6.11.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for RADIOI, and today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated May twenty twenty five,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder, radiois
a reading service intended for people who are blind or
have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
Please join me now for the continuation of the article

(00:22):
I began last time, entitled Australia's Big, Great, Big Camel
Conundrum by Sean Williams. In Saudi Arabia, perhaps the sports
global capital, the twenty twenty four Crown Prince Camel Festival
featured more than twenty one thousand camels and a staggering

(00:43):
prize pot of fifteen million dollars. Mcew is a realist, though,
and thanks the only way to solve Australia's camera problem
is to market the creature's varied attributes. The camel is
so underrated, he says, we need to lift that profile
and make it a another great industry for Australia. Opposed

(01:03):
to culling, like some Aboriginal communities and animal welfare groups,
is upset by the mindless slaughter of this great animal.
Camels are remarkably versatile, unlike most other animal that you
can race up to forty miles an hour. They can
also be milked. Camel milk, which is creamy and slightly salty,

(01:24):
offers a nutritious, low fat and low lactose alternative to
cow's milk. Australia's camel milk production, fifty thousand gallons a
year at least at last available count, is a drop
in the proverbial bucket compared with six hundred thirty four
million gallons in cow's milk sales today, but it's an

(01:46):
emerging cottage industry. The Camel Milk Company, founded north of
Melbourne in twenty fourteen, now has a milking herd of
more than two hundred at its dairy summer Land Camels
and Organic Farm and Queensland, where eight hundred camels Grayze
vaunts the benefits of the vitamin C rich milk and
offers a range of other dairy products from feta to gelato,

(02:10):
body cream to milk vodka. Elsewhere in Queensland, q Camel
is producing camel's milk chocolates. There are, of course, significant
challenges to scaling these operations to such a degree that
they could make a dent in the country's huge feral population.
As Warwick Hill of South Australia based camel dairy hump

(02:32):
Policious explains, animals bread for milking typically have uniformed teat
and utter sizes. Nobody's made any serious efforts to breed
camels for conformity to masure to machinery, He says, the
time it takes us to milk a dozen camels a
cow dairy could probably be putting through five hundred one

(02:53):
of Humpoliicio's products. Jerki points towards another potential solution, camel meat,
which is a one point six billion dollar global enterprise.
An industry report projects it will swell to two point
two billion by twenty thirty, with major markets in the
Middle East and Africa. Camel meat is already having a moment.

(03:16):
An episode of the new Australian TV show Eat the
Invaders urged viewers to try it. Businesses already taking advantage
of the demand include artisanal enterprises and large firms such
as Samx, a meat exporter in Adelaide and New South Wales.
F Fetala Foods, a wholesale and retail meat products supplier

(03:39):
for the domestic market that offers camel burger paddies. Like
camel dairy. Camel meat is a niche business in Australia.
Its camel meat industry produces a few hundred tons a year,
a far cry from the nearly three million tons of
beef it produces, but Eddie Hopkins, CEO of Camel Export Australia,

(04:00):
says there's a growing demand abroad for the camels country's
camel meat, particularly in the United States. He's fielded requests
from more than twenty five tons a week about two
hundred camelsworth, from grocers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, home to a
large Somali community for whom the animal is a staple

(04:20):
source of meat and milk. Hopkins thinks those requests are
just scraping the surface and believes the actual weekly demand
globally to be closer to twelve hundred camels, making him
optimistic about the industry's long term prospects. Carmody, the rancher
and YouTuber also hopes to sell some of the one

(04:42):
hundred thirty tons of camel meat that his culls could
yield annually. In one recent video, he slices off the
fatty hump of a dromedary to access the meat underneath it,
explaining he sometimes also makes cuts from the legs and
shoulders for sausages, but it's a lot of work. Wonders
whether enough customers will be willing to pay the necessary premium.

(05:05):
After all, it's painstaking and expensive to cull the animals
in the desert and transport them for processing. It's just
horrendously cost prohibitive, Comedy says, and it's cheaper just to
shoot them all. A number of experts agree that a
commercial camel meat industry would never reach the scale needed
to solve the problem. Biologist Tim Lowe of the Invasive

(05:28):
Species Council argues that focusing on industries that harvest camels
will only create resistance to necessary culling, which he sees
as the sole practical solution. Carmody, for his part, says
he can't even cull camel's efficiently with semi automatic weapons
thanks to a statewide ban on the firearms that's been

(05:48):
the subject of several jack out of the jack out
the Baack videos. I'm letting everyone know exactly what's going
on and how little we are supported, he says, being
told that we're a threat to society. If we have
access to tools to do the job, who are actually
doing something we have to do. Recently, Carmody was flying

(06:09):
up from Australia's southern coast toward home when less than
an hour into the flight he spotted a small herd
of camels heading toward a farming zone. It's not just
an out the back problem, he says. It's going to
start becoming a problem down on the coast, but for
now it's outback cattle stations like Carmodes and Severans that

(06:30):
remain at the heart of the crisis. To keep feral
camels in check, Severin holds about fifty at a time
that she's rounded up until they are mature enough to
be sold for slaughter. We don't like to shoot to waste,
she says, but her patience is wearing thin and she
fears another clash is on the horizon. It's not if
they'll come back, she says. They will come back. The

(06:53):
real question is what the inhabitants of the outback are
prepared to do about it. Next article, Who gets to
dig for dinosaurs? The French countryside is rich in fossilized eggs, footprints,
and bones. A battle is raging over who is allowed
to hunt for them? By Scott Johnson. One scorching day

(07:13):
last September, Annie Meechen crouched over a slab of red
clay on a remote patch of farmland near Marseilles, on
France's Mediterranean coast. Maiton was scraping away at the clay
when she unearthed what looked like a tiny bone fragment.
Sensing the familiar jolts of adrenaline that surged any time
she came across a fossil, she called out to her husband, Patrick,

(07:36):
who was digging near by. Carefully, the two amateur palaeontologists,
both retired and in their sixties, cleared the surface area,
dug a small trench around the bone, and fashioned a
plaster mold for the scientific record. By the time night fell,
the Machiens had two more molds and a growing sense
of excitement that they might be on to something big.

(07:56):
It was a consecration of the work we do, says Patrick. Indeed,
leading experts would soon touch the potential significance of their find,
but the discovery came at a tricky time for paleontology
in France, where there are efforts to keep the couple
and all other amateurs out of the digging game. Once simmering,
the debate over who gets to hunt for dinosaur fossils

(08:20):
has become a roiling fight over credentials. On one side,
French officials and scientists fed up with looting and an
international black market where fetch fossils can fetch top dollar.
On the other, hobbyists working with professionals to protect and
catalog the country's geologic patrimony, filling museums with specimens that

(08:40):
only hordes of enthusiasts could possibly collect. Each side accuses
the other of being anti science. Both sides have evidence
to back themselves up, and it's a conflict that is
becoming only more urgent as the country's palaeontological wealth is
increasingly understood. France was once filled with dinosaurs. Today it

(09:01):
has one of the most extensive fossil records in Europe,
ranging from the Late Triassic period to the Late Crestaceous,
roughly two hundred million to seventy five million years ago.
Fossils were first discovered in the country in the eighteenth century,
but interest in paleontology was turbocharged in the nineteen fifties

(09:21):
when researchers found a large cache of dinosaur eggs in
the stony southern foothills of Montagne Saint Victoire. A raft
of scientific and newspaper articles followed, and within months people
swarmed the area around the city of Exon Provence, soon
nicknamed Eggs on Provence, in search of their own scaly

(09:43):
orb roughly the size and shape of a football. A
clandestine market emerged. A single specimen might sell for a
few thousand francs the equivalent of several hundred euros today.
In response, authorities cracked down and in nineteen ninety four
turned San Vitoire into a nature reserve, but dinosaur eggs

(10:03):
kept cropping up. Between two thousand and two thousand four,
researchers in x uncovered five hundred or so at a
plot that would become a Monoprix retail store, and more
than four hundred eggs were found underneath the Grand Teatre
de Provence. Professional paleontologists, many busy with research, were unable

(10:24):
to constantly look for new fossils. Amateurs increasingly filled the void.
In the nineteen eighties, the Mechans dug up a massive
jawbone of an abolissurid, a dinosaur that until then had
only been found in South America. In twenty twenty two,
an amateur digger discovered what turned out to be a

(10:45):
nearly complete titanosaur in a wooded area by the town
of Cruisi in southern France. Many of those hobbyists, including
the Meschenes, follow paleontological methods when they dig, and then
share their discoveries with the scientific community. Earlier this year,
two amateur paleontologists in southwestern France uncovered several hundred noteworthy

(11:08):
fossils from the Ordovician period, some four hundred seventy million
years ago. Their finds quickly became the subject of an
academic study among scientists at the University of Lausand in Switzerland.
But there's big money to be made in the fossil trade,
and some diggers are less scrupulous. Tierri Tortosa, curator and

(11:30):
paleontologists at the sand Vetoire National Nature Reserve, has helped
a few hobbyists authenticate their finds, only to discover later
that the items were sold on the black market. A
specialist in vertebrates of the Upper Cretaceous period, he says
he is aware of private collections that are worth hundreds
of thousands of dollars, but there are surely some worth

(11:53):
much more. In November twenty twenty four, an Apatosaurus skeleton
found in Wyoming was sold to an anonymous bidder for
six million dollars at an auction in Paris. In twenty
twenty three, at t Rex known as Trinity was sold
in Zurich for five point four million. Museums can't afford
these price tags. Even if they could. Purchasing the fines

(12:15):
would open a Pandora's box, Tortosa says, if we start
buying fossils, every one will say, well, we won't give
it away because some one will buy it. More often,
fossils disappear from the public record with much less fanfare
than a public auction. One particularly valuable site in Roquefort
la Bedoul On, France's southern coast, has been repeatedly pillaged

(12:38):
by looters. It's a ruin now, laments Tortosa. Ninety percent
of private collections, he says, are sold, lost to fire
or simply abandoned. In one report, the French National Council
for the Protection of Nature found France's geological patrimony had
been heavily impacted by the collection of fossils in Normandy,

(13:00):
the situation is especially tense. For centuries, locals have been
collecting one hundred sixty million year old Jurassic period fossils,
ammonites and other treasurers from the beaches below the Sheer
Cliffs of Calvados, where some of the first dinosaur remains
in France were found. For the time being, they still can,
but the French government has plans to transform the area

(13:23):
into a twenty three mile nature reserve, a measure designed
in part to place restrictions on who is allowed to
dig at the site. If the proposed regulations are enacted,
anyone caught collecting fossils without permission could incur a seven
hundred fifty euro of fine. Carine Bautelier, director of the
local National Historic Natural History Museum Paleo Space, has described

(13:48):
the government's efforts as the assassination of paleontology in Normandy.
In protest, her team placed red flags on every dinosaur
specimen that had been collected by an amateur, virtually the
entire collection. Some twenty seven thousand fossils were flagged. Laurent Puglisi,
a doctor from Paris, and an Ardent amateur collector himself,

(14:10):
argues that the Calvados Cliffs represent a unique challenge. It's
a seafront area, so if the fossils aren't collected right away,
they'll be turned into sand in a matter of hours.
He fumes collecting them is preserving them. Puglisi has been
spearheading an effort to persuade local and national authorities to relent,
to little effect so far. Eric Beaufetot, the a paleontologist

(14:35):
at France's National Center for Scientific Research, echoes Puglisi's concerns.
If we prevent amateurs from collecting fossils, well, there won't
be any new fossils already. He says, parts of provols
would become a research wasteland because of overlay strict regulations. Meanwhile,
the meschens have been fortunate. Their discovery in Kravls near

(14:58):
Marseilles last septem ever, took place on a tract of
private land whose owner had given them permission to continue
their research. After their initial find, the couple returned to
the site four times and eventually uncovered several more fossils
belonging to the same dinosaur. The collection of rust colored
bones could answer a mystery that has been bubbling in

(15:20):
French paleontological circles for more than thirty years. In the
late nineteen eighties, the Meischans had discovered a similar set
of bones in another region of Provence. Beaufetau studied the
fossils and concluded that they belonged to a chicken sized
raptor with a hooked talon that looped at the tail
end of the Cretaceous period, just a few million years

(15:44):
before dinosaurs went extinct roughly sixty six million years ago.
Beaufetaut co authored a paper about the discovery and declared
a new raptor species, naming it Vera Raptor mechanorum in
honor of the meschens. Soon, a team of scientists from
Paris disputed the new designation, claiming the bones likely belonged

(16:06):
to a different raptor species, and Vera Raptor machanorum has
been shrouded in ambiguity ever since. The Mechans new find
could provide the missing pieces to help resolve the mystery,
says Tortosa, who has examined the discovery. Yet, despite his
collaboration with amateurs, Tortosa favors increased regulation and better enforcement

(16:29):
of existing rules over who is authorized to dig. Regulation
doesn't necessarily mean prohibition, he says. But France also shouldn't
be a wild West where anything goes, he adds. One
day recently, the Mechans opened the door to a small
room in an undisclosed location that houses their collection, the
fruits of four decades of digging, passing shells that hold

(16:52):
crocodile and alligator craniums, a giant turtle carapace, dozens of
dinosaur teeth, an ankle, sawrus pelvis, and numerous fragments of Titanosaurus.
Patrick and Annie paused next to a table covered by
a half dozen fossils. No entire skeleton of very Raptor

(17:12):
machanorum has ever been found, but the specimens laid out
on the table that included a tibia, a piece of cranium,
teeth and armed fragment, and portions of a vertebra represented
perhaps the most complete collection to date. Were not religious,
said Patrick as he looked around the room. But this
is like our church. Next. Paddling America's grandest water trail

(17:36):
by Freddy Wilkinson. A Season on the Northern Forest Canoe
Trail stretching from the Adirondacks to northern Maine reveals fresh
possibilities for an ancient route. The rain came down in sheets,
roiling the surface of Fourth Lake and Oblong Crescent, in
the heart of New York's Adirondack Mountains and the largest

(17:56):
of eight lakes in the Futon Fulton Chain. I laid
my paddle on my knees and looked around. Our small
flotilla of canoes and kayaks, containing a dozen or so paddlers,
was spread out over a half mile. Though the downpour
obscured many of my companions, we were hustling toward the
closest takeout a mile away on Fifth Lake. Only a

(18:18):
few hours earlier, I had shoved off from a tiny
hamlet of Old Forge in upstate New York, pushing east
with a group of Native American paddlers along a portion
of an ancient route that runs for seven hundred forty
miles to Maine. The Northern Forest Canoe Trail n f
c T is made up of a network of more
than eighty lakes, ponds, and rivers and streams that snake

(18:40):
from Old Forge across the heart of the Northeast through
Vermont Quebec and New Hampshire, before finally ending with more
than three hundred miles of travel deep in the woods
of Maine. Unlike a lot of canoe trips, this is
not a strictly down stream affair, but an overland journey too.
Many of these waterways are not connected, and so extend
of portaging of one's canoe, camping gear and food is mandatory.

(19:05):
Lucky for us, when we hauled the boats out at
Fifth Lake, our first carry was short, just a half mile,
and a gas station along the way offered a dry
spot to regroup. We left our canoes in a corner
of the parking lot. Most of the team huddled inside
around hot drinks while a few smoke cigarettes under an
awning out front. Spirits were not high, but there was

(19:25):
no easy way to bail. In two thousand, a group
of paddlers from New England established this long stretch of
waterways as the NFCT and began to formally map it.
An eponymous nonprofit has spent the twenty five years since
helping people of all stripes discover one of North America's
greatest canoeing adventures. Of course, the designation doesn't mean the

(19:46):
waterways are just now being utilized for the first time.
The communities within the Howdi Sonauni Federation and Algonquin people,
among others, have applied these waters for millennia. Beginning the
sixteen hundreds, the same network of rivers and lakes proved
vital to European settlers for transportation and expansion of the

(20:08):
fur trapping and timber industries, and in the decades after
the Civil War, the very beginnings of the American outdoor
recreation ethos began to take root in the area. All
for one reason. In this part of the world, it's
easier to travel by water than by land. I've lived
in New England my whole life, but I'm a mountain
guide and had virtually no canoeing experience. Still, when a

(20:31):
friend first told me about the NFCT, it felt like
a chance to hike the Appalachian Trail in the nineteen sixties,
to experiencing to experience something wild before it was overrun
by weekend warriors and influencers. Fewer than three hundred people
have paddled the trail in one go, and while I
never planned to join their ranks, over the course of

(20:51):
four months, I traversed hundreds of the trails miles on
trips led by members of several indigenous nations. At the
gas station, the hot coffee, cigarettes and energy drinks kicked
in and our spirits began to rebound. The downpour led
up just enough for us to talk each other into
heading for the first available campsite, a lean to three

(21:12):
miles away on sixth late, at the place called Gough Point.
It's easier to keep going when you don't have a choice,
someone said with a shrug. By the time we arrived,
the rain had nearly stopped. We started a fire and
sat in a circle, roasting hot dogs and drying out
our drenched gear. The blaze crackled, sending beams of firelight
glittering across the now still surface of the darkened lake.

(21:37):
On the opposite shore, we could see headlights weaving along
Route twenty eight. Growing up, Jeremiah Point learned about how
his grandparents survived the residential schools institutions deployed by the
US and Canadian governments that took Indigenous children away from
their communities to eradicate their cultures, often by violent and

(21:58):
abusive me He also knew that his parents had survived
the Indian day Schools, another assimilative of effort by generations,
the first to not be under an active policy to
assimilate and colonize. He told me, people think that it
happened a long time ago, and it didn't. Point did
not know the region's rivers the way his Aquissani Mohawk

(22:21):
ancestors did. That started to change in twenty thirteen when
he paddled on the Hudson River in New York State
as part of the Two Row Wampum Paddle, an event
that commemorated the four hundred year anniversary of the original
treaty between the Howdsaunee people and the Dutch. Despite it
being his first time on a canoe journey, Point felt

(22:42):
a strange sense of deja vous. Every time he encountered
somebody knew, whether from the Cayuga, Senator, Seneca, or Oneida nations,
he had a sense as though they'd met before. The
campsites they stopped at along the Hudson's banks felt like home.
It's in our dna. An elder told him, our ancestors
did this trip. They were here for thousands of years.

(23:05):
That's why the monarch butterfly can go from Canada to
Mexico over multiple generations. They're not taught that it's in
their blood. On our trip, Point shared an eighteen foot
canoe with Iowan A Howie sergeant and Aucassani Mohawk artists
on their first canoe journey. Each morning, the pair were

(23:25):
the first out of their tents, pripping breakfast and starting
the long process of breaking down camp. Iowan A Howie
shared points sense of unity on the water. It's a
place of connection and prayer, they told me. Most of
our crew, like Neil Benedict and Oneida Welder, were hoping
to make the full two week trip to Vermont. Others

(23:47):
like Lenny Printup and his then twelve year old son Thunder,
citizens of the Onandaga nation, were merely tagging along for
the long weekend, and some heard about the trip just
thirty minutes before our departure. One fellow was so excited
to tag along he nearly forgot to bring his paddle.
It is wonderful how well watered this country is. Henry

(24:09):
David Throughout wrote In the Main Woods, which was published
in eighteen sixty four and contains chronicles of three canoe
journeys through the northern forest on some of the same
passageways that now make up the NFCT. Generally, you may
go in any direction in a canoe by making frequent
but not very long pottages, an understatement, if ever, there

(24:31):
was one. As the Saranac River ran down out of
the Eastern Adirondacks in New York, just some twenty miles
west of Lake Champlain, whitewater gushing through a gorge forced
us to pull off the river and start yet another portage.
Although most carries on the NFCT are a mile or
less and portage wheels take the bit out of many

(24:52):
of them, the carries are often the most challenging part
of any canoe journey. Trails can get tight and hilly,
and navigating roots, rocks, and foliage while lugging your gear
takes as much mental fortitude as it does physical endurance.
For nearly the entire day, we trudged in the hot
sun down Casey Road, and had hardly rained since the

(25:12):
first days of our journey, and the river was unusually low.
We were forced to follow the road for eight miles
rather than the more typical five, most of the way
to Claybourg, a small village in the already small town
of Saranac. For the first few miles, the road was
nothing more than a narrow gravel track tunneling through a
dense emerald patchwork of June leaves. The river faintly rushed

(25:36):
somewhere in the distance. We were beat and what little
conversation we could muster tapered off as we labored along,
descending into the first stifling heat wave of summer. Four
miles into the march, the road changed to cracked pavement,
and a call broke our trance. Would you like a lemonade?
To our right? On a sturdy wrap around porch sat

(25:57):
Holly and Lee Plummadore, cheerful middle aged couple. The walls
were adorned with a collection of vintage signs Lee Tires, Nassau,
our happy place. It was the first house we had
seen all morning. We would indeed like some lemonade, we said,
grateful for the excuse to set down our canoes and
get out of the sun. The Plumbadors both had roots

(26:20):
in Clayburg. Lee was born and raised there, while Holly's
grandparents called the village home. She found her way back
for good once she married Lee, and the couples settled
down near the Saranac. Recently, they noticed an increase in
voters journeying down their road in the last two or
three years, as when it's really picked up, Lee said,
noting that the passers by varied from the occasional adventurer

(26:42):
to an almost daily parade of people. At the height
of summer. The couple started offering refreshments. It just seemed
like the neighborly thing to do. Some people stopped, some don't,
Lee said, nodding toward the road simmering in the noon heat.
This can be daunting. Later that afternoon, while we were
still plotting down the road and n f C. T.
Stewart and volunteer named Craig van Bargin pulled up alongside

(27:06):
us with a tractor and a wagon long enough to
accommodate all our canoes. He shepherded us down river and
deposited us at a campsite he maintains a short distance
from the Saranac. A few days later, when we trudged
into the village of swant and Vermont, I said good
bye to Point Ayanahua'i and the rest of my companions.

(27:27):
I kept paddling against the current up the Missiskoi River.
The lower water allowed me and Clayton Francis, a lone
paddler the group had befriended, to make our way up
several easy rapids, wading across pools and dragging our canoes
behind us with short sections of rope. This concludes readings

(27:50):
from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has
been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and
have a great day.