The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 088: Conservation Through Eradication
Episode Date: October 30, 2017The Delmarva Peninsula, MD- Steven Rinella talks with wildlife biologist Steve Kendrot of the Chesapeake Bay Nutria Eradication Project, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discus...sed: back nipples; all about nutria; why an airport needs a wildlife biologist; high-quality muskrat pelts; nutria of the Pacific Northwest; emergent marshes and the changing landscape of the Blackwater Refuge; public backlash over lethal wildlife management techniques; Mute swans as the big bastards of the marsh; defending sentient life; the value of trappers to conservation and their communities; the Delmarva fox squirrel as a bad mofo; 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.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.
You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this.
OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.
The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS
with hunting maps that include public and crown land,
hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps,
waypoints and tracking.
You can even use offline maps to see where you are
without cell phone service as a special offer.
You can get a free three months to try out OnX
if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.
This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless,
severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless.
The Meat Eater Podcast.
You can't predict anything.
All right, Steve, I want you to do two things, but you got to do it in the order, in this order.
Explain, like, what is a nutria and where are they from and all that?
And then explain who you are and where you're from and all that.
All right.
Yeah, sure.
A nutria is a big semi-aquatic rodent that's native to South America.
At one time, it was highly prized for its fur and
it was introduced throughout the world in fur farms and things like that to create a economic
resource for rural folks and similar to mink ranches and that sort of thing it's intermediate
in size between a muskrat and a beaver, for those familiar with our North American semi-aquatic.
Like how many pounds?
The average is probably between 15 and 17 pounds for an adult male.
Oh, they're big, yeah.
And, you know, I guess if I were to equate it to a—
What's that?
Yeah, compare it to something.
Probably a—
Raccoon.
Yeah, raccoon.
Bigger than a woodchuck.
Similar in size to a raccoon. Yeah, raccoon. Bigger than a woodchuck. Similar in size to a raccoon.
I think the biggest female that we caught was about 21 pounds.
And when they're gravid and full of little ones, they can tip the scales higher than the males do.
What's the word you just used?
Gravid?
Pregnant?
Gravid?
Am I getting all academic here i'm gonna
start throwing that word around all over the place pregnant is gravid say my wife i think
get out my thesaurus app yeah i'll check it yeah i'll check you on that um so they're really kind
of an interesting animal too though uh a lot of people don't know this but they get fascinated when they hear that the nipples on a female nutria are located along their back.
So the young can actually suckle when they're swimming in the water.
Didn't know that either.
Yeah, it's pretty fascinating.
You know, I have like a, I've never laid eyes on a nutria.
You know, I hadn't either before I took this job that uh that i took to try
to help eliminate them from the chesapeake bay but uh they're a pretty pretty amazing animal very
adaptable uh they're herbivores as most rodents are they dig up the roots and tubers the the
underground parts of plants in the wetland ecosystems here. And in doing so, they expose it to tremendous erosion
with the tidal influx of water and whatnot.
That's how muskrat feeds too, right, Steve?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, muskrats will eat, you know,
one of the things that they're most known for is they'll eat cattail roots
and parts of cattails, but they'll all, I mean, they'll eat cattail roots and parts of cattails but all i mean they'll eat
clams rarely but mostly they eat aquatic vegetation and they excavate it when they're
yeah the excavating from banks is what causes folks what gets muskrats in trouble with folks
is their denning activities more than their feeding activities is they dig bank dens and make a under,
usually an underwater entrance.
And then they'll burrow up into a bank
and then make a big hollow in the bank.
And then, you know,
some dude will be like mowing his lawn
and all of a sudden falls into a muskrat bank den.
That's what gets muskrats in trouble.
You used to get free haircuts. Whatrats in trouble you used to get free haircuts what's that
i used to get free haircuts from some ladies that had a muskrat problem in their pond at their little
haircut area up in plattsburgh new york so you trap muskrats for haircuts yeah i've trapped muskrats
i was the muskrat man to them and i got my haircut for free so good it's a barter economy so you all
right we'll get into this whole trap and thing trapping thing. Now that you've brought the subject,
we're going to have to explore the fact
that you were trapping before you became a government trapper.
Yes, I was.
I guess now is the time where you can tell us about who you are.
Then we'll get back into nutrients.
I just wanted a little teaser about those back nipples.
Oh, yes.
I'm Steve Kendrott.
I'm a wildlife biologist.
I work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services Program.
It's a small agency, about 2,000 people nationwide. It's within the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
And our primary mission is to provide federal leadership in the resolving human wildlife conflicts and
our primary mission areas are to protect agriculture human health and safety property
and increasingly natural resources which is how we're entwined with this whole
nutrient eradication project to try to save the Chesapeake Bay marshlands.
So I've been with that agency for about 18 years now.
I started out as a wildlife biologist at an airport, actually a military base in Virginia.
I also worked at two of the Washington, D.C. airports.
But in 2002, I took this job in in Cambridge Maryland hold on question
what's what's an airport need a biologist for well so uh birds and planes both occupy the same
airspace and uh oftentimes to great detriment to both the birds and the planes so uh we actually
have a very robust program throughout the country. Most of our major airports, we've got wildlife biologists stationed there
working to provide guidance to the airport about how to minimize wildlife habitat
and attractants on the airfield to keep them away from the runways and taxiways.
Deer, coyotes, other mammals are also problems that get on the runways
and get hit by planes during takeoff and landing and so on and so forth.
So it's a pretty big human health and safety component of our program.
Yeah, because that could be like a lot of deaths all at once.
Absolutely, yeah.
Well, yeah, the dude that put the plane down in the Hudson hit a goose.
Yep, several geese.
Several geese yep miracle on the hudson was the result of a bird strike with canada geese uh there was also a
tragic uh air force accident back in gosh i don't even remember when that was now it's been so long
since i've worked on the airport stuff but in Elmendorf Air Force Base,
a plane went down from that and killed quite a few service folk.
Went down from a goose or bird collision.
Yeah.
So it's, you know, not to scare the flying public.
I know you guys will be on a plane soon.
Not a lot to worry about.
It's a low risk but a high consequence kind of kind of thing so uh it's something our the airports take very seriously the faa takes
very seriously and uh as a result we've got a pretty robust program nationwide so most of those
biologists are employed by your agency then yeah and so our agency is kind of unique in that it's
not it doesn't get a huge
slug of federal appropriations or tax dollars to do the work we do we work through cooperative
agreements with other federal agencies municipalities airports that sort of thing
private individuals so it's very much a cost- type program where the the recipients of the services that
we provide are paying for at least some portion if not all of the service that we provide
so we're not a regulatory agency like some of the other federal agencies official wildlife service
that enforce regulations about endangered species and all that kind of thing. We're very much problem-solving service orientation.
And so, yeah, it's been a really interesting agency to work for.
And this project in the Chesapeake Bay with the Nutria
is funded by the Fish and Wildlife Service,
the United States Fish and Wildlife Service,
which is in the Department of Interior.
They're the folks that oversee the National Wildlife
Refuge System.
So to jump into the Nutria,
just to lay the groundwork on the Nutria
situation in Chesapeake Bay,
which is
a pretty fascinating story,
but how did it begin? When did they come in
and why did they come in?
And as a side note,
can they adapt to northern climates
or do they need warmer weather and not severe winters?
They are limited in their northern distribution
by winter weather.
However, here in Maryland is about the northernmost distribution
on the east coast.
But Nutria also, they've been established
in 17 or 18 different
states in the u.s uh introduced in a number of more but they haven't become established
a lot of people don't know that uh your home city of seattle and and uh portland um are home to the
nutria as well really where um all over in the coastal uh wetlands and a lot of the a lot of the parks in
portland oregon uh people feed carrots and stuff like that it's kind of crazy so you don't have
to go far to man i thought i thought the reason i'd never seen one is i'd always lived in the
northern tier states yeah no they're limited in the to the coastal distribution because of the temperate climate there.
So where was I?
Introduced in Blackwater. How and why did they come into the Chesapeake Bay?
Who put them there and for what reason?
So the Nutria were brought to the Chesapeake region in 1943 or thereabouts.
There was two entities that had uh nutria brought in the blackwater actually had the refuge itself
had a furbearer research station at one time and they housed nutria and they were doing uh
nutria research as well as muskrat and that sort of thing but there were also some private uh
entrepreneurs that were bringing nutria in to farm them. And for some reason, that never really took off economically.
And eventually, the farms either went out of business and they released their animals
or the conditions just became dilapidated and they escaped and whatnot.
Did that coincide with the drop in fur prices overall?
No, it was quite a bit, I think, with the drop in fur prices overall? No, it was quite a bit, I think,
before the drop in fur prices. And so nutria didn't really become an ecological impact in
the Chesapeake Bay region until probably the late 1960s, 1970s. And that's pretty typical for
a lot of introduced invasive species is that they'll exist at fairly low levels for an extended period of time and then begin to grow exponentially.
And once they hit that sort of critical mass in numbers, then that population can just like explode and go through the roof.
And so that's what happened throughout the 1970s and 80s
and they estimated at one point that blackwater was probably home to over 50 000 nutria and
that corresponded with a very significant decline in uh emergent marshlands at chesapeake uh or at the chesapeake marshlands
national wildlife complex or refuge complex but that blackwater unit uh at one point was about
13 000 or so acres of wetlands and they lost about 5 000 acres of that over the course of, well, between 1938 and 1999 or so.
Almost half.
Yeah, it was very significant.
You look at the aerial photographs of the core of the heart of Blackwater Refuge,
and you can see that it's just been converted almost entirely to open water.
So huge ecological impact. And you said emergent marshes? Yeah,
emergent marshes are those wetlands where the plants actually emerge out of the water. So you
look out and you see vegetation basically. Oh. As opposed to like a lily pad type environment or
that sort of thing. So the typical marshes that we have here in the coastal regions of the Chesapeake Bay are
characterized by three square bulrush, cattails in some of the more fresher headwaters of this
sort of drainage system. And the closer you get to the bay in higher salinities you'll get more needle rush salt hay those different types
of plant communities so the one that's really critical and probably from a wildlife perspective
one of the most valuable habitat types is the three square marsh it produces a lot of seeds
that are fed on by migrating birds and that sort of thing and That was the plant you showed me yesterday out in the swamp, right?
Yeah.
So if you roll it between your fingers, it's very triangular and cross-sectioned.
So it tends to grow in very organic-based soils,
and it basically accumulates as peat over years and years and years of rotting vegetation, sort of builds up this peat layer.
So it doesn't have a real solid foundation, and therefore it's very vulnerable to erosion when nutria come in and start carving up that root mat.
Oh, okay.
So while muskrat do feed on the same types of plants, three square is very important for muskrat as well.
They feed a little bit differently.
Nutria tend to dig up the tubers,
the roots of the plants,
and do it in a very concentrated area.
And even more importantly,
what they'll do is they'll dig swim channels,
kind of like a beaver does,
to get from the tidal waterways into their feeding areas.
And what they're essentially doing is creating a little stream bed for the tide to get in and out.
So it penetrates further into the marsh. And then when it comes out, all that material that they've dug up is gathered and swept out to sea, more or less, or at least out to the bay.
Oh, that's an interesting, yeah, because I was having a hard time picturing how what they were doing was causing so much trouble.
That's an interesting perspective on it.
Not a perspective on it, but like an interesting way to explain what's going on
is those canals, like the same canals beavers dig.
I never thought that as being a way for water just to snake its way further up into stuff exactly yeah so you get higher salinity water penetrating
further into what are typically brackish or even freshwater marshes beavers will dig those things
you'll you'll see them 150 200 yards long sometimes oh yeah to go access willow right yeah
so that contributes to this erosion problem what actually happens is that organic muck that this root mat is sort of floating on gets eroded from underneath and the marsh begins to sink.
And despite the fact that these are wetland plants, they're very susceptible to and intolerant of changes in the hydrology of the system. So all they need to sink is just a few fractions of an inch necessarily,
and those plants can no longer survive.
It turns into a different community.
And in many cases, it sinks so low that no plants can survive,
and it just turns into this kind of open water wasteland
that really doesn't produce much good habitat.
It's not deep enough all the time for a fish community to be really supported by it.
Most of the fish that we tend to see using those open water areas are also invasive species,
carp and things like that.
But it's not solely the nutria's fault that we've seen such wetland loss in the Chesapeake
Bay region because there
are a number of threats to this ecosystem.
And that includes sea level rise, land subsidence through the withdrawal of underground aquifers
for human consumption, irrigation, and all that sort of thing.
And so there's all these sort of multiple factors impacting the marshes,
which can be fairly resilient until you put Nutria into the equation.
And they're sort of the catalyst, that little, you know,
your grandma's sweater that she knitted for you when you were a kid
and you got a thread pulled on it and all of a sudden the whole thing unravels.
Nutria is the one pulling that thread.
And that's all of the other things sort of compound
when nutria are introduced to the equation.
So they did some really neat research back in the 1990s
trying to figure out the role that nutria played.
And what they did was they went throughout the Blackwater system
and they put in a bunch of fences basically,
30 by 30 meter exclusion fences that they buried into the ground so that the nutria couldn't swim under it or dig under it.
And then they made sure there were no nutria within them.
And they just monitored the vegetation around them.
And they very quickly could see a distinct difference.
They put them in areas where there was compromise by nutria and outside the fences continued to degrade and convert to this
muddy open water. And inside the fence, the plants came back. So it was a good indication that if we
could eliminate nutria from the equation that the the marsh could
possibly restore itself now real quick here do do they bank den or where do they sleep at night
that's a great question um they don't typically bank den um in fact many of the areas that
they live in out in the open marsh uh don have banks. So they just live on the surface. They don't build a lodge or a hut like a muskrat or beaver.
No, they don't.
And that's one of the reasons we think that they're limited in their northern distribution
because they don't have that thermal refuge from cold weather.
So what we would see.
So they just lay out.
Yeah, they'll build like a little nest, just a platform of vegetation.
Like a muskrat feed bed kind of thing.
Yeah, exactly.
And I've seen those built almost on stilts when we have real high water events.
We had a hurricane in 2002, I think, Hurricane Isabel,
that brought a six-foot storm surge over the whole marsh.
And when the waters receded, we found nutria beds that were made out of phragmites,
that invasive reed that you've been seeing lately,
four feet off the surface of the marsh,
all folded over and made a nice little platform
so they could get up out of the water.
Really?
But that doesn't provide thermal protection.
So what we see in the wintertime with these critters
is that they're very susceptible to cold weather.
They'll get frostbite on their tails,
and over the course of several years,
a big adult nutria might only have a stubbed six-inch tail or less even because it just gets
frostbit. Females under physiological stress from the cold weather will actually abort their females
or their fetuses. And so that's another element of nutria, why there's such a difficult
species to deal with is because they reproduce extremely rapidly. The nutria come into heat
and are ready to breed within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth. And they become sexually mature at
about six months of age. So once a nutria hits six months
of age she's virtually pregnant for the rest of her life and in the winter time if they let me
clarify that sure when you first said that i thought you meant um that the young but you're
saying a female will have a litter and then that female within within a couple days is ready to breed again absolutely
yep and her and her offspring can breed when how old at about six months of age so you get uh
it's about a four month gestation period three to four months and so they can produce like
three litters a year you're producing
generations in a year yeah oh yeah and in these northern climates where we do see these periods of
stress on the animals where the females will abort their litters if they're pregnant they'll
come into heat immediately after that so it it forces this sort of cyclic and seasonality to the breeding pattern in these northern climates
where we tend to see big pulses of reproduction,
litters born in like May, October, and January,
and then usually the January litter doesn't really survive
because these young are born at a time of year
where it just isn't conducive to survival.
So what year was it?
Remind me again what year they first may have gotten introduced here.
About 1943, early 1940s.
And then what year was it when the explosion,
like when you're describing how they'll just kind of putter along,
and all of a sudden their numbers get to a point where you can have this like,
all of a sudden this numbers get to a point where you can have this like all of a sudden it's like exponential right you know dynamite it was in the late 1960s when
they really started to notice you know nutrient abundance and then through the 70s and 80s that
marsh loss really seemed to accelerate to the point where you could people were seeing it in
their own lifetime they were seeing the marsh laws. Oh, yeah, definitely. I had employees on the project that were born and raised on the marshes of Blackwater.
And they said when they were kids, they could have walked in tennis shoes from the wildlife drive on the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge across to the property where they grew up.
It's about a two or three mile distance probably.
And the only place they would have gotten wet was
where the blackwater river coursed through that marsh there's a high marsh uh solid uh good
good ground and uh that's a big lake now okay yeah what year was it then that
or let me ask this to you how okay what year was it when someone said like is there
something we should be trying to do about this and how many nutria were there at that moment
yeah can you work in just like a general public perception into that answer too like what was the
public thinking and about it back then well you know, at first I think it wasn't perceived as such a problem
because there was a fur market for nutria
and people would go out in the wintertime
and they would hunt and trap them
and get some money for their pelts.
Excuse me.
But really from a wildlife perspective and from a local economy perspective, muskrat is the king here.
And when you lose three square marsh, you lose muskrat.
And I think people started to realize that, at least from the trapping community, that muskrat are much more desirable than nutria are.
And so there was support even from that element
that we needed to do something about it.
The big thing was the loss of marshes at Blackwater
and the surrounding Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area.
So it was in the 1990s that the various natural resource agencies
that have a role in managing and conserving
these important Chesapeake Bay resources got together and started thinking about what we
could do to try to stem the loss and maybe even foster the recovery of the marsh. This whole
project is not about killing nutrients. It's about restoring wetlands.
And that's the purpose of it.
So it took some time to get all the people on board and to get congressional support for, because this is a big initiative.
You know, we're talking, you know, a quarter million acres of wetlands that we eventually have have treated across this this landscape so no small task they estimated population estimates somewhere in the vicinity
of 50,000 nutrient blackwater national wildlife refuge and they they had some fairly good numbers
to make estimates off through their trapping programs because blackwater and fishing
bay are both available to uh for trappers to to bid on they control the the amount of trapping
the fur trappers can come in and bid on a lot correct like a like a chunk of ground within
the refuge to just to work for their own trap line right Right. Yeah. And so they had harvest records.
And at one point they were paying not a bounty per se, but trappers that did lease the trapping units could turn in nutria tails for $1.50 credit towards the total price of whatever they paid so if a trapper paid you know 1500 bucks for a trapping unit and they caught
what 100 nutrient turn the tails and they could get 150 per tail and cover the cost of their
lease they couldn't they couldn't catch you know 500 nutrient get seven yeah extra money but that
same guy would probably be that same guy would probably be stacking up muskrats in the hundreds. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
These wetlands support quite high densities of muskrats.
And these are high-quality muskrats around here.
Yeah.
The Chesapeake Bay region is renowned for the quality of their muskrat pelts.
Yeah, I heard a guy the other night. night i mean i remember like in the early eight like the late 70s early 80s muskrats you know i mean got up to like you know extra large muskrats you gotta imagine like the the
economic difference between now and then like what it meant but like seven or eight dollar muskrats
in the late 70s early 80s adjusted for inflation is like a valuable animal for something that
like an enterprising trapper
i mean there was guys who would quite handily put um trap flesh and stretch
upwards of a thousand or even more muskrats in a year you can make a living trapping back then
trapping muskrats now you're hard pressed to make a living trap muskrats you're hard pressed to pay
for your expenses trapping muskrats.
But at the time, it was just like an incredible thing.
I caught the tail end of that.
I was coming into trap and just as the –
I set my first muskrat trap in 1984,
and guys were already talking about the good old days.
But it was still pretty good, just not as good.
Well, the market continues to fluctuate.
We've never seen prices like back then.
But, you know, in the time that I've been here, muskrat pelts, extra larges,
have gone up to close to $8 and $5 with some regularity.
And they, you know, peak and valley over time.
But there's also a market for the meats here as well.
Yeah, that surprised me to
hear yeah by the time you sell the pelt and then you might get three or four or five bucks for the
meats as well uh you're actually looking at 10 or 12 dollars per muskrat and there are people here
that that uh make a significant part of their living off of muskrat you know it's a seasonal
work a lot of farmers will trap during the winter when they're not tending their fields and whatnot a lot of watermen will trap during that part of the year
so it's an important part of the local economy and you know a lot of people think that you know
trapping is a anachronistic type thing it's a dead art and it's we don't need it in this modern
society but there's still folks here that that really rely on income for trapping.
You know, Dorchester County is not a wealthy county.
It's the last time I looked, which was some years ago,
the median income was about $22,000 a year.
So if someone's catching $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 worth of muskrat in a year,
that's a significant chunk of their annual income.
So it's important
to people. It's not just a hobby or a pastime that people like to do. It's really important.
And this is a point that I think is forgotten, that those skills in the community, that
understanding of the natural world that we live in, I think no one understands better than a
trapper. Having to know an animal well enough and its habitat well enough to be able to go out and
catch it requires a certain amount of knowledge and know-how, understanding, and respect for
the environment.
And without those-
And to be out there doing that 90 days in a row.
Yeah, absolutely.
Dedication.
It's hard work and having those skills uh
i think are incredibly important to conservation today and and you can see it beyond what we did
here you know our the nutria eradication campaign that we mounted in conjunction with the maryland
dnr and the u.s fish and Wildlife Service, was essentially a systematic hunting and trapping program
that we used paid employees to implement.
So the problem was identified, and funding was secured,
and someone floated the idea of,
let's try to go kill all 50,000 nutria.
Every last one of them dead. that was the goal and what was the person if someone told me that if if you asked me if you asked me like before i found out about this if
you'd ask me like do you think in a not an island not in an island environment, but like in an open environment like this,
do you think you could mechanically remove an established population of a semi-aquatic rodent?
I would tend to say no, you couldn't.
But people did it successfully accidentally with beavers
in the early 1900s.
Yeah, on horseback.
So that was still
would it be daunting i would still be like yeah i don't know if you could really do it or not
and so wisely the project began as a pilot study because we weren't sure if it was feasible or not
and certainly there were a lot of people probably most people thought it probably wasn't but we were
able to convince enough folks in the right places that it was a worthy endeavor.
And we got the funding to do it.
And it started with about a two-year research project back in 2000.
And at that time, the project was being managed through the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where they had a cooperative fish and wildlife research unit.
It was part of the U.S. Geological Survey's research branch.
And so it started looking at things like, trying to answer questions like,
is there a density-dependent response of nutria reproduction
in response to intensive trapping pressure. So in other words,
if you trap nutria, are they going to just make more nutria faster? And so that was one of the
areas of research. Which is also a problem people find with trying to get rid of coyotes.
Yeah, there are examples of species that do respond by increasing their reproductive rates,
whether it's on a per-individual basis by an increase in litter size
or if it's through an increasing proportion of the population breeding
because you're disrupting the social dynamics of that species.
And some do it by increasing dispersal too, right?
When they get that pressure.
Yeah, well, that sort of ties into the disrupting their social thing,
especially with coyotes.
If you have a saturated population of coyotes,
they tend to suppress breeding in the younger animals
and they form more family groups.
And if you get a lot of mortality there,
then the family unit breaks up and the young disperse and then
you've got freedom to breed so um but with nutria uh the other thing they were looking at was trying
to determine if there are any sort of parasite loads that sort of thing sort of some basic
ecological research on how the species exists in the chesapeake region, but also trying to estimate
populations. And they found it challenging to catch enough animals to test some of their
hypotheses with these things because any marker capture study requires large sample sizes to come up with a reliable estimate of what that population is.
And it got to a point where I think the folks that were providing the funding wanted to see
us move into the eradication phase. You know, let's see if we can get this done.
Get out of the starting and get to the killing.
Right, exactly. So in 2002, Wildlife Services was asked to get involved as the implementing agency to sort of carry out this plan.
And it was very much an adaptive management type plan.
And we started at Blackwater.
That's where the problem originated.
And we actually had three main study areas that were used during the research phase that we started out on.
And one was at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge.
The other was on Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area.
And the third was on a private conservation property that was adjacent to the Fishing Bay and blackwater complexes so that uh that first summer that
we got engaged you know we worked on trying to trap out the study areas that they had started
doing all this research on and those weren't like enclosed areas though no no not at all and they
were isolated they were tied into the other population. Correct, correct. So they were, as I remember, they were about 600, 700, 800, 900 acres sort of plots within the Blackwater Fishing Bay and Tudor Farms system.
And that's where they had done the bulk of the mark and reca trapping techniques to sort of clear out those areas and try to give
some closure to the marker capture stuff so that we could get all those tagged animals and
account for them it would this be a good time to explain how the like i have no idea when you just
say you're trapping nutria like what did that look like yeah sure so we use some pretty conventional fur trapping
techniques uh the core of our trapping toolbox was the 220 counterbear which is an instant kill
body gripping trap uh it's commonly used near instant pretty near yes submerge it's fast yes it is um so you know we bought thousands of those things too is that
right yeah we had uh 15 full-time wildlife specialists you guys remember if you run like
victors or northwoods or uh just whoever yeah i think uh sleepy creek actually i think we
we had quite a few traps from them yeah um yeah body grip and
traps coming like series sizes so like there's like the 100 series sizes which are mink and
muskrat 200 series sizes are generally used for raccoon otter nutria um fishers guys will use 110s on dry land 110s for martin did i say mink i think i did then the 300
series are usually just beaver yeah but guys use 330s also for wolverines and some guys liked uh
some guys like 330s for otters because otters are harder to fence into 220 but they don't work as
good because sometimes their otter can pop out of one of the jaws.
You know, so people like 220s on those.
Yep.
Hey, folks.
Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.
And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle
or a sweepstakes.
And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.
Whew.
Our northern brothers.
You're irritated.
Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,
OnX is now in Canada.
The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.
The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps
that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,
24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.
That's right.
We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.
Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement.
You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.
That's a sweet function.
As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services
handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.
Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.
As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet
on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all
so they make any bigger is that the biggest never heard anything bigger than the 330 conibear 300
series conibear they actually do make a couple uh what do they call them 660s or something like
that and it's like two 330s welded together so it's still got the 10 inch jog spread from top
to bottom but they're twice as wide yeah that's good to throw in the measurements because the 220
220s are eight right uh seven inches i, I believe. Seven inches all spread.
Okay.
Yeah.
When you set this thing, this looks like a little wire box.
Right.
Right.
But it's got springs on.
The 330, you can break your arm, man.
You put your arm in.
Yeah.
They're not pleasant to have your appendage cut in.
So you guys went out and bought a mountain of 220s.
We bought a mountain of 220s and quite a few foothold traps as well
and what uh what were you doing up with those what size traps uh a lot of one and a half coil
spring traps but uh we also use some bigger so nutria have a much bigger hind foot than they do
front foot very much like a beaver and so the the uh the-a-half coil spring trap, which has about a four-and-a-half inch jaw spread, I think,
a nutrious foot can span the entire trap.
So unless you catch them by the front foot, you run the risk that they might just spring the trap and not get caught.
So we did have some larger traps that we used, number twos and threes, I think, that we sometimes set.
If you were setting for the hind leg?
Yeah.
Just for context for people,
like a one-and-a-half double coil spring is a foothold trap,
and that's the size generally used.
That's like the go-to trap for raccoon, fox.
Yeah, right.
That size critter.
Yep. So, and it's important to have different tools in your trapping toolbox because sometimes animals become trap shy.
You know, if they see a certain type of trap in there, you know, some animals are less tolerant of new novelties in their environment and they'll sort of steer clear of them so
foothold trap is easier to camouflage and sort of disguise so we tended to catch the bulk of the
animals that we captured in the 220 counter bear but when we had animals that were clearly you
know avoiding the body gripping traps we would set the foothold traps were you setting those 220s in the channels
yeah so we'd find those swim channels and and paths through the marsh and just neck them down
and they're the perfect width oh so they build a 220 size channel yep perfect perfect width for the
the 220 it wasn't it wasn't quite rocket science to catch him but and would you guys use those uh
those basic harness rigs
to hold the 220 so you can just stab it into the ground?
No, we actually used bamboo poles mostly.
So we wired the trap to a bamboo pole
and then stuck it through the spring
in the corner of the trap to provide some stabilization
and also sort of a visual guide
to send the animal through.
And you're hauling all this gear around what, a canoe?
A lot of it, well, yeah, mostly john boats, actually.
There are the main waterways you can navigate through the marsh,
but a lot of it was over the shoulder,
just carrying stuff through the equipment through the marsh. The bamboo poles were kind of handy because you could spring the trap on the end of the bamboo pole
and then gather 10 or a dozen poles up with traps on it and throw them over your shoulder and carry them across the marsh.
And it's stuff like that kind of circled back to where I was going with the importance of maintaining these trapping skills in the community.
We were very reliant on local knowledge and local trappers on this project to understand how to work in this marsh effectively and the techniques that work best. Because while trapping isn't rocket science, it's got a steep learning curve for a beginner.
And it can take people a long time to sort of figure things out.
And an experienced trapper can be very effective at selecting the species that they're trying to target and avoiding those other species that not.
But a novice trapper often is is uh not as selective so having that expertise
in the community and this translates to much much beyond uh you know nutrient eradication
fur trappers were incredibly important to the restoration of a lot of uh endangered species
in the united states wolves being probably one of the most prime examples of that.
The last remaining Mexican wolves were caught by a trapper named Roy McBride
and pulled into captivity for a selective breeding program
to build those populations up and restore them to the wild.
The Yellowstone wolf recovery effort was many of those wolves were captured and trapped, set by trappers.
I remember some years ago, some American fur trappers going down
to help some governments in South America catch jaguars.
Yep.
Yeah, they're, you know, a good trapper is a very valuable person
to the wildlife conservation community.
Were you a trapper before you got involved with wildlife services?
Yeah, he was trading muskrats for haircuts.
Okay, yeah.
I caught that when I was there.
I was certainly not a trapper in the sense that the folks here make a living off it,
but how I got started in it.
Actually, I grew up with somewhat of a negative opinion of trapping because my my grandfather was an
avid bird hunter and always had bird dogs oh yeah those guys and he yeah he'd had a couple
dogs get caught in foothold they're right there with the humane society
so yeah he he had sort of instilled in me this lack of appreciation, shall I say, for trapping in general.
But, you know, I went to school for wildlife management.
And I came out of that and went into graduate school for wildlife ecology.
And I was really dying to study carnivores and i managed to land a position
a graduate research position at the state university of new york college of environmental
science and forestry doing coyote research and you know for the first time i had to figure out how to
catch an animal with this sort of traditional fur harvesting tools. I'd done trapping with cage traps for pine marten
and other critters like that, but I'd never had set.
For research.
For research, yeah.
But I'd never set foothold traps,
and so I had to learn how to do it
to catch study animals for my project.
And when you're making a stipend of 800 bucks a month,
it doesn't quite make ends meet.
And I'm learning to trap, and I'm also driving through all of this prime muskrat country,
and I'm seeing farmers with problems with beavers and all that sort of stuff.
So I just started learning, and I was very fortunate to have a renowned fur buyer and trapper in the community that I was living in, in upstate New York.
Who was that?
Paul Grimshaw.
Yeah, Grimshaw. They make lures too.
Yep. And he didn't exactly take me under his wing. He's kind of a ornery old guy. But once you
sort of connected with him, he'd start sharing sharing knowledge and so i learned a tremendous amount
from him i'd just go and watch hand his wife's skin and stretch muskrat pelts and uh
just learned you know the kind of tricks of the trade for catching some of these other fur bears
and and i was able to supplement my income you know not tremendous i wasn't out there buying cars or anything with it but when you make a hundred
bucks a month an extra month's salary and in the course of a year it really helped out quite a bit
so i was telling you honestly our day about i used to sell i didn't uh flesh and stretch my own
raccoons because like no one likes doing that you know and i would sell them to a fur buyer who had a guy named Abe Salacena.
He was a tomato enthusiast who grew tomatoes and bought fur.
And you'd go into his to sell him raccoons.
And he'd be in there and he'd heat his barn with raccoon fat.
No kidding.
He'd open that door and take a gob of that raccoon fat and throw it in there.
Like black smoke coming out of that thing.
Well, you know, it was neat to be in such proximity to Paul Grimshaw
because he was an expert in putting up furs and whatnot.
So I put up my own fur from when I was doing that,
and I enjoyed that part.
It's kind of like butchering your own meat.
You're kind of taking that process from start to finish,
and you get more money for fur when it's put up properly.
You get less when it's put up poorly,
but I think they'd rather buy green fur than poorly put up fur.
Yeah, that's like lingo is green fur would be skinned,
but not flesh and stretch.
If you sold a muskrat,
like guys would also sell muskrats in the round,
which would mean just freaking muskrat.
Yeah, just pull up at the end, run your line,
and drive up and sell the guy muskrats in the round.
You might be selling them for half what you'd get
if you sold them stretched.
Exactly.
So that was a real uh learning experience for me and and the thing i liked about it is that it it really makes you step back and take time to learn about animals you normally wouldn't even
think about you know who thinks about muskrats unless you're trying to catch them and then so
just i learned a whole lot about the ecology of the region
and the behavior of the animals
and the importance of different habitat types
and what lives there
through this process of learning how to trap.
So when you caught wind of the,
you had to go apply for the nutria job
or was it just like fall into your lap?
No, I had to apply for it.
So when I was working in the Virginia Wildlife Services Program, every state has,
Wildlife Services has a program in every state, just about.
And so I was working through the Virginia Division of Wildlife Services.
And we would have these annual conferences where all the different states surrounding would get together and intermingle.
And for a couple years there, I was hearing them talk about this nutria eradication study that they were undertaking in Maryland,
and at the time, Maryland Wildlife Services wasn't getting involved.
We had a state director at the time that was close to retirement,
and I think wasn't really all that keen to take on this sort of massive project.
But he retired, and a new guy came in and jumped on the opportunity
to work with the Fish and Wildlife Service
and put this vacancy announcement out there.
Geez, it sounded interesting to me.
I had no idea what a nutria was i had to look it up and i put my name in the hat and i don't know how i got picked but
i did yeah i guess so um but i feel very fortunate to have been selected for that position because
it's the kind of thing that that uh doesn't happen too often in your career where you get to work on a project that just has
sort of profound impacts on conservation and ecology and results that you can see on the
ground and so the position was and it was everything you liked man yeah i was able to take
all of the skills that i developed
through my personal passions hunting and trapping and that sort of thing and sort of devote them to
solving a conservation problem and it really was rewarding to be able to do that and also
you know i have to give full credit to the guys that and gals that really got this job done
because I was not the trapper out there.
I did trap some, but I was a project manager.
So I was supervising the team, developing the strategies to how to work
and devote our resources across the landscape.
When is it time to move
from this area to that area that sort of thing making sure the guys had all the equipment that
they needed the boats the motors the waders the traps all that stuff um so that was sort of my
role and uh you know the opportunity to supervise was appealing to me.
I didn't think so when I first got into wildlife that I'd really want to be managing people.
But realizing how much more you can accomplish by harnessing the energy of others was a neat opportunity.
So I'm getting backed up on questions.
I got a couple of quickies. Sure. Out'm getting backed up on questions. I got a couple quickies.
Sure.
Out of context, out of order.
Were you hiring trapper trappers,
or were you hiring,
or that's not how it worked?
Like, you didn't come in and hire existing fur trappers
to do the physical trapping?
So the research phase of the project
had hired some local trappers
as part of the team,
and when we came...
To develop methodologies with it.
Yeah, well, to implement the research study
that they designed.
So that was primarily using cage traps
and some foothold traps.
But they did reach out to the local community
and got a handful of folks that were, you know,
born and raised in the Chesapeake Bay,
knew how to trap, how to handle animals and all that stuff.
And so we inherited when the Wildlife Services Program took over.
They wanted to provide a home for those, employment for those folks that had dedicated themselves to the research phase of the project. And so we were able to hire them when we came on board.
Not all of them chose to come with us, so I had some vacancies to fill.
And, you know, we put out vacancy announcements.
And we tried to recruit locally, and we also tried to recruit young wildlife professionals that were just getting out of college and starting their careers and i always strove to have a sort of a balance of the two because those uh those greenhorns don't know
what they're doing and they need someone to kind of show them the ropes and whatnot but they bring
a lot of energy and passion to their their work as well um yeah and it helps them in their career
it's a stepping stone for them impactful work yeah and then our our sort of uh
i always called them our veteran employees they weren't military veterans necessarily but
but the folks that had been with the project from the beginning and our folks that were
that were taught on the chesapeake they went to the school of the chesapeake you know to learn
their trade and so those folks would provide kind of the stability
and the long-term institutional knowledge
that we needed to keep the project going
because this is a long-term project.
So, okay, so the second quickie,
then I'm going to get into the longer question.
What do you guys do with all the nutrient that you trap?
You probably can't utilize them right
because it's part of a government project correct so and there was no market for them or anything
like that there's no use for the meats or anything so at first we were instructed to
remove all of the carcasses from the field and we were going to compost them or bury them or do something.
Pardon me.
But we quickly found, at the time that that sort of rule was put in place,
we had expected that there would be tens of thousands of nutria that we were going to be catching and when reality set in we started
doing the trapping it had been come become clear that the population had begun to decline and we
weren't catching nearly the numbers that we expected that began to decline because of the
trapping no not necessarily i think uh the the population on its own had started sort of
dwindling and part of the probably reason is probably that they they had eaten themselves out of house and home in many of these areas.
So there was habitat that was no longer there.
They were estimated to reach densities of, gosh, I should have boned up on some of my memory here.
Eight to nine, six to nine per square acre or per acre so at those densities uh which are
tremendous densities you know you could have seen 35 to 50,000 nutrient blackwater but wipe
5,000 acres of habitat off the map and get significantly fewer so we were bringing the
carcasses back,
but there weren't that many of them.
The big concern for removing them from the marsh
was the potential for avian botulism
with all these rotting carcasses out there potentially.
Being fed on by birds.
Yeah, just this mass of carrion
that would potentially create problems for other wildlife.
But it was very time-consuming to remove the animals from the field.
You know, at 15 pounds a piece, you get four or five of them.
You've got 60 pounds of carcass that you're hauling around.
So it was impeding our progress.
And it didn't seem like
there were numbers that would contribute to the kind of concerns that we initially had going into
it so we opted at that point to leave the carcasses out in the field and very quickly the
scavengers would would convert them back to you know ashes, dust to dust. So it didn't turn out to be so much of an issue
to have to remove them from the field.
And that freed us up to better to spend our time moving traps
and carrying more traps out than carrying.
Deal with all those cars.
Yeah, exactly.
So the longer question.
No, I got another quickie.
What was the public perception of the idea that we're gonna
kill all the nutrients get rid of them wholesale great people like good idea or people like that's
a horrible idea not whether you can't not whether it's plausible but whether it's like advisable
right so anytime you implement some sort of lethal management of wildlife populations, there's often an outcry of public sentiment that opposes that.
But because of the ecological impact that these critters had, and it was obvious to anyone familiar with this ecosystem, the ecological justification was so compelling
that there was really very little backlash.
Add to that that it's basically a 20-pound rat.
It doesn't generate a whole lot of sympathy.
But I wasn't more, yeah, that's good information.
And I liked that you said it,
but I meant I wasn't so much interested in those guys
i was interested in the people who actually liked the neutral but but no do both versions
i hadn't even anticipated you're talking about like the the animal welfare right because there
was a very i'm talking about the guys who were out there perhaps hunting trapping, eating, selling. So again, back to muskrat is the king.
Nutria had a pretty detrimental impact
on muskrat populations,
both for elimination of habitat and competition,
displacement competition.
So Nutria would, in the winter months in particular,
dig into muskrat houses to try to seek refuge from cold weather
or sit on top of them and bask in the sun and whatnot.
And they would basically destroy the muskrat house for the muskrats.
So we had a less valuable critter having a negative impact
on a really important critter and so there was
really no opposition so there's really no one who had any kind of reasonable widespread sentiment
that you should we had you know one land landowner that i worked with and that's something i should
mention too is that this project would have been inconceivable without the support of private land
owners because more than half of the nutria that we eventually removed came from private land. So having their support was critical.
As a federal agency, a non-regulatory wildlife services can't just go on private property and
conduct our work. We have to have their permission and blessing and they have to approve all the
methods that we use. So I had one farmer that we encountered who refused us access to his property
because according to what he said,
he liked to eat nutria
and liked to have a little refrigerator
out in the back 40 where he could go
and pluck some nutria for dinner on occasion.
Fortunately, it wasn't a big area
and we were able to sort of trap around it and kind
of pull the animals that were on his property off. So it didn't impede our progress in the long term.
But what it mostly come down to, I think, is there's a fairly significant anti-government
sentiment in the community, just about anywhere you go, but it's particularly
noticeable here in dorchester county
you know there's a lot of government regulations with you know wetlands and
and harvest of animals fish commercial fisheries and crabs and all that sort of thing so there's
just this sort of general resentment to government intrusion and people's livelihoods
wreak havoc and not have any repercussions. Right.
So there wasn't that opposition.
And then from the animal welfare side, there also wasn't opposition,
which is interesting because at the same time that we were undertaking this eradication campaign,
the Maryland Department of Natural Resources was trying to deal with a
rapidly expanding mute swan population that had reached another non-native species that does aquatic ecosystems very much what nutria do to these wetland ecosystems. So the mute swans feed on the submerged aquatic vegetation that's really critical habitat for all sorts of fish, crabs.
It provides a nursery for all these juvenile species.
So folks can imagine.
We're talking about imagine the most beautiful, picturesque swan that you would just want to protect and cuddle.
Exactly.
Like take pictures of and cuddle with.
Yep.
And they had reached populations.
Being a bastard of the marsh, man.
They had reached populations of close to 4,500 animals.
And explain their impact on ducks.
So they're very aggressive birds
and they will chase native waterfall and shorebirds
and displace them off of nesting grounds and feeding grounds and stuff.
So they're pretty...
Yeah, they don't play nice.
No, they don't play nice.
So he's like, you know, I'm going to nest here, and no one's going to nest within 100 yards of my nest.
Yep, exactly.
And so in response to that initiative that the Department of Natural Resources was taking on, there were animal welfare groups erecting billboards along Route 50, save our swans, and messages to the governor and so on.
Screw the ducks, save the swans, man.
Exactly.
So to their credit, the DNR persisted, and they have whittled that population down, last I heard, to probably less than 50.
So we've got two big ecological problems that have been dealt with in this region over the past 10, 15 years.
And a lot of that anti-sentiment went into swans and not into rodents.
Yeah, it was perhaps a bit of a distraction.
But I think that there's an element.
A lot of these groups are reliant on donations for their solvency,
and people are much more willing to open their wallet
for a big, beautiful white bird than a brown 20-pound rat.
But isn't it weird because you're kind of defending...
I mean, it's not weird at all because people are people
and you look at things and we tend to like and admire animals
that strike us as beautiful.
Sure.
But if you're based on the idea that you're just defending sentient life,
like you don't want to see damage come to sentient life it shouldn't
matter if it's a swan or a giant rodent it's like it's a sentient being yeah a man is a pig as a
dog is a boy but people uh really tend to um get very interested in in defending things that are
that are you know instagram worthy creatures more so than the ugly ones
well and the cynic in me says it's you know it's driven more by money than it is by
by commitment to the cause because that's where you get funding right yeah who's gonna who's gonna
pull out their wallet to save nutria yeah um so we were fortunate not to have to battle that sort of
of uh opposition to the the program and much to our surprise when we started reaching out
to private landowners when we kind of expected given the government sentiments anti-government
sentiments that we would have a hard time, people were opening their doors to us.
I can't tell you how many kitchens I sat in with my laptop computer and a little slideshow
talking to farmers and other landowners about what we were attempting to do and why it was
important for their assistance and whatnot.
And hundreds, hundreds of landowners gave us access to tens of thousands
of private acres of private property so that we could be successful in this. And a lot of them
did it sort of begrudgingly. They didn't think we'd be successful. They didn't think you'd catch
them all. No, hell no. You'll never get the last one. I don't even know why you guys are wasting
all this government money on there. But as one farmer I remember distinctly said
but I'm not going to be the stick in the mud
to keep you guys from trying.
So you know and we had a couple key landowners
that came on board early
that sort of helped us set the stage
and you know well if so and so let you on his property i guess i'll let you on
mine yeah and i think one of the most uh the biggest compliments i ever got working on this
project over the 12 years that i was on it was from that farmer that said he didn't want to be
the stick in the mud to stand in the way of of trying do this. But he had told me that there's no way in hell we
were ever going to get the last ones or probably even make a dent in the population. And a couple
years after we had sort of swept through his area, I ran into him at a gas station. He came up to me,
he said, you know, I never thought I'd say this, but I've got to eat some crow here. He said, I never thought you guys could have done what you did eliminating those nutria.
He said, I've been out.
He was a bird hunter, and he would take his dogs.
And he used to take his labs out and hunt nutria in the marshes behind his house.
And he said, I haven't seen a nutria in two years.
And I don't know where they all went, but how you guys did it.
But it's an amazing thing that you've accomplished here. a nutrient two years and i don't know where they all went but how you guys did it but you know
it's it's an amazing thing that you've accomplished here so and you know it wasn't like we just went
out and trapped one time and removed it was a constant effort of going back and sweeping through
and looking and making sure that we didn't leave anything behind well back up to how back up to the
first when you first isolated a test area and went for it, how long, like roughly how big was the test area?
And how long did it take to wipe out the test area?
And then how did you monitor it to see that you'd gotten them all?
So the test area began with these original 600 acre parcels or study sites, three of each.
I think there were a total of, I can't even remember now.
There were three study sites on each property.
And so we went in and we just intensively trapped them off.
We created a grid across the entire study site.
And then we deployed our trappers in sort of rows and columns,
like a checkerboard type thing.
And then we trapped across and saturated the whole area with traps.
But these were basically islands in a sea of occupied habitat.
So we very quickly could tell that it's just immigration.
We were creating a big
population sink but that if we were really going to do this and test the feasibility of eradication
on a landscape scale we couldn't do it on these little 600 acre plots so we finished those out
just to provide closure to that research project and then we sort of reimagined the whole landscape
and starting at the western edge of blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, we created a huge grid over that entire landscape.
Forty acres, about 400 meters or yards per side was the size of these trapping units.
And we would stack our trappers up in these rows and they would work east to west or west to east across the marsh, sequentially trapping each grid square.
So we basically had a swath of intensive trapping activity that kind of moved across the landscape.
We call it rolling thunder because it sounded cool. How many traps was Rolling Thunder running per night,
and how many Nutri were you stacking up per day?
So we set pretty heavily at the beginning.
There were a lot of Nutri to catch.
We wanted to remove them as quickly as possible.
And so we would have hundreds. Each employee could have a couple hundred traps out at any given
time so with 15 employees working on it you know we we had a couple thousand traps out at any any
given point in time and so what we do is we'd set the first row or column of of trapping grids up
and then once that was saturated and things started to
catch you know you'll see a really uh you'll catch a lot of animals at first and then it'll start to
dwindle off and tail off yeah so when we started to see that dwindling in the first row we'd start
taking some of those traps and rolling them into the second row and getting that one set up. So we just kind of leapfrogged ourselves along and it worked quite
well. And what we did looking at the numbers is that, and this was one of the things that we tried
to do at the very beginning of the research phase was this mark recapture population estimate uh we found it
was actually much more accurate to just go out and remove all the animals in one fell swoop and
count them all um and what it turns out is that we could trap out a particular grid in about three
weeks time okay and you know so we would catch looking at the numbers over time, we'd catch about 75% of all the animals that occupied that plot in the first week of trapping.
By the end of the second week, we'd captured 85 to 90%.
By the end of the third week, we've trapped about 95%.
And then we would continue to catch onesies and twosies for that remaining 5% over the, it might take an additional four weeks to get all those.
So if you rolled into a new area that was real hot
and you did a main set
and you got a few hundred traps in the water,
what might the first catch be?
Like what percent of traps would be full?
It depended on the trapper.
There's a lot of variability there.
Some of the more experienced trappers would set fewer and more targeted,
and others would set more broadly and try to catch them all at once.
And honestly, I can't tell you.
I remember anybody that had a double-digit day was feeling pretty good about their efforts.
You know, it's a thing that I think of from when I used to trap muskrats is that when you went into an area, you couldn't, if you were being like forward thinking, you wouldn't run more than two or, you'd never run more than two or three nights.
Because if you went into a marsh, and I used to trap a lot of isolated potholes, okay?
So if you went into a marsh and set up, it's isolated potholes okay so if you went into a marsh and
set up it's like i got a good number of muskrats the first night you might so the first night's
catch so you sat during the day let them sit overnight check them the next day
that night you might run 60 to 75 percent
full traps i mean if you knew what you were doing right yep the next night
you're gonna go back and that's gonna drop down to 25 percent if you if you were like a smart
guy thinking about next year's season you would pull at that point yep absolutely i could imagine
and i know you never did this because it just wasn't it wasn't practical and there was no
motivation to do it but i could imagine just now listening to you never did this because it just wasn't practical and there was no motivation to do it.
But I could imagine just now listening to you, just imagine like, yeah, if you stayed in that marsh for two weeks, three weeks, and kept running all those sets, you could absolutely.
Yeah.
But there you're talking about isolated spots.
It's hard.
I mean, they obviously got there in the first place, but it's not a matter of them just swimming over to your area.
They have to do it across land spring.
They'll migrate in the spring.
But yeah, man, thinking about it now, I could totally picture you could just like, for three weeks, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Oh, here's another one, nothing, nothing.
Here's another one.
You'd eventually just probably get them.
And so that is the most critical component. You know, there are a number of factors that you
have to meet, criteria you have to meet for eradication of any species to be feasible. So,
you know, in an eradication campaign like this, a trapping-based eradication campaign,
that's sort of like all the other kind of management things you hear about, that
80% of your energy is spent on 20 percent of
this or whatnot and what what we found out is that that uh like 80 or 90 percent of our energy was
spent capturing the last few animals in a population they'd get trap shy on you they get
trap shy and it's just uh you know it gets down to fewer animals leave less
sign so where exactly are they um and then it's a lot of activity on the marsh so their their
behavior will change they'll change the way they use the marsh and they'll move and different times
of the year they're you know in the summertime they can go anywhere they want because there's
an abundance of food everywhere uh so you know you'd find a little pocket and you'd set traps and then you'd not catch anything and find that they'd moved 200 yards.
And so you got to go find them.
And are you guys toting around 22s as well and just shooting them when you see them?
Yeah.
In the winter months in particular, we would do systematic hunting.
So when the marsh froze up.
I like the sounds of that.
Yeah.
I don't even know what that means.
When the marsh would freeze in the wintertime, if we were so lucky to get that and a little dusting of snow,
we could shoot a lot of nutrient in a short amount of time just getting out on that marsh and hunting them.
So that whole concept of all of this energy being consumed using, you know, catching the last few animals really forced us to think about kind of different strategies to find those remaining animals.
And one of the things that you mentioned earlier, you asked if there was any opposition.
And there actually was a little bit, there were some folks that thought that we should just offer a bounty and that the local trapples would take care of the problem if you offer a bounty.
Yeah, but they're not going to chase after the last 20%.
Exactly.
And so that was why we elected to, we're essentially paying people to check empty traps.
You know, the stuff they caught at the beginning well that's that's the easy part the
hard part is catching the last few and that's where we need to to keep that effort going and so
the uh the trick became how to find more efficiently those last remaining animals and
we tried a number of different things to do that. One of those was utilizing nutria themselves to find other nutria.
So I had gone to some conferences and met with some folks that work internationally on invasive species eradication campaigns and whatnot.
And in the Galapagos, they'd used Judas goats.
So they had these goats that they captured and put radio collars on them or GPS collars, and they let them go.
They're a social and gregarious creature, so they seek out other goats,
and they would go up in a helicopter and find these Judas goats
that they put out there and then take out all of the other animals.
All the new friends that he'd made.
Exactly.
And so knowing that nutria were social and sought out other Nutria,
I thought, oh, I wonder if this could work for us.
Hold on.
Pardon my ignorance, but where does the Judas...
What?
Where does it come from?
It's a Bible?
Did you grow up in some kind of pagan household?
You guessed it.
That's right.
You did grow up in some kind of pagan household? You guessed it. That's right. You did grow up in some kind of pagan household.
So Judas betrayed Christ.
Yeah.
In the Last Supper painting,
he's the only one
that won't look at.
He's the only one
not looking at Christ.
All right.
Yeah.
Betrayed him
to the Romans.
Hey, folks. Exc exciting news for those who live
or hunt in Canada and boy my
goodness do we hear from
the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a
sweepstakes and our
raffle and sweepstakes law
makes it that they can't join
our northern brothers
get irritated well if you're
sick of you know
sucking high and titty there,
OnX is now in Canada.
The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.
The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps
that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,
24K topo maps,points and tracking that's right you were
always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you
um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even
use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of
your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on
products and services hand-picked
by the OnX Hunt team.
Some of our favorites
are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex
Federal, and more.
As a special offer,
you can get a free three months
to try OnX out
if you visit
onxmaps.com
slash meet.
onxmaps.com
slash meet. Welcome to the
OnX Club, y'all.
I'm glad he's here
as the historian to answer that
question. I know it was
biblical, but I don't like to go
too deep into that biblical stuff.
So thank you for providing that insight. But yeah, so we-
Can I hear a fellow by the name of Moses?
Yeah, I heard him.
I just didn't know how deep we had to dive here. So we actually got a special grant to look at whether or not this concept would be feasible.
Because we didn't want to sort of detract from the ongoing efforts to trap and remove by diverting funds.
So we got some additional grant funding to support this effort from the national fish and wildlife foundation
and uh we captured a bunch of nutria we had them surgically sterilized because we didn't want to
be releasing animals that could then you know escape us and begin breeding out there as quickly
as they breed we knew that could be a problem as as well as a perception issue. Here we are spending millions of dollars to try to...
Put more back out.
Yeah.
So they were all surgically sterilized.
The males were vasectomized, and the females had a tubal ligation.
Yeah, I had the former.
Yeah.
Don't know about me.
And then we put radio collars, and in some instances,
they also had a GPS collar on them that stored the data that it collected on board.
So at the time, the technology was still pretty limiting that we couldn't.
These devices take a lot of power, and power means big batteries.
And putting a big package on a smaller animal, especially one that's got the body confirmation of a nutria, is challenging.
So we had these little devices custom made by a company in New Zealand that made them rechargeable.
And they would collect data for about a month.
And then it would store it all on board.
And we'd go back out and catch those animals and retrieve that gps unit and download it
and we could see everywhere that that nutria had been every 90 minutes it would collect a location
we could see where it had been over the past month and he's an unfamiliar train when you turn them
loose correct we so the the intent here was to determine if we left nutria behind in areas we
already trapped so we would release them into areas that we thought were devoid of nutria.
Well, lo and behold, some of these animals
started moving pretty widely across the landscape.
The collar also had a standard radio transmitter
so we could actually go out and track it
on a day-to-day basis
so we would at least know the general vicinity they were in.
And we noticed after some wide movements across the landscape
like miles miles yeah in some cases uh once they sort of sort of conglomerated into a smaller area
i thought i wonder if there could be other nutria there you know it's spending a lot of time in this
one area so we'd go out and we'd set our cage traps to try to catch these animals back and lo and behold we caught a few animals
that were not tagged i was like huh this could work in areas he thought you had trapped out right
yeah right so we knew there was a likelihood there were probably some animals but you know
we'd done the initial knockdown uh and we'd gone
back through and and sort of mopped up those are kind of terminologies we used to describe the
different phases of the eradication campaign and so it wasn't a complete surprise to us but it sure
was handy to to know where they were um from these critters But the problem that we had tracking them on a daily basis with their radio collars
is that because they moved so far and because it's a thick vegetation environment
and they're often in the water so the signal from that device doesn't travel that far,
you had to be pretty close to even detect a signal.
So in cases where they might have moved two or three miles overnight
we would spend all day you know trying to find them again trying to find them and so
it turned out that while the technique worked to expose the existence of other nutria in the
environment from an operational standpoint it wasn't really practical i mean the the human
resources that it took to just keep up with these animals.
So what would have really been valuable was to have had a GPS collar
that could, through either cell phone technology
or satellite technology,
relay that information to us remotely.
And then, so that exists for a lot of different species
that it can carry that additional battery power.
Not much extra equipment.
I want to ask you a question that's not related to Nutria,
but is related to tracking devices.
So let's say, let's just say,
that you know that in your state
there is a collaring program going on with elk.
And you know there are some elk wearing collars
um what prevents a person who just likes to tinker with kind of stuff what presents prevents
a person from finding uh from building up his own kit to go track that same to go track those
same animals,
just to find out where elk herds are so he can go hunt them?
So a couple things make it difficult.
It's certainly not impossible, and that's been an issue in places, I'm sure.
But the FCC designates certain bandwidths for government research,
and you can get these kinds of devices for hunting dogs and that sort of thing so they they sort of segregate the the use categories of the different bandwidths so that
the megahertz are frequencies that okay that these things emit on and so the the systems that are
used for wildlife tracking are not generally available to the public. And it's fairly expensive too.
So it doesn't happen too often,
but it certainly can happen.
And there's no,
so there would be a component of law would come into it,
that you're using frequencies you're not supposed to use,
or is that just?
I don't know.
I've never even had anybody say to me
that they were trying to do this it's just always puzzled me that right that you i was wondering if
you would be like breaking a law to go out with a receiver of some sort and be like and also sort of
tracking collared animals the same way that a researcher is tracking them well and so we had
actually an interesting thing there i'm not sure about the legality of it but uh researchers in general uh
keep a really tight lid on collar frequencies you know it's not information that they
they share readily so they keep that pretty close to the vests so that you don't have problems like
that but we had we talked the reason i first started thinking about this remember your friend up in fairbanks who had all those moose collared
and one day i made a joke being like i bet there's a lot of dudes in fairbanks that like to
track those moose with you because you just had ones that were out in hauntable areas
you know so sorry go ahead well so the way the government, the FCC divvies up these bandwidths,
so like the federal government gets, you know, 164 dot whatever,
and private or academic institutions get a totally different bandwidth.
So in theory, you shouldn't have all of this sort of overlapping.
You know, when I call up a telemetry company
and say, order a little bunch of collars, I don't get to pick and choose my frequencies,
but I can be relatively assured that someone else who's doing research in the same area
through a university is not going to be anywhere close to where I am because they're on a totally
different bandwidth. But it turns out that you can get these errant signals.
They're basically harmonics.
I don't know exactly how it works.
But there was another study going on in the area where we were doing our Judas project
that was looking at cichodier.
And so they had a whole bunch of collars on cichodier.
And we had a whole bunch of collars on Sikadir, and we had a whole bunch of collars on Nutria,
and we were working in the same general area.
And so we were out there looking one day,
and we got a nice strong signal on one of our Nutria,
and we're going through, and it's an area that we'd trapped out.
We had a beautiful frozen marsh, snow all over the place,
and we're tracking this thing down, and we kept bumping the cicadier,
and there were like no tracks in the snow from Nutria.
We were like, what the heck is going on here?
And so we started doing a little more digging,
and finally I called the graduate student
that was doing that project up.
I said, do you by any chance have a cicadier down in this area?
And he said that he did.
And I asked him what the frequency was, and it was way off.
I mean, it shouldn't even have been detectable on our radio system.
But as it turns out, it was.
We were getting these weird harmonics that would,
even though it was the wrong system, it still came in on our radio.
Oh, man, we had a whole bunch of data we had to throw out
because we couldn't be sure that what we were tracking was nutria versus cicadier.
So it was a little bit of a learning curve there.
Oh, that's interesting.
But it was really neat to be able to see how these animals use the landscape.
Different animals released in different areas
would move across the Blackwater Refuge System.
And it was amazing how similarly they use the landscape.
You know, there are certain points
that almost every animal that we release,
no matter where we release them, would pass by.
So it gave us some insights
on how we might utilize those points
as either trapping sites or detection sites
um that's yeah so you're saying the way that the the animals would be somehow
funneled by the topography or landscape and whatever they're looking for would bring them by
the yep and what would those features be points of yeah points of land or channels confluence of two
tributaries um any sort of point that sticks out uh so yeah it was uh it'd give you a good
idea of where to look in the future exactly so did it did it start to have as the project
went along and you started to sort of get the sense like, holy shit, we maybe are going to catch them all.
Yeah.
Did it feel like a hard stop or was it just like this kind of gradual wind down?
Well, we had a lot of real estate to cover.
So when it was winding down in one area, we would move to another area.
So we'd get these sort of peaks and valleys in our capture rates,
and that helped keep the staff sort of motivated
because even though their job is eradication,
most trappers evaluate their success by how many critters they catch.
And when you're trying to catch something that's not there,
it's a pretty frustrating and morale-busting activity.
No, if I had that job, I'd be real excited every time we moved into a new area.
Oh, yeah.
And the guys were.
But eventually, we hit all the known populations,
and it became this just drudgery of kind of looking and looking and looking.
And so when you're relying on an observer
based system to find an animal, it's like looking for Bigfoot, you know, you might never see him,
but you can't prove he doesn't exist, right? Yeah, that's a problem we're having with Bigfoot. Yeah,
exactly. So no one will ever believe you because you can't prove something doesn't exist.
So one of the problems with an observer
based system is that people get fatigued, they get bored, they're looking for something,
a needle in the haystack, they don't find it, they get distracted, maybe their text goes off
and they happen to look at their phone while they drive by a floating nutrient turd in the water
and they miss it, right? So we wanted to develop some other detection techniques that
wouldn't be so reliant on a human observer. The human observer is incredibly important. You can't
get this work done without people, but you got to come up with techniques that sort of compensate
for the weaknesses in different systems of detection. And so one of the things we had
worked on that actually evolved from a trapping technique was the guys would use what they called false beds.
So they'd make a fake nutria bed along a waterway, set a foothold trap or a counterbear on it,
and then the nutria would come along and see that.
And they're like, oh, hey, there's a nutria bed.
That's a good trick.
Yeah.
Just a quick tech question.
When you guys would set up a bed set like that, would you guys run a one-way drowner lock down to a stake?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
So we were required to check any trap that held an animal alive every 24 hours.
But we had an exemption that allowed us to go as long as 76, I think, or maybe even 96 hours if it was a killing trap.
Yeah.
And so we did rely on the submersion sets to make
sure that the animals were dead yes so what we're talking about there is imagine that you you got a
trap set up at the surface of the water on a little bed or you could set set up just for
illustration's sake imagine it's set on the you got traps that on the bank of a river
that trap chain like the little tether of that trap has a thing called a one-way slide on
it and then you drive a stake into the riverbank right next to the trap and run a wire from that
stake to another stake that's driven down into the bottom of the river out in the deep water
and when an animal gets hooked in that trap, especially an aquatic rodent, is instinctively just going to jump in the water
and dive down to get away.
So he runs that one-way sliding lock down that wire,
but it won't come back up.
Right.
Yeah.
So that was an effective and important tool for us,
and these false beds became more and more important
as a detection tool so when we
were going back through and and mopping up these areas we didn't want to set traps if we didn't
have good reason to believe there were nutria there so we would just make these false beds
and check them but the problem is when the tide would come up it washed them away or the grass
would grow up through them so uh one of
the guys thought well hey what if we put down a piece of plywood to keep the new grass from growing
up and then well that solved that problem but it still washed away on a high tide so he said well
what if we yeah what if we put it on a little piece of styrofoam and then so we we did that
and then we built a little rim around it to keep the wind and water from blowing stuff off the top
and we so we this
thing evolved into this detection platform that we would put these things out by the hundreds that's
a good idea and check them for scat and we wanted to get a sense of how nutria interacted with these
devices so we put some remote trail cameras on them and we got a couple interesting things and
they were staked with a fiberglass
pole so if the water came up they would actually float and they would so they would work all the
time whether the tide was higher down and we got one video where two nutria got on a single platform
and they were 24 inches square so one was already up there and the second one got up and it was just
too much weight and the whole thing kind of tipped sideways water swept over the whole thing and then the first nutria got off and the second nutria got
on and all the water and everything just kind of swept out the opening we had one one side that
had an opening with a little brace on it that we could set a conibear trap so if we we detected
something we could instantly turn it into a removal device. And so that got us thinking, like, man,
we could be losing all these opportunities to detect sign
if we're relying solely on the presence of scat to do this.
And so one of the guys went back to the drawing board
and came up with a really clever use for snare cable or aircraft cable.
And he took about a three or four inch piece of it
and he frayed the ends of it
and made a little tool to make it easy to do
and built it, sort of bent all the little strands backwards
so it formed this like multi-pronged
tiny little grappling hook.
And then he built a little support wire,
like a snare support wire
out of stainless steel welding rod
and attached that to the platform
and then made this little figure eight loop system on the end of the welding wire catch here to put
that snare in and it would catch hair when the nutria brushed against it so we we actually
implemented that and then we used the cameras to determine what we actually did a little study
looking at the detectability of nutria on these devices by the camera by the presence of scat and
by the presence of this hair snare and the hair snare was like remarkably effective it detected
like 98 of the visits to the platform whereas whereas the scat was very unreliable.
Yeah, you don't know if he had to go or not.
Exactly.
So all of these techniques sort of evolved out of necessity.
And this had never been done before using the tools that we had available to us anywhere in the world.
There had been one successful eradication of nutria in England,
but it was all done using baited cage traps on rafts.
And so we had to sort of forge our own path on this.
And so all of this creativity,
stemming from our local trappers,
was critical in sort of evolving our tools
as the needs of the program changed
as we approached
eradication so how many years into it or how many years did it take to get there
so we began trapping out the cora blackwater in 2002
we trapped out the last known infested watershed in 20 oh gosh 2013 i think the wicomico river was the last one we trapped out
and so i left the project in 2014 to take a promotion uh and so the folks that have continued
on in my absence uh have continued to look,
and they did clean out a few animals in that Wicomico watershed the following year.
But it has now been two and a half years since we've detected a nutrient anywhere in this ecosystem that we've trapped.
Now we've had some struggles funding.
One of the criteria for eradication is institutional support has to
continue throughout the length of the project. So you've got to have that commitment to provide
the resources to get the job done. But bean counters like to look at results and the easiest
result for them to measure is how many nutria we're catching. When you're not catching nutria,
it's a lot easier to start pulling back some of that funding. So we've had some issues there.
The staff is about a third of what it was at the peak of our efforts.
But we've tried to combat that by also increasing our efficiency.
One of the things that I had started before I left the project was this concept of using scat sniffing dogs to to help us find
nutria and more importantly in helping us find nutria because we had used dogs throughout the
program to eliminate nutria as a hunting technique but when you're trying to prove
they call it proof of freedom in the invasive species,
proof that an area is free of an invasive species,
is to layer multiple detection technologies
and techniques on top of each other
to give you enhanced confidence that there's nothing there.
You can never prove that they're
gone but by building a strong case of circumstantial evidence you can reach a conclusion that's
that the nutria have been eradicated like human observation no one's seen any they're not showing
up in your uh fur catchers on your floats exactly dogs aren't finding their droppings exactly and so the dogs true value here is not in
really finding nutria although it would be important if they did their true value is
is enhancing our confidence that they are in fact gone um because their sense of smell is remarkable
and a human observer can just is going off visual cues and you know you walk through this marsh and
you you know you were in it today hunting for sika deer and imagine would that have been a good
nutrient oh yeah yeah we removed probably 70 or 80 nutrient from that general area really yeah
right in front of where you were hunting uh that uh that was all prime nutrient habitat really
yep that's the kind of stuff they liked yeah So imagine having to cover like every inch of that marsh
between where you were and that far wood line,
and we had to scour that.
And when you're down to maybe there's only one or two nutria left in there,
what are the odds that two, three, or even four people
just walking back and forth are actually going to find
that one little piece of scat or whatnot?
Oh, yeah.
Well, Steve had a dead deer 150 yards from him, and without GPS technology, it'd be hard to find that one little piece of scat or whatnot so the dog yeah well steve had a dead deer 150 yards from him and you know without gps technology be hard to find that yeah i had to it's
hard i had to walk around there a little bit even i like i shot a waypoint from my tree stand to
where i thought he was you know just like a bearing and then a distance and walked over there and and
i was like yeah I don't know.
He's got to be in here somewhere.
Yeah, you could miss a lot.
So right now, do you think that within 20-mile radius where we're sitting right now,
you don't think there's a single living nutrient?
Or do you think there's got to be one that you missed?
It wouldn't be one, right?
If there's one, there's no worry.
Two, one boy and one girl.
Exactly.
And so what we know about their ability to reproduce
and their detectability when they reach some sort of critical mass,
we would reasonably expect to be able to find them
if over the course of two years that we've been looking,
that if they had sort of rebuilt a small population,
we probably would have detected it.
I'm pretty confident of that.
If you didn't find a small population,
you'd have to get in there and just be like,
hell's fury.
Rapid response, yep.
Get it out as quickly as possible so i'm
actually i have a lot of confidence in the crew that we put together and the folks that have
remained on the project uh are really committed and talented and i think that uh the fact that
they're not finding anything is an indication that there's nothing to find. So how are those people that are still working on it, how are they coping with the job anymore?
Well, so about five of them now are detector dog handlers.
And honestly, part of my rationale for getting that tool off the ground is a bit of a morale booster.
People love to work with dogs.
And so even if on a daily basis, they're not getting their own personal satisfaction by
finding a nutria, they're getting some satisfaction of working with a dog and training the dog and
making sure the dog is still up on top of things. But even then then it's a challenge you know the the uh the guys that have been with the
project from the very beginning talk fondly of the good old days you know and they miss it
you gotta be careful one of them might just keep that job to retirement
i wish i could tell the story we heard the other day, not about nutria, but I wish I could tell it. That's my follow-up question.
Already I have it.
I got one more main question.
Can you mind?
No, not at all.
Just wait for one more main one.
So other places that deal with nutria,
they still deal with them in Louisiana too.
Are other places that are dealing with infestations,
are they looking to what you guys did?
Are you exporting the technologies,
or is it just so regionally specific?
No, actually, that's a great question.
One of the criteria that was built into the funding legislation
that supported this program from the beginning was that one of our missions was to help to educate everyone else who's dealing with nutria with tools and techniques that can be helpful elsewhere.
So we put a lot of effort into outreach and working with other folks that are dealing with nutria.
We still get a lot of calls from people dealing with nutria we still get a lot of calls from from people dealing with nutria there's been a new outbreak or invasion in california where they had previously there'd
been a small population that had been eliminated so they didn't think they had a problem but i
think stuff is now moving down from from the northern states there and uh just this past summer i was invited to visit uh holland where they have a problem with nutria
invading from germany coming across the border and infiltrating their canal system which is
critical to life as they know it in holland uh so you know we've we've shared this technology
these techniques with other folks throughout the world but But I started to talk earlier, and I'm not sure I ever finished the thought on the sort of biological criteria you have to be able to meet in order for eradication to be feasible.
And one of those is you have to be able to put every animal at risk.
That's why getting the private landowners on board was so important.
And, oh, gosh, all these thoughts running through my head.
I've forgotten all the things that I used to be able to rattle off in all my slide presentations.
Yeah, it's been two years, man.
Yeah, it's been a little while.
So you have to have techniques that are uh effective so we you know work on all these different uh different techniques techniques that are socially acceptable so you know there
are toxicants that could be applied to eliminate nutria but they're probably also going to eliminate a whole lot of other species so so uh that's an important feature but when you start looking at those criteria and applying
them to other areas we were very fortunate in maryland the delmarva peninsula which is that
land spit between the chesapeake bay and the Atlantic Ocean that's comprised of the state of Delaware and the eastern shore of the Chesapeake portions of Maryland and Virginia is essentially an island.
And the nutria that we had here were introduced. They didn't expand from somewhere else. It was
an expanding population. And they're limited in their northern distribution by winter weather.
So essentially, we had an island, a big island,
but it was an island that we could sort of get around
and eliminate.
So if you look at places like Louisiana,
which have an almost identical ecological problem
to what we have here,
they have the same sort of coastal marshes,
the same suite of plant species that are impacted
and the same effects of nutria but it's orders of
magnitudes greater than both in size and in numbers of nutria than we have here they don't have as
severe winters so they've got more reproduction taking place and they estimate in Louisiana
in the 10 years the first 10 years after Nutria were introduced,
as few as probably 20 animals had attained populations of 20 million.
20 million?
Yeah, and they're everywhere, and they're in adjacent states.
So there's just no way to get around the problem.
So that one of the other criteria is the risk of reinvasion needs to be near zero so on the delmarva peninsula we had that very low risk of reinvasion unless someone
choose to bring one in louisiana unfortunately uh surrounded by a sea of nutria so they'll just
have a constant influx so they took a much different approach. And rather than hiring trappers
to trap down to a near zero population level,
they looked at the history of nutrient trapping activities
in relation to the fur market.
And they established a bounty system
based on historical pelt prices
to encourage and incentivize trappers to pursue nutria
in the hopes that they could depress the population enough
that they wouldn't see the amount of damage that they did.
So they monitored that by conducting annual vegetation surveys,
and they'd take a helicopter and fly these,
they had like 1,500 miles of transects or something like that.
And every time they reached a nutria, it's called an eat-out when they sort of destroy
an area of marsh, they'd fly a circle around it and they'd do that every year and measure
the size of those circles.
And if they were contracting, then they were sort of moving in the right direction.
If they were getting bigger, they weren't taking enough nutria.
So to put it in context with Maryland, over the life of the project, and you remember
earlier I said as many as 50,000 nutria on Blackwater Refuge alone, we've removed about
14,000 nutria over the lifespan of this project.
Far fewer than we anticipated at the beginning.
And if you compare that to Louisiana, their incentive program, their goal is to remove about 400,000 nutria a year.
And that seems to be enough, the target that keeps that marsh damage at a somewhat acceptable level.
So other places that have expressed an interest, we've had visits from folks in South Korea, China, Israel.
We were invited to participate in a big workshop in the Pacific Northwest a few, probably 10 years ago now.
But then it even crosses species we were actually asked to come and consult on a beaver infestation problem in teotihuacan yes extreme south america
where they were introduced ironically about the same time that nutria were introduced here
we did a we did a large aquatic road swap yep You ever see Capybara? Yeah.
Yeah, I saw some Capybara last winter, man.
Nutria actually pretty closely related to Capybara.
Yeah.
But the Argentinian military brought North American beaver in to establish fur for military clothing.
So they released them, and they thought they'd have trappers go out.
And, well, as it turns out, they didn't have a trapping community.
People didn't know what to do with them, and they expanded and proliferated, and now they're...
They should have tried to introduce trappers, too.
Well, that's...
Cut a male and a female trapper loose out there. our agency's been approached about conducting some training activities down there
to help kind of educate folks on how to effectively trap beaver and whatnot.
But part of that is, you know, the goal is eradication,
and trapping for fur and trapping for eradication are two different things.
Yeah, for reasons we explored here tonight.
It's a good story, man.
Yeah.
It was a pretty exciting chapter in my career.
Yeah, the story starts to make its own gravy.
It's got a lot to it, man.
Yeah.
Yanni, what was your conclusion?
Conservation through eradication.
When Steve first told me that, I was like, man, that's a ringer.
He pretty much answered it, but I was going to ask where the closest next population is to the south.
And then if it can come this way.
But it sounds like you have the barrier of the Chesapeake Bay that they're not going to swim.
They are in relatively close proximity.
And Virginia Beach is probably the closest place that we know about.
Virginia Beach has some? Mm-hmm. close proximity in virginia beach uh is probably the closest place that we know about virginia beach has something yeah that whole stretch that's south southeastern virginia and northeastern north
carolina that whole complex down on the ebomarle sound and alligator river national wildlife refuge
madame mesquite national wildlife refuge and then right up into the intensively urbanized areas in Virginia Beach. All the drainage systems and whatnot.
There's Nutria on the Naval Air Force bases down there.
It's got to be good for alligators, man.
Well, in Louisiana it is.
A lot of the Nutria trappers sell the carcasses to alligator farmers.
So they get five bucks for the tail that they turn in
and then they get a buck or two for the carcass that they provide.
But the mouth of Chesapeake Bay is about 14 miles wide.
That would be a pretty significant dispersal effort
to get a nutri to swim across that.
So the narrowest point of the bay outside of the mouth or the head of the bay
where the Susquehanna River feeds into it is actually right here in Dorchester County. It's
about four and a half miles across to Calvert County. And in the 1990s, they found a small
population in a tributary of the Potomac River.
And the Maryland Department of Natural Resources trapped about 50 animals out there,
and they've never seen a resurgence of that population,
although occasionally we get reports.
You guys need to move on the Norway rat.
Eliminate rats.
You know what an interesting tidbit is?
My brother was telling me that Anchorage is the world's largest port city with no rats.
Interesting.
And when they get a boat that comes in, they inspect it.
If they find rats on it, that boat does not touch shore.
Yeah.
Well, you've been to New Zealand.
Their biosecurity procedures are pretty remarkable.
You fly in.
They put out literature about making sure your hiking boots don't have weed seeds and your camping equipment.
Oh, yeah.
Didn't you get messed with for having muddy boots coming into New Zealand?
Yeah.
I don't know if we got – I can't remember now.
It was a long time ago if we got messed with or if it was just protocol. But they basically took all of my fishing gear, not the flies and reels and poles themselves,
but the clothing-type gear and all of our camping gear, and they took it into a room.
I think you could actually watch it, and they basically fumigated it.
And then they put it in a plastic bag and said, here you go, have fun.
Yeah, they take their invasive species stuff pretty seriously. fumigated it and then they put it in a plastic bag and said here you go have fun yeah yeah they
take their invasive species stuff pretty seriously and they're not that they don't have a thousand
invasive species right well that's why they're they're uh and they're working aggressively to
try to eliminate them as much as possible so right yeah we saw traps all over the place for
what they call stote which is uh little weasel um steve you got any final things
that fall so far out of context that you didn't get a chance to bring them up
oh man so much i was initially wondering if i could possibly talk about this for two hours and
but uh yeah you know i think the the one thing I'd like to just reiterate as a concluding thought is a plea for people to recognize the importance of traditionally urban or rural values and activities and the contributions they make to modern day conservation. You know, this project would have been extremely difficult without the local knowledge we were
able to tap into through the trapping community.
And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that crosses species and, you know, it's a segment
of our society that's much maligned and there their routinely efforts to eliminate trapping and the kinds of traditional wildlife management tools that we've used.
And they still have an incredibly important place in a modern society,
and I guess that's something.
Even, I think, non-trapping sports people
often don't think about trapping that much
and don't have the support.
Yeah, all you bird doggers.
There's a very ill-advised group of folks that tried to,
this is my concluding thought,
that the last year during the last election cycle
had tried to get through an initiative in montana to ban
trapping on public land and you know i thought of you know i had in my in my pocket like a dozen
reasons why i thought that was a bad idea one of the things that my pocket that one of the things
that my pocket did not include was the one the director of the state wildlife agency came out and said,
why would we be putting ourselves into a situation to pay government people to do something that you have other people paying us to go do?
Speaking of beaver removal he's like we do
not have the budget right to take care of all of the conflicts agricultural road other all of just
the beaver conflicts alone yep you got a whole squad of people out there who you know are running
like little small businesses trapping beavers and
you want to take that away from someone's gonna those beavers gonna cause problems and then we're
gonna have government guys doing it you know it was that measure was soundly defeated
yeah i actually have a second concluding thought concluding concluding thought that
want to just make sure I emphasize the
importance of sort of partnerships in tackling monumental conservation issues like this.
And without the joint efforts of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Maryland Department
of Natural Resources, Tudor Farms, and the hundreds of private landowners that supported,
as well as a ton of several dozen
non-governmental organizations
like the Maryland Trappers Association
and the Salisbury Zoo and other groups
that sort of rally around the environment
that really helped to generate the support
to keep the funding in place and all that sort of thing.
Those partnerships are just critical
for the success of programs like this.
All right.
So be a good partner.
That's right.
That's my final concluder.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you. We'll be right back. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.
You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law,
but hear this, OnX Hunt is now in Canada.
It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.
The great features that you love
in OnX are available for your hunts
this season. Now the Hunt
app is a fully functioning
GPS with hunting maps that include
public and crown land,
hunting zones, aerial
imagery, 24K topo
maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even
use offline maps to see
where you are without cell phone service as a special offer.
You can get a free three months to try out OnX
if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.