Ep. 903: Stranded Whales, Cattle-Killing Wolves, and Maine Cleans Up Its Act

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the news show everybody. Today, We've got news
about my unfortunate, regrettable criminal past. Damn removals in Maine,
stranded Wales on the Pacific coast. Anti Buffalo politicians are
generally winning, but they suffered a minor setback. And you've
heard of earn a buck. Well, welcome to earn a
second buck. And you won't believe this one. Wolves eat cows.

(00:29):
But first our news, and to open up our news,
we have a special guest here. The special guest's name
is John Jersek. He is a retired Michigan conservation officer.
Some folks call him game wardens, but in Michigan they
call him conservation officers. And I got to give some

(00:50):
background here. We're going back in time to around my
guess would be ninety three or nineteen ninety four. I
was parked in my truck on Mannisseee National Forest where
Cedar Creek crosses underneath M one twenty, checking mink traps.

(01:11):
In behind me pulls a game ward and a conservation officer.
He gets out we're talking. He asked me have you
been setting snares? Which alarmed me because I had and
they were illegal in that area, and it wasn't my fault.
I'll explain how it wasn't my fault. I'll explain right now.

(01:35):
There was a game There was a fur buyer named
Abe Salasina, and I would sell some fer to Abe Salacene,
and Abe Salacena would always be pushing snares on you
when the snow got deep. Abe b You know what
guys do in other areas is they sat these snares
and fur keeps coming in all winter. So it was
my fault, but it was very alarming to me, and

(01:57):
I lied. I lied. This this is all terrible. I'm
just being upfront about my behavior. I lied, and then
the game warden, the conservation officer goes to my annoyance,
goes through every trap in my truck, checking the tags
you're legally obligated to have a tag on there, checks

(02:18):
them all. We converse. He leaves. Now I have written
about this, I've talked about it. I told the story
a couple of weeks ago. My good friend from back home,
Ronnie Bain, is talking to a retired conservation officer. The
retired conservation officer knowing where Ronnie's from. He's from the
same twin Lake ask him, do you know a guy

(02:44):
Steve Ranella who I checked for whatever back in nineteen
ninety four, And I thought to myself, why in the
world is this on this man's mind? Now? Ronnie suggested,
I ask him here he is, thank you for coming
on the show thirty years later.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, well, I'm glad we've had this chance to sit
down and talk. And I'll tell you, you know, even though
it's spent a long time, you're gonna feel a lot
better getting us off your chest.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Okay, I've gotten it off my chest. I just need
to hear from your perspective because at the time I
didn't ask you what you're thinking and what you're doing.
To walk me through your recollection of this.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Well, it's interesting that you know how you get caught
with a snapshot in your brain of a spot, you know,
in an incident or a time. I can see that
I can picture you know, these eyes a good spy.
You know there was a sand trap there and you
could work trout fish right along that piece of ground.
And you know, we get trapped a little bit too.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Right, everybody, everybody set mink traps.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
There right right, real comments spy, this right along a
busy road. Yeah, so anyways, and you know, I've been there,
of course, dozens and dozens of times in my career
when I worked around here, and I can't remember, you
know what. You know, I think we approached this incident
from two different perspectives. I may have simply just hey,

(04:17):
here's a guy trapping, right, I'm gonna check them, uh,
and then going through traps and mentioning about snaring. The
bottom line the end to this whole story is I
I was clueless that you had any snares?

Speaker 1 (04:34):
How does he know I have snares? Though?

Speaker 3 (04:38):
John? Did you know that?

Speaker 4 (04:40):
Did you know that this fur buyer was out there
pushing young trappers to use snares?

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Did you know that the name?

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh yeah, I know the name, know who that was?
Didn't know it was being pushed, so to speak. But
but here here was. And this is probably why I
threw a and asked the question. Right, that was at
a time when it was it was growing an interest
locally sneering and you know, and I knew for sure

(05:08):
it was going on, but it wasn't at the time
legal It is today, but at the time it wasn't legal. So,
you know, just like any other, you know, game more
not a phishing expedition. I'm going to ask a few
questions and see what he says.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
You know, but you started right out with that question.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
I don't so I don't know if it was this part.
I don't honestly remember. Did I was was Did I
have some knowledge that maybe you, as a local guy,
were doing it? I don't remember that part one. Let
me add this. When I was playing out paperwork when
I retired back in nineteen you know, remember we had
the old report all poaching complaints, the rough complaints.

Speaker 5 (05:53):
I had found one from.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
You, and it was the best I can recall again
is it was Cedar Creek, No, no goes Bear Creek,
Bear Creek, okay, and uh, somebody had come across, or
you had come across maybe untagged traps or something like that.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
But I got in huge trouble with this from Abe Salasina. Okay.
I had found where a guy was trapping before season.

Speaker 5 (06:25):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
And even though even though I was, you know, as
innocent as it was, even though I was a violator,
I didn't want anyone else violating, and I thought that
that violation was a bad violation. So I called and
reported a guy for trapping. Before season, some informant told

(06:48):
Abe Salasina. Abe Salasina ripped into me that you would
ever report a trapper for anything, And where do you
get off and you take that man to man, you
do not call the state? Wow, Okay, well.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
A whole on. That's a good that's a good story
right in among itself, that in the trapper world, things
do get settled out on the road. You know, if
if people are stealing traps, if they're stealing fur from traps,
if they're trespassing, or even you know, if if one
guy gets on another guy's turf, that that little war

(07:28):
usually gets settled somewhere out there along the stream bank
or in the woods or wherever. And of course we
never heard about it. There was a number of local
trappers though, that I got to be pretty decent friends with,
and that you know, they were pretty good. Yeah, I
don't even want to call them informants. They just tended
to do the right thing and wanted to see things

(07:51):
done right. We're getting about four stories down the road now,
But on that rap complaint, it looked like I can
of remember the the verbiage on it is. I ended
up finding a young kid, you know, a teen or
something like that, and I had gotten back a hold
of you, and you wondered if I could just handle
it with a warning, which I did.

Speaker 5 (08:11):
Oh, and that's how that n did.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
That's probably after I got in trouble with Abe Salsino,
and it.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
Could well be. But the yeah, that was the whole deal.
And then going back to our Cedar Creek contact, I
don't know, you know, don't I don't recall that I
specifically remembered I was after you or I had solid
information that you were doing it. But the whole thing
about snares at the time is kind of everybody was

(08:41):
starting to do it. You know, it was something that
people were doing wasn't legal yet it was so easy.
You could cover a lot of ground, you could trespass easy.
What people were doing. It was even using it along
the thirty one corridor on the highways, like in the fences.

Speaker 5 (08:57):
Yea doing stuff like that, And we.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Probably didn't have an there are coyotes at that time
that we do now, but you know they were growing
in numbers too, and people were working at and you know,
as a trapper, anytime first starts going higher than normal
right man. The incentive to cheap ends up there, whether
it be trespassed another guy's turf, stealing some traps. And

(09:21):
I know I recovered quite a few stolen traps for
area trappers, you know, either out of the Whitehall Marge
or Muskegan marsh Yep.

Speaker 1 (09:29):
I'll tell you why it always stuck with me. What
I was doing is I was snaring red fox down
in the thickets, right, And when you said that, I
knew you knew, But I thought, why did he not
take it? Why did he not take it? Or why

(09:50):
did he not just steak one out or do some
kind of stuff to catch me? Right? And then I
was paranoid and quit for a while.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
Oh one time, one time on another local trapper. I
won't use a name though, but it was out at
the wastewater. Okay, real, real common wastewater trapper out there.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Oh, can I take a s. Did his first name
start with a B and his last name start with
the F? No? Was it b C?

Speaker 5 (10:26):
We should have this conversation.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
So anyways, the point was is he had a few
words with me out on the out on the dirt
road in the middle of the wastewater, like you know,
why are you eyes after me?

Speaker 6 (10:41):
And all that.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I concluded the conversation by turning around, getting back in
my truck and said, you know, Parenoia is a mighty
powerful tool, isn't it?

Speaker 5 (10:50):
And I just drove away.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
So, man, all right, My last question for you, John,
and I appreciate you doing this, My last question for
you is, since it was a nothing thing and you
didn't get me a ticket and you were just throwing
that out there as a fishing expedition, why did it
stick in your mind? Because I wasn't like a known

(11:13):
figure at all. I was. I had never been in trouble,
you know.

Speaker 5 (11:16):
Right right right, Yeah, let's clarify to the audience.

Speaker 2 (11:20):
You weren't anybody that I had on the radar or
was following around or anything like that, or he had
as best I can recall any specific information, you know,
on you doing anything. So I don't know, why does
it stick in my mind? You got me, you know,
I know I dealt with a number of local trappers
over the years, good and bad.

Speaker 5 (11:41):
I don't know some of them. You know, you were
just around for so long.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
You sort of got to know these guys, and you know,
it's it's nothing, nothing real specific, nothing evil.

Speaker 5 (11:53):
I don't remember again.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
I think this was just a chance meeting out out
on the side end one twenty and I thought, hey,
I'll throw a darts, see if the guys got snares,
you know, and you know, as a trapper, finding people
snares and that sort of thing not an easy task.
And well, yeah, and that's one of the things if

(12:17):
you talk to people that run a lot of snares,
I don't think they recover them all every year, you know,
because how do you simply remember if you got out
a hundred of them, you know, where are they all?

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Well, yeah, they were all.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Snaring was also starting to gain in popularity, like in
those uh you know, sort of the edge of the
skiing and Grand Haven Grand Rapids, those edges like the
fringe urban areas ye you know, you know, places where
you might have fox and stuff like that down in there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
So there you go, man, I sure appreciate you coming on.
This is going to add significant color to the story.
It's going to it's a hot tip for game wardens
just to throw out wild stuff, just through a wild accusations,
just to see if someone if it hits, and also
to induce paranoia and poachers.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
Well, you know, the whole nature of the job is
quite a bit of smoking mirrors. You know, a lot
of times you're covering a county by yourself or more
you know, and vast areas. You know, you might be
an hour to the other side of the area you
cover or more so, Like I say, it's smoking mirrors,
trying to make everybody feel that you're everywhere at once

(13:30):
twenty four to seven, right, which is impossible. So to
chum the waters with a little bit of information out there,
you know, and ask some questions. Yeah, never know.

Speaker 5 (13:41):
Sometimes you get lucky and they say something.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Well, it worked on me. I'd formed the opinion of
you that you knew all things that you were, like
you have like godlike omniscience about the woods. So thank
you very much for coming on, John, I appreciate it. Man,
enjoy it. Enjoy the rest of your retirement, all right,
thank muchav Oh buddy, take it easy.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Thanks John.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Thanks, it's great, Oh, Nate, pull up where it all happened?
Oh yeah, for you people watched on YouTube, here's where
it all went down.

Speaker 6 (14:11):
What other game wardens can we interview that you've ran
into in the past.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
You know, it's a great story. Uh, we were one
time here in Montana. We're hunting ducks and we had
our decoys in the canoe. We weren't in the canoe.
We were using the canoe to drag our decoys. Opening day,
I get a ticket for no life jackets. I try
to seventy five dollar ticket. I try to explain, but
we're not in the canoe. He's like, come on. I'm like,

(14:37):
I'm serious, man, it's just we're just using the drag decoys.
Still a ticket the next year, I'm not kidding you.
A year later, opening day, same boat launch, same canoe,
full of decoys, different game. Warden pulls in, writes me
a citation.

Speaker 6 (14:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
I'm like, but we're not in the canoe. Me and
the same buddy, seventy five dollars ticket.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Again, I think you would have learned.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
But that's not as good of a story. All right,
what's next? Max is right in, Oh, this is more
our news. This is more our news here.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
Oh, I'd like to preface this with, uh, well, the
text chain started at four fifty seven am.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
He's got a new baby.

Speaker 4 (15:23):
Yeah, but it also must have gotten fired up to
be texting another guy at four fifty seven am.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
It's a little bit early.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
I feel like I think he's up all night with
that new baby, so he's probably got nothing to do
changing diapers.

Speaker 4 (15:34):
You can think about it, he says. Drake's don't quack
like a hen, and I'll stand by that till I die.
I said, yeah, the cornell that proved that, but also
proved that they do quack like a drake. What I'm
calling a quack is pretty specific. I think ducks make
a lot of sounds, I said, depending on how discerning
the ear is. And since in quotes Max, they make
a lot of sounds, you can see how the two

(15:56):
could be conflated.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Ha ha. But a drake doesn't quack.

Speaker 4 (16:00):
Even Rocky knows that that is not the nickname or
name of his uh new son. But okay, so that's
just just pumping the tires up here a little bit
because I'm excited to see what Max came up with.

Speaker 7 (16:15):
All right, clearing the air here a little bit. Drake
mallards do not quack, simple as that, and I'll take
that to my grave.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
They don't quack.

Speaker 7 (16:28):
Yes, they make a sound out of their mouth, but
it's more of a buzz or a whistle, just not
a quack. I pulled up the same website yawning sever
listening to that is drake whistle. That is a hen quack.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
He is splitting hairs a little bit.

Speaker 7 (16:58):
Yeah, whistle, just two different things.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
Sort of like music.

Speaker 7 (17:04):
There is different pitches, and I think in duck calls
there's different pitches as well. A hen mallard can do
a high pitch and a low pitch quack. A drake
can also do a high pitch whistle and a lower
pitch whistle. What I think Yanni is getting confused is
that low end whistle. It's not a pure.

Speaker 1 (17:28):
Wheat.

Speaker 7 (17:29):
Is just like a little more sharper, a little more crisp.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
I'll pull up.

Speaker 3 (17:35):
It sounds a lot like a quack.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
No, hear him out, hear him out. He's getting his
calls out, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 7 (17:41):
Drake whistle standard. This is gonna be my high pitched.

Speaker 6 (17:47):
M M.

Speaker 7 (17:51):
At the end you can almost hear like a t
and then this can be my low end.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
MP.

Speaker 7 (18:06):
Nowhere near a quack. Simple as that. I am so
confident in my opinion. I'm gonna make a T shirt
that says drakes don't quack.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
That's confidence.

Speaker 7 (18:27):
Yeah, So there you have it. There's my opinion, there's
my stance on it. Drakes don't quack, they don't quack.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
I think he just wanted to show off his turkey fan.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
Put that in your pipe, smoky yohanni.

Speaker 6 (18:45):
Wasn't there somebody on the crew who saw a hen
turkey gobble?

Speaker 1 (18:50):
But that happens, but they don't gobble gobble? Right?

Speaker 6 (18:52):
But like I mean, if if you were to say
the kind of gobble but not really gobble, could you
not apply the same thing here? Like a drake will
quack but not really quack, just kind of a quacky.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
It's not quiet.

Speaker 4 (19:05):
And I think I wish that Max would have been
able to do a better drake whistle. That sounded like
that drake quack that we heard from the Cornell Lab
of more Orthology.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Drake quick, all right, spend tell us about the oartion
house Bodies.

Speaker 6 (19:18):
Auction house has one week left. Everything has been bid on.
We appreciate everyone throwing their money at this good cause.
There's one item though, that does not have a bid yet.
That is the boat motor. It's a Honda one fifty
V Tech outboard outboard motor. You got to pick it
up in Bozeman. We haven't listened at eight k right now.
That's that's like the first bid that's going to be made.

Speaker 1 (19:39):
Can I talk about that? Tell why that is? Yep?
This this money all goes This is a fun This
is a fundraiser like a nonprofit venture. All this money
goes to land Access Fund. We know that we can
take that one hundred and fifty outboard Hondo.

Speaker 6 (19:56):
Marketplace, we'd get ten to fifteen kit.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Because it's worth twice what's got it's got. The only
hours that has is the hours that we used to
film Doss Boat one season of doss Boat, which is
filmed over the course of a few dates.

Speaker 4 (20:11):
Yeah, the episode I was involved in, we floated that
boat with no engine, then we put the engine on
and fished for four hours.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
So my episode only had four hours.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
And so it's it's worth twice if you went and
bought it new, which it is, it's worth twice that.
So we put the minimum at eight grand because we
could just go sell it on Facebook marketplace, or probably
just take it to Townsend and bring it to an outboard
dealer and sell it to him. For eight thousand bars.

Speaker 6 (20:37):
This is the rare example in our auction house where
you could get something at a good deal and no
one's been of Dan, no one's been a day. So
we got the auction house going for another week. We
also have listed my box rocks. I don't feel like
that description does it justice, though, so I want to
tell you about my five favorite rocks. There's seventeen different
rocks I have in here that I've collected over the years.
I'm gonna give you my five favorite ones. First one

(20:58):
here is wonder Still from Nevada. We had the Mediater
Live tour in twenty twenty four. We spent the night
in Reno. I got up at five am. I went
and got a rental car. I drove out into the
desert about ninety minutes to a place car remember Rainbow Mountain.

Speaker 8 (21:12):
Was everyone like PRIs Spencer going.

Speaker 6 (21:14):
Steve threatened to come with me. Yeah, Steve threatened to
come with me, and I was like, I'll get you
up at five am, and you're like, eh, eh, maybe not.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
I was already up.

Speaker 6 (21:21):
So that that was formed by layers of volcanic ash.
It's a popular rock among artists who do mosaics because
you know, it's got a bunch of layers of color.
It's one of the prettiest rocks I own. So that
is wonderstone, also known as Ryo Light.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
There you go.

Speaker 6 (21:36):
This one's kind of an eyeball shit.

Speaker 3 (21:38):
A few of these I have.

Speaker 6 (21:39):
I have a few pieces.

Speaker 1 (21:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (21:41):
There it is when I found it on the mountain.
And then the next picture is my suitcase going home.
I took them plenty plenty of Ryo Light Wonderstone with me.
The tour bus got heavier after that day.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
That's a big one.

Speaker 6 (21:55):
Next one obsidian from Oregon. I found this at the
Glass Butte in or Again, that's one of the biggest
obsidian deposits in the world. Ancient humans were spreading this
stuff all across the continent. Obsidian trace back to here
has been found in Ohio that ancient people's carried their
traded their way there. So we got a big old
piece of obsidity. You could keep it raw just like that,

(22:17):
or if you're a flint napperor you could turn into something.

Speaker 3 (22:21):
That's what I was gonna do.

Speaker 8 (22:21):
You ever just get the urge to break some of
the rocks.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
I got some of this and I did bust it
all up? Yeah, it's so nice. You hit that with
a hammer, dude.

Speaker 6 (22:29):
Yes, this is a raw piece. You do whatever you
like if you're gonna break it up, like put a
towel around it and then smash that thing with a
hammer and.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
Then watch your ask. This stuff is sharp, the sharpest
natural substance.

Speaker 6 (22:40):
Yeah, it's it's very sharp. This is a raw piece.
It's about the size of a softball, all right. Number
three is a leaf fossil from Idaho.

Speaker 3 (22:48):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (22:48):
There's this landowner there who was building a dirt bike
track back in the seventies. And as he's building this
dirt bike track, he starts excavating the side of a
mountain and he uncovers a fifteen million year old lake bed.
And that lake formed when there was a volcano nearby
that went off and it dammed up this river and
just like in the blink of an eye, it it

(23:09):
totally flooded this valley and it put all these trees
and plant life under some really deep cold water. And
so this is one of those leaves looks like probably
from an elm.

Speaker 1 (23:20):
How old is that?

Speaker 6 (23:22):
Fifteen million years old? Likely from an elm tree? Really
delicate rock When you go to this guy's place and
you find him just on his property somewhere, like I
found him driving his tractor around. He's like, you here
for the dirt bikes or the fossils, and then you
pay him like ten bucks or I don't remember what
the what the fee was real cheap. It was like
ten dollars and.

Speaker 4 (23:40):
You found all that, all that and you can for
ten bucks. That's you pick which one you want.

Speaker 6 (23:45):
I don't remember what the dirt bike fee. My my
rock hounding fee was real cheap. It was only me
and my wife. And then there was one other group there.
It was somebody from China who was doing a research project.

Speaker 4 (23:58):
All that.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
All that.

Speaker 6 (23:59):
Didn't ask any quot Russian. You just said knock yourself
out and the ten dollar feet. So this is one
of those fossils that I found there. Damn yeah, I
don't know, probably like six inches long. Looks like it's
probably from an from an elm tree.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
Number two.

Speaker 6 (24:12):
This is a fish fossil from Wyoming. It's from the
world famous Green River Formation. It's a really amazing place
called American Fossil. You book your dig like way in
advance and then you get to go there. This is
a video of what a successful one of these would
look like. Wow, this is a nidea.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
You that's me.

Speaker 6 (24:33):
That's the state fossil of Wyoming. It's an extinct type
of herring. It's like one of the coolest places on
planet Earth.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
I think.

Speaker 6 (24:40):
You get to go to this giant quarry. You take
home anything you find there. It can be absolutely anything.
Fish is the most common, but there's mammals, insects, birds,
There's been like a three toed horse that was discovered
there and you could find something worth millions of dollars
you get to take home. So this is one of
those fish that I found that day.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
People do this up. They can go to hell.

Speaker 7 (25:01):
Uh.

Speaker 6 (25:01):
And then the last one here is a dino bone
that I found in Montana with the famous and infamous
Jack Horner.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
I've been on the show him.

Speaker 6 (25:11):
Yeah, I put him in a real tough spot when
he was on that show and I asked him if
I could come with on a dino dig. And how
does he say?

Speaker 1 (25:16):
No?

Speaker 6 (25:16):
You know when there's microphone.

Speaker 9 (25:17):
That's what happened, Yeah, on the show, and that's all
you got in Yeah, I guess.

Speaker 6 (25:23):
So, So I'm like okay, And I emailed him the
next day and like, Jack, when when can I join you?
And so like three months later, I was on a
dino dig with Jack in northern Montana. And this is
a a duck bill dino, a type of duck bill
that Jack actually discovered. Uh. And and if we were
doing this news show back in February, we might have
talked about Jack, huh, because he was in the Epstein Files.

(25:45):
So that's why I say the infamous also infamous for
other reasons. I never told this story, but I feel
like it adds something to this.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Oh, just be clear, being in the Epstein Files doesn't
in and of itself mean anything.

Speaker 6 (25:58):
Yeah, to add context for for Jack's involvement, he went
to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico to look for dino bones,
and then I think they talked about him joining the
ranch in Wyoming to also do some excavating.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's just important.

Speaker 6 (26:15):
Yes, right, There's some more Jack Horner background about his
one of his wives that he had.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Okay, so he married a student.

Speaker 6 (26:24):
When I go to this dino dig, this was twenty
twenty two, I believe as a volunteer, I'm teamed up
with a paleontologist, and then you're like given a job
and a paleontologist to work with. Our job was prospecting,
meaning we got to just like wander around the badlands
and look for possible fossils or like big big deposits
of fossils. And I'm asking this woman some questions, and

(26:47):
all of a sudden I elbow my wife. I'm like,
I think this might be Jack's wife, that the student
that he married. And then it comes out a little
bit later that it was so I found this rock
with Jack's famous x Y and Jack they split up
the case they split up, Yeah, but they're still friends.
They're great friends. And she's like, I love Jack. Jack's
one of the most important people in my life. We're

(27:08):
great friends. We still work together. So like the only
people have touched his bone or Jack Horner, Jack Horner's
ex wife me, my wife's that's the fossil you're getting
from a type of dinosaur that he discovered back in
the seventies that put Jack on the map.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Duck Bill done got what a box of fossils?

Speaker 6 (27:26):
Seventeen of them?

Speaker 3 (27:27):
Those are five of.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
My that's just five. That's the worst five.

Speaker 6 (27:30):
Yeah, we got petrified wooden here, clam fossils, snail fossils, agots,
all kinds of.

Speaker 1 (27:35):
Stuff ingot of gold, No, damn love it? Okay, on
on the your news now. Your News today has brought
to you by banished suppressors, which I'm holding in my
hand here. What I'm holding my hands specifically is the
meat eater banish collapse suppressor, which has the equivalent of
like a little adjustable muzzle brake apparatus on the end.

(27:56):
It's thirty cow. Can you can run on anything? I
run one of these on my twenty two creed more
on a rocky by that. Okay. The your News is
a guy that rode in today. He comes and looking
for life advice and he's gonna get it. He says
he was at a.

Speaker 10 (28:13):
What was he at a state sale?

Speaker 1 (28:16):
He was out in a state sale. I don't know
how he got there, and Randall wasn't there, but he
was at in the state sale and he sees that
there's a beaver pelt for sale. Winds up that there's
two beaver pelts. Once he gets to asking about it,
the old lady wants twenty five bucks for both of them.

(28:38):
He somehow gets her down to twenty bucks, So he
gets two beaver repelts for twenty bucks. He bought him
because they seemed cool. He didn't want him to get
thrown away. And he bought him because, quote, you guys
have talked a lot about fur as such an interesting
and high quality material. He goes on to say it,

(28:58):
but having them, I don't really know what to do
with them. Have a hat made, but it's not that cold here.
I wouldn't get to use it hardly. Ever. My wife, Okay,
it's hard for me to say this about crying. He says,
my wife is unlikely to allow them as the core.

Speaker 8 (29:21):
I feel like he should have gone a little further here,
and like, actually, like he hasn't even asked her yet.

Speaker 3 (29:26):
You know what I mean? We should wish it. I
know we need that.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
I sometimes need to ask my wife about something for
three months, just waiting for the right moment. I am
the other I'm petrified. Anyway, I thought you guys might
have some suggestions. Happy if you want to discuss on
the pod or even drop me a line or email.
Thanks in advance. I got a ton of suggestions. There's
all kinds of stuff you could do with it. Nate

(29:55):
pulled a picture here or my feet are resting on
a beaver fer ottoman? How does a guy like this?
How does a guy make something like this? I'll tell you.
We had an ottoman and it had a little pad.
I went and got some super thin so scrap a
super thin plywood, put the plywood on the bottom, wrapped

(30:17):
the beaver hide around the pad, and took a staple
gun and there you have it. It still started making
my back too sweaty. There was always a beaver repel
over this chair I'm leaning on. You could take your
two beaver repelts and have a hat made and send
it to a person that lives in a cold place.
You could just have it laying over a piece of furniture,

(30:38):
and when people come over, you go see that that's
a beaver repelt.

Speaker 8 (30:41):
Well, he's got his wife to contend.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
The biggest problem he's got. The biggest problem he's got
is what do you mean your wife won't let you like?
What does it? It's not even none of her business. When
I'm talking about not asking my wife something for two weeks,
it's not about something like that.

Speaker 8 (30:59):
Right. You would just lay it across the couch and
be done with it. Oh yeah, I mean what I want?

Speaker 1 (31:06):
Nothing else is there? You don't want to be in
a happy marriage.

Speaker 8 (31:10):
No, I would do the same thing.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
And it was like I was at my dentist the
other day. Yes, she does at my dentist.

Speaker 8 (31:15):
Dennis, are problems you know?

Speaker 1 (31:16):
You telling me his wife's out of town. He hung
a bunch of taxs during me up in a certain
place in the living room. His wife comes back out
of town. Doesn't like it, he said, But she can't
even climb up there.

Speaker 10 (31:27):
Dude, I got my wife just built these shelves and
there's twenty four nooks. Guess how many nooks I am allocated?

Speaker 3 (31:35):
Twelve?

Speaker 1 (31:36):
One, No, twelve, that's what I said.

Speaker 3 (31:38):
And you're not. No, You're gonna let it slide.

Speaker 8 (31:41):
I'm trying my best, but dude, all you do is
you build your own thing with thirty nooks.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
Put that want give her one? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
Man, there's all kinds of bad stuff about my wife,
but the one thing like she never there's certain things
she just does not mess with me about. She would
never mess with me about something like this at home
decor about skulls and all that kind of stuff. Never
messes with me about it. That's gift, and like never

(32:13):
messes with me about doing stuff in the kitchen. I
could take a roadkill moose and put it on that
counter and she's not gonna mention it.

Speaker 8 (32:20):
I feel like unless someone was like a vegan or
seriously anti hunting or something like a beaver, pel's not
offensive in any way.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
No, my wife is always mad at me, but like
she doesn't mess with me about some things. She's perpetually
mad about some stuff, but this is just not an
issue I have to deal with, so it's hard for
me to even empathize.

Speaker 8 (32:41):
Can we make that a regular segment like things that
she's mad at you about?

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Oh yeh?

Speaker 4 (32:44):
She can Hosted's your House, Spencer Around Home Decort.

Speaker 6 (32:50):
I have a pretty good guess by now as to
like what my wife would approve of and not approve of,
and so I don't get that one wrong too often.
But also if there's something I really want and she doesn't,
I'll be like, this is really important to me. I
really want this buck up in here that I killed. Yeah,
And then I that that usually wins it for me,
and I think that, But that's also like a powerful
sentence to say, like this is important to me, so

(33:12):
I don't use that one often either. I think you
could tell your wife that these beaver pelts from this
estate sale are very important to email her. That might
just do it.

Speaker 1 (33:21):
If not, try to get a new one. I'll call
him on the news.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
You didn't even mention getting them turned into a pillow.
Those are some of my favorite things.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
Problem, So why didn't I think of that? You're gonna
turn this into a win for your wife. I hadn't
thought of that. I'm gonna give you a hot tip
sewing by so My? Should we even say that? Should
we bleeped that out?

Speaker 3 (33:48):
I'm sure she'd loved the business.

Speaker 1 (33:49):
Okay, I'm gonna give you a hot tip sewing by
so My.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
How you spells some ice s O A.

Speaker 1 (33:57):
M I that's your hot tip. Say you want a pillow,
leather backed pillow your wife. Your wife will be praising you.
This is gonna turn all your marriage around. You're gonna
become a household hero when.

Speaker 8 (34:16):
She she'll ask you to start trapping beavers.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
When you get that leather back beaver fur throw pillow
in that house, she's not gonna get off it. You're
not gonna see her in your bedroom anymore, because she's
gonna be sleeping with her head on that couch pillow.
Onto the news.

Speaker 8 (34:36):
Earn a buck is back, except now it's earn a
second buck.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah that sounds that I like it. That's got more
of her, that's got more of a bring.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (34:45):
Yeah, it will give you the first one, you gotta
earn the second one. In New York State this time
h Beginning this year, UH, New York hunters MSS harvest
and report an antlerless deer, dough or antlerless buck before
becoming eligible to shoot a second antler buck or antler deer.

(35:06):
It's a statewide rule. It replaces the previous system that
allowed many hunters to harvest two bucks without taking an
antler list deer. Every licensed hunter will still receive an
antler deer tag, and they'll earn that second antler deer
tag only after legally harvesting and reporting an antler list deer.

Speaker 1 (35:26):
Can you back up minute, yep and explain to people,
why why is this even a thing?

Speaker 8 (35:33):
That's that's all next. So New York State's got a
million white tails, five hundred thousand hunters. Deer hunters annual
harvest is around two and twenty five thousand deer, but
only one hundred thousand.

Speaker 1 (35:48):
Of those are dose.

Speaker 8 (35:50):
So in a lot of wildlife management units, the deer
population is greatly exceeding objectives. And they're starting to see
that excess browsing is creating poor habitat, nutritional stress on
the deer that are there, and it slows down forest regeneration.
They're also seeing crop damage, more deer vehicle collisions. So

(36:12):
the dough harvest is the rate is too low, and
in fact, only about thirteen percent of New York deer
hunter's harvest one antlerless deer only three percent for harvest
and two or more. Really, yeah, I don't so, I
don't get it personally, Like it was never a big
like we always were all about harvesting. Does you know,

(36:35):
I don't know why it's a big deal these days,
but de EC Department of Environmental Conservation.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Can you look that up? A Department of Environmental Conservation.

Speaker 10 (36:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (36:47):
So they did like focus groups and surveys and things,
and they had input from biologists all over the state.
But before they came to this like this idea for
harvesting more, does actually something that came out in that
same the same surveys. Is a lot of hunters preferred
going back to a one buck limit, but uh DC concluded,

(37:09):
you know, that's not going to do anything to increase
antler list harvest, So there was no reason to do that.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
But at its inception to earn a buck concept was
you they were going into to try to control deer numbers,
and particularly around c w D. They were going to
places where you traditionally would just get a buck tag. Yeah,
and they were going to hunters and saying, no longer
can you just get a bus. You gotta you have

(37:37):
to kill a dough to get a buck, and that
wound up being in some areas exceedingly unpopular. Wisconsin did
it and undid it.

Speaker 8 (37:44):
Yeah, we'll get well, I'm gonna get to all that stuff.
So the regular season deer tag is now called the
antler deer tag. And you and you qualify for that
second buck by using you know, just a rifle dough
tag of bow, muzzleoader, whatever you get the dough with,
it doesn't matter. You'll get that second buck tag after

(38:05):
you prove that you've killed that dough. And this was
this was some interesting stuff here. The state's gonna implement
verification measures to prove to make sure hunters prove that
they actually killed the deer, because there was some concern
around people just like filling out a tag and saying,

(38:25):
you know, I killed one and then they get straight
to that second buck. They were never interested in shooting
a dough So they're they're gonna do field checks. Hunters
may be required to sign an attestation verifying the report
they if requested, hunters must provide proof of the harvest
within a week, and that could be a photograph, it

(38:48):
could be a like a receipt from a deer processor.
They're just trying to like dissuade people from fake in it,
and if they do get caught fake in it, it's
and fifty dollars per fence up to two grand, possibly
one year in jail.

Speaker 1 (39:03):
I imagine that. What are you in for? Yeah, but
this is what do you I'm in for? Murder? What
are you in for? It's like, well, you know the.

Speaker 8 (39:10):
Program, Yeah, Like New York's going big on proving this.
Michigan also just like they just came out with a
new proposal for a similar earn a second buck program.
They're they're looking to do a pilot program in five
counties in southern Michigan. And their proof is just like

(39:31):
the tag. They're just like we kind of looked at
proving it all these different ways. It was too expensive,
so a tag's good enough. So Michigan's going a much
different direction.

Speaker 3 (39:42):
Tag as in I bought a tag.

Speaker 8 (39:44):
No like you like like you know, they just looked
at like dealing with photos and and like game check
stations all that, and it was just too much more.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
But that was the that was the accusation I heard
in Wisconsin. When Wisconsin did earn a buck. I would
hear from guys saying that a group of guys that
get a dough and everybody'd use it right, Yeah, for
sure to go get their buck.

Speaker 8 (40:09):
Take now like this, like white tail populations are like
going through the roof in a lot of places. They're
like Steve mentions, there's concerns with CWD, but still like
it's it hasn't This program has not been popular in
the past, Like hunters feel like it delays their opportunity
to kill a buck. If you're a hunter who can

(40:31):
only you know, maybe hunt one day on the weekend
or two days on the weekend. It's it's like limited
time trophy. Hunters that aren't interested in shooting dose at
all aren't interested in it. And this, this last one
makes some sense because the regulation can tend to treat
low density and high density deer areas of the same.

(40:53):
For example, in New York, the Northern Zone the Adirondacks, Like,
that's an area with really low deer density, So you
know it's gonna make it harder to get that dough
and then get that second buck. The DC's DC says
it's to incentivedvise, not punish hunters. If they do want

(41:13):
a second buck, they can travel to one of the
wildlife management units where there's a lot of dos and
do it that way. For those hunters that like don't
like it, maybe question whether it works, Like there's proof
that it does work. You control populations by shooting dos.
Wisconsint pioneered the Earner Buck program in the late in

(41:36):
the nineteen nineties.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
It ran a.

Speaker 8 (41:39):
Little more than a decade before it got shut down
just because of a hunter dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with the program,
but it increased dough harvest rates by twenty to forty percent,
reduced deer densities and it helped improve forest regeneration the
wildlife management in Wisconsintly, they concluded it was like a

(42:02):
very successful program, but it's just like the hunters didn't
like it. Doug Dernill tell you it is the most
effective white tail heard management strategy ever created. There's a
few other states that have experimented with it, not like
on a state wide level. Iowa and some other Midwestern
states have run like localized earn a buck regulations with

(42:24):
the same results like higher dough harvest and faster population reductions.
So like it does work. We'll see if the New
York hunters embrace it or not. I'm not sure how
it's going to go. Like I'm all for it, but
I've never like really done it or experienced it.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
YEP. I would say, if you were a state and
you had a rigid you like in a rigid one
buck state. Yeah, okay, we're in a like we live
in a one buck state. Rigidly one buck.

Speaker 6 (42:52):
In New York is a two buck state. They're not
going from one to two. I'm not saying it too.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
I'm saying but let's say Pennsylvania two bucks state or
a one buck state, ye. I think the way to
do it is you got to you'd be like, let's
say you're a one buck state. You say, you still
get your one buck same as normal. You got to
kill two does and then you earn an unprecedented yeah,

(43:20):
second buck opportunity. An opportunity that would be people feel
like they're getting more, not like they got to jump
through hoops to get what they've always had, because that's
when you wind up with discontent. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (43:31):
But I mean it's like falling dough harvest is like
a problem all over the country.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
These yes, people don't because people are pains these they
don't want to eat deer meat. The Yeah, here's the
like in twenty years, this has become more clear. Maybe
to be fifty years have become more clear. Of the
two conversations, there's two conversations happening about deer white tail
deer in America. Conversation one, there's too many white tail

(43:57):
deer over vast of the range. There's too many white
tail deer by someone's measure, yep, okay, landscaping tics, agriculture,
highway collisions. By someone's measure, there's too many deer. The
other major conversation happening around whitetail deer in America is

(44:17):
that we have that chronic wasting disease is spreading, and
ultimately chronic wasting disease is going to have population level impacts.
Some people projected it's going to have catastrophic population level impact.

Speaker 8 (44:30):
And they're seeing falling populations in places already.

Speaker 1 (44:34):
I know, but these two stories, you're right, well, yes,
you can argue it. Yeah, these two stories at some
point are going to need to reconcile with each other. Yeah,
these two narratives are not in sync. Nope, And like
and I don't know, is it twenty years? Is the
fifty years when it becomes clear where one of the

(44:57):
narratives was wrong or or something, or they come together
and all of a sudden, we're talking about there are
no deer anymore.

Speaker 8 (45:07):
Yeah, hopefully it's not that. Hopefully it's like a management
strategy that everyone agrees works. You know, like here in
Montana they have special CWD hunts, like late in the
season where it's you know, he doesn't matter if you've
already shot a buck. You can get these CWD tags
and go in and kill a buck or a doe.
You just got to be prepared to deal with a

(45:28):
deer that might be CWD positive.

Speaker 10 (45:31):
In the same season, I hunted two different earn a
buck programs in two different states. One was you could
shoot a buck. It was exactly like this, you could
shoot a buck and then you had to shoot a
doe in order to shoot a second buck. And the
other one you had to shoot a dough before you
were allowed to shoot your one buck.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
I shot.

Speaker 10 (45:52):
I was way more motivated to go out and kill
that first dough I traveled to. I traveled probably eight
hours to go hunt over a Halloween weekend, shoot a dough,
came back home, then went two weeks later to shoot
a buck. The other program, where it was shoot a buck,
shoot a dose, shoot a second buck, was my home state.
I shot a buck peak Rut and I was like, cool,

(46:13):
I'm good. I didn't go out and shoot another dough
and I wanted to. It's not like I was like, oh,
screw these guys. I wanted to go shoot out another dough.
It was not a high enough priority for me to
get out there and do it.

Speaker 8 (46:22):
Yeah, I don't get the like not wanting to go
hunt and shoot a deer and eat a deer like
you're eat something you're hunting too and learning.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
But I still here.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
There's still people out there, and it might have something
to do with just the you know, high density, low
density areas. But there's people that have memories of years
where there were more deer in their area and they
long for those times when they would see twenty deer
a sit instead of just two.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
And well, I.

Speaker 8 (46:53):
Mean that was me when I was a kid. We'd
see forty deer and one was a spike.

Speaker 4 (47:00):
Yeah, but people miss those days, you know, they like
target rich environment.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah, sure, yeah, all right, moving on to the to
the Wild Buffalo Reporting Desk story about American Prairie. Some
of you might know it as American Prairie Reserve. It's
now American Prairie for reference sake, if you want to
go back into our library. We recently did an episode
with the CEO of American Prairie about their mission. To

(47:29):
summarize real quick before you get into the nitty gritty
on this one, American Prairie is a is a conservation
land preservation organization that operates out of north central Montana.
Their objective is to buy land on the open market. Okay,
willing seller willing buyer. They just bid and buy land

(47:49):
on the open market and then try to restore it
to you know, as pristine as possible of a landscape.
But they own outright deeded land. They own about one
hundred and sixty seven thousand acres of deeded land. They
sit on grazing leases. They sit on more grazing lease

(48:11):
land than they sit on deeded land. So to the
tune of it, they have grazing rights either because they
own it or they lease it on about a half
million acres. Okay, I'm throwing out some big numbers, and
some people maybe not be able to picture this. All right.

(48:33):
America Prairie again, they own one hundred and sixty seven
thousand acres, all right, The biggest ranch in the state
of Montana, four hundred thousand acres, is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Ap America Prairie owns more acres than Ted Turner's Flying
d So this is a big ranch. Very controversial. I'll

(48:54):
get into that in a minute, but I'm on before
saying that it's very controversial, I'm clarify all of that
land is all public. So the one hundred and sixty
seven thousand acres they own is open to the public.
You can walk across it, you can walk your dog
on it, you can go around looking around. The deed
of land is state and federal public land. So the

(49:14):
fact that they least grazing rights on it does not
make it that you can't hunt it. It's totally open
in public. They just have the right to run cattle,
buffalo whatever, to graze the grass, all right. Part of
the controversy of AP, there's a rallying cry to the
opposition to AP, which is save the cowboys, Stop American prairie.

(49:39):
It's this idea that if you buy up ranch land
and just use it for wildlife, you are creating an
existential threat to the American cowboy because he's supposed to
be out rope and cattle, and all of a sudden,
now it's just deer and elk.

Speaker 6 (49:51):
It's a popular sign, you see, the way you'd see
a politician sign.

Speaker 8 (49:56):
And I'll point out that on a lot of AP's
property there's till graising cattle.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
That a lot of.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Them, I'll point out too. AP owns, as I going
to get into, they own about nine hundred and seventy
buffalo there are two million cattle in Montana, So the
existential threat that these animals provide is a little bit.
You gotta take it with you know, you gotta think
of the numbers here. Okay. I find American Prairie to

(50:24):
be controversial. Why do I think they're controversial? My concern
with American Prairie, as I've told everybody I know that
works there or runs the place, or is on the board,
my concern is that their commitment to public hunting is tepid.
And when I put that in my notes, where I
don't think anyone's ever said the word tep it on
this show, I don't recall means lukewarm.

Speaker 8 (50:46):
I was just gonna say, I'm concerns.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
That their commitment to public hunting is lukewarm.

Speaker 6 (50:51):
What do they say to you?

Speaker 1 (50:52):
They say, of course not, we have this and this
and this, but they put restrictions. They put hunting restrictions
above and beyond what the state puts, and they basically
not basically they put a mildier hunting moratorium on their land,
but the state is not eye to eye on that. Right.
And then even like you go ask like deer researchers,

(51:13):
like a limited buck harvest, limited meal. Your buck harvest
has zero impact a mild your populations, right, it doesn't matter.
But and that's what it would be. So that's that's
why they're controversial to me. But I'll try to look
at things. In this case, I look at the good
and the bad. This is just the story of what's

(51:34):
going on.

Speaker 6 (51:35):
On the hunting thing. Like I would point out that
Montana is block management, which is like private land open
to public. It's not uncommon for those pieces to be
open to hunting, but have restrictions, right, Like you can't
kill an elk here, correct, you can't duck hunt. They're right,
you can't drive these roads, so like we see that
in other parts of this yet. But they have a
lot of acreage. Again, I would say this, I did

(51:57):
say this. I would say this with them sitting right
here because I'm like sympathetic to the mission.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
I support the buffalo part of the mission. I think
that they would be doing themselves a strategic favor by
being more open, putting, more lands open to hunting, less restrictions,
more agage of hunting, because you're going to create all
the hunters are going to be your allies. But instead
you're creating an impression in people's minds. They don't want

(52:21):
me around, and if they buy up more land, it's
more land that I'm not welcome on. It's just it's
this is way beyond what I want to talk about.
What I want to talk about here is politics. Their buffalo.
They run their buffalo as was called a conservation herd.
It's not a production herd. They're not running buffalo in

(52:42):
order to produce highe leather meat, right, They're running it
as a restoration project.

Speaker 8 (52:49):
It's the native They're categorized as livestock, aren't they.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
They have to be in this state. Okay, these are
ear tagged counted animals, not because they necessarily want them
to be, but they're not regard even though they're a
native land mammal, they're not regarded as wildlife in Montana.
They have to be regarded as livestock. So yes, out
of necessity they have to like count them, manage them

(53:16):
like livestock. But the objective is this is the dominant
native land mammal on that landscape historically, and they're trying
to put them back on the landscape. So they're doing
this by buying ranchland and letting the buffalo roam on it.
And they're doing it by doing leases, paying the lease fees,
and letting their buffalo run on state and federal grazing leases.

(53:38):
All right, what's a grazing lease. Well, a grazing lease
is the West is full of it. A grazing lease
is you got a chunk of land. Let's say it.
Let's just say for easy's sake, it's a thousand acres
you strike a deal with if it's Bureau of Land Management,
federally managed public land, Bureau of Land Management, they open
up a grazing lease for a thousand acres, they will

(54:00):
tell you you can graze blank number, blank cowcaff pairs
for blank months. And that's how it's like measured in
animal units.

Speaker 6 (54:14):
And if you're in a very lush place, that'll be
a high number, yep. And if you're in the bad
lands where it's all brown for you know, ten months
of the year, it's going to be a really low number.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Exactly. It's tweaked according to an assessment of the productivity
of the land. And you get a deal, you sign
a lease, you pay a fee. American Prairie has This
is a quote from AP. There's pointing this out in
terms of this grazing lease debate that I'm going to
explain as American Prairie says, America Prairie has lawfully grazed

(54:46):
bison on b LM lands for more than twenty years,
complying with every rule, regulation, and permit requirement. There have
been no grazing violations, and the administrative record contains objective
evidence showing that range land conditions have improved over the

(55:09):
last two decades with bison on the landscape. However, right now,
after twenty years, for reasons I'll get into the state
of Montana, and the Feds are tag teaming American Prairie.
They're coming at American Prairie on state leases. They're coming

(55:31):
at American Prairie on federal leases. Under the direction of
Secretary of Interior Bergham, the Department of Interior is pulling
American Prairie's federal leases. That's one fight. It warrants a
ton of discussion. But since this is a news show,

(55:54):
the news right now in this moment is about the
state leases that American Prairie has. Okay, America Prairie is
aiming to graze bison on five thousand acres of lands
owned by the State of Montana. They already have the permit,
they're just looking to put the animals out there. The

(56:16):
state manages one point four million acres of grazing leases.
So to put this another way, America Prairie is asking
to graze buffalo on point zero one percent of the
state's grazing acreage a tenth of a percent, okay. In

(56:42):
seeking permission from the state to do this, the state
slow walked them for seven years, would not process the request. Eventually,
the state Supreme Court steps in and says, that's just
bad government. You gotta process their request. So what happens
now The state now is saying we're not going to

(57:05):
let permits out to people that want to graze buffalo
and a conservation herd. One of the perspectives on this
is a stock grower, a stock grower's organization opposed to
them putting buffalo out a discretion. A discussion is that
they're saying grazing leases were intended for what they call

(57:28):
production livestock grazing, meaning grazing leases were intended to be
used to produce a food product, and if you have
a conservation herds, that's outside of the intention of grazing leases. However,
this intention was never adequately codified by law. It's an

(57:49):
interpretation of past intention. So the state fought them by
just slow walking their permits. Okay, while all this is
going on, they've had all these different debates. At one
point the state says, well, we can't do it right
now because our state land order borders BLM land and

(58:10):
we need to hear from the BLM what they think
about these dastardly buffalo grazing BLM land. BLM comes back
at the time. They come back and says, well, nothing
bad happens. It's kind of a non issue. So rather
than the state than saying, okay, we've heard from the BLM,
they say it's not a problem. We'll accept that. No,

(58:32):
they go, we're going to appeal your decision. That is
not a big problem. Then the state gets into this
kind of goofy debate. They start obfuscating what their objectives are.
They get into this goofy debate about whether one bison
actually equals one cow. Okay, Now, Montana State University has
research suggesting that you can few there an equivalent. See

(58:54):
if you put a buffalo onto grass it's the same
as putting a cow onto grass, okay. And since the
state sets the stocking ray shows anyways, they can say
how many are permitted to be out there, but that's
not what they're after. They just don't want them out there.
And then they put out this thing like, hey, we're

(59:14):
not trying to obstruct buffalo being on the ground. It's
just we're just trying to protect the grasslands. And it
kind of gets in this thing like omet so you're
trying to prevent the West from turning back into that
real dump that it was back when thirty million buffalo
were grazing around and vast herds of elk occupied the
American Great Plains, and like Lewis and Clark were staggered

(59:36):
by the abundance of wildlife, and whole cultures were existing
off of this wildlife for ten thousand years. Like, let's
not revisit that shit show, right, that's the argument. Finally,
the Supreme Court says, you gotta deal with these people's permit.
So then the State Land Board comes and directs the

(59:58):
Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation saying, don't renew
buffalo leases, don't give out buffalo leases. Just to they
change the rules. Okay, they're saying it has to be
production agriculture. So America Prairie takes them to court and
a judge just puts in an injunction. No, you think

(01:00:21):
I forgot to mention. Meanwhile, America Prairie canceled all their
public hunts. They do public raffle hunts. They had to
cancel all their hunts because of this whole shit show
going on.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
For bison.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
They canceled their public buffalo hunts. They do buffalo hunts
for veterans. They canceled it because of all this uncertainty
about their hurt. They want an injunction, but to me,
it feels very tenuous. Their argument is that the that

(01:00:51):
the Land Board and the d d NRC didn't do
the normal rule making process before changing the rule. So
we're saying you didn't you know, you didn't open it
up for public content and all that, And so the
judge put an injunction and says they don't need to
clear their animals out yet. It's a it's a very
minor victory. But like I said, it has a very tenuous,

(01:01:16):
a very tenuous feel to me. It is not like
a conclusive finding. It's just an injunction on something while
something else gets sorted out. The federal land thing which
still lingers. That all hinges on the intent and definition
of something called the Tailor Grazing Act. But again, the
Federal BLM part of this is a whole other story.
The state and the Feds are tag team and this

(01:01:39):
organization around their buffalo herd. What's funny about this, the
irony of this is a lot of this is taking
place against the backdrop of all this hoopla about the
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opening up in Medora, North Dakota,
and they tie the opening of the library for the

(01:02:02):
July fourth celebrations of our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
All these political figures converge on North Dakota for the
opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library over July for
a weekend because the political figures all want to align
themselves with the vision and mission of President Theodore Roosevelt.

(01:02:27):
What is that legacy? Tr is a It's like TR
just is a conservation president people that when people think
of tr today, they don't think, they don't think about
him storming San Juan Hill. They don't think about him
being an advocate of Panama Canal. He's a conservation president.

(01:02:49):
I'm on the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.
When people hear that, they don't think I'm talking about
conserving Panama. The guy is a conservation president.

Speaker 6 (01:03:00):
The conservation president.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
The just let me do it like a little year
by year run through on an issue. In December nineteen
oh four, President Roosevelt urged Congress to authorize that the
government set aside portions of forest reserves as refuges for bison.
Nineteen oh five, in his annual Message to Congress, Theodore

(01:03:26):
Roosevelt described the buffalo as the most characteristic animal of
the Western plains and addressed the importance of the remaining
small herds. He also acknowledged the economic advantages associated with
the value of the buffalo herd. He recognized Wichita Reserve
in Oklahoma as a forest reserve that could aid in

(01:03:48):
buffalo preservation. The next year, he becomes the honorary president
of the American Bison Society. The next year, we're now
in nineteen oh six, Rosevel we congratulated Senator John F.
Lacey of the of Lacy Act, Infamacy of Lacy Act
Fame not Infamous Fame congratulated Lacey forgetting the Senate Committee

(01:04:13):
on Agriculture to order an amendment to an appropriation bill
that approved money for the Wichita Reserve, which would house Buffalo.
The next year, nineteen oh seven, Roosevelt supported reintroductions of
Buffalo win Cave National Park the National Bison Range Wichita

(01:04:35):
Mountain Reserve. The next year, nineteen oh eight, the American
Bison Society, of which Theodore Roosevelt is the honorary president,
successfully petitioned petitioned Congress to pass a bill that would
establish a permanent bison range in Montana. So there's nineteen

(01:04:57):
o four, nineteen oh five, nineteen oh six, nineteen oh seven,
nineteen oh eight. I could go on and on. So
when these people are coming there and like and like
tying themselves to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt at the
same time trying to attack the restoration of the animal,
like what are you tying yourself to? It's because so
much stuff, so much stuff is just like perform You

(01:05:19):
could get the same people in the same room and
they acting like they're talking about the same thing, but
they're not talking about the same thing, Like, what are
they talking about?

Speaker 8 (01:05:29):
It looks good to stand in front of a portrait
of tr.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
That's what I always say. Every politician in America would
like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. But what
the guy wanted is so damn clear. Yep, And they don't.
It's just maddening. Or are you yannie?

Speaker 4 (01:05:49):
He's kind of an environmentalist by today's terms. Oh, he
was a radical radical.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
That's the other thing people don't realize is how much
people hated that guy for doing all this stuff. They
hated him.

Speaker 6 (01:06:01):
Steve would hate him because he liked national parks so much. Yes, yes,
you'd have disagreed with him back the guy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
That shot at him had that little booklet in his chest.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
He likes parks.

Speaker 1 (01:06:12):
No, I'm joking, Yeah, I would disagree with my on Matt.
I would have done a new show about that. I've
been like, Teddy, you're misguided.

Speaker 6 (01:06:19):
You know, the like journey for that. It was just
folded up speech that saved his life when he was shot.
It was it was said that that can trace all
the way back to his early years when he was
a president and he was really into boxing, to the
point where those in his cabinet where like, Teddy, you
can't be boxing with the interns anymore. Like, it's just

(01:06:40):
a bad look when you show up in some public
space and you've got a black eye. So he'd like
kind of started secretly boxing with people in his universe.

Speaker 1 (01:06:49):
One and ran with that. But he wasn't boxing.

Speaker 6 (01:06:53):
Yes, yeah, othery're bad physical contact. Uh, Teddy gets lit up.
One day, he gets knocked in the head. That messes
with his vision. He has to start wearing glasses. So
when he goes to give speeches, now the font is
so big that he like has to have more paper
physically to do his speeches. So for that speech, he

(01:07:16):
had a lot more pieces of paper. It was wadded
up in his pocket where he was shot. And so
like you can go back and say his little underground
boxing ring saved his life because he had more paper
in his pocket.

Speaker 1 (01:07:27):
That's the honest.

Speaker 8 (01:07:27):
Do you do a thing called mediator experiments.

Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
Yeah, that's great idea. Yeah, he finished his speech, but he.

Speaker 9 (01:07:34):
Did put a speech in your pocket. Start cutting loose
at you speech. Yeah, it was bad ass. It was
It was bad ass that Trump had to wear with
all the raises fists. But imagine how bad ass it
was to finish your speech.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Yeah, after a dude shot at you.

Speaker 6 (01:07:51):
Teddy definitely knew that. He's like, oh, look at all
the points I'm going to win here by doing this
speech after just getting shot.

Speaker 4 (01:07:59):
We have to really do some historical digging on you know,
like powder loads bullet. Yeah, you know, because you can't
nice acubond and try.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
A couple of years ago, there was a story. I
think it was a boyfriend girlfriend. We're messing around with that,
and I think one of them killed the other one
holding books up.

Speaker 6 (01:08:22):
We just used like these bean backgrounds shooting books.

Speaker 1 (01:08:27):
Let's talk about Maine.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
Yeah, we'll get into it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
Not fat but because I'm not gonna talk about that.

Speaker 4 (01:08:34):
Yeah, here's a here's a conservation win story.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
Inside Climate News.

Speaker 4 (01:08:43):
I need to get since we're doing the show all
the time, I got to get up on my subscriptions.
You boys must have a lot of subscriptions to all
these different news uh sources?

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
Is that right?

Speaker 1 (01:08:52):
It's got a lot of people that send me stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:08:55):
I need more of those people arger cover a couple
of them, just a couple. Inside Climate News reported that
because of damn removal. Main's alewives are making a significant comeback,
And like me twenty four hours ago, you might be like,
what's an alewife?

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
Which is really.

Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
Yanni? You're from Michigan. How could you not know what?
How did you pronounce it alewives? Al wives?

Speaker 4 (01:09:19):
Okay, I thought you said something different early earlier. Well,
I'll get to why I should know about it. As
a michigander, It's an anadromous herring averaging twelve inches but
can be as big as sixteen. Not considered a game fish,
although some folks smoke them and eat them. Ale wives
are most famous. This is why I should be embarrassed

(01:09:39):
as a michigander, for.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
You embarrassed for not knowing this.

Speaker 4 (01:09:43):
The welland canal to bypass Niagara Falls and invade the
Great Lakes, causing the extension extinction of several Cisco species.
They've also had negative impacts on yellow perch and whitefish
populations in the Great Lakes. And how they do that
is that they either outcompete them for the the zoap plankton,
or they eat the fry of the yellow perch and

(01:10:04):
cod and other fish like that. But this isn't about
how they got famous. Maybe they're gonna get famous because
of this conservation when because for their native range, which
is like South Carolina up to Nova Scotia and the
western Atlantic, they are not doing as well.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Do you have a picture of that al Wi?

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
I just had it on the lakes nearly that big?

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
What's that?

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
The Great Lakes Ones were small?

Speaker 3 (01:10:30):
Yeah? Oh they were. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:10:31):
I think it's like a food thing, you know, plankton, Yeah, stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:10:34):
Like that went on twelve inches man.

Speaker 6 (01:10:36):
And those those Great Lakes one they do not get
back to the ocean, right, they're just staying there.

Speaker 4 (01:10:40):
No, yeah, yeah, there's both populations that just are fresh
water and then the saltwater.

Speaker 1 (01:10:47):
They exploded there to the point where they would like there.
How many would die during temperature changes that that beaches
would be uninhappy, like people would go to the beat.

Speaker 8 (01:11:00):
Listen to this old time Old time Southsiders still call
the little tenants hearings all wives. For those summer days
in nineteen sixty seven when a billion pounds of the
dead fish wash up ashore beach goers.

Speaker 4 (01:11:15):
You know, lots of them. Sounds stinky. Why are alwives
al wives important?

Speaker 3 (01:11:23):
Or what do they do with them?

Speaker 4 (01:11:24):
I guess the most common use, which was interesting, I thought,
is for bait for lobster fishing. Okay, that's why people
are like to commercially harvest them. Like I said earlier,
people do smoke them for human consumption. But really, most importantly,
I think for all all of us and the stories
that it's a keystone species that provides food, you know,

(01:11:44):
all along through the food chain, and you know it
provides food for the bigger fish that we like to catch,
like stripe, bass and cod.

Speaker 3 (01:11:54):
Did you change my font size, Nate? I don't think so.
Oh gosh, I'm like Teddy Man. I can't. I can't
be having this smaller fond size.

Speaker 1 (01:12:04):
I need.

Speaker 3 (01:12:04):
I need my readers. Now you can you can zoom
in on your own. I know, I know.

Speaker 8 (01:12:12):
This is all staying in Well, your honest is doing that.
You know why they're called ale wives?

Speaker 4 (01:12:16):
Yes, well they have are They got a big old
belly on them and so they were, uh they're they
were compared to an ale wife, which is basically a
which is a.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Portly like a lady drinking too much beer.

Speaker 4 (01:12:32):
No one that one that would have one that would
run a a ale. I don't know what you call.

Speaker 6 (01:12:37):
It's a bartender at a tavern.

Speaker 3 (01:12:38):
Well, no more than that. Back in the I can
go way way deep.

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
The tavern gave you a little belly. You don't say,
I'm asking.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
Yeah, I would think so anybody was around.

Speaker 4 (01:12:50):
So this goes so far back. This goes like the
first mention of al wife. I think was like thirteen
hundred something. Back when ale was more were commonly consumed
than water in a lot of places because it was
safer to drink it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
Yeah, people consume like a leader a day on average.

Speaker 1 (01:13:08):
Right, were scared. The Pilgrims were scared of American water.
They drank ale for like.

Speaker 4 (01:13:13):
Every one hundred and forty people. You had to have
a place that made ale. Back then, it was a
It was a thing that women did.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
And if a dude owned that and his wife worked there, no, no, no,
he would develop a beer belly.

Speaker 3 (01:13:26):
That's the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
It was run by women, and they were called ale wives,
and they tended to be rotund.

Speaker 6 (01:13:35):
Holy man, I don't know, that's tough name nomenclature.

Speaker 1 (01:13:39):
Okay, huge Someday they'll get around to change in that one.

Speaker 3 (01:13:43):
Man, huge conservation Betsy Ross.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
Or they'll call them like the who's the suffrage person.

Speaker 10 (01:13:52):
On the oh Anthony, they'll call him like the Susan
being Anthony because they'll rebrand them because.

Speaker 4 (01:14:03):
I think go on unprecedented population recovery. The number of
migraine fish in Benton, Maine jumped from fewer than eight
hundred eight thirty five years ago, yes, to nine million
last year.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
That's pretty sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:14:22):
And that's just their math. I try to figure out
what percent increase that was when.

Speaker 8 (01:14:26):
They were real low like that they were just cut
off from their spawning grounds by dams.

Speaker 4 (01:14:31):
Yes, exactly, and so they've done all kinds of things
to help them get back up in there, which I'll
tell you about in just a second. Like I was saying,
it brings, you know, nutrients up into the mainland, kind
of like salmon in Alaska, right, these alewives bring It's
a vital food source for eagles, seals, otters, and uh yeah,

(01:14:56):
just makes the place nutrient rich.

Speaker 1 (01:14:58):
Want me to hit you with something, please. It's a
one million, one hundred and twenty four thousand, nine hundred
percent increase, so base that in my head. It's a lot.

Speaker 6 (01:15:13):
It's like going from the people in these buildings connected
to new York City.

Speaker 4 (01:15:20):
Starting in the seventeen hundreds, the construction of industrial dams
blocked the fish from swimming upstream to spawned, trapping them
downstream and causing populations to plummet. Intensive commercial fishing and
mid twentieth century farther decimated populations, and by nineteen ninety
four harvests collapsed to a fraction of their historical highs,
where the federal commercial fishing The FEDS basically put a

(01:15:42):
moratorium on fishing form in twenty twelve. So the population
rebound is driven by removing aging dams or building bypass systems.
The systems that they do are they do a bunch
of different things. One is high tech fish elevators were
literally they basically have just like a channel that kind
of comes out off the dam and then at the

(01:16:04):
end of it there's a bucket and when that bucket
goes down into the water, it creates a current as
you can imagine that, it sucks it in and those
al wives are literally attracted to it and they swim
right in there. The bucket picks them up, puts them
into the raceway, and then on they go. Then they
also do on smaller creeks, they basically just build little

(01:16:26):
you know steps, Yeah, where a fish can just jump
up and go up through the rocks and get on
up there.

Speaker 3 (01:16:32):
Let's see.

Speaker 4 (01:16:33):
Twenty twenty five, Maine saw a booming migration of over
twenty million ale wives. Unfortunately, in contrast, states south of
Maine continue to experience declining or depleted populations. Internet says
likely due to warming oceans and different ocean fishing pressures.
Maine is one of only five states with federal approval

(01:16:55):
for sustainable river herring fisheries, and as of last year,
five main municipalities have regained the right to harvest locally
under strict state limits.

Speaker 3 (01:17:05):
They actually have to right now.

Speaker 4 (01:17:06):
A lot of people don't like this, but right now
they have to monitor their fish returns for ten years
and produce that they have the stocks in these ponds
where where they do the reproduction like an average return
over Yeah, until they can start a commercial harvest. My
big takeaway here was I just thought it was so cool.
We've heard this over and over on these shows that

(01:17:26):
we do, and we hear I think it was. We
recently had some tribal members from the Northwest on They
just talked about the wonder that you can achieve from
nature when you see like I think we were talking
about the size of some giant chinooks. That was the
conversation we were having, and I think the same thing here.
There was a lot of locals that were interviewed that

(01:17:48):
can remember like seeing some of these fish swimming up
you know, these small creeks and Maine as kids, and
then they went through a period where there were literally
none and they have you know, put their own hard
work effort into it, and now they're seeing them return
and it's pretty cool. And now they're getting to pass
that on to the next generation. And people just say
it's like it's an amazing thing to stand there at

(01:18:09):
a small oat creek and literally see so many fish
swinging along where you can just stick your hand in
and fishfield.

Speaker 1 (01:18:16):
The points of the resiliency of my nature, if you like,
give it room to do what it needs to do.

Speaker 8 (01:18:20):
Yeah, there's something about Maine though, like that state compared
to a lot of other states when it comes to
knocking down dams, like they're all about it. I feel
like they they tend to do it at a higher
rate than a lot about it.

Speaker 4 (01:18:32):
Yes, I was talking about this on a run recently
with the fella and I was telling them I was
researching for today, and he was saying that this is
a big thing topic in northern Michigan. We're gonna have
to probably discuss that at some point. Yeah, because there's
a lot of people that are enjoying like the pontoon
boat lake life culture. And when you take that dam out,

(01:18:54):
that little reservoir you've been pumping around on might not
be around anymore. And it's a it's a trick right
now to try to sell people on saying, hey, the
river version of this might be as good or better
than the sure than the reservoir.

Speaker 1 (01:19:10):
Yeah. We used to pound salmon and steelhead where they'd
all get backed up on the sixth Street damn on
the Grand River, And if that wasn't there, it'd be great,
But then everybody'd have to figure out how to catch
them when they're not on a roadblock.

Speaker 3 (01:19:24):
Yeah, did we cover that?

Speaker 4 (01:19:25):
How they're putting the rocks back in in Grand Rapids
to put the rapids the rapids back in Grand Rapids?

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Are they tearing the dams out? Yeah? Oh good for them?
Pretty cool.

Speaker 6 (01:19:37):
Wales Wales whale strandings have been tracked for over fifty
years in Washington. The record for grey whales was set
in twenty nineteen when thirty four of them washed up dead.
We are only halfway through twenty twenty six and we
already have thirty of them this year. So the record
is thirty four. Six months in we have thirty of

(01:19:57):
them this year. I talked to John Callum Bokitis, he's
the founder of the Cascadia Research Collective in Washington, to
find out why. First, I asked him about twenty nineteen,
what caused that mass mortality and how did biologists react.
Then John said that the twenty nineteen hevelt felt normal
and it really didn't raise any cause for alarm. Biologists

(01:20:20):
had seen this before in ninety nine, in nineteen ninety
and in all three of those cases nineteen ninety, nineteen
ninety nine, twenty nineteen, they felt as though grey whales
had approached their global carrying capacity and so this was
just a natural cycle where they, you know, self reduced.
And the biologists just said, like, this is what a
grey whale boom and bus cycle is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
Can I can I comment on your graph? He's got
a graph up. One line is strandings. Is that stranding.

Speaker 6 (01:20:49):
Nope, the global population.

Speaker 1 (01:20:51):
I read it wrong. Never mind, Sorry, we've got.

Speaker 6 (01:20:54):
A chart looking at the global population and the calf recruitment.
Oh but anyway, he said in nineteen ninety, nineteen ninety nine,
twenty nineteen, they're like, this is actually a good thing.
You know, the oceans have plenty of gray whales and
so they're just like naturally having some reduction. As for
twenty twenty six, biologists don't think this is a normal

(01:21:15):
mortality event like the other ones.

Speaker 1 (01:21:18):
Sixteen to the.

Speaker 6 (01:21:18):
Whales that have had knee cropsies done, all sixteen were
determined to be malnourished, and of those sixteen, ten of
them had blunt force trauma from vessel strikes. So one
hundred percent of the knee cropsies said the whales were
starving and sixty three percent said that the whales were
starving plus struck by a ship. John said that a

(01:21:39):
starving whale is a delirious whale, So it's just more
likely to swim in front of a cargo ship. It's
a lot like when we talk about CWD with deer.
The CWD doesn't kill them, it's that that they don't
have their mental faculties anymore, to the point where they
wander in front of a semi they walk out in
front of a hunter. They don't smell a coyote anymore,
and that's what kills a CWD pop po deer, not

(01:22:01):
the CWD itself. It's a similar thing. That's why all
these starving whales are getting struck. So what's going on
to cause the whales to starve? John's direct quote was this,
there has been a profound change in the Arctic. Here's why.
He says that about ninety five percent of the world's
grey whales migrate to the Arctic. The other five percent
are these unique populations that wind up in Russian waters,

(01:22:25):
or they stay on the Pacific coast, or they go
into the Puget Sound. Those ones are called sounders. That
five percent grey whale population is not currently experiencing the
mass die off. The biologists who observe that five percent
say that they're doing just fine. It's the ninety five
percent that are going to the Arctic waters that are struggling.
John said, clearly there's been some sort of collapse in

(01:22:47):
the food in the Arctic. The grey whales they feed
by rolling around on the bottom and they scoop up
a bunch of mud and they fill throughout the tiny
shrimp in the worms. And he pointed out it's a
statistical fact that the Arctic is heating up faster than
any place else in the world. Loses ten percent of
its floating sea ice every decade, so obviously there's been

(01:23:08):
an impact to the microscopic food that the gray whales
are feeding on in the Arctic. And now it's like,
shine some new light maybe on the twenty nineteen population
to collapse. Maybe this is, you know, a whole decade
long thing that's happening. Here's some other tidbits from the
interview with John to believe that about fifteen percent of

(01:23:29):
dead whales wash up on the shore. The rest of
them sink to the bottom. Whale strandings for humpbacks and
orcs have been totally normal this year. I asked him
what happens to a dead whale that washes up on shore.
He said, there's three common solutions. It's buried nearby, it's
towed out to see where it sinks, or it's just
left to decompose. I found a juvenile dead hump back
last year in California. This one was just left there

(01:23:52):
to decompose. The smell was so intense on that thing,
you can smell it from like a mile away. I
wish I could have just like showed people that smell
like he to take a whiff of this thing.

Speaker 4 (01:24:03):
You want to talk some maggots, Well, why didn't you
just get a little ball jar and take a chunk.

Speaker 6 (01:24:08):
I don't think I'd be in jail, But that's auction
of boy smelly whale air. I also I noticed that
eighty one percent of the dead whales have been male,
and I asked him if that's normal. He said, no,
that that's a new phenomenon they're noticing. Asked if he
had a theory as to why. Here is his hypothesis,
which has not been tested. Calf reproduction has been very

(01:24:30):
low in recent years, and John thinks that maybe some
of the females are foregoing reproduction due to a lack
of resources. Therefore, the fields the females are more resilient
to the current conditions because they're not spending that extra
energy breeding and carrying a baby and caring for a calf.
So that's just his initial guests, you know, as to

(01:24:51):
why they've been seeing this for the last six months.
Something else John brought up. The thirty four dead gray
whales in twenty nineteen was a lot less concerning because
that time we were just coming off at an all
time high for their population. So thirty four dead whales
out of a population of twenty seven thousand is very
different than if this year, if this pace continues, that'd

(01:25:11):
be sixty dead great sixty dead gray whales out of
a population of seventeen thousand. So just like some really
problematic numbers there. I asked him what he thinks the
short long term solution is. Short term, he said, to
prevent vessel strikes and entanglement and fishing gear because those
are often happening closer to shore. Just feels like we
have more control of that thing long term, just like

(01:25:35):
helping the grey whales in the Arctic. That probably just
means with research right now, And John said this. I
don't know if it's something John has been told from,
you know, the federal government, or if it's just like
a known thing among biologists, but he said that if
you're like funding ask mentions climate change, that it's just
like got no chance of getting off the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Yeah, what's funny though, is four years ago, if it
didn't mention climate change, had no chance. Yeah. So John,
four years ago, you had to take your research and
make it about climate change, or else you'd never get
your research done.

Speaker 6 (01:26:07):
So for this as people would just.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
And I know many researchers, you would take what you're doing, yeah,
and just impose a climate spin on it. Even to
the point of, let's say you were just trying to
work in public lands acquisition, you would need to say,
as the earthworms, right, and as stress from climate change increases,

(01:26:31):
people will need more outlets. Yeah, how will they find
relaxation on public lands? Therefore, as a climate mitigation plan,
we would like to create more public lands. You have
to play this dumb game. Now, you just go back
in and take it out and just keep doing the
work you're doing. Yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:26:48):
The problem is, John says, if you want to study
grey whales in the Arctic, it's impossible not to mention
climate change. I find a way for the next two years,
you know, probably just not happening for them. Last thing,
I asked, what you think the Macas tribe request to
hunt gray whales. Here's a brief timeline, so you're up
to speed. The nineteen twenties, the Macaw tribe quits whaling
because populations are so low. Nineteen seventy gray whales low.

(01:27:13):
I couldn't find that number. I don't know if they
even have one that exists. It's not just like a guess.
Nineteen seventy gray whales are put on the endangered species list.
Nineteen ninety four.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
What population.

Speaker 6 (01:27:24):
I don't have the answer for you there.

Speaker 1 (01:27:25):
It'sn't real let down.

Speaker 6 (01:27:27):
Nineteen ninety four. Grey whales are removed from the endangered
species list nineteen ninety five. Don't have the popular list
nineteen ninety four, well, actually the chart probably does. Nineteen
ninety five, so this is one year after they're after
off the endangered species list, the Macaw tribe notifies the
government that they want to start whaling again.

Speaker 1 (01:27:44):
Oh whale, I don't.

Speaker 6 (01:27:46):
Know if that was the number.

Speaker 8 (01:27:47):
We get to.

Speaker 6 (01:27:48):
Nineteen ninety nine, the tribe kills one gray whale on
an approved hunt. This is a picture of one of
the harpoonists pursuing a whale at the time, So they
do kill one that year. That brings us to today.
The tribe has not been given the green lights since,
and the case is sat in limbo for twenty six years.
So they killed one gray whale in nineteen ninety nine,

(01:28:09):
have not killed one since.

Speaker 10 (01:28:10):
The at that point, they're Historically the caring capacity was
about twenty five hundred grey whales and they sit now
on thousand, twenty five hundred, okay, and then the optimum
sustainable populations about thirteen hundred.

Speaker 1 (01:28:25):
That doesn't think you're missing a zero.

Speaker 6 (01:28:27):
Something's missing looks like a specific grey.

Speaker 10 (01:28:29):
Whale population versus Western Wales global one.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
Yeah, we have some maca coming up the show to
talk about their whale. They're coming out up on an
upcoming show to talk about whaling.

Speaker 6 (01:28:42):
How many have stranded thirty four, No, thirty this year.

Speaker 1 (01:28:46):
Yeah, this tribe killing oh whale doesn't matter.

Speaker 6 (01:28:49):
So I I That's what I'm asking John about. They've
killed one since nineteen ninety nine. The government has not
given them the green lights. Since John is fully on
board with the McCaw tribe hunting, he cited this it's
the only treaty between the United States and a native
tribe that specifically mentions the right to hunt whales and seals,
and it was signed back in eighteen fifty five. Therefore,

(01:29:10):
John feels we should honor that as the only treaty
that has that specific language. Here's a direct quote from
Article four of the treaty. The right of taking fish
and of whaling or ceiling at usual and accustomed grounds
and stations is further secured to said Indians. So John
said he's also seen the management plan that the Macaw

(01:29:31):
tribe has for the gray whales. He said he feels
as though it's responsible and it makes reasonable requests regarding harvest,
So if they want to go kill one tomorrow, he's
cool with it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
The only thing I'd have to know here I would
want to see. I would love to see a century's
worth of population dynamic information, sure, because what I don't know,
and I don't know if anybody knows this is if
you look at over one hundred years, how dynam is
this population and how unusual is the trough? Right? And

(01:30:05):
if they're in a population trough right now? Are they
in this trough every thirty years? Are they in this
trough every century? Have they never been in this trough?

Speaker 8 (01:30:14):
What I'm seeing is Pacific grey whale population lowest populations
thirteen thousand whales, lowest population level since the early nineteen seventies.

Speaker 6 (01:30:27):
Okay, so we'll see in the fifty years of tracking.
He feels as though this is like the most serious
it's gotten for the grey whales.

Speaker 1 (01:30:35):
Not good news.

Speaker 10 (01:30:36):
What's interesting is like in ninety nine when they did this,
it was huge public backlash is insane. It's become so
much more tolerated. Which is the only thing I can
think of in the hunting world that people are now
more excited about today than they were twenty five years ago.

Speaker 6 (01:30:52):
You know, the grey whale strandings they could stop and
like you know, maybe thirty is the number they sit
on for the rest of the year, and then all
of a sudden, it's not so alarming, but it doesn't
seem likely. If that trend continues, this is going to
be like a real, like global topic. Politicians are going
to talk about this.

Speaker 1 (01:31:09):
Well, they'll be back to being the next time there's
the next democratic administration comes in and they'll be reconsidering
them for endangered species at connections.

Speaker 3 (01:31:19):
Ain't gonna happ now tell you that, thanks Spencer, so.

Speaker 1 (01:31:26):
Wolves eat cows crazy can't be true.

Speaker 3 (01:31:32):
It is little baby cows or big cows.

Speaker 10 (01:31:35):
Primarily baby cows. On average between three hundred and six
hundred pounds. Okay, so for almost one hundred years there
were no wild wolves in California. Today there's about ninety
individuals in twelve packs, and new genetic testing that came
out just the other day shows exactly what they're eating
and it's mostly cows. If you want to pull up

(01:31:56):
that map pill. This just gives an idea of where
the study is going on. We're going to talk about
the Lassen pack as well as the Harvey pack.

Speaker 1 (01:32:05):
What pins are we looking at here? That just that
wolf one? Oh not the test.

Speaker 10 (01:32:09):
Steve wants to know about the ten. That's where I
camped for sheep show last year.

Speaker 1 (01:32:13):
Okay, I'm with you anyhow.

Speaker 10 (01:32:19):
So last and Pack trickled in in twenty eleven, naturally
from Oregon, formerly identifying twenty sixteen as the first breeding
pair at the time of the study. Here in twenty
twenty three and twenty twenty four, there's fifty individuals and
about six packs. And as I've become the scat study
guy around these parts, this study is a scat pickup.

(01:32:42):
It covers, like I said, Last and Harvey packs, which
covered is about twenty wolves through the summers of twenty
twenty two and twenty twenty three, which is defined by
June through October because of the overlap with grazing on
public land. And in this study there were eighty six
percent of the SCAP samples picked up had cataly in them,

(01:33:03):
compared to in the teens and twenties for mule deer
or any other wild man.

Speaker 1 (01:33:08):
But I got so many dude questions. But keep going late, No,
la bammy, We'll keep going. Is it embryo like are
they is it after birth? No, we'll talk. Yeah, we'll
talk about it.

Speaker 3 (01:33:20):
Okay.

Speaker 10 (01:33:22):
This scat pickup method, as opposed to the iguano method
that was just purely counting, they.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
Did a very very rigorous.

Speaker 10 (01:33:30):
Extremely scientific methods, the first being mitochondrial sequencing to confirm
the species that was eaten, micro satellite genotyping which confirms
the identity of individual wolves, and DNA metabor coding to
identify the prey DNA in that scap. And then the
researchers through those methods were able to measure the exact

(01:33:53):
the biomass of what was actually eaten, so they could
tell in this scat eighty percent of that is cattle,
even though there might be seven different things that are
that are in that in that, and so it's not
just how often a prey showed up, it's relatively how
much that prey was eaten. And then through that so.

Speaker 3 (01:34:13):
They can tell you how many pounds of meat roughly.

Speaker 10 (01:34:16):
Yeah, it's it's pretty insane, and I could not get
into the specifics of how it works, but there's a
long section about that. And so when you when you
look into the biomass, which is which is kind of
what we're talking about, cattle averaged fifty five percent of
the biomass consumed versus twelve percent of mule deer and
fifteen percent of small mammals, So they're just chowing on cattle.

(01:34:39):
The you cannot determine what's distinguished from predation versus scavenging,
which which makes the data kind of interesting. But free
range calcalf operations traditionally have mortality around one or two percent,
So researcher state it's reasonable to think that a meaningful
share of this cattle biomass reflects actual kills.

Speaker 1 (01:34:59):
Not just scavenging. And there are a few that.

Speaker 10 (01:35:01):
Were confirmed to be actual kills, but generally it's so
remote and so dispersed you can't figure out what's what's
the scavenge and what's killed. Then I looked at a
meta analysis of this of like how does this compare
in California to wolves worldwide and how they're predating on things,
and you see that livestock are hit the hardest where
herds are grazing unattended and small dispersed groups. When when

(01:35:26):
you look at the occurrence of this compared to natural
game or that I should say that the game species
there actually seems to be a preference towards game species
as opposed to livestock. But the higher those higher rates
don't it's not the same when those cattle are dispersed
and when the prey goes down proportionally.

Speaker 8 (01:35:47):
Was it. Did you come across anything about like whether
like introduce populations of wolves or like new emerging populations
of wolves, like do they prey on livestock more than
like escablished population.

Speaker 10 (01:36:02):
Yeah, this idea that like maybe there's these coweaters that
were brought in that have been been talked to like.

Speaker 8 (01:36:07):
Or it's just like they go for the easy stuff
because they're like in a new environment.

Speaker 10 (01:36:12):
No, I didn't find that specifically. There's definitely a learning
curve associated with with like prey and a new species.
It seems that the prey have the learning curve rather
than the predators. But this meta analysis you look at,
it looks like two hundred different packs across the world,
and there's so some of we're going to be introduced,
some have been there for a long time, and this

(01:36:33):
is India, Europe, Us, and there's really not a preference
for cattle across the board. But when you compare that
to what's going on in California, they have no other
forms of ungulates, They have small populations of elk that
currently their ranges don't overlap a whole ton, and their
mule deer are in significant decline, So from a peak

(01:36:53):
of about a million in nineteen seventy to about five
hundred thousand today. What it shows is that as prey
species than free ranging cattle specifically get targeted by these wolves.

Speaker 1 (01:37:05):
So a problem with that, yeah, is that there weren't
wolves there in nineteen seventy for the mule deer. Yeah,
I mean the wolves are just there now. Yeah. So
for someone to say that wolves have switched from deer
to cattle in California, they weren't there when there was
a million deer.

Speaker 10 (01:37:22):
But in other places there's been there's like there's there's
a study in India where there's plenty of different.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
Species and see where you see ungulate declines. They pick
up on cattle. Yeah yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me.
And if there was no cattle there, they'd pick up
on whatever's next dogs exactly exactly.

Speaker 10 (01:37:37):
And so it's like, so what you know, I think
the big thing I came out of here with is
there there really isn't a thing of cow eaters. You know,
that was a big That was a big narrative in
the in the Colorado introduction. They're gonna eat what's convenient,
you know, they're gonna eat. They seem to have a
preference for wild game.

Speaker 8 (01:37:55):
Wait a minute, Yeah, there's not a thing. There's not
packs that just like over time it becomes a learned
behavior that the pack leaders teach the rest of the pack,
and then it becomes.

Speaker 10 (01:38:07):
A at larger scale. It only seems to happen when
praise species are at at are significantly lower than what
they could be, like the low carrying capacity. So they
I mean, they'll go hit the cows, they'll go hit
the cattle, but only when praise species are hurting a.

Speaker 1 (01:38:23):
Little bit of that feels off to me, but only
kind of off how.

Speaker 8 (01:38:27):
So well, like I'll give you an example, like the
wolves that were introduced in North in the North Park
area of Colorado that kept hitting cows and cows and cows.
There's shiploads of elk around there, there's moose around there.
There's like they're not in a game poor environment, sure,

(01:38:48):
you know.

Speaker 10 (01:38:49):
They're So that's a good thing that you'll hear all
the time. And I talk to someone who is intimately
involved with that reintroduction effort, and a lot of that
report from his perspective was that there were individual landowners
who were intentionally causing conflict because they didn't like that's
a big man.

Speaker 1 (01:39:11):
I know statement.

Speaker 10 (01:39:12):
And so there's there's two things at plays that There's
one the reimbursement portion of it, which in Colorado's management
system was very generous. Like it, you know, it's kind
of like your climate change things like, oh my cow died, but.

Speaker 8 (01:39:25):
What one's gonna they're not going to go kill their
own calf to be like.

Speaker 10 (01:39:28):
Give me but a cow, a calf might have died,
and they said wolf did that well.

Speaker 8 (01:39:33):
But they have investigators.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
But then you can't it's hard to splay.

Speaker 8 (01:39:37):
I don't want to distract.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
Let's do it. I don't have a total problem with
I have a because there's there's there's inverse questions. There's
this thing that wolves when you have when you have
a early we were talking about buffalo, when you have
a buffalo population on the ground, there's kind of this
magic number at which wolves will start to pay attention
to it. I can't remember what it is. You gotta

(01:40:02):
have a thousand of them, or you gotta have two
thousand of them. At that point the packs will start.
It's sort of somehow something clicks and it becomes worthwhile
in their mind to learn to kill it. And once
they learn to kill it and develop the techniques to
kill it, that's what the pack likes to hunt.

Speaker 10 (01:40:21):
It would see again based on a couple of studies,
but these studies are globally. It seems that that data
is not born out. It seems that they'll eat what's there.
It's not like they learn to attack a certain thing.
Maybe in like localized populations that could happen, but across
the board you're not seeing it.

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
They have a debate about this. Not you and me,
we should not you should get all over people me,
but like other people versus other people.

Speaker 8 (01:40:48):
I've also heard something that the larger a pack gets,
the more likely it is to turn to live.

Speaker 1 (01:40:55):
Because it's big and hard to kill. Big, Pa Kyle,
it's hunt deer. Go on. Just know I'm sitting over
here skeptical. Okay, well you'll you'll like this.

Speaker 10 (01:41:11):
Then there's a companion study that's happening at the same
time with basically the same wolf herd in twenty twenty two,
and they're measuring the stress response of cattle in this area.
And so this is getting at the landscape of fear idea.

Speaker 1 (01:41:24):
Yeah, and I'm getting interested again, yep.

Speaker 10 (01:41:27):
And basically, if wolves are present, whether or not they're
actually killing an individual cow, are they impacting the ranchers
operations because they're less because there's a boarded cattle, because
they don't lacktight as well because of all the other
things that cortisol can lead to. So you'll see in
as you compare these two herds, Traditionally, cortisol levels drop

(01:41:49):
as summer temperatures rise. You know, it's like a more
favorable growing season and the stress goes down, and wolf
exposed herds, that drop is fifty eight percent weaker. So basically,
the cattle when wolves are around, they stay stressed out,
whether they're getting.

Speaker 1 (01:42:03):
Eaten or not, whether they're getting eaten or not. It's
so like if you went to your own house and
scared the hell out of your dog and chases all
around but never killed it, the dog is gonna suffer.

Speaker 10 (01:42:13):
Old taste is good, you'll have a red cutter. And
so that raised cortisol is linked tenuously at this point
to lower fertility, weakened immunity, disrupted milk, or colosstrum transfer.
And the takeaway from this researcher is living among wolves
for cattle is a chronically stressful experience and that could

(01:42:34):
ultimately have production related impacts on both the short and
long term. However, it's yet, it's not proven yet. This
is an idea that people like to talk about. It
makes sense just when you think about it, but more
research is needed to see how much that's going to happen,
which gets back to the Colorado thing, because you look
at compensation and how do you prove compensation that my

(01:42:55):
cattle are not producing as much because there's a general
air of fear in this area and different different different regions,
different countries, different places have looked at that problem in
different ways because ultimately this conversation like wolves are going
to come back, we through ballot box biology or just
walking around, like wolves are going to enter landscapes that

(01:43:16):
traditionally have had cows that don't have large predators. And
so you look at three different types, three different methods.
There is a soul a pure India which I'm sure
I pronounced wrong, Wisconsin and then Colorado had basically three
different ways of compensating these ranchers in India, and they're
pretty similar, like they're pretty similar agricultural economies and whatnot

(01:43:38):
growing cattle or growing livestock, I should say. And India,
the wolves have always been there, Like people get it,
they've been there. They're cool with them, and claims are
managed by the government. They have very low rates of
claims of livestock predation claims in that area.

Speaker 1 (01:43:54):
What are they running goats and sheep?

Speaker 10 (01:43:56):
Yeah, because they're not slaughtering cattle in India. I think
it's all goats and sheep In Wisconsin. The original funding
mechanism was donations from pro wolf advocates given two ranchers
who or I should say agricultural folks who had claims
of wolf predation. Yep, that method lasted not long. It

(01:44:16):
is not the way they do it anymore. And then
in Colorado's they've introduced wolves. They pulled from the general
fund and they have a very generous scheme of paying
out basically predation permits. But it's tough. It's like, how
do you go about doing this? How do you determine
did that die by you know whatever, COVID or something
and got eaten by a wolf.

Speaker 1 (01:44:37):
Let me save someone at home a mean letter. I'm
just going to express their opinion now, so they don't
have to write you a mean letter. If you turn
out one thousand coles on range, okay, and they're up
doing your thing, and then the fall comes and you
go to pull them off range and you count them
up and you got nine hundred and ninety, you're never
gonna know what happened to them. So someone's gonna come

(01:44:59):
and tell you, like, oh, the wolf mitigation thing, just
show us like I don't know, I don't know where
they went. They're just they're gone, right. You can't then
go like, hey, I'm missing ten and someone's gonna cut
you a check. Yeah, So that's part of the frustration
is you got to be there and do like you
got to be there here it is, it's got this

(01:45:20):
tooth mark pattern on it and it leads to I'm
not saying it's undoable. They lose coles for all kinds
of reasons, like cows die, they got a way of dying.
I'm not saying this is the lead cause of death,
but that is a frustration. Is the it's like it's
on you, the burdens on you to show what happened
to get the compensation. So that's one of the pain

(01:45:41):
points around compensation. Sure, so someone doesn't need to write
you that letter.

Speaker 4 (01:45:45):
Thank you you guys, so that no one has to
write this letter as well. Common livestock in India includes cattle, buffalo's, goats, sheep,
and poultry, and India has one of the world's largest
cattle populations. But according to just quick AI search here
is that it's that's mostly for the milk.

Speaker 3 (01:46:06):
Everything else.

Speaker 4 (01:46:07):
The buffalo's, the goat, sheep, poultry, pigs they eat those.

Speaker 1 (01:46:13):
Just support tough tough nut.

Speaker 10 (01:46:15):
I started this thinking I was going to hear all
about how wolves are evil and their cow eaters.

Speaker 1 (01:46:21):
It's so complicated. Yeah, you got in over your waiters
on that. There's a thing that no one, there's a
thing that just leads to fighting wolves. Wolves. Yeah, you
know they say, never talk about politics or religion at dinner.
Don't talk about wolves.

Speaker 8 (01:46:37):
The water rights is another one.

Speaker 6 (01:46:41):
We should just stock more elk where these wolves live.

Speaker 10 (01:46:43):
That's what I'm stud We need healthy ungulate populations.

Speaker 1 (01:46:51):
At dinner. When you go like, no, I don't want
to get political, you know, then you say something real political,
like I don't want to talk about wolves, but tight
something about wolves. Huh? Is that it?

Speaker 3 (01:47:08):
I think that's all we got for today.

Speaker 1 (01:47:10):
That's we're gonna talk about one thing we're not gonna
talk about anymore. It's about California. Here's one we were
gonna coll but we're not gonna. In California, there's an
area where they ban dudes from the peer fish and
sharks for fear that they'd hook a shark and then
swim over and bite someone who's swimming.

Speaker 3 (01:47:29):
That's what they say.

Speaker 1 (01:47:30):
If I was the mayor, I'd be like, no swimming
because if a guy's fishing sharks, and his shark's tangled
up on you. He might lose it. You can read the.

Speaker 3 (01:47:41):
Mediator dot com We'll see you next week.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
You can read about me do.

Speaker 6 (01:47:46):
Better than the Mayor and Jaws The Mediator dot com
slash auction, Go buy something.

Speaker 3 (01:47:50):
Oh that's right, check out that model cow killers.

Speaker 7 (01:47:54):
Come on

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Host

Steven Rinella

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 903: Stranded Whales, Cattle-Killing Wolves, and Maine Cleans Up Its Act