Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to huntcast,
Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by First, like creating proven
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
Speaker 1: for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Hey there,
Speaker 1: I'm Janice, but tell us and I'm here to read
Speaker 1: an ad for you today because Steve is up at
Speaker 1: the fish shack having fun with all of his friends
Speaker 1: catching salmon, spear and salmon, diving for scallops, trying to
Speaker 1: catch halibt um, just general, you know, a good Southeast
Speaker 1: Alaska fun, but not I mean, I'm here in the
Speaker 1: podcast student, you know, reading this ad for you. Alright,
Speaker 1: but listen up, very serious. You should get fired up
Speaker 1: because this is big, this ad here that I'm about
Speaker 1: to tell you. Are you're listening all right? It's the
Speaker 1: first ever organization wide meaning everything under the Meat Eater
Speaker 1: umbrella meaning the Meat Eater Store, Phelps, f HF, and
Speaker 1: First Light. It's all on sale August second through the fourth. Okay.
Speaker 1: What's cool about this is that now under the new
Speaker 1: shopping experience that you can find on our website. You
Speaker 1: can do all your shopping in one place, put it
Speaker 1: all into one car. And the big hicker here is
Speaker 1: that you only pay for shipping one time. Um, I've
Speaker 1: done a little bit of surfing on the new media website,
Speaker 1: but phil Um says he's been down in the rabbit
Speaker 1: hole a few times? Why do you like that new website? So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think listeners know. I'm usually not the
Speaker 1: one to be able to speak to this the stuff
Speaker 1: that we sell on selling website. I'm a relatively new hunter.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not too deep in the waters. But man,
Speaker 1: if you if you have not been to the website
Speaker 1: in the last few weeks since it's been updated, I
Speaker 1: maybe the last time you shop was before last year's
Speaker 1: hunting season, check it out. It's great. It's very aesthetically pleasing.
Speaker 1: Like I'd say, if you had a choice to take
Speaker 1: a plane to New York to visit the Museum of
Speaker 1: Modern Art or go to the meat Eater dot com
Speaker 1: and check out our new store, that's a toss up.
Speaker 1: I'd say check out the store. It's way cheaper, way easier. Okay,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, like, go shopping on Amazon versus
Speaker 1: shopping on media at the meteat store. Oh no, I
Speaker 1: don't want to compare us to Amazon, comparing us to MoMA. Okay, Okay,
Speaker 1: A couple of the items that you can find that
Speaker 1: will be for sale is going to be, uh Like,
Speaker 1: let's let's start with a meat Eaters store. I want
Speaker 1: to mention that everything that we that is on there
Speaker 1: is curated by the team. Okay, Cal helps, Seth Morris Chester, myself,
Speaker 1: even Steve Ways in a little bit on what we
Speaker 1: should be carrying in that store. Okay, but it's all
Speaker 1: like really solid stuff. And even though I might not
Speaker 1: like use every piece that's on there, somebody in the
Speaker 1: company has said, I love that gear. I want us
Speaker 1: to sell that. Okay. At the meter store, there's Vortex Optics,
Speaker 1: trauma kits, Booze, cutting boards, and our logo where you're
Speaker 1: gonna buy the trauma kit first and then the cutting board,
Speaker 1: but when you're at home, you're probably gonna be using
Speaker 1: the cutting board and then need your trauma kit. So
Speaker 1: think about that. Be prepared first. Light off almost everything,
Speaker 1: including percent off the uncompagrade two point oh jacket, which
Speaker 1: is probably the piece that I use the most out
Speaker 1: of the whole first light lineup f hf percent off.
Speaker 1: The Biny Harness phelps up to fifty off select items,
Speaker 1: including off all renegade bugle tubes. So if you're not
Speaker 1: ready to go metal yet, get yourself renegade bugle tube.
Speaker 1: It almost half off. This might entice you to buy
Speaker 1: a medal to a regular price and then get off
Speaker 1: ending gave you go to and try and boat side
Speaker 1: by side. All right, so remember you got three days
Speaker 1: August two, third, and fourth. You can buy it all
Speaker 1: in one place, pay for shipping only once four brands,
Speaker 1: one card. Get it. It's gonna be the season opener
Speaker 1: sale of all season opener sales. That's a tongue twister.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you for listening. All right, everybody, you
Speaker 1: know we go, we go all the way to the top,
Speaker 1: go all way to the top on this show. And
Speaker 1: that's why we have the president and CEO, the lead
Speaker 1: figure of the Peregrine Fund here with us today, Chris Parrish. Uh,
Speaker 1: before we get into it, Chris Krin, I gathered you
Speaker 1: can test the idea that D and D is the
Speaker 1: primary driver of falconry. We just gotta put this thing
Speaker 1: to bed now. I let me tell you my evidence. Okay,
Speaker 1: my evidence is this, Well, you asked me, Now you're
Speaker 1: gonna love your question. My here's my evidence. Do you
Speaker 1: not listen to the shallow crest? I do? I have
Speaker 1: a family member. Um, I'm trying to keep it distance
Speaker 1: so the person. If the person is listening, they don't
Speaker 1: know I'm talking about them, like the person that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get to in a minute. I have a family
Speaker 1: member who had a roommate who they were way into
Speaker 1: D n D and that involved them first having like
Speaker 1: a lot of serpents, horrible roommates. They had serpents and
Speaker 1: that was like a D and D thing, and then
Speaker 1: pretty soon they graduated the falconry because they wanted to
Speaker 1: look like a wizard. And I heard that was a
Speaker 1: pretty common path, and then UM developed my theory that
Speaker 1: the bulk of falconers outside of the Middle East, American
Speaker 1: falconers are driven are are driven down that path through
Speaker 1: D n Well, I'm so glad you asked because um, Well,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I mean, I've been with the Paragrine
Speaker 1: Fund for twenty two years is founded by falconers. Falconry
Speaker 1: is a huge part of the way and how we
Speaker 1: do our business. But um, I had to ask her
Speaker 1: in what D and D is. So let's start there
Speaker 1: and dragons. You know what I'm talking about, right, I
Speaker 1: know about I know that the word, yeah, the phrase.
Speaker 1: But all your members aren't into that. I don't think
Speaker 1: any of them are. And falcony community is right now
Speaker 1: a plotting Yeah, no, the falconry community. If you look
Speaker 1: at the history of falconry and you want to talk
Speaker 1: about the US is history in falconry, you have to
Speaker 1: go back to UM the conservation movement and how that's
Speaker 1: tied to falconry, because falconry of three four thousand years ago, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's Turkey series. I ran what we call it today
Speaker 1: and it's in all the as soon as art and
Speaker 1: any art form, whether it's written or pictographs, petroglyphs, anything
Speaker 1: like that. You see falconry, you see depictions of of
Speaker 1: husbandry of animals that are depicted as being used to
Speaker 1: catch prey. Were the Egyptians into it absolutely because they
Speaker 1: got a lot of falcons and stuff in there. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: they're highly Do they have do they have hieroglyphics that
Speaker 1: suggests that's what they were doing with them? Well, not
Speaker 1: just that they were keeping them as part of a menagerie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they're on the fist. In many of these the
Speaker 1: birds are on the fist and the quarries hanging from
Speaker 1: their gloves, much as you see. Those guys are big
Speaker 1: into D and D form of a many sided die,
Speaker 1: of many sided die. I'm not following you. That's a
Speaker 1: that's okay. I only just put that together right now
Speaker 1: because I'm not familiar. Well, I remember there was like
Speaker 1: certain dudes in high school. I don't want to name them,
Speaker 1: certain dudes of high school of which I was friends.
Speaker 1: I was friends with that. You know, you got like
Speaker 1: your jocks, right, your stoner's head bangers, um ranch kids.
Speaker 1: Well we have farm kids. Yeah, D and D guys
Speaker 1: who crossed over with head bangers weirdly, but not stoners. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm betting that Elder Leopold probably didn't know about
Speaker 1: D and D and he said falconry was the perfect sport.
Speaker 1: Come on, really really held Leopold? Yeah, well he's you know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a dark side to Elder Leopold that
Speaker 1: people don't realize. So taking like seventy five yard hail
Speaker 1: Mary's with his bow was with his like seventy five
Speaker 1: yard hail Mary's with a long bow at deer and
Speaker 1: like just kind of shooting over that way to see
Speaker 1: what happens and stuff. People hunted different back then. But
Speaker 1: he liked falcony. Yeah, well, I mean he said it's
Speaker 1: a perfect the perfect sport. Um fran Hammerstrom one of
Speaker 1: his uh I think she was a PhD student. She
Speaker 1: became one of the one of the very first ladies
Speaker 1: in conservation and was awarded by the National Wildlife Federation
Speaker 1: or whatever it was before it became in WF in
Speaker 1: UH in Wisconsin for her work. And she was a
Speaker 1: falconer and had great writings about it. And I'm surprised
Speaker 1: that that given uh, you know, the your literate nature
Speaker 1: of understanding and looking at all these things that that
Speaker 1: you didn't have more of those you know, early falconers
Speaker 1: in the US and and understood what that was. Craigheads,
Speaker 1: for example, you talked about you both an Indian prince.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna send you a book, do you know that.
Speaker 1: I think it was under the Clinton administration they considered
Speaker 1: hitting Ben Ladden at a falconry camp m but didn't
Speaker 1: because there were there were certain uh, like high level
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabian people present in that camp, and they didn't
Speaker 1: hit the falconry camp. I could be messing up a
Speaker 1: small part of this, but I don't think I'm messing
Speaker 1: up a big part of it. Well, I tell you
Speaker 1: as much as you guys travel when you're three boys
Speaker 1: in Idaho, come to the World Center for Birds of Prey,
Speaker 1: and on that campus, we share it with the archives
Speaker 1: of Falconry, and we can tell you everything about falconry
Speaker 1: as far back as you want to go. Do you
Speaker 1: think that? And there's not a single not a single
Speaker 1: piece of evidence about, not a many side of day
Speaker 1: in the building, not a mini I have you been?
Speaker 1: Have you changed your mind? I'll never changed my mind, man,
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think perfect? Like they don't want
Speaker 1: to admit there into D and D it's like or
Speaker 1: something like that. Like this little bit of evidence here,
Speaker 1: this little bit of Evans doesn't look well. But I
Speaker 1: need to do my counter research now, okay, check out.
Speaker 1: Am I in a strong position right now? No, never
Speaker 1: stopped you before. The good thing is here. Follow up
Speaker 1: argument can come after Chris has left. So yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a quote I heard from someone who
Speaker 1: once said, Um, Okay, so I'm wrong, but am I right? Uh?
Speaker 1: Oh oh, here's I want to talk about this real quick?
Speaker 1: Did you just saying, Pat durkinsent Um, there's a study
Speaker 1: Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems. Okay, look, here's the name
Speaker 1: of the here's the name of the study, Locally Procured
Speaker 1: wild game Culinary Trends in the US, A study of
Speaker 1: the rough grouse as entree and accompanying nutritional analysis. And
Speaker 1: this paper in the in the heading gets into how uh,
Speaker 1: people who are into wild foods or eyes extolling the
Speaker 1: virtues of wild foods, but oftentimes their claims are not
Speaker 1: well substantiated in an academic sense, meaning like what is
Speaker 1: actually in gaming is a different right, Like you might
Speaker 1: be like eating rough grouse better and eat chicken man,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, And the u U s d A
Speaker 1: has this thing that's like massive thing of all the
Speaker 1: new like mineral composition, calories, makeup of all these foods.
Speaker 1: And these guys did the work to add the rofed grouse,
Speaker 1: so now you'll be able to find all the nutritional
Speaker 1: data of roughed grouse in this U s d A
Speaker 1: database of foods. I'm just gonna give you a high,
Speaker 1: a high level thing. So rough grouse compared to highly
Speaker 1: consumed domestic boneless here's where it gets okay. Compared to
Speaker 1: highly consumed domestic boneless skinless chicken breast meat, rough grouse
Speaker 1: has more protein per serving, less calories, and significantly less
Speaker 1: total fat and saturated fat. The cluss draw A content
Speaker 1: of grouse is also lower than domestic chicken. Much of
Speaker 1: the vitamin and mineral content of rust grouse of rough
Speaker 1: grouse compared to chicken were similar, with grouse having slightly
Speaker 1: higher amounts of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, saudi and rival flavan
Speaker 1: and nyasin. Chicken meat had slightly higher amounts of potassium,
Speaker 1: zinc in, vitamin A, and nichols on. But what it
Speaker 1: gets into, the main thing, is it gets into the
Speaker 1: health implications of hunting rough grouse. Of the people who
Speaker 1: participated in the survey. This makes hunting rough grouse seems
Speaker 1: like a daunting thing, and it is depending on your approach,
Speaker 1: depending on your approach the particulars of the year, But
Speaker 1: so so the people that participated in this survey. Hunters
Speaker 1: participating the survey logged twenty five hours afield during the season.
Speaker 1: They on average took about nine trips of field for
Speaker 1: the season and has spent about three hours of field
Speaker 1: per trip. So that's like the rough breakdown about so
Speaker 1: the average rough grouse hunter is spending twenty seven hours
Speaker 1: tis hunting rough grouse. Uh You generally each outing for
Speaker 1: rough grouse is four point five miles of walking. Now,
Speaker 1: if you ran all those stats on eating chicken, we
Speaker 1: would be a different nation. The here's the thing about
Speaker 1: the toughness of grouse hunt. Uh So in New York State, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is the New York State, and the hunters spending
Speaker 1: average of nineteen hours hunting per bird harvested. Wo A
Speaker 1: lot of that is some damn ass growls hunt. That's
Speaker 1: why a lot of people aren't drawing the upland Game
Speaker 1: hunting checker will carry you. They have burns people out
Speaker 1: real fast, like and then when they get something, they're
Speaker 1: like all of that Like calories lost to calorie games
Speaker 1: less than a pigeon worth of meat burn away. I
Speaker 1: asked more calories than that rose. But that's like averages
Speaker 1: and you know you know what I mean, who knows
Speaker 1: um and right? I think you could run it in
Speaker 1: different places, like you could run that for the western
Speaker 1: up of Michigan, the western upper Peninsula of Michigan, and
Speaker 1: I think you'd wind up with some highly some very
Speaker 1: different statistics. That just makes me question, though, my dedication
Speaker 1: as a hunter, because man if I went out and
Speaker 1: I got one grouse in nineteen hours on average, because
Speaker 1: I mean, what you're hunting for maybe like with dogs,
Speaker 1: like five or six maybe hours, so what that'd be
Speaker 1: four days? One growl? No, I feel like here, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh if people remember um So me Eater camp Fire
Speaker 1: Stories close calls volume two, and I'll point out that
Speaker 1: book that that that audio project accomplish something particular for
Speaker 1: a genre because normally, when the book goes the audio,
Speaker 1: like nomoany, when you buy an audio book, you're buying
Speaker 1: an audiobook of a book that exists in print. So
Speaker 1: when you look at the audio book best seller list,
Speaker 1: like the New York Times best seller list for audio
Speaker 1: books is typically audio books that wore books, So does
Speaker 1: the awareness of the book as a print edition, and
Speaker 1: it makes like an audio edition. But Campfire Stories debuted
Speaker 1: and stuck there as a New York Times bestseller and
Speaker 1: audio even though it wasn't even a damn book. Volume
Speaker 1: two is out now. Uh It releases August sewo but
Speaker 1: of course you can go and preorder the thing right now.
Speaker 1: And it's uh me eater stories, narrow misses in more
Speaker 1: close calls and and again it's like an immersive audio
Speaker 1: experience better than the first one. Um we have on there.
Speaker 1: Our friend Kimmy Werner, who tells the story that involved
Speaker 1: her and a mentor of hers and she violates a
Speaker 1: pact because they had agreed to never tell the story.
Speaker 1: That's my favorite one. There's a phenomenal story, a near
Speaker 1: death experience from our very own Clay nukelem Me and
Speaker 1: my son have a story. We also have stories from
Speaker 1: a guy who saved his friend's life by shooting at him,
Speaker 1: a guy who got into hand and hoof combat with
Speaker 1: a buck in a corn field, a guy who damn
Speaker 1: near died after shooting himself in the leg duck hunting,
Speaker 1: which is a crazy story, and his life was saved
Speaker 1: by his dog. You're in that killian I did hear that?
Speaker 1: If you're listening, snorts you on after that rattlesnake and
Speaker 1: a sheep hunter who got h so horribly Cliff hung
Speaker 1: in California, that near very near death Cliff hung Experience.
Speaker 1: Just a really really great collection. The guy who almost
Speaker 1: died from his own error. It's hard, hard, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you this some hard ship to listen to
Speaker 1: check it out. But no, it's like it's just like
Speaker 1: it's a lot of it's just skin crawling, but then
Speaker 1: you know the amount of it's like tart. It's like
Speaker 1: a quick Yeah, it's called narrow mrs More close calls.
Speaker 1: If it was just everybody died in the end one,
Speaker 1: it would be hard to get the stories right then,
Speaker 1: being all dead and everything. But the amount of blood
Speaker 1: shed in here is it is it's like it's like
Speaker 1: watching it's like watching kill Bill. Yes, some stories I
Speaker 1: don't want to spoil anything about it, but that one
Speaker 1: that you mentioned where someone had to shoot at his
Speaker 1: friend to save him, just listen. It was hard for
Speaker 1: me to listen to that one. But just a great story,
Speaker 1: really just interesting. So that's out Mediators camp Fire Stories.
Speaker 1: What we're gonna do to get a taste for the series.
Speaker 1: Last time we released the camp Fire Stories, we put
Speaker 1: Sam Lowries the mud puddle and just like built it
Speaker 1: on the end of the show. So, in keeping with
Speaker 1: that tradition, we're gonna do the best shot of my life.
Speaker 1: That's a spear fishing one. Cam Kirkconnell about the guy, Well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to spoil it. Yeah, just stay tuned
Speaker 1: till the end because it's it's awesome. It's got everything
Speaker 1: in it. You're gonna hear um, Yeah, we're gontack it.
Speaker 1: On the end of the show. You'll be so titilated
Speaker 1: by this little freebee that you'll run out and want
Speaker 1: to get the whole damn things. You can have all
Speaker 1: those hours and it's it's an hours of phenomenal stories,
Speaker 1: polished and really like experiential kind of musical score, and
Speaker 1: you're you're immersed, Yeah and polished, not like some dude
Speaker 1: up there him and in Han like we we we
Speaker 1: like obsess over every minute of the content. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we do. We really did. Everyone. Our good friend Jason
Speaker 1: Phelps over it. Phelps game calls just came out with
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this at one time or another, like
Speaker 1: I kind of pointed this out, like driving around and
Speaker 1: like friends cars and you you know how everybody has
Speaker 1: a bunch of junk in their car on the dashboard
Speaker 1: of the glove box. I have experimented with probably every
Speaker 1: every elk call, every cow call I'm not saying mastered
Speaker 1: or like even made a passable sound. I have experimented
Speaker 1: with probably every cow call on the market at some
Speaker 1: point or another over my lifetime. I think that, uh,
Speaker 1: in my view, Phelps is easy to sucker. Is the
Speaker 1: easiest cow call I have ever used. Under this category
Speaker 1: that makes a wide variety of sounds. I probably need
Speaker 1: to get one because I have a hard time listen.
Speaker 1: I don't understand. I don't get the mechanics of it.
Speaker 1: But normally so like over the years, people come out
Speaker 1: with bite and blow calls that are like monos. They
Speaker 1: make a sound, and everyone that uses them all makes
Speaker 1: that same sound. It becomes something of a joke, like
Speaker 1: a good call will come out. Then a couple of
Speaker 1: years later people laugh about when you make when you
Speaker 1: blow that call the alcohol goal the other direction, because
Speaker 1: you're like ship. It's one of those dudes. That one
Speaker 1: call um where you lose that problem is with diaphragm,
Speaker 1: because you have like like a tremendous vocabulary with a diaphragm.
Speaker 1: But this one is like one of the problems. A
Speaker 1: lot of bite and blow calls to or exposed read
Speaker 1: calls is it's so hard to get like the pressures
Speaker 1: of how much pressure with your lips or teeth you're
Speaker 1: putting on it, how much air you're putting through. It's
Speaker 1: just a pain in yass. And it's coming from guy
Speaker 1: who thinks game calls are painting he has in general. Uh,
Speaker 1: holy sh it, dude, Cal's gonna Cal's gonna suck on it. Steven.
Speaker 1: It's like you don't know, you don't you don't blow
Speaker 1: on it. You're just like and it's not even like
Speaker 1: you're sucking. You're like it's like a like an inhale.
Speaker 1: Do you like hyperventilate? It's like inhale and and like
Speaker 1: and it's hands free. It's just it's like a green rubber.
Speaker 1: It's called the easy sucker. Do you like it? Steve?
Speaker 1: Screwing this up a little bit? Okay, go ahead, Okay.
Speaker 1: So the more complex and called the wider range and
Speaker 1: noises you're you're gonna be able to make, but the
Speaker 1: more time you need to get into it and uh
Speaker 1: and really started playing, because they're like a musical instrument,
Speaker 1: a kazoo in the hands of someone who actually has
Speaker 1: messed around with a kazoo, a bunch can make that
Speaker 1: sound appealing. People who really pay after you get um,
Speaker 1: after you get Rhonda Santis and Chris Pratt, Chris Press
Speaker 1: and uh, you know who's the galph Meds NBC. I
Speaker 1: always want to get on the show, Rachel Madden, get
Speaker 1: us a good kazoo player. Thirty five minutes of pure
Speaker 1: kazoo easy listening. Uh, this is a dog inhale calicoll,
Speaker 1: but it's got a bite component to it, so you
Speaker 1: can actually create some different tones and pitches. Volumes. Is
Speaker 1: that included in tones and pitches? Well, I think there's
Speaker 1: you know, there's a limitation on this, which is good
Speaker 1: as far as like your overall volume. I was messing
Speaker 1: around with this, and you can do like some some
Speaker 1: little bowl sounds too, and and some Phelps can Phelps
Speaker 1: can do, but he doesn't like to say. He doesn't
Speaker 1: like to wreck amend it for bowl like, Oh, he
Speaker 1: was way out there. I think I need to get
Speaker 1: myself one of those. I can't play time with that one.
Speaker 1: And volume, you can actually get a different insert, right
Speaker 1: like I think Phelps has a different insert, So yeah,
Speaker 1: you can get a different like a louder call. She
Speaker 1: can switch mountain and you can take the biggest jackass
Speaker 1: on the planet there trying to segue into my kids
Speaker 1: on the end of that, you can take my children
Speaker 1: and they can make cow calls with it, Steve saying
Speaker 1: they have the experience level of jackasses or my children. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's like you're go for them. You can do a
Speaker 1: lot of playing around with the wraps, the kids, the
Speaker 1: monotone do everything yourself. Cow calls are the ones that
Speaker 1: I certainly stay away for m and I like to
Speaker 1: pick up one new col call a year, yep, and
Speaker 1: just mess around with it and try to find something different.
Speaker 1: And everybody has like a different read, thickness of read,
Speaker 1: length of read, et cetera. That makes a different pitch
Speaker 1: and call. So um, yeah, I need that one. And
Speaker 1: I feel like we all have that hunting buddy too
Speaker 1: that you just know you're gonna have to call for
Speaker 1: all the time, right, Like you're always going to be
Speaker 1: the guy in the back calling for him because he's
Speaker 1: just not gonna call. Like I brought that home, gave
Speaker 1: it to my wife, and it was like within just
Speaker 1: related to what you're just saying. I wouldn't say it's unrelated,
Speaker 1: but like within or take my wife friend. But in
Speaker 1: like a two minute time frame, I'm like, you're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to call for me, Like you're legitimately going
Speaker 1: to be able to call for me. Now that's awesome.
Speaker 1: I love it, dude, I'm throwing other ship in the
Speaker 1: garbage or in a box. Well, I do point out,
Speaker 1: since this is an inhale cow call, there's definitely room
Speaker 1: for an exhale cal call, of which Phelps makes several
Speaker 1: external read calls that are understand if you want to
Speaker 1: pick up a call, if you want to pick up
Speaker 1: a call and make a like and make very passable
Speaker 1: cow calls very quickly and not just one sound, but
Speaker 1: a variety of sounds, I would be like this and
Speaker 1: then just waste your breath exhaling for no reason. And
Speaker 1: I would say that if I thought Phelps was the
Speaker 1: was the biggest asshole in the world, I still say
Speaker 1: the same thing, because it's like an objective reality. It's
Speaker 1: it's a good one. I like, I like a minimum
Speaker 1: of two external read calls because you can definitely jam
Speaker 1: them up with with gunk and spit and you know,
Speaker 1: dirt and all the pollen and bugs. And I can
Speaker 1: keep going on with this list um and about this
Speaker 1: this this is a fun one. That's a fun one
Speaker 1: to add to the land yard. Cal do do do uh.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say one last land access initiative.
Speaker 1: So here's the deal, folks. We've been running the land
Speaker 1: Access Initiative for quite a while. It's a sweet program.
Speaker 1: We've had some success under our belt with the Shiloh
Speaker 1: Pond project. We're looking for the next one. We're still
Speaker 1: in the active looking phase. We've gotten a lot of suggestions,
Speaker 1: but honestly, very few out of probably six or seven
Speaker 1: hundred submissions at this sex of like of like solid
Speaker 1: this is the place, this is what we want to do,
Speaker 1: like like a project. We've we've had ideas of projects
Speaker 1: that frankly, we just don't have time for. You're looking
Speaker 1: for a whole nonprofit organization that can focus their time
Speaker 1: on this, of which there are so many, So get
Speaker 1: off your key, star and and I've forward these on
Speaker 1: to my friends in those positions. But we are looking
Speaker 1: for a place that is open to an easement outright purchase,
Speaker 1: something that will provide more public access to hunting and fishing.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of awesome stuff in the works.
Speaker 1: We got some cash on the fund right now. We
Speaker 1: got a lot of partners on board to make this happen. Um,
Speaker 1: we had we had an amazing donation offer. We have
Speaker 1: people that want to help so bad that they're giving
Speaker 1: away houses, little tiny ones that you can trap out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: super super awesome. Um. So go to the conservation page
Speaker 1: at the meat Eater dot com, click on land Access
Speaker 1: and submit a. The phones are ringing off the hook
Speaker 1: over here. Okay, okay, get in lines right now, click
Speaker 1: a submit to the Land Access Initiative and we want Yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to find that that perfect thing where we
Speaker 1: can jump in and help create more access to hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing. Garrett's only about a couple of the ones
Speaker 1: that are in there. We have, we have several very
Speaker 1: good ways to spend money, I think, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: we just just want to find like the perfect thing.
Speaker 1: But there's we have an absolutely phenomenal project here in
Speaker 1: the state of Montana and Northwest Montana that the Trust
Speaker 1: Republic Lands is working on, which would be at a
Speaker 1: system of ease months that would provide access for the
Speaker 1: myriad of land of many uses activities from firewood cutting
Speaker 1: to fishing to snowmobiling. In perpetuity, which is super cool
Speaker 1: and attractive. There's some incredible projects that Ducks and Limited
Speaker 1: is working on in in Iowa for instance, that are
Speaker 1: it would be money well spam. So if you have
Speaker 1: something that you just want to get active on, please
Speaker 1: submit it to the mediator Land Access Initiative. I want
Speaker 1: to give the dude to plug even though we're not
Speaker 1: we haven't moved on yet. Naughty log homes k n
Speaker 1: A U g h t Y naughty log homes. They
Speaker 1: want to donate a log trapper's cabin. I can't remember
Speaker 1: the dimensions of it. And they're I mean, they're donating
Speaker 1: a log trapper's cabin to the to the auction House
Speaker 1: of Oddities. They are one of a kind log home.
Speaker 1: That's a really cool name. They're just saying, you see, Sean,
Speaker 1: not sisters sister's organ donate the whole damn thing. That's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's big. No, it's a great offer. Uh oh, Sean,
Speaker 1: you're ready to lay out this. Uh about talking about
Speaker 1: Delta Waterfowl, Yes, sir, yeah, uh and Cal can speak
Speaker 1: to this too, but we are First Light is partnering
Speaker 1: with Delta Waterfowl for Camo for conservation as a lot
Speaker 1: of you probably well you've probably heard on the last
Speaker 1: podcast and seeing on social media and all that that
Speaker 1: first lights Waterfowl Pattern TYFA is out and a portion
Speaker 1: of the sales from that are going to Delta Waterfowl UM,
Speaker 1: which you know, I'm stoked about because I love Delta.
Speaker 1: I've talked about Delta a lot in these Duck Reports
Speaker 1: and they've been information with you on the Duck Reports. Yeah, yeah, there,
Speaker 1: And I mean the big reason those guys love help
Speaker 1: and so much is their duck hunters. I mean, they
Speaker 1: call themselves the duck Hunters Organization, but they really are.
Speaker 1: They are Their organization is about helping duck hunters. And
Speaker 1: there's still research organization. They have their four pillars duck
Speaker 1: production are three, habitat, conservation and research and education. Um.
Speaker 1: But like their research and education stuff is really keyed
Speaker 1: and focused on applicable science right ways that they can
Speaker 1: actually um you know, benefit duck habitat, duck numbers, the
Speaker 1: whole bit. So it's nice to be working with them
Speaker 1: to go buy some TYFA, kick some money toward Delta.
Speaker 1: We're just gonna make a donation to Delta two. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think every duck hunter should be with
Speaker 1: what the two big duck hunting orgs have done for
Speaker 1: water fowlers. Every duck hunter should be a member of
Speaker 1: both anyway, So so Campbell for Conservation first Light right now,
Speaker 1: prior to TYFA, if you bought a specter, anything in
Speaker 1: the specter camouflage pattern which is is our can mover
Speaker 1: folks who like to hide in trees, a percentage of
Speaker 1: every sale goes to NDA, which used to be q
Speaker 1: d m A National Lines and now and NDA and
Speaker 1: now it's just National Deer Lines. Uh. On the water
Speaker 1: foul side of things, any thing in the type of patterning,
Speaker 1: a percentage of that purchase goes to Delta water Fowl.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna feel real good about buying some unparalleled
Speaker 1: duck hunting camouflage and just stuff that's gonna keep you
Speaker 1: warm and dry when you need to be warm and dry.
Speaker 1: But you're gonna feel doubly good knowing that that cash
Speaker 1: is going to go make more ducks. And one of
Speaker 1: the coolest things about Delta that they talked about all
Speaker 1: the time is it was founded with the idea of
Speaker 1: I want to replace times two or times three every
Speaker 1: duck I take off the lance gate. And so you're
Speaker 1: buying clothing that you're ideally going to go out and
Speaker 1: remove some ducts from and some geese from the waters
Speaker 1: and in airways of America. But with with that purchase,
Speaker 1: you're gonna slide some money back to putting them back
Speaker 1: out times two or three good? Good? Okay. We got
Speaker 1: a guy rolled in from Alaska. So he said he
Speaker 1: has this say he wants people to weigh in on this.
Speaker 1: Just to give some background, I am in the military,
Speaker 1: stationed in Alaska and work for a three letter organization
Speaker 1: that I will omit from this email. Boy, that makes
Speaker 1: you really start thinking, I'm starting to think of them,
Speaker 1: ain't I r s? Anyways, recently this spring I was
Speaker 1: successful in a brown bear hunt and have since updated
Speaker 1: my Skype pro file of course on our classified computers
Speaker 1: with a photo of me kneeling next to my bear pictures.
Speaker 1: Very tasteful, not displaying any blood, gods, etcetera. Well, on Fridays,
Speaker 1: he goes on to say, we use Skype to conduct
Speaker 1: virtual meetings weekly to highlight mission successes for each work
Speaker 1: center in the building. I am currently the highest ranking
Speaker 1: enlisted person in my work center and am in charge
Speaker 1: of the missions we conduct, so I was speaking on
Speaker 1: my team's behalf and obviously my profile photo popped up,
Speaker 1: indicating who is speaking. No video on these skype calls.
Speaker 1: Shortly after the meeting, my three letters civilian boss came
Speaker 1: down to talk to me about mission related stuff. When
Speaker 1: he was pulled aside by another three letter civilian. She
Speaker 1: instructed him that he needs to speak to his team
Speaker 1: about displaying profile photos with dead animals and that it
Speaker 1: is offensive to people. He spoke to me about this
Speaker 1: instructed me not to change the profile as my photo
Speaker 1: is not offensive and I am not displaying the bear
Speaker 1: in a disrespectful way. My question is if this escalates
Speaker 1: into something bigger down the road, do I stand my
Speaker 1: ground and try to push back or do I simply
Speaker 1: just give in and change it. He goes on to say,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, I don't understand how this photo is
Speaker 1: offensive when my profile photo for the last year has
Speaker 1: been a photo of me holding a big silver salmon
Speaker 1: I caught with my fly rod. At what, at one
Speaker 1: point does a dead bear trump a dead fish? Is
Speaker 1: that the anthropomorphizing of bears and not salmon. Meanwhile, we
Speaker 1: all walk around and kyote brown suede leather boots. The
Speaker 1: military is literally walking around with dead animals on our feet.
Speaker 1: Half the civilians sit in luxury leather chairs at their desks.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to figure out if it's something I
Speaker 1: should stand my ground on or just be the bigger
Speaker 1: person and change my profile. Now here's my take on it.
Speaker 1: I have a take to after you. If there was
Speaker 1: a rule, if there was a pre existing rule dictating
Speaker 1: guidelines for your profile picture, and this broke a pre
Speaker 1: existing profile picture guideline rule, then you should change your rule.
Speaker 1: But if you're being singled out for this and nothing else,
Speaker 1: I would fight back on it. Yeah, my my take
Speaker 1: is a little more broad like in scope than that.
Speaker 1: You're in the military, which is purpose is to conduct violence,
Speaker 1: yet we're like offended. I don't understand how people in
Speaker 1: the military are offended by a dead animal in profile picture.
Speaker 1: But the whole point in the middle, if you don't
Speaker 1: get like, culturally, why that would that that's surprising to me. Culturally,
Speaker 1: it's surprising you well, and it's a little bit ironic
Speaker 1: to think about an organization that exists for like violence.
Speaker 1: I think all great points, but um, I would take
Speaker 1: it down. I would put up something very very milk
Speaker 1: toast that is mildly appealing to everyone who sees it.
Speaker 1: If it's the three letter organization we're talking about, um,
Speaker 1: we're talking about regime changes. We're talking about the ability
Speaker 1: to impact gross national product of any country on the planet.
Speaker 1: We're talking about zero dark thirty. You're an enlisted man,
Speaker 1: change your profile picks not worth its like this bigger
Speaker 1: fish to fry. Yeah, they're they're the organization fry the fish,
Speaker 1: bigger bear, bigger bear meat to fry. Yeah, here's why
Speaker 1: I think you're wrong, cal Um. That was so matter
Speaker 1: of fact. I don't think this is an issue of
Speaker 1: like compliance. I don't think it's like an issue of rules,
Speaker 1: like I think this is kind of semantics and like
Speaker 1: one of the things we deal with a lot on
Speaker 1: this podcast when we bring up is like different predator
Speaker 1: hunting getting closed down for no reason at all all
Speaker 1: over the place, And I feel like, uh, one of
Speaker 1: our jobs is that normalize it a little bit, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so it's not just so you know, like toxic whenever
Speaker 1: you do see it. I feel like folding on something
Speaker 1: like this, taking down the picture or not being able
Speaker 1: to embrace something that's a huge part of your life.
Speaker 1: It detracts from the normalization of something that then we
Speaker 1: come on here and we tell people like, no, it's
Speaker 1: a thing that people do and should be respected. And
Speaker 1: there's a key in the language used here is the
Speaker 1: individuals claiming not that it violates protocol or not that
Speaker 1: it violates picture rules, They said it is offensive. And
Speaker 1: I think that allowing people just to run around really
Speaker 1: nearly declaring yeah, like to declaring something that might offend
Speaker 1: me as being categorically offensive, are they is running rampant.
Speaker 1: I mean, like you can declare people things that the
Speaker 1: people would never even agree with, so to say, like
Speaker 1: it's offensive, Like, let's let's let's be clear. You find
Speaker 1: it offensive, but there are probably things about you it
Speaker 1: would be deeply offensive to me. You have a picture
Speaker 1: of your third wife on your profile picture. That's offensive
Speaker 1: to me. Why why have you been married three times?
Speaker 1: I find that very offensive? Take that down. No one
Speaker 1: would ever ask that of somebody, right, Or like I
Speaker 1: see that you have a picture of yourself, um not
Speaker 1: at church on Sunday, that's deeply offensive to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can make this encrypted channel. That's that's like a
Speaker 1: language thing. That's people stating as fact. So it's used
Speaker 1: to use the eye word everybody. But that's my point.
Speaker 1: Cal is like, it is insane that the people who
Speaker 1: exist to swap out dick to waters are getting offended
Speaker 1: by a bear picture. I think we're obviously I mean
Speaker 1: your computer, cow oh, because I'm I'm well read up
Speaker 1: on this crab situation, but you weren't on the other situation.
Speaker 1: I was working on some other things from the crab
Speaker 1: come for everybody. I want to tee up the next
Speaker 1: this next segment. If there's one thing the media loves,
Speaker 1: not TV, but there's one thing newspapers and magazines love,
Speaker 1: it is a story about someone utilizing an invasive species
Speaker 1: as a for something or another. Hit it cow, Yes,
Speaker 1: that I mean, that's that's a great There's a good
Speaker 1: couple of question marks in this story. So this distilling
Speaker 1: company in conjunction, I guess I'm not all that right
Speaker 1: up on this anyway. He's quietly quietly opening I could
Speaker 1: peer back up. So there's this green crab, this invasive
Speaker 1: green crab. They came over in the eighteen hundreds, we think,
Speaker 1: in the ballast of boats. Never heard of this crab
Speaker 1: and the things years of being here. When you do
Speaker 1: hear about it, though, they're like, they are horrible. They're
Speaker 1: horribly destructive. On Mola's they eat clams and and muscles
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, so obviously it's dipping into some
Speaker 1: other folks pocket books there. They are prolific and they're
Speaker 1: they're an edible crab, but they're so small the yield
Speaker 1: is really bad. So if you ever gone to a
Speaker 1: crab house and started picking crabs, eventually you might get
Speaker 1: sick of picking crabs. And that's why folks aren't eating
Speaker 1: a lot of these green crabs. Well, in this case,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire Distilling took up the problem and turned and
Speaker 1: this is where I really had. Here's here's what I
Speaker 1: don't like the language I'm worth distilling. It's not taking
Speaker 1: up the problem. Like it's not taking up the problem capitalizing.
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, okay, so I mean I thought,
Speaker 1: it's what do you mean by that? It's not taking
Speaker 1: up the problem. It would be like if I started
Speaker 1: eating let's say I eat dandelion salads. He took up
Speaker 1: the problems dandelions. He's been eating a dandelion salad at night.
Speaker 1: But take up the problem of dandelions, or might eating
Speaker 1: a dandelion salad? I get what you mean anyway. Um,
Speaker 1: they started with the bourbon base and then they added
Speaker 1: in this green crab stock are along with like bass
Speaker 1: seasoning and kind of classic crab stuff. And what you
Speaker 1: end up with is what they call something better than um.
Speaker 1: What the hell is the fireball? But it doesn't know
Speaker 1: now I'm not interested before. I can't even smell fireball,
Speaker 1: crab trapper green crab flavored whiskey. Wait, where does it
Speaker 1: say that that's the comparison? Fireball is nasty? Just eat
Speaker 1: a stick of like Big Red. I was just back
Speaker 1: at my hometown. I went to my hometown gas station,
Speaker 1: and the guy in front of me, which made me
Speaker 1: feel so much like I was in my hometown. The
Speaker 1: guy in from me bought a fistful a lotto tickets
Speaker 1: and then asked for a bottle of fireball, and they
Speaker 1: asked if he wanted it chilled or room town, and
Speaker 1: he was able to walk out. He's able to walk
Speaker 1: out with a fistball lot of tickets in a cold
Speaker 1: bottle of fireball. I can go cup. I can't even
Speaker 1: stomach drinking that in the summertime either it's like maybe
Speaker 1: in january ice fishing. But there's a there. It still
Speaker 1: is a bar called do drop you outside of West
Speaker 1: Glacier and they did off, you know, off say a liquor,
Speaker 1: so you could buy a bottle of liquor there. And
Speaker 1: this is the only place that's ever happened to me.
Speaker 1: But if you go in there and buy a bottle
Speaker 1: of liquor at the bar, they say, would you like
Speaker 1: cups and ice with that? Not? In addition to have
Speaker 1: you been on the on the kaibab right there in
Speaker 1: fre Donia you come down the hill off the Kaibab
Speaker 1: plateau and it's the center of the universe. Judd otto, guns,
Speaker 1: m o lotto and beer. Okay, So there is a
Speaker 1: good snippet here on on the green crab. They are
Speaker 1: probably one of the most successful invasive species that we
Speaker 1: have in North America, at least in the marine world.
Speaker 1: They can eat about forty muscles a day, just one crab.
Speaker 1: Each bottle has a pound of green crabs. And that's impressive.
Speaker 1: That is impressive, and in my immediate d I sent
Speaker 1: this to some folks in the in the culinary world
Speaker 1: because I to understand if there's what is the demand
Speaker 1: for like a good crab stock, so you know, you
Speaker 1: you don't go through the worry of picking everybody, just
Speaker 1: turn it all into a giant bats and crabstock. If
Speaker 1: there would be like a you know, canned crab stock
Speaker 1: type of market, I imagine there is, and that seems
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot better way to go than
Speaker 1: making it into something better than I wonder what the
Speaker 1: hangovers are like, Like you got feeling crabby, broa wake
Speaker 1: up in the morning, feel like you're rolling on a boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: except for your walking sideways everywhere you go. We probably
Speaker 1: can't get this here in Montana if anyone at tam
Speaker 1: tam Worth Distilling wants to send us a bottle at mediator,
Speaker 1: uh A marine Bio just goes on to say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's unlikely that this whiskey, this whiskey bottle
Speaker 1: and enterprise is gonna have a serious impact. But she says,
Speaker 1: someone goes on to point out, I'm not reading it carefully.
Speaker 1: Know who points out? They go on to point out,
Speaker 1: if you factor in producing fishing bait with green crabs,
Speaker 1: whiskey with green crabs, fish sauce of green crabs, and
Speaker 1: just more and more incentivize the use um. It could
Speaker 1: be good. You know, one of one of the invasives
Speaker 1: that I felt that you could most like kind of
Speaker 1: get after in a way that felt productive is shooting
Speaker 1: lion fish. Yeah, because you go like in the Bahamas,
Speaker 1: we just ran a boat and go out and cruise
Speaker 1: for coral heads and it's just sand, sand, sand sand,
Speaker 1: and then there's coral heads. You've see him from million
Speaker 1: miles away on a sunny day and you go to
Speaker 1: a coral head and every coral head to go to
Speaker 1: the be like o lion fish or to lion fish.
Speaker 1: They're easy to get. They're like they just stand the ground,
Speaker 1: like they don't it's not in their mind to get away.
Speaker 1: They stand the ground, and so you shoot them. And
Speaker 1: he'd be like, this coral head is free of lion fish.
Speaker 1: And then you move on to the next one and
Speaker 1: shoot those, move on the next one and shoot those.
Speaker 1: And it seemed like guy, he seems to be able
Speaker 1: to kill them all. But man, they haven't gotten that
Speaker 1: problem solved yet. The incentivize that. That's when Steve started
Speaker 1: the intro to this segment here he is correct, like
Speaker 1: we love talking about like good uses for these invasives.
Speaker 1: And the one that they've gotten the most use out of,
Speaker 1: by and large, of something that we see as a
Speaker 1: real problem. Or it would be the Asian carp species.
Speaker 1: And so there's some school, some collegiate school programs that
Speaker 1: their culinary programs utilize you know, several thousand pounds of
Speaker 1: fish every year, UM in their their meal halls, and
Speaker 1: they're making actual, you know, tasty stuff. But then in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio,
Speaker 1: there's some actual per pound incentivized fisheries and and processing
Speaker 1: facilities for these fish where they've actually there's enough incentive
Speaker 1: government incentive that folks who commercially harvest catfish or buff
Speaker 1: flow or paddlefish do they call spoonbill out there um
Speaker 1: can switch over net sizes and start targeting specifically the
Speaker 1: Asian carp, which there are some food markets for, and
Speaker 1: there's some fertilizer markets for and stuff like that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's definitely something that we we need to get
Speaker 1: ahold of, which is why you know, crabby whiskey, get
Speaker 1: some get some headlines, and it says that there is no,
Speaker 1: uh no real market around green crabs. So if something
Speaker 1: got started, it would be the first ever. Uh, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give you some very dated insight into the carp problem,
Speaker 1: the Asian carp problem, and differentiating it from the common
Speaker 1: European carp which fast of our waters, many of our waters.
Speaker 1: I spent some days with a guy that was a
Speaker 1: commercial netter okay, um. He was doing allow stuff that
Speaker 1: would wind out. He was catching a lot of those carpon.
Speaker 1: His primary buyer was using them for making a filter fish,
Speaker 1: so like canned fish preparation. And they're very concerned in
Speaker 1: those waterways about not catching like the native fish. I'll
Speaker 1: add that we caught a beaver, but that's just a
Speaker 1: side note. And so they'd regulate mesh size, okay. And
Speaker 1: he had to use whatever like an eight inch mash
Speaker 1: or something like a huge mesh that way all the
Speaker 1: bass right, like large moths, bluegills, crop ease, everything can
Speaker 1: get through the mesh. But it was a big enough
Speaker 1: mesh you kept it really catch a really big carp.
Speaker 1: And he said you could go into a stretch. The
Speaker 1: commercial guys could go into a big stretch of river
Speaker 1: with that high, that big mesh netting and really get
Speaker 1: it where you're not catching carp anymore. Like you catch them.
Speaker 1: It's it's just very the the way they use these
Speaker 1: saints very effective. Oh, after they come through, you're not
Speaker 1: catching they can work an area. Let's say you use
Speaker 1: an eight inch man, you can work an area with
Speaker 1: an eight inch mesh. Where you're like, we're does not
Speaker 1: catching them like we did, we must be having a
Speaker 1: positive impact. But then researches will point out the bio
Speaker 1: mass of the cart doesn't change, like the poundage per
Speaker 1: mile of carpon these stretches doesn't change. It's just not
Speaker 1: comprised of big ones, right, And so they'd be like,
Speaker 1: we need to be able to use smaller mesh. We
Speaker 1: need to be able to use do a six inch mesh.
Speaker 1: And then people be like, well, you know it could
Speaker 1: have ramifications for bass or whatever, and they use a
Speaker 1: sitien and then you kick ass with the new mesh
Speaker 1: and then you're catch slows. Meanwhile, per mile same pounded
Speaker 1: of cart, which which is why you see it's carrying capacity. Right.
Speaker 1: In this conversation around carbon specifically, you see a lot
Speaker 1: of prevention in the form of how do we get
Speaker 1: these fish to not spawn where you see like those
Speaker 1: bubble curtains and narrators and stuff that try to divert
Speaker 1: fish from areas where they would spawn. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: hell of it. I visited that electrical barrier on Lake Michigan.
Speaker 1: We're trying to keep him from entering the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's still up and running or not.
Speaker 1: A guy when out when I was sawing the people
Speaker 1: on that cart problem, he was saying like, I was like,
Speaker 1: what would actually fix the thing? And he said, what
Speaker 1: would actually fix the thing? And we'd never use it
Speaker 1: or be able to use it, and you wouldn't have
Speaker 1: public appetite for it because he goes. I could imagine
Speaker 1: there's gotta be some kind of virus or something that's particular.
Speaker 1: But who's gonna be the guy that pours out of
Speaker 1: the you know, who wants to play with the virus?
Speaker 1: Like he's like like path They're like there's They're like,
Speaker 1: if you really like there's maybe some pathogen or controlled
Speaker 1: studies say that nothing, nothing will go wrong, nothing bad
Speaker 1: app alright, Sean, we're gonna segue into raptors, uh, I
Speaker 1: mean lead ammunition yep. And we're gonna kick it off
Speaker 1: with Shawn's duck report. Got anything else to shape. You
Speaker 1: bet you had mentioned I don't know, a month ago
Speaker 1: or something, do a duck report, arm do a duck
Speaker 1: report on lead points, the lead shot band, what led
Speaker 1: up to it, whether it was successful. So, Chris, if
Speaker 1: I get something wrong here, which I'm pretty sure I
Speaker 1: don't have anything wrong, You're gonna have to correct me
Speaker 1: because this comes from your world. Really, I was raised
Speaker 1: at a time, o't Do you remember what year happened? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they tried several times, but when it ultimately happened was
Speaker 1: because you know, it's interesting, My first legal duck season
Speaker 1: was in six and there were people that were not
Speaker 1: duck hunting. They were they were like quitting duck hunting
Speaker 1: out of protest. Yeah, and that that some of them stuck,
Speaker 1: some of them just never came back, which is wild. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the lead shot ban um was a gradual crescendo.
Speaker 1: Late eighteen hundreds there started being reports of lead poisoning
Speaker 1: and waterfowl late eighteen hundreds. Yeah, they had a mass
Speaker 1: kill because guys like me and Spencer with them punt guns. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: it was mostly like commercial market areas that were punt
Speaker 1: gunning whole lakes um Texas seventy four they really started
Speaker 1: reporting it, and then in the early nineteen hundreds it
Speaker 1: turned into mass die offs because smoking wasn't even bad
Speaker 1: for you back then. It's just surprising. I don't need
Speaker 1: to be glue about. It's just surprising that at that
Speaker 1: time there was like the level of sophistication to take
Speaker 1: dead waterfowl and determine cause of death right and related
Speaker 1: to a related to a heavy metal and some of
Speaker 1: them weren't even making the correlation necessarily right away. They
Speaker 1: were like, there's a bunch of dead ducks here, and
Speaker 1: then they do a knee cropsy and find they just
Speaker 1: also happened to have letting their gizzards go out, and
Speaker 1: that's that's really where it started. Um, then you get
Speaker 1: into the early nineteen hundreds and they started having like
Speaker 1: mass kills, um hundreds and hundreds of birds on a
Speaker 1: single body water repeatedly seasonally. Yeah, and yeah, it definitely
Speaker 1: kept going faster and faster and more and more. Uh am,
Speaker 1: I correctness that the issue with ducks is that ducks
Speaker 1: are as they gather grit for their gizzard, they are
Speaker 1: finding lead shot and ingesting the lead and like ingesting
Speaker 1: the lead for grit for their gizzard. This isn't that
Speaker 1: they're all carrying around stray pellets. Well, it's no, it's
Speaker 1: not from It's definitely not from wounder wounded, hunter wound.
Speaker 1: It's it's mostly ingestion. They're like picking they see something like, oh,
Speaker 1: that makes a piece of great piece of grit from
Speaker 1: my crop. Yeah. And I mean they're getting it in
Speaker 1: both their gizzard and their stomach. It's not like just
Speaker 1: as they're picking up while they feed. They're picking it
Speaker 1: up while they feed. And people think, oh, how are
Speaker 1: they picking up that tiny little pellet in this big
Speaker 1: lace home? But it has it doesn't get to their
Speaker 1: stomach without going through their gizzard. Well what I'm what
Speaker 1: I mean is like that they're finding the lead shot
Speaker 1: in both places. It's not just poisoning them in the gizzard,
Speaker 1: it'll pay. It's passing intact, yeah, and into the gut.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of comparison photos that the Fish
Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service had that shows like a normal ducks,
Speaker 1: how healthy stomach and healthy gizzard to uh a lead
Speaker 1: poison one. Um. But you know, one of the big
Speaker 1: pushbacks from hunter and I did not realize how controversial
Speaker 1: this was until I started really digging. And see this
Speaker 1: was interpreted by a lot of outdoorsman as a anti hunter,
Speaker 1: anti Second Amendment government overreach movement. Was not positioned as that.
Speaker 1: The hunter thought that's what it was, right, um. But
Speaker 1: and you know one of their big arguments was how
Speaker 1: is a duck picking up stray pellets? You know they're tiny,
Speaker 1: a little pellet because I've never seen it, because right, right,
Speaker 1: But well that's We've had a lot of people right
Speaker 1: in and be like I have checked every stomach and
Speaker 1: every gizzet of every duck and they killed law ducstion,
Speaker 1: like and I found a pellet mm hm. So you
Speaker 1: know it's anecdotable, but we hear that, right right, yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but when you start breaking down like how much leads
Speaker 1: being dispersed on the environment, you know there's half pounds.
Speaker 1: So the average back then was a half pound of
Speaker 1: shot being you know, shot by a hunter per bird bagged,
Speaker 1: which comes out to four hundred pellets of number six lead.
Speaker 1: And you know that's per bird you shoot. Overall, their
Speaker 1: estimate was tons of lead shot being put into wetlands
Speaker 1: a year by waterfowl hunters. And there was that that
Speaker 1: was in the fifties. I think, um, this is got
Speaker 1: The guy that did this big study on this was
Speaker 1: a guy named Frank Bell Rose and he was the
Speaker 1: one that really brought it into like we got to
Speaker 1: do something about this. We need a management plan about
Speaker 1: lead shot. And that was in nineteen Yeah, like one
Speaker 1: of these things you have here. In one Lake, Michigan
Speaker 1: blue bill die off, ten stomachs were examined that held
Speaker 1: any were from forty eight lead pellets per bird. But
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that this guy was cooking the books.
Speaker 1: Boo boom. People are still hunting ducks. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 1: not like why is the why are the crops and
Speaker 1: stomach is not full of shot? I think one thing
Speaker 1: that would be really interesting to look at here would
Speaker 1: be your your hunter distribution, right like in methods of
Speaker 1: hunting during this study time, because I do have to
Speaker 1: wonder if there's higher concentrations on certain Martia's bodies of
Speaker 1: water than than we could have, how that distribution of
Speaker 1: actual hunting activity varies from then until today. Well, Sean
Speaker 1: hit him with that little detail you got near that
Speaker 1: little detail about a heavily hunted wetlands. Yeah, so and
Speaker 1: and that was a big part of it. You know.
Speaker 1: The argument is now a lot of that lead shot
Speaker 1: has been covered up by sediment because that So they
Speaker 1: did a bunch of sampling of major wetland areas that
Speaker 1: were like huge waterfowl hunting destinations, and they found some
Speaker 1: of those to have over a hundred thousand pellets per
Speaker 1: acre in the top three inches of the bottom sentiment,
Speaker 1: which is so man, see Sean did a good job,
Speaker 1: because he's not that I'm looking in here, Okay. From
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty four, they examined thirty
Speaker 1: six thousand gizzards six point six percent. Between nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: eight nineteen fifty four, thirty six sample size of thirty
Speaker 1: six thousand gizzards six point six p ingestion right had
Speaker 1: led in them with mallards seven. So there you go,
Speaker 1: go kill a hundred. So here's the tests for someone,
Speaker 1: now who someone who's like going to be like bullshit it, man,
Speaker 1: get a hundred ducks, especially if you hunt like a
Speaker 1: social hold, like a refew, like like you hunt a
Speaker 1: place that gets hunted, Go to a place it gets hunted.
Speaker 1: Shoot a hundred docks and see if you find seven
Speaker 1: percent to gotta steal or bismuth, pellet or gut be
Speaker 1: interesting if if it's constant through time, yeah yeah, and
Speaker 1: so okay. So where where it kind of like really
Speaker 1: got to the point of people having to do something
Speaker 1: about it was these die offs started becoming highly visible.
Speaker 1: Right you had TV and UM one that like was
Speaker 1: right perfect at the kind of the right time in
Speaker 1: the seventies when this was getting talked about more and more,
Speaker 1: and I think it was the National Wildlife Federation had
Speaker 1: already started trying to push for a lead ban. Fish
Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service wanted a lead ban, but they couldn't
Speaker 1: get it done. Um Lake Puckaway, Wisconsin. They end up
Speaker 1: with like over three thousand geese dead that we're winnering there.
Speaker 1: And the what ultimately what they said happened was that
Speaker 1: these geese winnered on a part of the lake that
Speaker 1: was shallow and had a lot of hunter um hunter use.
Speaker 1: And what year was this, m I can't remember exactly
Speaker 1: what year that was. It was either of the late
Speaker 1: seventies or early eighties, but it was right dear in
Speaker 1: the peak of the discussions. So the debate was heating up,
Speaker 1: and then there's all of a a sudden on TV. You
Speaker 1: know that a bunch of volunteers collecting thousands of dead geese,
Speaker 1: three thousand dead geese in a lake that had a
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand lead pellets per acre and three inches top
Speaker 1: three inches just so wild. It's a lot of dead geese.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to picture, like, um, an acre's good sized,
Speaker 1: chunker grown. I'd think to see a density map, like
Speaker 1: if you did a one hand, if you took your
Speaker 1: two hands and did a scoop of muck, you're probably
Speaker 1: grabbing one. And I'm sure yeah, and I'm sure it
Speaker 1: would probably be there would be something about how it
Speaker 1: lays out right, There would be areas probably with a
Speaker 1: lot of higher density just by how someone hunts the
Speaker 1: area or whatnot. Um, But you know, yeah, prevailing wind
Speaker 1: right just like I mean, just like if you're someone
Speaker 1: who knows where to look on an old pond for arrowheads,
Speaker 1: for bird points, it oftentimes has a lot to do
Speaker 1: with the prevailing wind in the area. Find your shotgun
Speaker 1: pellets around that same spot too. So But you know,
Speaker 1: bell Rose's point was not that these mass die offs
Speaker 1: are like a population threat. It's that there's so many
Speaker 1: other factors that come in Once waterfowl start dying from
Speaker 1: lead poisoning um, for example, take some two weeks to die,
Speaker 1: they start getting weird, isolating themselves, hiding in the weeds,
Speaker 1: making themselves more susceptible to predators. In addition to that,
Speaker 1: then you have you know, he he even pointed to
Speaker 1: like you can't even really count or no exactly how
Speaker 1: many baculi is um outbreaks, for example are because a
Speaker 1: lead poison duck dies and then you end up with
Speaker 1: a botulism outbreak because well just ultimately, if the more
Speaker 1: you know, the more you have waterfowl dyeing in random places,
Speaker 1: increased abundance of carrying, okay, overloading the system where scavengers
Speaker 1: are cleaning it up. There's great examples about that, but
Speaker 1: different and uh So, they tried to try to ban
Speaker 1: lead in seventy six. The Stevens Amendment blocked it, kicked
Speaker 1: that back to the States, and then that's where raptors
Speaker 1: came in and bald eagles in what happen, Well, they
Speaker 1: had sixty bald eagles from nineteen eighty to ninety five
Speaker 1: died from lead poisoning, and the National Wildlife Federation was
Speaker 1: um sued, fish and Wildlife Service for a ban on
Speaker 1: lead shot, referencing bald eagle deaths, and they actually blocked
Speaker 1: this suit because then fishing once that suit was like happening.
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service said, okay, well band lead, so
Speaker 1: this court case doesn't happen. The National Wildlife Federation led
Speaker 1: the suit, yep, and it never it got dismissed. But
Speaker 1: I got that because bald eagles at that time, we're
Speaker 1: in e s A. They were in dangerous that same
Speaker 1: year they got kicked too, threatened I think, But yeah,
Speaker 1: they were on the essay still. And of course why
Speaker 1: do people care because the replacement was steel shot. It
Speaker 1: didn't work as good as lead shot. Yeah that's what
Speaker 1: people said, right, but um, okay that steel shot. There's
Speaker 1: stuff now that works phenomenally well. But I think, like
Speaker 1: any you know, you had to switch to bigger pellets, right,
Speaker 1: so you you used to use sixes and leads and
Speaker 1: also using twos and fours. So you're throwing I want
Speaker 1: to say, less lead out there, less material out there.
Speaker 1: You're throwing out less material per shot with with a
Speaker 1: smaller number of lethal things flying towards the target in
Speaker 1: their Yeah, this is it, just this is a whole
Speaker 1: another Duck report though, Um, it's talking about like the
Speaker 1: steel shot lethality table and all the work Tom Roster
Speaker 1: did going in you showing that steel is far more
Speaker 1: effective than it gets credit for, well in the heart
Speaker 1: and wounding loss and harvest rates. Actually, while they did
Speaker 1: decline initially after the ban, the the what they posited
Speaker 1: was based on their observations is as hunters learned how
Speaker 1: to use the new tool, wounding loss actually was less
Speaker 1: with steel than it was because they're like, I can't
Speaker 1: take that hill Mary anymore. Yeah, And a big part
Speaker 1: of that is, you know, lead and steel shoot differently.
Speaker 1: See everything about how you shoot as a shooter is different. Um,
Speaker 1: and it was not you know, like one of the
Speaker 1: things that when people talk about Pittman Robert's act, it
Speaker 1: really likes to point out that people were like really
Speaker 1: excited about it. Hunters wanted it right when they don't
Speaker 1: maybe some don't now according to what the Clyde and
Speaker 1: Georgia so, but it's it's like part of the part
Speaker 1: of the story of Pittman Robertson and the excise tax
Speaker 1: and ammunition that it was brought by the rod and
Speaker 1: gun clubs of America like they wanted this, They willingly
Speaker 1: did this right, and um, this was not we lose
Speaker 1: sight of it now. But this was not a popular
Speaker 1: thing now. I mean, there was definitely some waterfowl hunters there,
Speaker 1: you know, there was appetite for it with some, but
Speaker 1: not everybody, not even close. Um, some people welcomed it
Speaker 1: and didn't want I didn't want to see lead poisoning
Speaker 1: and waterfowl and and you know, bought in on the
Speaker 1: Bell Rose study and seeing how how bad lead shot
Speaker 1: could be on waterfowl numbers. But also there was a
Speaker 1: lot of people that just don't want to quit shooting
Speaker 1: Grandpa's gun with the fixed full choke and the thirty
Speaker 1: inch barrel. Right, Oh, you know, real quick, tell me
Speaker 1: about the guy that tell us the story out, the
Speaker 1: guy you know that was jailed for shooting a red tail. Well,
Speaker 1: hold on, I think that Sean's point there is is
Speaker 1: a great one that doesn't get brought up hardly at all,
Speaker 1: is the fact that not only were you forced to
Speaker 1: use a different ammunition, there is a ton of guns
Speaker 1: in use, like heavily in use that could not shoot steel,
Speaker 1: couldn't shoot a pellet. That that's hard too. Hard on
Speaker 1: the barrel at that time, at that time because the
Speaker 1: loads hadn't been developed. I mean, you look at what
Speaker 1: they've done in Europe in the last ten years. They
Speaker 1: are shooting steel out of parkers and parties, but they're
Speaker 1: adjusting the loads. So by adjusting the loads and decreasing
Speaker 1: the pressures, you can still you It's not that you
Speaker 1: can't shoot them. You can't shoot the loads that they
Speaker 1: had then. Well, I mean here in America is bigger
Speaker 1: is better? Okay, two and a half loadger better? Thing
Speaker 1: is uh? I was talking to uh, a guy called
Speaker 1: the Jazz Doctor, and we're talking about I was having
Speaker 1: a problem matching a jet outboard to a flat bottom boat.
Speaker 1: You remember my whole trial Tralation and I one one
Speaker 1: day it was entertaining over the phone with the jet Doctor,
Speaker 1: the idea that perhaps there's like, is it perhaps too
Speaker 1: much engine for the boat? And he said, I've been
Speaker 1: in this business forty years. I've never had a guy
Speaker 1: come to me and tell me he wants he needs
Speaker 1: a smaller motor. Yeah. Now you see boats with four
Speaker 1: hundred horsepower racing motors on them. Unbelievable. All right, talk
Speaker 1: about the redtail dude, real quick um or slow, I
Speaker 1: don't care. Oh, there's not much to it. I was
Speaker 1: a little bit wrong on that. It was not one
Speaker 1: red tail. It was one. It was it was one
Speaker 1: red tail with a game warden with him, was the problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he uh he was working at a pheasant hunting farm,
Speaker 1: you know, in South Dakota, like a lot of people do,
Speaker 1: and was shooting red tails while he was out guiding
Speaker 1: pheasants because you know, pheasant honors eight red tales and uh,
Speaker 1: well that's a that's a great you know what I
Speaker 1: mean though, like you'll hear stories. I would hear stories
Speaker 1: from guys like I would hear stories. Got the generation
Speaker 1: prior to me would be like if you hunt on
Speaker 1: so and soals farm, he gets mad if you don't
Speaker 1: shoot the red tails, right, which is like a I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's still out there. But I think that there
Speaker 1: was a time when well he used to pay bounties
Speaker 1: on him, right, there was a time when it was
Speaker 1: like you were doing the right thing for the planet
Speaker 1: by killing every raptor you saw, because chicken farmers would
Speaker 1: thank you, you know whatever, And uh yeah, so I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know exactly how many he shot, but
Speaker 1: he did get six months federal prison time plus three
Speaker 1: months probation plus or no not three months house or
Speaker 1: plus four years probation. Big fine, Yeah we're talking about this.
Speaker 1: You could he could have killed his wife and landed
Speaker 1: in jail for last time. Yeah, I mean he did some,
Speaker 1: He did some. I mean that's serious time. Six months.
Speaker 1: What are you in here for? Shot a hawk with
Speaker 1: a game warden? And I think what they really got
Speaker 1: him on was after he shot it, he then picked
Speaker 1: it up, moved it and buried it, Which is like
Speaker 1: even on top of all that, on top of all
Speaker 1: that loss is hunting privileges four years Okay, Well, the
Speaker 1: sad thing is for a lot of those things there
Speaker 1: there are depredation permits for instances. You know, I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that they're justifying the killing of raptors, but where
Speaker 1: it does you know, impact an individual's livelihood, there there
Speaker 1: are ways that for that to be managed. But to
Speaker 1: say loosely quote unquote managed is you know, that's different
Speaker 1: than wanton shooting that where I grew up to the
Speaker 1: same thing. You go out there and every third telephone
Speaker 1: pole's got a red tail at it. M right, man,
Speaker 1: but that's changed in my lifetime. That's changed drastically. So yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: give me your spiel on I don't want don't deliver
Speaker 1: it like a spiel all right, he never does, he wanted.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think where it's talking to the microphone. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, I can hear myself breathing. I didn't. I
Speaker 1: want to. I want to. Let let's approach it this way,
Speaker 1: all right. When people are talking about um, when people
Speaker 1: are talking about leading the environment today from hunters and shooters, Okay,
Speaker 1: there is a widespread idea that this has something to
Speaker 1: do with the California condo. Oh god, that's okay, that's
Speaker 1: the lead in. Raise your hand. I'm trying to find
Speaker 1: an avenue. Raise your hand if you feel that if
Speaker 1: you're made aware of the issue years ago in relation
Speaker 1: to the California condor Okay, everybody, okay, even Chris Races.
Speaker 1: I'm relatively new. No, okay, well, yes, Unfortunately, unfortunately people
Speaker 1: think that this lad issue lad lead from hunting or
Speaker 1: the otherwise shooting of animals, whether it's depredation, whatever you want,
Speaker 1: whichever category it's it's assumed that it's only a problem
Speaker 1: because of the condor, and that's that was people's avenue
Speaker 1: to introduction, absolutely, and and from a scientific perspective, because
Speaker 1: we were focused on the condor because it was a
Speaker 1: species at such heightened level of endangerment, only twenty two
Speaker 1: birds left, and trying to figure out what was going
Speaker 1: on with them and saving them from extinction, not just
Speaker 1: for the sake of saving them, but for understanding what
Speaker 1: the hell is going on because the condor could you
Speaker 1: could argue that the condor has been on the road
Speaker 1: to extinction since well before the end of the last
Speaker 1: ice age, right, that's a that's a point I hear
Speaker 1: that with Well, you'll get into it, like with with
Speaker 1: the mega fauna extinctions o that stuff. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: range reduction that was observed based on the recovery of
Speaker 1: of fossilized remains and all that stuff. That's that's what
Speaker 1: we use as inference. We don't know that's what happened.
Speaker 1: We just have inference that there was a tremendous range reduction.
Speaker 1: Condor bones have been found in Florida, Upstate, New York, Texas, Arizona,
Speaker 1: New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, every all over the place.
Speaker 1: But that's a ubiquitous bird. Well, it was widespread. And
Speaker 1: when you as you come to know more about the condor,
Speaker 1: and this is the key. As you come to know
Speaker 1: more about the condor, you come to know more about
Speaker 1: the fact that they can fly states away in a
Speaker 1: couple of days, They can fly up to six hundred
Speaker 1: miles in a couple of days, and then by the
Speaker 1: time we biologists get up there to go find out
Speaker 1: what the hell it's do and it's on its way back.
Speaker 1: So that that then tells you it's not that condors
Speaker 1: were so dense they were all across the US. Is
Speaker 1: they had the ability to travel widely, and of course
Speaker 1: it would be seasonal based on all their their biology.
Speaker 1: Learning about the natural history of a species, a single species,
Speaker 1: anytime you study it to the level we've studied condors,
Speaker 1: you learn more things about the greater environment. That's the
Speaker 1: benefit of the scientific process and what we glean from
Speaker 1: studying a species. We did happen to come to find
Speaker 1: out that the number one cause of mortality for the
Speaker 1: California condor range wide in the reintroduction since is lead poisoning.
Speaker 1: Now there were there were sufferings in here. How that's
Speaker 1: determined well, when birds are tracked with telemetry, when they
Speaker 1: are tracked with telemetry, both GPS and VHF telemetry, because honestly,
Speaker 1: because there are so few of them, you can track
Speaker 1: them on individual basis and because they were so endangered
Speaker 1: that the birds are monitored individual basis. So when I
Speaker 1: came onto the scene as a as a state biologist
Speaker 1: fairs on a game and fish, there were six of
Speaker 1: us out there in February of watching six condoors and
Speaker 1: that was a the first Birds release December twelfth, which
Speaker 1: I thought was cool as hell because we're out in
Speaker 1: there for a million cliffs, which is also a really
Speaker 1: cool cheap spot. So you know, like we're gonna scan
Speaker 1: for condoors and while they're sitting there, we can scan
Speaker 1: for sheep and there's some pronghorn there and we're getting
Speaker 1: paid for this. I didn't know you could have this
Speaker 1: as a career. But anyway, my point is we had
Speaker 1: six people watching six condoors. And while that might seem
Speaker 1: crazy because do you really need to study them that
Speaker 1: much to really, you know, understand well, I would argue
Speaker 1: that yes, if you want to know what affects their
Speaker 1: survival or lack thereof you do need to study them
Speaker 1: that way. So as we study them, and and we
Speaker 1: we were able to monitor the way in which a
Speaker 1: species that once ranged in the Grand Canyon region, we're
Speaker 1: not reintroducing them. And there's all these big questions out there.
Speaker 1: Will they find enough food because one of the early
Speaker 1: posts in the thirties as to why their populations were
Speaker 1: declining is because there wasn't enough food anymore. The birds
Speaker 1: too big, or the birds too big, or or they
Speaker 1: eat too much and they can't fly afterwards, or they
Speaker 1: are all these different things that you hear, these old
Speaker 1: wives tales. And for me, as you know, look, I
Speaker 1: I grew up outside of Bakersfield, California, and a little
Speaker 1: farming community. So it was the oil field and the
Speaker 1: farm and cattle. That's where I grew up. To me,
Speaker 1: the way I was introduced to the California condor is uh,
Speaker 1: it's an endangered species. It's going to ruin our life, right.
Speaker 1: And so as I studied more and more biology because
Speaker 1: of my interest in hunting and angling only, and then
Speaker 1: I found out you could have a career in it.
Speaker 1: And the more and more I studied, I realized that,
Speaker 1: you know what the problem wasn't the species, and the
Speaker 1: problem wasn't us ignorant, you know, hillbillies or rednecks out
Speaker 1: in Button Willow. The problem was there's a disconnect between
Speaker 1: science the people of the communities, and there's a lack
Speaker 1: of trust because of this inability to communicate. Because one
Speaker 1: of the ranchers that I worked for was the son
Speaker 1: of an original homesteader in the southern San Juanquin Valley.
Speaker 1: He as a kid saw as many as fifty condors
Speaker 1: on a cal carcass. As a kid, he had natural
Speaker 1: history in his experience and knew more about condors than
Speaker 1: the people who were studying them right as the last
Speaker 1: one was taken out the wild in the eighties. And
Speaker 1: I thought, Man, if we could just get these two
Speaker 1: folks talking, there would be a shared understanding of the
Speaker 1: landscape and what's happening. That would be far greater than
Speaker 1: just science or just somebody who says, yeah, they're on
Speaker 1: they're on their way out, because that's the way of
Speaker 1: the you know, that's the way of God's creatures. They
Speaker 1: go extinct. So we would have thought, had we not
Speaker 1: studied the species, we could have thought that they were
Speaker 1: just on their way out. Hit real quick. You just
Speaker 1: said it, but the last one was taken out the wild.
Speaker 1: I think it's important people, important point to get that,
Speaker 1: like there were so few that they were all the
Speaker 1: living ones were collected. Well yeah, because they were declining
Speaker 1: so steeply, and that's only been since, you know, since
Speaker 1: they started being studied and studied in earnest in the twenties, thirties,
Speaker 1: and really a pivotal study by Carl Cooeford in the forties.
Speaker 1: Well there was a break because he had to go
Speaker 1: to war, but when he got back he finished it up.
Speaker 1: That's the way folks were back then. Um. Anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: the population was in such such deep steep decline, and
Speaker 1: there were all these theories. One is there's not enough food.
Speaker 1: The other is you know, goofy things, like they're so dumb,
Speaker 1: they're just not surviving well. From a biologist, a burgeoning
Speaker 1: biologists like myself and kind of a kid of the landscape,
Speaker 1: I was like, you know when nature really produce a loser,
Speaker 1: because it seems to me evolutionary biology hones and polishes
Speaker 1: every species to its finest representation as a wild animal.
Speaker 1: So why all of a sudden are they struggling it's
Speaker 1: got to be a major imposition on the landscape or
Speaker 1: something that's going on. And then there were people said, oh,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's l a, you know, it's uh, they
Speaker 1: lost their habitat or condors are so sensitive that if
Speaker 1: you if they see somebody and they're sitting on their nest,
Speaker 1: they'll abandon their nest. But once again, from just basic
Speaker 1: biology and my experiences as a hunter and angler, I
Speaker 1: was like, does does nature build something like that? It
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to me, right, or find me that
Speaker 1: other comparison, because if one behaves like that, there's something else. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a host of things that are sensitive to development.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, yeah, Oh yeah, and there's that little town,
Speaker 1: you know, Los Angeles, right there in the core heart
Speaker 1: of their range. Right. But if you look at me
Speaker 1: that like that, they eat so much and they can't
Speaker 1: walk around and get killed. Okay, I'm like, well, but
Speaker 1: that would always have been the case. And the idea
Speaker 1: that habitat, the idea that you had, like a habitat issue,
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to be as silly as like some
Speaker 1: other other things. Oh no, you can rank them, you
Speaker 1: can rank them, but ill, but I'll tell you. I'll
Speaker 1: give you a few examples about how by reintroducing the
Speaker 1: birds and studying them to the degree that we have,
Speaker 1: we've really narrowed it. Set aside, you know, were also
Speaker 1: some who said, and if you look at the early
Speaker 1: writings and um Audubon for example. I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: bashing Audubon here, but Audbon was against the collection of
Speaker 1: the birds and starting a captive flock. And and you,
Speaker 1: I know you've probably read this. It was in Matheson's
Speaker 1: book America's what was it called Wildlife in America. I
Speaker 1: read it, but I don't remember it. Yeah, he talks
Speaker 1: about that that that, look, we need to to to
Speaker 1: conserve these birds and prevent their extinction and then maybe
Speaker 1: understand why they were going extinct, because it may not
Speaker 1: only benefit that species, it may benefit our understanding of
Speaker 1: the ecosystem, which would be far greater used. But you
Speaker 1: have to collect these birds and retain them in captivity
Speaker 1: so that you can go and figure out what the
Speaker 1: problem was. Because by the time they were studied intensively,
Speaker 1: their population was already in such a steep decline that
Speaker 1: a captive population was the only thing that saved them
Speaker 1: from extinction. So December Easter Sunday, the last wild condor
Speaker 1: was captured and removed from the wild cat Uh, you
Speaker 1: gotta go check this out. You guys would dig this
Speaker 1: a pit trap, dig a hole, put a netting across you,
Speaker 1: fill it with debris and things to hide, and put
Speaker 1: a dripping rotting and carcass on top of that and
Speaker 1: lie under it in weight so when the bird comes
Speaker 1: and lands, you can grab it by the legs. Who's
Speaker 1: the guy to grab that? I think it was Pete Bloom,
Speaker 1: who still is your tombstone. It's one of the same
Speaker 1: ways that falconers. He's still alive. Yeah, how does he? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He's like he's the generation. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's one of our I look up to him as
Speaker 1: one of the He's one of the gods in the
Speaker 1: world of conservation biology because of the stuff that they
Speaker 1: were doing back then. So so anyway, I find that
Speaker 1: feller that bird that was captured, the last one. A
Speaker 1: C nine stands for adult condor nine because we're into
Speaker 1: labeling ship I like all those names. So A C
Speaker 1: nine was the ninth condor given a number, and now
Speaker 1: every condoor produced since then, and we're up into the
Speaker 1: eleven and twelve hundreds now both for birds produced in
Speaker 1: the wild end in captivity, every bird has a number,
Speaker 1: So a C nine was captured added to the captive flock. Luckily,
Speaker 1: the people running the captive propagation programs, the ones who
Speaker 1: really started it at Los Angeles Zoo in the San
Speaker 1: Diego Wild Animal Park or Zoo Global or what they're called,
Speaker 1: it's still the same outfit. They just changed their names. Well, um,
Speaker 1: that all started and they had that captive flock. A
Speaker 1: C nine was put in and paired up with a female,
Speaker 1: which again is not natural. And you have to understand
Speaker 1: two about the reproductive biology. Condors take eight years before
Speaker 1: they're able to reproduce in the wild. They're capable of
Speaker 1: it at five and six, respectively for males and females,
Speaker 1: but they're usually not successful until eight years of age,
Speaker 1: so they have a very slow rate of reproduction, which
Speaker 1: also lends to why weren't they able to respond naturally
Speaker 1: in the wild to increase causes of mortality because they
Speaker 1: don't produce quickly enough and their long lives species, so
Speaker 1: it's a difference between a K and are selected species. Anyway,
Speaker 1: go off on all kinds of tangents. So like a
Speaker 1: mus grats live a few months. It is throwing babies off.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but these things got tough at out for yeah,
Speaker 1: close to a decade. Yeah, so to replace themselves and
Speaker 1: they only lay, well, not they, it's only the female.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew that, but I read that.
Speaker 1: I read that. I always say they, and my my
Speaker 1: daughter's pointed out, like, dad, the male doesn't lay anything,
Speaker 1: Like I know that, Like, yeah, but you say they
Speaker 1: the pair, Well, okay, they have an egg that the
Speaker 1: female lays and then they incubate it together. It takes
Speaker 1: like fifty seven days and then the thing hatches and
Speaker 1: then six months later it finally is ready to leave
Speaker 1: the nest. And the nest for six months six months, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then after it fledges, the parents take care of
Speaker 1: it for an additional year. So now you really have
Speaker 1: the currency of exchange for you know, the the game
Speaker 1: of replacing yourself for condors, that's very limiting. But in
Speaker 1: captivity they could get the it's to read annually. And
Speaker 1: not only that, but they could prey upon another thing.
Speaker 1: We learned about a lot of different birds. They multiple
Speaker 1: clutch if they lose their first egg to predation. In
Speaker 1: the wild, the female is able to recycle and lay
Speaker 1: another fertile egg. Sometimes that can happen two or three
Speaker 1: times if their nest is predated. But of course all
Speaker 1: these things in nature, they would have had to elaid
Speaker 1: it early enough. Anyway, I know I'm geeking out on
Speaker 1: that part of it, but we take it. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to talk about condors, you got you got it all.
Speaker 1: I love talking about condors, but you talked. But you
Speaker 1: started it with lead and then condors, which I'll tell
Speaker 1: you why that's that's a bad idea. I don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: you were getting down to six of you watching six birds. Yeah,
Speaker 1: six of us watching six birds. We learned a lot.
Speaker 1: So by multiple um you know, um double clutching, which
Speaker 1: were some of us probably old enough to we think
Speaker 1: that has a different all right, Well, double clutching and
Speaker 1: birds is getting too in the in the same same year,
Speaker 1: same season. So you put the other egg in the incubator,
Speaker 1: you raise it up. Well, you don't want it to
Speaker 1: imprint on people. So they used the puppet to make
Speaker 1: sure that it was fair it and nurtured until it
Speaker 1: was then put into a foster care and then you
Speaker 1: take those young and you release them too the wild.
Speaker 1: Then we released into the wild, we put transmitters on them.
Speaker 1: We watched them now and back to the six people
Speaker 1: watching six birds, and you're like, now, we'll find out
Speaker 1: what happens to these sons of bitches exactly. And as
Speaker 1: we did, we found out it took them several years
Speaker 1: to occupy in behavior and in space what we now
Speaker 1: think is natural behavior because it's it's not very you know,
Speaker 1: we're seeing like a seventy eighty mile home range. These
Speaker 1: birds are moving seasonally around following the food. So during
Speaker 1: hunting season they eat the hell out of gut piles.
Speaker 1: It's a great food source. During calving season, they're eating
Speaker 1: the drop calves, the ones that don't survive, they're eating
Speaker 1: the remains left behind. All of these things are we're
Speaker 1: learning because birds like a C nine last one captured
Speaker 1: put into captivity produce so many young artificially enhanced because
Speaker 1: we left to play with things as we learned about it.
Speaker 1: So we've been able to exponentially grow the population a
Speaker 1: short period of time to maximize the return on investment
Speaker 1: of the cost of this. To pump these birds out
Speaker 1: and then monitor them. Well, here's a neat thing about
Speaker 1: the testament to the condor's resiliency. A C nine finally
Speaker 1: was so well represented, and we have a team of
Speaker 1: geneticists that monitor this to make sure that for every
Speaker 1: release site they have an equal representation of genetic diversity,
Speaker 1: so that if we lose one population to some catastrophe,
Speaker 1: we still have that genetic stock somewhere, either in captivity
Speaker 1: in Arizona and Utah or in California and Baja. Those
Speaker 1: are the three main groups, and your dozen egg carton,
Speaker 1: you're there's a lot of parents represented in that dozen
Speaker 1: egg carton, well as many as you could have because
Speaker 1: they are only you know, the all time low was
Speaker 1: twenty two individuals. So from those twenty two came the
Speaker 1: breeding stock for the entire population today, which begs the
Speaker 1: question of is there enough genetic diversity for them to
Speaker 1: be viable in the first place. Luckily, in avian species
Speaker 1: that's not as much of an issue as it is
Speaker 1: with primates. So the Mauritius kestral is probably the best example.
Speaker 1: That was down to four birds in in the island
Speaker 1: of Mauritius, and now that bird has been brought back
Speaker 1: to over four repairs. It's either fods or four innerpairs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but as you start studying now with our capacities and
Speaker 1: science to study that, to look back using genetics, to
Speaker 1: look back and see what that bottleneck was and how
Speaker 1: many family groups there are. Well, the Andean condor, the
Speaker 1: closest living relative to the California condor. It too went
Speaker 1: through a bottleneck that has like three or four family
Speaker 1: groups is all. They have, same thing with California condor. Anyway,
Speaker 1: My point about A C nine is he was so
Speaker 1: well represented they decided, why don't we rerelease him. He
Speaker 1: came from the wild, Let's put him back out there.
Speaker 1: Damned if he didn't get back back released and start
Speaker 1: breeding in the wild again and took a new mate
Speaker 1: and continued to produce young. He's probably pretty good at
Speaker 1: the reproducing part of this well because he had been Yeah,
Speaker 1: he'd been doing an annual basis right. My My point
Speaker 1: is people think that the condor is so fragile, and
Speaker 1: I think people have that misconception that all endangered species
Speaker 1: are so fragile that's why they're endangered. That's not the case.
Speaker 1: Species get endangered and we get upity as people when
Speaker 1: changes too rapid, because too rapid a change causes us
Speaker 1: to get tense about it, which and and too rapid
Speaker 1: a change for wildlife interrupts their ability to respond to it,
Speaker 1: like if there's a new cause of mortality. And so
Speaker 1: I'm prefacing all this stuff because it's gonna matter when
Speaker 1: we talk about lead. But what I know about lead
Speaker 1: is mostly from my work with condors. So we go on,
Speaker 1: we're studying these birds. They start, uh, first lead lead
Speaker 1: poisoning case comes in, and this gets back to finally
Speaker 1: answering your question, I do hear you, and I'm not
Speaker 1: ignoring you. How do you know about lead? How you
Speaker 1: know how many diet birds die of lead? We had
Speaker 1: a bird drop out of a tree south ron the
Speaker 1: Grand Canyon in the summer of two thousand. They went
Speaker 1: and recovered the bird, took it in, They did an
Speaker 1: EE cropsy, an autopsy for wildlife did an e cropsy.
Speaker 1: Come to find out the bird had lead pellets in
Speaker 1: it's digestive system, meaning it had consumed something with digestive
Speaker 1: in its digestive system and consumed that meat that had pellets,
Speaker 1: which is odd because it's summertime and it's a Grand
Speaker 1: Canyon that's what the hell is going on there? Well,
Speaker 1: I got my ideas and I almost got fired for it.
Speaker 1: A game and fish, but that's another story. Um Now
Speaker 1: we know that. I looked at the X ray and
Speaker 1: I was like, that's number six and sevens. I know
Speaker 1: those are sevens because I've reloaded a hell a lot
Speaker 1: of them, and that's a six and I see some
Speaker 1: of those in duck hunting. That's six and sevens. What
Speaker 1: in the world's going on there? One bird had thirty
Speaker 1: three pellets in its stomach. Turns out, after that bird
Speaker 1: we got the diagnosis back to pets, not lead pellets. No,
Speaker 1: we're gonna get the fragments. That's a whole another venue
Speaker 1: and it's way more conclusive than the where in the
Speaker 1: hell these pellets come from? So we um. After that
Speaker 1: bird gets diagnosed, we see a couple of weather birds
Speaker 1: looking lethargic, which is similar to any other vertebrate species
Speaker 1: and how they respond with lead poisoning. We're starting to
Speaker 1: see it, like, man, something wrong with this bird. It's lethargic,
Speaker 1: it's not going anywhere, it's not feeding with the rest
Speaker 1: of the birds. You go in and and well, let's
Speaker 1: trap the population we found thirteen birds after trapping the
Speaker 1: population in two thousand. I can't remember what the total was,
Speaker 1: but we had thirteen birds that had pellets in their
Speaker 1: gut and someone were sick and we had to keylate them.
Speaker 1: So luckily you can keylate the same process we use.
Speaker 1: Keylating is the is the Basically it's a you inject
Speaker 1: a solution and humans they do it through I V
Speaker 1: and the root word keel is claw and and it
Speaker 1: molecularly binds to the lead and then can be passed
Speaker 1: through the system. So in condors we just give them
Speaker 1: two injections a day and the intermuscular injections in the
Speaker 1: pack and then it helps to reduce the lead. It
Speaker 1: debriates more quickly because if it doesn't get taken out
Speaker 1: of the system like other vertebrate system, lead precipitates out
Speaker 1: of the blood stream into the organs, into the bone
Speaker 1: and brain, where there's an increasing difficulty of getting rid
Speaker 1: of it because the half life of lead and blood
Speaker 1: is like fourteen days. Half life of lead in the
Speaker 1: brain might be forty years. So we can start doing
Speaker 1: real damage with accumulations over a lifetime. Can we to
Speaker 1: find deporate? Oh gosh, yeah, I can't believe I used
Speaker 1: words of that. No, it's cool. No, people get to
Speaker 1: learn stuff. Deporation is the ability or the way in
Speaker 1: which a a an element. In this case, it precipitates
Speaker 1: out of the system. So they're different ways. Some of
Speaker 1: it is through waste, some of it is through being
Speaker 1: locked up into other compartments. So sorry, snort, I thought
Speaker 1: that was you for a minute. So um so, So
Speaker 1: we learned that lead poisoning in fact is something that
Speaker 1: reared its ugly head in our reintroduction program in Arizona.
Speaker 1: Now this wasn't unknown. There were studies in the eighties
Speaker 1: where they found a few birds and this gets back
Speaker 1: to another thing I was talking about earlier. They found
Speaker 1: a few birds near waterways and they had such huge
Speaker 1: crops that it looked like they were they had gorged themselves.
Speaker 1: But one of the effects that lead poisoning has on
Speaker 1: on a condor is, like other vertebrate species, there are
Speaker 1: neural neural impacts. They're neural pathways that are blocked and
Speaker 1: you get paralysis. And this happens with humans and lead
Speaker 1: poisoning as well. Um So, the condor's digestive system is paralyzed. Therefore,
Speaker 1: the sphincter that controls the food from the crop that
Speaker 1: goes down through the proventriculous and ventriculous and into the gut.
Speaker 1: It can't function anymore. So they're starving essentially, and they
Speaker 1: can't they they they're still eating more and more and more,
Speaker 1: and so they're filling up this huge crop. And because
Speaker 1: they're in a weakened state because they're not processing food,
Speaker 1: they can't fly. And because they can't fly and they're
Speaker 1: not processing food, they usually don't need metabolic water because
Speaker 1: they can I mean, they don't need water because they
Speaker 1: can get water through the metabolic processes of processing their food.
Speaker 1: So if they're not getting the benefit of their food,
Speaker 1: they're eating themselves into this and gorge state and they're
Speaker 1: not getting the moisture they need to go to water.
Speaker 1: So these birds were found I learned this when I
Speaker 1: was doing my dissertation research. And so we found that
Speaker 1: these birds would be there with this huge crop and
Speaker 1: they couldn't fly. It wasn't because they had over eaten.
Speaker 1: It's because they were dying lead poisoning, and they'd be
Speaker 1: collected near water. Yeah, yeah, and and that's common. So
Speaker 1: over like here's where this wive's tail came from exactly,
Speaker 1: like exactly, thank you. That was the point I wanted
Speaker 1: to come all the way back to. So as I
Speaker 1: started researching this, and because you know when birds go
Speaker 1: go silent on telemetry or GPS, when they're GPS is
Speaker 1: moving around as we expect them to, and ban they
Speaker 1: stop and they're there for two weeks. Something's wrong. You
Speaker 1: go there and and we started putting this together, is
Speaker 1: like is there a creek, yep, go to that creek,
Speaker 1: hike up that creek. We're gonna find that bird. So
Speaker 1: you get your VHF telemetry. You'd either fly at first
Speaker 1: to kind of narrow it down, and then we'd go
Speaker 1: in by by you know, a TV and then hike
Speaker 1: in the rest and then we would would find that bird.
Speaker 1: And sure enough it's got a full crop. And it
Speaker 1: smells because the crop is soured, which is not normal
Speaker 1: for I mean it it's when you smell like a
Speaker 1: like a paragrine that's just eating, that's just eating a meal.
Speaker 1: It doesn't smell what people think. It smells like, oh
Speaker 1: it's dead meat or it's red meat. It has a
Speaker 1: sweet smell, just like a good piece of elk does
Speaker 1: you know, and condors when they're scavenging, they're scavenging on
Speaker 1: carcasses when they're new because they find them by eyesight,
Speaker 1: not by their smell, and so their big bill allows
Speaker 1: them to tear into carcasses that other scavenging species like
Speaker 1: turkey vultures can't do. So condors are eating fresher carrying,
Speaker 1: if there is such a thing. So they usually don't stink.
Speaker 1: You can smell when they're sick and they have a
Speaker 1: soured crop and you can see it because it looks
Speaker 1: like a big balloon. Um. So we're so we're learning
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and then I start reading these old
Speaker 1: papers from the eighties where they said, well, we know
Speaker 1: lead poisoning could be a contributing factor. Well, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, lead poison is the number one factor. And
Speaker 1: so for us, that's how we came to our understanding
Speaker 1: of lead poisoning and how it could have really contributed
Speaker 1: to the steep decline and near extinction. And so rather
Speaker 1: than rest thing on that, we went to our partners
Speaker 1: that airs on the Game and Fish and Utah Division
Speaker 1: Wildlife and said, hey, folks, we've been monitoring these birds
Speaker 1: now since and beginning in two thousand two when the
Speaker 1: condors found the Kaibab plateau and they started feeding on
Speaker 1: gut piles in like, this was the seasonal thing you did.
Speaker 1: It's like State Fair in Bakersfield, right, everybody goes there. Well,
Speaker 1: hunting season on the Kaibab. All the condors. You can
Speaker 1: see all their location data if they're wearing gps is
Speaker 1: or we're tracking them with VHF. They all go to
Speaker 1: the Kaibab and we get a signal in the stationary
Speaker 1: signal means they're either perched or they're perched because they're
Speaker 1: they're feeding. Well, you have to wait awhile because they
Speaker 1: stop and rest and then fly quite a bit. But
Speaker 1: if they're there for a couple of hours and there's
Speaker 1: five or six birds, you go there and you rush
Speaker 1: up and there you are at a camp, at hunters camp,
Speaker 1: and there's a bloody greasy spot in the pine needles
Speaker 1: over there, and there's a bunch of condoors with big
Speaker 1: fat crops, and the hunters are long gone, and there's
Speaker 1: the bones, there's the hide, and the condors are fat
Speaker 1: and happy. You're like, great, it's a great food source.
Speaker 1: Until we started seeing seasonally high levels of lead speaking
Speaker 1: coinciding with the hunting season. So we took and sampled
Speaker 1: the bird's blood every time we caught them so that
Speaker 1: we could have samples of blood year round. And sure enough,
Speaker 1: we saw a spike that coincided with October November, which
Speaker 1: was when the two deer hunts are in the Kibab.
Speaker 1: But you're not seeing deaths at this point, oh no, No,
Speaker 1: deaths were creeping along. And then after like two or
Speaker 1: three years of consistent use of the kaibab, you could
Speaker 1: count on it. We were going to lose six to
Speaker 1: ten condors a year to lead poisoning. And that's when
Speaker 1: Steve we finally found the pictures in the radiographs. We
Speaker 1: we got an X ray machine and if a bird
Speaker 1: was sick and it had a high blood lead level,
Speaker 1: we would X ray it and sure as hell we'd
Speaker 1: find fragments. And then we started asking a question of okay,
Speaker 1: but wait a second, is this because of wounding loss?
Speaker 1: We didn't. We didn't yet understand the relationship between gut piles.
Speaker 1: So being lifelong hunters and being you know, the fund
Speaker 1: is founded by hunters falconers who don't do d and
Speaker 1: d uh, so they say, so we said, well, hell,
Speaker 1: let's do a study because because wounding loss we know
Speaker 1: is only about ten eleven percent in deer hunting, we
Speaker 1: looked at studies all over the place and like, we're
Speaker 1: not talking about ten or eleven percent of the dear
Speaker 1: harvested being the source of lead poisoning that accounts for
Speaker 1: of the condor flock having high lead levels. We're talking
Speaker 1: about something more ubiquitous on the landscape. We've got to
Speaker 1: figure out how much lead there can be. So we
Speaker 1: did our first study where we went and shot thirty
Speaker 1: deer up in Wyoming at one of our our board
Speaker 1: members places, and and sure enough, this was another point
Speaker 1: in my personal wildlife career is like, are you kidding me?
Speaker 1: We're all got five dopon permits and we're gonna go
Speaker 1: do this study and we're gonna shoot all these deer.
Speaker 1: We're gonna x raym hole. We're gonna shoot him with
Speaker 1: everything from a two forty three to three wimmag x
Speaker 1: ray m hole. Then we're gonna gut them into a
Speaker 1: supplement tub. If any of you know what that is.
Speaker 1: You know they find them out in the field all
Speaker 1: the time. We throw in the supplement tub. Then we're
Speaker 1: gonna xtray the supplement tub. It's that thing that you
Speaker 1: briefly know as an animal and you throw your binoculars
Speaker 1: on it. What the hell is a big bucket doing out,
Speaker 1: especially when you're hog hunting in California. So so we
Speaker 1: started extraying um these carcasses of deer hole at a
Speaker 1: with a veterinarian up there, and we put an narrow
Speaker 1: shaft through the wound channel so we could hold it
Speaker 1: perfectly straight up and down, so that the wound channel
Speaker 1: was in a kilumter fashion, so that when we had
Speaker 1: the x ray, we could also see if fragmentation occurred,
Speaker 1: how far those fragments UM got away from the bullets path.
Speaker 1: So we would started being blown away with just that alone.
Speaker 1: And we're like, man, that's a lot of that's a
Speaker 1: lot of lead. But still most we take the deer
Speaker 1: out of the we got it in Arizona. We got it,
Speaker 1: and we take it out of the field. And so
Speaker 1: we're like, well, let's do the gut piles. This blew
Speaker 1: our minds and we're lifelong hunters. We x rayed those
Speaker 1: fragments and and I'll give you I won't say the
Speaker 1: names of the manufacturers because I don't pick on anybody.
Speaker 1: But anyway, a soft point lead core bullet that everybody
Speaker 1: has probably used in their life and most common on
Speaker 1: the shelf. It's said to retain sixty four to sixty
Speaker 1: percent of its mass. Damn sure does. It's perfect. The
Speaker 1: mushroom looks beautiful when you actually that gut pile. And
Speaker 1: and people say not, probably your listeners. They say, well,
Speaker 1: I don't shoot them in the guts. Well, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, everything for and aft of the diaphragm
Speaker 1: is what we call the gut. You're leaving on the ground,
Speaker 1: but you're leaving on the ground or the grolic if
Speaker 1: you're in you know, Ireland or whatever. No, that's that's
Speaker 1: diaphragm back garlic? Is this diaphragm back? All right? Well
Speaker 1: let see there it goes a t question. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: you go. Get that in there. I hope he does
Speaker 1: ask about that. So anyway, um that when we actually
Speaker 1: the gut piles, that's what blew our minds. A single
Speaker 1: shot from say a hundred thirty grain two seventy soft
Speaker 1: soft lead core tip bullet could produce as many as
Speaker 1: four fragments from a single shot. Holy cow, it looks
Speaker 1: like a snowstorm. And so I started investigating and looking
Speaker 1: into the snow storm. You know, I didn't know what
Speaker 1: to call it at the time, but I said, well,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be fragmentation studies, you know, elsewhere, especially during wartime,
Speaker 1: because unfortunately, it's not like you see on the John
Speaker 1: Wayne flicks. You know, take a shot of whiskey, bite
Speaker 1: this dick, I'll get that bullet out. Well, you might
Speaker 1: get the core of the slugout, but you're not getting
Speaker 1: a let out. And there's what was defined in wartime
Speaker 1: as the snowstorm effect, which was the fragmentation that occurs.
Speaker 1: And it's basically the stripping off of the front end
Speaker 1: of that bullet as it comes in hot with its
Speaker 1: highest velocity and as it begins to lose velocity because
Speaker 1: it's losing mass, little pieces are being stripped off, and
Speaker 1: it looks like this little galaxy. And that's what these
Speaker 1: X rays look like. Uh, let me hit you with
Speaker 1: some what about is ms? You bet? What was going
Speaker 1: on like when the hide hunters and the commercial hunters,
Speaker 1: we're re shedding like shiploads of condors. I don't know,
Speaker 1: if you look at the condor's estimated decline, and you
Speaker 1: look at our increase in those activities, it looks like
Speaker 1: an inverse relationship wine inverse relationship. Well, oh got it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe I said that wrong. I don't know, honey, activity
Speaker 1: is going up and then the harvest. So someone could
Speaker 1: have it. You had the right tool kit, you could
Speaker 1: have in eighteen seventy gone out and found lead contamination
Speaker 1: and condors and might have charted a declining if I
Speaker 1: if I was a betting man and I had the
Speaker 1: money to bet, I'd be betting on that. Because look,
Speaker 1: and that's the beauty of this study. We weren't looking
Speaker 1: for lead to be the problem. We were looking and
Speaker 1: open to the idea of what what are the problems
Speaker 1: that contribute to Maybe it is the lack of genetic variability,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. We were thinking that. And there were
Speaker 1: people who said that all these birds hatching captivity, they're
Speaker 1: not going to know how to breed. And I was like, again,
Speaker 1: would nature produce something like that in just a few generations?
Speaker 1: And get this, Some of the birds we released when
Speaker 1: they became of breeding age at five and six years
Speaker 1: of age, they chose caves in the Grand Canyon that
Speaker 1: later through investigation of those caves were used by their
Speaker 1: ancestors in the place to see there were fonal remains
Speaker 1: that were carried there, likely by condors, because you're not
Speaker 1: going to get a Harrison's Mountain goat uh tooth, you know,
Speaker 1: in in one of those caves on the sheer red wall. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was kind and they found condor remains and those
Speaker 1: condors that were hatched in captivity. Who by some people's assertions,
Speaker 1: you know, they're not gonna know what to do, Well,
Speaker 1: yeah they did, and they did it just like you know,
Speaker 1: they're great, great, great great whatever uh did. So we
Speaker 1: became we became more and more confident that what we're
Speaker 1: seeing is more indicative of of what a wild condors doing.
Speaker 1: Like people said, well, there's not enough food out there. Again,
Speaker 1: I think about that and and a lot of what
Speaker 1: I think about as a conversation guys have had on
Speaker 1: this podcast. Wait a second, we're at the peak of
Speaker 1: productivity on the landscape right now with respect to carrying
Speaker 1: the potential for carrying wildlife populations of deer and elk
Speaker 1: and turkeys and whatever else you want to talk about.
Speaker 1: The the the age of conservation has produced an abundance
Speaker 1: of biomass of potential carrying. And then you add from
Speaker 1: the years of the Spaniards on through to today, the
Speaker 1: introduction of domestic stock and having the stocking rates we
Speaker 1: use on the landscape, I would posit that there might
Speaker 1: be more potential carrying today than there might have been
Speaker 1: right after the last the end, the less ice age
Speaker 1: when you factor in live stock. It's interesting. Oh, absolutely,
Speaker 1: Now there's because in a lot of areas you just
Speaker 1: you're you're constantly making sure that you're hitting max capacity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and people have made the argument. I think it's
Speaker 1: worthy the most. You know, with the the advent of
Speaker 1: veterinary care, the loss rates are are much less too,
Speaker 1: So one could argue, you know, I'm just saying that
Speaker 1: from what you've seen and observing the condors. We put
Speaker 1: food out there when we release birds because our management
Speaker 1: tool is the release site. If we can't keep them
Speaker 1: coming back to the release site, we can't go trap them.
Speaker 1: They're damn hard to trap once they're out in the field. Um,
Speaker 1: we we thought, well, we don't want them to come
Speaker 1: dependent on the food that we put out, So like
Speaker 1: five six months after you know, this is in the
Speaker 1: early years. We put the food out there, we'd move
Speaker 1: it every night, make them work for it, make them
Speaker 1: have to do what they're going to have to do
Speaker 1: in the landscape to survive. And then later we found
Speaker 1: that it doesn't matter what you do and how much
Speaker 1: foods there come the flying season as soon as March
Speaker 1: and April hit in northern Arizona and southern Utah and
Speaker 1: the winds pick up, Hey fuels cheap. Condors are gliding birds.
Speaker 1: They have nine and a half foot wingspan. They're gonna
Speaker 1: use it and they're gonna go and they're gonna feed elsewhere.
Speaker 1: So they're not dependent on the food. So we're beginning
Speaker 1: to answer these original questions. Was that their reproductive biology?
Speaker 1: Was it the amount of food on the landscape. And
Speaker 1: then you know people saying that they're they they're so uh,
Speaker 1: they're so vulnerable to people. Does that make sense? For
Speaker 1: as long as humans have hunted in North America, condors
Speaker 1: have been here, and condors follow scavengers, I mean follow predators.
Speaker 1: So I would argue that wait a second, condors aren't
Speaker 1: looking at us as a predator. And with the birds
Speaker 1: we see produced today, they're not afraid of humans, which
Speaker 1: is another major problem when it comes to people that
Speaker 1: have shot condors, which still happens today unfortunately. But they're
Speaker 1: not fearful of humans because we're a predator and they
Speaker 1: probably followed predators. Can you imagine in one of those
Speaker 1: old buffles, they don't look at us as a predator
Speaker 1: of them, of them, but they look at us as
Speaker 1: a predator that produces carrying were a food source. So
Speaker 1: can you imagine one of those buffalo jumps if there
Speaker 1: were condors that extended out into the planes, you know,
Speaker 1: which is entirely possible, and how that would have supported
Speaker 1: a population of condors long after you know, the natives
Speaker 1: left and there's there's so many tangents here. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: and look, well this this is all great, but in
Speaker 1: the interest of time, let's let's up to something. Uh.
Speaker 1: Out of that research, and I'm sure that there was
Speaker 1: plenty of fighting and suing, okay, but out of that
Speaker 1: research we get what I brought up initially, hunters and
Speaker 1: their ammunition, and we came to know about the condor
Speaker 1: recovery area, and folks were introduced to the idea of
Speaker 1: the FURST, the first widespread ammal restriction since the water
Speaker 1: foul the first widespread ammal restriction since the waterfowl. All right,
Speaker 1: you're jumping. I'm gonna have to back you up though,
Speaker 1: because you're jumping straight to the ban in California. I assume. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wasn't that, Like, well, it's it's spread to other places, right,
Speaker 1: like portions of Arizona had were in the condo recovery area. No. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the recovery, the addressing the lead issue as it was
Speaker 1: UM defined by condors. Addressing that began in Arizona and
Speaker 1: Utah long before the band in California. Yeah, and our
Speaker 1: approach was entirely differently. Okay, well that's always trying to
Speaker 1: I don't know the history. I just wanted to bump
Speaker 1: along and like sending the interest of time. You bet, so,
Speaker 1: let me give you the fast track. So from early
Speaker 1: two thousand's two thousand uh four or five, we did
Speaker 1: the Dear Study. UM put out a few more studies
Speaker 1: showing that the coincidence of increased lead exposure and let
Speaker 1: cause mortality in the hunting season, And then we went
Speaker 1: to Arizona game and fish. We built a program to
Speaker 1: share this information with hunters and asked hunters that they
Speaker 1: would consider using non lead Arizona game, and Fish took
Speaker 1: it a step further and said, hey, if you get
Speaker 1: drawn for a kaibab tag, which is the one once
Speaker 1: a decade thing, if you're lucky, we're gonna also give
Speaker 1: you two free boxes non lead ammunition. We need your
Speaker 1: help to address this problem for condors. Within three years,
Speaker 1: there's on a game and Fish reached voluntary participation within
Speaker 1: three years. Seeing the reason I back you up is
Speaker 1: because nobody knows this part of the Condoran lead story.
Speaker 1: All they know is what happened in California, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get to that for the sake of time. But
Speaker 1: for the last twelve years, I didn't know. I never
Speaker 1: I didn't know about the ammo. Yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know that there was a voluntary components, that a voluntary opponent.
Speaker 1: It was comprised of voluntary activities. And and to be further,
Speaker 1: um uh, I hardly know what to say to to
Speaker 1: be a better bunch of conservation scientists and wildlife managers
Speaker 1: who are all hunters. We said, and if you just
Speaker 1: can't get the stuff to shooting your gun, or we
Speaker 1: don't have there at caliber, you can still help prevent
Speaker 1: that potential exposure and that prevents potential poisoning by hauling
Speaker 1: your gut pile of the field. And when we first
Speaker 1: proposed that, some people like who the hell's gonna haul
Speaker 1: a gup pile out of the field, I was like, well,
Speaker 1: if you make that Cabella's gift certificate, they might win
Speaker 1: big enough. I can tell you a lot of folks
Speaker 1: that would. And it worked even with the ammunition shortages
Speaker 1: of late which I know is something you to talk about,
Speaker 1: and the price and price and availability. Even with that
Speaker 1: being an imposition last year, the hunters in Arizona continued
Speaker 1: to participate and they just transitioned if they couldn't get
Speaker 1: the AMMO, they still participated and helped wildlife because they
Speaker 1: were asked to do so, and we incentivised it to
Speaker 1: to say thank you. And even though there was fewer
Speaker 1: rounds of non let AMMO available for use last year,
Speaker 1: we saw the same annual participation. It's annual over that
Speaker 1: twelve year time for it. So nobody talks about that.
Speaker 1: And so when when California. It all started in California.
Speaker 1: It started because litigious based groups who quote unquote do
Speaker 1: conservation started with California. Because California was easy pickings because
Speaker 1: of the way the politics are there, And so when
Speaker 1: those groups started threatening litigation and saying you have to
Speaker 1: do a ban or else, I ended up over there
Speaker 1: talking to the Commission on two separate occasions, on behalf
Speaker 1: of the condor program AM and the research that had
Speaker 1: really put a lot of this on the map. And
Speaker 1: I was there at the Commission meetings saying no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm We're saying this information is new and it's real
Speaker 1: and it's worthy of consideration. But we're saying the assumption
Speaker 1: that a ban is the only solution. We're not quite convinced.
Speaker 1: And we have a perfect case in point here in
Speaker 1: Arizona and later into Utah that shows that you can
Speaker 1: work with hunters and ask for their help and share
Speaker 1: with them the information, and you can seek maybe higher
Speaker 1: rates of participation. Then you may even get with compliance
Speaker 1: with the law, especially if it comes from the angle
Speaker 1: of approach that it's coming. So that the crap deal
Speaker 1: for the way that went down in California, and the
Speaker 1: crap deal for why I'm hesitant to talk about lead
Speaker 1: and condors unless we do it the right way, which
Speaker 1: sharing our story I think is a better way. Is
Speaker 1: that it turned into a political quagmire where if you
Speaker 1: were talking about non lead today you're talking about oh,
Speaker 1: your condor lover. And I even had a mutual friend
Speaker 1: I won't say his name here, but a mutual friend
Speaker 1: of ours. He said, yeah, but you're a raptor nut.
Speaker 1: I said, no, I'm not. I'm a hunter conservation nut.
Speaker 1: The condor or another species is symbolic of what we
Speaker 1: as a society or capable. The guy we're talking about
Speaker 1: real smart. Yeah, I'm smart and very energetic. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: you yeah, yeah, anybody. And he'll know that I'm talking
Speaker 1: about him, because when he talks about this issue, he
Speaker 1: knows I'm gonna call him right after, right after the
Speaker 1: the oh, I almost gave too much away, right after
Speaker 1: some of their media um outputs go go live. God,
Speaker 1: I gave way too much anyway, um deep Yeah, there
Speaker 1: you go, so so for me. And I told him this,
Speaker 1: I said, what I love about this is it the
Speaker 1: fact that we can combine hunting and conservation and science
Speaker 1: altogether and own it. We can walk away on this
Speaker 1: issue of lead poisoning and how it affects the condor
Speaker 1: or the eagle. Because there's those recent studies that you
Speaker 1: reported on col Um, you know, with with the limitations
Speaker 1: to the eagle populations and going down those paths of
Speaker 1: the arguments, well, eagles are doing eagles are doing great,
Speaker 1: so how can let be a problem. It was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: humans are too, so COVID doesn't matter, right, just the
Speaker 1: logic we use today. We really have to shape this conversation.
Speaker 1: And if we, as hunters who who believe we are
Speaker 1: leading the way in conservation, if we're not out there
Speaker 1: in the front talking about it, then it will go
Speaker 1: by the wayside of those groups who have the loudest voice,
Speaker 1: those groups who spend their money on campaigns and litigation
Speaker 1: um and telling everybody they're saving the condor by passing
Speaker 1: this law. But the reality of it is, and what
Speaker 1: we were guarding against and warning against when they were
Speaker 1: petitioning and and cowfish and wildlife was put in a
Speaker 1: tight spot because they're gonna be suited if they don't
Speaker 1: do something. And and I was very proud to be
Speaker 1: a biologist to scientists who was there saying, hey, I
Speaker 1: did some of that work. I'm my name is on
Speaker 1: those papers, and I'm telling you I'm not sure a
Speaker 1: band will solve the problem. It'll change the law, which
Speaker 1: sounds good. But if people think that it's all um,
Speaker 1: you know, mocked up and and it's about an attack
Speaker 1: on our rights as hunters. I won't say we predicted it.
Speaker 1: It was obvious you didn't. Nobody had to predict it.
Speaker 1: And when that happened, that what the perception would be.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, And now guess what, lead poisoning still occurring?
Speaker 1: Where it lead his band? And and to those people
Speaker 1: who believe that the band was the only solution, I
Speaker 1: said to them, so if you are successful in your band,
Speaker 1: you have your parade in the streets, you say you
Speaker 1: solve the problem. You know. The crappy thing for us
Speaker 1: who are out there monitoring and watching taking care of
Speaker 1: these condors, they're still gonna be lead poisoned. And they're
Speaker 1: still gonna be lead poison because people are gonna say, yeah,
Speaker 1: I realize it's a law, but I think it's bullshit,
Speaker 1: So I'm not gonna worry about it. And it's unenforceable.
Speaker 1: Can you tell the difference between a polymer tip solid
Speaker 1: copper bullet versus a polymer tip lead core copper, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't tell. So there are all these issues that
Speaker 1: we were pointing out and saying, guys, don't get the
Speaker 1: cart before the horse here, do what we're doing, and
Speaker 1: not because we were right, but because we were seeing success.
Speaker 1: Hunters are responding in kind. We're the only people with
Speaker 1: the study and the study has this type of results, right,
Speaker 1: And then we would say and then finally I would
Speaker 1: just say, and I know, I'm I'm I'm going on
Speaker 1: too long about this too, but um I said, if
Speaker 1: hunters are the only ones that can solve this problem,
Speaker 1: so do you want to alienate them? That's an interesting
Speaker 1: point because that's part of the waterfowl ban was that
Speaker 1: North Dakota Game and Fish kind of hung their hat
Speaker 1: on that. They did, like, uh, they put on shooting
Speaker 1: clinics for hunters and they're like, we're gonna teach you
Speaker 1: how to shoot with Steele. We're gonna teach you that
Speaker 1: Steele isn't some awful thing. And you know, they spent
Speaker 1: the time and money to to work with hunters. Put
Speaker 1: on today like shooting clinics, show them lead poisoning, all this,
Speaker 1: and the hunters leave it and there they're positive about it.
Speaker 1: So I'm so glad you brought that up, because that
Speaker 1: is the foundation that I've laid for you, and what
Speaker 1: we experienced in Arizona and Utah is the philosophy and
Speaker 1: foundation that gave rise to the North American on lead partnership.
Speaker 1: And I hope someday we can come back with my
Speaker 1: co founder Leland Brown and talk about that partnership, because
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we're doing. So state agencies are are
Speaker 1: rightfully so they're concerned about the public perception about how
Speaker 1: big a deal is this lead thing? Do we need
Speaker 1: to do anything? And we're saying, hey, we can help
Speaker 1: you with that. We've already done it, and we did
Speaker 1: it in the range of the condor where it's even
Speaker 1: more contentious. But if you want to have this conversation
Speaker 1: about the potential for lead exposure and how to prevent
Speaker 1: the potential for lead exposure as a as an opportunity
Speaker 1: for an ethically minded, uh conservation minded hunter, we can
Speaker 1: we can give you confidence that this will resonate well
Speaker 1: with him. Let me let me uh, let me lay
Speaker 1: one on you. UM. I'll start off by saying you
Speaker 1: can comment on this comment. Start up by saying this
Speaker 1: goes beyond the problem with lead poison, or I don't
Speaker 1: even want to use value. I don't want to use
Speaker 1: value laid in terminology rafters. Besides condors, cannon do die
Speaker 1: from lead ingestion. Okay. Um, people who are uneasy or
Speaker 1: outright opposed to bands, as we discussed in California, where
Speaker 1: moves it beyond hunter choice? Okay, and you just raise
Speaker 1: your hand. So so people who oppose lead bands, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I don't oppose it, but go ahead, some people do. Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm very like I'm not. I'm highly highly uneasy with
Speaker 1: the idea of a lead band when you could get
Speaker 1: with compliance and technology gradually land in a similar place.
Speaker 1: So to the point where now if you had someone
Speaker 1: like if you come to me and said I could
Speaker 1: shoot uh letter Bismuth, right, like, I'll shoot business. Well,
Speaker 1: it's really expensive, but it performs well. So you have
Speaker 1: a technology function outside of any conversation, like, outside of
Speaker 1: any conversation about lead I know a lot of guys
Speaker 1: that shoot copper bullets. Yeah, okay, outside of it, Like
Speaker 1: they could be not even aware of the debate, but
Speaker 1: they're switching for issues of performance and other stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's a cost factor, but I'm strange from what my
Speaker 1: point is going to be someone who's gonna come and say, like,
Speaker 1: I am gonna resist any kind of mandate that tells
Speaker 1: shooters what they have to use. And someone says, what
Speaker 1: about the fact that that raptors die from lead, They
Speaker 1: would say, uh, raptors die from collisions with glass, Raptors
Speaker 1: die from wind turbans, Raptors get hit by vehicles and die.
Speaker 1: Raptors die all manner of ways. They die from lighting
Speaker 1: with fences. Um, why is there not a conversation about
Speaker 1: we can't have fences, we can't have glass windshields, we
Speaker 1: can't have glass sky rises. Why do you seem to
Speaker 1: not care about all these significant causes of death but
Speaker 1: you care about this one. And they'll say this, we're
Speaker 1: not talking about population level impact. They might say there's
Speaker 1: like this is an argument, and they're saying, sure, some die,
Speaker 1: they all die eventually, many die from many causes, but
Speaker 1: short of their being population level impact, it doesn't matter. Beautiful,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought this up. Okay, So that's that's
Speaker 1: a way of that's a not a fringe, not a
Speaker 1: fringe viewpoint. No, And what I would what I would
Speaker 1: enter into that because there's there's several things you need
Speaker 1: to impact there. Um. The first of which is yes,
Speaker 1: lead is not in many cases of population limiting effect
Speaker 1: for those other raptors. It's only proven to be so
Speaker 1: right now. Well, it can affect populations. That's that latest
Speaker 1: latest paper in science pretty much nailed that UM, and
Speaker 1: the condor is obviously affected a population limit limiting level,
Speaker 1: population limiting level. But they're all affecting population. But you
Speaker 1: can't say it's not either. But the argument it shouldn't
Speaker 1: be about that there are programs to educate and mitigate
Speaker 1: for all those other cause of mortality. Look at the
Speaker 1: stuff we're seeing about Ferrell cats right now, not that
Speaker 1: they're out killing eagles. But my point is, UM, there
Speaker 1: are programs out there, just hasn't been proven yet, but
Speaker 1: there are programs that do address it. The sticking point
Speaker 1: is are there programs problems and is addressed by let
Speaker 1: I won't get into the details of a law enforcement
Speaker 1: interview I had one time about the way I learned
Speaker 1: to shoot and whether it did or did not have
Speaker 1: anything to do with Ferrell cats, But UM, I won't
Speaker 1: get into that. UM. The point is is we're not
Speaker 1: talking about we we at the non the partnership or
Speaker 1: the Paragne fundering of our partners, and now we have
Speaker 1: over forty partners, including one of your else close outfits,
Speaker 1: First Light is one of our partners. We're not out
Speaker 1: there saying that the band's a solution. We're out there
Speaker 1: saying education, outreach, educating yourself, being able to make an
Speaker 1: informed decision. We are confident based on our experience in Arizona, Utah,
Speaker 1: now Oregon, beginning in Washington for new new partner to
Speaker 1: new partners to the two original of state agencies, we
Speaker 1: are confident that if you provide that information and you
Speaker 1: and you shape a path forward through Yes, incentives work great,
Speaker 1: and it's it's fun to maybe win something. Um that
Speaker 1: you can change people's perceptions, their awareness and that can
Speaker 1: lead to changes in behavior without telling them what to do.
Speaker 1: And me as a hunter, and that's why I'm so
Speaker 1: passionate about this. I want us to have our cake
Speaker 1: and eat it too. I want us to say when
Speaker 1: we a that hunters the original conservationists, Yeah, are they
Speaker 1: continuing to be? I hope what we're doing represents that
Speaker 1: because I want to be a hunter leading a way
Speaker 1: in conservation and far greater than any single species that
Speaker 1: we've prevented extinction from or or brought back to take
Speaker 1: them off of the endangered species list. All of those
Speaker 1: are testaments of what we're capable of. The way in
Speaker 1: which we go about it is the process that will
Speaker 1: see us through to the challenges in the future. It's
Speaker 1: well beyond a single species, and it's beyond a single
Speaker 1: issue like lead poisoning. There are other issues that are
Speaker 1: way bigger on the on the scale of things for
Speaker 1: wildlife management agencies to be dealing with. I I understand that.
Speaker 1: That's why I think we as a nonprofit, for example
Speaker 1: of the Paragrine Fund, that's why we we put our
Speaker 1: two cents in. We show our our We lead by
Speaker 1: example by saying we'll help you with that. That's why
Speaker 1: we co founded the non lad Partnership. You know what
Speaker 1: I forgot to do when I was laying out my
Speaker 1: no thing, I forgot to include this one which winds
Speaker 1: up in there and you continue unpacking the whole thing
Speaker 1: will be like, uh uh the bald eagle? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: what was it? What was the thing we did to
Speaker 1: save the bald eagle? What was the thing called silent
Speaker 1: spring and all that? Oh? Well, you are you talking
Speaker 1: about d d T or no, no, what was it?
Speaker 1: What was then there that made their eggs their eggshells
Speaker 1: and d d E, which is the residuees yea eggshell thinning. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean the paagrine falcon is probably a better example
Speaker 1: of that, but yeah, I mean the paregrine falcon was
Speaker 1: was was far greater affected. I mean it was oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they the paragn falcon. We we nearly lost because of that,
Speaker 1: and that obviously is thus the namesake of our organization,
Speaker 1: the Paragrin Fund. But that's why we were founded. Those
Speaker 1: falconers who noticed that populations of of Paragrine's were plummeting
Speaker 1: and wondering why and thought, well, we've we've got to
Speaker 1: be able to breathe these birds in captivity and re
Speaker 1: repopulate those areas. But we got to find out the problem,
Speaker 1: and the d d T was identified as the problem.
Speaker 1: And even though the science was there, kind of like
Speaker 1: what you were talking about with a hundred years of
Speaker 1: lead lead information, even though the science was there, one
Speaker 1: of the things that put it on the map was
Speaker 1: silent spring, you know, and like like Bell Rose, you know,
Speaker 1: Bell Rose was the guy who finally got it through
Speaker 1: to everyone. He was the Rachel Carson of I would
Speaker 1: argue that he was the guy at the time people
Speaker 1: finally came around to really accepting what was going on.
Speaker 1: He was the expert at the time. But it's never
Speaker 1: one person that finally did it, because you don't introduce
Speaker 1: something that's controversial, controversial that is going to require a
Speaker 1: great amount of change in human society's that that is
Speaker 1: listened to. They hear the case and they say, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do it, and then they do it. No,
Speaker 1: you hear about it, and the first one is called
Speaker 1: a radical, and then later on they're they're immortalized and talking,
Speaker 1: you know, exactly mountain from making a lot of wilderness,
Speaker 1: making a lot of forests and wilderness, and then everyone,
Speaker 1: every politician since then wants to compare himself to a
Speaker 1: guy that was ridicule yeah in his day, and and
Speaker 1: that's exactly beat pre hugging to some bitch on the
Speaker 1: plane exactly. So, uh, let me finish my bald eagle thing.
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten there yet. Sorry. Recently, there's a news
Speaker 1: story wing all day man, Well there's a news story.
Speaker 1: They got all kinds of pressed. I mean, in the
Speaker 1: last month or two some about like a prevalency of
Speaker 1: leading eagles, and people like, holy shit, these eagles all
Speaker 1: got lead at some point out home? Are we talking
Speaker 1: about the same bird that we quite famously removed from
Speaker 1: the Endangered Species Act protection because it's recovered and now
Speaker 1: it's everywhere and you don't even comment on bald eagles anymore.
Speaker 1: Is this the bird we're talking about that's getting killed
Speaker 1: by lead? Well, they do, they do in Alaska. They
Speaker 1: comment about that bird. Yeah, like at our fish chack.
Speaker 1: I think someone once counted right in a in a
Speaker 1: collection trees. But I'm saying that so like, on one hand,
Speaker 1: the media is running with this ball eagle thing. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, people are like, but hol on man,
Speaker 1: I thought that was like one of the great conservation
Speaker 1: success stories. How bad could the lead be? Yeah? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: And that's my point. It's not about does it affect
Speaker 1: a single species to the point where they might we
Speaker 1: might lose them. That's not the stake of the game.
Speaker 1: The game is understanding and having the information to be
Speaker 1: able to comprehend the system and be able to make
Speaker 1: wise choices. Because what's the one of the first tenants
Speaker 1: of of hunter education, No you're no your targetget beyond Well,
Speaker 1: there's a new dimension of this and I want, I want,
Speaker 1: I won't steal this because this is Leland Brown, my
Speaker 1: co founder that works for the organ Zoo was beyond
Speaker 1: the target. Yeah, this is a new dimension. We own
Speaker 1: that bullet. We're responsible to make sure it hits the
Speaker 1: target we intend to kill. And if we do our job,
Speaker 1: and we know our equipment, it does its job. What
Speaker 1: about after we leave and the remains of that bullet
Speaker 1: are there. All we want to do is make sure
Speaker 1: people know that there's a potential potential for that to
Speaker 1: poison a bird. Now, if it does poison a bird,
Speaker 1: does that mean that we're gonna lose that species that
Speaker 1: they did? That's not the point, folks. It's like leaving
Speaker 1: trash in the forest. Right, We're not telling people. Look,
Speaker 1: it's banned. It's it is banned. You can't leave trash
Speaker 1: in the forest. It doesn't mean that's what people do.
Speaker 1: You know, doesn't mean something's gonna die. Pick up your paper, right.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a good thing to do for ecosystem health.
Speaker 1: We want people to think about it that way, not
Speaker 1: that if we don't do it, we'll lose a species.
Speaker 1: I think that paradigm of that style of conservation is
Speaker 1: over because one, the science is still science, it's still evolving,
Speaker 1: and there's still the pera viewed process that that tests
Speaker 1: the science and our assumptions of what we know. That's
Speaker 1: an ever ongoing thing. But the thing is the way
Speaker 1: we do conservation, because now people don't trust the science
Speaker 1: and they don't know who to trust when they're talking
Speaker 1: about whatever. You know, PhD on this side and on
Speaker 1: that side of every every issue. Um, we need. This
Speaker 1: is a new paradigm of conservation, and I think we
Speaker 1: just have to go back and do the hard work
Speaker 1: and earning relationships and trust so that you can share
Speaker 1: it in the way that in some form or fashion
Speaker 1: we've been able to share share here today. Um, you've
Speaker 1: got to build that that trust before people are going
Speaker 1: to change their behavior because once again, just like those
Speaker 1: species that don't adapt well to major perturbations in an environment,
Speaker 1: we don't adapt well to major change either. Uh, you're
Speaker 1: not a physicist, you're not a human physiologist. And that's
Speaker 1: I know you're gonna ask about human health. Well let's
Speaker 1: do it. I'm not gonna ask about it. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: comment on it, all, right, Uh, no one has been
Speaker 1: able to tie in a way that that achieves some
Speaker 1: sort of academic consensus. No one has been able to
Speaker 1: tie hunting eating wild game meat with adverse health effects
Speaker 1: due to lead. In fact, remember they did this thing
Speaker 1: where they went and looked at North Dakota hunters to
Speaker 1: see how much lead they had, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: some of these hunters have elevated lead, but the average
Speaker 1: they had less. They had less lead in their system
Speaker 1: than urban nights who don't eat wild game because exposure
Speaker 1: comes from a a ways, lead paint, soil, all the
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline burning prologies. Right, So I don't want I
Speaker 1: don't want to get into the and because you're not
Speaker 1: a human physiologist, you can comment on it. But I
Speaker 1: think it's like you can comment on it, not that
Speaker 1: I need to tell you what to comment on. I
Speaker 1: try and put this way. Do you contest? Do you
Speaker 1: contest my statement if I say there is no proof
Speaker 1: that hunters are suffering healthy facts not not leading their system,
Speaker 1: are suffering health effects greater than the American public in general. No,
Speaker 1: And I would not contest that. But what I would
Speaker 1: say is, and this is the way I treat this issue.
Speaker 1: Because if you lead with the human health issue and
Speaker 1: and you try to tell people what's good for him,
Speaker 1: but you're not here to talk about human health. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to get to a different point. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to just leave it. I don't want to drop
Speaker 1: a hand grenade here and then walk away, right yeah
Speaker 1: atch it? UM? So so yeah, UM do I would
Speaker 1: I contest that, um, based on my interpretation the science,
Speaker 1: I would say I don't contest that that that the
Speaker 1: studies aren't conclusive that if you hunt and you eat
Speaker 1: the meat that you eat, UM, that you are suffering
Speaker 1: suffering delitarious effects of lead poisoning. However, I will say
Speaker 1: this that the science that goes along with our understanding
Speaker 1: of lead and its effects on humans. UM. The the
Speaker 1: median allowed blood or the allowed blood lead level when
Speaker 1: I was a kid and you were a kid I
Speaker 1: might be able to older than you, UM was like
Speaker 1: micrograms per desolader um. That's that's pretty pretty high the
Speaker 1: safe level today. UM. When you look at that CDC study,
Speaker 1: the one that followed the when you're talking about they
Speaker 1: said zero and so while while the zero how about
Speaker 1: because really when you think about it, there's there's no
Speaker 1: there's no species ever studied organism that uses that that
Speaker 1: that lead is a use of except us because it's
Speaker 1: great for amals. So when you look at all the yes,
Speaker 1: when you look at all the like like magnesium, potassium, like,
Speaker 1: there's no, there's no, like you didn't get your daily lead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the way I answered that question, and just to to
Speaker 1: really and and again, we have some other mutual friends
Speaker 1: that have been on the podcast, and they have very
Speaker 1: strong feelings about it. Though you can't say that it
Speaker 1: is affecting human health. And then I hear the argument, well,
Speaker 1: you can't say it's not because when you have a
Speaker 1: lead poisoning amount, an amount of measurable lead in your system,
Speaker 1: how do you determine where it came from unless you're
Speaker 1: doing is topic analyses? And again does it matter? Here's
Speaker 1: where I go to. But but okay, but you can't
Speaker 1: sit here, and like I said, we can't and we
Speaker 1: can't be doing we can't be doing the follow the science,
Speaker 1: listen to the science. Follow the science. Will say, okay,
Speaker 1: let's all agree to follow the science. Okay, if we're
Speaker 1: gonna agree to follow the science, there's not a human
Speaker 1: health risk. It's supposition. You could argue that. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: could argue, so let's and people do. Okay, So if
Speaker 1: if like if we because I almost roll my eyes
Speaker 1: now when someone says they're gonna follow the science or
Speaker 1: they don't want to listen to the science, I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know why, because science is weaponized. They've burned. Like
Speaker 1: if I was gonna look not that the scientific community
Speaker 1: is monolithic, if I was going to give advice to
Speaker 1: the scientific community as a monolithic unit, I would say,
Speaker 1: don't let your research be weaponized, because it's so weaponized
Speaker 1: that when someone says follow the science, you can reasonably say,
Speaker 1: who's exactly? I agree? And what you need to do
Speaker 1: is use the products of science as a way of
Speaker 1: informing yourself. But it doesn't mean it's the holy grail.
Speaker 1: I remember asking research your body mind, he's working on something.
Speaker 1: I said, what do you hope happens? Because I don't
Speaker 1: hope anything. What are you talking about hope happens? Right? No?
Speaker 1: And what I was like, man, I would be rooting
Speaker 1: for that ship. I would point out to that, like
Speaker 1: following the science, if you do want to do that,
Speaker 1: that means actually, like clicking the links in the article.
Speaker 1: All that grabbed your attention, opening up the actual paper,
Speaker 1: and then reading that paper. Yeah, you usually find that
Speaker 1: the paper there's a lot less explosive than when it
Speaker 1: got picked up by the news agents. Sometimes you read
Speaker 1: it two or three different times to find out how
Speaker 1: that article that you started out with actually has anything
Speaker 1: to do with this paper. So, yeah, absolutely, and and
Speaker 1: so the way I usually answer that question is like, man,
Speaker 1: let me tell you about my experience. I had two
Speaker 1: youngsters at home when we were doing that deer study.
Speaker 1: We're shooting all those deer, and because we shoot eight
Speaker 1: or ten deer a day and we processed them all
Speaker 1: to take us all day, we wanted their carcass, the
Speaker 1: carcasses to be shipped out to the processors to make
Speaker 1: sure we had thirty different processors so it wouldn't biased
Speaker 1: by the Yeah. Yeah, so that meant we had two
Speaker 1: days off from shooting more deer. Well, we had hauled
Speaker 1: but up to Montana with our bird dogs and shotguns
Speaker 1: and go hunt hunt upland birds because it was in
Speaker 1: the right season. Let all of our ship up. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. It's from Arizona, man. Anyway, um, we'd go
Speaker 1: do that, and my wife said, I called her. I said, man,
Speaker 1: I got not only we're gonna have all the dear
Speaker 1: meat from the study, I mean five tags worth the dophons,
Speaker 1: and it's all be gonna be cutting packaged professionally, which okay,
Speaker 1: let's either get or bad. But I like doing my Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's easy. We're gonna come home and I've got sharp tail,
Speaker 1: I got pheasant, I got huns, and we're probably gonna
Speaker 1: kill a few ducks with with falcons too to to
Speaker 1: boot and she goes, what do you hunt the uplom
Speaker 1: birds with? I was like, what a shotgun? Well, what'd
Speaker 1: you use? I was like, well, you use the four
Speaker 1: tail on the huns and the twenty on the sharp tails.
Speaker 1: And and it was at the end of of of
Speaker 1: stage grouse seasons and I got a stage grouse in
Speaker 1: my twelve. She's like, no, dummy, would you use well ammunition?
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know. They were double as
Speaker 1: something good, you know. She goes lead and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh right, well, uh, I have an X ray let
Speaker 1: me extra car. Because she was put putting it in
Speaker 1: my face, that are are you thinking? I was like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's a damn good point. I wasn't thinking,
Speaker 1: so yeah, maybe I'll try steal. And I tried steal
Speaker 1: and I've been using it ever since. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I'm only saying as to tea something up because I'm
Speaker 1: kind of teeing like what, I can't wait till you
Speaker 1: get there. Well, it's not as it's not as explosive.
Speaker 1: I think. What I'm trying tea up is if what's
Speaker 1: your like, what is your ask of your peers, like
Speaker 1: your peers being hunters, what is your ask? But I
Speaker 1: want you to say that like considering that, um if
Speaker 1: if if you can't look him in this straight in
Speaker 1: the eye, Okay, you can't look at hunter straight in
Speaker 1: the eye and say you are imperiling your family's health,
Speaker 1: which it's not my business. Okay, I'd never do that.
Speaker 1: Well and and you'd have a hard time making the
Speaker 1: case you would. Yeah, So I'm not gonna tell you that.
Speaker 1: But and I'm not going to tell you that you're
Speaker 1: having population and I'm not gonna tell you that you're
Speaker 1: gonna put the ball ego back on the endangered species list.
Speaker 1: But we as hunters are killing some number of birds
Speaker 1: by putting let out on the on the landscape, in
Speaker 1: gut piles. It's just it's like, it's not a debatable point.
Speaker 1: What you want to do about that. It's your business, Okay,
Speaker 1: are you like, hey, tough shit? Are you like, well,
Speaker 1: if I can if it's six and one half, if
Speaker 1: it's six and one half dozen the other maybe I
Speaker 1: don't want to do that, right, Like, like, what is
Speaker 1: the ask? I think the ask is to to one
Speaker 1: educate yourself before you make a decision. You want to
Speaker 1: make an informed decision, and there's a lot of information
Speaker 1: out there to make a decision. I have confidence that
Speaker 1: when the information is shared with hunters, they make good
Speaker 1: decisions for wildlife. M hm so. And and I'll also
Speaker 1: add a little another little little salt and pepper here,
Speaker 1: a little extra spice that you know the rest of
Speaker 1: the world is watching. And if the hunter and you
Speaker 1: gave one of these options or these alternative responses like
Speaker 1: I don't give a shit. Okay, careful, don't say he
Speaker 1: don't give a ship, because if you happen to be
Speaker 1: the hunter who the rest of the world is watching,
Speaker 1: that is not a hunter where ship? If they're an
Speaker 1: anti hunter and they can say, well, look he said,
Speaker 1: they don't care because it's not population limiting. They don't
Speaker 1: care if they kill a few eagles. That's that's a
Speaker 1: tough way that that's a tough place to be. So
Speaker 1: I guard against that by telling people will, well, there's
Speaker 1: a great way to representing the conservation ethical hunters if
Speaker 1: you say, yeah, I educated myself and I do take
Speaker 1: some precautions because I don't want to harm wildlife while
Speaker 1: I'm deliberately taking other wildlife. You know that I'm targeting
Speaker 1: um that I think that's the norm. Like do you
Speaker 1: do you feel that hunters would be rewarded in a
Speaker 1: legal sense, like rewarded by the legislation if they were
Speaker 1: demonstrating a year over year reduction in certain activities, or
Speaker 1: do you feel that in the end they're going to
Speaker 1: get hit by In the end, they're gonna get hit
Speaker 1: by bands no matter what they do. I hope not.
Speaker 1: I fear that if we don't mobilize and educate ourselves
Speaker 1: and come to some consensus about what best practices are
Speaker 1: when it comes to the potential for lead exposure in wildlife,
Speaker 1: I think we're more vulnerable than ever to a band.
Speaker 1: I you know, our our statement is we don't support
Speaker 1: legislation or litigation to solve this problem. I've had some
Speaker 1: good buddies of mine who I would assume that would
Speaker 1: never support a band say well, it's just time. I
Speaker 1: was like, WHOA, Well, Um, I don't know that it
Speaker 1: is because I don't have the confidence that hunters understand
Speaker 1: the problem. If I thought hunters really understood the potential
Speaker 1: for lead exposure and we, as a populacet said we
Speaker 1: don't give a ship, we don't care, I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: working so hard in this effort. But I don't believe
Speaker 1: it's the case because everywhere we go, even wildlife professionals.
Speaker 1: I'm not picking on them either. You go and talk
Speaker 1: about it and they're like, oh, I didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think do you mind if I jumped in here
Speaker 1: real quick, Steve? Yeah, you gotta pick your moments. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think something that would help me, Chris, because I,
Speaker 1: first off of preface, I am a I use both
Speaker 1: copper and lead. Um. I think you know the waterfowl
Speaker 1: story going from lead to steel has like man, massive
Speaker 1: die offs. We need to stop this now we're going
Speaker 1: to steal I think we would help somebody like me
Speaker 1: with making these decisions because I have educated myself to
Speaker 1: a moderate level on this and I'm not he knows
Speaker 1: more about guns name than anybody I know, um uh
Speaker 1: and um. And I'm not a blatant asshole like I
Speaker 1: do care about the wildlife. Right. So when I hear like, well,
Speaker 1: if you just educate yourself, like, it's a very easy decision, um,
Speaker 1: for me, I have not come to the same conclusion
Speaker 1: because part of my decision making has to do with
Speaker 1: that bullets performance. Can you stop from it, Scarrett long speaking,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's just been hanging out. Yeah, I's been
Speaker 1: hanging out here. Um. Part of this has to do
Speaker 1: with that bullets performance downrange. So a lot of folks
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to make parallels to steal and lead,
Speaker 1: right because I know it's like easy to jump there.
Speaker 1: But there's like a very very very obvious case with
Speaker 1: with the water fell side. Um, I know that at
Speaker 1: a certain speed my copper bullet isn't gonna do what
Speaker 1: it's designed to do. I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: don't understand that they get their six five creed more.
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't get that a opera bullet
Speaker 1: you get beyond depending on the length of barrel and
Speaker 1: everything like that. But you get beyond about three hundred
Speaker 1: ish yards, you're going to have performance. You can have
Speaker 1: performance related issues with that bullet, right with any bullet,
Speaker 1: but it's it's more likely because of how hard copper
Speaker 1: is it, there's a higher likelihood that it's not going
Speaker 1: to expand. So for me, when I'm making my kind
Speaker 1: of lead copper decision, part of that is mortality rate
Speaker 1: on the animal I'm hunting and likelihood of recovery, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think something that would help folks like
Speaker 1: me that are in this position, right that if if
Speaker 1: we just had copper and lead animal and it's like
Speaker 1: they're equally just as good, and it was like you
Speaker 1: choose one or the other. Well, I think you're right,
Speaker 1: the decision is a lot easier, but they're not just
Speaker 1: like one another. What would help me is what what
Speaker 1: is the level of risk? Right? When you say, like
Speaker 1: Steve brought it up earlier, like we know there's eagles
Speaker 1: dying from gut piles right somewhere at some point, Okay,
Speaker 1: but like, do we know that frequency in that level
Speaker 1: of risk? Because I know that I might hit a
Speaker 1: deer on the way home, right, and that's calculated in
Speaker 1: me driving, right, but it's it's probably not likely, and
Speaker 1: I think that would help me come to that decision
Speaker 1: a little easier, you know, you know, a good parallel
Speaker 1: what you're talking about with the switch, Remember, like b
Speaker 1: p A free water bottles, Like you can't even look
Speaker 1: and tell the difference between the water balls. They cost
Speaker 1: the same ones b p A Free. You made switch.
Speaker 1: They made switching so easy. Right, it's like it still
Speaker 1: holds water, right, costs the same amount of money. I
Speaker 1: can't tell if I'm looking at it, but right, it
Speaker 1: just becomes like people don't sit around arguing about it, right, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So so I guess I'm maybe I didn't. Um. What
Speaker 1: you point out is is very worthy of you know,
Speaker 1: and depending on the bullet and what its composition is
Speaker 1: copper and whatever, then um, some of them, you know,
Speaker 1: the monolithics, the solids that don't have all the pre
Speaker 1: scoring and all that stuff. Yeah, you need eight feet
Speaker 1: per second to get that boot bullet to open up
Speaker 1: like it's supposed to. Um. But now there are other
Speaker 1: companies making bullets that that will fully expand, if not
Speaker 1: fragment into you know, eight or ten pieces that I
Speaker 1: would never use on game meat that identity eat. I mean,
Speaker 1: those bullets will will do what they're supposed to at
Speaker 1: way lower. So you're absolutely right. You have to know
Speaker 1: your tools and you have to know the capabilities. The
Speaker 1: first time I shot all copper, the first time I
Speaker 1: shot an all copper bullet was look a decade ago.
Speaker 1: Remember I shot up Stagg with it, or Red Stag
Speaker 1: with it. He didn't know he'd been hit. He eventually
Speaker 1: fell over and it looked like someone like shoved U. Look,
Speaker 1: he took a field point arrow ran it through him
Speaker 1: and I was six yards away. But just come a
Speaker 1: long way since then, it has. And I think something
Speaker 1: that would be interesting too is because man, my bullets
Speaker 1: at a certain range, like when I'm out of range, like,
Speaker 1: I know what they're gonna do more than likely, right, like,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be very catastrophic. And we're doing a
Speaker 1: test on this actually in a couple of weeks on
Speaker 1: different bullet types and how they react to bone and
Speaker 1: things like that speed. But like, I would love to
Speaker 1: also see the data on a bonded bullet. Right. We
Speaker 1: know it's lead, right, but we know it's retention is
Speaker 1: a lot higher, right than that of a normal lead
Speaker 1: softcore bullet. So just be interesting to intertwine that to see,
Speaker 1: like what's my level of risk and choosing this, and
Speaker 1: how does that compare to you my perceived um potential
Speaker 1: of losing an animal, because I, like, I don't have
Speaker 1: a massive like I don't have massive ballist sticks expertise
Speaker 1: just for that sake, but I have, like I do
Speaker 1: a lot of big game hunting and shooting like trophy Copper,
Speaker 1: Federal trophy copper. I've yet to have what I get
Speaker 1: like a handful of big and animals every year, and
Speaker 1: I've yet to be like that son of a bit
Speaker 1: and both like never in fact, it will usually bring
Speaker 1: the opposite where people like hunting Couzi ever, but it's like,
Speaker 1: can't believe you're shooting right. It makes mushrooms perfectly, makes
Speaker 1: a perfect hole through them, things fall over. There's not
Speaker 1: a bunch of superfluous damage and a giant wound channel,
Speaker 1: but it mushroomed. I just had like, I'm sure you
Speaker 1: can find extremes, but in terms of like the performance
Speaker 1: thing just me as a dude out hunting and pretty
Speaker 1: normal Western big game situations, I haven't encountered the issue.
Speaker 1: And I think for a guy like you that um
Speaker 1: shoots a big gun, a three wind mag that goes
Speaker 1: pretty damn fast, and you don't reach outside a certain
Speaker 1: yardage like you have a fairly close like like that
Speaker 1: makes total sense. That's when I use copper right. I
Speaker 1: love it. I think it's when you get beyond that
Speaker 1: into different caliber types that it matters out to the
Speaker 1: shots where I'm like, I hear you. I'm glad you
Speaker 1: brought that up, because I wouldn't have remembered to bring
Speaker 1: that up. And it's a valid point. And and again
Speaker 1: it is to me just as simple as know your tools,
Speaker 1: know the information, and make an informed decision. And I
Speaker 1: think the impact from us just doing that as a
Speaker 1: hunting populace um it will make an impact. It will
Speaker 1: make a difference, which may make it more defensible. Back
Speaker 1: to your comments, Steve, that we don't need to be
Speaker 1: told what to do. We can we can operate as hunters,
Speaker 1: as the conservationists that we claim to be. We can
Speaker 1: do that with all of these things. Tell people ro
Speaker 1: out of time, tell people I get that all the time.
Speaker 1: Where if they want to find out more about the
Speaker 1: organizations you're involved, and if they want to read more
Speaker 1: about um whatever, uh you think they should go read
Speaker 1: about you. I know you've done a bunch of work
Speaker 1: on comparative ballistics and stuff. So just tell people to
Speaker 1: find what you guys work on. Yeah, I'll give you
Speaker 1: to UM non Lead Partnership dot org. UM and the
Speaker 1: hunting with Non Lead dot org. Those are those are
Speaker 1: two of the co founders UM Oregon Zoo because they
Speaker 1: have a program there that are co founder Leland Brown
Speaker 1: runs UM. Those are three good resources. And you can
Speaker 1: get a hold of us and we'll come to a
Speaker 1: ballistics demo. We'll bring ballistics. Jael bring a bullet trap.
Speaker 1: We did one of those years ago. And and I'd
Speaker 1: love to talk more more with you offline about the
Speaker 1: bonded bullets because yes, they do retain their weight, but
Speaker 1: there's some interesting things about that. So Nonlair Partnership dot org,
Speaker 1: the Paragrine Fund, any of our other partners. Arizona Game
Speaker 1: and Fish is a great resource. They've been at this
Speaker 1: long time Utah Division of Wildlife and soft down in Arizona.
Speaker 1: Yea soft Well you're gonna pay for that one. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: but um, yeah, I'd say hunting with non Lead dot
Speaker 1: Org is probably one of the best resources. And I
Speaker 1: also want to plug another another closer to here, um
Speaker 1: outfit that started up with a colleague of ours, Brian Bedrosian,
Speaker 1: and and they started one up called Sporting Lead Free
Speaker 1: in Wyoming. And it's another one that now pushing for bands,
Speaker 1: pushing forward, sharing information and pushing forward movements that show
Speaker 1: we can take that information and make really good decisions
Speaker 1: for wildlife. Alright, buddy, Chris Parrish, President CEO of the
Speaker 1: Peregrine Fund, thank you very much. Man. You're sticking around
Speaker 1: for trivia. Yeah, sure, I think you do good, but
Speaker 1: I don't think you'll win. I probably I'm not good,
Speaker 1: But no, I'm saying that because I think you might win.
Speaker 1: Because Brodie's now here. Okay, stick around with here and
Speaker 1: don't forget to stay tuned to get an exclusive first
Speaker 1: listen to one of the stories on our new Campfire
Speaker 1: Stories audio book, Narrow Escapes and More Close Calls The
Speaker 1: Best Shot of My Life by Cameron kirk Connell. A
Speaker 1: lot of the stories we're dealing with in the collection
Speaker 1: originally came to us in just little snippets, like little
Speaker 1: details of stories in a couple of cases, we would
Speaker 1: later find out that the details originally provided to us
Speaker 1: weren't actually part of the story at all. In other cases,
Speaker 1: we might have just gotten a little snippet of a
Speaker 1: story that was in fact the most tantalizing bit this story.
Speaker 1: Here is an example of the latter. Our next storyteller,
Speaker 1: Cameron kirk Connell his friends with the spear fisher woman
Speaker 1: Kimmy Werner, who you heard from earlier. And earlier I
Speaker 1: mentioned how Kimmy keeps a lot of things to herself.
Speaker 1: She lets experiences in the ocean oftentimes just stay between
Speaker 1: her and the water. Cameron is guided by that same
Speaker 1: principle and was not particularly eager to talk about this.
Speaker 1: In the end, he decided to tell us his story
Speaker 1: because he feels as though it might be helpful to
Speaker 1: other people who could wind up in a simil really
Speaker 1: dangerous position. He is anything but a glory seeker. However,
Speaker 1: perhaps to his own embarrassment, I'll point out that his
Speaker 1: actions and bravery were recognized by the United States Coast Guard.
Speaker 1: I called a little bit of the story, and I
Speaker 1: knew that if the part I heard was right, this
Speaker 1: story just couldn't be ignored. We had to go track
Speaker 1: it down, and I'm glad we did, and I think
Speaker 1: you'll be glad as well. I'm camera er'connell. I'm a
Speaker 1: professional spear fishing guide, and my family is from the
Speaker 1: Cayman Islands, so we grew up spear fishing and around
Speaker 1: the water, and I grew up doing nothing but wanting
Speaker 1: to be on the water. At the time this story
Speaker 1: takes place, I was working down in book a Grand
Speaker 1: as a tarpan guide, you know, helping people catch tarpin.
Speaker 1: When whenever I had a chance when I was off
Speaker 1: of work, I would go and and spear. And I
Speaker 1: saw a really good day of weather coming in where
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like flat calm, and there were some
Speaker 1: other guys at the marina that had a good boat
Speaker 1: that we could run way off shot of these really
Speaker 1: good spots. So I called a buddy of mine, Steve,
Speaker 1: who was up at the University of Florida. I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: come down, like it's gonna be like banner conditions, I've
Speaker 1: got everything, just show up. He was a really good diver,
Speaker 1: and it's it's hard to find other guys that are
Speaker 1: good at diving, so he drove through the night after
Speaker 1: having a pretty big July four and came down and
Speaker 1: met me, and I think he probably had about two
Speaker 1: or three hours of sleep by the time he got there. Um,
Speaker 1: so he was pretty whipped. This day, we were diving
Speaker 1: about sixty miles off the west coast of Florida on
Speaker 1: a spot that was in about eighty feet of water,
Speaker 1: and during that time of year, the water is usually
Speaker 1: nice and blue. Even in a feet of water, you
Speaker 1: can usually see far enough down to see some good fish,
Speaker 1: and the fish will come up midwater, so you're not
Speaker 1: diving all the way to the bottom on a free dive,
Speaker 1: which is breath hold diving, but you're actually chumming them up.
Speaker 1: Chumming What we do is we will take another fish
Speaker 1: or a bait fish, cut it up into small pieces,
Speaker 1: and slowly toss a couple of pieces out so the
Speaker 1: boat was anchored, and we would throw like three pieces
Speaker 1: of chum, Wait thirty seconds, three more pieces of chum,
Speaker 1: wait thirty seconds. And what that does is it sinks
Speaker 1: down and eventually it's going to go all the way
Speaker 1: to the bottom. You figure if you're a fish and
Speaker 1: eighty feet of water and you smell this delicious, you know,
Speaker 1: chum coming down the chunks of fish. You're gonna eat
Speaker 1: those little pieces and then you're gonna look up and
Speaker 1: be like, oh ho, so it's coming from up there.
Speaker 1: And then you follow that trail all the way up,
Speaker 1: so you can be out in a hundred or two
Speaker 1: feet of water and bring fish that are usually bottom
Speaker 1: fish nearly to the surface, so all the way up
Speaker 1: into range of what we can do free diving by chumming.
Speaker 1: We had just an epic day, Like the water conditions
Speaker 1: were awesome. It was really clear, beautiful blue um Both
Speaker 1: of us shot our biggest amberjacks, and the one that
Speaker 1: I shot I remember distinctly. I dove down and shot
Speaker 1: at it about seventy ft and I was in a
Speaker 1: hundred fifty water and the fish ended up weighing I
Speaker 1: think a hunned five or hundred seven pounds, so I
Speaker 1: can remember, like you celebrate with Steve on the surface.
Speaker 1: And then he shot another one, his best one. So
Speaker 1: it was getting towards the end of the day and
Speaker 1: we anchored up on a new spot and we were
Speaker 1: chumming for a while and getting in in the water
Speaker 1: so uh, the current was going straight off the back
Speaker 1: of the boat. So for the first thirty ft of depth,
Speaker 1: the current was going straight back and there was only
Speaker 1: about thirty ft of visibility in there. Uh below that
Speaker 1: there was a current that was going exactly ninety degrees
Speaker 1: perpendicular to it, and it was crystal blue water, and
Speaker 1: there was a group of Couberra snappers, which are a big,
Speaker 1: powerful snapper that fight really hard and really difficult to
Speaker 1: get and they really wouldn't come up over about a
Speaker 1: hundred feet. So Steve and I talked about it, and
Speaker 1: we decided that, you know, because of the rigs that
Speaker 1: we were using, which was spear guns with a hundred
Speaker 1: foot float line and a buoy, we weren't going to
Speaker 1: be able to get him with that rig So a
Speaker 1: spear gun is basically a piece of wood with a
Speaker 1: trigger mechanism and rubber bands that propel a metal shaft
Speaker 1: with a barb on it, and when it's loaded, it's
Speaker 1: like a rubber band gun. You had a kid except
Speaker 1: slings out of a metal shaft. So that spear has
Speaker 1: a hole in it and you tie a line off
Speaker 1: to that and then you've got about fifteen to thirty
Speaker 1: feet of slack line. That's attached to the gun, and
Speaker 1: then that is clipped off to a float line, which
Speaker 1: is a line that goes from the gun all the
Speaker 1: way to the surface. And you can have all kinds
Speaker 1: of different lengths of float lines and materials, but for
Speaker 1: what we were doing this day, we had a hundred
Speaker 1: foot float line, and then on the surface we have
Speaker 1: a float which is a big inflatable buoy that looks
Speaker 1: like a lifeguard float, so that when you shoot a fish,
Speaker 1: you don't have to fight them while you're down there.
Speaker 1: You can shoot them, keep the gun in your hands,
Speaker 1: the line comes away from it, and the line is
Speaker 1: attached to the buoy, so you can relax get to
Speaker 1: the surface. But the problem we were having is because
Speaker 1: of the way the currents were in the depths that
Speaker 1: we were diving, that boo was coming tight each time,
Speaker 1: and I was like just out of range of shooting
Speaker 1: that really big snapper and the other fish that were
Speaker 1: down deep. So we theorized the only way to do
Speaker 1: this was to use the fishing reel that was in
Speaker 1: the boat clip that off to the gun into the line,
Speaker 1: so if that fish came up to a hut, I'd
Speaker 1: be able to get to it shoot it and then
Speaker 1: be able to let go and just free ascend to
Speaker 1: the surface without having to fight anything, and the guys
Speaker 1: in the boat would be attached to it and be
Speaker 1: able to crank it up. So in order to give
Speaker 1: me enough slack to go deep enough to shoot one
Speaker 1: of these fish, we rigged the line from the spear
Speaker 1: actually to the fishing reel. So we talked it over
Speaker 1: with the guys in the boat and said, look, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go down. I'm gonna make this dive. Steve's gonna
Speaker 1: stay on the surface and watch me. I'm gonna shoot
Speaker 1: this fish, and when you feel a tug, you guys
Speaker 1: crank this thing up. And we all decided this was
Speaker 1: a pretty good plan. And up until that day and
Speaker 1: until now, I've never done that again. It's amazing that
Speaker 1: we actually did it on on that occasion. It could
Speaker 1: not have been timed better. At this point in the day,
Speaker 1: Steve was kind of getting a little bit tired, and
Speaker 1: I was the stronger deeper diver. I told Steve, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna rest up. You watch me, and I'm holding onto
Speaker 1: the back of the boat, currents flowing past and trying
Speaker 1: to relax every muscle in my body. Every muscle that
Speaker 1: you're tensing is burning oxygen. So I'm totally relaxed, chilling
Speaker 1: on the surface and just waiting, doing nice relaxed breast
Speaker 1: like you do in yoga um to auction date your body,
Speaker 1: lower your your heart rate, and then for the last
Speaker 1: thirty seconds, I'm doing a series of breasts before my
Speaker 1: last giant breath, which is belly, chest, shoulder, and then going.
Speaker 1: And during that time of waiting for me, I think
Speaker 1: Steve got bored and made a dive and I kind
Speaker 1: of noticed it out of the corner of my eye
Speaker 1: and didn't think much of it because there were pelagic
Speaker 1: fish wahoo's and mackerel and rainbow runners and stuff that
Speaker 1: would come by every once in a while. So I
Speaker 1: was like, he's just he's just gonna shoot something shallower.
Speaker 1: He's just going to look or whatever. Like I know,
Speaker 1: he's focused on watching me because my next dive is
Speaker 1: probably gonna be over a hundred foot. So I kicked
Speaker 1: down nice and slow. When you make a perfectly efficient
Speaker 1: relax dive, as soon as you hold your breath and
Speaker 1: invert and start kicking down, you can do three ft
Speaker 1: per second for your dive, So to get to ninety ft.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take you thirty seconds. Then you sit down
Speaker 1: there and relax. And my general routine is just about that.
Speaker 1: It's like thirty seconds down, spend thirty or forty five
Speaker 1: seconds down, and then thirty seconds back up. So my
Speaker 1: average dive is about a minute and a half minute
Speaker 1: forty five. After about seconds, I'm down at and sitting
Speaker 1: there waiting, and a nice school of snappers came up.
Speaker 1: There was four, like really good fish that at the
Speaker 1: time would have been one of my best Kubera snappers.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting there looking at these snappers, and my mind
Speaker 1: has always been so focused on records, and I always say, like,
Speaker 1: in order to get a hundred pound fish, you gotta
Speaker 1: let all the ninety pound fish swim past. And at
Speaker 1: the time I knew the record was a few pounds
Speaker 1: off of one that we had seen that had a
Speaker 1: huge white mark on its face. So down there, say
Speaker 1: thirty seconds or so, and I'm drifting, you know, from
Speaker 1: seventy down. So it's towards the end of my dive.
Speaker 1: I've got this school snapper here, but I still haven't
Speaker 1: seen the big one, the big one with the white
Speaker 1: spot on his face, and that's the one I really wanted,
Speaker 1: so um getting ready ahead the surfings, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go ahead and shoot one of these other snapper.
Speaker 1: Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I
Speaker 1: catch a glimpse of white and I turned to look,
Speaker 1: and in the distance, six year seventy plus feet away
Speaker 1: is the white handle of Steve's gun, which still loaded,
Speaker 1: heading straight for the bottom like a rocket. And I
Speaker 1: was like, oh God, that's not good. And I look
Speaker 1: and above that, just on the edge of my visibility,
Speaker 1: is Steve in a seated position, floating down towards the bottom,
Speaker 1: and I immediately know that he has blacked out. When
Speaker 1: you hold your breath too long and you're on land,
Speaker 1: eventually you're gonna pass out. But on land, your body
Speaker 1: is going to know that you're outside. There's arroganst your face.
Speaker 1: You're gonna take another breath. In the water, your body
Speaker 1: also knows that, hey, I'm in the water. Your body
Speaker 1: has a kind of a self preservation system that protects
Speaker 1: you and your vocal cords closed so you're not taking
Speaker 1: in any water. And basically it's like closing your your laptop.
Speaker 1: It goes into a sleep mode, so you pass out.
Speaker 1: You're not conscious. Your heart is still beating, but you're
Speaker 1: not breathing. So this is the state that Steve is in.
Speaker 1: The water was eight feet deep, and he was sinking
Speaker 1: at such a rate that I could not go to
Speaker 1: the surface and take another breath and come down and
Speaker 1: get him, because he would be gone forever. I knew
Speaker 1: then that I had one chance, and that was right now,
Speaker 1: to try and save him, at the very least recover
Speaker 1: his body. We didn't have any scuba tanks on the boat.
Speaker 1: We had no way of getting him. I have no
Speaker 1: one else on the surface, no one else to help me.
Speaker 1: Him and I were the only divers. So I dropped
Speaker 1: my weight belt and I kicked steadily towards him. He
Speaker 1: is maybe sixty or seventy feet away, which is a
Speaker 1: huge distance to swim horizontally underwater, even if I had
Speaker 1: been planning to do that on a dive, and then
Speaker 1: I knew that I had thirty seconds of breath to
Speaker 1: get back to the surface. Having to tack on that
Speaker 1: additional twenty seconds working like having to kick horizontally is
Speaker 1: a big deal, and one second makes a difference. Normally,
Speaker 1: when you help somebody that is blacked out, you go
Speaker 1: and grab them and bring him to the surface. And
Speaker 1: you can imagine the exertion it would take to bring
Speaker 1: someone's body up from seventy or eighty feet, which is
Speaker 1: where he would have been. Like when I got to him,
Speaker 1: and I knew there was just no way, Like it
Speaker 1: was absolutely impossible for me to do that, Like I
Speaker 1: would have died too, and no one you know, would
Speaker 1: have ever found us. As I'm closing the distance towards him,
Speaker 1: in my mind, I'm like, the only option I have
Speaker 1: here is to shoot him. We had talked, you know,
Speaker 1: over the years with different you know, friends around the world,
Speaker 1: that in a situation like this, it was totally hopeless
Speaker 1: that we would just shot each other, and at least
Speaker 1: then you'd be rigidly connected to him. The guys probably
Speaker 1: be pretty mad at you for shooting him, but at
Speaker 1: least he saved his life and you were attached to him.
Speaker 1: So I started kicking towards Steve. So now this is
Speaker 1: going through my mind in milliseconds, I'm trying to calculate
Speaker 1: can I get to him who's pretty far away, and
Speaker 1: then from there go to the surface, and in retrospect,
Speaker 1: I knew that I probably couldn't do it, but knowing
Speaker 1: that this was the only chance that I was going
Speaker 1: to have to be able to get a hold of
Speaker 1: him and secure him kind of overshadowed that, and I
Speaker 1: knew that I had to do something. I had to
Speaker 1: try because I figured he's gonna die either way. As
Speaker 1: I got about halfway there, I was like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: shoot him in the calf. I'm a pretty good shot.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna shoot him in the calf that way. There's
Speaker 1: no major art rereas or anything in there. I can
Speaker 1: punch through it and I'll have a good hold of him.
Speaker 1: So as I'm getting closer to him, I get about
Speaker 1: away and his whole body rotates towards me, and my
Speaker 1: heart just sank because there's no way I'm shooting him in,
Speaker 1: you know, in the chest or the abdomen or the thigh,
Speaker 1: and I was worried that the shin bones would be
Speaker 1: too hard to punch through at the distance, and I
Speaker 1: didn't have any more breath. I didn't have any more time,
Speaker 1: so I made a split second decision and aimed just
Speaker 1: in front of his toes and shot him through the
Speaker 1: fin As soon as I shot. I'm like, oh, my
Speaker 1: spear gun, and now the line is attached to the boat.
Speaker 1: And I looked to the surface and I'll never forget
Speaker 1: I'll never forget that feeling when I looked at the
Speaker 1: surface and new that I wasn't going to make it either.
Speaker 1: Just absolutely the most dreadful feeling I've ever felt my life,
Speaker 1: seeing the surface, knowing how much air I had, and
Speaker 1: knowing there was no way I was going to make it.
Speaker 1: I think it was probably eighty ft down at the time,
Speaker 1: and I kicked away immediately and thought back to my
Speaker 1: training and my free diving that I've done and went
Speaker 1: into the absolute most efficient, perfect technique I possibly could,
Speaker 1: and that is your hands. I love your head tied
Speaker 1: against your ears, hands overlapping and just basically making yourself
Speaker 1: a perfect arrow. And started kicking steadily up, trying to relax,
Speaker 1: sniffing the air out of my mask as I went up,
Speaker 1: trying to get every little bit of it. And I
Speaker 1: hit the surface and if my first breath screamed at
Speaker 1: the boat, which is the absolute worst thing to do.
Speaker 1: You need to take recovery breaths and get the CEO
Speaker 1: two out of your system and get air back in.
Speaker 1: So when I screamed like that, I started to pass
Speaker 1: out myself, and again I remembered the free diving training
Speaker 1: and when pilots pulled gs when they're flying their jets.
Speaker 1: To keep from passing out, they do something called a
Speaker 1: hook breath, which is and you do five of those
Speaker 1: and it pressurizes, brings out O two back in, gets
Speaker 1: the CEO two out. And those breaths saved my life
Speaker 1: because when I surfaced, I was more than a hundred
Speaker 1: foot behind the boat, down current and away from you know,
Speaker 1: the guys and anybody that could help me. So now
Speaker 1: I'm I'm conscious, and I'm hauling asked for the boat.
Speaker 1: I'm swimming as hard as I can for the boat,
Speaker 1: yelling at them the whole way. Cut the anchor line,
Speaker 1: pull it up, cut the anchor line. Steve's on it.
Speaker 1: Those guys are cranking like crazy, they're hooting, holler and
Speaker 1: thinking they've got, you know, the fish of a lifetime
Speaker 1: that I've just speared, this giant hundred plus colbera snapper.
Speaker 1: I climb on the back of the boat, immediately start
Speaker 1: throwing coolers and bean bags and crap off the back
Speaker 1: of the boat to make room and telling him cut
Speaker 1: the anchor line, get on the radio, called the coastguard,
Speaker 1: crank this up. It has Steve on it. He's blacked out.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to revive him. I need you guys
Speaker 1: to help me. And they're looking at me like what
Speaker 1: they're they're just they can't even wrap their heads around it.
Speaker 1: So they're cranking. I mean, this rod is bent like
Speaker 1: we've got the fish of a lifetime coming up. And
Speaker 1: up comes Steve backwards then first, and we grab his ankle,
Speaker 1: grab his arms and pull him into the boat. His
Speaker 1: skin was the worst color blue gray of death I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. He was bleeding from his eyes, his ears,
Speaker 1: his nose, and out of his mouth was just orange, foamy,
Speaker 1: horrible blood just foaming out of his mouth. He had
Speaker 1: a white rash guard on at the time, and within
Speaker 1: a couple of seconds, like his whole rash guard was orange.
Speaker 1: So we pull him up on the back of the
Speaker 1: boat and I lay him on the back of the boat,
Speaker 1: and you can imagine, like my adrenaline was, you know,
Speaker 1: going pretty hard. So I checked to see if he
Speaker 1: has a pulse, and he had a very very faint pulse.
Speaker 1: He wasn't breathing. I took his mask off, and when
Speaker 1: someone does black out, the quickest, easiest way to bring
Speaker 1: them back is to blow across their cheeks, because you
Speaker 1: have sensors in your cheeks that tell you, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: I'm in the air. I can breathe. So I blew
Speaker 1: across his cheeks, you know, opened his airway, tapped on
Speaker 1: his cheek, and I was talking to him, say breathe, Steve, breathe,
Speaker 1: You're okay, breathe. So I did two or three cycles
Speaker 1: of that, and he was unresponsive. In spear fishing, I've
Speaker 1: saved nine or ten people. Now, every single other person
Speaker 1: that I have helped recover from a blackout within the
Speaker 1: first two breaths has come back. They would come back immediately.
Speaker 1: In my mind, I'm like, this is really really bad,
Speaker 1: Like I've never seen anything like this. So I opened
Speaker 1: his air way again, nothing's happening. So there's so much
Speaker 1: orange foam in his mouth, like this bloody foam. I
Speaker 1: was like, maybe I'll roll him on his side. So
Speaker 1: I rolled him on his side and just this horrible
Speaker 1: orange foam is just leaking out of his mouth. And
Speaker 1: just as I'm getting ready to do rescue, breaths, which is,
Speaker 1: you know, like a CPR breasts. He goes and I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, that was that was like
Speaker 1: the death you know, the death breath that you hear
Speaker 1: about and you read about. And he did that the
Speaker 1: one time, and there was a pause and he took
Speaker 1: what I would say as a one percent breath. I
Speaker 1: blew on his face hard again, said breathe, Steve, breathe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he took a little bit more of a breath, and
Speaker 1: that orange foam was just coming out, and you could
Speaker 1: hear it like just gurgling in his lungs, like there's
Speaker 1: no room in his lungs, you know, for for even
Speaker 1: any air. So he started breathing slowly like that too,
Speaker 1: and five percent breasts and he's still unconscious, and I
Speaker 1: got him down into the boat. We got the anchor
Speaker 1: line off, we got the coast Guard on on the radio,
Speaker 1: and I told the guys, just as fast as you
Speaker 1: can go, head towards Tampa, head towards land. Coast Guard
Speaker 1: helicopter was on its way. So he's unconscious for fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty minutes, still that orange phones coming out, and
Speaker 1: finally he kind of comes to and the first thing
Speaker 1: he said, is thank you, And uh, that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like a big deal. But when you black out and
Speaker 1: you're unconscious that you have amnesia. So people that have
Speaker 1: blacked out don't remember anything so lasting remembers. He was,
Speaker 1: you know, ten fift ft from the surface and then
Speaker 1: lights out and this is the next thing is me
Speaker 1: holding him in in my arms and I held him
Speaker 1: and uh, and we we zoomed in as fast as
Speaker 1: that boat could go, and the helicopter came when we
Speaker 1: were about, you know, forty miles offshore. Lower the basket
Speaker 1: put him in the basket, and I'd been on the
Speaker 1: radio with them, trying to explain to the coast guard
Speaker 1: the whole time he's blacked out, it's a three diving thing.
Speaker 1: He needs oxygen immediately, and he just got to get
Speaker 1: him to the hospital. So the lower the basket put
Speaker 1: him in the basket in the front of the boat,
Speaker 1: lift him off, put him in, and they just poof,
Speaker 1: they're out of sight. They're gone. And I just sat
Speaker 1: down in the boat and just totally broke down. And
Speaker 1: I couldn't really talk to anybody in the boat, and um,
Speaker 1: it was it was tough. So Steve got to got
Speaker 1: to the hospital. UM, he was in the ICU for
Speaker 1: three or four days. His lungs were almost completely full
Speaker 1: of fluids and there was a big risk of secondary drowning,
Speaker 1: so he was in there for a while. UM he
Speaker 1: made a full recovery, no brain damage or anything. He
Speaker 1: played football at University of Florida for another two years
Speaker 1: or so, and him and I are still friends. He's
Speaker 1: actually my insurance broker and a and a really good
Speaker 1: buddy of mine. We still dive together. The tough thing
Speaker 1: about blackouts and free diving is you're basically watching your
Speaker 1: your friend die and it's all on you. In that moment,
Speaker 1: two make the right decisions in a very short period
Speaker 1: of time to save their lives. I wish I never
Speaker 1: had had to to shoot him in the fin but
Speaker 1: I'm glad it turned out the way it did. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it's the best shot of my life.