Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
- 0:13Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underware.
- 0:15Speaker 2: Listening past, you can't predict.
- 0:19Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
- 0:23Speaker 1: I need gear that won't quit. First light builds, no compromise,
- 0:27Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
- 0:31Speaker 1: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
- 0:35Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
- 0:38Speaker 1: t E dot com. Today we're joined joined by uh
- 0:45Speaker 1: what I say? Joined joined by George Buman, who's a
- 0:50Speaker 1: sculptor of bronze artists. He's a naturalist. But here's the
- 0:53Speaker 1: main deal for our for our purposes here, he's an
- 0:56Speaker 1: animal language and animal intelligence expert. Teaches courses on the
- 1:01Speaker 1: intelligence of animals. We'll go to those things in Yellstone
- 1:05Speaker 1: National Park. Leads seminars there of helping people understand what
- 1:10Speaker 1: they're hearing, what they're seeing, about how animals do their business.
- 1:13Speaker 1: He's got a new book called Eavesdropping on Animals. What
- 1:17Speaker 1: we can learn from wildlife conversations. We're gonna dive in
- 1:22Speaker 1: on all that. But just as a little tickler hit
- 1:26Speaker 1: me with, you don't need to say a word. Okay,
- 1:29Speaker 1: now listen, listen, this is this is George Buman. No
- 1:34Speaker 1: brody verify, yeah, no diaphragm in his mouth.
- 1:38Speaker 3: No, no animals in the studio.
- 1:40Speaker 1: No animals in the studio. We have some bronze pete.
- 1:43Speaker 1: We have a bronze piece. We have like the makings
- 1:45Speaker 1: of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey
- 1:49Speaker 1: right there, Tap that turkey so people realize that's not okay,
- 1:53Speaker 1: that's not that turkey is not making this noise.
- 1:56Speaker 4: Okay, hit us with okay, hit us with the note.
- 2:01Speaker 1: Hit us with some turkey vocalizations. No, no, this is
- 2:05Speaker 1: just just flat out okay, all right, okay, hit us
- 2:20Speaker 1: with some kyotes.
- 2:20Speaker 4: Way off? You got a good wolfall Oh yeah, let's
- 2:36Speaker 4: hear a wolf. Oh dude, can you do a good
- 2:49Speaker 4: elk way off bugle?
- 2:51Speaker 1: Yanni does a good bugle, but his Yanni's bugle is
- 2:53Speaker 1: miles away.
- 2:55Speaker 2: Yeah yeahn might be miles away.
- 2:57Speaker 1: Hit me with a good mile away off elk. That's
- 3:08Speaker 1: a lot closer than Yannis. Yannis is like, you can't
- 3:11Speaker 1: even tell.
- 3:11Speaker 4: If you heard it.
- 3:12Speaker 1: You're wondering you've got any good magpie vocalizations? Ravens anything
- 3:19Speaker 1: of the Ravens.
- 3:19Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, one of my favorites. They've got a lot
- 3:27Speaker 2: of a lot of range, a lot of meaning there.
- 3:30Speaker 1: Let me, I want I want to talk a bunch
- 3:31Speaker 1: about those guys, because man, it makes some crazy ass.
- 3:33Speaker 4: Noises and it can't be just that making noises for
- 3:36Speaker 4: no reason.
- 3:37Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no.
- 3:39Speaker 4: Okay, here's a real challenging one. And just just telling me.
- 3:41Speaker 1: If you can't do it, I wish I could. Can
- 3:44Speaker 1: you like this tests your whistling skills? Can you hit
- 3:47Speaker 1: a black can you do black cap chickenye?
- 3:49Speaker 2: Not to mind action. Yeah, there's they're certain to do
- 3:53Speaker 2: it now too.
- 3:56Speaker 4: Good.
- 3:57Speaker 1: That's a tough one, but you know how good it works.
- 3:59Speaker 1: So yeah, because people that can do it can bring
- 4:01Speaker 1: them in like crazy.
- 4:03Speaker 2: That's pretty good. Yep, damn yeah.
- 4:09Speaker 1: All right, all right, we're gonna get it off and
- 4:13Speaker 1: now that but what like, like, here's the main thing
- 4:15Speaker 1: I want. One of the main things I want to
- 4:16Speaker 1: talk to about when we get to I got to
- 4:17Speaker 1: do a couple of announcements is not just the noises,
- 4:21Speaker 1: but like.
- 4:23Speaker 4: There's the what like what they're talking about?
- 4:26Speaker 2: It means stuff. Oh, I can show you things you
- 4:29Speaker 2: would never ever have found.
- 4:31Speaker 1: They obviously mean stuff, but like because they're not doing
- 4:34Speaker 1: it for fun. No, I mean, it might be fun,
- 4:37Speaker 1: but they're not you know what I mean. Yeah, what
- 4:40Speaker 1: it all means. One of the main the first thing
- 4:42Speaker 1: to so you know what's gonna come. One of the
- 4:43Speaker 1: first things I'm gonna ask you about is you know
- 4:47Speaker 1: a pine squirrels pissed off noise or whatever his noise is.
- 4:51Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't do it real good, but there's a
- 4:54Speaker 2: ton of meaning in that.
- 4:55Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Ton, Yeah, you know.
- 4:58Speaker 1: He's pissed at his body.
- 5:03Speaker 2: Fisted at the bobcat.
- 5:05Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, real quick.
- 5:08Speaker 1: So there's a new YouTube. The Bear Grease YouTube channel
- 5:11Speaker 1: is becoming its own thing. A little behind the scenes
- 5:14Speaker 1: thinking here, Clay Clay started a YouTube.
- 5:17Speaker 4: Channel million years ago and it was like the.
- 5:19Speaker 1: Bear Journal or because when Clay owned Bear Hunting Magazine,
- 5:23Speaker 1: he had had a YouTube channel, So it's always been
- 5:25Speaker 1: kind of lurking around there. That YouTube channel is going
- 5:28Speaker 1: to stay like that's Clay's baby. But Clay and Bear
- 5:31Speaker 1: Nwcomb are going to build out the Bear Grease YouTube channel.
- 5:35Speaker 1: So all about them making them little bows out of sticks.
- 5:38Speaker 1: Hunting content, Mule content cooking stuff okay, And they're also
- 5:45Speaker 1: launching their own Instagram page, Round Bear Grease and I'll
- 5:50Speaker 1: tell you we haven't gotten it. I might be the
- 5:52Speaker 1: first guy ever mentioned this. Clay's book that's coming out
- 5:57Speaker 1: in a long time from now is exceptionally good.
- 6:02Speaker 4: It's good. I mean, I've only read the first five chapters.
- 6:05Speaker 4: It's it's a book. It's a it's a book. It's
- 6:07Speaker 4: like a history of the black bear. It is good,
- 6:13Speaker 4: including a large chapter on the circumpolar bear culture. I
- 6:18Speaker 4: don't know if I can. I'm allowed to. Yeah, why not?
- 6:21Speaker 1: Clay just he's turning his booking right now. There's circumpolar
- 6:25Speaker 1: bear culture.
- 6:26Speaker 4: Is crazy because there's like a latitude.
- 6:28Speaker 1: Band all around the continent, so it touches North America, Europe, Asia,
- 6:35Speaker 1: around the northern hemisphere. It's yeah, it's a band of latitudes,
- 6:39Speaker 1: northern northern latitudes all around the globe. And if you
- 6:45Speaker 1: think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around
- 6:48Speaker 1: the world, these are people that split. There's people within
- 6:51Speaker 1: this that split apart way long ago. Like meaning if
- 6:55Speaker 1: you imagine, like imagine it's human's column, like humans are
- 7:01Speaker 1: kind of in.
- 7:03Speaker 4: The Middle East. Humans are in Africa.
- 7:06Speaker 1: You know, humans are up in Spain wherever, and eventually
- 7:10Speaker 1: some of them come around and wind up in Siberia
- 7:13Speaker 1: and some come around and wind up in northern Europe.
- 7:16Speaker 1: Now by this point they haven't been hanging out together
- 7:19Speaker 1: for tens of thousands of years, right.
- 7:22Speaker 4: But.
- 7:24Speaker 1: You look at their religious structures and sort of like
- 7:27Speaker 1: spiritual understandings of bears, and you have this circumpolar bear
- 7:32Speaker 1: culture where people that wouldn't have no interaction with each
- 7:35Speaker 1: other develop or no interaction with each other for thousands
- 7:39Speaker 1: and thousands of years, develop the same sort of religious
- 7:43Speaker 1: understandings of bears and how bears fit into their culture
- 7:49Speaker 1: and the shamanistic aspects and like motivations that are assigned
- 7:54Speaker 1: to bears. And you cannot explain it how some dude
- 7:58Speaker 1: in Siberia, some dudent America, some dude in Europe have
- 8:01Speaker 1: the same concept of like how you treat a bear
- 8:07Speaker 1: when you hunt for a bear? What are your obligations
- 8:09Speaker 1: to the bear? That you definitely don't want a bear
- 8:11Speaker 1: to see you once it's dead, So if you kill
- 8:15Speaker 1: a bear, you approach it from behind.
- 8:17Speaker 4: Like these dudes are on the same trip all over
- 8:20Speaker 4: the do you know what I'm saying.
- 8:21Speaker 1: No, it's so weird, man. I hope he's not pissed
- 8:26Speaker 1: that I'm bringing that up.
- 8:28Speaker 2: Does he have no bear Mother story in there? Is
- 8:31Speaker 2: that that one that goes all over Northern Hemisphere?
- 8:33Speaker 4: It's all over, It's in there. He's got every damn
- 8:35Speaker 4: thing in there. Yeah, that's neat.
- 8:38Speaker 1: No, it's a super cool book available long time from now.
- 8:42Speaker 1: So the Beary's YouTube channel be run by Baron Clay nukeomb.
- 8:48Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 8:49Speaker 1: Oh February eleventh, two days before I turn fifty two,
- 8:55Speaker 1: very auspicious days.
- 9:03Speaker 4: Here's a great correction.
- 9:04Speaker 1: We're gonna start a thing where you win a prize
- 9:07Speaker 1: for you know, we're trying to, like in an age
- 9:09Speaker 1: of disinformation, shady information.
- 9:12Speaker 4: Yeah, we're trying to. We're gonna have a weekly prize
- 9:19Speaker 4: called Correction of the.
- 9:20Speaker 1: Week for the biggest fib so no rewarding people who catch.
- 9:25Speaker 4: Us being wrong.
- 9:26Speaker 2: Ah, that's a good thing.
- 9:28Speaker 4: Yeah, check this out.
- 9:29Speaker 1: For instance, there dam made a comment and that was
- 9:31Speaker 1: this is when we talking about stuff I didn't know. Well,
- 9:35Speaker 1: he even has the thirty seven minute mark. Episode eight
- 9:38Speaker 1: twenty six, was that episode called Skunk Smells Her First?
- 9:44Speaker 5: No, that wasn't it how skunks can ruin a marriage?
- 9:48Speaker 1: Okay, I said, oh, to my defense, I'm still this
- 9:53Speaker 1: is still a correction. To my defense, I said, I
- 9:56Speaker 1: don't think that a human operating word here being I said,
- 10:01Speaker 1: I on the subject of skunks and skunk essence, I said,
- 10:06Speaker 1: I don't think that a human can make.
- 10:14Speaker 5: That.
- 10:14Speaker 1: I didn't finish quite then, I okay, I.
- 10:17Speaker 4: Said, I don't think that a human can make.
- 10:20Speaker 1: I don't think in a lab you could make as
- 10:24Speaker 1: pugnacious or resilient of an order in a laboratory. Guy
- 10:31Speaker 1: wrote in He's like, you're way wrong.
- 10:36Speaker 4: They can't. Humans can and have, And he gets into
- 10:39Speaker 4: some of these odors.
- 10:41Speaker 1: While the skunk order is due to fields mercaptains sulfur
- 10:46Speaker 1: containing compounds, he says, there are other compounds, both synthesized
- 10:52Speaker 1: and isolated in laboratories that samel much worse.
- 10:57Speaker 4: I like this one. They have a.
- 10:59Speaker 1: Lab ba odor called cadaverine, which is a lab produced
- 11:05Speaker 1: odor of decaying flesh. They have pyridine putressine, and what
- 11:16Speaker 1: he regards to be the worst smell of all time,
- 11:19Speaker 1: thio acetone order, so potent it causes nausea. Vomiting and unconsciousness.
- 11:27Speaker 1: There was a lab leak. There was a lab leak
- 11:32Speaker 1: in Germany where they had they had a lab leak
- 11:36Speaker 1: of thio acetone and Germany and for a half mile
- 11:44Speaker 1: radius around the lab people reported nausea, vomiting, and unconsciousness
- 11:52Speaker 1: from a leak.
- 11:54Speaker 2: Powerful and what do they use that for?
- 11:58Speaker 4: Usually I don't know why.
- 11:59Speaker 1: I don't know how they justif either way, I don't
- 12:01Speaker 1: know how. That's a great question. This would be one
- 12:04Speaker 1: of those things we talk about ridiculous maybe when you're
- 12:07Speaker 1: like hacking on science, like the dumb stuff they spend
- 12:10Speaker 1: money on making bad smells.
- 12:13Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, so I'm staying corrected.
- 12:14Speaker 1: That's a good correction right there, man, I said, this
- 12:17Speaker 1: is the kind of correction.
- 12:18Speaker 4: What will be the prize when you get correction in
- 12:20Speaker 4: the week, It's gotta be something good. But it's we
- 12:22Speaker 4: have a lot of it.
- 12:23Speaker 5: We're gonna maybe.
- 12:25Speaker 4: We gotta fifty two of them.
- 12:26Speaker 5: Maybe this will excite people more.
- 12:30Speaker 6: So.
- 12:31Speaker 5: We will have a segment sponsored by to Cova's. To
- 12:34Speaker 5: Covas is.
- 12:36Speaker 4: Well, They're gonna do the they are.
- 12:39Speaker 5: Kickers Correction of the week and we will choose the
- 12:43Speaker 5: winning correction of the week. For We'll do this for
- 12:47Speaker 5: about a month first to see and the correction of
- 12:51Speaker 5: the week winner gets a pair of takovas.
- 12:54Speaker 1: Oh, so we're gonna start out you get a pair
- 12:56Speaker 1: of ship kickers, and then but we'll come up with
- 12:58Speaker 1: something comparable every time.
- 13:00Speaker 5: Sure that's phenomenal corrections.
- 13:06Speaker 1: This would be this would be a great This would
- 13:08Speaker 1: be a great one, I say, And again I said, think.
- 13:11Speaker 1: I say, you can't make something worse than that in
- 13:14Speaker 1: a lab. Guys say, hey you can. Here's another correction.
- 13:18Speaker 1: He calls it a craction by omission, but I'd like
- 13:20Speaker 1: to correct him. It's not a correction, bio missions, just
- 13:25Speaker 1: a correction. So I don't think he'd win because like
- 13:31Speaker 1: he's saying, hey, here's a correction by omission, and then
- 13:34Speaker 1: when I tell you the craction, you realize it's not
- 13:36Speaker 1: a correction, it's just a correction. He's just trying to
- 13:38Speaker 1: soup it up. I said. We were talking about retrieval laws.
- 13:44Speaker 1: We're talking about that in different states you have these
- 13:47Speaker 1: different governing laws about whether you can go and get retrieve.
- 13:53Speaker 4: Game. Okay, so picture that you're sitting there.
- 13:58Speaker 1: You're sitting there and you you you shoot a duck,
- 14:01Speaker 1: you know, ducks flying overhead, and you shoot a duck
- 14:04Speaker 1: and all of a sudden he like sails off and
- 14:06Speaker 1: plump lands overund the neighbor's place. States clarify. All states
- 14:11Speaker 1: have clarified, Like what are you allowed to do? Some
- 14:14Speaker 1: states you just flat out go get it. There's a
- 14:20Speaker 1: state where you can leave your gun behind and go
- 14:25Speaker 1: fetch it. And there are states like the one I'm
- 14:28Speaker 1: sitting in right now, you have no right or authority
- 14:32Speaker 1: to go fetch it. You'd have to go take it
- 14:34Speaker 1: up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I
- 14:36Speaker 1: sailed to duck over around your place.
- 14:37Speaker 4: Can I go grab it?
- 14:39Speaker 1: And as terrible as it sounds, I mean I'm totally like,
- 14:42Speaker 1: I'm like totally fine with that rule, but I would
- 14:46Speaker 1: like to think that most landowners would, when approached, facilitate
- 14:52Speaker 1: the recovery. I understand. I'm not condemning the rule because
- 14:55Speaker 1: I understand that there are situations is where someone could
- 15:01Speaker 1: set up in a way where they just basically know.
- 15:03Speaker 4: That that's going to be the outbum.
- 15:05Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it could be abused for sure, especially
- 15:07Speaker 3: with big game.
- 15:08Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, where you're hunting in a spot
- 15:12Speaker 1: where you're just if you're sitting there going like, well, yeah,
- 15:15Speaker 1: I know it's going to run on in the neighbor's place,
- 15:17Speaker 1: but I'm allowed to go get it, so that doesn't
- 15:19Speaker 1: matter like that, that's probably that could be potentially problematic,
- 15:22Speaker 1: he points out. So I say, in South Dakota, how
- 15:25Speaker 1: it's legal to retrieve upland game such as pheasants without
- 15:31Speaker 1: land owner permission? Okay, but yetta be unarmed. We clarified
- 15:38Speaker 1: that meaning you hit a pheasant, you hit a pheasant,
- 15:40Speaker 1: he sails off. On the neighbor's place in South Dakota,
- 15:43Speaker 1: you lean your shotgun whatever, set your shotgun down, you
- 15:46Speaker 1: run over and fetch it, he pointed out, And he
- 15:49Speaker 1: says that it was correction by omission.
- 15:52Speaker 4: He points out, you can't do that with big game.
- 15:56Speaker 4: Isn't that weird?
- 15:57Speaker 3: Strange? But I think it might be. South Dakota has
- 16:01Speaker 3: that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside roads.
- 16:04Speaker 3: It's like a right away. So I think a lot
- 16:07Speaker 3: of those birds that get shot end up ten yards
- 16:10Speaker 3: onto you know, where you're not permitted to go.
- 16:15Speaker 4: Yeah, they're doing it because of the rule.
- 16:17Speaker 1: You can ditch hunt Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah,
- 16:22Speaker 1: but you can't. Yeah, so just you can't. You can't.
- 16:24Speaker 4: You can chase a pheasant, but you can't chase the deer.
- 16:27Speaker 4: But if a buck sprung up out of that ditch.
- 16:29Speaker 1: And you are allowed to have your dog run over
- 16:32Speaker 1: and fetch it.
- 16:34Speaker 4: But check this out.
- 16:35Speaker 1: Let's say your dog runs over to fetch it flush
- 16:39Speaker 1: is a pheasant. This is what this guy's saying. If
- 16:41Speaker 1: he's wrong, sending a correction, and he'll have to give
- 16:44Speaker 1: you a prize for correcting him. If your dog runs
- 16:51Speaker 1: over onto a private Let's say you're hunting your ditch
- 16:55Speaker 1: hunting and your dog runs onto some dude's place and
- 16:58Speaker 1: flushes a bird off that dude's place, and that bird
- 17:01Speaker 1: then flies over you on the right of way. You
- 17:05Speaker 1: can't shoot the bird because your dog can go retrieve,
- 17:11Speaker 1: but he can't go hunt.
- 17:14Speaker 4: And that's basically having a dog with a shotgun. Here's
- 17:23Speaker 4: a nurse skunk story that was a bad segue.
- 17:29Speaker 1: This guy says this, this last week, I had been
- 17:31Speaker 1: skinning a skunk that caught the coyote trap. I wasn't
- 17:34Speaker 1: really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in it.
- 17:37Speaker 4: Sent gland.
- 17:37Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime. Oh, we're done with corrections,
- 17:41Speaker 1: not right, Yeah, this is this is this is a story.
- 17:45Speaker 4: Okay.
- 17:46Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime I had just committed, I
- 17:49Speaker 1: put the skunk outside to let things air out, so
- 17:52Speaker 1: he was skinning an inside. An hour later, the cop
- 17:57Speaker 1: showed up. Well, the local police showed up in my
- 17:59Speaker 1: house to inform me that there was a terrible smell
- 18:04Speaker 1: coming from my house, to the point that the local
- 18:07Speaker 1: middle school had to go into lockdown because they thought
- 18:12Speaker 1: kids were smoking massive amounts of weed.
- 18:15Speaker 4: He's the word marijuana.
- 18:18Speaker 1: They even had the fire department come to the school
- 18:21Speaker 1: to test the air for toxins. Now, my whole town
- 18:26Speaker 1: has been talking about me and infern to me as
- 18:29Speaker 1: skunk boy. I don't think the smell was that bad,
- 18:37Speaker 1: but I'm not sure what to do because I make
- 18:39Speaker 1: a homemade skunk based lure that I used to catch
- 18:42Speaker 1: all my predators. Here it goes into a question. This
- 18:45Speaker 1: becomes like a like a advice advice. This is becoming
- 18:48Speaker 1: an advice column.
- 18:50Speaker 4: Do I stop making it and risk being less successful?
- 18:55Speaker 4: He's leading the witness.
- 18:58Speaker 1: He asked, do I stop making it in risk being
- 19:04Speaker 1: less successful on the trap line, or do I keep
- 19:08Speaker 1: making it in secret and hope there isn't another incident.
- 19:12Speaker 1: I think that there is a middle ground Hunter Gregory.
- 19:17Speaker 1: See here's the evidence. The name of your kid Hunter
- 19:18Speaker 1: doesn't backfire. Yeah, his name's Hunter, didn't backfire. No names
- 19:24Speaker 1: their kid fishermen angler.
- 19:28Speaker 4: Yeah, they probably don't.
- 19:30Speaker 5: I don't know.
- 19:30Speaker 4: I've never heard it.
- 19:32Speaker 1: No names are kids, sportsperson outdoors? A person his name's Hunter.
- 19:39Speaker 1: It didn't backfire. Obviously he's obviously he's like neck deep
- 19:43Speaker 1: in the disciplines he's from. I'm not gonna give his
- 19:47Speaker 1: last name. I think you got to take this whole
- 19:52Speaker 1: operation elsewhere if it depends you have the right. Well,
- 20:02Speaker 1: what's that machine we want to get the founder of
- 20:03Speaker 1: this machine on the.
- 20:05Speaker 4: Nasal raider nasal radar.
- 20:07Speaker 1: We're calling the raider, but the nasal there's a machine
- 20:11Speaker 1: that they use that quantifies bad smells. You know about this,
- 20:15Speaker 1: called the nasal radar. I would say nasal raider, but
- 20:18Speaker 1: I was misreading it. That's a correction.
- 20:20Speaker 4: The nasal radar.
- 20:22Speaker 1: It's like when you get a oh, nasal ranger, sure, okay,
- 20:26Speaker 1: nasal ranger. When you get a smell complaint, like some
- 20:30Speaker 1: dude skin and skunks. It's so subjective.
- 20:34Speaker 4: Yeah right, it's like why not bother you?
- 20:37Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad.
- 20:40Speaker 1: The guy over here, he doesn't think it smells that bad,
- 20:42Speaker 1: So it does it smell that bad. The nasal ranger
- 20:45Speaker 1: is a machine that you put on your nose. It
- 20:49Speaker 1: looks like an elk bugle with contraptions coming off it.
- 20:54Speaker 1: Can you pull this up, Phil, just so people can
- 20:56Speaker 1: see it? To me again, you don't have a little
- 20:59Speaker 1: computer over there, and.
- 21:00Speaker 5: What was to do it?
- 21:01Speaker 6: I do, but I don't have a picture.
- 21:03Speaker 2: I guess I could just google it.
- 21:04Speaker 3: It tells you how bad you think it should smell.
- 21:07Speaker 4: The nasal Ranger. I watched this whole video, but it.
- 21:10Speaker 2: Just looks insane.
- 21:11Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, Like.
- 21:12Speaker 1: Let's say someone's like, dude, the hog farm next to
- 21:14Speaker 1: my place is killing me.
- 21:16Speaker 4: It smells so bad.
- 21:17Speaker 1: And it winds up being like, well, according to who
- 21:20Speaker 1: the nasal ranger you.
- 21:23Speaker 4: It looks like an Eler bugle that hooks to your nose.
- 21:25Speaker 1: There's a little nose coup, but it's got filters and
- 21:29Speaker 1: shit coming off. Okay, you go out there and there's
- 21:32Speaker 1: a meter that shows like what it.
- 21:35Speaker 4: Okay, right there, it looks like if a cop was, yeah,
- 21:42Speaker 4: clocking you radar.
- 21:45Speaker 1: You would think that if you saw this, you would
- 21:47Speaker 1: think a cop is smelling how fast your car's going.
- 21:50Speaker 4: Okay, there's a.
- 21:52Speaker 5: Whole article in the New York Times, like.
- 21:58Speaker 1: I'm getting to that, but I want to tell you
- 22:00Speaker 1: I want one so bad because I want to be
- 22:03Speaker 1: able to use it in arguments of my wife.
- 22:05Speaker 3: Yeah, be like see it's not so bad.
- 22:07Speaker 1: She sends me one of her like twice a year.
- 22:11Speaker 1: I can't live like this.
- 22:13Speaker 5: Okay, oh yeah we can. We can invest in one,
- 22:16Speaker 5: just like we did the Warner Bratsler's Sheer Force.
- 22:19Speaker 4: They're less expensive.
- 22:21Speaker 1: That's good, Like we bought that and I don't know,
- 22:24Speaker 1: maybe we spent too much money on that thing for
- 22:27Speaker 1: how much we needed it.
- 22:29Speaker 5: We're gonna keep trying to get our money's worth.
- 22:34Speaker 1: Okay, here's here's my here's the other day, here's my wife.
- 22:36Speaker 1: My wife has this to say to me.
- 22:40Speaker 3: She's gonna have a lot more to say to you
- 22:41Speaker 3: after you put this in a podcast.
- 22:44Speaker 5: Wife says, two thousand dollars.
- 22:47Speaker 1: By the way, there's two thousand bucks little background of
- 22:50Speaker 1: my wife. My wife all has always worked. She worked
- 22:53Speaker 1: all through having babies. She's taking time off of work
- 22:56Speaker 1: and now she's like, now that she doesn't have baby,
- 22:59Speaker 1: she's not working. She just know what people do with themselves.
- 23:02Speaker 1: So it's great. She started to trying.
- 23:04Speaker 4: She's not play tennis totally great, started baking.
- 23:12Speaker 1: I am at tennis and can't figure out why my
- 23:15Speaker 1: ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on
- 23:19Speaker 1: both ankles. If you brought fleas into our house because
- 23:24Speaker 1: of the things you trapped, you need to figure that
- 23:26Speaker 1: out now, like before work. I am not going to
- 23:30Speaker 1: live like this, soie right.
- 23:35Speaker 4: I get these all the time.
- 23:37Speaker 1: A lot of times they have to do with defensive odors.
- 23:39Speaker 1: And if I had a nasal ranger, I would be
- 23:43Speaker 1: able to be like, well, let's check you could avoid
- 23:47Speaker 1: cons I would be like, let's see is it offensive
- 23:50Speaker 1: or not.
- 23:51Speaker 4: Let's take the subjectivity out of it.
- 23:52Speaker 5: We need to make content out of it.
- 23:54Speaker 4: Let's measure.
- 23:55Speaker 5: I'm going to talk to our CFO about getting.
- 23:57Speaker 3: The subjectivity is the hard part.
- 23:59Speaker 4: Man, That's what the ranger.
- 24:03Speaker 2: So you can you can put any kind of ranger
- 24:05Speaker 2: on that you want.
- 24:06Speaker 1: I'll be like, well, you know what, it's actually not
- 24:08Speaker 1: offensive because I hit it with the nasal ranger and
- 24:10Speaker 1: it's in it's inemptible living.
- 24:14Speaker 4: So now then ranger, you hook it to your nose.
- 24:17Speaker 1: And so let's say someone's like it comes to you
- 24:20Speaker 1: with their complaining about how something smells, and they go
- 24:23Speaker 1: just smell. Yeah, Well people don't breathe that way, right,
- 24:28Speaker 1: That's that's not fair.
- 24:30Speaker 4: You know, no one comes around going.
- 24:33Speaker 3: Not Just last week, I was, uh, I had already
- 24:37Speaker 3: boiled this coyote skull, but it needs a little touch up.
- 24:43Speaker 3: There was some things that were still hanging on there,
- 24:46Speaker 3: and my wife laughed. I was like, I'm just gonna
- 24:49Speaker 3: do it on the stove. Sure I didn't smell a thing,
- 24:53Speaker 3: but when she got back she smelled it, yeah, and
- 24:56Speaker 3: I was just like, it smells a little like boiling meat.
- 24:58Speaker 4: That's all exactly.
- 25:04Speaker 2: Yeah, we'd clean out the whole university building that way.
- 25:08Speaker 1: That's that is its own kind of that is a
- 25:11Speaker 1: crazy odor. The nasal ranger you put it up to
- 25:15Speaker 1: your nose and there's a little meter that shows that
- 25:19Speaker 1: you're inhaling normally, So you can't go in and not
- 25:22Speaker 1: breathe and say like, I don't smell nothing because you're
- 25:25Speaker 1: not breathing and you can't go in and over smell.
- 25:31Speaker 1: It makes it that you're hitting like a baseline normal breathing,
- 25:37Speaker 1: and it's got these contraptions on it that are sucking
- 25:40Speaker 1: in the air and it's throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement.
- 25:46Speaker 4: So you can apply a number to when something reeks.
- 25:51Speaker 4: I love it. So let's say someone in.
- 25:53Speaker 1: The summer, some guy hits deer and stop by your
- 25:55Speaker 1: house or whatever, and it's chromnell maggots and someone's like,
- 25:57Speaker 1: my god, that smells. Imagine if you can go, yeah,
- 26:00Speaker 1: it's a five, yep, and apply a number to a
- 26:05Speaker 1: thing that is just entirely subjective.
- 26:08Speaker 6: I have a feeling that with fifty years of a
- 26:10Speaker 6: life lived, you know, breaking down animals, smelling everything there
- 26:15Speaker 6: is to smell, I have a feeling that the nasal
- 26:17Speaker 6: Ranger will skew towards the gen pop and probably I
- 26:21Speaker 6: think everything you are completely deadened to will read as
- 26:25Speaker 6: offensive to most people.
- 26:26Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why I need a nasal ranger.
- 26:31Speaker 3: Tweak the settings a little bit so it comes out
- 26:35Speaker 3: in your favor, Like.
- 26:36Speaker 1: Hack into the software or whatever to make it like
- 26:38Speaker 1: not because yeah, because what if it backfires in Your
- 26:41Speaker 1: wife is like, no, dude, this is a high as
- 26:43Speaker 1: it's an eleven.
- 26:45Speaker 4: Yep, it's an eleven anyway.
- 26:49Speaker 1: So this guy making this lure, and I understand, but
- 26:52Speaker 1: I don't know why in the world you're making that
- 26:54Speaker 1: next to the school. It's like, I feel like you
- 26:57Speaker 1: have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.
- 27:02Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he did puncture the gland, which I'm
- 27:05Speaker 3: sure made it. Oh well, he a hundred times worse.
- 27:08Speaker 1: Yeah, so he probably knows if he's making this lure.
- 27:10Speaker 4: He knows that.
- 27:11Speaker 1: You go down to Murdochs and you go into the
- 27:14Speaker 1: veterinarian care aisle and you get one of them large
- 27:18Speaker 1: gauge hypodermic needles. I mean the kind of needle you
- 27:22Speaker 1: can look through the son of a bitch, you know
- 27:23Speaker 1: what I mean. You get one of those heavy gauge
- 27:27Speaker 1: veterinarian needles that they use inject cattle with, put that
- 27:31Speaker 1: into there and.
- 27:34Speaker 4: Suck that smell out elsewhere yep, not at home.
- 27:38Speaker 1: Then you mix it in with your vasoline or your
- 27:39Speaker 1: petroleum jelly or whatever you're putting in New so you
- 27:41Speaker 1: got a skunk based paste elsewhere out in the woods.
- 27:48Speaker 1: Here's another tip he might want to know about. And
- 27:50Speaker 1: I was turned on to this one that works very well.
- 27:52Speaker 1: Get yourself a big sack of kitty litter. Get yourself
- 27:57Speaker 1: one of those small action packers or everyone.
- 27:59Speaker 4: He was, I don't care.
- 28:00Speaker 1: This tough five gallon bucket whatever, Fill it with kitty litter.
- 28:03Speaker 1: Once you make your lure, deep six it in that cat.
- 28:08Speaker 4: Litter, deep six the lure in there.
- 28:13Speaker 1: Store it incaste. I got store it in a in
- 28:18Speaker 1: a container deep down in kitty litter for your offensive odors.
- 28:27Speaker 1: That won't escape that no, And when I get a
- 28:30Speaker 1: nasal range, I'll prove it.
- 28:32Speaker 4: I'll prove it.
- 28:33Speaker 1: We'll take a draw off some skunk and then we'll
- 28:36Speaker 1: put it down in a bottle and kiddy lure and
- 28:38Speaker 1: take a draw off it.
- 28:39Speaker 4: And you won't.
- 28:39Speaker 1: That naise range is not going to pick it up.
- 28:43Speaker 1: Another guy wrote in about skunks. He's in the nuisance
- 28:46Speaker 1: wildlife removal business. They do with a lot of skunks
- 28:49Speaker 1: in the spring and summer. You can picture this skunk
- 28:52Speaker 1: gets in your house, living under your porch. Someone gets upset.
- 28:56Speaker 1: They they catch them in cage traps and they kill
- 29:04Speaker 1: them with in a CO two chamber for euthanasia. Do
- 29:11Speaker 1: you guys remember we were talking earlier. Do you remember
- 29:13Speaker 1: during the pandemic when they had to like in northern
- 29:18Speaker 1: Europe they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands
- 29:21Speaker 1: of mink.
- 29:24Speaker 4: Which they pelted, you know, they pelted those all out,
- 29:27Speaker 4: they did.
- 29:28Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that it would like make mink prices
- 29:30Speaker 1: skyrocket because they killed all these branch or whatever. But
- 29:34Speaker 1: someone's like that all went to market anyhow. Why I didn't
- 29:38Speaker 1: realize they got these little gas powered rigs they drive
- 29:41Speaker 1: around in on those mink farms, and there's a box
- 29:43Speaker 1: on the rig and it's harvesting its own CO two.
- 29:47Speaker 1: So like you're driving this little golf cart around and
- 29:50Speaker 1: it's harvesting its own emissions. To youth, the whole thing
- 29:55Speaker 1: sounds just like not a good line of work, like
- 29:59Speaker 1: a tough business to.
- 30:01Speaker 4: That's how they do that. They're killing him like that.
- 30:03Speaker 1: So this dude is saying, when they get like a
- 30:06Speaker 1: problem skunk, they euthanize it with CO two. Well anyways,
- 30:09Speaker 1: and then they throw him in a freezer, which I
- 30:10Speaker 1: don't get. But they had a guy in there, and
- 30:14Speaker 1: he says, I'll put it delicately and say he lacked
- 30:17Speaker 1: attention to detail. He pulls a skunk out of the
- 30:20Speaker 1: CO two chamber too early and places it into a freezer.
- 30:29Speaker 1: A half hour later, a different guy comes along and
- 30:32Speaker 1: opens the freezer and there's a skunk. Bam, fine no oh,
- 30:36Speaker 1: shuts the freezer real quick. I got you, makes a
- 30:40Speaker 1: plan on how he's gonna deal with this, but then
- 30:42Speaker 1: the skunks waiting for him the next time.
- 30:45Speaker 4: He opens the freezeropp nailed them. He says, you can't
- 30:53Speaker 4: get that smell out of that freezer.
- 30:55Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
- 31:00Speaker 4: Lastly, oh so you do want to say this. You're
- 31:02Speaker 4: back to wanting to say this. Okay please? Uh one
- 31:08Speaker 4: more launch.
- 31:08Speaker 1: We got a thing coming out called twelve and twenty six,
- 31:11Speaker 1: So that means in twenty twenty six we're gonna.
- 31:13Speaker 4: At least like twelve outdoor films.
- 31:16Speaker 1: Each episode showcases a hunt from a different Meat Eater
- 31:19Speaker 1: crew member. The first episode features Yanni's archery black Bear
- 31:24Speaker 1: Hunting Manitoba, which is out now, so stay tuned for
- 31:28Speaker 1: more and check out these hunt episodes of twelve and
- 31:30Speaker 1: twenty six series all Right.
- 31:34Speaker 4: George hit me with, let's don't know, I want to.
- 31:42Speaker 1: Get into the animal communication stuff here, and I want
- 31:44Speaker 1: to talk about brown sculptures, but I want to dive
- 31:46Speaker 1: into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think
- 31:50Speaker 1: about from your career and your study of animals, what
- 31:55Speaker 1: and let's let's keep to what lives around here? What
- 31:58Speaker 1: animal do you think lives around here? Has the or
- 32:02Speaker 1: not doesn't need to be around here? What American animal
- 32:05Speaker 1: that people would be familiar with in your who in
- 32:08Speaker 1: your mind, has the greatest vocabulary.
- 32:12Speaker 2: Land critters, you know, probably the one that's been studied
- 32:18Speaker 2: that way most. And that's probably because it's only because
- 32:24Speaker 2: that's the one that's been studied that I detail is
- 32:26Speaker 2: prairie dogs. They have an incredible vocabulary that goes down
- 32:32Speaker 2: to the level of there's a guy walking through the
- 32:35Speaker 2: colony with a green shirt on and he's tall. No, yep,
- 32:40Speaker 2: he's walking fast, he's walking slow. It's another guy. He's
- 32:45Speaker 2: got a red shirt on or a yellow shirt. There's
- 32:50Speaker 2: a badger, there's a hawk hawks flying fast, on and
- 32:56Speaker 2: on and on. Yeah, this guy called what yeah?
- 33:00Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 33:00Speaker 2: They went down to the level of saying, you know
- 33:02Speaker 2: it at a certain level they needed to analyze it
- 33:06Speaker 2: with computers because you just can't hear prairie dog at
- 33:09Speaker 2: that level. Okay, so they slow it down. You can
- 33:12Speaker 2: see all the bumps and blips in the spectrogram on
- 33:15Speaker 2: the computer, and these differences are parsing out with their
- 33:20Speaker 2: experimental design here. And they even went to the level
- 33:24Speaker 2: of let's put something in there they've never seen. So
- 33:29Speaker 2: what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout
- 33:33Speaker 2: or maybe you apply with painted black, put it on
- 33:36Speaker 2: wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled it
- 33:39Speaker 2: through the colony. They came up with a new word,
- 33:42Speaker 2: something they'd never heard him say before. They put it away.
- 33:47Speaker 2: Instead of an oval like the first one, they put
- 33:49Speaker 2: out a square, they say something different. They pull it
- 33:53Speaker 2: back out a little while later, they use the same
- 33:56Speaker 2: word for the oval. Same words. Yeah, yeah, And that's probably.
- 34:01Speaker 1: All like permutations of that what we would just when
- 34:03Speaker 1: we hear it's just an alarm call.
- 34:05Speaker 2: It's just like like, all right, I'm not getting much
- 34:08Speaker 2: out of that. But when you start listening with like
- 34:12Speaker 2: a lot of this stuff, you're like, oh, there is
- 34:15Speaker 2: a little difference there. And if you could listen with
- 34:18Speaker 2: the ears of a ground squirrel or a pocket gopher
- 34:22Speaker 2: or any of these things. You might hear it too,
- 34:25Speaker 2: but some of those they can, like the researchers. It
- 34:28Speaker 2: was so funny. They were so accurate that they had
- 34:32Speaker 2: different vocalization for dog versus kyote. No really, So they're
- 34:39Speaker 2: sitting there and the researchers can hear this difference and
- 34:41Speaker 2: they're hanging out and this this prairie dog says, uh,
- 34:46Speaker 2: there's a kyote coming, and clearly the researchers can see
- 34:49Speaker 2: it's a dog, and they're like, ha, they messed up
- 34:51Speaker 2: this time. It's like one example, and it gets closer
- 34:55Speaker 2: and it's a kyote. They're like, what the heck.
- 34:59Speaker 4: Hand and say that to me again.
- 35:00Speaker 2: So they identified this thing right, it was a coyote.
- 35:04Speaker 2: They gave the kyote alarm. But the researchers not knowing
- 35:09Speaker 2: their language real well, well, they knew the language enough
- 35:13Speaker 2: to say, hey, they're alarming for kyote. Through their eyes
- 35:16Speaker 2: they're seeing what they think is a dog.
- 35:18Speaker 4: Oh, so the research is like, oh, it's a domestic dogs.
- 35:20Speaker 2: It's a domestic dog. It looks like a kylet. They
- 35:22Speaker 2: just messed up. And it gets close, they're like, sound
- 35:26Speaker 2: a gun it's a coyote, So that stuff is actually everywhere, isn't.
- 35:32Speaker 2: But prairie dogs have been the best studied that way.
- 35:34Speaker 2: Their vocabulary. They even say that they they have these
- 35:38Speaker 2: sound bites that are like phonemes. They're basically like ba
- 35:43Speaker 2: duh at, you know, sound fragments that we recombine into
- 35:47Speaker 2: making words in sentences, paragraphs. They have sounds that function
- 35:52Speaker 2: the same way, so they can recombine these sounds to
- 35:56Speaker 2: say dog, kyote, hawk, badger guy, short guy, tall guy
- 36:05Speaker 2: coming through the colony.
- 36:07Speaker 1: I was reading this thing long ago. It's like one
- 36:09Speaker 1: of the dirtiest tricks I've ever heard in science. I
- 36:14Speaker 1: don't know where they were doing it. I don't know where.
- 36:16Speaker 4: Where's the vervet monkey live? A vervet monkey?
- 36:20Speaker 2: Verbets are African.
- 36:24Speaker 1: They were looking at the vocabulary of verbant monkeys and
- 36:27Speaker 1: they were getting this idea that they had and it
- 36:30Speaker 1: might be more nuanced than this, but they're like, there's
- 36:33Speaker 1: a thing that says threat from above, okay, and maybe
- 36:38Speaker 1: like certain avian predators.
- 36:41Speaker 4: And they had a noise that they realized it.
- 36:44Speaker 1: Meant thread on the ground, and they thought specifically it
- 36:48Speaker 1: was about leopards.
- 36:49Speaker 4: That's what it was leopards. So they.
- 36:56Speaker 1: Would record these vervet monkeys making these vocalizations and you
- 37:02Speaker 1: could play it and get the response. Meaning, if there's
- 37:05Speaker 1: a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree.
- 37:08Speaker 1: If there's a threat from the air, the troop all
- 37:12Speaker 1: seeks overhead protection. Then they recorded a monkey, they recorded
- 37:19Speaker 1: his threat call, and they would play it and everyone
- 37:25Speaker 1: would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where
- 37:29Speaker 1: he became the boy who cries wolf. Poor guy, and
- 37:34Speaker 1: they burned him out where they're like, he always does
- 37:37Speaker 1: that and he's wrong, to the point where if he
- 37:40Speaker 1: did vocalize, they would ignore it because they're like, that
- 37:45Speaker 1: dude makes that noise all the time because they have
- 37:47Speaker 1: been playing it to everybody, and they burned the dude
- 37:49Speaker 1: out on it. Yeah, but this is like, well, you're
- 37:53Speaker 1: talking about way more I mean like way more than
- 37:55Speaker 1: hey on the ground, Hey in the air.
- 37:58Speaker 4: Yeah, that's like a.
- 37:59Speaker 3: Deer camp with the kids, Like when you and I
- 38:03Speaker 3: walked through the Prairie dog Town. Those things are like eh.
- 38:06Speaker 3: But when they see Jimmy, they're like.
- 38:07Speaker 4: Holy kid, they probably.
- 38:11Speaker 2: Do and he's got a gun. He's got a gun
- 38:14Speaker 2: against that one kid. Yeah, totally yeah, it's so, I
- 38:19Speaker 2: think you're referring to that chaining safer. I did a
- 38:21Speaker 2: lot of that work in Abaselli National Park where they're
- 38:23Speaker 2: looking at those vervets. And yeah, they had a different
- 38:25Speaker 2: call for something in the air, those Marshall eagles, I
- 38:29Speaker 2: think they were. That's different one for leopards, and they
- 38:31Speaker 2: had a different one for snakes.
- 38:34Speaker 4: Okay, I remember that now.
- 38:35Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, and there's that's a tuughy with these
- 38:40Speaker 2: animal vocalizations, like how do you know you don't speak
- 38:44Speaker 2: that language, So they have these really clunky, sometimes really
- 38:50Speaker 2: you know, mean ways of figuring out. All right, at
- 38:53Speaker 2: least it's this level, this is what they're meaning. But
- 38:58Speaker 2: in between, like for me, into a ton of ravens.
- 39:01Speaker 2: I just fascinated by ravens and the stuff they say
- 39:03Speaker 2: just blows me away. They've got accents, they've got dialects,
- 39:06Speaker 2: they've got stuff you can't even imagine.
- 39:10Speaker 1: At what point did you first start getting interested in
- 39:12Speaker 1: in the just like the vocalizations of animals.
- 39:15Speaker 2: Well, I grew up like you guys did. I hunted
- 39:17Speaker 2: and fished and trapped for you know, a lot of
- 39:19Speaker 2: my youth because that was you know, the culture I
- 39:22Speaker 2: grew up in so I grew up learning call turkeys
- 39:25Speaker 2: and ducks and gear, and but like it wasn't enough
- 39:30Speaker 2: for me, just me being me, I was like, I
- 39:34Speaker 2: want to know more. You know, what are they doing
- 39:35Speaker 2: outside of hunting season? What do they say when this happens?
- 39:38Speaker 2: What are they doing when nobody else is watching? And
- 39:42Speaker 2: you needn't watch birds like nobody. I didn't know anybody
- 39:46Speaker 2: that watched birds until I went to college and they're like, oh, yeah,
- 39:49Speaker 2: we're going to birding.
- 39:51Speaker 1: Really, you know, mile Man he had an interesting bird taxonomy,
- 39:55Speaker 1: like as a as a hunter, you now, it was like,
- 39:58Speaker 1: there's this huge chunk of birds that were tweety birds. Yeah, yeah,
- 40:03Speaker 1: they meant like the ones like like outside of my
- 40:06Speaker 1: there's intensely interested in game birds. There's a handful of
- 40:11Speaker 1: other birds that catch my interest, but then there are
- 40:13Speaker 1: the tweety birds.
- 40:14Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. My friend has a system. He has it's
- 40:18Speaker 2: arts and narts for hawks. Arts are a redtail, narts
- 40:24Speaker 2: are not a redtail. Was like Jason not, you know,
- 40:27Speaker 2: it takes redtails to get a couple of years under
- 40:29Speaker 2: their belt before they get a red tail. He's like, God, damn,
- 40:32Speaker 2: it throws a whole damn system off.
- 40:36Speaker 1: I was reading and I think it was in Barry
- 40:38Speaker 1: Lopez's Arctic Dreams where I think it was in that
- 40:42Speaker 1: book where he's talking about into Its map drawing m
- 40:47Speaker 1: This is early like he was relating for early like
- 40:50Speaker 1: early contact with certain Into It hunter groups and they
- 40:53Speaker 1: would draw maps and they wouldn't do the maps would
- 40:56Speaker 1: be to the scale of interest. So if they're mapping
- 41:03Speaker 1: an island and there's a bay where they hunt ducks,
- 41:07Speaker 1: when you draw the map, the island gets really small
- 41:10Speaker 1: because they don't do it doesn't matter and the bay
- 41:13Speaker 1: ocky is the map. Yeah, And it's kind of like,
- 41:17Speaker 1: here's the part on something, here's the part of interest,
- 41:21Speaker 1: and then I'll just kind of rough in something to suggest.
- 41:25Speaker 4: The rest of it.
- 41:27Speaker 1: Right, And I feel like with a lot of wildlife stuff,
- 41:30Speaker 1: it's like Elk right, the bugle, you know, because it's
- 41:36Speaker 1: useful in hunting, and you can probably hunt Elko whole life.
- 41:40Speaker 4: And never be like, what really is going on with
- 41:45Speaker 4: that thing?
- 41:48Speaker 2: Right?
- 41:49Speaker 1: You know, like it works or don't work, but it's
- 41:52Speaker 1: kind of you You sort of have a like we'll
- 41:54Speaker 1: map it from a hunter's perspective, will map its vocalization
- 41:57Speaker 1: pattern and it'll only go as far is what I
- 42:00Speaker 1: need to know to satisfy my like base plan.
- 42:06Speaker 3: You're not really interested in what you might be saying
- 42:09Speaker 3: to them, right it works or don't?
- 42:11Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah right. And that's to human nature, like we're
- 42:15Speaker 2: we're simplifying machines. That's what our brains are designed for,
- 42:19Speaker 2: is after sensory stuff like problem solving, figuring out what
- 42:23Speaker 2: those patterns are. You know, what does that mean? And
- 42:26Speaker 2: I only pay attention to the stuff that affects me,
- 42:29Speaker 2: you know, But when you start paying attention to what
- 42:32Speaker 2: affects them, then the world opens up.
- 42:36Speaker 4: What was the first What was the first animal? Was it? Turkey's?
- 42:38Speaker 1: Like, what was the first animal? You kind of dove
- 42:40Speaker 1: into and started realizing you were finding out things that
- 42:42Speaker 1: maybe other people didn't know.
- 42:44Speaker 2: Well, I was obsessed with turkeys, like I was like,
- 42:47Speaker 2: my career was going to be making turkey calls, going
- 42:49Speaker 2: around calling contests and all that stop upstate New York.
- 42:53Speaker 2: And they just recognized that area. So I was taking
- 42:55Speaker 2: every spare minute. You could only hunt till noon, but
- 42:58Speaker 2: I was going out before school every day during the season.
- 43:03Speaker 2: This is a funny one. The disciplinarian principle. The vice
- 43:07Speaker 2: principal when my folks were in that school had retired
- 43:11Speaker 2: by this point, and I called well enough that he's like,
- 43:13Speaker 2: can you come with me, you know, skip school? Come
- 43:17Speaker 2: with me on Monday and Tuesday. My mom's like, hell no,
- 43:22Speaker 2: Frank Dunhald wants you to skip does vice principal wants
- 43:26Speaker 2: you to skip school so you can go turkey call
- 43:28Speaker 2: for him?
- 43:29Speaker 5: Jam up.
- 43:30Speaker 2: I was like, that's a gent right.
- 43:31Speaker 4: Hello.
- 43:32Speaker 3: Were you mouth calling back like no, no call? Or
- 43:36Speaker 3: were you using calls?
- 43:37Speaker 2: I was doing it. I was building wingbone calls, I
- 43:39Speaker 2: was building slate calls, box calls, using my voice. Was
- 43:43Speaker 2: doing all of it, you know. And but it was
- 43:46Speaker 2: interesting because sort of like we're talking about in that
- 43:49Speaker 2: hunting scene, you know, there was a there's a core
- 43:52Speaker 2: palette of sounds that you use and they do the job.
- 43:56Speaker 2: But I hit a certain point. It was actually when
- 43:58Speaker 2: I went to my first calling contests, I'm like, wait
- 44:01Speaker 2: a minute, this is what the guy there's a guy
- 44:04Speaker 2: behind that curtain over there, and he's like telling me,
- 44:07Speaker 2: if I sound like a turkey, there's no turkeys in
- 44:09Speaker 2: this contest. And there's certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying, yeah,
- 44:13Speaker 2: that sounds like a turkey, you know. I was like, hmm,
- 44:19Speaker 2: what you know? And there was even I found an
- 44:22Speaker 2: article when I was working on the book, this guy
- 44:24Speaker 2: who is a judge. He said, you know, if you
- 44:27Speaker 2: hear a lot of really bad calling, you know, it's
- 44:34Speaker 2: it's a wild turkey. If a lot of really good calling,
- 44:37Speaker 2: it's a guy. You know, turkeys make a lot of mistakes.
- 44:40Speaker 2: And I'm like, wait a minute, dude, mistakes. I think
- 44:45Speaker 2: it cost them. It cost them. You make a sound,
- 44:49Speaker 2: the predator's got to beat on you, right, you make
- 44:52Speaker 2: a sound. It cost energy to make the sound. Like
- 44:55Speaker 2: they're not doing it for no reason. Just because we
- 44:58Speaker 2: don't know the reason doesn't mean it doesn't have one.
- 45:02Speaker 1: But there's the I get the point. There's no no
- 45:05Speaker 1: like the point.
- 45:05Speaker 4: Would be this.
- 45:06Speaker 1: There's there's a there's a YouTube video I love and
- 45:08Speaker 1: it's a hen, like a wild ass hen in the
- 45:12Speaker 1: woods and she has the most.
- 45:15Speaker 4: Raucous bad box call yelp, which.
- 45:23Speaker 1: She stands there and does twenty seven times in a row,
- 45:29Speaker 1: twenty seven times in a row.
- 45:30Speaker 4: If you heard that, there's no way he'd be like,
- 45:36Speaker 4: that's a hen.
- 45:37Speaker 1: You'd be like, that is some twelve ass year old
- 45:39Speaker 1: kid with his dad's box call and he's just gonna
- 45:44Speaker 1: stand on that ridge and do that.
- 45:46Speaker 4: Yeah, I would one say that that's what that was.
- 45:49Speaker 1: I'm like some kid up there. It's a hand stander
- 45:53Speaker 1: twenty seven times in a row.
- 45:55Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 45:56Speaker 4: So, but so, like if you could interview her, You're like,
- 46:00Speaker 4: OMETT are you doing this on accident? Is this all
- 46:03Speaker 4: a mistake?
- 46:05Speaker 1: She would probably tell you no, No, what I'm doing.
- 46:09Speaker 2: Is I'm You should have seen the last time I
- 46:13Speaker 2: did this. Yeah, you know what happened.
- 46:16Speaker 4: But like I don't know, like what is she doing?
- 46:19Speaker 4: You know what is she doing? Yeah?
- 46:20Speaker 2: How much variability is in there that's acceptable for purpose X?
- 46:25Speaker 2: Like how are you doing a lost call? It does
- 46:28Speaker 2: go on twenty plus notes, but like within there, how
- 46:33Speaker 2: much stuff's coded in there beyond I'm lost or where
- 46:37Speaker 2: the heck are you? That's where they're find with some
- 46:39Speaker 2: of these new studies on songbirds and stuff, because they
- 46:43Speaker 2: hear differently than us. They're hearing into these sounds stuff
- 46:48Speaker 2: that hey, either happens way too fast or as in
- 46:51Speaker 2: frequency ranges that we don't register real well. So it's
- 46:56Speaker 2: like it almost seems in some cases, like the side
- 47:00Speaker 2: of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life
- 47:03Speaker 2: is coded to their communication. So like there was a
- 47:07Speaker 2: study where they actually took sperm whale clicks. Let me explain. So,
- 47:11Speaker 2: like sperm whales, huge animal communicating, these clicks travel real
- 47:17Speaker 2: well underwater, and somebody had the bright idea. You know,
- 47:20Speaker 2: they're trying to figure out what the heck these things mean,
- 47:23Speaker 2: you know, whe are the using this in this and
- 47:26Speaker 2: they've since found out a whole bunch. But somebody had
- 47:28Speaker 2: the bright idea to go in and delete all the
- 47:31Speaker 2: spaces in between the clicks, and lo and behold, it
- 47:35Speaker 2: sounds like a songbird. Like you hear all the rising
- 47:39Speaker 2: and falling of this, you know, and we're used to
- 47:41Speaker 2: listening to humans birds they're communicating so fast. But maybe
- 47:46Speaker 2: those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolic whatever
- 47:50Speaker 2: it is that makes them them, they're able to, in essence,
- 47:54Speaker 2: from our perspective, slow down that sound of the winter
- 47:57Speaker 2: ren or the magnolia warbler, and here into little tweaks
- 48:02Speaker 2: of individual notes, let's say, and get more information out
- 48:07Speaker 2: of that.
- 48:09Speaker 1: I remember what I was reading somewhere or some guys
- 48:12Speaker 1: saying that, like when you go to like you're gonna
- 48:14Speaker 1: you see a fly and you're just gonna smack them.
- 48:17Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean that?
- 48:20Speaker 1: To the fly he might be like, in a minute,
- 48:23Speaker 1: I'm gonna move because there's this thing coming toward me.
- 48:28Speaker 4: You know.
- 48:29Speaker 1: Like his trip, his like trip through life is just
- 48:35Speaker 1: the perception is so different than what we think. So
- 48:38Speaker 1: we think we're going wow, you know, and he's like, no,
- 48:41Speaker 1: it's going totally is just going ape shit crazy. Yeah,
- 48:52Speaker 1: like what yeah, something else might be like oh, he's saying,
- 48:57Speaker 1: oh kinds.
- 48:58Speaker 2: Of yeah, yeah. It just there's a great essay written
- 49:02Speaker 2: in the nineteen thirties I think is early forties about
- 49:06Speaker 2: the title is what It's like to be a bat
- 49:10Speaker 2: and the clue. You know, even if we could take
- 49:12Speaker 2: the best ai and all these models and figure out
- 49:15Speaker 2: their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn't
- 49:17Speaker 2: have a clue what they're talking about. You know this
- 49:19Speaker 2: when you go to a different country or even if
- 49:21Speaker 2: they're speaking English, there's culture. There's that culture behind and
- 49:26Speaker 2: underneath all that language that when you make a joke
- 49:29Speaker 2: among friends, like everybody knows in that group what the
- 49:32Speaker 2: hell you're talking about. But even if we could know
- 49:36Speaker 2: that language for a bat, for a bird, it takes
- 49:39Speaker 2: being able to hear like a bat. Yeah, breathe like
- 49:43Speaker 2: a bat. You know, all these things that contribute to
- 49:45Speaker 2: them being what they are that factors into how they
- 49:48Speaker 2: interpret what they hear and say.
- 49:50Speaker 1: Yeah, like we've long, I mean, like forever have known
- 49:52Speaker 1: that there are decibels the animals communicate in that we
- 49:56Speaker 1: flat out don't hear. So it's like sort of you
- 49:58Speaker 1: started with that, like one hundred. There's things we don't
- 50:01Speaker 1: hear that we know we don't hear. There's research about
- 50:04Speaker 1: the way birds proceed. You know, there's so much iridescence
- 50:06Speaker 1: and birds there's probably something in their eye when they
- 50:10Speaker 1: see iridescence. It just reads fundamentally different than what we
- 50:14Speaker 1: see when we see iridescence. They take it in and
- 50:19Speaker 1: the idea that there are like you're saying that when
- 50:23Speaker 1: you're at a turkey calling contest, what we're going when
- 50:27Speaker 1: we're saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey
- 50:31Speaker 1: could be tons of gibbers to a turkey.
- 50:34Speaker 4: Yeah.
- 50:35Speaker 2: Great, example is like when I do a hen yelp,
- 50:40Speaker 2: I found over years, I wouldn't get the same response
- 50:43Speaker 2: as if I used a box call or slate and
- 50:46Speaker 2: I the only thing I could come to is that
- 50:50Speaker 2: it sounded good to me, but there was things in
- 50:53Speaker 2: my call. Maybe it's missing frequencies or something that made
- 50:58Speaker 2: it sound plastic or fake ors or something just that
- 51:03Speaker 2: didn't get the same response. Literally, just go to a
- 51:06Speaker 2: box call. You know, you got incidentt response, like what's
- 51:11Speaker 2: up with that? You know?
- 51:14Speaker 4: Is it?
- 51:14Speaker 2: You know, certain frequencies like high frequency drops off real fast,
- 51:18Speaker 2: so over distance, you know, whether it's an elk call
- 51:21Speaker 2: or what have you. You're generally picking up the low
- 51:24Speaker 2: frequency sounds that travel better. But when you're right up
- 51:27Speaker 2: close to something like holy cow, you hear that elk
- 51:30Speaker 2: bugle right next to the car. If you're in Yellstone
- 51:32Speaker 2: or something, you're like, whoa, I'm missing a ton of stuff.
- 51:36Speaker 4: There's a lot more going on here.
- 51:38Speaker 2: What you know, what are they hearing? You know? They
- 51:41Speaker 2: you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes,
- 51:44Speaker 2: they can hear, you know. Dave Meach found that in
- 51:46Speaker 2: open terrain wolves can you're up to ten miles an
- 51:51Speaker 2: open train and max I think for me, unless wind
- 51:55Speaker 2: conditions and other things are going on. The max is
- 51:57Speaker 2: about three miles from me. So this is where often
- 52:01Speaker 2: with students and stuff, I'm like, look, you can't ever
- 52:05Speaker 2: hear that. You won't ever smell that, not even with
- 52:08Speaker 2: the nosearranger. Just can't do this. But if you start
- 52:17Speaker 2: watching these animals closer, you're like, hey, wait, all of
- 52:22Speaker 2: a sudden, they're starting to gather up their face in
- 52:25Speaker 2: one direction and then they howl hmm instantly. You know, Okay,
- 52:32Speaker 2: I'm looking at half of this story. The other half
- 52:35Speaker 2: of the book is I've had this happen. You know,
- 52:37Speaker 2: friends with radios, they're six miles away. Yeah, yeah, we
- 52:41Speaker 2: got the I got well packed there howling to the east,
- 52:44Speaker 2: you know, Yeah, I'm watching the druids or they're listening
- 52:47Speaker 2: to the west and they're going back and forth having
- 52:49Speaker 2: a conversation for hour two hours. We can't hear anything
- 52:54Speaker 2: but the individuals standing in front of us. There's so
- 52:58Speaker 2: many animals doing stuff like that that we're like getting
- 53:01Speaker 2: these fragments thinking that we know what's going on, and
- 53:04Speaker 2: when they're having conversations over space and in terrain that
- 53:09Speaker 2: we don't even know are happening.
- 53:11Speaker 1: You know, we'll move away from Turkey's in a minute.
- 53:14Speaker 1: But you've obviously been super close to hens like all
- 53:22Speaker 1: the like, I don't know what.
- 53:23Speaker 4: I don't know what.
- 53:24Speaker 1: I can't think, Like what distance you become aware of it?
- 53:26Speaker 1: But they're always making noises.
- 53:27Speaker 3: Yeah, those little noises you wouldn't hear from one hundred
- 53:30Speaker 3: yards away, but in ten yards you can hear it, right,
- 53:32Speaker 3: you know?
- 53:33Speaker 2: Yeah, what.
- 53:37Speaker 1: Let's I'm taking it in the wrong direction. Let's not
- 53:39Speaker 1: talk about ones people aren't familiar with. Let's just take like,
- 53:42Speaker 1: let me ask some real simple Do you feel that
- 53:45Speaker 1: a gobble.
- 53:47Speaker 4: Is just a gobble.
- 53:50Speaker 1: Or do you feel that there are there are different
- 53:53Speaker 1: gobbles that mean different things.
- 53:57Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there are different gobbles. And I I
- 54:01Speaker 2: had thought for years that gobbles just a gobble, and
- 54:04Speaker 2: a young tom makes not as good a gobble.
- 54:08Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the idea. Right. He sucks at it.
- 54:10Speaker 2: He just sucks. He hasn't learned how.
- 54:11Speaker 4: To do it because he aspires them one day be.
- 54:14Speaker 7: Like exactly just blow your hair back, but in fact
- 54:21Speaker 7: he's It was in grad school I was talking with
- 54:23Speaker 7: a friend who's he's really sharp on bird behavior and
- 54:28Speaker 7: all things, you know, research wise and scientific question answering
- 54:33Speaker 7: kind of wise, and he turned my mind on it,
- 54:38Speaker 7: and I thought for years, you know, a young tom,
- 54:41Speaker 7: you know, full on gobbler.
- 54:43Speaker 2: It looks like a big, full long and then you
- 54:45Speaker 2: hear a Jake, you know, it's like it's just chunked
- 54:50Speaker 2: up and he's He's like, no, you got to understand
- 54:55Speaker 2: they're gobbling in context to who's around them. And then
- 55:01Speaker 2: I started noticing, son of a gun, he's right if
- 55:04Speaker 2: it was just that Jake had many times, or that
- 55:08Speaker 2: Jake would actually give a full armed gobble because he
- 55:12Speaker 2: was by himself, he didn't know the big guy was
- 55:14Speaker 2: over that ridge, and Holland asked over to kick his
- 55:18Speaker 2: butt mm so he could say whatever he wanted to.
- 55:21Speaker 2: And of course he wants to sound like the big
- 55:23Speaker 2: guy on campus, right, And I'm like, son of a gun.
- 55:25Speaker 2: Then I started seeing in the field and I'm like,
- 55:28Speaker 2: a gobble isn't a gobble?
- 55:30Speaker 4: Maybe he's like a subservient gobble.
- 55:33Speaker 2: I'd love to, you know, correct me and add to it.
- 55:36Speaker 2: If listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more,
- 55:40Speaker 2: I'd love to learn more about that because that you know,
- 55:42Speaker 2: my Turkey days are a little further back than some
- 55:45Speaker 2: other stuff that it's fascinating with Just to think of that.
- 55:48Speaker 3: If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh,
- 55:50Speaker 3: that gobble, he's like, I'm coming now that gobble he's like, yeah,
- 55:54Speaker 3: I heard you all.
- 55:55Speaker 2: Maybe you get a double gobble, you're like, oh, he's
- 55:57Speaker 2: really liking that call, you know, triple gobble. You'll he's
- 56:00Speaker 2: got to be coming.
- 56:01Speaker 4: Do you think he's loving the call when hears a
- 56:03Speaker 4: double gobble?
- 56:05Speaker 2: That always, to me seemed like a good barometer to
- 56:09Speaker 2: how excited they were. Yeah, they gobble off the roost
- 56:12Speaker 2: and they hit the ground and gobbling and kind of
- 56:15Speaker 2: gobble along. But once you get them fired up, many
- 56:18Speaker 2: they're double triple gobbling repeatedly, and you're like, get ridy,
- 56:22Speaker 2: get ready, get ready, here they're come, you know.
- 56:26Speaker 4: So hey.
- 56:27Speaker 2: You know, if you look at it, the more I
- 56:30Speaker 2: started looking at it from the turkey's perspective, the more
- 56:33Speaker 2: I started understanding from my human perspective.
- 56:37Speaker 1: Uh, you say, you think about do you spend more
- 56:40Speaker 1: time on crows around ravens?
- 56:42Speaker 2: We just have more ravens around home, so I spend
- 56:44Speaker 2: more time listening to them.
- 56:46Speaker 4: Okay, the other day, it wasn't too long ago.
- 56:49Speaker 1: I was watching one and he just seems to be like,
- 56:52Speaker 1: from my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy.
- 56:55Speaker 1: He's flying along, just raising hell, just making racket.
- 57:02Speaker 4: Yeah right yeah, at a high way out mm hmm.
- 57:06Speaker 1: And I'm like, he's not with anybody, he's just like
- 57:09Speaker 1: making racket. Like, give me some insight into what like
- 57:13Speaker 1: what they're capable of conveying. Sure, yeah, and there's got
- 57:17Speaker 1: to be something like I found something to eat, like
- 57:19Speaker 1: that's pretty clear.
- 57:20Speaker 2: Yeah, there's stuff that it'll blow your doors off. And
- 57:23Speaker 2: I you know, I've only scratched the surface. I've found
- 57:26Speaker 2: stuff that researchers haven't found. I've corroborated for myself things
- 57:31Speaker 2: that they've found that yeah, that that holds here too.
- 57:36Speaker 2: And it's to me, it's always about starting into these conversations,
- 57:39Speaker 2: listening to what's most common. You pick the most common
- 57:43Speaker 2: thing close to you, and pick the most common thing.
- 57:45Speaker 2: It says, Okay, so it's like I only have pigeons around, great, awesome,
- 57:49Speaker 2: use pigeons because the lessons you learn through the pigeons
- 57:52Speaker 2: actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the raven,
- 57:57Speaker 2: the coyote, all those kind of other things because you
- 57:59Speaker 2: start sensing ties in your own nervous system to it.
- 58:02Speaker 2: And so when we were living in the park, I
- 58:04Speaker 2: purposely i'd finished my graduate work. I was like done
- 58:07Speaker 2: with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper,
- 58:11Speaker 2: and in that case, I just wanted the ravens to
- 58:14Speaker 2: teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot
- 58:18Speaker 2: more So. The most common thing they were saying was.
- 58:25Speaker 4: Yep. They like saying that. Yeah, like on a lit.
- 58:33Speaker 2: It took me the longest time to realize the ones
- 58:36Speaker 2: that were doing that were the ones that were right
- 58:39Speaker 2: next to our cabin, and it was two. It was
- 58:43Speaker 2: the resident pair. I'm like, oh, this is their song.
- 58:48Speaker 2: This is their territorial call that they used to keep
- 58:51Speaker 2: the riff raff out. Their largest songbird in the world,
- 58:55Speaker 2: even though it's not melodic, that's their no trespassing sign.
- 58:59Speaker 4: The largest songbird in the world.
- 59:01Speaker 2: Yep, common ravens. And so I was like.
- 59:05Speaker 4: The least melodic, you're the largest songbird.
- 59:10Speaker 1: But the people you could like so that that that's
- 59:13Speaker 1: funny because I ever thought about that classification.
- 59:15Speaker 4: They'd be classified as a songbird.
- 59:17Speaker 2: They are, OK, Yeah, they're in the passerine order, which
- 59:20Speaker 2: is the all the perching birds corvidaet family, you know,
- 59:23Speaker 2: which is Jay's crows, Jackdaws, Magpies stuff. But that that
- 59:29Speaker 2: gave me a hook. I was like, okay, I I
- 59:31Speaker 2: think I know what that three note thing is now
- 59:34Speaker 2: and then the key and I always stress this. The
- 59:36Speaker 2: folks is start listening for where it varies. So there's
- 59:41Speaker 2: one day I was out and you know, the ravens
- 59:43Speaker 2: are out there to.
- 59:44Speaker 1: Hit me with the hymn, sitting on a post, being like,
- 59:47Speaker 1: this is where I hang out.
- 59:48Speaker 4: This is my song.
- 59:48Speaker 2: Yeah, this is my turf.
- 59:50Speaker 4: Give me the noise, okay.
- 59:55Speaker 2: Right, And in this kind of group, you know, your
- 59:57Speaker 2: listeners like making animals is cool, like in pop culture,
- 1:00:02Speaker 2: Like you meet somebody at the dinner party and they're
- 1:00:04Speaker 2: speaking to one person in Korean and one person in
- 1:00:06Speaker 2: Italian and another person in French, and you're like, dude,
- 1:00:09Speaker 2: who is this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication.
- 1:00:12Speaker 2: You know, it's like he must have all this you know,
- 1:00:14Speaker 2: worldly experience. But you make an animal sound and they're like, like,
- 1:00:19Speaker 2: you know, so I always trying to prematice. I'm like, no,
- 1:00:21Speaker 2: that betrays our bias against animals as stupid and under us.
- 1:00:27Speaker 2: You need to start seeing them as those creatures that
- 1:00:29Speaker 2: look into the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear in
- 1:00:32Speaker 2: an ultrasonic and subsonic sounds, and those creatures that smell
- 1:00:36Speaker 2: it parts per trillion, like they best us in so
- 1:00:40Speaker 2: many ways. So listen from that perspective when I make
- 1:00:45Speaker 2: animal noises, because it's a crowd pleaser, but the value
- 1:00:51Speaker 2: in there is starting to get people to listen beyond okay,
- 1:00:55Speaker 2: that common call just counting. There's more notes and it's faster,
- 1:01:05Speaker 2: and I discovered that's a simple thing alone. Was happening
- 1:01:09Speaker 2: when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the
- 1:01:12Speaker 2: road right below the corral fence and popped out the
- 1:01:15Speaker 2: bag of Cheetos, like they see food, they know it's
- 1:01:20Speaker 2: in their territory. I'm gonna get it if anybody is,
- 1:01:23Speaker 2: and you sure as hell better not come in here
- 1:01:26Speaker 2: and think you're gonna steal it from me. So like
- 1:01:28Speaker 2: that extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a
- 1:01:32Speaker 2: more emphatic mine, mind, mind, mind, mind mine, hmmm. Right.
- 1:01:36Speaker 2: You know, you know we'd walk into an area, you know,
- 1:01:39Speaker 2: as a group to go sit down and listen and
- 1:01:41Speaker 2: watch and just us being there, those ravens would jump
- 1:01:45Speaker 2: off their perches and start flying over doing that, like.
- 1:01:52Speaker 4: But they're not talking to you.
- 1:01:53Speaker 1: They're talking to other ravens, Like, whatever's going on here
- 1:01:56Speaker 1: is in our turf.
- 1:01:57Speaker 4: We're on it.
- 1:01:58Speaker 2: If food, that's that's what it seems like.
- 1:02:01Speaker 4: I got a question for.
- 1:02:02Speaker 3: So that was a situation where there's people involved and
- 1:02:04Speaker 3: they recognize that that's potential food source. Would you hear that?
- 1:02:08Speaker 3: Did you ever hear that same noise like when they
- 1:02:11Speaker 3: were like out in the back country when there was
- 1:02:13Speaker 3: a carcass around?
- 1:02:15Speaker 2: That's an awesome question, Brodie, because that I've seen that,
- 1:02:18Speaker 2: so it's corroborating. Mind Like, the one I think of
- 1:02:22Speaker 2: most is there was a spot in Slew Creek Big Flats.
- 1:02:25Speaker 2: This bison had died, had been dead for a long time,
- 1:02:28Speaker 2: pretty much eaten up, but the resident ravens every time
- 1:02:32Speaker 2: another raven came within like half a mile, they were
- 1:02:35Speaker 2: up in the ka count and if not flying over
- 1:02:39Speaker 2: toward them to perch and you give them another cussing
- 1:02:43Speaker 2: from within the turf. So it's both, Yeah.
- 1:02:48Speaker 4: What is they like? What are they doing vocally around?
- 1:02:52Speaker 1: Like we know all these sounds, Like to go back
- 1:02:55Speaker 1: turkeys for a minute, We know all these sounds that
- 1:02:57Speaker 1: in our human understanding, we've kind of got it like
- 1:03:00Speaker 1: these are sounds of courtship. Okay, the same way we
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: might look at it, elk, But you can be like,
- 1:03:06Speaker 1: that's a sound of courtship. What like when you hear
- 1:03:12Speaker 1: a raven, you're just hearing raven noise. You don't understand
- 1:03:16Speaker 1: what is a What are they doing in the breeding season?
- 1:03:19Speaker 1: Like what kind of things does a raven want to
- 1:03:21Speaker 1: communicate in the breathing season? What would be the equivalent
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: of how we at least how we perceive to be
- 1:03:28Speaker 1: a gobbler going through the woods, goblin, you know, trying
- 1:03:31Speaker 1: to draw hens in.
- 1:03:33Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's it's different for raisins because they're
- 1:03:35Speaker 2: just socially different. You know, Turkeys are flock creatures. You know,
- 1:03:39Speaker 2: toms are hanging out together, but the hens and the
- 1:03:41Speaker 2: poults are hanging out together. They mix and mingle in places.
- 1:03:44Speaker 2: Ravens are very much territorial with you know, kind of
- 1:03:48Speaker 2: a slew of travelers and non residents filtering in and
- 1:03:53Speaker 2: around through there. Except times when somebody kills a bison
- 1:03:57Speaker 2: got our way or an elk and those big foods
- 1:04:00Speaker 2: has become big attractions. We know now from the research
- 1:04:03Speaker 2: in the park that some of these birds are coming
- 1:04:05Speaker 2: from Bozeman, flying to my house and gardener and Yellstone
- 1:04:10Speaker 2: over carcas to feed on carcasses during the bison cause the.
- 1:04:14Speaker 3: Word spreads down the valley somehow.
- 1:04:17Speaker 1: Yes, that's wild you know what, man, you know what? Like,
- 1:04:22Speaker 1: we were hunting the area with my kids. We were
- 1:04:27Speaker 1: hunting area this year where like there's a lot there's
- 1:04:29Speaker 1: a big cow elk harvest in a certain area pretty annually.
- 1:04:35Speaker 1: I was even coming to my kids like I'm like,
- 1:04:39Speaker 1: these things know what goes on here, and they're like
- 1:04:43Speaker 1: in town for it. I didn't know they were in
- 1:04:45Speaker 1: town from far away. I meant I thought they were
- 1:04:47Speaker 1: in town from the other side of the valley or something.
- 1:04:49Speaker 2: That's what I used to think. No way in hell.
- 1:04:52Speaker 2: These suckers are traveling twenty to thirty miles in the morning.
- 1:04:57Speaker 2: So you think of a Yellstone bird, You're like, oh,
- 1:04:59Speaker 2: that's wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park.
- 1:05:01Speaker 2: Now they come up, they're either feeding at the dumping
- 1:05:04Speaker 2: gardener or West Yellstone or out Cody flying back at midday.
- 1:05:09Speaker 2: They're commuting, literally commuting in the morning off the food source,
- 1:05:13Speaker 2: flying back in the day to maintain their terror.
- 1:05:15Speaker 4: Potentially thirty miles away.
- 1:05:16Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's daily, you know, saying.
- 1:05:19Speaker 1: No, they somewhere have their own place they would regard
- 1:05:22Speaker 1: as their hangout, their house as territory.
- 1:05:24Speaker 2: So to get back to that, the call that I
- 1:05:28Speaker 2: learned next in sequence with Ravens was this, And before
- 1:05:37Speaker 2: I even saw them, I knew that they were moving, right.
- 1:05:40Speaker 2: That's the sound they make when somebody's violated the no
- 1:05:44Speaker 2: fly zone in their turf. So they have to be
- 1:05:49Speaker 2: back there on their territory to hold that space for them.
- 1:05:53Speaker 2: So when the tour season rolls back around and everybody's
- 1:05:56Speaker 2: got frozen pizza and baloney sandwiches, they don't have to
- 1:06:00Speaker 2: do any fighting in border control. They're good to go
- 1:06:04Speaker 2: because everybody knows that's their turf. But we're to close
- 1:06:07Speaker 2: the loop on the mating season stuff. Like I think
- 1:06:09Speaker 2: a lot of these big food source locations end up
- 1:06:14Speaker 2: being like the bar the dating scene for Ravens, and
- 1:06:19Speaker 2: so you will see them displaying. They aren't vocalizing as
- 1:06:22Speaker 2: much that we can hear if you're close and you
- 1:06:25Speaker 2: hang out at the dump for the ravens like I
- 1:06:27Speaker 2: do sometimes and not for the trash, you hear all
- 1:06:31Speaker 2: these crazy soft sounds that probably I don't know if
- 1:06:35Speaker 2: we'll ever figure out what they mean.
- 1:06:37Speaker 4: You know, like.
- 1:06:39Speaker 2: You know, you probably heard those like a water drop
- 1:06:42Speaker 2: and stuff, and they use them in context of getting
- 1:06:45Speaker 2: know each other. And you can tell at times when
- 1:06:48Speaker 2: they display they're not fanning like a turkey, but they'll
- 1:06:51Speaker 2: puff their throat, they'll hold their beak up. You've probably
- 1:06:53Speaker 2: seen them, especially around a like a gut pile or
- 1:06:55Speaker 2: something where the birds converge. Look real close. Because in
- 1:07:01Speaker 2: a general sense, when you see those birds that kind
- 1:07:03Speaker 2: of drop their wings a little bit, they're proffing up,
- 1:07:05Speaker 2: they drop their flank feathers, those are your residant birds.
- 1:07:09Speaker 2: Those are the territorial ones who own that space, so
- 1:07:12Speaker 2: to speak. The others are interlopers, and they'll be trying
- 1:07:16Speaker 2: to run them off. In fact, when I did start
- 1:07:19Speaker 2: reading back into the literature on ravens, it confirmed what
- 1:07:23Speaker 2: I had seen in Yellowstone where what bren Heinrich, one
- 1:07:28Speaker 2: of the world's leading authorities on ravens, had found near
- 1:07:31Speaker 2: his cabin in Maine. Was this dead moose. One dead moose,
- 1:07:36Speaker 2: and one raven finds it, it lands and gives this call,
- 1:07:44Speaker 2: and ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding
- 1:07:47Speaker 2: on it with it. And he's like, that makes no sense, right,
- 1:07:52Speaker 2: You like, make a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and
- 1:07:56Speaker 2: your family, and before you eat, you have the high
- 1:07:57Speaker 2: school football team come over and dine first, like biologically
- 1:08:02Speaker 2: behaviorally like that didn't make sense until he started studying
- 1:08:06Speaker 2: him and marking them, And what he figured out was
- 1:08:09Speaker 2: the ones doing that were younger ones and non territorial birds.
- 1:08:15Speaker 2: And that call, which is a great way if you
- 1:08:17Speaker 2: ever injure an animal, or you've got a downed animal
- 1:08:20Speaker 2: and train you can't track him on, you got to
- 1:08:22Speaker 2: listen to the ravens. Because that call doesn't mean food
- 1:08:28Speaker 2: in a generic sense any food. It means meat really,
- 1:08:33Speaker 2: So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted
- 1:08:39Speaker 2: by the residents who own that turf. So if that
- 1:08:43Speaker 2: bird who found the moose was caught by the residents,
- 1:08:45Speaker 2: it'd be run out and it wouldn't get any food.
- 1:08:47Speaker 2: But by going it brings in an overwhelming number of
- 1:08:52Speaker 2: other ravens, and everybody ends up getting some.
- 1:08:56Speaker 1: That I can think of an analog that a friend
- 1:08:59Speaker 1: of mine was accidentally trespassing and found a mammoth jaw,
- 1:09:08Speaker 1: so he had to go over and say, sir, I
- 1:09:13Speaker 1: was accidentally trespassing on.
- 1:09:17Speaker 4: And lo and behold up on a mammoth jaw. What
- 1:09:21Speaker 4: are we gonna do about this?
- 1:09:23Speaker 2: And that bunny called in all his buddies is standing
- 1:09:25Speaker 2: around him to make sure he got the right answer.
- 1:09:27Speaker 1: Because he's like, he's like that raven. He's like, dude, like,
- 1:09:32Speaker 1: I know, I'm on your place. It's a big elk you.
- 1:09:37Speaker 1: I just would like to know what happens with the
- 1:09:39Speaker 1: thing and just try to be part of this, you know,
- 1:09:42Speaker 1: admitting that I'm on you.
- 1:09:46Speaker 3: And what I'm gonna do is calling a bunch of
- 1:09:48Speaker 3: my buddies to help me pack it out there?
- 1:09:51Speaker 4: You go, no way? Yeah, hit me with the meat
- 1:09:57Speaker 4: call again.
- 1:09:58Speaker 2: So let me qualify. It sounds very similar to what
- 1:10:02Speaker 2: young birds do when they're still on the nest and
- 1:10:05Speaker 2: they're fledging. So if you've ever had a raven or
- 1:10:09Speaker 2: a crow nest near your place, they never you know,
- 1:10:11Speaker 2: they never shut up, like they just talk, and a
- 1:10:14Speaker 2: lot of that is which just grates on your nerves,
- 1:10:20Speaker 2: and it's supposed to because in essence, what they're saying.
- 1:10:22Speaker 1: Is mom, Mom.
- 1:10:27Speaker 2: Hey mom. Right. So, if you see an adult bird,
- 1:10:31Speaker 2: and the way you tell on a lot of birds,
- 1:10:35Speaker 2: and certainly for corvids, is if you see them, call,
- 1:10:39Speaker 2: pick up your binox and look in their mouth. If
- 1:10:43Speaker 2: the lining of the mouth is black, it's an adult.
- 1:10:46Speaker 2: It's three years or older. We can't agent beyond that.
- 1:10:49Speaker 2: We just know that after about two years, the mouth
- 1:10:52Speaker 2: lining is all black. If it's a red pink, it's
- 1:10:56Speaker 2: a juvenile. So if you hear a juvenile going on
- 1:11:00Speaker 2: like that in August or September, you're like, eh, stupid kids,
- 1:11:04Speaker 2: I'm trying to get the parents to still feed them.
- 1:11:07Speaker 2: But if it's a black mouthed adult doing that, you
- 1:11:11Speaker 2: want to start looking. You want to start looking for
- 1:11:13Speaker 2: the magpies going in and out. You want to see
- 1:11:15Speaker 2: there it seeing if that there's a coyote coming over
- 1:11:17Speaker 2: the hell Oh you know, it's just the corroborating evidence
- 1:11:20Speaker 2: that there's something there that you're missing. That the eyes
- 1:11:23Speaker 2: in the sky picked.
- 1:11:24Speaker 4: Up and do the noise again, and you don't have.
- 1:11:27Speaker 2: To hear it once like I've had guide friends They're like, Hey,
- 1:11:30Speaker 2: there's a new bison in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone.
- 1:11:33Speaker 4: That's it.
- 1:11:33Speaker 2: I don't tell me anymore. I'll go in the park
- 1:11:36Speaker 2: and i'll hang out. I'll go to a real good viewpoint,
- 1:11:38Speaker 2: prominent point, and I'll close my eyes and I'll listen
- 1:11:43Speaker 2: for the first time I hear that call. And often,
- 1:11:45Speaker 2: because we often bias our other senses, sometimes I'll point
- 1:11:49Speaker 2: in the direction I think it is and then I'll
- 1:11:51Speaker 2: open my eyes and there it is, almost without fail.
- 1:11:55Speaker 4: Because he's making that racket.
- 1:11:57Speaker 2: He's making that racket because it found the food, and
- 1:12:00Speaker 2: it's calling in buddies to make sure the residents don't
- 1:12:02Speaker 2: run them out. You can, that's one of the best
- 1:12:06Speaker 2: ways to find that there.
- 1:12:08Speaker 1: Also, what he I got mixed up bout what he's
- 1:12:10Speaker 1: saying or what you're he's being like, if I go
- 1:12:15Speaker 1: down by myself, I'm gonna get her ass and run off.
- 1:12:21Speaker 4: Yeah, So he's basically calling in reinforcements.
- 1:12:26Speaker 1: So the thing going and feed and they're not and
- 1:12:28Speaker 1: they got enough people there where it's not going to be.
- 1:12:30Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a smoke screen, feathered smoke screen to
- 1:12:34Speaker 2: give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting
- 1:12:36Speaker 2: beat up. And you'll hear it too, Like, there's an
- 1:12:39Speaker 2: awesome reference. Do you ever read any of Richard Nelson's
- 1:12:43Speaker 2: ethnography work from Alaska? In Prayers to Raven there's a
- 1:12:47Speaker 2: passage on there book it's awesome and there's like a
- 1:12:50Speaker 2: one sentence description in there that I just like, I
- 1:12:54Speaker 2: just want to know what he's talking about. There he said,
- 1:12:56Speaker 2: when the native hunters quitchen find a fresh bear track
- 1:13:00Speaker 2: in the snow, they hide and they make the calls
- 1:13:05Speaker 2: of a raven to draw the bearon. And I'm like, oh, really,
- 1:13:09Speaker 2: what is that all like? And then he just keeps going.
- 1:13:12Speaker 2: I'm like, no, you know, come back that. There's two possibilities.
- 1:13:16Speaker 2: One is that non territorial bird saying right, that's possible.
- 1:13:22Speaker 2: The other one, which I think is probably more likely,
- 1:13:26Speaker 2: is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on
- 1:13:30Speaker 2: the ground at a carcass fight.
- 1:13:32Speaker 4: Oh, and they're all duking it out, duking.
- 1:13:34Speaker 2: It out, tolding you that like, we got a good
- 1:13:40Speaker 2: deal here.
- 1:13:41Speaker 1: Interesting, man, you'd go and get a bunch of guys
- 1:13:43Speaker 1: that could do that and start making that noise and
- 1:13:45Speaker 1: see what shows up.
- 1:13:47Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know how effective it was, but it's
- 1:13:49Speaker 2: effective enough apparently in their culture that they're that's a
- 1:13:52Speaker 2: known thing.
- 1:13:52Speaker 1: One of my favorite things, and make make prayers of
- 1:13:55Speaker 1: the raven One of my favorite things that he learned
- 1:13:56Speaker 1: from those guys he's hanging out with, is you know
- 1:13:58Speaker 1: they'd like to.
- 1:13:59Speaker 4: Then dig bear.
- 1:14:00Speaker 1: Yeah, and their take is like, man, anybody can you know,
- 1:14:04Speaker 1: because we look at that like, you know, most people
- 1:14:06Speaker 1: look at that like a cowardly act, you know, unsportsmanlike.
- 1:14:10Speaker 1: Their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear
- 1:14:12Speaker 1: walking around, Go climb in there and drag.
- 1:14:15Speaker 2: Them right right, And the old days they're doing it
- 1:14:19Speaker 2: with a lance. Yeah, they let the bear charge them.
- 1:14:22Speaker 1: You know, go climb in there and drag them out,
- 1:14:24Speaker 1: and tell me about how easy it is.
- 1:14:26Speaker 2: Yeah, Woosy, that's.
- 1:14:30Speaker 4: A good book.
- 1:14:31Speaker 1: Yeah, he spends a lot of time on I mean
- 1:14:33Speaker 1: obviously that that thing of like the significance of that bird,
- 1:14:38Speaker 1: which is probably in some way motivated by it's just
- 1:14:41Speaker 1: incredible intelligence.
- 1:14:42Speaker 2: And I could totally see like people will often ask
- 1:14:45Speaker 2: questions of like, you know the wolves around, you know,
- 1:14:47Speaker 2: are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as
- 1:14:50Speaker 2: we can see. No, Like there might be one or
- 1:14:53Speaker 2: two instances in the last thirty years where somebody can
- 1:14:55Speaker 2: say I'm pretty sure the ravens were maybe goaded those
- 1:15:00Speaker 2: wolves over a friend of mine was watching a brown.
- 1:15:04Speaker 4: Tap into the carcass or something.
- 1:15:06Speaker 2: But yeah, or you know, here's a weak animal. There's
- 1:15:09Speaker 2: a carcass right here. You know it's more there just
- 1:15:13Speaker 2: like parasites to the wolves. They're just taking advantage of
- 1:15:16Speaker 2: the wolves killed. I've seen times where wolves will be
- 1:15:18Speaker 2: feeding on the back end of an old wear out
- 1:15:21Speaker 2: bull elk, and the ravens are literally an antlers like
- 1:15:23Speaker 2: waiting their turn. Come on, man, give us, give us
- 1:15:26Speaker 2: a little space about it.
- 1:15:27Speaker 1: But you don't see that there's like a legitimate like hey,
- 1:15:30Speaker 1: come quick, this thing's will no no.
- 1:15:32Speaker 2: But like the northern cultures all over the globe were like, yeah,
- 1:15:37Speaker 2: that's how we find the caribou. And I think a
- 1:15:40Speaker 2: lot of those signals are as much behavioral, Like, for instance,
- 1:15:47Speaker 2: because we live on the edge of the National Forest
- 1:15:49Speaker 2: right north of the park, there's a lot of hunting
- 1:15:52Speaker 2: that goes on, and I can go out for a
- 1:15:54Speaker 2: walk with a dog and I'm like, uh, somebody killed
- 1:15:57Speaker 2: something over by the travertine two miles away, just by
- 1:16:02Speaker 2: the continual unidirectional flight of every single raven going that way.
- 1:16:07Speaker 2: So I think a lot of those early cultures probably
- 1:16:09Speaker 2: were not just picking up on sound, but they were
- 1:16:11Speaker 2: picking up on directional flight, flight altitude. If you see
- 1:16:17Speaker 2: arab back, you know, acrobatics in the air, they probably
- 1:16:20Speaker 2: you're close. There's a certain I don't know number of
- 1:16:23Speaker 2: hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you'll see ravens
- 1:16:27Speaker 2: chasing each other trying to get food away from each other,
- 1:16:29Speaker 2: and you know, like so you know you see that,
- 1:16:32Speaker 2: you're like, oh, we're within a couple hundred yards of
- 1:16:35Speaker 2: that food source.
- 1:16:36Speaker 1: I was in Tanzania this summer. In the trackers use
- 1:16:43Speaker 1: what oxpeckers do.
- 1:16:44Speaker 4: In the morning.
- 1:16:45Speaker 1: It's it's like it's diagnostic. I mean they don't look
- 1:16:48Speaker 1: at like, oh, maybe maybe there's something over there that
- 1:16:53Speaker 1: it's going to. Yeah, they're like he's up in the morning,
- 1:16:57Speaker 1: when he flies out, he already knows.
- 1:17:00Speaker 4: Yeah, he knows where they're at the buffalo.
- 1:17:04Speaker 1: Yeah, like he knows where they are because he was
- 1:17:07Speaker 1: with them before or whatever, and he's going there. Yeah,
- 1:17:10Speaker 1: you know, and so yeah, in that way, and those
- 1:17:12Speaker 1: messages they might they might not go there because of
- 1:17:16Speaker 1: whatever factors.
- 1:17:17Speaker 4: But they're like at daybreak when.
- 1:17:19Speaker 1: Six of them go yeah and disappeared down somewhere, like
- 1:17:24Speaker 1: that's not for something else.
- 1:17:26Speaker 2: And the bugs do that. You know, you probably read
- 1:17:29Speaker 2: Boyd Vardi's you know, line Tracker's Guide to Life or
- 1:17:32Speaker 2: something like that. One of his mentors was finding found
- 1:17:36Speaker 2: a lion kill from watching the.
- 1:17:37Speaker 4: Flies No same deal.
- 1:17:39Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I interviewed a guy from the book
- 1:17:41Speaker 2: and he didn't It didn't end up making it into
- 1:17:43Speaker 2: the final cut, but he and his buddy hunted a
- 1:17:45Speaker 2: lot in California, really rocky ground.
- 1:17:48Speaker 4: You know.
- 1:17:48Speaker 2: The first time it happened, they shot a bucket, ran
- 1:17:52Speaker 2: off somewhere, could kind of see, you know, ran out
- 1:17:54Speaker 2: of blood, didn't know, just kind of gave up almost
- 1:17:59Speaker 2: sitting on this this hill or next to this trail
- 1:18:01Speaker 2: and start seeing. He called him meat bees, you know,
- 1:18:04Speaker 2: el jackets that you're trying to avoid if you're processing
- 1:18:08Speaker 2: game from getting stung. Yellow jackets keep going up this trail.
- 1:18:15Speaker 2: So he followed him, and he's used that for years
- 1:18:18Speaker 2: thereafter to find down game God in places he couldn't track.
- 1:18:23Speaker 4: You know Tom Petty, Late Tom Patty.
- 1:18:25Speaker 1: He once said in one of his songs, he says,
- 1:18:28Speaker 1: I can track a single bee to its hive, which
- 1:18:31Speaker 1: is like how these define Yeah, staying there, starms and
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: standing there way till one goes by, see as far
- 1:18:38Speaker 1: as it went, go.
- 1:18:39Speaker 4: There, standing there, wait for.
- 1:18:40Speaker 1: The nuther one to go by, and you'll find your
- 1:18:42Speaker 1: buck like that. Man, Yeah, badass, you can.
- 1:18:46Speaker 2: And it's it's all that's to me. And I don't
- 1:18:50Speaker 2: hunt anymore. And that's a whole different conversation. But just
- 1:18:56Speaker 2: paying attention and trying to see the world through these
- 1:18:59Speaker 2: other creatures, you start picking that stuff up a lot more.
- 1:19:02Speaker 2: And this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors
- 1:19:05Speaker 2: knew this animal language stuff in far better detail than
- 1:19:09Speaker 2: I do. Like a friend of mine's hung out with
- 1:19:11Speaker 2: the San people in the Kalahari. They are unfreaking believable
- 1:19:15Speaker 2: in interpreting non human communication. And the ones are the best.
- 1:19:20Speaker 2: You would think are the hunters. He's like, no, actually
- 1:19:24Speaker 2: it's the women. The women are out in the bush
- 1:19:28Speaker 2: digging roots. They've got kids with them, they got old
- 1:19:31Speaker 2: people with them, all these people that are very vulnerable.
- 1:19:34Speaker 2: If the hyenas or leopard or the lions come through,
- 1:19:38Speaker 2: so they are ultra peaked. And he went out with
- 1:19:41Speaker 2: them one day and they're digging away and these women's
- 1:19:44Speaker 2: are spread out. You're like, dude, that's not safe right
- 1:19:47Speaker 2: from our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women
- 1:19:50Speaker 2: with the children, digging roots and things like that. And
- 1:19:54Speaker 2: he'd walk up to any of them, We're the closest lions.
- 1:19:58Speaker 2: Without even stopping, they point, how far about this far?
- 1:20:03Speaker 2: Walk to another one, Hey, where are the closest lions?
- 1:20:06Speaker 2: They point, go around and visit multiple women, doing this
- 1:20:10Speaker 2: just effortlessly as part of their day. They are absorbing
- 1:20:15Speaker 2: this information as they go. And in that particular case,
- 1:20:18Speaker 2: they went over a couple hours later in a vehicle.
- 1:20:22Speaker 2: There's the fresh lion tracks, got it, and even on
- 1:20:26Speaker 2: down really specific stuff, like he told me this story.
- 1:20:29Speaker 2: They were in this It was small plot of forest
- 1:20:35Speaker 2: and they hang out there in the day because it
- 1:20:37Speaker 2: gets really really hot. And they said to them, the
- 1:20:40Speaker 2: white guys, the tourists, do not leave this patch of forest.
- 1:20:44Speaker 2: There's Mama's out here, there's cobras, there's hyenas. The whole
- 1:20:48Speaker 2: laundry list, but one of the guys with him. There
- 1:20:51Speaker 2: was one of his students in animal language bird language,
- 1:20:55Speaker 2: and this student of his comes over. He says, Hey,
- 1:20:57Speaker 2: I know we're not supposed to leave, but I'm hearing
- 1:20:59Speaker 2: this bird do something that I think might be talking
- 1:21:02Speaker 2: about a snake. Can you come listen to it? So
- 1:21:05Speaker 2: he goes over there with him at the edge of
- 1:21:07Speaker 2: this little patch of trees and he's like, yeah, I
- 1:21:09Speaker 2: think you're right, but you know, we're not gonna go
- 1:21:12Speaker 2: out there. Let's but let's go get the one white
- 1:21:15Speaker 2: guy and he's got a gun. We will check it out.
- 1:21:18Speaker 2: So he comes over. The three of them walk out
- 1:21:21Speaker 2: and he's like, yeah, I think I think you're right.
- 1:21:23Speaker 2: I think it's I think it's a snake. But let's
- 1:21:25Speaker 2: go get aasi Quah. You know this this native guy,
- 1:21:28Speaker 2: his name literally translates into cobra, he'll know. So Isakulah comes.
- 1:21:33Speaker 2: The four of them then walk within I'll say sixty
- 1:21:36Speaker 2: eighty yards and he's like, yep, there it is. It's
- 1:21:38Speaker 2: a it's a black mamba. Don't go over there. So
- 1:21:43Speaker 2: my friend says to his student who were originally found
- 1:21:46Speaker 2: this whole deal, he's like, now watch this. They go
- 1:21:50Speaker 2: back into the trees and there's like five women sitting
- 1:21:53Speaker 2: around making beads with ostrich eggs shells and they're just talking.
- 1:21:58Speaker 2: Kids are playing around, people are working on tan and highs,
- 1:22:01Speaker 2: just the usual stuff of a community. So they stand
- 1:22:04Speaker 2: their patient and finally there's a break in the conversation
- 1:22:09Speaker 2: and the translator says, you want to ask the question.
- 1:22:13Speaker 2: So my friend says, yeah, do you ladies hear any
- 1:22:16Speaker 2: alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them
- 1:22:19Speaker 2: point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away,
- 1:22:24Speaker 2: says there's a mamba over there. Don't go over there.
- 1:22:27Speaker 4: Hmm.
- 1:22:29Speaker 2: So not only through their regular routine were they hearing it,
- 1:22:33Speaker 2: they also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even
- 1:22:37Speaker 2: seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on,
- 1:22:39Speaker 2: Like that's the level that not just Native Africans, not
- 1:22:43Speaker 2: just Native Amazonians, like our ancestors knew that. And it's
- 1:22:47Speaker 2: like so cool that we're discovering it now. It's like, no,
- 1:22:50Speaker 2: it's neat, but this is really old and it was
- 1:22:55Speaker 2: used because it was so useful. It was retained because
- 1:22:59Speaker 2: dinner was on the hoof, and you need to know
- 1:23:02Speaker 2: it was in there before you even went in there
- 1:23:06Speaker 2: to just limit the chaos that that life brings at you.
- 1:23:10Speaker 2: So and for me, it's like I was guiding a ton,
- 1:23:13Speaker 2: you know. So like people are paying you to find
- 1:23:14Speaker 2: the bear. Well, ha, Well, if there's anybody on a
- 1:23:21Speaker 2: carcass that's out there, it's probably gonna be a bear,
- 1:23:25Speaker 2: you know. So you got to listen to the raven.
- 1:23:27Speaker 2: You got to watch the duck. So I don't I
- 1:23:29Speaker 2: want to see a wolf, you know some people I like,
- 1:23:31Speaker 2: I don't care. You gotta watch everything here because everything
- 1:23:35Speaker 2: has a response and a relationship with everything else. And
- 1:23:38Speaker 2: the more you pay attention to that, the more you're
- 1:23:40Speaker 2: gonna see all those connections start done, just blossom. And
- 1:23:45Speaker 2: what's even more cool is when you see the position
- 1:23:49Speaker 2: you yourself hold you're being talked about. They respond to you,
- 1:23:55Speaker 2: Steve different than you, Brody different than you can and
- 1:23:58Speaker 2: they respond or eating our dogs dog has a different
- 1:24:01Speaker 2: bark for the ups guy because he gives them snacks.
- 1:24:05Speaker 2: Definitely different bark for the FedEx guy. No snacks there,
- 1:24:09Speaker 2: different bark for the neighbor knows that guy pretty well.
- 1:24:13Speaker 2: Different bark for or behaviors when one of the family
- 1:24:16Speaker 2: comes home so we're not in isolation of this, you know,
- 1:24:20Speaker 2: as it's seen in the wild world, like we're doing it,
- 1:24:23Speaker 2: our pets are doing it. It's just paying attention a
- 1:24:26Speaker 2: little bit more so that you start seeing in the
- 1:24:28Speaker 2: places that you want to know more.
- 1:24:30Speaker 1: Our dog has a greeting for people whose house she
- 1:24:34Speaker 1: has stayed at before.
- 1:24:36Speaker 4: What is it? Just a level of like swirling around,
- 1:24:39Speaker 4: make the wine. You know, it's like rolling over on
- 1:24:41Speaker 4: her back. That means she's like been dog sat by them. Yeah.
- 1:24:46Speaker 1: Well, the crazy thing is like if you haven't done that,
- 1:24:48Speaker 1: she's not gonna do it right.
- 1:24:50Speaker 2: It's true. It's so true. And like literally three mornings ago,
- 1:24:54Speaker 2: my wife and I are working at the dining room
- 1:24:56Speaker 2: table and our dog, We've got a black lab Hobbs.
- 1:24:59Speaker 2: Hobb starts going bananas like ape shit. I'm like, what
- 1:25:03Speaker 2: he only does that level of craziness for the ups guy,
- 1:25:07Speaker 2: or if the neighbor's dog comes in the yard because
- 1:25:10Speaker 2: he wants to go play, right, I'm like, what is it?
- 1:25:13Speaker 2: He's just like bouncing. It almost looked like a coonhound.
- 1:25:16Speaker 2: You know, it's babe, you know, treat to a raccoon
- 1:25:19Speaker 2: bouncing on his front feet. Bark and barking, barking, And
- 1:25:22Speaker 2: I look out the front door before I let him out,
- 1:25:24Speaker 2: and here's a bobcat walking up the stairs from the
- 1:25:26Speaker 2: lower yard into the upper yard, twenty feet from the
- 1:25:29Speaker 2: from the door, and then just veers off and through
- 1:25:32Speaker 2: the yard. You'd see those tracks. You're like, oh, yeah,
- 1:25:34Speaker 2: that bobcat came through the night, Like, no, dude, it
- 1:25:36Speaker 2: was ten thirty in the morning. We were working and
- 1:25:39Speaker 2: we would have missed it had hobs or in other cases,
- 1:25:43Speaker 2: we've seen lines in our yard because the magpies told us.
- 1:25:47Speaker 2: You know, we had a line with four kittens in
- 1:25:49Speaker 2: our yard this spring and they disappeared after a while.
- 1:25:53Speaker 2: Didn't think we'd see him again. And we're sitting on
- 1:25:55Speaker 2: the porch, my wife and I and Jenny says hear that.
- 1:25:59Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, magpies. Magpies. When they are social and
- 1:26:03Speaker 2: just hanging out together, they'll go yeka, can hear it
- 1:26:09Speaker 2: in different places they're just checking in. But when it
- 1:26:11Speaker 2: goes down ye yah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
- 1:26:15Speaker 2: it's like that's what we heard. And she says there's
- 1:26:18Speaker 2: something down there. I'm like, I know, and she no
- 1:26:22Speaker 2: more than stands up walks less than the distance from
- 1:26:25Speaker 2: here to Brody looks over the railing into the lower
- 1:26:27Speaker 2: yard and she says, fucking lion. And because of the
- 1:26:31Speaker 2: fore warning, he had enough time running the house, grab
- 1:26:33Speaker 2: her camera and got this killer footage of the cat
- 1:26:36Speaker 2: walking like thirty feet from the corner of our deckoree
- 1:26:42Speaker 2: in the afternoon, when you least expect it. It's like
- 1:26:46Speaker 2: when your life is on the line, like a magpie
- 1:26:50Speaker 2: who might be whacked by a wild cat, or a
- 1:26:53Speaker 2: raven who might get whacked by an eagle, like look
- 1:26:55Speaker 2: to those things that their lives depend on most, and
- 1:26:57Speaker 2: then you just start seeing this, this whole scene open up.
- 1:27:00Speaker 2: Is that's why they're talking that way, and you're just
- 1:27:05Speaker 2: you're just an eavesdropper listening. I was like, oh, whoa,
- 1:27:08Speaker 2: Like ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Some
- 1:27:12Speaker 2: things seem generic, but some things are extremely specific. And
- 1:27:17Speaker 2: this one and it can take a while, Like this
- 1:27:19Speaker 2: one took me about five years to figure out what
- 1:27:21Speaker 2: the heck it meant. I'd heard it. I'm like, WHOA,
- 1:27:24Speaker 2: that's different. I can't figure it out. Flying high just
- 1:27:29Speaker 2: making noise right, No, No, that's what happens when there's
- 1:27:34Speaker 2: a golden eagle?
- 1:27:35Speaker 4: What is that noise?
- 1:27:35Speaker 5: Like?
- 1:27:36Speaker 2: So it's a very consistent, uniform series of notes to
- 1:27:40Speaker 2: just go on and and it's it's serious. And I
- 1:27:53Speaker 2: was having lunch with a guy who runs the bird
- 1:27:55Speaker 2: programs in Yellstone. I'm like, hey, Dave, you did you
- 1:27:59Speaker 2: graduate working on golden eagles?
- 1:28:00Speaker 4: Right?
- 1:28:01Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. He's like, you know this raven call. I've
- 1:28:05Speaker 2: been hearing this raven call. I'm pretty sure it's just
- 1:28:07Speaker 2: for goldens. He's like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we
- 1:28:10Speaker 2: listened for to know to get the eagle traps ready
- 1:28:13Speaker 2: because one's coming.
- 1:28:14Speaker 4: Oh really, why are they tuned into goldens?
- 1:28:20Speaker 2: They're killers?
- 1:28:21Speaker 4: So goldens will kill them off of those.
- 1:28:24Speaker 2: I've only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but
- 1:28:28Speaker 2: it's really infrequent.
- 1:28:29Speaker 4: But he wants he wants to eat it.
- 1:28:30Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they're eating them. It's like a difference between
- 1:28:34Speaker 2: a wolf killing a coyote versus a lion. Lion will
- 1:28:38Speaker 2: eat you. Wolf just kills you, you know, till the
- 1:28:44Speaker 2: their level of response is different. That line is gonna
- 1:28:48Speaker 2: hunt you. That wolf is gonna opportunistically kill you because
- 1:28:53Speaker 2: you're filching off. It's kill and they know these variations.
- 1:28:58Speaker 2: So I asked Dave and Likes to have, you know,
- 1:29:00Speaker 2: a variation for bald eagles, because I think I have,
- 1:29:03Speaker 2: and he's like, nah, you know, he wasn't doing research
- 1:29:06Speaker 2: on them, so he didn't. But on the spectrum of
- 1:29:09Speaker 2: raven chasing another raven off versus raven chasing a golden
- 1:29:12Speaker 2: eagle off back from that golden eagle, end of the
- 1:29:17Speaker 2: spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it,
- 1:29:19Speaker 2: a few more bits of inflection. And it's hard because
- 1:29:24Speaker 2: you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape
- 1:29:28Speaker 2: because I only get maybe half a dozen of these
- 1:29:32Speaker 2: in a lifetime, some of these behaviors and calls. But
- 1:29:36Speaker 2: if you've got one hundred other people who listen for
- 1:29:39Speaker 2: exactly the same thing for a couple of thousand years,
- 1:29:42Speaker 2: and you're telling the stories, yeah, you see why the
- 1:29:45Speaker 2: bushmen are so damn good. But I've been able to
- 1:29:48Speaker 2: call it on bald a few times. You know, you
- 1:29:50Speaker 2: hear and I don't know if you can hear the
- 1:29:57Speaker 2: differences in there. It's not that and it's not the
- 1:30:01Speaker 2: raven chasing another raven. There's a little more insistence to it.
- 1:30:07Speaker 2: There's a little more uniformity, but compared to the Golden Eagle,
- 1:30:10Speaker 2: there's still more inflection, there's more spacing in there, and
- 1:30:15Speaker 2: they're doing those things for a reason.
- 1:30:17Speaker 3: It's all this stuff like are you doing all this
- 1:30:20Speaker 3: just kind of based on memory and things you're hearing
- 1:30:24Speaker 3: repetitively out while you're out are like, are you recording
- 1:30:29Speaker 3: it all to like listen to this stuff and get
- 1:30:32Speaker 3: nuance out of it?
- 1:30:33Speaker 2: Or is it just for years? For twenty plus years,
- 1:30:37Speaker 2: it's been me just listening in ways other people haven't
- 1:30:41Speaker 2: been and making some connections and missing most right. But
- 1:30:47Speaker 2: what's really cool right now is my friend's kind of
- 1:30:50Speaker 2: at the center of initiating a bioacoustics project in Yellstone,
- 1:30:54Speaker 2: which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle
- 1:30:59Speaker 2: wolf language. You know, can you sense this a wolf
- 1:31:02Speaker 2: population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves
- 1:31:05Speaker 2: out of a place by playing certain types of howls
- 1:31:08Speaker 2: in an area to keep them on of cattle? Right?
- 1:31:11Speaker 2: So they're doing more or less the basic research, though
- 1:31:14Speaker 2: it's just based you're putting out all these recorders and
- 1:31:17Speaker 2: recording twenty four by seven, three hundred and sixty five
- 1:31:21Speaker 2: days a year. But you're not just getting wolves. You're
- 1:31:24Speaker 2: getting everything. You're getting all the ravens, you're getting all
- 1:31:26Speaker 2: the bis in conversation, You're getting everything. And we've got
- 1:31:30Speaker 2: one of them in our yard a part of this project.
- 1:31:33Speaker 2: So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my
- 1:31:36Speaker 2: phone where I see a raven chase a golden eagle over.
- 1:31:40Speaker 2: I just make them time and date stamp and a
- 1:31:42Speaker 2: note of behavior in my phone. And now I can
- 1:31:45Speaker 2: actually go back because you're you all have this. If
- 1:31:48Speaker 2: you're trying to take a photo of something, you're trying
- 1:31:51Speaker 2: to record something, it's over before you're done, especially these things.
- 1:31:56Speaker 2: I only have a few data points ever, but this
- 1:31:59Speaker 2: is but.
- 1:32:00Speaker 4: This is not always running.
- 1:32:01Speaker 2: It's always running. So I can now make a note
- 1:32:03Speaker 2: and I'm like raven being you know, chased by this
- 1:32:07Speaker 2: or raven chasing that I can go back to the
- 1:32:10Speaker 2: sound recordings and listen to it over and over and
- 1:32:12Speaker 2: it's context totally. That's where this AI stuff is really
- 1:32:18Speaker 2: cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other behaviors,
- 1:32:22Speaker 2: but you still need the field time. You still need
- 1:32:26Speaker 2: somebody who's died in the wool in the field, and
- 1:32:29Speaker 2: that's all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise just
- 1:32:32Speaker 2: it's just noise. So that's the part I really enjoy,
- 1:32:37Speaker 2: and I like, I'm really wanting to figure out. I
- 1:32:41Speaker 2: have a strong suspicion of what the alarm coyotes use
- 1:32:45Speaker 2: for when they encounter a cougar. It's different than when
- 1:32:49Speaker 2: they find a wolf because they're bad dudes, and they're
- 1:32:53Speaker 2: going to tell everybody about it. They want them known
- 1:32:56Speaker 2: and they want to avoid them themselves and their families.
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: But I've only had four instances where I can verify
- 1:33:06Speaker 2: that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else's observations,
- 1:33:10Speaker 2: that kyote was barking at a cougar one data point.
- 1:33:15Speaker 2: And I hope this bioacoustics stuff is allow us to
- 1:33:19Speaker 2: then go in because like he and I hooked up
- 1:33:22Speaker 2: with a high school honors student kid wanted a project
- 1:33:25Speaker 2: on wildlife. So we're like, great, we need to train
- 1:33:27Speaker 2: the AI model. So we had him go listen to
- 1:33:30Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say,
- 1:33:33Speaker 2: this is a howl. It's not an airplane, This is
- 1:33:35Speaker 2: a howl. It's not a truck. This is a howl
- 1:33:38Speaker 2: of a wolf, not a coyote, so that then you
- 1:33:40Speaker 2: can let the machine listen to a year's worth of
- 1:33:43Speaker 2: recordings without you having to sit there for a year
- 1:33:46Speaker 2: for every single unit, and you know, isolate all the
- 1:33:50Speaker 2: right And you know, there's been an explosion in the
- 1:33:54Speaker 2: amount of info out there in the research world about
- 1:33:56Speaker 2: this kind of stuff in the last fifteen years. Like
- 1:34:00Speaker 2: a friend wrote a book in h came out in
- 1:34:03Speaker 2: twenty twelve called What the Robin Knows by John Young.
- 1:34:07Speaker 2: They had they had to scratch and dig to find
- 1:34:09Speaker 2: any documentation that talked about any of this stuff. You know,
- 1:34:13Speaker 2: everybody's got the app now, like here's the Song of
- 1:34:16Speaker 2: the Robin, you know, here's the Song of the Phoebe.
- 1:34:21Speaker 2: You know all these What they don't tell you and
- 1:34:23Speaker 2: they can't is what the hell that actually means.
- 1:34:26Speaker 1: You know.
- 1:34:28Speaker 2: And so there's been a lot more research in that
- 1:34:33Speaker 2: field recently, which is just it's pointing to the complexity
- 1:34:38Speaker 2: that we've been ignoring as modern humans for a long
- 1:34:42Speaker 2: darn time. And as it's fun. You know, you don't
- 1:34:46Speaker 2: need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff. You just
- 1:34:50Speaker 2: you don't even need binoculars. Just listen. Well, I don't
- 1:34:54Speaker 2: have good hearing anymore. I shot too many guns or
- 1:34:56Speaker 2: like me, you know, power tools and guns, and you know,
- 1:34:58Speaker 2: I got compromised hearing. But it's not about what you
- 1:35:01Speaker 2: can hear or can see. It's what you do with
- 1:35:05Speaker 2: what you can hear and see. Like I noticed a
- 1:35:09Speaker 2: friend of mine who's had a lot of the same history.
- 1:35:11Speaker 2: We pick up on cars on dirt road, a lot
- 1:35:14Speaker 2: further off than our wives do. Get the dogs, Get
- 1:35:18Speaker 2: the dogs in out of the road, Like, what are
- 1:35:20Speaker 2: you talking about. There's a car coming. Yeah, there's a
- 1:35:21Speaker 2: car coming. I don't hear it. Well, just give it
- 1:35:25Speaker 2: a sec you know, and there it comes. So each
- 1:35:28Speaker 2: of us comes to the to the game with a
- 1:35:30Speaker 2: slightly different set of superpowers, if you want to put
- 1:35:33Speaker 2: it that way. And we're tuning into things in ways
- 1:35:36Speaker 2: that you aren't, or you're tuning in stuff that I don't,
- 1:35:39Speaker 2: which is in some ways, like I don't like to
- 1:35:41Speaker 2: give a lot of instruction on this stuff because I
- 1:35:43Speaker 2: want to hear what you find. And if I tell
- 1:35:45Speaker 2: you what to look for, that's all you're going to see.
- 1:35:49Speaker 2: You follow me, you know, So I really it's like, yeah,
- 1:35:52Speaker 2: I'm gonna tell you some cool stuff to get you
- 1:35:54Speaker 2: started plant that seed, but man, I really want you
- 1:35:57Speaker 2: to do this on your own and te me what
- 1:36:01Speaker 2: you find. Oh yeah, the lions, you know, the Kyle's
- 1:36:05Speaker 2: do that at the lion, but it's when the lion's
- 1:36:06Speaker 2: behaving like this. So like when that bobcat came through
- 1:36:10Speaker 2: the yard the other day, I did get a small
- 1:36:11Speaker 2: recording of the magpies, and it was nothing like what
- 1:36:15Speaker 2: I would point out and say, bobcat over there. And
- 1:36:19Speaker 2: what you start to realize is there oftentimes talking about
- 1:36:24Speaker 2: Sure they're talking about the animal specifically, but as well
- 1:36:29Speaker 2: in that mix as them talking about that animal's behavior,
- 1:36:33Speaker 2: it's intention, you might say. So when a cat is hunting,
- 1:36:37Speaker 2: those alarms go through the roof, they'd light up the woods.
- 1:36:41Speaker 2: But if the cat like this one the other day,
- 1:36:42Speaker 2: it was just kind of like walking through the yard.
- 1:36:45Speaker 4: You know, it.
- 1:36:45Speaker 2: Drops off the retaining wall, sits down on a log
- 1:36:48Speaker 2: in the little cops of cottonwoods. Yeah, yeah, there's a trouble,
- 1:36:53Speaker 2: but we're not ratting it out like crazy, you know.
- 1:36:57Speaker 2: So in many cases you can you can actually read
- 1:37:01Speaker 2: into the behavior. You can read into the direction in
- 1:37:04Speaker 2: the animals moving. Like so when the kyote is alarming
- 1:37:07Speaker 2: at something like us. Naturally, they'll often shadow it as
- 1:37:11Speaker 2: it progresses, so you'd be like, Okay, there's a there's
- 1:37:16Speaker 2: a wolf over there, and it's going right to left
- 1:37:20Speaker 2: at a trot, I think, and if we want to
- 1:37:22Speaker 2: see it, we're going to have to go over on
- 1:37:25Speaker 2: the hill here where we're down wind. You can start
- 1:37:27Speaker 2: doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately
- 1:37:31Speaker 2: because they're hunting with rocks and sticks, need everything, and
- 1:37:37Speaker 2: this is one of those tools that helps you on
- 1:37:40Speaker 2: that razor's edge of survival. It's like the you know
- 1:37:45Speaker 2: the crow Indian, you know Crow tribal folks here, they
- 1:37:47Speaker 2: had to know Crowfair. I don't know if you guys
- 1:37:49Speaker 2: have been to Crowfair, but they were just a few
- 1:37:51Speaker 2: years ago. A twitter with the fact this one elder
- 1:37:54Speaker 2: was coming out of the mountains to tend and this
- 1:37:57Speaker 2: photographer friend of mine got to meet him, and you know,
- 1:38:00Speaker 2: he's very low key asking questions, and the elder asked
- 1:38:04Speaker 2: this friend of mine, He's like, so, you know what
- 1:38:06Speaker 2: do you do. I'm a photographer? You so, oh, what
- 1:38:09Speaker 2: do you like to photograph? Bears and wolves and otters
- 1:38:13Speaker 2: and stuff like that? You want to know where every
- 1:38:15Speaker 2: bear is, every wolf is. He's like, yeah, he's like
- 1:38:18Speaker 2: getting his notebook out. He's like, you know, thinking he's
- 1:38:21Speaker 2: gonna draw map, and he's like, he says, no. He says,
- 1:38:24Speaker 2: you listen to the birds. He says, they're like our women,
- 1:38:28Speaker 2: the gossip about everything.
- 1:38:30Speaker 8: Yeah, you know that's some deep wisdom right there, because
- 1:38:35Speaker 8: it's going on all the time, but we just don't
- 1:38:38Speaker 8: give it the credit it's due.
- 1:38:42Speaker 1: What ah, What other animals that people that people listen
- 1:38:48Speaker 1: would know would have a familiar familiarity with the with
- 1:38:52Speaker 1: the vocabulary already?
- 1:38:54Speaker 2: Yeah, great ones likerels. Okay, well in North America at least,
- 1:38:58Speaker 2: you know, gray squirrel is a great one. They're in Europe,
- 1:39:00Speaker 2: you know, they've been introduced to Europe and there a
- 1:39:02Speaker 2: plague over there. But again, nature doesn't care whether you're
- 1:39:05Speaker 2: non native or native. Everybody's contributions to this community conversation
- 1:39:11Speaker 2: is equal and listened to. So gray squirrels. If you
- 1:39:16Speaker 2: spend time in the woods, you know something's coming through
- 1:39:19Speaker 2: when you hear what what what?
- 1:39:20Speaker 4: What?
- 1:39:25Speaker 2: Which is in contrast to.
- 1:39:32Speaker 4: Does it ever hear that one? But without the yes.
- 1:39:39Speaker 2: Exactly look up? That is typically for a threat from
- 1:39:44Speaker 2: the air.
- 1:39:46Speaker 4: He leaves off the couple like whatever.
- 1:39:48Speaker 2: The chucks or chucks. The chucks are typically something on
- 1:39:54Speaker 2: the ground. Same with red squirrels.
- 1:39:58Speaker 4: That's him, that's something tally.
- 1:40:00Speaker 2: On the ground. There's some there's some debate in the
- 1:40:03Speaker 2: scientific community over what that actually means. And no, it
- 1:40:07Speaker 2: doesn't mean that. It means this, and we don't know.
- 1:40:09Speaker 2: And the bottom line is the squirrels. Now listen to
- 1:40:12Speaker 2: the squirrels, spend time with the squirrels, because when they got.
- 1:40:18Speaker 4: That one, what does that mean? Because there got a
- 1:40:22Speaker 4: version that just means I'm mad at another squirrel.
- 1:40:25Speaker 2: There is that. Yeah, you can't discount that, that's for sure, Like, dude,
- 1:40:29Speaker 2: get out of my midden.
- 1:40:30Speaker 1: I wish, I wish I could isolate the one because
- 1:40:34Speaker 1: I'm really interested in the one where he sees something.
- 1:40:38Speaker 4: But then a lot of times you'd be watching him.
- 1:40:40Speaker 1: From a fire and he'd be like he's fired up
- 1:40:42Speaker 1: because he's fired up at that squirrel. Yeah, you know,
- 1:40:44Speaker 1: he's not telling about some elk coming down the trail.
- 1:40:47Speaker 4: He's like pissed at a squirrel.
- 1:40:49Speaker 2: And what's really crazy cool is not only is are
- 1:40:52Speaker 2: most of these things innate in these species. So like
- 1:40:56Speaker 2: those vervet monkeys, they are wired from birth to yell
- 1:41:00Speaker 2: at the leopard like they do you think, so we know.
- 1:41:05Speaker 2: So what they don't always have, well, yes and no.
- 1:41:10Speaker 2: What they need is refinement of how to use that.
- 1:41:13Speaker 2: So like young ones they've seen in those verbts, like
- 1:41:15Speaker 2: adults basically like cuff the kids like, shut up that
- 1:41:19Speaker 2: it's a root. It's a tree, root, it's not a snake.
- 1:41:22Speaker 4: Oh all right.
- 1:41:23Speaker 2: So there there are these innate tendencies, there's these innate alarms.
- 1:41:27Speaker 2: But then there's also training that comes with the social
- 1:41:30Speaker 2: arrangement that that helps them refine it so that the
- 1:41:33Speaker 2: group can agree. Right, And that's also where you end
- 1:41:36Speaker 2: up with these dialects. You know, the ravens on Vancouver Island, like, dude,
- 1:41:39Speaker 2: they say stuff I've never heard before from here, Okay,
- 1:41:43Speaker 2: totally different accent in California. Dude, he's on my surfboard.
- 1:41:48Speaker 2: You know, it's like Manaier's you know, those ravens have
- 1:41:51Speaker 2: different sounds, same in Alaska. Like you can see. Then
- 1:41:55Speaker 2: it's like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture. Yeah,
- 1:42:03Speaker 2: and they're talking about things in pretty complex ways. They're
- 1:42:11Speaker 2: talking about us too, which I don't think a lot
- 1:42:14Speaker 2: of people realize they're talking about us in ways that
- 1:42:16Speaker 2: these wild communities are actually across species, not just across species,
- 1:42:21Speaker 2: across genera family, order of organism that are all listening
- 1:42:26Speaker 2: to each other simultaneously. So the mink is listening to
- 1:42:29Speaker 2: the frogs, The frogs are listening to the owl, the
- 1:42:33Speaker 2: the you know, the the owl is listening to the
- 1:42:35Speaker 2: jet going overhead. You know, there's this this whole hierarchy
- 1:42:39Speaker 2: of of order that.
- 1:42:42Speaker 1: They have a great point that, like as much you're
- 1:42:45Speaker 1: talking about trying to like sort figure out what the
- 1:42:48Speaker 1: noises make, there's all these different noises that have to
- 1:42:51Speaker 1: mean something. It's interesting to get into it, Like what
- 1:42:55Speaker 1: are other animals? So here you are a human. Here
- 1:42:59Speaker 1: you are one specie hearing an elk bugle, drawing conclusions
- 1:43:05Speaker 1: from that, But that elk is listening to a pine squirrel,
- 1:43:11Speaker 1: drawing conclusions from that.
- 1:43:13Speaker 2: None of them are in isolation. We are the ones
- 1:43:16Speaker 2: in isolation.
- 1:43:17Speaker 4: We're the ones.
- 1:43:20Speaker 2: And it's not like you got to go into a
- 1:43:21Speaker 2: wild place to hear this. No Like, literally, I'm gassing
- 1:43:24Speaker 2: up here and bows before I got here, and the
- 1:43:26Speaker 2: chickeny is pissed off at something. I didn't see what
- 1:43:28Speaker 2: it was, but I at least knew something's going on
- 1:43:31Speaker 2: over there. I've done enough times walk over and be like, oh,
- 1:43:35Speaker 2: I bet nobody in this neighborhoods seen that owl. Mmm,
- 1:43:40Speaker 2: it's been sitting there, probably lived there its whole life,
- 1:43:42Speaker 2: years and nobody's known that it's sitting right there.
- 1:43:47Speaker 4: We had one hanging dead in that tree there today,
- 1:43:49Speaker 4: din't you really?
- 1:43:49Speaker 2: Yeah, what happened to it?
- 1:43:51Speaker 1: We emailed or our texted one of the game wardens,
- 1:43:55Speaker 1: and you said, there's so much avian influenza right now,
- 1:43:57Speaker 1: and it's sitting the owls hard enough where they don't
- 1:43:59Speaker 1: even they're out even testing all the birds anymore, that's said,
- 1:44:03Speaker 1: And that's he was going to come by and grab it,
- 1:44:05Speaker 1: but he was like, he's like, there's a lot.
- 1:44:07Speaker 2: Pretty sure of it. Yeah, overwhelmed.
- 1:44:09Speaker 4: And that's yeah, that's there's too many to check them
- 1:44:12Speaker 4: all right now.
- 1:44:14Speaker 2: That's what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking
- 1:44:18Speaker 2: around the globe, is we're losing these informants. We're losing
- 1:44:23Speaker 2: these community members who are more than happy to welcome
- 1:44:28Speaker 2: us in and share information with us. If we slow
- 1:44:30Speaker 2: the hell down. Like something I do with the students
- 1:44:33Speaker 2: that I have done for years is I'll take him
- 1:44:35Speaker 2: out somewhere in the park and I said, everybody puts
- 1:44:40Speaker 2: your phones, your watches, everything in a bag. Pull out
- 1:44:43Speaker 2: a notepad or a piece of paper and a pencil.
- 1:44:45Speaker 2: That's all you're allowed to have. Spread out, you know.
- 1:44:48Speaker 2: So we all have everybody spread out for you know,
- 1:44:50Speaker 2: a few yards between everybody over a let's say an acre,
- 1:44:54Speaker 2: and we're going to sit for an hour, sixty minutes.
- 1:44:56Speaker 2: That's it, sixty minutes and then and I just want
- 1:45:01Speaker 2: you to look for any animals, you see, any sounds
- 1:45:04Speaker 2: you hear, just jot them down, and we come together
- 1:45:08Speaker 2: at the end of that. And I keep time, and
- 1:45:12Speaker 2: they have a crude way for them to keep rough
- 1:45:14Speaker 2: time stamps of when we're out there, so they can
- 1:45:18Speaker 2: correlate certain things. And I'll say to them, what did
- 1:45:23Speaker 2: you hear? Nothing?
- 1:45:25Speaker 4: Man?
- 1:45:25Speaker 2: There was nothing for like, I don't know, I thought
- 1:45:29Speaker 2: I heard a chickadee like maybe minute, you know, around
- 1:45:32Speaker 2: minute forty or when you made the signal for the
- 1:45:34Speaker 2: fourth quarter or something like. There was nothing, and then
- 1:45:37Speaker 2: there's stuff all over. I'm like anybody else notice that, Like, yeah,
- 1:45:41Speaker 2: actually the nutatge came down the tree, I saw coyo.
- 1:45:45Speaker 2: Like all these things start happening. I said, do you
- 1:45:51Speaker 2: think us going in there screwed things up? Did they
- 1:45:56Speaker 2: know we were coming? And you see the wheels starting?
- 1:46:00Speaker 2: The answer to that is absolutely yes. The same signal
- 1:46:04Speaker 2: system that's ratting out the Cooper's Hawk coming through the
- 1:46:06Speaker 2: neighborhood or the owl perched up in this spruce is
- 1:46:10Speaker 2: the same system that's telling everybody else about us.
- 1:46:14Speaker 3: That's it super interesting from a hunting perspective because like
- 1:46:19Speaker 3: you could be Glass and some mule deer that are
- 1:46:21Speaker 3: saying a thousand yards away and you're like, they have
- 1:46:24Speaker 3: no idea we're here, But maybe they do and they're
- 1:46:27Speaker 3: just not worried about it yet.
- 1:46:29Speaker 2: You know, they know the proximities, they know the priors.
- 1:46:33Speaker 2: They know that squirrel isn't going to do that until
- 1:46:37Speaker 2: it sees something of trouble. But they're three hundred four
- 1:46:40Speaker 2: hundred yards down.
- 1:46:42Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
- 1:46:43Speaker 2: If we see the Kyle Hall and ass up through
- 1:46:45Speaker 2: this meadow past us, we know that trouble's gotten about
- 1:46:48Speaker 2: another one hundred yards closer. You know that ghost buck
- 1:46:53Speaker 2: that nobody could ever harvest they at a very fine level.
- 1:46:57Speaker 2: At that age had to be half to be tuning
- 1:47:00Speaker 2: into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment.
- 1:47:06Speaker 2: And every species has a different threshold, you know, so Toey's,
- 1:47:09Speaker 2: for instance, they're out of there so fast, or like ninjas,
- 1:47:13Speaker 2: you just notice like they're gone, like where the hell
- 1:47:15Speaker 2: they go. The sparrows, you know, pay attention and they
- 1:47:19Speaker 2: make a couple of chip notes and then they take off,
- 1:47:21Speaker 2: you know, and a couple of minutes later, here comes
- 1:47:24Speaker 2: the dog has followed your trail into the woods.
- 1:47:28Speaker 1: Yeah, when you're sneaking along thinking that the thing that's
- 1:47:30Speaker 1: alerting stuff is you crunch and leaves and if you
- 1:47:33Speaker 1: think about and you's like like the forest is alive
- 1:47:36Speaker 1: with bird calls and whatever and squirrels and stuff. But
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: you think it's like you step down a twig. Yeah,
- 1:47:41Speaker 1: it's a good point. They might have been taught about
- 1:47:43Speaker 1: you for forever.
- 1:47:44Speaker 2: Man the turkey step on twigs, elk break brand, big break,
- 1:47:48Speaker 2: big stuff. So like why aren't they alarming?
- 1:47:50Speaker 4: At that?
- 1:47:50Speaker 2: I was like so pissed as a kid, like watching
- 1:47:53Speaker 2: these birds on my grandmother's feet are like a woodpacker
- 1:47:55Speaker 2: come in and flush everybody, or a jay or you know,
- 1:47:57Speaker 2: squirrel sidles up, I walk out. Everybody off. I'm like,
- 1:48:01Speaker 2: I'm not bad.
- 1:48:02Speaker 4: I'm not bad.
- 1:48:03Speaker 2: Guy, Like, come on, let's you know, hang out, show
- 1:48:05Speaker 2: me some stuff. And no, it's like you screw the
- 1:48:09Speaker 2: least common denominator as a hiker, a dog walker, a
- 1:48:13Speaker 2: beach comber, and you scare everybody. That's the piece we
- 1:48:17Speaker 2: don't get is if you scare the robin, you've already
- 1:48:21Speaker 2: been blown for everything. You scare the brown creeper, you
- 1:48:26Speaker 2: scare the mink.
- 1:48:28Speaker 4: You know.
- 1:48:28Speaker 2: It's like and then there's this beautiful this is like
- 1:48:31Speaker 2: gourmet level stuff where you start getting into secondary alarms.
- 1:48:34Speaker 2: So like, as you slow down, I'll back up just
- 1:48:39Speaker 2: a second, so that one exercise of making everybody sit
- 1:48:41Speaker 2: for sixty seconds or sixty minutes, I'll say, how many
- 1:48:46Speaker 2: times have each of you gone out in the woods
- 1:48:49Speaker 2: or somewhere just wildish and sat for sixty minutes and
- 1:48:53Speaker 2: done nothing but pay attention? You ask that yourself, like
- 1:48:58Speaker 2: you know hunters some.
- 1:49:00Speaker 4: But yeah, archery, whitetail hunters.
- 1:49:03Speaker 2: Yeah, that's how I learned it a lot.
- 1:49:05Speaker 1: That's when you see everything, well, you got it. Like
- 1:49:07Speaker 1: you gotta go sit there. At like an hour in Alston,
- 1:49:11Speaker 1: You're like, where is all this stuff?
- 1:49:12Speaker 4: Normally?
- 1:49:13Speaker 2: Bingo?
- 1:49:13Speaker 4: You know, it's like stuff everywhere.
- 1:49:16Speaker 2: It's normally exactly like you see after that hour. And
- 1:49:19Speaker 2: that's what this lesson conveys them, is like I've never
- 1:49:23Speaker 2: said anywhere for an hour. And so the result is
- 1:49:26Speaker 2: the reason we don't pick up on so much of
- 1:49:27Speaker 2: this stuff is we have never ever seen the environment
- 1:49:31Speaker 2: we live, our home, the place we think we know
- 1:49:34Speaker 2: the best, in anything other than a state of alarm
- 1:49:37Speaker 2: and disruption, alarm and disruption that we have created ourselves.
- 1:49:42Speaker 2: But the beauty is as you start to pay attention
- 1:49:46Speaker 2: to that, they recognize it in you. And it's very simple,
- 1:49:54Speaker 2: slow down, walk without an intention. Photographers, you know, even
- 1:49:59Speaker 2: the photograph for not hurting anything, doing anything. The behavior
- 1:50:03Speaker 2: most people take on when they're trying to get a photo,
- 1:50:05Speaker 2: it's predator like I see you, I'm focused on you.
- 1:50:09Speaker 2: I'm That is scary as hell to wild animals. What
- 1:50:15Speaker 2: it's saying is I'm going to get you. I'm getting you.
- 1:50:18Speaker 1: Yeah, I like I'm acknowledging that you're there, right, So
- 1:50:22Speaker 1: like if you're yeah, coming up and you tell people
- 1:50:24Speaker 1: if you're trying to get up on a cotton, ta'll
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: be like last thing you do. Don't look at it exactly,
- 1:50:28Speaker 1: look at it out of the corner, your eyeballs at it,
- 1:50:30Speaker 1: because when you aim your eyeballs at it, it knows you're
- 1:50:32Speaker 1: aiming your eyeballs.
- 1:50:33Speaker 2: At it exactly exactly. It's that language. So as you
- 1:50:39Speaker 2: slow down and as a friend calls it, I love
- 1:50:43Speaker 2: this term that the honoring routine. You start to honor
- 1:50:46Speaker 2: their space, you very quickly can tell what the squirrel's
- 1:50:50Speaker 2: personal space extends to you respect that you give them
- 1:50:54Speaker 2: a little bit of room. Ah, you know, I'm just
- 1:50:56Speaker 2: trying to get to the store, like I'm not walking
- 1:50:58Speaker 2: around every pigeon, Well, that is the barrier that's going
- 1:51:01Speaker 2: to stop you from moving through the woods, Like that ghostbuck,
- 1:51:06Speaker 2: like that lion. Do you follow me? They are paying
- 1:51:11Speaker 2: attention to the signals in the environment and working around
- 1:51:16Speaker 2: them and using environmental components to their advantage. So there's
- 1:51:20Speaker 2: some places there are worthless to try to hunt until
- 1:51:23Speaker 2: it's a south wind, right, You got to wait till
- 1:51:26Speaker 2: the wind's right. You see, certain birds and predators hunt
- 1:51:29Speaker 2: when it's pouring down rain, their survival is so narrow
- 1:51:34Speaker 2: on that razor edge, and they've got this huge neighborhood
- 1:51:40Speaker 2: watch trying to disarm them and keep them from killing
- 1:51:45Speaker 2: their prey. And so they're doing all these different things
- 1:51:48Speaker 2: to try to subvert the community of communication. That's busting them,
- 1:51:53Speaker 2: that's busting you, that's busting you. You step like, literally,
- 1:51:57Speaker 2: you got two minutes. Usually this is a fun one
- 1:52:01Speaker 2: to play with. Tell everybody to meet me at this
- 1:52:04Speaker 2: trail intersection at eleven o'clock, let's say, except you get
- 1:52:09Speaker 2: in there at ten, So it means you leave your
- 1:52:12Speaker 2: car or you know, do whatever you have to do
- 1:52:13Speaker 2: to be sitting down by ten and let things go
- 1:52:16Speaker 2: back to normal m h.
- 1:52:20Speaker 1: And then which is thirty minutes whatever, Yeah, yeah, to
- 1:52:23Speaker 1: lease at least it's usually more like forty to sixty minutes.
- 1:52:28Speaker 2: And then as you're sitting there and the birds are
- 1:52:30Speaker 2: feeding and they're preening and they're singing, you hear the
- 1:52:34Speaker 2: most common alarm in the woods, what is it? Silence?
- 1:52:44Speaker 2: Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in
- 1:52:48Speaker 2: nature that exists. So you just might think there's nobody
- 1:52:53Speaker 2: singing over there anymore, and then you see a couple
- 1:52:57Speaker 2: of birds like hauling ass going from the park lot
- 1:53:00Speaker 2: area past. You set your watch two minutes, so you
- 1:53:07Speaker 2: got two minutes to figure out do you want to
- 1:53:08Speaker 2: scare the tart and my buddy, do you want to hide?
- 1:53:12Speaker 2: Or do you want to you know, go to somewhere
- 1:53:13Speaker 2: else where I can watch them and screw them.
- 1:53:16Speaker 4: This is one about the quietness, man.
- 1:53:18Speaker 2: This is what the lion or the deer knows of you.
- 1:53:24Speaker 1: Is.
- 1:53:24Speaker 2: It's got two minutes through the robins, through the sparrows
- 1:53:28Speaker 2: to do a wide loop out, listen about your progress
- 1:53:34Speaker 2: through all the other birds and animals, and then you've
- 1:53:37Speaker 2: had I know you, guys, if you spent any amount
- 1:53:39Speaker 2: of time in the woods, you come back the same
- 1:53:41Speaker 2: trail you went in on. You're like, son of a bitch,
- 1:53:44Speaker 2: there's bear tracks right on my tracks, or wolf tracks
- 1:53:47Speaker 2: or coyote tracts or the deer. You know, it's because
- 1:53:51Speaker 2: they walk around you. They're listening and monitoring you through
- 1:53:55Speaker 2: the animal language in the environment, so they're like, oh, yeah, okay,
- 1:53:59Speaker 2: he's still going. He's going on left over that ridge.
- 1:54:02Speaker 2: And this stuff is is of such high utility that
- 1:54:07Speaker 2: it's one fella I mentioned in the book interviewed him.
- 1:54:10Speaker 2: He was training special ops crews and he had a
- 1:54:14Speaker 2: guy he trained in bird language as well as tracking,
- 1:54:18Speaker 2: and they had a Humbye ran over an ied you know,
- 1:54:23Speaker 2: in the road, just made a mess of this thing,
- 1:54:25Speaker 2: and they sent him, this student of the the fell
- 1:54:28Speaker 2: I I knew, in to find the bomb layer. And
- 1:54:34Speaker 2: he does a few loops around the Humby site, you know,
- 1:54:38Speaker 2: just chaos, bleeding guys, screaming guys, smoke fire. He picks
- 1:54:42Speaker 2: up a single set of tracks leaving same set. Came
- 1:54:47Speaker 2: in one way, left another. So he starts sign cutting.
- 1:54:50Speaker 2: You know, some of you might know that term. You're
- 1:54:52Speaker 2: moving fast, but you're you're periodically rechecking that you're on
- 1:54:55Speaker 2: the prints.
- 1:54:56Speaker 4: Okay.
- 1:54:56Speaker 2: He broke a branch over there, you know, just trying
- 1:54:59Speaker 2: to catch up. And he gets to a certain point
- 1:55:03Speaker 2: where he's this is Afghanistan. There's this waddy is little ravine,
- 1:55:07Speaker 2: and he hears the alarms. He's like that guy's he's
- 1:55:13Speaker 2: over in there. And as he's standing there trying to
- 1:55:17Speaker 2: figure out what to do, he starts hearing the bird
- 1:55:19Speaker 2: alarms go up this ridge beyond the wadi, and based
- 1:55:25Speaker 2: on what he learned, he want the opposite direction, so
- 1:55:28Speaker 2: he get it over on to another point, get a
- 1:55:30Speaker 2: clear view of that ridge and ends up taking the
- 1:55:33Speaker 2: guy out. Never saw him up until that point, but
- 1:55:37Speaker 2: he was clearly delineated in his movements and direction and
- 1:55:40Speaker 2: speed even through the bird conversations. And that's the thing.
- 1:55:45Speaker 2: He didn't know any of the birds. You don't need
- 1:55:48Speaker 2: to know any of the birds. You learn the birds
- 1:55:50Speaker 2: at home, and the patterns you find anywhere you go
- 1:55:52Speaker 2: are the same. They're going to be filled by different species.
- 1:55:56Speaker 2: But like I've heard so many people say, hey, you know,
- 1:55:59Speaker 2: I never would have seen that at Mongoose. We're in Africa.
- 1:56:01Speaker 2: But it's responding exactly the way the sparrows do at
- 1:56:04Speaker 2: my place along the river when the mink comes through.
- 1:56:09Speaker 2: The painted dogs, oh my gosh, Like we never would
- 1:56:12Speaker 2: have seen them. But those birds, whatever they are, are
- 1:56:15Speaker 2: the height off the ground. They're excited in the same
- 1:56:18Speaker 2: way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor's
- 1:56:20Speaker 2: dog gets loose and comes over yep. So that's the
- 1:56:24Speaker 2: universality of that concept. Is fascinating to me that we
- 1:56:28Speaker 2: all are operating on this same level of awareness and
- 1:56:32Speaker 2: use of sound to know what's going on. Sometimes miles
- 1:56:37Speaker 2: beyond our own sensory abilities, Like I know there's wolves
- 1:56:40Speaker 2: in the park two and a half miles away. If
- 1:56:43Speaker 2: I'm walking my dog, I hear, oh yeah yeah. At
- 1:56:47Speaker 2: this point, it's not even a if, it's just where
- 1:56:50Speaker 2: so I'll find that that signal maker or the coyoteor wherever.
- 1:56:53Speaker 2: And I just set up the scope and from the
- 1:56:55Speaker 2: deck of the house, you're like, oh, yep, you know
- 1:56:57Speaker 2: there they are. It seems like mad to people, but
- 1:57:01Speaker 2: it's not. It's just paying attention better people. And when
- 1:57:07Speaker 2: you pay attention better, you get treated different. That's the
- 1:57:12Speaker 2: real beauty to me is you start getting to know
- 1:57:15Speaker 2: individual wild animals and they at the same time they've
- 1:57:20Speaker 2: always already known you.
- 1:57:22Speaker 4: Oh yeah.
- 1:57:23Speaker 1: It's like why certain people can be out in their
- 1:57:25Speaker 1: yard and have stuff come into it.
- 1:57:26Speaker 2: Absolutely, that kid is the one when he comes to
- 1:57:29Speaker 2: the prairie dog community town, he's freaking popping our buddy's off.
- 1:57:34Speaker 2: That guy he doesn't even care. And they remember real
- 1:57:37Speaker 2: well whether you've been nice or especially if you've been naughty.
- 1:57:44Speaker 2: So there are times like even pigeons, let's go back
- 1:57:47Speaker 2: to pigeons, like they remember hundreds of people faces. You
- 1:57:51Speaker 2: can change your clothes, and the pigeons remember you. There's
- 1:57:55Speaker 2: some there's a study done in Paris to that effect,
- 1:57:57Speaker 2: one done in Philadelphia where they guessed that the pigeon
- 1:58:00Speaker 2: and rocked up might know and remember thousands of people
- 1:58:05Speaker 2: remember who's a regular, who's a tourist, you know, and
- 1:58:08Speaker 2: log all this stuff. We are being patterned all the time.
- 1:58:15Speaker 4: There's probably some dude listening who's thinking like.
- 1:58:18Speaker 1: I am that there's probably some like if you think
- 1:58:22Speaker 1: about like trying to call mallards or something that like that,
- 1:58:29Speaker 1: there's like some code that you could crack, do you
- 1:58:33Speaker 1: know what I mean? Like that to a duck when
- 1:58:36Speaker 1: duck comes over and it's clearly looking for other ducks,
- 1:58:40Speaker 1: and it's like the ducks like I know that that's not.
- 1:58:45Speaker 4: Right, Like I don't get the problem.
- 1:58:48Speaker 1: Right, there's some thing that's not right. Yeah, you're doing
- 1:58:51Speaker 1: something that's not right.
- 1:58:52Speaker 2: Everybody's just bothering.
- 1:58:54Speaker 1: Yeah, there's something like there's something you could say, you know,
- 1:59:00Speaker 1: there's something you could say that would just make it absolutely.
- 1:59:04Speaker 4: That duck would have to come down.
- 1:59:05Speaker 1: But you'll never well, you'll never learn it, you know
- 1:59:08Speaker 1: what I mean, You'll never learn Like when he goes
- 1:59:11Speaker 1: like no, not buying it.
- 1:59:13Speaker 2: Yeah. That speaks to another point where I don't sometimes
- 1:59:18Speaker 2: share too much because what these animals offer you when
- 1:59:25Speaker 2: you are let into their world is to see their strengths,
- 1:59:30Speaker 2: their incredible talents, but vulnerabilities. But you see their achilles
- 1:59:34Speaker 2: heels too, and that I don't. It's thrown around so
- 1:59:39Speaker 2: cliche but sacred. That to me is there's a sacredness
- 1:59:43Speaker 2: in what they have shared to then betray that. Like
- 1:59:47Speaker 2: a great example. You probably know this from your bison work,
- 1:59:49Speaker 2: is bison have this achilles heel of following the matriarch. Yeah,
- 1:59:54Speaker 2: and those bison hunters and partly annihilated them because of
- 1:59:58Speaker 2: their allegiance to the matriarch. They don't move anywhere.
- 2:00:01Speaker 4: I watched the exploit that.
- 2:00:05Speaker 2: So she can't move, and everybody meals around, and you
- 2:00:07Speaker 2: just mow the rest of them down. Anybody else tries
- 2:00:09Speaker 2: to take off and charge a new course, you bust
- 2:00:12Speaker 2: them through the guts. Everybody mills around, and you you know,
- 2:00:15Speaker 2: you in one stand you can get a dozen or
- 2:00:17Speaker 2: a hundred. I think there's one record of like a
- 2:00:19Speaker 2: hundred or something bison in one stand.
- 2:00:21Speaker 4: Guy named Vick Smith got over a hundred one time.
- 2:00:24Speaker 2: So to me, when you're let in, it's it's changed
- 2:00:31Speaker 2: the way I There are things I couldn't reconcile hunting,
- 2:00:38Speaker 2: And part of that was.
- 2:00:41Speaker 1: There there are things about hunting you couldn't reconcile, or
- 2:00:43Speaker 1: there are animals that you couldn't reconcile hunting.
- 2:00:46Speaker 2: For it was the former, like I didn't know what
- 2:00:51Speaker 2: it was, but there was an honoring piece, a recognition,
- 2:00:56Speaker 2: a sacredness that got cloud out. It over and me
- 2:01:00Speaker 2: trying to get that turkey, that tom, that specific tom there,
- 2:01:04Speaker 2: that buck or something like that that I'm I missed
- 2:01:12Speaker 2: I've found now and for me this is just me.
- 2:01:17Speaker 2: It took me stepping away from hunting to really soak
- 2:01:21Speaker 2: into their world on their terms if you follow me,
- 2:01:25Speaker 2: and that you know, and so they share things like
- 2:01:32Speaker 2: there's a there's a mule deer dough model mother, model
- 2:01:37Speaker 2: mama just we called her Mamma Deer and she she
- 2:01:43Speaker 2: always brought off funds. She was amazing. In one year
- 2:01:46Speaker 2: she had triplets, actually no, no, I think it was tried. Quadruplets,
- 2:01:51Speaker 2: which for meal dr almost never happens, like she knew
- 2:01:53Speaker 2: or to feed build up those reserves could handle that
- 2:01:57Speaker 2: many kids and love behole. We start into that winter
- 2:02:01Speaker 2: and it's a bitch, and one by one we start
- 2:02:05Speaker 2: seeing those fawns not show up on the yard, and
- 2:02:08Speaker 2: pretty soon it's down to just one. And then we
- 2:02:13Speaker 2: don't even see Mama deer. They're gone. I'm like, what
- 2:02:17Speaker 2: the hell? And we had years with this deer, like
- 2:02:20Speaker 2: we had enough understanding that I would walk with at
- 2:02:23Speaker 2: that time, our two black labradors, each about seventy pounds,
- 2:02:27Speaker 2: and I'd go to get the mail the mailbox like
- 2:02:29Speaker 2: tenth of mile up the driveway, and she'd be there grazing,
- 2:02:33Speaker 2: you know, off a distance. But in the meantime she
- 2:02:35Speaker 2: might come like right along the driveway and I would
- 2:02:41Speaker 2: put my hands on the shoulders of dogs. Not they
- 2:02:43Speaker 2: weren't even they weren't leashed, you know, our dogs run.
- 2:02:47Speaker 2: But to her, this was my gesture of it's okay,
- 2:02:51Speaker 2: they're with me, and I'm not going to let them
- 2:02:53Speaker 2: bother you. And there are times we could walk within
- 2:02:56Speaker 2: twelve feet of her and the fawns, like I go
- 2:02:59Speaker 2: sit in the yards sometimes and she was so comfortable
- 2:03:03Speaker 2: that she would walk between me, sitting on the edge
- 2:03:05Speaker 2: of the retaining wall and the edge of the decking,
- 2:03:08Speaker 2: which was like at most thirty feet she'd walk through
- 2:03:13Speaker 2: like we had an understanding. It wasn't she wasn't my pet.
- 2:03:18Speaker 2: I didn't, you know, but we gave each other the
- 2:03:21Speaker 2: space and understanding of each other's boundaries. Well, that hard
- 2:03:25Speaker 2: winter that she disappeared, we assumed she was just gone.
- 2:03:30Speaker 2: And lo and behold, like mid February, maybe early March,
- 2:03:35Speaker 2: who shows up on our deck but Mama, dear, and
- 2:03:39Speaker 2: she's just emaciated. She had this huge patch of hair
- 2:03:42Speaker 2: missing on her back right side, like a Lombard vertebra.
- 2:03:46Speaker 2: I don't know if she'd been hit by a car.
- 2:03:48Speaker 2: You could see her ribs. And what does she do?
- 2:03:52Speaker 2: She came up embedded down on the welcome mat to
- 2:03:56Speaker 2: our front door. She came up on the deck, which is,
- 2:03:59Speaker 2: you know, like a eight inch step up, and she
- 2:04:02Speaker 2: bedded down there every night for I think it was
- 2:04:06Speaker 2: three or four days until she eventually went under the
- 2:04:09Speaker 2: deck and died.
- 2:04:11Speaker 4: Because she knows it's nothing going to get her there exactly.
- 2:04:14Speaker 2: She and I and our family had put in the
- 2:04:20Speaker 2: time for her to see us, as in her worst hour,
- 2:04:25Speaker 2: her worst time, she knew she could find refuge with
- 2:04:30Speaker 2: that with us. Like to me, that was like one
- 2:04:32Speaker 2: of the most crushingly heartbreaking but also beautiful things at
- 2:04:38Speaker 2: the same time, that we had made enough of a
- 2:04:41Speaker 2: connection that she felt that she could live out her
- 2:04:44Speaker 2: last hours in our company, and that I can't now
- 2:04:51Speaker 2: look at another deer and not offer them that same
- 2:04:54Speaker 2: capacity to reproduce what Mamma deer did. Yeah, not that I,
- 2:04:59Speaker 2: let's say, wouldn't hunt again, but the way I would
- 2:05:02Speaker 2: hunt and view that is. And the author Joe how
- 2:05:05Speaker 2: to put it, really succinctly nicely this way, it's not.
- 2:05:09Speaker 4: Not the dude did all that work with turkeys.
- 2:05:11Speaker 2: He did my life as a turkey, and buc did,
- 2:05:13Speaker 2: and he wrote, he did a great film and book
- 2:05:16Speaker 2: called Touching the Wild on these Mulier down in Lander,
- 2:05:20Speaker 2: and uh, Joe, still he is. He moved back to Florida.
- 2:05:27Speaker 2: You know, I keep touching now and then, and he's
- 2:05:29Speaker 2: such a wealth of show.
- 2:05:31Speaker 4: Some time.
- 2:05:32Speaker 2: Yeah, I been some stuff going on, So I don't
- 2:05:36Speaker 2: know how he's doing right now, but I would he's
- 2:05:40Speaker 2: He's another one that's put in the time to see
- 2:05:42Speaker 2: all these other facets that most of us overlook when
- 2:05:46Speaker 2: we say, oh, look a deer, you know, And in
- 2:05:49Speaker 2: the way he sort of described what I'm I feel
- 2:05:54Speaker 2: is like, yeah, I'm going to go hunt again, but
- 2:05:57Speaker 2: now I have to reckon with the fact that it's
- 2:06:00Speaker 2: not what I'm killing as much anymore. It's who ye,
- 2:06:05Speaker 2: who am I? Who am I choosing to take out
- 2:06:07Speaker 2: of this population? Is this the matriarch, mama? Is this
- 2:06:13Speaker 2: a fawn, a fawn that has a certain spark and
- 2:06:16Speaker 2: talent that none of the others do. You know, It's
- 2:06:21Speaker 2: it'd be very hard for me to go into hunt
- 2:06:24Speaker 2: the way I used to when I was younger, and
- 2:06:28Speaker 2: when I did kill something, if I did kill something,
- 2:06:31Speaker 2: I would it wouldn't be with high fives anymore, you
- 2:06:36Speaker 2: know what I mean, like get that big buck or
- 2:06:39Speaker 2: something like that. It would be you know, silence, silence,
- 2:06:46Speaker 2: with that understanding that.
- 2:06:48Speaker 4: That it was a who who.
- 2:06:52Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And just every single day of our lives
- 2:06:58Speaker 2: is enriched by paying attention of these conversations and having
- 2:07:01Speaker 2: these individuals come in and out of our world because
- 2:07:05Speaker 2: they are our best teachers. When you have a shit
- 2:07:09Speaker 2: day at work and your family is pissed about something,
- 2:07:13Speaker 2: or you know, it's like you can always look to that.
- 2:07:16Speaker 2: Look at that. You know, that kid over there is
- 2:07:20Speaker 2: it's got a broken leg, you know, and it's it's
- 2:07:24Speaker 2: not making excuses. It's still keeping up with the pack.
- 2:07:28Speaker 2: Be it a little slower, you know. Listening to nature
- 2:07:31Speaker 2: at that level is you start seeing issues and trends
- 2:07:35Speaker 2: that magazines and the pop popular media want to make into,
- 2:07:42Speaker 2: you know, the save the whales kind of approach where
- 2:07:44Speaker 2: it's like top down, big stop. You know, It's like,
- 2:07:47Speaker 2: to me, this is the groundswell of where caring for
- 2:07:51Speaker 2: your environments, real stewardship, real conservation takes places you through
- 2:07:56Speaker 2: these conversations and over overhearing what matters to them lets
- 2:08:01Speaker 2: you into their world to know what you're doing that
- 2:08:07Speaker 2: is harmful that you weren't even aware of. Like, oh shit,
- 2:08:09Speaker 2: I guess I shouldn't mow the grass there now because
- 2:08:12Speaker 2: those that's where the bunnies, that's where that's where the
- 2:08:16Speaker 2: litter is coming off as that hole underneath that long grass. Okay,
- 2:08:19Speaker 2: I won't mow there for a month. More like simple stuff. Sometimes,
- 2:08:23Speaker 2: don't cut down that dead tree that's the woodpecker nest
- 2:08:26Speaker 2: site or that is the sentinel location for the principal
- 2:08:33Speaker 2: players in your neighborhood wildlife alarm system. You take that
- 2:08:39Speaker 2: one seemingly useless dead tree out, and all these animals
- 2:08:42Speaker 2: can't get a view now of what's coming before it's
- 2:08:45Speaker 2: on them. You know, It's like, so you have a
- 2:08:48Speaker 2: true bottom up level of appreciation and interaction that makes
- 2:08:55Speaker 2: you a better neighbor. I think I feel that way.
- 2:08:58Speaker 2: I still feel like a fool. I still feel ignorant
- 2:09:01Speaker 2: and like I'm making so many mistakes, but I feel
- 2:09:08Speaker 2: and I know when you enter into those spaces with
- 2:09:11Speaker 2: that sort of humility, nature's pretty resilient. It gives you
- 2:09:16Speaker 2: more latitude than you would have otherwise. Like people ask me, well,
- 2:09:23Speaker 2: should if I'm should I make animal noises when I'm out?
- 2:09:26Speaker 2: You know, I see some deer when I'm out for
- 2:09:29Speaker 2: a walk, or I see the fox, Do I make
- 2:09:30Speaker 2: fox noises?
- 2:09:31Speaker 4: Like?
- 2:09:31Speaker 2: No, do not. I don't imitate animals in the wild
- 2:09:34Speaker 2: anymore because the reason is I want to see them
- 2:09:37Speaker 2: do what they naturally do. And once you inject yourself,
- 2:09:39Speaker 2: it's game over. It's like pulling the trigger. Almost you
- 2:09:43Speaker 2: change the entire equation. I've been with people, we've actually
- 2:09:46Speaker 2: killed animals through making noises and interrupting the situation. I
- 2:09:50Speaker 2: want to see them do what they naturally do, so
- 2:09:52Speaker 2: I have a better sense of what they have to
- 2:09:54Speaker 2: teach me and your own voice. A lot of indigenous
- 2:10:02Speaker 2: cultures will say, when we talk to the animals in
- 2:10:05Speaker 2: our native tongue, they treat us like family. And so however,
- 2:10:10Speaker 2: people are like, well, only American, I speak English, and
- 2:10:14Speaker 2: you know, like you speak in the most expressive language
- 2:10:17Speaker 2: you have and be sincere, and you'll start having experiences like,
- 2:10:23Speaker 2: you know, the deer jump up on the morning walk
- 2:10:25Speaker 2: with a dog and say, hey, wait, wait, it's us,
- 2:10:27Speaker 2: it's us, And they stop and they go back to grazing.
- 2:10:32Speaker 2: They might even bed back down like that. But if
- 2:10:37Speaker 2: you bring a friend with you to watch, huh huhm,
- 2:10:39Speaker 2: it doesn't work because they're always responding to the lowest
- 2:10:43Speaker 2: common denominator. You bring in somebody that's not paying attention,
- 2:10:46Speaker 2: and we give off infinite amount of micro signals and
- 2:10:51Speaker 2: they know whether you're paying attention or not. There's stories
- 2:10:54Speaker 2: of like the horses that can do math and tell
- 2:10:56Speaker 2: time and read calendars and stuff, and they find out
- 2:10:59Speaker 2: they can't do that stuff. What they're doing is queuing
- 2:11:02Speaker 2: off of their handlers at such a fine minute level
- 2:11:05Speaker 2: that it gives the impression that another member of this
- 2:11:08Speaker 2: you know, another species has these capabilities when they're just
- 2:11:12Speaker 2: it's called the kluger Hans effect. They're paying attention to
- 2:11:15Speaker 2: you so well better than most humans pay attention. It's like,
- 2:11:20Speaker 2: how are we missing these cues? Well, your life doesn't
- 2:11:24Speaker 2: depend on it. When it does, you start paying attention
- 2:11:28Speaker 2: to stuff. You know, we all have the capacity like oh,
- 2:11:33Speaker 2: the furnace shut off, you know, look to the things
- 2:11:36Speaker 2: that are important to us. We still have those capabilities,
- 2:11:38Speaker 2: we just have directed them other places right right, like
- 2:11:43Speaker 2: something there's something screwed up with that trailer got pull over,
- 2:11:47Speaker 2: pull over, we got to check the change. There's a
- 2:11:49Speaker 2: bearing going out or you know, like we are laser
- 2:11:52Speaker 2: focused on those kind of details. But the power of
- 2:11:55Speaker 2: our brain to do that can be used then to
- 2:11:58Speaker 2: go back into the natural world like our our people
- 2:12:02Speaker 2: did in deep time and know stuff that is magic seeming.
- 2:12:08Speaker 2: But in ways that's really damn fulfilling, you know, when
- 2:12:12Speaker 2: you get you know, it's like I'd love to see
- 2:12:14Speaker 2: about in line at all, Like well we get we
- 2:12:17Speaker 2: get photos of them, you know, it's like that it
- 2:12:20Speaker 2: changes the whole equation. You do, you have opportunities that
- 2:12:25Speaker 2: you wouldn't have otherwise.
- 2:12:27Speaker 4: Tell me about the artwork you do real quick, you know.
- 2:12:31Speaker 2: I always say my artwork is kind of my tourist
- 2:12:36Speaker 2: trinkets or my souvenirs from living. So every piece is
- 2:12:40Speaker 2: not just done to make a turkey or make a bear.
- 2:12:42Speaker 2: It's done to tell an individual story that I've been
- 2:12:47Speaker 2: let in on. Some of these animals I've known for
- 2:12:49Speaker 2: an hour or two, some of them I've known for years.
- 2:12:53Speaker 2: Some of them I've known for generations. And so I
- 2:13:00Speaker 2: feel that the artwork, to me, is the a focal
- 2:13:04Speaker 2: point to spend a ton of time figuring out what
- 2:13:06Speaker 2: the heck that experience meant to me, if that makes sense,
- 2:13:11Speaker 2: and it forces me to see details I would miss otherwise.
- 2:13:14Speaker 2: And she noticed that that bowl has a knot in
- 2:13:17Speaker 2: his lower you know, metatarsal. He broke that, you know
- 2:13:22Speaker 2: at some point or oh there's people will say, oh,
- 2:13:24Speaker 2: there's that that cow elk is you know, walking across
- 2:13:27Speaker 2: the lawn and mammoth she's in she's limping. No, that's
- 2:13:29Speaker 2: actually part of the normal gait. But that one over
- 2:13:31Speaker 2: there she's got she's got a tooth infection. Look close,
- 2:13:36Speaker 2: see that little swell here. No, no, not the bulge.
- 2:13:39Speaker 2: That's the mass of r muscle or the bucinator muscle
- 2:13:43Speaker 2: in her cheek. But right below that, it's a little
- 2:13:45Speaker 2: you know, it's like it deepens further still. My my
- 2:13:52Speaker 2: experience with.
- 2:13:53Speaker 4: The wild, so that turkey is a turkey.
- 2:13:56Speaker 2: That's a specific one inspired by I gave it a
- 2:14:00Speaker 2: couple of talks at a nature center in Utah, and
- 2:14:02Speaker 2: they had three toms, Tom, Tommy and Thomas. And after
- 2:14:07Speaker 2: I was done with my obligations, I just followed him
- 2:14:10Speaker 2: around with some clay and sculpted, and you know, it's
- 2:14:12Speaker 2: just I was just so taken with that dexterity in
- 2:14:15Speaker 2: their tail. It's like a geisha, you know. They waved
- 2:14:18Speaker 2: that tail back so beautiful, you know, And when you
- 2:14:25Speaker 2: enter into these spaces you find that words don't really work,
- 2:14:30Speaker 2: And I guess that's I grew up around sculpture, tried
- 2:14:32Speaker 2: like hell not to do it, but it came back
- 2:14:35Speaker 2: around in a way that I could do it my way,
- 2:14:37Speaker 2: And for me, it picks up where the words sort
- 2:14:41Speaker 2: of trail off like that, just that curve of the
- 2:14:44Speaker 2: Achilles on the bear or that shin bone, that line
- 2:14:47Speaker 2: of always loved bones and skulls, and it's like it
- 2:14:51Speaker 2: was a place to put it. My love of that stuff,
- 2:14:54Speaker 2: like knowing every bone, every muscle from the inside out,
- 2:14:58Speaker 2: then seeing the overlay of the behavi behavior and when
- 2:15:01Speaker 2: they do this, how that bone articulates this way. So
- 2:15:03Speaker 2: I don't use photos. I don't use video. I used
- 2:15:05Speaker 2: to take a ton of that stuff I found, I
- 2:15:07Speaker 2: didn't use it. I got a roadkill kit. I got
- 2:15:10Speaker 2: a tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and
- 2:15:14Speaker 2: rubber gloves, and my own data sheets. I made up
- 2:15:17Speaker 2: one for birds and one for mammals. So I find
- 2:15:18Speaker 2: a moose or a grizzly bear that something's illegal to have.
- 2:15:21Speaker 2: I can take a full set of measurements and have
- 2:15:23Speaker 2: that archive in my studio to go back to. But
- 2:15:27Speaker 2: more accurately, what it does for me is on an elk,
- 2:15:32Speaker 2: I find a dead elk, I might take fifty measurements,
- 2:15:35Speaker 2: but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers, that
- 2:15:40Speaker 2: number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on that
- 2:15:42Speaker 2: animal at least one hundred different ways. So when I
- 2:15:46Speaker 2: go to work on a sculpture. I'm working from more
- 2:15:51Speaker 2: of a felt sense of the creature. I see just
- 2:15:56Speaker 2: a momentary pose that a fox or a bad or
- 2:16:00Speaker 2: an otter might do, or something like. I can freeze
- 2:16:02Speaker 2: that in my mind and I can fill in all
- 2:16:04Speaker 2: the details of what was where to make that happen.
- 2:16:08Speaker 1: Does most of your income come from the art or
- 2:16:11Speaker 1: from your work as a naturalist and guide?
- 2:16:14Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the art by far we're starting to do.
- 2:16:18Speaker 4: You're like occupationally an artist.
- 2:16:20Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, But when you just kind of follow your interests,
- 2:16:24Speaker 2: you kind of start screwing up the ability to be defined.
- 2:16:30Speaker 2: Like I love I love since as the time of
- 2:16:32Speaker 2: the kid loved stone tools and ancient technology. You know.
- 2:16:36Speaker 2: It took me thirty years and flew to Clovis Point.
- 2:16:39Speaker 2: But like always as a kid, there was just the
- 2:16:43Speaker 2: time I was young, a desire to have a felt
- 2:16:45Speaker 2: sense of what it meant to to make that.
- 2:16:50Speaker 4: I was able to do it because I had to
- 2:16:51Speaker 4: teed up for me.
- 2:16:55Speaker 1: I give it the final little flap. I know it
- 2:17:00Speaker 1: was all teed up. Yeah I did, but I took
- 2:17:03Speaker 1: a dirty way to get there.
- 2:17:05Speaker 2: That's dirty, dude, because the if whoever made the pre
- 2:17:09Speaker 2: form for you will tell you the flute's nothing, little.
- 2:17:17Speaker 1: Thumb off right, sounds like I'm done. I could do
- 2:17:22Speaker 1: a second.
- 2:17:25Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's what's you know that sort of stuff
- 2:17:27Speaker 2: as well. I just has always turned my crank and
- 2:17:29Speaker 2: I find a flake of obsidian on the ground near
- 2:17:32Speaker 2: the house or something like. I know almost exactly what
- 2:17:35Speaker 2: that what size and dimension that thing would have been
- 2:17:40Speaker 2: off of. I know what direction the blow came from.
- 2:17:43Speaker 2: I know what it was trying to do to take
- 2:17:45Speaker 2: off that lump on whatever the pre form like, just
- 2:17:49Speaker 2: that's always really been gratifying to me to have that
- 2:17:53Speaker 2: bottom up, inside out kind of look at things, and
- 2:17:57Speaker 2: the art and the educational programs, they're just kind of
- 2:17:59Speaker 2: you know, the little venier at the top.
- 2:18:03Speaker 4: And then hold on, when when is the book out
- 2:18:07Speaker 4: and available? Right now? It is.
- 2:18:09Speaker 2: It's available now wherever books are sold. You can find
- 2:18:12Speaker 2: them all over Amazon and beyond your local bookstores. Can
- 2:18:16Speaker 2: order it through Graystone Books.
- 2:18:18Speaker 4: Okay.
- 2:18:19Speaker 1: The title is Evesdropping on Animals What we Can Learn
- 2:18:22Speaker 1: from Wildlife Conversations by George Beuman, got a forward by
- 2:18:30Speaker 1: John Young.
- 2:18:32Speaker 4: Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, thanks for coming on.
- 2:18:36Speaker 2: Man, thanks for having me. Can I give one plug.
- 2:18:40Speaker 2: What do you mean for something other than the book
- 2:18:43Speaker 2: we're doing right now. It just went live. We got
- 2:18:47Speaker 2: an online event that's where some of our education is No,
- 2:18:51Speaker 2: oh no, that's fine. We have an event for people
- 2:18:55Speaker 2: who love nature and Yellstone Park called the Yellstone Summit,
- 2:19:00Speaker 2: and it brings together. We have this year over thirty
- 2:19:03Speaker 2: world expert speakers, as we have for the last five
- 2:19:05Speaker 2: years on Yellowstone talking about everything from filming mountain lions,
- 2:19:10Speaker 2: the history of beavers in the park, to population census
- 2:19:14Speaker 2: of moose, geology, Native American history. If you are thinking
- 2:19:19Speaker 2: of coming to the park and want some insight on
- 2:19:22Speaker 2: what to do and think about, join us. If you
- 2:19:25Speaker 2: longtime yellow Stoner want more deep stuff, join us. If
- 2:19:29Speaker 2: you're from the region. There's nothing that thrills me more
- 2:19:32Speaker 2: than run into somebody from Billings or Beed or you know,
- 2:19:36Speaker 2: Idaho Falls or something. There's like, oh my gosh.
- 2:19:38Speaker 3: Is that like an ongoing thing or is it so
- 2:19:42Speaker 3: time or yeah.
- 2:19:43Speaker 2: It's online, so anybody with internet can get involved watch
- 2:19:48Speaker 2: it anywhere in the world. It's registration just opened, so
- 2:19:51Speaker 2: by the time this airs, registration will still be open.
- 2:19:54Speaker 2: It goes live on February nineteenth through the twenty second
- 2:19:58Speaker 2: of this a year. And yeah, it's cheap. We try
- 2:20:03Speaker 2: to make it affordable. For fifteen bucks. You can get
- 2:20:06Speaker 2: to access for forty eight hours. Oh to all those
- 2:20:09Speaker 2: programs where if you want all access, which which means
- 2:20:13Speaker 2: you can like it's great because it's one.
- 2:20:15Speaker 1: There's a live component too, you can watch. You can
- 2:20:18Speaker 1: get a ticket watch online.
- 2:20:19Speaker 2: So like Deputy Superintendent Mike Trannelle of Yellstone will be
- 2:20:23Speaker 2: given a park update and you can show up and
- 2:20:25Speaker 2: ask him questions yourself, so like, yeah, since the flood,
- 2:20:28Speaker 2: you know what actually is going on with the road
- 2:20:30Speaker 2: and things like that. We've got folks who use it
- 2:20:33Speaker 2: for homeschool curriculum. We've got folks who use it to
- 2:20:37Speaker 2: train their park guides, so this is a training tool
- 2:20:39Speaker 2: for them. We got park service people who watch it
- 2:20:41Speaker 2: for their own training. So it's a very high level
- 2:20:44Speaker 2: but also has entry level basic stuff for anybody interested,
- 2:20:47Speaker 2: whether they actually ever make it here or not. And
- 2:20:50Speaker 2: just to check it out at Yellstone Summit dot com.
- 2:20:54Speaker 1: Got it so Yellstone Summit dot com and eavesdropping on
- 2:20:57Speaker 1: animals what we can learn from wildlife Converse stations with
- 2:21:01Speaker 1: George Buming.
- 2:21:02Speaker 4: Thanks for coming on man
- 2:21:03Speaker 2: My pleasure guys, thanks for having me