Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 354: If There's Lead In The Air, There's Hope In The Heart

Transcript

Ep. 354: If There's Lead In The Air, There's Hope In The Heart · The MeatEater Podcast

0:08
Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
0:13
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to huntcast,
0:18
Speaker 1: you can't predict anything presented by First, like creating proven
0:23
Speaker 1: versatile hunting apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear
0:27
Speaker 1: for every hunt first like go farther, stay longer. Hey there,
0:36
Speaker 1: I'm Janice, but tell us and I'm here to read
0:39
Speaker 1: an ad for you today because Steve is up at
0:42
Speaker 1: the fish shack having fun with all of his friends
0:46
Speaker 1: catching salmon, spear and salmon, diving for scallops, trying to
0:52
Speaker 1: catch halibt um, just general, you know, a good Southeast
0:56
Speaker 1: Alaska fun, but not I mean, I'm here in the
0:59
Speaker 1: podcast student, you know, reading this ad for you. Alright,
1:02
Speaker 1: but listen up, very serious. You should get fired up
1:06
Speaker 1: because this is big, this ad here that I'm about
1:09
Speaker 1: to tell you. Are you're listening all right? It's the
1:11
Speaker 1: first ever organization wide meaning everything under the Meat Eater
1:17
Speaker 1: umbrella meaning the Meat Eater Store, Phelps, f HF, and
1:23
Speaker 1: First Light. It's all on sale August second through the fourth. Okay.
1:29
Speaker 1: What's cool about this is that now under the new
1:33
Speaker 1: shopping experience that you can find on our website. You
1:36
Speaker 1: can do all your shopping in one place, put it
1:39
Speaker 1: all into one car. And the big hicker here is
1:42
Speaker 1: that you only pay for shipping one time. Um, I've
1:45
Speaker 1: done a little bit of surfing on the new media website,
1:49
Speaker 1: but phil Um says he's been down in the rabbit
1:51
Speaker 1: hole a few times? Why do you like that new website? So,
1:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I think listeners know. I'm usually not the
1:56
Speaker 1: one to be able to speak to this the stuff
1:59
Speaker 1: that we sell on selling website. I'm a relatively new hunter.
2:01
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not too deep in the waters. But man,
2:04
Speaker 1: if you if you have not been to the website
2:06
Speaker 1: in the last few weeks since it's been updated, I
2:08
Speaker 1: maybe the last time you shop was before last year's
2:10
Speaker 1: hunting season, check it out. It's great. It's very aesthetically pleasing.
2:15
Speaker 1: Like I'd say, if you had a choice to take
2:17
Speaker 1: a plane to New York to visit the Museum of
2:19
Speaker 1: Modern Art or go to the meat Eater dot com
2:21
Speaker 1: and check out our new store, that's a toss up.
2:24
Speaker 1: I'd say check out the store. It's way cheaper, way easier. Okay,
2:27
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, like, go shopping on Amazon versus
2:30
Speaker 1: shopping on media at the meteat store. Oh no, I
2:33
Speaker 1: don't want to compare us to Amazon, comparing us to MoMA. Okay, Okay,
2:37
Speaker 1: A couple of the items that you can find that
2:39
Speaker 1: will be for sale is going to be, uh Like,
2:43
Speaker 1: let's let's start with a meat Eaters store. I want
2:45
Speaker 1: to mention that everything that we that is on there
2:48
Speaker 1: is curated by the team. Okay, Cal helps, Seth Morris Chester, myself,
2:55
Speaker 1: even Steve Ways in a little bit on what we
2:57
Speaker 1: should be carrying in that store. Okay, but it's all
3:00
Speaker 1: like really solid stuff. And even though I might not
3:03
Speaker 1: like use every piece that's on there, somebody in the
3:06
Speaker 1: company has said, I love that gear. I want us
3:09
Speaker 1: to sell that. Okay. At the meter store, there's Vortex Optics,
3:14
Speaker 1: trauma kits, Booze, cutting boards, and our logo where you're
3:19
Speaker 1: gonna buy the trauma kit first and then the cutting board,
3:22
Speaker 1: but when you're at home, you're probably gonna be using
3:24
Speaker 1: the cutting board and then need your trauma kit. So
3:27
Speaker 1: think about that. Be prepared first. Light off almost everything,
3:35
Speaker 1: including percent off the uncompagrade two point oh jacket, which
3:39
Speaker 1: is probably the piece that I use the most out
3:42
Speaker 1: of the whole first light lineup f hf percent off.
3:46
Speaker 1: The Biny Harness phelps up to fifty off select items,
3:50
Speaker 1: including off all renegade bugle tubes. So if you're not
3:54
Speaker 1: ready to go metal yet, get yourself renegade bugle tube.
3:58
Speaker 1: It almost half off. This might entice you to buy
4:01
Speaker 1: a medal to a regular price and then get off
4:04
Speaker 1: ending gave you go to and try and boat side
4:05
Speaker 1: by side. All right, so remember you got three days
4:09
Speaker 1: August two, third, and fourth. You can buy it all
4:12
Speaker 1: in one place, pay for shipping only once four brands,
4:17
Speaker 1: one card. Get it. It's gonna be the season opener
4:21
Speaker 1: sale of all season opener sales. That's a tongue twister.
4:26
Speaker 1: All right, thank you for listening. All right, everybody, you
4:35
Speaker 1: know we go, we go all the way to the top,
4:37
Speaker 1: go all way to the top on this show. And
4:38
Speaker 1: that's why we have the president and CEO, the lead
4:42
Speaker 1: figure of the Peregrine Fund here with us today, Chris Parrish. Uh,
4:48
Speaker 1: before we get into it, Chris Krin, I gathered you
4:53
Speaker 1: can test the idea that D and D is the
4:56
Speaker 1: primary driver of falconry. We just gotta put this thing
4:58
Speaker 1: to bed now. I let me tell you my evidence. Okay,
5:03
Speaker 1: my evidence is this, Well, you asked me, Now you're
5:05
Speaker 1: gonna love your question. My here's my evidence. Do you
5:08
Speaker 1: not listen to the shallow crest? I do? I have
5:12
Speaker 1: a family member. Um, I'm trying to keep it distance
5:16
Speaker 1: so the person. If the person is listening, they don't
5:18
Speaker 1: know I'm talking about them, like the person that I'm
5:20
Speaker 1: gonna get to in a minute. I have a family
5:22
Speaker 1: member who had a roommate who they were way into
5:25
Speaker 1: D n D and that involved them first having like
5:28
Speaker 1: a lot of serpents, horrible roommates. They had serpents and
5:34
Speaker 1: that was like a D and D thing, and then
5:36
Speaker 1: pretty soon they graduated the falconry because they wanted to
5:40
Speaker 1: look like a wizard. And I heard that was a
5:43
Speaker 1: pretty common path, and then UM developed my theory that
5:48
Speaker 1: the bulk of falconers outside of the Middle East, American
5:53
Speaker 1: falconers are driven are are driven down that path through
5:59
Speaker 1: D n Well, I'm so glad you asked because um, Well,
6:06
Speaker 1: to be fair, I mean, I've been with the Paragrine
6:10
Speaker 1: Fund for twenty two years is founded by falconers. Falconry
6:12
Speaker 1: is a huge part of the way and how we
6:14
Speaker 1: do our business. But um, I had to ask her
6:18
Speaker 1: in what D and D is. So let's start there
6:22
Speaker 1: and dragons. You know what I'm talking about, right, I
6:27
Speaker 1: know about I know that the word, yeah, the phrase.
6:32
Speaker 1: But all your members aren't into that. I don't think
6:34
Speaker 1: any of them are. And falcony community is right now
6:38
Speaker 1: a plotting Yeah, no, the falconry community. If you look
6:42
Speaker 1: at the history of falconry and you want to talk
6:44
Speaker 1: about the US is history in falconry, you have to
6:48
Speaker 1: go back to UM the conservation movement and how that's
6:54
Speaker 1: tied to falconry, because falconry of three four thousand years ago, Yeah,
6:59
Speaker 1: that's Turkey series. I ran what we call it today
7:02
Speaker 1: and it's in all the as soon as art and
7:06
Speaker 1: any art form, whether it's written or pictographs, petroglyphs, anything
7:09
Speaker 1: like that. You see falconry, you see depictions of of
7:12
Speaker 1: husbandry of animals that are depicted as being used to
7:17
Speaker 1: catch prey. Were the Egyptians into it absolutely because they
7:19
Speaker 1: got a lot of falcons and stuff in there. Yeah, No,
7:21
Speaker 1: they're highly Do they have do they have hieroglyphics that
7:25
Speaker 1: suggests that's what they were doing with them? Well, not
7:27
Speaker 1: just that they were keeping them as part of a menagerie. Yeah,
7:30
Speaker 1: because they're on the fist. In many of these the
7:33
Speaker 1: birds are on the fist and the quarries hanging from
7:35
Speaker 1: their gloves, much as you see. Those guys are big
7:37
Speaker 1: into D and D form of a many sided die,
7:44
Speaker 1: of many sided die. I'm not following you. That's a
7:47
Speaker 1: that's okay. I only just put that together right now
7:52
Speaker 1: because I'm not familiar. Well, I remember there was like
7:54
Speaker 1: certain dudes in high school. I don't want to name them,
7:57
Speaker 1: certain dudes of high school of which I was friends.
8:00
Speaker 1: I was friends with that. You know, you got like
8:02
Speaker 1: your jocks, right, your stoner's head bangers, um ranch kids.
8:09
Speaker 1: Well we have farm kids. Yeah, D and D guys
8:14
Speaker 1: who crossed over with head bangers weirdly, but not stoners. Well,
8:19
Speaker 1: I'm I'm betting that Elder Leopold probably didn't know about
8:23
Speaker 1: D and D and he said falconry was the perfect sport.
8:27
Speaker 1: Come on, really really held Leopold? Yeah, well he's you know,
8:30
Speaker 1: there's a there's a dark side to Elder Leopold that
8:32
Speaker 1: people don't realize. So taking like seventy five yard hail
8:36
Speaker 1: Mary's with his bow was with his like seventy five
8:39
Speaker 1: yard hail Mary's with a long bow at deer and
8:41
Speaker 1: like just kind of shooting over that way to see
8:44
Speaker 1: what happens and stuff. People hunted different back then. But
8:46
Speaker 1: he liked falcony. Yeah, well, I mean he said it's
8:49
Speaker 1: a perfect the perfect sport. Um fran Hammerstrom one of
8:53
Speaker 1: his uh I think she was a PhD student. She
8:57
Speaker 1: became one of the one of the very first ladies
9:01
Speaker 1: in conservation and was awarded by the National Wildlife Federation
9:06
Speaker 1: or whatever it was before it became in WF in
9:09
Speaker 1: UH in Wisconsin for her work. And she was a
9:11
Speaker 1: falconer and had great writings about it. And I'm surprised
9:14
Speaker 1: that that given uh, you know, the your literate nature
9:20
Speaker 1: of understanding and looking at all these things that that
9:22
Speaker 1: you didn't have more of those you know, early falconers
9:25
Speaker 1: in the US and and understood what that was. Craigheads,
9:28
Speaker 1: for example, you talked about you both an Indian prince.
9:32
Speaker 1: I'm gonna send you a book, do you know that.
9:34
Speaker 1: I think it was under the Clinton administration they considered
9:38
Speaker 1: hitting Ben Ladden at a falconry camp m but didn't
9:44
Speaker 1: because there were there were certain uh, like high level
9:48
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabian people present in that camp, and they didn't
9:52
Speaker 1: hit the falconry camp. I could be messing up a
9:54
Speaker 1: small part of this, but I don't think I'm messing
9:56
Speaker 1: up a big part of it. Well, I tell you
9:58
Speaker 1: as much as you guys travel when you're three boys
10:00
Speaker 1: in Idaho, come to the World Center for Birds of Prey,
10:02
Speaker 1: and on that campus, we share it with the archives
10:05
Speaker 1: of Falconry, and we can tell you everything about falconry
10:07
Speaker 1: as far back as you want to go. Do you
10:09
Speaker 1: think that? And there's not a single not a single
10:12
Speaker 1: piece of evidence about, not a many side of day
10:15
Speaker 1: in the building, not a mini I have you been?
10:18
Speaker 1: Have you changed your mind? I'll never changed my mind, man,
10:23
Speaker 1: I mean, do you think perfect? Like they don't want
10:28
Speaker 1: to admit there into D and D it's like or
10:31
Speaker 1: something like that. Like this little bit of evidence here,
10:35
Speaker 1: this little bit of Evans doesn't look well. But I
10:37
Speaker 1: need to do my counter research now, okay, check out.
10:42
Speaker 1: Am I in a strong position right now? No, never
10:47
Speaker 1: stopped you before. The good thing is here. Follow up
10:52
Speaker 1: argument can come after Chris has left. So yeah, well,
10:55
Speaker 1: there's a there's a quote I heard from someone who
10:57
Speaker 1: once said, Um, Okay, so I'm wrong, but am I right? Uh?
11:05
Speaker 1: Oh oh, here's I want to talk about this real quick?
11:08
Speaker 1: Did you just saying, Pat durkinsent Um, there's a study
11:13
Speaker 1: Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems. Okay, look, here's the name
11:20
Speaker 1: of the here's the name of the study, Locally Procured
11:24
Speaker 1: wild game Culinary Trends in the US, A study of
11:27
Speaker 1: the rough grouse as entree and accompanying nutritional analysis. And
11:34
Speaker 1: this paper in the in the heading gets into how uh,
11:40
Speaker 1: people who are into wild foods or eyes extolling the
11:43
Speaker 1: virtues of wild foods, but oftentimes their claims are not
11:48
Speaker 1: well substantiated in an academic sense, meaning like what is
11:52
Speaker 1: actually in gaming is a different right, Like you might
11:54
Speaker 1: be like eating rough grouse better and eat chicken man,
11:58
Speaker 1: you know. Um, And the u U s d A
12:01
Speaker 1: has this thing that's like massive thing of all the
12:03
Speaker 1: new like mineral composition, calories, makeup of all these foods.
12:10
Speaker 1: And these guys did the work to add the rofed grouse,
12:15
Speaker 1: so now you'll be able to find all the nutritional
12:17
Speaker 1: data of roughed grouse in this U s d A
12:23
Speaker 1: database of foods. I'm just gonna give you a high,
12:28
Speaker 1: a high level thing. So rough grouse compared to highly
12:34
Speaker 1: consumed domestic boneless here's where it gets okay. Compared to
12:38
Speaker 1: highly consumed domestic boneless skinless chicken breast meat, rough grouse
12:47
Speaker 1: has more protein per serving, less calories, and significantly less
12:55
Speaker 1: total fat and saturated fat. The cluss draw A content
13:00
Speaker 1: of grouse is also lower than domestic chicken. Much of
13:06
Speaker 1: the vitamin and mineral content of rust grouse of rough
13:09
Speaker 1: grouse compared to chicken were similar, with grouse having slightly
13:13
Speaker 1: higher amounts of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, saudi and rival flavan
13:17
Speaker 1: and nyasin. Chicken meat had slightly higher amounts of potassium,
13:23
Speaker 1: zinc in, vitamin A, and nichols on. But what it
13:29
Speaker 1: gets into, the main thing, is it gets into the
13:31
Speaker 1: health implications of hunting rough grouse. Of the people who
13:34
Speaker 1: participated in the survey. This makes hunting rough grouse seems
13:37
Speaker 1: like a daunting thing, and it is depending on your approach,
13:42
Speaker 1: depending on your approach the particulars of the year, But
13:45
Speaker 1: so so the people that participated in this survey. Hunters
13:51
Speaker 1: participating the survey logged twenty five hours afield during the season.
14:00
Speaker 1: They on average took about nine trips of field for
14:03
Speaker 1: the season and has spent about three hours of field
14:06
Speaker 1: per trip. So that's like the rough breakdown about so
14:10
Speaker 1: the average rough grouse hunter is spending twenty seven hours
14:13
Speaker 1: tis hunting rough grouse. Uh You generally each outing for
14:22
Speaker 1: rough grouse is four point five miles of walking. Now,
14:29
Speaker 1: if you ran all those stats on eating chicken, we
14:35
Speaker 1: would be a different nation. The here's the thing about
14:40
Speaker 1: the toughness of grouse hunt. Uh So in New York State, Okay,
14:46
Speaker 1: this is the New York State, and the hunters spending
14:51
Speaker 1: average of nineteen hours hunting per bird harvested. Wo A
15:00
Speaker 1: lot of that is some damn ass growls hunt. That's
15:04
Speaker 1: why a lot of people aren't drawing the upland Game
15:07
Speaker 1: hunting checker will carry you. They have burns people out
15:10
Speaker 1: real fast, like and then when they get something, they're
15:12
Speaker 1: like all of that Like calories lost to calorie games
15:16
Speaker 1: less than a pigeon worth of meat burn away. I
15:19
Speaker 1: asked more calories than that rose. But that's like averages
15:22
Speaker 1: and you know you know what I mean, who knows
15:24
Speaker 1: um and right? I think you could run it in
15:26
Speaker 1: different places, like you could run that for the western
15:31
Speaker 1: up of Michigan, the western upper Peninsula of Michigan, and
15:35
Speaker 1: I think you'd wind up with some highly some very
15:37
Speaker 1: different statistics. That just makes me question, though, my dedication
15:40
Speaker 1: as a hunter, because man if I went out and
15:43
Speaker 1: I got one grouse in nineteen hours on average, because
15:47
Speaker 1: I mean, what you're hunting for maybe like with dogs,
15:49
Speaker 1: like five or six maybe hours, so what that'd be
15:53
Speaker 1: four days? One growl? No, I feel like here, yeah,
16:02
Speaker 1: oh if people remember um So me Eater camp Fire
16:06
Speaker 1: Stories close calls volume two, and I'll point out that
16:10
Speaker 1: book that that that audio project accomplish something particular for
16:15
Speaker 1: a genre because normally, when the book goes the audio,
16:18
Speaker 1: like nomoany, when you buy an audio book, you're buying
16:20
Speaker 1: an audiobook of a book that exists in print. So
16:22
Speaker 1: when you look at the audio book best seller list,
16:25
Speaker 1: like the New York Times best seller list for audio
16:27
Speaker 1: books is typically audio books that wore books, So does
16:32
Speaker 1: the awareness of the book as a print edition, and
16:34
Speaker 1: it makes like an audio edition. But Campfire Stories debuted
16:38
Speaker 1: and stuck there as a New York Times bestseller and
16:42
Speaker 1: audio even though it wasn't even a damn book. Volume
16:46
Speaker 1: two is out now. Uh It releases August sewo but
16:51
Speaker 1: of course you can go and preorder the thing right now.
16:53
Speaker 1: And it's uh me eater stories, narrow misses in more
16:58
Speaker 1: close calls and and again it's like an immersive audio
17:03
Speaker 1: experience better than the first one. Um we have on there.
17:09
Speaker 1: Our friend Kimmy Werner, who tells the story that involved
17:14
Speaker 1: her and a mentor of hers and she violates a
17:17
Speaker 1: pact because they had agreed to never tell the story.
17:21
Speaker 1: That's my favorite one. There's a phenomenal story, a near
17:25
Speaker 1: death experience from our very own Clay nukelem Me and
17:30
Speaker 1: my son have a story. We also have stories from
17:33
Speaker 1: a guy who saved his friend's life by shooting at him,
17:41
Speaker 1: a guy who got into hand and hoof combat with
17:46
Speaker 1: a buck in a corn field, a guy who damn
17:53
Speaker 1: near died after shooting himself in the leg duck hunting,
17:56
Speaker 1: which is a crazy story, and his life was saved
17:59
Speaker 1: by his dog. You're in that killian I did hear that?
18:07
Speaker 1: If you're listening, snorts you on after that rattlesnake and
18:12
Speaker 1: a sheep hunter who got h so horribly Cliff hung
18:17
Speaker 1: in California, that near very near death Cliff hung Experience.
18:23
Speaker 1: Just a really really great collection. The guy who almost
18:26
Speaker 1: died from his own error. It's hard, hard, Yeah, I
18:32
Speaker 1: gotta tell you this some hard ship to listen to
18:35
Speaker 1: check it out. But no, it's like it's just like
18:38
Speaker 1: it's a lot of it's just skin crawling, but then
18:41
Speaker 1: you know the amount of it's like tart. It's like
18:44
Speaker 1: a quick Yeah, it's called narrow mrs More close calls.
18:47
Speaker 1: If it was just everybody died in the end one,
18:50
Speaker 1: it would be hard to get the stories right then,
18:54
Speaker 1: being all dead and everything. But the amount of blood
18:57
Speaker 1: shed in here is it is it's like it's like
18:59
Speaker 1: watching it's like watching kill Bill. Yes, some stories I
19:04
Speaker 1: don't want to spoil anything about it, but that one
19:06
Speaker 1: that you mentioned where someone had to shoot at his
19:08
Speaker 1: friend to save him, just listen. It was hard for
19:11
Speaker 1: me to listen to that one. But just a great story,
19:14
Speaker 1: really just interesting. So that's out Mediators camp Fire Stories.
19:19
Speaker 1: What we're gonna do to get a taste for the series.
19:22
Speaker 1: Last time we released the camp Fire Stories, we put
19:25
Speaker 1: Sam Lowries the mud puddle and just like built it
19:27
Speaker 1: on the end of the show. So, in keeping with
19:29
Speaker 1: that tradition, we're gonna do the best shot of my life.
19:33
Speaker 1: That's a spear fishing one. Cam Kirkconnell about the guy, Well,
19:38
Speaker 1: I don't want to spoil it. Yeah, just stay tuned
19:41
Speaker 1: till the end because it's it's awesome. It's got everything
19:43
Speaker 1: in it. You're gonna hear um, Yeah, we're gontack it.
19:47
Speaker 1: On the end of the show. You'll be so titilated
19:49
Speaker 1: by this little freebee that you'll run out and want
19:52
Speaker 1: to get the whole damn things. You can have all
19:54
Speaker 1: those hours and it's it's an hours of phenomenal stories,
20:01
Speaker 1: polished and really like experiential kind of musical score, and
20:06
Speaker 1: you're you're immersed, Yeah and polished, not like some dude
20:09
Speaker 1: up there him and in Han like we we we
20:12
Speaker 1: like obsess over every minute of the content. Yeah, yeah,
20:16
Speaker 1: we do. We really did. Everyone. Our good friend Jason
20:21
Speaker 1: Phelps over it. Phelps game calls just came out with
20:25
Speaker 1: I'll tell you this at one time or another, like
20:28
Speaker 1: I kind of pointed this out, like driving around and
20:29
Speaker 1: like friends cars and you you know how everybody has
20:32
Speaker 1: a bunch of junk in their car on the dashboard
20:34
Speaker 1: of the glove box. I have experimented with probably every
20:39
Speaker 1: every elk call, every cow call I'm not saying mastered
20:45
Speaker 1: or like even made a passable sound. I have experimented
20:48
Speaker 1: with probably every cow call on the market at some
20:51
Speaker 1: point or another over my lifetime. I think that, uh,
20:57
Speaker 1: in my view, Phelps is easy to sucker. Is the
21:00
Speaker 1: easiest cow call I have ever used. Under this category
21:05
Speaker 1: that makes a wide variety of sounds. I probably need
21:09
Speaker 1: to get one because I have a hard time listen.
21:12
Speaker 1: I don't understand. I don't get the mechanics of it.
21:13
Speaker 1: But normally so like over the years, people come out
21:16
Speaker 1: with bite and blow calls that are like monos. They
21:20
Speaker 1: make a sound, and everyone that uses them all makes
21:22
Speaker 1: that same sound. It becomes something of a joke, like
21:24
Speaker 1: a good call will come out. Then a couple of
21:26
Speaker 1: years later people laugh about when you make when you
21:28
Speaker 1: blow that call the alcohol goal the other direction, because
21:30
Speaker 1: you're like ship. It's one of those dudes. That one
21:32
Speaker 1: call um where you lose that problem is with diaphragm,
21:39
Speaker 1: because you have like like a tremendous vocabulary with a diaphragm.
21:44
Speaker 1: But this one is like one of the problems. A
21:46
Speaker 1: lot of bite and blow calls to or exposed read
21:48
Speaker 1: calls is it's so hard to get like the pressures
21:52
Speaker 1: of how much pressure with your lips or teeth you're
21:55
Speaker 1: putting on it, how much air you're putting through. It's
21:58
Speaker 1: just a pain in yass. And it's coming from guy
22:00
Speaker 1: who thinks game calls are painting he has in general. Uh,
22:04
Speaker 1: holy sh it, dude, Cal's gonna Cal's gonna suck on it. Steven.
22:14
Speaker 1: It's like you don't know, you don't you don't blow
22:21
Speaker 1: on it. You're just like and it's not even like
22:23
Speaker 1: you're sucking. You're like it's like a like an inhale.
22:25
Speaker 1: Do you like hyperventilate? It's like inhale and and like
22:32
Speaker 1: and it's hands free. It's just it's like a green rubber.
22:35
Speaker 1: It's called the easy sucker. Do you like it? Steve?
22:37
Speaker 1: Screwing this up a little bit? Okay, go ahead, Okay.
22:40
Speaker 1: So the more complex and called the wider range and
22:42
Speaker 1: noises you're you're gonna be able to make, but the
22:45
Speaker 1: more time you need to get into it and uh
22:48
Speaker 1: and really started playing, because they're like a musical instrument,
22:51
Speaker 1: a kazoo in the hands of someone who actually has
22:55
Speaker 1: messed around with a kazoo, a bunch can make that
22:58
Speaker 1: sound appealing. People who really pay after you get um,
23:03
Speaker 1: after you get Rhonda Santis and Chris Pratt, Chris Press
23:08
Speaker 1: and uh, you know who's the galph Meds NBC. I
23:11
Speaker 1: always want to get on the show, Rachel Madden, get
23:14
Speaker 1: us a good kazoo player. Thirty five minutes of pure
23:21
Speaker 1: kazoo easy listening. Uh, this is a dog inhale calicoll,
23:30
Speaker 1: but it's got a bite component to it, so you
23:33
Speaker 1: can actually create some different tones and pitches. Volumes. Is
23:38
Speaker 1: that included in tones and pitches? Well, I think there's
23:42
Speaker 1: you know, there's a limitation on this, which is good
23:44
Speaker 1: as far as like your overall volume. I was messing
23:46
Speaker 1: around with this, and you can do like some some
23:49
Speaker 1: little bowl sounds too, and and some Phelps can Phelps
23:56
Speaker 1: can do, but he doesn't like to say. He doesn't
23:59
Speaker 1: like to wreck amend it for bowl like, Oh, he
24:07
Speaker 1: was way out there. I think I need to get
24:09
Speaker 1: myself one of those. I can't play time with that one.
24:15
Speaker 1: And volume, you can actually get a different insert, right
24:18
Speaker 1: like I think Phelps has a different insert, So yeah,
24:21
Speaker 1: you can get a different like a louder call. She
24:24
Speaker 1: can switch mountain and you can take the biggest jackass
24:27
Speaker 1: on the planet there trying to segue into my kids
24:35
Speaker 1: on the end of that, you can take my children
24:37
Speaker 1: and they can make cow calls with it, Steve saying
24:40
Speaker 1: they have the experience level of jackasses or my children. Yes,
24:46
Speaker 1: that's like you're go for them. You can do a
24:49
Speaker 1: lot of playing around with the wraps, the kids, the
24:54
Speaker 1: monotone do everything yourself. Cow calls are the ones that
24:58
Speaker 1: I certainly stay away for m and I like to
25:01
Speaker 1: pick up one new col call a year, yep, and
25:05
Speaker 1: just mess around with it and try to find something different.
25:09
Speaker 1: And everybody has like a different read, thickness of read,
25:14
Speaker 1: length of read, et cetera. That makes a different pitch
25:19
Speaker 1: and call. So um, yeah, I need that one. And
25:22
Speaker 1: I feel like we all have that hunting buddy too
25:24
Speaker 1: that you just know you're gonna have to call for
25:26
Speaker 1: all the time, right, Like you're always going to be
25:28
Speaker 1: the guy in the back calling for him because he's
25:31
Speaker 1: just not gonna call. Like I brought that home, gave
25:34
Speaker 1: it to my wife, and it was like within just
25:37
Speaker 1: related to what you're just saying. I wouldn't say it's unrelated,
25:43
Speaker 1: but like within or take my wife friend. But in
25:47
Speaker 1: like a two minute time frame, I'm like, you're gonna
25:50
Speaker 1: be able to call for me, Like you're legitimately going
25:53
Speaker 1: to be able to call for me. Now that's awesome.
25:56
Speaker 1: I love it, dude, I'm throwing other ship in the
25:58
Speaker 1: garbage or in a box. Well, I do point out,
26:03
Speaker 1: since this is an inhale cow call, there's definitely room
26:06
Speaker 1: for an exhale cal call, of which Phelps makes several
26:10
Speaker 1: external read calls that are understand if you want to
26:12
Speaker 1: pick up a call, if you want to pick up
26:14
Speaker 1: a call and make a like and make very passable
26:18
Speaker 1: cow calls very quickly and not just one sound, but
26:21
Speaker 1: a variety of sounds, I would be like this and
26:24
Speaker 1: then just waste your breath exhaling for no reason. And
26:27
Speaker 1: I would say that if I thought Phelps was the
26:29
Speaker 1: was the biggest asshole in the world, I still say
26:32
Speaker 1: the same thing, because it's like an objective reality. It's
26:35
Speaker 1: it's a good one. I like, I like a minimum
26:40
Speaker 1: of two external read calls because you can definitely jam
26:44
Speaker 1: them up with with gunk and spit and you know,
26:48
Speaker 1: dirt and all the pollen and bugs. And I can
26:52
Speaker 1: keep going on with this list um and about this
26:56
Speaker 1: this this is a fun one. That's a fun one
26:58
Speaker 1: to add to the land yard. Cal do do do uh.
27:03
Speaker 1: I don't want to say one last land access initiative.
27:07
Speaker 1: So here's the deal, folks. We've been running the land
27:09
Speaker 1: Access Initiative for quite a while. It's a sweet program.
27:14
Speaker 1: We've had some success under our belt with the Shiloh
27:18
Speaker 1: Pond project. We're looking for the next one. We're still
27:22
Speaker 1: in the active looking phase. We've gotten a lot of suggestions,
27:26
Speaker 1: but honestly, very few out of probably six or seven
27:31
Speaker 1: hundred submissions at this sex of like of like solid
27:35
Speaker 1: this is the place, this is what we want to do,
27:38
Speaker 1: like like a project. We've we've had ideas of projects
27:43
Speaker 1: that frankly, we just don't have time for. You're looking
27:45
Speaker 1: for a whole nonprofit organization that can focus their time
27:48
Speaker 1: on this, of which there are so many, So get
27:51
Speaker 1: off your key, star and and I've forward these on
27:53
Speaker 1: to my friends in those positions. But we are looking
27:58
Speaker 1: for a place that is open to an easement outright purchase,
28:05
Speaker 1: something that will provide more public access to hunting and fishing.
28:09
Speaker 1: We got a lot of awesome stuff in the works.
28:11
Speaker 1: We got some cash on the fund right now. We
28:13
Speaker 1: got a lot of partners on board to make this happen. Um,
28:18
Speaker 1: we had we had an amazing donation offer. We have
28:23
Speaker 1: people that want to help so bad that they're giving
28:26
Speaker 1: away houses, little tiny ones that you can trap out. Yeah,
28:31
Speaker 1: super super awesome. Um. So go to the conservation page
28:37
Speaker 1: at the meat Eater dot com, click on land Access
28:41
Speaker 1: and submit a. The phones are ringing off the hook
28:45
Speaker 1: over here. Okay, okay, get in lines right now, click
28:54
Speaker 1: a submit to the Land Access Initiative and we want Yeah,
29:00
Speaker 1: we want to find that that perfect thing where we
29:02
Speaker 1: can jump in and help create more access to hunting
29:05
Speaker 1: and fishing. Garrett's only about a couple of the ones
29:09
Speaker 1: that are in there. We have, we have several very
29:13
Speaker 1: good ways to spend money, I think, Um, you know,
29:19
Speaker 1: we just just want to find like the perfect thing.
29:21
Speaker 1: But there's we have an absolutely phenomenal project here in
29:25
Speaker 1: the state of Montana and Northwest Montana that the Trust
29:28
Speaker 1: Republic Lands is working on, which would be at a
29:31
Speaker 1: system of ease months that would provide access for the
29:35
Speaker 1: myriad of land of many uses activities from firewood cutting
29:43
Speaker 1: to fishing to snowmobiling. In perpetuity, which is super cool
29:49
Speaker 1: and attractive. There's some incredible projects that Ducks and Limited
29:54
Speaker 1: is working on in in Iowa for instance, that are
30:00
Speaker 1: it would be money well spam. So if you have
30:07
Speaker 1: something that you just want to get active on, please
30:10
Speaker 1: submit it to the mediator Land Access Initiative. I want
30:13
Speaker 1: to give the dude to plug even though we're not
30:14
Speaker 1: we haven't moved on yet. Naughty log homes k n
30:19
Speaker 1: A U g h t Y naughty log homes. They
30:23
Speaker 1: want to donate a log trapper's cabin. I can't remember
30:28
Speaker 1: the dimensions of it. And they're I mean, they're donating
30:31
Speaker 1: a log trapper's cabin to the to the auction House
30:35
Speaker 1: of Oddities. They are one of a kind log home.
30:41
Speaker 1: That's a really cool name. They're just saying, you see, Sean,
30:46
Speaker 1: not sisters sister's organ donate the whole damn thing. That's cool. Yeah,
30:56
Speaker 1: that's big. No, it's a great offer. Uh oh, Sean,
31:01
Speaker 1: you're ready to lay out this. Uh about talking about
31:04
Speaker 1: Delta Waterfowl, Yes, sir, yeah, uh and Cal can speak
31:09
Speaker 1: to this too, but we are First Light is partnering
31:14
Speaker 1: with Delta Waterfowl for Camo for conservation as a lot
31:19
Speaker 1: of you probably well you've probably heard on the last
31:22
Speaker 1: podcast and seeing on social media and all that that
31:25
Speaker 1: first lights Waterfowl Pattern TYFA is out and a portion
31:30
Speaker 1: of the sales from that are going to Delta Waterfowl UM,
31:36
Speaker 1: which you know, I'm stoked about because I love Delta.
31:39
Speaker 1: I've talked about Delta a lot in these Duck Reports
31:41
Speaker 1: and they've been information with you on the Duck Reports. Yeah, yeah, there,
31:47
Speaker 1: And I mean the big reason those guys love help
31:50
Speaker 1: and so much is their duck hunters. I mean, they
31:52
Speaker 1: call themselves the duck Hunters Organization, but they really are.
31:56
Speaker 1: They are Their organization is about helping duck hunters. And
32:02
Speaker 1: there's still research organization. They have their four pillars duck
32:06
Speaker 1: production are three, habitat, conservation and research and education. Um.
32:13
Speaker 1: But like their research and education stuff is really keyed
32:17
Speaker 1: and focused on applicable science right ways that they can
32:21
Speaker 1: actually um you know, benefit duck habitat, duck numbers, the
32:26
Speaker 1: whole bit. So it's nice to be working with them
32:30
Speaker 1: to go buy some TYFA, kick some money toward Delta.
32:34
Speaker 1: We're just gonna make a donation to Delta two. Yeah, yeah,
32:36
Speaker 1: I mean I think every duck hunter should be with
32:40
Speaker 1: what the two big duck hunting orgs have done for
32:43
Speaker 1: water fowlers. Every duck hunter should be a member of
32:46
Speaker 1: both anyway, So so Campbell for Conservation first Light right now,
32:52
Speaker 1: prior to TYFA, if you bought a specter, anything in
32:55
Speaker 1: the specter camouflage pattern which is is our can mover
33:00
Speaker 1: folks who like to hide in trees, a percentage of
33:04
Speaker 1: every sale goes to NDA, which used to be q
33:10
Speaker 1: d m A National Lines and now and NDA and
33:14
Speaker 1: now it's just National Deer Lines. Uh. On the water
33:18
Speaker 1: foul side of things, any thing in the type of patterning,
33:23
Speaker 1: a percentage of that purchase goes to Delta water Fowl.
33:28
Speaker 1: So you're gonna feel real good about buying some unparalleled
33:35
Speaker 1: duck hunting camouflage and just stuff that's gonna keep you
33:38
Speaker 1: warm and dry when you need to be warm and dry.
33:42
Speaker 1: But you're gonna feel doubly good knowing that that cash
33:45
Speaker 1: is going to go make more ducks. And one of
33:47
Speaker 1: the coolest things about Delta that they talked about all
33:49
Speaker 1: the time is it was founded with the idea of
33:54
Speaker 1: I want to replace times two or times three every
33:58
Speaker 1: duck I take off the lance gate. And so you're
34:03
Speaker 1: buying clothing that you're ideally going to go out and
34:06
Speaker 1: remove some ducts from and some geese from the waters
34:11
Speaker 1: and in airways of America. But with with that purchase,
34:16
Speaker 1: you're gonna slide some money back to putting them back
34:18
Speaker 1: out times two or three good? Good? Okay. We got
34:24
Speaker 1: a guy rolled in from Alaska. So he said he
34:26
Speaker 1: has this say he wants people to weigh in on this.
34:30
Speaker 1: Just to give some background, I am in the military,
34:33
Speaker 1: stationed in Alaska and work for a three letter organization
34:36
Speaker 1: that I will omit from this email. Boy, that makes
34:41
Speaker 1: you really start thinking, I'm starting to think of them,
34:46
Speaker 1: ain't I r s? Anyways, recently this spring I was
34:55
Speaker 1: successful in a brown bear hunt and have since updated
34:59
Speaker 1: my Skype pro file of course on our classified computers
35:02
Speaker 1: with a photo of me kneeling next to my bear pictures.
35:06
Speaker 1: Very tasteful, not displaying any blood, gods, etcetera. Well, on Fridays,
35:10
Speaker 1: he goes on to say, we use Skype to conduct
35:13
Speaker 1: virtual meetings weekly to highlight mission successes for each work
35:17
Speaker 1: center in the building. I am currently the highest ranking
35:22
Speaker 1: enlisted person in my work center and am in charge
35:25
Speaker 1: of the missions we conduct, so I was speaking on
35:29
Speaker 1: my team's behalf and obviously my profile photo popped up,
35:33
Speaker 1: indicating who is speaking. No video on these skype calls.
35:38
Speaker 1: Shortly after the meeting, my three letters civilian boss came
35:41
Speaker 1: down to talk to me about mission related stuff. When
35:44
Speaker 1: he was pulled aside by another three letter civilian. She
35:48
Speaker 1: instructed him that he needs to speak to his team
35:51
Speaker 1: about displaying profile photos with dead animals and that it
35:56
Speaker 1: is offensive to people. He spoke to me about this
36:00
Speaker 1: instructed me not to change the profile as my photo
36:04
Speaker 1: is not offensive and I am not displaying the bear
36:07
Speaker 1: in a disrespectful way. My question is if this escalates
36:12
Speaker 1: into something bigger down the road, do I stand my
36:15
Speaker 1: ground and try to push back or do I simply
36:17
Speaker 1: just give in and change it. He goes on to say,
36:21
Speaker 1: in my opinion, I don't understand how this photo is
36:23
Speaker 1: offensive when my profile photo for the last year has
36:26
Speaker 1: been a photo of me holding a big silver salmon
36:28
Speaker 1: I caught with my fly rod. At what, at one
36:32
Speaker 1: point does a dead bear trump a dead fish? Is
36:35
Speaker 1: that the anthropomorphizing of bears and not salmon. Meanwhile, we
36:39
Speaker 1: all walk around and kyote brown suede leather boots. The
36:43
Speaker 1: military is literally walking around with dead animals on our feet.
36:47
Speaker 1: Half the civilians sit in luxury leather chairs at their desks.
36:51
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to figure out if it's something I
36:53
Speaker 1: should stand my ground on or just be the bigger
36:56
Speaker 1: person and change my profile. Now here's my take on it.
37:00
Speaker 1: I have a take to after you. If there was
37:04
Speaker 1: a rule, if there was a pre existing rule dictating
37:10
Speaker 1: guidelines for your profile picture, and this broke a pre
37:15
Speaker 1: existing profile picture guideline rule, then you should change your rule.
37:20
Speaker 1: But if you're being singled out for this and nothing else,
37:23
Speaker 1: I would fight back on it. Yeah, my my take
37:28
Speaker 1: is a little more broad like in scope than that.
37:33
Speaker 1: You're in the military, which is purpose is to conduct violence,
37:37
Speaker 1: yet we're like offended. I don't understand how people in
37:42
Speaker 1: the military are offended by a dead animal in profile picture.
37:45
Speaker 1: But the whole point in the middle, if you don't
37:47
Speaker 1: get like, culturally, why that would that that's surprising to me. Culturally,
37:51
Speaker 1: it's surprising you well, and it's a little bit ironic
37:54
Speaker 1: to think about an organization that exists for like violence.
38:00
Speaker 1: I think all great points, but um, I would take
38:02
Speaker 1: it down. I would put up something very very milk
38:06
Speaker 1: toast that is mildly appealing to everyone who sees it.
38:11
Speaker 1: If it's the three letter organization we're talking about, um,
38:14
Speaker 1: we're talking about regime changes. We're talking about the ability
38:19
Speaker 1: to impact gross national product of any country on the planet.
38:24
Speaker 1: We're talking about zero dark thirty. You're an enlisted man,
38:32
Speaker 1: change your profile picks not worth its like this bigger
38:35
Speaker 1: fish to fry. Yeah, they're they're the organization fry the fish,
38:41
Speaker 1: bigger bear, bigger bear meat to fry. Yeah, here's why
38:44
Speaker 1: I think you're wrong, cal Um. That was so matter
38:49
Speaker 1: of fact. I don't think this is an issue of
38:53
Speaker 1: like compliance. I don't think it's like an issue of rules,
38:57
Speaker 1: like I think this is kind of semantics and like
39:00
Speaker 1: one of the things we deal with a lot on
39:02
Speaker 1: this podcast when we bring up is like different predator
39:05
Speaker 1: hunting getting closed down for no reason at all all
39:08
Speaker 1: over the place, And I feel like, uh, one of
39:12
Speaker 1: our jobs is that normalize it a little bit, right, Like,
39:15
Speaker 1: so it's not just so you know, like toxic whenever
39:20
Speaker 1: you do see it. I feel like folding on something
39:24
Speaker 1: like this, taking down the picture or not being able
39:27
Speaker 1: to embrace something that's a huge part of your life.
39:30
Speaker 1: It detracts from the normalization of something that then we
39:33
Speaker 1: come on here and we tell people like, no, it's
39:35
Speaker 1: a thing that people do and should be respected. And
39:39
Speaker 1: there's a key in the language used here is the
39:42
Speaker 1: individuals claiming not that it violates protocol or not that
39:45
Speaker 1: it violates picture rules, They said it is offensive. And
39:49
Speaker 1: I think that allowing people just to run around really
39:52
Speaker 1: nearly declaring yeah, like to declaring something that might offend
39:57
Speaker 1: me as being categorically offensive, are they is running rampant.
40:02
Speaker 1: I mean, like you can declare people things that the
40:05
Speaker 1: people would never even agree with, so to say, like
40:08
Speaker 1: it's offensive, Like, let's let's let's be clear. You find
40:13
Speaker 1: it offensive, but there are probably things about you it
40:17
Speaker 1: would be deeply offensive to me. You have a picture
40:19
Speaker 1: of your third wife on your profile picture. That's offensive
40:24
Speaker 1: to me. Why why have you been married three times?
40:28
Speaker 1: I find that very offensive? Take that down. No one
40:30
Speaker 1: would ever ask that of somebody, right, Or like I
40:34
Speaker 1: see that you have a picture of yourself, um not
40:37
Speaker 1: at church on Sunday, that's deeply offensive to me. Yeah,
40:41
Speaker 1: you can make this encrypted channel. That's that's like a
40:46
Speaker 1: language thing. That's people stating as fact. So it's used
40:52
Speaker 1: to use the eye word everybody. But that's my point.
40:54
Speaker 1: Cal is like, it is insane that the people who
40:58
Speaker 1: exist to swap out dick to waters are getting offended
41:01
Speaker 1: by a bear picture. I think we're obviously I mean
41:09
Speaker 1: your computer, cow oh, because I'm I'm well read up
41:13
Speaker 1: on this crab situation, but you weren't on the other situation.
41:17
Speaker 1: I was working on some other things from the crab
41:24
Speaker 1: come for everybody. I want to tee up the next
41:27
Speaker 1: this next segment. If there's one thing the media loves,
41:30
Speaker 1: not TV, but there's one thing newspapers and magazines love,
41:34
Speaker 1: it is a story about someone utilizing an invasive species
41:40
Speaker 1: as a for something or another. Hit it cow, Yes,
41:45
Speaker 1: that I mean, that's that's a great There's a good
41:47
Speaker 1: couple of question marks in this story. So this distilling
41:50
Speaker 1: company in conjunction, I guess I'm not all that right
41:56
Speaker 1: up on this anyway. He's quietly quietly opening I could
42:00
Speaker 1: peer back up. So there's this green crab, this invasive
42:03
Speaker 1: green crab. They came over in the eighteen hundreds, we think,
42:06
Speaker 1: in the ballast of boats. Never heard of this crab
42:11
Speaker 1: and the things years of being here. When you do
42:15
Speaker 1: hear about it, though, they're like, they are horrible. They're
42:18
Speaker 1: horribly destructive. On Mola's they eat clams and and muscles
42:23
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, so obviously it's dipping into some
42:27
Speaker 1: other folks pocket books there. They are prolific and they're
42:33
Speaker 1: they're an edible crab, but they're so small the yield
42:36
Speaker 1: is really bad. So if you ever gone to a
42:38
Speaker 1: crab house and started picking crabs, eventually you might get
42:41
Speaker 1: sick of picking crabs. And that's why folks aren't eating
42:45
Speaker 1: a lot of these green crabs. Well, in this case,
42:49
Speaker 1: New Hampshire Distilling took up the problem and turned and
42:56
Speaker 1: this is where I really had. Here's here's what I
42:58
Speaker 1: don't like the language I'm worth distilling. It's not taking
43:02
Speaker 1: up the problem. Like it's not taking up the problem capitalizing.
43:08
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, okay, so I mean I thought,
43:13
Speaker 1: it's what do you mean by that? It's not taking
43:16
Speaker 1: up the problem. It would be like if I started
43:18
Speaker 1: eating let's say I eat dandelion salads. He took up
43:22
Speaker 1: the problems dandelions. He's been eating a dandelion salad at night.
43:27
Speaker 1: But take up the problem of dandelions, or might eating
43:31
Speaker 1: a dandelion salad? I get what you mean anyway. Um,
43:36
Speaker 1: they started with the bourbon base and then they added
43:41
Speaker 1: in this green crab stock are along with like bass
43:46
Speaker 1: seasoning and kind of classic crab stuff. And what you
43:49
Speaker 1: end up with is what they call something better than um.
43:57
Speaker 1: What the hell is the fireball? But it doesn't know
44:04
Speaker 1: now I'm not interested before. I can't even smell fireball,
44:08
Speaker 1: crab trapper green crab flavored whiskey. Wait, where does it
44:13
Speaker 1: say that that's the comparison? Fireball is nasty? Just eat
44:16
Speaker 1: a stick of like Big Red. I was just back
44:17
Speaker 1: at my hometown. I went to my hometown gas station,
44:20
Speaker 1: and the guy in front of me, which made me
44:21
Speaker 1: feel so much like I was in my hometown. The
44:22
Speaker 1: guy in from me bought a fistful a lotto tickets
44:26
Speaker 1: and then asked for a bottle of fireball, and they
44:29
Speaker 1: asked if he wanted it chilled or room town, and
44:32
Speaker 1: he was able to walk out. He's able to walk
44:35
Speaker 1: out with a fistball lot of tickets in a cold
44:38
Speaker 1: bottle of fireball. I can go cup. I can't even
44:43
Speaker 1: stomach drinking that in the summertime either it's like maybe
44:47
Speaker 1: in january ice fishing. But there's a there. It still
44:52
Speaker 1: is a bar called do drop you outside of West
44:55
Speaker 1: Glacier and they did off, you know, off say a liquor,
45:00
Speaker 1: so you could buy a bottle of liquor there. And
45:04
Speaker 1: this is the only place that's ever happened to me.
45:06
Speaker 1: But if you go in there and buy a bottle
45:08
Speaker 1: of liquor at the bar, they say, would you like
45:12
Speaker 1: cups and ice with that? Not? In addition to have
45:22
Speaker 1: you been on the on the kaibab right there in
45:24
Speaker 1: fre Donia you come down the hill off the Kaibab
45:26
Speaker 1: plateau and it's the center of the universe. Judd otto, guns,
45:31
Speaker 1: m o lotto and beer. Okay, So there is a
45:36
Speaker 1: good snippet here on on the green crab. They are
45:39
Speaker 1: probably one of the most successful invasive species that we
45:42
Speaker 1: have in North America, at least in the marine world.
45:45
Speaker 1: They can eat about forty muscles a day, just one crab.
45:50
Speaker 1: Each bottle has a pound of green crabs. And that's impressive.
45:53
Speaker 1: That is impressive, and in my immediate d I sent
45:56
Speaker 1: this to some folks in the in the culinary world
45:59
Speaker 1: because I to understand if there's what is the demand
46:04
Speaker 1: for like a good crab stock, so you know, you
46:07
Speaker 1: you don't go through the worry of picking everybody, just
46:10
Speaker 1: turn it all into a giant bats and crabstock. If
46:14
Speaker 1: there would be like a you know, canned crab stock
46:17
Speaker 1: type of market, I imagine there is, and that seems
46:20
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot better way to go than
46:22
Speaker 1: making it into something better than I wonder what the
46:26
Speaker 1: hangovers are like, Like you got feeling crabby, broa wake
46:31
Speaker 1: up in the morning, feel like you're rolling on a boat. Yeah,
46:34
Speaker 1: except for your walking sideways everywhere you go. We probably
46:38
Speaker 1: can't get this here in Montana if anyone at tam
46:41
Speaker 1: tam Worth Distilling wants to send us a bottle at mediator,
46:47
Speaker 1: uh A marine Bio just goes on to say, like,
46:49
Speaker 1: you know, it's unlikely that this whiskey, this whiskey bottle
46:52
Speaker 1: and enterprise is gonna have a serious impact. But she says,
46:57
Speaker 1: someone goes on to point out, I'm not reading it carefully.
47:00
Speaker 1: Know who points out? They go on to point out,
47:02
Speaker 1: if you factor in producing fishing bait with green crabs,
47:05
Speaker 1: whiskey with green crabs, fish sauce of green crabs, and
47:09
Speaker 1: just more and more incentivize the use um. It could
47:13
Speaker 1: be good. You know, one of one of the invasives
47:15
Speaker 1: that I felt that you could most like kind of
47:19
Speaker 1: get after in a way that felt productive is shooting
47:23
Speaker 1: lion fish. Yeah, because you go like in the Bahamas,
47:27
Speaker 1: we just ran a boat and go out and cruise
47:29
Speaker 1: for coral heads and it's just sand, sand, sand sand,
47:32
Speaker 1: and then there's coral heads. You've see him from million
47:34
Speaker 1: miles away on a sunny day and you go to
47:36
Speaker 1: a coral head and every coral head to go to
47:38
Speaker 1: the be like o lion fish or to lion fish.
47:41
Speaker 1: They're easy to get. They're like they just stand the ground,
47:43
Speaker 1: like they don't it's not in their mind to get away.
47:45
Speaker 1: They stand the ground, and so you shoot them. And
47:48
Speaker 1: he'd be like, this coral head is free of lion fish.
47:51
Speaker 1: And then you move on to the next one and
47:52
Speaker 1: shoot those, move on the next one and shoot those.
47:55
Speaker 1: And it seemed like guy, he seems to be able
47:56
Speaker 1: to kill them all. But man, they haven't gotten that
47:59
Speaker 1: problem solved yet. The incentivize that. That's when Steve started
48:03
Speaker 1: the intro to this segment here he is correct, like
48:06
Speaker 1: we love talking about like good uses for these invasives.
48:10
Speaker 1: And the one that they've gotten the most use out of,
48:14
Speaker 1: by and large, of something that we see as a
48:16
Speaker 1: real problem. Or it would be the Asian carp species.
48:20
Speaker 1: And so there's some school, some collegiate school programs that
48:25
Speaker 1: their culinary programs utilize you know, several thousand pounds of
48:29
Speaker 1: fish every year, UM in their their meal halls, and
48:32
Speaker 1: they're making actual, you know, tasty stuff. But then in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio,
48:40
Speaker 1: there's some actual per pound incentivized fisheries and and processing
48:46
Speaker 1: facilities for these fish where they've actually there's enough incentive
48:52
Speaker 1: government incentive that folks who commercially harvest catfish or buff
49:00
Speaker 1: flow or paddlefish do they call spoonbill out there um
49:05
Speaker 1: can switch over net sizes and start targeting specifically the
49:11
Speaker 1: Asian carp, which there are some food markets for, and
49:15
Speaker 1: there's some fertilizer markets for and stuff like that. Uh.
49:18
Speaker 1: And it's definitely something that we we need to get
49:21
Speaker 1: ahold of, which is why you know, crabby whiskey, get
49:27
Speaker 1: some get some headlines, and it says that there is no,
49:31
Speaker 1: uh no real market around green crabs. So if something
49:37
Speaker 1: got started, it would be the first ever. Uh, I'm
49:42
Speaker 1: gonna give you some very dated insight into the carp problem,
49:47
Speaker 1: the Asian carp problem, and differentiating it from the common
49:51
Speaker 1: European carp which fast of our waters, many of our waters.
49:55
Speaker 1: I spent some days with a guy that was a
49:57
Speaker 1: commercial netter okay, um. He was doing allow stuff that
50:02
Speaker 1: would wind out. He was catching a lot of those carpon.
50:04
Speaker 1: His primary buyer was using them for making a filter fish,
50:08
Speaker 1: so like canned fish preparation. And they're very concerned in
50:12
Speaker 1: those waterways about not catching like the native fish. I'll
50:17
Speaker 1: add that we caught a beaver, but that's just a
50:20
Speaker 1: side note. And so they'd regulate mesh size, okay. And
50:24
Speaker 1: he had to use whatever like an eight inch mash
50:26
Speaker 1: or something like a huge mesh that way all the
50:28
Speaker 1: bass right, like large moths, bluegills, crop ease, everything can
50:33
Speaker 1: get through the mesh. But it was a big enough
50:35
Speaker 1: mesh you kept it really catch a really big carp.
50:38
Speaker 1: And he said you could go into a stretch. The
50:40
Speaker 1: commercial guys could go into a big stretch of river
50:42
Speaker 1: with that high, that big mesh netting and really get
50:46
Speaker 1: it where you're not catching carp anymore. Like you catch them.
50:51
Speaker 1: It's it's just very the the way they use these
50:53
Speaker 1: saints very effective. Oh, after they come through, you're not
50:57
Speaker 1: catching they can work an area. Let's say you use
50:59
Speaker 1: an eight inch man, you can work an area with
51:02
Speaker 1: an eight inch mesh. Where you're like, we're does not
51:04
Speaker 1: catching them like we did, we must be having a
51:07
Speaker 1: positive impact. But then researches will point out the bio
51:12
Speaker 1: mass of the cart doesn't change, like the poundage per
51:15
Speaker 1: mile of carpon these stretches doesn't change. It's just not
51:19
Speaker 1: comprised of big ones, right, And so they'd be like,
51:24
Speaker 1: we need to be able to use smaller mesh. We
51:26
Speaker 1: need to be able to use do a six inch mesh.
51:28
Speaker 1: And then people be like, well, you know it could
51:30
Speaker 1: have ramifications for bass or whatever, and they use a
51:32
Speaker 1: sitien and then you kick ass with the new mesh
51:36
Speaker 1: and then you're catch slows. Meanwhile, per mile same pounded
51:40
Speaker 1: of cart, which which is why you see it's carrying capacity. Right.
51:45
Speaker 1: In this conversation around carbon specifically, you see a lot
51:48
Speaker 1: of prevention in the form of how do we get
51:52
Speaker 1: these fish to not spawn where you see like those
51:55
Speaker 1: bubble curtains and narrators and stuff that try to divert
52:00
Speaker 1: fish from areas where they would spawn. Yeah, it's a
52:04
Speaker 1: hell of it. I visited that electrical barrier on Lake Michigan.
52:08
Speaker 1: We're trying to keep him from entering the Great Lakes.
52:10
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's still up and running or not.
52:12
Speaker 1: A guy when out when I was sawing the people
52:13
Speaker 1: on that cart problem, he was saying like, I was like,
52:15
Speaker 1: what would actually fix the thing? And he said, what
52:18
Speaker 1: would actually fix the thing? And we'd never use it
52:21
Speaker 1: or be able to use it, and you wouldn't have
52:22
Speaker 1: public appetite for it because he goes. I could imagine
52:24
Speaker 1: there's gotta be some kind of virus or something that's particular.
52:31
Speaker 1: But who's gonna be the guy that pours out of
52:34
Speaker 1: the you know, who wants to play with the virus?
52:37
Speaker 1: Like he's like like path They're like there's They're like,
52:40
Speaker 1: if you really like there's maybe some pathogen or controlled
52:44
Speaker 1: studies say that nothing, nothing will go wrong, nothing bad
52:49
Speaker 1: app alright, Sean, we're gonna segue into raptors, uh, I
53:02
Speaker 1: mean lead ammunition yep. And we're gonna kick it off
53:05
Speaker 1: with Shawn's duck report. Got anything else to shape. You
53:17
Speaker 1: bet you had mentioned I don't know, a month ago
53:21
Speaker 1: or something, do a duck report, arm do a duck
53:24
Speaker 1: report on lead points, the lead shot band, what led
53:28
Speaker 1: up to it, whether it was successful. So, Chris, if
53:31
Speaker 1: I get something wrong here, which I'm pretty sure I
53:33
Speaker 1: don't have anything wrong, You're gonna have to correct me
53:35
Speaker 1: because this comes from your world. Really, I was raised
53:39
Speaker 1: at a time, o't Do you remember what year happened? Yeah,
53:43
Speaker 1: they tried several times, but when it ultimately happened was
53:47
Speaker 1: because you know, it's interesting, My first legal duck season
53:49
Speaker 1: was in six and there were people that were not
53:52
Speaker 1: duck hunting. They were they were like quitting duck hunting
53:56
Speaker 1: out of protest. Yeah, and that that some of them stuck,
54:01
Speaker 1: some of them just never came back, which is wild. Okay,
54:07
Speaker 1: So the lead shot ban um was a gradual crescendo.
54:13
Speaker 1: Late eighteen hundreds there started being reports of lead poisoning
54:18
Speaker 1: and waterfowl late eighteen hundreds. Yeah, they had a mass
54:22
Speaker 1: kill because guys like me and Spencer with them punt guns. Yeah. Well,
54:26
Speaker 1: it was mostly like commercial market areas that were punt
54:31
Speaker 1: gunning whole lakes um Texas seventy four they really started
54:38
Speaker 1: reporting it, and then in the early nineteen hundreds it
54:44
Speaker 1: turned into mass die offs because smoking wasn't even bad
54:47
Speaker 1: for you back then. It's just surprising. I don't need
54:51
Speaker 1: to be glue about. It's just surprising that at that
54:53
Speaker 1: time there was like the level of sophistication to take
54:58
Speaker 1: dead waterfowl and determine cause of death right and related
55:03
Speaker 1: to a related to a heavy metal and some of
55:06
Speaker 1: them weren't even making the correlation necessarily right away. They
55:11
Speaker 1: were like, there's a bunch of dead ducks here, and
55:15
Speaker 1: then they do a knee cropsy and find they just
55:19
Speaker 1: also happened to have letting their gizzards go out, and
55:23
Speaker 1: that's that's really where it started. Um, then you get
55:27
Speaker 1: into the early nineteen hundreds and they started having like
55:30
Speaker 1: mass kills, um hundreds and hundreds of birds on a
55:34
Speaker 1: single body water repeatedly seasonally. Yeah, and yeah, it definitely
55:40
Speaker 1: kept going faster and faster and more and more. Uh am,
55:45
Speaker 1: I correctness that the issue with ducks is that ducks
55:51
Speaker 1: are as they gather grit for their gizzard, they are
55:58
Speaker 1: finding lead shot and ingesting the lead and like ingesting
56:03
Speaker 1: the lead for grit for their gizzard. This isn't that
56:06
Speaker 1: they're all carrying around stray pellets. Well, it's no, it's
56:10
Speaker 1: not from It's definitely not from wounder wounded, hunter wound.
56:16
Speaker 1: It's it's mostly ingestion. They're like picking they see something like, oh,
56:20
Speaker 1: that makes a piece of great piece of grit from
56:21
Speaker 1: my crop. Yeah. And I mean they're getting it in
56:24
Speaker 1: both their gizzard and their stomach. It's not like just
56:28
Speaker 1: as they're picking up while they feed. They're picking it
56:30
Speaker 1: up while they feed. And people think, oh, how are
56:34
Speaker 1: they picking up that tiny little pellet in this big
56:37
Speaker 1: lace home? But it has it doesn't get to their
56:38
Speaker 1: stomach without going through their gizzard. Well what I'm what
56:41
Speaker 1: I mean is like that they're finding the lead shot
56:44
Speaker 1: in both places. It's not just poisoning them in the gizzard,
56:49
Speaker 1: it'll pay. It's passing intact, yeah, and into the gut.
56:53
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of comparison photos that the Fish
56:56
Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service had that shows like a normal ducks,
56:59
Speaker 1: how healthy stomach and healthy gizzard to uh a lead
57:03
Speaker 1: poison one. Um. But you know, one of the big
57:08
Speaker 1: pushbacks from hunter and I did not realize how controversial
57:11
Speaker 1: this was until I started really digging. And see this
57:15
Speaker 1: was interpreted by a lot of outdoorsman as a anti hunter,
57:22
Speaker 1: anti Second Amendment government overreach movement. Was not positioned as that.
57:28
Speaker 1: The hunter thought that's what it was, right, um. But
57:34
Speaker 1: and you know one of their big arguments was how
57:37
Speaker 1: is a duck picking up stray pellets? You know they're tiny,
57:40
Speaker 1: a little pellet because I've never seen it, because right, right,
57:44
Speaker 1: But well that's We've had a lot of people right
57:47
Speaker 1: in and be like I have checked every stomach and
57:48
Speaker 1: every gizzet of every duck and they killed law ducstion,
57:51
Speaker 1: like and I found a pellet mm hm. So you
57:56
Speaker 1: know it's anecdotable, but we hear that, right right, yeah. Um,
58:02
Speaker 1: but when you start breaking down like how much leads
58:05
Speaker 1: being dispersed on the environment, you know there's half pounds.
58:08
Speaker 1: So the average back then was a half pound of
58:10
Speaker 1: shot being you know, shot by a hunter per bird bagged,
58:16
Speaker 1: which comes out to four hundred pellets of number six lead.
58:21
Speaker 1: And you know that's per bird you shoot. Overall, their
58:26
Speaker 1: estimate was tons of lead shot being put into wetlands
58:31
Speaker 1: a year by waterfowl hunters. And there was that that
58:36
Speaker 1: was in the fifties. I think, um, this is got
58:40
Speaker 1: The guy that did this big study on this was
58:43
Speaker 1: a guy named Frank Bell Rose and he was the
58:44
Speaker 1: one that really brought it into like we got to
58:48
Speaker 1: do something about this. We need a management plan about
58:50
Speaker 1: lead shot. And that was in nineteen Yeah, like one
58:54
Speaker 1: of these things you have here. In one Lake, Michigan
58:56
Speaker 1: blue bill die off, ten stomachs were examined that held
58:59
Speaker 1: any were from forty eight lead pellets per bird. But
59:04
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that this guy was cooking the books.
59:07
Speaker 1: Boo boom. People are still hunting ducks. Yeah, but there's
59:13
Speaker 1: not like why is the why are the crops and
59:15
Speaker 1: stomach is not full of shot? I think one thing
59:19
Speaker 1: that would be really interesting to look at here would
59:22
Speaker 1: be your your hunter distribution, right like in methods of
59:27
Speaker 1: hunting during this study time, because I do have to
59:32
Speaker 1: wonder if there's higher concentrations on certain Martia's bodies of
59:36
Speaker 1: water than than we could have, how that distribution of
59:40
Speaker 1: actual hunting activity varies from then until today. Well, Sean
59:45
Speaker 1: hit him with that little detail you got near that
59:47
Speaker 1: little detail about a heavily hunted wetlands. Yeah, so and
59:50
Speaker 1: and that was a big part of it. You know.
59:53
Speaker 1: The argument is now a lot of that lead shot
59:55
Speaker 1: has been covered up by sediment because that So they
59:59
Speaker 1: did a bunch of sampling of major wetland areas that
1:00:03
Speaker 1: were like huge waterfowl hunting destinations, and they found some
1:00:08
Speaker 1: of those to have over a hundred thousand pellets per
1:00:12
Speaker 1: acre in the top three inches of the bottom sentiment,
1:00:16
Speaker 1: which is so man, see Sean did a good job,
1:00:18
Speaker 1: because he's not that I'm looking in here, Okay. From
1:00:23
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty eight to nineteen fifty four, they examined thirty
1:00:28
Speaker 1: six thousand gizzards six point six percent. Between nineteen thirty
1:00:34
Speaker 1: eight nineteen fifty four, thirty six sample size of thirty
1:00:38
Speaker 1: six thousand gizzards six point six p ingestion right had
1:00:42
Speaker 1: led in them with mallards seven. So there you go,
1:00:49
Speaker 1: go kill a hundred. So here's the tests for someone,
1:00:52
Speaker 1: now who someone who's like going to be like bullshit it, man,
1:00:56
Speaker 1: get a hundred ducks, especially if you hunt like a
1:01:01
Speaker 1: social hold, like a refew, like like you hunt a
1:01:03
Speaker 1: place that gets hunted, Go to a place it gets hunted.
1:01:05
Speaker 1: Shoot a hundred docks and see if you find seven
1:01:07
Speaker 1: percent to gotta steal or bismuth, pellet or gut be
1:01:12
Speaker 1: interesting if if it's constant through time, yeah yeah, and
1:01:18
Speaker 1: so okay. So where where it kind of like really
1:01:23
Speaker 1: got to the point of people having to do something
1:01:26
Speaker 1: about it was these die offs started becoming highly visible.
1:01:30
Speaker 1: Right you had TV and UM one that like was
1:01:38
Speaker 1: right perfect at the kind of the right time in
1:01:40
Speaker 1: the seventies when this was getting talked about more and more,
1:01:45
Speaker 1: and I think it was the National Wildlife Federation had
1:01:49
Speaker 1: already started trying to push for a lead ban. Fish
1:01:51
Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service wanted a lead ban, but they couldn't
1:01:54
Speaker 1: get it done. Um Lake Puckaway, Wisconsin. They end up
1:02:01
Speaker 1: with like over three thousand geese dead that we're winnering there.
1:02:05
Speaker 1: And the what ultimately what they said happened was that
1:02:09
Speaker 1: these geese winnered on a part of the lake that
1:02:12
Speaker 1: was shallow and had a lot of hunter um hunter use.
1:02:17
Speaker 1: And what year was this, m I can't remember exactly
1:02:22
Speaker 1: what year that was. It was either of the late
1:02:25
Speaker 1: seventies or early eighties, but it was right dear in
1:02:27
Speaker 1: the peak of the discussions. So the debate was heating up,
1:02:31
Speaker 1: and then there's all of a a sudden on TV. You
1:02:34
Speaker 1: know that a bunch of volunteers collecting thousands of dead geese,
1:02:39
Speaker 1: three thousand dead geese in a lake that had a
1:02:41
Speaker 1: eighteen thousand lead pellets per acre and three inches top
1:02:45
Speaker 1: three inches just so wild. It's a lot of dead geese.
1:02:51
Speaker 1: I'm trying to picture, like, um, an acre's good sized,
1:02:55
Speaker 1: chunker grown. I'd think to see a density map, like
1:02:59
Speaker 1: if you did a one hand, if you took your
1:03:01
Speaker 1: two hands and did a scoop of muck, you're probably
1:03:03
Speaker 1: grabbing one. And I'm sure yeah, and I'm sure it
1:03:07
Speaker 1: would probably be there would be something about how it
1:03:11
Speaker 1: lays out right, There would be areas probably with a
1:03:14
Speaker 1: lot of higher density just by how someone hunts the
1:03:17
Speaker 1: area or whatnot. Um, But you know, yeah, prevailing wind
1:03:22
Speaker 1: right just like I mean, just like if you're someone
1:03:25
Speaker 1: who knows where to look on an old pond for arrowheads,
1:03:30
Speaker 1: for bird points, it oftentimes has a lot to do
1:03:34
Speaker 1: with the prevailing wind in the area. Find your shotgun
1:03:39
Speaker 1: pellets around that same spot too. So But you know,
1:03:43
Speaker 1: bell Rose's point was not that these mass die offs
1:03:46
Speaker 1: are like a population threat. It's that there's so many
1:03:51
Speaker 1: other factors that come in Once waterfowl start dying from
1:03:54
Speaker 1: lead poisoning um, for example, take some two weeks to die,
1:04:00
Speaker 1: they start getting weird, isolating themselves, hiding in the weeds,
1:04:07
Speaker 1: making themselves more susceptible to predators. In addition to that,
1:04:12
Speaker 1: then you have you know, he he even pointed to
1:04:15
Speaker 1: like you can't even really count or no exactly how
1:04:19
Speaker 1: many baculi is um outbreaks, for example are because a
1:04:23
Speaker 1: lead poison duck dies and then you end up with
1:04:28
Speaker 1: a botulism outbreak because well just ultimately, if the more
1:04:34
Speaker 1: you know, the more you have waterfowl dyeing in random places,
1:04:37
Speaker 1: increased abundance of carrying, okay, overloading the system where scavengers
1:04:42
Speaker 1: are cleaning it up. There's great examples about that, but
1:04:46
Speaker 1: different and uh So, they tried to try to ban
1:04:51
Speaker 1: lead in seventy six. The Stevens Amendment blocked it, kicked
1:04:55
Speaker 1: that back to the States, and then that's where raptors
1:04:59
Speaker 1: came in and bald eagles in what happen, Well, they
1:05:07
Speaker 1: had sixty bald eagles from nineteen eighty to ninety five
1:05:12
Speaker 1: died from lead poisoning, and the National Wildlife Federation was
1:05:19
Speaker 1: um sued, fish and Wildlife Service for a ban on
1:05:24
Speaker 1: lead shot, referencing bald eagle deaths, and they actually blocked
1:05:30
Speaker 1: this suit because then fishing once that suit was like happening.
1:05:35
Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service said, okay, well band lead, so
1:05:39
Speaker 1: this court case doesn't happen. The National Wildlife Federation led
1:05:43
Speaker 1: the suit, yep, and it never it got dismissed. But
1:05:51
Speaker 1: I got that because bald eagles at that time, we're
1:05:53
Speaker 1: in e s A. They were in dangerous that same
1:05:56
Speaker 1: year they got kicked too, threatened I think, But yeah,
1:06:00
Speaker 1: they were on the essay still. And of course why
1:06:04
Speaker 1: do people care because the replacement was steel shot. It
1:06:07
Speaker 1: didn't work as good as lead shot. Yeah that's what
1:06:10
Speaker 1: people said, right, but um, okay that steel shot. There's
1:06:18
Speaker 1: stuff now that works phenomenally well. But I think, like
1:06:22
Speaker 1: any you know, you had to switch to bigger pellets, right,
1:06:27
Speaker 1: so you you used to use sixes and leads and
1:06:29
Speaker 1: also using twos and fours. So you're throwing I want
1:06:34
Speaker 1: to say, less lead out there, less material out there.
1:06:37
Speaker 1: You're throwing out less material per shot with with a
1:06:41
Speaker 1: smaller number of lethal things flying towards the target in
1:06:45
Speaker 1: their Yeah, this is it, just this is a whole
1:06:49
Speaker 1: another Duck report though, Um, it's talking about like the
1:06:54
Speaker 1: steel shot lethality table and all the work Tom Roster
1:06:58
Speaker 1: did going in you showing that steel is far more
1:07:03
Speaker 1: effective than it gets credit for, well in the heart
1:07:06
Speaker 1: and wounding loss and harvest rates. Actually, while they did
1:07:09
Speaker 1: decline initially after the ban, the the what they posited
1:07:14
Speaker 1: was based on their observations is as hunters learned how
1:07:18
Speaker 1: to use the new tool, wounding loss actually was less
1:07:23
Speaker 1: with steel than it was because they're like, I can't
1:07:28
Speaker 1: take that hill Mary anymore. Yeah, And a big part
1:07:33
Speaker 1: of that is, you know, lead and steel shoot differently.
1:07:38
Speaker 1: See everything about how you shoot as a shooter is different. Um,
1:07:46
Speaker 1: and it was not you know, like one of the
1:07:48
Speaker 1: things that when people talk about Pittman Robert's act, it
1:07:50
Speaker 1: really likes to point out that people were like really
1:07:51
Speaker 1: excited about it. Hunters wanted it right when they don't
1:07:56
Speaker 1: maybe some don't now according to what the Clyde and
1:08:00
Speaker 1: Georgia so, but it's it's like part of the part
1:08:06
Speaker 1: of the story of Pittman Robertson and the excise tax
1:08:09
Speaker 1: and ammunition that it was brought by the rod and
1:08:11
Speaker 1: gun clubs of America like they wanted this, They willingly
1:08:15
Speaker 1: did this right, and um, this was not we lose
1:08:19
Speaker 1: sight of it now. But this was not a popular
1:08:21
Speaker 1: thing now. I mean, there was definitely some waterfowl hunters there,
1:08:27
Speaker 1: you know, there was appetite for it with some, but
1:08:30
Speaker 1: not everybody, not even close. Um, some people welcomed it
1:08:35
Speaker 1: and didn't want I didn't want to see lead poisoning
1:08:39
Speaker 1: and waterfowl and and you know, bought in on the
1:08:42
Speaker 1: Bell Rose study and seeing how how bad lead shot
1:08:47
Speaker 1: could be on waterfowl numbers. But also there was a
1:08:50
Speaker 1: lot of people that just don't want to quit shooting
1:08:53
Speaker 1: Grandpa's gun with the fixed full choke and the thirty
1:08:55
Speaker 1: inch barrel. Right, Oh, you know, real quick, tell me
1:08:58
Speaker 1: about the guy that tell us the story out, the
1:09:00
Speaker 1: guy you know that was jailed for shooting a red tail. Well,
1:09:03
Speaker 1: hold on, I think that Sean's point there is is
1:09:06
Speaker 1: a great one that doesn't get brought up hardly at all,
1:09:11
Speaker 1: is the fact that not only were you forced to
1:09:15
Speaker 1: use a different ammunition, there is a ton of guns
1:09:19
Speaker 1: in use, like heavily in use that could not shoot steel,
1:09:23
Speaker 1: couldn't shoot a pellet. That that's hard too. Hard on
1:09:26
Speaker 1: the barrel at that time, at that time because the
1:09:29
Speaker 1: loads hadn't been developed. I mean, you look at what
1:09:31
Speaker 1: they've done in Europe in the last ten years. They
1:09:33
Speaker 1: are shooting steel out of parkers and parties, but they're
1:09:36
Speaker 1: adjusting the loads. So by adjusting the loads and decreasing
1:09:39
Speaker 1: the pressures, you can still you It's not that you
1:09:42
Speaker 1: can't shoot them. You can't shoot the loads that they
1:09:45
Speaker 1: had then. Well, I mean here in America is bigger
1:09:47
Speaker 1: is better? Okay, two and a half loadger better? Thing
1:09:55
Speaker 1: is uh? I was talking to uh, a guy called
1:09:59
Speaker 1: the Jazz Doctor, and we're talking about I was having
1:10:01
Speaker 1: a problem matching a jet outboard to a flat bottom boat.
1:10:06
Speaker 1: You remember my whole trial Tralation and I one one
1:10:10
Speaker 1: day it was entertaining over the phone with the jet Doctor,
1:10:13
Speaker 1: the idea that perhaps there's like, is it perhaps too
1:10:16
Speaker 1: much engine for the boat? And he said, I've been
1:10:20
Speaker 1: in this business forty years. I've never had a guy
1:10:22
Speaker 1: come to me and tell me he wants he needs
1:10:24
Speaker 1: a smaller motor. Yeah. Now you see boats with four
1:10:29
Speaker 1: hundred horsepower racing motors on them. Unbelievable. All right, talk
1:10:33
Speaker 1: about the redtail dude, real quick um or slow, I
1:10:37
Speaker 1: don't care. Oh, there's not much to it. I was
1:10:41
Speaker 1: a little bit wrong on that. It was not one
1:10:44
Speaker 1: red tail. It was one. It was it was one
1:10:49
Speaker 1: red tail with a game warden with him, was the problem. Yeah,
1:10:54
Speaker 1: so he uh he was working at a pheasant hunting farm,
1:10:59
Speaker 1: you know, in South Dakota, like a lot of people do,
1:11:02
Speaker 1: and was shooting red tails while he was out guiding
1:11:05
Speaker 1: pheasants because you know, pheasant honors eight red tales and uh,
1:11:13
Speaker 1: well that's a that's a great you know what I
1:11:15
Speaker 1: mean though, like you'll hear stories. I would hear stories
1:11:17
Speaker 1: from guys like I would hear stories. Got the generation
1:11:21
Speaker 1: prior to me would be like if you hunt on
1:11:23
Speaker 1: so and soals farm, he gets mad if you don't
1:11:26
Speaker 1: shoot the red tails, right, which is like a I'm
1:11:29
Speaker 1: sure it's still out there. But I think that there
1:11:31
Speaker 1: was a time when well he used to pay bounties
1:11:34
Speaker 1: on him, right, there was a time when it was
1:11:35
Speaker 1: like you were doing the right thing for the planet
1:11:37
Speaker 1: by killing every raptor you saw, because chicken farmers would
1:11:42
Speaker 1: thank you, you know whatever, And uh yeah, so I
1:11:46
Speaker 1: don't I don't know exactly how many he shot, but
1:11:51
Speaker 1: he did get six months federal prison time plus three
1:11:55
Speaker 1: months probation plus or no not three months house or
1:12:00
Speaker 1: plus four years probation. Big fine, Yeah we're talking about this.
1:12:04
Speaker 1: You could he could have killed his wife and landed
1:12:05
Speaker 1: in jail for last time. Yeah, I mean he did some,
1:12:10
Speaker 1: He did some. I mean that's serious time. Six months.
1:12:14
Speaker 1: What are you in here for? Shot a hawk with
1:12:19
Speaker 1: a game warden? And I think what they really got
1:12:22
Speaker 1: him on was after he shot it, he then picked
1:12:26
Speaker 1: it up, moved it and buried it, Which is like
1:12:30
Speaker 1: even on top of all that, on top of all
1:12:32
Speaker 1: that loss is hunting privileges four years Okay, Well, the
1:12:39
Speaker 1: sad thing is for a lot of those things there
1:12:41
Speaker 1: there are depredation permits for instances. You know, I'm not
1:12:45
Speaker 1: saying that they're justifying the killing of raptors, but where
1:12:49
Speaker 1: it does you know, impact an individual's livelihood, there there
1:12:53
Speaker 1: are ways that for that to be managed. But to
1:12:57
Speaker 1: say loosely quote unquote managed is you know, that's different
1:13:01
Speaker 1: than wanton shooting that where I grew up to the
1:13:04
Speaker 1: same thing. You go out there and every third telephone
1:13:07
Speaker 1: pole's got a red tail at it. M right, man,
1:13:11
Speaker 1: but that's changed in my lifetime. That's changed drastically. So yeah, okay,
1:13:16
Speaker 1: give me your spiel on I don't want don't deliver
1:13:20
Speaker 1: it like a spiel all right, he never does, he wanted.
1:13:24
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think where it's talking to the microphone. Okay,
1:13:26
Speaker 1: all right, I can hear myself breathing. I didn't. I
1:13:30
Speaker 1: want to. I want to. Let let's approach it this way,
1:13:33
Speaker 1: all right. When people are talking about um, when people
1:13:39
Speaker 1: are talking about leading the environment today from hunters and shooters, Okay,
1:13:44
Speaker 1: there is a widespread idea that this has something to
1:13:49
Speaker 1: do with the California condo. Oh god, that's okay, that's
1:13:55
Speaker 1: the lead in. Raise your hand. I'm trying to find
1:13:59
Speaker 1: an avenue. Raise your hand if you feel that if
1:14:01
Speaker 1: you're made aware of the issue years ago in relation
1:14:05
Speaker 1: to the California condor Okay, everybody, okay, even Chris Races.
1:14:12
Speaker 1: I'm relatively new. No, okay, well, yes, Unfortunately, unfortunately people
1:14:20
Speaker 1: think that this lad issue lad lead from hunting or
1:14:25
Speaker 1: the otherwise shooting of animals, whether it's depredation, whatever you want,
1:14:29
Speaker 1: whichever category it's it's assumed that it's only a problem
1:14:33
Speaker 1: because of the condor, and that's that was people's avenue
1:14:37
Speaker 1: to introduction, absolutely, and and from a scientific perspective, because
1:14:42
Speaker 1: we were focused on the condor because it was a
1:14:45
Speaker 1: species at such heightened level of endangerment, only twenty two
1:14:48
Speaker 1: birds left, and trying to figure out what was going
1:14:51
Speaker 1: on with them and saving them from extinction, not just
1:14:54
Speaker 1: for the sake of saving them, but for understanding what
1:14:57
Speaker 1: the hell is going on because the condor could you
1:15:00
Speaker 1: could argue that the condor has been on the road
1:15:02
Speaker 1: to extinction since well before the end of the last
1:15:05
Speaker 1: ice age, right, that's a that's a point I hear
1:15:08
Speaker 1: that with Well, you'll get into it, like with with
1:15:12
Speaker 1: the mega fauna extinctions o that stuff. Yeah, and the
1:15:16
Speaker 1: range reduction that was observed based on the recovery of
1:15:19
Speaker 1: of fossilized remains and all that stuff. That's that's what
1:15:21
Speaker 1: we use as inference. We don't know that's what happened.
1:15:23
Speaker 1: We just have inference that there was a tremendous range reduction.
1:15:27
Speaker 1: Condor bones have been found in Florida, Upstate, New York, Texas, Arizona,
1:15:32
Speaker 1: New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, every all over the place.
1:15:36
Speaker 1: But that's a ubiquitous bird. Well, it was widespread. And
1:15:41
Speaker 1: when you as you come to know more about the condor,
1:15:44
Speaker 1: and this is the key. As you come to know
1:15:46
Speaker 1: more about the condor, you come to know more about
1:15:49
Speaker 1: the fact that they can fly states away in a
1:15:53
Speaker 1: couple of days, They can fly up to six hundred
1:15:55
Speaker 1: miles in a couple of days, and then by the
1:15:57
Speaker 1: time we biologists get up there to go find out
1:15:59
Speaker 1: what the hell it's do and it's on its way back.
1:16:01
Speaker 1: So that that then tells you it's not that condors
1:16:04
Speaker 1: were so dense they were all across the US. Is
1:16:07
Speaker 1: they had the ability to travel widely, and of course
1:16:10
Speaker 1: it would be seasonal based on all their their biology.
1:16:13
Speaker 1: Learning about the natural history of a species, a single species,
1:16:17
Speaker 1: anytime you study it to the level we've studied condors,
1:16:20
Speaker 1: you learn more things about the greater environment. That's the
1:16:23
Speaker 1: benefit of the scientific process and what we glean from
1:16:26
Speaker 1: studying a species. We did happen to come to find
1:16:30
Speaker 1: out that the number one cause of mortality for the
1:16:34
Speaker 1: California condor range wide in the reintroduction since is lead poisoning.
1:16:40
Speaker 1: Now there were there were sufferings in here. How that's
1:16:43
Speaker 1: determined well, when birds are tracked with telemetry, when they
1:16:48
Speaker 1: are tracked with telemetry, both GPS and VHF telemetry, because honestly,
1:16:53
Speaker 1: because there are so few of them, you can track
1:16:55
Speaker 1: them on individual basis and because they were so endangered
1:16:58
Speaker 1: that the birds are monitored individual basis. So when I
1:17:02
Speaker 1: came onto the scene as a as a state biologist
1:17:04
Speaker 1: fairs on a game and fish, there were six of
1:17:06
Speaker 1: us out there in February of watching six condoors and
1:17:12
Speaker 1: that was a the first Birds release December twelfth, which
1:17:16
Speaker 1: I thought was cool as hell because we're out in
1:17:18
Speaker 1: there for a million cliffs, which is also a really
1:17:19
Speaker 1: cool cheap spot. So you know, like we're gonna scan
1:17:22
Speaker 1: for condoors and while they're sitting there, we can scan
1:17:24
Speaker 1: for sheep and there's some pronghorn there and we're getting
1:17:27
Speaker 1: paid for this. I didn't know you could have this
1:17:29
Speaker 1: as a career. But anyway, my point is we had
1:17:31
Speaker 1: six people watching six condoors. And while that might seem
1:17:35
Speaker 1: crazy because do you really need to study them that
1:17:37
Speaker 1: much to really, you know, understand well, I would argue
1:17:40
Speaker 1: that yes, if you want to know what affects their
1:17:44
Speaker 1: survival or lack thereof you do need to study them
1:17:47
Speaker 1: that way. So as we study them, and and we
1:17:50
Speaker 1: we were able to monitor the way in which a
1:17:53
Speaker 1: species that once ranged in the Grand Canyon region, we're
1:17:57
Speaker 1: not reintroducing them. And there's all these big questions out there.
1:18:01
Speaker 1: Will they find enough food because one of the early
1:18:04
Speaker 1: posts in the thirties as to why their populations were
1:18:06
Speaker 1: declining is because there wasn't enough food anymore. The birds
1:18:09
Speaker 1: too big, or the birds too big, or or they
1:18:11
Speaker 1: eat too much and they can't fly afterwards, or they
1:18:14
Speaker 1: are all these different things that you hear, these old
1:18:17
Speaker 1: wives tales. And for me, as you know, look, I
1:18:21
Speaker 1: I grew up outside of Bakersfield, California, and a little
1:18:23
Speaker 1: farming community. So it was the oil field and the
1:18:26
Speaker 1: farm and cattle. That's where I grew up. To me,
1:18:29
Speaker 1: the way I was introduced to the California condor is uh,
1:18:32
Speaker 1: it's an endangered species. It's going to ruin our life, right.
1:18:36
Speaker 1: And so as I studied more and more biology because
1:18:40
Speaker 1: of my interest in hunting and angling only, and then
1:18:43
Speaker 1: I found out you could have a career in it.
1:18:44
Speaker 1: And the more and more I studied, I realized that,
1:18:47
Speaker 1: you know what the problem wasn't the species, and the
1:18:49
Speaker 1: problem wasn't us ignorant, you know, hillbillies or rednecks out
1:18:53
Speaker 1: in Button Willow. The problem was there's a disconnect between
1:18:58
Speaker 1: science the people of the communities, and there's a lack
1:19:02
Speaker 1: of trust because of this inability to communicate. Because one
1:19:06
Speaker 1: of the ranchers that I worked for was the son
1:19:08
Speaker 1: of an original homesteader in the southern San Juanquin Valley.
1:19:11
Speaker 1: He as a kid saw as many as fifty condors
1:19:14
Speaker 1: on a cal carcass. As a kid, he had natural
1:19:18
Speaker 1: history in his experience and knew more about condors than
1:19:22
Speaker 1: the people who were studying them right as the last
1:19:24
Speaker 1: one was taken out the wild in the eighties. And
1:19:27
Speaker 1: I thought, Man, if we could just get these two
1:19:29
Speaker 1: folks talking, there would be a shared understanding of the
1:19:33
Speaker 1: landscape and what's happening. That would be far greater than
1:19:36
Speaker 1: just science or just somebody who says, yeah, they're on
1:19:39
Speaker 1: they're on their way out, because that's the way of
1:19:40
Speaker 1: the you know, that's the way of God's creatures. They
1:19:43
Speaker 1: go extinct. So we would have thought, had we not
1:19:47
Speaker 1: studied the species, we could have thought that they were
1:19:49
Speaker 1: just on their way out. Hit real quick. You just
1:19:53
Speaker 1: said it, but the last one was taken out the wild.
1:19:55
Speaker 1: I think it's important people, important point to get that,
1:19:58
Speaker 1: like there were so few that they were all the
1:20:01
Speaker 1: living ones were collected. Well yeah, because they were declining
1:20:05
Speaker 1: so steeply, and that's only been since, you know, since
1:20:08
Speaker 1: they started being studied and studied in earnest in the twenties, thirties,
1:20:11
Speaker 1: and really a pivotal study by Carl Cooeford in the forties.
1:20:14
Speaker 1: Well there was a break because he had to go
1:20:15
Speaker 1: to war, but when he got back he finished it up.
1:20:17
Speaker 1: That's the way folks were back then. Um. Anyway, Um,
1:20:21
Speaker 1: the population was in such such deep steep decline, and
1:20:25
Speaker 1: there were all these theories. One is there's not enough food.
1:20:27
Speaker 1: The other is you know, goofy things, like they're so dumb,
1:20:29
Speaker 1: they're just not surviving well. From a biologist, a burgeoning
1:20:34
Speaker 1: biologists like myself and kind of a kid of the landscape,
1:20:38
Speaker 1: I was like, you know when nature really produce a loser,
1:20:42
Speaker 1: because it seems to me evolutionary biology hones and polishes
1:20:45
Speaker 1: every species to its finest representation as a wild animal.
1:20:49
Speaker 1: So why all of a sudden are they struggling it's
1:20:52
Speaker 1: got to be a major imposition on the landscape or
1:20:55
Speaker 1: something that's going on. And then there were people said, oh,
1:20:57
Speaker 1: it's it's it's l a, you know, it's uh, they
1:21:00
Speaker 1: lost their habitat or condors are so sensitive that if
1:21:03
Speaker 1: you if they see somebody and they're sitting on their nest,
1:21:05
Speaker 1: they'll abandon their nest. But once again, from just basic
1:21:08
Speaker 1: biology and my experiences as a hunter and angler, I
1:21:11
Speaker 1: was like, does does nature build something like that? It
1:21:14
Speaker 1: doesn't make sense to me, right, or find me that
1:21:16
Speaker 1: other comparison, because if one behaves like that, there's something else. Well,
1:21:20
Speaker 1: there are a host of things that are sensitive to development.
1:21:23
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, yeah, Oh yeah, and there's that little town,
1:21:26
Speaker 1: you know, Los Angeles, right there in the core heart
1:21:28
Speaker 1: of their range. Right. But if you look at me
1:21:30
Speaker 1: that like that, they eat so much and they can't
1:21:33
Speaker 1: walk around and get killed. Okay, I'm like, well, but
1:21:35
Speaker 1: that would always have been the case. And the idea
1:21:39
Speaker 1: that habitat, the idea that you had, like a habitat issue,
1:21:44
Speaker 1: that doesn't seem to be as silly as like some
1:21:47
Speaker 1: other other things. Oh no, you can rank them, you
1:21:49
Speaker 1: can rank them, but ill, but I'll tell you. I'll
1:21:51
Speaker 1: give you a few examples about how by reintroducing the
1:21:54
Speaker 1: birds and studying them to the degree that we have,
1:21:57
Speaker 1: we've really narrowed it. Set aside, you know, were also
1:22:00
Speaker 1: some who said, and if you look at the early
1:22:02
Speaker 1: writings and um Audubon for example. I'm not I'm not
1:22:05
Speaker 1: bashing Audubon here, but Audbon was against the collection of
1:22:09
Speaker 1: the birds and starting a captive flock. And and you,
1:22:12
Speaker 1: I know you've probably read this. It was in Matheson's
1:22:15
Speaker 1: book America's what was it called Wildlife in America. I
1:22:19
Speaker 1: read it, but I don't remember it. Yeah, he talks
1:22:21
Speaker 1: about that that that, look, we need to to to
1:22:24
Speaker 1: conserve these birds and prevent their extinction and then maybe
1:22:27
Speaker 1: understand why they were going extinct, because it may not
1:22:30
Speaker 1: only benefit that species, it may benefit our understanding of
1:22:33
Speaker 1: the ecosystem, which would be far greater used. But you
1:22:36
Speaker 1: have to collect these birds and retain them in captivity
1:22:39
Speaker 1: so that you can go and figure out what the
1:22:41
Speaker 1: problem was. Because by the time they were studied intensively,
1:22:43
Speaker 1: their population was already in such a steep decline that
1:22:46
Speaker 1: a captive population was the only thing that saved them
1:22:48
Speaker 1: from extinction. So December Easter Sunday, the last wild condor
1:22:55
Speaker 1: was captured and removed from the wild cat Uh, you
1:23:00
Speaker 1: gotta go check this out. You guys would dig this
1:23:02
Speaker 1: a pit trap, dig a hole, put a netting across you,
1:23:09
Speaker 1: fill it with debris and things to hide, and put
1:23:11
Speaker 1: a dripping rotting and carcass on top of that and
1:23:14
Speaker 1: lie under it in weight so when the bird comes
1:23:16
Speaker 1: and lands, you can grab it by the legs. Who's
1:23:18
Speaker 1: the guy to grab that? I think it was Pete Bloom,
1:23:21
Speaker 1: who still is your tombstone. It's one of the same
1:23:29
Speaker 1: ways that falconers. He's still alive. Yeah, how does he? Yeah,
1:23:34
Speaker 1: I don't know. He's like he's the generation. I mean,
1:23:37
Speaker 1: he's one of our I look up to him as
1:23:39
Speaker 1: one of the He's one of the gods in the
1:23:41
Speaker 1: world of conservation biology because of the stuff that they
1:23:45
Speaker 1: were doing back then. So so anyway, I find that
1:23:49
Speaker 1: feller that bird that was captured, the last one. A
1:23:51
Speaker 1: C nine stands for adult condor nine because we're into
1:23:55
Speaker 1: labeling ship I like all those names. So A C
1:23:59
Speaker 1: nine was the ninth condor given a number, and now
1:24:02
Speaker 1: every condoor produced since then, and we're up into the
1:24:05
Speaker 1: eleven and twelve hundreds now both for birds produced in
1:24:08
Speaker 1: the wild end in captivity, every bird has a number,
1:24:10
Speaker 1: So a C nine was captured added to the captive flock. Luckily,
1:24:14
Speaker 1: the people running the captive propagation programs, the ones who
1:24:16
Speaker 1: really started it at Los Angeles Zoo in the San
1:24:18
Speaker 1: Diego Wild Animal Park or Zoo Global or what they're called,
1:24:21
Speaker 1: it's still the same outfit. They just changed their names. Well, um,
1:24:25
Speaker 1: that all started and they had that captive flock. A
1:24:28
Speaker 1: C nine was put in and paired up with a female,
1:24:30
Speaker 1: which again is not natural. And you have to understand
1:24:34
Speaker 1: two about the reproductive biology. Condors take eight years before
1:24:38
Speaker 1: they're able to reproduce in the wild. They're capable of
1:24:42
Speaker 1: it at five and six, respectively for males and females,
1:24:44
Speaker 1: but they're usually not successful until eight years of age,
1:24:47
Speaker 1: so they have a very slow rate of reproduction, which
1:24:50
Speaker 1: also lends to why weren't they able to respond naturally
1:24:55
Speaker 1: in the wild to increase causes of mortality because they
1:24:59
Speaker 1: don't produce quickly enough and their long lives species, so
1:25:03
Speaker 1: it's a difference between a K and are selected species. Anyway,
1:25:06
Speaker 1: go off on all kinds of tangents. So like a
1:25:08
Speaker 1: mus grats live a few months. It is throwing babies off.
1:25:10
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but these things got tough at out for yeah,
1:25:13
Speaker 1: close to a decade. Yeah, so to replace themselves and
1:25:16
Speaker 1: they only lay, well, not they, it's only the female.
1:25:18
Speaker 1: I don't know if you knew that, but I read that.
1:25:22
Speaker 1: I read that. I always say they, and my my
1:25:24
Speaker 1: daughter's pointed out, like, dad, the male doesn't lay anything,
1:25:27
Speaker 1: Like I know that, Like, yeah, but you say they
1:25:29
Speaker 1: the pair, Well, okay, they have an egg that the
1:25:33
Speaker 1: female lays and then they incubate it together. It takes
1:25:36
Speaker 1: like fifty seven days and then the thing hatches and
1:25:39
Speaker 1: then six months later it finally is ready to leave
1:25:41
Speaker 1: the nest. And the nest for six months six months, yeah,
1:25:45
Speaker 1: and then after it fledges, the parents take care of
1:25:48
Speaker 1: it for an additional year. So now you really have
1:25:50
Speaker 1: the currency of exchange for you know, the the game
1:25:54
Speaker 1: of replacing yourself for condors, that's very limiting. But in
1:25:58
Speaker 1: captivity they could get the it's to read annually. And
1:26:01
Speaker 1: not only that, but they could prey upon another thing.
1:26:03
Speaker 1: We learned about a lot of different birds. They multiple
1:26:06
Speaker 1: clutch if they lose their first egg to predation. In
1:26:09
Speaker 1: the wild, the female is able to recycle and lay
1:26:11
Speaker 1: another fertile egg. Sometimes that can happen two or three
1:26:14
Speaker 1: times if their nest is predated. But of course all
1:26:17
Speaker 1: these things in nature, they would have had to elaid
1:26:19
Speaker 1: it early enough. Anyway, I know I'm geeking out on
1:26:21
Speaker 1: that part of it, but we take it. I didn't
1:26:23
Speaker 1: want to talk about condors, you got you got it all.
1:26:25
Speaker 1: I love talking about condors, but you talked. But you
1:26:27
Speaker 1: started it with lead and then condors, which I'll tell
1:26:30
Speaker 1: you why that's that's a bad idea. I don't know. Well,
1:26:32
Speaker 1: you were getting down to six of you watching six birds. Yeah,
1:26:35
Speaker 1: six of us watching six birds. We learned a lot.
1:26:38
Speaker 1: So by multiple um you know, um double clutching, which
1:26:43
Speaker 1: were some of us probably old enough to we think
1:26:46
Speaker 1: that has a different all right, Well, double clutching and
1:26:50
Speaker 1: birds is getting too in the in the same same year,
1:26:52
Speaker 1: same season. So you put the other egg in the incubator,
1:26:55
Speaker 1: you raise it up. Well, you don't want it to
1:26:56
Speaker 1: imprint on people. So they used the puppet to make
1:26:59
Speaker 1: sure that it was fair it and nurtured until it
1:27:01
Speaker 1: was then put into a foster care and then you
1:27:03
Speaker 1: take those young and you release them too the wild.
1:27:05
Speaker 1: Then we released into the wild, we put transmitters on them.
1:27:07
Speaker 1: We watched them now and back to the six people
1:27:09
Speaker 1: watching six birds, and you're like, now, we'll find out
1:27:12
Speaker 1: what happens to these sons of bitches exactly. And as
1:27:14
Speaker 1: we did, we found out it took them several years
1:27:17
Speaker 1: to occupy in behavior and in space what we now
1:27:21
Speaker 1: think is natural behavior because it's it's not very you know,
1:27:24
Speaker 1: we're seeing like a seventy eighty mile home range. These
1:27:27
Speaker 1: birds are moving seasonally around following the food. So during
1:27:30
Speaker 1: hunting season they eat the hell out of gut piles.
1:27:33
Speaker 1: It's a great food source. During calving season, they're eating
1:27:36
Speaker 1: the drop calves, the ones that don't survive, they're eating
1:27:39
Speaker 1: the remains left behind. All of these things are we're
1:27:42
Speaker 1: learning because birds like a C nine last one captured
1:27:46
Speaker 1: put into captivity produce so many young artificially enhanced because
1:27:50
Speaker 1: we left to play with things as we learned about it.
1:27:52
Speaker 1: So we've been able to exponentially grow the population a
1:27:55
Speaker 1: short period of time to maximize the return on investment
1:27:58
Speaker 1: of the cost of this. To pump these birds out
1:28:00
Speaker 1: and then monitor them. Well, here's a neat thing about
1:28:02
Speaker 1: the testament to the condor's resiliency. A C nine finally
1:28:06
Speaker 1: was so well represented, and we have a team of
1:28:08
Speaker 1: geneticists that monitor this to make sure that for every
1:28:11
Speaker 1: release site they have an equal representation of genetic diversity,
1:28:14
Speaker 1: so that if we lose one population to some catastrophe,
1:28:18
Speaker 1: we still have that genetic stock somewhere, either in captivity
1:28:22
Speaker 1: in Arizona and Utah or in California and Baja. Those
1:28:25
Speaker 1: are the three main groups, and your dozen egg carton,
1:28:28
Speaker 1: you're there's a lot of parents represented in that dozen
1:28:32
Speaker 1: egg carton, well as many as you could have because
1:28:33
Speaker 1: they are only you know, the all time low was
1:28:35
Speaker 1: twenty two individuals. So from those twenty two came the
1:28:39
Speaker 1: breeding stock for the entire population today, which begs the
1:28:42
Speaker 1: question of is there enough genetic diversity for them to
1:28:44
Speaker 1: be viable in the first place. Luckily, in avian species
1:28:48
Speaker 1: that's not as much of an issue as it is
1:28:50
Speaker 1: with primates. So the Mauritius kestral is probably the best example.
1:28:54
Speaker 1: That was down to four birds in in the island
1:28:57
Speaker 1: of Mauritius, and now that bird has been brought back
1:28:59
Speaker 1: to over four repairs. It's either fods or four innerpairs. Yeah,
1:29:04
Speaker 1: but as you start studying now with our capacities and
1:29:07
Speaker 1: science to study that, to look back using genetics, to
1:29:10
Speaker 1: look back and see what that bottleneck was and how
1:29:12
Speaker 1: many family groups there are. Well, the Andean condor, the
1:29:15
Speaker 1: closest living relative to the California condor. It too went
1:29:19
Speaker 1: through a bottleneck that has like three or four family
1:29:21
Speaker 1: groups is all. They have, same thing with California condor. Anyway,
1:29:24
Speaker 1: My point about A C nine is he was so
1:29:27
Speaker 1: well represented they decided, why don't we rerelease him. He
1:29:31
Speaker 1: came from the wild, Let's put him back out there.
1:29:34
Speaker 1: Damned if he didn't get back back released and start
1:29:36
Speaker 1: breeding in the wild again and took a new mate
1:29:38
Speaker 1: and continued to produce young. He's probably pretty good at
1:29:41
Speaker 1: the reproducing part of this well because he had been Yeah,
1:29:43
Speaker 1: he'd been doing an annual basis right. My My point
1:29:49
Speaker 1: is people think that the condor is so fragile, and
1:29:51
Speaker 1: I think people have that misconception that all endangered species
1:29:54
Speaker 1: are so fragile that's why they're endangered. That's not the case.
1:29:58
Speaker 1: Species get endangered and we get upity as people when
1:30:02
Speaker 1: changes too rapid, because too rapid a change causes us
1:30:07
Speaker 1: to get tense about it, which and and too rapid
1:30:10
Speaker 1: a change for wildlife interrupts their ability to respond to it,
1:30:15
Speaker 1: like if there's a new cause of mortality. And so
1:30:17
Speaker 1: I'm prefacing all this stuff because it's gonna matter when
1:30:20
Speaker 1: we talk about lead. But what I know about lead
1:30:22
Speaker 1: is mostly from my work with condors. So we go on,
1:30:33
Speaker 1: we're studying these birds. They start, uh, first lead lead
1:30:37
Speaker 1: poisoning case comes in, and this gets back to finally
1:30:39
Speaker 1: answering your question, I do hear you, and I'm not
1:30:41
Speaker 1: ignoring you. How do you know about lead? How you
1:30:44
Speaker 1: know how many diet birds die of lead? We had
1:30:47
Speaker 1: a bird drop out of a tree south ron the
1:30:49
Speaker 1: Grand Canyon in the summer of two thousand. They went
1:30:52
Speaker 1: and recovered the bird, took it in, They did an
1:30:53
Speaker 1: EE cropsy, an autopsy for wildlife did an e cropsy.
1:30:57
Speaker 1: Come to find out the bird had lead pellets in
1:31:00
Speaker 1: it's digestive system, meaning it had consumed something with digestive
1:31:03
Speaker 1: in its digestive system and consumed that meat that had pellets,
1:31:06
Speaker 1: which is odd because it's summertime and it's a Grand
1:31:09
Speaker 1: Canyon that's what the hell is going on there? Well,
1:31:11
Speaker 1: I got my ideas and I almost got fired for it.
1:31:12
Speaker 1: A game and fish, but that's another story. Um Now
1:31:17
Speaker 1: we know that. I looked at the X ray and
1:31:18
Speaker 1: I was like, that's number six and sevens. I know
1:31:21
Speaker 1: those are sevens because I've reloaded a hell a lot
1:31:23
Speaker 1: of them, and that's a six and I see some
1:31:25
Speaker 1: of those in duck hunting. That's six and sevens. What
1:31:27
Speaker 1: in the world's going on there? One bird had thirty
1:31:29
Speaker 1: three pellets in its stomach. Turns out, after that bird
1:31:34
Speaker 1: we got the diagnosis back to pets, not lead pellets. No,
1:31:37
Speaker 1: we're gonna get the fragments. That's a whole another venue
1:31:39
Speaker 1: and it's way more conclusive than the where in the
1:31:42
Speaker 1: hell these pellets come from? So we um. After that
1:31:46
Speaker 1: bird gets diagnosed, we see a couple of weather birds
1:31:48
Speaker 1: looking lethargic, which is similar to any other vertebrate species
1:31:52
Speaker 1: and how they respond with lead poisoning. We're starting to
1:31:54
Speaker 1: see it, like, man, something wrong with this bird. It's lethargic,
1:31:56
Speaker 1: it's not going anywhere, it's not feeding with the rest
1:31:58
Speaker 1: of the birds. You go in and and well, let's
1:32:00
Speaker 1: trap the population we found thirteen birds after trapping the
1:32:05
Speaker 1: population in two thousand. I can't remember what the total was,
1:32:08
Speaker 1: but we had thirteen birds that had pellets in their
1:32:12
Speaker 1: gut and someone were sick and we had to keylate them.
1:32:14
Speaker 1: So luckily you can keylate the same process we use.
1:32:17
Speaker 1: Keylating is the is the Basically it's a you inject
1:32:20
Speaker 1: a solution and humans they do it through I V
1:32:23
Speaker 1: and the root word keel is claw and and it
1:32:26
Speaker 1: molecularly binds to the lead and then can be passed
1:32:28
Speaker 1: through the system. So in condors we just give them
1:32:32
Speaker 1: two injections a day and the intermuscular injections in the
1:32:35
Speaker 1: pack and then it helps to reduce the lead. It
1:32:38
Speaker 1: debriates more quickly because if it doesn't get taken out
1:32:41
Speaker 1: of the system like other vertebrate system, lead precipitates out
1:32:44
Speaker 1: of the blood stream into the organs, into the bone
1:32:46
Speaker 1: and brain, where there's an increasing difficulty of getting rid
1:32:50
Speaker 1: of it because the half life of lead and blood
1:32:52
Speaker 1: is like fourteen days. Half life of lead in the
1:32:54
Speaker 1: brain might be forty years. So we can start doing
1:32:56
Speaker 1: real damage with accumulations over a lifetime. Can we to
1:33:00
Speaker 1: find deporate? Oh gosh, yeah, I can't believe I used
1:33:04
Speaker 1: words of that. No, it's cool. No, people get to
1:33:06
Speaker 1: learn stuff. Deporation is the ability or the way in
1:33:14
Speaker 1: which a a an element. In this case, it precipitates
1:33:19
Speaker 1: out of the system. So they're different ways. Some of
1:33:21
Speaker 1: it is through waste, some of it is through being
1:33:23
Speaker 1: locked up into other compartments. So sorry, snort, I thought
1:33:30
Speaker 1: that was you for a minute. So um so, So
1:33:35
Speaker 1: we learned that lead poisoning in fact is something that
1:33:38
Speaker 1: reared its ugly head in our reintroduction program in Arizona.
1:33:42
Speaker 1: Now this wasn't unknown. There were studies in the eighties
1:33:44
Speaker 1: where they found a few birds and this gets back
1:33:47
Speaker 1: to another thing I was talking about earlier. They found
1:33:49
Speaker 1: a few birds near waterways and they had such huge
1:33:52
Speaker 1: crops that it looked like they were they had gorged themselves.
1:33:57
Speaker 1: But one of the effects that lead poisoning has on
1:34:00
Speaker 1: on a condor is, like other vertebrate species, there are
1:34:03
Speaker 1: neural neural impacts. They're neural pathways that are blocked and
1:34:07
Speaker 1: you get paralysis. And this happens with humans and lead
1:34:10
Speaker 1: poisoning as well. Um So, the condor's digestive system is paralyzed. Therefore,
1:34:16
Speaker 1: the sphincter that controls the food from the crop that
1:34:19
Speaker 1: goes down through the proventriculous and ventriculous and into the gut.
1:34:23
Speaker 1: It can't function anymore. So they're starving essentially, and they
1:34:28
Speaker 1: can't they they they're still eating more and more and more,
1:34:31
Speaker 1: and so they're filling up this huge crop. And because
1:34:33
Speaker 1: they're in a weakened state because they're not processing food,
1:34:36
Speaker 1: they can't fly. And because they can't fly and they're
1:34:39
Speaker 1: not processing food, they usually don't need metabolic water because
1:34:43
Speaker 1: they can I mean, they don't need water because they
1:34:45
Speaker 1: can get water through the metabolic processes of processing their food.
1:34:50
Speaker 1: So if they're not getting the benefit of their food,
1:34:52
Speaker 1: they're eating themselves into this and gorge state and they're
1:34:56
Speaker 1: not getting the moisture they need to go to water.
1:34:58
Speaker 1: So these birds were found I learned this when I
1:35:00
Speaker 1: was doing my dissertation research. And so we found that
1:35:04
Speaker 1: these birds would be there with this huge crop and
1:35:07
Speaker 1: they couldn't fly. It wasn't because they had over eaten.
1:35:10
Speaker 1: It's because they were dying lead poisoning, and they'd be
1:35:12
Speaker 1: collected near water. Yeah, yeah, and and that's common. So
1:35:15
Speaker 1: over like here's where this wive's tail came from exactly,
1:35:18
Speaker 1: like exactly, thank you. That was the point I wanted
1:35:20
Speaker 1: to come all the way back to. So as I
1:35:22
Speaker 1: started researching this, and because you know when birds go
1:35:26
Speaker 1: go silent on telemetry or GPS, when they're GPS is
1:35:30
Speaker 1: moving around as we expect them to, and ban they
1:35:33
Speaker 1: stop and they're there for two weeks. Something's wrong. You
1:35:36
Speaker 1: go there and and we started putting this together, is
1:35:38
Speaker 1: like is there a creek, yep, go to that creek,
1:35:41
Speaker 1: hike up that creek. We're gonna find that bird. So
1:35:43
Speaker 1: you get your VHF telemetry. You'd either fly at first
1:35:46
Speaker 1: to kind of narrow it down, and then we'd go
1:35:48
Speaker 1: in by by you know, a TV and then hike
1:35:50
Speaker 1: in the rest and then we would would find that bird.
1:35:53
Speaker 1: And sure enough it's got a full crop. And it
1:35:55
Speaker 1: smells because the crop is soured, which is not normal
1:35:58
Speaker 1: for I mean it it's when you smell like a
1:36:00
Speaker 1: like a paragrine that's just eating, that's just eating a meal.
1:36:04
Speaker 1: It doesn't smell what people think. It smells like, oh
1:36:06
Speaker 1: it's dead meat or it's red meat. It has a
1:36:08
Speaker 1: sweet smell, just like a good piece of elk does
1:36:10
Speaker 1: you know, and condors when they're scavenging, they're scavenging on
1:36:14
Speaker 1: carcasses when they're new because they find them by eyesight,
1:36:17
Speaker 1: not by their smell, and so their big bill allows
1:36:20
Speaker 1: them to tear into carcasses that other scavenging species like
1:36:23
Speaker 1: turkey vultures can't do. So condors are eating fresher carrying,
1:36:27
Speaker 1: if there is such a thing. So they usually don't stink.
1:36:29
Speaker 1: You can smell when they're sick and they have a
1:36:31
Speaker 1: soured crop and you can see it because it looks
1:36:34
Speaker 1: like a big balloon. Um. So we're so we're learning
1:36:38
Speaker 1: all this stuff, and then I start reading these old
1:36:40
Speaker 1: papers from the eighties where they said, well, we know
1:36:41
Speaker 1: lead poisoning could be a contributing factor. Well, as it
1:36:44
Speaker 1: turns out, lead poison is the number one factor. And
1:36:48
Speaker 1: so for us, that's how we came to our understanding
1:36:51
Speaker 1: of lead poisoning and how it could have really contributed
1:36:55
Speaker 1: to the steep decline and near extinction. And so rather
1:36:59
Speaker 1: than rest thing on that, we went to our partners
1:37:01
Speaker 1: that airs on the Game and Fish and Utah Division
1:37:03
Speaker 1: Wildlife and said, hey, folks, we've been monitoring these birds
1:37:06
Speaker 1: now since and beginning in two thousand two when the
1:37:11
Speaker 1: condors found the Kaibab plateau and they started feeding on
1:37:16
Speaker 1: gut piles in like, this was the seasonal thing you did.
1:37:19
Speaker 1: It's like State Fair in Bakersfield, right, everybody goes there. Well,
1:37:22
Speaker 1: hunting season on the Kaibab. All the condors. You can
1:37:25
Speaker 1: see all their location data if they're wearing gps is
1:37:28
Speaker 1: or we're tracking them with VHF. They all go to
1:37:31
Speaker 1: the Kaibab and we get a signal in the stationary
1:37:35
Speaker 1: signal means they're either perched or they're perched because they're
1:37:37
Speaker 1: they're feeding. Well, you have to wait awhile because they
1:37:40
Speaker 1: stop and rest and then fly quite a bit. But
1:37:43
Speaker 1: if they're there for a couple of hours and there's
1:37:45
Speaker 1: five or six birds, you go there and you rush
1:37:47
Speaker 1: up and there you are at a camp, at hunters camp,
1:37:50
Speaker 1: and there's a bloody greasy spot in the pine needles
1:37:52
Speaker 1: over there, and there's a bunch of condoors with big
1:37:54
Speaker 1: fat crops, and the hunters are long gone, and there's
1:37:57
Speaker 1: the bones, there's the hide, and the condors are fat
1:37:59
Speaker 1: and happy. You're like, great, it's a great food source.
1:38:02
Speaker 1: Until we started seeing seasonally high levels of lead speaking
1:38:07
Speaker 1: coinciding with the hunting season. So we took and sampled
1:38:11
Speaker 1: the bird's blood every time we caught them so that
1:38:15
Speaker 1: we could have samples of blood year round. And sure enough,
1:38:17
Speaker 1: we saw a spike that coincided with October November, which
1:38:20
Speaker 1: was when the two deer hunts are in the Kibab.
1:38:22
Speaker 1: But you're not seeing deaths at this point, oh no, No,
1:38:24
Speaker 1: deaths were creeping along. And then after like two or
1:38:27
Speaker 1: three years of consistent use of the kaibab, you could
1:38:30
Speaker 1: count on it. We were going to lose six to
1:38:32
Speaker 1: ten condors a year to lead poisoning. And that's when
1:38:35
Speaker 1: Steve we finally found the pictures in the radiographs. We
1:38:39
Speaker 1: we got an X ray machine and if a bird
1:38:41
Speaker 1: was sick and it had a high blood lead level,
1:38:43
Speaker 1: we would X ray it and sure as hell we'd
1:38:46
Speaker 1: find fragments. And then we started asking a question of okay,
1:38:49
Speaker 1: but wait a second, is this because of wounding loss?
1:38:53
Speaker 1: We didn't. We didn't yet understand the relationship between gut piles.
1:38:57
Speaker 1: So being lifelong hunters and being you know, the fund
1:39:00
Speaker 1: is founded by hunters falconers who don't do d and
1:39:03
Speaker 1: d uh, so they say, so we said, well, hell,
1:39:11
Speaker 1: let's do a study because because wounding loss we know
1:39:14
Speaker 1: is only about ten eleven percent in deer hunting, we
1:39:16
Speaker 1: looked at studies all over the place and like, we're
1:39:17
Speaker 1: not talking about ten or eleven percent of the dear
1:39:19
Speaker 1: harvested being the source of lead poisoning that accounts for
1:39:23
Speaker 1: of the condor flock having high lead levels. We're talking
1:39:26
Speaker 1: about something more ubiquitous on the landscape. We've got to
1:39:28
Speaker 1: figure out how much lead there can be. So we
1:39:31
Speaker 1: did our first study where we went and shot thirty
1:39:33
Speaker 1: deer up in Wyoming at one of our our board
1:39:35
Speaker 1: members places, and and sure enough, this was another point
1:39:39
Speaker 1: in my personal wildlife career is like, are you kidding me?
1:39:42
Speaker 1: We're all got five dopon permits and we're gonna go
1:39:45
Speaker 1: do this study and we're gonna shoot all these deer.
1:39:47
Speaker 1: We're gonna x raym hole. We're gonna shoot him with
1:39:50
Speaker 1: everything from a two forty three to three wimmag x
1:39:53
Speaker 1: ray m hole. Then we're gonna gut them into a
1:39:55
Speaker 1: supplement tub. If any of you know what that is.
1:39:57
Speaker 1: You know they find them out in the field all
1:39:59
Speaker 1: the time. We throw in the supplement tub. Then we're
1:40:00
Speaker 1: gonna xtray the supplement tub. It's that thing that you
1:40:03
Speaker 1: briefly know as an animal and you throw your binoculars
1:40:06
Speaker 1: on it. What the hell is a big bucket doing out,
1:40:09
Speaker 1: especially when you're hog hunting in California. So so we
1:40:14
Speaker 1: started extraying um these carcasses of deer hole at a
1:40:18
Speaker 1: with a veterinarian up there, and we put an narrow
1:40:20
Speaker 1: shaft through the wound channel so we could hold it
1:40:22
Speaker 1: perfectly straight up and down, so that the wound channel
1:40:25
Speaker 1: was in a kilumter fashion, so that when we had
1:40:28
Speaker 1: the x ray, we could also see if fragmentation occurred,
1:40:31
Speaker 1: how far those fragments UM got away from the bullets path.
1:40:36
Speaker 1: So we would started being blown away with just that alone.
1:40:40
Speaker 1: And we're like, man, that's a lot of that's a
1:40:42
Speaker 1: lot of lead. But still most we take the deer
1:40:45
Speaker 1: out of the we got it in Arizona. We got it,
1:40:47
Speaker 1: and we take it out of the field. And so
1:40:49
Speaker 1: we're like, well, let's do the gut piles. This blew
1:40:52
Speaker 1: our minds and we're lifelong hunters. We x rayed those
1:40:56
Speaker 1: fragments and and I'll give you I won't say the
1:40:58
Speaker 1: names of the manufacturers because I don't pick on anybody.
1:41:00
Speaker 1: But anyway, a soft point lead core bullet that everybody
1:41:04
Speaker 1: has probably used in their life and most common on
1:41:07
Speaker 1: the shelf. It's said to retain sixty four to sixty
1:41:10
Speaker 1: percent of its mass. Damn sure does. It's perfect. The
1:41:14
Speaker 1: mushroom looks beautiful when you actually that gut pile. And
1:41:18
Speaker 1: and people say not, probably your listeners. They say, well,
1:41:22
Speaker 1: I don't shoot them in the guts. Well, you know
1:41:23
Speaker 1: what I mean, everything for and aft of the diaphragm
1:41:26
Speaker 1: is what we call the gut. You're leaving on the ground,
1:41:28
Speaker 1: but you're leaving on the ground or the grolic if
1:41:30
Speaker 1: you're in you know, Ireland or whatever. No, that's that's
1:41:33
Speaker 1: diaphragm back garlic? Is this diaphragm back? All right? Well
1:41:37
Speaker 1: let see there it goes a t question. Yeah, there
1:41:40
Speaker 1: you go. Get that in there. I hope he does
1:41:42
Speaker 1: ask about that. So anyway, um that when we actually
1:41:47
Speaker 1: the gut piles, that's what blew our minds. A single
1:41:50
Speaker 1: shot from say a hundred thirty grain two seventy soft
1:41:53
Speaker 1: soft lead core tip bullet could produce as many as
1:41:56
Speaker 1: four fragments from a single shot. Holy cow, it looks
1:42:00
Speaker 1: like a snowstorm. And so I started investigating and looking
1:42:03
Speaker 1: into the snow storm. You know, I didn't know what
1:42:05
Speaker 1: to call it at the time, but I said, well,
1:42:08
Speaker 1: there's gotta be fragmentation studies, you know, elsewhere, especially during wartime,
1:42:13
Speaker 1: because unfortunately, it's not like you see on the John
1:42:16
Speaker 1: Wayne flicks. You know, take a shot of whiskey, bite
1:42:18
Speaker 1: this dick, I'll get that bullet out. Well, you might
1:42:20
Speaker 1: get the core of the slugout, but you're not getting
1:42:22
Speaker 1: a let out. And there's what was defined in wartime
1:42:25
Speaker 1: as the snowstorm effect, which was the fragmentation that occurs.
1:42:30
Speaker 1: And it's basically the stripping off of the front end
1:42:32
Speaker 1: of that bullet as it comes in hot with its
1:42:35
Speaker 1: highest velocity and as it begins to lose velocity because
1:42:38
Speaker 1: it's losing mass, little pieces are being stripped off, and
1:42:41
Speaker 1: it looks like this little galaxy. And that's what these
1:42:44
Speaker 1: X rays look like. Uh, let me hit you with
1:42:47
Speaker 1: some what about is ms? You bet? What was going
1:42:51
Speaker 1: on like when the hide hunters and the commercial hunters,
1:42:56
Speaker 1: we're re shedding like shiploads of condors. I don't know,
1:43:00
Speaker 1: if you look at the condor's estimated decline, and you
1:43:02
Speaker 1: look at our increase in those activities, it looks like
1:43:06
Speaker 1: an inverse relationship wine inverse relationship. Well, oh got it? Yeah,
1:43:13
Speaker 1: maybe I said that wrong. I don't know, honey, activity
1:43:15
Speaker 1: is going up and then the harvest. So someone could
1:43:19
Speaker 1: have it. You had the right tool kit, you could
1:43:21
Speaker 1: have in eighteen seventy gone out and found lead contamination
1:43:28
Speaker 1: and condors and might have charted a declining if I
1:43:34
Speaker 1: if I was a betting man and I had the
1:43:35
Speaker 1: money to bet, I'd be betting on that. Because look,
1:43:39
Speaker 1: and that's the beauty of this study. We weren't looking
1:43:42
Speaker 1: for lead to be the problem. We were looking and
1:43:45
Speaker 1: open to the idea of what what are the problems
1:43:48
Speaker 1: that contribute to Maybe it is the lack of genetic variability,
1:43:52
Speaker 1: stuff like that. We were thinking that. And there were
1:43:54
Speaker 1: people who said that all these birds hatching captivity, they're
1:43:56
Speaker 1: not going to know how to breed. And I was like, again,
1:44:00
Speaker 1: would nature produce something like that in just a few generations?
1:44:04
Speaker 1: And get this, Some of the birds we released when
1:44:06
Speaker 1: they became of breeding age at five and six years
1:44:09
Speaker 1: of age, they chose caves in the Grand Canyon that
1:44:12
Speaker 1: later through investigation of those caves were used by their
1:44:15
Speaker 1: ancestors in the place to see there were fonal remains
1:44:20
Speaker 1: that were carried there, likely by condors, because you're not
1:44:23
Speaker 1: going to get a Harrison's Mountain goat uh tooth, you know,
1:44:27
Speaker 1: in in one of those caves on the sheer red wall. Yeah,
1:44:32
Speaker 1: it was kind and they found condor remains and those
1:44:35
Speaker 1: condors that were hatched in captivity. Who by some people's assertions,
1:44:39
Speaker 1: you know, they're not gonna know what to do, Well,
1:44:40
Speaker 1: yeah they did, and they did it just like you know,
1:44:42
Speaker 1: they're great, great, great great whatever uh did. So we
1:44:46
Speaker 1: became we became more and more confident that what we're
1:44:49
Speaker 1: seeing is more indicative of of what a wild condors doing.
1:44:53
Speaker 1: Like people said, well, there's not enough food out there. Again,
1:44:56
Speaker 1: I think about that and and a lot of what
1:44:58
Speaker 1: I think about as a conversation guys have had on
1:45:00
Speaker 1: this podcast. Wait a second, we're at the peak of
1:45:03
Speaker 1: productivity on the landscape right now with respect to carrying
1:45:07
Speaker 1: the potential for carrying wildlife populations of deer and elk
1:45:11
Speaker 1: and turkeys and whatever else you want to talk about.
1:45:14
Speaker 1: The the the age of conservation has produced an abundance
1:45:18
Speaker 1: of biomass of potential carrying. And then you add from
1:45:22
Speaker 1: the years of the Spaniards on through to today, the
1:45:25
Speaker 1: introduction of domestic stock and having the stocking rates we
1:45:29
Speaker 1: use on the landscape, I would posit that there might
1:45:31
Speaker 1: be more potential carrying today than there might have been
1:45:35
Speaker 1: right after the last the end, the less ice age
1:45:38
Speaker 1: when you factor in live stock. It's interesting. Oh, absolutely,
1:45:41
Speaker 1: Now there's because in a lot of areas you just
1:45:43
Speaker 1: you're you're constantly making sure that you're hitting max capacity. Yeah,
1:45:47
Speaker 1: and and people have made the argument. I think it's
1:45:50
Speaker 1: worthy the most. You know, with the the advent of
1:45:53
Speaker 1: veterinary care, the loss rates are are much less too,
1:45:56
Speaker 1: So one could argue, you know, I'm just saying that
1:45:59
Speaker 1: from what you've seen and observing the condors. We put
1:46:02
Speaker 1: food out there when we release birds because our management
1:46:05
Speaker 1: tool is the release site. If we can't keep them
1:46:08
Speaker 1: coming back to the release site, we can't go trap them.
1:46:10
Speaker 1: They're damn hard to trap once they're out in the field. Um,
1:46:14
Speaker 1: we we thought, well, we don't want them to come
1:46:17
Speaker 1: dependent on the food that we put out, So like
1:46:20
Speaker 1: five six months after you know, this is in the
1:46:22
Speaker 1: early years. We put the food out there, we'd move
1:46:25
Speaker 1: it every night, make them work for it, make them
1:46:27
Speaker 1: have to do what they're going to have to do
1:46:28
Speaker 1: in the landscape to survive. And then later we found
1:46:31
Speaker 1: that it doesn't matter what you do and how much
1:46:33
Speaker 1: foods there come the flying season as soon as March
1:46:36
Speaker 1: and April hit in northern Arizona and southern Utah and
1:46:39
Speaker 1: the winds pick up, Hey fuels cheap. Condors are gliding birds.
1:46:43
Speaker 1: They have nine and a half foot wingspan. They're gonna
1:46:45
Speaker 1: use it and they're gonna go and they're gonna feed elsewhere.
1:46:48
Speaker 1: So they're not dependent on the food. So we're beginning
1:46:50
Speaker 1: to answer these original questions. Was that their reproductive biology?
1:46:53
Speaker 1: Was it the amount of food on the landscape. And
1:46:56
Speaker 1: then you know people saying that they're they they're so uh,
1:47:00
Speaker 1: they're so vulnerable to people. Does that make sense? For
1:47:05
Speaker 1: as long as humans have hunted in North America, condors
1:47:09
Speaker 1: have been here, and condors follow scavengers, I mean follow predators.
1:47:13
Speaker 1: So I would argue that wait a second, condors aren't
1:47:16
Speaker 1: looking at us as a predator. And with the birds
1:47:19
Speaker 1: we see produced today, they're not afraid of humans, which
1:47:21
Speaker 1: is another major problem when it comes to people that
1:47:24
Speaker 1: have shot condors, which still happens today unfortunately. But they're
1:47:28
Speaker 1: not fearful of humans because we're a predator and they
1:47:31
Speaker 1: probably followed predators. Can you imagine in one of those
1:47:33
Speaker 1: old buffles, they don't look at us as a predator
1:47:35
Speaker 1: of them, of them, but they look at us as
1:47:37
Speaker 1: a predator that produces carrying were a food source. So
1:47:40
Speaker 1: can you imagine one of those buffalo jumps if there
1:47:42
Speaker 1: were condors that extended out into the planes, you know,
1:47:45
Speaker 1: which is entirely possible, and how that would have supported
1:47:49
Speaker 1: a population of condors long after you know, the natives
1:47:52
Speaker 1: left and there's there's so many tangents here. Well yeah,
1:47:56
Speaker 1: and look, well this this is all great, but in
1:47:58
Speaker 1: the interest of time, let's let's up to something. Uh.
1:48:03
Speaker 1: Out of that research, and I'm sure that there was
1:48:06
Speaker 1: plenty of fighting and suing, okay, but out of that
1:48:10
Speaker 1: research we get what I brought up initially, hunters and
1:48:14
Speaker 1: their ammunition, and we came to know about the condor
1:48:18
Speaker 1: recovery area, and folks were introduced to the idea of
1:48:24
Speaker 1: the FURST, the first widespread ammal restriction since the water
1:48:31
Speaker 1: foul the first widespread ammal restriction since the waterfowl. All right,
1:48:38
Speaker 1: you're jumping. I'm gonna have to back you up though,
1:48:40
Speaker 1: because you're jumping straight to the ban in California. I assume. Yeah,
1:48:44
Speaker 1: it wasn't that, Like, well, it's it's spread to other places, right,
1:48:47
Speaker 1: like portions of Arizona had were in the condo recovery area. No. Yeah,
1:48:51
Speaker 1: the recovery, the addressing the lead issue as it was
1:48:56
Speaker 1: UM defined by condors. Addressing that began in Arizona and
1:49:02
Speaker 1: Utah long before the band in California. Yeah, and our
1:49:06
Speaker 1: approach was entirely differently. Okay, well that's always trying to
1:49:09
Speaker 1: I don't know the history. I just wanted to bump
1:49:12
Speaker 1: along and like sending the interest of time. You bet, so,
1:49:14
Speaker 1: let me give you the fast track. So from early
1:49:17
Speaker 1: two thousand's two thousand uh four or five, we did
1:49:20
Speaker 1: the Dear Study. UM put out a few more studies
1:49:23
Speaker 1: showing that the coincidence of increased lead exposure and let
1:49:26
Speaker 1: cause mortality in the hunting season, And then we went
1:49:29
Speaker 1: to Arizona game and fish. We built a program to
1:49:31
Speaker 1: share this information with hunters and asked hunters that they
1:49:33
Speaker 1: would consider using non lead Arizona game, and Fish took
1:49:36
Speaker 1: it a step further and said, hey, if you get
1:49:38
Speaker 1: drawn for a kaibab tag, which is the one once
1:49:40
Speaker 1: a decade thing, if you're lucky, we're gonna also give
1:49:42
Speaker 1: you two free boxes non lead ammunition. We need your
1:49:45
Speaker 1: help to address this problem for condors. Within three years,
1:49:49
Speaker 1: there's on a game and Fish reached voluntary participation within
1:49:55
Speaker 1: three years. Seeing the reason I back you up is
1:49:58
Speaker 1: because nobody knows this part of the Condoran lead story.
1:50:01
Speaker 1: All they know is what happened in California, and I'm
1:50:03
Speaker 1: gonna get to that for the sake of time. But
1:50:06
Speaker 1: for the last twelve years, I didn't know. I never
1:50:09
Speaker 1: I didn't know about the ammo. Yeah, yeah, I don't
1:50:12
Speaker 1: know that there was a voluntary components, that a voluntary opponent.
1:50:15
Speaker 1: It was comprised of voluntary activities. And and to be further,
1:50:19
Speaker 1: um uh, I hardly know what to say to to
1:50:22
Speaker 1: be a better bunch of conservation scientists and wildlife managers
1:50:27
Speaker 1: who are all hunters. We said, and if you just
1:50:31
Speaker 1: can't get the stuff to shooting your gun, or we
1:50:32
Speaker 1: don't have there at caliber, you can still help prevent
1:50:35
Speaker 1: that potential exposure and that prevents potential poisoning by hauling
1:50:40
Speaker 1: your gut pile of the field. And when we first
1:50:42
Speaker 1: proposed that, some people like who the hell's gonna haul
1:50:45
Speaker 1: a gup pile out of the field, I was like, well,
1:50:46
Speaker 1: if you make that Cabella's gift certificate, they might win
1:50:49
Speaker 1: big enough. I can tell you a lot of folks
1:50:50
Speaker 1: that would. And it worked even with the ammunition shortages
1:50:58
Speaker 1: of late which I know is something you to talk about,
1:51:01
Speaker 1: and the price and price and availability. Even with that
1:51:05
Speaker 1: being an imposition last year, the hunters in Arizona continued
1:51:09
Speaker 1: to participate and they just transitioned if they couldn't get
1:51:11
Speaker 1: the AMMO, they still participated and helped wildlife because they
1:51:16
Speaker 1: were asked to do so, and we incentivised it to
1:51:19
Speaker 1: to say thank you. And even though there was fewer
1:51:22
Speaker 1: rounds of non let AMMO available for use last year,
1:51:25
Speaker 1: we saw the same annual participation. It's annual over that
1:51:31
Speaker 1: twelve year time for it. So nobody talks about that.
1:51:34
Speaker 1: And so when when California. It all started in California.
1:51:37
Speaker 1: It started because litigious based groups who quote unquote do
1:51:41
Speaker 1: conservation started with California. Because California was easy pickings because
1:51:47
Speaker 1: of the way the politics are there, And so when
1:51:49
Speaker 1: those groups started threatening litigation and saying you have to
1:51:52
Speaker 1: do a ban or else, I ended up over there
1:51:56
Speaker 1: talking to the Commission on two separate occasions, on behalf
1:51:58
Speaker 1: of the condor program AM and the research that had
1:52:01
Speaker 1: really put a lot of this on the map. And
1:52:03
Speaker 1: I was there at the Commission meetings saying no, no, no,
1:52:06
Speaker 1: I'm We're saying this information is new and it's real
1:52:09
Speaker 1: and it's worthy of consideration. But we're saying the assumption
1:52:13
Speaker 1: that a ban is the only solution. We're not quite convinced.
1:52:16
Speaker 1: And we have a perfect case in point here in
1:52:19
Speaker 1: Arizona and later into Utah that shows that you can
1:52:22
Speaker 1: work with hunters and ask for their help and share
1:52:25
Speaker 1: with them the information, and you can seek maybe higher
1:52:28
Speaker 1: rates of participation. Then you may even get with compliance
1:52:31
Speaker 1: with the law, especially if it comes from the angle
1:52:35
Speaker 1: of approach that it's coming. So that the crap deal
1:52:39
Speaker 1: for the way that went down in California, and the
1:52:41
Speaker 1: crap deal for why I'm hesitant to talk about lead
1:52:43
Speaker 1: and condors unless we do it the right way, which
1:52:46
Speaker 1: sharing our story I think is a better way. Is
1:52:49
Speaker 1: that it turned into a political quagmire where if you
1:52:52
Speaker 1: were talking about non lead today you're talking about oh,
1:52:55
Speaker 1: your condor lover. And I even had a mutual friend
1:52:58
Speaker 1: I won't say his name here, but a mutual friend
1:52:59
Speaker 1: of ours. He said, yeah, but you're a raptor nut.
1:53:01
Speaker 1: I said, no, I'm not. I'm a hunter conservation nut.
1:53:06
Speaker 1: The condor or another species is symbolic of what we
1:53:10
Speaker 1: as a society or capable. The guy we're talking about
1:53:12
Speaker 1: real smart. Yeah, I'm smart and very energetic. Yeah. And
1:53:19
Speaker 1: you yeah, yeah, anybody. And he'll know that I'm talking
1:53:21
Speaker 1: about him, because when he talks about this issue, he
1:53:24
Speaker 1: knows I'm gonna call him right after, right after the
1:53:26
Speaker 1: the oh, I almost gave too much away, right after
1:53:30
Speaker 1: some of their media um outputs go go live. God,
1:53:35
Speaker 1: I gave way too much anyway, um deep Yeah, there
1:53:40
Speaker 1: you go, so so for me. And I told him this,
1:53:43
Speaker 1: I said, what I love about this is it the
1:53:45
Speaker 1: fact that we can combine hunting and conservation and science
1:53:50
Speaker 1: altogether and own it. We can walk away on this
1:53:54
Speaker 1: issue of lead poisoning and how it affects the condor
1:53:56
Speaker 1: or the eagle. Because there's those recent studies that you
1:53:58
Speaker 1: reported on col Um, you know, with with the limitations
1:54:02
Speaker 1: to the eagle populations and going down those paths of
1:54:04
Speaker 1: the arguments, well, eagles are doing eagles are doing great,
1:54:06
Speaker 1: so how can let be a problem. It was like, yeah,
1:54:08
Speaker 1: humans are too, so COVID doesn't matter, right, just the
1:54:11
Speaker 1: logic we use today. We really have to shape this conversation.
1:54:16
Speaker 1: And if we, as hunters who who believe we are
1:54:18
Speaker 1: leading the way in conservation, if we're not out there
1:54:21
Speaker 1: in the front talking about it, then it will go
1:54:23
Speaker 1: by the wayside of those groups who have the loudest voice,
1:54:26
Speaker 1: those groups who spend their money on campaigns and litigation
1:54:29
Speaker 1: um and telling everybody they're saving the condor by passing
1:54:32
Speaker 1: this law. But the reality of it is, and what
1:54:35
Speaker 1: we were guarding against and warning against when they were
1:54:37
Speaker 1: petitioning and and cowfish and wildlife was put in a
1:54:40
Speaker 1: tight spot because they're gonna be suited if they don't
1:54:42
Speaker 1: do something. And and I was very proud to be
1:54:46
Speaker 1: a biologist to scientists who was there saying, hey, I
1:54:48
Speaker 1: did some of that work. I'm my name is on
1:54:51
Speaker 1: those papers, and I'm telling you I'm not sure a
1:54:54
Speaker 1: band will solve the problem. It'll change the law, which
1:54:57
Speaker 1: sounds good. But if people think that it's all um,
1:55:00
Speaker 1: you know, mocked up and and it's about an attack
1:55:03
Speaker 1: on our rights as hunters. I won't say we predicted it.
1:55:07
Speaker 1: It was obvious you didn't. Nobody had to predict it.
1:55:09
Speaker 1: And when that happened, that what the perception would be.
1:55:12
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, And now guess what, lead poisoning still occurring?
1:55:16
Speaker 1: Where it lead his band? And and to those people
1:55:19
Speaker 1: who believe that the band was the only solution, I
1:55:22
Speaker 1: said to them, so if you are successful in your band,
1:55:25
Speaker 1: you have your parade in the streets, you say you
1:55:26
Speaker 1: solve the problem. You know. The crappy thing for us
1:55:29
Speaker 1: who are out there monitoring and watching taking care of
1:55:31
Speaker 1: these condors, they're still gonna be lead poisoned. And they're
1:55:34
Speaker 1: still gonna be lead poison because people are gonna say, yeah,
1:55:36
Speaker 1: I realize it's a law, but I think it's bullshit,
1:55:39
Speaker 1: So I'm not gonna worry about it. And it's unenforceable.
1:55:43
Speaker 1: Can you tell the difference between a polymer tip solid
1:55:45
Speaker 1: copper bullet versus a polymer tip lead core copper, Yeah,
1:55:50
Speaker 1: you can't tell. So there are all these issues that
1:55:53
Speaker 1: we were pointing out and saying, guys, don't get the
1:55:56
Speaker 1: cart before the horse here, do what we're doing, and
1:56:00
Speaker 1: not because we were right, but because we were seeing success.
1:56:03
Speaker 1: Hunters are responding in kind. We're the only people with
1:56:05
Speaker 1: the study and the study has this type of results, right,
1:56:09
Speaker 1: And then we would say and then finally I would
1:56:11
Speaker 1: just say, and I know, I'm I'm I'm going on
1:56:13
Speaker 1: too long about this too, but um I said, if
1:56:18
Speaker 1: hunters are the only ones that can solve this problem,
1:56:21
Speaker 1: so do you want to alienate them? That's an interesting
1:56:24
Speaker 1: point because that's part of the waterfowl ban was that
1:56:28
Speaker 1: North Dakota Game and Fish kind of hung their hat
1:56:31
Speaker 1: on that. They did, like, uh, they put on shooting
1:56:34
Speaker 1: clinics for hunters and they're like, we're gonna teach you
1:56:38
Speaker 1: how to shoot with Steele. We're gonna teach you that
1:56:40
Speaker 1: Steele isn't some awful thing. And you know, they spent
1:56:43
Speaker 1: the time and money to to work with hunters. Put
1:56:47
Speaker 1: on today like shooting clinics, show them lead poisoning, all this,
1:56:52
Speaker 1: and the hunters leave it and there they're positive about it.
1:56:56
Speaker 1: So I'm so glad you brought that up, because that
1:56:59
Speaker 1: is the foundation that I've laid for you, and what
1:57:02
Speaker 1: we experienced in Arizona and Utah is the philosophy and
1:57:05
Speaker 1: foundation that gave rise to the North American on lead partnership.
1:57:08
Speaker 1: And I hope someday we can come back with my
1:57:10
Speaker 1: co founder Leland Brown and talk about that partnership, because
1:57:14
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we're doing. So state agencies are are
1:57:18
Speaker 1: rightfully so they're concerned about the public perception about how
1:57:22
Speaker 1: big a deal is this lead thing? Do we need
1:57:24
Speaker 1: to do anything? And we're saying, hey, we can help
1:57:26
Speaker 1: you with that. We've already done it, and we did
1:57:29
Speaker 1: it in the range of the condor where it's even
1:57:31
Speaker 1: more contentious. But if you want to have this conversation
1:57:34
Speaker 1: about the potential for lead exposure and how to prevent
1:57:38
Speaker 1: the potential for lead exposure as a as an opportunity
1:57:41
Speaker 1: for an ethically minded, uh conservation minded hunter, we can
1:57:48
Speaker 1: we can give you confidence that this will resonate well
1:57:50
Speaker 1: with him. Let me let me uh, let me lay
1:57:53
Speaker 1: one on you. UM. I'll start off by saying you
1:57:58
Speaker 1: can comment on this comment. Start up by saying this
1:58:01
Speaker 1: goes beyond the problem with lead poison, or I don't
1:58:04
Speaker 1: even want to use value. I don't want to use
1:58:05
Speaker 1: value laid in terminology rafters. Besides condors, cannon do die
1:58:14
Speaker 1: from lead ingestion. Okay. Um, people who are uneasy or
1:58:25
Speaker 1: outright opposed to bands, as we discussed in California, where
1:58:29
Speaker 1: moves it beyond hunter choice? Okay, and you just raise
1:58:31
Speaker 1: your hand. So so people who oppose lead bands, yeah,
1:58:35
Speaker 1: and I don't oppose it, but go ahead, some people do. Yeah, Okay,
1:58:41
Speaker 1: I'm very like I'm not. I'm highly highly uneasy with
1:58:46
Speaker 1: the idea of a lead band when you could get
1:58:51
Speaker 1: with compliance and technology gradually land in a similar place.
1:58:56
Speaker 1: So to the point where now if you had someone
1:58:59
Speaker 1: like if you come to me and said I could
1:59:01
Speaker 1: shoot uh letter Bismuth, right, like, I'll shoot business. Well,
1:59:06
Speaker 1: it's really expensive, but it performs well. So you have
1:59:09
Speaker 1: a technology function outside of any conversation, like, outside of
1:59:13
Speaker 1: any conversation about lead I know a lot of guys
1:59:16
Speaker 1: that shoot copper bullets. Yeah, okay, outside of it, Like
1:59:21
Speaker 1: they could be not even aware of the debate, but
1:59:24
Speaker 1: they're switching for issues of performance and other stuff. Okay,
1:59:27
Speaker 1: there's a cost factor, but I'm strange from what my
1:59:29
Speaker 1: point is going to be someone who's gonna come and say, like,
1:59:33
Speaker 1: I am gonna resist any kind of mandate that tells
1:59:39
Speaker 1: shooters what they have to use. And someone says, what
1:59:42
Speaker 1: about the fact that that raptors die from lead, They
1:59:46
Speaker 1: would say, uh, raptors die from collisions with glass, Raptors
1:59:52
Speaker 1: die from wind turbans, Raptors get hit by vehicles and die.
1:59:57
Speaker 1: Raptors die all manner of ways. They die from lighting
2:00:00
Speaker 1: with fences. Um, why is there not a conversation about
2:00:05
Speaker 1: we can't have fences, we can't have glass windshields, we
2:00:09
Speaker 1: can't have glass sky rises. Why do you seem to
2:00:13
Speaker 1: not care about all these significant causes of death but
2:00:19
Speaker 1: you care about this one. And they'll say this, we're
2:00:24
Speaker 1: not talking about population level impact. They might say there's
2:00:28
Speaker 1: like this is an argument, and they're saying, sure, some die,
2:00:32
Speaker 1: they all die eventually, many die from many causes, but
2:00:36
Speaker 1: short of their being population level impact, it doesn't matter. Beautiful,
2:00:42
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought this up. Okay, So that's that's
2:00:44
Speaker 1: a way of that's a not a fringe, not a
2:00:48
Speaker 1: fringe viewpoint. No, And what I would what I would
2:00:52
Speaker 1: enter into that because there's there's several things you need
2:00:54
Speaker 1: to impact there. Um. The first of which is yes,
2:00:59
Speaker 1: lead is not in many cases of population limiting effect
2:01:02
Speaker 1: for those other raptors. It's only proven to be so
2:01:05
Speaker 1: right now. Well, it can affect populations. That's that latest
2:01:08
Speaker 1: latest paper in science pretty much nailed that UM, and
2:01:11
Speaker 1: the condor is obviously affected a population limit limiting level,
2:01:15
Speaker 1: population limiting level. But they're all affecting population. But you
2:01:19
Speaker 1: can't say it's not either. But the argument it shouldn't
2:01:22
Speaker 1: be about that there are programs to educate and mitigate
2:01:26
Speaker 1: for all those other cause of mortality. Look at the
2:01:29
Speaker 1: stuff we're seeing about Ferrell cats right now, not that
2:01:31
Speaker 1: they're out killing eagles. But my point is, UM, there
2:01:34
Speaker 1: are programs out there, just hasn't been proven yet, but
2:01:39
Speaker 1: there are programs that do address it. The sticking point
2:01:43
Speaker 1: is are there programs problems and is addressed by let
2:01:50
Speaker 1: I won't get into the details of a law enforcement
2:01:53
Speaker 1: interview I had one time about the way I learned
2:01:55
Speaker 1: to shoot and whether it did or did not have
2:01:57
Speaker 1: anything to do with Ferrell cats, But UM, I won't
2:02:00
Speaker 1: get into that. UM. The point is is we're not
2:02:04
Speaker 1: talking about we we at the non the partnership or
2:02:07
Speaker 1: the Paragne fundering of our partners, and now we have
2:02:09
Speaker 1: over forty partners, including one of your else close outfits,
2:02:12
Speaker 1: First Light is one of our partners. We're not out
2:02:15
Speaker 1: there saying that the band's a solution. We're out there
2:02:17
Speaker 1: saying education, outreach, educating yourself, being able to make an
2:02:21
Speaker 1: informed decision. We are confident based on our experience in Arizona, Utah,
2:02:26
Speaker 1: now Oregon, beginning in Washington for new new partner to
2:02:30
Speaker 1: new partners to the two original of state agencies, we
2:02:33
Speaker 1: are confident that if you provide that information and you
2:02:36
Speaker 1: and you shape a path forward through Yes, incentives work great,
2:02:40
Speaker 1: and it's it's fun to maybe win something. Um that
2:02:44
Speaker 1: you can change people's perceptions, their awareness and that can
2:02:49
Speaker 1: lead to changes in behavior without telling them what to do.
2:02:52
Speaker 1: And me as a hunter, and that's why I'm so
2:02:54
Speaker 1: passionate about this. I want us to have our cake
2:02:57
Speaker 1: and eat it too. I want us to say when
2:02:59
Speaker 1: we a that hunters the original conservationists, Yeah, are they
2:03:03
Speaker 1: continuing to be? I hope what we're doing represents that
2:03:07
Speaker 1: because I want to be a hunter leading a way
2:03:08
Speaker 1: in conservation and far greater than any single species that
2:03:12
Speaker 1: we've prevented extinction from or or brought back to take
2:03:15
Speaker 1: them off of the endangered species list. All of those
2:03:17
Speaker 1: are testaments of what we're capable of. The way in
2:03:20
Speaker 1: which we go about it is the process that will
2:03:23
Speaker 1: see us through to the challenges in the future. It's
2:03:25
Speaker 1: well beyond a single species, and it's beyond a single
2:03:28
Speaker 1: issue like lead poisoning. There are other issues that are
2:03:31
Speaker 1: way bigger on the on the scale of things for
2:03:33
Speaker 1: wildlife management agencies to be dealing with. I I understand that.
2:03:37
Speaker 1: That's why I think we as a nonprofit, for example
2:03:39
Speaker 1: of the Paragrine Fund, that's why we we put our
2:03:42
Speaker 1: two cents in. We show our our We lead by
2:03:44
Speaker 1: example by saying we'll help you with that. That's why
2:03:48
Speaker 1: we co founded the non lad Partnership. You know what
2:03:50
Speaker 1: I forgot to do when I was laying out my
2:03:52
Speaker 1: no thing, I forgot to include this one which winds
2:03:56
Speaker 1: up in there and you continue unpacking the whole thing
2:03:58
Speaker 1: will be like, uh uh the bald eagle? Yeah, okay,
2:04:03
Speaker 1: what was it? What was the thing we did to
2:04:04
Speaker 1: save the bald eagle? What was the thing called silent
2:04:07
Speaker 1: spring and all that? Oh? Well, you are you talking
2:04:09
Speaker 1: about d d T or no, no, what was it?
2:04:11
Speaker 1: What was then there that made their eggs their eggshells
2:04:15
Speaker 1: and d d E, which is the residuees yea eggshell thinning. Well,
2:04:18
Speaker 1: I mean the paagrine falcon is probably a better example
2:04:21
Speaker 1: of that, but yeah, I mean the paregrine falcon was
2:04:23
Speaker 1: was was far greater affected. I mean it was oh yeah,
2:04:27
Speaker 1: they the paragn falcon. We we nearly lost because of that,
2:04:31
Speaker 1: and that obviously is thus the namesake of our organization,
2:04:33
Speaker 1: the Paragrin Fund. But that's why we were founded. Those
2:04:36
Speaker 1: falconers who noticed that populations of of Paragrine's were plummeting
2:04:40
Speaker 1: and wondering why and thought, well, we've we've got to
2:04:42
Speaker 1: be able to breathe these birds in captivity and re
2:04:45
Speaker 1: repopulate those areas. But we got to find out the problem,
2:04:47
Speaker 1: and the d d T was identified as the problem.
2:04:50
Speaker 1: And even though the science was there, kind of like
2:04:53
Speaker 1: what you were talking about with a hundred years of
2:04:54
Speaker 1: lead lead information, even though the science was there, one
2:04:57
Speaker 1: of the things that put it on the map was
2:04:58
Speaker 1: silent spring, you know, and like like Bell Rose, you know,
2:05:02
Speaker 1: Bell Rose was the guy who finally got it through
2:05:04
Speaker 1: to everyone. He was the Rachel Carson of I would
2:05:06
Speaker 1: argue that he was the guy at the time people
2:05:08
Speaker 1: finally came around to really accepting what was going on.
2:05:11
Speaker 1: He was the expert at the time. But it's never
2:05:13
Speaker 1: one person that finally did it, because you don't introduce
2:05:16
Speaker 1: something that's controversial, controversial that is going to require a
2:05:21
Speaker 1: great amount of change in human society's that that is
2:05:25
Speaker 1: listened to. They hear the case and they say, yeah,
2:05:28
Speaker 1: we're gonna do it, and then they do it. No,
2:05:30
Speaker 1: you hear about it, and the first one is called
2:05:31
Speaker 1: a radical, and then later on they're they're immortalized and talking,
2:05:36
Speaker 1: you know, exactly mountain from making a lot of wilderness,
2:05:43
Speaker 1: making a lot of forests and wilderness, and then everyone,
2:05:46
Speaker 1: every politician since then wants to compare himself to a
2:05:49
Speaker 1: guy that was ridicule yeah in his day, and and
2:05:52
Speaker 1: that's exactly beat pre hugging to some bitch on the
2:05:55
Speaker 1: plane exactly. So, uh, let me finish my bald eagle thing.
2:05:58
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten there yet. Sorry. Recently, there's a news
2:06:01
Speaker 1: story wing all day man, Well there's a news story.
2:06:03
Speaker 1: They got all kinds of pressed. I mean, in the
2:06:05
Speaker 1: last month or two some about like a prevalency of
2:06:08
Speaker 1: leading eagles, and people like, holy shit, these eagles all
2:06:12
Speaker 1: got lead at some point out home? Are we talking
2:06:14
Speaker 1: about the same bird that we quite famously removed from
2:06:20
Speaker 1: the Endangered Species Act protection because it's recovered and now
2:06:23
Speaker 1: it's everywhere and you don't even comment on bald eagles anymore.
2:06:27
Speaker 1: Is this the bird we're talking about that's getting killed
2:06:29
Speaker 1: by lead? Well, they do, they do in Alaska. They
2:06:32
Speaker 1: comment about that bird. Yeah, like at our fish chack.
2:06:36
Speaker 1: I think someone once counted right in a in a
2:06:39
Speaker 1: collection trees. But I'm saying that so like, on one hand,
2:06:42
Speaker 1: the media is running with this ball eagle thing. On
2:06:45
Speaker 1: the other hand, people are like, but hol on man,
2:06:46
Speaker 1: I thought that was like one of the great conservation
2:06:48
Speaker 1: success stories. How bad could the lead be? Yeah? Absolutely,
2:06:52
Speaker 1: And that's my point. It's not about does it affect
2:06:56
Speaker 1: a single species to the point where they might we
2:06:59
Speaker 1: might lose them. That's not the stake of the game.
2:07:02
Speaker 1: The game is understanding and having the information to be
2:07:07
Speaker 1: able to comprehend the system and be able to make
2:07:11
Speaker 1: wise choices. Because what's the one of the first tenants
2:07:15
Speaker 1: of of hunter education, No you're no your targetget beyond Well,
2:07:20
Speaker 1: there's a new dimension of this and I want, I want,
2:07:23
Speaker 1: I won't steal this because this is Leland Brown, my
2:07:25
Speaker 1: co founder that works for the organ Zoo was beyond
2:07:28
Speaker 1: the target. Yeah, this is a new dimension. We own
2:07:31
Speaker 1: that bullet. We're responsible to make sure it hits the
2:07:34
Speaker 1: target we intend to kill. And if we do our job,
2:07:36
Speaker 1: and we know our equipment, it does its job. What
2:07:39
Speaker 1: about after we leave and the remains of that bullet
2:07:42
Speaker 1: are there. All we want to do is make sure
2:07:44
Speaker 1: people know that there's a potential potential for that to
2:07:48
Speaker 1: poison a bird. Now, if it does poison a bird,
2:07:51
Speaker 1: does that mean that we're gonna lose that species that
2:07:53
Speaker 1: they did? That's not the point, folks. It's like leaving
2:07:56
Speaker 1: trash in the forest. Right, We're not telling people. Look,
2:08:00
Speaker 1: it's banned. It's it is banned. You can't leave trash
2:08:02
Speaker 1: in the forest. It doesn't mean that's what people do.
2:08:05
Speaker 1: You know, doesn't mean something's gonna die. Pick up your paper, right.
2:08:08
Speaker 1: I mean it's a good thing to do for ecosystem health.
2:08:11
Speaker 1: We want people to think about it that way, not
2:08:14
Speaker 1: that if we don't do it, we'll lose a species.
2:08:16
Speaker 1: I think that paradigm of that style of conservation is
2:08:20
Speaker 1: over because one, the science is still science, it's still evolving,
2:08:24
Speaker 1: and there's still the pera viewed process that that tests
2:08:28
Speaker 1: the science and our assumptions of what we know. That's
2:08:31
Speaker 1: an ever ongoing thing. But the thing is the way
2:08:35
Speaker 1: we do conservation, because now people don't trust the science
2:08:38
Speaker 1: and they don't know who to trust when they're talking
2:08:40
Speaker 1: about whatever. You know, PhD on this side and on
2:08:44
Speaker 1: that side of every every issue. Um, we need. This
2:08:47
Speaker 1: is a new paradigm of conservation, and I think we
2:08:49
Speaker 1: just have to go back and do the hard work
2:08:51
Speaker 1: and earning relationships and trust so that you can share
2:08:54
Speaker 1: it in the way that in some form or fashion
2:08:57
Speaker 1: we've been able to share share here today. Um, you've
2:09:00
Speaker 1: got to build that that trust before people are going
2:09:03
Speaker 1: to change their behavior because once again, just like those
2:09:06
Speaker 1: species that don't adapt well to major perturbations in an environment,
2:09:12
Speaker 1: we don't adapt well to major change either. Uh, you're
2:09:17
Speaker 1: not a physicist, you're not a human physiologist. And that's
2:09:20
Speaker 1: I know you're gonna ask about human health. Well let's
2:09:22
Speaker 1: do it. I'm not gonna ask about it. I'm gonna
2:09:23
Speaker 1: comment on it, all, right, Uh, no one has been
2:09:28
Speaker 1: able to tie in a way that that achieves some
2:09:33
Speaker 1: sort of academic consensus. No one has been able to
2:09:37
Speaker 1: tie hunting eating wild game meat with adverse health effects
2:09:43
Speaker 1: due to lead. In fact, remember they did this thing
2:09:45
Speaker 1: where they went and looked at North Dakota hunters to
2:09:48
Speaker 1: see how much lead they had, and they're like, oh,
2:09:50
Speaker 1: some of these hunters have elevated lead, but the average
2:09:52
Speaker 1: they had less. They had less lead in their system
2:09:55
Speaker 1: than urban nights who don't eat wild game because exposure
2:09:59
Speaker 1: comes from a a ways, lead paint, soil, all the
2:10:02
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline burning prologies. Right, So I don't want I
2:10:04
Speaker 1: don't want to get into the and because you're not
2:10:06
Speaker 1: a human physiologist, you can comment on it. But I
2:10:09
Speaker 1: think it's like you can comment on it, not that
2:10:14
Speaker 1: I need to tell you what to comment on. I
2:10:16
Speaker 1: try and put this way. Do you contest? Do you
2:10:20
Speaker 1: contest my statement if I say there is no proof
2:10:27
Speaker 1: that hunters are suffering healthy facts not not leading their system,
2:10:33
Speaker 1: are suffering health effects greater than the American public in general. No,
2:10:40
Speaker 1: And I would not contest that. But what I would
2:10:43
Speaker 1: say is, and this is the way I treat this issue.
2:10:47
Speaker 1: Because if you lead with the human health issue and
2:10:49
Speaker 1: and you try to tell people what's good for him,
2:10:52
Speaker 1: but you're not here to talk about human health. I'm
2:10:53
Speaker 1: trying to get to a different point. But I don't
2:10:55
Speaker 1: want to just leave it. I don't want to drop
2:10:56
Speaker 1: a hand grenade here and then walk away, right yeah
2:11:00
Speaker 1: atch it? UM? So so yeah, UM do I would
2:11:07
Speaker 1: I contest that, um, based on my interpretation the science,
2:11:12
Speaker 1: I would say I don't contest that that that the
2:11:15
Speaker 1: studies aren't conclusive that if you hunt and you eat
2:11:18
Speaker 1: the meat that you eat, UM, that you are suffering
2:11:21
Speaker 1: suffering delitarious effects of lead poisoning. However, I will say
2:11:24
Speaker 1: this that the science that goes along with our understanding
2:11:27
Speaker 1: of lead and its effects on humans. UM. The the
2:11:30
Speaker 1: median allowed blood or the allowed blood lead level when
2:11:34
Speaker 1: I was a kid and you were a kid I
2:11:36
Speaker 1: might be able to older than you, UM was like
2:11:41
Speaker 1: micrograms per desolader um. That's that's pretty pretty high the
2:11:47
Speaker 1: safe level today. UM. When you look at that CDC study,
2:11:50
Speaker 1: the one that followed the when you're talking about they
2:11:52
Speaker 1: said zero and so while while the zero how about
2:11:58
Speaker 1: because really when you think about it, there's there's no
2:12:01
Speaker 1: there's no species ever studied organism that uses that that
2:12:05
Speaker 1: that lead is a use of except us because it's
2:12:07
Speaker 1: great for amals. So when you look at all the yes,
2:12:09
Speaker 1: when you look at all the like like magnesium, potassium, like,
2:12:12
Speaker 1: there's no, there's no, like you didn't get your daily lead. Yeah,
2:12:19
Speaker 1: the way I answered that question, and just to to
2:12:22
Speaker 1: really and and again, we have some other mutual friends
2:12:25
Speaker 1: that have been on the podcast, and they have very
2:12:27
Speaker 1: strong feelings about it. Though you can't say that it
2:12:29
Speaker 1: is affecting human health. And then I hear the argument, well,
2:12:32
Speaker 1: you can't say it's not because when you have a
2:12:34
Speaker 1: lead poisoning amount, an amount of measurable lead in your system,
2:12:37
Speaker 1: how do you determine where it came from unless you're
2:12:39
Speaker 1: doing is topic analyses? And again does it matter? Here's
2:12:42
Speaker 1: where I go to. But but okay, but you can't
2:12:45
Speaker 1: sit here, and like I said, we can't and we
2:12:50
Speaker 1: can't be doing we can't be doing the follow the science,
2:12:53
Speaker 1: listen to the science. Follow the science. Will say, okay,
2:12:56
Speaker 1: let's all agree to follow the science. Okay, if we're
2:12:58
Speaker 1: gonna agree to follow the science, there's not a human
2:13:00
Speaker 1: health risk. It's supposition. You could argue that. Yeah, you
2:13:03
Speaker 1: could argue, so let's and people do. Okay, So if
2:13:06
Speaker 1: if like if we because I almost roll my eyes
2:13:09
Speaker 1: now when someone says they're gonna follow the science or
2:13:10
Speaker 1: they don't want to listen to the science, I'm like,
2:13:12
Speaker 1: you know why, because science is weaponized. They've burned. Like
2:13:17
Speaker 1: if I was gonna look not that the scientific community
2:13:19
Speaker 1: is monolithic, if I was going to give advice to
2:13:21
Speaker 1: the scientific community as a monolithic unit, I would say,
2:13:24
Speaker 1: don't let your research be weaponized, because it's so weaponized
2:13:28
Speaker 1: that when someone says follow the science, you can reasonably say,
2:13:31
Speaker 1: who's exactly? I agree? And what you need to do
2:13:35
Speaker 1: is use the products of science as a way of
2:13:38
Speaker 1: informing yourself. But it doesn't mean it's the holy grail.
2:13:41
Speaker 1: I remember asking research your body mind, he's working on something.
2:13:43
Speaker 1: I said, what do you hope happens? Because I don't
2:13:45
Speaker 1: hope anything. What are you talking about hope happens? Right? No?
2:13:50
Speaker 1: And what I was like, man, I would be rooting
2:13:52
Speaker 1: for that ship. I would point out to that, like
2:13:54
Speaker 1: following the science, if you do want to do that,
2:13:57
Speaker 1: that means actually, like clicking the links in the article.
2:14:00
Speaker 1: All that grabbed your attention, opening up the actual paper,
2:14:04
Speaker 1: and then reading that paper. Yeah, you usually find that
2:14:08
Speaker 1: the paper there's a lot less explosive than when it
2:14:11
Speaker 1: got picked up by the news agents. Sometimes you read
2:14:14
Speaker 1: it two or three different times to find out how
2:14:18
Speaker 1: that article that you started out with actually has anything
2:14:21
Speaker 1: to do with this paper. So, yeah, absolutely, and and
2:14:25
Speaker 1: so the way I usually answer that question is like, man,
2:14:27
Speaker 1: let me tell you about my experience. I had two
2:14:29
Speaker 1: youngsters at home when we were doing that deer study.
2:14:32
Speaker 1: We're shooting all those deer, and because we shoot eight
2:14:34
Speaker 1: or ten deer a day and we processed them all
2:14:36
Speaker 1: to take us all day, we wanted their carcass, the
2:14:39
Speaker 1: carcasses to be shipped out to the processors to make
2:14:42
Speaker 1: sure we had thirty different processors so it wouldn't biased
2:14:45
Speaker 1: by the Yeah. Yeah, so that meant we had two
2:14:49
Speaker 1: days off from shooting more deer. Well, we had hauled
2:14:52
Speaker 1: but up to Montana with our bird dogs and shotguns
2:14:54
Speaker 1: and go hunt hunt upland birds because it was in
2:14:56
Speaker 1: the right season. Let all of our ship up. Well, yeah,
2:14:59
Speaker 1: exactly exactly. It's from Arizona, man. Anyway, um, we'd go
2:15:03
Speaker 1: do that, and my wife said, I called her. I said, man,
2:15:06
Speaker 1: I got not only we're gonna have all the dear
2:15:08
Speaker 1: meat from the study, I mean five tags worth the dophons,
2:15:11
Speaker 1: and it's all be gonna be cutting packaged professionally, which okay,
2:15:14
Speaker 1: let's either get or bad. But I like doing my Yeah,
2:15:18
Speaker 1: it's easy. We're gonna come home and I've got sharp tail,
2:15:21
Speaker 1: I got pheasant, I got huns, and we're probably gonna
2:15:24
Speaker 1: kill a few ducks with with falcons too to to
2:15:26
Speaker 1: boot and she goes, what do you hunt the uplom
2:15:28
Speaker 1: birds with? I was like, what a shotgun? Well, what'd
2:15:31
Speaker 1: you use? I was like, well, you use the four
2:15:33
Speaker 1: tail on the huns and the twenty on the sharp tails.
2:15:36
Speaker 1: And and it was at the end of of of
2:15:40
Speaker 1: stage grouse seasons and I got a stage grouse in
2:15:43
Speaker 1: my twelve. She's like, no, dummy, would you use well ammunition?
2:15:48
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know. They were double as
2:15:50
Speaker 1: something good, you know. She goes lead and I was like, yeah,
2:15:54
Speaker 1: oh right, well, uh, I have an X ray let
2:15:59
Speaker 1: me extra car. Because she was put putting it in
2:16:02
Speaker 1: my face, that are are you thinking? I was like,
2:16:04
Speaker 1: you know, that's a damn good point. I wasn't thinking,
2:16:06
Speaker 1: so yeah, maybe I'll try steal. And I tried steal
2:16:10
Speaker 1: and I've been using it ever since. Like I said,
2:16:21
Speaker 1: I'm only saying as to tea something up because I'm
2:16:23
Speaker 1: kind of teeing like what, I can't wait till you
2:16:25
Speaker 1: get there. Well, it's not as it's not as explosive.
2:16:27
Speaker 1: I think. What I'm trying tea up is if what's
2:16:31
Speaker 1: your like, what is your ask of your peers, like
2:16:36
Speaker 1: your peers being hunters, what is your ask? But I
2:16:40
Speaker 1: want you to say that like considering that, um if
2:16:46
Speaker 1: if if you can't look him in this straight in
2:16:50
Speaker 1: the eye, Okay, you can't look at hunter straight in
2:16:52
Speaker 1: the eye and say you are imperiling your family's health,
2:16:55
Speaker 1: which it's not my business. Okay, I'd never do that.
2:16:58
Speaker 1: Well and and you'd have a hard time making the
2:17:01
Speaker 1: case you would. Yeah, So I'm not gonna tell you that.
2:17:05
Speaker 1: But and I'm not going to tell you that you're
2:17:08
Speaker 1: having population and I'm not gonna tell you that you're
2:17:10
Speaker 1: gonna put the ball ego back on the endangered species list.
2:17:12
Speaker 1: But we as hunters are killing some number of birds
2:17:18
Speaker 1: by putting let out on the on the landscape, in
2:17:21
Speaker 1: gut piles. It's just it's like, it's not a debatable point.
2:17:25
Speaker 1: What you want to do about that. It's your business, Okay,
2:17:27
Speaker 1: are you like, hey, tough shit? Are you like, well,
2:17:29
Speaker 1: if I can if it's six and one half, if
2:17:32
Speaker 1: it's six and one half dozen the other maybe I
2:17:34
Speaker 1: don't want to do that, right, Like, like, what is
2:17:37
Speaker 1: the ask? I think the ask is to to one
2:17:41
Speaker 1: educate yourself before you make a decision. You want to
2:17:43
Speaker 1: make an informed decision, and there's a lot of information
2:17:46
Speaker 1: out there to make a decision. I have confidence that
2:17:50
Speaker 1: when the information is shared with hunters, they make good
2:17:54
Speaker 1: decisions for wildlife. M hm so. And and I'll also
2:17:58
Speaker 1: add a little another little little salt and pepper here,
2:18:01
Speaker 1: a little extra spice that you know the rest of
2:18:04
Speaker 1: the world is watching. And if the hunter and you
2:18:07
Speaker 1: gave one of these options or these alternative responses like
2:18:11
Speaker 1: I don't give a shit. Okay, careful, don't say he
2:18:15
Speaker 1: don't give a ship, because if you happen to be
2:18:17
Speaker 1: the hunter who the rest of the world is watching,
2:18:20
Speaker 1: that is not a hunter where ship? If they're an
2:18:22
Speaker 1: anti hunter and they can say, well, look he said,
2:18:25
Speaker 1: they don't care because it's not population limiting. They don't
2:18:27
Speaker 1: care if they kill a few eagles. That's that's a
2:18:30
Speaker 1: tough way that that's a tough place to be. So
2:18:34
Speaker 1: I guard against that by telling people will, well, there's
2:18:37
Speaker 1: a great way to representing the conservation ethical hunters if
2:18:41
Speaker 1: you say, yeah, I educated myself and I do take
2:18:43
Speaker 1: some precautions because I don't want to harm wildlife while
2:18:47
Speaker 1: I'm deliberately taking other wildlife. You know that I'm targeting
2:18:52
Speaker 1: um that I think that's the norm. Like do you
2:18:55
Speaker 1: do you feel that hunters would be rewarded in a
2:19:03
Speaker 1: legal sense, like rewarded by the legislation if they were
2:19:07
Speaker 1: demonstrating a year over year reduction in certain activities, or
2:19:13
Speaker 1: do you feel that in the end they're going to
2:19:16
Speaker 1: get hit by In the end, they're gonna get hit
2:19:19
Speaker 1: by bands no matter what they do. I hope not.
2:19:25
Speaker 1: I fear that if we don't mobilize and educate ourselves
2:19:30
Speaker 1: and come to some consensus about what best practices are
2:19:34
Speaker 1: when it comes to the potential for lead exposure in wildlife,
2:19:37
Speaker 1: I think we're more vulnerable than ever to a band.
2:19:44
Speaker 1: I you know, our our statement is we don't support
2:19:47
Speaker 1: legislation or litigation to solve this problem. I've had some
2:19:51
Speaker 1: good buddies of mine who I would assume that would
2:19:54
Speaker 1: never support a band say well, it's just time. I
2:19:57
Speaker 1: was like, WHOA, Well, Um, I don't know that it
2:19:59
Speaker 1: is because I don't have the confidence that hunters understand
2:20:03
Speaker 1: the problem. If I thought hunters really understood the potential
2:20:08
Speaker 1: for lead exposure and we, as a populacet said we
2:20:10
Speaker 1: don't give a ship, we don't care, I wouldn't be
2:20:13
Speaker 1: working so hard in this effort. But I don't believe
2:20:16
Speaker 1: it's the case because everywhere we go, even wildlife professionals.
2:20:20
Speaker 1: I'm not picking on them either. You go and talk
2:20:22
Speaker 1: about it and they're like, oh, I didn't know that. Yeah,
2:20:26
Speaker 1: I think do you mind if I jumped in here
2:20:27
Speaker 1: real quick, Steve? Yeah, you gotta pick your moments. Uh.
2:20:34
Speaker 1: I think something that would help me, Chris, because I,
2:20:36
Speaker 1: first off of preface, I am a I use both
2:20:40
Speaker 1: copper and lead. Um. I think you know the waterfowl
2:20:47
Speaker 1: story going from lead to steel has like man, massive
2:20:51
Speaker 1: die offs. We need to stop this now we're going
2:20:54
Speaker 1: to steal I think we would help somebody like me
2:20:56
Speaker 1: with making these decisions because I have educated myself to
2:21:00
Speaker 1: a moderate level on this and I'm not he knows
2:21:02
Speaker 1: more about guns name than anybody I know, um uh
2:21:07
Speaker 1: and um. And I'm not a blatant asshole like I
2:21:10
Speaker 1: do care about the wildlife. Right. So when I hear like, well,
2:21:13
Speaker 1: if you just educate yourself, like, it's a very easy decision, um,
2:21:18
Speaker 1: for me, I have not come to the same conclusion
2:21:21
Speaker 1: because part of my decision making has to do with
2:21:24
Speaker 1: that bullets performance. Can you stop from it, Scarrett long speaking,
2:21:28
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's just been hanging out. Yeah, I's been
2:21:32
Speaker 1: hanging out here. Um. Part of this has to do
2:21:34
Speaker 1: with that bullets performance downrange. So a lot of folks
2:21:38
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to make parallels to steal and lead,
2:21:41
Speaker 1: right because I know it's like easy to jump there.
2:21:42
Speaker 1: But there's like a very very very obvious case with
2:21:46
Speaker 1: with the water fell side. Um, I know that at
2:21:50
Speaker 1: a certain speed my copper bullet isn't gonna do what
2:21:53
Speaker 1: it's designed to do. I think a lot of people
2:21:55
Speaker 1: don't understand that they get their six five creed more.
2:21:58
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't get that a opera bullet
2:22:01
Speaker 1: you get beyond depending on the length of barrel and
2:22:04
Speaker 1: everything like that. But you get beyond about three hundred
2:22:07
Speaker 1: ish yards, you're going to have performance. You can have
2:22:12
Speaker 1: performance related issues with that bullet, right with any bullet,
2:22:17
Speaker 1: but it's it's more likely because of how hard copper
2:22:20
Speaker 1: is it, there's a higher likelihood that it's not going
2:22:22
Speaker 1: to expand. So for me, when I'm making my kind
2:22:25
Speaker 1: of lead copper decision, part of that is mortality rate
2:22:30
Speaker 1: on the animal I'm hunting and likelihood of recovery, right,
2:22:34
Speaker 1: And so I think something that would help folks like
2:22:36
Speaker 1: me that are in this position, right that if if
2:22:39
Speaker 1: we just had copper and lead animal and it's like
2:22:41
Speaker 1: they're equally just as good, and it was like you
2:22:43
Speaker 1: choose one or the other. Well, I think you're right,
2:22:45
Speaker 1: the decision is a lot easier, but they're not just
2:22:48
Speaker 1: like one another. What would help me is what what
2:22:53
Speaker 1: is the level of risk? Right? When you say, like
2:22:56
Speaker 1: Steve brought it up earlier, like we know there's eagles
2:22:58
Speaker 1: dying from gut piles right somewhere at some point, Okay,
2:23:04
Speaker 1: but like, do we know that frequency in that level
2:23:08
Speaker 1: of risk? Because I know that I might hit a
2:23:10
Speaker 1: deer on the way home, right, and that's calculated in
2:23:14
Speaker 1: me driving, right, but it's it's probably not likely, and
2:23:18
Speaker 1: I think that would help me come to that decision
2:23:20
Speaker 1: a little easier, you know, you know, a good parallel
2:23:22
Speaker 1: what you're talking about with the switch, Remember, like b
2:23:24
Speaker 1: p A free water bottles, Like you can't even look
2:23:27
Speaker 1: and tell the difference between the water balls. They cost
2:23:29
Speaker 1: the same ones b p A Free. You made switch.
2:23:32
Speaker 1: They made switching so easy. Right, it's like it still
2:23:37
Speaker 1: holds water, right, costs the same amount of money. I
2:23:41
Speaker 1: can't tell if I'm looking at it, but right, it
2:23:43
Speaker 1: just becomes like people don't sit around arguing about it, right, right, Yeah,
2:23:48
Speaker 1: So so I guess I'm maybe I didn't. Um. What
2:23:52
Speaker 1: you point out is is very worthy of you know,
2:23:54
Speaker 1: and depending on the bullet and what its composition is
2:23:58
Speaker 1: copper and whatever, then um, some of them, you know,
2:24:02
Speaker 1: the monolithics, the solids that don't have all the pre
2:24:05
Speaker 1: scoring and all that stuff. Yeah, you need eight feet
2:24:08
Speaker 1: per second to get that boot bullet to open up
2:24:10
Speaker 1: like it's supposed to. Um. But now there are other
2:24:13
Speaker 1: companies making bullets that that will fully expand, if not
2:24:17
Speaker 1: fragment into you know, eight or ten pieces that I
2:24:20
Speaker 1: would never use on game meat that identity eat. I mean,
2:24:23
Speaker 1: those bullets will will do what they're supposed to at
2:24:26
Speaker 1: way lower. So you're absolutely right. You have to know
2:24:29
Speaker 1: your tools and you have to know the capabilities. The
2:24:32
Speaker 1: first time I shot all copper, the first time I
2:24:36
Speaker 1: shot an all copper bullet was look a decade ago.
2:24:40
Speaker 1: Remember I shot up Stagg with it, or Red Stag
2:24:42
Speaker 1: with it. He didn't know he'd been hit. He eventually
2:24:44
Speaker 1: fell over and it looked like someone like shoved U. Look,
2:24:47
Speaker 1: he took a field point arrow ran it through him
2:24:49
Speaker 1: and I was six yards away. But just come a
2:24:53
Speaker 1: long way since then, it has. And I think something
2:24:56
Speaker 1: that would be interesting too is because man, my bullets
2:25:00
Speaker 1: at a certain range, like when I'm out of range, like,
2:25:02
Speaker 1: I know what they're gonna do more than likely, right, like,
2:25:05
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be very catastrophic. And we're doing a
2:25:08
Speaker 1: test on this actually in a couple of weeks on
2:25:10
Speaker 1: different bullet types and how they react to bone and
2:25:12
Speaker 1: things like that speed. But like, I would love to
2:25:15
Speaker 1: also see the data on a bonded bullet. Right. We
2:25:19
Speaker 1: know it's lead, right, but we know it's retention is
2:25:22
Speaker 1: a lot higher, right than that of a normal lead
2:25:25
Speaker 1: softcore bullet. So just be interesting to intertwine that to see,
2:25:30
Speaker 1: like what's my level of risk and choosing this, and
2:25:33
Speaker 1: how does that compare to you my perceived um potential
2:25:39
Speaker 1: of losing an animal, because I, like, I don't have
2:25:42
Speaker 1: a massive like I don't have massive ballist sticks expertise
2:25:46
Speaker 1: just for that sake, but I have, like I do
2:25:49
Speaker 1: a lot of big game hunting and shooting like trophy Copper,
2:25:54
Speaker 1: Federal trophy copper. I've yet to have what I get
2:25:56
Speaker 1: like a handful of big and animals every year, and
2:26:01
Speaker 1: I've yet to be like that son of a bit
2:26:03
Speaker 1: and both like never in fact, it will usually bring
2:26:06
Speaker 1: the opposite where people like hunting Couzi ever, but it's like,
2:26:08
Speaker 1: can't believe you're shooting right. It makes mushrooms perfectly, makes
2:26:13
Speaker 1: a perfect hole through them, things fall over. There's not
2:26:16
Speaker 1: a bunch of superfluous damage and a giant wound channel,
2:26:20
Speaker 1: but it mushroomed. I just had like, I'm sure you
2:26:25
Speaker 1: can find extremes, but in terms of like the performance
2:26:28
Speaker 1: thing just me as a dude out hunting and pretty
2:26:31
Speaker 1: normal Western big game situations, I haven't encountered the issue.
2:26:35
Speaker 1: And I think for a guy like you that um
2:26:39
Speaker 1: shoots a big gun, a three wind mag that goes
2:26:41
Speaker 1: pretty damn fast, and you don't reach outside a certain
2:26:45
Speaker 1: yardage like you have a fairly close like like that
2:26:49
Speaker 1: makes total sense. That's when I use copper right. I
2:26:52
Speaker 1: love it. I think it's when you get beyond that
2:26:54
Speaker 1: into different caliber types that it matters out to the
2:26:57
Speaker 1: shots where I'm like, I hear you. I'm glad you
2:27:02
Speaker 1: brought that up, because I wouldn't have remembered to bring
2:27:04
Speaker 1: that up. And it's a valid point. And and again
2:27:07
Speaker 1: it is to me just as simple as know your tools,
2:27:10
Speaker 1: know the information, and make an informed decision. And I
2:27:14
Speaker 1: think the impact from us just doing that as a
2:27:16
Speaker 1: hunting populace um it will make an impact. It will
2:27:20
Speaker 1: make a difference, which may make it more defensible. Back
2:27:22
Speaker 1: to your comments, Steve, that we don't need to be
2:27:25
Speaker 1: told what to do. We can we can operate as hunters,
2:27:29
Speaker 1: as the conservationists that we claim to be. We can
2:27:32
Speaker 1: do that with all of these things. Tell people ro
2:27:35
Speaker 1: out of time, tell people I get that all the time.
2:27:38
Speaker 1: Where if they want to find out more about the
2:27:41
Speaker 1: organizations you're involved, and if they want to read more
2:27:44
Speaker 1: about um whatever, uh you think they should go read
2:27:48
Speaker 1: about you. I know you've done a bunch of work
2:27:51
Speaker 1: on comparative ballistics and stuff. So just tell people to
2:27:54
Speaker 1: find what you guys work on. Yeah, I'll give you
2:27:56
Speaker 1: to UM non Lead Partnership dot org. UM and the
2:28:01
Speaker 1: hunting with Non Lead dot org. Those are those are
2:28:04
Speaker 1: two of the co founders UM Oregon Zoo because they
2:28:06
Speaker 1: have a program there that are co founder Leland Brown
2:28:09
Speaker 1: runs UM. Those are three good resources. And you can
2:28:12
Speaker 1: get a hold of us and we'll come to a
2:28:14
Speaker 1: ballistics demo. We'll bring ballistics. Jael bring a bullet trap.
2:28:17
Speaker 1: We did one of those years ago. And and I'd
2:28:19
Speaker 1: love to talk more more with you offline about the
2:28:22
Speaker 1: bonded bullets because yes, they do retain their weight, but
2:28:25
Speaker 1: there's some interesting things about that. So Nonlair Partnership dot org,
2:28:29
Speaker 1: the Paragrine Fund, any of our other partners. Arizona Game
2:28:32
Speaker 1: and Fish is a great resource. They've been at this
2:28:34
Speaker 1: long time Utah Division of Wildlife and soft down in Arizona.
2:28:39
Speaker 1: Yea soft Well you're gonna pay for that one. Yeah yeah,
2:28:43
Speaker 1: but um, yeah, I'd say hunting with non Lead dot
2:28:45
Speaker 1: Org is probably one of the best resources. And I
2:28:47
Speaker 1: also want to plug another another closer to here, um
2:28:50
Speaker 1: outfit that started up with a colleague of ours, Brian Bedrosian,
2:28:54
Speaker 1: and and they started one up called Sporting Lead Free
2:28:57
Speaker 1: in Wyoming. And it's another one that now pushing for bands,
2:29:01
Speaker 1: pushing forward, sharing information and pushing forward movements that show
2:29:05
Speaker 1: we can take that information and make really good decisions
2:29:08
Speaker 1: for wildlife. Alright, buddy, Chris Parrish, President CEO of the
2:29:13
Speaker 1: Peregrine Fund, thank you very much. Man. You're sticking around
2:29:15
Speaker 1: for trivia. Yeah, sure, I think you do good, but
2:29:18
Speaker 1: I don't think you'll win. I probably I'm not good,
2:29:23
Speaker 1: But no, I'm saying that because I think you might win.
2:29:25
Speaker 1: Because Brodie's now here. Okay, stick around with here and
2:29:30
Speaker 1: don't forget to stay tuned to get an exclusive first
2:29:33
Speaker 1: listen to one of the stories on our new Campfire
2:29:35
Speaker 1: Stories audio book, Narrow Escapes and More Close Calls The
2:29:48
Speaker 1: Best Shot of My Life by Cameron kirk Connell. A
2:29:57
Speaker 1: lot of the stories we're dealing with in the collection
2:30:00
Speaker 1: originally came to us in just little snippets, like little
2:30:03
Speaker 1: details of stories in a couple of cases, we would
2:30:07
Speaker 1: later find out that the details originally provided to us
2:30:10
Speaker 1: weren't actually part of the story at all. In other cases,
2:30:14
Speaker 1: we might have just gotten a little snippet of a
2:30:16
Speaker 1: story that was in fact the most tantalizing bit this story.
2:30:20
Speaker 1: Here is an example of the latter. Our next storyteller,
2:30:25
Speaker 1: Cameron kirk Connell his friends with the spear fisher woman
2:30:29
Speaker 1: Kimmy Werner, who you heard from earlier. And earlier I
2:30:34
Speaker 1: mentioned how Kimmy keeps a lot of things to herself.
2:30:37
Speaker 1: She lets experiences in the ocean oftentimes just stay between
2:30:41
Speaker 1: her and the water. Cameron is guided by that same
2:30:45
Speaker 1: principle and was not particularly eager to talk about this.
2:30:51
Speaker 1: In the end, he decided to tell us his story
2:30:53
Speaker 1: because he feels as though it might be helpful to
2:30:56
Speaker 1: other people who could wind up in a simil really
2:31:00
Speaker 1: dangerous position. He is anything but a glory seeker. However,
2:31:06
Speaker 1: perhaps to his own embarrassment, I'll point out that his
2:31:09
Speaker 1: actions and bravery were recognized by the United States Coast Guard.
2:31:14
Speaker 1: I called a little bit of the story, and I
2:31:16
Speaker 1: knew that if the part I heard was right, this
2:31:20
Speaker 1: story just couldn't be ignored. We had to go track
2:31:23
Speaker 1: it down, and I'm glad we did, and I think
2:31:27
Speaker 1: you'll be glad as well. I'm camera er'connell. I'm a
2:31:38
Speaker 1: professional spear fishing guide, and my family is from the
2:31:42
Speaker 1: Cayman Islands, so we grew up spear fishing and around
2:31:45
Speaker 1: the water, and I grew up doing nothing but wanting
2:31:50
Speaker 1: to be on the water. At the time this story
2:31:53
Speaker 1: takes place, I was working down in book a Grand
2:31:56
Speaker 1: as a tarpan guide, you know, helping people catch tarpin.
2:32:01
Speaker 1: When whenever I had a chance when I was off
2:32:04
Speaker 1: of work, I would go and and spear. And I
2:32:08
Speaker 1: saw a really good day of weather coming in where
2:32:11
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like flat calm, and there were some
2:32:14
Speaker 1: other guys at the marina that had a good boat
2:32:16
Speaker 1: that we could run way off shot of these really
2:32:18
Speaker 1: good spots. So I called a buddy of mine, Steve,
2:32:20
Speaker 1: who was up at the University of Florida. I was like, dude,
2:32:23
Speaker 1: come down, like it's gonna be like banner conditions, I've
2:32:26
Speaker 1: got everything, just show up. He was a really good diver,
2:32:29
Speaker 1: and it's it's hard to find other guys that are
2:32:32
Speaker 1: good at diving, so he drove through the night after
2:32:36
Speaker 1: having a pretty big July four and came down and
2:32:38
Speaker 1: met me, and I think he probably had about two
2:32:41
Speaker 1: or three hours of sleep by the time he got there. Um,
2:32:44
Speaker 1: so he was pretty whipped. This day, we were diving
2:32:49
Speaker 1: about sixty miles off the west coast of Florida on
2:32:52
Speaker 1: a spot that was in about eighty feet of water,
2:32:55
Speaker 1: and during that time of year, the water is usually
2:32:58
Speaker 1: nice and blue. Even in a feet of water, you
2:33:01
Speaker 1: can usually see far enough down to see some good fish,
2:33:04
Speaker 1: and the fish will come up midwater, so you're not
2:33:06
Speaker 1: diving all the way to the bottom on a free dive,
2:33:08
Speaker 1: which is breath hold diving, but you're actually chumming them up.
2:33:12
Speaker 1: Chumming What we do is we will take another fish
2:33:17
Speaker 1: or a bait fish, cut it up into small pieces,
2:33:20
Speaker 1: and slowly toss a couple of pieces out so the
2:33:22
Speaker 1: boat was anchored, and we would throw like three pieces
2:33:25
Speaker 1: of chum, Wait thirty seconds, three more pieces of chum,
2:33:29
Speaker 1: wait thirty seconds. And what that does is it sinks
2:33:31
Speaker 1: down and eventually it's going to go all the way
2:33:34
Speaker 1: to the bottom. You figure if you're a fish and
2:33:37
Speaker 1: eighty feet of water and you smell this delicious, you know,
2:33:40
Speaker 1: chum coming down the chunks of fish. You're gonna eat
2:33:43
Speaker 1: those little pieces and then you're gonna look up and
2:33:44
Speaker 1: be like, oh ho, so it's coming from up there.
2:33:47
Speaker 1: And then you follow that trail all the way up,
2:33:50
Speaker 1: so you can be out in a hundred or two
2:33:53
Speaker 1: feet of water and bring fish that are usually bottom
2:33:57
Speaker 1: fish nearly to the surface, so all the way up
2:34:00
Speaker 1: into range of what we can do free diving by chumming.
2:34:07
Speaker 1: We had just an epic day, Like the water conditions
2:34:10
Speaker 1: were awesome. It was really clear, beautiful blue um Both
2:34:14
Speaker 1: of us shot our biggest amberjacks, and the one that
2:34:18
Speaker 1: I shot I remember distinctly. I dove down and shot
2:34:22
Speaker 1: at it about seventy ft and I was in a
2:34:24
Speaker 1: hundred fifty water and the fish ended up weighing I
2:34:27
Speaker 1: think a hunned five or hundred seven pounds, so I
2:34:29
Speaker 1: can remember, like you celebrate with Steve on the surface.
2:34:33
Speaker 1: And then he shot another one, his best one. So
2:34:35
Speaker 1: it was getting towards the end of the day and
2:34:37
Speaker 1: we anchored up on a new spot and we were
2:34:40
Speaker 1: chumming for a while and getting in in the water
2:34:44
Speaker 1: so uh, the current was going straight off the back
2:34:48
Speaker 1: of the boat. So for the first thirty ft of depth,
2:34:53
Speaker 1: the current was going straight back and there was only
2:34:55
Speaker 1: about thirty ft of visibility in there. Uh below that
2:34:59
Speaker 1: there was a current that was going exactly ninety degrees
2:35:02
Speaker 1: perpendicular to it, and it was crystal blue water, and
2:35:07
Speaker 1: there was a group of Couberra snappers, which are a big,
2:35:11
Speaker 1: powerful snapper that fight really hard and really difficult to
2:35:15
Speaker 1: get and they really wouldn't come up over about a
2:35:18
Speaker 1: hundred feet. So Steve and I talked about it, and
2:35:23
Speaker 1: we decided that, you know, because of the rigs that
2:35:26
Speaker 1: we were using, which was spear guns with a hundred
2:35:29
Speaker 1: foot float line and a buoy, we weren't going to
2:35:32
Speaker 1: be able to get him with that rig So a
2:35:34
Speaker 1: spear gun is basically a piece of wood with a
2:35:37
Speaker 1: trigger mechanism and rubber bands that propel a metal shaft
2:35:45
Speaker 1: with a barb on it, and when it's loaded, it's
2:35:47
Speaker 1: like a rubber band gun. You had a kid except
2:35:49
Speaker 1: slings out of a metal shaft. So that spear has
2:35:53
Speaker 1: a hole in it and you tie a line off
2:35:55
Speaker 1: to that and then you've got about fifteen to thirty
2:35:59
Speaker 1: feet of slack line. That's attached to the gun, and
2:36:02
Speaker 1: then that is clipped off to a float line, which
2:36:06
Speaker 1: is a line that goes from the gun all the
2:36:08
Speaker 1: way to the surface. And you can have all kinds
2:36:10
Speaker 1: of different lengths of float lines and materials, but for
2:36:14
Speaker 1: what we were doing this day, we had a hundred
2:36:17
Speaker 1: foot float line, and then on the surface we have
2:36:20
Speaker 1: a float which is a big inflatable buoy that looks
2:36:23
Speaker 1: like a lifeguard float, so that when you shoot a fish,
2:36:26
Speaker 1: you don't have to fight them while you're down there.
2:36:29
Speaker 1: You can shoot them, keep the gun in your hands,
2:36:31
Speaker 1: the line comes away from it, and the line is
2:36:34
Speaker 1: attached to the buoy, so you can relax get to
2:36:37
Speaker 1: the surface. But the problem we were having is because
2:36:40
Speaker 1: of the way the currents were in the depths that
2:36:42
Speaker 1: we were diving, that boo was coming tight each time,
2:36:45
Speaker 1: and I was like just out of range of shooting
2:36:48
Speaker 1: that really big snapper and the other fish that were
2:36:51
Speaker 1: down deep. So we theorized the only way to do
2:36:56
Speaker 1: this was to use the fishing reel that was in
2:37:00
Speaker 1: the boat clip that off to the gun into the line,
2:37:03
Speaker 1: so if that fish came up to a hut, I'd
2:37:07
Speaker 1: be able to get to it shoot it and then
2:37:09
Speaker 1: be able to let go and just free ascend to
2:37:12
Speaker 1: the surface without having to fight anything, and the guys
2:37:15
Speaker 1: in the boat would be attached to it and be
2:37:17
Speaker 1: able to crank it up. So in order to give
2:37:20
Speaker 1: me enough slack to go deep enough to shoot one
2:37:23
Speaker 1: of these fish, we rigged the line from the spear
2:37:28
Speaker 1: actually to the fishing reel. So we talked it over
2:37:31
Speaker 1: with the guys in the boat and said, look, I'm
2:37:33
Speaker 1: gonna go down. I'm gonna make this dive. Steve's gonna
2:37:36
Speaker 1: stay on the surface and watch me. I'm gonna shoot
2:37:38
Speaker 1: this fish, and when you feel a tug, you guys
2:37:41
Speaker 1: crank this thing up. And we all decided this was
2:37:44
Speaker 1: a pretty good plan. And up until that day and
2:37:48
Speaker 1: until now, I've never done that again. It's amazing that
2:37:52
Speaker 1: we actually did it on on that occasion. It could
2:37:55
Speaker 1: not have been timed better. At this point in the day,
2:37:59
Speaker 1: Steve was kind of getting a little bit tired, and
2:38:01
Speaker 1: I was the stronger deeper diver. I told Steve, I'm
2:38:06
Speaker 1: gonna rest up. You watch me, and I'm holding onto
2:38:10
Speaker 1: the back of the boat, currents flowing past and trying
2:38:13
Speaker 1: to relax every muscle in my body. Every muscle that
2:38:17
Speaker 1: you're tensing is burning oxygen. So I'm totally relaxed, chilling
2:38:21
Speaker 1: on the surface and just waiting, doing nice relaxed breast
2:38:25
Speaker 1: like you do in yoga um to auction date your body,
2:38:28
Speaker 1: lower your your heart rate, and then for the last
2:38:32
Speaker 1: thirty seconds, I'm doing a series of breasts before my
2:38:34
Speaker 1: last giant breath, which is belly, chest, shoulder, and then going.
2:38:41
Speaker 1: And during that time of waiting for me, I think
2:38:45
Speaker 1: Steve got bored and made a dive and I kind
2:38:48
Speaker 1: of noticed it out of the corner of my eye
2:38:50
Speaker 1: and didn't think much of it because there were pelagic
2:38:52
Speaker 1: fish wahoo's and mackerel and rainbow runners and stuff that
2:38:56
Speaker 1: would come by every once in a while. So I
2:38:57
Speaker 1: was like, he's just he's just gonna shoot something shallower.
2:39:00
Speaker 1: He's just going to look or whatever. Like I know,
2:39:02
Speaker 1: he's focused on watching me because my next dive is
2:39:05
Speaker 1: probably gonna be over a hundred foot. So I kicked
2:39:08
Speaker 1: down nice and slow. When you make a perfectly efficient
2:39:16
Speaker 1: relax dive, as soon as you hold your breath and
2:39:19
Speaker 1: invert and start kicking down, you can do three ft
2:39:23
Speaker 1: per second for your dive, So to get to ninety ft.
2:39:26
Speaker 1: It's gonna take you thirty seconds. Then you sit down
2:39:29
Speaker 1: there and relax. And my general routine is just about that.
2:39:35
Speaker 1: It's like thirty seconds down, spend thirty or forty five
2:39:38
Speaker 1: seconds down, and then thirty seconds back up. So my
2:39:41
Speaker 1: average dive is about a minute and a half minute
2:39:44
Speaker 1: forty five. After about seconds, I'm down at and sitting
2:39:51
Speaker 1: there waiting, and a nice school of snappers came up.
2:39:54
Speaker 1: There was four, like really good fish that at the
2:39:57
Speaker 1: time would have been one of my best Kubera snappers.
2:40:02
Speaker 1: I'm sitting there looking at these snappers, and my mind
2:40:05
Speaker 1: has always been so focused on records, and I always say, like,
2:40:09
Speaker 1: in order to get a hundred pound fish, you gotta
2:40:12
Speaker 1: let all the ninety pound fish swim past. And at
2:40:15
Speaker 1: the time I knew the record was a few pounds
2:40:18
Speaker 1: off of one that we had seen that had a
2:40:20
Speaker 1: huge white mark on its face. So down there, say
2:40:24
Speaker 1: thirty seconds or so, and I'm drifting, you know, from
2:40:27
Speaker 1: seventy down. So it's towards the end of my dive.
2:40:31
Speaker 1: I've got this school snapper here, but I still haven't
2:40:34
Speaker 1: seen the big one, the big one with the white
2:40:36
Speaker 1: spot on his face, and that's the one I really wanted,
2:40:38
Speaker 1: so um getting ready ahead the surfings, I was like,
2:40:41
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go ahead and shoot one of these other snapper.
2:40:46
Speaker 1: Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I
2:40:48
Speaker 1: catch a glimpse of white and I turned to look,
2:40:52
Speaker 1: and in the distance, six year seventy plus feet away
2:40:57
Speaker 1: is the white handle of Steve's gun, which still loaded,
2:41:01
Speaker 1: heading straight for the bottom like a rocket. And I
2:41:04
Speaker 1: was like, oh God, that's not good. And I look
2:41:08
Speaker 1: and above that, just on the edge of my visibility,
2:41:11
Speaker 1: is Steve in a seated position, floating down towards the bottom,
2:41:17
Speaker 1: and I immediately know that he has blacked out. When
2:41:22
Speaker 1: you hold your breath too long and you're on land,
2:41:24
Speaker 1: eventually you're gonna pass out. But on land, your body
2:41:28
Speaker 1: is going to know that you're outside. There's arroganst your face.
2:41:31
Speaker 1: You're gonna take another breath. In the water, your body
2:41:34
Speaker 1: also knows that, hey, I'm in the water. Your body
2:41:39
Speaker 1: has a kind of a self preservation system that protects
2:41:44
Speaker 1: you and your vocal cords closed so you're not taking
2:41:47
Speaker 1: in any water. And basically it's like closing your your laptop.
2:41:51
Speaker 1: It goes into a sleep mode, so you pass out.
2:41:54
Speaker 1: You're not conscious. Your heart is still beating, but you're
2:41:57
Speaker 1: not breathing. So this is the state that Steve is in.
2:42:01
Speaker 1: The water was eight feet deep, and he was sinking
2:42:06
Speaker 1: at such a rate that I could not go to
2:42:09
Speaker 1: the surface and take another breath and come down and
2:42:11
Speaker 1: get him, because he would be gone forever. I knew
2:42:15
Speaker 1: then that I had one chance, and that was right now,
2:42:19
Speaker 1: to try and save him, at the very least recover
2:42:22
Speaker 1: his body. We didn't have any scuba tanks on the boat.
2:42:26
Speaker 1: We had no way of getting him. I have no
2:42:27
Speaker 1: one else on the surface, no one else to help me.
2:42:29
Speaker 1: Him and I were the only divers. So I dropped
2:42:33
Speaker 1: my weight belt and I kicked steadily towards him. He
2:42:37
Speaker 1: is maybe sixty or seventy feet away, which is a
2:42:41
Speaker 1: huge distance to swim horizontally underwater, even if I had
2:42:46
Speaker 1: been planning to do that on a dive, and then
2:42:49
Speaker 1: I knew that I had thirty seconds of breath to
2:42:51
Speaker 1: get back to the surface. Having to tack on that
2:42:54
Speaker 1: additional twenty seconds working like having to kick horizontally is
2:43:00
Speaker 1: a big deal, and one second makes a difference. Normally,
2:43:07
Speaker 1: when you help somebody that is blacked out, you go
2:43:10
Speaker 1: and grab them and bring him to the surface. And
2:43:13
Speaker 1: you can imagine the exertion it would take to bring
2:43:17
Speaker 1: someone's body up from seventy or eighty feet, which is
2:43:22
Speaker 1: where he would have been. Like when I got to him,
2:43:25
Speaker 1: and I knew there was just no way, Like it
2:43:28
Speaker 1: was absolutely impossible for me to do that, Like I
2:43:32
Speaker 1: would have died too, and no one you know, would
2:43:35
Speaker 1: have ever found us. As I'm closing the distance towards him,
2:43:43
Speaker 1: in my mind, I'm like, the only option I have
2:43:47
Speaker 1: here is to shoot him. We had talked, you know,
2:43:52
Speaker 1: over the years with different you know, friends around the world,
2:43:55
Speaker 1: that in a situation like this, it was totally hopeless
2:43:59
Speaker 1: that we would just shot each other, and at least
2:44:01
Speaker 1: then you'd be rigidly connected to him. The guys probably
2:44:05
Speaker 1: be pretty mad at you for shooting him, but at
2:44:07
Speaker 1: least he saved his life and you were attached to him.
2:44:10
Speaker 1: So I started kicking towards Steve. So now this is
2:44:15
Speaker 1: going through my mind in milliseconds, I'm trying to calculate
2:44:20
Speaker 1: can I get to him who's pretty far away, and
2:44:23
Speaker 1: then from there go to the surface, and in retrospect,
2:44:29
Speaker 1: I knew that I probably couldn't do it, but knowing
2:44:34
Speaker 1: that this was the only chance that I was going
2:44:37
Speaker 1: to have to be able to get a hold of
2:44:40
Speaker 1: him and secure him kind of overshadowed that, and I
2:44:45
Speaker 1: knew that I had to do something. I had to
2:44:47
Speaker 1: try because I figured he's gonna die either way. As
2:44:52
Speaker 1: I got about halfway there, I was like, I'm gonna
2:44:54
Speaker 1: shoot him in the calf. I'm a pretty good shot.
2:44:57
Speaker 1: I'm gonna shoot him in the calf that way. There's
2:44:59
Speaker 1: no major art rereas or anything in there. I can
2:45:01
Speaker 1: punch through it and I'll have a good hold of him.
2:45:05
Speaker 1: So as I'm getting closer to him, I get about
2:45:08
Speaker 1: away and his whole body rotates towards me, and my
2:45:15
Speaker 1: heart just sank because there's no way I'm shooting him in,
2:45:21
Speaker 1: you know, in the chest or the abdomen or the thigh,
2:45:24
Speaker 1: and I was worried that the shin bones would be
2:45:28
Speaker 1: too hard to punch through at the distance, and I
2:45:31
Speaker 1: didn't have any more breath. I didn't have any more time,
2:45:34
Speaker 1: so I made a split second decision and aimed just
2:45:38
Speaker 1: in front of his toes and shot him through the
2:45:40
Speaker 1: fin As soon as I shot. I'm like, oh, my
2:45:45
Speaker 1: spear gun, and now the line is attached to the boat.
2:45:49
Speaker 1: And I looked to the surface and I'll never forget
2:45:54
Speaker 1: I'll never forget that feeling when I looked at the
2:45:58
Speaker 1: surface and new that I wasn't going to make it either.
2:46:05
Speaker 1: Just absolutely the most dreadful feeling I've ever felt my life,
2:46:11
Speaker 1: seeing the surface, knowing how much air I had, and
2:46:14
Speaker 1: knowing there was no way I was going to make it.
2:46:18
Speaker 1: I think it was probably eighty ft down at the time,
2:46:21
Speaker 1: and I kicked away immediately and thought back to my
2:46:28
Speaker 1: training and my free diving that I've done and went
2:46:32
Speaker 1: into the absolute most efficient, perfect technique I possibly could,
2:46:39
Speaker 1: and that is your hands. I love your head tied
2:46:43
Speaker 1: against your ears, hands overlapping and just basically making yourself
2:46:47
Speaker 1: a perfect arrow. And started kicking steadily up, trying to relax,
2:46:53
Speaker 1: sniffing the air out of my mask as I went up,
2:46:55
Speaker 1: trying to get every little bit of it. And I
2:46:58
Speaker 1: hit the surface and if my first breath screamed at
2:47:02
Speaker 1: the boat, which is the absolute worst thing to do.
2:47:05
Speaker 1: You need to take recovery breaths and get the CEO
2:47:07
Speaker 1: two out of your system and get air back in.
2:47:10
Speaker 1: So when I screamed like that, I started to pass
2:47:14
Speaker 1: out myself, and again I remembered the free diving training
2:47:20
Speaker 1: and when pilots pulled gs when they're flying their jets.
2:47:25
Speaker 1: To keep from passing out, they do something called a
2:47:28
Speaker 1: hook breath, which is and you do five of those
2:47:34
Speaker 1: and it pressurizes, brings out O two back in, gets
2:47:37
Speaker 1: the CEO two out. And those breaths saved my life
2:47:42
Speaker 1: because when I surfaced, I was more than a hundred
2:47:44
Speaker 1: foot behind the boat, down current and away from you know,
2:47:48
Speaker 1: the guys and anybody that could help me. So now
2:47:52
Speaker 1: I'm I'm conscious, and I'm hauling asked for the boat.
2:47:56
Speaker 1: I'm swimming as hard as I can for the boat,
2:47:58
Speaker 1: yelling at them the whole way. Cut the anchor line,
2:48:01
Speaker 1: pull it up, cut the anchor line. Steve's on it.
2:48:05
Speaker 1: Those guys are cranking like crazy, they're hooting, holler and
2:48:09
Speaker 1: thinking they've got, you know, the fish of a lifetime
2:48:11
Speaker 1: that I've just speared, this giant hundred plus colbera snapper.
2:48:15
Speaker 1: I climb on the back of the boat, immediately start
2:48:19
Speaker 1: throwing coolers and bean bags and crap off the back
2:48:22
Speaker 1: of the boat to make room and telling him cut
2:48:24
Speaker 1: the anchor line, get on the radio, called the coastguard,
2:48:28
Speaker 1: crank this up. It has Steve on it. He's blacked out.
2:48:31
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to revive him. I need you guys
2:48:33
Speaker 1: to help me. And they're looking at me like what
2:48:37
Speaker 1: they're they're just they can't even wrap their heads around it.
2:48:40
Speaker 1: So they're cranking. I mean, this rod is bent like
2:48:42
Speaker 1: we've got the fish of a lifetime coming up. And
2:48:46
Speaker 1: up comes Steve backwards then first, and we grab his ankle,
2:48:50
Speaker 1: grab his arms and pull him into the boat. His
2:48:54
Speaker 1: skin was the worst color blue gray of death I've
2:49:02
Speaker 1: ever seen. He was bleeding from his eyes, his ears,
2:49:06
Speaker 1: his nose, and out of his mouth was just orange, foamy,
2:49:11
Speaker 1: horrible blood just foaming out of his mouth. He had
2:49:15
Speaker 1: a white rash guard on at the time, and within
2:49:17
Speaker 1: a couple of seconds, like his whole rash guard was orange.
2:49:21
Speaker 1: So we pull him up on the back of the
2:49:22
Speaker 1: boat and I lay him on the back of the boat,
2:49:25
Speaker 1: and you can imagine, like my adrenaline was, you know,
2:49:28
Speaker 1: going pretty hard. So I checked to see if he
2:49:31
Speaker 1: has a pulse, and he had a very very faint pulse.
2:49:35
Speaker 1: He wasn't breathing. I took his mask off, and when
2:49:41
Speaker 1: someone does black out, the quickest, easiest way to bring
2:49:44
Speaker 1: them back is to blow across their cheeks, because you
2:49:47
Speaker 1: have sensors in your cheeks that tell you, hey, I'm
2:49:51
Speaker 1: I'm in the air. I can breathe. So I blew
2:49:53
Speaker 1: across his cheeks, you know, opened his airway, tapped on
2:49:57
Speaker 1: his cheek, and I was talking to him, say breathe, Steve, breathe,
2:50:00
Speaker 1: You're okay, breathe. So I did two or three cycles
2:50:05
Speaker 1: of that, and he was unresponsive. In spear fishing, I've
2:50:13
Speaker 1: saved nine or ten people. Now, every single other person
2:50:18
Speaker 1: that I have helped recover from a blackout within the
2:50:21
Speaker 1: first two breaths has come back. They would come back immediately.
2:50:26
Speaker 1: In my mind, I'm like, this is really really bad,
2:50:29
Speaker 1: Like I've never seen anything like this. So I opened
2:50:34
Speaker 1: his air way again, nothing's happening. So there's so much
2:50:39
Speaker 1: orange foam in his mouth, like this bloody foam. I
2:50:43
Speaker 1: was like, maybe I'll roll him on his side. So
2:50:45
Speaker 1: I rolled him on his side and just this horrible
2:50:50
Speaker 1: orange foam is just leaking out of his mouth. And
2:50:55
Speaker 1: just as I'm getting ready to do rescue, breaths, which is,
2:50:59
Speaker 1: you know, like a CPR breasts. He goes and I
2:51:07
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, that was that was like
2:51:10
Speaker 1: the death you know, the death breath that you hear
2:51:13
Speaker 1: about and you read about. And he did that the
2:51:21
Speaker 1: one time, and there was a pause and he took
2:51:27
Speaker 1: what I would say as a one percent breath. I
2:51:31
Speaker 1: blew on his face hard again, said breathe, Steve, breathe. Yeah,
2:51:40
Speaker 1: he took a little bit more of a breath, and
2:51:42
Speaker 1: that orange foam was just coming out, and you could
2:51:45
Speaker 1: hear it like just gurgling in his lungs, like there's
2:51:48
Speaker 1: no room in his lungs, you know, for for even
2:51:50
Speaker 1: any air. So he started breathing slowly like that too,
2:51:59
Speaker 1: and five percent breasts and he's still unconscious, and I
2:52:06
Speaker 1: got him down into the boat. We got the anchor
2:52:09
Speaker 1: line off, we got the coast Guard on on the radio,
2:52:11
Speaker 1: and I told the guys, just as fast as you
2:52:14
Speaker 1: can go, head towards Tampa, head towards land. Coast Guard
2:52:18
Speaker 1: helicopter was on its way. So he's unconscious for fifteen
2:52:25
Speaker 1: or twenty minutes, still that orange phones coming out, and
2:52:29
Speaker 1: finally he kind of comes to and the first thing
2:52:35
Speaker 1: he said, is thank you, And uh, that doesn't seem
2:52:40
Speaker 1: like a big deal. But when you black out and
2:52:45
Speaker 1: you're unconscious that you have amnesia. So people that have
2:52:51
Speaker 1: blacked out don't remember anything so lasting remembers. He was,
2:52:55
Speaker 1: you know, ten fift ft from the surface and then
2:52:57
Speaker 1: lights out and this is the next thing is me
2:53:00
Speaker 1: holding him in in my arms and I held him
2:53:04
Speaker 1: and uh, and we we zoomed in as fast as
2:53:08
Speaker 1: that boat could go, and the helicopter came when we
2:53:12
Speaker 1: were about, you know, forty miles offshore. Lower the basket
2:53:15
Speaker 1: put him in the basket, and I'd been on the
2:53:17
Speaker 1: radio with them, trying to explain to the coast guard
2:53:19
Speaker 1: the whole time he's blacked out, it's a three diving thing.
2:53:23
Speaker 1: He needs oxygen immediately, and he just got to get
2:53:26
Speaker 1: him to the hospital. So the lower the basket put
2:53:29
Speaker 1: him in the basket in the front of the boat,
2:53:31
Speaker 1: lift him off, put him in, and they just poof,
2:53:34
Speaker 1: they're out of sight. They're gone. And I just sat
2:53:38
Speaker 1: down in the boat and just totally broke down. And
2:53:43
Speaker 1: I couldn't really talk to anybody in the boat, and um,
2:53:48
Speaker 1: it was it was tough. So Steve got to got
2:53:59
Speaker 1: to the hospital. UM, he was in the ICU for
2:54:02
Speaker 1: three or four days. His lungs were almost completely full
2:54:05
Speaker 1: of fluids and there was a big risk of secondary drowning,
2:54:10
Speaker 1: so he was in there for a while. UM he
2:54:12
Speaker 1: made a full recovery, no brain damage or anything. He
2:54:16
Speaker 1: played football at University of Florida for another two years
2:54:19
Speaker 1: or so, and him and I are still friends. He's
2:54:22
Speaker 1: actually my insurance broker and a and a really good
2:54:25
Speaker 1: buddy of mine. We still dive together. The tough thing
2:54:29
Speaker 1: about blackouts and free diving is you're basically watching your
2:54:36
Speaker 1: your friend die and it's all on you. In that moment,
2:54:42
Speaker 1: two make the right decisions in a very short period
2:54:46
Speaker 1: of time to save their lives. I wish I never
2:54:51
Speaker 1: had had to to shoot him in the fin but
2:54:56
Speaker 1: I'm glad it turned out the way it did. Obviously,
2:54:59
Speaker 1: it's the best shot of my life.