The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 042: Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella talks with wildlife biologist Bart George along with Ryan Callaghan, Land Tawney, and MeatEater's Janis Putelis

Episode Date: August 19, 2016

Episode 042: Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella talks with wildlife biologist Bart George along with Ryan Callaghan, Land Tawney, and MeatEater's Janis Putelis. Subjects discussed: caribou in the lower-48; what's up with anadromous, catadromous, and adfluvial fish; Teddy Roosevelt's guided caribou hunt; lumpers and splitters, and how to tell the difference; hard (hot) releasing vs. soft (cold) releasing; Mr. Tom, a caribou killin' mountain lion; collaring animals; inherent risks of capturing wild animals; American vs. Canadian predator control; genetic drift; the charismatic mega fauna list; a barometer of wilderness; the warner-bratzler shear force test; and the three things necessary for caribou recovery in the lower-48. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right. I'm not going to say what kind of bar this is.

Maybe I will. We're sampling a bar. What do you call it? I mean, well, how would you describe the bar? It's category. Pemmican? No, no, no. I mean, it's like in the category of energy bars or what?

Yeah. Granola bars? Yeah, like super protein. When we were little mean, it's like in the category of energy bars or what? Yeah. Granola bars? Yeah, like super protein. When we were little kids, it was granola bars. But then people started putting other stuff in them. These here, the number one ingredient is ground beef. Then dried prunes, almonds, sweet potatoes, oats, brown flaxseed, tomato paste, I don't know, anchovies.

Yanni thinks it tastes like dog food. There's a hint of dog food. It's got a dog food hint. Essence. I first, listen, when I was first sent these, I opened one up and ate it. And I had a box,

a box of boxes. I opened one, ate it. It was so bad, I gave the people at the post office two boxes. I'm like, I don't know what you guys all do for lunch, but here. Then I went in there later,

and they're like, man, those things were awful. But now they're kind of grown on me. What I did is I put a bunch in my glove box of the car. My kids won't go near them. But I meant to be like, I'll just feed them to the kids,

and they start complaining in the car. And now and then I'll be like, just out of like, you know, driving along and I'll just kind of have a hankering. And they're kind of a little bit growing on me. These things expired last June, 2015 June. Is that right? Yeah.

Better with age. You're going to want to take a look at that. My friend met a guy and he described him as, or my buddy met a guy and his buddy described the guy as being the kind of guy that grows off of you, which I always liked. But you like him at first and slowly stop liking him. But these are the kind of things that grow on you.

First thing I want to talk about, Yanni, explain this. What we did. Oh, nice. Yeah. Did they send you your hat? Yeah, hell yeah. Yeah. So we were hunting squirrels in Kentucky, and we filled out a form, a squirrel hunting

cooperator survey report. Yeah, and you log your squirrel hunting activities. And we sent our squirrel hunting thing in. They sent me a sweet, blaze orange squirrel hunting baseball hat. And then they sent a summation of squirrel hunting in Kentucky. So dudes last year hunting in Kentucky would see 2.5 squirrels per hour in August, which slowly dropped to, okay. In August, a dude in Kentucky, your average Kentucky squirrel hunter,

who's probably your better squirrel hunter, because those are the kind of guys that would turn a log in. I don't think I'm going out. You're a trained biologist. Right. Would you agree that more tuned in dudes are going to turn in a voluntary log? Or would you think that even shitty bad hunters are going to turn in a voluntary log or would you think that even shitty bad hunters are going to turn in a voluntary log no i think the guys that are experiencing success and also who's hunting in august probably people are pretty

serious about turkey or about squirrels right so this is probably like a tuned in so this yeah these are the guys that are dialed in it's's biased or tuned in. Probably. So in August, your average Kentuckian is seeing 2.5 squirrels per hour and killing about one per hour. By February, here's the weird thing. By February, he's seeing one squirrel, about one squirrel per hour, and killing 0.5 per hour. You know what the moral of that story is, Giannis?

Hunt in August? Yep. They're seeing a lot more foxes than greys. That's good. When I was opening my mail, I ripped the sound. I'm not used to regular old mail anymore. I ripped my thing all to pieces. Anyhow, we're going to talk about caribou. Land Tawny sitting in with us.

Land from BHA, Bad Country Hunters and Anglers. Ryan Callahan, general guy. Hunter Fisher works at the hunting apparel company first light janice patelis the man who will not make me my perch flies uh we work closely together talk every day on the phone still won't do it and then introduce yourself bart bart george bart george yep i'm a bha board member for washington state and a wildlife biologist for the Kalispell tribe up in Northeast Washington. Okay. Explain that to me. They have a wildlife biologist. Right. Well, we have a big natural resource department. So we have about 15 fish biologists. I'm the only wildlife biologist, but- Why so many fish and not, so you work for the tribe?

Right. Because they're just fisheries reliant? Not necessarily fisheries reliant, but fish is where the money's at, right? Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. For sure. And where are you based out of? Northeast Washington, up Pondere County. It's the most northeast corner of the state.

And then also over into North Idaho, up around Priest Lake mostly. But explain that. Why is it that the money's in the fish because i wouldn't necessarily guess that um well certainly in the northwest with all the salmon runs in our um the anadromous fish but then also in our area it's the ad fluvial fish the bull trout stuff like that okay explain anadromous cotagronous and effluvial well most of us are familiar with salmon making their run out to the ocean and coming back into freshwater to spawn in their natal streams. That'd be anadromous fish. Adfluvial fish, like a bull trout that we have in northeast Washington, they're also an endangered run of fish,

but they use big lakes basically as their ocean. so instead of making it all the way out to saltwater um they use lake pondere or one of the big lakes there so anadromous refers to saltwater like like in the great lakes the salmon they took pacific salmon and cut them and established them and cut them loose in the great lakes so they treat the lake michigan for instance like superior lake michigan like here on they treat it as their ocean, which is freshwater still, and they run up to spawn. You would say that those are ad fluvial fish. Well, I guess.

Maybe I'm talking out of turn, though. I'm a caribou bear. I don't mean to point you into an area you're not familiar with, but that's what's going on there. Okay. And then so a catagorist fish would be like the american eel lives in the river goes out to the ocean to spawn i think we covered this before we certainly might have i can't say it's been on a podcast yeah so like eel spends his life in the river goes out actually

goes down to the sargasso sea um so if you're standing in like new york and you see eel swim by that he's going to wind up going to the sargasso sea to reproduce um okay that has nothing to do with what you work on nothing um but when you say them so so you explain again where you work um so northeast washington in the selkirk mountains into british columbia some into north idaho a lot across a variety of land owners like a lot of a variety of land ownership areas or no for sure um yeah a lot of state land a lot of federal land mostly forest service we don't have a lot of blm or any other management um a lot of private timber company um idaho state land washington state land provincial

land in british columbia so what's your like i don't understand what what's your mandate like if you work for you work for a tribal organization right uh so the tribe we're a small reservation we only have about 5 000 acres on the reservation so caribou are never going to be on the reservation but um they're an important species to the tribe historically. They're in the neighborhood, I guess, 20 miles up the hill. So the tribe, we don't have land ownership responsibility, but we have some management responsibility through cooperative agreements. I got you. I got you. And then lay out for me how you became to be a biologist real quick.

Like what sort of education path does a fellow take? When we were kids, we all would say we're going to be wildlife biologists. Right. Two of my brothers did it. Really? We just said it because it seemed like a way you get to spend a lot of time outdoors. It is. It's a good job that way.

So I got a bachelor's degree back in, I grew up in Iowa, small town, kind of farm kid. Went to Simpson College college got my bachelor's degree there and moved west immediately after college moved to washington state and started working on hydropower projects along the columbia river and then eventually moved up into northeast washington with the tribe again the rivers in the northwest are definitely where the jobs are at everything's sort of tied to wildlife mitigation or restoration projects that way uh my brother who is a fisheries guy when he first came out west it was hydroelectric stuff on the columbia counting salmon yeah that's pretty common sturgeon issues yeah then went on to do all kinds of things he didn't know about at the time right when you're

growing up in iowa there's no way you knew that there were caribou in the lower 48 right no way you probably walk around the neighborhood i bet most people in seattle wouldn't know there's caribou i lived in montana for years western montana for years before i would before i had the opportunity to call bullshit on someone who's saying that caribou used to come down into idaho and washington i'm like no they did not yeah idiot they definitely did they still do people yeah how is it not known growing up in montana it was like this montana history fact like yeah caribou in montana yeah that's the only way i knew in idaho now that i live in idaho i And I think we need to reiterate this. Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, caribou do exist there. Nobody knows.

Nobody knows. And the wolf thing is so giant and nobody knows about caribou. It just drives me crazy. Sorry, go ahead. No, that's true. It drives everybody crazy. How, okay.

This year, I'm going to ask you a handful of questions just to get people into what we're doing here to know what's going on. 100 years ago, no, let's do this. At the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, 10,000 years ago, pre-human contact,

how many caribou were running around possibly in what is now the lower 48 what was like a hundred years ago what's it like right now i can't i don't know anything about the pleistocene era or anything like that during you know whatever pre-contact um a hundred years ago there were hundreds of caribou south of the border there were enough that teddy roosevelt went on a guided hunt out of priest lake did he get one no but uh he spent 10 days hiking around the selkirk mountains looking for him so there must have been a handful around to make him think that he could experience some success and what was their range 100 years ago uh there are reports all the way down to the saint joe um down in the Coeur d'Alene, but mostly in the South Selkirks and over into the Cabinet Yak area. And were these caribou 100 years ago just spending some of their time in the lower 48,

or was there a caribou that would be born and die and live their whole lives in Washington, Idaho? They definitely lived their lives. There's enough habitat up there to support a herd of caribou for sure throughout the year, throughout their life. Right now, there's still caribou that kind of flirt with the border of both the states and Canada, and they kind of bounce around all three areas. So right now, at this moment, is there a caribou in the lower 48?

We don't know. I guess we only have two callers out right now, but it's possible. I bet there's a caribou within 10 miles of the border if there's not. And what kind of caribou are we talking about? A mountain caribou. Do you believe in all the distinctions they draw of caribou? Because you know how you have in taxonomy, you have your lumpers and your splitters. Sure.

There are people who look at animals and they see this amazing tapestry of subspecies. And there's like the, you know, the barren ground grizzly, the mountain grizzly, the coastal brown bear. And then you have other people in taxonomy who say it's all one species. They just have,

they just look a little bit different depending on where you go, but it's just one species. They just look a little bit different depending on where you go, but it's just one species. I recently read that a guy arguing that all caribou, even the ones in Eurasia, are just a species and there's no reason to say

that it's subspecies. Well, I don't agree with that. He acknowledged that he was going out on a limb yeah yeah i wouldn't agree with that i think there's you know again there's lumpers and they're splitters the caribou that we have in the south selkirks um what makes them unique to other mountain caribou um is their use of the high elevation country during the winter time okay so they're eating lichens arboreal lichens out of trees. Is that right? Old man's beard, the stuff you see growing in the trees.

Out of trees? Right. To get above the snow? Right. So they're standing on whatever, eight foot of snow, and they're eating lichens that are out of reach the rest of the year. And they're pretty much the only species that can do that. The only deer and moose and elk aren't up there.

So they have sort of a niche market because those animals all leave right um and historically moose and elk didn't really share that habitat anyway okay it's sort of a new thing um due to habitat change and other things so the caribou we have if we took caribou from the north you know they're still mountain caribou whatever say we get them from newfoundland or something and we drop them uh they would not know how to use that habitat there's a possibility we could train them though with um you know pen them together and let them sort of co-mingle long enough and do kind of a soft release or something like that but augmentation is where you just take an animal from a different ecotype and throw them down,

it's been a failure. Can you, I'm going to keep having you stop to explain things that people might not know what you mean. Can you explain the hot release or hard release and the soft release, which is, this is some fascinating stuff. Yeah, well, a hard release is pretty basic. You're taking an animal, you're moving it from one spot

and you're just wishing it luck and kicking it loose into a new area new habitat type new whatever mountain range some species you can do that with pretty well bighorn sheep you can't you can't store bighorn sheep for very long they'll kill themselves in the pen so you're pretty much stuck with doing hard release with that kind of animal wolves they're really easy they're gonna they're gonna make a life for themselves wherever you drop them hot or cold yeah you don't have to like sort of do a soft release you don't have to do anything to temper them into a new piece of habitat uh caribou it seems that you do you do got to do soft what we're going to do yeah what we would like to do is build sort of a pen or an enclosure and have a few of our resident animals and then bring some other animals out of one of

these other herds and put them all together and leave them to calve together in the spring and then, you know, July or so, open the gates and let them kind of come and go at their leisure until they sort of figure out how to use that landscape. And hopefully they'll mother up to that resident group of animals i was first introduced to those terms uh when i was researching a book i wrote about buffalo or bison and uh i did a hunt for a group of introduced buffalo up on the copper river in alaska and it was a classic like hot release story where they took 13 of them and put them in the back of a truck and cut them loose by a mine and for decades

everyone thought they just all died but then the herd turns up thriving 150 miles away oh wow and then later people learned that when you're dealing with those you build a you know an enclosure let them just be in there and taken care of. And one day you just kind of leave the door open. Right. Because if you kick them out of the back of the truck, they don't know what happened. And they can travel. And they just start moving, trying to find where they were coming from or whatever.

Yeah, we had augmentation animals end up in Montana and end up down in Bonner's Ferry in the River Valley in the winter time where lots of predators, lions were eating them, getting hit by cars, stuff like that. They just had no idea where they were and what to do. They didn't know how to use that landscape at all. Now, can I assume that... Anybody got any questions,

Calhan? I just love this topic so I'm going to be quiet and listen. Because you and me have run into Mountain Caribou. Yes. A little ways up. And Yanni. A little ways up into BC. Yeah.

And Yanni. A number of times. Gorgeous. Oh, my God. Gorgeous. Amazing. Dream animal. Especially that one we saw last year.

Fabio. We got to listen to him rutting and grunting. Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, it looked like Fabio, man. Just like, where was that at it was uh outside of prince george okay yeah non-migratory they just live they probably have some some amount of migration they just like are like glued to these mountain

ranges yeah you know you get up like in the north slope and you're looking when you hunt caribou as i like to do up in the north slope you're looking at animals that probably there's a very strong chance they've never been where they are right now right like you'd be like that might be his first you think of animals that's having such a defined sense of place but you look at a caribou like as far as there's a very good chance that that thing has never been in this valley before just roaming you know hundreds of miles. Here I do have a question. Why only two callers? And is there a ratio of callers to herd size? Don't answer Cal's question because we haven't established something.

Hold it. We haven't established like what it is, like what is, okay, lay off me the situation. We used to have them. Why don't we now? Is someone trying to do something about it? Okay, well, we can. Then we'll do Cal's question.

Actually, they're going to segue pretty nicely. We had six callers. No, no, not callers, caribou. Well, that's the same story. So we had six callers out and a pretty good cross-section of the population. And we've seen all these sources of mortality sort of pop up now that we have information on the caribou um so we have to use our collar data to sort of

extrapolate any information that we get from this i'm trying to go way deeper than that okay well we've lost animals to um the highway highway three cuts right through their middle of their habitat up in british columbia so we lose animals on the highway um we have significant habitat change we've got a lot of habitat protected up there um a lot of good intact old growth a lot of good high country for them to use um so uh what is the like can you give me a sense of the, the, the overall picture of caribou and caribou conservation in the lower 48? Um, yeah, I can. The, we have caribou in the lower 48.

They're in tough shape though. Um, there's been significant habitat changes, although we have lots of places still protected. There's like 12 caribou left in that south Kirkurd. Twelve? Twelve. And they all spend some of their, they all cross back and forth. Yeah, they're all right along the border.

A dozen. We're down to a dozen yeah we had where's like the next chunk of like their buddies or cousins or the next herd to the north um there are 15 sub herds in the in the south selkirks so there are other herds around um but they're not connected anymore there's development in the river bottom stuff like that they just so there's a there's a pop there's effectively a population of animals that is not getting that is not breeding with another population animals there's only 15 left 12 i'm sorry 12 left right um and that population was doing quite well actually in the early 2000s like we were on an increasing trend we added up to like 46 animals in 2000

um eight or nine 40 46 it's a big deal i'm such a hard time with numbers today 46 yeah so they were increasing increasing increasing they were doing pretty well um and like i said we have we have a lot of habitat protections in place. We have road closures. We have different things happening to keep caribou safe. The old growth forest is chopped up a little bit, but there are still places for them to find winter food, which is a problem for some herds.

So kind of what's happened, I guess, is we have all this habitat change and we have all these fragmented habitats. And, um, as we've logged these things over the last, whatever, a hundred years, we've created this huge moose population. Okay. So they love that second grow stuff. They love it. Yeah. 30 year old cuts are perfect for moose.

And we have a lot of those. Um, so as moose have sort of rolled into this country they've bridged the gap between the river bottoms which were white-tailed deer and the caribou elevationally and it wasn't a big deal until wolf recovery because now we have this prey species from the river bottoms to the moose up in the mid elevation to the caribou in the high country so where before moose were on the landscape wolves and caribou coexisted because they didn't really run into each other now they are encountering each other more often and we're getting secondary predation i guess you'd call it because oh go ahead white tails have traditionally lived along the right so you had areas where you had white tails in the riparian zones along the rivers and they would

support the wolf population and wolves knew about and knew about would hunt them right and you had caribou up in the high country and then moose came in and now a wolf would find good hunting at all these various elevations and now finds cause to be drifting around up in caribou country that's right and the the high moose population as a it's a totally a result of the um you know wildfires and habitat change i guess to logging um as the moose population has grown pretty high it maintains sort of a i don't want to say an artificially high level of wolves but higher than what would have been here historically they hammer moose pretty hard there uh yeah they support you know moose and elk are certainly supporting the wolf population um so since 2009 we you know we documented our first wolf pack in northeast washington in 2009

and we've seen this precipitous decline in the caribou population from 46 now to 12 over the course of just a few years how uh how contentious is that statement you just made not that contentious you'd be surprised um I think people pretty much recognize that that's the problem they do yeah because you get a lot of people who one wolves can do no harm and you get a lot of people who wolves do all harm well and you've met them both sure oh yeah yeah we see them both for sure um wolves are the it's it's additional um predation you know lions were a big problem in the 90s for predation. When a lion, they're specialists, so they key in on a small subgroup of caribou, and they would kill all of them if you let them.

We had callers out then, and if that started happening, we'd respond with dogs and chase a lion and kill it. The caribou were doing all right. You could pinpoint a specific lion. Oh oh yeah yeah they're definitely specialists i remember reading a story in trapper and predator caller magazine when i was a kid in the 80s and it was about like a lion they called like the hundred thousand dollar lion because they had done a bighorn sheep reintroduction down in arizona no the the price tag on the sheep introduction was a hundred thousand and uh

some tom moved in there and killed every single one of them oh yeah and they will they they will they will key in on a group and they're pretty effective um yeah they had one then whatever they don't usually name animals or whatever but they called this one mr nasty and it was a big tom and he lived in the high country and he was really tough on the caribou. Just a caribou. Yep. When they got rid of him, the herd started coming back up. It made a difference in the population.

Over how many years was that lion in there doing it? I think it was two or three years. And then, you know, it started off kind of once, one here and there, and then people started putting together, like, this thing's causing a bunch of trouble. And we started accrediting a lot of the kills to that one in that circumstance it's so acute it's kind of hard to say no that's not what's going on right i mean well that's an easy that's an easy fix that's certainly easier than um a wolf problem you know we have there's other options there's

a place in canada up in the peace river area they went in and wiped out most of the moose to help caribou yeah you know you remove the moose. To help caribou. Yeah. You know, you remove the moose, you remove the primary prey for the wolves. How'd that go over? It was wildly unpopular. Can you imagine trying to explain that to people

in British Columbia and North Idaho and Northeast Washington that we're going to kill all the moose to save the caribou? Yeah. Yeah, it wouldn't go. No, I can't imagine. I don't like imagining having that conversation yeah my kids uh were watching one day an animated uh like cartoon

movie and they call it i don't know what it's called they call it trapper wolves and it's like the plot is there's a wolf family you gather it's you know bc i gather and the bad guys are out trying to live trap the wolves and tranq them out of helicopters it's like the bambi story yeah but the bad guys are biologists out trying to tranq and relocate wolves to save the caribou really yeah i'm not kidding you and then the wolves leave to get away so it's like but the end result is the same because it wasn't the whole thing that you didn't want to get relocated but then they go find a new place to live sure yeah which is kind of what was going to happen it's a very confused plot it's a children's movie right yeah but it's like at

what point yeah but it was just a lot easier when they were just gonna go bad guys gonna kill it was like the bad guys are like oddly southern oh yeah hillbillies southern hillbilly biologists who are out trying to trank wolves to save caribou but they were bad so now it's the weirdest program teaching kids that biologists are bad like don't believe those biologists they're bad not only bad wrote that not only bad but from the south so caribou do they uh have a set of twins every year they single cavers single cavers pretty slow yeah reproducers and they don't reproduce till they're two and a half which is you know also cost you a year now so when you guys got rid of mr nasty the specialist tom mountain lion that that next season did you guys see a couple extra calves or yeah it was pretty immediate i mean obviously the lion's taking adult animals and sub-adults it doesn't matter um but yeah it was a pretty immediate difference when you got rid of him wow so a mountain caribou

waits till it's two and a half to have a calf yeah and then it'll kick one out every year pretty much yeah i mean ideally our caribou um have all been in pretty good condition when when they're captured and um handled they're in good condition they're almost always pregnant so we have you know that tells you that their nutritional needs are probably being met. So break down the collar situation. Now, Callahan, ask your collar question. All right. You have my permission.

So you said before you only have two collars out. Right. I mean, why only two collars? Is there like a prime ratio between how many collars you would have for your herd size? And as part of that, can you explain what you gain by what collaring means and what you gain by collaring something? Sure. Well, you certainly gain a lot of information by collaring the animals.

We figure out how they're using the habitat, where they're crossing the highway, which is a big deal. And then also you're figuring out sources of mortality. So you put gps locator on yeah they're gps callers and they have vhf during the daylight hours so if we go up in an airplane we can go fly and find them that way so we get one point a day electronically on our computer and then also with the vhf we can find them whenever um so with the collar data we're figuring out sources of mortality which is really important we're also figuring out calving areas which is nice to know um like stuff you didn't know before where they were we had an idea um you know we know the type of habitat but when you're down to 12 animals you start kind of

pinpointing like individual animals right yeah i got you um instead of thinking about like that herd and that herd you're like that animal right yeah right um so the reason we're down we started with six out of i think we had 17 animals in the herd when we collared um we're down to two collars one collar is on an animal but dead so we don't count that we have and you shoot it out you shoot a dart at it these are net gunned net gun out of a helicopter yep and you jump down yeah and they mug them collar them uh take whatever samples we need and just cut them loose yeah what do you steal from them when you mug them they're taking uh everything we can we're taking uh you know hair samples genetic samples a fecal um getting weight weight, and all the normal sort of measures, and then also fitting them with ear tags and collars.

So once we have these collars out, we can start figuring out sources of mortality. And since 2009, like I said, this sort of precipitous decline that coincides almost perfectly with wolf recovery so we kind of all had an idea but um once we had the you know the smoking gun so to speak with the wolves um we were able to move forward with actually a wolf call and in british columbia they're using helicopters to kill wolves in the recovery area so i want to get to that real bad, but I want to back up a couple of steps. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our Northern brothers. You're irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. How do you know when it died? We get a mortality signal. If the animal doesn't move for, I think it's 24 hours or maybe 12 hours.

So if the caller quits moving, it comes through in an email. You know, you get whatever, your smartphone goes off and you know that you have a dead animal and you know GPS coordinates. And you hike in there? Yeah, yeah. How far, what the the kind of extremes or is it just easy because the helicopters to go find the thing once you get the mortality signal we hike in um we don't have the funding to just hop in a helicopter whenever we want so we

take off and walk in it hasn't been too bad most of we had one that was actually a vehicle strike up on highway three so that was pretty easy 400 yards down the hill um we had a wolf mortality that was a bit of a hike um you know and sort of that mid to high elevation stuff in the summertime but a couple miles i mean these things it's it's pretty good backcountry area but there's still a lot of roads around a lot of trails. It's pretty accessible. You get the mortality signal and you always want to go look. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're definitely going to go look.

And when you find the animal, how obvious is it? Does it have to be a trained eye or can most anybody walk up and be like, oh, I can tell what happened to this thing? Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be that much training, I guess, but you should have an idea what to look for but can you tell a lion from a wolf oh yeah yeah you would tell a lion from wolf the problem up there is the bear population is so high um they're almost always scavenged um which is a concern that's a grizzly bear recovery area also so you know you have to kind of go in cautiously you want to be there's sort of a i don't know the last one we walked in um there was wolves in the area there's bears in the areas all this other stuff so you want to sneak in quietly enough that if

there's a wolf eating it you can kill the wolf um but if there's a bear on it you want to be making enough noise to spook the thing away and don't get rushed if you you know show up 10 yards from it all of a sudden um so what are you looking at when you look at the carcass to tell if it was a predation well lion kills are easy they're generally buried uh squirreled away up underneath the tree or something like that um we'll tuck it up against the tree and yeah up against a rock bluff or tree or whatever root wad something like that and they'll be covered with debris um so what do they like to eat off them um they usually go in behind the front shoulder and start start on the lungs and stuff

like that if it's a lactating cow they'll eat the udder and those areas. But it just depends how long it's been there. They're going to eat it until it gets scavenged generally. They're like a soft tissue. Yeah. I heard a guy explain that or his theory on that is that when they get on it, they don't know how long they're going to have it before something gets it. Right.

And they generally go for that stuff that you can just gobble down in a hurry sure like lungs liver you know and then work outward from the from the easy stuff work you know work outward right yeah that's probably true i don't know i haven't really heard that theory or read anything on it but makes sense yeah it's just a guy making a guess about it you know you know liver and stuff like that's pretty high nutritional value. With 12 animals, is it insanely hard to net gun these things? Do they just know the game inside and out? They've got the game pretty well figured out. So we net gunned the herd last when it was, and I wasn't on the aircraft that day.

So I was flying a fixed wing, and we marked their location, and then we called the location in, and a helicopter comes in and that guns them. It's another reason, you know, you asked about why we put six callers out instead of the whole herd or whatever else. There's a risk when you capture the animals that you'll kill them, right? You could experience some capture myopathy if you mug this thing and it just doesn't get back to its feet and then you have some explaining to do. So we kind of figured we'd do about a third of the herd if we could and we tried to focus on cows because that's where the best data is going to come from why is that well cows are certainly more important to the population i got you um they're the reproducers obviously so and

we're a little i don't know if you can call the herd bull heavy necessarily when there's like 12 animals you're not really heavy in anything you're light um but we have probably a disproportionate number of bulls so we really needed to know more about the cows um how do you tell i don't mean to keep harping on this which is of interest to me how do you tell uh so you know a lion how do you tell a wolf from a bear kill? Or don't bears hit them hard? Bears don't really hit them hard. Bears could be a source of calf mortality, but we don't really know that. If a calf dies, there's no way for us to know unless the cow goes with it. So bears may or may not kill a few of the calves,

but as far as adult mortality, they're not really a primary source. Wolf kills are pretty spectacular. The last wolf kill we went into, it was like 30 hours old, maybe. So we got the signal. I keep my passport in my work truck and I was headed towards the border as soon as it came in. And so it was probably actually about 20 hours old. It was fairly recent. And a group of what we think maybe five or six wolves had killed this small bull and three or four of us went in um the animals were gone and we found the collar with a pretty good scrap of the hide maybe six foot of the hide but not much meat attached to that found three of the legs and one of the antlers and the skull was all crushed apart of course um but we put i mean i put all of the caribou remains in my backpack and walked out and this thing was fresh like it didn't it didn't smell bad it was like packed them out it was fresh

so they when wolves kill it you know it's they don't leave a lot i mean they're eating the ribs they're eating most of the bones. Wow, man. And the head's crushed. Yeah, you said of course. Yeah, you said of course. So they're going after the brain matter and eyeballs. Yeah, they'll chew on the head. I've left. I've come back to where we've killed

elk after grizzlies got on what we left. And you'll find some balls of hair and then the back of the skull yeah yeah it's pretty tough back there like the frame and mat the area around the hole that your spinal cord goes in you'll find like a softball size hunk of that and other than that they eat the entire face off that thing yep yep you'll find and pass bone fragments all over the place right and you know you find the rumen content but the guts are gone yep yep you'll find and pass bone fragments all over the place right and you know you find the rumen content but the guts are gone yep and you find a big one looks like someone emptied out a

bag of lawnmower clippings you know that's right they ate the they ate the stomach but left the yep um so if we found a you know a more complete carcass the one we found that was struck on the highway was fed on by wolves and also had a black bear on it when we showed up. Um, so we're throwing sticks at that thing, trying to scare him away. And so it got hit by a car. Yeah.

Wolves came, found it, ate some, a bear came, started eating some more. And how much time had passed? Um, one day.

I mean, this is a predator rich environment. Wow. Um, so it's like 400 yards off the main highway um you know we find as much scrap as we can we only found one pre-mortal bite mark so it probably killed by some you know finished off i guess so you can analyze the hide and tell what bites that were alive and bites that were not sure yeah you know if there's bruising on a bite mark you generally can kind of guess that it was alive when it was you know chewed on yeah i heard that because i

remember this guy up in alaska gold miner i think he was a plaster miner found a uh a step bison i think bison latifrons they used to call it i can't remember which one but like a longhorn bison and it had been preyed on by an american lion like a lion species that used to live in the great plains and up into alaska and they could tell by the this thing was so well preserved in the permafrost they could tell where it had been bit before it died really bruising was still yeah hit it on the base of the neck nice yeah because it had like bled there and the rest of the body where it had chewed hadn't bled through. So when you can only pack out a six-foot chunk of hide, you can tell that kind of stuff from it?

Well, we're looking at it in the field and trying to make a decision out there. But yeah, we're going to pack it out anyway. If it's not a collared animal, you know, we found two dead caribou earlier this month. A hiker reported them, and one of the tribal biologists from the Kootenai tribe hiked up and gathered those. What did kill those? We have no idea. People? No, probably not.

Is poaching a big problem with those caribou? It hasn't been in a long time. Most people that hunt up there know, and there's signs and, you know, educational materials scattered out in the woods. Now, it wasn't poached. It was a really nice bull, actually. and there's signs and educational materials scattered out in the woods. It wasn't poached. It was a really nice bull, actually. A big set of antlers still laying up there intact.

But no saying what happened to it. No, no idea. There's two of them near one another, which maybe makes you think there was a predator work in that area, but it's anybody's guess. And then tell me again the number you had collared at one time. We had six at one time. And there was how many alive alive at that time i think there were 17 in the herd then and so the four that died with have you continuously collared throughout that period or you just had six and

now you have two right yeah we set we put six out at one time uh like two years ago one of those collars has died and three of those caribou have died. So we have two collars still working for us. And then the three that died, one got hit by a car. One got hit by a car, and two were wolf mortalities. Okay. And is the risk just too high at this point with a 12-animal group to try to collar anything else? We've talked about collaring some more um we're trying to put together a program we're trying to come up with a plan to you know augment the herd

and do some other stuff and we want to do everything kind of at once so we're not handling these animals more than we have to i got you you don't want to be out harassing them all the time right and you know like you asked they they do get smart about the helicopter when they you know animals that have been captured by a helicopter figure that out pretty quickly. And they're in tough enough country that if they really put their mind to it, they could get away from helicopter easily. I got a buddy who is a waterfowl researcher and he did a lot of capture netting for birds. And he's very, always very afraid of killing the birds oh yeah and his count he wasn't getting enough birds he wasn't getting data on enough birds and he was telling me how his

advisor at the time said if you're not killing birds you're not working hard enough meaning like get out there and get data but with this with a population the size you're talking about it's one thing if you're doing mallards right yeah yeah if you kill you know eight percent of the population with one bad shot you've got some explaining yeah but imagine if you guys if you guys had a mortality it would make it make the news probably yeah yeah yeah so is it growing right now or shrinking uh it's pretty steady right now. Well, I mean, whatever. We were at 15 a few years ago, and we're at 12 now. So we have some documented reproduction this year.

We've got some calves on trail camera, so that's good. The only real complete census we get during the wintertime, like March, we'll fly and count the animals again. But right now, the 12 don't stay together. They sprinkle out across the landscape in ones and twos. Oh, really? Yeah. So any real census this time of year is impossible.

Explain augmentation, how that would work. Well, hopefully it'll be, like I said, a soft release. We'll bring some animals in from one of the British Columbia herds that's nearby. Hopefully we'll get animals that kind of know how to use that landscape to stay high in the wintertime. If we don't, I would still want to augment. Even if we had animals that maybe didn't know that routine, we'd hope that we could train them. And are the people who the source herd, the people whose jurisdiction that is, are they open to the idea of you taking

of some animals coming from their herds to augment they're not too excited about it we've made a formal request we're working on working out details on that kind of stuff but herds all across that southern part of the selkirks are in a decline that's what i can imagine so someone's like just because i got a hundred doesn't mean i feel like i got animals to spare right um that herd has declined you know the main herd of whatever we call this a suburb the main herd has declined pretty significantly there's efforts going on there's maternal penning efforts going on in two different places in canada where they're capturing cows that are pregnant and putting them in a pen and trying to rear them rear the calves to like three months four months old before they turn them loose oh just to give them an enhanced chance

that they'll survive because their highest chance of getting killed is early in life and um are those wolves keen in on cows uh up there well they've done a pretty serious wolf removal in those areas so where they're turning those animals loose they've done serious wolf removal and um that has helped uh a lion actually killed like four animals at one time up there right after release so you look at this weird spike in the data and it's like you got to kind of put an asterisk next to that that's something that maybe we didn't know we could have avoided but now we know it's probably not going to happen again do you get involved in the predator control uh not really um i have hounds if if a if a lion killed a caribou i would be up there with the dogs that hasn't happened since we put

the collars out but i would obviously drop what i was doing to get the dogs up there and take care of that so you're a lion hunter right can i come with you lion hunt yeah you had some of my lion last year in missoula oh that was your line yeah yeah nick clare when i joined the little contest that was we didn't even get a participation award not up to me not up to me so uh i like the look i remember that look so when um what so you hunt lions but you haven't personally gone after the lions that were after the caribou well um like whose job is that nobody has that job necessarily no um i work for the outfitter up at priest lake um that selkirk guiding outfitting has a the area that goes all the way to the Canadian border.

Okay. And we target those animals early in the season. But as the snow gets too deep, it ends up being a 30-mile snowmobile ride just to get to any good areas. So early in the season, we try to take out some animals that are potential caribou predators. That are in the caribou recovery zone right but that's completely just your own that's just that's like legal over-the-counter lion hunting have nothing to do with with uh government sanctioned predator control no there's none of that there has been some you know there's no female quota up in the panhandle there's no um

you know anybody can buy tag over the counter that kind of stuff that you can run hounds in idaho you you can't do that in washington um in british columbia they've i think i've allowed a hound hunter to take two cats per winter or whatever but it's just it's remote it's backcountry stuff it's tough to access um you know in the winter time you the cats move down low the caribou stay up high you could kill a cat that may or may not ever travel to that high country. So you really don't know if you're getting the right cat or not. And is the wolf control in the, let me get this straight first. In the U.S., so I know that these animals are on the border moving back and forth.

But in the U.S. portion of the range, or in like what we'd call immediately potential range, like a place that could very well, maybe next month might have a caribou on it. Is the U.S. doing, in a government way, are they doing predator control to assist caribou? But Canada is. Canada is.

What is the argument against doing it to facilitate the comeback of caribou in the u.s like predator protectionists or what is it remember you're dealing with um wildlife that's managed by the states now so we have these we have two different jurisdictions there actually three if you count canada right so you've got north idaho where wolf hunting is liberalized um but it's hard it It's thick. It's steep. There's a couple of trappers up there that are finding some success, but there's no government effort. There's no bounty.

There's no anything like that. Washington, the wolves are still a protected species. We can't trap them. We can't hunt them. So those wolves on that side of the border are safe. There's no real government control effort. there's no like i said bounties anything else idaho has done what it could with um liberalizing the seasons but yeah i don't think we're going to see any kind of government effort to to kill wolves in the States. It's just too contentious of an issue with big groups.

Yeah. But you feel that there is a convincing case to make, or there is a case to make, that that would be one of the steps. I'm not saying to advocate or not. Absolutely. But that would be one of the steps towards recovering caribou. It is a very important step. And it's been interesting watching people kind of come around as they learn more about the caribou situation.

And we've had conservation groups even not come out with raving support of the wolf call, but like saying, we recognize that it has to happen. We don't like it, but to save this species, we know that that's part of the deal. So if we can get groups even to come on with that kind of support, that's fine. We're not asking for their money. We don't expect them to pay for the wolf removal, but they need to recognize that if we're going to save caribou, it's going to have to be sort of a predator-free zone for a little while. Got you. Now, let me ask you a question that'll probably make you uncomfortable. Maybe not. Let's say God came down from outer space and said,

you have absolute authority. You are the caribou czar. Okay? And I'm tasking you with recovering caribou in the lower 48. If you fail, I will kill every human on earth. What are the things that you would do? And you have three things you can do. Three things, okay.

Yep. Well, I would- Or everyone on earth dies. Well, they're- The pugs are hot. They're multi-progged. It's like a dream. It was meant to be a nightmare.

It's a multi-pronged approach so we would have to supplement the herd we absolutely have to bring new animals in or we're going to start seeing genetic drift and issues genetically what's genetic drift? it's where you get this small isolated population they basically become so inbred

that their productivity falls so we would start seeing that we have to bring animals in and if I could just snap my fingers and get animals, I'd get all of them. And the complications there are you want to draw animals who are coming from a similar habitat type and know how to utilize the environment. However, all of those animals are coming from herds that themselves are in questionable condition. Right.

That's right um so i guess if i could let's let's get rid of your situation and just make a more perfect situation like if i had unlimited money and like support from uh and everyone doesn't have to die you have god on your side you have all the money that's right i've got god on my side but but nobody has to die in this okay so yeah you're just like you have like unlimited you have unlimited funding right so in a perfect world um we could get our hands on a handful of caribou from all of these groups for a couple of years how many you know if we put i think if we put probably 10 a year for a few years out there oh did you say that you're essentially willing to borrow them we would we would be willing to borrow them once we recover yeah if we could get if we could make

our herd into a source population that would be fantastic obviously that's going to be down the road a little ways but we were like i said we were on a pretty strong upward trajectory we were going from you know 26 animals to 46 animals in the course of you know half a decade or something so we were doing really well kentucky. Kentucky, look at their elk population. Right. They got elk from other states, and now they're a lead source herd for eastern elk populations. And look, isn't the same case with the Nunavak muskox? Yeah, but that's kind of confused.

Yeah, but yes. Yes. Right. So we've got- Experimental population turned loose, and then it later becomes a source for restocking. Yeah, we've got bigh now turn loose and then it later becomes a source for, for restocking. We've got, yeah, we've got bighorn sheep in the same area as the, as the caribou that

are a source population and have been for years. Okay. So you get, so you can borrow, just letting everybody know he can borrow the animals and give them back later. Yeah. It's a high interest loan. We'd get that. But, um, so if we take these animals, we could then do our maternal pen.

We'd capture some of our resident animals, let them calve with the, and let all the cows calve together, all of our augmentation animals and our resident animals and give them three or four months in the pen to sort of co-mingle, get to know one another, whatever, and kick them loose and recognizing that the augmentation animals are going to have probably higher mortality um but we'd have collars on all of them once you're handling them you may as well put a collar higher mortality so that they don't know the ins and outs yeah yeah you're just going to have that and that's we recognize that's probably going to be part of the deal but um even if you had you know 75 mortality that'd be fantastic or 75 survival

that'd be fantastic um so if% survival, that'd be fantastic. So if we could do that for several years, we could get this trajectory back. And, you know, like I said, the habitat protections are in place. If we continued with the wolf control and, you know, I don't know if we need to ramp up the cougar control or anything else. Bears aren't really a big problem,

but, you know, keep kind of doing what we're doing. We just need animals. All right. Do you remember long ago when they were trying to recover the Florida panther? Mm-hmm. Okay. And there was a period of time when people thought the Florida panther was gone and some lion hunter down. No, a guy down there kept saying, no, there's some still here. Okay. And there was a period of time when people thought the Florida Panther was gone.

And some lion hunter down, no, a guy down there kept saying, no, there's some still here. This is an interesting story. A guy down there says, no, there's still some around. People are like, oh, bullshit, they're all gone. He goes and finds some lion hunter from Arizona, has him come out to Florida, and they start pounding lions. And people are like, geez, stop. He goes, just stop telling me there's none here because here's a pile of dead ones.

Later, they wanted to recover them. They tried all this kind of stuff, and there was a lot of, and some people came up with this idea, like, okay, what is the Florida panther? Sure, we're going to lose a Florida Panther, but let's try to at least save the idea of panthers in Florida. And what they wanted to do was let's just go get some from the Rocky Mountains.

It's the same species. Their offspring are sexually viable, right? But some people are so fixated on saving the Florida panther that they were willing to let panthers in Florida go away if they couldn't save like that population. Why not? Go get a whole shitload of them from Alaska and just cross your fingers.

Like you're down to 15, 12. It's embarrassing. It's embarrassing. You're down to 12. Like how, let's say five years from now, you're out, not just, I'm not just saying like you, it's like, it's your fault.

But five years from now, people involved in this effort are still going, please, how about a few caribou over here? Like, what is the argument with being like, okay, let's do plan B.

It's not as good, but it's viable that we could go get 200 of the things. Well, like I said, I don't know if we can train other, you know, like if we could go back to whatever newfoundland or someplace and get a bunch of mountain caribou that kind of know the steep landscape that aren't huge migrators i mean that would be the big problem right you drop a bunch of

these animals you put some barren ground carry one they're just gonna split they're gonna cruise someplace um so then your money's gone yeah your money's gone to carry where who knows where right down in iowa and you've burned a ton of like social capital too right you just like i got you played your hand social capital yeah yeah so you want to try to do something that's going to work i see i mean i knew there was a good answer for it but it's just something that you know yeah that's a that's a tough one um if we got animals like i said there are other mountain caribou that that drop to lower elevation in the winter there's a possible possibility that we could sort of change that behavior but it's that's a pretty strong instinct for some of them like so

we're just going to experience mortality if we do that and people just need to recognize that like if we get 50 mortality that's still 50 survival that's something that's you know additive to the herd yeah so it really seems like the best thing to do is try to get some of these ones from a bit north right we should go and get some of those ones we know about cal got a horse trailer i like it like i'm down horse trailer biology instead of bucket biology you know there used to be, do you remember, nevermind, it's such a weird digression. Okay, what else?

You still have powers, ultimate power. That's it? It's a short list. Yeah, we don't need magic. We just need some animals. Like I said, with habitat protections, they're pretty much in place. I would do a highway, like a wildlife overpass

on Highway 3, because animals, like they flirt with that highway all the time. Actually, I've got a highway, like a wildlife overpass on Highway 3, because animals, like, they flirt with that highway all the time. Actually, I've got a fantastic photo. Somebody emailed me of an awesome bull caribou and two cows and a calf, and they're standing on the shoulder of the road. They still use salt on the highway. I would change that. Yeah, they come down to get that. Yeah, so they're down there licking, and there's the caribou warning sign,

and then in the background, like, there's a semi bearing down on them. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is just a fantastic photo. It shows all these problems. So yeah, if we had a... Wildlife, wildlife. I know you mentioned, I was reading a piece about overpasses and underpasses. And when I've done the underpasses, they found a correlation between animals' willingness to use it

with the steepness of the walls. Oh, really? They found that when walls got to a certain pitch and they couldn't see, they did not want to go through that thing. The ones where they pitched the walls out enough where he didn't feel like he was going beneath a ledge, they were more willing to use it, and they preferred overpasses to underpasses really

interesting yeah visibility like it's a tough sell to be like hey man go into this here box canyon right yeah especially for on the genetic side of things um like what do you think your timeline is with your you got 12 incredibly valuable caribou right now 15 that's joke 12 and like what's your time frame when are you like we need new genetics in this herd by this time or you know else everybody's to be the slow cousin. I don't think anybody's really came up with a definite timeline that way. Obviously, we're trying to just stop the bleeding from this herd, right? Like genetics. Because it was 61? It was 46, maybe up to 50.

I can't remember. 46 for sure in 2009. Okay. When did you come on? I started working on the caribou project, I don't know half a decade ago five years or so yeah so you've seen a lot of this play out yeah yeah from the basic wolf recovery onward seemed like the bad years yeah so you wouldn't in this and playing god you want more animals no he wasn't playing god or god's giving him the power yeah sorry sorry very extension of um but you have uh you have more critters you have trying

to fix some of like the habitat fragmentation which is that highway right doing an overpass but not any kind of predator control no i would still have predator control going yeah and those are the kind of those are the three big ones you know that would be aggressive like what's going on up in british columbia yeah it would be you know targeted wolf removal we're not we're not anti-wolf and i don't want to come off that way um we don't mind having wolves on landscape that's just part of the deal um we do we don't want them cohabitating with the caribou right now because there's population for sure right now if we had if we had a thousand caribou it wouldn't make any difference if a

one got picked off every once in a while this is pretty incidental you know obviously wolves aren't making a living on the caribou they wouldn't last long um but any incidental take when you have just a handful of animals is pretty critical so yeah we would continue with the predator control um what percent chance is it that they'll all die i don't know likely or not likely um well at least you know from the once there's four they're done right i mean is it a point at which they're done there is a point and i don't think anybody wants to think about that. I don't know what that number would be. The Kalispell tribe, my boss, we're not going to quit working on the caribou until they're gone all the way. It won't end if they're gone, though, right?

Because then you can still... There's still a recovery area. There's still all this other stuff. But if we can't get animals to augment the population when there's animals there, imagine trying to pull those political strings and it'd be impossible. Are you married? I am. Okay. You come home and you're like, I don't know what the point is. I feel like I have the wrong career.

Why do I bother? And your wife wants to cheer you up, she says. Well, I've been, Stacy's super supportive of the caribou stuff. She cares about the caribou and likes that area. Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Why? Why does anybody care about the caribou? Well, I think because it's the right thing to do.

Yeah, but I was listening to a thing where Donald Trump was talking about how there's no reason to let water out of the Sacramento River because it's just a stupid three-inch fish. And he was kind of like ridiculing the fish. The delta smelt. He was like teasing the delta smelt. I imagine there's a lot of people

who kind of tease the caribou, right? Like, why go through all this? There's a petition right now to get them delisted. It's the most imperiled species in the lower 48, and there's a petition in front of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take them off of the endangered species list and remove the recovery area. Motivated by?

That's by the snowmobile closure. Gotcha. They've closed winter recreation up there and a big portion of north idaho and northeast washington and canada and um those groups are upset and they whatever maybe they have something of a point the caribou haven't been in some of that area for a long time there's maybe an opportunity to have that talk with them but you know to pull the animal off the list and remove the recovery area is ridiculous. Yeah, so it's not so much the animal,

they just want to remove the recovery area. Right. Recovery area restrictions. Sure. Yeah. And there are people that, you know, they see the cost of what this stuff, you know, is going to, and in total, I hate to even guess

what it might cost to recover caribou, like in your perfect world. I have unlimited funding, right? But why do people not even know about the caribou? I mean, that's only 15. Right, yeah. I don't know. Or nothing. I don unlimited funding. Why do people not even know about the caribou? There's only 15. Right, yeah. I don't know. There's so much crazy emphasis on the last big reintroduction success story

and protecting that big success story to crazy extent. But here's this 12 animal herds. Yeah, you got 1,800 grizzlies in Montana and people act like they know them all by name. Yeah. And if they're going to delist grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, they'll be like,

but what if old Snagglescar face gets killed? What happens then? The whole Yellowstone economy is going to yellowstone economy is people don't even know here you got where you could actually know all their names and people don't know or care that they're there how do they not make the charismatic megafauna list you yeah you just took the words out of my mouth they're not charismatic enough i don't know they're they don't pay the bills right there are no conservation groups getting on board with caribou recovery because you're not going to get some crazy cat lady in New York City to send you $40 to save the caribou. She doesn't care about the caribou.

She'll send you $400 to save a grizzly. Someone with claws and teeth she will absolutely care about. So people, maybe they just don't relate to caribou. I don't know. Have you got to spend much time up in areas, up in good caribou country? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Dude, it's amazing.

It's fantastic. It's beautiful. You know, we've hunted up there where we'd be there for a few days, and every day, hundreds come through. Yeah. You can never not see them. I haven't spent time in that caribou country. I've also hiked my ass off trying to find one but i'm saying i did have the experience of like

what everybody dreams about right they're just like coming and coming and coming and coming and coming and you wake up the next day and they're coming and coming and coming it's not even hunting it's like you sort of eventually be like okay we should probably go get one i guess all right it's just like it's like observation the places that these caribou live are fantastic in this elk rick's do there's you know's lynx, there's wolverine, there's fishers, you know, this whole suite of rare and cool species that a lot of people don't really realize we have up there. It's a pretty fantastic country, really. When I look at things, I always try to like draw to make definitions, you know, or try to struggle to find ways to qualify stuff. In one way, when I think of wilderness, right, a way to define it, and it's a very difficult

term to deal with, but I always think a barometer of wilderness would be that the species are intact, right? That like all the pieces are there. I realize that's tricky because that means you're kind of that definition is bad not bad but that definition isn't great because you're sort of ruling out the possibility of wilderness in the eastern u.s right and that's the thing to some degree you know with the delisting the the group that wants to or whatever whatever, if caribou, let's say caribou did go away, the recovery area would exist still. Um, it would take an effort to get that recovery area removed

because, you know, that's still potentially caribou habitat. Um, so people don't really recognize that. Um, you know, with the wilderness thing, yeah, I'm sort of reticent to, to say that the species have to be there, but certainly, like you said, the pieces have to be there. The, the, the habitat to meet the life needs of that species should be there. What was the last legally killed caribou by a hunter in the U S I feel like it was in the twenties, wasn't it? No, it was later than that. I want to think it was like 1959 or something, but I could be wrong.

Okay. Legally killed one. Do you know where it was? I don something, but I could be wrong. A guy legally killed one. Do you know where it was? I don't. I remember reading a thing about it, but I can't remember what it was. Yeah. I know that there was a couple poached in maybe the 90s even. Really?

Pretty late, yeah. Poached by dudes who wanted the heads or poached by dudes who were pissed off about caribou and pissed off about Endangered Species Act issues? Well, we don't know. It's hard to ask the caribou. We wouldn't know either of those cases, right? Because somebody that's pissed off about the caribou is probably not going to poach one and then go down and turn it in.

Yeah. These were mistaken identities. Oh, they were. These were people that killed a caribou and thought it was something else and they self-reported or whatever. Yeah. Dude, people shoot llamas thinking they're elk. I was just going to bring that up.

And he was a native Montanan. going to a fishing game check station and seeing a thing they had a thing up it says this is a llama this is this is an elk this is a llama this is the dalai lama what i thought was funny about that is okay he makes the mistake right he makes a mistake it's happened twice which is bad i mean you shouldn't do that anyways. But then he brings it to the check station like it's an actual cow elk. Packed it out, probably gutted it. One question I have for you is that hunters have been part of this great restoration across the country, right? And so, you know, white-tailed deer, elk, antelope, turkeys, they've all come back because of hunters.

And so you have this caribou population, which it would take, it sounds like, a long, long time before we'd ever have a hunting population of caribou. Yeah, you could probably remove that from your life goals about caribou before 48. But it's a species. We've done it before like i just i guess that question is so like when you talk about like the snowmobilers they don't like like them because of the area got shut down i get that piece but why aren't hunters more engaged in trying to like establish this population and if is that part of the whole like conversation that you guys are having um well i don't know that it's really part of the conversation it's certainly frustrating though

um there's such a cool species in there whatever you know you talk about what hunters want and different things and some hunters want caribou back because it's the right thing to do and they recognize they're probably never going to get the opportunity to hunt one um but you know they're they're antler to body size ratio is like the highest in the deer family they have huge antlers for their body size they They're a cool animal. They have heavier horns than the bear and ground animals. They're a beautiful animal. It would be fantastic to hunt one someday

or for our grandkids to hunt one someday. I'm sort of surprised the hunting community hasn't jumped on board more. There was a group in the Northwest Wildlife Council was a big partner in the original augmentation and they had augmentation and they had people helping and they put up money and stuff like that so that's kind of the last sort of hunting group that coughed anything up did they walk away because the it just wasn't working the

way they wanted um no they walked it they walked away because the the project was over and it was working they said they careibou were coming back. And so people, you know, this hasn't been like this slow decline. This has happened quickly and we have a pretty good idea why. We're not, yeah, I'm guilty. This is coming from a guy who's guilty of not having not done diddly squat toward helping caribou, you know, in the lower 48. Like I haven't done anything.

I'm just learning about it right now. But I do think that people should care about this kind of thing and be involved in it because I don't think it's right to have animals vanish from the face of the earth because of things we've screwed up. And I don't care if you need to draw the inspiration to adhere by that from religion or just as a humanist or wherever it comes from. It's just like,

it just seems to me categorically wrong to, to eliminate species from earth. You know? Yeah, I totally agree agree it's like just a sin um in all things it's like whether you feel that we have been given domain of the earth or whether we just happen to need to feel that way you know what we got it from a celestial being or not uh we just can't let things go let things vanish i think the reason it kind of falls under hunters purview is because hunters have done recovery of all of big game animals and it's like just because i think we have to take responsibility for big

game animals even if they're not going to be our game, you know? Right. And I think that the guys who first got involved in recovering bighorn sheep were not, were hardly motivated by the idea of someday I'm going to get to hunt one. I met a lot of guys who worked on the Kentucky elk reintroduction who've given their entire volunteer lives. And what are the odds of them ever drawing a tank they'll never do it the guys who know most about those animals and work hardest on behalf of those animals never hunt them you know it's not all it's not always about like well can i hunt one

right you know just people don't look at it that way um they're sort of a it's a weird thing and it it's this intrinsic reward or whatever that we get from the recovery effort but it's the same feeling probably that the cat lady in new york gets sent in 40 bucks to save a wolf right yeah she's probably never going to see a wolf she's never going to hear a wolf howl but it means something to her that they're there so yeah probably the similar kind of thing i argue in favor quite often lately of of delisting grizzlies in the greater yellowstone ecosystem and people are often like oh yeah because you want to hunt one it's like one i don't it would take me a long time to explain what i why i don't but i don't i

will never if i could put in for a tag right i, I wouldn't put in for it. It's just I'm not interested in that population in that way. Two, if I did want to, I would have probably somewhere well less than 0.25% or a quarter of a percent or so odds of ever drawing the tag, particularly as a non-resident. It's going to be a lottery draw if they do do a hunt. They're going to be giving out a handful of tags. They're going to have hundreds of thousands of applicants. You're not going to do it. But people can't help but just make that jump

that you must be in this for something, some dark motivation. It would be a good way to prove them wrong for hunters to get involved in this and look at, okay, it's a depleted game species. It's not like putting turkeys on the ground where in five years you're going to be hunting for the things. It's just you're not, but we should almost,

I feel like hunters should, especially people that live around that area, get involved in the same way that we've always gotten involved in recovering wildlife. It's just a long, slow process. Yeah, maybe sometime in 200 years or 100 years there's going to be a hunting season for them. Who knows?

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get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all well right right now there's a group and it's pretty much all agency folks putting together a plan but um you know when there's a decision made there will be an opportunity for people to step forward and we've talked about actually i've volunteered backcountry hunters and anglers is working on the maternal pen if we ever have a this maternal pen it's going to be rad it's going to be way up in the mountains it's going to be like you know 10 acre pen with a wall tent and a cabin that we have to maintain throughout the whole winter and it's going to be probably a volunteer effort so

i mean there are going to be opportunities for people to step to the plate um right now there's not unless you want to go you know cougar hunting in north idaho or northeast washington or go wolf hunting or something like that you can you know play know, play that kind of role, but, um, there's not a lot of things for people to do right now. You know, no, hopefully people, you know, it gets to be more of a mainstream conversation and people recognize that the caribou are still there and they're people trying to do things and support them, whatever, when the time comes through, you know, sending letters of support and different things like that. But that's a tough situation. So you need some agency to say,

okay, here are some animals. If they do that, do you get the money? We would find the money. Is the money there? We would find the money. What would be a price per animal that would not be surprising, that would be not surprising how cheap or how expensive it was? Or doesn't it work that way?

You know, I don't even know. Like I said, saving this species is more important to me probably than the budget would be. We would find a way to save it. Would it be, or could it potentially be actually like, okay, we'll sell them to you? Or does it not work that way? I don't know.

I don't know if it works that way. Cause you're people trading. If we're not, yeah, we're not getting these from the United States. This is coming from British Columbia. Um, British Columbia is a strong partner for us. They want the herd to exist, um, for a number of reasons. One, it's their Southern most herd. It's the only herd that extends into the united states and if they want the united states to remain a strong partner um they need to keep this herd around yeah and we are a strong partner and

both the tribes are strong partners in the states and everything else so um can i'm not i'm not trying to like paint canada in a negative light they want the herd to be there, but there's a cost to them to move those animals down with potential failure. There's also a potential reward. That's what we're trying to sell them. So does the decision rest on some individual's desk or is it more complex than that? I hope it's more complex than that.

I'm not really sure. I don't know who's making the decision. It's a high level in Canada. It's not some field biologist that's gonna go do this it's it's high level yanni interesting stuff got any thoughts on all that can you just real quick explain just because i'm still like lost and like very early on caribou land. We've got mountain that we've been talking about. We've got the barren ground, which is pretty much all of Alaska. Are the ones on the Kenai,

are those mountain or barren ground? I don't know. I don't know either. But what are the other caribou? Woodland, mountain, bear, caribou. Then there's the Labrador. There's one they call that. Then you have reindeer in Eurasia.

But in North America, we just have but it's they all have the same the same linnaean name down to the third word right i think they can reproduce too yeah um i think no they can yeah reindeer and caribou yeah that was one of the deals right so there's there's like five, I think there's five kinds. Woodland, mountain, barren ground, Le Havre d'Or, and then there's another one. Yeah, so we're dealing with a range for tarandas, woodland, mountain, caribou, whatever. It's sort of, you can use either name to describe the South Selkirk's.

We go by mountain caribou because I don't know why. We just do. But if somebody called them a woodland caribou i probably wouldn't jump up and correct them okay um they're definitely different than the stuff we have in alaska or in the northwest territories up there when i saw those ones that i saw we're hunting bears and we ran into some it was like you're looking at they're very different yeah yeah now you look at me like that's not the kind I know about. Badass looking things though.

Yeah, they're cool. They're heavier, thick, obviously thick for big giant feet for snowshoeing. Heavier antlers. Their antlers don't do the wobble when they jog. Yeah, that was cool. Got any more things you want to say, Giannis? No. I like that red t-shirt.

I'll get you one. Got any concluding thoughts? You kind of talked the whole time, but you still have a concluding thought. It can be anything that has nothing to do with this. No, no, this is great. I like, you know, hopefully more people just become aware that we have this caribou. Like I said, I'm not, this isn't an ask.

This isn't like I'm broadcasting out trying to get people to send checks or anything, but just letting people know that they're still around. And when the time comes, it might become an ask, like send a letter of support, do whatever. Yeah. I would ask that they take some of the energy they're spending toward saving recovered things and put it into things that are absolutely

not recovered oh yeah because you talked really about social capital we are burning a tremendous amount of social and political capital by arguing over things that by any scientific definition are recovered and ignoring things that are on the are in absolute peril because of a friend of mine pointed out no one has calendars anymore because of Instagram worthiness. It drives me nuts. Kel? All right. You're telling collars.

I keep thinking about two things. There's this old movie called The Rare Breed. Did you ever see that? No, I'd like to. The Rare Breed, Jimmy Stewart. It's about getting uh hereford uh cattle out out uh in texas oh supposed to be like the start of hereford cattle but they'd no man this is right in my alley though yeah giant ranch in texas with these wild ass longhorns that are just you know free ranging it out there and then they go round up these things

every year, and that's how they run that beef operation. The only way this rancher is going to give this Hereford bull his shot at co-mingling out there is to just do it like everybody else. Just turn them loose on the range and wish them good luck, and we'll see you in the spring. And that was supposedly the start of the herford thing i keep thinking about that like okay hard release here we go but the other part of this is

the like public knowledge just kills me like it would it be more beneficial to destroy part of this caribou range by building like a spur road off of highway three so you could take bus loads of tourists in there and be like look caribou only 12 left all 12 and people be like holy shit i need to get involved right well certainly if we had a maternal pen we'd have some opportunity to you know let people peek through the fence or whatever and or go in and feed them or whatever yeah you know we'd be looking for volunteers to gather lichens that's going to be a huge job imagine trying to get enough moss to feed 10 caribou for a winter yeah that might create awareness yeah generate some press get some school kids out there collecting moss certainly locally which is important they eat

that moss they love it oh yeah i knew a gal that worked at the large animal research station there in fairbanks and she was working on the caribou and she did that they went up to the north slope and collected with like a group of 20 people just filled up like i forget they were recycled not long just like grain sacks or maybe yeah just stuffed them full of lichen and she said i think for most of the, they didn't get it every day. And she said when that sack would come out, I mean, because the pen's pretty big, but those suckers would just run. Really?

Yeah. But you know the stuff he's talking about, like the grows up on the trees. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they weren't collecting that. Do they eat that one that looks kind of seaweed-y too? Yeah, the green stuff, nasty looking. Looks almost like something you'd find under the water. Right. They like that? Yeah, they'll eat that. that looks kind of seaweed-y too. Yeah, the green stuff, nasty looking. Looks almost like something you'd find under the water. Right.

They like that? Yeah, they'll eat that. There's plenty of- What is that? I've always wondered what that species is, man. I don't know. I used to think of hiking into the hot springs, and you'd always see so much of that stuff. I should look that up.

If you cut a tree down, though, the deer and elk, they eat that stuff out of the tops of trees. My buddy used to be a surveyor in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He says you'd be out there cutting a lion through all that bog land, just the sound of the chainsaw. He says you'd cut your lion, set everything up, and you'd have to hurry up to shoot the lions because deer would come toward the chainsaw sound. You couldn't even look down your thing. When you're shooting lions, you couldn't even look down your thing

because it would be all deer. You'd have to run down, scaring all the deer away, and then try to shoot the line real quick because they just know the chainsaw noise really yeah they're so hungry yeah they know someone's knocking down cedars or whatever and they were just yeah it's like a siren song man it's like deer the sound of a deer feeder motor in texas yeah chainsaw northern chainsaw northern michigan man it's good you know you're talking about the last of the breed the rare breed rare breed yep uh my brother was worked at works at this research facility where they're doing a um

they're they're working on a project or we're working on a project where they're trying to breed wagyu and limousine cattle so limousine the carcass attribute be like it's this huge animal okay but very lean and wagyu is a small squat animal very high fat content so they're trying to do this thing you breed the two and make a giant high fat content like to make wagyu which is where you get kobe beef to get wagyu from a large animal. And every year, the people that are working on this project would do these T-bone tests where they would be in a lab, and they got all these little grill tables set up, and they grill T-bones to a certain temperature on an electric grill, and then do a thing called a Warner Bruntler shear force test

where they just punch three holes in the t-bone and see how tender it is and just discard them and you'd go to my brother's house when they were doing that and his is like bars of gold stacked up in his fridge man he just bring all those freaking t-bones home with a hole three holes every so whenever you open one up it has like three holes in it drop an egg no it punches about a quarter inch hole man do it he always called him his t-bone testers that was like an annual feed you think you like the way grizzlies will hammer elk gut piles in the fall it was like his like it was like his time of year man is when they were doing the the the

warner bruntler shear force test on Wagyu beef land? Concluding thoughts? I'm with Cal. Like, I just, this is such a cool thing that's out there. And I think, you know, getting to have Bart on this podcast and letting people know that there's actual caribou in the lower 48 is a pretty awesome thing. And I think the more people know about it,

the more they're going to want to do something about it when we have the opportunity. So I think that's just i mean when i think about all the species that have been recovered in the united states and how like you know i haven't been able to be a part of much of that right like this is still something like this and bison are still something we can do which is pretty darn cool they get a lot of attention i mean i wrote a whole damn book about them you did and i think and think that's a much longer public conversation about that recovery. But with this population, as small as it is, as unique as it is, and it's only in a localized area in the lower 48 that they can even live, that's pretty cool. Yeah.

I think that's cool. Last thing I would say is that one of the things that makes BHA, even though we are a small organization, is we have badasses that are members and badasses that are in our leadership. And Bart hopefully, not hopefully, but did get that across the day. He spends a ton of time out in the woods, and so he knows the place really well, and he knows what it needs. And so that's who we are as an organization. I think that's pretty darn cool. Here's my concluding thought uh it's it's two-parter three-parter one i agree with you two i'm just getting old enough where i'm just starting to get like i just don't always have a lot of faith in people curmudgeon i've grown up there's a friend of mine who told me a vietnam veteran he said stevie people never change they say they're gonna but they never change and i just some things i'm like

as much as i'd like to say i just it's just hard for me to picture uh i hope i'm wrong it's just i it's just hard for me to picture um a situation this dire that i wasn't that aware of till today i mean i knew a little bit about it it's just hard for me to picture like uh turning it around what kind of person would you want to change i don't understand what you mean that it would be that it would be something that all of a sudden it would like get momentum. But how would it get this bad? And still no one knows about it. At what point did someone go, hey, these dodos are getting mighty thin. Do you know what I mean?

Was it one? If there's one caribou, would people come with like uh you know would npr go out and do a story 12 is not good enough for you that's what i'm saying that's like that people are gonna all of a sudden be like damn we need to fix this problem it's like if if that's gonna happen it seems like it's gonna have to happen pretty quick right that's frustrating yeah if it was polar bears or if it was wolves or grizzly bears or something like charismatic like you said earlier you need to hire not you people need to hire whatever pr agency it is or maybe there isn't one but someone should start one that can sell the american public on loving a critter.

They did it very effectively with wolves. It was done very effectively with grizzly bears. Very effectively with fur seals, which are the farthest thing from endangered. They need to go and be like, let's take some of that attention away and put it in a couple places where it really is needed

right now talk to the people at coors i look at my refrigerator i'm like okay 12 beers 11 beers i'm like oh i better get more yeah dude a beer can with a beer can with a mountain caribou on it mountains already there they're blue caribou it's cold enough to drink bring the sexy back to caribou right come on pete step up if you're listening was that part one of my thing i had a three-parter oh part one was i agree with land part two is i'm like come on yeah how did i not like like i like try to stay hip to this stuff i didn't know so i'm a little bit mad at myself part three this lion hunting we were talking about um i am pretty i've chased a couple lions down in dry ground not on the snow

um i'd be real eager to go out and look around chase lion tracks in the snow with you come on over what's your what time of year you like to hit it december 15th we start in idaho how long is it wrong um we can kill cats until about valentine's day mid-february and then we chase until march 31st and then we go to montana until april 15th usually but we're what part uh what part of the state you hunt not you're hunting the panhandle panhandle yep yeah up north and you're hunting lions that are mostly eating white tails mostly white tails um some elk killers also you know elk fat and lion yeah yeah big ones you know they get big when they start eating elk is that right well yeah it's so much food they don't have to hunt as hard they can stay put and just sit around and eat and get big yeah but you eat a lot of lion meat yeah yeah i've had a number of them it's good a lot

of the lions in that in kind of the caribou potential area though well we like i said early in the season we try to target those lions up in the caribou recovery area and then you just get snowed out and it just gets too hard to get up there um you know you're talking about eight ten feet of snow up there and the lions find little pockets of habitat that they can live in they don't they don't travel much it's hard to cut tracks oh i see because they're just kind of holed up somewhere but early in the season we catch a lot of big toms coming out of that high country they kind of migrate seasonally yeah they move around the you know not all of them but what's a big town um you know 150

pound cat is a big cat yeah anything over that is really a nice one everybody talks about 175 pound 200 pound lions i was talking to a biologist in oregon and uh throughout his career he'd worked up uh 300 i can't remember 360 some lions that's, like, I don't care how hard you hunt lions. It's hard to get to handle 360 of them. Okay. Cause he ran the predator program in Oregon. He worked up 360 some and weighed them. Okay.

Worked them up like scientific scales. I think the biggest one he had was 164. Yeah. Yeah. Lions. And that's hundreds. Like bears, you know,

it's people get. Yeah. Yeah, lions. And that's hundreds. Like bears, you know, people get exaggerated weights. You never run into somebody who's like, I saw a lion, little female. It was like, big old Tom. That's right. Big old Tom come around the corner. Everyone's huge. It's like, oh, so you're good with lions, dude. Not only did you know it was big, you gendered that thing?

That's right. In the dark? Big old Tom come around the corner. No female quota up there, though, so you can take any cat, right? Yeah, we don't really pick on the females too much just because we're guiding up there. We don't want to put ourselves out of business. So we try to take Toms. There are hunters that kill females out of there, though.

Do you guys tree females or pull the dogs off when it's a female uh if there's young we'll pull the dogs but we tree them um it's good for the dogs we we you know we maybe kill 25 of the cats that we tree we have a lot of clients that just like to go out and take pictures and do that kind of stuff and a lot of hunters you know want to come out and just see a cat or hunt for a week and we might tree three or four before they find one that they want it's probably good for the females that you tree them because it wises them up sure yeah it wises them up um they're less likely to climb a tree when they hear a dog bark and probably want to keep running i don't know i don't know about that i think they might be more

likely i think they might well if you let them go oh yeah no i got you so maybe it doesn't wise them yeah they're like the thing to do is climb a tree. Right. Well, maybe, yeah, just get up a tree, and we're going to get your picture taken, and you're going to get harassed for a little bit by the dogs, but it's safe. You're right. You're right. It doesn't wise them up. That's a good point.

All right. Meteor Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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