The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 046: Saratoga, Wyoming. Steven Rinella talks with guests Ronny Boehme and Ed Arnett, along with Brody Henderson and Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: October 14, 2016

Subjects discussed: Dirt Myth humor vs. Twin Lake humor; Steve's bet after the first date with his now wife; obligate species; lekking birds; tweety birds; the relocation of sage grouse; why some states still allow grouse hunting; sage grouse management; thrash and trash; sage grouse singles bars; brood rearing habitats; and more.  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, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, so recently, this has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about.

But recently, we've identified, we've been trying hard to identify a style of humor that is used by our man Dirt Myth, whose parents know him as Garrett Smith. Whom we love dearly. We're trying to get him to quit tobacco. Everybody, please send your emails to get Garrett to quit. Yeah, Dirt Smith's a chronic tobacco user. And we're thinking about implementing a tobacco-free workspace. I resemble that remark.

And it's going to be very hard on Dirt Myth. But Dirt Myth humor is... Yanni, explain Dirt Myth humor. There actually is no humor involved. Yeah, it's an attempt at humor. It's an attempt at humor, and it's like when the person themselves thinks that what they're going to do or say is going to be funny. But in essence is if someone asks you a question like, hey, can you grab me the milk out of the refrigerator? And you open the fridge door and you go, no milk in here.

But you actually just looked at a gallon of milk. And then you giggle to yourself. And then you go, no, I'm just kidding. It's just kidding humor. That might be the way to say it. He then you go, no, I'm just kidding. It's just kidding humor. That might be the way to say it. He'll be like, yeah, I saw a bear. And you're in an area with a lot of bears. You'd be like, oh, no shit.

No, I'm just kidding. And it winds up being, but it's not funny. And then it's totally plausible anyways. It's a spin on Twin Lake humor, which my old girlfriend identified when we were standing on the lake I was brought up on. And someone said to her, hey, do you see that sign across the lake? And she said, no. And they go, you couldn't see a sign across that lake.

And she's like, the people in this community use a style of humor that I'm completely unfamiliar with. Are we tying this into anything? No. Oh, okay. But right before we turned the podcast machine on, we were talking about Dirt Myth humor. Okay. Had Dirt Myth just attempted some humor? Dirt, did you just try to say something funny a minute ago?

No, Ron. Ron made sort of a lowbrow kind of a humor. I'm very lowbrow. One more thing that has nothing to do with anything. Yanni, I'm just finishing up a couple odds and ends we were discussing before we turned the podcast machine on. Yanni, you were a moment ago saying. It's actually a recording machine.

That you can't tell if a and speaking of in speaking about selecting a mate and selecting a wife you were telling dirt myth that a fella can't identify someone who's gonna be a good mom wife no mom wife you're actually putting these words in my mouth no i just heard you saying this who's going to be a good mom. Wife. No, mom. You're actually putting these words in my mouth? No, I just heard you saying this. You're talking about this morning over oatmeal? No, not last night.

This morning. Right now. Okay, go ahead. You were saying that it somehow is like when you get married to someone and then you have a child with them, that it's a complete unknown whether or not they're going to be a good mom or not. There's no way to anticipate their mom-ness.

No, that wasn't me. Yes, it was, dude. No. Well, you're embarrassing me now. Someone else here in the group might have been saying that. No, it was you, and I thought how odd it was because that does not jibe with the normal kind of things you say about these issues. I was the one that made the point we were talking about marriage because dirt. I can't believe he's not sitting in on this.

Because there's no, there's no, don't talk about this because you're going to, because there's no, nothing. Nothing's good against the come of it. No, we were giving marriage advice. No, we were giving marriage advice. Yeah, we were giving marriage advice. And I was just saying how. Which he didn't want. How I feel like that. I think he did.

That the commitment, the trust and the commitment is more important than being swept off your feet and the whole love thing. Oh. That was this morning's conversation. That was. That was not what you just said a minute ago, but that was a different conversation than we had the last night. This morning. This morning. Kids was not what you just said a minute ago, but that was a different conversation than we had last night. This morning.

This morning. Kids was just discussing basically the same thing. Okay, but like I'm saying, I do not. I'm sorry. I mean, I could be just high from sagebrush, but I don't remember saying this thing about the mom, knowing if someone could be a good mom. Yeah.

I do. I have come to think, and i don't want to talk you know this isn't a i don't want to talk about love advice um but i have come i have come to realize that you know now i've been alive so long and married so long that i've been to a lot of weddings and i've been a lot of weddings where i hear all about uh people who are like oh we're just so in love or more in love than anyone else has ever been in love and you wouldn't understand this is like such a special love we have you know we're so in love we need a special yeah preacher because our love because this is so you wouldn't get it right i'm always like dude come talk to me when there's a couple babies come talk to me there's some youngsters running

around that house and i would love to hear how special it is because at some point and it's not all it is but there are days and times and weeks when it's just a bunch of work steve could i segue into one thing before we talk about sage grouse and hunting oh yeah why not now i mean we're on okay sky's the limit what you're talking about are those guys who post things on Facebook and said, you know, they state their anniversary, and I married my best friend, and it drives me crazy because if it's your best friend, you can tell them how good-looking that chick at the mall you saw was earlier in the day. And if you can't tell your wife that, she's not your best friend.

Ronnie, can I remind you of one quote of yours that has always been a favorite of mine? What's that? I don't even believe this. I just always liked it a lot. You said one time, you were talking about, this is not meant to offend anybody out there. You were somehow on a tirade about people who have their dad be their best man at their wedding. And Ronnie said, if your dad's your best friend, you don't have one. If your dad's your best friend, you don't have any fucking friends.

Unless you and your dad used to go out in the backyard. And you had a good relationship with your dad. Oh, absolutely. Great. But yeah, if your dad's your best friend, you don't have one. Because, I mean, my dad didn't camp in the backyard in a pup tent, you know, scared of booger men and stuff. No, he was sleeping in bed with mom.

Your best friend is, you know, but to an adult level of it, your best friend, you can tell them anything. Your wife can be the best partner in the world, but you can't tell her everything. Yeah. You cannot say, wow, look at the figure on that woman. You can tell your best friend that, though. In all relationships, out of respect, you practice some restraint. I'll now say things to my wife. She won't be annoyed.

She'll just be disinterested. And she'll say, I think that sort of thing is, I think, best left for the guys you work with. And I think this is a perfect segue. I don't need to hear that. Yeah. It's a perfect segue into hunting, social hunting. You hunt with your friends. Let's work.

Can we? If you hunt alone. I got a good segue. Okay. We got to come back around real quick because I feel like you left it off saying that I somehow said that you can't judge a girlfriend or fiance somehow you have an idea of what sort of mom and I'd like to clarify that I sure do believe that there's a lot of things I think that you can see from a from a person and judge their character and like being

a good mother is definitely one of those things when I had my first date with my wife now it was a four day long date so it wasn't like going out to dinner or something right like i was living in alaska and she was living she was living in new york right so when we agreed to go on a date we went and cruised up and down that we went up like by san bernardino santa monica and california and cruised around for a few days. So it was a date, but it was like a whole bunch of dates stacked end to end. But I go back up to Anchorage after my first date

and I said to, you know, we're sitting in my brother's, drinking beer in my brother's kitchen and I said to the guys there, I said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to marry her and my friend Matt Carlson

called bullshit on me he's like you are not you don't know what you're talking about so I said I'll make a bet with you man and I said I'll pick a date and I can't remember what it was it was like I'll be married I'll be engaged to her a year from today

and I'll be married to her two years from today and we bet $100 and we drew up a contract. I signed it. He signed it. My brother signed it as a witness. Two years later, I get a $100 bill in the mail along with the contract because I knew. I knew.

And part of that was I knew she'd be a very good mom and I'd be able to trust her with my children. Not just with them, but to have them. Yanni's so engaged by this. He's sending Morse code. He's sending Morse code with a flashlight. Here's a segue for you. Ed, will you describe?

You didn't introduce everybody, Steve. You forgot. No. All right. Because describe? You didn't introduce everybody, Steve. You forgot. No. All right. Because Ed's going to be talking a whole bunch. I'm going to do some introductions. There's the Lavie and the Eagle. He's all put back together again.

I recently, when Yanni messed his knee up, I wrote him off. I heard that. Yeah. But they fixed his knee, and he's back to normal now. Now he can't even keep up. I rode him off. I heard that. Yeah. They fixed his knee and he's back to normal now. Now he can't even keep up. It's so good. Ron Bame, lifelong friend. Hails from

Twin Lake, Michigan, but also kind of lives in Virginia. I do. Shenandoah Valley. Would you say that? Yep, Shenandoah Valley. Ron lives on a hilltop that he actually named Beer Mountain. Lives on Beer Mountain. If you send a mail and it says Beer Mountain, Virginia, it'll get to me.

Just use the right postal code, though. I don't actually have my own postal code. The postman will be like, I know what he's got to be talking about. Because the beer cans go all the way down the driveway to the mailbox. Brody Henderson. Brody, you want to say anything about yourself?

You haven't said a word yet. I know. I'm just listening. How long have you been married? You have a good wife, right? Actually, my 10th anniversary was about four days ago. Two children? Two children, two little boys, five, and one and a half or so.

Is your wife, do you feel like she's doing a good job as a mom? Oh, yeah. Did you sense she worked her ass off, too? Yeah. You had a good feeling? Yeah. So it wasn't like what Yanni was saying. See, I...

Then there's Ed. Ed Arnett from the biologist with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Is that how you like to put it, Ed? Sure. That works for me. TRCP. Ed, explain the biome that we're in right now. Am I using that word right? Yeah. Explain where we are right now.

So we are in southern Wyoming in what many know as the Sagebrush Sea. It's a landscape that is mostly dominated by sagebrush there's smatterings of aspen draws and and uh and meadows that uh that are scattered throughout but by and large this landscape is dominated by sagebrush and we're at about 7,400 feet. Yep. Above sea level. Yep. And Mark Twain described sagebrush as a monarch of the forest. I didn't know this until tonight, but Ed was telling me. A monarch of the forest, an exquisite miniature. Yep.

That's it. How old can a sagebrush plant be? Oh, they can be well over 100. And some of the stuff you were probably walking in today, and I was walking in today, was over 100 years old. But there's varied age classes. It surprised me that it can still be yanked out pretty easy. Yeah, it's pretty shallow soils.

I mean, you know, the soils are pretty shallow. That's what caused that. The root system is pretty shallow. I have a serious sagebrush question, not a silly one. Is there an altitude where sagebrush exists and quits existing or is it always up high

like we are? If you get down to the Great Plains, is it... It fades out in the Great Plains for sure. Is that an altitude thing or is it... It's probably an elevational issue. I can think of a lot of sagebrush below 3,000 feet. Yeah.

Oh, really? Kind of depends on where you're at. Oregon, for example. I've seen so little of it. It's not necessarily an altitude thing. Okay. Sagebrush makes up a large part of southeast Oregon, and it's not 7,000 feet. Okay.

And explain its role in the natural systems out here. Like, what all sort of uses the sagebrush sea? And before you do that, I'll say that at times you can walk through the sagebrush sea, and it can feel— Real empty. Yeah. And it's been referred to as the big empty too. Is that right?

Yep. Which is a false impression. Exactly. But it can seem that way. It seems like low and kind of monotonous. And you sort of miss the details because of the expansiveness. I think that's exactly right. When you spend time in the sagebrush sea, and especially when you were hunters who spend time looking and watching for lots of things, it's teeming with life.

There are 350 different species of plants and animals that depend on this particular ecosystem in one way, shape, or form. 350. 350. Plants and animals. But sage grouse are what we call obligates so they they have to have sage brush mule deer and other species don't necessarily have to have it they're associates but they strongly dependent on it i mean you've hunted plenty of plenty of mule deer and sage brush some call the sage brush see the big empty because as you said we can walk you can walk for miles and not see

anything but it's so vast that if you're not paying attention, you'll miss what's out there. And there are 350 plus species of plants and animals that are dependent on this ecosystem. Some of them are obligates. And an obligate is something that has to have that particular plant community. And sage-grouse are a good example of that. Others like mule deer deer which use all kinds of different you know plant communities they associate with uh sagebrush and they associate very closely with and it's very important for for mule deer but they're they're not what we

would consider a true obligate elk too there's elk out in this system right now but they're not obligate not obligates why like why does a sageouse, why is the obligate to sagebrush? That's how they evolved. They evolved in this particular community. But in its daily life, is it just that in its absence they go away, or does he rely on it in some absolute way? They rely on it. They eat exclusively sage grouse in the winter.

Jesus. Back that up and edit it out. They're not cannibalistic. No. They eat exclusively sage-grouse in the winter. Jesus. Back that up and edit it out. They're not cannibalistic. No. They eat exclusively sagebrush. They exclusively sagebrush in the wintertime, yeah. And in this time of year, they're still picking on insects and forbs, but they're starting to shift into sagebrush.

But they have evolved, and they don't have a gizzard. I think you knew that. So they eat forbs and insects. Quick question, Ed. Forb. Quick definition. Flower. Forbes of insects? Forbes. Quick definition. Flowering plant. Flowering plant.

Okay. Thank you. Not a grass or shrub. I was reading one time that a biologist was telling me one time, a fellow you probably know, I'm sure in your wanderings you've run into Robert Abernathy. Oh, yeah. I know Robert quite well. He was telling me one time that a turkey, that a turkey pult,

so when a turkey comes out of the egg, is eating, needs a lot of protein. Yep. And they're eating 75% animal matter. Yep. And sex. 25% plant matter and then with an adult Robert if you're listening and I'm messing this up

I'm sorry high proportion in their adulthood it's inverse about 75% plant matter 25% insect matter that's

and I didn't look up the, you know, the proportions for sage grouse before we sat down and talked. But definitely the chicks are eating a high proportion of insects and forbs, forb material. But that's basically what they eat is forb, sagebrush, and insects in a nutshell. And that's what, you know, they use this for nesting cover. They use it for wintering habitat. It's food. So they are truly obligates of this sagebrush ecosystem. And when it goes away in even small proportions,

the sage-grouse numbers decline precipitously, and it's very well documented in the science. Now, you know, you hear, like, I think the two little facts people hear about sage- grouse all the time is it has no gizzard. And it's the biggest grouse. Yep. Second largest game bird, second only to the turkey.

It's the biggest grouse. It's second only to the turkey? Yep, turkeys, people do consider them the game bird. Yeah, no, for sure. Second largest game bird, but it is definitely the largest grouse in North America. I don't. I'm not sure if there's a bigger one in Europe or not.

Caperkele's pretty damn big, man. I was going to say. It's a grouse, though, is it? Caperkele? Caperkele's. Is it a grouse? I don't know. I thought they were.

Anyway, it's a big damn bird. It's the biggest one in North America. You know in south america i hunted um with with indigenous peoples in south america i hunted uh curacao's you familiar with that bird no from your show i saw a black curacao crestless curacao and those things sit up in a tree and they're roost and hoot like a turkey. And you sneak in underneath them while they're hooting. And those boys don't wait for them to come down out of the tree. Yeah. They get under the tree and they try to skylight it.

It's not that different from the sooty grouse. No, not at all. Yeah. You know what? It's more close to that. Yeah. So, Yanni, cool up to now? I do have a question.

Lay in some groundwork. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What would be another albogut of the sagebrush community, another sagebrush albogut species? The sage thrasher and pygmy rabbits are alboguts of the sagebrush. A couple. What's the thrasher?

Snake? No, it's a songbird. Oh. What I referred to earlier today. It was reprimanded for. Sage sparrow. Actually, thrash and trash are not far off. Yeah, when we reprimanded you, you should have said.

Oh, no, you misheard me. You misheard me. I said it was a thrash bird, not a trash bird. We had Bravo went on point. We were many hours into hunting, and it was a solid point. And I finally got all excited. Cameras going in, and everything's cool. And these little birds fly out at a sage.

And I said, trash birds. And, yeah. My old man had the same thing. My old man believed that there was, you had all the game birds, which you damn sure knew what their name was. And then blue jays, which he despised because he loved the other

bird he knew, which was robins. And he knew that blue jays were going to kill a robin. So he didn't have any use for those. All other birds were classified as Tweety birds. Tweety birds. I've heard that, yeah. LBJs, little brown jobs. Yeah, and I got a friend who was a waterfowl biologist,

and he was talking about some of the guys he grew up around who, in their mind, there were two species of ducks. There were mallards and scrap ducks. That wasn't alcohol, was it? No, no, the buddy mind's buddies. Yeah, he said there's mallards and scrap ducks. You know, we always said in Louisiana, there's two kinds of wildlife. There's game and potential game.

Yeah. So, all right. So, sage-grouse. I want to just, like just set the mood here. How many sage-grouse? I'm sure there's going to be more. Obligate species to sagebrush. Sketch out their range.

Their historic range. Historically. What all sorts of areas, what kind of collections of states would you live in? Arizona all the way into three provinces of Canada. So the Great Plains. They're basically the Great Plains and into the Intermountain West and to the Great Basin. So California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada.

Used to be in Arizona, but not anymore. Nebraska was the furthest east extent. They're gone from two states, Nebraska and Arizona. Gone. Gone. Not there anymore. North Dakota is getting close. They're pretty tight, pretty small numbers.

They actually closed their hunting season, and we'll probably talk more about that later, about hunting and such. But North Dakota may have reinstituted theirs this year i didn't check before it came but i think they were talking about it i talked to the director but so that's kind of the eastern end right up to the great plains and then all the way into or into the sage step into the great basin so they go into so they're outside of the great plains to the oil in the great basin yeah yeah yep southeast oregon nevada the great plains begin roughly at like the 100th meridian and go westward to the Rockies. It's kind of like a thumb shape thing, actually.

In Texas Panhandle up into Canada. There's no state that's entirely Great Plains. Some people define it by rainfall. So like 14 inches, 14 or less precipitation. Yeah. There's no state entirely in the Great Plains. But then these birds jump over and go into the Great Basin. Yep.

And actually, there's a very large population there. An iconic Western bird. Yep. Absolutely. At the time of European contact, or however you want to define it, how many were there? Those estimates are like Buffalo, 60 million, you know.

Do you know where the 60 million estimate came from? I don't remember. I've heard this. You heard of Dodge City? Yeah. Okay. Colonel Dodge of Dodge City fame once saw a large herd of buffalo. He estimated the width of the herd. And the time it took to pass.

How much time it took to pass, which took correspondence with other individuals to figure out. Then he took a look at a map, figured out how many there must have been there, took a look at a map, and he's like, yeah, you know, I know the range of where they are and that was probably all the ones that lived in that area so by my calculations there were 60 million and that became the fashionable estimate for over a century and we've heard 16 million for and i can't remember where

it comes from but we've heard 16 million you know well before the turn of the century sage grouse say okay because nowadays the fashionable estimate nowadays the fashionable estimate for buffalo now is 32 million. Somebody perfected it to get it to 32. Yeah. So with sage-grouse, it's what? 16 million before European settlement. So not as many as buffalo. No, but it was millions of birds.

I mean, think about the range of buffalo i mean they range much further east than yeah sage grouse do so it's a range issue but you know there were a shit ton of sage grouse yeah and that has to be just a wild ass absolutely so now but now it's it's still hard to estimate them because we base the counts basically on the number of males that attend Lex. And then scientists. You can't just say that. You're right. I can't. Okay.

Bag up. It's based on the number of males that attend their breeding grounds, which are called Lex. L-E-K. So they, L-E-K. And so all the prairie grouse, sharptail grouse, lesser and greater prairie chickens, sage grouse, they all go to what are called blecks. And they're very high fidelity to that. They go to those year after year after year. It's like a little dance. It's where the boys go to pick up the girls. It's a sage grouse singles bar. So they dance and they puff

and they do all their things in the spring to attract females. Just describe the topography of a lek. It's actually very flat. It's different. It's quite different than what you're used to walking around for sagebrush hunting for grouse. It's usually a flat area where they can get out and display. They're quite vulnerable to predators when they're doing this, obviously.

Oh, I imagine like avian predators. Yeah, they come through and they're scattered. They're waiting for the sage-grouse hoedown every spring. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, don't think they haven't figured this out. You know, the raptors figure it out pretty fast. They kind of key in on it. Yeah.

How far will they travel to get to a lek? These birds use big landscapes, and they are quite capable of traveling long distances to a lek. I'm not sure on the statistics on that, but between seasonal ranges, they're well-documented at least 60 kilometers, 30 miles plus, from winter to summer range, those kinds of things. They can travel a long way, and there are actually further distances. I just haven't verified it. I talked to a friend of mine in montana he said they were moving 60 plus miles um so seasonally which really makes it complicated for some of the conservation stuff we're working on if you don't know where they're going all the time but back to the numbers so

biologists really are dependent on counting those males at these breeding grounds these breeding sites and then you're just using well known by now not all of them you don't you don't always find all of them so there's a detection bias and they move sometimes they may move quite a distance sometimes you know quarter half mile or more to a different site and for whatever reason but you know if a biologist doesn't know to go look or they're not doing aerial surveys they may miss so there's kind of a detection factor that's a real issue here you can find lecking birds from the air yeah yeah you can see them from there so um but most most people count they either you know they do the aerial surveys,

but then they'll also send in people to ground truth to make sure they're getting the right count. Gotcha. But what they do, basically, is... They have one month? When they go on the LAC? April is really the peak. Early April is the peak.

So, late March through, you know, probably about the second week of April or so. By late April, they're pretty much done. But, you know, like if you wanted to come back out, not very far from here, there's quite a number of leks all around here. You come out here in early April and you'd see males and females, but it's really quite a spectacle to see the boys doing their thing. But basically, the calculation is pretty rudimentary. It's pretty simple. It's really the best we've got right now. There's some people that are working on some pretty fancy modeling, but you take the number of males counted on Lex

and you take the proportion of females in the population. That's just based on when you guys kill your sage-grouse, and you will. You're going to deposit a wing in the wing barrel somewhere down the road, and the biologists use those wings to tell males from females that plus capture data that they have nesting data all these kinds of things with chicks and and the ones that radio marking all of this data is used to figure out proportions of males to females in the population that's a basic calculation you take the number of males and multiply it by the estimated number of females,

or multiply it by the proportion, and you figure out your total population. So of every male that comes out of an egg in the spring, at one year of age, the next April, all those males are going to lek. They're all going to go. Is lek a verb? They're going to try. But the big dominant males are... It's probably like jakes and gobblers. Yeah, exactly. The gobblers get in there and do it.

Only the dominant males are the ones that are going to breed. But you're counting them. If not, you'd have to factor in how many of those are out there. And there's a bias there as well. You're not counting them all. There's an observer bias, so you and I might see things very differently when we go to count a lek. I mean, we try

to reduce that, obviously, with the same observer, same lek, that kind of thing. Yeah, you'd have to make sure they had a good game eye. I know some people you'd put out there, and they'd come back and tell you there weren't anything. Exactly. And weather, too. You know, weather and those kinds of things really affect it. Do they leave the lek for the

actual breeding process? They'll breed in the vicinity they leave the lek for the actual breeding process? They'll breed in the vicinity and on the lek, yeah. And then the females leave. How far do they go to nest? Well, it depends on some of the states. Like Wyoming here, a friend of mine has documented that roughly 95% of the females nest within four miles of a lek, but that varies. It can be further.

So they're going long distances. And, you know, part of the reason, you know, we have to manage and conserve large landscapes is because they use big landscapes. We're talking townships, not sections. Yeah, gotcha. Now, do you know the word for what it is where, let's say a turkey, let's say a hen turkey is going to drop 10 eggs, 12 eggs. Or was it 8 eggs on average?

In the vicinity, right? Yeah, somewhere in there. Between 8 and 12. Are you familiar with, there's a term, maybe there is no term for it. But you know like a female turkey no term for it but you know like a female turkey a female turkey she's gonna lay eight to twelve eggs yep she needs to breed with that male she like breeds the male right then drops an egg breeds the male drops egg breeds the male drops the egg i mean she doesn't you know so she's only dropping one egg every day. Right. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. I don't believe that's the way it is with Sage Grouse.

When she flies, she needs to be bred, then she flies off, yeah. So she's got enough in her to do that. And I can't remember the term. But does she lay them all at once, or does she do that like one? Because with a turkey, she'll lay an egg every day and then synchronize the eggs because she won't incubate them until they're all down. Right. So they don't hatch over the span of eight to ten days.

Right, they're hatching very close at the same time. She heat sinks them, you know. Yep. No, i think all game birds practice that because it wouldn't make sense to leave four eggs in the in the nest and have four chicks running around you gotta take care of them absolutely not all right so there we are we got a leg feller goes out there counts them up you extrapolate from there based on some informed assumptions yep and you got what how many how many of these grouse do we got well a couple of years from there based on some informed assumptions. Yep. And you got what?

How many of these grouse do we got? Well, a couple of years ago when Ronnie and I were out here hunting, we figured there were somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 at that particular time. Now it's upwards of 400,000 plus because the numbers are up. We've seen a couple of increases in the last few years. They really started coordinating back in the mid fifties, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which is the professional association of the state wildlife agencies. So all the biologists get together and, and, um, they have working groups and, and, um,

you know, the, the Prairie Grouse group was, you know, coordinating this work for a long, long time. But the formal number starting point for lek counts is in 1965. Okay. And we've got a long-term trend between 1965 and now. Obviously, we've increased effort with the whole issue of the bird being potentially listed, petitioned, and considered for listing under the ESA. That increased the research effort dramatically. So when he says that, he means listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

But the Endangered Species Act, just when you're listed under the ESA, it doesn't necessarily mean you have endangered status, because you can be listed under the ESA with threatened status. As threatened, correct. Vulnerable. Yep. Threatened. Or what order does it go? It's threatened or endangered. Threatened, endangered, extinct.

So threatened is the classification that it has a high likelihood because of all the threats surrounding it of becoming endangered. Oh, okay. Endangered is they actually have a high likelihood of becoming extinct. That's the difference. Like genetically extinct. Gone. Gone.

Yeah. Gone. Sorry, I've lost my podcast etiquette. I forget. I can't throw all these terms around. Yeah. But I'll get you where you were because you were saying that people started counting them in 1965. Yeah.

There's been increased interest as we realized that something's happening with these birds. So we've increased the amount of effort and the monitoring, but the numbers go up and down. Game bird populations fluctuate dramatically. I mean, they can fluctuate 60, 70% in some years just because of drought conditions or other factors. Naturally. Naturally. So that's, you know, that's what makes a population estimate so hard because they do this, you know, I mean. And they're very short lived. And, well, sage grouse are a little longer lived than some other grouse. And we should talk about that a little bit as it relates to hunting.

But they're not like quail and pheasant. They're a little hardier. So like the majority don't die within the first year? A chunk of them certainly do, no question. But once they hit that first year of age, they have a good likelihood of living two to four years. And I think some males can live up, you know, I don't remember what the oldest is, but it wouldn't be uncommon to find a five-year-old bomber out here. Like a turkey. Yeah. So they're a lot hardier. They

have good overwinter survival. So, you know talking about the juvenile survival after a hard winter, your prairie grouse are oftentimes a little hardier, particularly sage grouse, compared to quail and pheasants and some of the other exotics that have been introduced, huns and chuckers and those kinds of critters. They're a lot hardier. But you look at a pheasant fawning to die. Exactly. Now, I've seen spots running in the woods, not hunting duskies, but been hunting elk or something, and you find like a fir tree, and underneath it, it's just littered with dusky grouse scat, right? I mean, just piles on top of piles on top of piles where it seems like

that bird spent the whole winter in that tree yeah probably a roost yeah right yeah which they kind of do that's what i've been told at least right they'll literally like pick a spot when the snow gets deep and they kind of hang out in one little zone in one tree right needles yeah so do these birds because we today hunting saw a couple areas where it was definitely like the poop was very concentrated do they do the same thing kind of have their little zone of sage and just they do they use these big landscapes but they use specific parts of that landscape and of course if we could figure that out every time we wouldn't we wouldn't be skunked sometimes when we go hunting.

But we don't know a lot about wintering habitat. You know, not that we're focused on winter here, but we're just starting to understand some things about wintering habitat. But once those, you know, they're going to have the nest. They're going to go away from the lek at some distance away from that and nest in that landscape and then when the brood hatches they're going to take them to you know bird rearing what we call bird rearing habitat and quite often that's brood rearing habitat yeah and that's where the moms are taking them to to get that high protein content well a lot of these wet meadows that are around here are very very important and that's why a lot of these wet meadows that are around here are very, very important. And that's why a lot of private lands are important because quite often, you know, the wet meadows are concentrated on private land because that's what was settled first. So these wet stringer meadows are vital to brood-rearing habitat. Winter habitat is a little different.

Obviously, these are going to be covered with snow and lots of snow. So that's totally different. It's going to be more on higher ridges, but it these are going to be covered with snow and lots of snow. So it's totally different. It's going to be more on higher ridges but it's still going to have sage brush. Places where they get wind swept. Exactly. Alright, so let me back you up a minute. Brody, you cool right now? Yeah. Nothing.

Everything you're wondering about has been taken care of. I have a question for Brody. Yeah. That sounds interesting. Brody, sage grouse in Colorado. I do, yeah. And we're kind of talking about Wyoming. Yep. Is it just that chunk of Wyoming that is close to Wyoming?

Colorado. I mean, is it a chunk of Colorado that's right on the border of Wyoming? There's two different areas of Colorado that hold sage grouse. So northwestern Colorado from just west of Steamboat Springs out towards Craig is a big chunk of habitat. Would it look like this kind of? Yeah, real similar, yeah. And then there's a smaller chunk of sage-grouse habitat in North Park near Walden, Colorado, which only has a two-day hunting season.

That's a smaller population. Good job, Brody. Yep. Thank you. Just talked away back there. All of a sudden, this Good job, Brody. Thank you. Talked way back there. All of a sudden, this rolls out some good info. Got anything else right now? I want to see you shoot one.

Ron, you cool right now? I'm just going to back Ed up to something one way. Are you going to back him up to the forward or are you going to just back him up? I'm going to back him up in time. I'm going to back him up in time in two ways. In time. This is a segue.

Kind of. You cool, Yannick? I'm cool. So here's what I didn't get. The numbers are like every, not like everything, but like a lot of things. The numbers are way down from our suppositions about what the situation might have been like at the time of European contact.

Right. Okay. But between, you said there became a concerted effort to sort of tally up sage grouse in 1965. Break down for me like what's kind of happened since 1965. Like what are the trends? I know you're saying it's hard because they go up and down by 50 percentage points. So the long-term trend, let me just say that a lot of people hang up on these numbers and they misinterpret them. And trends are very interesting, but when you see these wild

fluctuations, right now we're 63% higher. This past year, or wait a minute, last year was 63% higher, the 2015 counts, than relative to the 2013 counts. But the 2013 counts were the second lowest in history. Okay. Since 1965 to 2015. What was the first lowest? I can't remember. Way ago or was it the year before?

It was like 95, I think, or something like that. Because you know like every year the earth sets a new record for the hottest year? It's not like that. It was like the, okay. Yeah, it was like 95, I think. Something like that, mid-90s. And in fact, a little bit of history. Let me finish this up.

But a little bit of history. It all kind of really started in 95 when people really got concerned because that was mid-90s. That was one of the lowest points in record. But a lot of people have been saying, well, gosh, you know, we've got 63% more birds this year. That's proof positive that things are on the mend. Well, 63% is well within the range of what a bird can do, a game bird population can do naturally. And it has a good spring. Exactly.

And we've been having rain. You know, we've been getting rain since 2014, 2015, and we did pretty good this year. It's been dry lately, but we had a pretty good spring. And so the bird numbers are doing pretty well. Plus, we've been, you know, putting out all this conservation on the ground, you know, for sage grouse and trying to protect them and so it's all manifested into higher numbers but if we get a drought again they're going to drop regardless the key is is keeping them dropping so dramatically low and try and reduce the amplitude of that drop that would be the goal of conservation they're going to fluctuate but the deal is trying not to have them drop so freaking much.

Yeah, dangerously low. Exactly. In as much as I've followed this, I understand that when you look at the decline of sage-grouse, correct me where I'm wrong. I'm going to rattle off some things you hear. I do have one more statistic throughout you I forgot.

Please, please, go ahead. Because I meant to tell you, you talked about the long-term trend. The long-term trend from 1965, even with all these ups and downs, that's where I was going with the crescendo here, the long-term overall trend is 0.8% decline every year. So what that means is we're still on a negative trend over that period. 0.8% every year? Yep.

That's what the current. Over the course of 50 years? Yep. Since 65. Yep. Is that? Yeah. That's damn near 50 years.

So basically it results in an annual decline of about 0.8% per year, and it's still on the decline. So we need to stabilize that as well. Okay, that's what I'm getting at. Why is that? And I'll tell you what the things I always hear. No, I'm not even going to – there's no point for me telling you what I always hear. Why is that?

And I know you don't know absolutely, but why the 0.8%? Well, habitat loss primarily. Sagebrush loss. Yeah, we've lost 50%. We started out a while back talking about the range. We've lost them in a couple of states. They're dramatically reduced in others. They're in 11 states and a couple of provinces now,

but they're in dangerously low numbers in Alberta and other parts of Canada and some of the states. We kind of happen to be in the capital of the sage-grouse right now, right? Wyoming has the largest population. I believe Idaho is next, then Nevada, then Oregon. So Colorado actually only has 4% of the birds, but they've got spectacular habitat in northwest Colorado, as Brody said. And North Park's still pretty good, too. But it's been habitat loss. We've lost 50% of the range.

And I don't remember when the calculation started, but somewhere around 2000 or so, people started looking at this stuff real serious. And they figure about 50% of the range is gone. We've lost 50% of our uninterrupted sagebrush habitat. Has the downward trend of mule deer populations mimicked that? It tracks it interestingly close at times. Yeah. Because mule deer are, again, not truly obligates, but they are really dependent on sagebrush.

Exactly. Shrinking winter range. Yep. You know what's interesting I heard one time, and I think you could probably draw a parallel here. Someone was talking about the notion of predator swamping. When you have a population of, any kind of population, when they synchronize their reproduction so that all the young are born. Synchronized. Yep.

That it puts so much food on the ground all at once that you're going to have some of those animals wind up getting out of infancy safely. Because there's just not enough predators to get them all at one time. If you staggered it out over the course of a month, it might be a different story. But it's like, bam, there they all are. There they all are. You can't get them.

And what they're pointing to is certain species of birds that will form these big nesting conglomerations. And the predators just work on the edges. Kind of like snow geese up in Alaska. That's a good example. The predators work on the edges, Kind of like snow geese up in Alaska. That's a good example. The predators work on the edges, and they never get to the core. Right. And what this thing was is once you start to break those groups up,

you increase the edges, and you wind up seeing strange things happen. And what this kind of alludes to is how all the passenger pigeons we used to have how they went so precipitously into extinction when it wasn't like why was there a long evening period when there was just some why did it have to be there's millions and then none or none it was like because somehow having any like having any relied on there being millions. Yeah. And then you broke that, something fractured, and there was no middle ground for the species.

Right. Market hunting was a good example for her. Yeah. It was like, bam. Buffalo saved her. Yeah, you get them to a point, and they just systematically collapse. But sage-grouse have an autumn. Oh, I don't know what I was going to get at with that.

It doesn't mean necessarily that we've lost 50% of our sagebrush plants. We've lost 50% of our big open expanses of sagebrush that aren't interrupted by development, right? Right. Yeah. 50% of the original range has been completely lost to either cropland development, urbanization, other energy type development, whatever. It's been just fire, but it's been just lost. So it's gone.

Now, after fire, it will come but it takes it takes decades for some of these fires to restore it's amazing how long it takes sagebrush to come back well you know steve when you talk about forest like we talked earlier when you talked about the passenger pigeon you know they they nested in the hardwood forest in northern michigan so predominantly and i mean you wonder if the sage grouse is there there's a bird that's just, I don't want to say doomed, but like, it's going to, no matter what we do, could it just eventually go away? You know what I mean? It's like, it depends, like you say, big country, big area. And when that reduces, it sounds like it could almost be like a passenger pigeon thing

without market hunting. I think with the conservation efforts that are underway now, and we probably need to talk a little bit about that because things have changed dramatically since the mid-2000s or so. I'm optimistic. However, we're still chunking away. 0.8%. It remains to be seen.

It's kind of a big test right now as to whether all these conservation efforts are going to work over time. What problems are the conservation efforts trying to address? Well, basically, in the eastern part of the range of the greater sage-grouse, energy development, which would be the intermountain west and where we're sitting right now, energy development, infrastructure development, wind energy, oil and gas development, urbanization, all of those kinds of things are major threats. We've also had West Nile virus issues in this area. But in the West, you know, in the Great Basin, Idaho, Nevada, southern Oregon,

fire and cheatgrass are a real bad combination because you've got these massive fires that burn really hot, and then it takes decades for that stuff to come back. Because there's too much litter built up. Exactly, and that cheatgrass is a real flashy fuel. It's an annual, and it's a real problem. And also conifer encroachment with juniper encroachment on sagebrush habitats, and there's a big effort underway, particularly in the Great Basin, conifer encroachment with juniper encroachment on sagebrush habitats.

And there's a big effort underway, particularly in the Great Basin, but other parts of the country as well, Utah and other states as well, where they're really going after eradicating juniper, which is good for deer. It's good for livestock production. It's good for sage grouse. And one rancher in Idaho, or not Idaho, in Oregon coined the phrase, what's good for the bird is good for the herd. Because basically, you cut these trees out, maybe even change your grazing practice a little bit. It's good for the livestock.

It's good for sage grouse. Very compatible. But those are kind of the major threats. Okay. Now explain how it came to be that a year ago, everyone was on the edge of their seats about- Us included. About whether or not they were going to get listed as a threatened species, as a federally protected species under the Endangered Species Act. Okay. So as quick as I can, I'll give you the timeline.

So I said in the mid-'90s, biologists— now, a lot of people think, you know, like the serial litigant environmental groups were the ones that originally thought about this issue of sage-grouse populations. It was the biologists within this Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies group that became deeply concerned in about 1994 because that was, again, one of the lowest, I think that was the lowest number of lek counts in the history since they've been counting them. They actually considered petitioning to list. They decided at that point in time. Fish and game agencies.

Fish and game agencies. And they decided it didn't meet all the criteria for listing at that time. A few years go along, we're still chunking away habitat. You know, there was some litigation. Basically, another petition was filed. And there was a petition to list the bird. And in 2005, and again, because of habitat loss and declining populations, in 2005, it was considered not warranted for listing. However, there was more litigation. seemingly the judge was convinced that there were issues with the science and and more data were coming in during these lawsuits and they said and the court said basically you have to go back and revisit that 2005 decision that decision had to be rendered in 2010 and in 2010 the bird was in fact considered warranted for protections under the ESA but precluded and what that means is basically they do warrant protections under the Endangered Species

Act but but the Fish and Wildlife Service has you know hundreds of species they're dealing with there were others that had higher priority okay so it there was another bit of litigation and basically the court ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to make a decision by September 30th, 2015. That's how that all manifested. And in the interim between 2005 and the 2015 decision, an awful lot happened. But their decision would be continually informed by whatever's going on. The decision wasn't going to be based upon 2005 stuff. No, not at all. New stuff coming in.

And between 2000, you know, in the era of 2000 to 2010, there was a lot of oil and gas development. There were a lot of big fires. There were a lot of things that were threatened. There were West Nile virus outbreaks. There was new science coming out showing that crop conversion in Montana, for example, if you just converted a small percentage into cropland, you saw big drops in sage-grouse. So we're starting to really understand the landscape relationships and the loss of the habitat. So that was all informing this.

And, you know, the service was ordered by the court. Indeed, they were ordered to make a decision by 2015. But that kind of had to happen because nothing was happening. I mean, I wouldn't say nothing was happening. I apologize to my friends that have been working on this forever because they'll kill me for saying that. But a lot of things had been happening, but not enough was happening to thwart off a listing. And when that listing decision was set in stone in 2015, people started scrambling, trying to figure out what to do. The states that hadn't put plans together, all of a sudden were starting to try to figure out how they were going

to put their plan together. They had strategies. They were dealing with sage grouse. All these states have been working with sage grouse for decades. But it puts emergency into actually getting meaningful, strong conservation plans and measures and a bunch of private land efforts that started happening in about 2010. All of that really started because of that 2010 warranted but precluded and then the listing deadline. And, you know, the Natural Resource Conservation Service's sage-grouse initiative was spawned in 2010. And they put almost a half a billion dollars into that. I mean, we don't see a half a billion dollars floating into very many conservation issues on private land. So it's been historic. And the states put all their plans together. Wyoming led the way. They started in 2008. They saw the writing on the wall and Governor Dave

Friedenthal, then Governor Dave Friedenthal, and now Governor Meade, who you've spoken with a number of times on this issue. You know, they took the bull by the horns and leadership from the state's perspective and put a pretty good plan together. Other states have put their plans together, but some are, they're all varied. Some are better than others, but the federal plans are now in place. And these are land and resource management plans developed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service for the sagebrush ecosystem driven by sage grouse. But it's really a new way of doing business in this ecosystem it doesn't shut off oil and gas it doesn't shut off grazing and all these kinds of things that people are saying in some areas it does but it tries to reduce that disturbance which is so detrimental to grouse but how do they know

so if in 2015 they came out and okay, everybody's got a good plan. Listing is not warranted. But you're also telling me that the 0.8% decline is still happening annually. And the plans haven't all been implemented. So it was speculative. It's speculative. And it's a policy that came in, I believe, in the mid-2000s. A colleague of mine, Steve Williams, was the architect of this, and he was then director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, and it's called the Peace Policy. It's a policy for evaluation of conservation efforts, and basically it gives

the Fish and Wildlife Service the ability to consider things that will happen. But they have to have assurances that they will be implemented, and they have to have some level of appreciation and understanding that they'll be effective. So when Wyoming put a plan together, and you hear often that Wyoming put a good plan together and was aggressive about it. Is that fair? Yeah. What was the plan? I mean, if you had to just very quickly give a synopsis of what the plan would be. Yeah, so the main nuts and bolts of it is it basically allows a maximum amount of disturbance in a landscape surrounding Lex, which is about four miles around Lex

because of the data showing that the vast majority of females nest within a four-mile radius of a lek. So basically buffering those and allowing a certain amount of disturbance that's backed by, at least for now, we think it's backed by, at the time it was backed by the best science available, so it allows a certain amount of disturbance, which equates to basically one well pad and an associated road and infrastructure per section of land. So imagine thinking about a section and having one well pad and a road going into it. That's it.

Okay. Across the landscape. That's the max. And Wyoming's done a pretty good job of denying- And they always rely on enhanced drilling techniques, too, that you just have to go on a well pad and get- And that's the other ticket, Steve, because it's a very good point because at the time when coal bed methane was being developed in Northeast Wyoming and out in the Jonah

Field in some of the country where you did the beaver trapping work and the episode there in the Jonah Field, that was downhill drilling. And, I mean, you could look over at the truck and there'd be another from here to 30 yards away and there'd be a well pad. The spacing was ridiculously close. But now, you know, the spacing is much, much further. The horizontal drilling, you can put multiple, you know, wells on one pad and go out in different directions and get the resource without the disturbance.

So it's changed dramatically. And I don't remember the exact statistics, but I want to say that it basically, downhole drilling has been virtually eliminated with the horizontal drilling. So it's really helped. So technology helped reduce the footprint of extraction. It certainly has. Can you say, are you comfortable saying, like, name a state that has a bad plan or doesn't want to play ball? Or are you not comfortable doing that?

Well, I'll just say that the state plans fall on a gradient. And some of them are based on voluntary mitigation programs. And that's kind of it. And others are like Wyoming, where they have, you know, pretty strong statutorial assurances, and, you know, they have the executive orders from the governor, those kinds of things that really, and they're committing to doing it, and they're doing it.

So they fall along a range of gradients. Most of them, you know, there's a couple of pretty good ones, ones and some in the middle and some that are dependent, I would say, on the federal plans being in place. And that's kind of a big argument right now because some in Congress are trying to basically say that the federal government should use state plans on federal ownership. And there's all kinds of problems with that, starting with hundreds of years of statutes of public lands and having states manage public lands. But again, some of those state plans just simply could not, they couldn't address all of the threats.

I mean, fire is a really good example because firefighting costs are astronomical, as most of the threats. I mean, fire is a really good example because, you know, firefighting costs are astronomical, as most of us know. And, you know, a given state couldn't probably deal with handling those threats on their own. You know, they're dependent on federal partners and private partners too. So one of the things the Department of Interior did was, you know, with the states was develop this coordinated firefighting and an invasive weed plan as well. But the firefighting plan seems to be working. And there's just more coordination now between counties, states, federal agencies, and private, you know, landowners on firefighting than there ever was in the history of wildlife conservation. And quite frankly, you know, in my history as a biologist in my career,

I've never seen anything quite like this. I mean, we've never really seen anything like this since Theodore Roosevelt's days. And when we had to do something or we were going to lose buffalo, elk, mule deer, pronghorn, all these species that were just that close to becoming extinct because of market hunting and habitat loss. Do you think that we were, like, were we, did we come as close to losing elk? We damn sure came as close to losing bighorns as we are right now. But did we come as close to losing elk as we are right now of sage-grouse? No, I don't think so. We came closer to losing turkeys we are right now of sage grouse no i don't think so we came closer with

turk we came closer to losing turkeys probably closer with turkeys but yeah i mean sage grouse were on the verge and i think so i think the urgency well it's like you said earlier you know some of these populations there's a tipping point every population has a tipping point and they just spiral out of control now i've heard one grouse biologist say once they get below 100,000, they just spiral. Atwater's Prairie Chicken's a really good example. There's a handful hanging on in Texas, but they're never going to come back, probably. Ed, can you talk about the Gunnison subspecies? A little bit. I haven't worked on them as much, but it's a subspecies of sage-grouse. And they are endangered, correct?

They're threatened. So they're managed differently than these birds are. Correct. They now are managed by the federal government, basically. But they're working on that. They're going to work on, I think, what led to that decision is now being addressed, and the service is working very hard to work with the state of Colorado and Utah to get that decision, to bring that population to a point where they can take it off the list. There's one core population in Gunnison County with a solid number of birds, and then there's one core population in Gunnison County with a solid number of birds,

and then there's a bunch of satellite populations. And the satellite populations became an issue for the service, and some of them were pretty close to blinking out, and there's 50, 100 birds. And, you know, when I talked to my state colleagues, you know, a lot of them felt that some of those, that just there was nothing more that could be done. I mean, they've got easements. They've got all the protections they could possibly do. But they're working together.

The birds aren't reproducing. They're reproducing. It's just at that particular juncture, the service felt like they had to go ahead and list the bird. Can I get a question in about the sage rate? Is there any relocation of sage else being done a little bit do you know of a little bit um that's that's fairly controversial well that's because the source populations aren't strongly supported well i think some and it's not

biologists necessarily that are stirring up the controversy i think some state legislators wonder why we're moving our birds to somewhere else when we when we have to know, have impacts on oil and gas industry and wind industry and others. And now we're shipping our birds to Canada or somewhere else. That's a little bit of the controversy. But it's been done. And, you know, I had a comment on the blog post I just had recently on captive rearing. Now, I can assure you captive rearing is the only reason we still have black-footed ferrets. I guarantee.

I went to grad school with the guys that went out and caught some of those original ones and worked on some of the ferret work. We would not have black-footed ferrets in this country or condors, for that matter, without a captive breeding program. But they know for a fact it didn't work with turkeys. Yeah, and I don't think it would work with sage-grouse. Kind of what I wrote to the individual was we weren't at that point. But even if we got to that point, I'm not convinced it would work with sage grouse and kind of what i wrote the individual was we weren't at that point but even if we got to that point i'm not convinced it would work it's never been done with with game birds like that so although you could probably argue you know with the exotics that are here there's some some precedent for that but they essentially do it with pheasants but it doesn't actually work exactly like if you didn't establish long-term populations continually

stock pheasants you wouldn't i mean you'd never have them no exactly it's like basically like it's basically like a farm animal that you hunt for exactly so i don't i don't think it would work for sage grouse so so okay so where we're at now is the u.s fish Service says, okay, sounds like everybody's ready to play ball. You guys have some good plans put together. We trust that you're going to pursue these plans. If you had to rate the adoption and enforcement of the plan on a 1 to 10 national average, where are we? As far as people being like, I'm doing the plan.

Look, I already started. It's kicking ass. I'm going to put my professor hat on because I never get perfect scores by any stretch, but I'm not going to give an average either. I'm going to give it a 7. And the reason I give it that is it was an extraordinary... Don't give 10s. Not very often. But I want

it to get to a 10. I want implementation to get to a 10. Is that a 7? Well, I think right now it's just beginning. Are some states 9s and some states 2s? Yeah, I think so. You said overall, so I gave you the 7. But I think some are just getting started. And the BLM is really just getting started. They've been, they just released instruction memorandums to the field offices. And all that is for everybody out there is guidance to the field offices on what they're supposed to be doing on implementing sage grouse conservation and these plans. And so they've been implementing some things, but they're just getting started. And I think, you know, and we've got a little bit of a hammer, the ESA kind of

hanging over everyone's head and it's called the five-year review. So they're going to review this in 2020. That was my next question. Yep. And what the service is looking for, I, you know, there's a short document I'll send you. You'll find it intriguing because they are looking for exactly what we've been talking about, implementation. Did you implement the plans the way you said you would? Did you address the threats? Why would they care about anything but where the numbers are? They're concerned about the numbers too. I mean, they definitely are going to look at the numbers. But if everyone implements their plans and it has no effect, well, at that point, they might be, what are are going to look at the numbers but if everybody implements their plans and it has no effect well at that point they might be

what are we going to do if we list them yeah yeah well that'll be an interesting uh challenge for us if all this actually gets implemented and the numbers still continue to decline then we're going to have to readjust it's just going to get real we're going to have to readjust yeah we're talking passenger pigeon so or you know you're probably talking ESA. They may list the bird if the numbers are not responding. Again, keeping in mind they fluctuate, you know, within a wide range as game bird populations do. But I'm pretty optimistic. I see what you're saying because you could have a five-year stretch of just like perfect weather conditions.

Yep. But then the core problems have never been addressed you might still be like yeah we've got some good birds because it's been wet but meanwhile we've seen sage sage brush habitat sage grouse habitat continue to plummet yep once we get a five-year drought the birds are cooked and that's exactly it because when we have that drought, and I guarantee you we will, and oil prices are going to go back up and there's going to be more demands for resources on these public lands, then we're going to really test conservation. Then we're really going to see how it works. Because we got, in my opinion, Steve, we got lucky. Because in 2014, the rains came back. If we had had stayed in drought that's part of the reason the birds plummeted like they did prairie chickens plummeted i mean ronnie we had i mean you know

across our bird hunting range and all the birds that we hunt quail was phenomenally quail really took it hard in those droughty years as they always do and had those rains not come back, I'm convinced that the service probably would have listed the bird because the numbers would have been even lower and kept going down. In 2014 and 15, we got lucky in there on an uptick. It gave us a breather to finish the plans and now get them implemented. So, yeah, exactly. To your point, now we've got to deal with the core of the issues, and that's what the plans are going to hopefully address.

One thing I found interesting looking at what kills sage-grouse, that they fly low and they crash into fences. Yeah. Occasionally they do. How significant is that? You know. Because there's a lot of talk of going and marking fences, lowering fence heights. Yeah.

They definitely kill some birds, but it's not a major threat. Neither is hunting. I mean, you know, hunting has never been identified as a major threat by the Fish and Wildlife Service or any of the state agencies. But certainly the individuals that get shot or hit a wire, they're out of the population. How long is the list of major threats? Well, you know, again, it's mostly about habitat loss and disturbance. So, you know, it's pretty short. I mean, it's a long list of things that kill sage-grouse and cause problems, but the major, major threats are really pretty short. Why do some states continue to allow

sage-grouse hunting? Well, in part because, and I just preface that by saying the state wildlife agencies have really done a very good job of managing hunters and bag limits and seasons. I mean, sportsmen have sacrificed, I'll say, and maybe that's not the right word, but we have certainly contributed by loss of opportunity. And that's exactly what the state should do when populations are low. They should manage hunter numbers and or season and bag limits. In Oregon, it's been a two-bird permit system for as long as I can remember. I moved there in 1990 and it's still that way. Like on turkeys, you get a tag. Exactly. It's a trophy tag. You get two birds a year, and that's it. And it's been that way forever, regardless of whether

the numbers are up or down. That's just the way they do it. But they may issue more permits, see, in the years when they're up. What do the states feel that they're gaining? Okay, they're losing some number of birds that are being mechanically removed. Like, there's not a habitat destruction. There's not a significant disturbance, right? They're not affecting chick survival and mortality. Right. So, I see that, but, like, when a state weighs out, okay, we're going to lose some birds, but we're going to gain some what?

By having a hunting season. They gain advocates and they gain support and they provide opportunity for the sports and which are their customers basically. And again, in Montana, a recent article I read in Montana, I think 1300 birds have been radio marked over about a 16 year period. Nine of them were hunter harvested birdsvested birds. So they used those statistics to determine that hunting mortality is— Like a mark and recapture. Well, it's just radio-marked birds that were turned in and cause of mortality determined. Nine of those were hunter-harvest. And how many did they have?

1,300. So 1,300 birds. It's just a fraction and nine got killed by hunters so that's one study now it's going to vary from area to area obviously this area that you know we have a good barometer though well depends on how much how long the hunt season yeah exactly so wyoming used to have i think when i was going to grad school here in the 80s, it was a 30-day hunting season, three-day bag limit. And I shot any number of sage grouse in that month period. And it may have been longer. Montana, I think, was at least two months.

And it might have been a little longer. But again, the states have responded. So they have contracted season lengths. We've been at two weeks and two birds a day here in Wyoming for a while. I think in 12 it was one week and two birds, four in possession. So they've adjusted those harvest rates accordingly, and they've actually closed seasons. You know, the northeast part of Wyoming used to have strong populations of sage-grouse.

It's closed now. Yeah. What are you saying? You can hunt two days? That's North Park, so near Walden. Wyoming used to have strong populations of sage grass. It's closed now. Are you saying you can hunt two days? That's North Park, so near Walden. Just a few game management units around Walden, Colorado. Did you ever go hit the two-day season? I did last year. Did you find any birds? I did. Hey folks, exciting news

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. It's a thing I've been curious about for a long time, and I think about it all the time, is this idea of gaining advocacy. I recently had occasion to have a conversation with a professor who teaches animal ethics, and he's an animal rights advocate. He's pretty true to form. I mean, he has a very strict vegan lifestyle. You can't point to this dude, and there's not a lot of hypocrisies right like he he has a set of beliefs he can defend them and he lives them you know he's not your like

anti-hunter who like buys chickens and shit at the store yeah i just can't even have that i have a conversation there but this guy was fascinating and very bright. And we were having this conversation, and I was trying to explain to him hunting conservation, like hunter conservationists. And I was just, you know, as a case in point, I just brought up, I believe the situation I sketched out for him was I was mentioning work done by Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. With how many, you know, the hundreds of thousands of acres they've helped protect and set aside.

All the work they've done on habitat improvements, all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, the money comes from dudes who like to hunt elk. And these dudes who like to hunt elk like hunting elk so much that they go to these banquets and whatnot and start, have a couple drinks or whatever and start giving away money or they sit at home and just like write checks. Yep. They're like, I like to hunt elk. Therefore I will spend a bunch of money to not only help elk, but I'll spend a bunch of money to help elk habitat and increase elk habitat. And he was saying, Matt, I saw a ripping shooting star over there. He was saying,

it's a shame that it takes that. And I'm like, yeah, but you just have to open, you have to be a pragmatic individual. He's like, why can't they give all that money and not go hunting? I'm like, because they, if they didn't go hunting, they wouldn't have even been aware of the problem and went and gave the money. Yeah. You don't give the money first it's like you know like it took me until i was in my mid-30s to get serious about conservation yeah right and like spending on conversation because it's like you go hunt ducks first then you say i want more ducks and better conservation oh i don't know i don't know why it works that way but no one who's ever seen a duck or an elk or a sage grouse, it's just like, I'm sorry.

But generally, those people are not going to be like, man, we need to do something about sagebrush. And he's like, well, it's just too bad that that's the case. I'm like, you know what? It's too bad that all kinds of shit is all kinds of ways. But at a point, you just have to kind of open up your mind to the fact that that's,'s frankly that's how it works well the next series of questions is do you like open natural spaces yeah sure i love the open natural space well what do you pay

you know what what do you pay into wildlife conservation a lot of those folks don't want to give money like i always tell people buy a duck stamp or buy a hunting license you don't have to go just buy it it goes to the game and fish and they use that for habitat conservation all kinds don't want to give money. I always tell people, buy a duck stamp or buy a hunting license. You don't have to go. Just buy it. It goes to the game and fish, and they use that for habitat conservation, all kinds of things. Matter of fact, it's a fix. For all you folks that don't hunt at all

and then don't spend diddly on wildlife conservation, go buy a duck stamp because, what, 90-some percent goes to habitat. Buy a wetland habitat, exactly, which is hundreds of species. We'll see how many non-hunters are going to run out and buy a duck stamp. Well, part of their philosophy there is that, well, no, it goes to hunting. It goes toward hunting and hunter management. So philosophically, they struggle with that. But we have been trying to crack that damn nut since I've been in the profession and forever.

How do you tax the non-consumptive user and get them excited about things? We can't get people excited about sage-grouse. Most sportsmen, you say, hey, you know, we've got to work on this sage-grouse thing. It doesn't resonate. What resonates is the sagebrush ecosystem, the fact that this is home to the kinds of critters that you like, pronghorn, elk, mule deer, those kinds of things, and sage-grouse. Oh, and by the way, sage-grouse. That gets them excited.

Then you start putting the big picture together, and I think really, those kinds of things, and sage-grouse. Oh, and by the way, sage-grouse. That gets them excited. Then you start putting the big picture together, and I think really, you know, people, they don't see the big picture. They can't see the forest or the trees. And there was a time when sage-grouse weren't exactly viewed as a premier game bird, you know, several decades ago. Right. I've heard so many people say, oh, they're terrible to eat, you know. That drives me crazy.

But, you know, people didn't even chase them hardly back in the day. Yeah, but I mean, that kind of thing. People said about everything. Yeah. Pronghorn. Everything they say about. Anything that eats sage. Yep. So, alright. Look into your crystal ball.

Matter of fact, we should do a time capsule capsule brody has a shovel in his truck we'll make a time capsule we'll bury it right here and we'll come dig it up in uh in five years what are they what what's the what's the service gonna say the federal you know the uf fish and Service is going to take a gander. And don't give me some, like, optimistic BS. Or don't give me pessimistic BS. Give me the straight dope. The straight dope. Like, if you actually had to get it right.

You had your time capsule had to be right. We're going to get it right on Sage Grouse. to be right. We're going to get it right on Sage Grouse and they'll come to a not warranted. I want you to be telling me the truth, but I don't want you to be doing like your job right now. I can't help but be optimistic,

but... No, I think they'll come to a not warranted. In five years. Yeah, they'll continue with the not warranted decision. So pray for rain. I think, pray for rain. But again, the true test of these conservation plans, you know,

and again, it's all predicated on them getting implemented. Right now, you know, the work of putting all of this planning together in the science is done. Now they just got to get it on the ground. They do the work. And the private landowners are way ahead of the game. They are doing the work. Is that right? They are.

They're doing the work, man. They are putting a lot of money into it and a lot of good very proactive conservation ranchers just just good ranchers just good people they know they know how to manage their land not everybody does but the good ones are doing it right just right over the hill here is my friend that uh was in that article oh yeah he's right over there that's an interesting guy great Great guy. Doing good things. And I think we'll get there in 2020. But there's not a lot of room to screw up. There's not a lot of room to screw up because I don't know when oil is going to hit again. I don't know when the next boom for something on our extractive resources in our public lands is going to hit hard.

It hasn't grown to a stop, but it's slowed way down. It's slowed way down, and it gave us a breather. You know, again, if we'd had $80 barrel oil in a drought, I don't know how the service wouldn't have. I'll give you a comparison. Lesser prairie chickens were listed in May of 2014. They were contemplated and petitioned for listing in 1995. So this isn't just sage grouse. This has been happening around the country, you know, with various game bird populations. Lesser prairie chickens were really declining. And finally, in 2014, they decided to list them. In the previous two years, now mind

you, there were, I think, an estimated 120,000 lesser prairie chickens, I think at 95 when they were contemplating this. In 2012, I believe it was below 100,000 and the population halved twice based on let counts and these crude population estimates. They halved in the two years they were trying to make the decision. How do you not list the bird? They're estimated at 17,000 birds. Where are they now? They're on the uptick because of the rain and conservation.

So they're on the uptick. I don't know where they're sitting right now. But the range-wide population goal is now 67,000. I thought the number was too low. I mean, it's half of what they were when they originally were petitioned. But it's, you know, it's still double what the birds were a couple of years ago. So they've come up, but, you know, drought will hit that region again too. So my point is, is the true test of these conservation plans is in the making.

And I'll tell you the wild card in our crystal ball jumping ahead in our time machine is fire. You can have a 200,000 acre fire and nothing flat in some of this country. And if it's not taken care of, it'll take care of me if it's not put out. You can burn a lot of acres pretty fast. But that's a whole other conversation I want to have because you're perpetuating a problem you've already created.

This stuff used to burn. All the time. Yeah. In a not severe way. Yep. So now we've prolonged it where we have tinder boxes. And now we're in a situation where we have to keep doing the screw up to make up for the bigger screw up yep it's not a bad point it's a good point i mean the cheatgrass is really perpetuated in the great

basin you know that's that's really really created an untenable situation for those guys and it's hard they're they're making some advances on how to address cheatgrass, but, man, that's a big problem. My brother, both my brothers are ecologists. One of them has always worked on these plant ecosystems, arid land, you know, rangeland ecosystems, and has done a lot of work on cheatgrass. And right now, he's focused almost exclusively on uh shrub regeneration getting sage brush and other shrubs to come back on degraded landscapes or disturb landscapes is that in montana he does he does work all over the west but yeah he's in he's based in montana and a lot of stuff's like coal mine like when you do open you know open surface coal mines yep part of the remediation process you know at a time

you could get away with just being like oh you know we put it up in grass yeah now you're like no it needs to be you know it's more of the mind frame of no it needs to be kind of back to like what it was but it's very difficult to do yeah do. He spends a lot of time working on that. And it takes a lot of time. And he talks about the sage grouse issue has had an impact on his work because it's affected where money flows. Yeah, absolutely. They're pumping tons of money into it. Is he getting some of that?

Yeah. I mean, I always hesitate because the things he works on are you know there's you know it's nuanced and sensitive and i don't know but what does he say about she was here what does he say about reclamation time it takes decades in a lot of cases but i don't you have to i'll put you in touch i'm just curious'm just curious. I'm just curious. Yeah, I'm not a restoration ecologist. He recently had some sort of epiphany, right? He had the most groundbreaking. He was telling me that he had what he felt was going to be the most impactful thing of his career. Something he found out.

That's pretty cool. About regenerating shrubs. Johnny, what do you got? You got a little marriage advice? Can we talk about today's hunt? Or is that too early? Just not a lot to say. It was a big hunt.

Not a lot of harvesting. Yeah, we covered a lot of ground, man, but I just feel like we're, you know, I feel like, you know, my sage grouse, my lifelong sage grouse harvest to date is one because I've never focused on hunting them. I run into them because I like to, you know, being like generally a big game hunter, I run into them hunting antelope. I run into them out messing around.

We used to run into a lot of them when we did a lot of late season rabbit hunting on the plains. But, you know, seasons are short, never lined up. And I'm just not, this is the first time I've ever like devoted, this is the first time I've ever devoted a day to finding some. And like any kind of thing, you know, you can cold roll. Well, as I know very well from this spring, we cold rolled into a new turkey hunting spot. And there's no one talking about listing turkeys right now we got turkeys in far more states than we had them at the time of european contact we rolled into a new turkey spot this spring and had our asses handed to us for

about three days in a row so it's like any kind of like real hunting um any kind of real hunting there's a learning curve man and it's like you know if you just if you just think you're gonna cold roll into some new spot and start knocking the hell out of everything you either don't know what you're talking about or you've had some really unusual hunts in your life so we were out here last weekend and didn't find them in my honey holes either and they move around yeah so it's like i's like, I mean, it's like I'm really reluctant to have a bad day and talk about how it was a bad hunt. We had something happen tonight that was interesting

is we got to, we messed with a badger for a while. And, you know, not messing, like, you know, just observed him to the point where he got frustrated with us and gave us a couple of hisses. But, you know, we had a fun day. But, no, it's interesting. You know, it's like you're trying to learn something new. Yanni, you got anything?

You stood up. Yanni, what's going on? He's tired. I'm getting smoked out. Oh. I've been getting smoked out, so I'm trying to get out of the smoke. You know, your body makes it eddy. Yeah, it's not from the fire. Oh. I've been getting smoked out, so I'm trying to get out of the smoke. You mean your body makes it eddy? Yeah, it's not from the fire.

Oh. Oh. He's got gas. Oh, because you're really sensitive to Ron's cigarette smoking? Yeah. Cigar. Small cigar, please. Thank you.

Ron smokes. Ron's the only guy I've ever met in my entire life that chain smokes Swisher Sweets. You ought to give it a try sometime. I might. That's all you got, Yanni? Just so you don't get sick of that smoke. Yeah. Ron?

I would like to say, as a lifelong bird hunter, how frustrating it is to try to do i feel like the guy i used to take guys to south dakota after i had my learning curve and i'd take friends to south dakota you know a couple of them steve and within sometimes a half a day they start going well you know what we ought to try you know and i found myself myself like talking to Garrett today while we're walking, overthinking the hell out of it. You know, like, okay, you know what we should do? No, you know what we should, I'll bet you it's this.

It was so frustrating because everything else I've hunted, it's kind of like I've never hunted an obligate species, and today it just drove me a little mad crazy thinking, okay, this looks like really good cover because I think birds that need really good cover. And then we talked to somebody like, no, no, don't go in the waist-high cover. Go in the knee-high cover. And I'm like, yeah, but there's less cover here.

Why wouldn't the bird want more cover? And it was just a very frustrating day. I'm ready to go at it again tomorrow already. My knees are, they had ibuprofen kicked in. I feel good. I've had a beer. But I've never hunted a species that was that aggravating before. Yeah, I think that it's part of the problem is you look out there.

Like normally when you're hunting a game bird, you pretty quickly learn to sort of identify where you can rule out 95% of the area. Don't go into the hardwoods after grouse. Yeah. Maybe you'll find one. Focusing on things and you sort of look at it and you just start seeing it in the way of like that's where they're going to go. It could be really simple like the sunflower patch for morning doves. Or it could be just like you look

into an alder stand or a poplar stand and you see the parts where the grouse would hang out. There's some undergrowth. You see a thorn apple tree in there. You're like, yep, there's some food. It's all food. The whole valley is food. It's very food. The whole valley is food.

It's very tough mentally. When they're concentrating in the meadows, you can hit those. But they've scattered. They've moved around. Like I say, we were out here last weekend hunting where I thought they would be. Pretty predictive where I thought it'd be. And I've shot them before and not to be had. They hadn't been harassed by hunters and moved around.

Yeah, yeah. So they were moving around the landscape. Brody, what do you got? Oh, I just think it's pretty important to reiterate how, especially for a lot of guys that are big game hunters, how linked sage-grouse are to some much more popular game animals like mule deer and antelope. Like, if you like shooting giant mule deer bucks,

you should be worried about sage-grouse also. Is that right? I think so, don't you? Yeah, I do. I mean, wherever sage-grouse live, there's a good chance it's mule deer winter range. And, you know, we've been looking at nice antelope bucks the whole time we've been here too so my concluding thought i don't know if it

counts it counts as a thought it's not very complete it has a question mark on the end of it it's like i hope that i want to believe in the idea that industry and wildlife can continue to find a way to work together. When I was young, before I developed the pragmatism that comes with age, I was acutely aware of environmental issues in my 20s, and my solution was that you would just destroy every road and revert everything back into a pure wilderness. Over time, you start to be like, you know what? And I still love the idea of that, but you go like, that's not going to work. Because people, including myself, we use fossil fuels. We have families, we have jobs, we have income, We need the support. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's just we rely on minerals.

We rely on fossil fuels. Our economic health depends on those things. And when you become, if you become a student of the world, you realize that one of the worst things that can happen to wildlife is societal impoverishment. Impoverished societies, impoverished societies who have, you know, sustained endemic levels of unemployment, failed states, okay? Impoverished societies do not do well with wildlife.

No. Africa is a good one. Yeah, no, I remember going to is a good yeah no i remember going like you know i remember going to the philippines bringing my and being like holy smokes is this gonna be good fishing right the philippines coral reefs 7 000 islands dude you can't find a fish it's like impoverished cultures that don't have strong leadership, wildlife suffers immensely. So I'm like, yes, there is a great benefit to wildlife to having an economically strong society of people who earn a livable wage.

It just is like, it's hard to explain, but there's a correlation there. Absolutely. Wildlife is a luxury that can be supported by wealthy societies. So I've come to over time really root for our ability to be an advanced

wealthy society that can attack things like poverty and can attack unemployment and still find a way to coexist with sustainable amounts of wildlife. And I think that watching right now, you can watch a handful of things play out.

What's happening in with, with fisheries, red fish, red snapper, like various fisheries in the Gulf states, you look and you see that struggle. Looking at wolves, grizzly bears, sage grouse in the West, you see the struggle where you might take a superficial look and be like,

oh, it's industry against wildlife. And they're diametrically opposed. But then as you get a little more, like if you get a little more nuanced, a little more complex look at it, you realize that the struggle is finding the technologies and the intelligence and the restraint to allow those two things to function together. It's not that one's going to defeat the other. It's that you're going to find a way

to allow them to come together. I heard a guy talking about climate change and he was saying that the answer isn't going to be personal restraint. The solution will wind up being technological. It won't be because some people canceled their vacation because they didn't want to fly on a plane, because they didn't want to increase their carbon footprint.

It'll be because, like, technology. Something fixes it, yeah, that we think of. You know, and you just, it's like, I just watch. And like we're saying, like, you know, very, like, drilling technologies. If you want to get interested in wildlife, it's like, I just watch. And like we're saying, like, you know, very like drilling technologies. If you want to get interested in wildlife, it's like, you might also kind of become interested in drilling technologies. And in all these other things that make it so, just make it frustrating. And what you wind up not having is, and it's really refreshing to have them. It feels great is having bad guys.

And like the world, you know, there's just not a lot of, there are some, there are not a ton of real bad guys. I agree. Yeah. There's a lot of people who are focused on some aspect and they might weigh things differently. And you're trying to talk to them and be like, yeah, I agree. What you're talking about is important. But can you just tip it a little bit toward what I'm talking about? I'm not asking you to ignore what you're talking about, but just listen a little bit to what I'm saying too.

That's where the extremes on both ends of this particular issue, to me, have been mildly marginalized because a lot of people came together to seek that balance because without the public support of any of this we don't have conservation in this country i mean if you asked a basic question of the population would you be willing to pay 10 cents a gallon more for sage grouse what do you think the answer would be i would say absolutely absolutely they would no i would say that i would i yeah you and i would but i can't most sportsmen i think the majority of the public would say no no in that context that question but i think when you put that bigger picture perspective and that balanced ideal out there about what these

ecosystems really provide, then they would understand. The general public is what I'm saying. Would you pay 10 cents more for sage-grouse? Probably not. Would you pay 10 cents more for 360 species that rely on a certain ecosystem? Exactly. It produces $100 million. Can we do nine?

I'm up for nine. Ed, you got any final thoughts? No, it's been great. Marriage advice, anything like that? Yeah, no marriage advice. I've been married 10 years now, so. Good for you. Yeah.

Ed cooked himself some Sandhill Crane. That's a bird that won't menu around, and now they're doing pretty good. Yep. Yep. Doing good. All right. Well, you do got Yep. Doing good. All right. No, I just... Well, you do got one.

Appreciate chatting with you guys. I appreciate what you do. I'm glad you got out to experience this ecosystem because it's something else. Yeah, and so far, so far our party hasn't reduced sage-grouse population one bit. At all.

See, it's a fraction of the mortality. That's where they get that hunter has not much impact on the species. Yeah, they came to our camp. These hunters, Steve and I have not had zero impact. Like we looked into it, and they don't do diddly. Steve wrote me an email. I got to last conclude. Steve wrote me emails.

You know, when we get out there, maybe we should show some restraint. And came up with, like, maybe we should just shoot. I said, we'll just get one each. You're out two, but we're going to get one. And I wrote you back, let's find one first. And that's what we're still doing. We're still trying to find one. Tomorrow will be a better day.

Wise words. All right. Thanks for listening. 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 on x hunt is now in canada it is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season.

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