Bear Grease - Ep. 402: Backwoods University - Flying Reindeer

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

In this special Christmas-themed episode, we will be focusing in on the animal that seems to get all press and attention during the holiday season- reindeer. In the high arctic of Norway, reindeer have been around for long, long time, and we're going to learn all about them. The stories and lore, their actual biology and ecology, the indigenous tribes that heard them, and even some Santa Clause talk. It's all part of a bigger story of how reindeer impact our world and lives today. Connect with Lake Pickle and MeatEater Lake Pickle on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and YouTube Clips MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to Onex Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. And today, oh, today, my friends, is not your run-of-the-mill Backwoods U episode. I mean, how could it be? We're just days away from Christmas. Chances are, if this has found its way to your eyes and eardrums, you're in the midst of the holiday hustle and bustles. Maybe you're out doing last minute shopping.

Maybe you're out getting ready for a party or for family to come over. Maybe you're on vacation until New Year's and you're riding out to go hunting, you lucky rascal. Whatever you're up to, I hope this most wonderful time of year brings you all the joy and happiness that your heart can stand. And in the nature of being in the Christmas spirit, I present to you this very special Christmas episode. Now, think for a minute.

If I was to do a podcast focused on wildlife and wild places that was Christmas themed, where do you reckon I would land? What animal gets more press than any other during this holiday season? I hope y'all are ready for some crazy stories. So grab a seat and make sure you're bundled up because we're headed to the high Arctic of Norway to learn all about reindeer, the stories and lore built around them, the biology and ecology of the actual animal, and the people who interact with them every single day. I'm going to tell you about Santa Claus. like many of these things

which seem complete fairy stories there's actually a grain of truth in there in this case actually more than a grain of truth you think of the guy who flies around in the middle of the winter drawn by reindeer

comes down the chimney ringing presence and you might say who made that up but of course Of course, it's almost entirely true. Every bit of it, well, except for the flying. The voice with a very cool accent you're hearing is Dr. Nicholas Tyler, a wildlife biologist who has spent 40 years studying the ecology of both wildlife and domestic reindeer.

He's going to be our main source of truth and learning all the wild and cool facts about these animals. But first, he's going to give us this unique Santa Claus origin story that I bet most of you didn't know. I certainly didn't. In the old days, the principal transport in the snow season up here in the mountains was by reindeer and sledge. And you have a, in the eastern part of North and Norway, Finnmark, you have big sledges with big runners, a curve up at the front. I'm sorry, in the western part, in the eastern part, you have, Things called pulk, which are like little boats because it's more forested, and the big sledges don't move well between the trees.

But in either case, you sit on your sledge or in your polk and you're dragged about by reindeer. When the animals had spent the summer out of the coast and they migrated inland in wintertime and settled down, the people on their migration were used. using their larvae, their tents rather like your wigwams, canvas tents in a pyramidal form. But in the winter, they would move into a gamma, and a gamma is a permanent structure, a wooden frame and built up on all size and on the top with turf.

And once you settled in your gamma, your winter hut, then you would let the door snow in. snow would pack around the hut and that's good it's more insulation and at that time the only way in and out of a gummer is up the ladder and out of the smokehole now the only guy you see where i'm going the only person who's moving around at that time of year is the shaman and the shaman is sitting on his sledge being pulled by reindeer and when he arrives at the gummer, he comes down the smoke hole. But he's not bringing gifts.

He's bringing something much more important. He's bringing medicine and news. Medicine and news are really important. So there you have it. Here you have the good guy traveling around in the middle of the winter, pulled by reindeer. He comes down the smoke hole, and he brings up. gifts. Why, he brings important stuff. Sounds familiar. I don't know whether that is the origin

of Santa Claus, but it jolly well ought to be. I think it jolly well ought to be, too. I bet y'all didn't think y'all ever going to get a Santa Claus education on Backwoods University, but here we are. Got to stay on your toes around here. We got one more wild tale that I don't think you'll believe, but we're going to save that until the very end of this episode. For now, let's dive into all things reindeer, starting off by learning a little more about Dr. Nicholas Tyler, who's going to be our resident reindeer expert. I'm a biologist, and I've spent 40 years studying the ecology of reindeer, and I started off with wild reindeer in the high Arctic archipelago of Swalbard. And then since then, I've worked a lot also with domesticated reindeer in northern Norway, where I live.

and the reason for working with those animals is that we can keep them in captivity for physiological experiments. But when you work with these animals, you can't avoid also becoming involved in the Sami people who heard them. So although I'm principally an ecologist, I do some work in physiology as well, but I have also written papers on reindeer pastoralism and the Sami people. which is a part and parcel of studying reindeer in their environment. Okay, so we got a good bit of foreshadowing of where all this conversation will take us. Wild reindeer, domesticated reindeer, the indigenous Sami people of Norway that heard them. I'm telling you, this has a lot of fascinating twist and turns, some of which, I promise you're not going to see coming.

And another thing that excites me about these kind of topics is it gives us a glimpse to how humans interact with wildlife and wild places outside of our. own country. I always find it valuable to gain more perspectives and identify key differences and similarities between there and here at home. But before we get into all that, let's get a better general understanding of the animals themselves. Rain deer, as we call them in English, in Eurasia, and you call Caribou in North America, that's the same species. It's one big species, Rangifer Tarandus. And these animals have a circle. polar distribution. So they are found right the way across northern North America and northern Eurasia from the Fennoscand-Navian Peninsula in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

And Caribou, the North American form, exist only as wild animals. So altogether there are about four million of these animals in the world. About half of them are what we call domesticated. So in a North America, you have wild caribou, and in Eurasia you have wild reindeer and domesticated reindeer, which are the majority over here. And these animals are herded by indigenous peoples right the way across northern Eurasia, 24 different peoples from the Sami people of Fennascandia. And then you have Nanets and Komi and Dolgans and Avens and Avenki, different groups of indigenous peoples continuously stretching halfway around the northern world,

northern Eurasia. And there's evidence of humans working closely with reindeer in northern Eurasia, going back about 10,000 years. But domestication, as we recognize it now, seems to be of more recent origin, probably 2,000 years old in some form, but large-scale reindeer husbandry, as we see it now, with herds of thousands or even more animals, is probably of more recent origin. four or five hundred years. But all the way across northern Eurasia with these peoples,

one of the many, many common elements they have in their different languages is a highly sophisticated vocabulary about all aspects of reindeer and their environment. And the existence of these vocabularies tells us that the association between peoples and the animals is of very ancient. origin. All right, three things right out of the gate that we need to make sure sticks. Number one, you heard the term circumpolar distribution. If you don't know, this means that an animal can be found all the way around either the North Pole or the South Pole. In this case, reindeer can be found all the way around the North Pole from Norway to Russia to Alaska. Number two, saying reindeer

and caribou is like saying tomato tomato. They're the same thing. This is going to come back up later, so make sure you hold on to that. Number three, the relationship between the indigenous peoples and the reindeer is a huge part of this story. We haven't made it far enough into the conversation to truly grasp how important and how impact will just yet, but trust me. Before we dive into all that, I want to spend a little bit more time with Dr. Nicholas Tyler about how he personally became interested in reindeer, other wildlife species of the Arctic, and the Arctic ecosystem itself. I think it's important that we get a sense of the passion this man has for this subject before we dive into the facts and science part of it. As a boy, I went with my father, I went camping and fishing and walking in the mountains in England, insofar as we've got mountains, and loved being outdoors. And then I was fortunate enough to find a profession that enabled me to do that as part of my job.

and was enormously inspired by people who had an understanding of the natural environment and a scientific understanding. That's more than just really good naturalists who can tell you, identify anything they see and tell you a lot about it. But looking at the mechanisms of phenomena that the things that we see for the reindeer, how do animals survive in the cold? You know, you're out there in December in the twilight, and it seems a barren wasteland stretching away as far as the eye can see,

and unless you've got really good clothing on, you can't stand it out there for more than a few minutes. And then a bunch of reindeer walked past you, and these animals, perfectly happy, perfectly comfortable. How do they manage it? and it's questions like that. I find absolutely gripping. We have a hut in the mountains here near Tromser,

and we're going to spend Christmas there, and there will be little forest birds out there, little great tits and things like that, little animals that weigh 15 grams, and the temperature's minus 20 centigrade and Fahrenheit, and there's a strong wind, and you weigh 15 grams. I mean, people think polar bears are cool.

Polar bears are complete amateurs. I mean, what's cool about being a polar bear? 400 kilos of meat with a great big bellage, not a problem. I mean, they're really tough guys. Are these small people 15 grams? How on earth do they manage? And the same with a big, great, big, great, big, amazing animal like a reindeer, just standing around and the wind is whipping snow around its legs

and it's standing there looking at you, chewing in the card, apparently completely contented. And when you start taking measurements of that animal, indeed it is completely contented. I have books here at home that I bought when I started my PhD in 1979. one of them was J.P. Kelsoll's great book, The Caribou, published in Canada in 1968. And at the time, this was the most mighty volume. This was, every aspect of the animal was covered in it. Absolutely monumental piece of work. Fantastic. It still is. But even though, and this is in no way detracting from it,

even though it is a monumental piece of work, if you compare what we know now and the kinds of questions we can ask now about the animals and their environment with the kind of knowledge, even people like Kelso had 50 years ago, it's just fantastic how much progress has been made. I mean, it's absolutely wonderful. And so when I started, the general idea was the Arctic was a frightfully vicious place where plant and animal life was teetering on the brink of existence. And the smallest pressure would knock things into extinction. My gosh, it's a really fragile environment. Quite the reverse. You've got wonderfully well-adapted plants and animals. who are as comfortable in their environment as you are in yours.

It's a highly unstable environment, but it's immensely robust. And I think that kind of discovery is absolutely wonderful. It completely changes the way you think about the world around you, without in any way detracting from the majesty and the beauty and the awe that world inspires. Quite the reverse. Quite the reverse. It enhances your appreciation of that world because you feel having a little bit more understanding now than people had in the past.

And that's just great. The more you understand something, the more you're able to respect it and appreciate it. My experience so far with this show and the topics we've chased down is that this sentiment has only become more solidified and true. I also find it so important to hear this type of perspective from folks just like Dr. Nicholas Tyler. You can feel the deep admiration for the things and places he spent his life studying coming all the way from his home in Norway through your speakers. And it's impossible for me not to respect that. So now that we have a good grasp on that side of it, let's dive into reindeer, starting out the gate with some need-to-know reindeer facts brought to you by some of Dr. Nicholas Tyler's own writings and publications. You ready?

Here we go. Ten thousand years ago, leading to their current distribution throughout the entire northern Arctic, Reindeer exist and are recognized in three different types, Hier Arctic Island type, continental tundra type, and forest mountain type. There's also 14 extant subspecies. The current distribution of different genotypes is owed heavily to glacial types that caused major shifts in the distribution and abundance of reindeer during the Pleistocene. Some of these subspecies include Alaska Caribou, Canadian Barren Ground Caribou,

North American Woodland Caribou and Siberian tundra reindeer, just to name a few. There's a lot of physical distinctions and characteristics specific to reindeer, but the two we're going to highlight today are their antlers and their adaptations to the northern environment. Starting out with the antlers, reindeer are the only known servant in which both males and females annually grow a set of antlers. So if you ever see a live reindeer or a picture of one, you can't just look at a set of horns and say, oh, that's a male, like you could, an elk or a white tail. Could go either way. Move over to their adaptations to the northern environment.

We heard Dr. Nicholas say earlier that the Arctic is often portrayed as a barren and unwelcoming place, where life is an almost impossible struggle. However, reindeer are so very suited to not only survive, but rather live content and happy in the conditions the Arctic is known for. They're able to achieve this by three very important environmental adaptations. Number one, reduced energy or food requirements in the winter. Rainier do this by restricting heat loss and by down-regulating their growth. Their main tool in doing this is their fur.

Their coats can be up to seven centimeters deep in hierctic forms, and their coats consist in part of hairs that have a hollow core that creates an incredible insulation. Dr. Tyler told me that he had personally witnessed reindeer at 35 below zero, and they still exhibited no metabolic response, and are perfectly comfortable in those temperatures. That's crazy. 35 below. Number two, enhanced ability to extract energy from the environment.

Reindeer have broad-spreading hooves to dig through the snow to find the nutrition-dense plants covered beneath. They sometimes dig up to a meter deep to find the food they want and need. Some also suggest that these widespread hooves could potentially aid in flying and making quick and quiet stops on rooftops, but there's no scientific evidence to confirm that. Number three, energy storage. All reindeer retain energy in the summer months and store it as fat, which they can use to draw from during the winter months.

The last thing that we have to mention is migration. Often, especially here in the United States, when you hear the word migration, your mind often goes to birds, like migratory bird species, like the annual waterfowl migration, for example. But reindeer are migratory, which doesn't necessarily mean that they could fly like birds, but it definitely doesn't rule it out. Just saying. But seriously, reindeer can't. Caribou, whichever one you want to call them, they migrate. Sometimes these migratory groups number into the hundreds or even thousands of animals, and they can travel hundreds of miles to areas where they have, grow, store up fat reserves

before returning months later to an area where they spend the winter. It's some pretty wild stuff. Go search on YouTube for videos of reindeer caribou migrating, and you'll see what I mean. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a full of blood.

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Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever. you get your podcasts. Okay, now let's shift a tad, to still talking about reindeer, but focusing more about the human involvement with them. Quick, FYI, you're going to hear a term called pastoralism, which basically means animal herding. In Norway, reindeer pastoralism is a flagship of the Sami people. It's only a minority of the Sami who are reindeer herders,

I think in the order of 10%, but nevertheless it's symbolic of that people and their culture. If you think of any form of pastoralism, you've got one extreme which is sheep or cattle in a fenced field. And in a situation like that, the humans have complete control of the animals, where they are, what they do, what they eat, how and when they reproduce and so on.

The other extreme is that you have free-living animals in nature that migrate north and south, as their wild conspicuics do, and the people follow the migration. The people don't lead the migration, they follow it. So the domesticated animals are doing the natural behavior of this species, and humans, follow along as part of it. So what you could say is the animals control the humans in terms of the annual cycle, but the humans might control the animals

from day to day. So a group of herders might say, we want our animals across this river, and we're going to take them across this river tomorrow. And there, on a day-to-day basis, the humans are in charge of the animals. But to terms of an annual cycle,

it's the other way around. The Sami people are just one of the 20-plus indigenous people groups that herd reindeer. Collectively, these groups graze upwards of 2.5 million of these animals, and this practice spreads across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Pretty wild. Today, we're going to be focusing mostly on the Sami people. And the interesting thing to me here is, well, you heard Dr. Nicholas say it just a few seconds ago. These aren't reindeer sitting inside a fenced pasture like cattle here at home.

Like we learned earlier, reindeer migrate for miles upon miles, and the herders follow them along during this. It's fascinating, and it's been going on for thousands of years. It's hurting animals, but they're essentially using and moving through the same landscape that they were before they were ever domesticated. It's an interesting human and animal dynamic that I'm very unfamiliar with, and frankly now I'm intrigued by it. But I'm interested in what's going on with it currently. If you take reindeer pastoralism generally, not good. It's under threat. There are about 450,000 domesticated reindeer in the Scandinavian Peninsula. There are about 1.7 million domesticated reindeer in Russia. Russia is considerably bigger

than the Scandinavian Peninsula. So the density of animals here is very, very much higher than in Russia. But reindeer husbandry, reindeer pastoralism here, is under threat or at least under pressure. It's under multiple pressures, the principal one being a loss of habitat to industrial and domestic encroachment. about 71% of the pasture lands in Norway are influenced by the presence of humans. And that means that animals move away from where humans are. So there is huge areas of pasture which is underused.

And the other side of that coin is there are huge areas of pasture which are overused as a result of that phenomenon. And then the same situation exists in the Russian Federation where reindeer husbandry increased considerably during the communist period. But when communism collapsed in 1991, so did the subsidies given to a herders, and reindeer husbandry in the east has suffered considerably as a result. I talked to one leader from the far east of Russia, and I knew that some years before he was in charge of about 20,000 reindeer. And I said to him, then, well, how are your animals now? And he said, there aren't any. And I said, well, where did they go? And he said, we ate them.

And because, this is, now we're talking about the late 1990s, because food, was in short supply. The supply lines provided by the common estate had been dismantled, and the people ate their reindeer. So reindeer pastoralism, which is enormously, culturally, enormously important for all these peoples, is, if not exactly under threat, it's certainly under considerable pressure. So were reindeer pastoralism to reduce that would have an effect not only for the herders and for the animals and for the pasture lands which the animals historically have grazed, but it would have an effect for an entire culture. I don't think the situation is quite as catastrophic as that sounds,

but it's clearly the case that the implication of a decline in reindeer pastoralism involves effects on more than just the people who are directly involved. the herders themselves. It's more important than that. It's interesting. It's very interesting. So talking about that subject there and then all this loss of access and habitat, we deal with similar things in North America, right?

We lose wildlife habitat all the time to industrial activity, to domestic sprawl. There's some parallels there. And at home, some things that we have in place, like we have some conservation organizations that folks will try to make an effort or initiative to, you know, put some acreage of land back into wildlife habitat or they'll try to restore or rewild areas. Is there anything like that in Norway where, you know, there are attempts to try to restore habitat or re-hop an habitat or anything like that? What we have at the moment is a furious argument about the creation of wind farms in the mountains.

And our local newspaper up here, every week there is somebody writes in about a new wind farm and say, this is simply appalling. We don't like these wind farms. They are intrude in the terrain and they disturb the animals and the reindeer, for example, move away from them and so on. And then the following week, you get another person who writes in and say, well, that's all nonsense. wind farms are green energy, we have to have more energy, and anyway, the reindeer don't avoid them. And so the debate goes on. But it's absolutely clear. There are a lot of people here who are desperately anxious that our remaining undeveloped habitat shall stay that way. That's a really important part of the Norwegian psyche, maintaining the outdoors. At the same time, we all like electricity and we all like major computer developments that give us AI access and things like that.

So you can only see that this problem is not going to go away. It's only going to get worse. We face similar issues here. A guy that works for meat eater, a guy named Ryan Callahan. I heard him say that he said conservation is rarely convenient. Because to your point, look at what we're doing right now. You know, I'm talking to you in Norway from Mississippi, thanks to technology. I enjoy modern conveniences, but I also put high value. I put high value on wild, undeveloped wildlife habitat. And it is encouraging to hear that a lot of the culture over there puts a relative high level of value on that as well. Yes, I completely agree.

I couldn't think of anything else to say. I totally agree with you. Yeah. It's interesting to me when I can find some parallels between natural resource issues going on here in North America and all the way over in Norway or any other country. Loss of wild habitat due to urban activity, well, we North Americans can relate to that one for sure. And I know it's different because we're talking about the habitat loss effects on herding animals, but stay with me here. We have to remember that these reindeer are moving about and using the same wild habitats that they were using since, well before domestication. So in turn, we can safely assume that this habitat loss is affecting other species, wild species, as well. It's also nice to hear that it's an important part of the

Norwegian psyche to protect undeveloped and wild habitats. I don't know about y'all, but I'm for conserving wild places regardless of whether or not I'll ever step foot in them. Now, I'm going to take a sharp topic turn. Remember, when I told you all earlier that the relationship between indigenous people and reindeer was going to be a vital part of this story. Well, here it is. And I bet y'all didn't see this coming. 1892. Report on the introduction of domestic reindeer into Alaska with maps and illustration. And this is a report to the Senate of the United States. All right. This story is only going to get wild. So y'all settle in. During the 1890s, there was growing concern that Alaskan native people were starving due to lack of marine mammals, the whaling industry, and the fact that there was virtually no reindeer or caribou in Western Alaska at the time.

The U.S. government made the decision to import domestic reindeer into Western Alaska in an attempt to provide food, income, and training for reindeer herding. So that meant that they brought in Sami people to help with that training. So these Sami people that we've been learning about throughout this whole episode that reside in Norway were brought stateside along with their reindeer. Crazy. And this was written by a guy called Sheldon Jackson, January 1893, Washington, the government printing house. and he was instrumental in moving domesticated reindeer from Siberia to Alaska. I think 1894, the first ones came. As Dr. Nicholas tells me this story, he's showing me pictures of the boats being used to haul reindeer,

reindeer getting lifted and loaded for transport, and some honestly pretty chilling and sad photos of skeletal remains of people who had succumbed to starvation. These photos were taken to help encourage the U.S. government to proceed forward with this plan. They didn't mess around when they wrote government reports in those days, I tell you. No, they didn't. But that was one of the main reasons they wanted to introduce reindeer pastoralism in Alaska was for sustenance for native folks. Yeah, food and employment.

At that stage, there were no caribou in western Alaska. And so animals were brought from Siberia. and that was the success. Then the contract went out to northern Scandinavia, and hundreds of animals were taken from northern Sweden and northern Norway and shipped across the Atlantic to New York and put on trains and taken to San Francisco. And they were unloaded at San Francisco, and they were taken up to Anchorage,

and that they were taken into the interior. These guys did not mess around. It was so productive because there were no caribou in western Alaska at the time, and the pastures were really rich, and the animals thrived. This importation of domestic reindeer was so successful that at one point there was believed to be around 600,000 animals present in the 1930s. However, this success didn't last forever. The Reindeer Act was signed and made federal law in 1937, which prohibited reindeer ownership in Alaska by any non-native Americans.

This would lead to any of the Sami people that still lived in Alaska to sell their herds. Many of them would leave Alaska after doing this, and it pretty much put an end to reindeer herding in the United States. Furthermore, mismanagement and losses of reindeer to wolves and also losses to wild caribou by way of interbreeding and also just captive herds joining up with wild herds and leaving, the numbers dropped drastically.

to the tune of an estimated 50,000 in the 1950s. Today, there's still believed to be around 30,000 domestic reindeer living in Alaska. Wild story. But it's not completely done yet. There's one more part of this that I think y'all have to hear. The Loman Company took their goods down to, I think again, San Francisco at Christmas time, to sell reindeer sausage and reindeer meat and so on. and there are photographs of Sami people with their little blue costumes and their hook-toed shoes and their pointy hats in Alaska at Christmas time with reindeer and a sledge.

And does that sound familiar, sort of Christmas card-wise? it all seems as though the commercialization of reindeer and little people and snow is an American advertising gimmick. Who would have thought that the Sami people, just minding their business and herding their reindeer, would end up not only being brought over to Alaska to teach reindeer herding, but would end up being the muse, so to speak, of how Santa's elves are commonly depicted in Christmas illustrations. I mean, it's crazy. Okay, we've about reached the end of this story, but I did promise at the beginning of this episode

that I had one more mind-blowing tail involving reindeer, and I promise you're not going to guess where this is going to go. Let me tell you another story, which is also illustrative. The BBC on one occasion were making a program about animals that used narcotics of one, four, or another, you know, ate fermented fruit and things like that. And the question was, put to me, was it the case that the Sami reindeer herder would go into the snow and collect the frozen urine of the reindeer that had been eating the magic mushrooms and use that? And I said, I have absolutely no idea.

But I will ask a Sami friend of mine. and I repeated the question to him, and he said, no, no, no, no. They've got it all wrong. It's the other way around. There would be some in a herd who were clever, and they knew that either the Sami or the herder collected magic mushrooms. And these animals would hang round his tent and wait for him to urinate in the snow, and then they would eat that because they want some of the good stuff too.

And I can't remember the word, but the Sami word for reindeer is Boazoo. And there is a prefix for Boazoo, which is the name of the type of animal that specifically does that, hangs around the tent waiting for the good stuff. Maybe that's why they think they can fly sometimes. Well, there could be. Told you all that was a crazy story. Also, stay away from those mushrooms. They're bad.

I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Greece in this country life. I know it means a whole lot to Clay, Brent, and myself. And I truly do wish that you and your loved ones have a Merry Christmas and a fantastic holiday season. If you like this episode, share it with a friend. And stick around because the new year is almost here and we have big plans for 2026. There's a whole lot more on the way. First Lights Fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before. opening day and continues when the season ends.

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