The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 095: Inconvenient Critters

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

Loveland, CO- Steven Rinella talks with wildlife biologist Ed Arnett along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: losers in Darwin's casino; that huntin' and fishin' problem; why you should care about the greater sage grouse; economically inconvenient animals; priority habitat; the Sage Grouse Initiative; the PECE Policy; the Roosevelt Party; Aldo Leopold and hunting technology; on Theodore Roosevelt and conservation; cautious optimism; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Go farther, stay longer. Ed Arnett, I didn't know until, I don't think I knew until now. You used to be a bat, like a bat biologist? I did. I just can't picture because I always figure you, that your biology interests are dovetailed with your hunting interests, but with bats, that's not really the case. They certainly were.

I grew up always wanting to be a biologist and wanting to study big game like most biologists, a lot of biologists do. And I did my master's on bighorn sheep. So I fulfilled that for a long time. And when I went to work in the Pacific Northwest, I started working a lot more on non-game issues. And when I went to work for a company warehouser i really started engaging in bat research my phd was on bats and forest management did a lot of work on wind energy and bats and before i came to trcp and got to meet you guys i was running conservation programs for bat conservation international and led a bunch of research on wind energy and bat kills across the

country so you mean like bats running into windmills? Or not windmills, but... They're being hit by the turning blades. They don't run into them. Bats have a very unique echolocation system, and that helps them see in the dark. And if there's too many of them that run into things, it'd be what I'd call losers in Darwin's Casino.

They're not supposed to run into things. So they're getting hit by the turbines so what was uh what was weyerhaeuser's interest in bats so you know like if you if for you listeners if you got a a ream of printer paper laying around there's a very good chance if you go look at that printer paper it will say weyerhaeuser on it. What was their interest in bats? So back in 1990, when I finished up my graduate program on my bighorn sheep study, I went to the Northwest and I was working for the Forest Service, then went to work with Weyerhaeuser. The reason I mentioned the Forest Service job is I started that literally a month after they listed the Northern Sp owl and a couple years later um i uh

i basically um applied for this job and got it and um you know at that time spotted owls were driving a lot of the issues for this forest products company yeah okay go ahead i got a comment but it's an endangered species issue and so my job we were hired on basically to look at all of the managed forest and all the different kinds of wildlife that use managed forests and how in fact managed forests provide habitat or don't and what we could do in a in a intensively managed forest context to manage all these species that could be listed in the future. Back at that time, they were called Category 2 species, which all that really meant was there was a designation that they could be listed in the future.

So Weyerhaeuser hired a bunch of people, myself included, to look at things beyond just spotted owl and other endangered species issues. Because in their mind, all the trouble that spotted owl and other endangered species issues because in in their mind all the trouble that spotted owl all the controversy and trouble and just bad for business stuff that the spotted owl brought on to the logging industry they were thinking to themselves what's the next thing that's going to come up and how can we get out ahead of this that's exactly right which is like being a responsible player right yeah exactly they were thinking ahead of the game whatever their mode regardless of their motivation the motive yeah obviously there were business ties to that and community relationships

and those kind of being good neighbors and that kind of stuff but the reality was it was all about you know the future license to operate and at that time and there still are today a number of species that are potentially going to be listed. So I did most of my work. I shifted from most of the work on four-legged ungulates and other four-legged critters to nothing but songbirds, amphibians, in-stream amphibians in particular, those that utilize small streams and forests, and bats. So that's how I got into it. And one thing led to another and started working pretty intensively on bats

and developed a PhD dissertation project on it. And kind of the rest is history. What was the vulnerability of the bats? Like what was the bats problem? Timber harvest. Timber harvest. Like what do they need? What were they using timber for?

Nesting? Well, what they need, yeah. They need them for roosting, for both maternity roosts where they have their young. You're talking in hollows, in hollow trees. Yeah, some will roost behind exfoliating bark, so crevices in bark. And you've seen this walking around the woods. Dead trees, they'll go into woodpecker holes.

Sometimes just a slight crack in a live tree can create a place for bats. So they either roost during the night. They do what's called night roosting, but they also have maternity colonies. And sometimes you'll be walking around. Next time you're out in the Ponderosa Pine Forest, you might see a big slab of bark peeling off a dead tree. There might be 200 or 300 bats under that thing, just depending on how big the area is.

I had no idea, man. What species of bat is this? So it could be any of a number of species. There's what we call the crevice roosting species, and that could be anything from big brown to little brown bats, what's called the long-eared myotis. That was the pictures you were looking at a little while ago in my house. That was a long-eared myotis getting a drink of water.

There's several of them that use those crevices. I'm guilty of having not paid a whole hell of a lot of attention to bats in my life. I didn't either. I got that hunting and fishing problem that you get where I spent a lot of time observing, thinking about, reading about, talking about either game species or like charismatic animals right right so animals that may be animals that sort of have something to do with hunting and fishing even if they're only a peripheral player right like i'm not gonna hunt humpback whales but i'm interested in humpback whales because when i'm out fishing salmon and halibut and whatnot i'm observing humpbacks and watching them fish and so they sort of enter my consciousness

right but like the bat has never had a real inhold with me yeah and and it does it for most people i mean most hunters probably wondering if they could hit them with a shotgun when they're out running around in the evening. But the reality is they're ridiculously important to ecosystems. And the insectivorous bats eat insects at a rate that can oftentimes render the – render? That's maybe not the right word, but lessen the need for and in agricultural systems because they eat so many insects there's some studies in texas that demonstrate it's into the multi-billions of dollars in terms of the loss or the reduction of agricultural pests um they but they also important pollinators they're important seed dispersers across the world they eat just about everything those that eat blood those that eat fish.

Some have specialized hooks for catching fish. All the bat pictures you've seen around my place, they're all insectivorous bats. But they play a vital role. And, you know, the interesting thing, we started calling things like this. You know, you've heard LBJ, the little brown jobs for dicky birds. Oh, yeah. And then there's LBMs. In mycology, LBM the little brown jobs for dickie birds oh yeah and then uh and then there's lbms in mycology lbm little brown mushrooms little brown mushrooms like if you're out mushroom hunting and you see a little brown mushroom it's like just keep walking you'll never

positively identify that thing you know i mean or that's kind of like the just the term like we got your you know morels corals bleats, LBMs, little brown mushrooms. We started calling bats and other things like them the not-so-charismatic microfauna. Yeah, that's a good term for them. But they're critical. They're absolutely critical. And it starts getting you to think about ecosystems and biological communities and systems. Everything's interconnected.

What Elder Leopold called the cogs and wheels cogs and the wheels exactly right yep you know i was in um i was in the seychelles you know where the seychelles are no like they sit off if you imagine if you went due east out of somalia way out in the indian ocean the seychelles are so far removed that no one even knew they didn't they had never been colonized no one knew about them until they came up with like intercontinental shipping like no indigenous people it wasn't like the polynesian islands where indigenous people eventually found all the like hawaii and everything no one ever stepped foot on the seychelles until someone showed up and like on a full-on ship no one knew they were there but we were there and the only native mammal

on the seychelles is a bat yeah big huge freaking bats big fruit bats yeah that's what they were come out at night look like a jet like a bat the kind of bat that would like bite your neck could kill you yep but not and they are consumed in in some some countries there's still consumption of bats yeah that was one of the few times i ever paid attention to a bat and my kids like to go on they like it to me to go on youtube and pull up videos of aboriginal australians hunting bats boomerangs which is like if you got kids that's big shit to a kid yeah it's it's hitting the bat of the boomerang is endlessly fascinating to children that's a hell of a lot of skill too these. These guys are good, man. And they round them up and cook them. So, I can't remember where we left off.

We're talking to eggs. We're going to talk about sage grouse. You want to add? You got to add? I know where we're left off, but go ahead. I know right where we're left off. You know where we're left off. I do. I wrote it down.

How long ago was it that we had a sage grouse conversation? A year ago and maybe a month. Okay. So, we're doing a year ago checking on something and here's why go sorry here's why you should care here's why you should care about sage grouse besides the fact that it's just like a uh it passes the test that i put out earlier the test i put out where like i'm interested in things that have hunting and fishing implications so there's that with sage grouse so you know this is a game bird, the largest grouse species we have.

It's a very, it's an iconic bird that is, symbolizes, is kind of a symbol of a certain biome or a certain habitat type of the great sagebrush seas. And also it's really important to watch, because earlier we were talking about the spotted owl. If you're old enough to remember the spotted owl debate, the spotted owl kind of became this sort of bird that was a proxy for a broader argument.

And the broader argument was about to what level do we inconvenience our commercial activities? To what degree are we willing to inconvenience our commercial activities out of deference to wildlife? Is that fair, Ed? That's very fair. So it became this symbol of a national debate about if we determine we can make money doing something but

we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna perhaps lose species of wildlife in order to make that money is it worthwhile or not like do we push ahead or do we pull back and it was sad for the bird because here's this bird has no idea any of this is going on. But the bird becomes like a maligned creature. Yep. The bird becomes like the punchline to a joke. Or a threat. Sure. There was a lot of that going around in the 90s.

Yeah. And it wound up being like the bird's reputation kind of suffered. And in a way, like if you think about these sort of debates debates we're sort of in a current thing now with you know we're in a security now like gray wolves okay where the gray wolf sort of stands in as a symbol of this bigger argument about do are we gonna allow an animal beyond the landscape that is so inconvenient to some people live like it's an inconvenience of livestock producers and a lot of hunters perceive it as being very inconvenient to them people live like it's an inconvenience of livestock producers and a lot of hunters perceive it as being very inconvenient to them and so what is our tolerance level going to be of this species and it suffers in a similar way that the spotted owl suffer and it's always sad to

see this happen where the wolf like this animal that cannot that would be incapable of comprehending the debate that he's in like wolves exist without the knowledge that this conversation is taking place they don't know they have no like it's they don't know anything else of the world beyond their own experience like if you ask a wolf in wyoming he doesn't know that there's a bunch in alaska but they're missing from other areas it's just like way outside he just like understands his little realm. But meanwhile, we're talking about them as this big, they become this big symbol and they become something that winds up being like the animal itself becomes controversial when all he's doing is putting us in a situation where we need to discuss our tolerances,

but he becomes sort of a victim of it. That's all like a preface to say that right now, if you want to understand wildlife politics and kind of where we're headed and the kind of conversations that we're going to continue to have the current version the current spotted owl like today's spotted owl real quick though ed what happened how's the spotted owl doing now is he good no they're not off the list yet no um and just to add one quick thing to that, you know, they became the poster child. And in my view, really kind of resembled the metaphor of you can't see the forest because of the trees in front of you. And everybody focused on spotted owls, but it was really about that ecosystem.

Yeah. And about accelerated harvest of old growth forest forest and how important old-growth forests were. We learned a lot about, you know, at that time there wasn't an immense amount of research, particularly in managed forest, and I think we learned a lot about, you know, how you can manage structural features and habitat features for the animal without necessarily having older forests. But you have older forest conditions. But what I think a lot of people realized in, with the spotted owl as the poster child, that this is about an ecosystem that's vital to so many different creatures.

And you can manage, you can, you can preserve old growth forest, but you can also learn and also manage for habitat in, in managed forests as well. Yeah. And in the same way that that spotted owl became a poster child or symbolic of old growth forest we're going to talk about now like with sage grouse the sage grouse is sort of standing in as this as the poster child of sagebrush yep and like a better one a thing that would ring with more people perhaps would be if the American pronghorn or antelope were in as rough of a spot as the sage grouse is. I think people might be seeing this differently.

More well-known creature. And it's kind of more like there's just kind of like a cooler. It's just bigger. It's more recognizable. Yeah. You know, you show a picture people that animal they're going to know yeah to start a conversation about sage grouse you almost got to be like okay here's what one looks like because a lot of people don't really know right but to wrap up the point i was

making earlier in in leading into this this conversation that we're having about income like economically inconvenient animals and what and how much do we curtail activities in order to ensure that we don't drive species to extinction and when we talk about extinction it's we're talking about making things gone forever this conversation will always be going on it's just the players will change that's right On the wildlife and the human front. Yeah. The wildlife and the, that's good. Because you know what?

At a time, if we hadn't figured out electricity, and we were driving some whales to extinction and driving some whales to near extinction in order to make fuel oil for city lamps, we would have been having this conversation in the 1800s yep instead of when we did yep but the whale was saved by electricity or probably no other petroleum yeah by the no not electricity yeah but but uh fossil fuels yep so which is at the heart of this discussion which yeah which was which yeah to bring even more full circle winds me off this

so we're going to talk about sage-gallops, but remember, when we're talking about sage-gallops, we're talking about a current version of something that will always be happening in our society, in our country, which is a country that places a tremendous value on wildlife. And also, we place a tremendous value

on economic prosperity. Yep. You know, if I may, before I tell you where we left off and start into that, you also made a point in the last podcast that really hammers home on this because you were talking about you'd think if you went to the Philippines or some other place, you could just catch the hell out of fish. And not always the case. No. And there's that linkage between that social and economic component

with conservation that's vital. I mean, we want wildlife in this country. We have a variety of laws and principles that we work from to keep wildlife. We have the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt and all of the people that he worked with and were colleagues with and thereafter that defined that social desire to have wildlife in our landscapes. And then we've been trying to figure out that economic balance ever since. But make no mistake, if we had 500 million people in the U.S. and hardly any resources, we wouldn't have very many wildlife either. That's the funny thing I find.

You know, like guys that like to get all ready for like societal collapse, like prepper type guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're always real fired up about having the right kind of hunting guns. Like you'll see them online debating like what's the perfect gun for post-apocalyptic hunting scenarios.

It'd be like, dude for post-apocalyptic hunting scenarios it'd be like dude post-apocalyptic scenarios or like societal collapses in failed states generally mean there is no wildlife right yeah you don't have a fail you don't have a like robust wildlife within a failed state that's right well that is the first thing that goes yep that was your point oh was i talking about that well that was the whole point of i thought you know the discussion about the philippines where you're talking about going fishing and hard to can find a fish because they're impoverished scenario i was reading i'm gonna just turn into the frontier days again yeah like yeah right but yeah boys are coming through the road no this one guy this one prepper i was reading at one time he

was talking about he's like laying it out for his buddies, and he's like, hey, here's the thing, though, man. In a real post-apocalyptic societal collapse scenario, you need a gun that's real good for rats and dogs because he's planning on he's going to be eating these rats, but he thinks that the dogs are going to be out trying to kill you, that the dogs are going to pack up. This is the level of detail prepper guys get prepper guys get into he's got it all sorted

out yeah but all right so a year ago where was the can you just lay out for me what's going on with sage grouse okay what's going on in general what was going on a year ago and then we're going to focus on what happened since a year ago okay so when you and ronnie were out hunting and we hooked up and talked about sage grouse it was days literally days after the decision was made as a not warranted decision by the fish and wildlife service to list and provide protections under the endangered species act for sage grouse meaning they they looked at the sage grouse issue and tried to figure out like do we need to make give them endangered species act protections correct yeah based on ran all the numbers and said you know what we thought we might need to but we don't well they didn't run

they ran a lot of numbers but there was a lot that went into that that we'll get into on what it took to get to that decision but not everything was in place and that's why it's so important for our talk today about what still isn't yet in place per se and what's being considered but what led up to that were decades of research a lot of concern back in the 90s from biologists not not net not you know uh ngo i got i got it's killing me i gotta interrupt you go ahead can you back up from biologists, not NGO. It's killing me. I got to interrupt you. Go ahead.

Can you back up 150 years? Oh, man. Not detail level, but tell, I know it's impossible saying this, and this kind of question drives biologists nuts. How many of these birds were there? Where were they living? And how much has their habitat been reduced? Okay. And how much has their habitat been reduced okay and how much has their numbers been reduced just so people kind of understand like well how this even came to

be yep um they are an obligate of sagebrush which means they cannot live without sagebrush in their lives so you didn't have them in the east or the south or in Illinois or, you know, the heart of the Midwest. You know, so went the sage grouse as sagebrush did. So they were everywhere where there was sagebrush. And at that time, there were 14 states, I believe at least three provinces that had extensive sagebrush habitat. There was an estimate, and I remember we talked about this because you asked me if i knew where the 60 million bison uh figure came from it was guesstimated i'll say at best 16 million sage grouse at the turn of the century you know here you know before the turn

of the century before europeans who knows if that's correct and the sagebrush like portions of the sagebrush seas were like the 100th meridian in the west, and the Great Plains, and then the Great Basin. Yep, that's right. And they no longer exist in three states, so now we have them in 11 states. It's estimated that about 50% of the habitat's been lost. And that was one of the metrics that led the service to consider the species for listing. They've lost half their habitat.

It's been fragmented. It's been degradated. There's all kinds of threats to the remaining habitat. And the numbers have been going down for a long time. Now, as you all know, game bird populations fluctuate on an annual basis, sometime on, you know, 8 to 10 year cycles. But it's all tied to precipitation and the quality of the habitat and they can the right rain could double their numbers the wrong hailstorm could have exactly yeah that's exactly right and so they always have these oscillations on any given year but the long-term trend has been about 1% decline since 1965 up until the last figure in that particular study that I often reference through the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies was 2015.

In 2016, the numbers went up quite a bit. This year, they're down more. So they fluctuate. But the long-term trend has been down. And that's largely because they've been losing habitat. And even if there's sage brush out there, it doesn't necessarily mean it's quality in good condition that renders it suitable for the birds. So that's part of the reason that they were even being considered to be listed in the first place. We were down somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 to 400,000 birds thousand birds which in of itself isn't necessarily an alarmingly low number but the longer you kick

that can down the road the more likely it is to go down to maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand and then all of a sudden you're at 50 going oh shit now what do we do yeah it may be irreversible at that point in time would you call uh sage grouse an indicator species yes and we often refer to them that another term would be an umbrella species whereby if you if you manage habitat across a landscape for that particular species you're very likely to encompass a variety of other critters that live in that system we often use that term what's the term it's like it's not there's a term it's it's like a similar like bergman's rule or bergman's principle it's got a name attached to it but there's a term for when you have like like with uh um passenger pigeons you can have three billion of them

and they're fine but somehow you can't have 50 000 of them there's like a word for this. That just sounds like a tipping point. Yeah, there's a point at which you could never maintain a species, and we now know, you couldn't maintain a species of 10,000 passenger pigeons. Yeah. It has to be that there has to be like a million or none. Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe I'm making this up. You remember what I'm saying? Well, I can tell you're saying. Yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe I'm making this up. You remember this, Ian? Well, I can... I don't. I can tell you one term sometimes people confuse with the indicator species is keystone. And that's very different. If sage-grouse were to somehow miraculously go away, and we certainly hope they don't, I doubt there is a keystone effect.

If you take wolves out of an ecosystem, and we saw this with Yellowstone, you can have cask or beaver for example you can have huge impacts on other other parts of the system does that make sense yeah if the sage grouse goes you're not likely to see some like cascading series of antelope aren't necessarily going belly yeah you won't see like some ecological collapse however though um if sage grouse, that means their habitat's gone. So my guess would be a lot of other species would go with them. Not because they went, but because if they went, it's because the sagebrush is gone.

If the sagebrush is gone, you're going to lose 27. That's exactly right. Or some profound number of, you know. And as we've discussed before to the question on the indicator species, there's 350, at least 350 species of plants and animals that are dependent on the sage-grouse ecosystem in some way, shape, or form. Including some big-time game animals. Exactly. Mule deer, antelope.

Yeah, and we probably both have stories on chasing deer and busting sage-grouse. I got a current one from this buck my cousin and I just killed, and there's sage-grouse busting up all over the place while we're trying to put a sneak on this damn deer. Yeah. So they utilize the same systems. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians

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OnXMaps.com slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all alright so back to our timeline

so club y'all all right so back to our timeline yep uh so the department of interior at the time sally jewel no secretary sally jewel okay inherited that from ken salazar ken salazar kind of started all this with the you know um and made uh some good headway with the states and then and then secretary jewel came in afterwards um the uh the states were working on their individual state plans uh back in 2010s when this really kicked off because there was in fact a lawsuit that that said uh what what happened back uh prior to the 2015 decision the bird was determined to be warranted for protections under the esa but precluded and what that meant was they definitely warranted those protections but there were a bunch of other species that had higher priority that

were ahead of them okay so that's what the precluded part means now and that was the wake up call to the states into industry that you better sort this out or it's going to get real bad for you. That's right. And what really kicked that off, and you'll hear a lot of people talk about the sue and settle scenario. There's no doubt there was a lawsuit that forced the decision. And Judge Windmill, who was the federal judge that was handed this lawsuit, said, no, Fish and Wildlife Service, you're going to go back and you're going to actually make a determination. But I'm going to give you five years to do it. So that's where that whole timeline came in. If that hadn't happened, who knows how serious people would have taken this.

You always got to have a good crisis, you know, to start doing something. It seems like our history is replete with that, unfortunately. But the proactive is always got to be a little less than the reactive. So this was a reaction to that lawsuit. And everybody did take it serious and started putting state plans together. The federal agency started working on their federal plans. The service is trying to get their head around how this is all going to stitch together into a comprehensive strategy that would get them either to a warranted or not warranted decision and what just to let me just step in just so people follow the kind of like when i say that it was a wake-up call like if a species like let's say the sage grouse if the sage grouse were to get listed and get endangered species act protections that is going to shut down a lot of land use activities

in places that are vital to sage grouse so one thing is damn sure is going to happen is you're not going to hunt them anymore that's right so hunting seasons are done done what are also done is a lot of cattle grazing sheep grazing operations are going to be affected probably but primarily is going to be like energy development energy extraction that industry is going to be just locked out of a lot of places so we say a wake-up call these guys might have never paid any attention to sage grgrouse. Hunters definitely do. Someone says, you know what? I sense a long-term problem for sage-grouse. I'm going to say that I'm going to argue that they should be listed under the ESA, and I'm going to sue the feds

for having not done it. The feds look at it. They come up to a settlement that says we need time to determine, to figure out if this is true or not. Now, all these groups from guys, sportsman's groups like the Hunnam and any other business and states that host this business are like, holy shit, if this goes down, our economy goes down. So we now are all of a sudden real interested in sage grouse. Yep. That's the impending crisis that kickstarted everybody's engine.

It's the hammer. It's like the hammer over your head. Yep. Is the ESA. And now there's a big movement to try to make the ESA, the hammering is not so hammer-like. Right. But that's a whole other conversation. A whole other conversation.

But yeah, pull some teeth out of that jaw. Yeah. Well, to bring that full circle back to how we started this and how I got into bats, that's exactly what Weyerhaeuser saw with what happened with the spotted owl. It literally shut down entire communities. We're not talking just three of us getting kicked off our job we're talking entire parts of states going you know

having true economic collapse and and the industry saw the kinds of revenues that were wrapped up in in the protection zones and they said okay we can't do this again let's start let's start being more proactive that's why i was hired to study bats it seems harsh but it's one of the beautiful things about america is that there's some like elements of america that values wildlife so highly yeah but so okay which is unique so to get back on track here so i want to make sure we we get this covered so so that's all going on and you're you were just getting to okay the state started to be like, who, what, what's a sage grouse? Yeah.

Do you want me to describe a sage grouse? No, no, no. I'm saying that we were getting to the part where the states were all of a sudden getting real interested in what a sage grouse is. Why do we care about this critter? Yeah. So, you know, the states started putting their plans, and make no mistake,

the state biologists have been watching this for a long time. It's just sometimes it takes that looming crisis to really get there. They were aware of this. They were aware of it, and they had, they had been doing things, research monitoring, some habitat projects, those kinds of things. But there wasn't a, you know, a comprehensive strategy for many of the states. Wyoming led the way. They started it in 2008. And then other states followed.

And so you had all these state-level efforts going on. You had the federal agencies putting their plans together. And then in 2010, you had something pretty extraordinary, which was the Natural Resources Conservation Service, NRCS, put an initiative together called the Sage Grouse Initiative that was pumping millions and millions of dollars into private landowners to incentivize them to change their grazing practices, do some fencing and water type projects that were favorable to sage grouse, all kinds of different things, cut juniper trees, and it incentivized conservation on private lands. So you have those three legs of that stool

that kind of put together, made a good, solid, comprehensive package. In addition to a fire strategy, a firefighting strategy that crossed political boundaries between feds and states and counties, and I don't want to get into that because that's an extensive conversation in of itself,

but just make no mistake, firefighting wasn't always as coordinated and it probably still has some issues today but at least there's a plan and a strategy in place to try to fight fire in the Great Basin in particular where fire is a huge threat to sage grouse habitat and in fact I think in Nevada they lost well over a million and a half acres just this year. So you could say it's not working, but the reality is it just— Because it burns and other shit beats it out. Yeah, yeah. Well, and— Cheat grass.

Cheat grass comes back, and it's a vicious cycle with that cheat grass because it's a real flashy fuel that burns even more extensive than— So you had a catastrophic fire, destroys the sagebrush, and the sagebrush just never gets the leg up because it's getting beat out by invasive plants. It takes a long time to come back and it varies you know some it depends on precipitation elevation and the vegetation community right so you've got site potential on any given piece of land that you can grow certain kinds of vegetation really well and sometimes you can't yeah and that you know as you go up in elevation and to get into like mountain big sage systems

with higher precipitation um they have more resistance and resilience if you will to fires and they come back more readily than out in you know parts of the great basin for just as an example where there's much lower precipitation different soil regime that kind of thing but anyway all those legs of that stool were really important for the fish and wildlife service to say okay we've got federal plans that are pretty solid um we've got a lot of state plans uh varying degrees of uh ability to address all these different threats to sage grouse we've got these private land efforts lots of money going into that and we've got this firefighting strategy that's what got them in a comprehensive way to that not warranted decision.

None of those things probably could have stood alone on their own. You needed that comprehensive nature. So they were able to say like, all right, we trust all these interrelated plans and parts that you've put in place we trust that that you're going to recover sage grouse that's in essence that's exactly what they said now and when that announcement came samara was a big deal like you know you had the governors from several states yep all collected there's a big speech did people were people really thinking that they didn't know what the answer was going to be? Like, how serious were they?

On the stage? No, not, I don't care about the stage. Like, that, I mean, like, like, was it, did you know all along? Like, here's a predict, okay, like, here's another issue. Oh, okay. Like, I anticipate that Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay will not happen. I believe it will never happen right now were there people that said the listing will never happen or was it really like people really felt that i don't think anybody felt that it was like it was a real possibility yeah no i that was an

absolutely real possibility no question about that sorry i didn't follow your line there no i um no i don't think anybody sat back and said that's never gonna happen they may have in 2010 um or even before that but i can assure you leading up to it everybody knew that that was was a very strong possibility yeah and i don't think anybody really knew up until the day of the announcement, except those of us that were really working on it extensively. I felt just as a biologist, just thinking about what the determinations of threatened and endangered mean and the criteria by which they decide those. I thought about it in that context i thought about it in what i could see playing out on the landscape i didn't think they could get a warrant they should

get a warranted i felt that it would be a not warranted with all of those pieces in place however if they're looking at the same data you're looking at you feel like it should be i felt i didn't feel i didn't think they could withstand legally a suit if they did list the bird with all that in place i really i really felt like we had enough to now that gets to the question of okay how much is enough what do you want how many grouse do you want we're not going to have 16 million again or whatever the hell the number was so you're saying that that uh you're saying that had they said we're going to list the sage grouse you felt that that you could have beat them in court. I think if someone would have sued to say that was an inappropriate decision, as was done with lesser prairie chickens a few years ago, that the court would have said, no, I think there is enough here.

You're going to have to go not warranted. Gotcha. Now, mind you, after the not warranted was was put in place lawsuits came on both ends of the extreme you had uh you had the hard left uh some of the hard left environmental groups that sued because they didn't think it was enough and some of the industry groups sued because they thought it was too much yeah and sally julie even said i think i must have hit the mark because i got somewhere in the middle. Yeah. I recently had a politician tell me that he always knows when he's found his spot when the far left and the far right are about the same mad. He goes, then I know I've probably got about where I need to be. the in the hunting and like in the sportsman world in the hunting world it was generally applauded

the not necessary because people were so euphoric about uh the fact that all these like disparate groups came together on behalf of this bird yeah yeah so people thought like this new conservation strategy yep that you could that that people could come together sportsman's groups industry the political world could come together see a problem coming down the line address the problem effectively and not need to get into the game of of of using the endangered species act that we were going to like solve problems in some kind of way of like working together. Everyone's making a little bit of sacrifice. Everyone's putting up with a little bit of inconvenience

and stopping and preventing it from becoming a cultural war. Yep. And I want to talk about that just a little bit because I experienced firsthand both the spotted owl approach and in that era and and sage grouse and they're they were very different and you hit the nail right on the head we brought all of these groups together to talk about this now it wasn't as proactive and and uh as as maybe we needed to maybe that should have started back in 2005 or 2000. We could have got ahead of the curve even

better. But it's not that back in the days of the spotted owl that the regulatory agencies weren't talking to the industry. They were talking to counties. They were talking to all the different factions. It's just, it was just different back then. You know, it wasn't as comprehensive and cohesive as it feels like the sage grouse effort was. And mind you, there's a whole lot more players on the sage grouse front than there were on the timber and, you know, on the spotted owl issue. And that really wound up being kind of a one size fits all. You hear that rhetoric all the time, one size fits all, federal top down. That's really not how it was. Some will argue with me and that's fine they can argue

all they want but the reality is the sage grouse issue was a little bit more organic and a little bit more uh you know driven by state level uh players and and local working groups collaborations with the states and the feds and the and the counties and all the different uh industries the sportsman's groups were involved hell we weren't involved with spotted owls um because guys like me aren't interested nobody was going to shoot a spotted owl you know and and uh but you know we weren't thinking as big about ecosystems then if you think about spotted owls you start thinking about tule elk for example or some other you know or other types of species that we might hunt

in in old growth forest systems but we weren't thinking like that we weren't even invited to the table the sportsman's groups and you know that that plan not to get too far down the spotted owl path but the reality is that plan came down after a presidential summit that clinton held they brought some players together all plan yeah. They brought some players together. The Spadadal plan. Yeah, they brought some players together. Then the feds went back and wrote it and implemented it specifically to federal lands. It's not that private lands weren't considered

or somehow regulated, but they were part of the bigger picture strategy. And I can remember even having discussions when I was doing some of my bat work talking about the role of private lands and endangered species in the Northwest. And spotted owls on our lands weren't even necessarily considered as part of the recovery process because it was all about reserve systems on federal lands. Okay. So that really was kind of a one-size-fits-all kind of a strategy.

And back to your question, how they doing, they're not doing so good. And maybe if we would have done it like the sage-grouse way back then in the 1980s, it might have been a different outcome because they weren't even really considering private lands that much. Private lands were still regulated, but it was just kind of written off that the managed forest doesn't provide anything for spotted owls. We've got to conserve them this way with a preservation system. That's not at all what happened with the sage-grouse. And again, kind of point I was trying to make is we've always talked to these different factions, but we haven't done it in the way we did with the sage-grouse issue. It's a new way of doing conservation. I think it's the way we have to do it

with anything at this stage forward. Landscape scale, multiple species, and everybody at the table from the front end. And that doesn't mean every individual or every group, but you get those diverse voices in on the front end. Get them engaged. Counties, states, sportsmen's groups, industry. And that's how you're going to get to making both both ends of the extremes mad probably because you find enough players that are willing to work

to a compromise to the middle yeah that's what this was in my humble opinion and then and then what happened a month or so after we spoke last year, we had an election. So where we left off, you gave us a hypothetical like you like to do. We're going to bury ourselves in a time capsule right here in this spot where we were doing that podcast out in the sticks. And five years from now, where are we going to be? And I expressed lots of optimism. And I didn't say it then, but I'd say now we're all going to go hunting sage grouse and do a celebratory hunt. I was pretty optimistic because I felt like I told you earlier, I felt like they got to a not warranted in a legitimate

and credible way. It wasn't perfect. Um, and everybody sacrificed something, but we got a good comprehensive strategy that I didn't feel was going to yield sage-grouse winding up on the threatened or endangered species list at some point down the road, if it was implemented. That's the key. So earlier you said crunching the numbers. Well, part of that was crunching the numbers to see what the trends in the habitat and what the trends in the in the numbers of sage grouse were doing but what

the fish and wildlife service used extensively in this decision was something called the peace policy p-e-c-e the policy for to the policy to evaluate conservation effects. It's a policy that was put in place in the early 2000s. And what it basically says is that when we make a decision about it, and we, the Fish and Wildlife Service, are making a decision about a threatened or endangered species, we will look at things that may manifest in the future. There's some regulatory certainty or some kind of administrative policy or some level of certainty that these things are going to be implemented in the future yeah and we can consider that as part

of our decision and i can assure you that was extensively used in this particular decision because the federal plans haven't played out yet to their fullest extent go to some guy you're gonna buy the house from the guy. And you're like, man, you know, the porch is falling off. And the guy's like, listen, bro, I'm going to fix this porch before the sale goes through. And you're like, okay. Yep. I'm trusting that the porch is going to be fixed.

Yep. And you come back and buy the house. And you go on and do the deal because the guy's going to fix the porch. Yep. So what happens when you come back and it's not fixed? You get mad. There was no assurance no but if you sign that in a contract yeah in the agreement that you sign when you buy a house it's like we agree to these things you come back it better be fixed or i'm going to sue your ass yeah that's the it's a pretty good metaphor because that's basically

what the fish and wildlife service looked at i I've got signed federal plans. These are amendments to the resource management plans for the BLM and the forest plans for the Forest Service that codifies. They're going to do these things. That's an assurance to the service that something's going to happen in the right direction. Okay. When we left off before, it was kind of like there was a lot of promises had been made, but the fulfillment stage hadn't begun. That's right. And we were like, what, six, eight days after they'd been signed.

The ink was hardly dry. Now, if I pop out of that time capsule up there in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming, where y'all were hunting sage grouse and we were chatting about this. I don't know. I think it's up in the air a little bit, but I'm still optimistic that we're going to do the right thing. And what has happened since then, we had an election and a change in administration. Secretary Zinke is now in charge of the Department of Interior. A couple of things that happened in between there, somewhere in about January or February, remember we've talked about some of the bad language, and you've helped us with some of this on the National Defense Authorization Act and some of these bad riders on these policies that basically was handing over management authority to the states, gave gubernatorial veto power over any decision on sagebrush lands and the federal lands those kinds of things not not necessarily the best policy that we would we would agree with and we advocated pretty strongly against that we'd only seen that come out of the house in february we saw a senate version of that and that that woke us up a little bit that now all

of a sudden there may be some potential traction here on both houses. Like where the House and Senate, so the U.S. House and Senate, your congressmen and senators, coming and saying, you know, on second thought, let's not do what we said we were going to do to save the sage grouse. Yeah, let's do something different. Let's hand it back over to the state we're in a different climate now different political climate different administration yeah i wish i kind of wish i hadn't said all that shit because it's not kind of inconvenient but that that woke us up a little bit and only to the extent there were political motivations for why that was done and such and i don't need to get into it but the reality was we now had a house and senate version threatening some pretty bad legislation so one of the things we thought would be interesting and we

worked with the department of interior at the time for was to get a secretary we knew there were issues with the states let me back up just a little bit i mean look not everybody got what they wanted some of the grazing community was unhappy with certain prescriptions and some things that were playing out in the plans. There were mining interests that were fired up. There was, and this gets a little bit in the weeds, but there was a prescription, if you will, in these sage-grouse amendments that were solidified in September of 2015 that added a designation called focal areas. Now, what these were, there's about 35 million acres across BLM land of what's called priority habitat. It receives the highest priority and the most restrictive types of prescriptions to manage sagebrush.

You can't occupy the surface a certain number of miles or some buffer distance around the breeding grounds for sage-grouse. Other kinds of prescriptions that just basically try to keep it intact and in good habitat quality and condition. So on top of that, about a third of those acres, about 10 million acres of that was scheduled for what was called these focal areas. And it would, and they had to, or they, the suggestion was to withdraw them from mining. So basically it removes them from the 1872 mining law. Now this gets complicated, but all you have to know about the 1872 mining law, I mean, it was kind of a land rush, kind of a prospector's law back in the 1870s where,

you know, it allowed people, you and I go out and stake a claim on public lands. We just go out and look. It allows people to go look for minerals without even asking the federal government's permission. Now you can't do anything with it until you get permission that's a permitting issue and such but it allows you to go stake a claim and if you have a valid claim um it it takes precedence over surface rights so subsurface can always take precedent over surface rights so if I literally didn't own my, in my four acres here, in that back lot there, if I didn't own my mineral rights, literally an oil and gas company, if they owned my mineral rights, they could come in and put a well right back there in my yard today.

Because your service rights cannot obstruct their ability to get their mineral, to get what they want out of it. And that goes back to the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 i believe as well so so this was a way so they had 10 million acres and they and they wanted to withdraw all um withdraw those acres from mineral claim and basically but okay 10 million acres would be withdrawn from mineral claim. How many million acres would be withdrawn if the bird had been listed? That's a really good point. Hundreds of them. Yeah, it could have been a lot more. It would have been a lot more, potentially.

Hundreds of millions. Well, not hundreds of millions, but there's only a couple hundred million. But certainly wherever there were minerals in sagebrush it would have been impacted no question yeah and really what it was it was it was it was a reserve ecologically speaking the concept is sound you know you're trying to get it's really the only way the fish and wildlife service can get ahead of the 1872 mining law is to withdraw those mineral right up you know those opportunities way on the front end of planning and that's what they were really trying to do is saying these are the this is the best of the best habitat this is where we'd like to see minerals withdrawn and these are basically reserves for sagebrush and it also set prioritization of you know a variety of other things vegetation

management firefighting all those kinds of things but i can tell you that dropping that designation on top and keep in mind it's a subset of the priority habitat so it's already designated as priority habitat and already has various restrictions around it that are codified in the in the resource management it's just like instead of super protected it's super duper protected yeah exactly yeah so and um if they went away it would just take the duper away. Really. So, but by law, you have to do an environmental impact statement on the withdrawal specifically. And to make a long story short, in Nevada, this went to the courts, mining industry and others sued on that. And basically the court said, no, you have to go back and do, you violated the National Environmental Policy Act.

You have to go back and do a supplemental EIS, environmental impact statement, to supplement the ones that are already existing. And so that was basically decided upon not very long ago, a couple of months ago, where the BLM just said, we're going with the no action alternative of this EIS, which is we're not going to withdraw minerals from these areas. So that was the decision that was made. So now you have these focal areas, but you can still do mining claims within them. So basically, they're managed just as if they were priority habitat. Very little has changed. But that designation of focal areas came down pretty late in the game, and it made a lot of the states mad and a lot of the players mad. And it's become a hot-button issue, a red flag issue.

States and industry players. Yeah. And it it's become a hot-button issue, a red flag issue. States and industry players. Yeah, and it really has become a hot-button issue. A couple other things that are in those plans that are, you know, there's argument from the oil and gas industry about density disturbance caps. There's a maximum amount of disturbance that you can have in a particular landscape because sage-grouse are very sensitive to infrastructure development and disturbance from vehicles and all the things that go with developing an oil and gas well or wind facility or anything else so there's caps to that and buffers around the lecking areas or the breeding sites where males go to to find find

the girls and they're very sensitive to that disturbance so there have been the science basically supports that you know once you get over a certain amount of disturbance you're going to start seeing you know plummeting population numbers of males at least attending the lex which theoretically track with the population so there's arguments about that there were concerns about grazing prescriptions uh notably there's a seven inch stubble height. The desire is to have about seven inches of grass available when the birds are nesting for nesting covers so they can avoid predators. Everybody's hung up on that seven inches. There's actually quite a bit of flexibility in the plans, but there are many that want that removed, which would take an amendment. It would take a full-blown plan amendment.

And so there's all kinds of concerns that were generated. And that led Mr. Zinke to do a review of the plans. And we were supportive of a secretarial order that tried to address these issues with the states rather than blowing it up with this bad legislation i was leading to alluding to earlier where we now have a house and a senate version it's like okay this has got a little more traction than it used to a better way would be for the secretary to try to address these very specific issues that that may or may not affect grouse you know deeply in the long run. Maybe it's just adjusting the boundaries a little bit or changing a few pieces of the prescription. You still get the same outcome in the long run,

but you get rid of this toxic language, that kind of stuff. Gotcha. So they quietly come in, what are the problems? How can we fix the problems without really damaging the plan? Right, exactly. And you're hopeful for that kind of treatment. Yeah, exactly. And what we were really hoping for, well, and we were hoping that the secretarial order would be very specific to the issues.

But what it did was it put together a review team. and BLM and some other players that were charged with basically looking at all these plans and listening to the states, listening to the stakeholders and try to determine what the issues really were. Now, that in and of itself is not an egregious act. If you or I were voted into Secretary of Interior next time around. Appointed. Appointed. Yeah. I mean, you'd want to take a look at what the predecessors did and just make some assessments. There's nothing wrong with that. But our concern was how Mr. Zinke

was starting to talk about sage-grouse. He was talking about managing population numbers and he was talking about captive rearing programs to predator control, all these kinds of things that people have talked about and thought about a lot, but he wasn't talking about them the way biologists would talk about them.

He was actually talking about them, in my opinion, as if they were going to be mitigation tools to open up oil and gas, but you just captive rear a few birds and throw them out and all's good and well. Okay, but here you're getting into an important piece that we need to back up on. Yep. Because the original plan to recover sage-grouse dealt with not going out and just counting up birds. Right. So not going out and saying, like, how many birds should we have? But it came down to looking like how many birds and how much available habitat because a hailstorm

at the wrong on the wrong day in the spring a hailstorm can cut your population in half theoretically that's right by cracking the eggs yeah all this stuff is habitat based so you can destroy a whole you can destroy a whole like brute like you know what do you call a bunch of uh a brood a brood you can destroy like a whole area's brood well clutch and then when they hatch it's a brood okay yeah clutch yeah so you can have a bad hail storm on just the wrong day yep cracks thousands of bird eggs let's say and so then you have a falling population if you just go by bird numbers it's not particularly telling because you could have a really good situation where you're like there's so much habitat that's right so much food i have no doubt that next spring we're going to

totally rebound because all the stuff the hard to get shit's there the birds will be fine if you give them the habitat that's right and this is what conservation always comes down to is like it generally when people are talking about like a conservation issue the the wildlife populations respond to the habitat yep it's generally watch habitat if you look at the work like if you go look at the work that rocky mountain elk foundation does the work the national wild turkey federation does ducks unlimited oftentimes these organizations are very focused on available habitat knowing that the animals will take care of themselves that's right if you give them a place to do it so so the idea of like the recovery plan for sage grouse was really focused on

habitat that's right the new idea is you know what let's just count birds and we will raise them in a pen and turn them loose and then count yep so if we don't get the number that we want we'll make it that we get the number we want by just letting them go like chickens yep and then counting at the right moment and be like see they're all there which is fatally flawed and doomed to fail. But almost kind of cynical. Right. It's like, oh, you want birds, do you?

Here you go, buddy. Naive answer. I'll turn some loose tomorrow. Which, if we learned anything in other wild bird recoveries, is that pen-raised birds don't work. That's right. Especially for native grouse.

In the wild turkey. Yep. They spent millions thinking they were going to recover the wild turkey with a reintroduction program. And then what it wound up taking was, it wound up taking that you would capture birds, capture wild birds

whose ancestors were wild and move those birds into new areas and you would recover the population. Yeah. That's what it took with turkeys. Yep. They spent, the Turkey Federation in many states spent a small fortune learning that lesson. Yep. Well, and look at Atwater's prairie chicken.

Captive bird chicken. Atwater's prairie chicken. I mean, the only reason we really still have any Atwater's prairie chicken is because of a captive rearing program, but they can't get the birds that have been captively reared to then raise their own young out in the wild. Something gets lost. So you just got to keep dumping them, and you're in this perpetual cycle of having to put birds in the landscapes to say that we still have Atwater's prairie chickens.

Yeah, if you want to get a census, it'd be interesting be interesting it might even exist someone should draw up a map that shows like the ring-necked pheasant is not a you know it's like as much as you see like pheasants pheasants pheasants in america the ring-necked pheasant is not a native bird right right if you'd made a map showing they'd be interested to have a map of the u.s with one color showing where we have pheasants and one color showing where we would have pheasants if it wasn't for releasing programs yep that'd be an interesting that'd be an interesting map yeah chuckers too i can tell you the one the the part that shows where we'd have birds if it wasn't for supplemental stocking would be way way way smaller than the part showing where pheasants are yep it would you know where they first reintroduced pheasants no alamut valley oregon did they yep it's you know where they first reintroduced pheasants no lambert valley

oregon did they yep it's the first place they were introduced no no yep in young guns um yeah and young guns he kicks up a pheasant yeah and i remember thinking were those pheasants around back then yeah or is that too uh they get their stuff wrong but in uh last mohicans they kill a red deer red stag that's right in the east yeah yeah it's hard to pull that kind of stuff over on hunting guys that's right like we watch movies and we're like we always know when we smell something fishy with the wildlife they used to like watching the old johnny weiss mueller tarzan movies and i'd hear a bird in the background go that's a freaking pileated woodpecker not endemic to africa i'm pretty sure so all right so yeah so they get the idea yeah you were just getting to

that the that the incoming secretary starts talking about birds in a way that yeah it doesn't sound like we're that doesn't sound like we're on this sort of thing about how we're going to save the bird by that's right protecting habitat that's right and you've also got an administration that is promoting energy. It was independence. Now it's dominance. We just saw a report come out recently from the Department of Interior on energy burdens. And as you guys might imagine, just about anything could be considered a burden to development. So there's a lot of things aligning that make us concerned and nervous about this amendment process.

And, you know, it's no different than opening up the Endangered Species Act or any piece of legislation. If it's targeted and specific to increasing efficiency and effectiveness and those kinds of things, that's hard to argue. But, you know, everybody starts to want to hang an ornament on the Christmas tree and all of a sudden it falls down. So, you know, the motivations behind the review, in my opinion, were fine and solid. I'd want to review things that a predecessor had done before. But how that plays out is going to be interesting because we have yet, as I said about the peace policy earlier, that not warranted decision was predicated heavily on things being implemented into the future. And not all BLM offices are implementing the plans in their fullest extent. There's a lot of confusion right now about where this is all going to go.

And, you know, some states and some offices are moving right ahead and some are still trying to figure it out. So, but regardless, we have yet to see full-blown implementation across the board, across agelands of these plants. So now— There's kind of a weird short-sightedness going on where if you have an administration come in like they they not real worried about the bird more worried about industry and then you let the bird falter you need to like think ahead because we have a thing that happens in this country where we have wild political vacillations political the pendulum swing as we call it someone else might come in in four years or in eight years. Another person is going to come in,

and they're going to have their own appointee for the Secretary of Interior. And they're going to look and be like, sons of bitches, never did do the sage grouse thing. Now, I am going to list them. Yeah. The fact that people go like, oh, the current climate will always be here, so let's just screw this whole sage-grouse thing. You'd think that you'd still be real interested

in solving the problem because you're not always going to have your people in charge. Well, you're interjecting long-term thinking and rational thoughts, Stephen. Not everybody thinks that way. You know, I mean, you know, sometimes industry thinks out to the next quarter

and that's a year out maybe. Now, that's long-term thinking and planning. And look what happened with the spotted owl now that we've used that as one of our talking points in this. That pendulum swung hard and too far hard, in my opinion. I mean, we haven't seen meaningful timber harvest in a lot of places, particularly the Northwest, but for a long time since then. And now we've got forest issues. Like old growth logging just shut down. It just shut down.

But a lot of logging on public lands has shut down. There's not much of a timber industry here in the Rocky Mountains either, quite frankly, a little bit. But, you know, as you guys drive around and hunt, you can see dead trees, lots of standing forests. You know, there's just, it was a big pendulum swing back then. But prior to that, it was swung the other direction. They were cutting federal lands as if they were private lands to some extent. So, and make no mistake, the industry was warned well before the listing of the spotted owl. I know the people that did the warning back in the 70s.

They said, look, this is going to be an issue for us and we need to deal with it and really about the only thing that happened in the in the years to to come right before the listing was increased accelerated timber harvest which exacerbated the issue yeah so almost almost in a in a in a gosh if we don't have the in a in the sense of if we don't even have the habitat we want to worry about this but it didn't quite work out that way that that like thinking of the next quarter like profit earnings for the next quarter next year and very few people looking at what's business like in five years and this pendulum now is going to swing back eventually and i'm just listen it's there's no way if if they don't get if they don't get serious about this problem there's no way that in four years someone's not gonna say like son of a bitch we should have got more serious about this problem yep that's right and you know i'm still hopeful back to our

time capsule thing five years from now i'm still hopeful because we haven't nothing's really been done yet um it's but the stage is set and so the amendment process so let me back up a little bit. So this report comes out mid-summer or so from the secretary. The secretarial order came out and said, we're going to review these plans and look at them all, look at all these issues. It generated a list of issues that people had. And then this review team, which was a very credible group of individuals, put together a matrix of actions. So some of them were short-term, some of them were long-term. So for example, if they wanted to completely eliminate these focal areas, it would require a plan amendment. If they wanted to change certain prescriptions in the grazing section,

that might require an amendment. Now the amendment process in BLM planning is extensive. At minimum probably 18 months it could go out for another three years. So some of these things that need to be fixed we felt a lot of those things could be fixed with just clarification, training, better instruction on here's how you need to implement these things. Others might require a plan amendment, but our position was, why don't you let this play out a little bit and just actually implement the plans, gather some information and see what needs to be fixed then. But there's a rush. You know, people are kind of looking at the clock and this administration may or may not be around in 2020. and it's going to take three years probably to get through this amendment process so now

what's happening is there's an they're going to open up the plans potentially for an amendment process right now they're taking public comment on the federal plans and whether they should be amended and changed, basically. So you've got them codified now in the current resource management plan that was changed in September 15, 2015, that got us to the not warranted. Now they're looking at changing it. We haven't even hardly gotten started yet. So where is the sportsman community at on this now?

If you look at the hunter-based conservation community, where do they tend to be on what should be happening? Well, I know of no mainstream or other type organization that is engaged or cognizant and aware of the issue that really wants this opened up, except a couple of fringe element type groups. But the vast majority of the sportsman groups don't want to open these plans up. They want to get them implemented.

I mean, everybody that I know that's a biologist. Adjusted, refined, implemented. Sure. I mean, look, no credible scientist or biologist would say that it's a bad idea to make something better if you've got data to prove it. But the problem is they don't have a lot of existing information to demonstrate that something will or will not work. So, for example, if the industry wants to come back and say, well, gosh, you know, we don't think this disturbance cap of a maximum of 5% in some landscape area is correct. We think it should be 20%. They don't have any data to prove that, I can assure you.

But they may lobby to have it changed. They just don't have any scientific information to back it, and that's kind of been our position from day one. If there is science underpinning a buffer distance or a disturbance cap in an area or whatever the prescription is, let's use that to improve the plans. But there's a lot of those areas that in my humble opinion don't have that science and it's it's not supported and substantiated a lot of times what we'll hear industry say is that a lot of the energy studies and there's probably 25 plus studies that have looked at energy impacts on

grouse none of them say energy development's good for grouse that's one bit of information all of them collectively pretty much say that it's negative at some level and you know i'm a scientist i can pick or at least i used to be a practicing scientist i can i can find a hole in every piece of every study that's out there i mean ecology isn't perfect and you can find a hole in a study but the weight of evidence this is is the way I like to couch this, the weight of evidence is very clear that energy development at certain levels has an impact on the bird. There's just no denying that. But one of the arguments is that, well, all those studies looked at the old technology.

Now we've got the new technology where we can put multiple wells on or multiple wells on a pad which is true we have less disturbance on the landscape that's true as well but at some level that doesn't that argue doesn't matter it's still disturbance on the landscape and the birds are going to respond at some level to that disturbance so it doesn't matter if you're drilling horizontally three miles out or straight down 300 meters it's still infrastructure and there's still disturbance so um you know they're going to have to demonstrate that it's more than just new technology that you know they have information that would demonstrate there's a reason you can shrink those those buffers or or expand them or whatever yeah so

and i haven't seen that information yet so it'll but there's a lot of efforts that are ongoing now and new science that's coming but but the bottom line is we've got to implement these plans and you know there there's some tweaking of the plans that can happen right now that it's like i said if the focal area boundaries were you know to somehow disappear i don't think grouse are going to disappear. I also don't know that it's necessary to completely open up the plans to do that. But that may be where they go. But the thing people have to remember is that it's just a sub-designation within that broader designation of priority habitat.

All of that habitat is still going to be managed. Yeah. You know, unless those prescriptions change. That's our concern. So what's the next step for people? What should people be, if people are following this issue, what's the thing they should be doing now? Well, the public needs to express their,

and our sportsman's community need to express themselves. We've got an open action alert now. And basically what we're saying is that, you know, some targeted amendments that are supported with scientific information, you know, could be acceptable. But don't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. And by the way, Governors Meade and Hickenlooper, who you've shared the stage with and know their work quite well. Republican and Democrat. Yep.

Both working on sage grouse. They're saying the same things. Let the plans work. Let the plans work. Let the plans work let the plans work let the collaboration work don't make this a federal top-down war on the west as some proclaim on on different sides of the aisle i mean it's not that different let this play out and work some targeted changes can be acceptable but don't don't be making major whole scale changes so we've got an open action alert now um and you can just

go to the theater roosevelt Partnership's website and take action on sage grouse. And basically what it says is that we don't want to see whole scale changes. We want to see this collaboration work. Targeted changes maybe in the future, but that's kind of what it basically says. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my 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

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. So that's what they should be doing, but they should also, you know, people should just be aware and paying attention to, and it kind of comes back to what you said. This is a new way of conservation, in my opinion, and many of my colleagues and many of the people you talk to say the same thing uh you know the way the sage grouse plans and this whole manifestation of conservation strategy to get to that not warranted decision really was a miracle and really a a major milestone in contemporary wildlife it was like such a piece

of good news man it was like this euphoric moment it was and again not everybody got what they wanted and some of the fringe elements are really pissed and fired up but the bottom line is it was a hell of an effort to get it there now we got to make it manifest on the landscape because right now there's a lot of areas that are just paper birds and paper habitat it's all in a document until it manifests on the ground that's when we get real habitat and real birds that's what we got to have happen you think from my personal perspective that this always makes me think of is that if you're like like hunters and fishermen really it's almost like you don't have a political home now this is me talking to personal i want to implicate you in this but it's like you don't

have a political home because the political world's too dirty like from the left okay like again i'm not implicating ed in this observation at all but from the left from the democrat side you have like an atmosphere that's not like it's culturally oftentimes culturally hostile to hunters like right now there's a thing in arizona there's a referendum coming up in arizona to ban lion hunting and bobcats i promise you a republican did not put that up right okay so we're always getting attacked on the democrat side you're always getting attacked culturally people trying to like restrict your rights mess with wildlife management give like new jersey cat ladies sort of an outside

outsized voice and how we manage wildlife in america ban certain hunting practices you're just getting attacked all the time they're firearms issues and then from the republican side we're always going to attack on habitat issues yeah it's like i want to start a new political party i like how like the roosevelt party which is going to be like any kind of soul any kind of party yeah the bull moose party any social issue to be like no comment it'll be fiscally conservative robust military like ardently pro-habitat yeah i like that and like maybe a little like, maybe a little social liberal, maybe a little socially liberal to social libertarian, socially libertarian.

Listen, privacy of your own home, bro. Yeah. Right. Like a strong respect for that. But generally social issues, no comment.

You'll figure it out on your own privately, please. Yep. But, uh, it just sucks, man. And,

and I know, like, I know a good many people in the political world like who are like people who are willing to work in a bipartisan way from the right and from the left to come to like good decisions and like have wildlife in mind like those people do exist but those people are generally regarded as like very quiet individuals yeah that and most people in america like can't understand people who speak in a pragmatic quiet way they can only understand just like in like loud insanity or not understand

but they like it because it's like oh i get that i can get that so easily that's easy for me to understand complicated shit i don't want i don't have time for complicated shit i want the one sentence fix yep and you wind up it just gets so frustrating man and these are complicated issues right and they're hard to put in one sentence but you have to because i mean you guys do this and you're in television all the time you've got a message in a way that resonates with a much broader audience than than the three of us sitting here. And I had to do that when I was doing my science. Now that I'm glad we brought up the Weyerhaeuser connection, we'll just come back to that because I remember being a scientist in that organization,

but you had to also be a pretty good communicator with those that didn't want to know. They just didn't want to know about all your science. I was even told one time, it's like, we hired you because we thought you were a good scientist. I don't want to hear all that shit about statistics and such. Tell me what it means, what the bottom line is, why should we care, what's the bottom line for the business, and how can we fix it? So you've got to break things down and make it important to, in this case, managers, but to the public. It's like, why is it it important why should you give a

shit about sage grouse and not that many people probably do in the big picture until you put it in a broader context because how we learn to address the sage grouse issue is gonna it's gonna have implications for every other situation when this comes up. And this will continuously come up. And right now, we're talking about it with sage grouse. We're talking about it with wolves in the upper Great Lakes. We're talking about it with grizzly bears. Tomorrow, I don't even know who we're going to be talking about. So my prediction is the northern Great Plains and the short grass prairie,

that prairie system there is going to be the next sagebrush and sage grouse. And the ducks, right? Well, and sharptail grouse, prairie chickens. Yeah, we had a big conversation about ducks a long time ago. Yeah. You know, the prairie pothole region. Yep. So, yeah.

Look at the Bakken. We'll have it again. Look at the Bakken. Look at wind development in that area. That area is considered the Saudi Arabia of wind. The only reason it hasn't been developed extensively is there's no transmission right now. So there's a lot forthcoming,

and we need to be thinking big. But to get into a situation where we can look at conservation issues and look at wildlife issues and sort of make like a template for how to approach long-term issues that will insulate them a little bit from wild political vacillations yep and i think we know how to do it i mean i'm not going to tell

you all the sciences there but i've been playing this game a long time and you know the reality is we've got the tools we've got a good chunk of the science we know conceptually how to do adaptive management which is learning by doing we do do something on the ground, we monitor it, and then we fix it and do something. You know, we've got all those kinds of tools. And now we really know who all the players need to be. We just need to incentivize the conservation efforts and give everybody skin in the game. And I've always said that we've got to make conservation an investment, not an impediment. And we're doing that, you know, in a lot of ways, but we need to do it more.

Because we're not growing any more acres. No. I can tell you that. We're losing acres. If you look at the coast, we're losing acres. We're not going to grow anymore. We've got to do good with what we've got. For sure.

And it gets even more complicated because I feel like Secretary Zinke's done a lot of great stuff with access issues and other things but so it's like he's in a situation where you're constantly it's like getting heat on one thing right and you're trying to like satisfy and do some like clearly trying to do some good things for sportsman's access and other issues and getting hammered on other stuff so it's like it's hard for a person to find that happy ground where just the radical right and the radical left are pissed it wasn't being very difficult for political operators to work in the situation and just look at the sagebrush issue like here's another complicated thing those people like like the

people in industry have been screwed before oh yeah yeah and western and states have been screwed before as they keep getting screwed on wolf on the wolf issue and on the grizzly issue where you're like you came and said we agreed we agreed what grizzly bear recovery looks like we talked about it 20 years ago we've met that for 13 years the moving goalposts so it's like and we made a plan on wolves do you remember we talked about what wolf recovery would look like we achieved it why do we still have to talk about it now so they do get screwed on stuff yeah yeah and it's like and i think screwing them on those things coming from the rat they're coming from like screwing them from the radical left perspective winds up making people put up walls and not wanting to have conversations that could be more effective.

Yep. Well, it's probably one of the consequences of partisan politics. And we're very partisan now. And that pendulum swings back. My fear is that it swings back the other direction too far. Yes. Can't we figure out a space in the middle? My new political party.

Yeah, exactly. I like that. Dude, when that party. Space in the middle. The one in the middle. Well, political party. Yeah, exactly. I like that. Dude, when that party. That's the space in the middle. The one in the middle. Well, I'd sign up for that party. Yeah, when I get that party going and we got the House, Senate, White House, we have all the Supreme Court nominees.

Wildlife's going to be solid, man. Yep. Good hunting and fishing. And we'll make conservation an investment for everybody's future. And good mountain lion seasons in all appropriate locations. Jan, you got any concluding thoughts? Well, yeah, you were telling me the other day we were talking about mountain men, I believe, right?

And how everybody's talking about how you want to go back in time, like see what the country was like back then, right? And everybody has these like visions, right? I have those. And that's what we hope for. Well, I think like now is the time to try to like look to the future and think like that our kids are going to want to go, man, wish I could have seen what that stage for C was like back then.

Wish I could have seen all that. That was pretty damn cool. And we need to really keep that, you know, like keep thinking about that. Because it's so easy, I think, to forget with all the just it is the partisan stuff of it, you know. And you just can't get wrapped up in emotions and just think about the big picture. It doesn't matter what political party you're affiliated with. Like we all want to like look back and kind of, we wish we could see what this country looked like 100 years ago, right?

Yeah, that's almost something that people universally agree about. People are interested in, I mean, this is a wide net, right? People are interested in wildlife, hunting, American history, Western history, pioneer history pioneer history dan boone whatever people who are interested in that sort of shit generally are like holy smokes man it would have been great to see what lewis and clark saw so pay attention to that little part of your brain because that little part of your brain is telling you something important do you want to strive for a future that works looks more like that or less like that yeah yeah the catch is don't don't hang up on it ever looking like that again but think about what it

did look like and what you could do to make it look as close to that as possible into the future because it ain't gonna be the same yeah let's not have this conversation about pronghorn antelope and mule deer exactly please if we get to 20 years we'll be talking about listing like mule deer listing yeah are they going to give esa listing to the mule deer because we weren't paying attention to when people first started bringing up to us 30 years ago that the mule deer is going to need some little teeny bit of help well i've told you this i told i think we talked about this in the last cast on on sage grouse this wasn't a shock this didn't manifest in 2005 or 10 and wasn't court or i mean it was court ordered but that's not what the driver was the driver was we drug our damn feet

for a couple three decades when we were warned same thing with spotted owls the industry was warned but there was no hammer immediately hovering right over the head and that's the problem we've been reactive throughout the history of wildlife management there's just so many examples of that and we're damn lucky we got what we got back to the whole notion of what other countries have or don't have so we have a lot of incentive in this country to have conservation and wildlife well we got to get out of uh and we've been having these conversations a lot on the esa i've been working with governor mead's uh endangered species act initiative from the day it started and now we're into a little bit more conversation about how do we avoid having to use the endangered species in the first place,

which was one of my fundamental tenets when I gave testimony in the first conference. Well, then we figured out how to avoid using it, which was on bringing a bunch of people together to figure out how everybody's going to give a little bit to make the thing work. That's right. And being more proactive and putting money on the front end. It's like going into the mechanic after you drove the vehicle for three more thousand miles with no oil change no oil change yeah exactly it's like oh you blew your engine you should have saw me earlier probably could have done that for 40 bucks just saw me earlier when it was just come down to an oil change exactly you know just to return to a

thought man and this is kind of me just operating in my own mind but like aldo leopold in sand county almanac aldo leopold talks about okay i'm gonna bring this up but now i got now caught in a trap i gotta dig a little bit deeper aldo leopold's talking about technology he's talking specifically about hunting technology and he was saying that like that you can't improve the pump without improving the well. Yeah. He's not talking about oil rigs. He's talking about water. Yep, water.

But meaning, if you're going to make it easier and easier and easier to extract more and more and more water, you're going to have to figure out a way to make the well better too. Deeper and better and purer, yeah. Because you will suck that sumbitch dry if you're not thinking about both and when i think about that's like kinds of winds up being that that partisan battle i was talking about earlier yeah i feel that like that from the right we're like the right side of me. Okay. The right leaning, right wing leaning side of me is usually very interested in like improving the pump. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. Improving access, democratically allocated public access to wildlife. Like I like that to resources for us to use renewable resources, wildlife resources. The left leaning side of me is like, and let's make the well deep and wide.

Yep. Well, and to Yanni's point on the legacy, one of my favorite quotes that Roosevelt had was about conservation and stating that it means preservation and development. And he recognized the rights, maybe he didn't say rights, but he recognized the needs to use these resources, but he didn't appreciate or recognize the rights to steal those from future generations.

Paraphrasing a lot there, but conservation is about development and preservation. We've talked about this a thousand times before, but when, I'm going to tell the story again. Theodore Roosevelt was very interested in preserving wildlife and saving wildlife. And there had been an argument where someone said, so if the wildlife, if that is as you're saying,

that wildlife belongs to the American people, we're Americans, let us in there and let us go get it all, since it's ours anyways. And he says, well, yes, it belongs to you, but it also belongs to those in the womb of time. The womb of time. Yep. it's not all yours right now

some is yours right now some is for those who will follow man do we need leopold and roosevelt back don't we somebody some big thinkers and political as my buddy buddy Doug Dern puts it, when speaking of his family farm has been in his family for generations. And when thinking about decisions around his family farm, he says of him and his siblings, he'll be like, it's not ours. It's our turn. It's our turn. Yeah. Great way to think about it. I don't know if Doug made that up or not, but he likes it. And I like it. Doesn't matter. It's our turn. Yeah. Great way to think about it. Yeah. I don't know if Doug made that up or not, but he likes it.

And I like it. Doesn't matter. It's profound. Do you got any final thoughts, Ed? I just hope I kill an elk next week. I need to fill my freezer and take from today. Leave a little for tomorrow. Leave a little for tomorrow.

It's been great talking again. It's my fourth time. You guys need to come up with a five timers jacket or something if we ever do this yeah like a letterman jacket says need your podcast on the back like Saturday Night Live the five timers yeah well what we'll do is

in a year we're going to come talk to you and see where we're at 52 episodes from now we're going to come to talk to you about Sage Grouse again we'll see where we're at I hope we're in a good place i'm still optimistic but cautious optimism i hope that next year when we're talking about they'll keep well this birds sage grouse be banging into the windows there's somebody out there they're just like errantly flying around and coming in the house we're throwing them out the door maybe maybe i mean i I think that, you know,

as this defines the conservation model for the future, we need to learn from it and grow and build and look to the next one. And don't make the same mistakes twice. Isn't that the definition of insanity? Yeah. Keep trying the same thing over and hoping you get a different result.

Doesn't work. Learn from the mistakes of the past. Thanks again, Ed. 52 episodes from now, we will talk again. I appreciate you guys. Keep doing what you're doing. Thanks, Ed. Okay, a couple things, though, before you go.

Oh, you got add-ons, John? Yeah. We appreciate all the reviews and the ratings. You guys are killing it on that. But I know, because I see how many there are, that there are still thousands of you out there that have not written a view and have not given us a rating. Steve prefers it.

Ed just raised his hand. You never gave a rating, Ed. Steve prefers it if you just do the five-star one. If you're not going to do the five-star one, don't bother. Oh, yeah. Don't give it like a low rating. I don't care what kind of rating. No, no, don't.. Oh, yeah. Don't give it like a low rating. No, you know what? I don't care what kind of rating.

No, no, don't. Just give it. I always say, just to make it easy for you, go to the rightmost star and click it. You've never given a rating, Ed? I've never seen the stars on what I'm listening to. The way I'm listening to it, I've looked. I've tried. Come on, dude.

Here's the thing. People don't realize. That's why I'm not on iTunes. People don't realize how helpful it is to us to go and give the damn five-star rating. Write whatever you want. No one's going to care. Ed, I would think that you'd be on there being like, man, I've been on the show four times. You'd think so. Love it.

I'd give these guys six stars. I'd give them six. But you guys know my bazaar everything you do is six star ten star go and give ratings i will go find it but i'm not on itunes that's maybe why well give it that doesn't matter give it a rating out whatever however you listen stitcher itunes i mean there's like the vast like those two cover the vast majority of people you can go to the to the meatater.com and listen right there. However you're doing it, go give it a mega five-star rating.

And then write your thoughts down. No one will read your thoughts. Just put down the stars. What else, Yanni? Be on the lookout for TheMeatEater.com big Black Friday sale. It's coming at you. Yeah, get a Meat Eater podcast t-shirt. That's the Friday after Thanksgiving if you're not hip to Black Friday.

And that means that it's a day that people like to shop. That's right. I believe after Black Friday, now there's a Cyber Monday. Yeah, that's when you buy shit online. So do all that. What else, Yanni? If you're looking for a pocket knife, you need to go to Benchmade and check out their pocket knives.

Especially check out their new Bugout. I just got a Bugout. Oh, yeah. It's a sweet little knife. Did you get one too? No, but he showed me one. It's light. It's simple.

I like it. The only reason I got one is because of being a dumbass, and I walked into the airport with my G10 on my clip on my belt, so I had to leave it. So you got the new bug out? Yeah. Like a super lightweight little knife. Yeah.

Let's say you have a paper clip on your pocket. Exactly. Exactly. Hey, did you ever hear us talk about ad that in the catch can airport it's like the thing that brings me the most happiness in all the world outside of my own children in hunting is that in the catch can airport there's a display and my wife i got your back there's a display of of stuff they've confiscated from people there's in this display is a is a full-on brass knuckles dagger no kidding yeah oh man guys like traveling with the brass knuckles dagger yeah it's the greatest i've seen one of

those cases but i've never seen a brass it's just like the greatest like what do you mean i can't have uh i can't bring this on yeah and it's got a really nice fancy bench made knife in there oh yeah there's some there's some some quality blades in there, too. But there's some crazy stuff that people try to bring on planes. Well, ask Ronnie Bame about that sometime. I don't want to go into details, but you might want to ask him about TSA rules. How to get letters from the TSA. What else?

That's all I got. Five stars. Hey, check this out. Last time we asked for stars, a bunch of people came and gave stars, and it's good for us. It was really helpful. I don't want to explain all why, but it's good to give them their stars. Also, as long as we're on the subject of you helping me, us,

is if you go on all the time, and you're like, now and then you're like, oh, I'm going to go listen to the meat eater podcast. Subscribe. Right. That's hugely helpful. If you subscribe and it just comes to you automatically, that's good for you because it eases you into good listening. And it's good for us because it's like a demonstration of reach. So subscribe.

Five stars. Black Friday. Right? The Monday. The Monday. Cyber Monday. And also, throw your support. There's so many great conservation groups out there that generally you'll find speak with a pretty unified voice.

So if you're a hunter or a fisherman and you're hearing about complicated things and you're reluctant or leery about wading into something and advocating a certain viewpoint without knowing all the sides it is a smart idea to just kind of go and do a survey about where leading national conservation groups like where are they making stands on certain issues and i think that you'll find that on a lot of these issues you'll find like pretty good cohesion around reasonable policies and policy solutions uh i like the work of the trcp just as i like the work of many conservation groups some of which i've named here today but um check them out check out others too and go sort of gather up like how people in the conservation space and the hunting and fishing space how are they looking at wildlife issues resource management issues and begin to educate yourself that way and you hopefully will

find groups that kind of resonate with you and you can throw your support behind them but start out but it's kind of like take a look at sort of the national picture of how these conversations are going and start to learn about it. And then you'll want to, I think, hopefully, you'll want to start exercising, you know, flexing some of your personal muscle by getting behind these groups and making good hunting and fishing for not just you but your kids and their kids right that's it for me and i can tell you it makes a difference everything steve said having worked in this arena now it works and it does make a difference you're talking to five stars right

the five stars the six stars works even better the five stars works but conservation advocacy works too it really does and we make sure it works by amplifying your voice, so we appreciate you saying that. Alright, stay tuned. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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