Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 121: A Man of the Law

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Ep. 121: A Man of the Law · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case underwere listening podcast. You can't
0:18
Speaker 1: predict anything, okay? Officer Bill Andre Colorado game Warden slash
0:31
Speaker 1: District Wildlife Manager slash District wildlife manager. For how many years, Brody?
0:37
Speaker 1: Has he ever written you a citation for anything? Not yet?
0:40
Speaker 1: Have you been? Have you been? Naturally just checked? I
0:44
Speaker 1: know where to what areas to avoid, you know what
0:46
Speaker 1: we're areas. But I've actually heard you better watch out
0:49
Speaker 1: because he can pop up anywhere. That's what you heard
0:53
Speaker 1: in your area. Yeah. Yeah, he's known as known to
0:56
Speaker 1: find people that are doing things they shouldn't be doing.
0:59
Speaker 1: So been You've been in the business, in the wildlife
1:02
Speaker 1: game warden business for thirty eight thirty eight years? How
1:06
Speaker 1: many more years you got in you? Not many? You're
1:09
Speaker 1: like in the evening of your I'm in the twilight
1:12
Speaker 1: of my career. Uh what year did you move out
1:15
Speaker 1: to Colorado? Nineteen seventy six to go to school, Go
1:18
Speaker 1: to school and then studied. I had a degree in
1:24
Speaker 1: fisheries in zoology from Kay and then like went right
1:28
Speaker 1: to work as a uh no I uh I took
1:31
Speaker 1: the test for the district wildlife manager job. Didn't make
1:34
Speaker 1: it the first year, so I went to Utah to
1:37
Speaker 1: be an assistant manager at a private fish hatchery. And
1:41
Speaker 1: then UH, the next year, I took the test again
1:43
Speaker 1: and got in. What was stumping you? I don't even
1:46
Speaker 1: know what the test is, but what was stumping you
1:47
Speaker 1: on the test? I don't know what really stumped me.
1:52
Speaker 1: It's a there was When I was taking it for
1:55
Speaker 1: there was ten positions. You had about six hundred and
1:58
Speaker 1: seventy seven hundred people are apply for it and go
2:02
Speaker 1: in and take a written test UM and then if
2:05
Speaker 1: you pass the written test, you went to an oral
2:07
Speaker 1: test and then you went through a physical psychological testing UM.
2:12
Speaker 1: And out of the six or seven hundred people, I
2:15
Speaker 1: didn't make the top ten the first of all. It's
2:18
Speaker 1: a narrow pool, it wasn't it was. Then he dusted off,
2:21
Speaker 1: came back the next year and got in, got in.
2:24
Speaker 1: Congratulations belatedly, but elatedly, thank you. UM. So you're a
2:29
Speaker 1: man of the law, right, and a man of the
2:31
Speaker 1: law needs to be UM needs to approach things you
2:36
Speaker 1: know objectively right. But are you still comfortable in dealing
2:39
Speaker 1: with hypothetical because there's been There's a handful of questions
2:43
Speaker 1: that have been raised to us over the years for
2:45
Speaker 1: people right in and be like, hey, what if I
2:47
Speaker 1: did this? Or what if a fella did this? And
2:51
Speaker 1: it's very hard for us to get answers. But I
2:55
Speaker 1: feel that, because you've probably been in all of these situations,
3:00
Speaker 1: that I could ask you a hypothetical and you could
3:03
Speaker 1: tell us what way you would lean on it. Can
3:06
Speaker 1: we try one? Yeah? Well, I mean I can give
3:09
Speaker 1: me an answer to a lot of them. Really, Okay,
3:11
Speaker 1: let me let me lay this one because this one
3:12
Speaker 1: just came in. The answer would be is if you
3:15
Speaker 1: use the word if, don't do it? Okay? What if
3:20
Speaker 1: I have one more drink and drive? What if I
3:24
Speaker 1: take that second shot? If if he's in there, you're
3:28
Speaker 1: telling yourself, probably shouldn't do this, okay? But can I
3:31
Speaker 1: lay someone? You bet? Because I just want to like, like, alright,
3:35
Speaker 1: a guy writes in and says this, let's say you
3:38
Speaker 1: this just we just got this email. He's and it's
3:41
Speaker 1: not even hunting season, so I'm assuming this isn't like
3:43
Speaker 1: a thing that he's now trying to figure out if
3:45
Speaker 1: what he does right or wrong. But he's saying Let's
3:48
Speaker 1: say you take a shot minutes before the end of
3:53
Speaker 1: legal shooting light. So so bouch right, you go over
3:57
Speaker 1: there and you gotta take a step and shot to
4:00
Speaker 1: finish it off. But now it's past legal shooting light,
4:05
Speaker 1: he shoots again. How would you view that? Well, it's
4:12
Speaker 1: gonna I mean, the circumstances are gonna be. It's gonna
4:16
Speaker 1: have to show me two bullet wounds, Okay, because if
4:19
Speaker 1: he shoots twice and there's only one, why am I
4:23
Speaker 1: going to believe that the second shot was it was?
4:26
Speaker 1: I just had to finish it off. So you do
4:30
Speaker 1: a little detective work. Sure, you gotta do a little
4:32
Speaker 1: detective work on it. Have you been in the situation before?
4:35
Speaker 1: Not on that exact one. I mean, we've had it
4:37
Speaker 1: on private land. The animal jumped the fence after I
4:41
Speaker 1: shot it. It was laying on the other side of
4:43
Speaker 1: the fence. I finished it off. May not have crossed
4:46
Speaker 1: the fence, but I shot across the fence to finish
4:49
Speaker 1: it off. If there isn't two bullet holes in it,
4:50
Speaker 1: he has a problem. Got If there's two bullet holes,
4:53
Speaker 1: and at least it's plausible it could have happened, and
4:56
Speaker 1: then it just depends on on how up for you
5:00
Speaker 1: feel they are, Um, are they sincere and what they're
5:03
Speaker 1: saying and what the circumstances show you when you're out there.
5:07
Speaker 1: So I mean a lot of it's give and take. Um.
5:11
Speaker 1: You know, if the person is extremely nervous, or you've
5:13
Speaker 1: had dealings with him before, or they're known to be
5:16
Speaker 1: always the one that was just a minute after shooting light,
5:21
Speaker 1: then you're like, you're not learning your learning your lesson.
5:24
Speaker 1: Maybe quit shooting twenty minutes before the end of shooting
5:27
Speaker 1: light instead of waiting till the last minute. Uh. I
5:32
Speaker 1: want to get background and ask you about if you
5:35
Speaker 1: have people in your area, Like I want to ask
5:38
Speaker 1: you what your area is, if you have people in
5:40
Speaker 1: your area that you find that you are routinely dealing with.
5:45
Speaker 1: But I want to hit you with two more hypothetical Okay,
5:50
Speaker 1: one time a guy and I was never going to
5:51
Speaker 1: get this guy an answer on this, and he was
5:52
Speaker 1: asked asking the question about Alaska. But maybe there's something
5:56
Speaker 1: in your zone. Really be able to answer this guy's
5:58
Speaker 1: question for him or provide some insight where he was
6:02
Speaker 1: saying that one time he's on he's in a piece
6:07
Speaker 1: of public ground that allows rifle hunting, okay, But he's
6:14
Speaker 1: on the border with a piece of ground that's managed
6:19
Speaker 1: in such a way that the seasons are the same,
6:22
Speaker 1: but there's no rifle hunting. You cannot discharge a firearm there.
6:26
Speaker 1: You can only hunt with archery equipment. So same season structure,
6:30
Speaker 1: same bag limit structure, but just the Land Management Agency
6:33
Speaker 1: has said no discharge of firearms on this chunk land.
6:38
Speaker 1: But he was sitting in the firearm discharged thing looking
6:41
Speaker 1: across the border, looking across this boundary at a black
6:46
Speaker 1: bear and didn't shoot. And later all of his hunting
6:50
Speaker 1: buddies were like, well, you definitely could have because you
6:54
Speaker 1: weren't discharging your firearm in the no firearm discharge area.
6:59
Speaker 1: How would you look at the situation like that? If
7:02
Speaker 1: the bullet hit the animal in the no discharge area,
7:05
Speaker 1: you killed it with a firearm. I mean, if it's not,
7:09
Speaker 1: I mean, I like it. The reason you can't you
7:12
Speaker 1: can't discharge a firearm because you can't kill something with
7:15
Speaker 1: a firearm there. So if the bullet hits it and
7:18
Speaker 1: kills it, you killed it with a firearm. It doesn't
7:21
Speaker 1: matter where you're stand doesn't matter where you're standing exactly.
7:24
Speaker 1: I like, I mean, I like to thinking. It's good thinking.
7:27
Speaker 1: I don't know that I agree with it, but I
7:30
Speaker 1: like to thinking, well, if you're standing on I mean,
7:33
Speaker 1: I don't know if I agree with it in like, um,
7:36
Speaker 1: just in terms of having like a debate. I feel
7:39
Speaker 1: like you could run circles around the idea if if
7:46
Speaker 1: the animal died from a bullet, the only way for
7:48
Speaker 1: a bullet to kill it is you discharged the firearm. Yeah,
7:51
Speaker 1: and sent that thing or sent that thing across that line. Good,
7:56
Speaker 1: all right? Last one, last hype, and this might not
7:59
Speaker 1: even be a hype, that are you allowed a corner
8:01
Speaker 1: hop in Colorado? I believe the answer is no. I'm
8:06
Speaker 1: not sure on that, but I believe it's no. That's
8:09
Speaker 1: how I've always operated in Colorado. Have you ever had
8:13
Speaker 1: to um write a citation to someone who argued, no,
8:20
Speaker 1: this idea. No, I don't totally understand the reason why
8:24
Speaker 1: it's not legal. I mean, it was a big right
8:26
Speaker 1: up in one of the magazines, this winner on it,
8:30
Speaker 1: and and I can't remember he was in Wyoming that
8:33
Speaker 1: they were doing it, but we talked about it incessantly.
8:36
Speaker 1: And no, it's like a it's like a legal black hole. Yeah,
8:38
Speaker 1: I don't understand how if you don't touch that private land,
8:43
Speaker 1: why it's not legal for you to corner hop but
8:46
Speaker 1: not an expert on it, haven't had any dealings with it.
8:49
Speaker 1: You just enforced a lie. You don't make them right.
8:52
Speaker 1: I hit you with one more. Someone is um public
9:00
Speaker 1: land and they're shooting at the animal. This is when
9:03
Speaker 1: we talked about incessantly for whatever reason. Uh, this one's
9:07
Speaker 1: on public land and they're shooting at an animal that's
9:09
Speaker 1: on public land with their bullet crosses private land. Would
9:12
Speaker 1: you ding them for having trespassed, for having their bullet
9:20
Speaker 1: trespassed across someone's land. Um? Personally, I probably would not,
9:27
Speaker 1: but I did see UM. I think it was an
9:29
Speaker 1: attorney's general opinion, but it might have just been from
9:32
Speaker 1: a district attorney, one of the local district attorneys that
9:36
Speaker 1: if you're shooting over their land, you're trespassing. Um. But
9:41
Speaker 1: it would take a lot for me to to write
9:43
Speaker 1: an actual citation. I might write him a warning. So
9:48
Speaker 1: it also depends on did he cross a corner he
9:53
Speaker 1: wasn't aware of, or was he aware that his neighbors
9:56
Speaker 1: got an eight foot fence and he was sitting in
9:58
Speaker 1: a tree and purposely shot over the eight foot fence
10:00
Speaker 1: across the guy's property to get something on the other side.
10:04
Speaker 1: So there's always circumstances you have to look at. You
10:07
Speaker 1: know that that It's like you knew better, You knew
10:11
Speaker 1: there was a reason you weren't supposed to do it,
10:13
Speaker 1: and you went to all this effort to do it,
10:15
Speaker 1: so you already knew the answer before you pull the trick.
10:18
Speaker 1: I got you. I got you. That's the thing, like
10:20
Speaker 1: from talking in the past and talking to you you now.
10:22
Speaker 1: The thing that, um that's come out when I've asked
10:26
Speaker 1: these questions is how much you're sort of when you're
10:29
Speaker 1: dealing with someone, how much you uh seem to sort
10:36
Speaker 1: of pay attention to in fact or in like like
10:42
Speaker 1: sort of the entire package of what's going on, like
10:45
Speaker 1: an individual's intent sort of how are they, how up
10:48
Speaker 1: front are they being? To what point did they self report?
10:52
Speaker 1: To what point you gotta like work at them to
10:54
Speaker 1: try to find out the full story. If I have
10:58
Speaker 1: to work at it to get the full story, lie
11:00
Speaker 1: to me, you don't have much success. I'm probably gonna
11:04
Speaker 1: write you the ticket. If you're upfront and truthful then
11:07
Speaker 1: I'll treat you the same way I mean to me.
11:10
Speaker 1: It's treat them like you want to be treated. We're
11:13
Speaker 1: all going to make mistakes in our life. Some will
11:15
Speaker 1: be an honest mistake, some will be like what if,
11:20
Speaker 1: and other ones will be I know I shouldn't do this,
11:23
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna do it anyways. And I think it's
11:26
Speaker 1: important to try to get to those little details of
11:30
Speaker 1: just how did this happen and why did it happen? All? Right? Now,
11:34
Speaker 1: well I don't know this, this might not be bad
11:35
Speaker 1: and that moving forward, But now can you not? Weve
11:38
Speaker 1: got those dates, Greff. Can you can also explain me
11:41
Speaker 1: like the breadth of your work, like like what is
11:44
Speaker 1: sort of your professional mandate in terms of what you're
11:47
Speaker 1: responsible for and where you're responsible for it? Well, we
11:52
Speaker 1: all we all have our own districts, UM, but are
11:55
Speaker 1: like today, as we talked about, I'm the on call
11:58
Speaker 1: officer for the Area eight, which goes from Aspen to Veil.
12:02
Speaker 1: So if there's any wildlife calls, UM, I get the
12:05
Speaker 1: call first. Does that overlap with the hunting units? Yes,
12:09
Speaker 1: so it's the it's the units or no, it's UM
12:14
Speaker 1: like we have that they don't. Unfortunately, the units don't
12:18
Speaker 1: really follow a normal numbering system, so we have everything
12:22
Speaker 1: from the lowest unit I believe is thirty five and
12:25
Speaker 1: we go up to four seventy one. So the way
12:29
Speaker 1: they were designed doesn't really fit in with when you
12:32
Speaker 1: look at the numbering system scattered all around. But I
12:36
Speaker 1: mean my main responsibilities within my district, which is the
12:39
Speaker 1: Upper Eagle Valley UM, but on it when you're on call,
12:42
Speaker 1: then you're responsible from here all the way to Aspen
12:46
Speaker 1: so and in hunting season, if a call comes in
12:48
Speaker 1: and nobody else is there, you're expected to be able
12:50
Speaker 1: to go handle it, whether you're the on call office
12:52
Speaker 1: or not. So with only eight guys working in the
12:56
Speaker 1: field over that big in area, there's lots of times
12:59
Speaker 1: you have to go out side your normal area and
13:01
Speaker 1: work on it. But we also have the ability to
13:04
Speaker 1: go anywhere in the state. I mean, we're UH Class
13:08
Speaker 1: one peace officer for the state of Colorado, so we
13:10
Speaker 1: can enforce any of the laws in Colorado, but we
13:13
Speaker 1: stay pretty much to the game and fish laws. So
13:15
Speaker 1: you could pull over someone for speeding, Oh yeah, without
13:18
Speaker 1: a doubt. Do you do that much? No, it's not
13:24
Speaker 1: not my expertise. I mean, I don't have a radar gun.
13:27
Speaker 1: Our direction is pretty much that if somebody is driving
13:30
Speaker 1: in such a way that they're a clear hazard and
13:32
Speaker 1: could cause severe bodily injury, then pull them over and
13:35
Speaker 1: get a state patrol or a sheriff's deputy or a
13:37
Speaker 1: town police to come out and handle it. So I
13:42
Speaker 1: want to talk more about law enforcement, But what are
13:44
Speaker 1: your other So besides law enforcement, law enforcementy other responsibility.
13:49
Speaker 1: Law enforcements used to be about a third of the time. Um.
13:53
Speaker 1: Now it depends how you classify law enforcement. When you
13:56
Speaker 1: look at the bear calls and the line calls we
13:58
Speaker 1: deal with, to a certain degree, those are law enforcement
14:01
Speaker 1: in that you may have to discharge a weapon to
14:03
Speaker 1: put the animal down, maybe right in the middle of town.
14:06
Speaker 1: So that's definitely a law enforcement situation in that part.
14:10
Speaker 1: But we always go through the discussion, Um, is it
14:13
Speaker 1: law enforcement you're responding to for human safety or is
14:16
Speaker 1: it a biological concern you're responding to that the bear
14:20
Speaker 1: or the moose is in a place it shouldn't be
14:22
Speaker 1: and it's a danger to people. How much time do
14:25
Speaker 1: you spend dealing with that now relative to in the past,
14:28
Speaker 1: with with wildlife conflict like like, particularly with bears and
14:31
Speaker 1: melt alive uh in the summer. Over fifty percent of
14:35
Speaker 1: the times bears on on the bad years, I mean
14:39
Speaker 1: on a good year, it might only be ten percent
14:42
Speaker 1: of what ten percent of your whole time in the summer.
14:45
Speaker 1: You spend fifty percent of your time in the summer
14:47
Speaker 1: dealing with bears. Yes, but last year doing what well?
14:51
Speaker 1: Last year, just in this area from Veiled Aspen, we
14:55
Speaker 1: handled over eleven hundred calls and some of those are
14:59
Speaker 1: simply calling somebody back and saying, well, yeah, I put
15:01
Speaker 1: your trash up, put your bird feeder up. Other ones
15:04
Speaker 1: you might spend two or three days on. You drag
15:07
Speaker 1: a trap over to Aspen or to Veil, you set
15:09
Speaker 1: the trap, you have to go back the next day
15:11
Speaker 1: and rebait the trap. Then if you catch the bear,
15:13
Speaker 1: the decisions made whether the bears put down or moved,
15:17
Speaker 1: and then to move it you have to go about
15:18
Speaker 1: a hundred airline miles. So once you catch a bear,
15:20
Speaker 1: if you have to move it, that's an all day
15:22
Speaker 1: deal for at least one offs or sometimes two. Now
15:26
Speaker 1: do you expect to do a lot more of that
15:28
Speaker 1: this summer? Since it's a drought year. Well, it certainly
15:30
Speaker 1: could be. I mean, the nice thing about so far
15:32
Speaker 1: this year is knock on wood. We we got through
15:35
Speaker 1: all the blossoms without a frieze or a frost. Now
15:40
Speaker 1: we could still get one as the fruit setting and
15:42
Speaker 1: lose them all, or it could get so dry that
15:45
Speaker 1: the fruit just doesn't really produce, and the acorns don't produce.
15:48
Speaker 1: So acorns and service berries and stuff like that, and
15:50
Speaker 1: choke cherries, those those are the key. So you're talking,
15:53
Speaker 1: you're talking wild fruit, wild fruit. Yeah, we mean the
15:58
Speaker 1: fruit in town and people's crab apple tree ease because
16:00
Speaker 1: they're watering it in a drought year, that's where the
16:03
Speaker 1: fruit is going to be and and the bears are
16:05
Speaker 1: going to go in there to get it. So you
16:06
Speaker 1: so you mean you could have a like a wild
16:09
Speaker 1: choke cherry failure, a wild blueberry failure, the wild acorn failure,
16:14
Speaker 1: and you can then anticipate we're gonna have trouble with
16:17
Speaker 1: bears direct correlation. So this year might not be that bad,
16:23
Speaker 1: might not be that bad. I mean, we've had we
16:26
Speaker 1: haven't had anywhere near as many problems this year as
16:28
Speaker 1: we've had in years passed in our area in the southwest,
16:33
Speaker 1: which is in a much greater droughts having some more
16:35
Speaker 1: problems than we're having right now. What's the last time
16:38
Speaker 1: someone in Colorado was killed by a black bear? I
16:41
Speaker 1: haven't heard about that in a long time. Well, the
16:44
Speaker 1: last one was about three years ago. Uh. The lady
16:47
Speaker 1: down by tell your ride that was feeding bears through
16:51
Speaker 1: a chain length fence on her porch. The bears killed her.
16:56
Speaker 1: I mean through a chain link fence. She had put
16:58
Speaker 1: a chain length fence around the deck of her porch
17:02
Speaker 1: so that she could hand feed the bears and the
17:04
Speaker 1: bears couldn't get to her. Unfortunately, the bears could get
17:08
Speaker 1: to her. Oh. I don't know how. I wasn't there,
17:11
Speaker 1: but the bears did kill her. Gotcha. Uh, when you
17:17
Speaker 1: said you have to move a bear a hundred miles,
17:19
Speaker 1: what do you mean in order to try to transplant
17:21
Speaker 1: the bear, you try to get them out of their
17:23
Speaker 1: home range. Oh, so that doesn't mean it just happens
17:26
Speaker 1: to be a hundred miles to a good place to
17:27
Speaker 1: put it. But there's a thinking that move a bear
17:29
Speaker 1: one and you'll and he's likely to not show back
17:33
Speaker 1: up where you left him, right me? But you also like,
17:35
Speaker 1: we don't take many bears in our area, um, even
17:38
Speaker 1: though we might were a hundred miles from Denver Um.
17:41
Speaker 1: Part of the reason is we have enough bear problems
17:43
Speaker 1: going on. But you have to look at another domestic sheep.
17:47
Speaker 1: There is there a campground there. If this is a
17:49
Speaker 1: bear that's been getting food from people, you don't want
17:51
Speaker 1: to dump in the middle of a campground. So we
17:53
Speaker 1: kind of try to pick the places that he's not
17:56
Speaker 1: gonna immediately cause another problem. Doesn't mean he won't pick
18:00
Speaker 1: up and move twenty miles and cause the problem the
18:02
Speaker 1: next day, but we try not to put him in
18:04
Speaker 1: a spot that's gonna cause him a real problem. What
18:07
Speaker 1: factors play in when you look and and you're trying
18:10
Speaker 1: to decide whether an animal needs be youuthanized or relocated.
18:14
Speaker 1: It's generally based on the animals um disposition where they
18:19
Speaker 1: aggressive to people. UM. Certainly, if they break into a house,
18:23
Speaker 1: if a windows open a crack and they rip that
18:25
Speaker 1: window open and come in the house, we euthanize them
18:29
Speaker 1: because of thinking then, is that that he has a
18:32
Speaker 1: proclivity to go into houses? Right, could be has for
18:35
Speaker 1: the next person, right with the next person or if
18:37
Speaker 1: you move them. Somebody in a tent has a piece
18:39
Speaker 1: of nylon between them and the bear versus a wall
18:42
Speaker 1: and a window. Just so people understand, like, it's it's
18:46
Speaker 1: well known that once a bear does that, once they're
18:50
Speaker 1: going to keep doing it. Right, they learned, they learned it,
18:53
Speaker 1: they especially if they get rewarded. It's you know, you
18:56
Speaker 1: could make an argument that, well, yeah, he pulled the window,
19:00
Speaker 1: and but he never got in the house and got
19:01
Speaker 1: any food. Somebody scared him off before. But once they
19:05
Speaker 1: get in the house and start eating out of the
19:06
Speaker 1: refrigerator or the cupboards, then it's like that that bear
19:10
Speaker 1: knows how to get food and he's probably gonna do
19:13
Speaker 1: it again. Have you ever seen video of a bear
19:16
Speaker 1: work in the outside of a house. I've seen it
19:18
Speaker 1: in person. People think like I think some people visualize
19:23
Speaker 1: that that the bear comes up and understands doors and
19:26
Speaker 1: windows initially, but they just work the whole thing, pulling, prying,
19:34
Speaker 1: biting anything they can get there, claw under right, and
19:39
Speaker 1: they just like explore that whole exterior and eventually find
19:42
Speaker 1: something that kind of gives you know, there are some
19:44
Speaker 1: bears that clearly know a door in a window from
19:47
Speaker 1: from having been through that process. Men, you watch him.
19:50
Speaker 1: They'll walk right up to a deck, right up to
19:53
Speaker 1: the sliding glass door. There's there's pictures on security cameras
19:58
Speaker 1: of bears opening a car door. Asked as you and
20:00
Speaker 1: I can, they walk up, They lift the latch and
20:03
Speaker 1: they're in the car. That quick. They figured it out.
20:07
Speaker 1: They know exactly how to open that door. They know
20:10
Speaker 1: where to go. What they don't know how to do
20:12
Speaker 1: is open the door from the inside. When the door
20:13
Speaker 1: closes on them, that's when you have the problem. Then
20:17
Speaker 1: they're in the house. Have you dealt with that? Oh? Yeah,
20:21
Speaker 1: got a bear in a home. What do you even
20:24
Speaker 1: do then, Well, the first thing you do is you
20:26
Speaker 1: try to convince the people there, if they can safely
20:28
Speaker 1: do it, is to open every door on the house,
20:31
Speaker 1: give the bear options to get out. So also, you've
20:34
Speaker 1: had calls some people who are in a house with
20:37
Speaker 1: a bear in the house, with a bear in the house,
20:39
Speaker 1: and they're calling from within the house. What are they
20:43
Speaker 1: saying after they stopped screaming, Yeah, um, they're they're just
20:48
Speaker 1: you know, bears in the house. I'm in the bedroom,
20:51
Speaker 1: I need to get out, help me. And lots of
20:54
Speaker 1: times just because where we're located, we call the local
20:57
Speaker 1: p D or the s O and say, hey, well,
21:00
Speaker 1: I mean the sheriffs department, the local police department or
21:03
Speaker 1: the shriffs department, just because they generally can be there quicker.
21:06
Speaker 1: And the big thing is open the doors to the house,
21:10
Speaker 1: give that bear away out. Um. If the people can
21:13
Speaker 1: go out a windows safely or there's another exit, then
21:16
Speaker 1: help them get out that window and we'll be there
21:18
Speaker 1: as quick as we can with it. And then if
21:20
Speaker 1: you've when when you've arrived at a house, where does
21:22
Speaker 1: a bear in a house? Yes? Do you do? You
21:25
Speaker 1: just like going there guns blazing? Are you going there
21:28
Speaker 1: trying to figure out ways to get doors open and
21:30
Speaker 1: let the thing? The first thing you do is try
21:32
Speaker 1: to get the doors open. You don't want to have
21:35
Speaker 1: to destroy the bear inside somebody's home. And then you'll
21:38
Speaker 1: just find him, like if he takes off, you'll just
21:40
Speaker 1: go find that bear, right. I mean, we generally carry
21:44
Speaker 1: a trank gun with us. UM. A lot of the
21:46
Speaker 1: officers now are carrying tasers. UM. A taser works on
21:49
Speaker 1: a bear or moose just like it does a human.
21:51
Speaker 1: Oh do you guys have tasted the bears and moose.
21:53
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, what's the due to it? The same
21:56
Speaker 1: thing he does to a person. Because I don't know
21:58
Speaker 1: what a does new person, You ought to have voluntineer
22:01
Speaker 1: taste them. Yeah, I mean it doesn't like incapacitate. It does. Yeah,
22:05
Speaker 1: as long as long as you keep pulling the trigger
22:07
Speaker 1: and put the juice to them. They're on the ground,
22:09
Speaker 1: they can't move. Really, have you hit a bear of
22:13
Speaker 1: the taser? I have not. I'm not trained in a taser, so,
22:16
Speaker 1: but tasing and well, like you see, you hear about
22:20
Speaker 1: moose is stuck in swing sets. No, oh you haven't.
22:25
Speaker 1: I've seen my kids get started. You know. There's there's
22:28
Speaker 1: quite a few videos of moose and swing sets. And
22:31
Speaker 1: it used to be you either try to get the
22:33
Speaker 1: moose walk into a yard and hooks his antler and swing,
22:36
Speaker 1: or he decides to fight with it. No, I didn't
22:39
Speaker 1: know this is the thing. Oh yeah, yeah, just well,
22:41
Speaker 1: I'll just like anything else, you know, moose or bull
22:44
Speaker 1: elk gets upset, they walk into the swing, the swing
22:47
Speaker 1: come back and hits them. They throw their head at
22:50
Speaker 1: it because something just hit them, and they end up
22:52
Speaker 1: with the rope or the chain wrapped around their antlers,
22:56
Speaker 1: so that the old way was you either try to
22:58
Speaker 1: cut it loose without in anything to it without getting stomped,
23:02
Speaker 1: or you dart it and then once it's understodation you
23:06
Speaker 1: do you remove it. The new way is that you
23:09
Speaker 1: go in with tasers and you taste the thing, and
23:12
Speaker 1: as long as you don't touch the wires going from
23:15
Speaker 1: the taser gun to the implants, you can handle the
23:18
Speaker 1: moose or cut the chain of the rope loose from them,
23:21
Speaker 1: and then once you stop tasting at the thing jumps
23:23
Speaker 1: up and runs away, and it's safer for the animal
23:25
Speaker 1: than tranquilize of it. It's safer because you don't have
23:28
Speaker 1: to well, first off, you don't have to wait. Now
23:30
Speaker 1: there would you walk up and dart it, It's going
23:32
Speaker 1: to take four or five minutes for that to take effects,
23:34
Speaker 1: so the animal can hurt itself, and then you have
23:37
Speaker 1: to depending on the tranquilizer you use, you either have
23:40
Speaker 1: a reversal or you have to wait a couple hours
23:42
Speaker 1: for the animal to wake up. So you know, it's
23:45
Speaker 1: much easier to deal with trying to move a moose
23:47
Speaker 1: out of somebody's yard or sit there with it for
23:49
Speaker 1: four or five hours and then realize when you turn
23:52
Speaker 1: it loose, it may run out in the street and
23:53
Speaker 1: get hit. It's a whole lot easier if you don't
23:56
Speaker 1: they I mean, it's not like they wake up and
23:58
Speaker 1: they have a dent of the senses about them. I
24:02
Speaker 1: mean they wake up and coming out of being sated. Yeah,
24:04
Speaker 1: I mean they wake up from the reversal fairly quickly
24:07
Speaker 1: and they can move, but it doesn't always mean they're
24:10
Speaker 1: a d percent there. And you'll see him jump up
24:12
Speaker 1: and run a little ways, and then they kind of
24:14
Speaker 1: stop and shake their head, so you don't know if
24:16
Speaker 1: they're really a UM mobile and aware of what's going on.
24:23
Speaker 1: But when he comes out of being tazed, he's back
24:24
Speaker 1: to himself. Back to himself yeah, yeah, and pissed or
24:29
Speaker 1: not pissed from what I've seen in the videos. It
24:32
Speaker 1: depends on the animal. UM But there's been a lot
24:35
Speaker 1: of times with moose and bear that I mean the bear,
24:37
Speaker 1: that they're generally not tasting the bear to immobilize it,
24:41
Speaker 1: to do anything. They're trying to taze the bear to
24:43
Speaker 1: give it a negative experience that hey, you show up here,
24:47
Speaker 1: just like hitting it with rubber buckshot every time you
24:49
Speaker 1: come up on a deck, somebody does something nasty to you.
24:52
Speaker 1: Pretty soon you're gonna start saying, I don't like to
24:54
Speaker 1: go to those places. It hurts. So it's it's not
24:58
Speaker 1: so much with the bears that were in it to
25:00
Speaker 1: immobilize them, to work on them. We're doing it more
25:02
Speaker 1: to try to give them that negative experience. What's the
25:05
Speaker 1: typical mountain lion problem, Like, what's the typical sort of
25:09
Speaker 1: pattern of of a mountain lion, you know, kind of
25:12
Speaker 1: crossing that that sort of division into into human territory. Right,
25:17
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty same as the bears. Um. Although I
25:20
Speaker 1: haven't been to any mountain lions in a home, I've
25:23
Speaker 1: been to mountain lions to sleep on people's front doors,
25:26
Speaker 1: at their sliding glass doors. For what reason they just
25:29
Speaker 1: decided to curl up there and go to sleep. I mean,
25:33
Speaker 1: I don't know the reason. Homes with pets are not
25:35
Speaker 1: even necessarily not even necessarily with pets, no livestock generally,
25:39
Speaker 1: or maybe horses and solar radiation and playing, there's probably
25:43
Speaker 1: a nice place to take an laying up on a rock,
25:45
Speaker 1: and it is a pretty lots of times they are.
25:47
Speaker 1: They're on kind of the least side, they're out of
25:50
Speaker 1: the wind and the snow, and they are right up
25:52
Speaker 1: against the base of the house. I mean we had
25:55
Speaker 1: one in Ego that crawled underneath the house trailer and
25:58
Speaker 1: we crawled underneath the house trailer with it to try
26:00
Speaker 1: to get it out, and went in the first time
26:04
Speaker 1: just to see where it was. Didn't have a dart
26:05
Speaker 1: gun and and could not get the thing to move
26:08
Speaker 1: from the corner it was in. When in the second
26:10
Speaker 1: time with two of us in a dart gun, and
26:12
Speaker 1: once we got close, it ran around us and ran out,
26:14
Speaker 1: and then we had to chase it down after that
26:17
Speaker 1: to do what we put it down. Um, it had
26:21
Speaker 1: been in town three or four times, up by the
26:24
Speaker 1: school and when we got close enough to sit, I
26:26
Speaker 1: mean we were eight feet away from this thing under
26:29
Speaker 1: the house trailer. Uh, it was emaciated. I mean it
26:32
Speaker 1: stayed away in sixty or seventy pounds. It was weighing
26:34
Speaker 1: about pods. Yeah, we're seeing quite a bit of that
26:38
Speaker 1: with with yearlings that they just don't seem to learn
26:42
Speaker 1: how to hunt or distribute that too. I don't know
26:44
Speaker 1: if it's just they got kicked out too early by
26:47
Speaker 1: the mom um and they just don't know how to
26:49
Speaker 1: hunt or or if they're injured somewhere inside. I mean
26:53
Speaker 1: sometimes when we do the knee cropsies, we don't run
26:55
Speaker 1: everything on them to be able to determine what their
26:57
Speaker 1: cause is for being in such bad shape. Usually just assume,
27:02
Speaker 1: just like people, you've got good hunters, you've got bad hunters.
27:04
Speaker 1: But you're saying you feel like you see more of
27:06
Speaker 1: it now. Well, um, the best quote was from the
27:11
Speaker 1: neighboring officer here in Eagle. He's been on thirty five years.
27:14
Speaker 1: I've been on thirty eight and in January of two
27:17
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, we dealt with more lion calls in one
27:20
Speaker 1: month than we dealt with the thirty plus years we've
27:22
Speaker 1: each had before. You never used to get a call
27:25
Speaker 1: about a lion in town, but like there has been.
27:28
Speaker 1: I mean, there has been many things contributing to this.
27:33
Speaker 1: But do you have some like theories about it? Oh? Yeah,
27:38
Speaker 1: like lay them out? Oh you want to know what
27:40
Speaker 1: my theories are? Yeah, and and and and ivious, Like
27:42
Speaker 1: I understand that you're you're just you know, no one
27:45
Speaker 1: right as someone knew the absolute answer, Well, it would
27:48
Speaker 1: be impossible to know the absolute answer. But there has
27:50
Speaker 1: been something like some good ideas about what is going
27:53
Speaker 1: on right Well, definitely the mountain lion populations increased, and
27:57
Speaker 1: so has the human population. So you and you had
28:00
Speaker 1: you have more of e than one, you have a
28:02
Speaker 1: bigger chance for interaction. But if you look across up
28:07
Speaker 1: almost all the Western states, all of them are showing
28:09
Speaker 1: this an increase in conflicts between bears and lions and people. UM.
28:16
Speaker 1: I mean we did last year two thousand seventeen again
28:20
Speaker 1: from Veil to Aspen. I think we responded to write
28:23
Speaker 1: out a hundred mountain lion calls. Before two thousand fourteen,
28:27
Speaker 1: we didn't even bother keep track because there was so few. UM.
28:31
Speaker 1: We uh. We've increased our harvest quota on lions in
28:34
Speaker 1: most of the places, and we're usually filling those and
28:38
Speaker 1: even after filling them in two thousand sixteen, after filling
28:43
Speaker 1: the quota, UM, we had a couple areas in the
28:46
Speaker 1: Upper Eagle Valley where we were seeing people were seeing
28:49
Speaker 1: three and four lions at a time, working together, coming
28:53
Speaker 1: right up to their homes, walking around the homes, coming
28:55
Speaker 1: up on the decks. Um, probably looking for pets, pet food, UM,
29:00
Speaker 1: deer elk that we're in their net yards. Do you
29:03
Speaker 1: feel that increasing the quota does it allow like, does
29:08
Speaker 1: it allow you guys to even target the lions that
29:10
Speaker 1: are coming into town or is it two almost separate populations.
29:14
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know that it's two separate populations.
29:17
Speaker 1: But one of the problems we have is sometimes where
29:19
Speaker 1: they're coming into town, it's a really bad place to
29:22
Speaker 1: try to run them with hounds, mainly because the roads, well,
29:26
Speaker 1: the hounds get hit on the roads, or the lion
29:28
Speaker 1: decides to run back into the neighborhood. And now you
29:30
Speaker 1: get four hounds underneath somebody's crab apple tree barking at
29:34
Speaker 1: a lion in their tree, and they want to know
29:36
Speaker 1: what this guy with the guns doing on their property. Yeah, understandable.
29:39
Speaker 1: So so tough, tough in some of these places to
29:42
Speaker 1: hunt it tough. Right along Ice seventy. A lot of
29:44
Speaker 1: the problems we have are right on the edges of
29:46
Speaker 1: Ice seventy. Course, that's where the subdivisions are here. The
29:50
Speaker 1: other thing that it appears to be happening is the lions,
29:53
Speaker 1: just like the bears, have learned that a subdivision and
29:56
Speaker 1: a golf course is a pretty good place to live. Um,
29:59
Speaker 1: you know, for the airs, you got all the fruit
30:01
Speaker 1: trees that people plant for the lions. You've got pets,
30:04
Speaker 1: you've got pet foods, you've got lots of rabbits um,
30:07
Speaker 1: you got deer and elk spending an entire year living
30:10
Speaker 1: within these subdivisions. And we're talking big subdivisions, not a
30:14
Speaker 1: not a twenty acre subdivision, but something like Cordiera that's
30:18
Speaker 1: maybe a thousand acres homestead, that's eight hundred some acres.
30:21
Speaker 1: I mean, there's enough room for these animals to find
30:23
Speaker 1: a place to live and stay out of site most
30:26
Speaker 1: of the time. And then the other reason I think
30:29
Speaker 1: we get more calls is everybody has security cameras or
30:32
Speaker 1: game cameras. Everybody's got a game camera in their backyard,
30:35
Speaker 1: and the lion may have always used to walk through it,
30:37
Speaker 1: but now they've got a picture of it. Oh and
30:40
Speaker 1: you mean you see it on TV all the time
30:42
Speaker 1: that you know in Denver, they just had a picture
30:44
Speaker 1: of a month or so ago of female and three
30:46
Speaker 1: kittens jumping over a guy split rail. Flint's walking through
30:50
Speaker 1: the yards, sniffing around the bushes and then going into
30:52
Speaker 1: the neighbors. And that may have been going on for years,
30:55
Speaker 1: but nobody had that video camera out there, and they
30:58
Speaker 1: get alarmed when they see it. Some to some they're
31:01
Speaker 1: just like, well, that's really cool. They get alarmed on
31:03
Speaker 1: their cat or their dog disappears, and they get pretty upset.
31:07
Speaker 1: You know. I want to share with you a couple
31:08
Speaker 1: of perspectives that, uh, coming from folks in Washington, where
31:15
Speaker 1: I currently live, and actually not far from where I live,
31:18
Speaker 1: they just had the first mountain lion, uh human fatality
31:22
Speaker 1: from a mountain lion in ninety four years. Okay, so
31:25
Speaker 1: it's a couple mountain bikers were out riding not far
31:30
Speaker 1: from town and uh look back and there's a lion
31:35
Speaker 1: chasing them. They jumped off their bikes, use their bikes
31:39
Speaker 1: to sort of scare off the lion, rode down the
31:43
Speaker 1: trail a little bit away to get away from the area, stopped.
31:48
Speaker 1: We're kind of like, oh my god, I can't leave.
31:49
Speaker 1: It just happened, and then the lion jumped from above
31:52
Speaker 1: attacked one of the bikers. That biker got the lion off,
31:57
Speaker 1: got on his bike and fled, and then the line
32:00
Speaker 1: killed the other biker and drugged the biker up and
32:05
Speaker 1: cashed it under some brush. They had a houndsman come out.
32:11
Speaker 1: The houndsman started the track at the line there at
32:14
Speaker 1: the at the kill and tracked down and killed the lion. Um.
32:20
Speaker 1: One thing that came out of that it was interesting
32:22
Speaker 1: was the way that everyone who has sort of an
32:25
Speaker 1: agenda around mountain lions use that example to further their perspective,
32:35
Speaker 1: ranging from some people saying there must have been something
32:37
Speaker 1: wrong with the lion because there's no other way to
32:41
Speaker 1: account for how this would happen. Other people saying, no,
32:44
Speaker 1: there was nothing wrong with the lion. It's just a
32:47
Speaker 1: thing that can happen. Uh. A friend of mine who
32:53
Speaker 1: I have a couple of friends who are houndsman who
32:55
Speaker 1: do a lot of work for the States, and one
32:57
Speaker 1: of these guys had an interesting perspective on it, where
32:59
Speaker 1: he's just taking his own career. So he'd spent decades
33:03
Speaker 1: doing uh like wildlife conflict work around mountain lions as
33:08
Speaker 1: a houndsman, and he was saying when he was young,
33:12
Speaker 1: there was zero tolerance for any kind of mix up
33:17
Speaker 1: like any lion. That when anywhere near people are attempted
33:23
Speaker 1: to kill the sheep or did anything like the lion
33:25
Speaker 1: was just dead, he would get a call. He would
33:28
Speaker 1: be told kill the lion. Now he'll get calls where
33:32
Speaker 1: they're like, don't want to kill the lion. Can you
33:36
Speaker 1: run it and scare it away? Maybe a couple of times,
33:39
Speaker 1: or it's gonna be a lot of pressure on us
33:41
Speaker 1: just due to the neighborhoods. Gonna a lot of pressure
33:45
Speaker 1: on us if we have to euthanize the lion. So
33:48
Speaker 1: he feels that as acceptance for these soft encounters has increased,
33:54
Speaker 1: you're like it or not, you're gonna invite additional art encounters.
34:01
Speaker 1: The thing about his perspective is this is the first
34:03
Speaker 1: time it's happened in ninety four years. So if another
34:06
Speaker 1: hundred years goes by and then no one else gets
34:08
Speaker 1: killed by a mountainline, you'll be like that adds a
34:10
Speaker 1: lot of validity to the fact it was like a fluke, Right,
34:14
Speaker 1: If all of a sudden, now it like becomes a thing,
34:17
Speaker 1: you know, every now and then a person gets killed,
34:19
Speaker 1: I think it might lend. It might give some creedence
34:21
Speaker 1: to what his perspective is. It's just like, if we're
34:25
Speaker 1: going to be more tolerant of large predators and it
34:28
Speaker 1: amongst us, we're gonna have to learn to be more
34:30
Speaker 1: tolent with the fact you're gonna inevitably have these dangerous encounters.
34:37
Speaker 1: Does that speak to you it all, like, I mean,
34:39
Speaker 1: does that seem like something that makes sense based on
34:42
Speaker 1: your I mean different state, right, but yeah, a different state. Um.
34:47
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know enough about Washington's lying population
34:50
Speaker 1: to talk intelligently about their side of it, but you know,
34:53
Speaker 1: I kind of subscribe to that same thing that you
34:58
Speaker 1: know it used to be. We would tell people, you know,
35:01
Speaker 1: just clean up your trash, take your bird feeders down,
35:04
Speaker 1: the bears will go away, and to a certain point
35:06
Speaker 1: they do. Um. But with what we found, with the
35:10
Speaker 1: number of droughts we're getting now and the changes in
35:14
Speaker 1: what's going on with vegetations, the lack of fire, I mean,
35:16
Speaker 1: some of the best places for them to find food
35:19
Speaker 1: is in the town, whether it's garbage or everybody plants
35:22
Speaker 1: raspberries in their backyard or service berry choke, cherries, crab
35:25
Speaker 1: apple trees. So we're kind of inviting them to come
35:28
Speaker 1: into where we are, and at the same time, we're
35:31
Speaker 1: moving out into their habitat more and more. So definitely
35:34
Speaker 1: going to increase the number of encounters. And some people
35:37
Speaker 1: are very tolerant of it. Some people the first time
35:41
Speaker 1: they show up that they don't care if you kill
35:42
Speaker 1: that bear or what you do. But just get that
35:44
Speaker 1: bear out, go put them back in the woods. It
35:47
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that, Hey, you live up against a wilderness area.
35:51
Speaker 1: You're surrounded on two sides by forest service, and one
35:54
Speaker 1: of those sides is the wilderness boundary. Where in the
35:57
Speaker 1: state do you want us to put them? But it
35:59
Speaker 1: isn't for them to be. And you get the same
36:02
Speaker 1: thing with people out on a trail that Hey, I
36:05
Speaker 1: was walking on this trail and the wilderness and this
36:07
Speaker 1: bear showed up and stared at me. You gotta do something. No,
36:10
Speaker 1: that's where I want the bear to be. You need
36:13
Speaker 1: to understand that the bears are there and you need
36:15
Speaker 1: to take the appropriate actions to keep yourself safe. But
36:19
Speaker 1: but conflicts aside. You feel that there are more like like,
36:25
Speaker 1: numerically right, there are more lions. You feel there are
36:28
Speaker 1: more lions now than the world a decade ago. Oh,
36:30
Speaker 1: without a doubt, and bears right and bears? Do you
36:33
Speaker 1: think that there's more bears because they don't get hunted
36:38
Speaker 1: in the spring anymore? I don't because we actually harvest
36:41
Speaker 1: more bears just our fall season now than we did
36:44
Speaker 1: with a spring in a fall season. It's just a
36:46
Speaker 1: general increasing population. Yeah. The big difference in bears when
36:51
Speaker 1: Tom Beck was doing his study down in the Black
36:53
Speaker 1: Canyon of the Gunnison, when we would have a bad
36:56
Speaker 1: drought year like this or a failure of acorn sore berries,
37:01
Speaker 1: the thinking was, and I think it was true at
37:03
Speaker 1: that point, was the cubs that were born that year
37:07
Speaker 1: weren't going to get enough food to make it through hibernation.
37:10
Speaker 1: They would end up dying. The sows that were impregnated
37:13
Speaker 1: because bears do a delayed implantation, they wouldn't have enough fat,
37:17
Speaker 1: they wouldn't implant those embryos. So you lost this year's crop,
37:23
Speaker 1: cub crop, and you lost next year. See you losing
37:26
Speaker 1: To explain delayed implantation real quick, that the sow's impregnated
37:31
Speaker 1: in the spring, but they don't implant the embryos until fall.
37:35
Speaker 1: So in the spring the egg so when they rought
37:38
Speaker 1: in June and June okay, so the egg is fertilized
37:43
Speaker 1: and begins to form, but it's not implanted yet and
37:48
Speaker 1: the implant Martin's there's a lot of different animals that
37:51
Speaker 1: have delayed implantation. Yeah here I heard the uh yeah,
37:54
Speaker 1: you're like river rotters and handful members of the Weel family.
37:57
Speaker 1: And so the thinking like, so then she needs to
38:00
Speaker 1: be in a certain state. So the bear needs to
38:02
Speaker 1: be a certain state of physical fitness for her to
38:04
Speaker 1: allow the implantation to occur. Correct, So continue on now. So,
38:08
Speaker 1: so you lose two years of age, two classes of
38:12
Speaker 1: age class. You lose the cubs from two thousand seventeen,
38:15
Speaker 1: and you don't get any cubs in two thousand eighteen.
38:18
Speaker 1: So that's a huge hit to your population. I mean,
38:21
Speaker 1: imagine if you're going to to grade school and you
38:23
Speaker 1: lose the third and fourth grade class, you know, for
38:26
Speaker 1: the when they get ready to hit high school, that
38:29
Speaker 1: grade you winning class goom and be pretty darned small.
38:31
Speaker 1: When it comes time for them to start reproducing, there's
38:34
Speaker 1: a whole lot less of them out there to reproduce.
38:36
Speaker 1: Hard to build a population on that. And when you
38:39
Speaker 1: think how long live bears are, I mean that that's
38:42
Speaker 1: a long period that you're missing those two And if
38:44
Speaker 1: you get two that are close together, which I would
38:47
Speaker 1: think you could say two thousand twelve and two thousand
38:50
Speaker 1: and eighteen, are fairly close together. When you're talking about
38:52
Speaker 1: an animal might live twenty years, you know there's there's
38:55
Speaker 1: four age classes you lose. What we've seen different now
38:59
Speaker 1: is that the bears are coming into town. They're feeding
39:02
Speaker 1: on the trash, they're feeding on the apple trees and towns. Uh,
39:06
Speaker 1: they're going into the corn fields and the orchards and
39:09
Speaker 1: grand junction, which they never used to do in the numbers.
39:12
Speaker 1: They're doing it now. So they're picking up all these
39:14
Speaker 1: other food sources. The other food source that there seemed
39:17
Speaker 1: to be using is they're not a prose to picking
39:19
Speaker 1: up road kills off the interstate. So we have all
39:22
Speaker 1: these other food sources for them to take place of
39:26
Speaker 1: a natural food failure. And we've seen it quite often
39:29
Speaker 1: now with these in these years of natural food failures,
39:32
Speaker 1: that the following year we'll see cubs or sALS that
39:34
Speaker 1: have three cubs. So instead of having lost her cubs,
39:38
Speaker 1: she was fat enough to pull off three cubs. And
39:41
Speaker 1: we've seen the It appears the statistics don't show it
39:44
Speaker 1: as clear um, but when I started in nineteen eighty,
39:48
Speaker 1: if you saw a stile with three cubs, that was
39:50
Speaker 1: huge news. I mean, we didn't have email, but you
39:53
Speaker 1: called everybody anew and say, I just saw a stile
39:55
Speaker 1: with three cubs. Can you believe that? Um? Now we
39:57
Speaker 1: see them routinely every year. We did an episode once
40:01
Speaker 1: about a bear called the Wisconsin supersou. She had five,
40:08
Speaker 1: brought them all up to a hundred pounds. Two years later,
40:13
Speaker 1: had five more and brought them all up two hundred pounds.
40:18
Speaker 1: It's like a very successful and you know what it
40:21
Speaker 1: wanted be in that she was doing. She it seems
40:24
Speaker 1: as though she had found where the state was dumping
40:28
Speaker 1: road kill carcasses, and so just it was like tied
40:31
Speaker 1: to that, just like fitness and of great food source
40:36
Speaker 1: and was reproductive, very savvy and also in a funny way,
40:39
Speaker 1: very careless about her denning locations which just kind of
40:42
Speaker 1: layout like just in a barely covered up in a
40:46
Speaker 1: brush pile. Yeah. So we I mean we've seen that. Um.
40:52
Speaker 1: When Tom was doing his study, we didn't think the
40:55
Speaker 1: bears and the females were breeding until they were four
40:57
Speaker 1: or five. Now it appears they're breeding near earlier. Um.
41:01
Speaker 1: It appears that the litter size has gone up by
41:04
Speaker 1: maybe a half. Um. You know, seeing we haven't seen
41:08
Speaker 1: any fours yet that I have heard of. I mean
41:10
Speaker 1: Wisconsin has it, Pennsylvania has it, where they'll have sALS,
41:13
Speaker 1: they'll have four or five. So that's more common in
41:15
Speaker 1: those areas. It's more common because if you look at
41:18
Speaker 1: the food sources they have, I mean, their bears are
41:21
Speaker 1: they generally have more bears than we do per square mile.
41:23
Speaker 1: They generally have heavier bears than we do. When you
41:26
Speaker 1: look at the food source out here, um, you know,
41:29
Speaker 1: we would say a lot of the Upper Eagle Valley
41:31
Speaker 1: is not very good bear habitat because there's no oak
41:33
Speaker 1: brush above Walcott. Almost all the oak brushes down here
41:37
Speaker 1: or over in the Roaring Fork Valley, and oak brush
41:41
Speaker 1: is considered to be one of the key things. But
41:43
Speaker 1: the bears in the Upper Valley are making it on
41:45
Speaker 1: service berry and choke cherry. I mean, that's that's what
41:48
Speaker 1: they're living on. That that's their key winter survival is
41:52
Speaker 1: to get enough service berry and choke cherry. So if
41:54
Speaker 1: you put all those together, then all of a sudden,
41:58
Speaker 1: instead of have a population that might grow ten percent
42:00
Speaker 1: a year just to figure out of the air, now
42:03
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, they're growing fift of a year.
42:05
Speaker 1: I mean that's a huge jump in a population if
42:07
Speaker 1: you can add even just two or three percent growth
42:09
Speaker 1: in a year. And and that is a fact that
42:13
Speaker 1: in a lot of units around here, the number of
42:15
Speaker 1: bear tags that are that you guys issue has been
42:19
Speaker 1: increased greatly. That's just to keep up with this growing population. Yeah,
42:23
Speaker 1: it's an effort to try to keep up with your
42:24
Speaker 1: growing population. So you got so, what year was that
42:28
Speaker 1: the Colorado lost that spring season in late nineties mid
42:32
Speaker 1: nineties and now so it used to so and you
42:37
Speaker 1: just said that. I'm not questioning the clarity with what
42:39
Speaker 1: you said. It's just a surprising to me. Now even
42:42
Speaker 1: with the loss of the spring season, more black bears
42:45
Speaker 1: are killed in Colorado annually, just in the fall season
42:50
Speaker 1: alone now and there's more black bears altogether than before.
42:53
Speaker 1: We We've I'd have to look at the numbers, but
42:56
Speaker 1: we've had several years where we've harvested over a thousand
42:59
Speaker 1: bears in a year out of statewide, statewide, and when
43:05
Speaker 1: we had the spring hunt and the fall hunt with
43:07
Speaker 1: bait and hounds. Um, I don't think we ever hit
43:10
Speaker 1: a thousand. Do you find that? Um, there's some pretty
43:14
Speaker 1: good bear hunters here, like is it is it like
43:16
Speaker 1: a thing that guys get good at, or is it
43:18
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to be like something that people kind of
43:20
Speaker 1: just stumble into. Know that a lot of them have
43:23
Speaker 1: gotten very good at it, and in fact, part of
43:25
Speaker 1: the problem is some of them gotten so good at
43:27
Speaker 1: it um that now when they buy a license, they're
43:31
Speaker 1: only buying a license that they're looking for a specific bear,
43:34
Speaker 1: an extremely large bear, a certain color phase, and if
43:38
Speaker 1: they don't see it, they won't harvest to bear. And
43:41
Speaker 1: that's part of the reason we increase the tags is
43:43
Speaker 1: because we've had a number of these guys have gotten
43:45
Speaker 1: good and they've shot four or five bears and they're like,
43:47
Speaker 1: I don't know how many more I need to shoot.
43:50
Speaker 1: So unless I see something really special, I'm gonna go
43:53
Speaker 1: out and hunt them still, but I'm not gonna pull
43:55
Speaker 1: the trigger. What are the guys that are what are
43:57
Speaker 1: the really good bear hunters? What do they do? They
44:00
Speaker 1: spend most of August looking for either the choke cherry,
44:04
Speaker 1: service berry or the oak brush that. No, they don't hunt.
44:07
Speaker 1: They go out to scout. They're scouting and finding the
44:10
Speaker 1: best patches of food supplies for these bears. So they're
44:13
Speaker 1: looking for food they're looking for the food areas and
44:15
Speaker 1: then they're moving into those areas when the bears move
44:18
Speaker 1: in there. There every morning and after work with binoculars,
44:22
Speaker 1: you know, scoping out four or five different spots to
44:25
Speaker 1: see where they can see bears at and then they
44:27
Speaker 1: once they find him at night, if it's not a
44:29
Speaker 1: good opportunity there, back there the next morning or the
44:31
Speaker 1: next night, setting up closer to where the bear was.
44:34
Speaker 1: And it's usually hunting over fruit, not hunting acorn patch.
44:36
Speaker 1: No acorn is big. They hunt a lot of them
44:38
Speaker 1: over acorn, especially here in the Eagle because Brush Creek
44:41
Speaker 1: has so much acorn. So how do you know when
44:43
Speaker 1: you go into the air with a lot of acorn?
44:45
Speaker 1: How do how do you guys know? Uh? Is it
44:47
Speaker 1: pretty obvious one of the bears work in that area?
44:51
Speaker 1: Just so people are aware. The acorns were talking about
44:53
Speaker 1: a gamble o right, not like an oak tree, just
44:57
Speaker 1: a brushy very di jinky little acor size of a
45:02
Speaker 1: big one's the size of your little finger. Um and
45:06
Speaker 1: one does bear season? You're opening The fall opens on
45:09
Speaker 1: this second of September, And that was part of the
45:13
Speaker 1: initiative that was passed by a vote at the Colorado
45:16
Speaker 1: people on when it can open. One had it opened
45:19
Speaker 1: in the past, Well, we had a spring season and
45:22
Speaker 1: I think it open September. One done. It's been a
45:25
Speaker 1: long time since I had to ask that answer that question.
45:28
Speaker 1: But yeah, now, Brody, what what prevents you from being
45:31
Speaker 1: like a big time Colorado bear hunter guy? I've been
45:34
Speaker 1: looking for one for this will be like six or
45:38
Speaker 1: seven years in a row sitting water. He hasn't. He
45:42
Speaker 1: didn't know this thing at I spend time grouse hunting
45:45
Speaker 1: and then I get distracted, like looking for elk when
45:47
Speaker 1: I'm should be looking for a bear. And but do
45:50
Speaker 1: you go out because I know you like when you're
45:52
Speaker 1: big game, when you're hunting deer and elk, you're open
45:54
Speaker 1: to the idea of finding a bear. Yeah. So I'll
45:56
Speaker 1: get a tag most years, like this year, I got
45:59
Speaker 1: a tag around my house which is specific to that
46:03
Speaker 1: September bear rifle season. But as these guys have increased
46:07
Speaker 1: tag numbers, there are areas now that you can pick
46:10
Speaker 1: up a second bear tag as a B tag, like
46:13
Speaker 1: around here. So I'll get that rifle tag for September
46:17
Speaker 1: and then pick up a B tag. So I'm packing
46:20
Speaker 1: a bear tag while I'm hunting deer and elk too.
46:23
Speaker 1: But I've yet to you, yet to seal the deal
46:27
Speaker 1: on my first Colorado black bear. I'm hoping that's going
46:29
Speaker 1: to change this year because I can hunt right by
46:32
Speaker 1: my house up north. It's been like right above the
46:35
Speaker 1: house there. You saw that gam below on the hillside
46:38
Speaker 1: and service Berry up there, so we'll see. I would
46:43
Speaker 1: just take advantage of the officer Andre being here and
46:45
Speaker 1: somehow tap into his electronal, tap into his communication. He
46:49
Speaker 1: got any problem bears he need taking care of. We
46:52
Speaker 1: actually have people call us and ask us that, I believe,
46:56
Speaker 1: what's your policy on that. If it's a place they
46:58
Speaker 1: can legally hunt, we'll tell But really, I mean to
47:02
Speaker 1: what to what level of specificity? Like what would you say,
47:05
Speaker 1: throw it? Just throw one out? I mean, if I
47:07
Speaker 1: have a sheepherder losing bears, they're losing sheep to bear,
47:12
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll tell them give this person a call.
47:15
Speaker 1: You know, the sheepherder will probably you'll have to understand
47:18
Speaker 1: bask or Spanish whatever they talk um, but you know,
47:22
Speaker 1: otherwise you use hand signals and draw pictures. But most
47:26
Speaker 1: of the time they're happy to help you. I mean
47:28
Speaker 1: it's the problem on some of it is the bear
47:31
Speaker 1: was in the sheep in this drainage and two days
47:34
Speaker 1: later they're headed to another drainage. So you don't know
47:36
Speaker 1: if the bear is going to go with him or
47:37
Speaker 1: stay in that drainage. But if you know, if we
47:40
Speaker 1: have a you know, if you have a bear in town,
47:42
Speaker 1: you certainly can't put a hunter on it. And you
47:44
Speaker 1: really don't want to say, well, if you sit up
47:46
Speaker 1: on that hill just outside of town, that bear may
47:48
Speaker 1: walk up or down, because you don't want them shooting
47:50
Speaker 1: the bear and running into town. So only special circumstances
47:54
Speaker 1: of the workout. Yeah, I mean sometimes you know with
47:58
Speaker 1: the sheep, it will work out. Around the campground. Um.
48:01
Speaker 1: Some of the campgrounds have continuous problems with bears in
48:05
Speaker 1: the fall, and it's like, well, you're in the national forest,
48:08
Speaker 1: you know, stay away from the campground. UM. But certainly
48:12
Speaker 1: especially on week days after after labor days over on
48:15
Speaker 1: week days, there's hardly anybody in the campgrounds, so you
48:18
Speaker 1: just have to be the distance for service requires you're
48:20
Speaker 1: from a campground, you can set up and work that bear,
48:24
Speaker 1: you know, Speaking of sheep, like, we've had questions about
48:27
Speaker 1: predators that surplus kill. What's what's your thoughts on a
48:32
Speaker 1: bear that goes in and kills ten sheep in a night?
48:35
Speaker 1: Like what what's his motivation? Or I'm not Doctor Doolittle,
48:41
Speaker 1: like we just had people ask people love the subject. Yeah,
48:46
Speaker 1: feel that they're finding people like the idea. Okay, you
48:51
Speaker 1: can't deny that it happens, and that I'm not asking
48:53
Speaker 1: you what happened, like you can't deny that's now and
48:55
Speaker 1: then like a predator is going to go in, a
48:57
Speaker 1: bear line goes in and kills way more stuff they
49:00
Speaker 1: could ever possibly consume. And I think people look there,
49:04
Speaker 1: they want to hear about those because they're looking to
49:07
Speaker 1: answer something in their mind. I have no idea their
49:12
Speaker 1: motivation to it. Some people talk about they you know,
49:15
Speaker 1: they get started and they just get into a frenzy.
49:17
Speaker 1: They talk about the same thing with a weasel in
49:19
Speaker 1: a henhouse that they just go on a killing spirit.
49:22
Speaker 1: They're not counting, they're just doing what they're supposed to do. Yeah,
49:24
Speaker 1: I haven't found one yet that's very good at counting,
49:27
Speaker 1: so um, but yeah, they mean it just happens. So okay,
49:32
Speaker 1: we can move on from this subject. But I got
49:34
Speaker 1: one last question for you. You you you carry a
49:36
Speaker 1: service weapon? Do you so when you're going into a
49:40
Speaker 1: situation where you have a bear caught loose in someone's
49:42
Speaker 1: yard or house or whatever, Uh, do you have like
49:46
Speaker 1: a h did you carry a separate firearm for those situations? Well? We,
49:50
Speaker 1: I mean we all carry shotguns and rifles. But you know,
49:54
Speaker 1: if you're in a house, UM, you sure don't want
49:57
Speaker 1: to uh let loose a three o eight round in
49:59
Speaker 1: somebody's house, and and the shotgun can make a pretty
50:03
Speaker 1: big mess. It's it's generally if there's if we're looking
50:07
Speaker 1: for a bear that's injured somebody, you'll see us out
50:10
Speaker 1: with a rifle or a shotgun. If we're just going
50:12
Speaker 1: into a house because the bear broke into a house,
50:15
Speaker 1: you'll see a dark gun or just just our pistols
50:17
Speaker 1: that we always have on. So do you carry a
50:18
Speaker 1: dark gun too? We we don't have enough dark guns
50:22
Speaker 1: for every officer, um, but like the on call, when
50:25
Speaker 1: I'm on call, I generally pick up the dark gun. Um.
50:28
Speaker 1: We have more than one for the area. I think
50:30
Speaker 1: we have four for eight guys. So usually the on
50:32
Speaker 1: call officer picks up one so he has it with him. Um,
50:36
Speaker 1: and and otherwise that the problem is otherwise you store
50:38
Speaker 1: them sometimes in Glenwood, Carbondale or here an Eagle, And
50:41
Speaker 1: if you're up in Veil when the call comes and
50:43
Speaker 1: it's in Veil, then you gotta run back here have
50:45
Speaker 1: somebody from here bring it up to you. So usually
50:47
Speaker 1: the on call officer picks up a dart gun and
50:50
Speaker 1: has it with him. I feel like they should supply
50:52
Speaker 1: you guys with a handful of more dark guns. Well,
50:54
Speaker 1: they probably should. They're expensive little items. Yeah, yeah, they're
50:58
Speaker 1: they're they're pretty close three thousand apiece. So alright, Uh man,
51:05
Speaker 1: we have a bunch of things we wanted to ask
51:06
Speaker 1: you about, Brody asked the while we're on bears, can
51:10
Speaker 1: we just like we still hit embarrassing? Yeah? Can we
51:12
Speaker 1: just get into the other bear that may or may
51:15
Speaker 1: not be around or do you not want to get
51:16
Speaker 1: into that? Go ahead, go ahead, We're getting into this later.
51:21
Speaker 1: But we'll get into it later. I mean, yeah, okay,
51:25
Speaker 1: go ahead. Yeah. Well, we just we're hanging out with
51:27
Speaker 1: another fellow that hunts about in Colorado, and uh he
51:31
Speaker 1: seems to think that they're accomplished hunter. Yea, we accomplished
51:34
Speaker 1: hunters sin's a lot of time out there, hangs out
51:36
Speaker 1: with a lot of people to hang out. You know,
51:37
Speaker 1: there are in the woods a lot family has been
51:39
Speaker 1: here for a bazillion years. Yes, homestead. I think the
51:44
Speaker 1: simplest way to say is that is that he believes
51:48
Speaker 1: that there's a conspiracy. I feel like you're leading to this. Okay,
51:52
Speaker 1: go ahead. There were that somehow that there's were there's
51:55
Speaker 1: grizzly bears in Colorado, but they're being they're being trapped
51:59
Speaker 1: and moved back up to Wyoming, and it's being covered up.
52:02
Speaker 1: Nobody gets to hear anything about it. In this day
52:06
Speaker 1: and age of cell phones and game cameras everywhere, I
52:09
Speaker 1: don't think you could cover anything up. I mean, are
52:12
Speaker 1: there grizzly bears in Colorado? Honestly, I don't know. Um,
52:17
Speaker 1: you know, we had a wolverine come from Yellowstone. We've
52:20
Speaker 1: had our links go from here all the way back
52:24
Speaker 1: to Canada and in Alaska where they were caught. Um,
52:26
Speaker 1: we've had wolves come down from Yellowstone. Um could a
52:29
Speaker 1: grizzly bear do it? You bet? So? If somebody says
52:32
Speaker 1: it's as possible ones here, sure it's possible. We don't
52:36
Speaker 1: have any definitive proof, you know, on the wolves that
52:39
Speaker 1: showed up, they got hit by a car, one got shot,
52:41
Speaker 1: one got poisoned. We got definitive proofs wolves have made it.
52:45
Speaker 1: We got definitive proof on links and the wolverine that
52:48
Speaker 1: they made the trek Um. We just don't have any
52:51
Speaker 1: definitive proof that there's any grizzly bears in Colorado? Do
52:54
Speaker 1: you guys investigate credible reports? We look into concredit. Yeah,
52:59
Speaker 1: I'm not your invest the gates the right word, but yes,
53:01
Speaker 1: we we look into it, especially if they have a picture.
53:04
Speaker 1: I mean you'll get reports lots of time that well,
53:07
Speaker 1: this is bigger than any black bear I've ever seen,
53:09
Speaker 1: so it had to be at grizzly. Yeah, but well
53:11
Speaker 1: we've handled two. We handled a bear in Glenwood I
53:16
Speaker 1: think in two thousand and twelve that twenty four hours
53:19
Speaker 1: after it died at wage seven and thirty eight pounds
53:21
Speaker 1: in August. WHOA, Yeah, And I don't always understand the
53:25
Speaker 1: size thing, because there's plenty of two pounds hundred pound
53:28
Speaker 1: grizzlies running around them. That's the thing I don't get either,
53:31
Speaker 1: because like you know, grizzlies do get to can get
53:35
Speaker 1: to be huge, but there's like a ton of a
53:37
Speaker 1: couple hundred pound grizzlies, and there's a lot of black
53:39
Speaker 1: bears in the United States. They're way bigger than the
53:41
Speaker 1: average grizzly. Yeah, but I mean everything that people see
53:46
Speaker 1: is always much bigger than than it really is, and
53:49
Speaker 1: that's just human nature. I mean, you guys have all hunted.
53:52
Speaker 1: You've all seen ground shrinkage where you shot an animal.
53:55
Speaker 1: It's like, this is a huge buck and it's like, huh,
53:58
Speaker 1: he's sure shrunk when he hit the ground. Yeah, everybody
54:00
Speaker 1: that runs in New a lion, big old Tom, big
54:02
Speaker 1: old Tom. And if okay, so let's say they're one
54:09
Speaker 1: did turn up or whatever, wouldn't it be the case
54:13
Speaker 1: that there's no no way you guys are gonna like
54:16
Speaker 1: cover it up, Like you would have to notify US
54:18
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife because there's an endangered species aspect to it, correct,
54:23
Speaker 1: Like they would have to become involved in some way.
54:28
Speaker 1: I wrong, But I don't know what they have to.
54:30
Speaker 1: I mean, if all it is is a sighting. But
54:32
Speaker 1: I'm saying, like, if if there was one confirmed in Colorado,
54:36
Speaker 1: like you guys knew, but I mean, certainly if we
54:38
Speaker 1: trapped one. There's no way you would keep it quiet.
54:42
Speaker 1: I mean somebody it's you know, just like everything else
54:47
Speaker 1: on the internet. Somebody's gonna post that picture, maybe only
54:50
Speaker 1: to send it to their best friend, and their best
54:52
Speaker 1: friends gonna send it to his best friend. It's gonna leak.
54:55
Speaker 1: It's gonna leaky, and it like if they said yes
54:59
Speaker 1: they are, you know, if it was confirmed they are here.
55:02
Speaker 1: At that point, would US Fish and Wildlife have to
55:04
Speaker 1: become involved because they're an endangered species, um threaten or what? However?
55:10
Speaker 1: There could be very they'd be very interesting. Yeah, I
55:12
Speaker 1: mean Idaho just he could prove their grizzly bear hunt.
55:16
Speaker 1: So one tag. Yeah, I think it is one tag
55:18
Speaker 1: for Idaho. Yeah, so I don't know for sure what
55:21
Speaker 1: that involvement would have to be in that all right? Uh,
55:28
Speaker 1: who wants to who wants to lay out how you
55:31
Speaker 1: guys totally screwed up how you run uh tag draws
55:36
Speaker 1: in Colorado? Well you're the one that's complaining about not drawing.
55:41
Speaker 1: You lay it out, Brodie. Oh so this this you
55:44
Speaker 1: guys went to a new basically a new re online
55:47
Speaker 1: retail system and new kind of draw like licensing draw
55:52
Speaker 1: process where you do not have to pay up front
55:56
Speaker 1: for the tag during the the application process. So and
55:59
Speaker 1: you is pasted. You paid the full fee for the
56:03
Speaker 1: license before that, the whole draw application process went through.
56:08
Speaker 1: If you didn't draw, you then got refunded that money.
56:12
Speaker 1: Now it's just a three dollar application fee, no money
56:16
Speaker 1: up front, And it seems like it doesn't seem like
56:19
Speaker 1: like the application numbers have increased greatly because you're not
56:24
Speaker 1: investing up front in that. So we're just wondering, like,
56:28
Speaker 1: was there a thought process why c p W doesn't
56:32
Speaker 1: want the money up front anymore? Or is there like
56:35
Speaker 1: is there some reasoning behind the process, like just not
56:38
Speaker 1: going through the refund thing is simpler and saves time
56:41
Speaker 1: and money. And yeah, that's exactly thought. You guys made
56:44
Speaker 1: a lot of money by having all that money right
56:46
Speaker 1: hold away into bank account. Well I have thought that too,
56:49
Speaker 1: but I was told we don't. Everybody thought everybody it
56:51
Speaker 1: was like a big thing, like making millions on interest
56:55
Speaker 1: on off of all. I mean, you think about and
57:00
Speaker 1: you've got a better banker than most people. You know,
57:02
Speaker 1: you're looking at a normal bank under one percent a
57:05
Speaker 1: normal bank account. If you get a CD for saying
57:08
Speaker 1: it wasn't even being put in a bank account. It was, well,
57:10
Speaker 1: it was in a bank account. But I don't think
57:12
Speaker 1: it's creating any interest. I feel like I need to
57:14
Speaker 1: back up from it. I feel like I needed I
57:15
Speaker 1: feel like some people, some people are not gonna understand
57:18
Speaker 1: FLA what we're talking about. So in instances where you
57:25
Speaker 1: have a greater demand for tags than there are hunting
57:31
Speaker 1: tags available, so there's more people to want to go
57:34
Speaker 1: hunt elk and some mountain range than the population can support, you,
57:39
Speaker 1: AH got a limited all, right, and so you hand
57:42
Speaker 1: out opportunities through a lottery permit. Some every state handles
57:48
Speaker 1: is differently. But Colorado was a state where you sent
57:51
Speaker 1: in all the money, right, and then they do their
57:55
Speaker 1: drawing and refund you. But but how long would the
57:58
Speaker 1: how long would you be your money? A couple of months? Yea,
58:02
Speaker 1: from from May to July? Okay, So someone's like out
58:07
Speaker 1: of pocket a substantial amount of money for talking like right,
58:10
Speaker 1: especially if it's a nonresident applying for a moose, sheep
58:14
Speaker 1: or go tag. That's you know, you're putting down a
58:16
Speaker 1: couple of thousand bucks for potentially if you're applying for
58:19
Speaker 1: all three of those you're putting down six thousand bucks
58:21
Speaker 1: for a tag that you don't even know if you're
58:24
Speaker 1: gonna draw. I had heard before, not particularly not not
58:27
Speaker 1: pertaining to Colorado, but I've heard before the reason they
58:29
Speaker 1: did the pay up front thing is because states used
58:32
Speaker 1: to do the drawing and then have people be like dah,
58:38
Speaker 1: but I don't actually have the money, okay, so it
58:40
Speaker 1: messes your whole system up. So like, okay, everybody pays
58:43
Speaker 1: up front that when we know it's all paid for,
58:45
Speaker 1: and when we pick a guy or a woman, um,
58:49
Speaker 1: they're good for the expense because they already pay for
58:51
Speaker 1: the dame thing. So now what Colorado is doing right
58:55
Speaker 1: is the minute your name comes up, you get being
58:58
Speaker 1: by the computer, they run your credit card right and
59:02
Speaker 1: if you if you, they give you a couple of
59:05
Speaker 1: weeks after the licenses that that are announced, like but
59:10
Speaker 1: if but if your credit card is not good. I
59:12
Speaker 1: think this year the licenses were announced this week's so
59:16
Speaker 1: first week of June. If if you haven't paid for
59:19
Speaker 1: that thing by June, and then they go down the list.
59:24
Speaker 1: So got like, I don't understand why so many more
59:27
Speaker 1: people I've heard all kinds of or heard there's increase
59:31
Speaker 1: in the amount of people applying for non resident big
59:33
Speaker 1: game tags in Colorado. I've heard you said you used
59:36
Speaker 1: off the chart. You're still paying all the money, Like
59:40
Speaker 1: what is what was people's problem? They didn't want to
59:42
Speaker 1: be out the money for a couple of months. Well,
59:44
Speaker 1: here's the deal in Colorado. Something that we should have
59:46
Speaker 1: explained to um is that as a non resident, you
59:50
Speaker 1: couldn't do credit card for moves sheep and go. So
59:54
Speaker 1: you couldn't just have be a guy that had like
59:56
Speaker 1: a credit card with the limit of ten grain you have.
1:00:00
Speaker 1: She had to have sixth grade in your savings and
1:00:02
Speaker 1: then write out three checks to the box of piece
1:00:05
Speaker 1: to apply for those three So that's like even at
1:00:09
Speaker 1: one step hard. Yeah, it's not funny. No, I didn't
1:00:15
Speaker 1: realize that a couple of very stern looks when my
1:00:18
Speaker 1: wife would be like what, oh, I like, well, I
1:00:21
Speaker 1: only did sheep and moose, I didn't do all three. Yeah,
1:00:24
Speaker 1: my wife when I when I you know, started getting
1:00:27
Speaker 1: involved with my wife and we got to the point
1:00:29
Speaker 1: where we combined finances, which we resisted for a while,
1:00:33
Speaker 1: but she just got fed up with She likes to
1:00:36
Speaker 1: just know everything what's going on. And it was like
1:00:40
Speaker 1: the annual discussion we had to have about like she's
1:00:44
Speaker 1: like this cannot be real, and I might listen. I
1:00:47
Speaker 1: didn't make it up. It's not my choice. But yes,
1:00:51
Speaker 1: there there is a substantial sum of money scattered around
1:00:55
Speaker 1: in various state bank accounts, and it will all come
1:00:58
Speaker 1: back if I don't draw. It'd be like, well you
1:01:02
Speaker 1: better not draw unless you win lottery, in which case
1:01:05
Speaker 1: you will be out. Part of it's just this, I think,
1:01:08
Speaker 1: just the psychological barrier. People are just like that doesn't
1:01:11
Speaker 1: cost me anything. I'll apply, you know, and I'll figure
1:01:14
Speaker 1: it out if I get dropped. I wasn't thinking about
1:01:18
Speaker 1: you actually had to write a check, like you really
1:01:20
Speaker 1: need the money for those for those cheap moose goat tags,
1:01:26
Speaker 1: the rest of them not not. So what was what's
1:01:28
Speaker 1: the motivation? Like why I change it? Well, I had
1:01:33
Speaker 1: to make a better system and it yeah. I still
1:01:36
Speaker 1: had people that were doing paper applications. And you know,
1:01:41
Speaker 1: every time you use a credit card, you get charged
1:01:43
Speaker 1: a fee. So you're getting charged to fee to to
1:01:46
Speaker 1: take the person's money as the credit card, and then
1:01:49
Speaker 1: instead of refunding it back on the credit card, we
1:01:52
Speaker 1: are writing them a check. So every time you write
1:01:54
Speaker 1: a check, there's a cost to write a check, so
1:01:56
Speaker 1: that I mean there was a huge cost savings to
1:01:58
Speaker 1: do away with that fee, so run to draw costs money. Yes, yeah,
1:02:02
Speaker 1: and it just simplified the whole administrative process of it.
1:02:06
Speaker 1: I mean even it will as we work all the bugs.
1:02:09
Speaker 1: Anytime you open a new system, doesn't matter what it
1:02:12
Speaker 1: is that I mean, there's gonna be bugs. I mean
1:02:14
Speaker 1: some people were getting notified ten times that they've got
1:02:17
Speaker 1: a license, and they're like, did I get ten licenses?
1:02:21
Speaker 1: They're like, free, today is a good day. I got
1:02:25
Speaker 1: ten deer tags. So all they got the email ten times.
1:02:28
Speaker 1: I mean, there's just gonna be glitches in any new
1:02:30
Speaker 1: system you have, and and they just have to be
1:02:32
Speaker 1: worked through the fact that more people put in. And
1:02:35
Speaker 1: I haven't seen the numbers yet either, but I have
1:02:38
Speaker 1: heard that it is a significant increase in the number
1:02:41
Speaker 1: of people putting in. Um, the fact that more people
1:02:45
Speaker 1: put in it seems like, well something worked. Yeah. Well,
1:02:49
Speaker 1: I have three different perspectives on and they're they're competing
1:02:51
Speaker 1: their their contradictory one is just from a purely like
1:02:56
Speaker 1: what's in it for me? I remember my nine. A
1:03:00
Speaker 1: government teacher L de Young would always express everything in
1:03:03
Speaker 1: the world where he would say, like and remember, I'm
1:03:05
Speaker 1: only concerned with what affects al de Young, and that
1:03:08
Speaker 1: was like, that was how he explained the government right.
1:03:11
Speaker 1: He would he would discourage students from getting registered. He said,
1:03:15
Speaker 1: why would I want you people to vote? Why would
1:03:18
Speaker 1: I want to dilute my vote? So that was like
1:03:20
Speaker 1: so in looking at it from the L. De Young perspective,
1:03:23
Speaker 1: I'm bummed because now I have more competition to draw
1:03:26
Speaker 1: a permit, so that that's pretty selfish and I recognize that,
1:03:29
Speaker 1: but there's a part of my brain that holds that
1:03:30
Speaker 1: to be true. Part three, they're part two, And my
1:03:34
Speaker 1: competing perspectives on this Part two is I'm usually not
1:03:40
Speaker 1: resistant to they're being barriers to entry because it winds
1:03:48
Speaker 1: up being that the more dedicated, right, the favors the
1:03:53
Speaker 1: more dedicated people. Like I remember for a while in
1:03:56
Speaker 1: Montana you had to buy your bear license before bear season.
1:04:01
Speaker 1: They're thinking was they wanted to they wanted to prevent
1:04:05
Speaker 1: people from getting a bear and then running down and
1:04:07
Speaker 1: getting a tag because in the spring season they would
1:04:10
Speaker 1: find that it was a lot of just sort of
1:04:11
Speaker 1: incidental harvest. And so they're like, well, we're gonna look
1:04:14
Speaker 1: like people who are planning to go bear hunting making
1:04:16
Speaker 1: a specific effort to go on a bear hunts. You
1:04:18
Speaker 1: have to buy it that law came in. I thought,
1:04:22
Speaker 1: you know, I get it. That makes sense that there
1:04:24
Speaker 1: were people who are like dedicated to it. They're on
1:04:27
Speaker 1: top of it, they're following the rules, they know what's
1:04:30
Speaker 1: going on, right, and it gives a favoritism to that.
1:04:34
Speaker 1: They since got rid of that, and I was a
1:04:35
Speaker 1: little bit saddened by it. Now Part three, the part
1:04:38
Speaker 1: that competes is there shouldn't be any barriers to entry, right,
1:04:43
Speaker 1: it should be just more wide open, more availability, easier
1:04:48
Speaker 1: for people to participate. So I believe I feel all
1:04:50
Speaker 1: of these things, even though they don't all line up,
1:04:54
Speaker 1: meaning I see both sides of the story or all
1:04:57
Speaker 1: three sides of the story. Okay, agree with that. I'm
1:05:01
Speaker 1: a little saddened kind because that part one part about
1:05:05
Speaker 1: like I'm concerned only with what affects l the young
1:05:07
Speaker 1: part It's like I really am, like you know, I'm
1:05:11
Speaker 1: looking at him like really that just got harder, so
1:05:16
Speaker 1: got easier, harder, harder to draw, easier, and that That's
1:05:21
Speaker 1: another thing is we're like we're constantly hearing like about
1:05:26
Speaker 1: hunter numbers just falling, falling, falling, But yet it's like
1:05:31
Speaker 1: harder and harder to get a tag. And how how
1:05:34
Speaker 1: does that? How do those two things kind of line
1:05:37
Speaker 1: up with each other? If there's less hunters, why is
1:05:40
Speaker 1: it hard? Because the numbers that are falling are the
1:05:42
Speaker 1: dudes that used to buy like a used to hunt
1:05:45
Speaker 1: pheasants for a day. But there's more guys that are
1:05:47
Speaker 1: getting seriously just way more. The number of like the
1:05:51
Speaker 1: number of like hardcore hunters I feel has to be
1:05:56
Speaker 1: your choppers here to take you to dinniversity. He's gonna
1:06:01
Speaker 1: drop me on a hunting spot on the way, give
1:06:05
Speaker 1: me the coordinates for that way, like to run over there.
1:06:09
Speaker 1: No quick should be aside a. So less serious hunters gone, Okay,
1:06:17
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I like I don't know, I feel that
1:06:21
Speaker 1: there's I feel the number of like really dedicated hunters
1:06:25
Speaker 1: who are like out there, you know, applying for permits
1:06:28
Speaker 1: and crawling back into all the high holes is going up.
1:06:32
Speaker 1: What do you think? Um? Yeah, I think in some
1:06:35
Speaker 1: areas it is definitely. I mean we're seeing that a
1:06:38
Speaker 1: lot of it is. I mean, you guys are perfect examples.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: How many different states do you put in for so
1:06:43
Speaker 1: you could have the same number of hunters and decide
1:06:46
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put into two states this year instead of one,
1:06:50
Speaker 1: and so those two states see an increase in the
1:06:53
Speaker 1: number they get. And I think that's a lot of it.
1:06:55
Speaker 1: Can you speak at all, just quickly to that declining
1:07:00
Speaker 1: you know, supposed declining number of hunters, Like we're just
1:07:03
Speaker 1: like hearing all these doomsday scenarios all the time. Well,
1:07:07
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's doomsday, but unfortunately I represent
1:07:11
Speaker 1: that um in that our average age of hunters is
1:07:15
Speaker 1: getting older every year. And you would think, well, of
1:07:19
Speaker 1: course everybody is a year older. But if you got
1:07:22
Speaker 1: a sixty year old guy and you bring in a
1:07:23
Speaker 1: fourteen year old kid, you just dropped that age level
1:07:26
Speaker 1: way down. So it's the fact that that we're an
1:07:30
Speaker 1: aging part. The baby boomers are aging, and I think
1:07:34
Speaker 1: it's I can't remeber if it's fifty five or fifty six,
1:07:36
Speaker 1: but it's in the fifties somewhere is the average age
1:07:39
Speaker 1: of a hunter, and you know everything's coming and they're
1:07:42
Speaker 1: looking more golf time. They may not be in the
1:07:44
Speaker 1: same shape. Um, you've got travel restrictions in a lot
1:07:48
Speaker 1: of areas. Um, just the cost of getting places if
1:07:52
Speaker 1: you're coming from another state to hunt here, it's getting
1:07:56
Speaker 1: more and more expensive. So I mean, I definitely if
1:07:58
Speaker 1: you go out, if you went out and spent a
1:08:00
Speaker 1: day with us. When you go into camps, you remember
1:08:03
Speaker 1: the camp where you can say there was two people
1:08:05
Speaker 1: into thirty years old in that camp, or that camp
1:08:08
Speaker 1: was everybody under twenty. They were all young kids out
1:08:11
Speaker 1: there hunting. That's all I run into. Is anomaly you're
1:08:16
Speaker 1: saying now, Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean it used to
1:08:19
Speaker 1: be nothing to see UM families out there, maybe just
1:08:24
Speaker 1: the mom, maybe just the dad, but they'd have two
1:08:26
Speaker 1: or three kids with them sometimes that we're old enough
1:08:28
Speaker 1: to hunt. But they're out there now. You might see
1:08:30
Speaker 1: that on a Saturday or Sunday, but they're all gone
1:08:32
Speaker 1: by Monday. So it's in your opinion, it's a recruitment thing.
1:08:36
Speaker 1: It is definitely a recruitment and retention. When we went
1:08:39
Speaker 1: to totally limited deer tags and I don't remember the number,
1:08:44
Speaker 1: we lost a lot of deer hunters and they really
1:08:46
Speaker 1: haven't come back because they used to be over the
1:08:48
Speaker 1: county used to be over the counter you can get
1:08:50
Speaker 1: you could make the decision that day. Here you can
1:08:52
Speaker 1: make the decision a couple of days after. You had
1:08:54
Speaker 1: to go to a UH Division Wildlife office and buy
1:08:58
Speaker 1: your license there after the season open. But you could
1:09:00
Speaker 1: get it over the tag deer hunt and go whenever
1:09:02
Speaker 1: you want it. Now it's it's all draw you know.
1:09:06
Speaker 1: A lot of the people have just they're like, you know,
1:09:08
Speaker 1: I just don't want to fight with it. It takes
1:09:10
Speaker 1: me two years or three years to get a tag.
1:09:12
Speaker 1: I just don't want to do it. Um, brodyn tee up.
1:09:19
Speaker 1: The shed hunting thing you guys like actually came in
1:09:21
Speaker 1: and now you manage sheds like you manage shed antlers
1:09:24
Speaker 1: like game animals. Now there's there's rules around it. There
1:09:27
Speaker 1: is rules around it, So I mean I could I'll
1:09:32
Speaker 1: speak to my history of it. I used to get
1:09:35
Speaker 1: after it pretty hard. Um. You know. Shed hunting has
1:09:38
Speaker 1: gotten more and more popular in the West all over
1:09:41
Speaker 1: the place really um, but it's like highly competitive, and
1:09:47
Speaker 1: it got to the point where there were days when
1:09:50
Speaker 1: I'd go out shed hunting and late winter early spring
1:09:53
Speaker 1: where I would see more guys out shed hunting than
1:09:56
Speaker 1: I would ever see during rifle deer season, like running
1:10:00
Speaker 1: into it's so weird. Like when I was a boy,
1:10:04
Speaker 1: it would be that if you saw one, you might
1:10:08
Speaker 1: pick it up. But also like the whole country decided
1:10:11
Speaker 1: that it was just the most important thing you could
1:10:14
Speaker 1: be doing, is being out picking up antlers, and and
1:10:17
Speaker 1: I look, I I got pretty serious about it for
1:10:19
Speaker 1: a while, but then I started like, because you're trying
1:10:23
Speaker 1: to make money on it, well, because the chew toy market. No,
1:10:27
Speaker 1: I mean I just collected him and liked looking at him.
1:10:30
Speaker 1: Before we moved. I sold a bunch for a couple
1:10:32
Speaker 1: of thousand bucks. But um, you had enough that you
1:10:35
Speaker 1: had enough to make it worth selling. Because that's another thing.
1:10:39
Speaker 1: And just like have we talked about this before? That
1:10:44
Speaker 1: the market, So there's a commercial market for antlers, and
1:10:47
Speaker 1: it was the chandelier So like antler, chandeliers became popelars,
1:10:51
Speaker 1: so they became a market for chandeliers and decorations. And
1:10:54
Speaker 1: then the chew toy market took off where they buy
1:10:57
Speaker 1: antlers and saw him up and sell them for an
1:10:59
Speaker 1: ungodly automony, and pet stores they do all sorts with them.
1:11:02
Speaker 1: They grind them up in a powder. No, that's only
1:11:05
Speaker 1: with velvet. But is there anything else that you know
1:11:08
Speaker 1: build the antlers are sold or used for after they're sold. No,
1:11:12
Speaker 1: that I mean those are the three main things that
1:11:14
Speaker 1: they go overseas and then chew toys. And but I
1:11:17
Speaker 1: don't even know if that commercial market is even close
1:11:21
Speaker 1: to being the main problem. No, But but it's this.
1:11:23
Speaker 1: But here's the point I'm getting at. And I can't
1:11:25
Speaker 1: tell you that this is actually true or not. But
1:11:27
Speaker 1: what feels to me, what seems to me correlated, is
1:11:30
Speaker 1: as the commercial market developed, the recreational market became like
1:11:37
Speaker 1: people all of a sudden ascribed a value to it.
1:11:40
Speaker 1: For instance, with Morel's when you hear that morals are
1:11:44
Speaker 1: worth x dollars a pound in a restaurant, it increases
1:11:50
Speaker 1: people's interests, like they're like, oh, that's something I'd like
1:11:54
Speaker 1: to find and eat. If they're so valuable, it makes
1:11:58
Speaker 1: me want to go do it, for instance, like trapping
1:12:01
Speaker 1: spot trapping spot proms or spot shrump. Knowing that that's
1:12:05
Speaker 1: the most like we trap them, And in my mind
1:12:07
Speaker 1: I get sort of like I can't help but get
1:12:09
Speaker 1: slightly more excited about it, knowing that it is the
1:12:11
Speaker 1: most expensive shrimp. And then when you hear that they're
1:12:13
Speaker 1: going for like thirty some dollars a pound, I'm like, wow,
1:12:17
Speaker 1: you're running the numbers in your head. And then I'm
1:12:19
Speaker 1: and I'm and I'm like kind of sinfully almost viewing
1:12:23
Speaker 1: them differently knowing the value. So I feel that as
1:12:25
Speaker 1: that chew toy market and chandelier market came in, people
1:12:29
Speaker 1: also also we're like, I just want to find it
1:12:31
Speaker 1: and have it laying around. And because I now recognize
1:12:34
Speaker 1: the value and get a picture of your holding it
1:12:37
Speaker 1: on social media, I mean that's a huge part of Yeah,
1:12:42
Speaker 1: people do grip and grins with antlers. Yeah. Man, Like,
1:12:45
Speaker 1: so you didn't do anything, You just picked the damn thing. Yeah,
1:12:47
Speaker 1: I mean, but they it is like as big as
1:12:50
Speaker 1: having a picture of you holding the big buck. If
1:12:52
Speaker 1: you're holding the set of matched antlers, man, that's like, yeah,
1:12:57
Speaker 1: so now we got Bill tell us why this increase um? Yeah? Yeah,
1:13:03
Speaker 1: what happened. Also, every time Dick and Brody is our
1:13:08
Speaker 1: scrounged around on the woods for handlers, Yeah, and they're
1:13:11
Speaker 1: competitive about it. I want to get there before Brody
1:13:15
Speaker 1: and from out of state, from from well, yeah, well,
1:13:18
Speaker 1: part of the problem was, you know, Wyomings always had
1:13:21
Speaker 1: closures on winter range, so you couldn't go there and
1:13:24
Speaker 1: hunt stuff, but on very specific patch of the ground
1:13:27
Speaker 1: right right right, but there was still closures. And and
1:13:31
Speaker 1: then Utah did there. It was free, but you had
1:13:34
Speaker 1: to do the permit over the internet, taking educational test
1:13:38
Speaker 1: on it and go. No big deal. But what we
1:13:40
Speaker 1: saw as other places close things, and as you get
1:13:44
Speaker 1: units like we're sitting in here now forty four that's
1:13:46
Speaker 1: a trophy deer unit, a known trophy deer unit where
1:13:50
Speaker 1: people are doing their grips and grins with their harvested
1:13:52
Speaker 1: two thirty bucks. People like I want to go there,
1:13:56
Speaker 1: and I want to go there in the spring and
1:13:58
Speaker 1: I'll scout and I'll pick up outlers and I'll know
1:14:01
Speaker 1: what I'm looking for. And it's it was no longer
1:14:04
Speaker 1: the recreation guy that maybe on Saturday there's ten people
1:14:07
Speaker 1: in you Go county out hunting it. It's like on
1:14:10
Speaker 1: Monday there's five people out there hunting it, and on
1:14:13
Speaker 1: Tuesday there's five people out there hunting, and on Wednesday,
1:14:17
Speaker 1: I don't know five. What people forget is I mean,
1:14:21
Speaker 1: I don't know that Brody walked up the same hill
1:14:24
Speaker 1: yesterday that I'm gonna walk up today. So you're looking
1:14:26
Speaker 1: at an animal again. Remember, these does are all pregnant,
1:14:29
Speaker 1: they're in their third trimester, they're coming off a starvation.
1:14:33
Speaker 1: They're starving during the winter, no matter what the winter is.
1:14:35
Speaker 1: Your quote is winter weekends, spring kills, right, And it's
1:14:41
Speaker 1: I mean, you're you're looking at all these things. And
1:14:44
Speaker 1: now you've got these people out there pushing deer. We've
1:14:46
Speaker 1: we've had reports. I haven't seen it, but I believe
1:14:48
Speaker 1: it will happen that people are out chasing the bucks,
1:14:52
Speaker 1: trying to get him and in December, trying to get
1:14:55
Speaker 1: him excited where they run and maybe knock their antlers off.
1:14:58
Speaker 1: I've heard many December in December, but I mean I've
1:15:01
Speaker 1: seen it out of a helicopter that as you're counting deer,
1:15:04
Speaker 1: they jump a fence and an antler drops off. But
1:15:06
Speaker 1: certainly even February, you know, yeah, I've heard many reports
1:15:11
Speaker 1: that some like firsthand reports of people seeing oh like
1:15:16
Speaker 1: a bull that's already dropped one and trying to chase,
1:15:20
Speaker 1: thinking to the other one's gotta be ready to fall.
1:15:22
Speaker 1: And and there's I mean, I've seen it firsthand of people.
1:15:25
Speaker 1: Every night on their way home for work, stop at
1:15:27
Speaker 1: a place that has elk winter range. There was seven
1:15:30
Speaker 1: bulls there yesterday. There's only five today, but there's seven elk.
1:15:34
Speaker 1: They dropped their antlers. The next morning, they're up there
1:15:36
Speaker 1: looking for him. Well, the next guy comes in, he
1:15:39
Speaker 1: doesn't know somebody else gonna do it. I'm gonna go
1:15:41
Speaker 1: up there tonight, you know. And then that's well, I
1:15:44
Speaker 1: didn't find it, but they got to be there because
1:15:45
Speaker 1: they're still there, so they go up the next day.
1:15:47
Speaker 1: You just keep pushing these animals, and you're just you're
1:15:50
Speaker 1: impacting the animal that you want to be as healthy
1:15:53
Speaker 1: as possible to produce the best offspring and and to
1:15:57
Speaker 1: have the biggest set antlers they can for these is
1:16:00
Speaker 1: they're looking for a trophy animal because it's just the
1:16:02
Speaker 1: time of year where those animals cannot afford to burn
1:16:05
Speaker 1: extra calories. That's kind of the irony of it, right,
1:16:08
Speaker 1: is that in looking for antlers, you sort of celebrating
1:16:12
Speaker 1: this emblem of like a really healthy mature animal, but
1:16:15
Speaker 1: in doing it, you're impairing its ability to become a big,
1:16:19
Speaker 1: healthy mature animal, and you're impairing the ability for that
1:16:22
Speaker 1: herd to grow. I mean, if you stress those doughs
1:16:25
Speaker 1: enough that they don't put on you know, in a
1:16:28
Speaker 1: in about April, these animals can start to gain weight.
1:16:32
Speaker 1: And that's really crucial for those doughs. They start to
1:16:35
Speaker 1: gain weight because lactation is the most energy requiring item
1:16:40
Speaker 1: they're going to go through in their life. So they're
1:16:42
Speaker 1: coming out of a starvation, they're trying to put weight on,
1:16:44
Speaker 1: they're gonna give birth, they're going to go right into lactation.
1:16:47
Speaker 1: I mean, they've got to have time to pick up
1:16:49
Speaker 1: whatever weight they can. If that dough doesn't get enough
1:16:53
Speaker 1: food to do good lactation, those fawns don't make it,
1:16:55
Speaker 1: or they make it as a run. So just like
1:16:58
Speaker 1: we talked about on the bear, now got an age
1:17:00
Speaker 1: class of the that didn't make it or their subpars,
1:17:03
Speaker 1: so they don't make it through the winter. And if
1:17:05
Speaker 1: that dough or cows in bad enough shape, they won't
1:17:08
Speaker 1: breathe in the fall because they're they're just not in
1:17:11
Speaker 1: good enough shape to get pregnant. So people are clear
1:17:14
Speaker 1: that the new rule is west of you cannot shed
1:17:19
Speaker 1: hunt on public land before May one. Have you had
1:17:25
Speaker 1: to have you issued a citation um. In some areas
1:17:28
Speaker 1: we've issued citation in other ways. We had a closure here,
1:17:31
Speaker 1: so we could issue citations um. In some of the
1:17:33
Speaker 1: areas west of they hadn't had a closure, so they
1:17:37
Speaker 1: have to give just warnings. Now if I if I
1:17:39
Speaker 1: warned you and I see you out the next day,
1:17:41
Speaker 1: I can issue a citation. But because it's a new rule,
1:17:45
Speaker 1: we generally give them a grace period that you'll just
1:17:47
Speaker 1: get a warning. Oh, I think just for wearing it
1:17:50
Speaker 1: for the first year. Yeah, did you notice you feel
1:17:54
Speaker 1: that that's gonna be effective? Like have you? Did you
1:17:56
Speaker 1: kind of notice a change? And I mean there's well
1:17:59
Speaker 1: the change we noticed was we had several people hearing
1:18:02
Speaker 1: eagle that got permission to hunt on private land and
1:18:06
Speaker 1: that somebody would see him walking the fence line and
1:18:08
Speaker 1: maybe they were over the fence line, maybe they weren't,
1:18:10
Speaker 1: but they were turning them in. Oh. And then the
1:18:13
Speaker 1: guy would say, well, I saw Brody down there, glass
1:18:16
Speaker 1: in me. That's I saw that sucker up on this
1:18:18
Speaker 1: side doing it. So they're turning one another. You know.
1:18:22
Speaker 1: I was walking into a spot to rabbit hunt in
1:18:25
Speaker 1: February and there is a lady that I see hiking
1:18:28
Speaker 1: in a certain area with her dog and she's like,
1:18:30
Speaker 1: you know, there's just you're not supposed to be shed hunting.
1:18:34
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm rabbit hunting. It's okay, So so
1:18:37
Speaker 1: what is the exact prohibition. It's picking it up actually
1:18:42
Speaker 1: going from memory. I haven't read it in a month
1:18:44
Speaker 1: or so, but it's actually uh searching for it, marking
1:18:48
Speaker 1: it or picking it up. So if you're out there
1:18:51
Speaker 1: with your GPS and marking out, you've got a problem.
1:18:55
Speaker 1: I got you. So then it kind of gets into um,
1:19:00
Speaker 1: how to stop a dude walking around the woods and
1:19:01
Speaker 1: be like, what exactly is your intention right now? Well,
1:19:05
Speaker 1: you don't have to necessarily stop him if you watch
1:19:07
Speaker 1: him and you know you you see him doing this
1:19:10
Speaker 1: grid pattern. Not many people hunt rabbits in a grid
1:19:13
Speaker 1: pattern and then they don't stop and do this. Oh yeah,
1:19:18
Speaker 1: I saw a bunny here. Let me mark that. Yeah,
1:19:21
Speaker 1: So I mean there again, it's it's you know, it's
1:19:23
Speaker 1: the circumstances and you gotta put the whole picture together.
1:19:26
Speaker 1: But was there quite a bit of blowback where people
1:19:28
Speaker 1: pissed about it. There was a lot of people pissed
1:19:30
Speaker 1: about it. But what what do they view were they
1:19:33
Speaker 1: were they annoyed because man, I like to hunt shed
1:19:35
Speaker 1: antlers and now I'm annoyed or they annoyed because this
1:19:39
Speaker 1: is a weird way for government to kind of step
1:19:41
Speaker 1: into one's life. I think more of it was, well,
1:19:45
Speaker 1: more of it was actually I'm obeyed the rule, but
1:19:48
Speaker 1: he's not. Oh, I want you to do something about
1:19:51
Speaker 1: So yeah, I can see that everyone's gonna go anyway,
1:19:53
Speaker 1: but now I don't feel like I can go. And
1:19:56
Speaker 1: I mean, I think what you'll see is more and
1:19:58
Speaker 1: more states do this. You'll really dilute the impact to
1:20:03
Speaker 1: each one of the states. Because you know, if Wyoming
1:20:06
Speaker 1: had it that you can't hunt there during these months,
1:20:09
Speaker 1: will they come here? And if Utah has something, well,
1:20:13
Speaker 1: they can't go there. And I think Nevada has done.
1:20:15
Speaker 1: There's four or five different states some season of enclosures.
1:20:19
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, but I think that's mainly on their
1:20:21
Speaker 1: state property, state game management with winter range areas. So
1:20:25
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you're going to see but you know,
1:20:27
Speaker 1: part of it is is we've been pushing, especially in
1:20:31
Speaker 1: this area and in the resort areas, that the level
1:20:34
Speaker 1: of recreation. I mean, as I sit here and look out.
1:20:36
Speaker 1: There's probably been a hundred people go by this path
1:20:38
Speaker 1: up above us, which isn't a big deal. It's not
1:20:40
Speaker 1: a spring winter or spring area or winter range right now.
1:20:44
Speaker 1: But the recreation has become such a huge issue here,
1:20:47
Speaker 1: and there's been a lot of studies done on the
1:20:49
Speaker 1: impact of any type of recreation or human disturbance on
1:20:52
Speaker 1: these animals that we felt you'd be a hypocrite not
1:20:56
Speaker 1: to say that, hey, you're out hunting sheds, you're impacting
1:21:00
Speaker 1: these animals just like a person running mountain, biking, horseback riding,
1:21:04
Speaker 1: or a TV in out there. We gotta step back
1:21:07
Speaker 1: and say we got to protect this too. I mean,
1:21:10
Speaker 1: it's not about the sheds, it's about protecting those animals
1:21:13
Speaker 1: that are out there trying to make the living through
1:21:15
Speaker 1: the winter and come into spring in good shape so
1:21:18
Speaker 1: they can reproduce. Yeah. Yeah, it's a pro wildlife should
1:21:22
Speaker 1: be viewed as a pro wildlife, pro hunting move right.
1:21:25
Speaker 1: Oh yeah yeah? Um, are there really like a whole
1:21:34
Speaker 1: ton more moose in Colorado now than it used to be? Well,
1:21:37
Speaker 1: we reintroduced him in the late seventies and our population
1:21:41
Speaker 1: now I didn't I didn't realize you guys had to
1:21:42
Speaker 1: do a reintroduction here out well, I don't know, well
1:21:47
Speaker 1: wiped out or just no longer here. I don't believe
1:21:50
Speaker 1: it or not. I wasn't around in those years when
1:21:53
Speaker 1: when moose might have been here before with the country
1:21:55
Speaker 1: was settled. But we reintroduced him up in North Park.
1:21:59
Speaker 1: So we went from I think it was seventy seventy
1:22:03
Speaker 1: nine we reintroduced him, and now we have about just
1:22:06
Speaker 1: a little over three thousand moose in the state. We
1:22:09
Speaker 1: hunt him in sixty different gm us, and we give
1:22:14
Speaker 1: out like four hundred and fifty tags each year for moose,
1:22:19
Speaker 1: and you're adding more hunts and new units almost every year.
1:22:23
Speaker 1: Almost every year we add some more. So I'm sure
1:22:26
Speaker 1: you're a word of like in in a lot of
1:22:28
Speaker 1: the northern tier states, moose are in real trouble because
1:22:33
Speaker 1: of primarily because of some pathogens, but in also because
1:22:38
Speaker 1: of increased predation in some areas. And just like it's
1:22:41
Speaker 1: a pretty bleak picture, um, you know, from Maine, Minnesota westward. Uh,
1:22:48
Speaker 1: it's like a pretty bleak picture in certain patches of
1:22:51
Speaker 1: moose range. So it's curious to hear that moose seemed
1:22:55
Speaker 1: to be doing there seems to be more moose every
1:22:58
Speaker 1: year in Colorado, right, I mean, we don't have brain
1:23:02
Speaker 1: worm here, hopefully we won't. Um. You know, our our
1:23:07
Speaker 1: tick situation isn't the same as the like Minnesota, Maine. Um.
1:23:11
Speaker 1: I mean it was up in Idaho recently and you
1:23:13
Speaker 1: couldn't walk outside in in May and Idaho without picking
1:23:16
Speaker 1: up ticks. We don't have the same level of ticks,
1:23:20
Speaker 1: and and ticks are becoming a big issue for him. Um.
1:23:23
Speaker 1: We're at a little bit of a higher elevation than
1:23:25
Speaker 1: a lot of these places. It may not be so
1:23:28
Speaker 1: certainly the ticks, the lack of the brain worm, and
1:23:30
Speaker 1: a lot of these places where you see the moose
1:23:32
Speaker 1: population going down always seems to be where there's a
1:23:36
Speaker 1: good number of white tailed deer, and so far in
1:23:39
Speaker 1: western Colorado we don't have a large, uh influx of
1:23:42
Speaker 1: white tailed deer. So I think that that plays a
1:23:45
Speaker 1: little there the vector for the brain work. Yeah, but definitely,
1:23:49
Speaker 1: you know, anytime you're bringing animal into a habitat that
1:23:52
Speaker 1: they haven't occupied, that that's good. There's kind of a
1:23:55
Speaker 1: niche that's waiting for him. So you can see this
1:23:58
Speaker 1: huge jump you see it in you a res of war.
1:24:00
Speaker 1: When a new reservoirs created, fishing is great for the
1:24:02
Speaker 1: first five or six years, and then all of a
1:24:03
Speaker 1: sudden really tapers off. So that's where we put some
1:24:07
Speaker 1: turkeys in and in a while later it just explodes
1:24:09
Speaker 1: and then they kind of they kind of hit that
1:24:12
Speaker 1: level that now we can really grow the population, and
1:24:15
Speaker 1: then they kind of plateau or or dropped down. So
1:24:18
Speaker 1: we're still in the in the climbing stages even from
1:24:20
Speaker 1: like so, so that's interesting that even from the late
1:24:23
Speaker 1: seventies they're still sort of doing that thing of like
1:24:28
Speaker 1: establishing a new territory and exploiting a niche that hadn't
1:24:31
Speaker 1: been exploited before. I mean, we moved him to North Park,
1:24:35
Speaker 1: we moved him to the Grand Mace, we moved him
1:24:37
Speaker 1: to the flat Tops, moved him down in the southwest
1:24:40
Speaker 1: part of the state. And the actually the ones in
1:24:42
Speaker 1: Eagle County here all came on their own. We haven't
1:24:44
Speaker 1: transplanted any of these in Um. I mean, the first
1:24:47
Speaker 1: moose that I knew have showed up in about two
1:24:50
Speaker 1: walking through the town of Vale, and by I think
1:24:54
Speaker 1: it was nine nine, we had them winnering in Homesteak Um.
1:24:58
Speaker 1: So they've kind of they've kind of taken off and
1:25:01
Speaker 1: done it on their own. I think part of what
1:25:03
Speaker 1: we're seeing, especially around the resort towns is in some
1:25:08
Speaker 1: places we may not have reached the habitats capability to
1:25:11
Speaker 1: handle them, but we may have reached the fact that
1:25:13
Speaker 1: they're moving into towns. They're happy to live in a town.
1:25:16
Speaker 1: I live near Steamboat, and there's a lot of human
1:25:19
Speaker 1: moose conflict, and they're really surprisingly tolerant of of people
1:25:27
Speaker 1: in the way, like even an anchor's where they'll just
1:25:29
Speaker 1: settle in and like spend their whole winter in something
1:25:31
Speaker 1: in a yard. They're they're tolerant until you make the
1:25:35
Speaker 1: wrong step and then they're gonna tap dance on you. Yeah,
1:25:39
Speaker 1: then they'll they'll they'll occasionally kill people. So I mean, um,
1:25:44
Speaker 1: I think you know steamboats an example. You know, we
1:25:47
Speaker 1: had some problems in Veil last winter. The winter before that,
1:25:51
Speaker 1: the moose were actually licking the cars to get the
1:25:53
Speaker 1: mag chloride off it um and and that was causing
1:25:57
Speaker 1: problems to it was right by the hospital to have
1:25:59
Speaker 1: people trying to get in and out of the hospital
1:26:00
Speaker 1: with moose standing by their car looking the side of
1:26:02
Speaker 1: their car. So it's one of those that sometimes you're
1:26:07
Speaker 1: going to hit a political carrying capacity that, hey, we
1:26:10
Speaker 1: need to reduce moose in this area because of these problems.
1:26:13
Speaker 1: You hit the social limit. Right as are you guys
1:26:18
Speaker 1: having white tail encroachment? Um, we're definitely seeing white tail
1:26:23
Speaker 1: along the Colorado River. We've had a few along the
1:26:26
Speaker 1: Eagle River. Um, like in place they've never been seen,
1:26:29
Speaker 1: we've never been seen before. Do you have Is there
1:26:31
Speaker 1: a policy here to because this is world famous mule
1:26:36
Speaker 1: deer country and and it's like that's kind of culturally
1:26:39
Speaker 1: what people are accustomed to seeing, and it's a celebrated animal.
1:26:43
Speaker 1: And we know that white tails don't do a lot
1:26:45
Speaker 1: of good for mule deer, and you have moose and
1:26:48
Speaker 1: white tails aren't great for moose. Is there is there sentiment,
1:26:53
Speaker 1: like public sentiment or pressure coming from hunters that let's
1:26:57
Speaker 1: do what we can to not allow the white tail
1:27:00
Speaker 1: intrusion into these areas. Yeah, you get it both ways.
1:27:04
Speaker 1: You get those saying let's get rid of the white
1:27:05
Speaker 1: tails and others saying, hey, i'd really like to shoot
1:27:07
Speaker 1: a white tail. Who's got the who's got the louder voice? Well,
1:27:10
Speaker 1: right now he's getting rid of the white tails. I mean,
1:27:13
Speaker 1: there are certain areas in the state that they've done
1:27:16
Speaker 1: unlimited tags, oftentimes on private land. You know. The big
1:27:20
Speaker 1: problem is, I mean, if you know a white tail
1:27:23
Speaker 1: from a mule deer, and you've seen enough of them,
1:27:25
Speaker 1: it's easy to tell the difference. Some people haven't seen
1:27:28
Speaker 1: enough of them, and we worry about somebody shooting the
1:27:32
Speaker 1: wrong one if if they aren't familiar with it. But
1:27:35
Speaker 1: there's been discussions going on. Um we have a few
1:27:39
Speaker 1: people with private land here that they're like, hey, I
1:27:42
Speaker 1: really like seeing the white tails. They're neat. I don't
1:27:44
Speaker 1: want to get rid of them. And we have other
1:27:46
Speaker 1: people that say can I shoot When you say, like,
1:27:49
Speaker 1: as far as the confusion you're talking about, if you
1:27:52
Speaker 1: were to issue white tail only tags for this area,
1:27:55
Speaker 1: you'd be worried that people would shoot mule deer. But
1:27:58
Speaker 1: as it stands now, I'm just buying a deer tag
1:28:01
Speaker 1: for this area. So if I saw a white tail,
1:28:04
Speaker 1: I'm good to shoot it. That it's an interesting point
1:28:08
Speaker 1: about not being able to see him, because there's like
1:28:11
Speaker 1: I grew up all around white tails and hunting white tails,
1:28:14
Speaker 1: and when I first moved out west, when I saw
1:28:18
Speaker 1: a deer for a couple of years. I would have
1:28:22
Speaker 1: to sort of like look at it, you know, consciously,
1:28:26
Speaker 1: like look at to figure out what I was looking at.
1:28:28
Speaker 1: As familiar as I was with one, the sort of
1:28:32
Speaker 1: search patterns or the clues I saw in the animal
1:28:35
Speaker 1: were more like when you see a deer, it's just
1:28:37
Speaker 1: a deer, because it's not an option. In Michigan, they're
1:28:40
Speaker 1: all white tails. And it actually took me a little
1:28:42
Speaker 1: while like looking at both to get to where you
1:28:45
Speaker 1: just like instantly and instinctively no one from the other. Um.
1:28:50
Speaker 1: It doesn't come automatically like you can have deep familiarity,
1:28:52
Speaker 1: like just like I think you can have like deep familiarity.
1:28:55
Speaker 1: We're looking at black bears all the time and and
1:28:59
Speaker 1: probably very quickly confused a grizzly for a black bear.
1:29:01
Speaker 1: You need to have a lot of experience of looking
1:29:03
Speaker 1: at both because if not, when you see it, an
1:29:08
Speaker 1: idea jumps in your mind, but you're not like separating
1:29:11
Speaker 1: the two of them out right, so you can see
1:29:14
Speaker 1: that like white tail, like guys who just hunted white
1:29:16
Speaker 1: tails all the time could make a snap decision and
1:29:18
Speaker 1: shoot a milder because when they look they just see dear, Yeah, exactly,
1:29:22
Speaker 1: they see dear. They you know, if the antlers are there,
1:29:24
Speaker 1: it's much easier. Moost guys are gonna see that that
1:29:27
Speaker 1: rack just doesn't look right. But if they're hunting antler less,
1:29:30
Speaker 1: you know, they aren't thinking, Wow, those ears look small,
1:29:34
Speaker 1: that head looks small. You know, the whole animal looks small.
1:29:38
Speaker 1: It's like just a yearly and I'll take it. So
1:29:43
Speaker 1: what else man here? You are, bro, do you have
1:29:45
Speaker 1: a of genuine game warden from your home area? I
1:29:51
Speaker 1: don't know. We've covered a lot of ground. Oh you
1:29:55
Speaker 1: know what we didn't touch on his uh he was Bill.
1:29:59
Speaker 1: I think we want to talked to Bill about some
1:30:01
Speaker 1: declining elk numbers mostly Oh yeah, and what the reasoning
1:30:08
Speaker 1: is behind that, because I know, you know, back when
1:30:11
Speaker 1: joannest lived in this area and and we're you know,
1:30:15
Speaker 1: we were both doing a lot of elk hunting around here,
1:30:18
Speaker 1: it was very easy to pick up an extra cow tag.
1:30:22
Speaker 1: I mean, to the point where some were going unsold
1:30:25
Speaker 1: an hour, to the point where the tags have been
1:30:28
Speaker 1: reduced a bunch. And you guys have some concerns about
1:30:32
Speaker 1: certain elk herds. Yeah, Colorado has what I mean vastly
1:30:35
Speaker 1: more elk than in any other state. What is the
1:30:38
Speaker 1: latest hundred grand more than the next state? I think
1:30:41
Speaker 1: what then Montana? Is it still hovering in that too,
1:30:46
Speaker 1: it's almost three hundred. Well, I think it's more like two,
1:30:50
Speaker 1: is it, is it? Yeah, we've came down from wine.
1:30:53
Speaker 1: We used to be around two fifty. We've reduced it
1:30:56
Speaker 1: since then. But you've been actively reducing the numbers by
1:31:01
Speaker 1: issuing more cow tax right in a lot of the units,
1:31:04
Speaker 1: we were trying to trying to reduce the herd numbers
1:31:07
Speaker 1: because of conflicts. But now you've got some concerns about
1:31:10
Speaker 1: certain Yeah, we've got some big concerns in certain areas.
1:31:14
Speaker 1: This is one of the areas from what we call
1:31:16
Speaker 1: E sixteen, which is the unit's forty four forty four
1:31:23
Speaker 1: and I think it's forty seven on the Aspen side
1:31:25
Speaker 1: that we've just seen it a significant decline since two
1:31:29
Speaker 1: thousand two, and that occurred, I mean almost fift decline.
1:31:34
Speaker 1: What's going on there? Grizz grizz and white tails. Yeah. Uh,
1:31:41
Speaker 1: you know, it would be wonderful if you could say
1:31:44
Speaker 1: there was just one thing, um, But as with most
1:31:47
Speaker 1: things of the wildlife, there's never just one silver bullet
1:31:50
Speaker 1: that this is what's causing it. But certainly if the
1:31:53
Speaker 1: big part we feel we're seeing is the human encroachment
1:31:58
Speaker 1: development ski areas. Uh. You know, it used to be
1:32:01
Speaker 1: known for its winter recreation in this area. Now it's
1:32:03
Speaker 1: known for the summer recreation, the loss of habitat, also
1:32:07
Speaker 1: habitat fragmentation a habitat. I mean, the same thing we
1:32:10
Speaker 1: talked about was shed hunters. Um. Any of you guys
1:32:14
Speaker 1: that have had kids, you know, if your kids are
1:32:16
Speaker 1: fussy and you're the only parent in the house and
1:32:19
Speaker 1: you sit down and try to have dinner, you don't
1:32:21
Speaker 1: get a whole lot of dinner because you're up dealing
1:32:23
Speaker 1: with the kids. So it's it's no different for deer
1:32:25
Speaker 1: elk that they're trying to fill their belly in the
1:32:28
Speaker 1: summer and a group of recreationists come through and disturb them.
1:32:31
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes later there's another group. So instead of feeding
1:32:35
Speaker 1: above the alpine maybe for three or four hours in
1:32:37
Speaker 1: the morning to get an hour worth, and then they
1:32:39
Speaker 1: have to go back lay down in the trees, and
1:32:41
Speaker 1: then they come out and try and do it at night.
1:32:43
Speaker 1: This whole other form of recreation, of recreating at night. Um.
1:32:48
Speaker 1: We used to have a rafting at night with night
1:32:53
Speaker 1: vision goggles. That was a big thing. And then now
1:32:56
Speaker 1: you have mountain bike races and twenty four hour running races,
1:33:00
Speaker 1: so you have people out at night training for those.
1:33:02
Speaker 1: And it's just getting to the point where the animals
1:33:05
Speaker 1: don't have a time to be alone. Solitude is important
1:33:09
Speaker 1: to them, The chance to feed it every possibility is
1:33:12
Speaker 1: important to them. Not having to move and burn energy.
1:33:16
Speaker 1: And then you add upon that there hasn't been much
1:33:19
Speaker 1: habitat improvement done. We haven't had any big fires. Uh yeah,
1:33:24
Speaker 1: predators in the mix. Um, you know if you're we
1:33:28
Speaker 1: know from our study we did in the nineties in
1:33:30
Speaker 1: the Upper Eaco Valley that if humans go in during
1:33:33
Speaker 1: the calving season in the cabin areas we can, we
1:33:35
Speaker 1: can drop the cow caffe ratio down by almost half too.
1:33:39
Speaker 1: But going back to the bear lion thing we're talking
1:33:41
Speaker 1: about earlier, that's that's the increasing number of bears and
1:33:44
Speaker 1: lions that's having an effect too. I mean, we know
1:33:47
Speaker 1: that bears and lions are very effective predators on calves
1:33:51
Speaker 1: and fonts um. And we've had more in enough radio
1:33:55
Speaker 1: collared adult cows killed by lions in the winter to know,
1:34:00
Speaker 1: pretty effective on them in the winter, and you get
1:34:02
Speaker 1: to that point where you get your population low enough,
1:34:05
Speaker 1: normally it's considered that, you know, predators aren't a huge
1:34:10
Speaker 1: issue if you have a healthy population there. It's what
1:34:14
Speaker 1: we call a compensatory mortality. In other words, they're gonna
1:34:19
Speaker 1: kill fifty elk, but probably forty those elk were gonna
1:34:22
Speaker 1: die anyways. They were gonna something else might have killed them.
1:34:24
Speaker 1: They might have had a wounding loss, they break a leg,
1:34:26
Speaker 1: they starve, but when you get to a certain level,
1:34:30
Speaker 1: you kind of reach that straw that breaks the camel's
1:34:32
Speaker 1: back and every animal you lose, it doesn't matter how
1:34:34
Speaker 1: you lose. It is an additive effect. There's no longer
1:34:38
Speaker 1: enough animals to say it's compensatory. So what we've done
1:34:42
Speaker 1: in this unit, um we've cut the licenses up till
1:34:46
Speaker 1: last year down by um this year we took the
1:34:51
Speaker 1: cow licenses down to ten cow licenses in every season.
1:34:55
Speaker 1: So there's gonna be a lot of people that were
1:34:57
Speaker 1: used to get in cow tags and ten a season,
1:35:01
Speaker 1: tennis season and per g mu per g m u y. Yeah,
1:35:06
Speaker 1: So like you know, first season for elk, you can
1:35:09
Speaker 1: hunt the whole data analysis unit. So you buy one
1:35:12
Speaker 1: license and it's good for all those units. In the
1:35:14
Speaker 1: second season, when you buy a license for forty five,
1:35:17
Speaker 1: it's only good for forty five. So there's ten cow
1:35:19
Speaker 1: tags in forty five in the second season. Third season
1:35:22
Speaker 1: there's ten, in the fourth season there's ten. So I
1:35:25
Speaker 1: mean that's a it's a huge cut in the number
1:35:27
Speaker 1: of licenses. Um, we're looking to run it up the
1:35:30
Speaker 1: chain of command and through the commission to look at
1:35:34
Speaker 1: maybe limiting bowl licenses, maybe doing what they did in
1:35:37
Speaker 1: the flat tops, limiting archery licenses. It might go to
1:35:41
Speaker 1: a totally limited ELK unit to reduce all of that pressure.
1:35:45
Speaker 1: In addition to that, out propose that only hunters are
1:35:47
Speaker 1: allowed to ever go into the woods. Okay, sure, those
1:35:55
Speaker 1: are some big changes. Those are huge changes, and we're
1:35:58
Speaker 1: seeing it. Uh. We just met with our research group
1:36:02
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago. Um, they're looking at drumming
1:36:05
Speaker 1: up some funding to try to get some callers put
1:36:08
Speaker 1: on cows, and we'll also put a vaginally inserted transmitters
1:36:14
Speaker 1: so when they calve, that transmitter will come out. It'll
1:36:16
Speaker 1: send a signal there calving and then We'll go in
1:36:19
Speaker 1: and capture the calf and put a collar on that
1:36:21
Speaker 1: calf and determine what happens to that calf. Does it
1:36:25
Speaker 1: die because of a predator? UM? Does it just die
1:36:27
Speaker 1: because it was in bad shape, doesn't make it through,
1:36:30
Speaker 1: doesn't make it through the first two months and then die?
1:36:33
Speaker 1: You know? Does it make it till winter and then die?
1:36:35
Speaker 1: I figure out when when are we losing these calves?
1:36:38
Speaker 1: How when you doing stuff like that? How many collars
1:36:40
Speaker 1: you or how many tags or collars do you have
1:36:42
Speaker 1: to have out in order for it to begin to
1:36:43
Speaker 1: be helpful? Well, I mean that's way outside of my knowledge.
1:36:48
Speaker 1: But the number they're talking about is like sixty. So
1:36:51
Speaker 1: at that point you you can start get a good picture.
1:36:53
Speaker 1: You start to get a picture. I mean, then you
1:36:54
Speaker 1: rely on on the computers that you put all the
1:36:57
Speaker 1: information in the computer with some parameters and it spits
1:37:00
Speaker 1: out what it what it should be seeing. Is this UM?
1:37:05
Speaker 1: Is that trend statewide or is it regions? Like is
1:37:10
Speaker 1: there areas in Colorado where the elk are just kicking
1:37:13
Speaker 1: ass or in Meeker they're doing good? And and it's
1:37:16
Speaker 1: funny you asked that because UM just across the road
1:37:20
Speaker 1: in what we call E twelve, which is thirty five,
1:37:22
Speaker 1: thirty six and three six I seventies. The only thing
1:37:26
Speaker 1: that separates them not a uh, not a blockage from
1:37:31
Speaker 1: predators to move, not a blockage for wintertime or summertime,
1:37:35
Speaker 1: and that Elkred was pretty well maintaining itself. Um. This
1:37:39
Speaker 1: year was a was a strange year with the snowfall
1:37:42
Speaker 1: and we had some issues getting a helicopter permit. Um,
1:37:45
Speaker 1: but we were running in the high thirties low forties
1:37:49
Speaker 1: for a winter cow caffe ratio UM this year. On
1:37:52
Speaker 1: the other side, all of a sudden, it went to
1:37:54
Speaker 1: explain that from a how many cas per hundred cows,
1:37:59
Speaker 1: so you would know, really want to see in the
1:38:00
Speaker 1: winter above forty calves per hundred cows to have a
1:38:04
Speaker 1: healthy population. And on the north side of I seventy
1:38:08
Speaker 1: we were maintaining that pretty easy at what number att
1:38:13
Speaker 1: So that's basically like almost year olds. They're nine months
1:38:16
Speaker 1: old or what everyone you're telling them they were counting
1:38:18
Speaker 1: in December and January. Um, they made it through the season.
1:38:22
Speaker 1: By they made it through the hunting season. You know,
1:38:24
Speaker 1: December is still a lot of winter to go and
1:38:26
Speaker 1: spring to go. So you can always lose some. But
1:38:29
Speaker 1: we we do in certain areas more on deer than elk.
1:38:33
Speaker 1: But in certain areas we have deer herds that they
1:38:36
Speaker 1: have enough collars on them they can tell us that
1:38:38
Speaker 1: the fawn mortality in this area was and the dough
1:38:42
Speaker 1: mortality was five or The nice thing about the south
1:38:46
Speaker 1: side of Ice seventy is is we had over three
1:38:48
Speaker 1: hundred mark animals from starting in about four untill about
1:38:52
Speaker 1: two thousand, so we knew a lot about those elk.
1:38:55
Speaker 1: We knew what their survival was. We were we were
1:38:58
Speaker 1: watching elk that had teeth left in their head produced
1:39:01
Speaker 1: calves year after year, and then in a really bad
1:39:04
Speaker 1: winter the cows would succumb to that bad winner. But
1:39:07
Speaker 1: we were getting cows we thought were twenty years plus
1:39:10
Speaker 1: being reproductively successful. So we had all that information to
1:39:15
Speaker 1: see that heard all of a sudden plummet like it
1:39:18
Speaker 1: has and on the other side of the highway it
1:39:19
Speaker 1: was staying pretty stable. Now, like I said, this year
1:39:22
Speaker 1: was it was a different year in our counts. We
1:39:24
Speaker 1: didn't get to count on the south side of Ice seventy.
1:39:26
Speaker 1: We only did the north side. There was very little
1:39:29
Speaker 1: slow snow. It makes the animals harder to find. But
1:39:32
Speaker 1: we went from a forty casper hundred cows down to
1:39:36
Speaker 1: so something's happened in that unit that bang all of
1:39:39
Speaker 1: a sudden. We've seen it. We've watched on the south
1:39:42
Speaker 1: side of Ice seventy. That's just kind of steady declined.
1:39:44
Speaker 1: Even though we keep reducing the licenses every year. The
1:39:47
Speaker 1: herd keeps going down now to see it on the
1:39:50
Speaker 1: other side, it's like, Okay, something's going on. They're seeing
1:39:53
Speaker 1: it in Montrose, they're seeing it. I think down in
1:39:56
Speaker 1: the San Louis Valley um Steamboat, I think saying they're
1:40:00
Speaker 1: starting to see kind of the same thing. Meeker they
1:40:03
Speaker 1: occurred is doing great and and I mean the only
1:40:06
Speaker 1: reason an elk herd is going to decline like that
1:40:10
Speaker 1: as a calf recruitment issue, right right, Well, I mean
1:40:14
Speaker 1: it could decline like that in in a severe winner.
1:40:16
Speaker 1: You can lose adults too, But yeah, if you're it's
1:40:19
Speaker 1: just like everything else. If you don't have any younger
1:40:21
Speaker 1: the year coming up, you're in trouble. And we did
1:40:24
Speaker 1: a Yeah, part of the reason we did the study
1:40:27
Speaker 1: we did in the Upper Eagle Valley is those elk
1:40:30
Speaker 1: were totally available to you in the summer. They were
1:40:33
Speaker 1: all above the alpine. You could put people out with
1:40:36
Speaker 1: a spotting scope and in one or two people could
1:40:39
Speaker 1: watch a group at two to three elk and see
1:40:42
Speaker 1: how many calves were nursing on the cows. I mean,
1:40:45
Speaker 1: we had radio colored cows and we would have to
1:40:48
Speaker 1: watch that cow for over three minutes to see if
1:40:50
Speaker 1: a calf nurse. Lots of times in the first ten
1:40:53
Speaker 1: minutes you get there, you'd see a calf nurse, so
1:40:54
Speaker 1: you know that's a successful cow. Sometimes on the ones
1:40:58
Speaker 1: that were barn you had to watch in the full
1:41:00
Speaker 1: three say, after three minutes, we never saw that cow
1:41:02
Speaker 1: nurse a calf, so we you know, we would go up.
1:41:07
Speaker 1: We did it. We did their search there because one
1:41:10
Speaker 1: we we had the skier is to be able to
1:41:11
Speaker 1: kind of keep people out. It allowed us to keep
1:41:15
Speaker 1: one area that there was no interaction with people. In
1:41:17
Speaker 1: the other area we brought people in to go due
1:41:20
Speaker 1: to disturbance. Then they were available to us in the
1:41:22
Speaker 1: summer to watch. So we went out last year because
1:41:25
Speaker 1: we've been talking for two or three years of doing
1:41:27
Speaker 1: a recreation impact study. What is the impact of recreation
1:41:31
Speaker 1: on trails to these elk. We wanted to see if
1:41:34
Speaker 1: we could get the same results they got out of
1:41:36
Speaker 1: the Starkey Research area UM that the Forest Service has.
1:41:40
Speaker 1: So we went up and flew last year in a
1:41:42
Speaker 1: fixed wing and in places where I normally it would
1:41:44
Speaker 1: see two to three elk, we saw none. Um. We
1:41:47
Speaker 1: put in two and a half hours of flying and
1:41:50
Speaker 1: we saw eighteen elk in the alpine. They did the
1:41:53
Speaker 1: next week they did the frying pan and they I
1:41:56
Speaker 1: think they saw twenty two elk in the alpine. So
1:42:00
Speaker 1: the elk were if they were there at all, they
1:42:01
Speaker 1: were feeding before daylight and by daylight they were gone.
1:42:05
Speaker 1: It was not unusual when we're flying to see people hiking.
1:42:08
Speaker 1: Um they were already at the top of the mountain
1:42:10
Speaker 1: at seven am in the morning. So so Pete just
1:42:13
Speaker 1: so people know, you were flying over alpine high country
1:42:18
Speaker 1: like tree lists tread so if you weren't seeing how
1:42:22
Speaker 1: they may have been in the timber. It could have
1:42:24
Speaker 1: been down below in the timber. But you know from
1:42:27
Speaker 1: doing it, since they normally would be out till ten
1:42:32
Speaker 1: o'clock in the morning. And if there's a snow field
1:42:34
Speaker 1: because the bugs they like to lay on the snowfield
1:42:36
Speaker 1: to stay cool and it keeps the bugs away from them.
1:42:39
Speaker 1: I mean, they weren't even on the snowfields. It was
1:42:41
Speaker 1: just nothing. So summer recreation, you're thinking of loving it
1:42:45
Speaker 1: to death? Man, loving it to death. I mean if
1:42:47
Speaker 1: you if you look at it, if you've lived here
1:42:49
Speaker 1: long enough, or you do that recreation. I mean it's
1:42:53
Speaker 1: seven sixty five days a year. There's recreation in this
1:42:57
Speaker 1: valley now. And if you look at my trail is
1:43:00
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. Each one of these towns wants
1:43:02
Speaker 1: to become a summer recreation mecca. So do you first
1:43:05
Speaker 1: see any like I mean, do you issue daily permits
1:43:10
Speaker 1: for certain areas for recreational use or like I mean
1:43:14
Speaker 1: what would be the way it just limit you somehow
1:43:17
Speaker 1: is what what would be limit use? But also educate
1:43:21
Speaker 1: the people. Um I mean we did a town of
1:43:24
Speaker 1: Aale ran a nice program, a wildlife forum. This winner
1:43:28
Speaker 1: um I was there, the Forest Service was there, there
1:43:31
Speaker 1: was two private consultants there and we addressed those type
1:43:34
Speaker 1: of issues. And the Forest Service provided I mean just
1:43:37
Speaker 1: an amazing figure that they had a trail that was
1:43:40
Speaker 1: closed for elk Calvin and mule deer migration closed in
1:43:43
Speaker 1: the spring, and so they went out and put a
1:43:45
Speaker 1: camera on it and in ten days they found two
1:43:47
Speaker 1: hundred people on the trail. So it's like, hey, here's
1:43:51
Speaker 1: a closed trail trying to give these animals this place
1:43:53
Speaker 1: to go. And two hundred people used it. And that
1:43:56
Speaker 1: was just on one section of the trail. There was
1:43:58
Speaker 1: other sections that could have been on and not use
1:44:00
Speaker 1: that seen that camera. Well, out of that there was
1:44:04
Speaker 1: enough hunters, mountain bikers, and hikers trail runners that said, well,
1:44:08
Speaker 1: what can we do? And so the Forest Service got
1:44:11
Speaker 1: them to be volunteers and they're standing on those trail
1:44:13
Speaker 1: closures on weekends. They put up gates so it's not
1:44:17
Speaker 1: just a sign now it's a gate, but these guys
1:44:18
Speaker 1: are standing there. Guys and gals are standing there saying
1:44:21
Speaker 1: this trail is closed. If you want a mountain bike,
1:44:23
Speaker 1: you should go here. If you want a hike, you
1:44:24
Speaker 1: ought to go there. So just some more education making
1:44:28
Speaker 1: people understand that you are the impact. Um. They did
1:44:33
Speaker 1: an interesting study on Antelope Island in Utah where they
1:44:37
Speaker 1: went out and they talked to the people that were
1:44:39
Speaker 1: recreating and they said, uh, yeah, you're a you're a
1:44:43
Speaker 1: mountain biker, do you think you have any impact on it? Now?
1:44:47
Speaker 1: But those horseback riders they screw up everything. Asked the
1:44:51
Speaker 1: horseback riders, those hikers to them, they screw it all up,
1:44:54
Speaker 1: pointing the finger at everyone else. Asked the hikers, it's
1:44:56
Speaker 1: the mountain bike riders. Nobody thought they were the impact.
1:44:59
Speaker 1: It was always somebody else. And it's I mean, I
1:45:03
Speaker 1: understand that that type of thinking on it, and it's like,
1:45:07
Speaker 1: it's just me and my dog. We just walked up
1:45:09
Speaker 1: the trail at nine o'clock in the morning, went at
1:45:10
Speaker 1: anybody else there? Well, but you weren't there at ten
1:45:13
Speaker 1: o'clock when three other people did, or at ten thirty
1:45:16
Speaker 1: when four people did. I mean every hour there's somebody
1:45:19
Speaker 1: on that trail, and that kind of constant irritation and
1:45:22
Speaker 1: disturbance is tough on animals. It's interesting to talk about
1:45:27
Speaker 1: all this from black bears and mountain lions having conflicts
1:45:33
Speaker 1: in town. Two. You know, agricultural practices that might allow
1:45:39
Speaker 1: whitetail deer to thrive in a place they hadn't thrive before. Um,
1:45:44
Speaker 1: this issue of what is like you know, mountain summer
1:45:47
Speaker 1: recreation have on wildlife. Uh, you know, no one can
1:45:54
Speaker 1: fool themselves anymore into thinking that there's anything in the
1:45:59
Speaker 1: lower forty eight that like it's just like isolated, you know,
1:46:04
Speaker 1: like just at a cursory glance, like of course, like
1:46:07
Speaker 1: humans have impacted everything, but just in these little detailed ways. Uh.
1:46:12
Speaker 1: We are in a position where we just have to
1:46:15
Speaker 1: own up to the fact that we impact virtually all
1:46:21
Speaker 1: aspects of the wildlife world. Um and need you in
1:46:26
Speaker 1: some ways like measure what that impact is and in
1:46:28
Speaker 1: times take like what are gonna be like unpopular decisions
1:46:32
Speaker 1: around how to control it, like with the shed hunting issue.
1:46:35
Speaker 1: I mean, it's all it's like people love to be outdoors,
1:46:38
Speaker 1: they love to be around wildlife, they want to participate
1:46:40
Speaker 1: in in you know, the world of wildlife. But my god,
1:46:44
Speaker 1: does it come at a cost? Man? Well, and you
1:46:46
Speaker 1: can't and you can't tell people hands off because then
1:46:48
Speaker 1: you don't want to encourage apathy. I mean it's almost
1:46:52
Speaker 1: worse if no one cared. I made the forest service
1:46:55
Speaker 1: in our organization and in all the state game and fish.
1:46:58
Speaker 1: I mean you see it all the time. Get out
1:47:00
Speaker 1: in nature, get your kids outside. They learn much better
1:47:04
Speaker 1: if they're in nature. So we're trying to get the
1:47:07
Speaker 1: people out, but we have to understand that as we
1:47:10
Speaker 1: do that, there's an impact, and we have to give
1:47:12
Speaker 1: them the tools on how to deal with those impacts.
1:47:15
Speaker 1: And a big thing you hear you hear at all
1:47:17
Speaker 1: the time at public meetings that those deer don't care.
1:47:20
Speaker 1: They stay in my yard every day. They don't care
1:47:23
Speaker 1: if I'm there, they don't care if my dog comes.
1:47:25
Speaker 1: And and we've told people, if the animal changes its behavior,
1:47:29
Speaker 1: you're too close, you've done something wrong. Back up. What
1:47:32
Speaker 1: we haven't told him is that whole physiological part of it.
1:47:35
Speaker 1: That just because the deer is standing there, if you're
1:47:37
Speaker 1: standing there looking at you, he's gone from maybe a
1:47:40
Speaker 1: green state of alertment to a yellow state. He's ready
1:47:43
Speaker 1: to flee. He's not eating, so he's not getting calories,
1:47:48
Speaker 1: and if he has to flee, then that's an impact
1:47:50
Speaker 1: on them. But we we haven't done a good job
1:47:53
Speaker 1: of saying what those physiological impacts are. The fact of
1:47:57
Speaker 1: a deer and elk standing up from laying down. The
1:48:00
Speaker 1: standing up is increasing calorie output. So if you think
1:48:04
Speaker 1: about it, every time you walk by, and if all
1:48:06
Speaker 1: they do is stand up, you increase their calorie output
1:48:08
Speaker 1: for that period it doesn't take long they get stood
1:48:12
Speaker 1: up ten or twelve times a day that you've really
1:48:14
Speaker 1: put a drain on their calories. And that's that's our fault.
1:48:18
Speaker 1: We haven't done a good job putting that out and
1:48:21
Speaker 1: getting people to understand that. We understand it ourselves. If
1:48:23
Speaker 1: you walk by a guy's house that has a giant
1:48:26
Speaker 1: Doberman pincher that charges that gate, even though you know
1:48:29
Speaker 1: you can't get through that gate, your heart rate goes up,
1:48:31
Speaker 1: The hair on the back of your next stands up,
1:48:34
Speaker 1: your respiration goes up, and it's like, you know that
1:48:37
Speaker 1: animal can't get to you, but you went through that
1:48:40
Speaker 1: physiological reflex. Nothing you can do about it. The you know,
1:48:48
Speaker 1: the the the animal in my yard. I feel that
1:48:53
Speaker 1: like that's something that you I spent a lot of
1:48:56
Speaker 1: energy trying a lot of time trying to counter as
1:48:58
Speaker 1: people to have this idea like, well, how could development
1:49:01
Speaker 1: be bad for wildlife? Because I have a deer, I
1:49:05
Speaker 1: have a turkey, I have an elk that comes into
1:49:07
Speaker 1: my yard. And it's you need to like when people
1:49:11
Speaker 1: have that mentality, you really need to try to invite
1:49:13
Speaker 1: them to view a much bigger picture that the fact
1:49:16
Speaker 1: that there's you know, a deer hanging out in your
1:49:19
Speaker 1: yard doesn't mean that the answer to more dear it
1:49:22
Speaker 1: would be clearly to build more yards, right right. It's
1:49:25
Speaker 1: kind of like you have to if you're gonna think
1:49:27
Speaker 1: that way or look at that way, you have to
1:49:29
Speaker 1: go a little bit deeper into some long term trends
1:49:32
Speaker 1: and thinking about what that deer's whole life cycle is
1:49:36
Speaker 1: and how it uses the landscape throughout the year. Um.
1:49:39
Speaker 1: But I think that it almost like does like when
1:49:41
Speaker 1: people get comfortable with that idea, and almost does a
1:49:44
Speaker 1: disservice to wildlife management, you know, yeah, and like there
1:49:50
Speaker 1: must be tons of them. There's one in my yard,
1:49:52
Speaker 1: and I mean you have to go back and say, well,
1:49:54
Speaker 1: before your house there was twenty there. Now there's one,
1:49:57
Speaker 1: and the other nineteen couldn't stand to be next to
1:50:00
Speaker 1: your house anymore. So they left or they died. I
1:50:03
Speaker 1: mean that's the question we get all the time when
1:50:05
Speaker 1: we talk about the reduction and elk numbers. Well where
1:50:07
Speaker 1: did they go? They didn't go anywhere. We don't see
1:50:11
Speaker 1: the herds next door jumping up in population numbers. These
1:50:14
Speaker 1: animals are dead, they're gone. They didn't There isn't a place.
1:50:19
Speaker 1: There isn't shankra law over the next ridge for them
1:50:21
Speaker 1: to live at. I mean every place that has elk,
1:50:24
Speaker 1: their elker there and they're trying to use it. If
1:50:26
Speaker 1: you move other elk in on them, you just double
1:50:28
Speaker 1: stressed them. And it's the same with you know, yeah,
1:50:32
Speaker 1: there's deer in my yard. You know, if you go
1:50:35
Speaker 1: and you followed those deer, it's like, well, they probably
1:50:38
Speaker 1: don't live as long as a deer in the wild
1:50:39
Speaker 1: because they get hit by cars. They're more stress, they're
1:50:42
Speaker 1: more susceptible to disease, um, they're probably not eating foods
1:50:46
Speaker 1: that are the best form because somebody is probably feeding
1:50:48
Speaker 1: them Cheetos or something. So you have all of these
1:50:52
Speaker 1: things that build up. And there was actually some stuff
1:50:54
Speaker 1: done in Chicago on raccoons of all things, and raccoons
1:50:58
Speaker 1: were becoming obese, they were getting diabetes, their teeth were
1:51:03
Speaker 1: rotting because they were eating so much human food. They
1:51:06
Speaker 1: weren't getting their normal diet, becoming like us. Just like us,
1:51:10
Speaker 1: they were eating human food. They became a human. If
1:51:13
Speaker 1: they could sit home on the couch with a remote
1:51:15
Speaker 1: and a bag of cheetos, they were pretty happy. So
1:51:20
Speaker 1: all right, you guys got any anymore? Man, I'm good. Yeah,
1:51:24
Speaker 1: I gotta follow up. Um, I killed the cow this year.
1:51:30
Speaker 1: I don't know what what the problem was, but clean kill.
1:51:34
Speaker 1: She ended up being chewy. I had had a chewy
1:51:36
Speaker 1: elk in a while, right, But like every single cut
1:51:39
Speaker 1: is just like even the tenderlan one is just like
1:51:41
Speaker 1: a little too eldente. Right. So I figured, you kill
1:51:45
Speaker 1: a lot of elk, You've seen a lot of elk,
1:51:47
Speaker 1: You've eating a lot of elk. You know that there's
1:51:49
Speaker 1: elk out there, like you said, without teeth in their head.
1:51:51
Speaker 1: There their twenty plus the old cows. Do you have
1:51:54
Speaker 1: any thoughts on what sometimes produces chewy elk? Well, yeah,
1:52:00
Speaker 1: I mean they're just thoughts. They're not nothing based in fact,
1:52:04
Speaker 1: but but on thirty some years of experience of I mean,
1:52:09
Speaker 1: the big thing is what happened to that elk the
1:52:11
Speaker 1: hour before you killed it? Did it come from the
1:52:15
Speaker 1: ridge side on the other side and run all the way?
1:52:17
Speaker 1: Was it hyped up that it was all excited? Um?
1:52:20
Speaker 1: You see a lot with antelope that you know, people
1:52:23
Speaker 1: will go out and they shoot an antelope that came.
1:52:25
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, I was standing out there in the
1:52:26
Speaker 1: stage brush. His anilope came busting over the ridge right
1:52:29
Speaker 1: to me and I shot it. Man, it was terrible. Well,
1:52:32
Speaker 1: maybe that animal been running for thirty minutes, so all
1:52:35
Speaker 1: the andrelin is pumped in his body, it's got all
1:52:37
Speaker 1: the lactic acid, it's got all this stuff going on.
1:52:39
Speaker 1: So so I think that's a big factor in it.
1:52:42
Speaker 1: You don't know. I mean, the elk could look like, hey,
1:52:45
Speaker 1: there's a good layer of fat on it. It looks healthy.
1:52:47
Speaker 1: The teeth looked good. But that doesn't mean at some
1:52:50
Speaker 1: point in the time that that elk wasn't suffering some
1:52:52
Speaker 1: other stress or some other problems. Um. Interesting, I don't
1:52:57
Speaker 1: see a lot of ticks on our animals here, but
1:52:59
Speaker 1: when we're trapping elk every day, it was amazing. When
1:53:03
Speaker 1: we started in eighty four and ended in the mid nineties.
1:53:07
Speaker 1: During that ten or twelve year period, we started seeing
1:53:09
Speaker 1: more and more ticks on elk in the winter than
1:53:11
Speaker 1: we've ever seen before, enough that we were writing it
1:53:14
Speaker 1: down on our data sheets. This elk is full of ticks.
1:53:17
Speaker 1: So you don't know if if in the summer they
1:53:20
Speaker 1: were impacted by ticks. Um, you know, just what was
1:53:23
Speaker 1: going on with them? Something was stressing them. Something's usually
1:53:26
Speaker 1: stressing them out. I mean when you you see it,
1:53:28
Speaker 1: especially in hogs, that if you get a hog before
1:53:31
Speaker 1: slaughter that's too hot or it's stressed on that white meat,
1:53:35
Speaker 1: you'll see red dots through it, and that's a sign
1:53:37
Speaker 1: that that animal was stressed before it was killed, and
1:53:41
Speaker 1: that really affects the quality of the meat. Yeah. I
1:53:44
Speaker 1: feel like the last time I had a chewy animal,
1:53:46
Speaker 1: it was a it was a mule deer buck and uh,
1:53:49
Speaker 1: I didn't put didn't The first shot missed completely, it
1:53:53
Speaker 1: ran I shot. There was some more shooting that went on,
1:53:56
Speaker 1: and fifteen minutes later the animal was dead. It didn't
1:53:58
Speaker 1: die e'sle and um, yeah, it was a tough, tough
1:54:02
Speaker 1: eat the animal. And I just feel like, yeah, it
1:54:04
Speaker 1: was chemicals, surgeon and livestock slaughter they go through. There's
1:54:10
Speaker 1: a lot of steps in the process to alleviate stress
1:54:14
Speaker 1: doing livestock slaughter. For from a meet, I mean, not
1:54:18
Speaker 1: just from a humane perspective, from a meat quality perspective,
1:54:21
Speaker 1: to alleviate stress. So as far as as far as
1:54:25
Speaker 1: age being a factor, I think it's a factor, man.
1:54:29
Speaker 1: Do Yeah, Well, I mean I think it's a factor,
1:54:31
Speaker 1: but it's not a guaranteed factor that a toothless one's
1:54:34
Speaker 1: going to be tough. Yeah, I mean, I mean, Nick,
1:54:37
Speaker 1: We've all shot an animal that was we thought was
1:54:39
Speaker 1: a year lane, two year old maybe, and it's like
1:54:41
Speaker 1: it just didn't taste as good. Um. I mean, I've
1:54:46
Speaker 1: shot some big horn sheep that were eight and ten
1:54:48
Speaker 1: years old. It tasted great. We're drawn more than one
1:54:51
Speaker 1: big horn sheet tag grown too? Is because you work
1:54:53
Speaker 1: for the state. Yeah that's too big horn tags ner lifetime? Yeah? Wow,
1:55:00
Speaker 1: Well one was in any sheep. One was a ram tag.
1:55:03
Speaker 1: You gotta understand he's in a position where he's all
1:55:05
Speaker 1: mad because he didn't draw any good tag. I just
1:55:06
Speaker 1: suffered through a horrible tag draw season. But I didn't
1:55:09
Speaker 1: draw my moose tag. So I'm right there with you.
1:55:13
Speaker 1: I feel like I've been isolated out and picked on
1:55:15
Speaker 1: this year by the permit draw systems. So you cool.
1:55:21
Speaker 1: You shot a tough old cow Neil still eating her?
1:55:24
Speaker 1: Was it old? I didn't even go and have her aged? Well,
1:55:30
Speaker 1: But would the teeth look like, I mean, they look
1:55:32
Speaker 1: good or they look they gotta have? You got to think,
1:55:34
Speaker 1: you gotta know what you're doing. Really look at those
1:55:36
Speaker 1: teeth man, Well, but I mean are they all there? Yeah? Um,
1:55:44
Speaker 1: have you She's already had time to freezer age, and
1:55:48
Speaker 1: that hasn't helped. No, uh, you know, might just be
1:55:54
Speaker 1: that you're just gonna have to just grind it, grind
1:55:58
Speaker 1: it up. Oh no, definitely, and listen like yeah, flavor, yeah,
1:56:02
Speaker 1: it's it's fine. And when you cook a roast a
1:56:04
Speaker 1: proper way, it's eating fine. But you're just like, gosh,
1:56:08
Speaker 1: just a little just got a sharp knife, little thinner man.
1:56:12
Speaker 1: Yeah uh no, but yeah, we're out of burger, so
1:56:17
Speaker 1: it's like perfect. You know, I'll be taking out a
1:56:19
Speaker 1: bunch of roasts out and just turning into burger because
1:56:22
Speaker 1: the flavor is good, or cook it and and just
1:56:27
Speaker 1: slice it thin thin. But you know what I do
1:56:30
Speaker 1: have a little bit of my freezer off that like
1:56:32
Speaker 1: I had never experienced, and I you hear stories about it,
1:56:35
Speaker 1: and it's where all this stuff perpetuates from. Are these
1:56:39
Speaker 1: mule deer right? That the sage game? Well, listen, well
1:56:43
Speaker 1: I heard the whole story. It was like one guy
1:56:46
Speaker 1: shot it, it it went over the ridge. He decided not
1:56:48
Speaker 1: to even follow up, so that his body went over there.
1:56:51
Speaker 1: Feeling bad killed it. The guy didn't brought it to
1:56:54
Speaker 1: the guy. He didn't want it. It sat out and
1:56:56
Speaker 1: the sun for a day. Eventually my neighbor ends up
1:56:59
Speaker 1: with it. He's like, I'll take it, So I helped him.
1:57:02
Speaker 1: It didn't smell bad or anything when we butchered it. Um.
1:57:05
Speaker 1: But taking these packages of ground meat out, like when
1:57:08
Speaker 1: you open the package of ground meat, you just like
1:57:10
Speaker 1: you can smell it right then and there you cook it,
1:57:13
Speaker 1: it's bad. So like taking care of strass, stressing it,
1:57:17
Speaker 1: taking care of it like it can definitely happen. I've
1:57:21
Speaker 1: told a story a hundred times. I don't know if
1:57:22
Speaker 1: I've told it on this digital radio program, but about
1:57:25
Speaker 1: my box that fell into a sinkhole. You that one
1:57:28
Speaker 1: worst buck I ever ate because it was I couldn't
1:57:31
Speaker 1: recover it quickly down on a sinkhole. Well, my Colorado
1:57:38
Speaker 1: moose is eating great. Oh yeah, rub it in. It
1:57:43
Speaker 1: was a cow. That's the only the thing I get
1:57:46
Speaker 1: so sick. I was that big meal to your bucks.
1:57:47
Speaker 1: Don't taste good when you get that, like a nice
1:57:49
Speaker 1: big meal of your buck. And he's got a bunch
1:57:51
Speaker 1: of fat on his room. Yeah, listen, my wife who
1:57:53
Speaker 1: doesn't care at all about dear antlers, doesn't even get it.
1:57:57
Speaker 1: She can't tell a big one from a little one
1:57:59
Speaker 1: when the sitting right in front of her. She's like,
1:58:01
Speaker 1: it just looks like the same, like all the other ones.
1:58:03
Speaker 1: Doesn't care. She likes that meat, the big old mule
1:58:07
Speaker 1: deer buck meat, only going by the ship, like when
1:58:09
Speaker 1: I make dinner, Okay, when I make dinner, if that's
1:58:12
Speaker 1: what it is, she's like, that is so good? What
1:58:14
Speaker 1: is that? Loves it. She wouldn't like the bucks Yanna shoots.
1:58:19
Speaker 1: She doesn't like like white like white tail meat. She
1:58:22
Speaker 1: feels it's a little too mild, a little too bland,
1:58:26
Speaker 1: you know, used me. She doesn't really every time I
1:58:28
Speaker 1: cook moves. I don't even tell her what it is,
1:58:29
Speaker 1: but she'll eat it and she's like, what does that?
1:58:31
Speaker 1: And I'll be like, moves. She's like, you know, it's
1:58:32
Speaker 1: just something about it. Yeah. I shot a yearling cow
1:58:36
Speaker 1: last December, and it was surprising how mild it was. Like,
1:58:40
Speaker 1: because you get used to eating stuff, you know, you're
1:58:42
Speaker 1: shooting older elk or bucks or whatever, you get used
1:58:46
Speaker 1: to that just flavor. And that thing was like vealish,
1:58:50
Speaker 1: you know it was so and even the meat was
1:58:53
Speaker 1: lighter than you'd expect to see, and and it was mild.
1:58:57
Speaker 1: Like I know you've said it before. It's like almost
1:59:00
Speaker 1: to the point where it's not that it tastes bad,
1:59:04
Speaker 1: it's just so mild. There's almost nothing that gets to
1:59:07
Speaker 1: the point of being a little blamed. Yeah, pound for pound,
1:59:10
Speaker 1: I don't I don't like. I wouldn't trade it because
1:59:12
Speaker 1: I like to eat the animals that I shot, or
1:59:15
Speaker 1: the next best thing is animals with my body shot
1:59:17
Speaker 1: when I was with them, kind of thing. Just yea mentally,
1:59:20
Speaker 1: So I wouldn't like literally do these trades. But you know,
1:59:25
Speaker 1: pound for pound, I would swap out, like three or
1:59:28
Speaker 1: four year old mule dear meat. I would like trade
1:59:31
Speaker 1: out to get that back. I like it. You've got preferences,
1:59:38
Speaker 1: and really that's my wife's favorite, saying that's my favorite.
1:59:42
Speaker 1: So you like it like you like that flavor as
1:59:46
Speaker 1: long as you treat it right. Yeah, no, I think
1:59:48
Speaker 1: that we put we put in the freezer. Was it
1:59:52
Speaker 1: a mule? Yeah, mule deer. It's so hard to tell
1:59:55
Speaker 1: because we come home from you know, working and with
1:59:57
Speaker 1: you know, we're always digging up meat. But I had
2:00:00
Speaker 1: to handle open the freezer. And it's by far been
2:00:02
Speaker 1: a favorite this year for everybody. And I haven't noticed
2:00:07
Speaker 1: the difference in in bigger bucks and does and that
2:00:09
Speaker 1: at all. But you know that, I mean within fifteen
2:00:13
Speaker 1: minutes of hitting the ground, that suckers in a cooler.
2:00:17
Speaker 1: So did you draw an antelope tag? Yesterday? Did not?
2:00:20
Speaker 1: So you just gotta find out like everybody else, I
2:00:22
Speaker 1: gotta fight it, just like everybody else, just like I'm fighting,
2:00:26
Speaker 1: like on the moose. I've been fighting since there's been
2:00:28
Speaker 1: a moose season in Colorado for it. And there's some
2:00:31
Speaker 1: people in the valley that have drawn their bull tag
2:00:34
Speaker 1: and now their cow tags. So when they're doing the draw,
2:00:37
Speaker 1: do they call up like your colleagues call up and
2:00:39
Speaker 1: be like, build great news. You just gotta check your email,
2:00:45
Speaker 1: got check your just like a regular old guy that's
2:00:48
Speaker 1: like that's horrible, man. Yeah, I know there's no there's
2:00:53
Speaker 1: no benefit one where it all looked pretty bad. It
2:00:56
Speaker 1: would look pretty bad. Did another conspiracy theory? But I've
2:01:02
Speaker 1: heard that one plenty. Oh yeah, yeah, alright, anyone else?
2:01:06
Speaker 1: Any last things, Officer Andre, you have any um final
2:01:10
Speaker 1: things you didn't get to say? Be safe out there.
2:01:13
Speaker 1: Be safe out there. Self report, self report. Everybody's gonna
2:01:18
Speaker 1: make a mistake. Just turn you do the right thing,
2:01:20
Speaker 1: turn yourself in. I think everybody be happy with the
2:01:24
Speaker 1: outcome when you do that. Try to hide it. You
2:01:26
Speaker 1: aren't going to be happy with the outcome. And if
2:01:29
Speaker 1: you have to say if, if you have to say if,
2:01:32
Speaker 1: I probably shouldn't do it. All right, thank you very
2:01:35
Speaker 1: much for joining us. All right, thank you