Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 635: Working on Grizzly Bears

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Ep. 635: Working on Grizzly Bears · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Listeningcast, you can't predict anything.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by first Light.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
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  Speaker 1: for el, First Light has performance apparel to support every
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  Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
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  Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T l I t
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: e dot com. Joined today by Dusty Lassiter, former Wyoming
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: game and fish bear management specialists, the keyword there being former.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I love the agency guys. But the problem with having
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: agency guys on to talk about wildlife management is they
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: got to worry about them getting in trouble. Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: I don't have to worry about getting in trouble anymore.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Real, there's no trouble. Nothing can do it to you.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Let the air out of your tires.
• 1:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, write me a ticket.
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  Speaker 1: I guess no. Again, I have nothing, But you know,
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  Speaker 1: I have like a lot of respect and the admiration
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  Speaker 1: for agency biologists and game wardens Like you know, I
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  Speaker 1: love it. So many of them are driven by passion
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  Speaker 1: and a desire to do good. But when talking about
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: policy just gets tricky for him because you know, they
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  Speaker 1: they get reprimanded.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, you get muzzled a little bit, and you know
• 1:30
  Speaker 4: you're trying to walk the party line a little bit,
• 1:33
  Speaker 4: you know, the department line.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Uh, give everybody a run through of what you've
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: done in your career around grizzly bears and wolves.
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  Speaker 4: And oh man, So I started in twenty ten and
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  Speaker 4: I was just supposed to be on for one fall.
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  Speaker 4: In one spring, I got hired on because one of
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  Speaker 4: my coworkers was going back to college. And that was
• 1:59
  Speaker 4: the busiest year that we'd ever had. We caught sixty
• 2:02
  Speaker 4: seven grizzly bears in Wyoming outside of Yellstowe National Park.
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  Speaker 4: And then in that year, so damn man. Yeah, yeah, it.
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  Speaker 1: Was all in barrel traps.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. We we call them culvert traps, but they're really
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  Speaker 4: big square box traps. Now the Montana guys still use
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: those culverts, but it's a pain in the butt to
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  Speaker 4: pull a bear in and out of them.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah remember that round, Remember that video Callahan climbing in there,
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  Speaker 1: climbing one of them tubes of that bearris basically like
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: laid out on it. Yeah.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so we we I think we dealt with
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  Speaker 4: enough bears. We came up with a better trap design. Honestly,
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  Speaker 4: what do you what were you guys?
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  Speaker 1: Man? I got so many questions go on. I just
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  Speaker 1: remember that later. I want to ask you about what
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  Speaker 1: kind of how you like, what your favorite bait and
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: stuff is. But keep going. Yeah, so you got on.
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  Speaker 1: You guys started just hammering bears.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was just call after call. I would try
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  Speaker 4: to go home just to take a nap, and I
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  Speaker 4: would get flagged down on the road somebody being like,
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  Speaker 4: I got a I got a bear. Actually, one of
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  Speaker 4: those guys was Jim Zumbo. You know. He flagged me
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  Speaker 4: down on the road and he's like, yeah, I just
• 3:10
  Speaker 4: got back from Alaska. I'd killed my twentieth black bear,
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  Speaker 4: and he was he was smoking some salmon and a
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  Speaker 4: grizzly bear came by and smashed his salmon smoker.
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  Speaker 1: Oh I got it, so.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, so I started.
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  Speaker 1: Jim Zumbo, Yeah, came home from Alaska, was smoking salmon
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: that he brought home from Alaska, and a grizzly showed
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: up and smashed Jim zumbole smoker.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah exactly, yep, yep, so pretty legit kind of funny.
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  Speaker 5: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I wanted one up with my George Bush
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  Speaker 1: story h joke.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah. So that was just a really busy season and
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  Speaker 4: there was a need for more help, so they hired
• 3:58
  Speaker 4: me on another season.
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  Speaker 1: And because you were a big game guide, yeah I was.
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  Speaker 4: You know, I went to the University Wyoming, got finance degree,
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  Speaker 4: came home and just loved where I lived. And when
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  Speaker 4: I came home, I was working on the thoroughfare as
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  Speaker 4: a guide, and you know, just doing construction, trying to
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  Speaker 4: make ends meet, and.
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  Speaker 3: Home as Cody, Home as Cody.
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  Speaker 4: That's where I grew up. And I was just wrong place,
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  Speaker 4: wrong time, honestly, because there weren't a lot of people
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  Speaker 4: that went to college and came back and I had
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  Speaker 4: a lot of knowledge and skill about horses in the
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  Speaker 4: back country, and you know, my life was immersed in
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  Speaker 4: wildlife and bears growing up, and my parents worked for
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  Speaker 4: outfitters and you know, they were stopping in at the
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  Speaker 4: house and telling crazy stories and I was just sucked in.
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  Speaker 4: So that's why I came home. And I wasn't intending
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  Speaker 4: to get into bear work, and I just fell into
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  Speaker 4: it and the timing was right, and yeah, they hired
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  Speaker 4: me on and you know, that first year I saw
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  Speaker 4: twenty five bears, and then that next season I was
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  Speaker 4: in on another twenty five Grizzly captures and had fifty
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  Speaker 4: under my belt and a pretty quick, you know amount
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  Speaker 4: of time.
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  Speaker 1: So were you doing all the were you doing all
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the relocations on those two? Like how many are euthanized
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  Speaker 1: and how many are relocated?
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  Speaker 4: So at the time, my boss was a guy named
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  Speaker 4: Mark Persino, and we were really still in the recovery
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  Speaker 4: phase with these bears, and we probably only euthanized one
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  Speaker 4: out of five when I started, and they were in
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  Speaker 4: really bad shape. You know, they'd been repeat offenders. Never
• 5:50
  Speaker 4: it's never the three strikes and you're out. People say
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: that all the time, and I get so sick of that.
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  Speaker 1: That's not true.
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  Speaker 4: No, that's not true. It's not California. So but yeah,
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  Speaker 4: there were some bears that, you know, I'd been in
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  Speaker 4: multiple livestock conflicts that were removing or I caught a
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  Speaker 4: female that year that her back leg was broke and
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  Speaker 4: it was six inches shorter than her other back leg,
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  Speaker 4: and I had the bone in my office and it's
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: just a you know, melded piece of calcium.
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  Speaker 1: How do you think she broke her leg, No idea.
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  Speaker 4: I always wondered that.
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  Speaker 1: You know, on a bear like that, on a grizzy
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  Speaker 1: like that, it's in heart, it's in bad shape, it's desperate,
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  Speaker 1: and it's not gonna You're not gonna you know what
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  Speaker 1: the word to use. You're not going to rehabilitate it.
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  Speaker 4: No, it just wasn't going to be successful relocating that
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  Speaker 4: kind of bear. And she was emaciated, and she actually
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  Speaker 4: had a yearling that we didn't know about at the time.
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  Speaker 4: You know, she was she was trying to orphan a
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  Speaker 4: yearling bear because she was not even producing milk. She
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  Speaker 4: was in such poor physical shape.
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  Speaker 1: Got it. You say she was trying to orphan it.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it was. It was following her around,
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  Speaker 4: but she's not providing for it at all. And we
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  Speaker 4: ended up catching that bear too, and and we relocated
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  Speaker 4: that bear, but she just wasn't a good candidate for relocation.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. And when you relocate the grizzlies, how do you
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  Speaker 1: how do you figure out where to try because you
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  Speaker 1: got to put him so far away from you got
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  Speaker 1: to put them so far away, Yeah, to reduce the
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  Speaker 1: temptation you're going to get in trouble again. And that's
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: and that's got to be like very time consuming.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, it definitely takes some man power, but you're trying
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  Speaker 4: to take it as far away from the conflict as possible.
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  Speaker 4: And there's really about six relocation sites in Wyoming that
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  Speaker 4: we use, you know, And that kind of had changed
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  Speaker 4: over the time that I'd been at the department. We
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  Speaker 4: started doing some relocation that weren't as.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Far and use helicopters to dump them off.
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  Speaker 4: We don't. We had one bear trap that you could
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  Speaker 4: take off the wheels and haul with the helicopter, But
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  Speaker 4: and the time that I was there, the eleven years
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  Speaker 4: I was there, we never did that.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, now tell me how you catch one.
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  Speaker 4: So most of the time you're using a culvert trap,
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  Speaker 4: and you want to get that thing as low to
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  Speaker 4: the ground as possible. You want to set it as
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  Speaker 4: close to the conflict as possible, and you just put
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  Speaker 4: a piece of bait in the front of that thing,
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  Speaker 4: usually a road killed deer with a string that goes
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  Speaker 4: up up the front wall around the top, and then
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  Speaker 4: it's sitting on a pair of ice scripts and the
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  Speaker 4: door is sitting on those vice scripts. So bear comes
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  Speaker 4: in pulls that bait springs, the vice grip springs the
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  Speaker 4: vice script and the door shuts and there's a pin
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  Speaker 4: that shoots. Yeah, a lot of times we use beaver
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  Speaker 4: caster is always my favorite thing to use. A little lure, Yeah,
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  Speaker 4: a little bit of lure in there. If it's ket
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  Speaker 4: in on fruit, we'd use apples and watermelon things like that.
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  Speaker 1: Stick that back of the trap.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, even like a trail into it a lot of times.
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  Speaker 4: A lot of times you make a drag and they'll
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  Speaker 4: follow a drag for a.
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  Speaker 1: Long long ways, like drag a road kill deer, right, yep?
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  Speaker 1: How far might you drag that deer to make a
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  Speaker 1: cent trail?
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  Speaker 4: I mean, my old boss had done it a couple
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  Speaker 4: of miles and cock bears running a couple miles on them. Yeah,
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  Speaker 4: and they're finding now with these GPS callers, that a
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  Speaker 4: bear can smell a carcass ten to fifteen miles away,
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  Speaker 4: and we'll just start blining it for a carcass.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 6: I followed a grizzly bear track and the bob wants
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  Speaker 6: nine miles to a I don't know how far he started,
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  Speaker 6: but I followed the tracks for nine miles in front
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  Speaker 6: of me to a moose carcass.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was impressive. Yeah, they got a pretty good sniffer.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. I've told the story to anyone that'll listen to it.
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  Speaker 1: But we're one time camped up on the Arctic slope
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  Speaker 1: and you know of the off the north slope of
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  Speaker 1: the Brooks Range. Yeah, and we were camped where a
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  Speaker 1: creek came into a bigger river. And one morning we
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  Speaker 1: got up and walked three miles up that tributary and
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  Speaker 1: killed caribou okay, spent the day up there, carried it
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  Speaker 1: down that tributary to our camp. That night, we're sitting
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  Speaker 1: in our camp and here comes a grizzly down the
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  Speaker 1: gravel bar, digging roots. You see him move in, digging,
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  Speaker 1: move and digging. He gets to the mouth of that tributary.
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  Speaker 1: It's kind of like a slight little canyon. He gets
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  Speaker 1: in the mouth of that tributary and stands up like
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  Speaker 1: someone shocked him wow, waves his nose in the air,
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  Speaker 1: and took off at a full run. So I don't
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  Speaker 1: I can't tell you for sure, you know what I mean,
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  Speaker 1: But it was like there was no discussing it. It was
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: like that sound of a bit smells that cariboo.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what happened.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, coming down that coming down that creek, and that's
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: only three miles and you're talking about.
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  Speaker 4: How far GPS colors are saying in ten to fifteen.
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  Speaker 1: What do you what do you see on a GPS
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  Speaker 1: collar that suggests to you that a grizzly is onto something?
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  Speaker 4: Oh, it's meandering and then all of a sudden it's
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  Speaker 4: a straight line.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: You know.
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  Speaker 4: It's like, just like you're talking about, there wasn't any
• 11:15
  Speaker 4: second thoughts in that bear's mind.
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  Speaker 1: Got it? And then he's just going there, he's going. Yeah,
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of there's a lot of bruh on
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  Speaker 1: the news right now. There's always been a bear, there's
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: always been a very polarizing bear. Yeah, in the polarizing
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: bear in the Yellowstone National Park area. Yeah, goes by
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: the handle three nine nine, which I always like because
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: I like it when they you know, when they give
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: the animals like a name like pedals or something, then
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: you know it's trouble. So if it has its research number.
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: There's some clinical detachment there.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. A research number allows the citizens at large to
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: stay a little usually allows citizens at large to stay
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: a little chilled out aboutelebrity animals. But three nine nine
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: it was. It might as well have been named cookie, right.
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  Speaker 1: It just got really famous. And the American public, particularly
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: those who are very unfamiliar with wildlife, will have this
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: view that they look at an individual animal and they
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: see it with like like crystalline clarity, that one, and
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: they cease to view it as in context of its
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: like species at large, meaning you could have eight hundred
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: grizzlies in the area and it's kind of whatever, but
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: that one, nothing better happened to, right, right, They're not
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: it's not like it. They don't have an awareness of
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: the population at large. They have an awareness of that one.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: I'm not lecturing you. I'm just trying to update listeners. Yeah,
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: when making an analogy about it, I'll make the analogy
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: of that someone like a hunter, some one in the concert,
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: like someone in the wildlife hunter based wildlife conservation might
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: view habitat as an apple tree. And if this apple
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: tree is taken care of, it will continuously produce apples,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and the apples are someone expendable, some get eaten, some
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: dying rot take care of the tree in perpetuity, it'll
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: put apples out animal rights people and preservation minded preservationist
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: minded people aren't that interested in the apple tree. But
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: now and then there's an apple that really catches their eye. Yeah,
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: and they are very concerned about what happens to that apple.
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a good analogy.
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: I guess this bear became that apple. Yeah, bear three
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: nine nine.
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  Speaker 3: It's usually an apple that photographs well and it's pretty dependable.
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: It's an apple that shows up again and again.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, or it would be like a moose
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: that's piebald. So because moose, you know, generally, people aren't
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: able to distinguish one from the other. Then you get
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: a moose in some neighborhood that as a white splotch
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: on it, and then people are able to put individuality
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: to it. And then someone gets that moose and it
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: causes a whole shit show. Three ninety nine. The bear's
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: had books written about it. It just got hit by
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: a car. Yeah, And our little preamble chat I brought
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: up to you that it's that bear now is getting
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: its final it's being put to rest with much fanfare
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: and consternation. Yeah. I mentioned it to you, and you
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: had a comment about your view on on this particular bear.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: You didn't deal with it professionally.
• 14:50
  Speaker 4: Correct, No, I know her type though.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about that bear. What that like? You
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: mentioned a thing about management.
• 14:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think that's poor wildlife management. And we
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: learned this lesson early on with a bear named one
• 15:07
  Speaker 4: oh four. So before three ninety nine, there was a
• 15:09
  Speaker 4: bear named the number was.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: One O four.
• 15:11
  Speaker 4: It was a celebrity bear, celebrity bear, another shiny apple,
• 15:15
  Speaker 4: if you will. And my predecessors tried to relocate that
• 15:20
  Speaker 4: bear mover she got so not trap shy, but trap savvy,
• 15:28
  Speaker 4: not savvy like she enjoyed traps. You could you could
• 15:33
  Speaker 4: drive down the road with the door open and she'd
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: come running down the road and jump in the trap
• 15:38
  Speaker 4: and you would catch her.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: You know. She was that kind of freaking like I
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: was just associated it with food.
• 15:43
  Speaker 4: Yeah, because there was so many positive experiences jumping in
• 15:46
  Speaker 4: traps and.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: You eat the whole damn deer and then some guy
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: that's yeat yeah exactly, and you walk back home. I
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: get it, I get it.
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah. So we just learned early on that those habituated
• 15:59
  Speaker 4: bears aren't successful. And she also got hit by a
• 16:02
  Speaker 4: vehicle one oh four and you know, I always thought
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: that was gonna happen to three ninety nine. It took
• 16:08
  Speaker 4: longer than I would have guessed.
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: You pictured to getting struck by a car.
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and one of her cubs got hit by a car,
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: you know.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: And really.
• 16:19
  Speaker 4: The park Service could talk about more. They probably know
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: all the individual cubs that she had, but as far
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: as I'm aware, there's only one of her cubs that's
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: still alive in existing because they just get so habituated
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: to people, they don't learn normal bear manners is what
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: I call it. So, you know, one of her cubs
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: got shot by a guy who he was he was
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: hunting and he's in his camper and this bears walk
• 16:45
  Speaker 4: and ride at him like it's coming to eat him,
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: you know, but that bear's used to getting its picture
• 16:51
  Speaker 4: taken and that guy's scared for his life because he
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: thinks this bear is gonna hurt him.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: And you don't think it was.
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: It was so used to people, it was smiling the
• 17:02
  Speaker 4: whole way it was coming in. I'm sure, you know.
• 17:07
  Speaker 4: So I just don't think it sets bears up for success.
• 17:10
  Speaker 4: And three ninety nine was really polarizing. I mean, some
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: people loved her. Some people hated her. I think people
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: forget that she mauled a guy years ago, so I
• 17:21
  Speaker 4: mean she was still a grizzly bear.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: And what do you say people hated that bear? Do
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: you mean that they hated that bear because what it
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: Because it was a symbol for something.
• 17:30
  Speaker 4: I think. So I think I think people would make
• 17:33
  Speaker 4: comments that I would see and it would really ruffle
• 17:35
  Speaker 4: feathers where you know, if they would say things like
• 17:39
  Speaker 4: if they dealist grizzly bears and I can hunt, I'm
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: gonna shoot that bear, and that just that really affected
• 17:48
  Speaker 4: people negatively.
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: So well that Shane Shane who got scratched off by
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: the bear.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: He said right in his chair, Yeah, and he had.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Good reason to believe that it was three ninety nine.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: That's what he had said. Well they well, how would
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: they not know for certain, sorry that he was scratched
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: up by Yeah.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: That's that was one of the things that he said.
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: And she was in the vicinity.
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: She was in the vicinity. But it was like if
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: three ninety nine was the one that did this to you,
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: we don't want to know about it. Was that kind
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: of a thing. So it's I mean, that was that
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: was one of the things that he mentioned sort of
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: off handedly, and he's like, if it was three ninety nine,
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: I don't think anybody would come out and declare to
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: the world that three ninety nine had done this and
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: needs to get destroyed, because it would just cause such
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: an uproar. So it was kind of like there were
• 18:42
  Speaker 3: there's like a buffer zone built around this bear to
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: protect it from the consequences of its bad behavior once
• 18:49
  Speaker 3: people get so attached to it. Yeah, I got you,
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: but he he post I think when three ninety nine
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: died too. He posted something again to the effect of
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: like there's a good chance that this was the bear
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: that did it.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Wow, let me ask you another one.
• 19:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that was that was a hard question. I'm sure
• 19:07
  Speaker 4: people are gonna cry over that. So three was just
• 19:12
  Speaker 4: touched a lot of heart strings.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Rip yep.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Three nine was never going to die, you know, in
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: a warm bed with a roaring fire, surrounded by loved ones, right, Like, yeah,
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: I was sick. That's the the craziest part is like,
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: getting whacked by cars not the worst way to go.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: Wild Animal Cal went out, Cal did there's a col
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: in the field about this on YouTube type and Cal
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: in the Field grizzly Barry, you'll see this one. But
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: there's a col in the field where he goes out
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: with some Idaho guys and they work and they they
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: colvert trap a grizzly and work up the grizzly. So
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: they colvert trap a grizzly and it's got a lip tattoo,
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: so they like an identifying marker, right, they call in
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: the lip tattoo and and they're like, oh, we know
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: that bear. They had had a collared female grizzly in
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: the park. She found a carcass. She found a buffalo
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: carcass and was on it. And they get a mortality
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: signal and they go there and there's their sow with
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: the collar dead on top of the buffalo carcass, and
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: standing on top of the both of them is this
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: male bear. Yeah right, but man, you could explain that
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: kind of stuff all day long, like that the number
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: one cause of death of Yellowstone wolves as wolves. Like
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: you could explain that stuff all day long, but it
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: is never gonna It just doesn't resonate. You know. People
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: will look at certain causes of death, like if three
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: ninety nine had been killed by a male grizzly, I
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: don't think people would be upset, you know what I mean? Yeah, people,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: it's it's that they're upset because it's human caused.
• 21:03
  Speaker 4: Yeah, people put different values on different animals, and and
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: they even yeah, even at the individual level, put values
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: on animals. And yeah, people just really valued that bear.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: So let me hte you with another easier to answer one.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: But you'll get this will make other people mad. Good,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Now you're gonna, Now you're gonna. We have we know,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: we have a full spectrum of listeners. Sure, we got
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: we got the horseshoe, you got, we got, we got
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: left we got righty's lefties, and then we got where
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: the rights and the lefties meet, which is crazy redneck hippies.
• 21:41
  Speaker 4: Sure.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So no matter what you say, your eyes and
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: get someone that's gonna get mad. And this will be
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: a thing where where the the the the right bottom
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: of the horseshoe get will get very irritated no matter
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: what you say, uh, bear spray or pistols like when
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: you're out. Yeah, no one, what you know, having dealt
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: with as many grizzlies as you we dealt with and
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: been to as many conflict sights as you've been to,
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: and touched as many of them as he touched to
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: and talked to as many people has been messed up
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: by grizzlies as you've talked to bear spray or pistol.
• 22:14
  Speaker 4: Without a doubt bear spray really, yeah, and.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: Tell me more now I'm mad. You promise he's a
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: gun grabber. The other day Yanni was talking about them
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: needing to ban the Red Rider. I was like, now,
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: you're a gun grabber trying to take away people's Red Rider.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: What was his?
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: Uh, he's got some cockamami theory that cheating a kid
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: to shoot on a Red Rider to get used to
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: a heavy trigger pull. My little kids, Yeah, my little
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: kids shooting Red Riders. I remember they used to shoo
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: him with two fingers because you cannot get that go off.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: I thought it was going to be like he was
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: anti BB gun fights.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: He's he thinks he thinks of Red Rider. He just
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: form And I think that's a very Unamerican statement. You
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: shoot your eye out Bear spray unequivocally.
• 23:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah. I have one caveat to that. If you're really
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: well experienced with with handguns, then by all means carry
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: a handgun. But a lot of people just aren't and
• 23:19
  Speaker 4: I investigated so many cases of self defense defensive life shootings,
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: and people are just really bad shots with pistols and
• 23:31
  Speaker 4: a lot of times they would even hit the bear,
• 23:33
  Speaker 4: but they don't hit it lethally. And bear spray. The
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: beauty of it is it makes a four foot cloud,
• 23:40
  Speaker 4: so you don't have to be accurate.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: And how much do they hate that bear spray?
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: I've never seen it not work.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: So do you know that? Red a statistic and I
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: didn't really spend a lot of time.
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: If you spray it on the ground, they'll come sniff
• 23:53
  Speaker 4: it though. It becomes an attractant.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: Oh oh yeah, I got I'll tell you a good
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: one about that. But I read a statistic and I
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: never really spent much time on it, but it seemed
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: like it seemed significant that twenty five percent of the
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: time a pistol or sorry, twenty five percent of the
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: time when a firearm is discharged in a bear attack,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: it hits a human.
• 24:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the other reason.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Have you heard that?
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: No, I haven't heard that statistic. That seems high. There's
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: a lot of not shoot not there.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: But listen, man, like I know, yeah, I know a
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: bunch of cases where that's happened, and I haven't looked
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: into it. I just read it.
• 24:34
  Speaker 4: You know, there was a case on the Montana Idaho border.
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: It ended up being in Montana where the guy was
• 24:40
  Speaker 4: getting mauled and his buddy tried to shoot the bear
• 24:43
  Speaker 4: off him and actually killed his friend.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had shot that that bear. They were black
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: bear hunting. They mistook it for a black bear, so
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: they shot it and the bear runs into the into
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: the brush. He thinks he hit a black bear, so
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: he goes trailing in there after it and boom.
• 25:03
  Speaker 4: I just remember it was so close on the border,
• 25:05
  Speaker 4: they didn't know who had jurisdiction about it. So yeah,
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: so that's that's why I carry bear spray. And you know,
• 25:15
  Speaker 4: ultimately it's up to people. I know there's gun lovers
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: they want to carry guns and that's fine, but a
• 25:19
  Speaker 4: lot of people just don't practice shooting pistols enough.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I think it does say a lot about
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: your The choice might say more about your mind frame
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: than it does your like your strat your sense of strategy. Right.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: I remember being like up at Sportsman's Warehouse and Anchorage
• 25:36
  Speaker 3: and seeing people that just got off a plane and
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: they're going to buy a pistol for their Alaska vacation
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: and then you know, pawn it off or whatever at
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: the end of the vacation. Like, I think there's like
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: a there's an assumption that if you, if you believe
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: in the handgun, like you just go get when you
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: get a box ammo, and you keep it near you,
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: and like that's just a recipe for disaster. But I
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: think there's a lot of overconfident and I'm i myself,
• 26:07
  Speaker 3: I have no confidence in my handgun shooting ability, and
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: I shoot one pretty regularly.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: But I'll tell you, my little my I'll walk you
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: through my irrational thoughts on it. If there's slight risk
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: of First off, I I condemn and yell at and
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: harrass and tease anyone that carries bear spray where there's
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: no grizzlies, indefensible it works on lions.
• 26:29
  Speaker 7: What if it's just on your by hardness teas worthy
• 26:35
  Speaker 7: in her as.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: Bear spray is not nice to get shot with, and
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: they and it like they go off. I've been in
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: two I've been never mauled by a bear, been charged
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: by them, but never mauled. But twice I've been hosed
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: by people's bear spray.
• 26:50
  Speaker 4: Mine doesn't come off that.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: They trust it every two years, Yes, trust me, it's
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: like it happens. Those are not those The plastic nozzles
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: on those cans are not invulnerable. One time, on just
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: standing around a car unloading backpacks, someone stepped on the
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: plastic nozzle everything. And one time I got pickpocketed in
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: the thick in the like a willow choked hell hole.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: And also I was like, what is that noise going?
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: All your ship's done, all your gear is gone, You
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: cannot get it out.
• 27:29
  Speaker 5: Wait?
• 27:29
  Speaker 7: Is it bad to keep your bear spray.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: In your car?
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah?
• 27:34
  Speaker 7: Keep itature It'll total your car.
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Know, I know people whose car has been told your car.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: When that goes off your car, it will total your car.
• 27:44
  Speaker 4: Temperatures are dropping. I had a friend who did that
• 27:46
  Speaker 4: and he's still driving his vehicle giving yeah all the time.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Put get a small amimal can. There's one right outside
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: the door of the of the studio. Get a small
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: animal can and put it in the ammal can. And
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: then when you're using it, Carrie, when you're done using it,
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: put in an animal can. I was gonna I'm gonna tell
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: you my irrational logic. Let me tell my funny story. Yeah,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: we had the Ranella family. We had we went into
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: the summer with two bear sprays, and we have like
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: a little camping spot where there's grizzlies. So when we
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: get there, before I get a sense of what's going on,
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: I'll like tell my kids, like, take the spray if
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: you're gonna go fish, or take the spray and bring
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: the dog. And then once we kind of get a
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: sense of what's up, everybody relaxes about it. But at
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: first it's thick, you know, at first I'll take the
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: bear spray. So the end of the summer we only have.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: Now there's one bear spray, and of course no one
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: knows what happened to the other bear spray. Well, me
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: and my wife are up shutting our little camping area down.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: And here right outside of our little composting outhouse toilet, Yeah,
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: right outside the door is the can of bear spray,
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: empty with four holes in it. It got at by
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: a bear.
• 28:56
  Speaker 4: Got yep, got eaten by a bear. Seen that before?
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Uh, here's my irrational logic. Okay, slight risk of grizzlies,
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: I use spray. High risk of grizzlies. I bring my
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: ten milimeters pistol ultra high risk of grizzlies. I bring
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: my sawd off pump twelve gage with slugs in it.
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I've found this spray and pray.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: And I always look at it, and I always look
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: at all three of them. I'm like, hey, man, like,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: what are you thinking here?
• 29:28
  Speaker 4: That's a that's a myth I can dispel too. Is people, Uh,
• 29:34
  Speaker 4: people take shotguns and they alternate buckshot and slugs.
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because you know, I know that. No, I
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: think it's supposed to. Brody told me you're supposed to
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: run two bird shots. Yeah. Then you start going. Then
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: you start going slug but shots, because it's like you
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: warn it, boom, you warn it boom. Then like it's
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: getting closer. Now you hit it with the slug boom.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Then it's so close and everything's so chaotic. Then you
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: start going buckshot.
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: And most bears are aware of this choreography, this elaborate
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: choreography before.
• 30:06
  Speaker 6: They Yeah, all the time, there's.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: The warning shot.
• 30:10
  Speaker 4: Yeah, there's warning.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: He tells his bite. Listen when you're coming in, he's
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: gonna hit you two bird shots. Yeah, then you got
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: to dodge the slug. Watch out for the buckshot.
• 30:18
  Speaker 4: Yeah, a zig and then a zag.
• 30:22
  Speaker 6: Here's my scenario that I find myself in all the time.
• 30:24
  Speaker 6: As most hunters, we don't get to pick our weather,
• 30:27
  Speaker 6: but we do get to pick which direction.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: We walk when we're out hunting.
• 30:29
  Speaker 6: And most of the time the winds in my face,
• 30:32
  Speaker 6: and a lot of times the winds honking. I don't
• 30:35
  Speaker 6: trust bear spray when the wind's blowing.
• 30:37
  Speaker 4: Okay, So I've had that question a bunch over the years.
• 30:41
  Speaker 4: And I had a really good friend who was horn
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: hunting in the spring. It was super windy out. A
• 30:48
  Speaker 4: sow with cubs, real little cubs, charges him, and you know,
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: the winds in his face. He spray's bear spray. Half
• 30:56
  Speaker 4: of it goes in her face, half of it gets
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: in his face. They both ran off trying so it. Yeah,
• 31:03
  Speaker 4: the propellant still gets out there, but not as far
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: as it normally would.
• 31:07
  Speaker 6: I'd love to practice in the wind, but I don't.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: Want to get a case of those inert cans.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that'd be interesting.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: I should get a case of those inert cans. I
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: just like shoot each other around, like laser tag around.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: That would be fun.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: I tried to shoot a sow and cubs with a
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: can of bear spray out of a window.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: And the when I was.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: Working Yellowstone, they were coming in and tearing up our cat.
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: When I was working up in Alaska, they'd come in
• 31:36
  Speaker 3: and tear up stuff on the portrait and trying to
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: give a bad and like they would come in, they'd
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: get into the fish shack to get into the tool
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: shed that eat rubber boots that do all this stuff.
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: And like so I was, I stayed in the main
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: lodge that they kept coming into and open the window
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: and they were walking past, and I sprayed, and it
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: might have been just outside of the range, but all
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: that bear spray went along the building and they like
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: went ten feet back and stood up and then kind
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: of circled around and came right back in.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Killed you shut the window real quick. And then actually
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: we sat around. I was with this kid.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: We just like we were sitting in the cabin like
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: later on, like forty five minutes later, and we were
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: both kind of like does it smell weird? And then
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: we started getting like you know, like licking your cheeks
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: and like your lips and stuff, and and we'd gotten
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: like a trace amount inside and it had been swirling
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: and swirling, and we spent like the rest of the
• 32:31
  Speaker 3: night just like kind of licking our lips and rubbing
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: our noses and stuff. Yeah, that was my one experience
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: actually discharging.
• 32:39
  Speaker 4: A can can't tell you a story.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Yep, please sory here. I'm jealousy. I was. I was
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: impressed that Randall got to shoot at one with a spray,
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: But go on to have video of it somewhere.
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: I actually never did get at a spray a bear
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: with one. But I was deer hunting one fall and
• 32:59
  Speaker 4: I was going in some really heavy dark timber and
• 33:02
  Speaker 4: my dad always taught me to load around in my gun.
• 33:05
  Speaker 4: So I'm going through the timber and I walk under
• 33:08
  Speaker 4: this tree and there's a magpie sitting in the tree
• 33:12
  Speaker 4: and he's just staring at me. He's just looking right
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: down at me, and I'm looking up at him, and
• 33:16
  Speaker 4: I'm thinking, boy, that's weird that magpie.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Why is he hanging out?
• 33:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah? Why is he hang out? Or just staring at
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: each other? And I go another i don't know, thirty
• 33:26
  Speaker 4: yards and I hear something and I turn around and
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: there's this bore coming down the hill at me. He's
• 33:34
  Speaker 4: coming right at me and.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: How many yards way?
• 33:37
  Speaker 4: Maybe twenty? Guy, I mean, he's coming for me. And
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: I was thinking myself, I got one shot with this rifle,
• 33:45
  Speaker 4: you know, I got one chance to kill this thing,
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: and it's going to be on top of me. And
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: I realized what my dad was trying to teach me
• 33:53
  Speaker 4: was just to be prepared, you know, And I would
• 33:56
  Speaker 4: have been way better off with a can of bear
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: spray in my hand, just walking through the woods and
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: as a guide. I do that sometimes, you know, if
• 34:04
  Speaker 4: it's real tight quarters, I don't have a problem walking
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: around with the cann of bear spray. Even if you
• 34:09
  Speaker 4: spray yourself, you're gonna live to talk about it.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: So what happened?
• 34:14
  Speaker 4: He Yeah, I sprayed him and he didn't care.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 34:20
  Speaker 4: I started yelling at him and he was coming down
• 34:22
  Speaker 4: the hill at me, and he just kind of did
• 34:24
  Speaker 4: a quarter pass, which is like a classic bear move,
• 34:28
  Speaker 4: you know. It was it was a bluff, but I
• 34:32
  Speaker 4: thought it was the real deal. And I just remember thinking, like,
• 34:35
  Speaker 4: I gotta wait until this thing is right on top
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: of me before I shoot, because I only got one chance.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: So what is after all those bears you worked up,
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: what is a big bear in the rockies.
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: A big bear is five hundred pounds. The biggest bear
• 34:52
  Speaker 4: ever caught was six twenty four in the spring, would
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: have been a true seven hundred pound bear in the fall.
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: When people come.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Into big bear, that's a huge bear because every bear
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: is like I just cut.
• 35:05
  Speaker 4: People's number in half immediately, you know, whatever it is,
• 35:09
  Speaker 4: I cut it in half.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: They tell you how big the bear was, Yeah, yep.
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: And you know, all those bears I worked up. The
• 35:16
  Speaker 4: sows are almost always right around three hundred pounds two
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: seventy five, three twenty five. They stop growing when they're
• 35:25
  Speaker 4: about seven to eight years old, where the males just
• 35:28
  Speaker 4: keep putting on weight, keep getting bigger. So a five
• 35:32
  Speaker 4: hundred pounds adult male is a huge bear in the
• 35:34
  Speaker 4: alstone ecosystem.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: That's a huge bear. Yeah. And what's a more typical
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: male like, like, what is like a four or five
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: year old male two fifty?
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: You know, I don't know, three hundred.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: God, they seem so much bigger, badder, Yeah, and they're bad,
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: but they seem so much bigger. Yeah.
• 35:50
  Speaker 4: And people overestimate wolves too, and really, you know, lions
• 35:55
  Speaker 4: are way bigger than wolves. But people because of the hair,
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: especially the fall bears, animolves, but bears especially they get
• 36:04
  Speaker 4: that that winner code on and people just think they're
• 36:07
  Speaker 4: way bigger than they are. You know, they're like, it's
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: a sow with a two full drown cubs, and it's like, no,
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: that thing weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, but it's
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: got so much hair it looks like as big as her.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 36:22
  Speaker 5: Uh.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: You were with the agency when the delisting looked like
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: it was going to go through.
• 36:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, ok, it did go through.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: Well, sorry, when it looked like they were no, well
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: it didn't an undid they were delisted yeah multiple times? Yeah, okay,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: So help me with the timeline here, just to give
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: people rough sense what will happen is Well, first off,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: I'm me saying this is not surprise. This is surprisingly
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: not a partisan like Democrat versus Republican issue generally grizzly bears. Well,
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: hear me out, because because I'm going to top of
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: all the dlistings. Okay, yeah, so you can, you can.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: You can give that because there's definitely a tendency and
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: a tendency. But just I just think that people have
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: the opinion, they have their erroneous idea that somehow like
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: a governor or whatever can just declare right right that
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: something would happen right, that you would that that it's
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: that it's a simple that doing this is a simple process.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: It just takes the right political figure to do it.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: It's I'm going to explain how it's a little bit
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: more complicated in that right. In seventy four seventy nineteen
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: seventy four, nineteen seventy five, grizzly bears and the lower
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: forty eight were listed as an endangered They're listed as
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, so they're
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: given Federal and Endangered Species Act Species Act protection under
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: the EESA. And seventy four seventy five Richard Nixon, Dick Nixon.
• 37:57
  Speaker 4: Don't remember him, heard of.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Republican signed in the e s A signed Ina signed in.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: Then he established the EPA.
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: That's that's the National Environmental Protection Act.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about the
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: native milk.
• 38:23
  Speaker 4: No.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: Sorry, Oh yeah, Richard Nixon CRAS and Endangered Species Act.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: And one of the first like marquee species to get
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: protection under that is grizzy bears and lower forty eight.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: All kinds of years go by and wildlife managers kind
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: of look and say, well, the saying the lower forty
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: eight is not a great way of looking at this.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: For instance, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco once upon
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: a time had grizzly bears, and I don't we don't
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: view that Golden Gate Park is going to recover that
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: San Francisco is going to recover it's grizzly bear population, right,
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: is never gonna work. So over time they establish they
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: take a look and they go like, where really could
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: we have grizzly bears? Like where is the right food resources,
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: low enough human population, proper habitat where you could feasibly
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: have a population of grizzly bears? And they come up
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: with six. One is in the Northern Casque what they
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: call the Northern Cascade ecosystem. So one is like basically
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: the Northern Cascades in Washington where you're kind of rolling
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: into BC.
• 39:36
  Speaker 4: Zero bears, sometimes one, sometimes one.
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: It depends on what side of the Yeah, it depends
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: on what side of the border.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: If you're from Wyoming, it looks a lot like zero bears.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, they if they have it bears
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: because one walked over there for a minute. Moving eastward,
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: you have the bitter Root cell Kirk cell Way none.
• 40:06
  Speaker 4: None, sell Kirks have bears, the bitter bitter Root does.
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: The Bitterot side. That's one. Oh, I forgot. They gave
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: a name to these things that already say the name
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: they call the distinct distinct population segments. So they say, okay,
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: we're gonna say that there's a grizzly bear population or
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: the possibility of a grizzy bear population in the Lower Cascades.
• 40:25
  Speaker 4: Uh, there's another one in Cabinet Yacks.
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: That's right, Cabinet Yack has bears. Bitter Root sell Kirk,
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: Bitter cell Way, Selway. Sorry, sell Kirks are in BC
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: Bitterroot cell Way, Northern Continental Divide, which is Bob Marshall
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: Glacier National Park, in some other areas up there, all
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: the way out to the front Range. Uh. Then the
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: g y E did I do them all? Am I
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: missing any?
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: I think that's it?
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: Okay Uh, And they go like, so let's stop talking
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: about the lower forty eight writ large and let's talk
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: about let's get real okay right and talk about where
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: could we actually have these bears. And then they looked
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: at like Okay, So instead of saying that we're going
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: to recover them across their range in the lower forty eight,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: which basically was the one hundredth meridian westward New Mexico, Arizona,
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: Utah into northern Old Mexico coastal California. Right Like, let's
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: just look at this. And so they say, let's say
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: that we're going to try to recover and manage these
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: as distinct population segments. And they look and say, if
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: we're going to do that, there's two places, the Northern
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: Continial Divide ecosystem in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which is
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: a chunk of ground about the size of Indiana. And
• 41:51
  Speaker 1: they're like, those are recovered. The rest of the Lower
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: forty eight not, but these areas I recovered, and so
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: let's move those out of the e Let's move those
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: out of endangered species at protection. The US Fish and
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: Wildlife Service has management has management authority. The US Fish
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: and Wildlife Service has to come forward and they do this.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: The US This has happened with Democrats in the White House.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: This has happened with the Republicans in the White House.
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: They'll come forward and say the US Fish and Wildlife
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: Service says, we propose that we propose that we delist
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: the grizzly. Then you have preservations like three ninety nine
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: type people. Preservations organizations will go like, well, Jesus, that
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: could mean that three ninety nine could get hunted. So
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: then they will sue in federal court to block the dlisting.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: So they'll delist, and then there's a lawsuit and they'll
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: they'll never sue on basis they don't sue on how
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: many bears there are. They sue on uh, well, we
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: don't think the DPS thing was fair, Yeah, right, because
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: you can't treat them as distinct because because a bear
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: could move from one to the others. So we we're
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: going to attack the logic of the of the DPS.
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: Or you'll say, well, have you considered white bark pine
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: blister rust and how there's a fungus that's killing white
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: bark pines and grizzlies like the eat white bark pines,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: and since we don't know what will really happen in
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: the long term to white bark pines, we're suing to
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: block the listing. Or well, what if cutthroat trout don't
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: do that? Well in the future, and ten percent of
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: bears might eat a cutthroat trout at some point in
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: their life. So we're going to sue to block the
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: delisting because we don't really know how well cutthroats are doing.
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: The risks because then the Fish and Wildlife Service is
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: required as part of that review process to consider all factors,
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: and they kind of have an impossible job, right, I mean,
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: like there's they basically are saying, we did a comprehensive review,
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: our conclusions are x, Y, and Z, and the litigators
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: are saying, it's not that comprehensive. You missed this, you
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: miss that, And they're kind of poking holes in the
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: bigger picture.
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it will be It will come from anti
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: hunting organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity, Humane Society,
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: United States, Greater y Elson Coalition. Who else is a common
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: player here? Center H And they'll they'll do these delistings
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: or they'll they'll sue to block the delistings.
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: Last one was the crow the Crow tribe tribe.
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: What was the argument there, Uh.
• 44:44
  Speaker 4: That we shouldn't be delisting.
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: You know that's interesting. That was a long That was
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: a long preamble to my question yeah, you were around
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: for all this, yes, now, both of them. Okay, what
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: I remember being really interesting about this is the three
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: the three states that have chunks of ground and what
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: we call the Greater Yellstone Ecosystem, a name that I
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: resent because it call they should call it the Greater
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: Cody ecosystem.
• 45:12
  Speaker 4: They should call Wyoming bears.
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they should call it the Greater Cody ecosystem.
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: Most simmar in Wyoming.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the Wyoming ecosystem. Yeah, there's three states. The bulk
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: of it's in Wyholming. But the three states take an
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: attitude where they're like, uh, okay, if d listing goes
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: through and we take what that means is the states
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: now manage it as a wild as wildlife under their jurisdiction.
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: Idaho says, this is twenty twenty.
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: Is this when it's happened last seventeen?
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: Earlier?
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Idaho says we're going to give out one grizzly tag.
• 45:44
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: Montana chicken shits out right and they say, not going
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: to play this game. We're not doing any grizzly tags.
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: Montana actually had to give part of their quota to
• 45:55
  Speaker 4: Idaho so the Ida Idaho could have one.
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: Oh is that right? Yeah, Wyoming just lays all on
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: the table. Yeah, and they're gonna give out twenty four tags, right. Yeah.
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: Guys like me who really want who really think that
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: the grizzies should be delisted, and I think that state
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: management and I'm very open and enthusiastic about a very
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: limited grizzly bear hunting season. Guys like me. As part
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: of our rhetoric, if we were being unscrupulous, we would
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: say that by opening up a hunting season, it'll reduce
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: conflict because bears will learn to be scared of people.
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: Not true.
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: That's why I stopped saying it, because it was intellectually dishonest. Yeah,
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: talk about that. I just spent like an hour setting
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: up the question. But give me your feelings on all
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: of this, all of this whole deal, all of this hunt,
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: don't hunt, the bears need to learn to be scared
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: and respect humans, and blah blah blah.
• 46:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know where you can start. He opened
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: up so many holes there I beight shops.
• 47:03
  Speaker 6: Do you think grizzlies would be nervous of people if
• 47:05
  Speaker 6: we started hunting them again?
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: I got one?
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: If I got one?
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: Did you hear about bear four twenty two.
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: I mean maybe at some level. I don't know personally
• 47:18
  Speaker 4: because I haven't been there, but they talk about bears
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: on Kodiak Island being like really weary of human scent
• 47:24
  Speaker 4: because they're heavily hunted and always have been and always
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: have been, and same with Sweden. So maybe at some level,
• 47:32
  Speaker 4: But the reality is, you know, you have black bear
• 47:35
  Speaker 4: populations all over America that are hunted and there's still
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: black bear conflicts, so you're still gonna have conflicts with bears.
• 47:45
  Speaker 4: Bears do learn on experience with humans. If they have
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: a negative encounter, then they're more likely to run away
• 47:52
  Speaker 4: from a human. But I just don't think you'll hunt
• 47:55
  Speaker 4: them at a level that would be that would change
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: their being behavior.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: So you know, they delisted in two thousand and seven,
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: and that delisting went from two thousand and seven to
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: two thousand and nine when a judge put him back
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: on the list.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: Because it's always the same judge in Missoula.
• 48:14
  Speaker 4: Wow, this was a different judge. I was, Oh, yeah,
• 48:17
  Speaker 4: there was Molloy and then Dana Christiansen, and we knew
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: we were in trouble when when Dana Christiansen had said
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: My spirit animal is the wolverine. You know any judge with.
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: That, that's cultural appropriation anyways.
• 48:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know any judge with a spirit animal.
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they should have gotten him. They should have attacked
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: him from the woke spectrum and said that that's cultural
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: appropriation and you should be fired. That was before wokens.
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: I believe man be freaking out. Man, I just don't coffee.
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: It just died.
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: Get some more coffee on that.
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: For anyone listening. Steve spilled a large cup of coffee
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: on his computer moments before we began recording Field.
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: Do you have the tech capabilities to plug that clip in?
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: Which clip? Well, because I was kind of talking about
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: I was talking to Oh, absolutely, yeah, we can do it.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: Cut out me saying that bad stuff about that actor
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: though it doesn't really inspire. Oh shit, one of those
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: dudes that doesn't really inspire, like it, guys. I was
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: observing that there's an actor that's in a lot of movies,
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: but no one cares about him, and I don't want
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: that to get out. I feel like that's that's the
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: definition of a great character actor. No one cares about him,
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: but you're you're happy to see him right, Yeah, I
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: don't know.
• 49:39
  Speaker 3: He always brings it. Yeah.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: Uh so so yeah, so back back to this and
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: and and pardon me for not know what I'm talking about.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: I thought it was the same judge both times.
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: But anyways, No, you're right that they do go judge shopping.
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: That that's part of this whole thing. But yeah, two
• 49:54
  Speaker 4: thousand and seven, two thousand and nine, Wyoming didn't have
• 49:56
  Speaker 4: a hunting season even though the population was recovered. We
• 49:59
  Speaker 4: could to use hunting as management tool, and when they
• 50:03
  Speaker 4: got relisted, I think the state's opinion was, the next
• 50:07
  Speaker 4: time they get delisted, we're gonna hunt these things, and
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: we're it's not to control the population, it's to create
• 50:13
  Speaker 4: a social pattern of hunting.
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: That's what see, that's that's a good way of putting it. Yeah,
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: that's what I want the states to do it because
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: I want them to quickly exercise the management authority.
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: And Montana checking out chickening out was a bad move
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: in my opinion, because you're setting a precedent that that
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: you're not hunting them.
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I remember they were going to chicken out
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: for five years or something like that.
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's true this time around too. They've
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: said that recently in recent history.
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that they would make that choice now,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: but at the time they were they had a plan
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: to like formally chicken out for five years.
• 50:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: Uh. You know what's interesting about that when I say,
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: like even the Idaho play, as weird as it was
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: to do one on the Idaho play of the social
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: maneuver of doing the hunt. I remember I was talking
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: to these guys that were really involved in the elk
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: reintroduction in Kentucky and they were nervous about this. So
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: they ever since when when they started working on the
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: elk reintroduction, which was state agency Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: it was like, because of hunting, and will hunt them,
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: and we'll hunt them, even though those years in the future,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: they baked it into every conversation to not then down
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: the road go like, oh, hey, now that we got
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: all these elk, how about we have a hunting season.
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: It was like they were they were deliberate about setting
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: an expectation that that's where this would go. And you
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: see when you see signs around any anyway you go
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: around in this area, you'll see signs delisting means hunting
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: and it's it's meant to be delisting means hunting, and
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: it's meant to be like an anti delisting. They're coming
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: right out and saying, we're not gonna we're not looking
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: to argue about how many bears they are, because no
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: one's gonna argue that bears are stable. They're looking to
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: be like they're using the ESA, they're using any Endangered
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: Species Act not as a management tool. They're using it
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: as a way that they can prevent something from happening
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: that they don't want to happen. It's like, it's my
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: favorite Animal Protection Act. It is not the Endangered Species Act,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: and they even know it, and their rhetoric mirrors it.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: But when I look and I see that sign delisting
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: means hunting, I always think, I sure hope they're right.
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you're rooting for that.
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: And they'll always show a sow with cubs, the one
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: they use around here. Sure, they show a saw with
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: cubs with a crosshair. Yeah. I'm like, but you can't
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: shoot cells with cubs. Yeah, so that's a poacher. They
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: should arrest that person.
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: We actually had, like I remember having five heights talking
• 53:00
  Speaker 4: about how many bears we were going to harvest and
• 53:04
  Speaker 4: a game warden in a district that has a lot
• 53:06
  Speaker 4: of bears thought that twenty four was like not nearly
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: enough and and was upset about it. And it's like,
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: we're not trying to manage the population totally through hunting.
• 53:17
  Speaker 4: We're trying to create a social standard for hunting. You know,
• 53:25
  Speaker 4: I say we, But that was past.
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: Years when we first started this podcast, million years ago
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: in an office where me and my wife, Me and
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: my wife had dinner not a great one either, across
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: the road from our original old office last night on
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: our little date night. Anyways, in that office upstairs, we
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: and one of our early early podcasts we first launched
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: a podcast. We had a guy from the USGS, Frank
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: mcmahonan man. What is his name, Van Man? We had
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: him on talk about He yeah, he does demographics on Grizzy.
• 54:00
  Speaker 4: Sure.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: So the USGS is a it's a federal organization, and
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: the USGS doesn't do policy. The USGS doesn't manage land, Okay,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: like the US Forest Service, the Usdaight manages land, US
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: Fish and Wildlife Service manages refuges, the National Park Service
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: manages parks. You have a bunch of land management federal agencies.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: The USGS doesn't do land management, they don't do policy.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: Their mandate is information. Sure, they provide information. So this
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: this guest we had, it's a great podcast. We want
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: to go back and listen. Love it's still relevant today.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: This guest we had explained we got to talk about demographics,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: grizzy bear demographics. And there's the number. At that time,
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: I don't know what the number is now. The number
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: at that time was something like it was like fixed.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: It was like carved in stone, seven hundred okay, yeah,
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: and it will And he explained that. I was like,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: where does that number come from? What they had looked
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: at is at a time they looked at, Okay, in
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: this ecosystem, how much space does a breeding age female use?
• 55:07
  Speaker 4: Thirty square kilometers was the estimate.
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: That okayep And they would draw what's that little shape
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: you draw on them at an octagon or polygon?
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was actually a grid. Okay, but yeah, and
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: that was called the chow To model.
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Explain, yeah, okay, so you know about the shit, Yeah,
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: explain how the number was arrived at. And then and
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: then I'm going to share with you something he told
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: me about the number that I was like we spent
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: an hour talking about yeah, because he would say at
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: least I'd go, how many at least seven forty? Well,
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: how many at least seven forty? Yeah, well how many
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: at least seven forty?
• 55:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, So that model has been updated twice since then.
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, but explain how it's like, it's really fascinating how
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: you make a model like this.
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: Okay, So bears are really hard to count because they're
• 55:57
  Speaker 4: solitary nature. They're not territory. Their home ranges overlap, so just.
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: Say solitary but not territorial, right.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: They like to be in visialistic, but they don't have territories,
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: not like a mountain lion. Solitary nature has a territory.
• 56:14
  Speaker 4: It's keeping other cats out of there. So if there's
• 56:17
  Speaker 4: food availability, their home ranges overlap.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, I've never even thought about that term. That's a
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: great term. Solitary but not territorial.
• 56:24
  Speaker 4: Right, And that's what happened with the model. That's what
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: makes them really difficult to count. So the early research
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: showed that a grizzly bear sal's home range was thirty
• 56:36
  Speaker 4: square kilometers, so when they were counting, if you're counting
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: bears and there's you break the system, the ecosystem up
• 56:46
  Speaker 4: into a grid, and there's a sow with cubs in
• 56:48
  Speaker 4: one of those squares. You cross off that grid because
• 56:52
  Speaker 4: you don't want to you want to lean conservative, you
• 56:57
  Speaker 4: don't want to overestimate the population. One with that model
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: is as the population gets higher in density, your model
• 57:05
  Speaker 4: gets more and more biased because of those home ranges overlapping.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 57:11
  Speaker 4: So that model maxed out at seven forty, Like I
• 57:16
  Speaker 4: can't remember seven fifty. Maybe you couldn't get it. You
• 57:20
  Speaker 4: couldn't shove any more grizzly bears into the ecosystem in
• 57:23
  Speaker 4: that model. They went back and they looked at color
• 57:26
  Speaker 4: data and they found out that SAO's home range was
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: more like fourteen square kilometers.
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: You know, I gotta this is great, but I want
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: to add in a thing here. Yeah. That he'd explained
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: is be that when they make the model, you're just
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: you count you're trying to count breeding age females, and
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: then you look.
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: At what with cubs of the year, okay, and then to.
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: Look at what you know about the demographics, meaning that
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: you could go into a let's say you could go
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: into a country perhaps and count how many how many
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: females with children are in this country, and then probably
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: go like, okay, so we know human males and human
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: females are born at a one to one ratio. We
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: know that like a female is most active reproductively between
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: twenty four and thirty eight, and that they have on
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: average two point two kids, and so we can just
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: look at how many moms there are and make a
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: guess at what the human population is in that country.
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: That's kind of what you're doing with grizzies, right, You're like,
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: we know that that you got males, you got cubs,
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: but if we can know this one number, we can
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: extrapolate outward to get a sense of how many are there,
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: rather than mechanically counting them.
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, you have. You know that they're the driver of
• 58:50
  Speaker 4: the population. But what you're describing is actually more like
• 58:54
  Speaker 4: a census, and that's closer to what the model is now.
• 58:57
  Speaker 4: It's an integrated population model. But you know, yeah, the
• 59:03
  Speaker 4: ratio of bears in the ecosystem you have, however many
• 59:09
  Speaker 4: adult males you have, however many subadult bears and females
• 59:13
  Speaker 4: with cubs are driving your population. So it's just a
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: multiplier understood essentially, so it got changed to fourteen square
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: kilometers and that made the estimate more like twelve hundred bears.
• 59:30
  Speaker 4: And then what you just described is now what they're
• 59:33
  Speaker 4: doing is an integrated population model, and it's more of
• 59:38
  Speaker 4: a census and you can plug in other factors.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: I got it.
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: So what's the number now, ten oneenty thirty.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: How good you think that number is?
• 59:51
  Speaker 4: I think that's pretty accurate. I think there's definitely parts
• 59:55
  Speaker 4: of the ecosystem where there's higher densities than other parts.
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: And growing up in Cody, I just assumed everywhere had
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 4: really high densities, and you go to other parts and
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 4: they're just not. And this new modeling system is going
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 4: to incorporate some of that and show you where where
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 4: there's more density of bears. And that's only in the
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 4: demographic monitoring monitoring area. So there's bears that live outside
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: where they're even looking for bears. So that is a
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 4: minimum because they're not counting bears that aren't in suitable habitat.
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 4: Oh really, yeah, they might be living years.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: They're not counting bears that don't count.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So if a bear moves out into like if
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: a bear moves out of and moves out into like
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: Fort Benton, out of out of the Shouldo area and
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: just keeps going east. He leaves the counting.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: Area if he's there year round, if he's outside of
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 4: their their demographic monitoring area. And I don't know about
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 4: the NCDE, but that's how they did it with the
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 4: g ye got it. Yeah, you got to be in
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 4: a bear place to be a bear. Yeah, stract don't
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 4: count outliers.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: So there's about So tell me the number again, you think, oney? Thirty?
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was as high as twelve hundred was
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 4: estimate a couple of years ago before they changed to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 4: this other model. But it has a lot more factors.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 4: It's a lot more accurate. God, it's my understanding.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: That's good.
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 4: No, I still thought it was that old seven.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I didn't know that anyone moved beyond that number.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 4: That was laughable. People in my hometown never believe that.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: Why do they Why do they seem to congregate in
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: these little micro areas so much. There's just some like
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: valleys that are like such hot spots, and you go
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: to another valley and you could go to another value
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: and hang out there over the years, ten ten years
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: and never lay eyes on one. But then there's like,
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: you can't it just doesn't. You can't really tell the
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: difference from looking at them.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 4: It's just food availability, food sources, and some of it's
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 4: learned behavior. And my part of the woods, we have
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 4: what are called moth sites, and there's these bears on
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 4: moth sites, and you know, I've done flights where I've
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 4: counted forty bears on moss sites. So there's a high
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 4: concentration of food, and that's one of the highest caloric
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: value foods in the ecosystem.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: He explain what that means.
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 4: Cloric value?
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: No, what a moth? I know about it? Oh, yeah,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: I know a little bit, but just tell people what
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: that is.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 4: So there's these army cutworm moths that migrate from the
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 4: Midwest and they come up in the mountains at night
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 4: pollinate flowers, and then in the daytime they get in
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 4: these talus slopes and they use that as a heat refugia,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 4: and bears come along and they flip over those rocks
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 4: and eat those bugs. And they're probably eating twenty to
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 4: forty thousand of.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: Those moths a day, licking them up.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 4: Licking them up, yep. And it's just a really rich
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 4: food source for bears in ecosystem. But what I was
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 4: going to say is there's places in the ecosystem where
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 4: there's moss sites and there's not bears utilizing them, So
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 4: they think it's a learned behavior, like.
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: They know about it, right yep. Huh, Like if you
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: took all the bears out and put new ones back in,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: they might not find those.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: Moths maybe not for a while, or they use different ones,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 4: or they could use different ones.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, huh. What are some of the other main foods,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: Like everybody likes to think of them just you know,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: eating elk calves, But when you had a list like
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: their main grub sources, what do you think it is?
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 4: Uh, vegetation. You know, bears eat a lot of different
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: roots and tubers and corns, and that's a big one.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 4: In the spring, elk calves is a big food source.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 4: I mean, that's kind of undeniable. These moths sites. There
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 4: are a few places in the ecosystem where they eat
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: those cutthroat trout that are spawning white bark pine. But
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 4: they did a food synthesis analysis on bears and found
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 4: that they eat over two hundred and sixty different plants
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 4: and animals so kid. Yeah, in the Yellstone ecosystem, they
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 4: have the most diverse diet.
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: Two hundred and sixty species. Yep.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 4: That bear that I caught there was six twenty four.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 4: I figured that he was probably eating meat year round.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 4: You know, that bear was going from winter kill carcasses
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 4: to elk calves, to moths, to killing cattle in the
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 4: fall because we'd caught him before killing cattle, to eating
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 4: gut piles. You know, he was eating probably nothing but meat.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: How old was that bear?
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 2: Mmm?
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 4: I don't remember. I caught another bear that was five
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: hundred and twenty pounds in the spring, same exact location,
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: and I caught him eight years later and he was
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 4: twenty eight years old.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: Wow, Holy cow man.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 4: So that other bear could be thirty I think. I think, well,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: when he was twenty eight, that bear was past his prime.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 4: Maybe when other bear was probably between fifteen and twenty.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: Gotcha, Yeah, man, it's twenty eight.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: Zach Turnbull caught one that was thirty two in the
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: Upper Green.
• 1:05:16
  Speaker 1: And that's got to be getting close to mass.
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 4: That's the oldest bear they've caught in the ecosystem.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your mind, what is the what
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: is the most common sort of way things play out
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: when people get scratched up by a bear.
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 4: Hmmm, what do you mean, like, how.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: If you were if you were no, no, no, no, I'm sorry,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: if you were going to look at from all the
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: things you've heard and seen, when someone gets mauled by
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: a bear, what is the normal.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 4: Scenario surprise encounter?
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: Probably like you're spooking it.
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and probably sounds with cubs more than anything else.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 4: You know, I see a big adult mail track, I'm
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 4: not nervous. I see a little tiny cub track, and
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 4: I'm like really looking around.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's that you like jump it at close range.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the majority of them. You know, there's a
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 4: lot of cases every year where guys get elk down
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: and and there's bears coming into those dead elk or
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 4: they're going back to retrieve a bear or excuse me
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 4: an elk carcass and and they jump a bear. That's
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 4: pretty common too. I mean it's it's food, cubs and
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 4: personal space, And a lot of times you're getting cubs
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: and personal space at the same time.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: Got it, that's trouble. Yeah, do you believe you know,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: there's like a thing I don't know if it's a
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: if it's a what's the opposite of an urban legend,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: rural legend?
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 4: Rural myth?
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: Okay, like my brother redneck talk my brother Danny, he
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: now and then goes in, uh hunts kodyac but after
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: you know, he hunts in the winter for black tail deer. Right,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: and he'll swear when the bears are down, he'll swear
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: to red fox. No, a gunshot. There's a lot of
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: red fox there. He's like, you shoot a deer and
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: they're just there. Yeah, and he's like, you know, they're
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: smelling it whatever. But it's so fast you can't help.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: But wonder like, are they're like, oh, they're like and they're.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 4: Like, ooh yeah, go that way.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: You hear people say this about grizzlies.
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, all the time.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: Do you think that's true?
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 4: No, not at all.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: You don't think they can't do a gunshot.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: No. I'll tell you why, because I have friends that
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 4: are really poor shots, have guided hunters. They're really poor shots.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 4: And you sit there for fifteen twenty minutes and no
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 4: bears show shows up. We have a shooting range outside
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 4: of Cody.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: It's not full bears.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 4: It's not full of bears, even though I've caught bears
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 4: adjacent to it, but they're not running to that thing,
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 4: you know, got it. So it's really when you get
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 4: an animal down that blood, that room and smell that guts.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 4: As soon as that hits the air, you gotta clock
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 4: on you. And what I like to do as a
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 4: guide is start a fire, you know, as long as
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 4: there's not a fireband if I'm in a good location,
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 4: you know, and started upwind because that kind of masks
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 4: that scent and fire. The real reason is it calms
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 4: your hunter down because as soon as they kill something,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 4: they're like super bear scared.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we do that fire thing caughtting up moose in
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: alask especially when it's real thick, I'll get a fire gone.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it's like my owne I just have.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I like to have the idea that
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: it somehow broadcasts the human presence more might be total horseshit.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think so. I don't think bears want to
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 4: come into a fire. So that's just something I've learned
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 4: since after the game and fish.
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: You know, have you handled bears that had killed people?
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 4: Hmmm, No, I've handled there's that have mall people. Yeah,
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: after the mall and yeah.
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 7: Didn't you tell me that story about how.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so the first yeah, one of my yeah, one
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 4: of my first conflicts that I came on. I wasn't
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 4: even hired on full time yet. I came in the office.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 4: I was just volunteering on my days off. And my
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 4: boss was on the phone and he said, I remember
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: him saying, three maybe four people mauled. I'm on the
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 4: way to the hospital. And he got off the phone
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: and he said, hey, can you help us for a
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 4: couple of days, And I said yeah. And there was
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: a mauling at by cook City, a campground called Soda Butte.
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 4: There was a human fatality there. And ran up there
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 4: with the trap and you know that was obviously in Montana,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 4: but we assisted Montana and trying to catch those bears
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 4: and they set the traps. They caught those bears, I
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 4: you know, set but we didn't catch anything. And then
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 4: I was shuttling samples to our vet lab and layer
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 4: me what kind of samples, well, tissue samples from the
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 4: bear to make sure that it was a match. Okay,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: but she had mauled three people and the first tint
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 4: was a young kid and his girlfriend and a dog,
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 4: and she tried to Sorry, she didn't maul, but she
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 4: she tried to attack three different people. She tried to
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 4: come into that tent and the dog started barking, and
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 4: she left it, and that kid got so afraid. I
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 4: call him a kid. He's probably like eighteen nineteen. He
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 4: packed up all his stuff and left, and that Soo
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 4: went further down the campground and there was a couple
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 4: who slept in separate tents because the husband snored and
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 4: maybe maybe they're in a fight, and that Soo ripped
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 4: into a tent and tried to grab that and she
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 4: fought it off, and it actually broke a tooth out
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 4: of the bear's head in her arm.
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, it's weird, like all the shit he bit
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: in his life that that would break his tooth off.
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 4: It was It was a sow, but she was so
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 4: malnourished that she was desperate, and that was Those are
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 4: predatory attacks, obviously, which is different than your defensive aggressive attacks.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 4: So then she, yeah, she went further down the campground
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 4: and she got in another tent and she killed and
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 4: ate a guy, and there was three other yearling bears
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 4: with her through those attacks. So I didn't work up
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 4: that bear personally, but yeah, I've worked up other bears
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 4: of mald people.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: Does that give you a creepy feeling?
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 5: Mmm?
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I will never forget the look in
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 4: that bear's eyes. It's so to bete. I mean, she
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 4: was so demoralized, and yeah, I'll just never forget the
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 4: way she had her head on her paws and just
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 4: look completely demoralized.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: Like what do you mean demoralized? M just.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 4: There was like a sadness in her eyes. I don't
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 4: know how else is that?
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 4: And you catch a lot of bears and see a
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 4: lot of bears and traps and they avoid eye contact.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 4: That's really normal, but there was just like a feeling
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 4: about it. I don't know how else to describe it.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: Hum, when they're avoiding eye contact, what do you think.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 4: That is in the bear world? You know, that's aggressive posturing.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: When I was teaching, eye contact is aggressive.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah, when I was teaching kids, i'd say, you know,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 4: especially middle school girls, you know, when you see somebody
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: in the hallways and you kind of stare them down,
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 4: that's aggressive posturing. You know you're being mean, right, And
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 4: they all understand that and that's the same with bears,
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 4: is they pretty much avoid eye contact until they're raid
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 4: to rumble the rate to fight.
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: M so they'll look away from one another.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yep, those big adult males, when you see them fight,
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 4: they'll circle each other and they'll be avoiding eye contact,
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 4: and when they finally get the nerve to lock eyes,
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 4: that's when they're you know, trying to fight each other.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: Do you think there's a tell if a bear is
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: gonna falls charge or charge charge? Do you think there's
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 1: a physical tell? Ye?
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 4: Head posture, Okay, if they're really intent on hurting you,
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 4: their head is as low to the ground as possible.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 4: They're trying to get there. And you see that with
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 4: self defense shootings. A lot of times guys aim center mass.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 4: Center mass is the hump, you know, and it doesn't
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 4: kill them. When they're shooting bears. If it's a bluff charge,
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 4: a lot of times their head is high. You know,
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 4: they're kind of high on their front legs and they're
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 4: not coming as fast as they could head down, head down, Yep,
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 4: aim low.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 8: With your spray, yeah, shot, yeah, with your yeah at
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 8: what let's say, once coming you got prayer spray at
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 8: what distance?
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: For you personally, Like, at what distance are you touching
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: that spray off?
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 4: Oh, thirty yards?
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're just letting it rip. Let it rip,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: don't be like trying to don't try to conserve.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: I would, I'd hold it down for a second and spray,
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 4: and you know, if it kept coming, I'm going to
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 4: keep spraying. But yeah, about a second's all it takes.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: What do you think about the wolverine situation, the wolverine
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: delisting m or sorry, the wolverine listing? Do you think
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: the wolverine listing is warranted?
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 4: I think we're living in a time and age where
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 4: a lot wildlife habitats just getting chopped up, and wolverines
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 4: need a really big home range. And there were links
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 4: in Wyoming and they just kind of blinked out and
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 4: nobody ever noticed. So I don't know a ton about wolverines,
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 4: but I think you probably gotta do everything you can
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 4: to protect their habitat at this point, you think, so, yeah,
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 4: and I you know, they just have such a huge
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 4: home range and this was probably for the south extent
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 4: of their habitat anyways, Yeah, right well down into Colorado. Yeah,
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 4: historically they're probably so far down.
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that they're using two they use two
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: hundred and fifty.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 4: Square miles five hundred five hundred square that's wild, it's more.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 4: But same thing with links, you know. They they went
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 4: really far south. And I had a friend that was
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 4: a trapper and he'd always say, it's not like the
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 4: Canadians are excited every time a bobcat crosses into Canada.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: You know, a good point.
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 4: It's just we have a different mentality because they're coming south.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 4: What do you think about wolverines?
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: Man? Uh, I think that they I think that we
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: lack any kind of historic reference. So when someone goes
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: and looks and they think that there's a low number
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: of wolverines that no one's ever looked at it in
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: a sophisticated sense before. One way you could look at
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: the research they did is you'd say, man, there's wolvernes
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: all over the place, right because they go out and
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: do the they hang the carcasses and do the trail
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: camp stuff and catch hairs.
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah I actually did that one, did you?
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: And so you'd look and be like wow. Like one interpretation,
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: you'd be like, huh, that's cool. There's a lot of
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: wolverines out there because no one knew. But instead you
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: take that you you realize there aren't many, but you
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: don't know how many there ever were, right, and then
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: you point to an area, you know, you point to
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: an area and cannon they had seen a decline, but
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 1: it's not the same kind of area. You're on the
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: southern edge, and you just go like, there aren't many,
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: therefore they must be endangered. I feel like, without being
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: able to have it, demons like a demonstrated decline over time.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: I'm a little suspect, and I also I'm a little
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: suspect because I think that they are a I think
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: that it's a little bit of a red herring. I
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: think that they're being used, that they're being used as
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: a tool to get at something that, to get at
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: something different.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 4: Sure that's probably saving habitat.
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And it's like it's like, we want to
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: save habitat, which I totally understand. We want to save habitat,
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: we want to slow certain development. The way to do
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: that is to do the wolverine and get the wolverine listed.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: But then the wolverine will get listed and it'll wind
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: up being that you'll see that you can't go and
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: snow and beyond certain areas, and you can't trap in
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: certain areas. And you'd be like, but but running a
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: snowmobil and trapping aren't have it. Don't do habitat destruction.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: If this is all about habitat destruction, why do we
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: do it this way? Well, this is very personal.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Steve still collecting his thoughts on this subject.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 4: You know, back to the point I made earlier about
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 4: links linking out in Wyoming, there's a chance that part
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 4: of that was because of snowmobiles and and what that
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 4: does is creates a path for coyotes to go kill
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 4: snowshoe hairs, which obviously links are dependent on. Got it,
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 4: And so you know, it doesn't seem like snowmobiling has
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 4: an impact, but it.
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: May, you know, one of the weirdest ones of those God.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 4: I don't want to be like a making make me
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 4: sound very green here. That's great.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: Listen that that's that's that's great for me. I mean, uh,
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: you know, I like it's a it's good things to
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: beerious about. Yeah, uh, think about this. One time we
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: spent a lot of time years ago on when there
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: was still some caribou that were living in the Idaho Panhandle. Yeah,
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: and the efforts to try to save those caribou in
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: the in the Selkirk Range, and they would come into
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: Idaho Panhandle. Sure, right now there's no caribou in the
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: lower forty.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 4: Eight Yeah, super sad.
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: When they looked at that. An interesting thing was that
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: they were seeing so much wolf predation on caribou, and
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: it was like, why wasn't there, Like, that's nothing new.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: You've had wolves on the landscape right in BC. The
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: caribou there, why wasn't it. It was like white tailed
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: deer numbers, like like certain certain timber harvest practices created
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: a lot of white tailed deer and elk and moose habitat.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: As you brought up that number of ungulates this is
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: theory obviously, as you brought up that number of ungulates
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: at the edge of caribou habitat, it created an incentive
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: for wolves to hunt in the area. And once wolves
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: had taken the habit of hunting in that area, because
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: they're killing deerd or killing moose, they're getting some caribou. Historically,
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: there hadn't been enough like bio mass on the landscape
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: to warrant them hunting the area and they would just
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: be elsewhere. It's a theory, but it's interesting and you
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: think of like like you do this and kylet's now
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: push up on snowbill trails and hunt and they got
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: a way to get from spot to spot and it
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 1: right right, it's a human cause. It's a human cause,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: very like step by step, kind of hard to track.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the corequence of events, the correlations probably
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 4: when snowmobiles got souped up. I'd be curious if that
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 4: was like the years when when those animal's behavior started
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 4: to change.
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: Got it when high marking became a thing.
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 4: Yeah, because when I was growing up, you know, you
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 4: were about a foot off the ground and that thing
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 4: didn't go very fast. Yeah, but now you can, you
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 4: can go anywhere with a snowmobile.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I picked up a wolverine on a trail camera
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: last year.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's cool.
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: I felt like I was I felt like I was
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: real excited. I sent it to everybody.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 4: It was like trapping, Yeah, yeah, it was like trapping
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 4: to get one.
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah on a camera.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 4: No, We've had some game fish guys get some on cameras,
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 4: but it's really rare. And when they were doing that
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 4: population estimate, you know, it was I want to say,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 4: not more than five in the whole state, And they
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 4: put a lot of effort into trying to identify wolverines.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 4: Something that was really cool, though, is they had a
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 4: wolverine that had a white arm with a black spot,
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 4: so really unique. And she'd actually been caught in the
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 4: northern part of Yellowstone and had a had a number
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 4: and I think for a while had a transmitter in
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 4: her I'm not sure if that's true, but she was
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 4: fourteen years old. I want to say, wow, r really yep,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 4: because they're so identifiable.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: They knew about how many and Wyoming.
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 4: Well through all the you know, I think the population
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 4: estenate is probably twenty Is it that low?
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: Is that low? Yeah?
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 4: She's really God I might be miss speaking twenty to
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 4: fifty one hundred, No more than.
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: We got a lot better to tabitat though. Here. Yeah,
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: in the northwest part of the states.
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 3: So how far away was she she said she was
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: She had been caught in the northern part of Elstone.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: Do you know where she was then reidentified?
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: How far away?
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 4: Fish hawks? Probably eighty miles away? Wow, twenty one and
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 4: twenty two.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 6: Wyoming game and fish set approximately twenty four wolverinesh.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: Look at this guy.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 4: It's been a while since I thought about that.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: Man. It makes my cameras things seem even cooler.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 4: You know who you know who? Osborne Russell is sure man.
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: He calls them common.
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and he talks about him in by Salt Lake,
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 4: So yeah.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of he calls them common.
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of carkajew references in the Mountain Man journals.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Ye know that oral history stuff does because I would
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 1: not call them common.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 4: Right, So there's gotta be more than there is now.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Osborne Russell, we covered this very We're working on
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: a thing called the Mountain Men. Yeah, sure, part of
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: our American History series. And the other thing that you
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: just wouldn't believe is, uh, the number of big horns.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah in the early eighteen hundreds.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, like not elk, right.
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: Big horns. Hundreds, like hundreds of big horns.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 4: I've talked horns, yeah, big horns and deer. I've talked
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: to Larry Todd about this, and there's only two Indian
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 4: camps in Wyoming that have elk parts in them. So
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 4: what I don't understand is there's a really big elk
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 4: migration that comes from Yellowstone and it goes to south
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 4: of Kody, and you know, I imagine it's been going on
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 4: for thousands of years. But you think maybe there weren't
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 4: that many elk back then, or you know, it's more
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 4: buffalo than elk.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: And yeah, Osborne Russell would run into people who were
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: like sheep specialists.
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 4: Sheep eaters, sheep. Yeah, we have a bunch of artifacts
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 4: around us that were sheep eater artifacts. They're they're part
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 4: of the Shoshown tribe. But we just learned.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 3: That's why I scratched it.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: I asked, I actually asked as a person.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 4: Yea, well I've never known, only preferred. Yeah, that's the
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 4: river that flows through Cody.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: That's yeah, that's that's what got Yeah, you're sitting in Okay.
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 3: Well he would know the rivers and the places go
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 3: by Shoshone, but the people go by Shoshone is sort.
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: Of what he was. He was a rapp a hole. Yeah,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: but he lives with Yeah, lives. Yeah, that's true.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: The conclusion we collectively arrived at.
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 4: Have you ever seen the bows that those sheep eaters make?
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: No? But I read Osborne Russell's description of the bows.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they're pretty cool. There's a guy named Bob Lucas
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 4: that there's a video of him making one. But they
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 4: take a big horn, sheep horn, and they reverse the
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 4: curl and then they glue it and tie it together
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 4: and it's basically a recurved bow.
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: They steam it, reverse it right yep.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 7: Uh.
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: Osborne Russell figures very heavily into our into the thing
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: we're working on because he did such.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 4: A good job of documenting stuff.
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, such a phenomenal job of making a journal. Uh.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: Tell me about your guide in business? Who do you
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: guide for?
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 4: I've guided for a bunch of different outfitters, to be honest,
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 4: and I took this season pretty much off because I
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 4: just had a kid. But I've worked for Yellowstone Country Outfitters,
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 4: three oh seven Outfitters, ran Crick Outfitters, Livingstone Outfitters. So
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 4: I've got to see a lot of country.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: And your specialty these horseback trips.
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 4: Yeah, everything's horseback, horseback and mule sawbucks or deckers sawbuck guy. Yeah,
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 4: I've never understood that though. Montana guys. Yeah, I can't
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 4: take a toothbrush if they don't man yet.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I've always thought the same thing.
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, we always laugh at Sawbucks. Yeah, you'll have to
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 4: teach me, so all right, Yeah, trade seems pretty easy.
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 4: So there's two style of pack saddles. One is what
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 4: you call sawbook, which is seems self explanatory. You hang
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 4: paniards and then you have a lash rope where you
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 4: tie a hitch so keep everything pinned down. And Montana
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 4: guys run what's called decker pack saddles, and they have
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 4: ropes hanging off the bars on their packs and then
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 4: they tie a hitch, usually with something that's man eat up,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 4: so they pack all their camping stuff in a in
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 4: a canvas manny and fold it up real nice, like yeah, manny,
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 4: petty sort, you're tracking, you're tracking? Help me out here.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 6: Yeah, no, that's accurate.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 4: I don't know what you don't know.
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 6: My theory is decker like when you lash down at
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 6: decker saddle, say with a YETI cool, And then you
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 6: can crow's foot it to really lash it down. You
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 6: can bump into a lot more trees and have it
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 6: stays stay set. Compared to Sawbucks, addles might move around
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 6: a little bit more or get loose.
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 4: I've never some pretty steep country.
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 6: Well steep maybe how thick is it?
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 4: It's pretty thick. Well, it sounds like.
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 3: I guess whatever style floats your boat.
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 4: I know that you can pack real awkward loads with deckers.
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 4: They're a lot more versatile.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 6: Yeah, we would pack raft frames sixteen foot raft rames
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 6: them on the uphill side.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, we just don't take that stuff. So yeah,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 4: very awkward?
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: Are you mostly deer? Mostly elk?
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 4: I've done it all sheep, mountain goat deer elk, not
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 4: grizzly bear, but everything else. Uh no, never have a
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 4: guated black bears. Actually kind of got burned out on
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 4: the bear thing, so.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, messing with bears like a person gets a job
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: to ice cream shop, then.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 4: I don't like ice cream no more, exactly exactly the
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 4: same reason I don't eat Mexican FID.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: And you're and you're looking for your ear between careers.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 4: Now you know I'm doing construction, but I'm definitely open
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 4: to doing something that benefits wildlife. I don't want the
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 4: best thing that I've done for wildlife to be catching
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 4: and killing bears.
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: So what drove you to do? You mind saying why
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: did you leave the state agency in Wyoming fishing game.
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 4: I was just really personally conflicted with some of the
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 4: management decisions that were being made. You know, So there
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 4: were a lot of reasons I was. I was super burnout.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 4: If I had to give one more bear safety talk,
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 4: I was gonna suck start a forty four? God what
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 4: or bear spray?
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: What would be at what would be an area of management? Like,
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: what would be like an area of management that you
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: would find conflict. You don't need to tell me the
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: exact conflict, but when you say that, what do you mean?
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: What do you mean?
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 4: What do you mean? Like?
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: Do you mean the way they sat harvest objectives?
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: Oh?
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: The way they where I had conflict? Or was it
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: like administrative issues? You know?
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was leadership and it I just didn't feel
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 4: like relocation and removal decisions were really consistent.
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 3: So god, oh on the bear question, yeah, it's like
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 3: how you're handling individual bears.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you know, I'd had a certain standard with
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 4: my old boss, and I just felt like it wasn't
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 4: the same.
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: Do you is my last question for you? Do you
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: give me your personal take? I like, like came in
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: so hot and heavy on delisting. What's your personal take?
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: On delisting.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 4: Hmmm. I think it's the best thing to keep states
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 4: into managing bears, which is probably the best thing for
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 4: the people on the landscape. And I also think hunting
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 4: is a positive because it creates its advocates for wildlife,
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 4: creates advocates for bears. People right now say there's too
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 4: many bears on the landscape, but as soon as you
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 4: start hunting them, they'll be like, I don't know where
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 4: all the big bears have gone. These guys are hunting
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 4: too many. It's a non residence.
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it'll just be some other boogeyman.
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 4: Man. So, but they continue to expand. And a big
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 4: issue that the court see is that genetic connectivity between
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 4: the GYE and the NCDE, and right now they're only
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 4: thirty six miles apart. And I think that whether you
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 4: delist or not, I think they eventually make that connectivity.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 4: But there was a bear that showed up in the
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 4: Big Horns two years ago actually, and you know that
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 4: bear was removed ethanized right away. And I think they're
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 4: going to continue to expand whether you try to contain
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 4: them or not.
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: Oh, was that a containment decision?
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 4: Social acceptance, you know, but we've caught and killed a
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 4: lot of bears over the years, and you're just trying
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 4: to contain them into the absorcos. This year, they'll hit
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 4: seventy bears have died in the Elstone ecosystem, and probably
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 4: forty of those will be management removals. And you got
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 4: everything from bears getting killed in irrigation canals, there were
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 4: bears electrocuted. There's bears that get hit by vehicles, like
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 4: three ninety nine obviously, so.
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: Seventy to one calendar year.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it'll be a record year this year.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 6: Montana's at twenty eight right now.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 4: I don't think it's over yet. There's still bears out.
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: One of the uh one of the arguments I heard
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: from when I talked about I was joking and I
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: half joking about Montana chickening out on the bear hunt.
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: But one of the things they brought up is they
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: had no They felt that their quota would get hit
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: by non hunting purposes and if they did a hunt.
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 4: This is kind of like the logic, right, Yeah.
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: If they did a hunt and killed a couple bears,
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: they would burn up their quota and then they wouldn't
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: be able to do bear management on problem bears because
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: they would have already hit their human Cause quota.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: Doesn't sound unreasonable.
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: Fee feels more across that bridge when you come to it.
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I think again, it's what you what the number
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 4: you believe is in the ecosystem. And the reason Wyoming
• 1:33:54
  Speaker 4: was going to be so high is because twelve of
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 4: those bears were going to be outside the demographic monitoring area,
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 4: so they weren't even counted towards the population.
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: Got it, got.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 4: It, you know. And the DMA is about twenty thousand
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 4: square miles and bear distribution right now is about fifty
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 4: thousand square miles.
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's a grizzly coming to a neighborhood near you.
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 4: Yeah. So everywhere I would go, people go, there's kids
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 4: in the neighborhood. You got to get this bear out
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 4: of here, you know. And then one lady called me
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 4: and she goes, there's old people in this neighborhood. You
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 4: got to get this bear out of here. I'm like, Oh,
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 4: there's no appropriate age to live with a bear.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: There's two things that are going to happen. I like
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: to joke about golfers and Montana is uniquely created a
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: golfer Gophers. No, I believe that someday Montana will have
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: a golfer get mall about golfing, oh in Whitefish.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 6: Yeah, probably at Meadow Lake Resort, Columbia Fall the big
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 6: scot they.
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 3: Called one on a golf course down the bitter.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we will have. It'll be like it'll be I
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: hope he doesn't get it bad. If he gets a
• 1:35:05
  Speaker 1: bad I'll feel bad. But I I uh, it'll be
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: an interesting day when we have a golfer get malb
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: digging through the rough looking.
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 3: It's probably not gonna be a good golfer because he's
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 3: gonna be sticking to the fairways.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: And yeah, he's gonna be down to the dick. He's
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: gonna be down to the creek bottom looking for his
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: golf ball.
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 4: Another good reason to work on your backswing.
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: We're gonna have a golfer, get Mall, and that's going
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: to change public opinion. And then for whatever reason, like
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: we have a little.
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 4: Mountain range right here in town Bridgers, Uh, you know,
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 4: not right here.
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: I mean it's way bigger than that. But it toes
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: off like this, you know, toes off into town and man,
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: there's grizzlies right.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 4: Across the highway, I know, thirty six miles.
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: And it's like, at some point in time, this is
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: we have this real popular hiking trail called the m Yeah,
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: it's not out of the it's not out of it's
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 1: like a reasonable thing that someone's gonna get scratch on
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: the m Hill. I feel like that'll impact public opinion
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: when a golf forgets it. Yeah.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 3: I mean there is in Missoula the Rattlesnake Wilderness right there.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 3: You know, you can take a city bus to it,
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 3: and they had a sow and cubs that set up
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 3: in one of the first gulches there. That's like a
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 3: really popular mountain biking area. But I remember going to
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 3: an event and there's a bear biologist there talking about
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 3: grizzlies coming into the Missoula area, and he's like, you know,
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 3: they're in Gold Creek, they're down on the golf courses
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 3: in the bitter Root, they're in the Rattlesnake. And he said,
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 3: I would be surprised if in five years there aren't
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 3: sort of resident known bear families, you know, population groups
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 3: here and there in the city around the city.
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: I should say, I don't want people to think I'm
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: bringing that up like a golfer getting scratched. I'm not
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: bringing this up as a thing that I'm worried about,
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: and I don't think it's a negative. I mean, I'm
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: not the golfer get scratched. I'm not saying I want,
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: I don't want. I think I'd love it if we
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: had bears. I'd like if there's grizzlies all over town,
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: like go to Anchorage. Yeah for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: I like them. Yeah, I'm not an anti bear guy whatsoever. Right,
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: I love the bears. I like seeing them. I get
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: excited I see him anyway. You never I never meet
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: anybody who's bummed out that they saw a grizzly. Yeah,
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: I love them.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 4: As soon as you get mauled, people's attitude sure changes.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: I love them. I just want it to go. I
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: want to be that there's a bunch of bears, and
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: I want it to be that there's there's a state
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: managed and there's a tag draw. That's what I want.
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, everybody thinks about their self interest, right, especially me. Yeah,
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 4: I think it's the story that you that you portray
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 4: into the future. Here how people paint bears. So three
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 4: ninety nine is a great example, Like you could paint
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 4: her as a bear that mould people, or you could
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 4: paint her as the biggest advocate for bears in the
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 4: mm hmm in the world. So yeah, future bears is
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 4: up to the public.
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: Really. Yeah, and my you know, you mentioned like everybody
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 1: wants what their own self interest is. I should clarify that. Uh,
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna draw a Grizzly bear tag. I live
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: in a state that one had they done, I don't
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: know that. I orn't even put in for the tag. Yeah,
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: uh we didn't do it. If we did one, you're
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: not gonna draw it. I mean, what are the odds
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 1: you're gonna draw it? You know. It's like I've been
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: applying for big horn sheep tag for decades, haven't drawn
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: one yet.
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 7: I a lot.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: No, not not like, yeah, you get you're not gonna draw,
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: Like the draws are gonna be slim. So it's not
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: like it's not like I feel that this is my pathway. Yeah,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: I mean I hunt the last every year. This isn't
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: my like, I'm not pursuing this as because it's my
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: personal pathway to getting a Grizzly. It's like it's not
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: gonna happen. I'm not going to get a grizzly in Montana.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna get a grizzy in Idahol. I'm not
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: gonna get a grizzy in Wyoming. This isn't all me,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: you know, with some like Machiavellian plan by which I'll
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: be able to hunt grizzlies in my neighborhood. It's like,
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: just as an advocate four hunters, and as an advocate
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: for state management, and as an advocate for responsible use
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: of renewable resources, here's an animal that that people, that
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: has was historically a game animal that has people that
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: there's people that hunt them in other places, there's a
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: desire to hunt them. Hunting them is not incompatible with
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 1: having a stable population, as we've demonstrated with mountain lions,
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: black bears, white tailed deer, mule deer, elk moose, big
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: orange sheep, mountain goats. I could go on and on.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: It's not incompatible. I don't know why there should be
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: any different.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 4: This guy's put in.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: You know what I'll do right now? You know what
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna do right now now, I'm gonna tell you something.
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: Right now, I'm gonna tell you something right now, just
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: because you said that, I promise I won't put in. Okay,
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: for how long ever, I won't.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 2: Put it in.
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: I won't put in.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 4: It's a true advocate.
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: And you go scroll the records and see if you
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: ever see me put in, I won't put in.
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 4: I got friends I'll call.
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to put it. I said one time before,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: like to talk about in drilling an ant war. Yeah,
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: And people are like, oh yeah, just because you hunt
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: up there all the time. I'm like, okay, if I
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: could sign a contract that said they won't drill an
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: war but I can't ever go there, I would sign.
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 4: The contract right me too, I'm not going there.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like okay, fine, I need to go there,
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: just whatever. That's fine. And if I had to sign
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: a contract, we'll dlist and turn over to State management
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: and create a hunting season tomorrow, but you have to
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: agree that you'll never apply for a tag. I'd be like, okay, cool,
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: that's not what it is for me.
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 4: I think the real question here is can you get
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 4: bears off the list? Can you have state management without
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 4: people continuing to sue and and tear down the ESA,
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 4: or do you have to change the ESA in order
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 4: to get animals delisted, and I think that would be
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 4: horrible if if you don't get bears off the list.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: You know, That's why my advice to people who support
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: the ESA is to stop effing around with the essay,
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: what weaponizing it, because you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: do You're gonna do to the essay what they did
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: to the spot at owl. Like the spot at Owl
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: used to be an owl, yeah, and then it became
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: a symbol of overreach. Right, you're gonna now create You're
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: gonna be like you have here. You sit like let's
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: say you were like Joey ESA, Right, you're like the
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: diehard defender of the ESA. My advice to you stop
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: weaponizing the ESA. Then delist that bear which is a
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: hit recovery, which which hit recovery objectives twenty five years ago. Yeah,
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: but and move on to what's next.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 4: The reason I brought up that bear in the Big
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 4: Horns is that's in the DPS and that's unoccupied habitat.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 4: So you know, in theory, the ESA calls for bears
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 4: moving into that suitable habitat.
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 1: But they mapped out when they listed them. They mapped
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: out recovery objectives and they hit recovery objectives twenty some
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: years ago.
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 4: Yeah that's true.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, So why bother, why bother having an Endangered
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: Species Act? Why bother making recovery objectives if it's just bullshit? Yeah,
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: if you don't mean it.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it erodes public trust, no doubt about it.
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: Two percent of the things that go on the ESA
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: come off because of recovery. Okay, things will come off
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: because they realize it wasn't warranted. Things will come off
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: because they'll go extinct. Two percent of the things that
• 1:42:53
  Speaker 1: go on the ESA come off because recovery. Here, you
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: have a recovered thing. Why is it not celebrated?
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: They didn't bitch Like eagles came off, no problem, peregrine fault.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: But this one they just got to hold it tight
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: to their chest, yep. Because it's not about the ESSA.
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 4: It's a money maker, that's what it is.
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So forget me saying I'm coming at it from
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: a perspective of one hundred. I'm coming at it from
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: a perspective of someone that wants to get on with
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: UH to like salvage the ESA and not make it
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: that it just is a thing of derision.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 4: Glad I bolstered your argument.
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: No, thank you cut all that out, feel so I
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: can just start saying that like I thought of it.
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: Well man, thanks for coming on the show.
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 4: Thanks for having me appreciate it. It's good to meet
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 4: you guys.
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: Is there anything that I that you wish you got
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 1: to talk about that I asked about.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 4: I meant to talk about snaring bears.
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: That's something I didn't talk tell me about that.
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 4: So another way we catch them is with foot snares,
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 4: and you use what's called an aldrewe spring, and you
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 4: put the spring and a snare loop and you dig
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 4: a hole and then you recreate the surfaces though it's
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 4: just ground, and you try to get a bear to
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 4: step in that. And that's a fun part of trapping.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: So how do you get him step in there? Hanging
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: a bait?
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 4: A lot of times you have a cubby set and
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 4: you're trying to direct them into your set, but you're
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 4: putting sticks, and bears don't like to step on sticks
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 4: and hurt their feet, so you can kind of control
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 4: their foot movement with those.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: When you're doing that, so he actually thinks he's putting
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: his foot on the ground and his foot breaks through
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: the ground.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and it hits this Yeah, it's a pit trap,
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 4: but it hits this trigger and that trigger flings a
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 4: spring and that pulls that snare cable tight. And the
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 4: snare cable just has a little bracket that only slides
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 4: one way, you know. And you caught a bear.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: And can you is he too messed up? Or can
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: you release him? Oh?
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, no, you you release those bears.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: He's gotta be pissed.
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 3: Do you get him on video when you do that?
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 3: I got some sounds like a fun visual mm hmm.
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 4: Got some pictures somewhere, I think. But he's pissed a
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 4: lot of times they're trying to run off and they
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 4: hit the end of that snare cable and they roll over.
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 4: And sometimes they are pissed and they try to charge you.
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: Yep, in regular trap.
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 4: And you call that blocking, Yeah, exactly.
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. A bobcat trapper was explaining one time that people
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: would use blocking for bobcats, but they don't realize this.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: Bobcats want to stand on little things, so they'd put
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: little rocks to block, or put a log to block,
• 1:45:33
  Speaker 1: But he wants to be on that. Yeah, so this guy,
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: you know, you know to sycamore, you know, a sycamore ball.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: They don't live around here, but it's like that little
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: poky little it's like a poky little seed pod. There's
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: this trapper to he doesn't even live in that area,
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: but he gets big things of those sycamore things because
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: it's real spiky, and the cat don't want to put
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: his foot on it. So then you can actually control
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: his foot placement. But you put a stick there and
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: that cat's like, oh sweet things. And missus the pants
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: you're standing on, your blocking you know, the stuff that's
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 1: supposed to keep them from wanting to do it. Yeah,
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: so you want stuff that looks like uncomfortable for his foot. Interesting,
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: keep that in mind. I might just go trap bears
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: on my own, just for fun. Bear trapping.
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 4: Yeah, whose ear tag is this?
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: Well, dude, thanks thanks for coming out, man, I appreciate it.
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having me, and good luck on your
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 4: job hunt. Thanks appreciate that name.
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 1: Name what line of work you want, because maybe someoneill
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: call you and give you a job.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 4: Land conservation I think could be up my alley. I
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 4: think that would be beneficial to wildlife. So should I
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 4: throw out my email. Can I do that?
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 7: They you can throw out your email if you want
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 7: a bajillion people messaging you, or they can email loss
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 7: Yeah yeah that's.
• 1:46:45
  Speaker 4: Mine Wor they can also take through.
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: His own job.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 2: Yep, that's true.
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 4: My email is just Dusty dot Lassiter L A S
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 4: S E T E R ten at Gmail. Looking for work,
• 1:46:57
  Speaker 4: looking for work. I got a great job. I have
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 4: a great boss, but I still want to do something
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 4: that benefits wildlife.
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: I got a construction project I might lay out in
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: front of you.
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 4: To I can handle it.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: It's in grizzly country.
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm a mediocre carpenter.
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: But that's what that's kind. I'm looking for.
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 4: More of a painter.
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: All right, man, thanks so much than.
• 1:47:23
  Speaker 5: The fingers are told so cold that they burn. Were
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 5: standing in the creek in our Burney.
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 2: Just for me in a warm bomb. And then back to.
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 5: The pros chasing cotton tail High. I was just ten,
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 5: but High got to join his Carol protested Grandpa's firm.
• 1:48:15
  Speaker 2: I've had him shooting since he was me. High. He
• 1:48:20
  Speaker 2: sees tayd him.
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 5: Then an apro close with the ball on the wind
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 5: hot home tray and bring it in her round moved
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 5: up ahead, just into the lane where case colored Steve
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 5: has put two on the ground. Morning turn high and
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 5: he was singing, came about to spill as a shot
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 5: shell off Lou at its ord home, and I couldn't
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 5: have off. We're in in fingers on the ema, lips
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 5: turning blue.
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: Ever, at the end.
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 5: Of Novegeber, the memories all showver me, bitter sleep, goness,
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 5: early morn, cotton tail hunting, afternoon targets, esteemed dinner feeds,
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 5: forty hot people with cousins, and of those who have
• 1:49:35
  Speaker 5: half forgotten, and all all harried, rarely so happy.
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 2: House spoke first in me in the.
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 5: Bond that was away back in my you. I watched
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 5: it all changed through the heat. It's time we roll
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 5: both bedrock.
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 2: And bone and old age wilts. Even the most pierced.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 5: Grandpa we lost in the cold of Dember Carol. Few
• 1:50:20
  Speaker 5: turns before, how bout farm when they couldn't remember. Nothing's
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 5: the same anymore, Born God.
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 2: Leave the old home lost.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 5: It shee You can hear the wind a whistle at too.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 5: She creaks, and she bones and all over chrown. But
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 5: we'll get her looking brand new.
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: Here at the end.
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 5: Of November, memories all show over me bitter sweet, go
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 5: his early morn cotton sail, hunting after new targets and skins, feeds,
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 5: forty hot people, dozins, and of those who have half forgotten,
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 5: brand all harriet, rarely so happy. Their housefold burst in
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 5: and fed in the pond, swear ris up.
• 1:51:37
  Speaker 2: A few kids on my own, maybe one day grandson to.
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 5: How want the same hells with the hand on each
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 5: shoulder open maybe week kick.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 2: Up, few ran over. They feel this place.
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 5: Every at the end of November. Memory and all show
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 5: over media, bitter sweet.
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 2: As early morn, cant and tale afternoons.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 5: Targets speak, two feeds, forty hot people, cousins and of
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 5: coles who have half forgotten, and all harried, rarely so happy.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 5: House foolhursted and made in the part