Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 877: Does Predator Management Actually Work?

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Ep. 877: Does Predator Management Actually Work? · The MeatEater Podcast

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  Speaker 1: by Mike Bowdenchuck professional wildlife biologist forty five years professional
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  Speaker 1: experience and private, state and federal government services.
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  Speaker 2: Are you recently retired from.
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  Speaker 1: APHIS that's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Services.
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  Speaker 2: That's right, yep, you spent how many years doing that?
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  Speaker 3: I've been plenty four years with APHIS. I've spent about
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  Speaker 3: ten in the private sector and four with state government
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  Speaker 3: before that.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, and currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist.
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  Speaker 1: That's correct. But your area of expertise, and this is
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  Speaker 1: how you were recommended to us by many people, not
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  Speaker 1: only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in
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  Speaker 1: predator prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management.
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  Speaker 3: You bet Aphis does a lot of predator control around
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  Speaker 3: the state, or predator predation control. Actually, we don't control
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  Speaker 3: numbers as much as we do the ones that are
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  Speaker 3: actually killing.
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  Speaker 2: Got it.
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  Speaker 3: But I've done that really my whole career.
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  Speaker 1: You know.
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  Speaker 2: But besides, when you were a DJ.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that was a long time.
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  Speaker 2: What was up with that?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been in high school. I had a job.
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  Speaker 3: I think they just needed somebody who could read and
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  Speaker 3: talk and I could do both.
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  Speaker 1: So so you were a DJ. I was a DJ
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  Speaker 1: for a couple of years. Yeah, what stage?
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  Speaker 3: You grew up in New Mexico. I lived in New
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  Speaker 3: Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country
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  Speaker 3: after that.
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  Speaker 1: So as a kid you cut your teeth like hunting
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  Speaker 1: and trapping.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, I did actually growing up. I got to hunt
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  Speaker 3: deer back when we had a lot of deer right
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  Speaker 3: in New Mexico in the seventies. There was a lot
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  Speaker 3: of deer, and I got to do that. I started
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  Speaker 3: trapping when I was eleven years old. So what year
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  Speaker 3: to that had been, oh, man sixty eight? Oh okay,
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  Speaker 3: So yeah, so I've been trapping for a long time and.
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  Speaker 2: Then eventually got into that kind of work professional.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. When I went to college, that's all
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  Speaker 3: I wanted to do was become a wildlife biologist. I
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  Speaker 3: wanted to work outdoors, and that's when I graduated college.
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  Speaker 3: Jobs with game Department were on a hiring freeze, and
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  Speaker 3: a job came open with the predator control program in
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  Speaker 3: New Mexico, so I started with that outfit. After four years,
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  Speaker 3: I was getting hunters on the side and went into
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  Speaker 3: the private sector, guiding and managing ranches in Texas, doing
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  Speaker 3: some consulting work down in Old Mexico and Sonora. Well
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  Speaker 3: you did, yeah, yeah, there was a center for desert ecology.
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  Speaker 3: We built a zoo down there in Norma, seou and
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  Speaker 3: moved some animals into it, captured pronghorn in San Lui.
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  Speaker 1: Suppos.
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  Speaker 3: Did a lot of a lot of work in Mexico
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  Speaker 3: over the years. After my kids were born, I decided
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  Speaker 3: maybe I needed a job that had health insurance.
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  Speaker 2: Got it.
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  Speaker 3: I came back to government work in Mississippi as a
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  Speaker 3: beaver trapper, and then South Dakota. Spent thirteen years in Utah,
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  Speaker 3: mostly predator management. The deer herds crash there in nineteen
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  Speaker 3: ninety two ninety three, and I moved in there just
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  Speaker 3: after that, so we started doing preader control for domestic
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  Speaker 3: sheep protection, but also from you deer pronghorn protection, big
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  Speaker 3: horn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep
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  Speaker 3: into it, studying predator pray relationships.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, let me hit you with one that wasn't expecting
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  Speaker 1: to ask you about. But I was just reading about
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  Speaker 1: it yesterday. Have you spent much time working in Alaska.
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  Speaker 3: I've been up to Alaska several times, but never never,
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  Speaker 3: you know, a month at a time.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of weeks here and there. There's a
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  Speaker 1: little there's a it was a constantly a brew hanl
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  Speaker 1: ask about predator management around coyote stuff. But I was
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  Speaker 1: reading about some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bear
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  Speaker 1: control to try to re establish a caribou herd that
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  Speaker 1: had gone through like a ninety four percent decline.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, that it is a worldwide phenomenon. I was an
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  Speaker 3: invited speaker at the first European Trapping Conference and they
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  Speaker 3: were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer.
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  Speaker 3: But what do we do with that? Yeah, I'm working
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  Speaker 3: with a group in Alberta that's trying to to standardize
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  Speaker 3: predation management to protect wildlife. That that deal in Alaska
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  Speaker 3: is a long brewing controversy going way back. But but
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  Speaker 3: predators can put prey in a predator pit. When the
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  Speaker 3: prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't
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  Speaker 3: drop off, that's when we have a predator pit. And
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  Speaker 3: that's what they're trying to reverse in Alaska. It's interesting
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  Speaker 3: because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually
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  Speaker 3: support subsistence use yep. And so it's a real tussle
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  Speaker 3: between our well, are you eating caribou or can you
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  Speaker 3: eat a bear?
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  Speaker 1: Yeah? I got it, got it.
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  Speaker 3: But in those areas they are doing bear removals and
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  Speaker 3: some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time.
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  Speaker 3: The bears are hard on them and it's working right.
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  Speaker 3: We've seen some of those caribou herds and will chatting
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  Speaker 3: the herds up about twenty five percent.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
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  Speaker 1: That was the one that had the ninety four percent
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  Speaker 1: decline and now it's kind of coming out of it.
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  Speaker 1: And there's a naturally cyclical element to it. But I
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  Speaker 1: think you can probably take you can probably take the bottoms,
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  Speaker 1: You can probably round the bottoms off with control or
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  Speaker 1: decrease the timeline.
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  Speaker 3: Right in Wyoming, prong horn will die in a severe winter.
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  Speaker 3: We know that that's the limiting factor winter. But do
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  Speaker 3: we want to wait seven years for them to come
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  Speaker 3: back up or do we want to bump them up
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  Speaker 3: in two or three years? You know that's when we're
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  Speaker 3: talking about predation management on wildlife.
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  Speaker 1: Yep.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, what pratory have you spent the most time on
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  Speaker 2: in your.
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  Speaker 3: Career, without a doubt, coyotes, right. I actually trapped coyotes
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  Speaker 3: and hunting coyotes for fur when I was in college,
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  Speaker 3: back when college was cheap and fur was valuable, And
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  Speaker 3: I spent most of my time around coyote management and
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  Speaker 3: all the rest. But I spent a lot of time
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  Speaker 3: with mountain lions. I did postgraduate work on mountain lions
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  Speaker 3: in New Mexico and had hounds for thirty years, So
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  Speaker 3: I spent a lot of time online work.
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  Speaker 1: You know you had spent college, being when college was
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  Speaker 1: different amounts of money.
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  Speaker 2: I always tell people that this is no joke.
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  Speaker 1: Man. When I got out of high school, I didn't
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  Speaker 1: think I was going to go to college, got kicked
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  Speaker 1: around going to the army and then like decided to
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: go to college. And I remember we had a community college.
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  Speaker 1: We called it thirteenth grade. And I went down there,
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  Speaker 1: and I'm not kidding you, man, I went down there
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  Speaker 1: and wrote a check for six hundred dollars at like
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  Speaker 1: a cashier window, Yeah, to pay my tuition. Yeah, my
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  Speaker 1: tuition was six hundred dollars for a semester, and I
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  Speaker 1: like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all
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  Speaker 1: talking about putting our kids going to college, knowing how
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  Speaker 1: expensive it is, I'm like six hundred bucks.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, semester Ice little to Bob gat In in the
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  Speaker 3: spring of seventy nine for three hundred bucks and walked
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  Speaker 3: across campus with that check and paid off the last
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  Speaker 3: of that semester's mill.
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  Speaker 1: Is that right?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's Those days are gone now,
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  Speaker 3: you know.
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  Speaker 2: On Kyle's Man.
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  Speaker 1: Here's the conversation I have people all the time, is, uh,
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  Speaker 1: you get a guy, you know, you get a well
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  Speaker 1: meaning landowner, right, farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself,
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  Speaker 1: the ranch manager himself, the ranch himself, whatever, and they
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  Speaker 1: have the idea that like they want to help their
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  Speaker 1: dear population now, they want to increase their turkey population
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  Speaker 1: or whatever. And they'll occasionally in November shoot a kyo,
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  Speaker 1: right because they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to
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  Speaker 1: help out help Yeah. Or you'll say to a farmer
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  Speaker 1: you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there,
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  Speaker 1: we saw a couple kyles. You didn't shoot them, you know, Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and you have this conversation You're like like, listen, man,
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  Speaker 1: I don't have any problem with you doing whatever you
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  Speaker 1: want to do. But that doesn't matter, right, Like, like
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  Speaker 1: this kind of stuff is so it's it's like timing
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  Speaker 1: and intensity dependent. Absolutely.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Can you explain that a little bit from a professional
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  Speaker 1: perspective of when, like how do people kind of view
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  Speaker 1: predator control and what does predator control look like when
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  Speaker 1: it's done in a professional sense? Sure?
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  Speaker 3: And it's it is very very comp I don't want
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  Speaker 3: to go too far down a rabbit hole, but it's
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  Speaker 3: a deep rabbit hole.
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  Speaker 2: Sure, man, That's what I'm asking about it.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah. Predators impact prey in one of two different ways.
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  Speaker 3: The first one is how many get eaten? Right, And
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  Speaker 3: that's what we'd studied for fifty years. How many deer
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  Speaker 3: fons get eaten by coyotes and a deer adult deer
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  Speaker 3: get eaten by mountain lions and no kidding, decades of research.
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  Speaker 3: The very first wildlife monograph is about the Pants basin
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  Speaker 3: and they followed deer radio coolor deer followed them around
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  Speaker 3: Pants basin northwest Colorado. And if a deer starved to death,
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  Speaker 3: they said, see it's habitat related. And if a deer
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  Speaker 3: was killed by coyotes, they said, see it's predation. And
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  Speaker 3: that's what we understood about predator management or predator impacts
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  Speaker 3: for a long time. Really, when we started putting wolves
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  Speaker 3: in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts. And
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  Speaker 3: the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those
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  Speaker 3: prey animals to avoid predation. So wolves didn't eat elk
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  Speaker 3: on the Northern deer herd or northern elk herd near
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  Speaker 3: as much as they change their behavior. Instead of them
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  Speaker 3: being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want,
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  Speaker 3: they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation,
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  Speaker 3: but they're starving to death in what we used to
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  Speaker 3: consider a mild winter. I got it, and that secondary
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  Speaker 3: impact is probably as important as the primary impact. So
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  Speaker 3: shooting a coyote in the fall is that going to
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  Speaker 3: help anything. If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down,
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  Speaker 3: then maybe very small.
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  Speaker 1: Maybe.
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  Speaker 3: If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever.
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  Speaker 3: Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a specie, and
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  Speaker 3: they can come back from any kind of pressure up
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  Speaker 3: to sixty five percent removal. You'll have them back within
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  Speaker 3: a single.
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  Speaker 1: Remove.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, they bounce back in a single breeding season. And
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  Speaker 3: this is this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic
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  Speaker 3: systems to look at predation because they can't leave, right,
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  Speaker 3: fish can't.
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  Speaker 1: Get all that.
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  Speaker 3: And so there's been a couple of studies where they had,
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  Speaker 3: you know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it,
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  Speaker 3: and the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and
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  Speaker 3: they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring.
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  Speaker 3: And they put in just a couple of predatory fish
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  Speaker 3: in that system and all the algae eaters go to
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  Speaker 3: the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have
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  Speaker 3: any algae eaters in it, and you have an algae bloom.
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  Speaker 3: And think about that. If you understand food pyramids and
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  Speaker 3: all the rest, that's the basis of life being directed
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  Speaker 3: by a predator species because.
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  Speaker 2: They can't do what they want no more.
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  Speaker 3: They can't they can't safely go out there. They change
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  Speaker 3: their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment,
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  Speaker 3: and I love this one, they had snails in an
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  Speaker 3: aquarium with with growing plants, and the snails will feed
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  Speaker 3: up and down the stock of that plant, including the
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  Speaker 3: terminal bud at the tip of the plant. They eat
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  Speaker 3: it and they keep the plants crop back. They didn't
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  Speaker 3: introduce snail predators, they introduced the smell of snail predators.
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  Speaker 3: They had its snail preadors another aquarium. They circulated that
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  Speaker 3: water over there.
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  Speaker 2: Really, what's the snail predator?
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  Speaker 3: Some other kind of fish that that'll crunch the shells?
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  Speaker 3: And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the
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  Speaker 3: plant and the plants grew up and choked out the systems.
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  Speaker 2: They can smell those sons of bitches.
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  Speaker 3: They can smell them. I may not be giving snails
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  Speaker 3: enough credit for their thought process, but that's an evolutionary thing, right,
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  Speaker 3: It's yeah, that was it. That's it. That's evolution, and
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  Speaker 3: that's the that's the ying and yang of predation, right.
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  Speaker 3: It shapes the predator, It shapes the prey. When things
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  Speaker 3: get out of whack, when people interfere, then then predators
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  Speaker 3: can have an impact on them. Yeah, another fascinating deal.
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  Speaker 3: When I was in Utah, they asked me to identify
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  Speaker 3: why predators have an impact and what would we do
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  Speaker 3: to manage that impact. And I started looking at mountain
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  Speaker 3: lions and deer, and mountains kill deer, that's their job,
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  Speaker 3: that's how they evolve. Deer evolved feeding mountain liones. That
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  Speaker 3: that's that's the relationship. But mountain lions kill bucks in
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  Speaker 3: greater percentage than the percentage in the population. If bucks
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  Speaker 3: are twenty percent of a population, it might be thirty
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  Speaker 3: thirty five percent of what lines killed. And the reasons
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  Speaker 3: for that are multiple. But bucks are solitary, Bucks move more,
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  Speaker 3: so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups,
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  Speaker 3: so it's you know, they don't have a defensive of
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  Speaker 3: a lot of eyes.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, because you would think just on that point, I've
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  Speaker 1: seen that before, yeah, and heard that before. But you
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  Speaker 1: would think in some ways, the fact that it's for
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  Speaker 1: much of the year it's armed with antlers, you would
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  Speaker 1: think in some ways that would offset that, and maybe
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  Speaker 1: it does. Maybe it'd be maybe if they didn't have
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  Speaker 1: if they didn't have antlers, to be even worse. But
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  Speaker 1: you'd see in some ways, I feel like I'm surprised
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  Speaker 1: that doesn't turn a cat off.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't turn a cat off.
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  Speaker 1: There.
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  Speaker 3: They're they're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders
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  Speaker 3: and biting where they need to bite.
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  Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, you'll need the antlers or no.
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  Speaker 3: I've seen them kill adult bull elk, you know, with antlers.
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  Speaker 3: So mountainin z O will killed dozen fawns and relative
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: abundance to each other. And and so if there's a.
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  Speaker 1: Hundred songs, explain it again.
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  Speaker 3: They killed dozen fawns and relative abundance to each other.
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  Speaker 3: So you take the buck mortality out of it. If
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  Speaker 3: you got a hundred phones per one hundred doze, which
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  Speaker 3: we never have, half a wood a lion kill is
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  Speaker 3: going to be fons and half will be doze if
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  Speaker 3: you had that ratio.
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  Speaker 1: They don't care, right because you don't know what's in
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  Speaker 1: his head. But that's what you see.
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  Speaker 3: That's it's just availability. They're equally vulnerable to predation, so
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  Speaker 3: it's just whatever he comes on the closest one to
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  Speaker 3: the bushes, right. What we found out though, is that
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  Speaker 3: when predator or when fall numbers are down, lion mortality
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  Speaker 3: is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age dos
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  Speaker 3: and that can drive a population down.
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  Speaker 1: I explain that's me and I got confused there.
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  Speaker 2: The model that I had when numbers are down.
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  Speaker 3: When fall numbers are down, when you get below fifty
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  Speaker 3: falls per one hundred dos, what a lion's killing is
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  Speaker 3: two thirds of what the non bucks are adult breeding
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  Speaker 3: age doughs. Only one third is fonts. If they're killing fans,
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  Speaker 3: it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: got some that are coming up to be breeding.
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  Speaker 1: Age I got you.
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  Speaker 3: If they're killing breeding age dose, you can see the
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: whole population depressed because they're the ones that are that
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: are feeding in, you know, young into the system.
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  Speaker 1: Like that's when it's happened, like a sort of a
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  Speaker 1: greater population level impact.
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  Speaker 3: Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official line
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: population was about three thousand based on densities and all
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  Speaker 3: the rest. The official deer population was three hundred thousand,
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  Speaker 3: or about one line for every one hundred deer. When
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  Speaker 3: faun ratios got blowed fifty falls per hundred doze. The
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  Speaker 3: population was declining because lions were killing does yep. Lions
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  Speaker 3: aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: reason the faun ratios were low was because coyotes were
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  Speaker 3: eating the falls.
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  Speaker 2: Got it.
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  Speaker 3: So when we started doing predator management in the book
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  Speaker 3: Cliffs in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after
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  Speaker 3: the coyotes. We tried to get our fahone numbers up
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  Speaker 3: above fifty falls per hundred doze. We get above sixty
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  Speaker 3: seventy falls per hundred doze. Lions can eat whatever they
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  Speaker 3: want to eat and you don't notice the difference. So
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  Speaker 3: you got two predators working on the same population, but
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  Speaker 3: they're hitting different levels of the population. One's eating fams
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  Speaker 3: and the others eating adult dose. It can depress that
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  Speaker 3: population as.
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  Speaker 1: Well, got it.
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  Speaker 3: So there's all kinds of factors. We identified eighteen factors
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  Speaker 3: that affect predation rates. Give me some more linear habitat.
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: find every duck nest if they have to nest on
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  Speaker 3: the edge of you.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up, because this is
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: in our notes. This linear I've never heard this concept before.
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so what's more linear than a beach? A beach
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach,
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: and one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: beach can find one hundred percent of the nest. Got it,
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: Which also gets to what do you do about it?
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: You can remove ninety percent of the coyotes, but one
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat's
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: you've got to be really really intensive other factors like
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: herd size and age. Right when wolves were killing elk
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: and Yellowstone, the average age of the elk that were
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: being shot by hunters cowilk was about five, but the
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: average age that the wolves were eaten was like eleven.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: That's because they're at the back of the herd. The
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: eleven year olds are the slower ones at the back
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: of the herds. That's the one the wolves you're sharketing
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: and pulling down, so they're not equally distributing that predation
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: effort over the whole population. You can lose some eleven
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: year olds, you start losing your five year olds, and
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: your population is going to decline because that's the reproductive
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: capacity of that herd right there.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: It's a fascinating, fascinating picture. Some of the some of
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: the factors involve the predators, coyotes. You probably know this,
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: but coyotes don't breed till their second year, So right
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: out on the landscape, you've got the current year's pups,
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: which are like fifty percent of the population. Numerically, you've
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: got the last year's coyotes, the yearlings that are out there,
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: transient coyotes between territories trying to stay out of everybody's
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: coyotes are like twenty percent of the population. Two year
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: olds and up. Those coyotes are the ones that are
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: doing most of the killing of wildlife. Bose are the coyotes. Yeah,
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: you got a four year old pair that's been on
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: that territory for three breeding seasons. They're going to know
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: where to go hunt. Phones they're the ones that are
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: the most active at killing.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Just think they got the most experience.
• 19:47
  Speaker 3: They've got the most experience, and they're feeding pups. In
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: experiments with livestock predation, when when you remove the pups
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Got it visioning.
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: Those pups and you think about it. Kyote pups are
• 20:04
  Speaker 3: born right around April fifteenth, deer phones hit the ground
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: the end of June, first of July. Those pups got
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: to eat meat. Those kyotes are killing as fast as
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: they can to provision their pups.
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: You know, I gotta just keep your train of thought.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But the idea of buddy of mine, who's a songwriter,
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: he says, hey, I got a kyote question for you.
• 20:25
  Speaker 2: And I don't know where he's got I don't even know.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: He didn't even I didn't even ask him that this
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: has to do with something he's writing. But he happens
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: to be a songwriter and he happens to have called
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: me and asked me this question, but no explanation of
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: why he was asking. But he said, do you ever
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: see And I didn't have great answer for him. I
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: could just tell him anecdotally, or I could just tell
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: do you ever see a kyote take a step to
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: dispatch something? Or do they just kind of like grab
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: it and start eating it. She's talking about, why do
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: looking around. You know, I mean like some things. If
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: you think of like a terrier, right when if a
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: tarrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing. A lion,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: like a terrier, sinks his teeth into the neck. You
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: actually see him seat his teeth into the neck and
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: shake it. Right. A lion is like a lion is thinking,
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: I'm going to kill this thing, and I know how
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: to kill it, and I know where, like I know
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do in top priority is it's going
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: to die. But a kyote just seems to not be
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: interested in dispatching something, and for his sake, what's the answer.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: Coyotes. Coyotes do kill them. They're they're a coursing predator mostly,
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: and this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: a coursing predator. They chase down their game and when
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: don't have thumbs. That they're not like a lion that's
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: got claws, so they grab it with their mouth. Once
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: They don't have to kill it right away. In fact,
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: they're not going to kill it till they're ready to
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: eat it sometimes.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: So it is like it's not their instinct make it
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: no huh.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: They they're they're gonna grab it, they're gonna pack it off,
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: you know. With with baby lambs, they'll they'll shake them once,
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: maybe bite the top of the head. But they're they're
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: moving food, is what they're doing. If food's still alive,
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: if they're taking it back to a to a den,
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: the pups will kill it.
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: You get around to kill it later.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: Red foxes can't do that, right. Everything that red fox
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: eats is small, and so when they grab it, it
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: dies and they take it back, and red foxes will
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: cash their food around a den. Kyotes don't. They just
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: go back and either puke it up if if that's
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: if they ate meat, or just drop it and the
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: pups will tear it into it. But it's it's it's
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: a difference just in size and what they're trying to
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: do at the time.
• 23:01
  Speaker 2: Got it.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: In the winter time, when they grab something, they'll eat
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: it right away. Yeah, in the summertime, they may be
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: packing it back to the den site, and that's what
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: they're trying to do.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: What do you guys, see when you look at with
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: coyotes with fawn predation versus adult Let's just stick to
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: white tail deer for a minute. Yeah, like what do
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: you see when you look at And maybe I'm wrong,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: but it seemed if I had to take a guess
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: at it, thisrom when I picked up And there's so
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: much false information about this floating around out there, and
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: so much myth and legend. But like that, in the
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: North they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: In the South they don't. They don't seem to kill
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: adult deer as much. Like what of that is true
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: and not true?
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: So we talked about the eighteen factors, and one of
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: those other factors is alternative prey.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: I lived in Mississippi for two years and trap beavers
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: down there and worked on some problems when I was there,
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: And I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: rabbit call. I could hal them up and they'd come out,
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: but I never called one with a rabbit call. And
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: I think the answer is they don't know what rabbits are.
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: They're living in such a food rich environment in Mississippi
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: and Mississippi Delta, they can eat grapes, they can eat
• 24:21
  Speaker 3: per simons, they can eat all this other food that
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that
• 24:28
  Speaker 3: grows in the South. I talked about them being a
• 24:32
  Speaker 3: coursing predator. Not in Mississippi, not in South Texas. I
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: wondered for my whole career until I moved back to Texas,
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: how you can have six coyotes per square mile and
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: still have white tailed deer in South Texas.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: Well, you sure come do a rabbit in South Texas.
• 24:49
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they do. But coyotes in South Texas are
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: more like an ecologically, more like a fox. They're a
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: pounce predator. They go up and down the cinderos and
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it. Cotton rat,
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: they'll pounce on that.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: Huh.
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote,
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: all they have to do is turn left and go
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: out through the through the brush, and the coyote can't
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: seem anymore.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 25:14
  Speaker 3: So we've got white tails in South Texas, But the
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: coyotes are twenty pound coyotes and they pounce. We've got
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: all that other alternative prey. I see, So at your issue,
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: you know what else is going on out there? Are
• 25:29
  Speaker 3: the packs larger because they have to hunt, because they
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: have to hunt deer, whereas elsewhere the packs are kind
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: jack rabbits and that's only a meal for one.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: And you feel that that's true.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't need like if they have tons of stuff,
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: they don't need to pack up.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: They don't need to pack up. Their territories get smaller.
• 25:53
  Speaker 3: They tolerate more overlap in territory. Huh. We've got territories
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: in South Texas where we've got radio call on kyotes
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: three hundred acres.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: Acres?
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah really Yeah, it's fascinating and other kyotes right on
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: top of them, huh, because everything they need is on
• 26:14
  Speaker 3: that three hundred acres.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so they they don't. They're more leaning about other
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: ones coming in because there's enough food. There's enough food.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, another coyote territory thing, but I'm going down different.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: This is great.
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: In the sixties, there was a coyote study with VHF. Collars,
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: and they mapped out where the coyote territories were based
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: on all the locations, and they had had a picture
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: of what that looked like in the whatever the decade
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: we're calling it. After two thousand, forty years later they
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: went in there with GPS collars and did the same study,
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: and the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me,
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: they had the same boundaries. Oh really, Yeah, they didn't
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: left over. When one coyo pair disappeared, another coyo pair
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: would pick it up, and whatever they were seeing out
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: there on the landscape, they maintained the same. Kid huny
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: forty years, that's twenty coy generations.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Now, I wonder, like, there's no way to answer this, probably,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: but picture that you had.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: Somehow magically we're able.
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: To pull them all out, okay, like the shake of
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: a wand and they're all out, and then you replace
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: them with totally different ones. Then I wonder would they
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: find those same? I mean, yeah, like, is the territory
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: thing inherited? There is there some logic to it that
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: a kyo understands that we don't under say.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: Coyotes sees it the landscape differently.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because we tend to think of like fence lines.
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, fence lines and roads because I could.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: Talk about, oh, he came off the neighbor's place, as
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: though the deer has some comprehension. I mean, like as
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: though like he's like, yeah, I'm going over to the
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: neighbor's place.
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: Now.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: You know. It's just like the way we like view
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: you know, isn't how they see it, doesn't how they
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: experience it.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: We talked some about not only the pack size, but
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: individual animal size. Right, they get larger as they go north,
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: you know, away from the equator or south away from
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: the equator, but their prey also decides their individual size.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: I've been working with wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and and
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: eat white tailed deer in the same place, in the
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: same place. What just a few miles apart? Fifteen miles apart?
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: Your kidding?
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: No?
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: No, h So wait, what are you doing with wolves
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: up there?
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: Radio collars? We're handling wolves, putting radio collars on them.
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: Are you catching them foothold drafts?
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: No? What draft you use?
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: I'm using MB seven fifty on wolves the Alaskan with
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: a bigger offset.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: We had another wolf researcher on and I asked her
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: that question. She said, MB seven fifty two.
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a good stout trap.
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: It's kind of for years yeah, backfoot Yeah yeah, huh.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: But and you just and you're out like you just.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: They kept walking me through going out and catching a
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: wolf in Michigan, like, what are you doing?
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: Well, we're working in wilderness area. Yeah, so we're doing
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: this out of a backpack. Okay, you don't pack twelve
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: of those traps on your back and go for a walk.
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: You know, take four or five of them out there,
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: and there are traditional places where they walk. But if
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: i'm if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: a trap. You're just wasting a lot of time setting
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: hoping that something's going to come by here. Because we're
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: putting radio colors on, we're running those traps every day,
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: got it. So you can only have so many traps
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: out in a day and still get to that wolf
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: before noon and getting processed and out of the trap.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Let me sets you guys, roam when you're doing that
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: a dozen okay, you know, and then you get it,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: we get the wolf, you call the biologist or whoever.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: Are you working it up yourself?
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: We're working it up ourselves. It's a team effort. I
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: mean just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: the wolf up. It's it's usually two to three person team.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: What month are you doing to them?
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: May? Usually we'll be doing some this late this.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Month, and you'll be up there this month.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the end of this month and the first
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: part of gins.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: And what are you finding with those collars? Are you
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: analyzing the data too? Are you just collecting it?
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: I get to see it, but we've got other biologists
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: that are analyzing the data. They've got territories. They make
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: some pretty good extra territorial movements. They'll go over here
• 30:39
  Speaker 3: and try and poach a girlfriend or come back. We
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: caught a pair of wolves one night. It was a
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: male and a female, three year old male and two
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: year old female, and I felt like they were pack mates.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: We put collars on both of them, and as soon
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: as we turn them loose, they split and one went
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: back to another pack's territory. He was a member of
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: that pack, and he was a they're trying to poach
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: your girlfriend?
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: You're kidding me? Really, No, it just happened.
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: We just happened to catch them on Date Night. Yeah really, Yeah,
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: that was fascinating. I'd never guess that if we didn't
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: put the collars on.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: What are you seeing that nowadays?
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: With I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Upper Peninsula a long time ago. But what are they
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: seeing nowadays at those populations there.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: I think they're kind of stable. I mean they've they've
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: are kind of low, so there's not a lot of
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: groceries left. You don't see I think every breeding pair
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: is still having a litter, but you don't see a
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: lot of young wolves coming up there.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: They filled in, Yeah, they filled in. You know, here's
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: the thing I'd like to talk to you about about
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: predator prey relationships. So you might maybe familiar with this
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: story where you a the Hudson Bay Company. Oh yeah, okay,
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: So Hudson Bay Company and it was like the oldest
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: corporation you know dissolved now right, you know for a while,
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: like the oldest court operation out there. Just for listener's sake,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: what used to have it is like in Canada, and
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: this would happen in a minor way in the US
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: and Canada. They would give these sort of charters or
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: commissions to company, basically corporate charters yep. And they would say,
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company and it
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: had all these different names over time, but Hudson Bay
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: Company was was they had them. They had a monopoly
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Hudson Bay. And they kept meticulous records, so you're familiar
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: with like that snowshoe hares follow this up down cycle
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: of seven to ten years, seven years. There's all these
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: different debates about what drives it, like it seems to
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: be like I think the consensus nowadays what drives it
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: as plant toxins that as plants get over consumed, they
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: produce more toxins, they produce more toxins, the rabbits lay off,
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: and so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: back through time and track the link cycle and see
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: that the link cycle follows the snowshoe hair cycle. And
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: you see like how many links are coming through their
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: trading posts, right, And they look and it's like it's
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down, kind
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: of in line with rabbits, but or hairs. Here's my question,
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: how long is the delay mecause I think a lot
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: They would look like predator management doesn't matter because if
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: all the deer are dead, right, if there's no deer left,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: then the predators will die.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, that's what I was taught when I went
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: to college in the seventies. Yeah, so prey drives the
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: predator numbers, and and we were shown those very grass,
• 34:09
  Speaker 3: those very data. There's another famous study Paul Arrington did
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: with muskrats and mink when when muskrat mink numbers go up,
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: when muskrats crash, mink numbers crash.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they can't beat those lines aren't traveling like this,
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: They're about a year behind. Okay, that's what There has
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: to be a delay.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: And it has to do with kitten survival for links,
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: so that the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: kitten numbers don't survive in the downswing, death and dispersal.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: If you look at non target links, take in Idaho,
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: for example, they're catching links out in the deserts where
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: there aren't any links, and Bobcat sets when you have
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: a snowshoe hair crash and the links have to disperse, they.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: Leave, got it.
• 34:59
  Speaker 3: So it's not not always dying, ye, And that's what
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: we were all taught, and that that actually works in
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: a single predator, single prey system. Okay, I don't get
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: to work in those systems. I've got I got mountain lions,
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: i got all kinds of predators.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: So single predators, single prey.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: Let's take like, just to help you understand what we're saying,
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: we've we've talked about this on past shows.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: Like Isle Royal.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and in Lake Superiors is kind of famous example
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: of it's like you basically there's moose, and there's wolves
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: and beaver.
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: Okay, you got you got beaver, but only half the year, right,
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: they're under.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Ice the rest of the year, So that's not even
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: single predators.
• 35:36
  Speaker 3: They whacked the heck out of the beavers too, Okay, yeah, okay,
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: beaver's are a favorite food to wolves.
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: So so continue that thought though, like that that the
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: situations where you don't have single prey, single predators.
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: So so in the famous line study that Hornocker did
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: in Idaho, that the lions didn't kill elk okay because
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: there weren't many elk. Back then, there were hundreds and
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: hundreds of deer and almost no elk. Now that total
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: systems changed, there's very few deer and a lot of elk,
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: and the elk are buffering the lions to where the
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: lions can still find something to eat and keep the
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: deer numbers low.
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: Got it.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: In a study on the Spider Ranch in northern Arizona,
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought.
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: The lines didn't cause the crash, but a couple of
• 36:29
  Speaker 3: years of no phone survival and the deer herd's way down,
• 36:33
  Speaker 3: lions just switched over to cattle.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: All the lions on the study area that weren't killing
• 36:39
  Speaker 3: cattle when there were a lot of deer switched to cattle,
• 36:42
  Speaker 3: every single one, and so the line numbers didn't go down.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: So that's the actual system, right that we're worried about
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: on the one that's depressed enough to keep them in
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: that predator pit. That's when we have to get step
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: in and remove them. And it's got to be very specific. Right,
• 37:07
  Speaker 3: you go out there and kill a bunch of yearly
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: in coyotes and and not deal with the pair that's
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: raising those pups, you haven't done a darn thing. I'll
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: go one further. We do a lot of predator management
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: around pronghorn YEP, very well documented. If you've got pronghorn
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: herd that might have twenty five fons per one hundred dos,
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: if you do kyote removal effective chyote removal, you can
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: get up to about fifty fonts. You can about double
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: that phone survival if you do it well. One state
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: insisted that we do that work at the first of
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: May because that's when the phones start dropping in May,
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: so they only wanted coyotes removed in May. If you
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: go out there with an airplane, you go out there
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: in May, you're going to find male coyotes that are
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: provisioning pups. The female was right there tied to the den. Okay,
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: if you get it, she's in the hole with those pups,
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: and you're out there killing males you have no impact whatsoever.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: You got to get the reproduction. The time to get
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: those is before she has the pup and if you
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: can remove her, another capital take her place. But they
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: won't have pupps in that territory that year. That'll be
• 38:23
  Speaker 3: a safe low for prong horns to fawn.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: My buddy does that work for an imperiled prong horned population.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: And he goes down to his camp. I feel like
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: he's in his camps. There's like the peak day when
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: they drop fawns. Yeah, I feel like he's in his
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: camp six weeks yeah, prior six weeks post something like that.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: Some schedule like that, right, like, well in advance, you know.
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, you that's the time I'd like to see it.
• 38:48
  Speaker 3: We did aerial removals on deer fawning range between January
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: and March and removing it, especially here in the mountains.
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: Kyotes that live above seven thousand foot in January are
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down with the groceries.
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: But you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: that time of year.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: But why are they up there though they.
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: Can't afford to leave? If they leave somebody else is
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: going to take their place.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: You think, so, oh, I've seen it. I've seen so
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: much where you be up so high and like the
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: snow's crusted. Yeah, and you're like, why what are they doing.
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: They're digging down to old kills. They're I don't know,
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: eating juniper. I have no idea, but about seven thousand
• 39:32
  Speaker 3: foot and above, it's all territorial kyotes. So you go
• 39:35
  Speaker 3: up there in January, February, March, territory bonds are established,
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: the pair bonds are there. You get fresh though, you
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes,
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: and livestock losses that year cut in half. Really, fawn
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: losses are cut way down. Other coyotes will take their place,
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: but those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: pups born in that territory that year. Yeah, and you're golden.
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: If you did it in November, there'd be another pair
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: of coyotes in there by January and you'd still have pupps.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: So the timing is critical to when you get that.
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: The coyotes you remove are critical. It's it's literally got
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: to be the adult female. If you can get her
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: out of there before shee whelps. You've got a pretty
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: clear sailing all all through falling season. But if you
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's
• 40:27
  Speaker 3: gonna kill just as bad as if they were both.
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: Is that right?
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah? What do you see? Do you ever see a
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: situation where, let's say you have like good high deer numbers? Yeah, okay,
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: So if you have a long historical trend.
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: And you kind of know, like what what.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: You have data over decades, and you know like what
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: low looks like for deer out numbers, say white tail deer,
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: you know what low looks like, you know what high
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: looks like, and you're plugging along in good stable country.
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: In those cases, do you generally feel like there's no
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: there's no point in doing predator removal?
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: relationship to carrying capacity and carrying capacity changes over the years, right,
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: I mean things dry out, you get a fire, and
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: you have to reshuffle the whole deck because you don't
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: know what the carrying the right carring capacity is. And
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: this is in aside, but agencies have to decide every
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: year where are we going to spend our money, and
• 41:31
  Speaker 3: we're going to spend it on habitat work. We're going
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: to spend it on predator control and the world. According
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: to Mike, you do habitat work all the time. You
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: do habitat work for next year, for five years down
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: the road. If you're pushing junipers to create more brows
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: for deer, you still got to do that. You do
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: predator management. If you have unused habitat today, got it.
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah,
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: we had a three step process to decide if a
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: predator plan was necessary.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, if we were fifty.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: Percent of our hurt objective or less, and had fifty
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: phones per one hundred dos or fewer, and had a
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: three year stable to declining trend, then that would be
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: a unit that we would consider for predator management. Okay,
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: if you had an increasing trend but you still met
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: the first two, you could let it go. You could
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: see if they'd get there on their own.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: You would put.
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: Your resources someplace else. But if it met all three
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: What cases in your career have you seen where, like
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, Buddy mine is working on a pronghorn deal.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: I mean they have like he's working. I don't want to, Yeah,
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I don't want I just didn't ask him if I
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: could talk about you know, yeah, I don't know how
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: much he wants yapping about this. But he's an area
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: with the numbers are exceptionally low, right, so he's doing
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: work timed removals in hopes of lifting them up. How
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: often in your career have you seen where you had
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: where nothing was working, okay, and you're seeing like a
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: desert big horn population collapsing, you're seeing a meal deer
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: population collapsing, whatever, and you come in and do the work,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: and then you see immediate benefits from from predator removal.
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: Immediate.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: Do you ever do it where you come in and
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: you do predator removal and you realize it was something different,
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: Like it it doesn't move the needle.
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it can be something different. And predators aren't the
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: like it's a single issue, but everything else is working
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: on them at the same time. When we start predator
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: management for let's say, prong horn or mule deer, white tail,
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: I told the agencies, I'm not going to do it
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: for less than three years. The fawns I save in
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: year one won't contribute their own farms until year three.
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: They get bread as yearlings, and they drop it the
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: beginning on their second birthday, if you will. So we've
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: got to see any kind of moving the needle. It
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: takes at least three years. With a species like that,
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: got it.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: We see it a little bit quicker.
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: In waterfowl, you know, the Bear River Refuge in Utah
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: used to produce eighty thousand ducklings. Most of the flyways
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: cinnamon teel came out of that particular system, and they
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: had a flood in the eighties that completely put the
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: refuge under water. When they came back the floodwaters receded,
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: they built dikes again that linear habitat to control the
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: water to prevent the refuge from flooding, But all the
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: nesting habitat became dikes at the same time. Raccoons and
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: red fo just came in. Neither of those were native
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: predators in that system.
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: Will cause those to come in like that.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: brought them into chasing with hounds. The red fox.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: I know that Hans the pigs, but I know I
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: didn't know that has.
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: Well, that's how we got rabies in the northeast. It
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: was Florida coons being moved up there. The red fox.
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: You could actually watch their march across across the landscape.
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: In fact, there's an out of Leopold wrote a book
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: called Game Survey. He dedicates several pages in that book
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: maps in years in all the rest. So it's been
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: going on since the forties. But red fox has just
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems.
• 45:52
  Speaker 3: But they produced nothing. For two decades after that, they
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance. We radio collared
• 46:03
  Speaker 3: stuff and watch them. And when we started removing the predators,
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: the duck numbers came up. Okay, but ducks have like
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: an eighty percent fidelity to the site they were born at. Okay,
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: So we went twenty years without producing any ducks. What
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: are the chances we're going to go from zero to
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: eighty thousand in one year?
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: Yah? None God.
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: We had to have some ducks that were raised there
• 46:26
  Speaker 3: come back and start raising their own ducks. And so
• 46:29
  Speaker 3: it's a it's a long term process. If you're saving
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: sea turtles, what are you doing?
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: Man?
• 46:35
  Speaker 3: It might take fifty years before you actually see the
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: sea turtle population rebound because because they got to be
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: twenty years old to breed.
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: In the first place.
• 46:45
  Speaker 2: Have you ever worked on sea turtles?
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: Oh?
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we did feral hog removals for sea turtles.
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: And what'd that look like again?
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: Sea turtles nest in may. You kill hogs, they'll still
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: swim out to the islands or get to the beaches.
• 47:00
  Speaker 3: We would go in there at the end of April
• 47:03
  Speaker 3: and aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could,
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: all though that had access to those beaches. And it's
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: kind of easy in a saltwater ecosystem because the pigs
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: have to drink fresh water. You know where the fresh
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: water is, you can go get all the pigs around that.
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: But hogs would reinfest the island by the next year.
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: But all we had to do is give it forty
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: five days worth a protection, got it, And those those
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: little eggs would hatch and make their way back to
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: the sea.
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: That seems to me like the one predator control project
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: you work on where you're not going to get sued
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: my Like's Center for Biological Diversity or something, because they're
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: all going to agree that sea turtles are cute and
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: hogs are and they're probably going to agree that hogs
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: are bad.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but any other thing they're like, no, no, no.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: down there, and they said, you know, their controversies aren't
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: should we do it? Their controversies are how do we
• 47:58
  Speaker 3: do it?
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Humanly?
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: Know they're there. Red foxes are invasive and they're impacting.
• 48:03
  Speaker 3: The native hairs are invasive. Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: talks about should we it's just the arguments over do
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: we use poison?
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: Well, they had that little problem where they had school
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: kids out getting house cats and that caused like a
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: little bit of age.
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: But yeah, the cat people are a little crazy, Yes
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: they are.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: Sea turtle work, yeah, yeah, So what was the sea turtle?
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: Uh, there's a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle that's being restored
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: in Texas, Okay, and so but uh, there's work done
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's again raccoons,
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: it's coyotes, it's it's a farrel hogs.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: Now, I know what I was gonna ask about. It
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: seems that I hesitate to use the word fashion Yeah,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: but it seems fashionable right now. Like I wish my
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: buddy Yanni was here because he's he's all.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: Up in this right now.
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: want turkeys on the ground more turkeys are real hip
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: to like reducing raccoon numbers, right yeah. And I've paid
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: attention to this because if you look at when fur
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: prices are high. Okay, so let's say you go back
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: to seventy eight to eighty two, right there is there
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance. Like if I
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: go back to the county, the counties where I grew up,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: raccoon abundance in like eighty four, nineteen eighty four, nineteen
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: eighty six. I mean, you'd get excited if you found
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: a raccooned entry because everybody is running raccoons because they're valuable.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Everybody's running them with dogs, and everybody's trapping them because
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: you're trapping in those days, dollars like twenty dollars raccoons,
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: thirty dollars raccoons, forty dollars raccoons. There were no raccoons,
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: and you go, I shouldn't say there were no, but
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: it was like competitive to get them.
• 50:00
  Speaker 2: You go there now, man, I mean.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: It's nothing but raccoons, right, It's just like the rolls
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: are littered with raccoons a raccoons all over because those
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: fur prices, people.
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: Aren't out getting them.
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: And so it seems like more and more guys now
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: are interested in trying to go out and put all
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: to help their wild turkeys. So that's what they feel
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: like they're doing. Are they being impactful?
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: Sure they are if they if they do it on
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: a big enough scale. So we looked at not to
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: not to leave turkeys, we come back to it, but
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: we looked at pheasants in Utah, and pheasants are farmfield birds, right,
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas,
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: one in northern Utah, one in southern Utah and southern Utah.
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: We went from sagebrush on the east to sagebrush on
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: the west and just picked the valley floor had some
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: natural choke points where roads or rivers came in where
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: we could and to say this area is a study
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: unit sixteen seventeen square.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: Mile, Yeah, where you could sort of block it off
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: with some kind of natural feature.
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: And after the first year we mapped where we caught
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest.
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: And after the first year we would get red foxes
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: still back in the center of the area, but raccoons
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: and skunks were all on the edges. They were coming
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: in from the boundaries, and so we made a difference.
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas, in those treatment
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: areas compared to the no treatment areas.
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: We had foresights by going after foxes.
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: Raccoons, and skunks. Those were our three nest predators, and
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: same study in northern Utah, but our study areas were
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: on section lines four square miles, okay, and we had
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: six three no treatments, three treatments. We kind of stabbed
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four score miles,
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: it's two by two. The center of that unit's only
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: one mile from the edge. And we did not change
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: one hundred trap nights, it was the same at the
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: end of the project as it was at the beginning.
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: We would kill a raccoon and another one show up
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: for the funeral, Right, Okay, that's it's good coon habitat.
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: an area as you've got groceries. Okay, Skunks aren't territorial.
• 52:35
  Speaker 3: So if it's good habitat, had you have to work
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: bigger than that. When the fur was valuable, trappers were
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: all over the place. There was competition, like you say,
• 52:46
  Speaker 3: not just for the animals, but for the space to
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made
• 52:53
  Speaker 3: a difference.
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: So if my body, Yannie, is doing raccoon work on
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: forty eighters.
• 53:02
  Speaker 3: He might help one nest.
• 53:07
  Speaker 2: It's just they're coming from everywhere, and they're finding.
• 53:09
  Speaker 3: Coming from everywhere, and he'll probably remove as much at
• 53:12
  Speaker 3: the end as he does at the beginning.
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: So tell me again, like, what is the center of
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: the circle, Like, what is the what is the radius
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: of the circle need to look like? Meaning, if you're
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: trying to restore turkeys in the Okay, there's a forty
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: acre area, you have a forty acre area of great
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: turkey habitat, you got roost trees, you got nesting cover,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: you got food. What is the radius need to look
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: at the center of the circle.
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: So if we're talking about rio grand turkeys in there
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: in the valley, okay, I would do the valley and
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: I would have I want to have seven ten miles
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: of valley that you would be working up and down
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: because the turkeys are going to pick. Yeah, yeah, that
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: might be a meaningful management area. Forty acres isn't going
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: to get it. Huh. And this is I mean to
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: me again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: may impact a few deer, but the deer also select
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: where they're going to go fall. The turkeys select where
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: they're going to go nest based on the abundance of
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: predators or that secondary risk. We had one of the
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: PhD studies that was done on ducks at.
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: Bear River Refuge.
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: They built predator exclosure forty acre exclosures and outside the
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: exclosure where the predators were going. They had no nesting
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: Inside the exclosure, they had a nest for every two acres.
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing
• 54:59
  Speaker 3: was it's fin it's a fenced exclosure. They would still
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: try to dig underneath the fence, so we had to
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: more predators per acre protected there than we did out
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: on the outside. We're still we're still finning the outside predators.
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: Really, but the.
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: Cost in predators was higher simply because it attracted the animals.
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: They picked their nesting site, and that's what might be
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: working for Yanni. We biologists do studies like dummy nests. Right,
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: you put out a bunch of eggs, you put out
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: you make a fake nest and then monitor it with
• 55:40
  Speaker 3: a camera or go back and see if it gets
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: attacked and you know, did ravens get it or did
• 55:46
  Speaker 3: who's doing what? Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: A turkey lays an egg today and walks away, and
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it,
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: and she walks away, and she comes back a third day.
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: And if a predator got those two eggs, she's got
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: to go find a new place to nest. She doesn't
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: just keep putting them in the same place, okay, And
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: so her body's gonna tell her when she's had enough,
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: But she may do that four or five times if
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: nest predators are getting those eggs while she before she
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: even starts incubating.
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: I got it. I didn't know this about them. Totally
• 56:23
  Speaker 2: makes sense.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: And I know that that habit of that they don't
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: incubate until they get their whole, until they get the
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: whole clutch.
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: I never knew that she would abandon.
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: She'll abandon that site. And so nest sites selection is important.
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: Quail are a big thing in Texas.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: Right Santa Texas.
• 56:37
  Speaker 3: Bob Boy. Quail have to have their nest within ten
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: feet of bare ground because those chicks are an inch
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: tall when they're born, they can't walk through the thick grass.
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: They lead them out into the open where they grab
• 56:50
  Speaker 3: grasshoppers as baby chick that they don't feed them, they
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: have to feed themselves. Well, if that hen gets bumped
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quailed make
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: a difference at all. But she gets bumped by coyotes.
• 57:03
  Speaker 3: If her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to build
• 57:08
  Speaker 3: that clutch, then she's going to select less attractive sites
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: for nest success just because of that secondary predator impact.
• 57:18
  Speaker 3: And so when we talk about coyote control for quail,
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: it's they don't need enough to make it worthwhile. Well,
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: maybe if the nest site selection is being affected in
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: to do raccoon control. You got to do gray fox control,
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators
• 57:36
  Speaker 3: may start chilling up. So you do total predation management
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: if you're trying to do quail ness protection.
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: In Texas, some time ago, over a year ago, we
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: had a researcher on about quail.
• 57:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, about just the general.
• 57:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know shittiness of the nation's quail population right now, right,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are bright spots, there's far more. There's
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: far more dark spots than bright spots. You got states
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: that used to be good at quail hunting, now it's not.
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting.
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: Now there's no quail. Right. This story is just all
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: over the Bob White quails territory. We had a research
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: around from Texas and he'd been working on he'd been
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: working on a FDA approved I'm failing to think of
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: the right word, man, Like, what would you call like
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: a treatment for a parasite?
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: Yep, I worm, that's right, yep.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: Okay. So he was working on a medicated feed and
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: there was some superlative around it. If I remember right,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: it was the first time the FDA had approved a
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: medicated feed you could put out for a while.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, an anti parasite.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: And he had found in some areas that this was
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: you could have a positive impact.
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, Now this upset.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: This upset all kinds of quail people because in their
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: minds like habitat, habitat, habitat. Membory said, like Mike's rule,
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: always habitat, And they were insulted or put off, but
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail, right,
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: because anything else is a band aid, right, right. So
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: on the quail question, if you look across the Bob
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: White quails territory, do you feel that predation is if
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: it's death by a thousand cuts, is predation one of
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: those cuts?
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: I'm Bob White qail.
• 59:46
  Speaker 3: I think nest predation in many cases and the secondary
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: predation impacts.
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: the private sector for quail, okay, and we removed all
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 3: the nest preaderors, We removed housecats, we removed bobcats, everything,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: and we got quailed to one to two acres wild
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: bob whites. You could flush twenty covees in in the morning.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: It is a good deal.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: Were you doing the parasite treatment too?
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: No, No, we didn't. I don't think we had them
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: at that time. I never noticed eye worms in any
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: of the birds that we harvested. But it it it.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: We had good habitat too, right.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: Yep, it was the empty you had empty good habits.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: You had empty good habitat. I don't know that I
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 3: could have got them any higher than one to two acres.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: When are you saying one to two acres?
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: What do you mean one.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 3: Bird to every two acres of habitat on the rand?
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: So what's that come out to? Like covey per acre?
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: A covey of birds might use ten acres. And we
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: had some places where we had overlap in covees yep,
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: And there's there's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: had birds that would leave this covey and go join
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: the whening back and forth. Oh yeah, No, they're not
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: all the same all the time.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: But they'd get sick of their bodies and go join
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: a new covey.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah. If you look at some of the research that's
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: done on that, it looks like a wiring diagram for
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: an old Toyota radio, you know, wires going everywhere. This
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: game went over here for three days and then came
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: over here and oh yeah, and intact if they're if
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 3: they're dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 3: shuffling that goes on. I see, But yeah, that that's you.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah, And what
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: we used to consider shitty habitat just they would start
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 3: going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage,
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: and do just find out there in the absence of
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 3: a million predators. But what we know about sage grouse
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: is in the present predators they have to have this
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: tall sage, and they have to have this and that.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: And of course we got a huge number of ravens
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: in the west right, so that's a changing factor. But
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: when you do that work, they'll start picking their own
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: nest sites based on what's good. We see that with
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: turkeys too. I wanted to come back to turkeys. Turkeys
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: will pick their nest site based on the presence or
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: but we did it the way a turkey does. We
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: went and put cameras out let the wildlife get used
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: to the cameras. They went out and put one egg
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: in front of it, and came back the next day
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: and put a second egg. And we even went so
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: far as as to use a golf ball retriever to
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: place the eggs. So we weren't leaving tracks in and
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: out to this nest them. We had fifteen nests. We
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: studied them for fifteen days, putting the eggs in one
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: day at one at a time, and we only had
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: one nest survived that without getting predated.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: Really one of the fifteen.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: The rest of them got whacked. Some of them got
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 3: whacked multiple days, you know. Yeah, so the turkey would
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: quit and go somewhere else, and then quit that place
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: and go somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 3: site selection and that doesn't always favor the chick survival.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: Yep, you've done a lot of work on wild hogs.
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I was considered a predator expert for a long time.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: Now I'm a hog expert, and that's not a promotion
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: yet I'm going the wrong direction.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: Your hog expert.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, let me ask you a super like wide
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: general question. Are we at a point in this country
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: where hogs have gotten where they're going to get? Yes,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: you think so.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: I mean there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 3: in a truck. Yeah, they would, they would, they could
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: set up shop. But but we've eliminated hogs. The government
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: has eliminated hogs in number of states where they had
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: new populations. We've got some resolve to keep them out
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: of those places, and we're never going to eliminate them
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: in some states. Texas is one of those. We're never
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 3: going to eliminate them there.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: What did you make of in the north and they're
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: talking about did you follow this story in the door
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: like this whole like this whole Canadian super hog deal?
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I do.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: The guy who coined that term, what do you tell
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: everybody what that was?
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: Well, that like bullshit to me.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: There are hogs that can winter in Canada and I
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me,
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: so I don't know how.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: But here's the deal about that, Like, just just for
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you something you already know. I mean,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: if you go look at if you go just google
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: up images of hogs in Siberia, there's endless images of
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: hogs walking around in deep snow.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 3: a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 3: wild boar as a farm animal to be raised in
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: So that's what they were doing.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: They're trying to span agricultural They were production, yeah, but.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: The market collapsed on that, and so a lot of
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: those pigs are just releases from the farms. They're highly
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 3: genetically linked to Eurasian pigs and and that's the super
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: pig part, right. They can survive in that environment. They'll
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 3: make snow caves and stuff like that, and and they
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: do well. Eurasian pigs only breed once a year. Eurasian
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 3: pigs are smaller.
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: Litters, so you're Eurasian like the Eurasian pigs on native habitats.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: When you're talking about a pig in his endemic range,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: he breeds once a year like a deer, right, huh.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 3: And that's probably, you know, again, evolutionary, right.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: They don't they don't want to drop young in the
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: middle of the.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 3: Winter, that's right. If they did, they didn't survive, And
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: so those pigs didn't.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: Breed, so the drop them when food was a bunch. Right.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: The wild hog that we have in the US is
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 3: a mixture of Eurasian blood and domestic strains and and
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 3: what we call heritage breeds. Back back when Hatfields and
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: McCoy's were feuding with each other, that was over actually
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: a pig, and they turned them loose, they ear notched them,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: they'd turn them loose, and then they'd gather them in
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: the fall when they could smoke the meat, smoke the
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 3: bacon and preserve it.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: You hear the War the Pig, I think it was
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: called the War the Pig out on San Juan Island. No, No,
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: same thing. Yeah, I can't remember the details. Shot somebody else.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: People had pigs running around and the kind of there
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: was an understanding who owned water or whatever. And yeah,
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: some American shot some Brits pig, or a brit shot
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: an American's pig.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: Now big foss broke out.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and and and so our pigs we see
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 3: in the wild in Texas at least we see three
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: litters every two years, about seven month interval between litters,
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: and we see upwards of six pigs per litter in
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: those litters. So you could see the difference between Canada's
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 3: pig problem and our pig problem is mathematically that's why
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: they haven't caught up to us yet. But Canada has
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and meetings with
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 3: Canadians and they said, we don't want to be Texas.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 3: We want to get on top of our pigs early on.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: So one of your former colleagues we both know, Parker Hall. Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: I remember I was putting a similar question to Parker
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: Hall about pigs and pig management, and he had an
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: interesting perspective, he told me, and to if you disagree
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: or disagree with this, but the way he put it
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: to me is he said, if it was up to
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: the pig right, the whole country's pig territory.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: But he said, but in a lot of areas were
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: just able to get them right. You know, a lot
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: of it's like if they were there, they would be
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: vulnerable to people getting them to finding them right, like
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: meaning in open like in more open country without certain attributes.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: where it's possible to go and take care of an outbreak.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: And that could be messing up some of his perspective.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: And he said, in some places, the terrain vegetation is
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: such that you just can't get them.
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: And there's there's public resolve, right, I mean, you've got
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 3: to actually have the will to get them. When the
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: government had the what we called the Farm Bill program,
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 3: there's a far wild pig eradication control pilot project that
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: was created by the last Farm Bill. They said, show
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 3: us some demonstration areas where we can really make a difference.
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: And in Texas we said, yeah, we think we could
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: do this. We had one area right up on the
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 3: Oklahoma border, and Oklahoma had a site on the other side.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: So we're working on them from both sides of the
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: Red River. And even with a free program, even with
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: all the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: thirty percent of the land was signed up. Yeah, so
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: there are landowners who want to keep their hogs.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: Oh and.
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 3: Unless we're gonna say there's a foreign animal disease and
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: we're gonna come on your land whether you like it
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 3: or not, we're never going to eradicate pigs in those areas.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: This is a hobby of mine.
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: A hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: know to complain about pigs or that let us hunt
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: pigs or whatever. Yeah. I'm was like, if you could again,
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: if you could wave a magic wand and have all
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: the pigs be gone forever?
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 2: Would you do it?
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: And I don't think I've met anyone who is yet
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: said to me, I would wave it. The thing is
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: usually I just wish there weren't as many.
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's it. And I've worked in Texas the
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: first time. When I was in the private sector, there
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 3: are about a million pigs in Texas. When I came back,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 3: there was about three million pigs in Texas. And the
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: difference is remark Yeah, you know, if we could get
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 3: them back to a million, we could, we could tolerate
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 3: the damage that they do. We could manage those numbers.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: At three million, the pig bomb has gone off. It's
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: it's it's a critical mass.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but something weird culturally has happened.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: There's I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: taxes around pigs, meaning there's an industry.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: Now there's there's like a hog hunting industry.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: Sure, you know, yeah, I think that there are a
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: lot of people in Texas that are sort of that
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: are justifying behaviors, motivating behaviors around pig removal, but they're
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: rooting for the pigs.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 2: Sure, because they've built an economy around.
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 3: Them, cropping them. Those helicopter operators will come in there
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: until the landowner. We're helping you. But they're selling the
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 3: seat at fifteen hundred dollars an hour. They got to
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 3: have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: So they're not coming back there next week to shoot
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 3: them again, and they're going somewhere else.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah and so, but but it's but the narrative to
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: the to the would be hog hunter going down to
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: Texas is, Oh, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: that because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: then you look at the guys running the outfits. I'm like,
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. Is he's built
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: the whole business around pigs. So the guy with the
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: cornfield wants the pigs gone.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 3: are living. The habitat's over here on his neighbor. And
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: they're coming out of a canyon or they're coming out
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 3: of a swamp and hitting the corner and then going back. Yeah,
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 3: that guy is selling hunts. This guy has the damage.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: Ye. Another thing I remember learning about pigs and maybe
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: you know if this is still happening or not, is
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: you'd see now and then a state would would seemingly counterintuitively, yep,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: a state would come in and say no pig hunting.
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: Pig hunting is not allowed, right right, No one's allowed
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: to hunt pigs. And he'd be like, well, why would
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: they I want them to hunt the pigs if there's
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: because wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: pigs because you don't want the pigs. But what they're
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: They have such a hell of a good time in
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: Texas that when they go back to Missouri, they like
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: throw a couple of hogs in the trucks. And that
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: was the area of spread.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 3: Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains book.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 3: When they opened it up statewide, populations started popping up everywhere,
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: got it. When they closed it on the western side
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 3: of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving hogs.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: For that.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: I got to preface my next statement with this, I'm
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: a hunter. Yeah, First and foremost that's at the core
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: of who I am.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: Good to meet you, that's.
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 3: I'm a hunter. My wife was a taxidermist her whole
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 3: She made a living that way. I was an outfitter
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: for ten years full time. My first born child is
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: named Hunter.
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 2: Okay, that can backfire.
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 3: Hunting has never capped a wild pig population anywhere in
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, okay, they can outproduce bullets.
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I understand.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 3: So anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine.
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 3: But if you get to the kind of damage that
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 3: we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck,
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: one thing hitting another hitting another, there's got to be
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: some level of control.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: Like recreational hunting is not going to dig out of it.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: And we can't barbecue our way out of the problem. Right,
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: We've got We've got a big problem down there. It
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 3: takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 3: landowners and work at the same time. They can make
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: a difference, but it's it's the problem gets big. Yeah,
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 3: banning hunting Kansas has done at Missouri went through quite
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 3: a bit. Even in banning hog hunting is to reduce
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: the incentive to go move pigs that's what they're trying
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 3: but how Berta's got a bounty on pigs and they're
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: using it as a way to gather data on where
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: they are. God, if there was a bounty, then nobody
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 3: had report the pigs and they'd start to get up.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: So somebody's gonna shoot one of those hundred dollars pigs
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 3: and now we know where they.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: Got a little pocket maybe.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's there's all kinds of approaches, whether you're
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 3: a high density state or a low density state. And
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 3: we killed all the pigs in Washington like three different times,
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 3: is that right? We killed them all, somebody went and
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 3: got them again and brought them back, and they went
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: to the same source. Because the genetics.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: Map, those maps that show source areas that the area
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: I think the area around I can't remember if it
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: was around Dallas or around Austin seems to land a
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: lot of pigs in certain places around the country. And
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: there's a couple other little hot spots where you can
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: tell like where guys are sourcing them and bumping them
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: out of state.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, both genetics and disease wise too, right, got pseudo rabies,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 3: and we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona being moved.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: To Colorade because they carry that ravee pseudo rabies. Yeah yeah,
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: I don't understand.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 3: Rabies is the technical name it's or the common name
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: Azyuski's disease. It's a virus. It's a herpes virus that
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 3: pigs have, so once they get it, they've always got
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 3: it the rest of their life. Got it, they got
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: antibodies to it, but they shed that virus for like
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 3: a ten to fifteen day period after they contract it,
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 3: build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 3: weeks of age. It's it'll cause abortions in South but
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 3: adult pigs, even little pigs will get over it. It's
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 3: fatal to dogs. Have hunting dogs that encounter pigs that
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: are shedding the virus that die from the disease. It's
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 3: it could be fatal to wildlife.
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: You want to talk about public will start killing off
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: people's dogs or be public will Oh.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, no. There's some dog owners, even hog dog owners,
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog.
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 2: I got a friend in Los Angeles.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: She listened like La La, Yeah, and uh, she's always
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: send me Like the other day she sends me a
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: picture where she's got her shoes outside her door, you know,
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: but she sends me pictures just one shoe outside her
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: door and out in her yard as.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 2: A chewed up shoe. Like, are you shoot a coyote?
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: She sends me pictures, you know, I mean, she said, no, dude,
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: these kyotes are all over And she says, used to
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man,
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed, trapped.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: Kylets in LA And she goes, no, because people like
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: their pets, yea, more than they like. She says, it's flipped.
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: It's flipped where now that I feel the threat to
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: their pets. So she said, all that goodwill to kyotes
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: is kind of going out the window.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 3: Well, And I worked a case with the Salt Lake
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 3: Police Department. They were working with a Denver police department.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 3: They thought there were some cereal cap mutlaters that were
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 3: that were you know, cutting cat that's in half and
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 3: the skin was cut with a sharp deal And it
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: was a year long investigation and they finally came and
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: asked me, what do you think? And I said, well
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 3: that that. They showed me a picture, said what killed this?
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: lungs and it's been fed on by a bird that
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 3: how do you know? We'll see where the furs removed.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 3: They took me to a veterinarian's office where we thought
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 3: out a cat and I said, it's going to be
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 3: crunched on the brisket, not on the back. Why when
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 3: a cat gets attacked by a coyote they roll over
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 3: on their back and try to scratch the face. Sure
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: enough had puncture marks. They over a year they were
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 3: looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: doing it the whole time.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I got three areas. Three more areas. I
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: want to ask you about cattle mutilations. Yeah, you know,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: I spend much time on it. I want to ask
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: you about sort of the what maybe is a myth
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: like so the old like the old kind of westerns
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: and stuff where there was a specific wolf, a specific grizzly,
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: a specific lion that's wreaking havoc through the county yep
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: and then lastly a little bit a philosophical question. But
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: let's start with let's start with the myth or not
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: of the individual animal.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: Okay, right, how often do you see that?
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: Not often anymore. But when we were in the business
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 3: of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 3: to get, okay, and they became somewhat mythical. They you know,
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: they brought in multiple people after him. I went to
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 3: Australia in two thousand and three and worked on dingoes
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: down there, and they took me to one place and
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 3: they said, this dingo's been killing.
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: Sheep for two years.
• 1:18:52
  Speaker 3: And the way they trap is they they bring their
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 3: dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure, and
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 3: so the dog would go over and peel on a.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: Rock and scratch at it.
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: And they put a set right there, and they said this,
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: every time we set traps, the thing moves out and
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: go somewhere else. And so I looked at it and said,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 3: this is an old male. They said, he's eighty kilometers
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 3: from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence, you know,
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 3: and he's eighty kilometers from the next known dingo, but
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 3: an old male, and your dog's coming in here and
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: peeing on that rock is a territorial challenge. He's leaving
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 3: because of that. Oh they said, okay, wise guy, well
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 3: what is going on?
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: What would you do?
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: And I couldn't think of it right off. I don't
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 3: know what you feed a dingo in Australia, Yeah, grind
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 3: up a kangaroo, give him food something. But it came
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 3: to me at night. All canines like horse hoof. If
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: you're around a ferrier, get some horse hoof and take
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 3: it home to your dog.
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: They go crazy.
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 3: So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make it
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 3: a little paste out of it, and put in a
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 3: dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by.
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 3: Oh really, Instead of using a territorial marker they were using,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: they use something else, and they caught him right away.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 3: And he was an old male.
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 3: Those old legendary animals are kind of like that, right,
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 3: An old wolf that's just traveling the country looking for females.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 3: And if you go in there and you give them
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 3: a cow to eat, they're not going to eat the cow.
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 3: They're they're looking for another female, or they've been kicked
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 3: out of a territory, they're one hundred miles away from
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 3: another wolf pack, got it, And they're afraid of their
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: own shadows, so they're particularly hard to catch.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: Do you ever see a situation where when you have
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: those like the mythic animal and he's got a name
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: or whatever, you know, and no one can catch him,
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: and everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal. Yeah,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: do you see do you ever see those real differences
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 1: in behavior, meaning that, let's say you're working a there's
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: a desert big horned recovery project going on somewhere and
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: you're losings. Does it ever wind up being that it's
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: like a cat without a question, like a lion is
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: doing that without question.
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 3: The individual behavior is the hardest thing to account for.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: We put California big horns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 3: and there weren't many lines there. They'd had a pretty
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 3: aggressive season, but we knew there was a tom up
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 3: there that we knew there was a female up there
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: looking at the tracks. Put radios on every big horn,
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 3: and we had kind of a three strike in your
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 3: out rule or two strikes in thirty days in you're out.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: And the tom killed almost immediately. Within the first week,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 3: he killed a you and we could tell it was
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 3: him where the sheep died. He was gone for about
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 3: five days. He came back and killed another one. That's
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 3: two strikes in thirty days. We started after him. He
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: actually got a third sheep before we could catch him.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 3: And the day we caught him with the hounds, he
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 3: was traveling with a female side by side. I think
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 3: he bred her that day because she had a little afterwards.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 3: But that line we removed after three kills in like
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 3: fourteen days. She lived in the middle of those sheep
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 3: and for the rest of the collar life.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: She never killed a bigness, is that right?
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: And she's raising kittens, she's got high nutrition.
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: And she had the physical capability, physical capability.
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: She killed Kyle el because she wanted.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, just the individual behavior that Tom knew where to
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 3: go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: go get a line or go get a big horn.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 3: But we also see the opposite, right for in those
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 3: lone wolf deals. You know, this wolf's been killing here
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 3: for twenty years. I bet he hadn't.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 2: Oh they don't.
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: Live that long, right, That's what's funny. But that's kind
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: of what I was getting at with the mythical animal too.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: You see these be my buddy Brody.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: We've looked at somebody these narratives, you know, where there
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: was like this old bear frame or whatever. Yeah, and
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: it'd be that that for forty years he terrorized his valley.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 2: You know, it's like, I don't feel that that's the
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: same barrier.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: No, I don't think so.
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: You know he'd been that might be his grandson, Yeah right, yeah,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: uh okay, I want to ask you about that, Oh,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: cattle mutilations you were talking about, the reason I brought
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: that up is you were talking about having people come.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: To you with dead animals.
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and and they're like, hey, what happened here?
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 2: And there's some forensics.
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: You know, it'll be like it was a drug up
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: under a bush and buried, what was eaten? How did
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: the animal? You know, where did the predd or enter
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: the animal? What did it go after first? All that
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff can tell a tale, right, do you
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: when when people come up with these these inexplicable carcasses,
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: uh where they're like, you know, you get a rancher
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: and he's like, I never see anything like this, you know,
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: and it was cut this way or whatever.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen have you ever seen carcasses.
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: Where and I don't want to get I don't want
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: to get in like I'm not in any way inviting
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation.
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: I'm just generally annoyed by the paranormal world.
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: But have you ever seen carcasses where you just like,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: I have no idea what to have done that?
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the ones that I have been called to, we
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 3: could explain, and it's usually a multi pronged explanation. Right,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 3: this cow was killed by lightning and fed on by
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 3: a bear, and so there's two different things going on,
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 3: and you're not getting the same signal that you know there's.
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's that.
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: But there are things in cattle mutilations that I read
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 3: about that I've not seen, like the tongue missing, just
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 3: the tongue missing, you know, rigor mortis sets in pretty
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 3: fast and it's hard to get in that. How did
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 3: that happen? I don't know that I can explain that,
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: but that's not what I've seen. I investigated a suspected
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 3: wolf kill right on the Utah Wyoming border in the
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 3: cow and that cow had himmer gene right above her hawks. Okay,
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: yearling uh halfer come off the mountain and big hole
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: in it, and and and when we skinned the cow,
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: that's the only bruising that we found. I think the
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 3: darn thing was killed by team ropers all, you know,
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 3: and some cowboy was out there practicing and jerked her
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: down too hard or something.
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: But there was there was just no other bruising. When
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: you were saying like hamrhaging there, I didn't know if
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: you meant like bid up, you mean just under skin bleeding.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: Skin bleeding, but it was in a straight line on
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 3: both legs at the same point of going, oh with me.
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: But someone fun and got a little rough Yeah, yeah, no, kid.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: So there's there's you know, everything I've seen I've been
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: able to explain is as multiple most cases, multiple explanations,
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 3: you know, carrying fed on his carrying, but killed by
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: something else. Lightning gills are the hardest ones to explain
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: because they'll be four of them dead under a tree.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, you know earlier I mentioned you something.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: I made a joke about if you're doing wild hog
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: work for sea turtles, you're going to have you're going
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: to have a high level of buying public buying, sure,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: you know, because people I don't want to use the
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: word fetishized. I'm not thinking the right word, but there's
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: you know, there's strong public sentiment about turtles sea turtles, right,
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: like people being like I don't want to use a
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: drink and straw because it might get a sea turtle.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: removal to saving dangered sea turtles, you're going to find
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: like high public acceptance, not universal, but high public acceptance.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: I would say in other cases where you have you know,
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: an imperiled or an eesa protected species and you're doing
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 1: where where you're still gonna have a high level of acceptance.
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: You know, for me personally, people will say, well, you're
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: just killing coyotes so you can have more analope to hunt,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: and I'm like, my response to that is, yes, there's
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: more to it, but yes.
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: I'm okay with that, right, I'm okay with that.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm okay with the idea that if we have
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: a big game species that people like to hunt, rely
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: on has cultural value and if it's going down and
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: you can do predator work to help recover it and
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: bring the numbers back up because there's a strong social
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: interest in having high numbers and you're not having long
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: term negative population impacts. I'm the predator in my mind.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: I'm like, yes, guiltiest charged. I don't think that that
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: is bad. Yeah, a negative thing to do. What has
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: been your view on that through your career? If you're
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work,
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: you know than you would and helping a guy out
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: at it throughout your career?
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 3: Somebody once famously said, if public opinion is all that mattered,
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 3: California would have nothing, but predators in North Dakota wouldn't
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 3: have any. Yeah, public opinion is just part of the equation.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 3: You've got to have the social license to do what
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 3: you do.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 3: Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 3: of habitat. So if there is available habitat, and if
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 3: we as a group, through our game department, said we
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: want ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline, then we
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 3: should work towards getting ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 3: That's an objective that's set through a public process and
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 3: all the rest. I've had people in Texas ask me
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 3: to protect their deer and their ranch is overgrazed and
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 3: they're feeding deer to keep them alive. And that's not
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: the problem, right God, protecting their deer might be the
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 3: reason it's so overgrased, or they got a brows line.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 3: And so if it's in the context of the habitat,
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 3: and if we have the social license, our game department
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 3: has said we want this, or we have a landowner
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 3: who's conscientious about meeting their objectives, absolutely we should be
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 3: deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 3: We had a internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 3: West Texas. They had to do transplants to bring them
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 3: back in, and the first couple of years of transplants
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 3: were horrible because the predators were eating all the fonts.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 3: We went in there and started removing those funds, removing
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 3: those predators. Bobcats actually were a big predator on problems
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 3: picture in the flats, but they're pretty good at it.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 3: And once we did that, we got the herds back up.
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 3: We talked about when do you start predator management? You
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 3: got to have an exit strategy too, when do you stop.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 3: If we do it for five years and we haven't
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 3: moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else. If we've
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 3: done it and we get to where we're eighty percent
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 3: of carrying capacity or eighty percent of our objective, then
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 3: maybe we can leave that hurt alone and go somewhere else.
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 3: So you got to have an exit strategy for this too.
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 3: And that's that's you know, should be done in the
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 3: planning process. We'll do this for this long or until
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 3: we see these results.
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 2: And you're.
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: You're you work in the private sector now, yeah, yep,
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: and who are your clients?
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 3: So I'm working on a research project with Saphari Club
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 3: Foundation right now. We're putting radio callers onlines and putting
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 3: cameras out in West Texas, trying South Texas as well,
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 3: trying to get a handle online populations.
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: You know the reason subscriptive what's out there?
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, distribution in abundance. Basically, lines in South Texas are fascinating.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 3: They just use the riverine corridors. So I'm going to
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: pick a number and I guarantee it's wrong. But we
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 3: might only have one hundred lines in South Texas, but
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 3: we may only have habitat for one hundred lines in
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 3: South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution and habitat
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 3: fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 3: Oil fields and power lines, everything tends to disrupt some
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 3: of that. Landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches. Yeah,
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 3: that's a problem. I'm working with the Outfitters Association of
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 3: Canadian Province try and get some of the predator management
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: back into their wildlife management scheme. Whether it's stuff that
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 3: the outfitters themselves are doing, is individual outfitters. You know
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 3: they've got they've got regulated territories. Not everybody can go
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 3: to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey,
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 3: look I want I want more elk, I want to
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 3: reduce my wolves. Well what does that look like? Just
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 3: again shoot one in November? Are you actually going to
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 3: go out there and target the panic? So so we're
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 3: building some some strategies there. I'm working for some individual
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 3: landowners in Texas that that have got mostly high fence
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 3: properties and the predators are impacting their genetics selection. These
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 3: guys are farming deer.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 4: Essentially, they're outside, they're inside the fence, but they're they're
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 4: they're free roaming inside the fence, but they've invested in
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 4: the genetics.
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 3: And that's that's a little different than just the capacity.
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 3: We still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got eighty
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 3: ninety phons per one hundred doze. You better be shooting
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 3: a lot of does this fall because we can't feed
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 3: that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 3: genetics and letting them decide rather than the kayitch decide
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 3: which fonds to get.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: How do people find you?
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 3: Uh, word of mouth a lot. I mean I had
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 3: a pretty good following move when I was with USDA.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 3: A lot of landowners know who I am, so I
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 3: work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 3: on some of that, So some of those landowners already
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 3: know me.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: So if there was some dudes, some landowners somewhere and
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: he wanted to talk to you about a problem you had,
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: or if you're trying to figure out if he has
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: a problem, he just type in Mike Bowdenchuck and he'd
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: find you.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 3: He probably would. Yeah, there's there's a lot there on
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 3: the not all of those flattering either. The animal rights
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 3: activists know how to find.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: Jam Yeah yeah, yeah, Well man, I sure appreciate you
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: coming on top of all this stuff.
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, No, predators are my life's work, and understanding
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 3: how it works is probably important. You know, a lot
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 3: of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: is is critical.
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 2: I think that's all fascinating.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 2: I like to have you back on in the future.
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 1: Good. Yeah, well, we'll just you got to keep a
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 1: little running tab of stuff to talk about when you
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: get up to six or seven let me know, okay,
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: all right, all right, Mike Bowden, Chuck, Michael Buden, Chuck,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: Where do you go bout Mike, Mike, Mike Bowden Chuck.
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: Thanks man, great