The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 074: Gray Wolves

Episode Date: July 27, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with John Oakleaf, Vicente Ordonez, and Karl Malcolm of the US Forest Service, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Mexican gray wolves; taxonomic lumpers and splitters; historic sub-species of wolves in North America; Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy; wolves and livestock depredation; the Endangered Species Act; tainted bait for trappin'; foothold traps for wolves; roadkill buffalo; how many elk do wolves kill?'; wandering wolves; a correction re: brevited and brigadier generals; 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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Go farther, stay longer. Moving on. now we're going to talk about a a controversial subject and that is um the the mexican gray wolf and i'll explain why it's kind of it's controversial from from the ground up uh for a bunch of different reasons which we'll get into but first i want to go around and have our guests introduce themselves we got someone from the u.s fish and wildlife Wildlife Service. Yeah, Steve, I'm John Oakleaf with the Fish and Wildlife Service. I'm the field programs coordinator. So out in the field working with various folks and been on the project since 2002.

The project being? The Mexican Wolf project. And then Forest Service. USDA Forest Service, Vicente Rodonius. I am the Forest Service liaison to the Mexican wolf project. They have me embedded with the biologist on the wolf program to try to help with the communication process. It's a complex, controversial, a lot of moving parts going on with this project. So they have me in place to try to help smooth those parts and keep them working smooth with communications with our forest users

and try to reduce some of that conflict that's going on. And it matters to you guys because a lot of this is occurring on land administered by the Forest Service. Yeah, almost exclusively on Forest Service land. The Forest Service is a land management agency. We manage the habitat and Fish and Wildlife Service does on the ground work on dealing with the wolves. Yeah. And then again, becoming a frequent guest, Dr. Carl Malcolm. That's accurate. Yeah.

Carl Malcolm, Southwestern Regional Wildlife Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service. How long have you been Dr. Carl Malcolm. That's accurate. Yeah. Carl Malcolm, Southwestern Regional Wildlife Ecologist with the USDA Forest Service. How long have you been Dr. Carl Malcolm for? I finished my PhD. I defended my thesis in late 2011. So I'll be coming up on six years. So you're like an old-timey doctor. Man, I don't know about that. All right, here's the first question.

So everybody knows gray wolves, right? Gray wolves are gray wolves. They had an enormous range at the time of European contact. Is it legit? Because you know in taxonomy you got lumpers and splitters, right? Okay. As my brother said, you got lumpers and splitters and they know who they are um how legit is it to say that that it's a subspecies when there was no when there was no break in the populations they just like bled into each other

yeah so what they what they think going back in time is there was uh in terms of the gray wolf it came over from old world europe across the across the bering sea and there was several evasions so there was three invasions of gray wolves that came over the first wave basically was a mexican wolf okay so it comes over establishes on north america everywhere yeah basically at the time the second wave then is Canis lupus nubilis. So that's basically Great Plains wolves, the wolves that are up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, those areas. And then the last wave is Canis lupus occidentalis,

which is up in Alaska, Canada now, kind of coming down from that area right up to the United States border. So it's pretty widely recognized that those three are subspecies of the gray wolf. And you say like, so distinct, these are distinct waves of distinct species coming down. I mean, they were all subspecies in Europe at the time. They just represent different genetics. And then once they're isolated from each other, they start representing different genetics and you can really determine between them and so you feel that a dude riding around on a horse in in 1700 if he was if he started in if he started at the the

the arizona mexico border and rode due north, that he would have thought, like, man, like as he got up into the northern Rockies, he would have said, man, these wolves seem different than the ones that I was running into when I started my ride. Well, yeah. I mean, Mexican wolves down here are 80 pounds for a big male, for instance. A big female would be 60 pounds, somewhere in there.

When you go north and get up into the ones in Yellowstone and some of those areas that are there now, 140 pounds is a big male with about 20 pounds of meat in its gut. So you'd say 120 pounds even. And then females are in the 80, 90 pound range. So even something like that, Northern Rockies wolves, all the other subspecies have black phases and white phases. Mexican wolves, only gray. Oh, is that right?

Yeah, only. So that's a distinguishing feature. So someone, anybody can see the difference, the big differences that occur. Yeah. So what's up, because can see the difference, the big differences that occur. Yeah. So, what's up? Because there's one more. What's up with the red wolf? So, the red wolf is a separate species is what they, so it's Canis rufus. Oh, so it's not even, it's not a subspecies. It's a whole separate species. Right, right. And then there's an eastern wolf that's out there that some people are debating whether it's associated with the red wolf or it's associated with gray wolves.

And so there's a fair bit of debate about that eastern. Did the red wolf come out of some kind of hybridization with wolves and coyotes? Oh, that's interesting. Science isn't perfect, right? So there's a lot of disagreements among scientists. And so there's two different hypotheses right now going on. And one's that it's a hybrid between gray wolves and coyotes. And the second is that it's a North American just developed a bigger type of canid. Yeah, got you.

And so this is the bigger type of canid represented by the eastern wolves and the red wolves. And then they subsequently bred with some coyotes through time. And so, but in terms of how they evolved, they evolved in North America as a big canis. So if you, again, going back in time, if you, what would have been the pre-contact, like the pre-European contact range of what we now describe as the Mexican gray wolf? So it'd be in Arizona and New Mexico, south into Mexico. So if at that same time you were in the Texas panhandle, what would you have said that wolf was? You would probably call it, it would be a Mexican wolf as well. Over in Texas, that's primarily Mexican wolves.

But there's bleed over, right? Subspecies breed with each other still. And so there's gradations that go on through it. It wasn't a sharp, defined line. You'll see maps that have, here's a line. But in reality, it was some big fuzzy area transition zone yeah it's similar to now when we look at um if you look at mule deer and blacktail deer in california we've conveniently decided that i5 right yeah that a deer can go from being a black-tailed mule deer just by hopping the highway. Sure.

Because you have that, like, I remember the intercline of some, there's some way to put it, like a steady intercline of grades or something like that. So people like the clean line, right? Man, I like a good clean line. Yeah, it's a lot better than saying, hey, it's gradations all over the place and stuff like that. I mean, if you go back in time, there were 24 subspecies in North America of gray wolf. And so saying that there's three right now that you'd recognize consistently is, that's the lumpers kind of going in there. Yeah.

And so review for me the three that are here, the three that are in North America now. The Northern Great Lakes. the three that are here the three that are in north america now so it's the northern great lakes yeah so you have the great lakes which is uh canis lupus um i'm getting goofed up here but canis lupus nubilus so that's the great lakes and it's stretched all the way across the central plains okay and all the way over into california and just big big broad swath and then occidentalis was up north and it kind of was the last invading wave. And so when you see the common line depicted for Occidentalis, which is the big Alaska kind of wolves, it comes down into Montana just a little bit. And it's kind of this odd shape, right? So it kind of cuts out a shape of where Nubilus was.

So that's kind of evidence of this evasion happening, that they're the last. They would have continued to take over range because they're bigger, tougher, stronger kind of thing. And then down south is Canis lupus balei, which is the Mexican wolf. So that's all the way down to Mexico City and kind of coming up into the Mogollon Rim here in Arizona.

And kind of that's where the transition zone really was where wolves started getting bigger and stuff. So if you go from the deserts off Phoenix and kind of that area where it's kind of desert-y, there certainly was less dispersal as you got up into the Mogollon Rim. Some people called those bailey eye and some people called them nubilus so somewhere in that range so what was the last year um they came damn near to dying out right but not but there was a point there was a point in time right when the only ones that existed existed in captivity yep what what year was that? Well, so the Fish and Wildlife Service, right, they listed them, gray wolves overall.

And then we went to a trapper by the name of Roy McBride. And so that was 78, 79, 80 timeframe right in there. And he went down to Mexico and caught some Mexican wolves brought up to start the cap. So there were none in the U.S.? There was none in the U.S. And he went down to Mexico and caught some Mexican wolves brought up to start the captivity. So there were none in the U.S.? There was none in the U.S., so he goes down to Mexico. Not even in captivity? Not even in captivity at that time. Oh, so there was a moment when...

They're gone from the U.S. Like what year? Okay, so now that I know that, it kind of changed my question. What year were they gone in what's now the U.S.? Well, so a few kept on coming up in the 70s and stuff like that but then they they were coming up from mexico so they're falling kind of trails and stuff across the border and coming up are you familiar with uh cormac mccarthy's border trilogy i'm not you haven't read that how could you i don't well i i

told you i was impressed by your reading listen you need to need to read Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy. Okay. The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses. And I've heard that before. Okay, The Crossing is a kid who grows up on the New Mexico, Mexico border. He, there's some, they're losing some cattle to a wolf. His dad says, catch the wolf and kill it. And he studies up and through trials and tribulations catches the wolf and can't kill it.

And he decides what he needs to do is bring it down to Mexico and let it go where it won't be bothering anything anymore. Except for all the cattle in Mexico. Wolf dies. The wolf dies anyways, but it goes, but it, oh my God. Yeah. So anyhow, there you are. Mexican Crayola. Billy and Boyd.

You need to read The Crossing. Yeah. When you retire or something. Well, before that, probably. Yeah. So what was the year they were gone so or kind of gone well let's just say mcbride goes down there and he captures some wolves to start up the captive captive breeding so where was he going to catch him oh durang he was going all over mexico but durango kind of the sierra madre occidental which is all that kind of stretches all the way down the mountains ranges in the west.

And they had good populations down there or not? Not really. There's about 50 left at the time when he was down there. Oh, shit. Really? Yeah. So what was Mexico's relation? What was their thought on this?

Well, we signed an agreement to go get them down there. And they thought even though we got 50, we're willing to cut a few for you? Because the figuring was they were going to be gone oh they were going to lose theirs too yeah yeah so pretty widely dispersed and probably going to lose their populations as well yes and uh so by about i mean roy mcbride was a guy who removed a bunch of wolves killed a bunch of wolves before this and then he was hired to go down and capture these wolves because he knew how to do it he knew how to do it and so he literally started up the recovery program by going down and doing this what was his what was his relationship to it to what do you feel that he just was interested in the money or do you feel that he

was uh was he like uh you know was there something bigger going on or is it just like he liked to catch wolves and if that's what catching wolves was like now that's what he would do he's more of a lion hunter he's still alive yeah he's an interesting guy to talk to builds traps and stuff like that and so talk to him on the phone every so often and he's a neat guy is he rooting for the wolves or not rooting for the wolves yeah he's probably just he just recognizes him as an animal out there on the landscape doesn't hold him in this giant special regard right he's been through both sides of it so and i want i want to step back just to just to make sure all the context like um so i keep trying to find ways

phrases what year was it when one that would have been fair to say that they were like what was the last point at which they were still plentiful in arizona new mexico their historic range in the lower 48 uh man the 50s maybe okay 40s 50s 60s there was some they were brought out a fair number but again most of those were still kind of coming up from mexico but that would be the time frame when there's still some and by the 70s it was dismal there's nothing and then by the oh when we rode up in 95 there was some surveys down in mexico and there was no more Mexican wolves in Mexico. So they did lose them down there. Yeah.

So they were gone as well. And so what we got left with was this captive population. And through genetics and stuff, we found a couple other animals that were pure Mexican wolves in captivity that have been long-standing captive populations at different places just some hobbyist had yeah so it was ghost ranch was one lineage that we refer to it now there and um and they proved to be that they were still genetically intact yeah pure man they hadn't bred with dogs or whatever. Yeah. So how many were there at this point in captivity? Well, so there was, that's the start of the captivity was seven animals. So that's what started our captive population.

So the whole population bottlenecked down to seven. Yep. And they can withstand that kind of thing. Well, wolves are, because they disperse a long ways they do pretty good with genetics so if you can raise them up and so you can deal with the bottleneck like grizzly bears and yellowstone bottleneck pretty severely when they shut down the dumps but then the population goes back up broadens back out pretty quickly and then you get that they can deal with that you don't lose

as much genetic diversity yeah so once you start producing them in captivity and you do a fair bit of that then it works out okay it's less than ideal though yeah but it's better than none right black-footed ferrets down to 16 at the time so that's's... And they came out of that. Yeah, they brought them in captivity and they're putting them out in various areas. So Wyoming, Arizona, all over the place. So when they were down to seven in the late 70s, what number did they hit in captivity?

Well, before we did, I mean, 82, I remember we did a recovery plan and they were saying it was around 20, 25 or something in captivity. And where were they? They just go to zoological institutes. So they kind of start scattering them around all over the place. Just so like one bolt of lightning couldn't kill them all one day. Yeah, that's a good idea, right? Yeah, spread them out.

And then when we started doing releases, there was about 150. So in 98, we started doing releases up here and there was somewhere 200, 150. Now there's 250 to 300 in captivity. All right, but that's okay. That's a huge jump yeah when you say that when we started doing releases so how like how'd that all come like lay that story out

how we started doing releases no like where who wanted to do it who didn't want to do it? Where was it going to happen? Oh, yeah. I mean, I wasn't here at the time. I'm not that old. Anyways, I think in general, when you look at releases and going to do reintroductions, a lot of people who are local in the area who are raising livestock, who are hunters out there, are generally opposed to wolf reintroductions because it's another predator that's competing on the environment. And so when you lay it out like that,

those were the folks who didn't want to do it. At the time, New Mexico Game and Fish didn't want to do it. Yeah, so it's similar with the gray wolf reintroduction in the north where the states state i mean in a very general sense the states were uneasy yeah yeah because it or beyond uneasy you bet you bet so, right, game populations are part of that equation. So if you're impacting game populations and stuff like that as a state agency and where your constituents are, which are broadly hunters and fishermen, they, when you're talking about reintroducing a predator, that's not the most popular position for those guys to be in. Oh, go ahead. It wasn't gone that long from a predator, right? That's not the most popular position for those guys to be in. But from the, oh, go ahead. It wasn't gone that long from the landscape, right?

So it was like, and for many adults, it was probably still in their memory that these wolves had been around. And I'm guessing that if you guys were breeding them, the plan was always to reintroduce them. It wasn't like you bred them up and then all of a sudden said, oh, what about this thing?

Yeah, so. Reintroduction. So in 82, they said, well, we only got 20, 30 animals in captivity. So all we can imagine is finding an area that's 10,000 square miles that we can get a hundred wolves to exist in the wild. And that's not recovery, but that's all that we can imagine and so these guys that were writing it up that was the extent of their imagination for the mexican wolf that's what they envisioned yeah but that's but we'll get into this but that's still kind of the plan now well no we've we've we've envisioned a little bit more envision more we've grown a little bit since 1982 but just all right but but you're operating so the agency that you work for is operating under is operating under sort of mandates or the legal framework of the endangered species act

which signed into law by nixon in 72 right yeah so i mean it's not real it's not real gray about what that means for i mean when a species gets listed it means that we have a national priority to like work toward delisting to recover the species absolutely and so it's like in a way it's it's not it's not so much like a guy decides to go out and do a reintroduction like it's a little more complicated than that sure sure i mean it's like a federal mandate well right and so you write an environmental impact statement is what it's called and so it's hundreds of pages you put it out to the public they have comments on it and then you write a rule that says here's a non-essential experimental rule that kind of loosens up the restrictions yeah overall that is placed from the endangered species act oh because you did it as they did it as an experimental herd here or experimental

population right and they didn't do that they didn't do that in the north well they did they did it in um yellowstone and idaho with experimental status experimental status non-essential experimental so it did okay but in uh montana they were endangered because they were naturally coming down from canada into montana so there was already a population in montana before those reintroductions ever occurred. So they kind of segmented out zones and most of it was experimental too. Yeah. To back up, I just want to, and correct me where I go wrong, I just want to explain this to people, that, I'm trying to think of a good case scenario. So I take the bitterroot mountain range what when when grizzly

bears were listed in the 70s listed under endangered species act protection in the 70s uh they were focused on recovering some areas that had remnant populations of bears and there was mountain ranges nearby that historically had them, but didn't anymore. And the animals are treated differently if they naturally went into a mountain range than if they were put into a mountain range. Right. So if they walked over there, they carried with them full ESA protections. And if they let them go in there, there so much like political pushback to letting them go

that they would make compromises and declare them um an experimental status which gives you a lot more leeway on lethal control of problem animals and other stuff so i remember this debate raging among grizzly advocates of being like do we go with the sure thing and put grizzlies into the bitter roots? Right. Where they're going to have only marginal protection or do we play the long game and wait for them to walk in? And I think that was part of the, the government even proposed that for grizzly bears in terms of the central Idaho wilderness doing a reintroduction. Yeah. And they're under non-essential experimental uh because it

gives you a lot of leeways it gives you a lot of leeways for uh not leeway it gives you a lot of leeway for controlling conflict sure for right so for right now um people out there at the they see wolves attacking cattle on their private land they can can shoot the wolf. And that's completely legal. It's within our rule that we put in place. They see on private land wolves in the act of attacking a dog right now, they can shoot the wolf. So they have certain measures that they can take in place. And then to mitigate cattle conflict, we can control wolves as well, either by removing them with traps or or shooting them and so all this is flexibility that isn't allowed under standard endangered species stuff you know the other thing is you have uh section seven consultations on any land management action

and so that's where the like the forest service comes into play we don't have to do section seven consultation with the wolf in the non-essential experimental so we're not restricting any land use activities out there because of the presence of wolves oh i got you so someone that wants to do like if someone wants to do some mineral development on their land they're not faced with that it's that it's gray wolf recovery area and that their permit process gets hung up right yeah so now back up again early on it was like okay we need how many acres it was 10,000 square miles 10,000 square miles right and who how did how was that selected well so it's the EIS process. They spent some time selecting between different areas. Arizona Game and Fish did a study in terms of

different areas. One area was the White Sands Missile Range that fell out all that. Another area was the Blue Range. Why'd that area get rejected? Well, it was included in the final rule, so White Sands was there. We never did reintroductions there. It was a backup spot. But really, there's not a lot of prey in that area. It's not high. By the time 98 hit, most of the mule deer were pretty low in terms of population sizes. And so we didn't ever choose to put wolves out in that area.

In the Gila. For fear that they would starve or for fear that they would just split? Yes. Both. Yeah. So they would split or starve. Yeah. The ones that survived would split and the ones that stayed would starve.

Yeah, I guess. They couldn't live off Ibex on the... That's a tough living, man. Those oryx out there. Or oryx, yeah. Yeah, those are... I wouldn't want to take down an oryx with my mouth. Yeah.

So that area was within the area, but wasn't like everything you need. I've hunted that. I've hunted... I ran lions with a buddy of mine in the Blue Range. Yeah. Every trail has got signs about wolves, you know. Right. And then, well, there's lots of elk there, man. There's a pile of elk

so right now you're talking to gila 22 000 elk in the greater gila national forest and over on the arizona side these are the two forests where we did it to start with on the arizona side eight to ten thousand on the two little chunks that we did it on so you might you probably know this you know that at a time i I'm sure you know this, that at the time New Mexico had no elk? Right. Yeah. Talk about a bottleneck.

Right. And you know. Zero to 70,000 elk. Hunters and fishermen set the stage for wolf recovery by reintroducing elk, by caring about the land, caring about these ungulates that are out there and reestablishing big herds of ungulates. Yeah, but now we're like, that ain't why we did it.

Well, that's not why they did it, right? They did it for hunting, right? No, did it for, yeah. Hunting has a very large umbrella term. Yeah, yeah. Because if you go and look, like in Kentucky, which is engaged in a reintroduction of elk, the odds of drawing an elk tag in Kentucky are like a percent.

The guys that work on that reintroduction are never going to draw an elk tag. Right. They're just doing it for doing it. It's the land between the lakes out there? Is that where they're doing it at? No, no, they're doing it in southeast Kentucky, all doing it in southeast kentucky all that recovered coal mine you know the mountaintop removal coal mine uh when they when they did uh you know the mitigation problem out the what's that remediate

is the remediation yeah the remediation plan for a lot of that mountaintop coal mining basically it's created a little prairie patches on top of those mountains and created all these grasslands so earlier i said new mexico had zero elk at one point there were zero elk east of the mississippi and now there's elk herds in 11 states kentucky's got ballpark their recovery plan was 10 000 now it's kind of like the the semi-official number is 14 000 elk some people think it might be 20 000 elk it's the biggest herd east of the mississippi and it lives on those things but with the point being that um yeah you might be like oh you're just doing it because you want to shoot one and people they're like dude i can tell you one thing that ain't gonna happen is me drawing a elk tag

in kentucky but i still got involved in the process. The same way there's a lot of people involved in wolf recovery that have no intention of shooting one. Matter of fact, I'd venture to say everyone involved in wolf recovery has no intention of shooting one. No, but I'd like to see you get there, right? You want to see it where it's a huntable species, where it has populations robust enough.

Because of what that would mean. Yeah, yeah. Because that would mean you had a sustainable population. Yeah, so that's great then at that stage. And so that's a wonderful thing. I think if you go back to the 30s, though, when they were doing the elk reintroduction or the 40s, I wonder if there wasn't more focused on hunting and stuff like that.

No, yeah, I think making a resource, man. No, absolutely. And then you still had a cult. There was still a cultural memory of having hunted them too. Right. But yeah, when I say it's like hunting has an umbrella idea that pushes that kind of stuff. Because I think it's not that someone goes down the path of doing that thinking like, oh, next year I'll be hunting them. You're playing a long game and it's not

just like totally pragmatic now a guy that goes and buys a truckload of bluegills to dump in his private pond is focused on the very near term future you know he's like a different fella than a guy who's like let's go through all this hassle and catch a wolf down in mexico and breed it up and maybe in 20 years we'll have something. Right. You know. So when it came to be that you were identifying land, when I say you, I'm using it loosely, it wasn't that you weren't going to find a ranch big enough to do this. Oh, no. No. And even, so we set up on Forest Service land and even that, we had a rule where we'd remove them if they strayed outside of the Gila and Apache National Forest.

Oh, is that right? Yeah. So when they went outside of that, we removed them. But we just recently— Lethally or just brought them back into the middle? Just brought them back in the middle, unless they're killing cows and stuff like that. And that's a death sentence, killing cows. Well, not, I mean, if you kill quite a few of them, yeah, that's a death sentence at that stage.

Yeah. So anyways, even that size of an area, which is really big, was too small because wolves. You guys, I mean, you realize after the fact it was too small. Yeah, they were outside the boundary. We spent a lot of time chasing wolves outside the boundary, and that's kind of inconsistent with recovery. So right now we have a broader area that we put out. So right now wolves can range anywhere south of I-40

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What was the... Is the ESA, is the Endangered Species Act so powerful that the Forest Service had to say, okay. Well, sure. I mean, that's part of our mandate also is recovery of endangered species. Okay. So we're partnered up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to implement the Endangered Species Act. But the fun kind of comes into the work is when you have multiple use objectives on the Forest Service land.

You know, you've got livestock grazing, you've got timber harvesting, you've got recreation, you've got all these activities going on on public land. Plus now you're trying to reestablish and recover a predator. That's where the heavy lifting and work comes in.

Yeah. You mean balancing out those interests? Balancing that. I imagine the most, so the two big, not compromises, the two big conflict areas would be hunters in a general sense. Yep. And then livestock producers. Absolutely.

Who hold private property on the borders of this and who hold grazing leases on the inside of it. Yeah, probably a lot of the heavy lifting comes with our livestock grazers and permittees, trying to prevent the conflicts and reduce the conflicts and providing the communications with those folks to let them better understand what's going on and what to expect.

That's where all the real challenges lie. Yeah. How might those challenges manifest? You know what I mean? Like on a ground person level, what's a common sort of conflict that happens? Well, you know, the big conflicts obviously is the direct depredation of livestock by the wolves. And trying to, first of all,

trying to find ways to prevent that. And then when it does happen, working with the compensation programs to try to compensate these permittees that have losses. And there's some good compensation programs in place to help recover some of those losses that do occur. Those compensation programs are far from perfect, but they do provide a way to compensate the permittees for losses that they could take. And going into you guys, like you had to have known, right? The minute, like how many did you let go the first time you let them go?

I was three packs in 98 in March of 1998. And how many were in a pack? You know, around five. Well, there was yearlings and an adult pair. So, at that time, they were getting ready to breed, bred up. So, they're going to have pups in April, May. And they had no institutional memory of hunting within that pack. They'd been live, they'd been captive. Yeah, yeah. They hadn't hunted at all. It's interesting because some of the wolves that came right out of captivity, less than a month, some of the ranchers are saying, yeah, they killed an elk right out of here, right out of the gate. So it's kind of just...

They just knew what they were up to. It's just programmed into them, right? So when they hit the ground, how much time went by before someone's like, hey, those sons of bitches killed my cow? I think we got through 98 without an actual depredation. Really? Yeah. So 98 was a good year. But it's certainly every year since then.

How many? Been depredations. Well, so you kind of say it on a per 100 wolf basis right because you want to compare to other places and you want to compare year to year so as the population grows you get more and more so somewhere between 20 to 50 cows on per 100 wolves so it's a fairly significant yeah so depending on beef prices they're killing twenty thousand dollars worth of property. What's the elk per hundred wolves? Elk per hundred wolves?

So it's four wolves per thousand elk in our area right now that we're roughly shooting for. So when we did the rule change. No, I mean, how many, okay. I got to think about that one. But how many, and I i got i got to think about that one how but how many and i remember just reading this recently in the northern rockies a wolf how many elk a wolf kills per year so it's it's basically around 12 to 16 a wolf kills 12 to 16 elk a year. And that's commonly referred to as cow elk equivalents.

So a lot of those, that's not the right number because a lot of them are calves that are smaller that they kill. Yep. And so you're just trying to base them or bulls that are bigger. So you're figuring a 400-pound animal. Right, right. So you're trying to get it standardized across something. So 12 to 16 elk per year so around like 1600 around 1600 elk annually

yeah killed by wolves right now with a population of 100 wolves how many how many elk a year hunters killing out of the same area? I don't know. That'd be a question for New Mexico Game of Fish, but a lot more. Oh, yeah. I mean, order of magnitude more, probably. Mexico's got 70,000. Well, we can find it out.

Yanni, we find that out? So sort of an ironic point on that front, talking about elk too, and the relationship between livestock production and these different wildlife species that I think is worth dropping in here, is that we have places in the state, including some of the producers around this border country, who have direct conflict or at least perceived direct conflict between cattle production and competition with wild free-ranging elk.

So on the one hand, you have some folks voicing up that the hunters who don't want to compete with wolves for the elk they're trying to kill, and you have ranchers who don't want wolves killing their cattle. You also have ranchers who don't want elk competing with their cattle. So there's kind of this multiple angles of frustration. That's an interesting thing I hadn't thought of, man. Have you guys had of permit holders, of people that hold grazing permits on federally managed lands, have you ever had someone say,

I'm losing more pounds of beef to grass competition from elk than i'm losing pounds of beef to direct consumption by wolves has anyone ever made that calculation no i don't think i've ever heard that argument i've heard some ranchers say you you know, don't tell anybody, but I'm just happy if they kill elk. That's great. I'm happy that the wolves are here killing elk, getting rid of them.

But in New Mexico, right, they have a landowner tag thing. So they get distributed elk tags based on how much land they own as well. And so that's kind of the interchange. So a lot of the livestock owners are also outfitters and guides or heavily dependent on the elk as well. And so I get into conversations with some of those guys and they're like, I don't want

the wolves eating anything. Wolves got to eat same as worms, right? All right. I'm getting like too many questions in my head here. So there's one I keep wanting to ask And that is behold don't answer it yet Because I want to do another one before I forget What all have they eaten that you know about to date

Okay Like what are they eating And while you sit on that one What um When the reintroduction occurred, how universal was disapproval among livestock producers who are running cattle on the recovery area or private lands surrounding the recovery area? You know, that was before my time. I've been in the program for about three years now. Uh-huh.

But I would imagine it's pretty consistent with what it is now. A general lack of support for the recovery of the General lack of support. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a competition for them. It's perceived that this large predator was taken

off the landscape because it was problematic for them. And then now government wants to put it back in. So it's, it's hard for them to come fully on board on supporting that. And would you say the same thing on the hunting community, general lack of support, or is it more mixed? It's got to be more mixed. I would say it's definitely more mixed.

I sit on both sides. I'm not from here, but I was in a state that had it. I sit on both sides of it. One, I think it's immoral and i don't throw that word around very often but i think it's immoral to drive species to extinction i think it's like playing god with god's stuff right i think it's like a a a grievous sin to knowingly eliminate a species from earth. Okay. On the other hand, I used to hunt it.

We hunted an area through its, we hunted an area that we started hunting in the Northern Rockies the year of the reintroduction. And we, within a handful of years, we were hunting one-third as many elk as we were when we started hunting it now we got better all the time so my brother he still he still hunts it he still kills elk every year even though he's hunting a third as many as he was before but he's just like his knowledge of the area has kept pace with the diminishment of the herds right and of course you wait and hope with the diminishment of the herds.

And of course you wait and hope that the elk get used to it and figure out how to deal with them. Well, I think you can point to different management units, different areas, and the whole gamut of prey responses occurred with wolves being present there. So it's not universally all of a sudden wolves show up and you're driving elk to extinction that's the funny thing to always bring out people man is like the funny thing i always bring out the people's like why does everybody okay dudes like me are always uh dudes like me are always like oh the wolves are killing everything but everyone wants to go hunt in alaska right i hunt alaska

all the time alaska wolves in alaska 95% or 96% of their historic range. So I'm like, if that's true, why does everybody want to go hunt Alaska? You guys should steer clear because it's full of damn wolves. Right. So there is like, it's a little more complicated than what people would have it be because everyone's waiting in line to go up there. Right. And they hope they see a wolf. Right. the area i mean i'm not sure the area of the year but i worked up there on on wolves shortly after

the reintroduction in montana and then wyoming in those areas and kicked around and um you know there was an incredibly hard winter there's wolves reintroduced and they're harvesting the crap out of cows in certain areas because they want to reduce the number of elk yeah so. So outside of Yellowstone, all three of those things happen simultaneously. Yeah. So people look at it through these wolf-colored glasses, right? So they're just, well, the only thing that's changed is there's wolves. Well, there's a lot of things that changed in that particular thing. In some areas, wolves are there, elk are still high, same hunting stuff.

And in other areas, that's not the case. So the more predators, so grizzly bears, wolves, lions, coyotes, and humans, when you have the complete suite of predators, right, you have more chance of driving down populations of ungulates than you do, say, down here where you don't have grizzly bears, that's one thing. And you don't have heavy winter mortality, that's another thing. Yeah, but you have lions. You do have lions. We looked at some stuff they did out of Idaho where they figured they were losing, pre-wolves, they were losing 30 calves per hundred to lions. And when wolves came in, they were losing a total of probably 40 calves per hundred.

So they were losing 10 calves per hundred for wolves. I mean, it was like ballpark figures. Sure. But the way this is explained to me is people were very accustomed to 30 calves per hundred. It has always been that way. And they knew what that looked like and what it felt like and what it meant for harvest rates. But then when that little extra chunk got carved out of there, it was felt very acutely

and people then sort of blamed all 40 calves per hundred on this new thing rather than looking at it as a little addition. Right. And it's harder to recover. So if you're a manager out there, you're used to saying, okay, I'm harvesting cows because I want to drive down the elk population. I'm going to drive it down. I'm going to harvest cows. And then, okay, I'm going to stop my cow harvest because i want it to go back up wolves predation in general can slow that increase right so it's harder to have this rapid rebound i got rapid control kind of stuff that you're used to having where you're just working that valve and like right right so it's it's a different thing that people have to get

used to as well because the one thing you you can control is human harvest out there. Up in the Northern Rockies, they're still shooting shitloads of cow elk. Yeah. I love hunting. I have conversations all the time with people. And I'm like, if I thought reintroducing wolves was going to prevent me from hunting, I would have been against it a long time ago. I love to hunt elk. I love to hunt deer deer i love being out there and doing that stuff so that's that's an important

part of who i am but a thing that frustrates hunters i think is that you have some people okay you gotta get your way that the extremes right you got the guy who is like they they're gonna kill every last elk there won't be an elk left right and on the other hand you got people who i swear they're trying to tell us that wolves eat nuts and berries right you know and i feel like i i hear it in each of my ears i'm hearing from like these two people wolves eat elk and cows so that's i mean that's what wolves a little bit of deer but the deer is a little bit a lot less taken at least down here and in the northern Rockies where there's an elk deer. Why do they like elk so much?

They're just the perfect package, man. It's just, they're in a good herd. You get to chase them and there's, something falls behind, something's weak in that group. So, they get them and they know where they are. They like being in flat areas where wolves like to be and hunt. They like hunting that flat terrain. Wolves like hunting flat terrain. Sure, because you've got to run. You're chasing them down. So flat terrain is better. Lions like the steep stuff, right? Yeah, because it's more of

an ambush hunt. Yep. You know, I think the one trend I have seen is as the wolf population increases, the hunter community is becoming more involved in the issue and more concerned. More concerned about the increase in wolves or more concerned about helping wolves out?

Well, no, more concerned about how the wolf population is impacting their choice of prey, the elk. Okay. So the one thing the program is doing is studies to help really understand what it's doing to the population and the impacts. And I don't know if you want to- What is it?

What do you guys feel that it is doing? I'll let John kind of speak to that a little bit more. Well, right now, I mean, so far far we haven't there's no detectable impact so that's what the state agencies say all the time there's no detectable impact well that's that's a pretty significant change right to detect when you're talking 22,000 elk or 10,000 elk if you're talking arizona or new mexico so hold on have you found it yet no why not unless i start going like by unit by unit it's gonna be tough i just haven't found it you can't type you tell me you can't type in how many elk are killed in new mexico and come up with a number well and it's not all

in new mexico it's just the greater gila right so you do got to do a unit by unit. So to be fair, you don't just know this like in your mind? I don't know that in my mind. And I think it's pretty hard to come up with an answer because, and this gets back to what you're saying about the mountaintop removal and remediation work happening, kind of painting a picture of what the landscape looks like. And for folks who aren't familiar with this chunk of ground that our experts here are referring to in Southwest New Mexico and Eastern Arizona, you're talking about some of the most remote, rugged country in the lower 48. And it begins from the East. You've got the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, which is about a quarter million acres into the Gila proper, which is somewhere 570 some thousand

acres. And you've got the blue range wilderness west of that, and that butts up against the state line. But then the wild land continues because you have the blue range primitive area that I know Steve, you're familiar with west of the New Mexico, Arizona state line, which is kind of de facto wilderness. And then that's surrounded by some of the still most remote and undeveloped National Forest System land. So you're talking about two different states. You're talking about a large number of game management units for each of those states.

And right off the top of my head, I don't have a number, but I think for folks to kind of get this vision, this image of how remote and wild the landscape is. And a little anecdote to that end, there's a place there at the western side of the Gila wilderness, you guys maybe can help me fill in the details, but it's known for having the best night sky anywhere in the lower 48 because you are as far as you can be from an anthropogenic light source and the sky viewing is deemed to be the best anywhere in the lower 48 because you're so remote. So this is a chunk of country that is massive, you know, 10,000 square miles. It includes these different wilderness areas. And it's a place where wolves have been hunting elk for a lot longer than white dudes have been on the landscape.

Yeah, they only missed, they missed like, what, they missed 30 years of the action. Yeah, and even then you still had these stragglers coming up. Yeah. You know, like you were referring to in that great Cormac McCarthy book. So I guess the, a good way to settle on it is, so you're saying that the New Mexico Fish and Game, who, and to generalize, as a state agency with a state

that was generally uneasy with the introduction, they have said that they haven't noticed? Certainly the Arizona Game of Fish has been, they've had a little bit more look at this and they say they haven't noticed an impact from wolves. But the wolves are a low number right now. What are they at? So 110. So they fluctuate around. It dips up and down but it generally hovers around 100. Yeah, yeah.

So, well, for the last three years, three, four years. It's been around 100. Around 100. And you guys don't feel, you do or do not feel that that's sustainable? That's, there can be more than that. No, no, I'm saying like minimum sustainability. Like, for instance, we spoke with a guy with the usgs who was working on grizzly bear recovery in a tri-state area in the northern rockies and you know there's a lot of debate about how many there are you know i think the official number is 642 everyone agrees that there's more

because their counting system is flawed and they all know it so they're like 642 everyone agrees that there's more because their counting system is flawed and they all know it so they're like 642 probably more or whatever the hell the number is right and he says in his opinion he's like you could have that number living in that patch of ground for 100 years. He's like, that area and that number is a sustainable number in a sustainable area. Right. Do you feel that, do you guys feel that 100 where they are now, that they're too vulnerable?

Or do you feel that you could have that for 100 years? Well, so our rule that we just put out, we said that our goal was 325 in that big area, south of I-40. 325. 325. But they sold it in on a hundred. Our goal is to get to 325 right now. Initially, our goal was to get to a hundred, which was the initial thing that folks said wasn't recovery. And recognize that and so 342 recovery well 325 oh 320 sorry i'm mixing up two different we can just throw out whatever random numbers you want 325 is recovery uh we haven't defined recovery yet we're just we're redoing the 1982 rule

and literally the draft should come out in a couple of weeks three four weeks and so i you know i can't talk about that right now but yeah what are some of the definitions we're talking about because i guess what i'm referring to is well in the case in the case of grizzly bears um when when looking at that number is you're sort of saying, have you achieved a sustainable population on a piece of habitat that seems stable where it's reasonable to assume that if we engage in business as usual, we would, into the foreseeable future, not run into problems?

Now, I think if you have, like, with the Florida Panther, for a long time, we were in a position where someone said, can this continue? Can you have a population of 25 lions in South Florida? And the people said, no. This will not, like, there's no reason

to think that in 100 years, we'll have 25 lions in South Florida, or however bad it got in south florida right before they supplemented the population so there's i mean for recovery purposes there's what we refer to as a three hours which is a resilient population which means there's enough of them out there to you know have jeanette and to represent a population that's good and stable and all those kind of things is going to survive. And then there's redundancy, which is there's multiple populations. So not all your eggs in one basket. So there's, right now we have, there's a reintroduction going on in Mexico

that's south of the border that just started. And so that's the redundancy that you would want to see. It's less controversial there, right? No, I mean, they still kill cattle and stuff like that. And then there's the representation is the third R, which is genetically robust. And it's spread across the landscape to represent a fair amount of that historic landscape that's out there. So those are the things.

So when you look at 325, is that recovery, you would say that that population probably is pretty resilient. It's enough of them to live on that landscape. And so it may be one population in the future that works towards recovery. Yeah. But there's more things that go into it, right? So let me throw in a couple additional details here, because you hear John using some of the qualifiers like probably and we think. And what we're talking about here, you know, the term for this is we run what's called a population viability assessment. And essentially, you never can say with certainty that at any point in time in the future, you will still have

that species in that place, but you can be increasingly confident in the persistence of a species when you have more individuals and when you're talking about a shorter timeframe. So it would be, for example, easier to say we are highly confident that we have 100 wolves now and if we keep 100 wolves in three years we'll still have 100 wolves as opposed to saying if we kept 100 wolves on the landscape 100 years from now yeah we're less confident so the two things that really play into yeah i realized this risk number to throw out 100 years because yeah and a lot can change i I mean, a meteor could hit. Something catastrophic could happen that would eliminate the animal.

So there's never this certainty. So it's really a risk assessment. And the degree of risk associated with extinction of a population, you have more confidence in your assessment of security in the near future than in the long future. And when you have more animals than less animals, those are kind of some common basics. Then another point in this whole discussion of population ecology, you familiar with the Ali effect? No.

Is that all you ever hear about that? I've heard the word, but no, I'm not. Okay. So just for the benefit of listeners who take an interest in wildlife ecology and science, it's a good place to throw this in there's a gentleman by the name of warder clyde ali who came up with this notion that kind of flies in the face of one of the factors that we often take for granted in wildlife ecology and that is the notion that as competition decreases, as the number of animals on the landscape of your species decreases, you do better. So we talk about density dependence, right?

The higher density gets, the tougher competition is, so the less well an individual animal will do. So the Alley Effect essentially is the inverse of that. The notion that if you drive a population down far enough, and it's a social species or a species that benefits from the existence of conspecifics, you can push that species towards extinction. Yeah. Like, like what you'd see with passenger pigeons.

Exactly. You're going to have a billion or none. Right. That's a classic example. So with passenger pigeons, they think one of the key drivers was the fact that you needed these huge flocks in order to elicit normal reproductive behavior and you had that last lonely passenger pigeon martha dying in the cincinnati zoo i think it was september 1st 1914

and they tried you know they tried like hell to get that bird to breed when there were still other males around but they lacked those massive flocks that elicited the breeding behavior. So that's a classic example of Ali effect. And this guy, Warder Clyde Ali, he did a lot of research looking at species that are a little less sexy than wolves or passenger pigeons. He did a lot of work with like goldfish, for example, where the regurgitation of food from one goldfish in a tank can be beneficial to the other goldfish and goldfish rooting up around the bottom,fish and goldfish rooting up

around the bottom like carp are churning up food that's available. If you think about wolves and their predatory behavior, they're another species where if you push them to the point where they're no longer able to locate pack members and function as that super organism and find and kill prey through that social structure, you may have the potential to push them beyond that point. In contrast to grizzly bears, as we've been talking about, where you need obviously two to tango in terms of reproduction, but the predatory behavior has nothing to do with depending on pack mates.

Got you. In fact, they seem to kind of like a little loneliness. The breeding age females. The interesting part for wolves is they're good at finding each other. Long distance dispersals and that kind of stuff. Most of the packs just start out as two animals. Then you have pups.

It's just a family group and their offspring. That's how the packs establish. That's what they are. Do you have any sense? Um, I guess we should finish this part of it up before we get, I want to talk about what they eat and why they eat it, how they find it. Can I slip in a question that's relevant here is that we, and I figured we'd hit on it, but that number jumping around or not jumping

around, but being moved or reevaluated from 100 to 325, I think that's probably one of the most contentious topics of all with Wolves, isn't it? At least I hear it a lot where they're like, well, they first said it was going to be 50. Moving the goalpost. Yeah, moving the goalpost. But that's serious stuff, man. The goalpost moving is a real thing. Right, right, right, right.

So I'd just like to hear, and especially you probably vincent day how you guys handle that well that's actually more of a fish and wildlife service number that they're struggling with but yeah okay so let me ask this like like to what to what you're saying what when the first time when 100 yeah that wasn't like that they would delist at 100 right that was just a number like an objective that was just an interim goal it was their wildest imagination they said that's not recovery and so that's what we're trying to define right now so that's the difference you're trying to set the goal post right the first time right for what d when delisting will occur. Exactly. If people misconstrued then. Well, yeah, because that's one of the areas in which,

not the agency, but it's one of the areas in which the public becomes obstructionist is when recovering populations reach what we all agree recovery was supposed to look like. Where all the, I don't want to hear this term so much, where all the stakeholders have said, okay, we agree that 100 or, you know,

1,000 of X species, at that point, everyone here now agrees that they will be delisted. And could go back to state management and they could be open to hunting, whatever the states decide to do. And then it starts getting up to where there's a thousand of said animals. Right. And people start filing shit loads of lawsuits and then prevent any dream of ever conducting the delisting. It's not the agency's fault because the agency could be petitioning for the delisting. It's not the agency's fault because the agency could be petitioning for

the delisting. Well, the agency very much wanted to delist wolves in the Northern Rockies, for instance, the Fish and Wildlife Service. But they wind up taking the blame for actions of people who are going to use, who wind up using the ESA, not for its intended purpose, but use it as a way to protect animals that they like to look at pictures of on Natural Geographic from any possible chance of human exploitation. But it's our job, Fish and Wildlife Services, to do a better job in the process. So we don't lose on the biology. It's the process where we lose in court. So we didn't check some boxes there or something.

Oh, they nitpick. Oh, yeah, some administration thing. They nitpick horribly. And so that's where the agency can do better. But they're not, and oftentimes the lawsuits aren't even challenging, the lawsuits aren't challenging the

key principles. They're not saying like, oh, in fact, 1,000 of these isn't enough. They'll go after like procedural things. Exactly. Exactly. That's where. Like where like oh no you need to file the you filed uh a uh everyone or you filed b first and you didn't file a and you're supposed to file a before b so therefore we're going to block this whole thing for a decade yeah the big

thing in the northern rockies was significant portion of range so when we first tried to do it we tried to delist Washington and Oregon together with Idaho and Wyoming and Montana and they said well you didn't analyze the wolves cover a significant portion of their range in that area and so their habitat range and so it went down on that among other things yeah and it I don't know no but but i i i feel for you because that's one of the ways in which i feel that public um public blame right when when again like dudes like me like hunting guys or whatever when they look and they get pissed about how something's not going the way they want they're not they don't usually blame like obstructionist groups who are what i know this is i'm you know i'm not this is not these guys in the room talking this is me talking one

obstructionist groups who are manipulating the law like that's not who gets the blame right the blame often falls i feel like in the wrong place well the government's good to blame no no usually no one questions you. Just to get back on track, if the 325 or whatever the hell number, they're going to come up with a number. Is that going to be the number that is regarded as an acceptable recovery objective, at which point it would be reasonable for people to expect the delisting

process to occur very much so so that's the number that we're going through going through a pva like what carl talked about earlier and it's reasonable to think it would fall somewhere in the range of around 300 or so yeah somewhere in that i mean for one population and there's consideration on where other populations are and there's consideration on where other populations are, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into that, how well the populations are connected, how well dispersal happens between those populations is a genetic component that you got to think about.

And so there's a whole bunch of things that go into that. And so me sitting here talking, it would be a poor representation of the overall plan. Like what all is going on. Yeah, that will come out. And so it would be much better to read it and really digest it. No, I'm with you. So down here, I know in other areas with other species that are going through ESA recovery, recovery and we should point out that uh when something makes the the list when someone gets

es something gets esa listing that does not generally mean that they're like they got it made two percent of this two percent of species that get listed on the esa listing only two percent get delisted because they recovered. Right now. I mean, it's a long process. It's a long process to get them to that stage. Oh, for sure. I'm just saying, it's like there's been a handful,

there's been some notable cases, and it's not even the fault of the people commissioned with it. Sometimes things have been listed, and then it turned out that they were gone. Right. You've had things listed, and then they find other populations populations or definition change and they get delisted that way. But it's only like a handful of things. I mean, some notable examples being like bald eagle.

Gray wolf, peregrine falcon, American alligator. But if you look, there are, I think, over 2,000 species that have gotten ESA listing and a handful. What I'm getting at is my feeling is that when the ESA works real well and we get recovery, I would think people would be dancing in the streets. Yeah, I went to. But they generally don't. They generally want to say like, no, it's not. I went to a prairie generally don't. They generally want to say like, no, it's not. You know?

I went to a Peregrine Falcon recovery party. So for the delisting of the Peregrine Falcon, which my father was involved in that recovery. And yeah, yeah, we were excited about it. People were happy about it. Oh, yeah. It was a great thing. So as biologists, you celebrate that you want nothing more in your

career yeah i didn't get to go to northern rockies recovery party because it took so many legal everyone was that was it was so sad the the way that just everyone that just seemed like everyone got burned. Yeah. It was a tough deal going back and forth like that. And then, I mean, but the good part was that Montana and Idaho were ready to manage wolves and their plans were acceptable. And so even though it went through Congress

and it's not the standard way of delisting a group, we were allowed to celebrate that and turn it over to the states earlier than some of the stuff that was holding back. So the Wyoming plan in particular just got approved through courts this year. Yeah, that's great so now they're delisted up there and that's so you're proud now buddy yeah all all the folks

all the folks that worked on it though they're all retired moved away and stuff like that so no no party so what like what let's say um let's say someone draws, someone comes up with this idea that, oh, there's another question I asked. Do you guys use distinct population segments down here? So are you treating the current recovery area as a distinct population segment or isn't it far enough along because we don't have two segments? Well, so we just listed the subspecies. So you can list a species subspecies or a distinct population segment so what we did is we listed the mexican gray wolf as a subspecies but you might later need to carve off a distinct population segment if this population hits recovery and then

you have another population in infancy somewhere you need to draw out a distinction between the two. Well, you could. You could. But the idea is to recognize that in different ways. So part of the problem in the Northern Rockies is when they went to delist things, then they're drawing the DPS. So they're designating a species to be delisted. The idea is that you designate a species, you go through recovery planning, and then

you delist that species after it's recovered. So you want to designate it early on. You don't want to designate a DPS to delist. Well, I don't, that's a big, that's a problem that's happening with the grizzly bear situation is they listed the species and then that's kind of where it'll get hung up in court probably right you listed the species and then later they said man we've achieved way above recovery in this chunk of ground the size of indiana let's delist this chunk right and it's like the you know i got you on a technicality because you can't.

So, yeah, that's a problem with it, right? So you want to have the foresight to create population units or alternatives on how you can reduce it to threatened. So make it a threatened species and reduce some of the restrictions over range wide over a bigger area and um so that's you know you want to plan and have that foresight in your plan on how you think you should delist area too and you avoid problems going forward so how much suitable habitat um how much suitable habitat is there for like because it's it's I think it's helpful on these kind of things to think about where could they be? And so, again, just to keep returning

to the grizzly bear situation, just because I know it well and it sort of provides a parameter to think about this, is there are some people, well-meaning, knowledgeable people, who look at the grizzly bear situation and they feel pretty confident that as far as suitable habitat goes, we've filled it up.

In Idaho, like areas of the GYE. And some people argue like, well, no, because there's many more mountain ranges. But there's some people who say like anywhere else conflict is going to be so high that this really is the suitable patch of ground. And we've filled the suitable patch

of ground as full as it can fill. If you look at the Mexican gray wolf, how much and I'm sure there's varying definitions of it, how much suitable ground could there be? Oh, a lot. So there's enough to where it's not going to limit recovery in terms of numbers to get to a viable population. So between Mexico and the U.S.

Yeah, I keep forgetting Mexico. So between those two, there's going to be enough. And the other thing is wolves are pretty habitat generalists. and the U.S. Yeah, I keep forgetting Mexico. So between those two, there's going to be enough. And the other thing is wolves are pretty habitat generalists. So they're not as specific as grizzly bears are, and they don't kill people. Yeah, that's a flaw in the grizzly bear phenotype or whatever. So, I mean, they can be closer to people

and kind of wiggle in and out of some of these areas and still be okay. So, outskirts of Rome, Italy, for instance, there's wolves. So, the suitable habitat doesn't become as big of an issue. It's not. Because when you draw a suitable habitat for coyotes, you pretty much draw a big circle around the whole country and just follow the coastlines with your pencil, and then you kind of draw on it. Wow, we don't want to go that far. It's not as big as a grizzly bear.

It's not as much. Yeah, they're not as prone to immediate trouble when they fall outside of it. Yeah, because suitable habitat for the bears isn't a matter of where they'll find enough food. It's just where they'll have a reasonable chance to go through their lives without winding up in a direct, possibly catastrophic interaction

with a human being. I worked on grizzly bears up in Wyoming, outside of Jackson. And bears are the true denizens of wilderness. So a lot of times that's tied to wolves. And I would argue it's more bears because they need to be, you know, pretty limited in terms of people for that interaction with grizzly bears specifically, not black bears, but grizzly bears specifically. And so I always have a soft spot

for grizzly bears. I'll go up to Yellowstone and I'll see some wolves and it'll be like well yeah but i i like watching that grizzly bear over there sitting on top of stuff i love watching them yeah um so you can't really it's impossible to say it's suitable habitat but when you draw the line there's going to be like a no-go zone that'll probably always exist yeah Yeah, that's, I mean, when you do a non-essential experimental population, right, you set up your rules in that area and it's actually area specific. So right now our area is everywhere south of I-40. You have these things that you can do that you can, you're out there. there so north of i-40 right now we say we'll go get those wolves because we don't want the wolves from the reintroduction being in this area or causing more not having those relaxed restrictions but it wouldn't be okay for anyone just to run into one and shoot it north of i-40 now it's a fully protected and it's a fully endangered species north of i-40 if it shows up there

oh because it's not it's based on where they stand. It carries full ESA protections, but you also have the ability to go round it up and bring it back where it belongs. Yeah, through Fish and Wildlife Service permits, but really only we have that ability at that stage. Do you ever hang out with the trappers? I am a trapper. What do you guys use?

Padded, like double long springs? Yeah, we use number fours as a primary thing or 14s. What's your typical set that you make? Dirt hole, flat, any of them. You just got in urine. It's more about wear than what. Are they tough? Are they smart about it yet or have they caught on to it yet?

No, wolves are tougher than you catch a lot of coyotes, than what are they tough are they smart about it yet or had they caught on to it yet no there's wolves are tougher than you catch a lot of coyotes and coyotes are generally considered the tougher ones to catch by trappers out there and uh wolves are tougher just because they're fewer of them less stance right so 200 square miles for a pack and so you're trapping over a big broad area and trying to get them to step in one square inch. So what's your general approach on getting on one? Like you start out where you get a sighting. Yeah, so you just, I mean, howling, looking on the ground, looking for tracks, looking for scat,

just looking trails, roads, just like you would with a coyote kind of thing. And looking for those travel paths. And eventually you do some sets, you see where they're coming and and looking for those travel paths and eventually you do some sets you see where they're coming and going both directional travel and then that's that's where i'm gonna set a trap how many sets if you're trying to catch one how many sets are you putting out ah just dozen so it's not long line and because you care about each one you want it to be you're worried about your thing so we do a lot of things to make sure that that animal is okay you're checking every morning you're you're kind of you have drags on them so and you have springs in line in the chain and so all those things

if it's too cold overnight we'll monitor every hour with trap monitors is that right yeah so they don't freeze a foot or anything like that. So we're very careful with that because each one is an endangered species. What's your preferred bait when you go to do the dirt hole set? The dirt hole set, I like skunk kind of stuff, but there's also a bobcat kind of gland lure. Yeah, and all that stuff. Ground up bobcat works really good.

Yeah. So, so yeah there's a reason why wolfers in all the stories right they come back and they stunk right it's because they got bait all over yourself yeah yeah dude we used to make some crazy concoctions for bait you know yeah we call it tainted bait where you take jar cube up meat and put it in a jar and leave it out in the sun and just at the right minute like it start to smell a certain way and get like a coat of oil and then you bury it in the ground put glycerin in it to slow the decomposition and bury it in the ground dig it back up hope there weren't any maggots in it yeah crazy bait stuff man kind of an art form but kind of a gnarly art form.

It is. So a quick anecdote here on the wolves north of I-40 deal, and this relates back to this blurry distinction among subspecies. We had a wolf killed in southern Utah. By a dude. Yeah, by a hunter who mistook it for a coyote. And this was in early 2015. Well, about a year prior to that, 2014, that

same wolf had been collared in Wyoming. Oh. And it had been seen on several occasions in Northern Arizona, close to the Grand Canyon. And it's notable, this is a female wolf bear in mind, covering hundreds of miles between Wyoming and the rim. Yeah, I was trapping for that animal. Trying to catch it.

Yeah. So. Trapping for where? North rim of the Grand Canyon. Oh, okay. So that was the first wolf known to be in northern Arizona in something like 70 years. And maybe you could share some more of the details on that account,

but I remember when that was kind of circulating and we were having meetings like at Arizona and people were like, no, no, that's probably just like a domestic wolf that got out. There's a wolf breeder up here who has him in captivity. And lo and behold. That's the thing is it's like we went up there and there's a single wolf. So a single wolf you're trapping for one in a big wide area and you're like, oh gosh, I got no shot. I got to get a step in 10 square inches in somewhere between Wyoming

and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. So there was a pile of buffalo that were run over by a UPS driver right on the entrance to the North Rim. They have a huntable buffalo population up there on the North Rim. They have a huntable buffalo population up there on the North Rim. Also a little bit controversial. Yeah, because they have cows in them. They have some

cow DNA in them. And there it's the there it's the park that doesn't like them. Right. The park wants to get rid of it. They don't want them in the park because they aren't part of the natural system there. Or maybe they are and all that yeah yeah so anyways the the ups driver tried to do the park's work ran over about eight and this wolf landed in this area and so it'd come down

and it walked by people when he walked down the road eat on pile, giant pile of buffalo carcasses, and then walked back up to its bedding area. And so people got photos of it. People were calling in and you're like, this just doesn't sound like a wild wolf that came all the way down from Wyoming through Utah and now landed in Arizona. Why didn't he get shot somewhere along the way where it's this observable but we went up there because some of the photos were really convincing and one of the photos actually showed a radio caller we were pretty pretty clearly a radio caller from our stuff and so um we went up there and we we saw the wolf so you go up there and set up a camp yeah well we went and stayed with the park service okay and uh i got you yeah and uh we we went up there and the first thing we went and stayed with the Park Service. Okay. Oh, I got you. And we went up there, and the first thing,

we went out like the first morning, really early in the morning, just to follow the pattern of people seeing it. And sure enough, there it was. And so we had two things. We wanted to get DNA from the wolf one way or another, either capture it or whatever. And so that first day, it poopeded and we went out there and scooped up a little bit of the from the outside of the because intestinal intestinal cell walls intestinal

cells slough off on the yeah so we had the dna right off the get-go and then we set traps right along the path that it kind of walked around and we scattered out some traps and we had a dart gun that if you get close to a wolf you can shoot a dart at it but wasn't the case that day and so i mean it came close to our traps a couple of different times but it's just a single wolf wandering and so well fed yeah so we we came really close i remember one time i saw it in early in the morning i saw it in exactly the same spot so this is just after we had scattered out the track so I was like well I'm just gonna do exactly what I did the other

day and that wolf will wander right into our sets so I turned around on the road and I'm just kind of watching it ways behind it and instead of just wandering the because that's what I did the day before, it turned around in the opposite direction from all the sets. And I'm like, damn it. So anyways, we never ended up catching it. So it went up to Utah, got shot. But we did. It was the same wolf and stuff like that. It would have helped us to catch it.

Did you get the carcass after the guy shot it? Our law enforcement does. You didn't need it for anything? No, we didn't get it. So we figured out what wolf it was and everything else from the DNA. Why do you think, like, why does a wolf start doing that? You know, it's just, it's individuals, right? Some people like to wander and see new ground.

I think some wolves just kind of set out in a direction and keep going. This wolf got all the way down to the grand canyon when i'm not gonna cross the grand canyon so that is a turn around went the other direction right yeah and went back up and so you got a little window to catch the wolf and it was hanging out in a spot and we just weren't able to some wolves most of the time wolves just you get to be two years old and you leave your pack. So you're. But leave in a big way. Well, you don't have to. They just leave until they find an area where they can make a living or a mating opportunity and all that kind of stuff.

So most of dispersal is close. So it's pretty close range dispersal. And then a few of them are these abnormal really long range movements that are out there i used to know a girl who i wanted to go out with real bad never did but she was working on a project um someone's looking at like how the grand canyon did affect movement of animals and they were setting hair traps for mountain lions on each side and whoever was running this thing was was testing the idea whether there was no genetic exchange but there is they don't care yeah and lions you know those they'd catch the same they'd catch the

same like offspring of the same there's like... Things that you perceive as being boundaries sometimes aren't. I was recently looking at some stuff with lynx in Alaska that big swollen rivers every day. It used to be that they wouldn't

do it, and then they realized, well, not only will they do it, but they'll do it without even thinking twice about it. Right. So the thought was the Snake River, some of the big rivers there in Idaho that wolves wouldn't cross very frequently to get to Washington, across the Snake River Canyon and that stuff. Yep. But every time you say something, you're wrong. So wolves won't show up in Northern California. Wolves are now in Northern California.

So wolf biologists pretty well, even wolf biologists underestimate wolves pretty consistently. Is there a feeling in your community, is there a feeling that instead of doing all this, that it just would be if you just wait the map is going to fill in anyways well i think i think that's the case in some places yeah and then uh but not with mexican wolves because you're doing the captive thing there was none left so you have to they wouldn't have to release them and then you have genetic constraints because they started from seven animals that's all you have so captive represents that genetic diversity

that's out there and so there's some maintenance of that genetic diversity that you want to do out in the wild and do releases continuing through time have you guys ever looked at is it necessary to bring in even though you'd be like sacrificing the you'd be sacrificing the genetic integrity did you ever look at bringing in a northern gray wolf just to just to be like it'll get diluted but it will bring some diversity so the that's one of those debates that goes on out there uh a fair bit so like the florida panther with the lions from texas that came in and helped rescue the florida panther right now we don't see the evidence where the genetic diversity is restricted where it's limiting the wolves population growth and that

kind of stuff so as long as the population dynamics are okay you wouldn't you don't you probably wouldn't do that. But they don't, they don't, their genes, like they're not going through like genetic mutation on such a short span of time that they're increasing their genetic differentiation. Like their, their like genetic diversity is increasing. I mean, that's something that happens over tens of thousands of years, right? Right. But a Northern wolf, for instance, is instance is big 120 pounds has black coat and has stuff in it that the mexican wolves don't know yeah but i'm saying but that's the result of

enormous amounts of time passing right i'm saying you don't get like once you get down to a population that had seven animals right even if you grow that into 300 you still have like you're still feeling that very limited bottleneck of genetic diversity that you had when you had seven right right so we have we have frozen zoos we keep frozen sperm in places and so artificial insemination all those kind of things are still an impact and wolves because they disperse so far and travel so widely, genetic diversity is high among wolves in wild populations and everything else. I got you. So they're an animal that, so even when you're down to seven, it still represents.

A fair bit of diversity, but every year goes, every generation that goes by you lose some genetic diversity so that's just a consistence of population size and how much is out there it's just kind of a standard thing so right now the the captive population that we have represents 83 percent of the genetic diversity that was in those seven founding animals i got you so and then our wild population represents a percentage of our captive population so you want to get that as high as possible to at least have all the genes represented out there that we can is there any chance left is there any mystery left like might it all of a sudden be that someone in mexico is going to be like hey we found a couple we didn't know about yeah i there's a we've had um there was one that was in a zoo

it ended up being having a large part of uh dogs in it so they had us it looked enough from the mexico colleagues and we had it tested genetically. I was referring more in the wild. Yeah, they brought it in from the wild, though. They captured it in the wild and brought it into the zoo and held it. It held some dog. It had been tangled up with some dogs. Yeah, and so most of the ones that are left, because it's such a remnant population,

I would guess you'd get into them and they'd have some dogs in them, even if you found a pocket isolated somewhere that was. Yeah. But there's always that possibility in Mexico that there might be something down south in Durango or, you know, some different places. But the best thing at finding other wolves is wolves. So when you're doing a release, there's people who believe there'd be wolves, there was still wolves left out here. They would pop out of the woodwork. Yeah. But you release

the wolves out there and you don't find any other wolves. And so there's nothing that doesn't track back to our wolves. So, you know, there wasn't wild wolves that were out there in this chunk of country here in the New Mexico and Arizona. and so they're doing a release now in mexico since 2011 so as these wolves disperse out and go to different places if they find other wolves and you say yeah well there's probably other wolves but they'll find them how many uh how many are guys poaching every year? Oh, that's a hard question. But I mean, 10 that we document,

but there's other ones that are undocumented. They get shot. And so some of them are... So people are shooting 10% of the population every year? Yeah, I would say in that range, 10 to 20% in a given year what and i know we're getting into things that are hard to quantify what percent are cases of mistaken identity and what percent are like dudes that are pissed oh boy i think a lot of them are mistaken identity personally i think down here in terms of they're shooting a coyote yeah i mean we've solved some cases where people

say that and they think it's a coyote that they shot and turned themselves in. And I always tell people, as long as you're honest with me, you'll get it. It's like if you shoot, you're out there, you're hunting, and you shoot a cow because you thought it, you have a bull tag and you thought it had antlers that were massive there and it turned out it was a tree or whatever. You might get a ticket for that. But as long as you're honest about it and turn yourself in then you get less of a fine than you would if you tried to hide it bury it yeah i've never heard anything to contradict that from any

game warden i've ever spoken with they put a high premium on the guy that comes and says hey man did i mess up and i'll take you and show you where it happened. Yeah. So if it's an honest mistake, I expect people to be honest about it. Yeah. And so if it's nefarious, then I expect them to be secretive about it. So some number of them are, do you ever get people that are poaching them because they want them to hides? Or are they usually poaching them just because they want them dead?

Everybody always does. Nobody wants the hides. So they're poaching them because they're pissed. Well, the ones that are killing them nefariously, yeah, they're just killing them. And then have you guys, when I say you guys, has anyone ever, who prosecutes it? So it's the Fish and Wildlife Service.

So it's a federal offense. Yeah, and then it goes, they make the case, our special agents do. So they do all the investigation and stuff like that. With assistance from states. Sometimes in the whole wide network, Forest Service, law enforcement. Everybody's involved in that. They have a network. But then it goes to district attorneys and federal kind of cases on has it have any of them been prosecuted yeah there's been a a couple here or there

they've been prosecuted i mean they come down on them hard or no well they can but i don't think it depends on the circumstances so in the one case that I'm aware of, I think they came down pretty hard because the person picked up the carcass and moved it from Arizona to New Mexico. And so at that stage, that's a Lacey Act violation because you cross state lines as well, which is a felony. And so... Why did he move it? Just trying to hide evidence. He doesn't want it where it laid down and moved it away.

And so I think that person that came down, it was early on. And I think he got a little bit of jail time associated with that. Other people that are really honest about it and call and say, hey, look, I thought it was a coyote. I shot it. Here's the evidence. Here's the thing. They, you know, civil fine yeah so it ranges all that level um but we'll see how it goes on that stuff law enforcement is pretty

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so do you think um like you know if you guys look at this as like sociologists do you think, like, you know, if you guys look at this as like sociologists, do you think that there's a way in the future that it might be a conversation where someone's saying, hey, do you remember when everyone was all pissed off about these wolves now? Ha, that was stupid because, look, they're here and everybody's so happy now. How's that working out in Montana for us? That hasn't happened there.

But the blood's still drying in Montana, man. I think people will normalize it eventually, but it's a long ways down the road, and it's different from areas where they came down naturally and areas where you do a reintroduction because it's the government it's kind of the government going against your values so back when we were shooting all the wolves i think there's probably people who are going i don't agree with that this This is wrong or whatever. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, although Leopold and various other things. And so the government's doing a program that's not favoring your personal beliefs.

And so it's no different with reintroduction in this case. There's people who are out there, ranchers, hunters. There's people who this doesn't match with what their core beliefs are in terms of things and it impacts them. Yeah, but I think that like nationally, nationally the reintroductions have pretty enormous support. Sure. Particularly among people who aren't affected by it. Well, you know, I think I've observed like in the areas where we've had the recovery effort going on for quite a while, there's more of acceptance there.

People are understanding that, okay, this is something we're going to have to live with. So let's just start working together a little bit better. The challenges also comes where we start looking at new areas to expand because then we start that whole process over of people getting used to wolves in new areas.

And then that's gets tough again so you have to build those relationships again in a whole new area and start building trust but it it turns takes time do you personally um do you have to do you personally go in and deal with people who are having a problem with wolves? Well, yeah, that's one of the things the program does is, uh, as the forest service representative, I, uh, do a lot of communication with the permittees to try to help resolve the issues, but. People have grazing permits.

Yeah, grazing permits, but, um, the biologist on the ground from the fish and wildlife service in the Arizona game of fish do also quite a bit of contact with the permittees and actually do the work with the wolves to minimize those impacts. And they, they do a pretty good job at trying to resolve those issues.

What, what's the process like when, when a guy gets a, he's got a cow gets killed? What's his process like? Like what's he got to do? So he, he calls us, calls us up either us or wildlife services, which is another agency under the Department of Agriculture as well. And they get an investigation on it. So you skin it out.

And so what you're looking for underneath the hide is bruising. So when a wolf bites, it bruises underneath the hide. So it's like subcutaneous hemorrhaging. So it's the same as URI. And then you're looking for attacks in the hindquarters and the armpit areas. That's kind of prototypical of wolves, wolf tracks in the area. And then it gets confirmed, and they send that in and get compensation. So they send in the confirmation from Wildlife wildlife services and then they send that in.

And then their compensation is some kind of fair market value for the animal. Yeah, it's set by, right now we have a Mexican wolf livestock council that's working on that. And it's composed of ranchers and a few conservationists. And so, yeah, they do they base it on the market value at the time and average for the area. They also do a pay for presence thing, which is when you're out in these big allotments, ranchers can't possibly find all the dead cows that happen from anything. Oh yeah, that's what I was going to bring up is that's the thing you hear is they don't know,

they round them up and they got less than they had and they can't go and find skeletal remains and make a claim on it. Right, right. So that's a hard thing. So there is actually financial impacts to ranchers, real financial impacts. And so there's this pay for presence thing thing which is based on a formula based on wolves

being there and how many cows you have and so that that's also part of the mexican wolf livestock payouts and then they're defending that you're compensating someone without them needing to go and prove specific cases where they lost animals. Right, right. So they, yeah, it's just based on wolves and pups, how many pups are raised with the wolves. So things that are good for recovery and then how many livestock they have in an area and then whether or not they implemented proactive things. So that's stuff like proactive is like range riders being out there, extra range riders looking for, uh, deads or moving cows away from wolves or, uh, different things that you can

implement out there on the ground to try to avoid predation as well. And those things aren't of, they aren't the golden, they aren't the silver bullet, right? So there's still depredations that can occur despite those things happening out there and some of them aren't found how many individual animal payments get paid out in a typical year uh it's pretty consistent that you know the number that are depredated get paid out most years so i not most people put in for the 20 to 50 animals that are killed in terms of the livestock loss yeah and then there's some component that are missing and you never find and now there are cases where um i'm sure i don't mean like isolated was it a common problem where you're not able to come to consensus

that the livestock owner and the investigator aren't able to get on the same page about the cause of death. Yeah, some of that happens with the investigator, but the investigator's trained, been through a lot of different ones. And so that's why they're professionals on what they do. And so that's what we go with is what the investigator does and makes a call in the end.

So that's kind of the way it goes out there. There was one permittee a long time ago who decided that he didn't want to have wildlife services out there, who works on them with coyote control, all this kind of stuff works with the ranchers, and decided instead to have the Fish and Wildlife Service out there doing its investigations. And what I would tell him all the time is like, look, this would be the same exact call. Wildlife Services would make the same call that I'm making here. Wildlife Services would make the same call. There's no differences. So over and over, and eventually he went back to wildlife services doing it. And so

the evidence is evidence. Do you go on a lot of those calls? I do on some. And I've been out there trapping for removals with depredations and stuff like that with wolves that are out there. And so, yeah, when there's big problems, then I get hauled out of my office occasionally. So I get to go out in the field when it's not fun. Like when there's conflict. Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't get the sense that you're losing a ton of sleep at night about this whole thing. Oh, it's funny. I've had people come up to me and say, you're such a nice young man, John. Why did you choose to do this? Why aren't you doing something productive with your life? And so, you know, and how can you sleep at night? And I think what I try to do out there is relate with people. So I relate with the

livestock producers out there fairly well. I have a lot of common values. Land, being open land that they provide out there, the waters that are out there and maintained by them that's good for hunting and fishing. So all those common values are there. Not choosing a lifestyle where you don't make a lot of money, but you enjoy being outside. So there's a lot of commonalities that are all over the place. Gotcha. And so you try to establish those commonalities.

I mean, those guys aren't like, I know how I'll get rich. Right. Growing cattle in the desert. Right. There's no, it's not. They do it because it's their family thing and they love it and they love the land that they're on so that's that's why they're they're in the business most of them yeah and you find common ground on that sure and so the point is it's like if someone else is here who doesn't have those same values or those same kind of working together

goals then it doesn't work out as well so i think both can be there livestock can be on the landscape and in multiple use hunters i'll still hunt wolves aren't going to drive me out of hunting and so uh and wolves as well there's there's enough room for all of it to be there out on the landscape. I guess probably not. But let's say all of a sudden, whatever happened, delisting occurred. You'd probably never be like, hey, I'm going to go on a wolf hunt. I probably wouldn't. I haven't hunted bears.

Because you've already been tangled up with wolves. Yeah, you've already caught a whole bunch of them. I haven't hunted bears. Because you've already been tangled up with wolves. Yeah, you've already caught a whole bunch of them. I haven't hunted bears or lions either, and that's just a personal. Nothing wrong with it. I have zero problems with any hunting. But when you map out your year, you're like thinking about elk. Elk, deer, you know, just those kind of, just what I like to hunt. Turkeys.

Yeah. I really like calling things, too. I like that interaction, turkeys. I really like calling things too. I like that interaction, getting in close with things. Wolves too, howling up bulls. If you go out and you're looking for a pack of wolves, early on I remember looking for a pack of wolves in Montana, and I got the tip from this farrier, the guy shooing another guy's horses.

He says, if you want to find wolves, you should go over here. So I go over there and I'm driving along and doing just howling at night. And then they all lie. Do you howl just straight out? Yeah, yeah. Can you let one rip right now?

Oh, you don't want to. Yeah, I do. As long as you do it right after me. Ooh. No, I bet you got a good one. Yeah, you can. So. Nice.

But you need the moon up in the sky and you need to tip your head back. Well, that'll do it right there, huh? Yeah, something like a little bit longer. What's that call saying i don't know they got into that they haven't told me dude i got a buddy that he thinks like i got a buddy that when he's doing wolf calling he's it's like he's like uh oh yeah i'm saying this and he's saying that he's i'm answering him back this question do you think he's right i don't know i don't know either so you don't have like you're not like i'm gonna throw the old roundup call at him well no i don't have the

challenge call or anything i just try like hell to get them to respond and i'm thankful when they do so you haven't found like you're not you haven't found there's different well i'm doing a break how so when you hear my voice break from high to low, that's kind of a break howl. So would that be called like a locator call? They're all locator calls. Is that right? Yeah.

I mean, wolves are always looking for other wolves. So they're always... It's just a howl. You can do a flat howl and you just... You don't really do that break kind of in your, if you can avoid it. I can't. But you don't feel that that sends a different message?

I don't know. They just, they respond. If you get them at the right time of year, pups love to talk. So if you get them in about August, September timeframe, the pups will all start yakking and the adults will break in and you get all the wolves howling out there. But anyways, just howling along in a new area and you get that response and you say, ah, God, I just found a pack of wolves that's uncolored, unmarked. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. You like the uncolored ones better. You like the wild ones. Oh, yeah. That's neat. Because if it's a collared group, you go, beep, beep, beep. Oh, there it is. And now I'm going to howl.

And sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't. And I'm pissed off when they don't. And I'm kind of like, well, I did what I should have got done if they do. Yeah. Yeah, man, I like the real wild ones. Alaska? Yeah, just, I mean, not that I'm down on the other ones, but once something, and it's important work,

but once something gets caught, something in it changes, man. You know? But I was pointing that out one day, and I was like, but that's like, it's sweet when you catch, when you shoot a bird that's got a band on it. Right? So it's, it's like very inconsistent. Uh, yeah, they're all interesting. I mean, catching them is interesting.

You walk up to them, handle them with nothing but a Y stick, you know, so you're just kind of Y stick them down and then you hand inject the drugs i wouldn't do that with a lion dart a lion dart a bear uh grizzly bears back in the day when i was handling them you can y stick one of those things right you have to make sure you're out of the the path of the snare where it's destroyed around the tree. Yeah. And so, I mean, wolves are, but some of them are aggressive. Some of them will bark and howl and growl at you until you get them pinned down, mainly the alphas.

Yeah. So, but it's tricking, getting them trapped is hard. So every time I trap them, I handle them with a lot of respect. And then, because it's my responsibility at that stage. them trapped is hard so every time i trap them i handle them with a lot of respect and then uh because that's i it's my responsibility at that stage and i'm happy with myself because it's hard yeah yeah you can't be out killing them on accident no i so wildlife work in general you have some mortality that occurs with handling animals that's's a reality. So you want to minimize that to an absolute smallest amount possible. So we take training every year with vets that go through stuff

and try to minimize that to the greatest degree possible. So I can only think of a few instances where we've killed wolves out there yeah I'm sure it's to some degree inevitable it once you handle a certain number of them yeah you get enough you have it and so bighorn sheep captures some will die from that and so all the captures that's a part of it so you have to evaluate whether your goals of your project and whether your goals of handling that animal is worth taking that risk. And so that's always what you do out there

with these kind of projects. It's not just cool. You don't just go catch one just to see, just to have some fun catching them. Right, right. There's a purpose behind everything. All right, Giannis. Right, right. There's a purpose behind everything. Yeah. All right, Giannis.

That was great. That was fantastic. Oh, I did find the number of elk New Mexico hunters killed last year, 14,500. And wolves are, I know it's different because they're in New Mexico and Arizona and all that, but wolves kill how many in the chunk of land they got right now? I think we put the estimate around

12 to 1600. So basically... And what percent of New Mexico is the wolf recovery area? Percent of the elk area? I don't know. There's a lot of elk up north in New Mexico, so maybe

40% of the elk population probably is in wolf country. So you fellers that hunt elk, you, yeah, you are, right? What's that? There's some elk that get wound. It's true. It is a trade-off. Right. You're dealing with, yeah, you're dealing with some elk that would wind up in your freezer, will wind up in the belly of a wolf.

Right. It's competition, right? Yeah. But on the other hand, do we have the right to dust off species off the face of the earth forever that's a theological it's like it's a spiritual almost theological question do you get to say nope that one doesn't get to live anymore it will be gone for eternity because it inconveniences me um and and i don't know when you're out there hunting you're in grizzly bear country or you hear wolves howling or any of that stuff to me it's just it makes it a little more interesting yeah everybody yeah that's the thing that's one

of the weird things about it is people um when talking about wolves people naturally are like it gets their hackles up because of they don't want to see their deer and elk resources diminished and they're hard on moose in the north too yeah seriously hard so um you don't want to see it diminished but then there's you're almost not a human if there's some part of you that doesn't get a little tickled when you hear one of those things rip out a howl sure and some people i mean ranchers like they're out there on there a lot how means i could possibly have an impact on my wallet yeah right tonight and some of the ranch answers go you know at first i hated that sound but then i was like man that's amazing that's a neat sound to hear so i gotta give them i gotta

give them that much you know and so i think yeah i think the real key and this is easy to say and very hard to do but i think like kind of the the key from from my conversations and my hard to do, but I think kind of the key from my conversations and my exposure to a wide variety of people across a wide variety of landscapes is that a lot of people who are upset about projects like this, what they're afraid of is being told half the story or to have the story change later. And I think that if there was, not that there's a lack of transparency, but it's difficult to project how these projects are going to go and then what the legal processes are going to be like down the road.

And it leaves people feeling burned when someone told them recovery will look like this but then it doesn't and then it doesn't and you're like waiting for some kind of relief from maybe some of the sacrifices you're making and the relief doesn't come and it leaves people with a real bad taste in their mouth and what i hate to see is anyone who's old enough to remember like the spotted owl situation in the pacific Northwest where an animal loses its like essence and just becomes a symbol for conflict. You know, it's like someday people will be able to hear spotted owl again and visualize a bird but for many people when you hear spotted owl you don't visualize a bird you visualize distrust and conflict and yeah right and it's and i hate it when uh and i hate to see like other animals that i love a lot I hate to see them become symbols for symbols for something besides just

their essence as a wild animal. But wolves have been symbol for something besides their essence of a wild animal for a long time. You know what? It's very hard to find the animal. It's very hard for people to find the animal within the animal.

They are just giant walking metaphors i mean it's been forever right europeans coming over here the whole thing yeah no you're right they are the owl did enjoy owleness but the wolf it's been a long time since the wolf was able to enjoy his wolfness i I don't know what the cavemen were thinking, but it may go back that far. I bet you they felt something when they heard that howl ripping. Yeah, sitting by the fire. I bet they weren't passive about it. That's why fire was invented.

You need some comfort. Well, I appreciate you guys talking about this, man. It's like, you know, I feel vested in it. And also, it's just fascinating, right? And it's like, what a luxury that we're, that, what a luxury that as a nation, we're in a position where we could be talking about whether or not, how many wolves we want, right? There's a lot of nations trying to figure out if they're going to be a nation tomorrow, you know? And like, it's like a real, it's a luxurious problem, man, to be like, how much wildlife do we want?

First world problem. Yeah, first world problem. And when you look at it in Mexico, they're reintroducing them. And so they have problems with, they can't access particular areas because of drugs, right? They have people that are hungry. The wolves are competing with subsistent food, right, for people. So this is, it's a bigger issue. The fact that they're trying to recover wolves down there too is a fascinating thing. More social issues that are far more important.

I'm going to brush up on my Spanish and go talk to those boys. Yeah. And it's all private land down there, right? So it's entirely private. You have some national designations on top of private land. Yeah.

So ranchers, where they're doing the reintroduction, they have to get ranches to agree to reintroduce wolves on their ranch. Those ranches, me and Yanni have been fortunate to spend some time chasing around down there. And those ranches are like wilderness area equivalents. Sure. You'd be talking to a rancher, he's like, well, I haven't been over there in three years. I mean, just like you spend days up up hunting maybe now and then you glass up some

dude riding a mule you know off in the distance but it's some wild country man this is some real wild country carl you got anything i've got a theme and it's the theme of one-way streets all right things that are hard to take back so the notion that for example preventing an extinction uh versus trying in the aftermath to respond to an extinction yeah we've talked about a bit um The notion that this particular species and others have been so close to the brink and your point about the small percentage of species that have been listed and then delisted. Delisted because of recovery.

Right. Yeah. Well, your point is well taken, but this species, the grizzlies, another example are in far better straights now than they were when they popped onto that list. And I think it's important to remember this piece of legislation's only about 44 years old. And if you contemplate the amount of time it takes for a species to evolve

and the amount of successful work from a conservation perspective that's been achieved during that short period of time, there's a lot to feel really good about. But some other one-way streets that are relevant here, one is the loss of a way of life and the changing approach in rural communities to interacting with the land and the challenges that some of these communities face

just in terms of keeping these traditional uses on the landscape. And I love the way John talks about the approach he takes to interacting with those folks. And I know Vicente's got a phenomenal skill set as well in terms of relating to these people. And it's not a phony thing. I mean, these guys understand the value of- You mean relating to people who are losing cattle, wolves? Relating to people who are on that side of the equation. Or having their lifestyle or occupation compromised.

Yes, and I know both of these gentlemen and I very much value the fact that there are people out there contributing to the retention of undeveloped land. And that's the last one-way street that I'll leave you with, is this notion that once you lose lose open be it public or private land to development that's another one-way street that is rarely undone yeah so i see no that's a very good point to bring up i see these these concepts being in the same vein the notion that once something is committed be it development be at the loss of a species be at the urbanization of a culture it's a heck of a lot harder to bring that back

than it is to preserve it yeah point taken it's good it's better to yell at your kids when they're little than bail them out of jail When they get older Alright Giannis You didn't have anything? Oh I got a Do you have any final thoughts?

I don't Just thank you for Bringing up this topic And allowing it to be discussed No Appreciate it I got a final thought A correction We were talking some time ago about Custer and allowing it to be discussed. I appreciate it. I got a final thought, a correction.

We were talking some time ago about Custer, Custer's last stand, and a lot of military guys wrote in that we were using Brigadier General the wrong way. Custer, Brigadier General has nothing to do with what we were talking about. I was talking about when, during the Civil War, when they had a lot of attrition of officers,

they were promoting other officers into generalships or into the general position on a temporary basis to make up for how quickly they were losing officers. That term, it's not brigadier, it's a breveted general. Like Custer, when he was a general custer was a breveted general not a brigadier general and when he died he was he died as i believe lieutenant colonel so a lot of dudes from the military wrote in um not in a mean way just wrote in to be like dude you're way off on what a brigadier general is the breveted general did they define the brigadier yeah but i can't remember

now what it has to do with like man hold on man just bear with me a minute i'm just gonna give it right from the we're just gonna get right into it here oh you know this give this give this guy your headset yanni no no we're good let's do it we're gonna do it ah you can say stuff from the background okay all right so if you're not comfortable here we go uh this this feller alan is saying uh fyi just a point of clarification on the subject of bridge brigadier generals brigadier generals are not he's quoting me fake or quote temporary generals yeah i, I used the term.

I called Custer a fake general. They are, in fact, full generals. But the brigadier is a reference to the type of unit they have traditionally commanded brigades. I think the correct term you're looking for is brevet. Breveted generals were officers of a lower rank who were temporarily or honorarily given the rank of general. Brevets usually occurred during times of war.

In this case, Brigadier General Brevet Custer was a regular Army lieutenant colonel who was temporarily promoted to brigadier general during the Civil War, and later again to major general. He was actually a lieutenant colonel at the time of his death. So my apologies to all you fine folks of service who took offense to me talking about fake generals. Other than that, that's it, right? That's it. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate the time. Yeah, thank you. Other than that, that's it, right? That's it. Hey, thank you, Steve.

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