1: how it died, whatever, who was related to. It's just
Speaker 1: an amazing tool. Yeah, people people really, some people really
Speaker 1: like uh we keep talking about change. Some people like
Speaker 1: things that don't change. We're just down. We just had
Speaker 1: our little family vacation down in Baja and we bought
Speaker 1: a really small bananas like those, a little dinky finger banas.
Speaker 1: My daughter, who doesn't like bananas, liked these bananas. My
Speaker 1: son is upset by this for some reason, and it's
Speaker 1: saying to her, I thought you didn't like bananas. And
Speaker 1: I said to him, it was like any sentence that
Speaker 1: you begin with the words I thought you didn't is
Speaker 1: a not necessary sentence where you're calling someone out for
Speaker 1: having changed something. But he didn't like it, and maybe
Speaker 1: he likes his sister to not like bananas because she
Speaker 1: doesn't like bananas. And I think a big part of
Speaker 1: the whole wolf thing is in our memory of our
Speaker 1: parents and grandparents, there were not wolves on the landscape
Speaker 1: and now they're back and it's change. But if they
Speaker 1: went back two years ago, the landscape was crawling with
Speaker 1: wolves and that was the normal. So we are selective
Speaker 1: in our memory about what we want to think about
Speaker 1: or how we analyze things. In hunting and fishing, dudes
Speaker 1: are generally in love with the Lewis and Clark era.
Speaker 1: They're like, man, if I could do one thing, it
Speaker 1: would have been out with those boys, all the wolves
Speaker 1: running up down Chase and everything, killing all the game
Speaker 1: except for the ten million vice and whatever. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's an interesting concept. So I always ask people that,
Speaker 1: just instead of thinking of just how things are today
Speaker 1: or in your mind, try and think on a bigger scale.
Speaker 1: And the future, I mean the future is there's going
Speaker 1: to be left less and less landscape available for wildlife,
Speaker 1: and that that frightens me. And I think I would
Speaker 1: like to see people instead of hating this or that
Speaker 1: or wanting to kill all the wolves or whatever, I
Speaker 1: would be more concerned about protecting and preserving a wildlife
Speaker 1: heritage on the landscape. And I think ranting community and
Speaker 1: hunting communities are absolutely key to that. I mean, I work.
Speaker 1: Do you look at where they look at where the
Speaker 1: big game winners? Think about these ranchers. Man, you look
Speaker 1: drive between Livingston and Gardner, Holy crafters. Thousands of animals
Speaker 1: out there eating up. There's nothing this the grass that
Speaker 1: looked like this table and they got to raise cattle
Speaker 1: on it next year. It's private land. They support all
Speaker 1: that wildlife. Your own people want to get rid of
Speaker 1: their cattle because wolves get killed. You know what. They
Speaker 1: provide a huge amount of wildlife resource. I want to
Speaker 1: see them there. I want to see him stay in
Speaker 1: the landscape. I got I know a guy down in
Speaker 1: Utah and they had some unusual snowfall patterns this year
Speaker 1: in Utah and he lost forty dollars or they hey
Speaker 1: to a group of elk, And he texted me that
Speaker 1: he's trying to be cool about us they season. So
Speaker 1: it's it's really complicated. It's it just does Uh Do
Speaker 1: you have any final little things you wanted to wedge
Speaker 1: in there that we didn't get to. I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Um No, We've covered a lot. I like your point
Speaker 1: that space for wildlife. That's why I become front. That
Speaker 1: might be one of the reasons I become frustrated with
Speaker 1: UM aspects of the animal rights community or people who
Speaker 1: UM oppose any kind of wolf hunting or wolf trapp trapping.
Speaker 1: For the hides would be that when I look in
Speaker 1: the future, like, I see a problem that needs to
Speaker 1: be addressed, and it's maintaining half a tat, maintaining space
Speaker 1: for wildlife. And I'm like, how are you so, Like,
Speaker 1: how do you when you look into the future, how
Speaker 1: do you see? Um? Why do you Why are you
Speaker 1: not worried about that? Why are you worried about Why
Speaker 1: are you bringing so much energy into this thing when
Speaker 1: the real problem is that the real problem is habitat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the two things That one is that habitat for
Speaker 1: world life is not not necessarily or at all exclusive
Speaker 1: to human presence. Like I just point out the ranching.
Speaker 1: The ranch lands are the winter range for the most part,
Speaker 1: And I think people get hung up on wildlife has
Speaker 1: to have wilderness, No, I have to have it. Yes,
Speaker 1: we all do. I mean that's part of the I
Speaker 1: do have one more point that I want to tell
Speaker 1: it's called a concluder. Kind of concluder. So the thing
Speaker 1: that I think about a lot here in the West
Speaker 1: especially is but it's true anywhere, is how do we
Speaker 1: create a value for wolves, Because the only way they're
Speaker 1: gonna be hilerate on the landscape is if they have
Speaker 1: a value. That value can be in terms of uh,
Speaker 1: cultural it can be in terms of hide value selling hides.
Speaker 1: It can be what's wolf hide worth right now? I
Speaker 1: think it was told hundred seventy five dollars. So like
Speaker 1: up in Alaska, some of the biggest opponents of aerial
Speaker 1: gunning were the trappers because it's their culture, subsistence and income,
Speaker 1: and they didn't want to see those wolves gonned off
Speaker 1: because they cont on trapping them and catching them. So
Speaker 1: that's a value. Another value would be aesthetic. Maybe you
Speaker 1: live in Des Moines, Iowa, and you'll never see one,
Speaker 1: but you like to know they're just out there. Maybe
Speaker 1: you come to Yellowstone Park and your value is seeing
Speaker 1: them in that environment or potentially hearing them hall. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't care what the value isn't those values are
Speaker 1: on opposites in the scale, and they may be conflicting values.
Speaker 1: But they have a value because if something lives in
Speaker 1: our world and it doesn't have a value, it's gone
Speaker 1: pretty quickly or is innocuous or is innocuous. Well maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well anyway, I'm just and I think
Speaker 1: it's really important that you know, we they have a
Speaker 1: value to survive. And I know in this particular in Montana,
Speaker 1: for example. What I mean by that is what I
Speaker 1: mean by that actually clarify the point. What I mean
Speaker 1: is things that require some level of sacrifice have to
Speaker 1: have a corresponding value. You could have something like you know,
Speaker 1: people might not put a lot of cultural or economic
Speaker 1: value on apossums, but will continue to have apossums because
Speaker 1: they're not you know, we're not we're not making a
Speaker 1: decision about their fate. Generally, you provide certain things and
Speaker 1: they just continue to exist. They're not controversial. Um, we
Speaker 1: don't need to have meetings in public comment periods about
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do. I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I possum country. Okay, Okay, we don't talk about possums. Okay,
Speaker 1: damn shoure talking about everything else, right, steelhead deer, turkeys,
Speaker 1: we talk about it possums. Nope, what's kind of like matlons.
Speaker 1: So you know, Jimmy, I didn't hear Jim's podcast, but
Speaker 1: there's three times as many mountain lions and the landscape
Speaker 1: in Montana's there are wolves. People aren't angry about mountain
Speaker 1: lions and the landscape. They aren't piste off. They don't
Speaker 1: want to seem eliminated. They're introducing twelve bills into the
Speaker 1: legislature this year to kill more mountain lions. And it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, if there's three times as many mountain lions,
Speaker 1: it's two and a half to three times as many.
Speaker 1: Is there are wolves, you can presume that they're killing
Speaker 1: three times as much, two and a half to three
Speaker 1: times as mentioned. Game as wolved. Why aren't people concerned?
Speaker 1: I heard an explanation. Please tell me this is out
Speaker 1: of a thing that this is out of a research
Speaker 1: piece in Idaho and they kill people. This is not
Speaker 1: a research piece in Idaho where you, let's say, annually
Speaker 1: you lose sixteen seventeen per cent of your elk calves
Speaker 1: or no, it's like you lose or your elk calves
Speaker 1: every year two mountain lions. And it's been that way
Speaker 1: for a long time, and people are used to a
Speaker 1: certain cow calf ratio. But then you come in with
Speaker 1: this additive, this new additive thing, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden it adds a five mortality rate that you feel
Speaker 1: that five. You can observe that five in your lifetime
Speaker 1: because static, your idea of static was the mountain lion presence.
Speaker 1: So people see a shift the new thing to point
Speaker 1: to ours, just to change, and so that's where the
Speaker 1: animosity grows. When all along you've been losing this very
Speaker 1: high percentage to mountain lions, but you've always you're used
Speaker 1: to that. When you're out and you see cows and calves,
Speaker 1: you're used to a certain ratio. The ratio switches and
Speaker 1: people perceive that new thing as being the problem. This
Speaker 1: is articulated through something that the buddy sent me. But
Speaker 1: still the majority of them are being killed by lions,
Speaker 1: had shown over and over and people don't worry about
Speaker 1: it because it's And I also think in addition to that,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. But in addition to that, moultlines
Speaker 1: have a value. How much is an outfit or charge
Speaker 1: for a mountline hunt four? And how many does he
Speaker 1: do it? Year? Many? So it has a value to him.
Speaker 1: The Houndsmen are very well organized. They're very vocal proponents
Speaker 1: of keeping lions on the landscape. They're also pretty vocal
Speaker 1: about getting rid of wolves. From what I've seen, dogs
Speaker 1: killing dogs and kill mountlines and compete with them. So
Speaker 1: but my point is, you know, honsman her amazing. They're
Speaker 1: amazing to learn from when they bring in mountlines to
Speaker 1: be tagged. At work with a lot of them tagging
Speaker 1: their lines, and I learned a lot from them. They're
Speaker 1: really good information sources about where they're seeing wolves and
Speaker 1: how many lions are out there. But they have that value,
Speaker 1: and then nobody goes drives and spends thirty five millions
Speaker 1: annually to go to look at mountainins and Yellowstone Park.
Speaker 1: That's yeah. I mean, I'm just saying they're sneaky, they're quiet.
Speaker 1: You don't know they're there, and there's a lot more
Speaker 1: of them and people don't. I mean, they kill a
Speaker 1: few people every so often in mal people it's like, oh, whatever,
Speaker 1: I can tell you when it happens sometime in the future.
Speaker 1: Who knows if wolves kill a person, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be really all over the front page for
Speaker 1: weeks on end. It's happening all the time with lions embarrassed. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean there hasn't been alone. I mean, yeah, there
Speaker 1: was a couple of Yeah, there was two I can
Speaker 1: think of. Yeah, there's a couple of years more in Oregon, one, Washington. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying there's a different value system on these
Speaker 1: different animals, economic, cultural, ecological, visual. It's something can be
Speaker 1: interesting to think about. So my point is we need
Speaker 1: to create value on wolves. Could guided wolf hunts be
Speaker 1: the salvation of wolves? I don't think. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's hard. But you know what, some people are taking
Speaker 1: people out to kill wolves as they learned how to.
Speaker 1: They've learned how to get them, and they're good at it.
Speaker 1: And I know some of them and they're they're pretty efficient.
Speaker 1: They understand wolfee college, they understand behavior, they know how
Speaker 1: to find them. They mostly calling yea, they know how
Speaker 1: to call them. And so the sounds are they using
Speaker 1: so you don't have to ask them? You do know?
Speaker 1: I don't know, you never got curiousness? Do you need?
Speaker 1: They're using wolf vocalizations? Do you think they're using pre vocalizations?
Speaker 1: I'm saying, is there what could be a business for it.
Speaker 1: There could be a business for it. And and there
Speaker 1: is business for a wolf. I mean, look at the
Speaker 1: number of wolf safaris. I mean there's a huge economic
Speaker 1: value to seeing wolves. But if you wanted to do
Speaker 1: them for hunting, and right now with the move to
Speaker 1: pay bounties on wolves, that will incentivize for people. It's
Speaker 1: a monitory. Does put a value on them. It may
Speaker 1: not be your value or my value, or might be
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it puts a value on them.
Speaker 1: They get a thousand bucks a wolf, they can Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not called a bounty. It's a compensation program. H
Speaker 1: and at least got a value, right Liner, It may not,
Speaker 1: I mean it sit well with everybody. No, it won't,
Speaker 1: all right, Diane Boyden, Yeah, you got any final concluders,
Speaker 1: I don't mind, say, Shade, we go on forever. Like
Speaker 1: you said, there's hours and hours, but what he'll come back.
Speaker 1: We'd love to have you again. One last yes or
Speaker 1: no question. You had to go back to seven all
Speaker 1: over again. Would you have like sold your motorcycle and
Speaker 1: drove off to work on wolves up in Eale, Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't think twice about it? Absolutely, that's good. No, thank
Speaker 1: you very much for coming on the show. Thank you.
Speaker 1: MS convert to prove to feet