Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 172: Wrath of the Birders

Transcript

Ep. 172: Wrath of the Birders · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: can't predict anything, okay, honest, I want to do uh,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: like a war game exercise. Yeah, where like we act
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: like I die like I'm dead and you gotta carry
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: on the show, all right, But my dying words are um,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I know that Spencer wanted to mention something and I
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: had a lot of things to talk about. That's my
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: dying words. And then Austin you jump in, uh and
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: start out and you jump in here you are you
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: not have to to start the show. Just start the show.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Let me see. I just want to see what would happen.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: So all right, I'm dead. Damn guys, you believe that
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: he seemed a pretty healthy fella, see, but that you're
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: gonna start the show by small talking. You're not gonna
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: come in like small talking. He just died. I can't
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: just pass that by, okay, don't you think? But you
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: haven't brought you haven't brought listeners up to speed. If
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: if I killed over, wouldn't you mention it? Not? If
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: it would interfere with the flow, I think they'd be
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: I think they'd be interested. What do you think killed
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Steve and his age is probably her attack on that
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: that's not gonna be what it is. Well, I guess
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: that this is the number one killer now, Guys in
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: the forties dropped dead sometimes her attacks. Oh yeah, I
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: saw that yesday. Traumatized my kids. Well, got running errands
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: to go to the hardware store, all these ambulances, some
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: dude laying off in the grass along the sidewalk look
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: dead and dead. Pat Maybe you'll since you're since you're
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: a writer, maybe you'll write his obituary for us. That's
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: a good pivot. Hold on, I'm not done yet. But
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: before you get to thinking about that, and since you're
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: here because you had a whole bunch of stuff to
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: talk about, we also have with a Spencer new Heart
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: who had one top topic in particular that he wanted
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: to bring up. What was that? It is a call
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: back to the wolf episode you guys did a few
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: weeks ago where it was kind of brought up in
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: passing but discussing why dear uh shed their antlers, Like
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: we know it's photo period in testosterone, but the bigger
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: reason as to like why evolutionary they did that? Okay,
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: so why evolutionary? For evolutionary reasons do dear lose their antlers?
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: So can I point out here we can't know, Yes,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: I was going to bring that up. Oh good, go ahead.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: So there's like three um trains of thought. None of
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: them can be proven, none of them are widely accepted. Really, Uh,
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: they're just all kind of kicked around the big why
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: in the world when you just want them all the time? Right,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Like like if you look at a bison or a sheep,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: why don't why did endear end up doing the same
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: thing and just keeping those all the time their headgear
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: all the time? Now, the first two reasons are pretty
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: simple and they're probably the most widely accepted, But the
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: first reason would be, uh, the energy cost it is
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: to keep those things. If you're like a big moose
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: and you've got giant panels on your head or a
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: big white tail, and the purpose of those antlers is
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: for breeding, Um, why do you need them? In January, February, March, April.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: The rest of the time of year, there's no breeding
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: being done, so you don't need those antlers, so they
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: just shed them. I don't know about that. Yeah, yeah,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: I'm just throwing them out there. So that's the first one,
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: and I would guess that that is like the most
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: widely accepted one. It's just pretty simple. But then it
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: doesn't really explain like why bison and sheep and animals
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: like that do keep your head gear. So do you
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: any thoughts on that one? If they kept that, it
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: would have to be living right, right, because the antlers
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: like living and then like kind of dies. Right. If
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: they kept that, it has to be living because it's
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: gonna need to continue to grow, So there's gonna be
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: blood flowing there. And I could see it being an
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: enormous heat loss. They think that the sheep loses a
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: lot of heat, really yeah, through its uninsulated horn, you know,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: through horn coore. I could see it being a lot
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: of heat loss if that was alive. The energy thing though,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: in and of itself, I mean, how much more how
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: much energy take to keep growing the sun's bitches? Oh yeah,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: I'd be like, I can't maintain my house, so I
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: just burn it down and rebuild it every year. So yeah,
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: go on. So that kind of brings you to point
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: to you, uh, another theories that they shed their antlers
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: so they always have a fresh set for the next fall.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: So during the rut, uh, we can be as specific
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: as a white tail in October November. Uh, they're battling
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: it out with other bucks. Uh. You'll see it as
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: dramatic as losing like an entire main beam. Where come
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: the end of November, you'll see bucks walking around with
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: broken off times, broken brow times. Uh. Entire main beams
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: lost that kind of thing. So they adjusted to that
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: by having these broken antlers every fall to just dropping
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: them and growing new ones. Yeah, is there any Is
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: there any aquatic? Is there any fish or anything that
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: grows a weapon and drops the weapon? Not that more
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: of it's so like when you think about like that,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: it's so weird. Maybe thing that like grows a weapon
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: and then drops the weapon drops it. Maybe this is
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: helpful Like for thinking about this too, is that it's
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: believed h dear grew antlers in place of tusks, like
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: the most primitive deer have tusks, rather than that they
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: got antlers instead. So maybe that like helps form your
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: opinion of why they do this. Yeah, um, there's another one. Still,
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: there's another one, And they say I'm gonna save mine
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: because I don't want to do in minds like totally unfounded,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: but I'm gonna save mine. Ah, so this is my
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: favorite one, but it's probably um like the least widely accepted.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: This is like you typed in the truth about antlers.
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: Oh nothing, just running. This is the inside Joe. This
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: is like a deep dark web answer. But we had
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: a guy, we used to work with, a guy that
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: always had these wild explanations for everything and conspiracy theories,
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: and we felt that when he does internet searches that
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: he must always write the truth about in order to
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: get the kind of like he had, the kind of
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: information that seems like it would be that would come
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: up if you wrote like the truth about you know,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: like imagine if you're studying capitalism and then you wrote
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: in the truth about capitalism. Do you feel that you
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: would get the same search results as if you wrote
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: in what is capitalism? Probably not. No, you're making me
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: think of these magazine blurbs. I used to write the
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: truth about the rut, you know, Oh exactly, how can
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: I make this sound of the truth about hunting scrapes? Okay?
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: Number three? So and and this is kind of deep, right.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: This is like when you talked about how mule deer
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: came to be that time, and you're like, it's just
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: a little bit too uh like cute and tidy to
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: actually almost be that believable, being that deer guts separated
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: by the glaciers. Glaciers were gone, and then black tails
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: and white ties came together and made me able to right,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: it's kind of like that, And I think your hybridization event, yes,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: and your comment about that was like, it's it's just
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: a little bit too tidy and cute. So the third
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: theory is that um bucks dropped their antlers in the
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: winter so they can then mimic a dough because otherwise
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: predators like wolves, mountain lions, bears, coyotes, once snow was
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: on the ground and it is post rut, they would
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: recognize those bucks is being malnourished individuals and they would
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: seek them out and kill more bucks than they would otherwise.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: So to combat that, deer then started losing their antlers
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: to look more like does and not have these very
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: obvious signs saying I am a weakened animal. Get me. Yeah, okay,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Are you familiar with the um Stephen
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: Jay Gould, he wrote a lot about genetics, No is
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: the turkey named after him? No? No, he has the
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: thing where he's like, why is bark brown? Right? Right?
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Is bark brown because it's advantageous to have brown bark?
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: Or is bark brown because it just happens to be brown?
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's advantageous to have bark, it's advantageous to have
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: a protective cover, and just so happens that protective covers
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: such as bark tend to be brown, and there's nothing
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: driving the brownness. But we'd look and be like, why
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: is it brown? And then we'd be like, ah, I
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: think it's brown because it's a camouflage, or I think
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: it's brown, but it's just maybe there are advantages to
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: being brown, but that's not the one pressure. It doesn't
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: make any sense. Unny, So I don't know. I don't know.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: Uh so you're saying, I accept all these are all
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: great things. I just don't know enough about like the
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: early forms, you know, like the early like like what
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: was the first thing that started to have a thing
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: that shed What did it look like with the circumstances
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: that it lived under? Did it live? Did the first
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: served that was that began shedding? An antler? The first
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: thing that he emerged as a servant and it began
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: shedding an antler. Was it dealing with wolves? What were
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: what was it dealing with in predation terms? What would
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: like like, Yeah, so when there's a man that knows
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: the man that would have a really good sense, Yeah,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: we're gonna have him on in here in the upcoming
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: after a man named Yeah, Doug Emlyn, you're welcome to come.
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: I listen. I like everything you're throwing. I like them all. Yeah.
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: Uh but but but it's just it's difficult for me
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: that third That third one is a lot of fun.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: But there's Dug Emlin specializes in animal weapons, Okay, and
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: this is uh on topic with that. One of the
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: things that you could be like, Nope, number three doesn't
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: work is because in yellow Stone, after wolves were introduced again, Um,
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: they noticed and there was a scientific study done on
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: this a few years ago, that the wolves weren't killing
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: that many males or we're not killing that many bull
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: elk besides in the winter, and the elk that they
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: were here killing, um, we're ones that still had their antlers.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: And then no, am I getting this wrong? So they
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: were saying that, uh, in the winter when elk. When
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: bull elk would start shedding their antlers, the ones that
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: shed sooner got a head start on growing their antlers
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: for the next year. Uh and and they were healthier.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: The ones that shed sooner, We're healthier. And predators would
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: know this, that those ones were healthier, so they would
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: seek out and kill the ones with antlers. Yeah, that
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: makes a little bit of sense because I know that
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: that the wolf researcher Diane Boyd was saying how elk
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: don't really use their antlers against wolves, and that you
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: are packing around a lot of extra weight and it
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: is a signifier that you are entering the winner in
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: a depleted state that you could pick up like you
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: know what. The ones that these things on top of
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: their heads seemed to be in not the best shape.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: They seem to be a little worn down. I might
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: have butchered dead. Story. Come back to me on that.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: You want to check it out. I want to check
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: that out. Well, that's why I said about white tails
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: to at the fonts go first bucks next door was
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: last winter starvation and predation that the you know they're
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: getting preyed upon, that they like Diane was saying about
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: hitting the young and the ones that given the opportunity,
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: And quite often these bucks come into winter warren down
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: and they're sitting away out and the friends of these
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: yards sometimes the wolves pick them off. You know, they
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: know they're running down. They they don't they don't have
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: the stamina, the strength they had a month earlier, you know,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: so they those productors. I thought I was fastening to
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Yass's comment on the your your chickens and backyard stuff.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: How they start showing a sign of weakness, somehow they disappear.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: And there's things that these these produtors pick up on
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: that we have no at least in the modern humans
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: don't have that awareness. So funny you mentioned chickens because
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: chicken egg shales have we touched on this egg shales
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: have really dropped off. He came in all hot with
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: a couple of dozen eggs and it just really tapered off. Um, Pat,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: where do you Spence is gonna do a little research.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I want you to talk about the guy that found
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: the dead people with his own ar machine a long
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: time ago. But there's a bunch of other stuff we
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: want to talk about. Which do you which do you
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: care about talking about? First, let's talk about Rick Um.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: The guy's name is Rick Krueger. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: And just a quick aside about Rick that how we
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: came together, And this is one of the things that
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: I like like about the kind of work we do,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: how you bump into people sometimes and meet acquaintances. Is
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: I screwed up a story one time about a fishing exposition.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: Who was who the speakers a fishing exposition. I mentioned
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: this guy, Rick Krueger, and I gave all his details
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: and the start of Rick Krueger race to me and says,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: it's very nice, but that's you know, you got it
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: all wrong. That guy's a fishing guide. And what I
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: do is I run run sonar and the mass and
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: lakes and I look for, oh, structure cars, anything that's
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: been throwing the bottom the lake basically or ended up
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: in the bottom the lake. Up. You're writing about a
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: fishing exposition, convention or trade show, and you see that
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: there's a guy Rick Krueger gonna talk, and you mix
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: up and you think it's a fishing guy, but in
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: fact it's supposed to be a sonar guy. Yeah, okay,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: so the sonar guy gets ahold. He says wrong Rick,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: and and I said to him, well, I owe you one.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: I I screwed it up. I I do apologize because
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: now some people who wanted to hear him talk, you know. Anyway,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: I came which one I screwed up anymore? Anyway, So
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: I met this guy that Krueger, like Freddy Krueger. Yeah,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: he spells a k r u e g e r
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: and he's um he turns out. You know, it was
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: one of the best mistakes I've ever made in my career,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: because I ended up being the most fascinating day I spent,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: like I in recent memory, where get on the boat
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: and he was showing me around Lake Manona in Madison,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: and he started telling me all these different history historical
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: stuff about the lakes based on stuff he had found
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: on the bottom of the lake. And you know, like
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, and people get toward fall if
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: they had a work barge out in the lake. Rather
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: than go to trouble bringing that barge in and holding
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: it out there, they just think it out there in
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the lake. And they said, he finds all this kind
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: of stuff out there, and just sunken boats and the
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: most fastening with a regular fishing. Yeah, they're they're high end.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: He has he has two of them, at least he
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: had two of them that day I was with them.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: He had one over here on the side and went
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: up on the screen and then they can see off
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the sides. They can see down the down, straight down.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: He had them looking at all angles and these screens
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: he's monitoring. He he kept pointing stuff out to me
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: on these screens and basically telling me, you know what
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: he's looking at, because like my untrained eye can really
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: figure out, even with that good on our screen, what
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: he's looking at. Sometimes. But then once he showed it
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: to me that I can understand. But he said, you're
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: typically looking at it like a shadow. I guess althose
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: sonar units. And but as we're talking and he's telling
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: me some of the unique things he's found, I kind
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: of said, well, what's the coolest thing you have found?
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: What's the one thing he most proud of? Because this
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: is stuff sometimes going down seventy ft into the water,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: and because if what he does is he finds the thing,
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: tries to identify as best he can with the sonar,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: but that's still not an actual picture. So then he
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: takes his underwater camera and lowers it down, tried to
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: get a barrel look at it, and then brings it up.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: And if it's something he wants to really get a
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: good look at, he'll either go home and look at
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: it on the computer screen and see it in a
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: bitter detailer also let's dive down. And so the story
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: started telling me it was about a car he had
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: found over on an our mass and lake about ten
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: fifteen miles away called Lake Wabisa's Um. The mass and
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: lakes is four him and Manona is the second biggest one.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure in terms of acres, but I guess
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: I think manoticed by about three or four miles across
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: kind of a circular type sheet bikes good good sized
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: legs called Madison Lakes. Yeah, the mass and chain of
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: legs are basically, you know, a generic thing. But if
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: you're a mass near the real famous lakes Mendota, Manona, Wabisa,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Ringra and their wings the smallest one, Mendota is the
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: biggest one, the deepest one, Manona. I'm not sure the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: maximum death maybe sixty seventy ft In place that another
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: Vick Kruger story before we gone the most famous thing
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: never happened on Lake Mandona. That's where Otis Writing, the
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: famous singer died. He was like twenty seven years old.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Plane crash. Reading died at seven years of age. Yeah, yeah,
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: sitting on a dock in the bay. And yeah, and
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: then he died. He died in that. He died crashing
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: in the Lake Manona in the winter. And then no ship, yeah,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: no ship, and and ricks Vick to this day, here's
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: a guy that wrote sitting on the dock in the
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: bay and recorded it back in the dding that he
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: would then die in the water. Yeah, spooky stuff. Yeah,
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: I was wishing he was on the dock if I
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: make it to the dock. Yeah, huh Yeah, that's where
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: Ordis Reading died. That's great. Yeah, I mean too bad
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: for him, but yeah, yeah, I mean it's great. You
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: know what I mean. It's it's costing. It's an interesting
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: factory that a lot of people don't know about. Mass
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, that's where Otis Reading died. And he died
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: going into a lake. You know, for some reason, buddy,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: Buddy Holly, everyone knows he died in the crashed in
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the corn field in the middle of winter or whatever.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: It was an April or whatever. But um, for some reason,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: people don't make that connection with Ortis writing how he
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: died and you know at such a young age, this band,
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: and you know, I think it's like six seven people
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: in that plane that went down. John Denver, John Denver two?
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: What do you run out of gas or something? Died
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: in there? You're playing? Yeah, came Mountain and Jim you
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: probably liked that song because you lived in Colorado a
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: long time. Rocky Mountain Jim tros too. So get get
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: back to her career. So shopped a bunch of people up.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: So hey, when you get do a really suspenseful spot
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: in the story. Yeah, and this is a good story.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah stop, okay, and we're gonna check back in with
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: Spencer about his uh about the about the problem. I
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: think I know it goods about to stop like a
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: suspenseful spot. Okay, Well I think I do anyway, So
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: there you guys, are you say to him, hey, man,
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: what's the weirdest thing you found out in these lakes? Yeah?
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: And he didn't even hesitate you start talking about um,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: he was wearing a lake wabisa and he told me
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: about He's told me the story where he said, you know,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: two guys years ago when ice fishing, like two o'clock
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: in the morning, and this is not sober, not probably
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: not sober. They about partying most of the night there. Um.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: The guy's name is Um ron Wick and Carl Stults
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Rick was Rick. Ron Wick was Um twenty years old
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: and Stultz was three years old. And they they were
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: out partying, even had a girl with him for a while,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: and they asked if she's going to go out there
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: walleye fish with him, and she, fortunately for her, turned
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: them down. Instead of the old like do you want
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: to come back and see my aquarium, You're like, do
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: you want to go with me and my body here
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: out ice fishing? So she she said no, she'd had
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: enough for one night. But those guys, so I like
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: these guys, they got their fries, very straight, admirable guys.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: And they so they after they dropped this this young
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: lady off, they knew knew of a bait shop in
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: town that had been of those all night things you oppress.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: You know this is one, by the way, one This
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: story starts Um February one. They go to a bait shop,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: ring the doorbell, a woman answers comes in and she
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: they want to win a walleye bait minnows and they've
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: talked to her. Okay, I was picturing for a minute
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: that you meant a vending machine, because that was the
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: thing for like some period of time. But you mean
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: a twenty four hour ring like like like ringing the
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: bell out of motel in the middle of the night exactly. Yeah,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: you could summon someone to sell you bath in the morning. Yeah,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: I bet that place is not in business, not in
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: business anymore now that those kind of places are long gone.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: But but you know, I remember those kind of places
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: when I was a kid, you know, I was. I
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: was in sixty when I was five years old. But I, um,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: so this all comes back, This all comes back to
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: me at some point. But so they got this bait shop,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: and while they're in the bay shop getting their minnows,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: this woman woman, um was probably thinking this a little
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: bit weird that they're here two o'clock in the morning.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: But the guy says to her, Yeah, I don't think
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: a a little crazy to be going out fishing in
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: the middle of the night like this, two o'clock in
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: the morning. And I don't know what she said, you know,
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: but that was a newspaper story. But anyway, these guys
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: go off and leave leave her while she ended up
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: being the last person ever saw him. And well Rick
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: knew they were gone and back in the sixties and
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: this is happening. This these guys disappeared. It was it
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: was a local or that went on for years. They
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: were gone, and there's series like they actually went out
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: to west somewhere and started their life over. But one
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: of the guys was married. But my wife never heard
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: from again. Mother never heard from from them again, and
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: all these kind of things. And I remember bought the bait.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: They bought the bait and commented on in order to
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: like create a narrative. Yeah, they had. You know, there's
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: all sorts of stories going around talking about what happened
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: these guys and were they near to Wells No, I
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: think I think there had been working till like um
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: ten o'clock that night, whatever the job they had. They
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: got off work, went partying for a little bit and
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: then went went to the bait shop and on the
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: way out. Well, the one thing you should know about
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: the mass and lakes, and this goes back to that era,
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: they had outlawed driving on the lakes with a car
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: years decades ago. At the time these guys were doing this,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: these guys knew that it was against a lot of
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: out in the lakes driving a car in the lake,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: but they they apparently knew of a spot on a
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: lake Wabisa. I think I think a guy is either
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: a relative or someone they knew had an access road
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: that went out on this lake. And they've been going
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: out there at night fishing, and so it wasn't the
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: first time they've done this, and so they knew the spot.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Tell what they're driving. Ended driving in nineteen fifty Ford
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Coupe and there's a eleven year old car and they
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Rick Rick had done enough research on these guys, so
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: guy had some some knowledge of what the different theories were.
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Because now it's now we're kind of going back and
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: forth between eras here. Rick didn't find their car. They
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: went down in February one, one nine. They sat in
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: the bottom of lake. Would be forty five years till
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: Rick Cruder found them. Now, so Drick's operating theory was that,
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: you know, different theories on where these guys went down.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Some people thought it was like my Norman because they
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: found oil popping up in weird places once in a while.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: They even had a site could come in and try
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: to figure out where they where they were. Where did
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: the psychic thing? Psychic thought Lake Manona, which was you know,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: refrict me based off what it's like. Who knows he's
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: a psychic. Steve. He stood on the shore and god
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: whatever vibes he thought he was getting food brought a
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: psych again, well it was a family or or who
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: brought it him out, had no idea. I mean, it
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: would be an interesting guy to get ahold of. Well
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: he's probably long gone but now but you know, well
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: some of that stuff, it's not some of the psychics
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: duty and once while, there's some weird things they do.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: So he stands on the beach. But I think I
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: think one of the stories this is gonna be a
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: long story, but um no, no, this story is not
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: long enough. But one of the one of the things
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: that the psychic um But they I think they actually
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: went out and searched one of the sites. He was
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: getting some vibe off and I think they found that
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: vibe dead people throw off at the bottom of a lake.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: He was getting that vibe. Yeah, I'm not an expert.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: On psychics, but I think they actually did do a
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: search based on something that he Um sensed, and I
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: think they found like a steel beam up there or
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: something or something. There was something out there, but it
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: was just not not the car obviously. So Rick Um pat,
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, No, I appreciate you. Bringing up stuff like
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: this makes me so gets me so agitated. I'm with
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: I'm with you, because psychics and that kind of stuff,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: I just always And then they found a beam. Yeah,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: so you dive around the bottom leg loan Behold there's
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: a beam, and the psychics says, oh, you know, I
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: knew it was something, but well, you know, I thought
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: it was a car with two young gentlemen in it.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: But it turns out it was a beam. But I'm
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: guessing it's like like a lots of things when you
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: screw up. He just kind of quietly disappear and hope
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: no one brings it up again. So the psych this
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: shows the mystery and desperation. Yeah, and and and that's
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: another whole aspect of finding people after the long gone
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: that rick talked about. It was pretty interesting. But so
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: the psychic saw the picture. Rick Um always went back
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: this idea that he thinks that they went on on
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Obisa based on the fact initially the police when they
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: were because you know, these guys are gone for couple
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: of days before anyone really realized, Hey, what happened to
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: Carl and Rod? You know. And then then once the
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: police got going, they went out and they found some
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: tracks coming off of this one um access road, and
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: so they'd find entire tracks. But what had happened in
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: the days A couple of days um that went by
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: before they were actually realized, oh god, these guys are gone.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: What happened to them? And then they finally started backtracking
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: them and they gut and something. I think that bait
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: woman notified the police or something. Hey I had two
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: guys in here there night. Matchet description might have been them,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: and so so Rick. That's one tangible thing Rick had
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: to operate on these tire tracks. But what had happened
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: was after they if they realized they're missing, they start
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: launching a search. Well, by that time that there had
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: been a warming um spell going on, so the lake
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: had been getting softer, the ices getting softer, sa is
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: like you know, like I said, late February, and by
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: the time they put airplanes up to go look for
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: holes in the ice, that kind of thing. There's as
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: much water on top of the ice, and people who
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: live in the north know how that happened in spring,
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: you know, late winter that they couldn't see anything noticeable
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: down there, and so that this petered out. There had
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: no no knowledge where these guys went tooth they went
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: off on with Wabisa or to die on Lake Monona.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: But they're pretty sure they're probably out there somewhere. We're
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: both guys married, not just the one. I think. I
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: think the older guy, Carl stults year old think he
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: was married. So it was the younger guy. Was the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: younger guy with was he court and the woman? Now
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: Rick brought it up, and then that's where, um, there
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: are some controversy there that never um it got kind
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: of interesting, was that there was some speculation that this Carl,
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: that the twenty three ye old guy, I was maybe
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: not the best the best husband. You know, that there's
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: some he was that basically he was hitting on her.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Basically I think that was a story. And but again
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: this is not you know here, I feel like I'm
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: in the National Enquirer because typically as a reporter, you're
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: not comfortable with this. I'm not comfortable with this because
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: this is all stuff that that Um, it's kind of hearsay.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: I never got this from anyone besides just filtering down
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: through the years. Another quick question, Um, and I didn't
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: catch us when you and I discussed this over breakfast
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: one day. Rick Krueger, the sonar enthusiast, I didn't catch
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: that he was aware. I didn't catch that this is
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: a personal mission of his. Yeah, was he did? He
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: remember it from childhood? He has a long history in
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: the man asked an area of looking looking for stuff
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: in the bottom of lakes. So this story of the
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: two guys disappearing, that was even I knew about it,
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: and and the reason I really connected on the story
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: with Rick after you know, I didn't know he didn't
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: know he was the guy phoned until we're out in
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: the boat that day. But you knew that I had
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: been found. Yeah, I knew have been found. And I
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: also had I have a bit of memory, Like I
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: think I said to you in my email are day,
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: it haunts the ship out of me because I remember
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: when I was eight years old fishing on there's these
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: four big stacks and on the Isthmus in Madison between
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: the two lakes, and we were fishing bluegills out there
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: and my dad I was telling my uncle about these
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: two guys that disappeared. And my dad was a firefighter,
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: so he was on these rescue or those ambulances in
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: those days, so he knew all these stories that were
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: going on, and probably and probably some of the stories
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: I'm telling your stuff from her from dad talking about it,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: because he was involved in the search and stuff trying
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: to find these guys and what happened to them. So
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: I remember hearing this story while we're fishing bluegills. But
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: these two guys that disappeared falls to the lake on
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: a in the car and they're illegally out in the
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: lake and it fell through. And so this is always
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: in my head that what a hell of a way
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: to go. You know. I was a guy who ice
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: fish is a lot driving across the lakes. I always
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: have that back in my mind, these two guys that
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: when you put on that fast you're not getting horrifying.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: I thought you were gonna talk about being afraid of
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: snagging into him. No, No, that don't really crossed my mind.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: When I was in high school, dude I went to
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: high school with got drunk and stole a boat and
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: crashed into a buoy and they couldn't find his body.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: And then my other body, Craigs uh uncle was out
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: fishing and was just working the shoreline and saw an
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: ankle because see like an ankle in a shoe and
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: the rest of the body was all obscured by weeds. Yeah. Yeah,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: he didn't like that one bit. Spencer, I now have
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: my story straight on this uh research project. Did you
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: care to relate your earlier perform to rate your earlier performance? Um,
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: I don't remember what I said now, I got so
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: caught up in pat story which signor what I said before?
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: So this kind of contradicts that third theory saying that
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: bucks would shed their antlers to blend in with dose
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: and not stick out like malnourished critters to these predators.
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: So this was published last year by university by researchers
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: from the University of Montana and it was in Nature,
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Ecology and Evolution, and this show the evolutionary tie between
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: wolves and wind elk shed their antlers. Okay, so they
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: discovered and they noticed this that in Yellowstone National Park,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: since wolves were reintroduced that wolves hunted bulls who had
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: already shed their antlers over those that still had them
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: during late winter. So this suggested to them that the
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: antlers were a great deterrent to wolves, that they used
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: the as weapons to keep away um the wolves. And so,
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: which is like a little that's intuitive. Do you imagine
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: you're you're like, how effectively the elk wields them or not?
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Like how is that a how is there an upside
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: to attack in something with twelve daggers sticking off the
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: top of its head? Right? And but I think this
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: explained to them, like you know, oh, we thought that
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: they grew antlers to court females, but this show's no,
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: there's actually like great benefit to deterring predators. One of
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: the quotes is we believe elk evolved to keep their
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: antlers longer than any other North American deer because they
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: use their antlers as an effective deterrent against wolf predation. Yeah,
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: you know not. An interesting thing about elt um is
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: the window in which they drop as a very wide window.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: You know, you can be outspring bear hunting and see
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: bulls carrying their antlers from the year before. In April, yep,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: and so this kind of goes against that third if
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: you believe that this doesn't really work for that and
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: so these elk are kind of uh like, since the
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: introduction of wolves, there's a you know, pros and cons.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: So if you keep your antlers longer, you can deter wolves,
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: but you don't get a head start on growing. If
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: you drop your antlers sooner, you get a head start
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: on growing and courtship in the fall, but you're more
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: likely to get killed by wolves. And so they think
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: this could maybe play out long term, you know, change
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: the things that uh, elk in Yellowstone noticeably keep their
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: antlers longer than maybe you know, the areas just outside
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: of there that don't have wolves. That's good stuff. Yeah,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: interesting to track over time, really interesting, and and that
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: uh like I had written an article a few years
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: ago on you know, talking about the evolutionary reasons of
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: why deer would shed their antlers not just the photo
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: period into saccer on thing, and uh it was always
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: real cool with that third theory unless something came out
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: that went against it, because, like you said before, this
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: is really hard be like, yep, that's why or even
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: to you know, I think that we're ever going to know,
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: and this pretty much goes against that third theory. Yeah,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: it's it's what you're looking at um, things that would
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: would influence timing size right, things that would like reinforce
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: that are not reinforce. That a thing that the things
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: that I think about with with the antlers is um.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: They are a reflection of um. Like proportionately, they get
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: so much bigger, right, proportional to the dearest body size.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: They get so much bigger each time by growing new
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: ones all the time. Never mind. So it's it's so far,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: it's so puzzling, like when you said earlier that maybe
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: bark is brown just because it's brown, Like there's no reason.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: I feel like this is so unique to serve it
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: that there has to be like reasons behind it. This
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: wasn't just accidental that the antlers dropped off this winter.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: You know. It seems like huge family, this huge family
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: of animals all has the same strategy and it's still
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: specific to them. Like you said before, like you can't
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: think of aquatic creatures that do something like this. And
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: then you get into the weird one. We're gonna get
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: back to these drowned fellers in a minute. You get
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: to the weird one, which is how a female caribou
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: we'll grow as at antlers, and it hurts that they're
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: not synchronized with the males. She has her own time
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: of years. She grows in her own time of year
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: that she sheds, and it's not in alignment with when
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: males grow and shed. And so if it's all sexual display, right,
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: it's not meant to time out. It doesn't time out
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: with rot and she keeps them for a different time period.
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: And that's how that story starts to make some gravy. Yeah,
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: when's the handler exp We're gonna be here soon, hopefully.
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: Let me now, I love to bug him, Folks who
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: want to prepare for the animal expert being on um
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: He his new book. His name's Doug Emlyn. His new
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: book is called Animal Weapons. And guess what it's about.
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: NI take a stab anglers and teeth and claws. Yeah,
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: good job, yuh all right? So Rick, okay, Rick, it's curious.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger's cousin, Rick is curious about what happened to
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: the missing ice anglers, who may or may not have
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: been fooling around. It depends. We have to get the
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: woman on the show to find out who she was
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: flirting with, if anyone, if anyone, That just goes to
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: show us how our minds work, that we assume there
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: was a flirtation happening in that car, in that coup.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: But it could have been that they were just buddies.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: Why isn't that possible, Pat, Why does it have to
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: be that they were flirting? Well, the time, time of day,
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: men flirt. I'd like to get around the show. So,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: so where'd you leave us off? Okay? So can I
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: stop you? During my research? I think I missed an
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: important details to you said that they were out there illegally.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: You were you were not tracking because you were reading right.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: So I feel like I have parts in Yeah, but
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: what was the illegal part? That the illegal part is
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: that to this day you cannot drive a car on
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: the mass and lakes that you can you can go
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: out there if you have flotation stuff rigged on your
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: a t V. Your No one brings a car with
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: flotation because it's a refuge y no, Because I think
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: I think I think they did have um probably enough
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: accidents for people are going on to the ice back
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: in the forties or the thirties some place back in
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: the er because as long as I've been alive, you
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: cannot drive in the past some lakes and like these days,
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: most people have flotation devices for the a t V
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: or something and they im limited to that. But yeah,
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's one area of Lake Minona where
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: it's open year round because the power company has an
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: outlet there. But um, it's on all four the lakes.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: You can't do it. Um. So so these guys, you know,
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: they're they're missing now, they've been missing for forever and
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: it's basically a local legend by time Rick is investigating it.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: In the early two thousands and Rick brick up this time.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: One thing we were starting to talk about I think
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: was he had um he was connected with the massive
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: mass and police department, the Sheriff's department because he was
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: always with all his great expertise and soon are and
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: underwater stuff and you know, all a different technology is
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: he was a he's a radio tech guy, so he's
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: always into all the stuff for um, electronics for fishing.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: But as time when out of this fishing and the electronics,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: he started to have more fun finding stuff on the
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: mob and the lakes than investigating stuff and he's a diver,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: so that kind of stuff would intrigue him. He got
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: he's at the point now where he spends much more
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: time still sleuthing on the massive legs for hidden stuff,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: and he's falling, like, um, oh gosh, just I have
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: a whole list of stuff in this article I wrote
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: about it. But so if we get back to the
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: idea that what's the most intriguing thing, He told me,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: stick to me that story, and right away that I'm
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: he's telling me the story in the boat and I'm
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: you're the guy that falling those two guys because I
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: was shocked. I had had no idea who I was
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: sitting the boat with. And now he's my hero because
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: I thought, what a hell of a thing to solve
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: a forty five year old mystery. So we're talking about
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: he said, yeah, he he new they went into that lake.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: I figured that's still the best possibility out there. But still,
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: even when you have tire tracks going out off the landing,
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: who knows what they want the psychic think? He thinks
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: that like, so Rick Rook's pretty sure it's it's it's
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: on obsa because that's the only physical evidence it was.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Those tire tracks. So he he starts. He he's he's methodical.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: He just started laying tracks with his his boat. And
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: this is like, this is now like I think it's
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: July twenty two of two thousand and six, forty five
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: and a half years after the fact. He comes along
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: on one of his passes and this is just blind
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: He's just out there blindly searching a quadrant out there. Yeah,
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: he's just you know, doing And he's got all the
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: GPS stuff too, so he's probably pretty well locked on
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: knowing not to recover ground because that's he's doing this
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: whole all over the mass and lakes. He's out there
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: on these grids all the time. So he's back in
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: that corner of this this big end of Lake Wabisa,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: and he comes across on a screen he sees something
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: big on the bottom at forty five degree angle, and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: he's looking at it and thinking, what the hell would
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: that be? And he's only thinking think because he said
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: I had had enough of a shape looked like could
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: be a car upside down on the bottom lake, upside down,
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: upside down. Yeah, that's because it was the bottom of
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: the car is flat, and he saw this degree angle things.
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, and so he so he um he
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: gott I think I think when he dies, I think
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: he always gets his wife with him. So I don't
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: know if his wife was with him the time where
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: he went back and got her. But he he dove down.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: It was thirty five ft down down there, and um
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: he he um. Of course went straight to the license plate,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: and I think he he said he wasn't supposed to
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: bring up the license plate because you know, basically it's
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: um he supposed to be tamping and stuff from the
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: lake bottom. But he thought, well, this is pretty exceptional,
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: so he brought the license plate up and he's got
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: got the numbers off. But in contact of the guy
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: from the de checked as he knew in the mass
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: and the Folice department or Sarty from my kitmeer which
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: wish department was now. But the guy ran the numbers out,
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: you know, from the back of the back in the
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: sixties to figure out that was the car. Sure enough
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: it was I think it was um. I think it
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: was the guy um uh rick it was. It was
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: um Ronald Ronald Wicks car, I think, the twenty year
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: old guy. So then they know they had they had
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: the car now, and so, of course, being a morbid guy,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: I am. I asked Rick, when you're down there poking
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: around in that car, could you see skeletons inside the car?
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: And he said no. He said it was just he
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: was smuch silt down there and smuch silted filtered into
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: the car. He couldn't see anything in the car, you know,
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: So it's not like he did, you know, try to
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: look in there and figure out what you could see.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: But he said it was a gooeymoky mess by that
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: point forty five years in the bottom of a lake.
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: So then, um, that was like the twenty one to July.
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: I believe it took him about two weeks. They're out
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: back out there with a salvage barginal with a crane
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: and everything, and they there's a center picture this morning
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: on email of that great picture. Yeah, this old rusty
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: coop when she was cracked. But they had it all
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: and harnesses, and I think they used and then might
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: use some flotation devices to to lift it off the bottom.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: And I'm pretty sure I got this right where they
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: didn't find, you know, the remains until they got the
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: car up on the surface and then to do um
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: at that point it becomes an investigation. So they they
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: found they followed the two skeletons in there, and the
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: one guy's hand was stuck in the door like you've
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: been trying to get it open. Yeah, And and so
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: that's that's the story. That's all Ron Wick and um
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: Carl Stultz met the end, you know, while I fishing
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: three o'clock in the morning. And then they're only bought
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: in the lake for forty or five years, and all
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: the legends about them disappearing to start a new life
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: is all evaporated. And but for me, it's just a
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: great um story of a guy with a hobby who
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: um the police used, you know, used him a lot,
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: his help a lot over the years to find John
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: victims and and even did for a while diving. Helped
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: him dive and find Drawning victims. And he's it. It
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: was um really hard emotionally because you he said, at
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: first when he was doing this, he never wanted to
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: be on the site when the relatives would come out
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: and identify the body. He just didn't want to deal
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: with the emotions of that. And he said one year though,
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: Um a woman wrote to him after the fact and
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: thanked him for giving her closure that she could she
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: now knew what happened to her son with certainty. And Ron,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: I mean Rick sudden when he got that letter. From
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: that point on he was no longer um. He always
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: would hang around them and you know, aid do the
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: aid and comfort routine with these people because he realized,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: you know, it was hard for him to pull a
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: body out of there, because it has to be hard
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: to be in the water like that, and it's not
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: exactly clear water usually, and all of a sudden you're
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: face to face with a body. You know that's gonna
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: be hard. But but Rick was doing that for a
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: number of years. But then but like a lot of things,
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: you know, he's now in his sixties, and when the
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: police for using him the almost in the shift permans
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: using him the most is back in an era twenty
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: years ago where that you know, all these different police
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: agencies weren't weren't at that stage in the development of
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: technology where there as good at good using that stuff
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: as he was. So they really used him as a tool.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: You know, they call him Radio Rick. He's always out
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: there looking at this stuff. And it's it's a cool
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: story too, because to this day is still doing it.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: You know, he's he's always he's been trying to trying
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: to get the nailed don with some certainty Ordisruddings, you know,
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: flake flight path going in the lake. You know what's
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: still out there. And he's still wandering through the other
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: piece of the plane that haven't been following yet. And
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: then he's also got he sells um fisherman his way
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: points like he has always wipe. He's got like I
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: think four hundred four thousand way points of things like
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: underwater rock piles that no one knows about. Um, you know,
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: people building in the old days illegal fish cribs and
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: dropped them into the lakes. You know, if they're going
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: he sells that information. He says, he basically gas money.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: We're for twenty bucks and you want my way points,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you. You You know what what they represent and
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: what's something what's at that at that spot. Is he
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: a good fisherman? I think he is, But now he
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: says he just soon go out and um look for stuff. Yeah,
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: we're talking about someone to talking about his reluctance to
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: be around the victims families and and uh, we discussed
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: something on this show one time that prompted a first
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: responder to write in it's really touching, kind of dark
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: story about him finding it was a nine year old
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: boy who drowned, and finding that boy and getting him
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: up on the bank of the river and sitting with
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: him for sitting with the boy's body for a long time,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: waiting for someone to come. And it was just like
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: like a life altering experience. You know, this is the
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: way it seemed like the boy could just sat up. Yeah,
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: the only time, only time. People have asked me a
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: number of times for some reason, um about my day
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: when he was a firefighter. No, they'll make these assumptions
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: that dad had a lot of traumatic things he had
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: to deal with as a firefighter. I said, you know,
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: he might have, but the only one I remembered was
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: one when he was on the ambulance crew and had
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: to pull an entire family out of you know, head
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: on collision, you know, with her in a station wagon
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: like the kind of we drove. And he had six kids,
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: and that's in to haunt him, remember him, this kind
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: of you know, talk to my mom about you tell it.
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: I shook him up. You know, I'm pulling these little
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: kids out of the car and I'm sure, man, that's
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: just hard stuffed, you know, I can't imagine doing that. Okay,
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: so what should we jump into next? I'le Royal. Yeah,
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: I like it. Wolves. We kind of jumped off the
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: early introduction of Steve's death, you know, and he was
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: right back in the game pretty quickly. Yeah, but I
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: was just curious about this. He just wanted the intro
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: the game out and I thought, and then he did
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: so good once he got rolling, I got jealous. I
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: came back in hard. So I was like, a, but
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: you you admit your ferilties. Always always amire of that.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: I was like, man, he's kicking the ass. I'm gonna
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: get back in here. Well, I have to say that
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: the Ile Royal story, um that you guys, Um Spencer
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: I talked about back in February, and well, the one
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: thing I have to say, Stevid, I like working in
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: the articles of more working out for meat either this
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff that um, you know, Scott got some stuff.
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: It's got some depth to you know, where you get
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: people on the phone, you watch and read different things
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: that have been written about these things. And the Ile
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: roy one was thinking one of the more complex things
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: I've worked now where you um, we should probably back
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: up a little bit, and it's basically I think that
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: the table try I'll try to not I really struggle
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: how to how do you even start writing this story?
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: But um, the way way I talked about getting into
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: the story was back in October the UM Park Service
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: trapped for wolves, dropped my Royal, and then in January
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: we got a pullar vote Vertex and I'll Royal and
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: if you have for people who can't picture this, it's
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: up in the very top of Lake Superior, kind of
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: the northwestern corner using my hands here in the studio
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: until you can't see it closer to Canada, owned by Michigan. Yeah. Yeah,
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: it's like forty five miles from north of of Holton County, Michigan,
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: and only about thirteen fifteen miles depending on where you
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: look at it off of Ontario and in the corner
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: of Minnesota up there. And so it's in the national park.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: It's National Parks since nineteen forty and it's been a
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: National Wilderness areas since um, I think since the Wilders
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: was past I think sixty four. So it's a really remote,
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: remote island in a spot um, I think it's about
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: two hundred and one square miles or yeah, and then
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: it's like about nine miles long four and a half
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: miles wide, something like that. But for a comparison size wise,
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: it's the same size is Zion National Park, and it's
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: twice the size of Arches National Park. So maybe that
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: helps for reference. As Pad tells the story, and the
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: best we know from history is that wolves were never
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: on the on this island until until about nineteen and
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: the moose were out there they think in the nineteen tens,
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: nineteen really nineteen hundreds of the first decade of the
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, and the moose pretty much for like fifty
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: years just you know, went up and down in the crashes,
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: over browsing, all those kind of things. When the wolves
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: came out there and the wolves peaked at a bought,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: I think it's the nineteen eighty I believe is that
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: wolves some thing it was, and they're crossing on the ice,
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: and the wolves and the moose severe winters. That's that's
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: that's the theory that they crossed on the ice. And
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: you know, because we had much more consistent winters, you know,
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: a hundred years ago, fifty years ago than we were
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: having these days. These days, we're not getting those consistent
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: land become essential ice bridges between Ile Royal and the
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: um Ontario on Minnesota region and Dell. Be out of
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: your pet that the wolf population peaked in fifty wolves,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: the moose population peaked in at fifty God, is that
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: many about there at one time? Population is not that anymore,
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: and I think I think right now they're back up
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: to they're they're pretty high again right now. The most
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: recent census I've read about third day up there and
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: when the fastest things I just thought about this was that, Yeah,
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: this one guy made a great point that we don't
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: know for certain how the moose got out there. That's
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: he's I think he's a National Park archaeologist type guy.
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: There's lots of stories that back in the early nineteen
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: hundreds that Minnesota was moving moose all over the place,
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: and so who knows for certain that they put some
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: moose out in the island. You know, people are doing
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing years. But was it that is
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: it well known? And uh, is it well known that
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: in the historic record there was a period when they
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: were not there, when wolves were not there, yeah, yeah,
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: you know, they have no records as far as I
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: from the reading I did and interviews I did, there's
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: no record of wolves being on the island until I
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: and Moos moost too, Okay, so we know that it
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: was absent moose. Yeah. And what what What the island
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: was famous for until basically nineteen hundreds was links and caribou,
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: and the cariboo disappeared aud the links, as they always say,
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: blinked out in the nineteen thirties, you know, for God.
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: But but you know, I happen to be doing a
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: story about it about six months ago on the Aposta Islands,
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: and some of the research has been doing there on
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: the on the little predators that populate the Appassa Islands.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: And it's not uncommon for these islands. They just have
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: some small ecosystems. Uh, stuff comes and goes. They get
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: out there and they overrun their habitat and wherever. They
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: just realize they can't sustain themselves for the isolated population,
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: and they go out. There's enough wolf on an island
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: called Stockton Island off on the Apostles that was there
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: and people saw it a few times and then they
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: found found this body one day if you're that presently
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: wolf that was out there halk out there, no one,
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: no one really knows. So so that's that's kind of
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: those weird things in nature happened in the you know,
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: in the area around Puget Sound in the time that
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: I that I lived out there in the Pacific Northwest.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: You'd have just think like, oh, a bear showed up
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: on an island that historically doesn't have them, and it
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: kind of runs around and gets in trouble vanishes. Elks
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: show up on the island that they didn't hasn't historically happened,
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: like it swam out, you know, and they'll be in
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: the news like, oh my god, no one's seen the
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: elk here in seventy five years. But then the elk
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: swims off gets hit by a car, which is constantly
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: happening where like small little populations of things or single
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: animals will will find these places. So you can imagine
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: the right situation. Yeah, just too Yeah, as well as
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: you get to show up out there at the same time,
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: you could create some highly volatile, you know, a little
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: population of animals in a in a weird spot. So
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: that so they had these um, I think what was
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: one of the things I found kind of fun about
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: the story was that right now here we have a
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: real scientific debate going on over the re established this
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: wolf population on an island that really had no record
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: of wolves, um, you know, sixty seventy years before, and
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: and yet that humans have a much longer history on
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: the island that than than wolves do, and that moose
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: do you know they have these archaeological findings of people
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: making copper tools, you know, thousands of years ago out
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: there in the copper veins in those islands. Yeah, that
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: kind of kind of interesting stuff like that. And plus
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: the voyagers all came through there, and it says, and
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: there's been mining and more until it became a park.
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: There is all sorts of cool stuff going out there,
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: as far as logging, you name it. People out there,
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: you know, exploiting it somehow, and we're as I think,
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: the big question is, you know, it kept coming up
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: a lot in these different debates, is you know, if
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: wolves and moose are meant to be out there, why
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: did it take until basically modern times and to cross
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: those on those ice bridges When I went out there earlier,
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: you know, I never heard that theory that that when
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: Minnesota's moving moose around and doing various introductions reintroductions, that
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: there was the idea that maybe someone turns them out
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: as soon as unprovable, might might be a wive's tale.
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: And I mean that's you know, I think you and
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: I and all of us in this room have been
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: we have tried tracking on the wives tales. Is just
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: you know, they're they're they're plausible given the given the
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: era of what people are doing. I mean, I was
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: to get Anacosti island off the Quebec for the guy
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: in this big turned into a deer um sanctuary basically
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: now animal taste tool. I'm sure there's still hunting deer
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: out there, but they're moving, moving fish around, you know,
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: dropping fish out of airplanes, and the moultin lakes, doing
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: all sorts of stuff a hundred years ago that you know,
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: these days we just wouldn't do unless we really know.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: I have a pretty good sign, but we think is
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: a good scientific justification for it. Um So, and so
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: they peaked. The wolves peaked in nineteen eighty and then
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: they I think they're tapering downhill pretty steadily. And then
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: about um a male wolf showed up apparently, and it's
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: just a good job breeding the wolves that were remaining
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: out there that there's basically he apparently his jeans got
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: every wolf that was out there. Old Greg guy, what's
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: his name? And it's great having this this this expert
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: here shows up and just starts breeding his ass off.
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: He was responsible at one point for fifty six percent
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: of the wolves on the island. Those were his offspring. Yeah,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: it was, it was something. There was some stay like
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: he had hugely possible for like forty five pups, and
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: then his forty pups were responsible for like forty pups
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: or something like that. So good details. Yeah, done by
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: um by last fall. So I think they had I
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: think Diane said this and um she talked about how
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: it came down to just a male and a female
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: offspring of his. I think, I mean he's left. But
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: in the meantime, as this was going on over the
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: last twenty some years and the wolves did this, said,
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: these things are inbred. You know, they're they're turning up
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: with you know, being born blind, web feet, messed up
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: spines and some of the congenital stuff from the predetory
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: stuff that like in the spinal problems you know, like
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: I think Dave meets this famous wolf BALLA just said,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: you know, it comes to parlo virus and some of
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: other things they were trying to say might have caused
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: the wolf the wolf population to come. Di said, well,
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: you know that was that goes That goes on the
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: mainland too, but not this in the White Mouth. The
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: way we're thinking out here in the islands. They're quite
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: sure how all these things happened. But but the final
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: conclusion was that they it was they were inbread. There's
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: not that the population couldn't be saved. They show up,
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: they first show up in the population peaks thirty six
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: years later at what number wolves, and then dives off
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: until recently when it was down to just two. And
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: they don't know the founding event. They don't know how
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: many wolves moved out there for the founding event, if
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: there's just two individuals or I don't. I couldn't find
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: a thing that I actually put a number on that,
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: you know, And that's which is um, you know that's
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: now that now they have these four alter last last
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: last winter, and then um, that's all this discussion about
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: what we gonna have the ice perges anymore to get
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: new wolves coming in, and so you know, should man
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: step in and intervene here and re established that wolf population?
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: And it's been up debate going on for probably close
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: to this this whole dec people fighting about this, you know,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: in scientific circles, in the whole philosophy of it. You
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: know it should man be out there tinkering with mother
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: nature now, you know, because they because chances are we
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: didn't put the we can't start wed not not put
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: them out there. So should we now go in and
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: supplement them and supplement them and re established something that
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: um was that naturally was coming down, going down, backing
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: up a little bit. I remember if it was you
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: that presented this or if it was someplace else. I
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: read it, But they said that after the war, a
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: bunch of trappers came back. I reported that it was.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: It was from It was really really people want to
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: go online and read watch a really good Suminar. There
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: was a Suminar done in two thousand and thirteen. They
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: had these guys um Dave Meach and Ralph Peterson and
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: similar um Well that the anthropologist guy, that historian really
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: a good thing that had the things they did in Minneapolis.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: You can go online and search it. It's worth a
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: two hour set to watch that. Um So, where was
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: I here Wars? Yeah, so, so one of the stories
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: is that they think, you know, it's it seems plausible
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: that during the war when all the Canadians and Americans
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: were over um whiskey whiskey to World War two, World
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: War two, you know, thanks Steve um. During World War two,
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: you know, every able bodied man was over in Europe
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: basically were out in the Pacific fighting, fighting the war.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: And so I think a lot of these guys that
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: would have been trapping wolves in that region, we're all
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: off at war. Well in their absence, they think, you know,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: when the theories is that well, under absence, these wolves
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: probably started coming back up in numbers and started dispersing.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: And if there's always consistent Ice Bridges Price got out
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: there from that region of Ontario and in Minnesota and
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: got this population rolling out there. So that's kind of
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: what what the what the theory is. But I guess
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: from those stories that it's plausible, but no one really
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: we had no where like track the kind of stuff,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: So it's it's kind of speculation. But um so, when
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: these wolves are transplanted, then from. I can't remember where
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: they came from. The first four they brought out there
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: for miship Picton Island off to the east, or really
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: got them one of them after all this debate about
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: ice bridges not being um happening anymore if you're not
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: getting consistent ice bridges anymore. Well, as soon as they
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: put some wolves out there to supplement to start bringing
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: re establishing things, one of them takes off across the
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: ice bridge home runs home. Yeah, because he was that one.
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: I think they were think they may have been from
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: that part of Ontario, and so he basically runs home.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: Another one tried to get home, but they think it
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: encountered prior bat was breaking up again and just came
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: back to the island. But I thought the irony of
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: it all. You know, you're trying to re established me
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: and you dropping them into the happy hunting grounds man. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: but then the homing instrict and I think, um, I
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: think Dave meets seven. You when you try to transplant
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: wolves from that close to their home range, you know
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: that they know, they you know that it's another trying
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: to They've been going out, you know, farther away and
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: picking them off. Other places I think they've been. They've
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: been talking about the next group they'll try to get,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: probably from the up of Michigan to bring them up there,
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: and you get that diversity from around the whole region,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: not just from a couple of a couple of wolves
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: that came onto the is Yeah, the first ones they pulled,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: they pulled them from an island that's owned by you know,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: an island in Ontario. Oh yeah, are you asking me? Yeah,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: I think that's correct, right, they pulled Well, I think
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: then the first flour something I think. I don't know
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: what they I don't know. We're all four came from.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: For certain, I'd be just pulling out my asp. I
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: tried to say that. I don't remember offhand. Maybe Spencer
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: can look it up, but I know at least one
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: of them was that one that went back to the Ontario,
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: but that was only about fifteen mile john to cross
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: the ice there and then as home range is probably
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: farther inland, but apparently that's where it was last headed.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: You know, when they were tracking it, they think it
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: was going back and then once it got back in
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: this home range and started doing what wolves do, just
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: you know, doing there they're they're hunting, and so that
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: one's gone. But then, um, I think right now they're
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: at fifteen wolves. The most recent come they brought They
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: brought Marit and they brought someone from this I can
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: I can never pronounce the island's name, but it's um
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: Misia pick a ten or something like that. Yeah, it's
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: off the east and that's a whole another story. But
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: um it. So now they got it back a fifteen
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: and now you know, now it's gonna be an It's
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: basical an experiment, you know, because now you have you're
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 1: getting any wolves from these different regions, while how do
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: you get along? Now they form packs with different strange
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: wolves from different areas. It sounds very with being the
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: national parks. Are you know, expected to be a little
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: bit hands off, or that you're trying to mitigate human
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: car like like the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction. Right as you're saying, well,
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: we know that they were extirpated from human activities, so
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: we're putting them back as a way of rebuilding from
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: our own impacts. But this is um, this is not
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: that right. And some people are trying to make the
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: argument that well, humans are causing um the climate change
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: that's causing us not to have the ice bridges. They're
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: trying to make that argument that still human caused. And
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: the point Dave Meach brings up is, Okay, tell me
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: all that lack of ice bridges, it's actually hurting the island. Though,
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: can you really make the argument what exactly is being
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: heard out there? And and you like one thing they're
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: they're looking into, I think it would be part of
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: this whole interesting develop materials we watch this unfold is well,
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: the moose and ile royal are doing very well compared
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: to the moose just a few miles to the to
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: the west and uh no, oldn Northern Minnesota. Yeah, and
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: places where you have white tail deer currying brain worm
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: typically cause a cause problem for moose. Well, the moose
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: aren't having brain worms out on an ile roll because
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: the deer can't get out there because you know, if
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: they wanted to cross some the ice pridgel has but
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: no icebridge, so that the absence of an ice bridge
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: might be benefiting the moose by nothing coming out throughout
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: across the ice that could could kill them. So you
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: make that argument, So it's really hard like the moose
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: population benefits there ye. Maybe someday it'll be a great
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: sourceer for moves could be. But you know, so you
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: have a hard time making the argument that's human caused
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: and that we're now, you know, fixing a human caused
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: um situation. Well as being the guy who grew up
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: in Michigan, we took like a lot of pride. It
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: really informed the the Michigan mystique knowing that we had
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: this island, they had a bunch of wolves and moose
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: on it. Like you, you grew up very aware of that.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: And there's an element of look, how wild and cool
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: our state is because we got like the up and
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: we got this crazy island's got these wolves and moves
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: on it. Isn't it cool? So I could see that
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: losing that would make people sad, that it would feel
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: end of nature ish, Yeah, and that that would wind
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: up motivating you to find all kinds of justifications to
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: maintain just the spectacle. And there's been um I think
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: meat started this research back in the sixties. You're staying
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: the wolf and moose in your actions and how those things,
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: you know, fluctuate, and so they have a good along
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: running research going out there. And I think is that
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: Michigan Tech University. So it's a lot of cool stuff
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: that's come out to the island. But then you get
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: back in the whole philosophical discussions of um, well this
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: a olderness area or not? And should man be in there?
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: You know that, you know, you always get that great
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: quote um about you know, land should be untrammeled by
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: man's and no interference basically for man that let nature
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: nuts course out there? Why we let we always have
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: it thrown at us all the time? When should let
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: nature take its course? Well, when it comes to the wolf,
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: you know a lot of people don't they want they
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: want that wolf out there. That there's something about wolves
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: that people really are intrigued by them. They protect them.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: It used to be a little bit like zoo keeping though, Yeah,
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: exactly like that. But it harkens back to all these too.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: The we always talked about it, how a hundred years ago,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: like the Maryland stick of beer, right, like back in
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: the day that was just a thing. People did shift
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: animals all over the world and introduced species. Um, your
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: favorite my favorite quote of yours, Pat is that deer
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: make people stupid. Dude, Yeah, wolves make people crazy. But
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: I've always in my years of reporting on the outdoors,
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: I've always thought the two jobs of at least like
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: would be a wolf be a wolf biologist, to be
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: a dear biologist because everyone you know, everyone who doesn't
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: doesn't agree with to you just just too much motion.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: You wrapped up on that stuff. The other night, we
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: had a conversation where UM, the US Fish and Wildlife
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: Service just put out a jaguar recovery plan, which you
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: know runs from Central America open into Arizona, and they
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: had in identifying like habitat, usable habitat, or historic habitat,
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: they put this cut off marker where when looking in
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: the United States, UM, places that were that they know
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: as like jaguar habitat, they put a caught off at
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two. So it's like, from nineteen sixty two
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: on will acknowledge where jaguars have been, but anything prior
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: to that is dismissed. Okay, because it winds up being
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: this very small sliver of Arizona for for suitable jaguar
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: habitat in the US, And if you extended pre sixty two,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: it gets much bigger and you have jaguars up into
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: central Arizona West Texas, New Mexico, and so they're kind
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: of like proposing a very limited version, of very limited
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: scope of what jaguar recovery might look like in the US,
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: and now they're effectively extinct like now and then there's one,
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: possibly two up in Arizona, but typically like at this
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: particular second, maybe zero or in Arizona. Um. But it
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: brought up this conversation about when we start to apply dates,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: like here's what nature should look like, it should look like,
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: and that's what we'll strive towards. You get into this
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: funny space, especially with the Ile Royal thing, where here
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: we are like really striving hard to create. Um, we're
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: trying hard to like recreate the splendor of which is
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: not that which doesn't resemble eight If we're chasing eighteen eighty,
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: it sounds like we'd be trying to put links in
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: caribou on Ile Royal, But we're chasing something that occurred
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: in my lifetime. Archaeological records show that caribou and lynx
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: were there for the last years, so that wolves moves
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: to the last hundred years quite a bit different, is it?
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 1: It's just because it's wolves, man, it feels something else
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: you're the caribou getting no love. No we just want
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: we just let the last We just let that last
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: carry were heard in the United States, blink out, largely unnoticed.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: No one cares. You can't get people to care about it.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: The Purcell Mountains used to drift down into Idaho Panhandle.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: They're gone, people, but in the helicopter and wolves are
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: damn plates. I I really liked this um comment that
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: Tim herber Land made that you know, it will never
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: be a headline in the New York Times that says
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: let wolves die for science. You know, we just don't
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: do that. You know, if we don't let wolves die
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: for science, and I I think it would be fasten
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: to see and track and research what really happens on
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: an as overall, if you just leave the moose alone
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: and see how they go open down. I mean, if
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: the if the if the trees get over browsed, they
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: get over browsed, and that they've done that before, they'll
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: do it again. At some point they'll probably eat themselves
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: a house, a home. Well, then the island will will
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: self correct and they'll probably a new new era. But yeah,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: trying to I guess you make it make I think
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: my favorite point is that why would we always want
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: to make it look like what we have right now?
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: But that's what we do. Can't answer it. And and
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: if you let the wolves die and be gone, maybe
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: links will come back. There was one links documented that
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: showed up there in uh ass the ice from Canada,
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: but that's been the only time one links there was
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: one sided out there. And so maybe if the wolves
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: are gone, we see links come back. And I should
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: to be um to get the other other point of view. Though.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: One thing that is different now is that you know,
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: they think the wolves they came out there originally work
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: came from basically one source area, where now that they're
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: bringing them from these different areas, and assuming they can
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: form packs get along nat to work together, that there
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: will be enough to diversity to sustain them for a while.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: And then like when I asked the biologists up there, well,
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: but what if twenty years from now these guys start
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: going down here and you try another transfusion basically where
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: it's all going to end. And he said, well, you
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: know that we'll just scutts step when we get to
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: that point. But but it's a to me, it's plausible
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: that maybe with this these new different genes trains coming
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: and they can sustain themselves longer out there. But yeah,
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: I have to agree that for on the factor of wolves,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: we won't be doing this. But but even that isn't
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: um like natural, like trying to create a diverse population,
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: because I think I read somewhere that every wolf on
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: that island descended from one female that was out there
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: and like came from old gray guy. And so by
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: creating this island population that has wolves from like Canada,
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: Minnesota and the up that's not even what it was
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: like during this era we're discussing trying to replicate now
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: they want to make damns or they stick this time.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: Ka patas jump gears, change gears. You don't jump gears, uh,
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: grind gears sometimes, dude, I'm looking to get the picture
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: of the car getting hoisted out of that Oh my god,
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: it's haunting. Man, that's wild. They'd be sweet refurbished that car.
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: Pat we should point this out. And he wrote that
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: article on the Ile Royal Wolves back on April twelve.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: We published it. I told him at the time it's
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: one of the best things we ever ran. So if
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: you want more on this, go to the meat Eator
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: dot com. Type in Ile Royal you'll find pass piece there.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: Give it a read. It's a great piece of writing,
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: really informative and entertaining. Thank you you getting feedback people
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: mad at you. No, No, I really didn't. Um. I
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: heard from Ed Banks, you know, the wolf biologist, to
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: the Rocky Mountain Wolf Free introduction. I try to get
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: ahold of the story, to get his perspectives, I thought,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 1: And he's always a thoughtful guy, and but he was
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: done fishing in coose to Rica or someplace and then
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: get back to me till after the fact, and and
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: his comment to me was he kind of agreed, however,
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: aligned that let's let's see what happens. And he says,
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: he said, now he said, I'd like, he said, now,
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: I'm in a point where I think the wolves may
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: surprises again if you're just left him alone. Yeah. And
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: that's what made it, I guess that's what makes it
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: kind of magical. Um, is that you had this island
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: with a bunch of moves, and these wolves found it. Yeah, right,
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: and they kind of ran there whatever their little courses.
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: And now you're like, oh, yeah, they're out there because
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: we stuck them out there. It seems a little artificial
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: for National Park. And if you'd ask the wolves that
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: they wanted to be moved, I'm guessing they're gonna tell
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: you they'll pass. Okay, you're you're you admire your your
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: obituary hunting, obituary enthusiast. Oh yeah, yeah, Um, obituaries one
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: of those things. I don't know one of this, Steve,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: But all my career as a writer was the newspaper
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: back in the eighties. If some important died in town,
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: the newspaper coming to my desk and say, I'm pat,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: could you do a feature? Do a feature obituary? And
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: this guy I became this kind of this obituary writer
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: of the uh for famous people. You know, how do
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: you approach an obituary? Um? Why phone calls? You know?
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: I start when my dad died, I had a guy
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: called me from a newspaper and um interviewed me about
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: my dad. Of course, then when when the thing came out,
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: it wasn't these days and newspapers you can't get in
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: the depth that we used to be able to get
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: into when I was writing newspapers back in the eighties.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: But I, UM, I like to think I'm an empathetic person,
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: and I I'll read about I go into they call
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: them morgue, and I'd find them more in our newspaper.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: For these guys, read read as much as I could
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: about them, try to get a good feel for them,
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: and then call like a son or a daughter or
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: or a wife. Might being just interviewing for for a
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: half hour an hour, but they're still a fresh dead
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: and you're calling the relatives. But but if you do
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: it sympathetically and especially condolences and that you know, tell
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: them you want to you're working at a piece you
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: wanted to just man a final final honor, woman, a
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: final honor that um people are pretty pretty good at
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: talking to it. And you realize you're not. You're not
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: calling there, you know, throw dirt on the guy before
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: he's you know why he's being lord in And yeah,
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: so I I feel that kind of stuff fascinating. But
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 1: when I when I was mutioning you is um it
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: was this um guy over and I don't have in
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: front of me now, but it was a cool, cool
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: thing about a guy that died vice hunting out there
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: and people so often I get this at Deer and
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: during the magazine. A lot people would die and then
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: the sun would be talking to his dad on the deathbed.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: Is this what you're talking about, Steve? People come into
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: the man's room and he's dyeing the hospital and asking him, Hey,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: next fall, when I'm out hunting, could you send a
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: big buck pass me? Is that what you're talking about?
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: Or are you talking about the Sweden guy with um
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: that we had a heart attack out in the woods
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: and it was otherwise was the otherwise good hunt? This
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: is what I like. All this what I'm thinking primarily
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: about the the other people that described it as an
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: otherwise success. Could you read that line because I don't
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: have it from me, you don't have in front of you. Um,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: it was about jeez, you're right, Remember I said that
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: you said if I died, you said it would be
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: a heart attack. Yeah, okay. There was an article about
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: a forty four year old hunter who died in the
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: woods and it says on November eleventh last year, his
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: heart suddenly stopped during an otherwise successful hunt with his friends,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: and that it made me think about all these different
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: things that during my career that I've stumped onto of
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: um because it's people on the death that wishes and
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: the other story that came up today. I was shared
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: with you that I'm sorry um that I shared with
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: you that I thought was just I great commentary and
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: maybe thinking when we started talking earlier about you dropping
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: them in the set here what we do well back
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: in this I think it's probably in the nineteen forties nine. No, No,
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: I had to be about nineteen sixties, because I'm not there.
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: Writer in Wisconsin named Don Johnson he died. I'll pry
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: about just you know, but ten fifteen years ago now.
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: But Don was a great storyteller, great writer. If he
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: told the story of he was out covering opening week,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: opened day of duck season Wisconsin. Back it must have
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: been in the sixties, and he went to this boat
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: landing and he has duck hunters would coming from the
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: day of hunting because they had a neon opener. I'm
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: not sure we have a neon open anymore in Wisconsin,
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: but back then as a neon opener. So late in
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: the day, this this this duck boat comes in and
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 1: he's starting to interview the guys, asking how the hunt went,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, and well, here's the a dead
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: hunter lying in the bottom of the other boat with
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: a bunch of ducks problem, and they're having this conversation about, well,
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: you know, what do we do now? Should we called it?
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: We have to kill the sheriff department. We got called
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: the more we supposed to doing. Don's you know, pretty
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: baffled by all us. You know, it's a dead man
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: in your boat, you know. And well apparently the guy
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: died that morning while they're putting out decoy, setting up
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: the blind and stuff, and they knew he's gone, so
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: they just putting the bound the boat. And they had
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: a little discussion and they agreed that well I came
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: to the guy's name, Well, Fred would have wanted to
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: keep going, so we so we did. We kept hunting,
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: and when they got their limits or they got done hunting,
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: they came in with this the whole time, like probably
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: four or five hours, those guys lying dead in the
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: bottom the bound the duck boat. Now, I thought that
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 1: was just a classic story that you know, what would
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: you do of all these days we up, we would
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: just feel you know, like obligated to, you know, probably
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: come in and do it, because you'd probably you know,
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: looke dawn upon by everyone in your talent for a wee. Yeah,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: I think so could just be like how careless can
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: you be? But then on the other side, I think
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: I think it's kind of cool. You know, if that
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: happened me, I want to take I want to take offense,
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: you immediately agree with it. You would feel like sort
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: of guilty into immediately doing something about it. It wouldn't
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: be more like a legal issue. You know. If I
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: was out hunting, If I was out dug hunting and
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden, someone that I'm hunting with dies,
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: I would, uh, you know, I can't really say him
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: in that situation, I feel like I would wrap her up.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: I feel like i'd wrap her up. I'd say, guys,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: we're gonna wrap her up and take our our dead
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: friend here back into town and and notify his family
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: and pulled it. Yeah, I'd go so far as to
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: say that would be mine. I wouldn't even pull the
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: decoys because I would also be wondering, Uh, how did
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: they know he wasn't I mean, did they administer CPR?
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. I mean he must have
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: been just stone. Like, let's say you let him off
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: and he's in his blind and you come back and
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: he's just so dead that he's chili. But like, if
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: if you were to fall over and seem pretty dead,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: how would I rule out that there wasn't a thing
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: that could be done After I administered CPR on you,
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't run back to see if perhaps they'd shock
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: you back to life. So that's where it also gets tricky.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: But if it was be that You're like, hey, I'm
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: gonna go take a whiz or whatever, and then an
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: hour later I go on, there you are cold and stiff,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: and I'd be like, there's no chance of resurrecting him.
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: I would still wrap up that gut reaction. But then
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: I think if like Pat or Spencer were like, but
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: you know you, Steve really like to hunt. It's the
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: opener looking all the ducks flying. I think I could
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: be pretty easily persuade. Let me put it in there.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: Let's say this. Let's say I was in the autumn
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: of my life. I'm in the autumn of my life,
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: and we all know I've already had three open heart surgeries.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: I'm like, Yanni, if I could just get out one
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: last time. You know that was a hypothetical. Steve hasn't
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: had an open heart surgery, but yeah, like like like
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: I'm an old, old, old old guy, and and everybody
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: he can't believe I'm still alive. And I'm like, if
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: you could just get me out in the marsh one
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: more time, yeah, you know it could that calm my soul.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: And and that's how I dream of passing. You probably
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: would have prefaced the hunt at breakfast being like, hey,
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: and by the way, if I kill over, why you
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: guys shot, just keep shooting? And I couldn't picture, you know,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: if I didn't say that, and I could picture there,
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: I sat and I'm like, oh, Yanni, just to be
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: back out, like I don't ever want to go home
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: and all sudden not going to the eternal slumber, right,
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: I could see how you guys white, you know, shoot
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: a few volleys, work a couple of flocks and in
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: a largely symbolic sort of way before boating me back
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: into town. I can see that. Well. No, here's another
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: another factor. Would you consider um going taking Stee's advice
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: and getting off the lake, knowing that if you didn't,
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: he has a wife back home that would just hate
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: you the rest of the rest of her life. For
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: not immediately pulling that body off off the lake. You're
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: not probably gonna talk to her that much more anyway.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: It's like you know what I mean, like it depends
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: on how much you planned on hanging out with her
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: after your body died. Good point. It seems like irrational
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: confidence from these duck hunters that were probably made up
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: of like a banker, a welder, and an insurance salesman
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: that was like, yeah, he's gone nothing. We can do
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: what we do about now. I'm not pulling decoys. That
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: wasn't how Don Johnson described him, but um, you know
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: it's plausible. Okay. Uh. Another you had another final observation
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: about your time exploring obituaries is that you find that
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: people we'll hope when sending off of a loved one
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: into into death, that they'll hope that the person does
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: what in the afterlife big buck their way. I never
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: heard that. I'll tell you if I mean he's he
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: wrote about it. That was one of the well, you know,
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: Steve's favorite quote of mine is you know, do you
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: make people stupid? And that was one of the things
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: that used to just amazed me how many times I
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: gotta got queries and manuscripts over the transom out of
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: the blue from people with that kind of storyline or
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: that you know, Dad's on the deathbed and you know
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: Junior is in there knowing this, this is it and
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: and hey Dad, you know if you had a chance,
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: send a big buck man waiting this fall. And like
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: I always think, yeah, that was my last chance to
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: know to ask for a favor that once he's on
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: the inside like that, that's fine. I think it might
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: be a little bit more ingest than no. No, the
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: stories I got you, honest, the stories ever written a
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: sent to me that that I never published. These were, um,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: those guys, heartfelt sentiments. They were pitching you this while
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: you read. Yeah, and and and some stories you can
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: get from deer hunters along those kinds of themes really
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: are touching there. Some of them were really well written.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: And maybe something can pull that one off and make it.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: I've well written requests, but the guys I heard from
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: I never I just never quickly could quite buy it. Yeah,
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: but you know you can't be like, uh, you know,
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: have him send world peace my way. Rights. You can't
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: have to be like a huge thing. And you remember
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: the hunting times together it's not gonna cost you know,
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: it's not a not a humongous miracle. It's like in
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: the scheme of miracles, it's pretty mild to be like,
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to over ask here. I
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: don't want to be like a prima donna. You know,
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: I'm not like asking for wealth, great wealth and and
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: and fame. Just if you could, you know, just a
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: nice buck, like a nice buck, I mean, how bad,
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: Like you know, how bad could that be? You only
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: got these querries if dad followed through and sent him
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: a big buck, right like, it was never that son
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: of a bit like, no big book. I don't think
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: we were. You know, I don't recall that anyone who
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: actually had had the big ultimate buck come by. You know,
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: these are typically just wishes and stuff. I think I
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: don't recall it ever being um I got I don't.
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: I don't call anyone ever attributing a big buck that
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: got to that to the deathbed wish. That's helpful. I
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: thought you were getting like a follow up. No, No,
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: these are just I think that there's trying to be
• 1:28:55
  Speaker 1: a sentimental story, and I thought it's the kind of
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: story that say, if Steve Ronella were to write the castory,
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: I think I'd probably buy the story because I thought
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: i'd probably pretty well written. But typically the stories I got,
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: you know, they weren't they weren't that, they weren't convincing,
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: so I never never on bought any of them. I
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: was listening to a Elk calling instructional tape. I just switched.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: So now when I drive around, I have an out
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: call my mouth, the turkey call my mouth, um, And
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: there's a peculiar passage man that I'm getting into it
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: this early. Yeah, turkey SE's not even over. Yeah, but
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: I'm moving on in my mind, man, moving out of
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: my mind. That's what I got. Are you frustrated by
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: the Turkey's calling? Not at all. No. I just was like,
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: it's may man. I mean, yeah, you know, before we
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: know it. Yeah, it's like before we know it. Um.
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: In this instructional thing I'm listening to, there's a there's
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: a there's a thing that the man. There's an audio
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: recording of a of an actual hunt. And you hear
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: a guy kills a bull oh with the bow, and
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: you hear him talk about how and he names the
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: bow the bow manufacturer names the bow manufacturer by name
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: and talks about the lightning speed with which the bull died,
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: and he says, I couldn't have asked the Lord to
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: help me kill it any quicker, which I thought was like,
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: a uh, just a strange observation that you would like
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: that that would be a ask, Yeah, that you know,
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: like I couldn't even if I had, like if I
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: had asked the Lord to kill it faster, he couldn't
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: have helped me. Like this bow killed it so effectively.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: The even divine intervention couldn't have added anything to this
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: bow's power. I don't know if that's how he meant
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: that to come across, but just struck me as a's like, yeah,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: I just remember it's like it's it's like I appreciated
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: the acknowledgement. But then the more I thought about, Mike,
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: that is a weird commentary on your perception of the
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: Lord's power, that like this bow is very swift killer.
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: That person did not think that far, didn't think of
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: that far through. But I think that's one of the
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: fun things of writing, and that the thing is um
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: when people racing like that, when you realize kemmy red
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: in a way that might not make you look like
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: you want to be viewed, and so yeah, but I
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: think that makes it in the print. No patters, Well,
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: nice thing we wanted to talk about. If you're into it,
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: into it? Um the wrath of bird watchers, yeah, um
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: as an audience when you write about wildlife. One of
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: the fun things of writing an outdoor column all these years,
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: you know, you start figuring out there's certain different groups
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: of people that they're reading you. And I learned a
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: long time ago that birdwatchers ain't me right about a
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: cool thing about birds you've observed they appreciate it because
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: I think they don't. They probably see a whole lot
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: of things written about different birds. So one thing I've
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: always liked doing over the years is just writing basically
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: backyard observations about birds I see, and then getting into
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: how wood peckers are hammer away all day and not
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: how their brains get rattled, and look into this kind
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: of stuff. And so anytime I write about birds, always
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: get really nice feedback from bird watcher. You'll throw a
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: little nod of the bird world. Definitely, yea. Probably every
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: couple of months typically I'll write something about birds that's
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: good as an outdoor columns because another observation. I like
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: you your quote about how dear maybe people stupid, but
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: you had another observation about being a naturalist, being a
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: hunter and being a naturalist, and you were observing how
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: in this day and age you can have great hunters
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: who are horrible naturally well, definitely, and you're saying that
• 1:33:01
  Speaker 1: some of the best deer hunters, you know, I couldn't
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: tell you what kind of tree their deer stand is
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: hanging in. Definitely, I can. I can name names, but
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: I can't do that, you know. Um, So it's admitted,
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: So so mitigate that or to counteract that, you'll now
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: and then write up you'll write a piece about birds.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: That's the only reason I read about it. I don't
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: want to be like one of those guys, because like
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: you got your game and you got your tweetie birds
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: Steven Ella, see's right through the bullshit. No, actually, um,
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: Growing up, I had a grandmother who lived with us,
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: who was in the birds, and so I learned I
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: could identify a lot of birds, feel like a young age.
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: But then I kind of peeked out and so anyway
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: I learned over the over the years. Writing my column
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: that ain't me right, about birds and the natural stuff
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: about birds. The bird watchers adore you. I get these nice,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: nice emails and letters from different women that older women
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: typically and other birdwatchers love me. But then along the way,
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: because I'm a hunter, a number of times I've written
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: about um three things that I learned piss off birdwatchers,
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: really piss them off on the first one is to
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: suggest something like, why don't you guys paying your way
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: on conservation on the conservation front? Why don't you Why
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: don't you tell those back their companies that they should
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 1: be getting a front exercise tax and other braoculars that
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: they sell for bird watching, why don't you put an
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: exercise tax on bird feed these kind of things like
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: the hunters have done and the gun owners have done
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: to try to build into the conservation fund. Why they
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: don't like that. They really come after you and what
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: is there? What is there? What? Why do they find that? So?
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: Because they aren't Typically what they'll say is they they
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: don't think they're harming anything out there, so why should
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: they be paying extra for it? They're not consumptive, they
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: don't they don't use that term, but they look at
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: themselves as being we're just um observers of nature, and
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: you guys are takers of nature, so you should be
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: paying something for it. Didn't think that's been Yeah, I'm
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: sure there's other gut things that just bug him about
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: the idea of a lot of twos. I don't want
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: paymark anymore any more. Like, yeah, I could, I could,
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: I could, I could counter that argument, but that's a
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: that's a fair argument to throw out there. So so
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: that's what. So that's one thing that pisces off bird watchers.
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: The earth that pisces off birdwatchers is is um Wisconsin.
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: Until the year two thousand, their boats to not have
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: a hunting season on morning doves. And so we had
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: a big fight, and eventually we um we passed a
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: morning dove season. And because I'm a hunter, and I
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: wrote about why I thought was very biologically easy to
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: have a bird season hunting season on morning doves. Why
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: not you know we hunt? Wait, the thing I always
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: would point out is that name one thing we hunt
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: that's isn't pretty? Because I say, well, had it's such
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: a pretty bird that hasn't it's a beautiful call. I think, well,
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: what do we hunt that um isn't pretty? And how
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: you saying that if you want to kill ugly things,
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: that's kind of elitist, you know, just killed the ugly stuff.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: That sounds pretty rotten. And so I never never bought
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: that argument. So anyway, they didn't like me for that,
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: and I get a hate mail about that. And the
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 1: one that's still going to this day in Wisconsin and
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: parts of the country is, um, you know, any to
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: me talking about having a hunting season on Sandhill crane
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: vicious stuff that comes in, you know, just the kind
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: of stuff that Um, I thought, Man, I thought these
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: people love me, and and now they're calling me names
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: and and just um just beating the crap out of
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: me and I but the thing is, as as a
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: outdoor columnists, I'm kind of used to people taking shots
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: at me, So it wasn't that big a deal. But that'sought.
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: It was really interesting how the same people who will
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: love me forgretting about birds will turn so quickly and
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: just really come after me. And yeah, I'd say, just
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: as viciously as as the most harappy deer hunter. You
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: know what I came to real venom. I think on
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: the morning dove and say, because on the morning, dont
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: sand Hill crane issue why you get a lot of resistance.
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: It tends to be very difficult for people to accept
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: um the onset of hunting for something that you weren't
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: hunting previously, no matter how short the window that you
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: weren't hunting it. So sand hill cranes are once abundant.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: Hunting was ridespread. Due to unregulated hunting and other habitat issues,
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: we had like a great diminishment in sand O cranz
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: and now we're coming along and recovering them pretty effectively.
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: But it was that period when you couldn't That just
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 1: gets fixed in people's minds. So when you point there's
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: a perceived scarcity. So when you point out that, like
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: you know, now we have as many and we're going
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: to add it to the list of dozens of things,
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: dozens of species of game animals and fur bears that
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: you're allowed to hunt. We're gonna add it to this
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 1: big giant list you probably couldn't even make. It's so
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: many of the unbable list them all we're gonna add
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: to that big list. People get real upset, Like morning
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: doves in my home state, these too don't have a
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: morning dove season because it's like it's like it's just
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: this thing where you know you don't And even states
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: where that they take up, there's like a gap in hunting.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: You might hunt black bears for a long time, numbers
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: get down, they end the hunting season, numbers come back up,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: they go to reinstate. It's very difficult to overcome that
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: um more soul than people that wanted to take things
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: that can presently be hunted and make them not able
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: to hunt. It's just hard to get things up and
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: running and hunting you really. People talk about it with
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: the elk reintroductions in the East, it's it's a thing
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: that that that they want to make very clear, even
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: in the onset of the reintroductions is that we're going
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: to do this and when numbers get high, we're gonna
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: hunt because they've had resistance. Were also there's this new
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: animal on the landscape put there with the intention of
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: that it would be hunted, and then later people are like, oh, man,
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: what right. They weren't involved in the reintroduction, They didn't
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: spend any money on it, but now that it happened,
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: they're kind of like what it's like, No, no, we
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: spent the money to put them there. With the intention
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: that we would hunt the elk that we put there. Well,
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: you know, when it comes to our situation with Sandy
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: Hill Crane's, I'm I'm never expecting it to pass in
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: my lifetime, but I think when I can have a
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: good conversation with some bird watchers who opposed the hunt,
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: I asked him, well, really, have you seen anything different
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: in the morning dove situation in the last twenty years
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: since we started hunting morning doves? Even have you an't
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: seen anybody hunting morning doves? Because typically, you know, hunting
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: is not a weren't for Blaze Orange, most people wouldn't
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: even know that, um, there's a hunter out there during
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: the deer season because it's just you know, I mean, yeah,
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: our guns make a lot of noise, but how many
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: people are like notice? And so I'll just that's my
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: point to them is that you know, if you had
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: a Sandy Hill Crane season, you wouldn't't notice. It would
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: just be would be so well regulated, not gonna endanger
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: the species, could just be Yes, people like me could
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: go out and enjoy a good meal from our Samuel Crane,
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: enjoy a new kind of hunting experience, and you know,
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: so what's the harm. Yeah, most people do not Most
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: people are not realized that the morning dove is the
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: most harvested game bird, most harvested in anything in this country.
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: I think that American hunters kill around ten million mourning
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: doves a year. But here's the thing. The numbers. I
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: don't want to say that the numbers are artificially inflated,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: but we have a lot of mourning does because of
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: human activities, like our agriculture, like our agricultural crop systems
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: have I mean that we have far more mourning doves
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: than we would have in the absence of people. It's
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: one of those species that really wins, It really wins
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: around human manipulations on the landscape. So we create a
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: giant is that recently on some of the haunts we've
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: been on where who were are we maybe in Texas recently?
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: And what else? Have we hunted turkeys recently Montana? Where
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: you just see like a pair here, pair there, you know,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: and there's sort of just like part of everything else.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: But if you go to like a place that was
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: like known for it and where the birds are really
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: working the sunflower crops, you know, you're talking about thousands
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: you know that. Really that really makes that example true.
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: When we were kids, we would hunt them. You weren't
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 1: allowed to hunt them, but we'd hunt them on power
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: lines because you could look down the power line and
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: see morning doves way down. You'd kind of mark how
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: many posts you had to go. This was the pelicons.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: You'd mark how many posts you had to go. Then
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: you'd go in the woods and parallel the power lines,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: counting down the posts, and then you belly crawl into
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: the edge of the cut, hoping to get within pellet
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: rifle range of a dove on the wire. Did you
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: get me in that way? No? No, But then my
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: brother in law had a real souped up pellet rifle
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: that was very hard. It was a tent pump and
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: by the time you got to the tenth pump, dude,
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: it was hard to pump. And that offered like enough
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: a little bit of range over our plastic stocked once
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: and so that was a little bit helpful. But no,
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: it's not a very effective way to morning doves. Um.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: But we were raised to believe that it was a
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: great injustice that Michigan had no morning dove season, and
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 1: so it was almost an act of civil disobedience. My
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: father viewed it as like like you know, yeah, civil disobedience. Uh,
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: that that you would that you would pursue some doves.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: My my dad had a real problem with the American robin.
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: You know, it's our states, our state burd in Wisconsin.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: But Dad always hated the robin because it was pretty
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: strawberry patches more than any of our bird, because it's
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: such a big fruit eater. And he and he don't,
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't recall you remember shooting because he
• 1:42:59
  Speaker 1: shot a lot of birds off for strawberry patches. But
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: I'll let me call himber shooting a robin. But he
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: did not like them. Oh it was man, we would
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: have gotten killed if we touched a robber. But my
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: father had a lot of h wrath for blue jays,
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: which he identified as being robbin killers. So in honor
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: of the our state bird as well was the robin,
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: and in defense of the robin, which he liked a lot,
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: it was in his mind there was a perpetual war
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: against blue jays, which for robin killers. And he felt
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: that the ruthlessness, ruthlessness with which a blue jay would
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: go in and eat baby robins, that the eggs, but
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: killing eat the baby. Robbins that um no punishment was
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: too great for a blue jay, and he would devote
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: a lot of his winner to um ridding our yard
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: blue jays and they would melt out of the snow
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: in the springs. I know, I just like I don't
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: let my kid. I don't let my kid get any
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff like that. Yeah. I think there's a
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: famous um Autobu painting of a blue jay rating a nest.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: It almost looks like one of those um dark War
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: scenes were there's the evil person killing the babies, you know,
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: and that kind of what's the imagery? No? Oh, yeah,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: you get you. You know, everybody gets excited. You watch
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: a robin setting up shop and it's like the eggs
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: and then one day there's one and they're ripping him apart.
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: But you know where I realized a few years ago
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: where I was not meant to be a wildlife photographer
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: was there's a low hanging orioles nest with my driveway
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: and I went out there with my nice camera one
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: day to get a picture of the bird's nest because
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: it's a beautiful orioles nest hanging down only about fifteen
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: ft up. Well, I'm focusing on the basket to that
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: Oriels nest. I also blue jay hop onto the branch
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: about ten feet away, and I'm kind of thinking, what's
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: this blue jay doing up on on that by that nest?
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: Just stupid not thinking it through the blue jake hop stone,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: and I like, my camera is up, my cameras focused.
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: Blue Jay reaches into the nest, pulls out an egg,
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: and I, instead of snapping the picture like a photographer
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: would do, I lower the cameras, like to look at
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: and awe and what the hell did it just do?
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: And then when I finally realized that going on, it
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: was too late. It was gone to have a picture
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: of this blue jail, you know, focus off on the
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: side as he's hopping out, and then when he actually
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: grabs the thing, and my fingers should be pressing the button,
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: I'm too busy looking at him to trying to figure
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: out what he's up to. Remember the old days, people
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: would have, you know, like roadside attractions where you had animals.
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: It's kind of more common than like we were going
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: to a place where guy had just a couple of
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: bears for some reason. Definitely, definitely he had a couple
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: of bears in a fence, and when you're on a
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: road trip driving around, you'd like you'd have a I'm like,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: come see the bears. I remember being at one of
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: those places, and I remember there's because he my dad
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: had pictures of it. He liked it so much that
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 1: there's a big like don't feed the bears sign. But
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: he reached in and gave a bear a tipsy roll,
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: and the bear got the tittsie roll stuck on its teeth,
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: And my dad took a bunch of pictures of this
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: bear trying to dislodge a Tutsi roll on the fence.
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: They just tickled him endlessly. But like his what he
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: saw when he looked at animals is just different than
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: what I see when I look at animals in some way. Yeah,
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: you know, like I just don't feel that impulse when
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: I see its like don't feed the bears. I'm the
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: kind of guys like, oh, you know, if it must
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: be a good reason. But he'd be like, well why not.
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: Maybe if I feed it, I'll find out why you're
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: not supposed to. I told you before, but I've told
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: you and I've told me Anny Newburgh how much. You
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: like when you talk about your father's and the stories
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: of your you know, the observation and they would make
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: and the things you would hear as a kid, because
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: I think I have those with my dad where I think,
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: what the hell is he thinking? You know? But but
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: but it's it's fun stuff because it's different eras and
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: your different ways of looking at life, at life. You know,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: I enjoy that story. Oh man, I sit around Onener
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: all the time. I'll say something my kids now and then,
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: or we'll do something now and then I'm like, someday
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: you'll say, you know, it's so weird one time my dad, Right,
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: they'll tell those they already have some well definitely just
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: say my my my son's in law already have Pat
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: Durkin stories things that they I have a little sign
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: at that end of my driveway. It says, um um,
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: deer Hunter's pointed some kind of sign that we picked
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: up somewhere and then needs it just the Durkins, you know.
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: And and so my my son in law Matthew, refers
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: to deer Hunter's point as d HP. And every time
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: something comes up for his little um you a disagreement
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: in the family, he'll he'll kind of look at Miller's
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: sons in law like James and say, that's not how
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: we do things here at d HP. I'm the patriarch
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: of the family now, you know, with thirty two stuff
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: dear in your house? Yeah, I and an elk in
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: a couple of prong horns. So pat you mentioned earlier
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: like how you get feedback from burgers or fishermen or hunters.
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: I would fall out of my chair if someone sent
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: me like a handwritten letter on something that I wrote
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: for the meat eater or wherever. I imagine that's not
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: the case with you, though, Like do you get a
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: lot of handwritten letters? I still do. Um, there are
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: really old people, you know they're eighties. Like how frequently
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: you know when my newspaper column wasn't was that's mass
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: circulation I'd getting pretty pretty regularly. Yeah, And and I
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: never knew what to I never knew what to expect
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: from that. I had an envelope come in with that
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: with that, Um, you know when they're getting really old
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: and that their hands aren't shaking or shaking now, and
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: you never knew what being what's going to be inside?
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: But um, the thing I can say that's true now,
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: is that it was true back and I started writing,
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: you know, forty years ago, thirty five years ago. Is
• 1:49:20
  Speaker 1: that you get more good feedback than bad. You know,
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: you get you get some overall or through handwritten notes.
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: I've never gotten a negative handwritten note. I've gotten some
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: really nasty handwritten ones. I think some of my nasties
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: for back the nineties. So you know, that's one thing.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: One thing I've noticed I'm watching my writing workshop. But
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: one thing I've noticed in my in my writing careers,
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: as I've gotten older, I've gotten less of the vehement,
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: hateful stuff except from burders. The burders just going they
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: don't care how old you are. The deer hunting no restraint. Yeah,
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: the deer hunters are a Wisconsin. I think the ones
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: who've read my stuff kind of know where I stand
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: and stuff, And I think I think I've kind of
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: stood the test of time where store writing after all
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: these years. So I think they might just kind of say, well,
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 1: he's I don't agree with him, but I read them.
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: And but you can you can find threads a lot
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: of those, especially like bull hunting sites, they are just
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: basically bashing me. I'm various issues in Wisconsin forms you know,
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: and I used to have. I would say I thought
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: you were my friend. People send me links to that
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: stuff as if I want to read it. People bashing
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 1: on me are friends to do that? Yeah, they'll send
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: me nice screenshots of people like ship talking. I was like, thanks, bro, Yeah,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: it's good to know. Made my day. I think I'll
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: sleep better to night. Yeah, I'll sleep better at nights.
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: Other my my wife won't. My wife won't read, won't
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: open my um. She like, she won't open your mail
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: because someone's gonna put some that could be too yea.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: If she sees a letter come in without a return
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: address label, she'll never open it because those are the
• 1:50:53
  Speaker 1: ones that usually are the worst. There's gonna be a
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: level of passion involved to like sit down and write
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: you a letter about something you wrote, but it's it's um,
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: it's I can't predict when I really can't. I have
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: a big envelope where I used to put because you
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: used to get a lot more of it, and I
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: had a big envelope where would stick letters into it.
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: But that's kind of slowing down down because now you're
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: just like there's so many ways just really quickly tell
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: someone how much you don't like them. Yeah, people like
• 1:51:22
  Speaker 1: people are excited to tell you that they don't like you.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: They don't want to wait. They don't want to imagine
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: you being sad days from now, when they can make
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: you sad right now. Like dude, I'm I want like
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: lightning vengeance. Man, I'm not even be mad in a
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: week when he gets the letter. But I can just
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: feel now that I can lash out well. And that's
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: that's the thing that I think. It's always intriguing about
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: that is that, Yeah, you know, most people when they
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: get they really ticked off about something, they'll write it down. Then,
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: at least for me, when I started getting that way,
• 1:51:56
  Speaker 1: by the time I got got got down where I'm
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: gonna be sending it, I go back and I delete everything.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: I think, why would I why would I want to
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: just keep this thing going? You know? And and plus
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: there's there's a guiding thought, and I really at times
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: drive it into myself. I don't forget it is that
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: this I quoted all the time with Samuel Johnson, great philosopher,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: writer wrote no man but a blockhead ever wrote except
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: for money. So when you take time out of your
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 1: schedule when you're a freelance writer to write someone some
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: stupid response this long that's something that he sent you.
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: You're killing yourself. You're taking money on your your pocket.
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: You should be putting that time into something that pays
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: your bills. You know why you have trying to change
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: this guy's mind. And so I was thinking, No, you're
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: a writer, don't you know, don't don't waste your writing
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: on this guy or this woman. It just doesn't make
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: any sense. Okay, Getty final thoughts. That was a good
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: one right there. That's your town path that that doesn't conclude.
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you that that was a good concluding thought.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: I like that. We'll come back around you, Spencer. Uh.
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 1: Con If you like Pat's contributions on the podcast, I
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: like this man. This is great. Like the connections you're drawn,
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: You're gonna like him even better. On the website, go
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: to the media dot Com click on contributors. Pat writes
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: an article every two weeks for us. It's some of
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: the best stuff that we've put out, Spencer. Check out
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: his work there. Uh, you'll be entertained. You will not
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 1: be disappointed. Thank you. Yeah, good research based stuff, man,
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: Thank you. You guys make a lot of good phone calls,
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: and you have an ear. You have an ear for
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: the counterintuitive, and I've never been told that before. Thank you.
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: I think you kind of like things where, you know,
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 1: you like things where everybody sort of makes an assumption about, Oh,
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: that's gotta be what it is, and then you'll be like,
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: you know what, I know that it sure seems like
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: that's what it is. But the truth is a little
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: different than what you think than what you come to
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: an immediate conclusion. And you know what's fun about when
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 1: you going to research type stuff and watch researchers present
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: their stuff and read about their thought process. So often
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: they're really these are typically smart people, but so often
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: they get into the research and realize their assumptions were
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: all wrong and they've they've proven it themselves now that
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: that didn't turn out the way where I did it.
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: I UM, I can just think of it. It's this, um,
• 1:54:24
  Speaker 1: I keep going back time hover line. But he wrote
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: a whole book basically about his his research as a
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: real sociologist, different things, different assumptions he had about different topics.
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: For there's wolves, something the up or people flooding victims
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: out in Western States, how they would be responding to
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: different things, and so often you're his his um his
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: his hypothesis was just you know, shattered by the by
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 1: the actual results. And I think that's that's where, like,
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: you know, I don't care who it is. You're talking
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: about people and people's motivations. You get into people's motivations
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: and why they did something. Man, you're playing a fire there.
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: You don't know. Most of us can't explain our own
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: motivations why we do certain things. When you start making
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 1: those assumptions about people in the public eye or whether
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: they're they're scientists or people saying you're pushing a genda,
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: think heck, most of us we don't know. If you're
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: in a gener we don't know what it is. You know,
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: we just we can't operate that what we do and
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: who knows where that ship comes from. You think people
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: are make assumptions about people who are in the public eye. Yeah,
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: people like you know what people like a good story about.
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: They like a good story about what an asshole some
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: famous person. Yes, they like that better than what a
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: good guy like you could tell someone. I can tell
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: you a story about a celebrity who turns out there,
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: pretty good guy. I can tell you a story about
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: celebrity who's actually an asshole. Nine out of ten people
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: are going to take the ladder, and people can't wait
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: to tell you that shitty story. Yeah, and it's I
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: don't know what it is, but I looked away all
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: these different people in history. I don't care if you're
• 1:56:04
  Speaker 1: talking about presidents or obscure senators. Look at and you think, yeah,
• 1:56:08
  Speaker 1: but there and that. The net result is they're pretty
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: cool people. They might have had their their their problems
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: here and there, but you know, I look at my
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: own father that way a lot. You know, where I
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: grew up really just puzzled and scared him at times. It's,
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: you know, really wondering what the hell is this problem?
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: But then as time goes on, you look back on
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: his life and you know, you give a eulogy like
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: I did when he died, and you realize, yeah, it's
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: I think I think that's a philosopher, the Pascal. I
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: think it is pscl don't fres a philosopher named Pascal.
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: I think he said, I think it's him. I might
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: be misquoting, getting the wrong guys saying this, but he
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: said Amanda is not shows greatness of being at one extreme.
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: He shows greatness by being at both extremes at the
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: same time. And I think that's that's my dad. You
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: know that you could be this just um borderline a
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: physically abusive and then an hour later track you down
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: and have a real heartfelt conversation with you. We're later
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: in life, you've figured out you know, he lost his temper.
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: He realized he lost his temper, and but he's he
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: cares enough about how what he just did to you
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: to come out and track you down and try to
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: smooth things over a little bit. I hope my kids
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: remember that, like the three times I did that this weekend.
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: That's why I'm always telling my kids too. At the day,
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: I'm like, take note of the expert parenting I'm doing
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: right now. Someday you'll you'll like to talk about this definitely. Uh.
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 1: One time, this is my concluder. Uh. I had just moved,
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: we'd moved my family, and I was in a we
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: were in a house. Yet we're just in a hotel
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 1: and I'm there with my just me. My wife's not
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: there and I'm just there with my three kids. And
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: then and then we're leaving on a long trip for work.
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: So I wake up and my kids are all sleeping
• 1:57:58
  Speaker 1: in the hotel room and when I'm on the floor
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: and to her in bed, and it's very sad for me,
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: like could we just moved there kind of in all
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: this there in this uncertain space, and I need to
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: like slip out to go to the airport, and our
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: babysitters like waiting at the door so that at four
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: in the morning, I can walk out and she can
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 1: come in. And my wife need still hasn't gotten in
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: to town yet, and I'm like feeling very conflicted about
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: leaving my children right just like that, that we had
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: invited this chaos and how they might perceive this. And
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: Yeahning and I go to the airport. It's early five,
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: six in the morning, and we run into a buddy
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: of ours whose friend has just fallen to his death
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: in the mountains. And a guy comes up and he
• 1:58:49
  Speaker 1: wants to take a picture. He's like fan of the show.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: We do the picture, and then it's not an hour later,
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: get a letter, get an email about what an a
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: soul I am? How really let him down and seemed
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: like I was distracted, but the Yanni was cool. Ye, dude,
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: you know you're walking in on a life and progress
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: at six in the morning. You don't know the context.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry that I let you down. I have a friend.
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry that I was distracted, but the loss of
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's like I have a
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: friend that as I I like, um, Gordon Lightfoot's music,
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: not just the famous I've seen him live twice. Yeah,
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: and I like I like his stuff and but one,
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: but you don't, of course you do. Are you telling
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: me this person out there who could have a problem
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: with the records? But I tell you a guy who
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: was a problem with Gordon kick his ass, would kick
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 1: his ass. Go ahead, Yeah, this this my friend Tom.
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: Why actually my friend that that Tom is now deceased.
• 1:59:59
  Speaker 1: But Tom one time when he heard that how much
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: I liked Lightfoot? Um, he says, Okay, I'll keep talking.
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 1: While while Tom was on this pier and Sturgeon Big Wisconsin,
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: and a lot of people come sailing off the Great
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: Lakes in the Sturgeon Bay. Well, one time, Tom's on
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: on this pier in Sturgeon b Wisconsin, and who comes
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 1: walking down the pier toward him but Gordon Lightfoot. He
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 1: had you know, he's a sailor and and Tom. Tom's
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: on front who works the marina, knew like for enough
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: to where he could introduce him. And as he's coming close,
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: this guy starts talking to Lightfoot, want an interest in
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: to Tom and like for just watch right by him
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 1: without you and acknowledge him, and and Tom to this
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: was dying day. I didn't like the guy because of that.
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: And I said, I said to him about Tom for
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: all you know, he was just in the bar. This
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: is back in days of a pay phone. Maybe Si
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: is calling someone died in his life, maybe his wife
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: cut cheating, no meer, who knows, Maybe he's in the
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: middle of anurism. I mean, who knows, you know? Said,
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: why would you think he would? Why do you take
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: that so personally? You know what I mean? They got
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: something on his mind. Son. When I saw Gordon both
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: times I saw him, he knows that, like a lot
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 1: of people are there for the rack, especially in Michigan.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: That's big ship, right, definitely, that's big Every Michigander who
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: who has a any kind of right to call themselves
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: as such carries a has a weight in their heart
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: about the reck of y Evan Fitzgerald. Uh, and Gordon
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: knows when he's playing Michigan. Well, I saw him in Sioux, Ontario,
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 1: which is sister city of the Sioux Michigan, and then
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: I saw him in Traverse City, Michigan. And he knows
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: that everyone's there to watch him do the rack and it.
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: They're probably gonna allot him, are gonna split afterward. But
• 2:01:58
  Speaker 1: he's come to peace with that, and he puts it
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: that in appropriate place. He doesn't wait till like the
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: bitter end. He doesn't wait for an encore. He doesn't
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: want to lead his audience on. He doesn't hit it
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: with him too early where they're not ready, and he
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: knows where to put it in the act, and he
• 2:02:12
  Speaker 1: also knows how to sell people on it. So like
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: when I saw him in Sue Ontario, he's out there
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: doing his deal doing all He's got a lot of hits, right,
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: but he's up there doing his deal and uh, we're
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: in a big hockey stadium and all of a sudden
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: he says, um, I can't remember what number, what what
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 1: year it was, But all of a sudden he gets
• 2:02:30
  Speaker 1: off and he goes, um, it was twenty years ago,
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: this November whatever, some cryptic thing like that, and people
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: just come out of their seats. People come out of
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: their seats. Yeah, whoa, you know, every's so excited. He
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: does the record, the Evan Fitzgerald takes some out eleven
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: minutes and then people just kind of split. Man, I've
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: never seen that happened. I've seen him. I'm not kidding you.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: I've seen Gordon Land for at least ten times, and
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: I've not seeing people's But he sings that song. But yeah,
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 1: I'll never have but may may. Maybe I'm not paying attention.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: It's a great jukebox song, because really get that in
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: American pie back to back, Yeah, dude, fifty cents you
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: get three hours and listening to join. You know, Dandy
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: Warhols do a cover of the Wreck of the administ
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: It's not very good. Oh you got any concluders. Oh man,
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: it's gonna be hard to come on the heels of
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: all this good stuff. But I heard this brought a
• 2:03:34
  Speaker 1: great song. Pat talking about writing as a you know,
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: wasting your time writing a bad response to somebody. Um
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: that that hits home and it got me to thinking
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: about how my father in law recently we were He
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: was telling my daughter how he just doesn't fight with
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: anybody anymore and doesn't get angry because it's just a
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: waste of time, you know, and he's so he's over it.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: He's at that point in life, Yeah, where it's like
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: freaking you know, you just like time just get shorter
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: and shorter and there's less and less of it, and
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: you're just like, I'm not going to spend time um
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: doing that anymore. But then I think it might have
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: been an NPR. Over the weekend, I heard this quote.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: I really liked it. I think I should share it.
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: It's a Sam Clements quote. You know that guy some
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: folks call Mark Twain. Yeah, there isn't time, So brief
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: is life for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There's
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: only time for loving and but an instant, an instant
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: so to speak for that. That's not Mark Twain, is it?
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like something he'd say. But all Mark
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: Twain did a is bicker and call people to account.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: It did entire life to calling people to account. Maybe
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: this was late in life, Yeah, all right. Yeah. Plus
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: you can also have a quote that, like, you have
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: a quote that contradicts sort of what you've done. Yeah,
• 2:05:02
  Speaker 1: you can picture like Mike Tison being like, you know,
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: you should never punch another person, right, yeah, sure, then
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: that sounds like I mean so often these days when
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: people quote Mark Twain at my intendant, because I think
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: Mark Twain has been given all sorts of quotes, they
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: never said that one actually sounds like like his way,
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: he's space pasted and stuff like that. That probably has
• 2:05:26
  Speaker 1: the Mark Twain. But dark snow Twain hated Roosevelt. Yeah
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: I didn't like. Yeah, yeah, well, well Twain wrote, I
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: think when the great um criticism of turkey hunting ever
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: written what, Yeah, I don't know. He thought it was
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: just the height the height of um. I can't remember
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: what term you used, mean spiritedness to take the wing
• 2:05:52
  Speaker 1: bone from a turkey and crafted into a call and
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: then fool that bird with its own um bone basically,
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: And it's an interesting story, but it's it's it's it's
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: really good. I I'd like I would say, yeah, if
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: you caught a turkey in a live trap and cut
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: its bone out of it, cut its wing off, cut
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: it loose, made a call, called it back in, and
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: killed it, yes, yeah, but a different turkeys bone. No,
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: I just say we agreed with him. Yeah, can I
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: tell one more from my concluder because you still got
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 1: a concluder. Yeah, try to rob you of it, but
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna let you have it. Is n done. I'm done. Okay,
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: I'm not telling another unless you find the Turkey quote.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: And so it's actually a whole short short story. It's
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: it's worth reading. Though. Um, I'm not telling tell you
• 2:06:40
  Speaker 1: another cool Rick Krueger story. I thought of enthusiast I
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: thought about this one. Um is it? Ben Long wrote
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: the pieces last week or so on on these on
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: trump sniffing dogs, Um, the fact that you could train
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: dogs to sniff fall trout and the species of trout,
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: even walter in the water. Well, Rick Krueger, Mhm, I
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 1: never knew till I talked to him. He just tell
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: me that that these cadaver dogs. Everyone. I always thought
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: caldaver dogs basically were operated on land, and that you know,
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: that was the only place they could they could be
• 2:07:15
  Speaker 1: have any use. But he says he had a case.
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: This is only about five ten years ago now. A
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: young man from called Connam, Wisconsin, was Don and Madison
• 2:07:26
  Speaker 1: in December early this mid December for a for a
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: conference and he went out drinking. And people who know
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: the Lake Mondotta structure, there's a there's a hotel on
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: the southwestern end of Lake Monona. You can see it
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: from across different parts of the lake. This guy was
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: out drinking, got drunk and banged on some woman's window.
• 2:07:48
  Speaker 1: He's twenty six year old guy, and I wanted to help,
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: basically because he didn't I don't know if you didn't
• 2:07:55
  Speaker 1: know where he was. But the woman kind of freaked
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 1: out and didn't didn't know what he wants, so she
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: didn't answer answer him. But then she saw him kind
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: of shelfling off toward the lake. And they think what
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: happened was he tried taking a short cut across the
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: lake on the ice to the to the hotel where
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: he was staying. Never made it there. He was missing,
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: and the lakes were partially frozen, so they're pretty sure
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: he tried going across the lake thus directions from and
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: saw him going. Well, they went out there and they
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 1: had these cadaver dogs and then in like thirty three
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: ft of water. These cadaver dogs, I guess when they
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: smell what they're out there, you know, trying to find
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: they'll sit down. I guess they just sit and well,
• 2:08:34
  Speaker 1: here they're in the spot and they sat. No, yeah,
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: thirty three ft of water. As I asked if, I said, really,
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: I didn't know this, and he was yeah. And so
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 1: that the police marked that GPS unit and they could
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: not because of weather in the because of conditions, they
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: couldn't go down and check it out. And so they
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: so Rick got those coordinates of where they were, those
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: cadaver dogs that spot in Lake Manona. And that was
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 1: like in December. Come April, the lakes are free advice.
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: Rick got his boat ready to go. I got it
• 2:09:10
  Speaker 1: all fired up and got verified the GPS coordinates, went
• 2:09:13
  Speaker 1: out there very first pass finds what he thinks there's
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: a curled up body in the bottom the lake right there,
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: and so and he pulls pulls his camera down a
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: his his procedures. He got his camera down and he
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: thinks he could see that little camera viewfinder what looked
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 1: like a boot or a shoe or something. And he
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: wasn't quite certain though, so he went home, but on
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: his computer blew it up definitely that guy. And they
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: went out there and went on got him and yeah,
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: but then but you can't rule out that dog was
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: a psychic. You just I mean, this is why you're
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: this is why your podcast that he smelled it, but
• 2:10:02
  Speaker 1: I think he might have picked up on that unmistakable
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 1: juju that comes off of Well then then my my
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: um so my footnote to that one though, when I
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: when I questioned Rick on these dogs have that ability
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 1: to be able to pick out a cent thirty three
• 2:10:22
  Speaker 1: ft down in the bottom of the lake, he said, well,
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 1: if you want, if you think that's impressive, he said.
• 2:10:28
  Speaker 1: Over a lake Mondota, not too far away from there,
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: there's these these um up behind the u W University
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: of Wisconsin campus. There's this nice cool ridge along the lake,
• 2:10:38
  Speaker 1: and up there are some old Indian mounds and they
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: were out there with the cadaver dogs for for some
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: reason doing something, probably looking for someone else. And these
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: dogs kept sitting at a certain spout out there, and
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: the only thing they could come to conclude was that
• 2:10:55
  Speaker 1: somehow there were scent is coming off those those moulins
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: up there. These dogs are picking it up. There something
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: up there that they could pick up, and that's what
• 2:11:04
  Speaker 1: they kept sitting right there. It's interesting and they've been
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: psychic about that too. So who well, Pat Durkin, it's
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you like
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 1: how you always came, You got like things we need
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 1: to cover, makes our job easy. What's enjoyable? Ski, Thanks
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 1: for having me