The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 054: Steven Rinella talks with Carmen Vanbianchi along with Janis Putelis from the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: January 27, 2017

Subjects discussed: squid jigging birthday parties; invasive mongoose; mist-netting song birds; the Bison Boys; prejudice against women in the world of carnivore field research; life advice Steve likes to give now that he's older and wiser; grrr and grit; darting cougars and helping them down from trees; kill site analyses; the correlation between animal interaction and empathy; trapping wolves for research; treadle trigger systems; Jared Diamond; de-scenting trail cameras for wolves; 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.

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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, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. This is the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, Carmen, tell me your last name again.

Van Bianchi. Van Bianchi. Van Bianchi. What did you think about squid jigging? It was great. I hadn't done that in years. We grew up doing that in the Puget Sound. It was a birthday party thing in my family. Well, you had to have a fall birthday.

Where did you go any time of year? No, actually, December 8th was my sister's birthday. And you guys would jig squid? Yeah, we sometimes would take a group of girls down on the dock. Now, would you guys clean house? Like, were you guys better at it than me and Yanni are at it? Not much better. I mean, we didn't have our own lights, so we'd just go onto the ferry dock and just fish wherever the pools of light from the ferry lights were. And so I don't know. That doesn't seem to bring as many in. We do.

Better some nights. Worse some other nights. Yeah. I'm addicted to it. So now, it's squid season in the Pacific Northwest. They come in shallow to spawn. They congregate. November and December.

I read that they spawn between like five and 30 feet of water. And then people show up down on the piers. Like it seems that the squid are kind of drawn to light. I don't know if they're prey. I don't know if they're drawn to light because the stuff they're feeding on congregates around light. There's a lot of like things people don't there's a lot of things people have different opinions on about squid right now why okay first off a squid jig this looks like a it's like a little cylinder like a glowing dark little cylinder and there's

no hook on just a bunch of wires up facing upturned wires that impale the squid you're bit you're snagging squid yeah now why do you feel and i'm not you're not a squid expert what's your theory about why what is that squid's interaction with the squid jig so my squid knowledge is based on a national geographic that i owned when i was little and a um my first report i ever did in elementary school, which was on octopus and squid. And so my understanding- So you got started in biology early. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Very early. Anyway, my understanding is that in absence of dock lights, they're congregating in moonlight. And they're congregating to mate. And so when they see that flashy squid jigs they try to mate with it and that's when you get them that's what you think they're doing because i've had a lot yeah i've had people tell me that well i think it's like i think it's like a feeding thing okay i've heard both i mean i can know i I heard a guy saying they're territorial and he's trying to fight the jig.

Maybe so. I've had guys saying they're trying to mate the jig. Yeah. And I've had guys saying they're trying to feed on the jig. Because people catch a lot of squid all times a year using jigs outside of the spawning season. Right, so that would point to eating. We caught a giant. My friend and colleague, Ben O'Brien, caught a giant, a different species.

The ones we were getting last night are Loligo opalescens. It's common name is the market squid. He caught a big fatty. I don't know what it was. That son of a bitch hit a halibut jig. Now, I don't think he's trying bitch hit a halibut jig. Now, I don't think he's trying to breed that halibut jig

in June. Yeah. Probably trying to eat it. Everybody's got different opinions about it. Sounds like a place for research. They do seem to like light.

Yeah. I wrote a whole article about it. I never, I like, it was years ago on Outside Magazine I wrote a piece

about squid jigging in Puget Sound. And what's particularly interesting to me is that it doesn't look like your normal fishing, your normal American fisherman down there, because the people that like to fish squid in Seattle are generally the immigrant communities from Southeast Asia, particularly from my own conversations with people, a lot of people from Vietnam, a lot of people from Laos, a lot of people from Cambodia, Filipinos.

And a lot of these guys that I had interviewed before had fish squid in their home countries. Even some guys that had come in the 70s after the fall of Saigon, some guys had come over and they had jigged squid. Same deal, have a light. Yep, have a light,

but also talk to guys that fish with poison and guys that fish with dynamite. Whoa. That's one way to get some squid. This guy was telling me years ago, I wrote this article, I remember it was right after the terrorist attacks because i was i lived in montana and i hadn't spent a lot of time around big buildings and it was right after the terrorist attacks and

i remember it was december the december after the terrorist attacks and i remember you know the around seattle there's so many planes crisscrossing and i couldn't watch a plane while in my field of view there was a large building without thinking that it was headed for the building and i remember being like so paranoid where i'd be like half watching my rod tip and half waiting for a plane to burrow into a skyscraper yeah so i'll always have it fixed in my head that it was december 2001 um the hell's that getting that i don't know about i don't know who's who's squid jigging on the docks here in the pacific northwest yeah that was what it was and yeah and very few now you see you see like some you see like a handful of white people around but it's generally people from the from southeast asia yeah

yeah oh i don't know what i was gonna get now i interviewed a guy by interview i mean just like was generally people from Southeast Asia. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I know what I was going to get at now. I interviewed a guy. By interview, I mean just like basically bullshitted with him on the pier while we were squid jigging. He had fish squid in Vietnam. Came to the U.S. in 75. Had no idea and would walk along the piers being curious about the area where there's a flashlight.

And one day shined a flashlight in the water, saw a squid, and started squid jigging. Now, he doesn't claim to be the guy that fathered squid jigging, but he discovered it not through hearing about it and seeing people. He discovered it by walking down and seeing a squid. And that's when he started squid jigging in puget sound yeah i don't know the history of it here but um ever since i was little there's been people out there and yeah i don't that thing is i don't know like if i was at my place in southeast alaska right now would i go out on a float and knock the shit out of squid if i shined a light in the water or is it like peculiar to the area i don't know like i don't know if people

fish squid here because there's squid here or people fish squid here because there's a population of people who are interested in fishing right right because people doing it so they do it yeah like i grew up in a place where people go way out of their way to catch yellow perch here is the best yellow perch fish in the world. No one fishes them. It's just local culture, maybe. Yeah, there's no panfish culture in the Pacific Northwest because everybody's got a salmon-centric view of the world.

Yeah, yeah. What do you think about, Jonas? I think more people would get after it. It's so fun, man. Once you figure it out. Kids love it. Yeah. Yeah, we had my two older youngsters out there,

and they have a good time. I mean, they're not necessarily fishing, but they're kids love it. Yeah. Yeah, we had my two older youngsters out there, and they have a good time. I mean, they're not necessarily fishing, but they're just taking it all in. That's how kids fish at first. Yeah, totally. Part of why I loved it when I was little was it was exciting to get to go out at night, and you're bundled up, and you have hot chocolate, and it's just a cool experience to be outside at night in winter. Like most cold weather outdoor activities there's hot chocolate involved so yeah all the kids are yeah and like every other worthwhile

pursuit there are some people who are really good at it and a lot of people that suck i'm in the suck category and like what do we have we had 15 you got 15 maybe and we watched some boys next to us they probably filled a bucket yeah they caught 15 to every one of ours yeah fishing the exact same shit we were fishing away from us they had a bright ass light yeah i think as a little experiment you should get a brighter light greg was dipping over into their light and he wasn't pulling squid out like that. Yeah, but he was kind of on the edge of it. I mean...

They definitely had some differences in tackle. Longer rods... That's true. That doesn't account for everything. It doesn't account for everything. Yeah, but... Every little thing matters. Yes.

And the longer rod does a few things. One, you've got more play in the rod. It's a softer rod tip, you know? So who knows? so maybe when you're jerking it with a stiffer rod maybe they get out of the way you know because they're feeling it more and that softer pull of this longer softer rod impales them in a different way that you know they can't get off oh if you think they're running double jigs too yeah i do that too and the reason i got away from it is having inexperienced anglers.

Like when I have my kids or whatever, they lose so many jigs. So then they're losing two at a time. And then if I put two on, then they're like, why don't I get two? And then you got to be like, well, because you'll lose them. And then it's like you're an asshole. You're like, you know what I mean? So that's why. If you and me were out, we would have been running too. You got to be like, well, because you'll lose them. Then it's like you're an asshole. You're like, you know what I mean? That's why.

If you and me were out, we would have been running too. But, you know, it's hard to keep stocked up on Jake. You have to try to mimic their setup as much as possible. Then if still nothing is changing, we're just going to have to go over and learn Cambodian. Last time I was out, I was running two and had a nice double i saw a guy get a triple two on one and one on one a triple on a double he had a double rig triple squid you know i know that half of the ones i caught were impaled like in the side yeah but that's just something that happens no that's what i'm saying it's like having stands they were swimming by i impaled them with my jig motion most of the ones i saw coming in with the guys next to us looked like the squid

was hooked like between the tentacles yeah no there's a lot of mystery to it now one time i was out there my buddy drove in 2001 and we went down and we had just a regular 60 watt light bulb we had a battery and an inverter and a 60 watt light bulb one of those aluminum shrouds you put around a 60 watt light bulb and we went down there right at dusk and knocked the shit out of them like we had over half a bucket so there is stuff like there's a voraciousness I think they get. They get fired up and hit better. Maybe sometimes it's so good any idiot, right? Sometimes it's so good any idiot's going to do good. Last night, it was like the men were separated from the boys.

Oh, yeah. The women from the girls. Last night, by those two dudes next to us, because there was probably 25 people on that pier, and two guys were knocking the shit out of the squid. And it was killing me. Big ones. Big ones, too.

I don't think we caught a single squid as big as the ones they were pulling. Yeah, and they hooked them all in the face, man. It's hard to say face because their eyes are at one end and their mouth is at the other end. They hooked them at the mouth. No. Mouth is at the same end. It's weird to say face because their eyes are at one end and their mouth is at the other end. They're hooked right at the mouth. No.

Mouth is at the same end. Mouth is at the same end. It's weird, though, because their feet are at that same end. Yeah, they're a decapod. They have 10. Well, they have like eight, two arms and eight legs, but a total of 10. Two of those things are longer than the others. Yeah.

And have different cup, like a different suction cup array on them. And they got a beak like a bird. Yeah. Like a hard, black, hooked beak like a bird. I got bit by that one Ben O'Brien caught that hurt. Yeah. Now, Carmen, tell me, what's your job description? Well.

Like, how do you describe? I guess I describe myself as a wildlife biologist i went to school for and i got a um wildlife management and conservation degree from my undergrad humboldt state university in california northern california big dope smoking area big yeah especially in humboldt county that's what I'm saying my buddy always points like I got a buddy from Humboldt County and um and and uh when he says Humboldt County certain segment of the American population their ears perk up when they hear it's probably less so now but back in the day that was yeah you know yeah like his father ran a hydroponic supply store

there you go probably did well yeah so that's the first thing that people think of, but it's also a beautiful place that's great to learn about wildlife because we were just constantly out in the field learning all the waterfowl. It's a huge waterfowl migration area and birds everywhere. You've got the ocean, you've got redwoods, you've got the mountains. So it was a really good place to go to school for that. But you weren't hunting back then, right? Like you grew up fishing, but you didn't hunt. Uh, you know, yeah, I didn't hunt. Um, when I was in college, there were a lot of hunters in the program and I was starting to get really interested in it and knew that I wanted to do it. So then, um, when I graduated from there, I started actually taking action on it and

I went out and bought a gun, not really knowing what I was doing and took hunter safety and just kind of started putting it together from there. But anyway, so yeah, I call myself a wildlife biologist and I concentrate on carnivores. So most of the work I've done has been with carnivores. My master's work was on lynx. In what area? In Washington. And so most of my career has been just working seasonally all over the country, different projects.

Yeah, but you say you're like field biology though, right? Yeah. I mean, so you're out there catching and trapping and tracking carnivores. Yeah, yeah. So for example, yeah, mostly. I started out, actually my first job was after my second year of school and it was in Hawaii working with hawksbill turtles monitoring turtles which was a pretty cush job we camped on the beach waited for turtles to come and then basically put them in a full nelson which didn't work the first time I tried to do that

turtle just kept on going like there was nothing on top of her. Oh, is that right? They could drag you along? Yeah, I didn't quite have the body type for that. Hold on, hold on. So I obviously don't know about this turtle that you're speaking of. What kind of a turtle is it? It's a big sea turtle.

Big sea turtle. Bigger than the green one you always see in Hawaii. Well, I think, yeah, yeah. Maybe probably, I think there's some overlap in size. How much do they weigh? I don't know what an average one is, I think there's some overlap in size, but. How much did they weigh? I don't know what an average one is, but that's like a wheelbarrow. Big.

It was huge. Very, very strong. And so this turtle comes up on the beach. We've been told you restrain it by jumping on it, putting it in a full Nelson, and then the rest of the crew will tag it while you've got it restrained. So you hook your arms under his front feet. So, yeah, you get. Under his paddles. Yep.

You're on the turtle shell. Your front arms are under the front flippers, sort of lifting them up so they can't get any purchase. And then, you know, your hands are locked over its neck. So I did that. So he can't come around and grab you. Yeah. These are nesting turtles. And just to keep it in one place so that you can put tag on its flippers.

That's where they tag them? Uh-huh. Why not tag the shell? Because it's easy to just punch through the skin on the flippers. When I've caught tagged soft shells here, they clamp it right to the back of the shell. Seems like a perfect place to put it. You put it in its flipper. Yeah, it was just a little metal tag with a number on it.

Oh, not like a tracking device. Right, right, right. I see, yeah. And they will try to get you when you're trying to restrain it. Probably. I mean, yeah, you don't want to put your hands in front of their face, and then their flippers are just flying, and it can be kind of a rodeo,

especially when I did it because I just didn't have the weight to hold it down, so it just kept going. Yeah, I got you. So we swapped out. We got it figured out. Anyway, that was my first job, and that was also my first dally into trapping because we would trap mongoose around the beach to try and keep those populations down there invasive there and they

just tear try to control mongoose from getting the eggs yeah yeah how would you catch those uh have hearts catch them and have hearts um and then we just euthanize them with uh co2 gas really yeah how's that work you just pick up the trap and you put in a plastic bag and you have a tank and you shoot a shot in there what's that just shoot a squirt of co2 in there yeah because you get the same effect by just closing off the bag it just takes forever right that might be a slow and yeah painful sort of deal so this is fast and you could check your little trap line and feral cats and rats too yeah when i've been in hawaii you do see a lot of those freaking mongooses around yeah man it's a problem invasives you know the turtles there what's the other so there's the hawks but there's the other kind like a green turtle yeah yeah now last year we were on family

vacation and i was spearfishing there and i'd go out at night and you dive down under the coral ledges and you bump in face-to-face with those turtles. It's like everything underwater is scary. Everything underwater at night is even scarier. And it's like on the beach, a turtle is a big-ass turtle. Underwater, it always be like kind of intimidating to roll up on those things. And then one time I went down and there was a turtle laying there underwater

under a coral head and there was a kala like a unicorn fish feeding on the turtle's head and it was a big kala and I didn't want to obviously hit the turtle and so I corrected so much to try to get the kala but not get the turtle I wasn't missing the fish off the backside of the fish. Even though I was like point blank range, I was just paranoid about messing with that turtle. Which is like an image stuck in my mind. It's giants because they don't like attack people. But anything like that just seems kind of intimidating underwater, man.

You're so out of your element in the water too. I run around in the woods all the time and I work with predators and I don't worry about bears. I don't think about cougars. I'm not, I'm totally comfortable, but in the water, I just, I did some snorkeling when I did that job and I would just be, I couldn't stop thinking about sharks. I just felt so out of my element and it's just not, you know, just not what you're used to. You know, I guess it's what you're used to that you're comfortable with. Yeah, because I used to have some of that fear of, like I used to have more of a fear of grizzlies. But it just gets used up somehow or goes away, you know.

Yeah, I mean, I think you just get comfortable and your perception of what the risk is changes. Yeah. You start to realize that it's usually overblown. So what was the next animal you worked on after the turtle work? What were they trying to find out about the turtles? Just mark and recapture? Yeah, it was a monitoring project, and then we'd mark the nests. It was also an effort to protect the nests.

And then in the fall when they hatch in late summer, I actually wasn't there for that part. When the nestlings hatch, they're trying to be there to get as many as possible to the ocean just to get them over that first hurdle of making it alive. So it's like mechanically assisting keeping predators away,

helping them get back in the water. That's their vulnerability, right? The beach. Yeah, well, and then also in the water. Right, right, yeah. Because that's their vulnerability, right? The beach. Yeah, well, and then also in the water. Not many of them make it anyway, but I think the idea is to just give them a little better of a chance to make it because they're struggling, a struggling species. Yeah. Do you know how many times one of those females might breed? I don't know.

That was my one and only dally into reptiles. Yeah. That's the weird thing about with animal populations like that or like fish, you know, they're laying thousands of eggs. Well, in the case of turtles, they're laying a dozen or more eggs. They're going to live for decades. Presumably lay eggs dozens of times. Yeah. And then it's like. If they can have two of those eggs, they're successful if two of those eggs turn into turtles. Oh, yeah. If that. Yeah.

Like you're successful. Yeah. Over the lifetime. Yeah. Not per. Yeah. So like a salmon comes up and drops how many hundreds of eggs. Yeah.

It's successful if two or roughly one or two live yeah yeah it's common strategy in nature i mean you even see it in just our our prey populations you know the deer are having way more babies in the land can support so yeah just hope that some of them sticks. Yeah, yeah. We had a guy we interviewed on here one time that had a, he had a black bear sow that he watched during his research project that he watched rear 10 cubs, 200 pound size. That's impressive. Back to back, is it quintuplet? Five?

Mm-hmm. Back to back quintuplets that's impressive that she got all 10 to 100 pounds at least but at that point they're they're rocking yeah at 100 pounds she had a good territory she was successful yeah well we got into that she was on to a lot of cropland it was on to the place where they dumped roadkill deer. Ah, that's right. I heard this podcast. Yeah. Yeah, that's always handy. Yeah, the bear's name is the Wisconsin Super Sow. So you did the turtle thing. Then what happened?

So let's see. I did a couple bird projects, one in the Smokies. That was fun, doing some mist netting and looking for nests. What kind of birds? We wereting and looking for nests. What kind of birds? We were looking for junco nests. They're just a common. Really? Yeah, little sparrow.

I got those in my yard right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the reason we were looking for those is we were collecting eggs, so it needed to be a common bird. And I was working for a PhD student who was looking at environmental leaching. So from all the pollution, I'm wondering, is calcium leaching out of the environment enough that it's affecting eggshells? Why is there calcium in the environment?

Just natural calcium in the environment. That's the good part. That's what the birds need from eating snails and whatever. And then need it for making shells. So being leached out by pollution could be a problem. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah.

Because when, you know when they used to use DDT? Right. It would cause the bird's shells to be too soft. Yeah. So that when the bird was incubating, do you know what it was, was that a calcium issue? I don't know. I don't know what the issue is. Why it caused their shells to get thin? Yeah, I Was that a calcium issue? I don't know.

Why it caused their shells to get thin? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. So that was a great job, just basically wandering around the Smokies, usually by myself, hiking around. Looking for the eggs. Looking for nests, yep. How would you find them?

They like to nest on the ground in cut banks a lot, so you're just hiking trails you just watch for birds flushing you just are looking to see the little nest tucked in there yeah you know that tom petty song where he says i can track a stink i can track a single bee to its hive that's how people like hunt beehives in the old days you just sit out in the woods and watch a honeybee fly by watch it go as far as you can see it stand there wait for a honeybee to fly by watch until it disappears out of your line of sight stand there and over time i got a friend who used to do it sometimes

it'd take him a couple days of just whenever he would have time. He'd just go to his last position and wait for one to go by. And eventually you'd locate the honeybee hole. Yeah. Yeah. So sort of same deal, but we'd wait for them to flush. You'd sometimes just walk with a stick. I don't know the Tom Petty cannon fact track single bee to its hive, but he made that claim.

Yeah. How many would you find? Was it a good day a bird? Oh, no. More than that. Oh,, no, more than that. You'd find more than that? Yeah. You'd be finding, there's tons of juncos there.

You'd find, I don't know, I don't remember, probably four or five might be a good day of nests. Just working by yourself. Yeah. So when you do these jobs, we're going to talk about a bunch of them, but how many jobs like this have you had, coming into work on a research project that involved you running around out in the woods that's what they've all been i don't know how many jobs i've done a dozen yeah uh maybe almost yeah how are they described like how do you know about um there's a big the texas a&m has a

wildlife program and they have a just an online job board that's kind of the go-to for a lot of people. You just start cruising the job board, and you find a job, and you're like, that's in a cool place, and I'd be doing something cool. I'm interested in that, and you apply. And the more you do, then the better your resume is. Right, yeah. But is the goal to wind up, do you want to just keep doing this or do you have a goal you'll wind up at a fixed position? Yeah, see, that's something I agonize over because I love being in the field.

I love doing what I do. I'm dreading the day when my typical day involves a lot more office work, which it will when I someday get a permanent job, which is I would only do because you're going to make more money and it's just more stable. There's certain fields, I think, that

do that. Yeah, and the higher up you go in the field, the less you're in the field. I got friends in the military too, man. They train up to learn how to do all this badass stuff and you do well at it. And eventually what that means is you stop doing it because pretty soon you have a desk.

Yeah, exactly. I cling to the hope that your job is somewhat what you make of it. And so if I can get a job where I'm doing some office stuff and maybe getting to think of research projects and actually be managing research projects but balance out with some field work, that'd be good. That'd be ideal. Yeah. Doing carnivore stuff.

That'd be good. But I've been having a to be able to, for a lot of this time before I kind of settled down in eastern Washington, to be able to just kind of travel all over, which really opens up the number of jobs you can apply for, obviously. Yeah. If you're free to just go and live wherever for a season. How many years ago was it that you did like the Junko thing and the Hawaii thing? Let's see. I started school in 2002. Hawaii was, I guess, yeah yeah and then what'd you go

on to do after because you still haven't done a carnivore job if we're tracking your my career yeah so the jungle like hunting bird eggs hunting bird eggs and I um I knew I wanted to do carnivore I knew I wanted to do wildlife stuff from when I was really little. And then I started getting really interested in carnivores and knew I wanted to do that, but I couldn't. I don't know. I was applying for carnivore jobs, but I think people were hesitant to hire a 20-something-year-old girl who's going to go and trap bears.

I mean, I think I needed to prove myself a little bit. Do you feel like there's an honest bias there? Yes, I can confidently say that. It's definitely, especially in the carnivore world, it's definitely a boys club. And that's something I'm conscious of, but it's also, I mean, it's not like it's been a problem or something

in the field where I'm, I feel like people are respectful of my abilities and stuff. So. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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Does your resume override like does your or there's still some people like i don't care what i see on this resume it's a girl i don't know if people would not hire me because of that um everybody i've worked with has been great, but there have been people where it takes a little longer to gain their respect. And I have the feeling, I mean, it happens enough, and I see them interacting with other men on the crew or whatever, that I sense that it is maybe just even a subconscious bias against what they think I could do in the field.

I had someone in archaeology one time refer to the bison boys. And I said, what are the bison boys? And she was saying, well, in this field, it helps if you're working on bison and you're a boy. It's all about like, you know, in that like in New World Archaeology on the Great Plains it's like the bison boys

the bear boys I think it's common with those field jobs that are especially I don't know more traditionally thought of as I don't know if macho is the right word but it involves trucks and knowing how to get yourself unstuck when you truck stuff.

It involves snowmobiles and four-wheelers and big animals that you're moving around and traps. I don't blame people because there aren't examples out there of women doing this a whole lot. So when people, I think, just look at me, the first thing they think is probably not, I don't know, burly trapper biologist girl, you know? So I don't know, but I can usually get people past that

and it works out, so yeah. So bird collecting, bird egg gathering. Yeah, so bird- You never ate one of those eggs, right? No, I didn't. I was watching the idea with my kids, man. They like to watch stuff about the Arctic. And we were watching these videos of these boys who, just with old, shitty, three-eighths-inch line,

rappel down cliff faces to gather eggs yeah they rig up they got this old looks like crab pot rope and they rig up a harness and shit and they take the oldest frailest older guy because he's real light and lower him down over that edge that son of a bitch is gathering those eggs up and they're saying this the narrator is talking about how it's a common way to die this is in siberia. I bet. Have you seen that footage of collecting nests for egg nest soup? And they're going down these caves with like. They build those rickety, they build those scaffold systems. Yeah.

I've tried to do that with, that's a swallow. Yeah. Or a swift. Yeah. What is that family? Like swallows family like swallows they have a saliva yeah and they take stuff in their mouth and they coat it with the saliva and the saliva is sticky and they build their nests and then um you boil it down and you can extract that sticky saliva and use it to thicken soups and i've taken you know those kind of swallows that like build

them under bridges the mud the mud yeah like a barn swallow or something yeah i've taken shit loads of those nests and boiled them all down and then and then skimmed off the you know let the mud settle and i then cooked it down i've never found that shit in there whatever it is like i've never isolated what it is the sticky stuff because i wanted to make some of that soup right and i figured that they don't reuse those you know those dome nests i figured you could probably break those up without breaking any laws and i'd get them under urban bridges yeah yeah but i could never get whatever they're after i don't know if it's like whatever they use to make that mud sticky i don't know how they extract it when

they cook it huh well that mud maybe the mud they use to make that mud sticky i don't know how they extract it when they cook it huh well that mud maybe the mud they use is already sticking they don't need any of their own specials i didn't do a whole hell of a lot of research i just i just jumped right into it and bobbed out it might be delicious you real quick um before we get off the birds you called it miss netting yeah what's that meaning so that's how you catch birds songbirds to put little bands on their legs so you set up these nets that are just really fine you can hardly see them missed or missed missed oh i thought you said miss m-i-s-t yeah as in they made like missing them i was like that doesn't seem like an effective way i'd be hit i'd be hitting them no missed net so you set

those up in the morning and they don't they. And they don't break their bones and shit? No, they fly into them and they get tangled. And so then you go out there and untangle them. And then you can draw blood and measure things. You got to have some mortality, right? There is some mortality, yeah. But I don't think it's real great. I think the most dangerous part is getting them out of the net.

It's kind of a trick to learn how to do that really delicately. I got a buddy, I don't want to say his name. He works with ducks. And his PhD advisor said, if you're not killing some ducks, you're not working hard. Meaning, he wanted them to get some data yeah and like if everything if you're making all your decisions around no mortality you know his feeling was yeah and that's a balance you work with mallards and things i mean you work you're not you're not it's like you're trying to like catch the last ivory build woodpecker right yeah so um Yeah, so after birds, then I got into carnivores finally.

I volunteered. Volunteered? Yeah. No pay. Right. I spent a summer just trapping bears around where I lived, helping out a trapping effort there, and then cleaning houses. That was in Humboldt. So you were trapping bears and cleaning houses in California. Yeah, cleaning houses and taking care of somebody's homestead, doing their garden

and stuff like that. So I'd clean some days and then I'd go trap bears other days. And how were they, what was going on with the bears? How were they catching them? Foot snares? No, so there we were using just culvert traps. So it's a piece of culvert usually blocked off on one end. And at that end, for that job, we were using a sock, stuff it full of dog food, dip it in old, nasty fryer grease, and then hang some fish carcasses. So you hang that in the back. What kind of fish? I think they were like just salmon carcasses. So you hang that in the back. What kind of fish? I think they were like just salmon carcasses. Stinky stuff, basically.

Yeah. Hang that in the back of the trap on a chain that's connected to the, like a guillotine door. Yep. They go in, pull on it, door closes. You go up to the trap and there's little hatches on the sides that you can open up to stick a jab stick um so a long pole with the hypodermic needle on the end and instead of the plunger you've got the pole going into the um casing of the needle or the um whatever that's called like the tube that holds the tube that holds the...

The tube that holds the drug. Oh, so the impact of you driving to think injects the... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so then somebody kind of distracts the bear. You're over by the hole and you jab it in the butt. Goes to sleep, you open the door and pull it out. And what were they trying to do? What's the bear's attitude when you roll up usually?

It depends. It depends on their personality yeah and it depends on how careful you are about you know moving slowly and being quiet i like to across species try and keep them as calm as you can and just react better to the drug and you just, I mean, it's a stressful, awful experience for them, I think. Even when they're under, with a lot of the drugs, it's like, I've had it described as a really bad trip, basically, depending on the drug. So if you're making a lot of noise and jiggling them around and stuff, I don't know, it just sounds awful. So, and there's complications that can happen

if they start getting stressed out while they're under. So anyway, sometimes they're, you know, popping their lips and banging around in the trap, but sometimes they're calm. I think a lot of that is just individual personality, but they got to get trapped shy from those culvert traps. That's funny. That's funny that's also across species also that can be kind of uh individual too like how is that they're gonna fall for that sometimes they i've had animals get very trap happy when they're like it's not that bad i get to go on the trap i get a meal and then it's like easy to catch oh yeah because when i used to trap fox, you know,

if you pinch the toe on a Fox and then get them, they got smart about that shit. Yeah. Canines are a little different. And these are, um, I mean, traps with bait,

you know, that's where you'd have it happen more. So we, for example, we had a links that was always getting in our traps. We'd already put a collar on him. He'd always get in our traps and he'd figured out a collar on him. He'd always get in our traps, and he'd figured out that he could just chew a hole through the trap,

get out, go down the trap line. What kind of trap? So for lynx, on... Let's back up for a minute. Okay. Why were you guys catching the bears? What were you trying to figure out? The bears, this was on timber company land,

and they were having a lot of problems with bears girdling the trees because they eat the- I've heard of that. Yeah, and so it kills the trees. People here struggle with that. Like on the Olympic Peninsula, people talk about doing bear control because of how much they girdle and kill trees. Yeah. So they were trying to figure out where they were going. We should explain girdling.

Oh, like, you know, in the old old days we went out to clear land like when you hear about you know pioneer type settlers when they would clear land they would generally go in to get your first crop and they just go and girdle the tree so you cut through the bark and through the cambium layer all the way around the tree um think about like a girdle on someone's leg right you're just like cutting a ring around the tree and then kill the tree. Yeah. And then you could, so you would, you didn't need to necessarily to start to establish farmland or whatever. You didn't

need to necessarily go in and log the thing off. You can just girdle everything first. That lets sunlight through and you can start growing crops and at your leisure you can go in and cut the tree down. So people would talk about girdling a tree to kill it just doing that to it. And bears are just doing that because they're just eating it. Yeah, they're eating the cambium layer,

which is right under the bark. And so they're eating that, so they're stripping the bark up. And they'll go all the way around the tree or probably just strip it far enough up that it can kill and damage the tree. On conifers. Yeah, on conifers. So they were... What time of year are they hitting the trees? Oh conifers. Yeah. Yeah. On conifers. So they were, um,

what time of year are they hitting the trees? Oh, I don't know. But there, I think if I remember right, I actually did my like senior thesis, uh, using some of this information that we learned, but they like to hit the young, fast growing trees. I, I think, because there's more cambium. And so on logging land, that's a problem for them. But one of the things they were hoping they might discover from the collars that we were putting on them was, were they migrating in the fall to places for acorns where they could maybe direct hunters.

So hopefully the goal was to maybe figure out how to target the bears that were impacting there. So they were like trying to do scouting for people. Basically, yeah. That's the kind of research we like. That's dirty. Well, yeah. That's the kind of research we like. That's dirty. Well, yeah, and I don't know. I actually don't know what became of that data.

So they wanted to be like, where are these sons of bitches in the fall during hunting season? Yeah, basically. Yeah. There's also a master. That is dirty pool right there, man. I'd like to get my hands on some of that data. There were also, there was a master's student on that project. I'm not sure what she was using the data for.

And then I did like a little habitat analysis with the data that we got. But so then we'd go and after we trapped, we went out and we'd do telemetry to figure out where they were hanging out. Did you ever mess up and get scratched up by a bear when you're working a bear? No, I haven't. Like had them come up, come back to you or something? No, that generally happens pretty slowly. So they start lifting their head a little and you can just try and calm them down.

You put a blindfold on them to help keep them calm. You heard about that story in Montana, right? Some guys were working up a grizzly and where they were working up a grizzly. And where they were working it up, they were relocating it. Or just working it up. But either way, they put some signage out while they were working. Got all done.

The bear was still comatose. What do you call it? Sedated? The bear was still sedated. They took down their signage. Some fellow who lives in the area had seen him in there and wondered what they were doing. Goes in there, bear wakes up, kills that dude. Yeah, super unfortunate.

Yeah. Yeah. So we, after, on that project, after we worked up the bear, we'd put it back in the trap and let it recover fully. Oh, is that right? Yeah, and then we'd actually tie a rope. So you don't put him out when he's vulnerable. Right. And we didn't want them like, I mean, they're drunk seeming when they start to stumble

off. So we didn't want them walking down a logging road and, you know, That seems like a good policy, man. Let the kid get its wits about it. Oh, definitely. Because they could be killed by another bear or whatever. So we'd let them recover in the trap and then tie a rope to the door, tie that to the

truck and open the door that way and let them run off. And when they come out, are they usually just looking to get out of town? Oh yeah. They want to get away from... You probably get a little bit... I imagine the vast majority of grizzlies are probably the same way, but I think

they'd be more inclined to maybe come out and be like looking to assign blame yeah be a little pissed yeah like be like first i'm gonna take care of this i'm gonna make this thing not want to mess with me anymore and like miller's mule deer yeah yeah saved yeah we got a friend we had a friend who saved a mule deer buck who got all hung up in some ropes on a fence and once he got it cut free, it attacked him. Yeah, I have not had that happen yet. So, all right. What's up with the house cleaning? Are you working for a service or just running ads?

At that time at Humboldt, you could put your name on this just kind of like pick up odd job sort of thing. And so I put myself on that list for house cleaning and like yard work. Would you snoop around the people's houses? Oh, man. See some weird stuff. Yeah.

You know their secrets. I imagine, man. Yeah. People probably don't really hide their secrets as I imagine, man. Yeah. People probably don't really hide their secrets as well as they think they do. It's not like you get to do any real snooping. Right. And I'm an anal cleaner, so I'm deep cleaning. I'm dusting inside the drawers and stuff like that. Is that right?

Yeah. I can imagine. Yeah. Actually, I think I'm a good cleaner for the same reason that I do pretty well in biology. It's attention to detail. Really? There's some overlap there. So are you now professionally, as a field biologist, are you now, you just can work? Or do you still have to do side jobs in the off-season?

Why is there an off-season? You guys talk about a busy season. Why is there a busy season? Well, I mean, in the summer, there's usually a lot of jobs because that's when people can get out there easily. It's easier to collect data in the summer. But there's always jobs that are going on in the winter too, just usually not as many.

A lot of times that's when projects take time to do their analysis or whatever. So the field portion is often in the summer. But then there's jobs that are specific to the winter, like snow tracking and trapping some species is often in the summer. But then there's jobs that are specific to the winter, like snow tracking and trapping some species is easier in the winter. So do you still have to do odd jobs to fill in? I haven't done odd jobs in a while. That's good.

I remember that being when I was coming up as a writer. That being a big moment when I just could do what I wanted to do. Because I would do, like I trimmed trees, you know, did arborist work. Uh-huh. And when I finally got where I didn't need to do arborist work, not that I didn't like doing arborist work. Right, but. It was like a mile, it was a milestone.

Yeah, exactly. It was a milestone. Yeah. You know what I mean? To be like. Yeah. Just like now, it was like a leap, right? It was like, now I'm just going to do this thing.

Yeah. And not have to worry about the other thing. Feels good. It does. But it's still got to be hard to make a living, right? When you're jumping from job to job to job. And they're not paying, there's not a lot of money. It's all entry level.

That's probably why people get out of it. As much fun as you're having, eventually you're like, I just can't dread when I get bills and stuff. stuff well and then you have that conundrum of like like you're saying like you make the money and all of a sudden you're not in the field anymore yeah yeah but yeah i think that you have people when you're younger you have a tolerance for uncertainty yeah it fades if i'm any example like I used to be very comfortable with uncertainty. It didn't bother me at all. Oh yeah. It bothered me a little bit by me.

Like I kind of like half lived in my one brother's basement, half lived in my other brother's spare bedroom. Yeah. Right. And it was just like, oh, okay. This is how it is. Yeah. And I, um, I didn't have a whole lot.

I mean, it's not like i had a bunch of bills i just it felt good to know that i could fit everything in my car and go and and work wherever yeah i went for years with nothing but a cell phone bill yeah was the only thing my name was on yeah i didn't even have that for a long time um and then i also yeah i did I mean I'd do some odd jobs if I couldn't find a winner job or whatever I did baking a lot I had a bakery I could always go back to just come crawling back

make some cinnamon rolls really in the end it makes you just such a whole person you know I mean think about if you hadn't done all these odd jobs you know how different of a person you'd be now but like you have you skills in baking and like i'm sure your house is probably a very clean organized house oh it's totally but the other thing about it and i get into this all the time with people who i guess like now that i'm my age or whatever i've come to the weird point in life where i find

myself giving out dispensing yeah advice. I give advice now. I have four pieces of advice I give to people. One of them is develop your humility, man. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I feel like I could say a really old man type thing now

and start talking about kids these days, but I'll spare you that. I find that the people i admire and the people who do something new and find success in something new we're not where they have like family lineage propelling them along you know but like you're like yeah you know our you know like my like my parents didn't go to college you know? So when we went into professional lives, we were sort of going in a new direction. I think to go and do that, you got to have, you got to like be able to just like do sucky jobs well. Yeah.

Because that's the quickest way out. The quickest way out of a sucky job is to kick ass at it. Yeah. If you don't kick ass at it, you'll always have sucky jobs. Because people will be like, that dude, you'll always have sucky jobs. Because people will be like, that dude couldn't even do the sucky job. I'm not going to give him the important one.

But like humility. Yeah, I have scrubbed a lot of toilets and that's a quick way to humility. Yeah, I remember when I was in graduate school, I had a job cleaning the bathrooms in the LA building, the liberal arts building. And like I was in a very prestigious graduate program. It was very difficult to get in. And I would in like my classmates would be coming out of writing workshops and going to take a leak while I'm in there scrubbing the toilets.

Right. And that shit hurts, man. It hurts. But it's like it does something to your head and it makes you like different you know it gives you something uh well it gives you just on top of like a level of humility yeah the you know the familiar sting man you know it gives you grr and grit yeah i remember sitting remember sitting there with Giannis one day in Bozeman. We were scrubbing toilets.

No. We were actually pulling out of a coffee shop. And we see a drift boat go by on a trailer. Very obviously, a young guy driving a boat on a morning. Clearly, that dude is a guide. And Giannis said, oh, that brings back memories and i thought he was gonna get all nostalgic was like floating that same fucking stretch of river every day the bolsa boys had it better than i do because i later found out after we talked with that photographer that was with us on that trip he guided you know and he said something like

within an hour's drive they have like 200 miles of floatable river where we had, I don't know, maybe a quarter of that, you know, maybe more like 20 or 30. So he might not be floating that same stretch. Yeah, so he didn't have the same, you know, feelings that I did about it, but yeah. All right, so after Bears. So after that job.

And that was volunteering. Oh, yeah. That's, I mean. You got to have balls to put up a job listing that you're not going to pay. That's a lot of wildlife tech work, especially fun carnivore jobs that are super competitive. So they're like, people are going to want to do this. People are going to want to do this. People need to get their toe in the door.

They need to get experience. And our project has no money. Let's get volunteers. We just got some cash. We could probably get WPA volunteers. Oh, I know we could. But then it's like, then you can't even yell at them. Oh, I'm sure you got yelled at as a volunteer, right?

You know what? Everybody was so appreciative. They were? They treat you good. Oh, yeah. they treat you good my next job was right after I graduated and I spent the summer in Alberta in the mountains there

on a cougar kill site analysis was that paid? it was very little see that's the other thing is a lot of these places you get a stipend you're not spending money because you're in the middle of nowhere. They give you housing and stipend.

And you're camping out. No, well, we had like four service housing. Okay. Yeah, so bunkhouse. And what's kill site analysis? So this project, he was looking at prey composition. So what the cougars there were eating, and kill rates, so how often they were killing. So you got collars on cougars. Collars on the cougars.

And these were GPS collars. So these collars would take a location and store it in the collar. Did he already have the collars when you joined out? That was a wintertime thing. They'd use hounds in the winter to collar them. So run the cougar down on the hound. Dart it. Dart it out of the tree.

That's the thing I wanted to ask. My boy asked this question last night after he was talking to you. When you dart the cougar up in the tree, how do you keep it from getting injured on the fall? This is how he did it and described it to me, is that he would go up there before it was so out that it just fell. Help it down.

Help it down, yeah. Gotcha. Because it seems like they'd be in some positions where you couldn't dart them. Boy, that's got to be intimate with a big cat. Just not quite out and just, oh, let me help you out of the street. Yeah. Kitty. Yeah, you're kind of stuck. You don't have a lot of room to maneuver yeah i'll tell you a horrible story i was working on a magazine article in nevada one time and i got to hanging out with this dude who um had been a mule deer and lion guide so he's a he's an outfitter he had long long since since he got out of the

business he we get to looking through a photo album and he's got pictures of him up in a tree with lions with a jab stick okay so the same setup you're talking about he explains me that when he was a lion guide he would find that the clients only had so much appetite for running lions because it's hard work he would keep a couple he would go out in the off season trank lions this you're gonna think i'm bullshitting he took me and showed me the cages on his property he would trank lions this is highly illegal he would tranq lions keep them in cages feed them deer meat when he had a client that couldn't hack it he'd let one of those out and then they'd run that one that's cheating yeah you gotta talk about dirty pool no it's awful

you want to punch the guy in the nose right but i mean he's talking about like something from way back and in his mind you know clients never knew yeah i mean he should weird thing is yeah he's got a photo album with like big blown up photos just he was like he wasn't you know hiding and he was hiding it from them but he's like oh yeah here's me and here's where i used to put him i'm not shitting you. He was an old fella. I'd be surprised if he's still alive right now. But he's talking about whatever. I don't know if this is something he's doing in the 50s or 60s.

Yeah. But, you know, if there's a moral to that story, it's watch out for, do your research on your guide. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you'd hope that that stuff is harder to get away with these days. Yeah, you'd like to think. Anyhow, so this fella has some collars on some lions. Yeah, so we would, so these GPS collars, they're taking locations.

I think his were set to every two hours. So you're getting pretty detailed location data from these animals. It's stored on the collar. The collar also has a traditional radio transmitter so it's making the beep if you've got your little antenna. In case the GPS fails or something? Just so you can locate them

because with these collars, you have to find the cat again, get close enough that with a special antenna you can suck the data off the cat's collar and download it. Depending on the topography and everything, I don't know, 80 meters maybe? Close.

Close. Sometimes further if it was a good strong collar. So you've got to find the lion all bedded up somewhere. Yeah, hopefully they're not moving or you're running to catch up with them shit so you track in on the lion yeah i download its waypoint i never saw one doing that i heard one but i never saw one doing that uh just because it's thick and they're good at hiding and they'd be laid up in the rocks usually or down in the forest yeah it was a lot well there were some there was we had one mountain cat. She was way up high.

What do you mean mountain cat? She was way up high. A lion in the mountains. Yeah, a lion in the mountains. So she lived, her territory was way up in the Rockies, and she was eating mountain goats and bighorn sheep and stuff. Wow, alpine cat. Yeah, so she was in a lot of open you know cliffy country but then we had cats that were just down in the in the more boreal forest so it was really thick and

then there was one kind of town cat that lived sort of near to um rocky mountain house a town that was nearby and so that cat was you know know, in farmland, but also timber and stuff. And where would it bed up at? Or where would you find it? Just in timber stands all over. I mean, they're, you know. But mostly in timber stands. Yeah, I mean, I don't know

that they'd be bedding down in a grassy area. I don't know. I mean, we weren't, we were going to kill sites. So we just, it would be every month. But you wouldn't be able to find the kill site without downloading where it had been. Right. But you'd do that every month or two sort of opportunistically as you heard them. Oh, I got you.

I got you. Yeah. So you'd get a whole pile of data all at once. So you'd go find it, download the stuff. You didn't have to do that regularly. No. And then you'd have all those GPS waypoints. Right.

And you'd analyze those to make sense of where it might have killed something. Yeah. And how would you know by looking at the waypoints? Just it lingered in an area? Yeah. So he had developed an algorithm that would go through the points and pull out places where the cat had spent enough hours within a small enough radius. So it was like a 200 meter, the cat had stayed within a two day period,

had made locations within a 200 meter radius or something for enough hours. So they could leave, but if they came back more than two or three times, it would make what they call a cluster, a little cluster point. So it's basically saying this cat hung out here consistently for more than just a couple hours.

So then our job was to go out to those spots, get there however we could. We did a lot of four-wheeling, a lot of backpacking in, especially for that mountain cat. And then you just plug it into your GPS and navigate out there. And then you'd get to the area where the cat had been hanging out. And you just start searching and searching and searching to see if there was a kill there. Oftentimes, it was just a bedding site. And you could find a little bed under a tree or whatever.

But a lot of times it was kill. And so then you'd, this is where I started getting really into tracking. I'd been interested in tracking before this and learned a lot in school and just on my own, but it's really cool to go to a spot where a predator has been recently and left a lot of sign and you're trying to figure out sometimes from just tiny bone fragments and hair what it was they ate who else was there scavenging what went on there. That method you would miss

all the small stuff the cat killed. Right. Yep. Yeah so you're not going to find like fox, turtles I mean all the garbage they pick up and eat you're only going to find the stuff where you had a substantial amount of meat underground right cats with cats i feel like we were finding some we were finding some smaller stuff they'd often when they have a kill they eat and they stay there um whereas with say wolves they tend to eat for a little bit and then go bed down or

just go on their way if they've eaten at all so i don't know it felt it was cat would hang out yeah for some i mean mice and little stuff you're right you're not catching that stuff but you're getting the the bigger prey items like would you ever go in and find like a bunch of blue grouse feathers i can think of that happening one time and that was all we found but that you find blue grouse feathers all the time. So you don't know if it's coincidence or not. Right, exactly. Yeah, I got you. So what were the main things you were locating?

Elk, deer, what? Elk, deer. During the spring, there was a lot of calves, moose calves, elk calves. Moose calves. Yeah. So we'd find moose, porcupines, beavers. They loved beavers. They would linger on a beaver

carcass. Yeah, we found a lot of beavers. I guess, yeah, because if you got a cat that's 100 pounds and he kills a 40-pound beaver. That's a meal. Yeah, I mean, he's going to hang out. Yeah. It's like he's going to drag it off. I mean, he's not going to drag it too far. Yeah. And then... And it would be hit.

When they're hitting the beavers, you imagine they're probably catching them when they're up out of the water working on cutting willows and stuff. Probably. I also imagined, because there's, I remember in a lot of spots, it would be like a wet meadow with just a deep trench that the beavers have made. But it's, you know, not there. And they're the channels. Yeah. Plucking them out of there. I mean, I don't know.

I never saw that happen or anything, but it's easy to imagine a cat just waiting for one to swim by. Yeah. You know? You know, I've hand-grabbed. You can hand-grab beavers on dry land. Yeah, they're not so bad on dry land. If you get between them and the water, there's nothing they can do.

Yeah, yeah. You know, we've just heard back when we were of the age that you would harass animals that you found out in the woods, we would harass beavers if we caught them on dry land now and then yeah yeah so yeah they ate a lot of beavers there was one that ate porcupines a lot and then now i mean what would you find on the you'd find would that skin be pretty intact on the porcupine would they kind of pull that porcupine right out of the skin or would they shred that skin and all you'd find maybe a piece of it but there'd be a pile of quills.

Maybe a piece of the back with quills on it. Did you ever get the sense that they ate it and then passed the quills or would they get the meat out? No, I never had the sense that they ate the quills. Yeah. Because you could go to a where a grizzly bear has something. They'll run the whole damn thing through their system where

all the bone, all the hair sometimes you system where all the bone, all the hair, sometimes you'll find all the bone, all the hair in dropping form. Have you found porcupine quills though? Never. Yeah. Nothing I can think of. That might not be good on your digestive system. I'm mad to be awful.

Yeah. I'm mad to be awful. We found, my buddy, we were hunting in Southeast Montana and he shot a mule deer. And it was just nasty because she must have, the only thing I think is she ran over a porcupine in an accident. I mean, how does a deer get her entire bottom coated in quills? I just feel like she was going along and happened to get over one. Yeah.

Man, she was full of infections. It was disgusting. It's bad, yeah. She was, like, messed up. Like, to the point where it could have, like, long-term fatal. Yeah, probably. You know, from all that. Just full could have long-term fatal. Yeah, probably. From all that, just full of quills on her belly and around her mammaries. Oh, man.

Yeah, all this green. We cleaned it up and got most of the meat off it, but I remember thinking it was like a deer killed, like would have become a deer killed by a porcupine. Yeah, yeah. So the other fun thing about those kill sites is that on multiple occasions

we would find where they had been eating their deer or moose or whatever and another animal would come along to scavenge and they just opportunistically swipe that animal and add it to the pile. No shit, really? Like what? I found a bobcat once, a fisher.

I think somebody might have even found a lynx once. Hold on a minute. He had a kill and then was like sleeping or up in a tree or whatever. Around comes some other thing to get in there, kills it, and then eats it. Yeah, they're opportunistic. We would find double kills, two deer in one cache. No shit. Yeah.

I got a buddy that was running lions, and they had a lion get up in a tree on a rock pile. And it was dark by the time they got there, and they couldn't get up on the rock pile. And there was a dog up on that rock pile they couldn't get back. Oh. So they left and came back at first light. No lion, but an eaten dog. Yeah. The lion came down out of the tree, ate the dog, and took off.

Yeah. Yeah. From what I've learned about hunting with hounds, you don't want to get your hound, any of them, isolated. Because a pack, they'll run away from. But they know they can take on a single animal. It had to have been a satisfying meal to be a dollar. You son of a bitch.

Yeah. Now I got you alone. Yeah. Yeah. Would you find the animals that the lions killed tucked up and buried? Yeah. Would they bury a beaver or they just eat the beaver and not cache it? They cache it. They cache the beaver. Yeah. Like, would they bury a beaver or they just eat the beaver and not cache it? They cache it.

They cache it. Yeah, they cache a fawn. So sometimes what, fighting fawns is really hard because a lot of times it's just some tufts of hair and maybe one little hoof or one little bone. But they scratch the cover up, huh? Yeah, they're real anal about that. So they'll scratch around it. And then with a deer or something, especially there, it was, you know, real mossy if we were in the forested areas. And so they'd just haul moss from all around and make a huge pile.

Oh, yeah. Now, were they pretty fastidious about eating the whole thing or they often leave a lot of meat? Or does a cat like to eat his kill right down to the bone? That's something I'm really interested just in general with with predators because i think there's a lot more scavenging than than we think about going on so for um i mean like other stuff eating the yeah coming in and eating so after the fact right and with cats i think it probably happens less because they tend to stick close. But I'm sure they could get chased off of a kill. I definitely went to some that were just like, there's a huge rotting maggot pile here.

For whatever reason, didn't get to finish it. But typically, we were finding the rumen contents. They don't like that. They take that out first, drag the- They eat the stomach. Or does the lion not like to eat the stomach? They don't like the rumen contents. They'll eat organs and stuff.

Yeah, because you always see it looks like someone dumped out a bag of grass clippings out of a lawnmower. Yeah. Because they eat the actual stomach but leave that sack of grass laying there. Yeah. I also, sometimes you just find that because they've just kind stomach but leave that sack of grass laying there. Yeah. I also, sometimes you just find that because they've just kind of taken out the whole thing. So they almost got them. Almost, yeah. Yeah.

But eat the soft tissue. Eat the soft tissue. Liver, heart. Yeah, yeah. That's really nutritious stuff that tends to go first with kills in fact with wolves you can tell you can kind of get a timeline from the scats um so like the early scats from the first feedings on a kill will be these like black nasty i call them organ scats because they've been eating just the organs and pure meat and then as they eat those things up and they start eating cracking more bones and eating hair

more of the hair and hide and stuff you get those more yeah and you can also learn a little bit about who maybe left that scat because the um breeding uh male and female get first pick generally and so they're eating the the organs but that's wolf's first pick oh wolves yeah yeah yeah so i'm jumping around sorry no that's all right yeah my buddy uh remy just was showing me some photographs he was out hunting elk and found where some lions those two lions had killed do you remember what they killed they killed an elk or deer i don't remember what it was he's got all these pictures of them up in a tree because the wolves rolled in and the lions just ran up on a couple of leaning

lean trees you know this took a nap yeah they're like yeah fuck it now yeah took a nap just waited for the wolves to leave because there's nothing they're gonna do about it you know they stayed up in the tree right yeah i actually went to a wolf kill site that had it was hard to tell what had happened because it was an old kill site that the wolf i was following had returned to but it looked to me like she'd they'd killed a deer i think is what it was and then i also found uh where they had been where they killed a mountain lion and she'd gone back and was renawingnawing on those bones. The wolves killed the lion. So, I mean, you never know exactly what happened. But the lion's carcass was close to the deer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they might have rolled up, got a tussle over the deer and killed the lion. Yeah. And then ate the lion. Mm-hmm. That's a good way to get trichinosis. Yeah. That's how that happens.

Yeah. yeah that's how that happens yeah so but anyway just mainly the point there is that when you're looking at predation rates and you know how often predators are killing prey you got to kind of think about and remember that it's probably not just that that predator that that pack that's eating it a lot of times there's bears coming in. There's all sorts of things. Providing food for a lot of stuff. Yeah. We got a friend, a fellow we talked to, that he was doing, they were doing mortality.

They were investigating mortality of collared caribou. And they had a caribou wearing a collar. Got the death signal or the mortality signal. They'd been hit by a car, eaten by wolves, eaten by a bear. Yeah. So a lot of sharing going on. Definitely, yeah. And so that's one of the things that makes kill site analysis fun is it's not always

just a straightforward, oh, the cat was here, so it ate it all up. You don't know, is this a scavenge situation with the cats that's less common just because they like fresher meat but um what percent of a wolverine like what percent of a wolverine's diet did he not kill himself it's got to be enormous oh yeah that's i think one of their main things is scavenging avalanche slides other kills yeah so now the last thing about the lion that lion job what were they trying to find out what are they eating what are they eating and what's the kill rate yeah what's that mean like how many kills yeah what'd you find

or what'd they find they've i'm not gonna be able to remember off the top of my head but as far as prey composition it's you know it's very but it also I mean predator populations and eating habitat or eating habits in general are really kind of controlled from the bottom up so what's available you know something that I've come to realize just from being out there and from you know know, reading the literature is that a lot of times it's the reverse of what people think. It's more the, the prey population controlling the predator population, um, which is kind of relieves some of the fears that, that people have of, you know, these predators are going to come in and, you know,

decimate this deer population or whatever. Yeah, that's the thing I struggle explaining to people oftentimes when people get a little bit too hysterical about the predator threat is, you know, predators have a really, it doesn't really make sense mathematically for a predator to annihilate its resource because that spells real bad things

for the predators. They can mop something up and then move on to something else. Our buddy in Kentucky he was saying when coyotes came in he felt that the first thing they did was they worked groundhogs.

And he said that was like the one thing you saw that just vanished from the landscape was groundhogs. It was like he said he felt just anecdotal personal observation. But he felt that they went from having shitloads of groundhogs and then they had no groundhogs. And then they went on to other thingss of groundhogs and then they had no groundhogs and then they went on to other things and established a viable population but he felt that that was a case where it was just they were gone yeah and then did they did you feel like they switched to something oh yeah no yeah and now they got you know shitloads of coyotes and they eat all kinds of stuff but he felt that one thing that he saw just vanish was it must have been just easy pickings and something

they really dedicated a lot of time to. And that was what they've done. Yeah, it's the other thing that I have learned is that. Trying to pinpoint the relationship between prey and. Predator populations is really complicated. It's tempting to say, you know, this population of deer is doing really badly because X predator is on the rise or, you know, because they gave out way too many tags or whatever. It's easy to try and pin it on one thing. But in reality, there are usually a lot of factors going on

and working together. And I think that climate is underappreciated for its influence on prey populations, you know, a bad winter or a drought or whatever. Yeah. And predators are often over appreciated for their effects. I understand what you're saying. It's hard to find a situation where, I mean, it happens,

especially in situations where prey populations are already not doing well. But it's not often that you see this population of prey is doing badly and it's because of this predator population. But yeah, I think that it becomes most pronounced when you get to those vulnerable spots. Like, for instance, the caribou guy we talked with. Right, exactly.

He's dealing with a dozen animals in a population. Right, which anything that kills one is going to have a decimation. One is a huge deal for us. You know, like losing one to a predator is a huge deal. Losing one to anything. Losing one to getting hit by a car. Right, yeah. Now, vehicle mortality on

white-tailed deer isn't really making anybody worried but when you got a dozen of something it's a big deal or when you have a drainage that has a population of maybe six or seven breeding female moose yeah predation becomes an issue because you got six or seven. Well, and everything becomes an issue. So, yeah, everything becomes an issue at that point. So you can't just point at the predators. And it's habitat and climate are, they're usually big. It's hard to isolate all those different factors for the research so that you can say if it's one thing or another. But that's what our buddy Bill Andre was talking about, the warden from Colorado. Have you heard about the research they're doing in the Peons Basin in Colorado with the predator-mule-deer relationship?

They feel like they've got an isolated enough area in a herd that's not doing well compared to other herds around it, but it's isolated, and they know that they've got, what do you say the habitat they know can support the the fall yeah they have they're having great fun 95 of the females they test are pregnant yeah a lot of times with twins the fawns when they test them the live fawns when they test them are heavier than the last time they were tested in the 80s. So they're well-fed, but they have just zero recruitment. So they feel like maybe they're getting some very heavy predation right during that early stages of growth, like in June, July.

And so they're going to try predator removal at those key, what they think is the key time. But one of the things you're saying too, what's peculiar about the approach you're taking, is a lot of times people do sort of this like generalized predator control but they're going to do a very targeted predator control at a very targeted time so not like going out in january february to catch cats that may or may not be killing fawns in may and june but to kill cats in May and June. To see if...

You never know if you're getting the cat, but to see what kind of movement that has on it. Yeah. But man, yeah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Predator control, it's like such a thorny subject. It is, and it's I think it's slowly

changing a little bit. I think our traditional predator management is has been in the past that there's a problem, we kill the predators. But I think that there are

other ways and that that's slowly starting to be incorporated. Yeah, but I'm afraid they're going to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I think the old days of taking a half-dead animal and injecting it with strychnine and then having that be your predator control program is, you know, those days are beyond us. But I think that also there are times like this thing we're talking about,

this piece of work that they're doing in Colorado or the thing they're doing with mountain, like the thing they're not doing active predator control at the mountain carrier, but were they? It's like in cases, I think it's very valuable. But everybody, you know, people want to be so binary. the early 1900s model, which was use poison to eradicate all predators, and then now to have this overcorrection that we're leaning to now where we want to be like, oh no, it's like this tool we dastardly use because of the public perception of it and the PR obstacles in the way.

It's just like everything else. I think predator control at times can be a valuable tool. Does that mean I think we should poison carcasses and kill everything that feeds on a dead elk? No. Yeah, I think that we don't want to limit the tools we've got. But I don't know, my feeling and what I've learned from just being around predator management is that we often come at it from, look at it with a certain framework

of what we've always done, which is there's a problem, we control predator populations where I think we're missing in situations that there are other things that might actually be the problem, a more underlying problem. And that there might be other ways to solve it. Like that it's not a panacea.

Yeah. Some people, especially on our end of things, like a lot of big game owners, want to that that's like the answer to all problems right yeah i think where where it gets weird with predator controls when people act like it's a um you know i think a lot of hunters especially act like it's like this panacea where they feel like it'd solve all problems the predators are the root of all evil when it comes to diminished game populations yeah i read this paper not long ago it was more like a internal letter where a guy was there there's a biologist and he was explaining people's perceptions of of the impact of wolves on elk and he's saying how we've always you prior to the reestablishment of wolves,

we'd always lost 30 calves per hundred to lions. And he said the wolves probably added about 10 calves per hundred. But people were just used to 30. People had just become used to the fact that you know about 70 of calves survived and they got used to like that was how we allocated tags that's what people were used to seeing and then you had an additive effect of wolves right and it wound up you know upset this sort of long-standing system and it impacted the number of elk, impacted the number of tags,

and people were like, oh, it's all wolves. I was like, no, in fact, it's mostly lions. Wolves are just a new additive to that. Yeah. But it's like people take a while to get used to it. But then I run into people about wolves who almost want to make you believe that wolves eat grass. By the way, they point out that there's no, do you know what I mean? That they don't do anything.

I was like, well, they eat seven pounds of meat a day. So it's coming from somewhere. Yeah. I mean, they're out there just doing their thing, but in both directions, the impact that they have, I think is overblown a lot. They're not necessarily fixing everything and they're also not ruining everything.

I enjoy them being out there. I enjoy them being out there. I like them being out there. I think that I probably represent a pretty standard view of, I like having all the native species on the ground. I like having an intact collection of large predators. And I also like it when those large predators are managed as a renewable resource where you have interest. So that's just my personal take on it. I'm like a middle that the game we play where emotional attachment to different animals and

just kind of their own belief system. You know, there's some animals that are just taboo for take, you know? But I think we all, we all have that, that threshold somewhere, or, you know, a lot of hunters, I think of, I kind of think of a graph and there's a lineup of animals on the X axis. And like, so for me, zero is mosquitoes. And then, you know, at the other end of the X axis, there's something I would not want to kill, like my grandma or something. And then there's this two lines and one is your desire

to eat it, hunt it, be a predator for some reason. And then there's another line that's just kind of your empathy or whatever. And so you have this line that

for me I want to kill mosquitoes so I don't have empathy and I have a or whatever. And so you have this line that, for me, I want to kill mosquitoes, so I don't have empathy and I have a high want. And then where those lines intersect where I've got the desire to kill something is higher than my empathy, higher than my desire to just know they're there, that individual's there. But there's also the point where I like knowing they're there and my empathy is so great that I have no desire to kill them. So where does it fall for you?

I think empathy grows as you interact with animals a lot. So for me... I don't know about that. Well, okay. Well, okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. I think bears is where things start getting really gray for me.

Those lines start to get really close. Yeah. I would have a hard time hunting a bear i wouldn't i don't have a desire my desire to to eat it doesn't outweigh my desire to just know they're there i've also i've interacted with so many bears i've held their cubs and watched them in their dens and watched hours of you you know, trail cam footage of them. And so I just feel too connected.

And so that empathy line has gone up. But that in and of itself doesn't explain it. Why not? Interaction doesn't explain it because think about, Giannis, how much have you interacted with elk? Yeah, thousands of hours. Yeah. Held their babies.

No. Okay. Yeah, thousands of hours. Held their babies. No. Okay, short of that, but observation, studying, right? Yeah. I think in my case, interaction leads in the other direction. There's some things where I feel like recently we had a wolverine, right? Get into a wolf carcass. In an area where you're allowed one wolverine right get into a wolf carcass in an area where you're allowed one wolverine a year hunting it was the first wolverine i ever laid eyes on i was like i'm not gonna kill the first wolverine i ever laid eyes on

right that's the thing i was thinking about when people go to africa where it's kind of like oh that's what that looks like bam you know yeah it Bam! I don't have any context with it. I'm not going to shoot the first wolverine I see. Now, if I'd been out and I glassed up a dozen wolverines over the course of a couple years, I'd start being like, yeah, I now have sort of earned my place at the table.

Ah, yeah. That's just another measuring stick of like, I don't know, I just feel like everybody's got their own kind of complicated value and ethics around it and that that plays into it but there's i mean would you shoot a panda bear no i have no desire to do it that's what yeah that's where i draw the line man panda it used to always happen to me guiding it seemed like around animal number 10 of the fall where like because early on it's just like

every client you're just like i want to kill an elk with you i want to kill an elk with you let's go let's go let's go and then when you've seen about 10 of them hit the dirt all of a sudden you just kind of like oh killing another one yeah there's still fresh for the client though yeah he hasn't no he's not he's not feeling that, you know? But I definitely felt like as a guide, I would just be like, oh, well, you know. Yeah, if you don't want to run after that one, we don't have to, you know?

Yeah, so that empathy line is starting to inch above your desire to... Yeah, I have it with wolves. As much as I support the right of state fish and game agencies to manage wolves as they see fit, and as much as I support hunters who are operating within the letter of the law, their right to hunt, as long as their state game agency has determined that the population can support harvest. And it's all done within accordance to preserving the long-term viability of the species and all that stuff. That's a long caveat, right?

And I've purchased wolf tags. But when I see a wolf, I just don't, right? Yeah. I just don't feel desire. One time we were out and I'd killed a doll ram. And then my buddy got a bear. And that night we had a white wolf come rolling down the riverbank where we were. And at that time, I just was like, we just got a sheep, we got a bear.

Two days later, it's like, you know, that's a lot. Yeah. But there's always something. Another time, I was just hiking up a river with my rifle. Wolf standing there. Could have, you know, shot the wolf. Zero desire.

I was standing there, I could have thrown a rock at it. Yeah. No desire. But in the back of could have thrown a rock at it yeah no desire but in the back of my head i was like yeah at some point but it's like when it happens i don't yeah the the the when i like it you know you show me something like a doll ram the minute i see it my desire to go after it goes through the roof yeah but the minute i see that you know lay eyes out wolf the desire doesn't climb grizzly bears it's like a very gradual down like a wolf it's like the desire is pretty sharp down grizzly bears is a gradual down black bears is a flat line i'm like oh there he is suppose we should go over there and get him yeah I mean there's a lot

I'm like let's go let's go there's a lot that goes into how quickly that empathy threshold is reached and I think that's I don't know it's not something that we should necessarily like strive to push through that

or to you know not think about it too hard because it's upsetting to think about killing this elk. And I think it's okay. You can be upset about it a little bit, but also want to kill it and go through with it. And it's okay if you're like, I cannot just make that wolf into something I don't have empathy for. If the reasons to kill it don't outweigh the kind of sad feeling it would give you to kill it,

why push through that? No, I know. And listen, I think that people, yeah, I think it's something that it's a valuable thing for people to discuss and talk about i do think also it's important that people recognize it's pretty arbitrary yeah okay it's very personal and very arbitrary and i only have problems with that when people want to start legislating based on their personal arbitrary perception of it. Because I'm like, okay, I talked about this the other day with someone. Like if you go and buy, like if you buy a box of Chicken McNuggets, right? How many chickens are in that box?

I mean, the way they produce that shit, it's not like one chicken. It's a dozen damn chickens in there there all blended up in a blender together so i'm like oh just imagine cuddling all those 12 little chicks right but it's like you're not invited to think about it right so i think that when some people do run the calculations in their head and they're like and they arrive at this thing i wouldn't want to hunt black bears therefore i'm going to really push to make it that't want to hunt black bears therefore i'm going to really push to make it that no one can hunt black bears yeah because it's upsetting for them to think

about other people it's like it's upsetting for me to think about all those little baby chicks yeah so yeah it's but some people feel like obligated to really pursue pushing their line yeah and that's the only time it starts to be not offensive to me but it just i start to get a really pursue pushing their line. Yeah. And that's the only time it starts to be not offensive to me, but I start to get a little skittish. Yeah. When that happens. I think it's always going on.

If you watch the way initiatives work and the political cycle, it's always going on that people are coming up with arbitrarily arriving at their favorites and then trying to legislate their favorites when it is entirely arbitrary. Yeah, that's true. But I think that it's going to be a constant battle all the time between our sort of historic cultural attitude towards wildlife and our natural areas in general of this is here for us and we can just take.

I think that's one extreme end. And then there's, you know, it can't be touched. And let's ignore the fact that we're predators and have a desire to engage with nature in that way. So if those extremes keep fighting and we keep meeting in the middle, you still want to have both ends maybe or people closer to the middle. Yeah, because I feel historically, when I look at just the historic wildlife, the enemy is the just take, right?

What happened to American wildlife in the late 1800s and early 1900s was having absolutely no regard for the future, no comprehension of the finiteness of our resources. And further than that. This Abrahamic, you know, like Leopold calls it, like this Abrahamic concept of land where it's somehow everything was like given to you. Right, it's your God-given right. Yeah, like this, you have this like, you like this divine right to just destroy.

And a divine duty to civilize. Yeah, to tame. And tame that wilderness. So that's like the old enemy, and that has been largely vanquished in this country. I'm not saying globally, but that attitude has been defeated. That root is still there. Yeah. No, its root is still there, but we've arrived at a place where we've legally squashed it.

Yeah. Right? arrived at a place where you've legally squashed it. The new enemy now, like the new threat now, I feel is the other side of it, which is the complete dissociation with wildlife and that it's something that we just have to look at out the window of a car and it has nothing to do with our lives anymore. That it's a relic of the past

and it's just meant for observation. Yeah, yeah. There's no entanglement. Yanni, what do you think about it? You got a concluding thought? Just after my bathroom break, you're going to hit me with that? I'm thinking we need to have Carmen back again, because we took a little break,

and I got to chat her up about her early hunt experiences and there's a lot to talk about there and we didn't even get to that. Yeah. How many animals did we miss off? We were just getting started on my resume. Yeah, and I'd even like to know just like a real quick,

like how even like how it's done. What? The tactic of trapping wolves yeah when they when they put collars on wolves or catch them in foot traps yep padded jaws padded jaws yep put inline springs in them um they're just i mean they're they're no different they've just got pads so you it's like a double coil spring with pads. Mm-hmm. And then you get one in a trap and you drug it and put a collar on and kind of the standard rigamarole. They just use urine to lure them? All kinds of stuff.

Bait? All kinds. No, not bait. Odors? Yeah. Scent lures. Mm-hmm. No, not bait. Odors. Yeah, scent lures. They are so smart, and they tune up really fast. And so scent control in the area of your trap is really important.

In fact, so the trapper that trapped for this project would have everybody else there just sit in the back of the truck. Yeah. Because, you know, you didn't want our footprint smell around. And then just disguising these traps really well and using different scent lures. And it's not easy because they are so smart and the slightest little thing wrong is going to make them skittish. I've done a lot of trail camera work over the last couple summers with wolves and even they get wary of those.

I have so many videos of them just slinking around my camera. They somehow know that it's there. They don't like it. They don't like it. And I don't know. I've tried putting like fur bows in my hands and then grabbing the camera with that. So I'm not even touching the camera. So you de-set the camera

as much as you can. I try to. They've got the black light so they supposedly can't see it. You get pictures of their staring right at it. So they're pretty savvy. Yeah, there's a sheen to it or something. The color.

Something or maybe a tiny noise. I don't know. It's hard to figure out. When I used to trap fox and coyote, it would be that all the precautions, like you'd dye and wax your traps. I'd store them in boxes full of hay. Only use rubber gloves. Clean your rubber gloves every time. Only use rubber gloves. Clean your rubber gloves every time. Only use rubber boots. Clean them every time.

Disinfect everything. And then when you bed the trap and you cover it in half inch, three quarter inches of dirt, if that trap had any wobble in it, it's like you're stepping on shit that wobbles all the time.

Yeah, but something's not right. That's what I'm saying. But how many times has he placed his foot? He places his foot thousands of times every day. Yeah, but how often is something just under the soil? It's just different enough. They're already probably worried. And they're nervous because they're nervous because they smell something.

Yeah. So you ask them to come in and once you pinch one's toe, man, they get very, very difficult. You'd even then go and like, if you had like a dirt hole set or a scent post set you know and you got your trap you know nine inches back three inches off center and then you'd wind up bedding a couple of them two three feet back because he's not expecting them to be there you know but they it's just like they just there's yeah and they're just being so frustrated. You just dread the moment. Like when you came out and saw your trap excavated, like where he'd dig around the outside jaw and expose the jaw,

you're like, I will never catch this thing. And he will come and do this every night. That's the, I think the fun thing about research trapping is there's an added challenge of, A, you're not always trapping in a place where that animal's plentiful. So, for example, I first trapped lynx in Maine where there were many more, and it was a lot easier. We caught a lot of animals, although catching females we had to get trickier with because they just, I don't know, it seems like in general across species a lot of times the females are harder to get, and older animals.

So if you care about getting a nice slice of the demographic, you know, young, adult, male, female, that adds a challenge. And then you're trapping somewhere where there aren't many, so trapping lynx in Washington, they're threatened here, and there's less than 50 probably. And so it's a whole winter of trapping, and we caught four. And there's this one female with kittens that we just pulled out every stop for and got her in a trap once, but she got away before we got there. Now, you're not trying to catch those in leg holds, right? No. They wouldn't hold up, probably. They can get frostbite.

Yeah, so we just use... It just doesn't seem like a cat's going to do well in a foot trap. People use them in the summer. They do? Yeah, but it's hard to get a permit for that in Washington for research. So you guys are using box traps?

Box traps, yeah. They're not particularly trap-shy, but they get trap-sh that in Washington for research. So you guys are using box traps? Box traps, yeah. They're not particularly trap shy, but they get trap shy about a box trap. That's individual. Some of them would go into traps once they figured out that there was bait in there. They'd go in them every night or so for a while.

Like I said, the females are super hard to catch. This one in particular I mean we had when we ended up when the time that we did catch her this is a story that still makes me sick to my stomach because it was so frustrating we'd been targeting her the entire winter and we'd extended our season because we wanted to get her so bad. And on the last day, we were out closing our traps. And we'd pull up to this trap. We'd started setting double traps.

So we'd have one box trap backed up to another one. We'd cover all sides of it with boughs. So that if a kitten or one of the lynx went in one trap, the only way for the kitten's mom or mom to get closer to that kitten would be to go in the other trap. So we had a double trap set, and we'd done away with our whole treadle season, our treadle trigger system. Yeah. So we had fishing line.

We need to explain what a treadle. You step on the stick and it triggers the trap. Yeah, you step on it, it's like a little platform. A lot of deadfall traps that way. Okay. Because it's just a trigger system where when it enters, it puts its foot on a, basically like a stick, like an inch or two off the ground, right?

Yeah. So this was, so basically our trap sets were this box trap. You cover the sides with bows so that it's a tunnel through. And you've got visuals out in front of it. You're trying to get the links in the area. And then you've got bait in the back of the trap. And your hope is that they will feel comfortable enough to walk into the trap to get to the bait.

And they'll step on this little paddle that you've done your best to disguise with snow and whatever. And they step on that and that triggers the door. The door falls down. You remember like Ben Bennion's hog traps? Yeah. Yeah, where they bumped the wire. Picture that you had anything, even like a piece of plywood elevated

to where you put weight on that plywood. Yeah, it tips forward, and the door goes. So it was kind of like a have-a-heart trap, but these were homemade and bigger. What kind of weight does it take to trigger that trap? You try to just have them on a hair trigger. It is a hair. But it was just weird enough that

they'd get bunged up with ice and whatever, so they weren't working well enough that we were catching cats and they were wary of them. So what we did was we took those out and we took fishing line and we took fishing line and we strung it kind of towards the back in a sort of a, like a Z shape. So it came

from one side to the other and looped back and then mounted on the top of the trap and um that would throw the trigger yeah that would throw the gate yeah so the the fishing line was um tied to the little fake cheese thing and then we had the door was on a on a little piece of rope and you'd loop that over the the um the little the bale thing yeah the bale so that when the cheese got pulled on even slightly we had birds tripping these things when it got pulled on even slightly by an animal in the trap the door would close. So anyway, so we've gone through all this. It's our last day. We're closing traps, and we pull up to the trap, and the doors are closed because it's a double trap.

We leap off our snowmobiles, and the trap is empty. And we could tell from the tracks what had happened was either the mom or the kitten had gone in the trap and the other had obviously been upset about this and was trying to get at it. We even sat on top of it and all this stuff, but before it got desperate enough to go into the other trap and we would maybe even have both of them, a little bit of snow buildup at the bottom of the door

created a tiny gap between the door and the top of the trap, and that lynx squeezed out of there. Oh, shit. So we never caught that female. We came so close, but never caught her. So anyway, the point of all that is when you have to catch certain individuals, you don't just get to move on.

It makes you get creative and get, and it's fun. Even with beaver trapping, sometimes there's just that last female that you really want to get out of there because you want the whole family group or whatever. And you just, even that can be super tricky. So you found that the females are harder to get than males?

Like as a generalization? Yeah, yeah. I think just they're less risky, more wary. I'd say in general the easiest is young males. Yeah. And experienced young males. I'd buy that. Yeah.

Because oftentimes they're finding themselves in strange areas too. Yeah, and they've just learned stuff. Where they spread out more aggressive. Yeah. All right, man. We're going to have to have you back on and talk more about all this. Now can you do your concluding thought, Yanni? A lot of similarities there between the animal kingdom and us.

The young males get in trouble all the time. Jared Diamond talks about, Jared, the physiologist, among many other things, Jared Diamond talks about why reckless behavior in males, how that would become selected for in sexual selection like why would why would you know the propensity to do like ridiculous crazy shit that will get you hurt why is there an advantage there and he thinks it's like getting really shit-faced drunk okay why is there why is that advanced why is that selected for and he he talks about i can't remember if he was given this idea of his own or given a summation

of someone else's theory, but it was that it's a demonstration of fitness because you're basically saying, I'm so fit. I'm so fit that I can afford to do these very risky behaviors.

And that has, over time, had a sexual advantage in attracting females. That you're like, now there's a specimen. He can get that drunk and still be okay. Because there is something about it. Why it wasn't just that sexual selection and adaptive advantages wouldn't just make you real timid. People don't want that. They want that bull elk that just comes screaming in thrashing brush.

The guy hiding out in the black timber, he's not getting anywhere. All right. Is that your concluding thought? No. I guess thanks for coming on, and I'm so stoked that we have people like Carmen out there doing the good work and getting this research done. And now that you're a hunter, it's even better, you know?

I don't know. We were talking about it off while we weren't recording but just getting somehow keeping science um you know like in the forefront to keep you know people making decisions and not getting you know the politics involved too much. Yeah. Just hope we have more people like Carmen out there doing wildlife research and helping the rest of us make informed decisions. Yeah.

Just find out about stuff. Yeah, keep learning. I don't have any concluding thoughts. What are your concluding thoughts? You got anything you want to try to get the job or anything? I would just... You got anything you want to try to get a job or anything? I would just... You don't have anything to gain from this. You're not selling anything?

Are you selling anything? No. You don't have a t-shirt company or anything? I mean, as scientists, I think it's important to try and reach a wider audience. We had a long discussion about that last. We had a researcher on who does sociology research. And we had a long discussion about what I see as my need for scientists to, as painful as it is for them, to translate their work for a popular audience.

Yeah. But a lot of them, it's just a very uncomfortable place to go in because you live in a world of caveats and reservations and not wanting to make generalizations and not wanting to oversimplify things. And you enter into a world where people are like, so what's it all mean? Yeah. And you're like, that's not my job. Yeah.

I don't tell you, I'm not here to tell you what to think about it. Yeah, no. I'm here to tell you what's there. Yeah. I can tell you what's going on, but I'm not going to translate it for you. Yeah. Yeah. But scientists need to be able to do that effectively, you know,

so that their work isn't just being circulated among other scientists. That's the other thing I thought about too, is like someone's going to translate it. Why not be in the driver's seat? Yeah. Why let some, you know, penny-ante journalist read your paper and take a stab at it

when you can a little bit try to guide it by getting out there with your messaging? Of course, people can abuse it and you wind up having scientists who get accused of grandstanding where everything they do is meant to be outward facing and they lose their credibility but i think that yeah to uh to enter that uncomfortable space of coming in and taking something that's like really complicated and you try not to make to read into it too much and you're trying not to be swayed by policy and personal opinion and then

explain to people like here's what's going on out there it's tough to distill it down because you can always imagine your colleagues listening and jumping on you yeah yeah i mean it's it's definitely a skill i mean it was taught in classes that i've taken oh is that right oh yeah they actually talk about it oh definitely i mean a lot of scientists know, okay, we've got this problem. We need to figure out how to teach people what we have found in a way that's understandable and yet still accurate and true to what we've found, you know? Because it's a balance between making it understandable and also not missing important points of your research or simplifying it too much or whatever well my one of my brothers you know he's a researcher and part of the there's

it's kind of built into his it's sort of built into his job description is some amount of public facing yeah some amount of public-facing work. Yeah, it's a skill. Build into it now. It's a skill because you can have a great scientist who gives a talk and nobody can understand or follow it. And so that doesn't work either. Just as much as oversimplifying it or not explaining enough doesn't work.

So yeah, it's a skill. Yeah, it's a lot easier just to have every answer be, I don't know, it's complicated. Yeah, yeah. Too complicated, I can't explain it. Yeah. All right, well, thanks again. Yeah, you're going to have to come back on.

Yeah, definitely. That'd be fun. We left a lot out there. All right, thank you. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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