The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 121: A Man of the Law

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

Eagle, CO: Steven Rinella talks with game warden Bill Andree, along with Brody Henderson and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: a man of the law; doing a little detective work; corner hopping and other hypotheticals; the difference between a live mountain lion in your house and live bear; big-time Colorado bear guys; bulls and swingsets; tasing moose for their own good; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, Officer Bill Andre, Colorado Game Warden slash...

District Wildlife Manager. Slash District Wildlife Manager manager for how many years 38 brody has he ever written you a citation for anything not yet have you been have you been naturally uh just checked i know where to what areas to avoid you know what where areas no but i've actually heard you better watch out because he can pop up anywhere that's what you heard in your ear oh yeah yeah he's known as known to find people that are doing things they shouldn't be doing so you've been you've been in the business in the wildlife game warden business for 38 38 years how many more years you got in you not many you're like in the evening of your... I'm in the twilight of my career.

What year did you move out to Colorado? 1976. To go to school? To go to school. And then studied? I had a degree in fisheries and zoology from Colorado State. Oh, is that right? Okay. And then went right to work as a... No, I took the test for the district wildlife manager job.

Didn't make it the first year, so I went to Utah to be an assistant manager at a private fish hatchery. Okay. And then the next year I took the test again and got in. What was stumping you? I don't even know what the test is, but what was stumping you on the test? I don't know what really stumped me. When I was taking it, there was 10 positions. You had about 670, 700 people or so apply for it and go in and take a written test. And then if you pass the written test, you went to an oral test, and then you went through a physical, psychological

testing. And out of the 600 or 700 people, I didn't make the top 10 the first year. Oh, so it's a narrow pool. It was then. So then you dusted off, came back the next year and got in? Got in. Yeah, congratulations. Belatedly. Belatedly, thank you.

So you're a man of the law, right? And a man of the law needs to approach things objectively, right? But are you still comfortable in dealing with hypotheticals? Because there's a handful of questions that have been raised to us over the years where people write in and be like, hey, what if I did this? Or what if a fella did this? And it's very hard for us to get answers but i feel that because you've probably been in all of these situations that i could ask you a hypothetical and you could tell us what way you would lean on it sure can we try one yeah well i mean i can give you an answer

to a lot of them really okay let me lay this one out because this one just came in. Well, no. The answer would be is if you use the word if, don't do it. Okay. What if I have one more drink and drive? What if I take that second shot? If if is in there, you're telling yourself, probably shouldn't do this. Okay, but can I lay some on you?

You bet. Because I just want to know, like, all all right a guy writes in and says this let's say you this just we just got this email he's in it's not even hunting season so i'm assuming this isn't like a thing that he's now trying to figure out if what he did was right or wrong but he's saying let's say you take a shot minutes before the end of legal shooting light. So, so blouch, right? You go over there and you got to take a second shot to finish it off. But now it's past legal shooting light.

He shoots again. How would you view that? Well, it's going to, I mean, the circumstances are going to be, he's going to have to show me two bullet wounds. Okay. Because if he shoots twice and there's only one, why am I going to believe that the second shot was, I just had to finish it off.

Gotcha. So you do a little detective work. Sure, you got to do a little detective work on it. Have you been in this situation before? Not on that exact one, no. I mean, we've had it on private land. The animal jumped the fence after I shot it. It was laying on the other side of the fence.

I finished it off. Okay. It may not have crossed the fence, but I shot across the fence to finish it off. If there isn't two bullet holes in it, he has a problem. Gotcha. If there's two bullet holes, then at least it's plausible it could have happened. And then it just depends on how upfront you feel they are. Are they sincere in what they're saying and what the circumstances show you when you're out there? So, I mean, a lot of it's give and take.

You know, if the person's extremely nervous or you've had dealings with them before or they're known to be always the one that, well, it was just a minute after shooting light. Yeah. Then you're like, you're not learning your lesson. Maybe quit shooting 20 minutes before the end of shooting light instead of waiting until the last minute. Yeah. I want to get back around and ask you about if you have people in your area.

I want to ask you what your area is. And if you have people in your area that you find that you are routinely dealing with. But I want to hit you with two more hypotheticals. Sure. Okay. One time a guy, and I was never able to get this guy an answer on this,

and he was actually asking the question about Alaska, but maybe there's something in your zone where you'd be able to answer this guy's question for him or provide some insight. Where he was saying that one time he's on, he's in a piece of public ground that allows rifle hunting. Okay. ground that uh allows rifle hunting okay but he's on the border with a piece of ground that's managed in such a way that the seasons are the same but there's no rifle hunting you cannot discharge a firearm there you can only hunt with archery equipment so same season structure same bag limit structure but just the land management agency has said no discharge of firearms on this chunk of land.

But he was sitting in the firearm discharge thing, looking across the border, looking across this boundary at a black bear and didn't shoot. And later, all of his hunting buddies were like, well, you definitely could have because you weren't discharging your firearm in the no firearm discharge area. How would you look at a situation like that? If the bullet hit the animal in the no discharge area, you killed it with a firearm. I mean, it's not. I mean. I like it. The reason you can't discharge a firearm because you can't kill something with a firearm there.

So if the bullet hits it and kills it, you killed it with a firearm. Doesn't matter where you're standing. Doesn't matter where you're standing, exactly. Yeah. I like it. I mean, I like the thinking. It's good thinking.

I don't know that I agree with it. But I like the thinking. Well, if you're standing on... I mean, I don't know if I agree with it. But I like the thinking. Well, if you're standing on... I mean, I don't know if I agree with it in terms of having a debate. I feel like you could run circles around the idea. No. Never mind.

If the animal died from a bullet, the only way for a bullet to kill it is you discharged a firearm. Yeah, and sent that thing across. Sent that thing across that line. Good. All right. Last one.

Last hypothetical. This might not even be a hypothetical. Are you allowed to corner hop in Colorado? I believe the answer is no. Okay. I'm not 100% sure on that, but I believe it's no. That's how I've always operated in Colorado. Have you ever had to write a citation to someone who argued this idea? No.

I don't totally understand the reason why it's not legal. I mean, there was a big write-up in one of the magazines this winter on it, and I can't remember. I think it was in Wyoming. Yeah. They were doing it. We talk about it incessantly. And no, it's like a legal black hole. Yeah.

I don't understand how if you don't touch that private land, why it's not legal for you to corner hop. But not an expert on it. Haven't had any dealings with it. You just enforce a law. You don't make them. Right. Can I hit you with one more? Sure.

Okay. Someone is on public land, and they're shooting at an animal. This is one we talk about incessantly for whatever reason. Someone's on public land, and they're shooting at an animal that's on public land, but their bullet crosses private land, would you ding them for having trespassed, for having their bullet trespass across someone's land? Personally, I probably would not. But I did see, I think it was an attorney's general opinion, but it might have just been from a district attorney, one of the local district attorneys, that if you're shooting over their land, you're trespassing. Okay.

But it would take a lot for me to write an actual citation. I might write them a warning. Okay. So it also depends on did he cross a corner he wasn't aware of or was he aware that his neighbors got an eight-foot fence and he was sitting in a tree and purposely shot over the eight-foot fence across the guy's property to get something on the other side. So there's always circumstances you have to look at that it's like you knew better. You knew there was a reason you weren't supposed to do it, and you went to all this effort to do it. Yeah. So you already knew the answer before you pulled the trigger.

I got you. I got you. That's the thing, like, from talking in the past and talking now, the thing that's come out when I've asked these questions is how much you're sort of, when you're dealing with someone how much you uh seem to sort of pay attention to and factor in like like sort of the entire package of what's going on like an individual's intent sort of how are they how up front are they being to what point did they self-report? To what point do you got to like work at them to try to find out the full story? If I have to work at it to get the full story or you lie to me, you don't have much success.

I'm probably going to write you the ticket. If you're upfront and truthful, then I'll treat you the same way. I mean, to me, it's treat them like you want to be treated. We're all going to make mistakes in our life. Some will be an honest mistake. Some will be like, well, what if? And other ones will be, I know I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to do it anyways.

And I think it's important to try to get to those little details of just how did this happen and why did it happen. Yeah. All right. Now, now well i don't know this this might not be bad cannot this might be moving forward but now can you now we've got those taken care of can you sort of explain me like the breadth of your work like what is sort of your professional mandate in terms of what you're responsible for and where you're responsible for it well we we all have our own districts um but our like today as we talked about i'm the on-call officer for the area 8 which goes from aspen to vale

so if there's any wildlife calls um i get the call first does that overlap with the hunting units yes okay so it's the it's the 800 units or No, it's like we have, well, unfortunately the units don't really follow a normal numbering system. Okay. So we have everything from the lowest unit, I believe, is 35, and we go up to 471. Okay. So the way they were designed doesn't really fit in when you look at a numbering system. I see. I see.

They're scattered all around. Right. But, I mean, my main responsibility is within my district, which is the Upper Eagle Valley. But when you're on call, then you're responsible from here all the way to Aspen. Okay. So in hunting season, if a call comes in and nobody else is there, you're expected to be able to go handle it, whether you're the on-call officer or not. So with only eight guys working in the field over that big an area, there's lots of times you have to go outside your normal area and work on it. But we also have the ability to go anywhere in the state. I mean, we're a class one peace officer for the state of Colorado,

so we can enforce any of the laws in Colorado, but we stay pretty much to the game and fish laws. So you could pull over someone for speeding? Oh yeah, without a doubt. Do you do that much? No. It's not my expertise. I mean, I don't have a radar gun. Our direction is pretty much that if somebody's driving

in such a way that they're a clear hazard and could cause severe bodily injury, then pull them over and get a state patrol or sheriff's deputy or town police to come out and handle it. Okay. So I want to talk more about law enforcement, but what are your other, so besides law enforcement, you have many other responsibilities. Right. Law enforcement used to be about a third of the time. Now it depends how you classify law enforcement. When you look at the bear calls and the lion calls we deal with, to a certain degree, those are law enforcement in that you may have to discharge a weapon to put the animal down, maybe right in the middle of town. So it's definitely a law enforcement situation in that part.

But we always go through the discussion. Is it law enforcement you're responding to for human safety, or is it a biological concern you're responding to that the bear or the moose is in a place it shouldn't be, and it's a danger to people? How much time do you spend dealing with that now relative to in the past with wildlife conflict, like particularly with bears and mountain lions? In the summer, over 50% of the time, it's bears. But on the bad years. I mean, on a good year, it might only be 10%. 10% of what? 10% of your whole time in the summer.

Hold on a minute. You spend 50% of your time in the summer dealing with bears? Yes. Last year. Doing what? Well, last year, just in this area from Vail to Aspen, we handled over 1,100 calls. And some of those are simply calling somebody back and saying, well, yeah, put your trash up, put your bird feeder up. Other ones you might spend two or three days on.

You drag a trap over to Aspen or to Vail. You set the trap. You have to go back the next day and rebait the trap. Then if you catch the bear, the decision is made whether the bear is put down or moved. And then to move it, you have to go about 100 airline miles. So once you catch a bear, if you have to move it, that's an all-day deal for at least one off or sometimes two. Now, do you expect to do a lot more of that this summer since it's a drought year? Well, it certainly could be. I mean, the nice thing about so far this year is knock on wood we we got through all the blossoms without a freeze okay

or a frost now we could still get one as the fruit setting and lose them all or it could get so dry that the fruit just doesn't really produce and the acorns don't produce so acorns and service berries and stuff like that choke cherries. Those are the key. So you're talking wild fruit. Wild fruit. Yeah. I mean, the fruit in town and people's crabapple trees because they're watering it in a drought year, that's where the fruit's going to be. And the bears are going to go in there to get it.

So you mean you could have like a wild choke cherry failure, a wild blueberry failure, a wild acorn failure, and you can then anticipate we're going to have trouble with bears. Yes. Yeah. Direct correlation. So this year might not be that bad. Might not be that bad. I mean, we haven't had anywhere near as many problems this year

as we've had in years past in our area. I mean, the Southwest, which is in a much greater drought, having some more problems than we're having right now. When was the last time someone in Colorado was killed by a black bear? I haven't heard about that in a long time. Well, the last one was about three years ago. The lady down by Telluride that was feeding bears through a chain link fence on her porch. The bears killed her. What do you bears through a chain link fence on her porch. The bears killed her.

What do you mean through a chain link fence? She had put a chain link fence around the deck of her porch so that she could hand feed the bears and the bears couldn't get to her. Unfortunately, the bears could get to her. How? I don't know how. I wasn't there, but the bears did kill her gotcha uh when you said you got to move a bear 100 miles what do you mean in order to try to transplant the bear you try to get

them out of their home range oh so that doesn't mean it just happens to be 100 miles to a good place to put it but there's a thinking that move a bear 100 miles and you'll and he's likely to not show back up where you left him. Right. But you also, like we don't take many bears in our area, even though we might, we're 100 miles from Denver. Part of the reason is we have enough bear problems going on, but you have to look at other domestic sheep there. Is there a campground there? If this is a bear that's been getting food from people, you don't want to dump in the middle of a campground. So we kind of try to pick the places that he's not going to immediately cause another problem. Okay. Doesn't mean he won't pick up and move 20 miles and cause

a problem the next day, but we try not to put him in a spot that's going to cause him a real problem. What factors play in when you look and you're trying to decide whether an animal needs to be euthanized or relocated? It's generally based on the animal's disposition. Were they aggressive to people? Certainly if they break into a house, if a window's open or crack and they rip that window open and come in the house, we euthanize them. Because the thinking then is that he has a proclivity to go into houses and that could be hazardous for the next person right well next person or if you move them somebody in a tent has a piece of nylon between them and the bear versus a a wall and a window and just so people

understand like it's it's well known that once a bear does that once they're going to keep doing it right they learned they learned it they especially if they get rewarded yeah it's you know you could make an argument that well yeah he he pulled the window open but he never got in the house and got any food somebody scared him off before but once they get in the house and start eating out of the refrigerator or the cupboards then it's like that that bear knows how to get, and he's probably going to do it again. Have you ever seen video of a bear working the outside of a house? I've seen it in person.

Oh. People think like, I think some people visualize it that the bear comes up and understands doors and windows initially, but they just work the whole thing, pulling, prying, biting, anything they can get their claw under, right? And they just like explore that whole exterior and eventually they find something that kind of gives, you know? There are some bears that clearly know a door and a window. Oh, from having been through that process. Right.

I mean, you'll watch them. They'll walk right up to a deck, right up to the sliding glass door. Not even really. There's pictures on security cameras of bears opening a car door as fast as you and I can. They walk up, they lift the latch,

and they're in the car that quick. They've figured it out. They know exactly how to open that door. They know where to go. What they don't know how to do is open the door from the inside when the door closes on them. That's when you have the problem.

Oh, then they're in the house. Have you dealt with that? Oh, yeah. Or in the car. You've got a bear in a home. In a home. What do you even do then? Well, the first thing you do is you try to convince the people there if they can safely

do it is to open every door on the house. Give the bear options to get out. So you've had calls from people who are in a house with a bear in the house. With a bear in the house. And they're calling from within the house. Yes. What are they saying? After they stop screaming.

Yeah. They're just, you know, bear's in the house. I'm in the bedroom. I need to get out. Help me. And lots of times, just because of where we're located, we call the local PD or the SO and say, hey. What's that mean? The sheriff's department.

Okay. The local police department or the sheriff's department. Just because they generally can be there quicker. And the big thing is open the doors to the house. Give that bear a way out. If the people can go out a window safely or there's another exit, then help them get out that window and we'll be there as quick as we can with it. And then when you've arrived at a house where there's a bear in a house, do you just go in there, guns a-blazing,

or do you go in there and try to figure out ways to get doors open and let the thing? First thing you do is try to get the doors open. You don't want to have to destroy the bear inside somebody's home. And then you'll just find him. If he takes off, you'll just go find that bear. Right. I mean, we generally carry a tranq gun with us. A lot of the officers now are carrying tasers.

A taser works on a bear or a moose just like it does a human. Hold on, you guys have tased bears and moose? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's it do to it? Same thing it does to a person. I guess I don't know what it does to a person. Oh.

You ought to voluntarily be tased then. Yeah, but I mean, it doesn't like incapacitate them, does it? No, it does. Yeah. As long as you keep pulling the trigger and put the juice to them, they're on the ground, they can't move. Really? Have you hit a bear with a taser?

I have not. I'm not trained in a taser. Tasing a moose? Well, like you hear about mooses stuck in swing sets. No. I've seen my kids get stuck in swing sets. There's quite a few videos of moose

in swing sets, and it used to be you either tried to get the moose out. Like he's walking through a yard and hooks his antler in a swing set. Or he decides to fight with it. No. I didn't know this was a thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, just like anything else, moose or bull elk gets upset.

They walk into the swing. The swing comes back and hits them. They throw their head at it because something just hit them. Okay. And they end up with the rope or the chain wrapped around their antlers. Okay. So the old way was you either try to cut it loose without doing anything to it, without getting stomped, or you dart it. And then once it's under sedation, you remove it.

The new way is that you go in with tasers and you tase the thing. And as long as you don't touch the wires going from the taser gun to the implants, you can handle the moose or cut the chain or the rope loose from them. And then once you stop tasing it, the thing jumps up and runs away. And it's safer for the animal than tranquilizing it. It's safer because you don't have to, well, first off, you don't have to wait. In other words, you walk up and dart it. It's going to take four or five minutes for that to take effect. So the animal can hurt itself. And then you have to, depending on the tranquilizer you use, you either have a reversal or you have to

wait a couple hours for the animal to wake up. So it's much easier to deal with trying to move a moose out of somebody's yard or sit there with it for four or five hours and then realize when you turn it loose, it may run out in the street and get hit. It's a whole lot easier if you don't. I mean, it's not like they wake up and they have 100% of their senses about them. I mean, they wake up. You mean coming out of being sedated.

Yeah. I mean, they wake up from the reversal fairly quickly and they can move, but it doesn't always mean they're 100% there. You'll see them jump up and run a little ways, and then they kind of stop and shake their head. So you don't know if they're really 100% mobile and 100% aware of what's going on. But when he comes out of being tased, he's back to himself.

He's back to himself. Yeah. Yeah. And pissed or not pissed? From what I've seen in the videos it depends on the animal um but there's been a lot of times with moose and bear that i mean the bear that they're generally not tasing the bear to immobilize it to do anything they're trying to tase the bear to give it a negative experience i see that hey you show up here just like hitting it with rubber

buckshot every time you come up on a deck somebody does something nasty to you pretty soon you're going to start saying i don't like to go to those places it hurts yeah so it's it's not so much with the bears that we're doing it to immobilize them to work on them we're doing it more to try to give them that negative experience what's the typical mountain lion problem like what's the typical sort of pattern of of a mountain lion you know kind of crossing that that sort of division into into human territory right it it's pretty same as the bears although i haven't been to any mountain lions in a home i've been to mountain lions asleep on people's front doors at their sliding glass doors for what reason they just decided to curl up there and go to sleep i mean

i don't know the reason. Homes with pets or not even necessarily? Not even necessarily with pets. No livestock generally, or maybe horses. Probably some solar radiation in play there. It's probably a nice place to take a nap. It's like laying up on a rock in the sun. It is a pretty, lots of times they are.

They're on kind of the lee side. They're out of the wind and the snow, and they are right up against the base of the house. Maybe we had one in Eagle that crawled underneath a house trailer and we crawled underneath the house trailer with it to try to get it out and went in the first time just to see where it was. Didn't have a dart gun and could not get the thing to move from the corner it was in. Went in the second time with two of us and a dart gun, and once we got close, it ran around us and ran out. And then we had to chase it down after that.

To do what? We put it down. Yeah. It had been in town three or four times. Oh, I see. Up by the school. And when we got close enough to see, I mean, we were eight feet away from this thing

under the house trailer. It was emaciated. I mean, instead of weighing 60 or 70 pounds, it was weighing about 25 pounds. Wow. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh. Yeah, we're seeing quite a bit of that with yearlings, that they just don't seem to learn

how to hunt. What do you attribute that to? I don't know if it's just they got kicked out too early by the mom, and they just don't know how to hunt, or if they're injured somewhere inside. I mean, sometimes when we do the necropsies, we don't run everything on them to be able to determine what their cause is for being in such bad shape. It's usually just assumed, just like people, you've got good hunters, you've got bad hunters. But you're saying you feel like you see more of it now.

Well, the best quote was from the neighboring officer here in Eagle. He's been on 35 years. I've been on 38. And in January of 2015, we dealt with more lion calls in one month than we dealt with the 30-plus years we'd each had before. We never used to get a call about a lion in town. But, like, there has to be, I mean, there has to be many things contributing to this. But do you have some, like, it oh yeah like lay them out oh oh you want to know what my theories are yeah

and i'm like i understand that you're just you know no one right if someone knew the absolute answer well it'd be impossible to know the absolute answer but there has to be something like some good ideas about what is going on. Right. Well, definitely the mountain lion population has increased, and so has the human population. So, I mean, you have more of either one, you have a bigger chance for interaction. Okay.

But if you look across almost all the western states, all of them are showing an increase increase in in conflicts between bears and lions and people i mean we did last year 2017 again from vale to aspen i think we responded to right out 100 mountain lion calls before 2014 we didn't even bother to keep track because it was so few we we've increased our harvest quota on lions in most of the places, and we're usually filling those. And even after filling them in 2016, after filling the quota, we had a couple areas in the Upper Eagle Valley where we were seeing,

people were seeing three and four lions at a time working together, coming right up to their homes, walking around the homes, coming up on the decks, probably looking for pets, pet food, deer, elk that were in their yards. Do you feel that increasing the quota, does it allow you guys to even target the lions that are coming into town, or is it two almost separate populations i don't know that it's two separate populations but one of the problems we have is sometimes where they're coming into town it's a really bad place to try to run them with hounds

right mainly because you get hit on the roads well the hounds get hit on the roads or the lion decides to run back into the neighborhood and now you got four hounds underneath somebody's crab apple tree barking at a lion in their tree and they want to know what this guy with the gun's doing on their property yeah understandable so so tough to tough in some of these places to hunt it tough right along i-70 a lot of the problems we have are right on the edges of i-70 of course that's where the subdivisions are here the other thing that that appears to be happening is the lions, just like the bears, have learned that a subdivision and a golf course is a pretty good place to live. You know, for the bears, you got all the fruit trees that people plant. For the lions, you got

pets, you got pet foods, you got lots of rabbits, you got deer and elk spending an entire year living within these subdivisions. And we're talking big subdivisions, not a 20-acre subdivision. But something like Cordillera that's maybe 1,000 acres. Homestead that's 800-some acres. I mean, there's enough room for these animals to find a place to live and stay out of sight most of the time. And then the other reason I think we get more calls is everybody has security cameras or game cameras. Everybody's got a game camera in their backyard. And the lion may have always used to walk through it, but now they've got a picture of it.

Oh, I see. And you see it on TV all the time. In Denver, they just had a picture a month or so ago of a female and three kittens jumping over a guy's split rail fence, walking through their yard, sniffing around the bushes, and then going into the neighbors. And that may have been going on for years, but nobody had that video camera out there. And they get alarmed when they see it. Some do. Some are just like, well, that's really cool.

They get alarmed when their cat or their dog disappears, and they get pretty upset. You know, I want to share with you a couple of perspectives that uh coming from folks in washington where i currently live and actually not far from where i live they just had the first mountain lion uh human fatality from a mountain lion in 94 years yeah okay so it was a couple mountain bikers were out riding not far from town and looked back and there's a lion chasing them. They jumped off their bikes, used their bikes to sort of scare off the lion, rode down the trail a little bit away to get away from the area, stopped. We're kind of like, oh, my God, I can't believe that just happened. And then the lion jumped from above, attacked one of the bikers.

That biker got the lion off, got on his bike and fled. And then the lion killed the other biker and drug the biker up and cached it under some brush. They had a houndsman come out. The houndsman started the track at the lion, or at the kill, and tracked it down and killed the lion. One thing that came out of that that was interesting was the way that everyone who has sort of an agenda around mountain lions

use that example to further their perspective, ranging from some people saying, there must have been something wrong with the lion, because there's no other way to account for how this would happen. Other people saying, no, there was nothing wrong with the lion. It's just a thing that can happen. A friend of mine who, I have a couple of friends who are houndsmen who do a lot of work for the States. And one of these guys had an interesting perspective on it where he's just talking about his own career. So he'd spent decades doing like wildlife conflict work around mountain lions as a houndsman. And he was saying when he was young, there was zero tolerance for any kind of mix-up. Like any lion that went anywhere near people or attempted to kill a sheep

or did anything, like the lion was just dead. He would get a call, he would be told, kill the lion. Now he'll get calls where they're like, don't want to kill the lion. Can you run it and scare it away? Maybe a couple of times. Or it's going to be a lot of pressure on us just due to the neighborhoods. It's going to be a lot of pressure on us if we have to euthanize the lion.

So he feels that as acceptance for these soft encounters has increased, you're, like it or not, you're going to invite additional hard encounters. The thing about his perspective is this is the first time it's happened in 94 years. So if another 100 years goes by and no one else gets killed by a mountain lion, you'll be like, that adds a lot of validity to the fact that it was like a fluke. If all of a sudden now it becomes a thing, no one else gets killed by a mountain lion, you'll be like, that adds a lot of validity to the fact that it was like a fluke, right? If all of a sudden now it becomes a thing,

every now and then a person gets killed, I think it might lend, it might give some credence to what his perspective is. It's just like, if we're going to be more tolerant of large predators in and amongst us, we're going to have to learn to be more tolerant with the fact you're going to inevitably have these

dangerous encounters. competitors in and amongst us, we're going to have to learn to be more tolerant with the fact you're going to inevitably have these dangerous encounters. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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OnX Club, y'all. Does that speak to you at all? Does that seem like something that makes sense based on your, I mean, different state, right? Yeah, different state. I mean, I don't know enough about Washington's lion population to talk intelligently about their side of it.

But, you know, I kind of subscribe to that same thing that, you know, it used to be we would tell people you know just clean up your trash take your bird feeders down the bears will go away and to a certain point they do but with what we found with the number of droughts we're getting now and the changes in what's going on with vegetation it's a lack of fire i mean some of the best places for them to find food is in a town whether it's garbage or everybody plants raspberries in their backyard or serviceberry, chokecherries, crabapple trees. So we're kind of inviting them to come in where we are. And at the same time, we're moving out into their habitat more and more.

So definitely going to increase the number of encounters. And some people are very tolerant of it. Some people, the first time they show up that they don't care if you kill that bear or what you do but just get that bear out yeah go put them back in the woods it doesn't matter that hey you live up against a wilderness area you're surrounded on two sides by forest service and one of those sides is the wilderness boundary where in the state do you want us to put them that it isn't right for them to be? And you get the same thing with people out on a trail that, hey, I was walking on this trail in the wilderness and this bear showed up and stared at me.

You got to do something. No, that's where I want the bear to be. You need to understand that the bears are there and you need to take the appropriate actions to keep yourself safe. But conflicts aside, you feel that there are more like numerically, right? There are more lions. You feel there are more lions now than there were a decade ago.

Oh, without a doubt. And bears, right? And bears, yeah. Do you think that there's more bears because they don't get hunted in the spring anymore? I don't, because we actually harvest more bears with just our fall season now than we did with a spring and a fall season.

It's just a general increase in population. Yeah, the big difference in bears, when Tom Beck was doing a study down in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, when we would have a bad drought year like this or a failure of acorns or berries, the thinking was, and I think it was true at that point was the cubs that were born that year weren't going to get enough food to make it through hibernation they would end up dying the sows that were impregnated because

bears do a delayed implantation they wouldn't have enough fat they wouldn't implant those embryos so you lost this year's crop uh cub crop and you lost next year so you lose can you explain delayed implantation real quick it uh that the the sows impregnated in the spring but they don't implant the embryos until fall so in the spring the egg so when they rot in june right may and june okay so the egg is fertilized yeah and begins to form but it's not implanted yet okay and they implant martin's there's a lot of different animals that have delayed implantation yeah i heard that uh yeah you hear like river otters and yeah i know a handful of members of weasel family and so the thinking like so then she needs to be in a certain state so the she needs to be in a certain state.

So the bear needs to be in a certain state of physical fitness for her to allow the implantation to occur. Correct. Okay. So continue on now. So you lose two years of age, two classes of age class. You lose the cubs from 2017, and you don't get any cubs in 2018. Okay.

So that's a huge hit to your population. I mean, imagine if you're going to to grade school and you lose the third and fourth grade class you know for the when they get ready to hit high school that graduating class going to be pretty darn small yeah when it comes time for them to start reproducing there's a whole lot less of them out there to reproduce hard to build a population on that and when you think how long-lived bears are i mean that that's a long period that you're missing those two and if you get two that are close together which i would think you could say 2012 and 2018 are fairly close together when you're talking

about an animal that might live 20 years you know there's there's four age classes you lose what we've seen different now is that these bears are coming into town they're feeding on the trash they're feeding on the apple trees in towns they're going into the corn fields and the orchards in grand junction which they never used to do in the numbers they're doing it now so they're picking up all these other food sources the other food source that they're seem to be using is they're not opposed to picking up road kills off the interstate. So we have all these other food sources for them to take place of a natural food failure. And we've seen it quite often now in these years of natural food failures that the following year we'll see cubs or sows that have three cubs. So instead of having lost her cubs,

she was fat enough to pull off three cubs. And we've seen the, it appears the statistics don't show it as clear. But when I started in 1980, if you saw a sow with three cubs, that was huge news. I mean, we didn't have email, but you called everybody you knew and say, I just saw a sow with three cubs. Can you believe that? Now we see them routinely every year. We did an episode once about a bear called the Wisconsin Super Sow. She had five, brought them all up to 100 pounds. Two years later, had five more and brought them all up to 100 pounds. It's like a very very successful and you know what it wound up being that she was

doing she it seems as though she had found where the state was dumping roadkill carcasses right and so just it was like tied to that just like fitness and a great food source and was reproductive very savvy and also in a funny way very careless about her denning locations would just kind of lay out like just in a barely covered up in a brush pile yeah yeah so we i mean we've seen that um when tom was doing his study we didn't think the bears and the females were breeding until they were four or five. Now it appears they're breeding earlier. It appears that the litter size has gone up by maybe a half. We haven't seen any fours yet that I have heard of. I mean, Wisconsin has it.

Pennsylvania has it where they'll have sows. They'll have four or five. Oh, so that's more common in those areas. It's more common because if you look at the food sources they have, I mean, their bears, they generally have more bears than we do per square mile. They generally have heavier bears than we do. Okay. When you look at the food source out here,

we would say a lot of the Upper Eagle Valley is not very good bear habitat because there's no oak brush above Walcott. Most all the oak brush is down here or over in the Roaring Fork Valley. I see. And oak brush is considered to be one of the key things, but the bears in the upper valley are making it on serviceberry and chokecherry. I mean, that's what they're living on. That's their key winter survival is to get enough serviceberry and chokecherry. So if you put all those together, then all of a sudden,

instead of have a population that might grow 10% a year, just to figure out of the air, now all of a sudden they're growing 15% of a year. I mean, that's a huge jump in a population if you can add even just 2% or 3% growth in a year. And does the fact that in a lot of units around here, the number of bear tags that you guys issue has been increased greatly, that's just to keep up with this growing population. Yeah, it's an effort to try to keep up with the growing population. So what year was it that Colorado lost its spring season? Late 90s, mid-90s. Yeah.

And you just said this. I'm not questioning the clarity with which you said this. This is surprising to me. Now, even with the loss of the spring season, more black bears are killed in Colorado annually. Just in the fall season alone now. And there's more black bears altogether than before. Right. I'd have to look at the numbers.

But we've had several years where we've harvested over 1,000 bears in a year. Out of statewide statewide okay and when we had the spring hunt and the fall hunt with bait and hounds um i don't think we ever hit a thousand okay do you find that um are there some pretty good bear hunters here like is it is it like a thing that guys get good at or is it does it seem to be like something that people kind of just stumble into no they a lot of them have gotten very good at it and in fact part of the problem is some of them gotten so good at it um that now when they buy a license they're only buying a license that they're looking for a specific bear an extremely large bear a certain

color phase and if they don't see it they won't harvest a bear okay and that's part of the reason we increase the tags is because we've had a number of these guys have gotten good and they've shot four or five bears and they're like i don't know how many more i need to shoot yeah so unless i see something really special i'm i'm going to go out and hunt them still but i'm not going to pull the trigger what are the guys that are uh what are the really good bear hunters what do they do well they spend most of august looking for uh eithercherry, serviceberry, or the oakbrush. Hunt in August? No, they don't hunt.

They go out and scout. Oh, I see. Okay. They're scouting and finding the best patches of food supplies for these bears. So they're looking for food. They're looking for the food areas, and then they're moving into those areas. When the bears move in, they're there every morning and after work with binoculars, you know, scoping out four or five different spots to see where they can see bears at. And then they, once they find them at night, if it's not a good opportunity, they're back there the next morning or the next night, setting up closer to where the bear was.

And it's usually hunting over fruit, not hunting acorn patches. No, acorn's big. They hunt a lot of them over acorn, especially here in Eagle because Brush Creek has so much acorn. So how do you know when you go into areas with a lot of acorn's big. They hunt a lot of them over acorn, especially here in Eagle because Brush Creek has so much acorn. So how do you know when you go into areas with a lot of acorn, how do you guys know? Is it pretty obvious when a bear's working that area? Yeah. Just so people are aware, the acorns we're talking about are gamble oak.

Right. Not like an oak tree, just a brushy. Yeah, very dense. It's a dinky little acorn. It's a dinky little size. A right? It's a dinky little size. A big one's the size of your little finger. And when does bear season here open in the fall? Opens on the 2nd of September.

Okay. And that was part of the initiative that was passed by a vote of the Colorado people on when it can open. When had it opened in the past? Well, we had a spring season, and I think it opened September 1st. It's been a long time since I had to answer that question, but yeah. Now, Brody, what prevents you from being like a big-time Colorado bear hunter guy? I've been looking for one for, this will be like six or seven years in a row. But you look for them.

He's just been sit in water he has he didn't know this thing no i spend time grouse hunting and then i get distracted like looking for elk when i'm should be looking for a bear and but do you go out because i know you like when you're out big game when you're hunting deer and elk you're open to the idea of finding a bear well yeah so i'll get a tag most years like this this year, I got a tag around my house, which is specific to that September bear rifle season. But as these guys have increased tag numbers, there are areas now that you can pick up a second bear tag

as a B tag, like around here. So I'll get that rifle tag for September and then pick up a B tag. So I'm packing a bear tag while i'm hunting deer and elk too okay but i've yet to uh yet to seal the deal on my first colorado black bear i'm hoping that's going to change this year because i can hunt right by my house up north and spend like right above the house there you saw that gamble oak on the hillside and serviceberry up there. So we'll see. I would just take advantage of Officer Andre being here

and somehow tap into his electronic. Follow him around. Tap into his communications. Hey, you got any problem bears you need taken care of? We actually have people call us and ask us that. I believe it. Oh, they do? Yeah.

What's your policy on that? If it's a place they can legally hunt, we'll tell them. Really? Really. To what level of specificity like what would you say just throw it just throw one out i mean if i have a uh sheep herder losing bears they're losing sheep to bear i mean i'll tell them give this person a call okay you know the sheep herder will probably you'll have to understand basque or sp, whatever they talk. But, you know, otherwise you use hand signals and draw pictures.

But most of the time they're happy to help you. I mean, the problem on some of it is the bear was in the sheep in this drainage. And two days later, they're headed to another drainage. So you don't know if the bear is going to go with them or stay in that drainage. But, you know, if you have a bear in town, you certainly can't put a hunter on it. And you really don't want to say, well, if you sit up on that hill just outside of town, that bear may walk up or down because you don't want them shooting the bear and it running into town. Only in special circumstances does it work out.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes with the sheep, it'll work out around a campground. Some of the campgrounds have continuous problems with bears in the fall and it's like well you're in the national forest you know stay away from the campground but certainly especially on weekdays after after labor days over on weekdays there's hardly anybody in the campgrounds so you just have to be the the distance forest service requires you're from a campground you can set up and work that bear you know speaking of sheep like we've had questions about predators that surplus kill what's what's your thought on a bear that goes in and kills 10 sheep in a night like what what's his motivation or i'm not uh dr doolittle i don't know no we just had people ask people love the

subject yeah yeah why did i feel like they're finding people like the idea okay you can't deny that it happens and i'm gonna ask i'm gonna ask you what happens like you can't deny that it's now and then like a predator is gonna go in a bear or lion goes in and kills way more stuff than it could ever possibly consume sure yep and i think people look they're they they want to hear about those because they're looking to answer something in their mind i i have no idea their motivation to it some people talk about they you know they get started and they just get into a frenzy they talk about the same thing with a weasel in a hen house, that they just go on a killing spree. They're not counting.

They're just doing what they're supposed to do. Yeah, I haven't found one yet that's very good at counting. But yeah, I mean, it just happens. Okay, we can move on from this subject, but I got one last question for you. You carry a service weapon. Yes. So when you're going into a situation where you have a bear

cutting loose in someone's yard or house or whatever uh do you have like a did you carry a separate firearm for those situations well we i mean we all carry shotguns and rifles oh you do okay but you know if you're in a house um you sure don't want to uh let loose a 308 round in somebody's house and and the shotgun can make a pretty big mess. Generally, if we're looking for a bear that's injured somebody, you'll see us out with a rifle or a shotgun. If we're just going into a house because a bear broke into a house, you'll see a dart gun or just our pistols that we always have on. So do you carry a dart gun too? We don't have enough dart guns for every officer,

but like the on-call, when I'm on-call, I generally pick up the dart gun. We have more than one for the area. I think we have four for eight guys. So usually the on-call officer picks up one so he has it with him. And otherwise, the problem is otherwise you store them sometimes in Glenwood, Carbondale, or here in Eagle.

And if you're up in Vail when the call comes and it's in Vail, then you've got to run back here, have somebody from here bring it up to you. So usually the on-call officer picks up a dart gun and has it with them. I feel like they should supply you guys with a handful more dart guns. Well, they probably should. They're expensive little items. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they're pretty close to $3,000 apiece. Okay. So. All right. little items is that right yeah yeah yeah they're they're pretty close to 3 000 a piece okay so all right uh man we had a bunch of things we wanted to ask you about brody asked the ask while we're on bears can we just like we're still hitting bears yeah can we just get into the other bear that may or may not be around or do you not want to get into no no go ahead yannis go ahead i thought we were getting into this later but we'll get into it later yeah i mean late yeah okay go ahead yeah well we just we're hanging out with another fella that hunts a lot in colorado and uh he seems to think that very

accomplished hunter yep very accomplished hunter spends a lot of time out there hangs out with a lot of people that hang out you know that are in the woods a lot. Family's been here for a bazillion years. Yes. Homestead days. I think the simplest way to say it is that he believes that there's a conspiracy. I feel like you're leading up to this. Okay, go ahead. Somehow there's grizzly bears in Colorado, but they're being trapped and moved back up to Wyoming, and it's being covered up.

Nobody gets to hear anything about it. In this day and age of cell phones and game cameras everywhere, I don't think you could cover anything up. I mean, are there grizzly bears in Colorado? Honestly, I don't know. You know, we had a wolverine come from Yellowstone. We've had our lynx go from here all the way back to Canada and Alaska where they were caught. We've had wolves come down from Yellowstone. Could a grizzly bear do it? You bet. So if somebody says, is this possible ones here? Sure, it's possible.

We don't have any definitive proof. You know, on the wolves that showed up, they got hit by a car. One got shot. One got poisoned. We got definitive proofs. Wolves have made it. We got definitive proof on lynx and the wolverine that they made the trek. We just don't have any definitive proof

that there's any grizzly bears in Colorado. Do you guys investigate credible reports? I'm not sure investigate's the right word, but yes, we look into it.'m not sure investigates the right word but yes we look into it especially if they have a picture right i mean you'll get reports lots of time that well this is bigger than any black bear i've ever seen so it had to be a grizzly yeah well we've handled two we handled a bear in glenwood uh i think in 2012 that 24 hours after it died, it weighed 738 pounds in August.

Whoa. Yeah, and I don't always understand the size thing because there's plenty of 200-pound, 250-pound grizzlies running around in Montana. That's the thing I don't get either because grizzlies can get to be huge, but there's like a ton of couple hundred-pound grizzlies. And there's a lot of black bears in the United States that are way bigger than the average grizzly yeah yeah but i mean everything that people see is always much bigger than than it really is and and that's just human nature i mean you guys have all hunted you've all seen ground shrinkage where you shot an animal and it's like this is a huge buck

and it's like huh yeah he sure shrunk when he hit the ground. Yeah, and everybody that runs into a lion, big old Tom. Big old Tom, 300 pounds. Okay, so let's say one did turn up or whatever. Wouldn't it be the case that there's no way you guys are going to cover it up? You would have to notify U.S. Fish and Wildlife because there's an endangered species aspect to it correct like they would have to become involved in some way am i wrong i don't know that they have to i mean if all it is is a sighting but i'm saying like if if there was one confirmed in colorado like yeah you guys knew about i mean certainly if we trapped one there's no way you would keep it quiet right

i mean somebody it's you know just like everything else on the internet somebody's going to post that picture maybe only to send it to their best friend and their best friend's going to send it to his best friend it's going to leak it's going to leak and it like if they said yes they are you know if it was confirmed they are here, at that point, would U.S. Fish and Wildlife have to become involved because they're an endangered species? Or threatened? They'd be very interesting.

I mean, Idaho just, I think, approved their grizzly bear hunt. One tag? Yeah, I think it is one tag for Idaho. So I don't know for sure what that involvement would have to be in that. All right. Who wants to lay out how you guys totally screwed up how you run tag draws in Colorado? Well, you're the one that's complaining about not drawing.

You lay it out brody oh so this this you guys went to a new basically a new online retail system and new kind of draw like licensing draw process where you do not have to pay up front for the tag during the the application process so in years past you paid the full fee for the license before that the whole draw application process went through if you didn't draw you then got refunded that money now it's just a three dollar application fee no money up front and it seems like it doesn't seem like like the application numbers have increased greatly because you're not investing up front in that. So we're just wondering, was there a thought process

why CPW doesn't want the money up front anymore? Or is there some reasoning behind the process, like just not going through the refund thing is simpler and saves time and money and yeah that's exactly it i thought you guys made a lot of money by having all that money right hold away in a bank account well i thought that too but i was told we don't i think everybody thought everybody it was like a big thing yeah like cpw's making millions on interest on off of all the millions on interest well i mean you, unless you've got a better banker than most people,

you're looking at under 1% in a normal bank account. If you get a CD for six months. But it wasn't even being put in a bank account. Well, it was in a bank account, but I don't think it was creating any interest. I feel like I need to back up for a minute. I feel like some people are not going to understand fully what we're talking about. Okay. So in instances where you have a greater demand for tags than there are hunting tags available, so there's more people that want to go hunt elk in some mountain range than the elk population can support,

you've got to limit it all, right? And so you hand out opportunities through a lottery permit. Every state handles this differently, but Colorado was a state where you sent in all the money, right? Yep. And then they do their drawing and refund you. But how long would you be out your money? A couple months.

Yeah, from May to july okay so someone's like out of pocket a substantial amount of money if we're talking like right especially if it's a non-resident applying for a moo sheep or goat tag that's you know you're putting down a couple thousand bucks for potentially if you're applying for all three of those you're putting down six thousand bucks for a tag that you don't even know if you're going to draw i had heard before not particularly not not pertaining to colorado but i heard before the reason they did the pay up front thing is because states used to do the drawing and then have people be like yeah but i don't actually have the money money. It messes your whole system up. Everybody pays up front. That way we know

it's all paid for. When we pick a guy or a woman, they're good for the expense because they already pay for the dang thing. Now what Colorado is doing is the minute your name comes up, you get binged by the computer. They run your

credit card. They give you a couple of weeks after the the licenses that the that are announced like but if but if your credit card is not good i think this year the licenses were announced this week's so first week of june if if you haven't paid for that thing by June 20th, you're- And then they go down the list. Yeah. So I don't understand why so many more people, I've heard all kinds of numbers. I've heard there's a 200% increase in the amount of people applying for non-resident

big game tags in Colorado. I've heard you said, you used off the chart. Off the chart. You're still paying all the money. What was people's problem? They didn't want to be out the money for a couple months? Well, here's the chart. Off the chart. You're still paying all the money. What was people's problem? They didn't want to be out the money for a couple months? Well, here's the deal. In Colorado, something that we should have explained too

is that as a non-resident, you couldn't do credit card for Moose, Sheep, and Go. So you couldn't just be a guy that had a credit card with the limit of 10 grand. You actually had to have six grand in your savings and then write out three checks to apply for 1800 bucks a piece to apply for those three so that's like even at one step harder yeah so you couldn't even finance it yeah you couldn't it's not funny money no i didn't realize that a couple of very stern looks when my wife would be

like what oh i thought well i only did sheep and moose i didn't do all three when my wife would be like what oh i'm like well i only did sheep and moose i didn't do all three yeah my wife when i when i you know started getting involved with my wife we got to the point where we combined finances which we resisted for a while but she just got fed up with she likes to just know everything what's going on and it was like the annual discussion we had to have about like, she's like, this cannot be real. And I'm like, listen, I didn't make it up. It's not my choice, but yes, there is a substantial sum of money

scattered around in various state bank accounts, and it will all come back if I don't draw. And they'd be like, well, you better not draw. Unless you win the lottery, in which case you'll be out. Part of it's just, I think, a psychological barrier. People are just like, eh, it doesn't cost me anything. I'll apply.

And I'll figure it out if I get dropped. I wasn't thinking about that you actually had to write a check. You really need the money. For those cheap moose goat tags. Yeah. The rest of them not. So what's the motivation?

Why change it? Well, I think to make a better system. I mean, you still had people that were doing paper applications. And every time you'd use a credit card, you'd get charged a fee. So you're getting charged a fee to take the person's money as the credit card. And then instead of refunding it back on the credit card, we were writing them a check. So every time you write a check, there's a cost to write a check. So there was a huge cost savings to do away with that fee. So running the draw cost money.

Yes. Yeah. And it just running the draw cost money. Yes. Yeah. And it just simplified the whole administrative process of it. I mean, it will as we work all the bugs out. Anytime you open a new system, doesn't matter what it is, I mean, there's going to be bugs. I mean, some people were getting notified 10 times that they got a license. And they're like, did I get 10 licenses? They're like, dang, I need a bigger freezer.

Today's a good day. Today's a good day. I got 10 deer tags. So, no, they got the email 10 times. I mean, there's just going to be glitches in any new system you have, and they just have to be worked through. The fact that more people put in, and I haven't seen the numbers yet either, but I have heard that it is a significant increase in the number of people putting in um fact that more people put in it seems like well something worked yeah well i have three different perspectives on it and they're competing they're contradictory

one is just from a purely like what's in it for me i remember my ninth grade government teacher al young would always express everything in the world where he would say like, and remember, I'm only concerned with what affects Al DeYoung. And that was like, that was how he explained government, right? He would discourage students from getting registered. He said, why would I want you people to vote? Why would I want to dilute my vote so that was like so in looking at it from the alde young perspective i'm bummed because now i have more competition to draw a permit so that that's pretty selfish and i recognize that but there's a part of my brain that holds that to be

true part three or part two in my competing perspectives on this part two is I'm usually not resistant to there being barriers to entry because it winds up being that the more dedicated, right, that favors the more dedicated people. Like I remember for a while in Montana, you had to buy your bear license before bear season opened. Their thinking was they wanted to prevent people from getting a bear and then running down and getting a tag. Because in the spring season, they would find that it was a lot of just sort of incidental harvest. And so they're like, well, we're going to limit people who are planning to go bear hunting, making a specific effort to go on a bear hunt. So you have to buy it.

That law came in. I thought, you know, I get it. That makes sense. There are people who are dedicated to it. They're on top of it. They're following the rules. They know what's going on, and it gives a favoritism to that. They since got rid of that, and I was a little bit saddened by it.

Now, part three, the part that competes is there shouldn't be any barriers to entry right it should be just more wide open more availability easier for people to participate so i believe i feel all of these things even though they don't all line up meaning i see both sides of the story or all three sides of the story i agree with that i'm a little saddened because that part one part about like i'm concerned only with what affects al de young part it's like i really am like you know i'm looking at i'm like really that just got harder so well it got easier harder harder to draw easierer to draw, easier to get. And that's another thing. We're constantly hearing about hunter numbers just falling, falling, falling.

But yet, it's harder and harder to get a tag. And how do those two things kind of line up with each other? If there's less hunters, why is it harder to get? Because the numbers that are falling are the dudes that used to buy like a that used to hunt pheasants for a day but there's more guys that are getting serious about there's way more the number of like the number of like hardcore hunters i feel has to be oh your chopper's here to take you to dinner steve he's gonna drop me on a hunting spot.

On the way. Give me the coordinates for that, will you? He likes to run over there real quick and issue me a citation. So, less serious hunters. Is it gone? Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know. I feel there's a number of really dedicated hunters who are out there applying for permits and crawling back into all the hidey holes.

It's going up. What do you think? Yeah, I think in some areas it is, definitely. I mean, we're seeing that. But a lot of it is, I mean, you guys are perfect examples. How many different states do you put in for? So you could have the same number of hunters and 20% of them decide, I'm going to put into two states this year instead of one.

And so those two states see an increase in the number they get. And I think that's a lot of it. Can you speak at all just quickly to that declining, you know, supposed declining number of hunters like we're just like hearing all these doomsday scenarios all the time well i don't know if it's doomsday but unfortunately i represent that um in that our average age of hunters is getting older every year and you would think well of course everybody's a year older but if you got a 60 year old guy and you bring in a 14 year old kid you just drop that age level way down so it it's the fact that that

we're an aging pot the baby boomers are aging and i think it's i can't remember if it's 55 or 56 but it's in the 50s somewhere is the average age of a hunter and you know everything's coming they're looking more golf time they may not be in the same shape you got travel restrictions in a lot of areas this the cost of getting places if you're coming from another state to hunt here it's getting more and more expensive so i mean i definitely if you go out if you went out and spent a day with us when you go go into camps, you remember the camp where you can say, there was two people under 30 years old in that camp.

Or that camp was everybody under 20. They were all young kids out there hunting. I mean, you walk in. I feel like that's all I run into is young dudes. That's an anomaly, you're saying now. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it used to be nothing to see um families out there maybe just the mom maybe just the dad but they'd have two or three kids with them sometimes they weren't old

enough to hunt but they were out there now you might see that on a saturday or sunday but they're all gone by monday so it's in your opinion it's a recruitment thing it is definitely a recruitment and a retention when we went to totally limited deer tags, and I don't remember the number, but we lost a lot of deer hunters, and they really haven't come back. Because they used to be over-the-counter tags. Used to be over-the-counter. You could make the decision. Here, you could make the decision a couple days after you had to go to a Division of Wildlife office

and buy your license there after the season opened, but you could get in over the tag deer hunt and go whenever you wanted now it's it's all draw and a lot of the people have just they're like you know i just don't want to fight with it takes me two years or three years to get a tag i just don't want to do it um brody can you tee up the shed hunting thing you guys like actually came in and now you manage sheds like game you manage shed antlers like game animals now there's close there's rules around it there is rules around it so uh i mean i could i'll speak to my history of it i used to get after it pretty hard um you know shed hunting has gotten more and more popular in the west all over the place really um

but it's like highly competitive and it got to the point where there were days when i'd go out shed hunting in late winter early spring where i would see more guys out shed hunting than i would ever see during rifle deer season like running in yeah it's so weird because like when i was a boy it would be that uh if you saw one you might pick it up but also like the whole country decided that it was just the most important thing you could be doing is being out picking up antlers yeah and and i look i i got pretty serious about it for a while, but then I started like – Because you were trying to make money on it. Well –

Because the chew toy market. No, I mean I just collected them and liked looking at them. Before we moved, I sold a bunch for a couple thousand bucks. So you had enough to make it worth selling. Mm-hmm. Because that's another thing. And just to – like have we talked about this before that the market so there's a commercial market for antlers and it was the chandelier so like

antler chandeliers became popular so there became a market for chandeliers and decorations and then the chew toy market took off where they buy antlers and saw them up and sell them for an ungodly amount of money in pet stores they do all sorts with them they grind them up into powder they have a deject no that's only with velvet but yeah is there anything else that you know bill that the antlers are sold or used for after they're sold no that i mean those are the three main things that they go overseas and then chew toys and but i don't even know if that commercial market is even close to being the main problem no but but it's this but here's the point i'm getting at and i can't tell you that this is actually true or not but what feels to me what seems to me correlated is as the commercial market developed

the recreational market became like people all of a sudden ascribed a value to it for instance with morels when you hear that morels are worth x dollars a pound in a restaurant it increases people's interest like they're like oh that's something i'd like to find and eat if they're so valuable it makes me want to go do it for instance like trap and like trap and spot, trap and spot prawns or spot shrimp, knowing that that's the most, like we trap them. And in my mind, I get sort of like, I can't help but get slightly more excited about it, knowing that it's the most expensive shrimp. And then when you hear that they're going for like 30 some dollars a pound, I'm like, wow, you're running the numbers in your head. And then I'm, and I'm, and I'm like,

kind of sinfully almost viewing them differently knowing the value so i feel that as that chew toy market and chandelier market came in people also also were like i just want to find it and have it laying around and because i now recognize the value and get a picture of you holding it on social media i mean that's a huge part of it yeah people do grip and grins with antlers yeah man like so you didn't do anything you just picked the damn thing yeah i mean but they it is like as big as having a picture of you holding the big buck if you're holding the set of matched antlers man that's like people just don't yeah so now we got bill tell us

why this increase um yeah it was a problem yeah what happened all of a sudden every tom dick and brody is out scrounged around on the woods for antlers yeah and they're competitive about it i want to get there before brody and from out of state even from well yeah well part of the problem was you know wyoming's always had closures on winter range so you couldn't go there and hunt stuff but on very specific patches of ground right right right but there was still closures and and then uh utah did their it was free but you had to do the permit over the internet take an educational test on it and go no big deal but what we saw is as other places close things and as you get units like we're sitting in here now 44 that's a trophy deer unit a known yeah

a known trophy deer unit where people are doing their grips and grins with their harvested 230 240 bucks people like i want to go there and i want to go there in the spring and i'll scout and i'll pick up antlers and I'll know what I'm looking for. And it was no longer the recreation guy that maybe on Saturday there's 10 people in Eagle County out hunting it. It's like on Monday, there's 500 people out there hunting it. And on Tuesday, there's 500 people out there hunting it. And on Wednesday, I don't know if 500 is the right number. What people forget is, I mean, I don't know that Brody walked up the same hill yesterday

that I'm going to walk up today. So you're looking at an animal. Again, remember, these does are all pregnant. They're in their third trimester. They're coming off a starvation. They're starving during the winter, no matter what the winter is. Yeah, your quote is winter weakens, spring kills, right? Right, yeah.

And it's, I mean, you're looking at all these things and now you got these people out there pushing deer we've we've had reports i haven't seen it but i believe it will happen that people are out chasing the bucks trying to get them and in december trying to get them excited where they run and maybe knock their antlers off i've heard many in december even in december well i mean I've seen it out of a helicopter that as you're counting deer, they jump a fence and an antler drops off. But certainly even February, you know. Yeah.

I've heard many reports, some like firsthand reports, of people seeing like a bull that's already dropped one and trying to chase it, thinking the other one's got to be ready to fall. Right. And there's, I mean, I've seen it firsthand of people every night on their way home for work, stop at a place that has elk winter range. There was seven bulls there yesterday. There's only five today, but there's seven elk.

They drop their antlers the next morning. They're up there looking for them. Well, the next guy comes in. He doesn't know somebody else is going to do it. I'm going to go up there tonight. And then, well's well i didn't find it but they got to be there because they're still there so they go up the next day you just keep pushing these animals and you're just you're impacting the animal that you want to be as healthy as possible to produce the best offspring and and have the biggest set antlers they can for those that are looking for a trophy animal.

Because it's just a time of year where those animals cannot afford to burn extra calories. That's kind of the irony of it, right? Is that in looking for antlers, you're sort of celebrating this emblem of like a really healthy, mature animal. But in doing it, you're impairing its ability to become a big, healthy, mature animal. And you're impairing the ability for that herd to grow. I mean, if you stress those does enough that they don't put on, you know, in about April, these animals can start to gain weight. And that's really crucial for those does. They start to gain weight because lactation is the most energy-requiring item

they're going to go through in their life. So they're coming out of a starvation. They're trying to put weight on. They're going to give birth. They're going to go right into lactation. I mean, they got to have time to pick up whatever weight they can. If that doe doesn't get enough food to do good lactation, those fawns don't make it or they make it as a runt. So just like we talked about on the bear, you got a an age class that either didn't make

it or they're subpar so they don't make it through the winter and if that doe or cow's in bad enough shape they won't breed in the fall because they're they're just not in good enough shape to get pregnant yeah so people are clear that the new rule is west of i-, you cannot shed hunt on public land before May 1st. Correct. Yeah. Have you issued a citation? In some areas, we've issued citations. In other words, we had a closure here, so we could issue citations.

In some of the areas west of I-25, they hadn't had a closure, so they have to give just warnings. Now, if I warn you and i see you out the next day i can issue a citation okay but because it's a new rule we generally give them a grace period that you'll just get a warning oh i see just for wearing it for the first year yeah yeah did you notice do you feel that's going to be effective like have you did you kind of notice a change in in i mean there's well the change we noticed was uh we had several people here in Eagle that got permission to hunt on private land. And that somebody would see them walking the fence line and maybe they were over the fence line, maybe they weren't.

But they were turning them in. And then the guy would say, well, I saw Brody down there glassing me. I saw that sucker up on this side doing it. So they're turning one another. You know, I was walking into a spot to rabbit hunt in February, and there is a lady that I see hiking in a certain area with her dog, and she's like, you know, you're not supposed to be shed hunting. I was like, I'm rabbit hunting. It's okay.

So what is the exact prohibition? It's picking it up. Actually, going from memory, I haven't read it in a month or so, but it's actually searching for it, marking it, or picking it up. So if you're out there with your GPS and marking it, you've got a problem. I got you. So then it kind of gets into you've got to stop a dude walking around the woods and be like what exactly is your intention right now well you don't have to necessarily stop them if you watch

them and you know you you see him doing this grid pattern okay not many people hunt rabbits in a grid pattern and then they don't stop and do this oh yeah i saw a bunny here let me mark that spot yeah yeah so i mean there again it's it's you know it's the circumstances and you got to put the whole picture together but was there quite a bit of blowback where people pissed about it there was a lot of people pissed about it but what what did they view it were they were they annoyed because man i like to hunt shed antlers and now i'm annoyed or they annoyed because this is a weird way for government to kind of step into one's life I think more of it was well more of it was actually I'm obeying the rule but he's not

oh I want you to do something about it yeah so yeah I can see that everyone's going to go anyway but now I don't feel like I can go and I mean I think what you'll see is more and more states do this. You'll really dilute the impact to each one of the states because, you know, if Wyoming had it that you can't hunt there during these months, well, they come here. And if Utah has something, well, they can't go there. And I think Nevada's done it. There's four or five different states now. Montana has some seasonal closures, I know. Yeah, but I think that's mainly on their state properties. Yeah, state game management, like winter range areas. So, I mean,

I think you're going to see, but, you know, part of it is we've been pushing, especially in this area and in the resort areas, that the level of recreation, I mean, as I sit here and look out, there's probably been a hundred people go by this path up above us, which isn't a big deal. It's not a spring, winter a spring area or winter range right now. But the recreation has become such a huge issue here. And there's been a lot of studies done on the impact of any type of recreation or human disturbance on these animals that we felt you'd be a hypocrite not to say that, hey, you're out hunting sheds. You're impacting these animals just like a person running, mountain biking, horseback riding, or ATVing out there.

We got to step back and say, we got to protect this too. I mean, it's not about the sheds. It's about protecting those animals that are out there trying to make the living through the winter and come into spring in good shape so they can reproduce. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pro-wildlife, should be viewed as a pro-wildlife, pro-hunting move.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. um are there really like a whole ton more moose in colorado now than there used to be well we reintroduced him in the late 70s okay and our population now i didn't i didn't realize you guys had to do a reintroduction yeah we did it wiped out well i don't know well yeah wiped out or just no longer here i don't believe it not, I wasn't around in those years when moose might have been here before the country was settled. But we reintroduced them up in North Park. So we went from, I think it was 78, 78, 79, we reintroduced them. And now we have about just a little over 3,000 moose in the state. We hunt them in 60 different GMUs, and we give out like 450 tags each year for moose. And you're adding more hunts and new units almost every year now.

Almost every year we add some more. So I'm sure you're aware that in a lot of the northern tier states moose are in real trouble because of primarily because of some pathogens but and also because of increased predation in some areas and just like it's a pretty bleak picture um you know from maine minnesota westward uh it's's like a pretty bleak picture in certain patches of moose range. So I was curious to hear that moose seem to be doing, there seems to be more moose every year in Colorado. Right, right. I mean, we don't have brain worm here.

Okay. Hopefully we won't. You know, our tick situation isn't the same as like Minnesota, Maine. I mean, I was up in Idaho recently and you couldn't walk outside in May in Idaho without picking up ticks. We don't have the same level of ticks and ticks are becoming a big issue for them. We're at a little bit of a higher elevation than a lot of these places. It not be so certainly the ticks the lack of the brain worm and a lot of these places where you see the moose population going down always seems to be where there's a good number of white-tailed deer yeah and so far in western colorado we don't have

a large uh influx of white-tailed deer so i think that that plays a little and they're the vector for the brain worm right yep but definitely you, anytime you bring an animal into a habitat that they haven't occupied that's good, there's kind of a niche that's waiting for them. So you can see this huge jump. You see it in a reservoir when a new reservoir is created. Fishing's great for the first five or six years, and then all of a sudden it really tapers off. Yeah. So that's where we think. You put some turkeys in, and then a while later it just explodes and

then it kind of settles down they kind of hit that level that now we can really grow the population and then they kind of plateau or drop down so we're still in the in the climbing stages even from like so so that's interesting that even from the late 70s they're still sort of doing that thing of like establishing new territory and exploiting a niche that hadn't been exploited before. Right. I mean, we moved them to North Park. We moved them to Grand Mesa. We moved them to the flat tops.

I moved them down in the southwest part of the state. Actually, the ones in Eagle County here all came on their own. We haven't transplanted any of these in. Okay. I mean, the first moose that I knew of showed up in about 1982 walking through the town of Vail. And by, I think it was 1990, we had them wintering in Homestake. So they've kind of taken off and done it on their own. I think part of what we're seeing, especially around the resort towns, is in some places we may not have reached the habitat's capability to handle them,

but we may have reached the fact that they're moving into towns. They're happy to live in a town. I live near Steamboat, and there's a lot of human-moose conflict in Steamboat. They're really surprisingly tolerant of people in the way, like even in Anchorage, where they'll just settle in and spend their whole winter in a yard.

Yep. They're tolerant until you make the wrong step. Yeah. And then they're going to tap dance on you. Yeah, then they'll occasionally kill people. Yep. So, I mean, I think Steamboat's an excellent example. We had some problems in Vail last winter or the winter before that the moose were actually licking the cars to get the mag chloride off it.

And that was causing problems. It was right by the hospital to have people trying to get in and out of the hospital with moose standing by their car licking the side of their car. So it's one of those that sometimes you're going to hit a political carrying capacity that, hey, we need to reduce moose in this area because of these problems. Yeah, you hit the social limit. Right. Are you guys having whitetail encroachment? We're definitely seeing whitetail along the Colorado River. We've had a few along the Eagle River.

Like in places they'd never been seen before? Never been seen never been seen before do you have is there a policy here to because this is world famous mule deer country and and it's like that's kind of culturally what people are accustomed to seeing and it's a celebrated animal and we know that white tails don't do a lot of good for mule deer and you have moose and white tails aren't great for moose is there is there sentiment like public sentiment or pressure coming from hunters that let's do what we can to not allow the white tail intrusion into these areas yeah you get it both ways you get those

saying let's get rid of the white tails and others saying hey i'd really like to shoot a white tail who's got the who's got the louder voice well right now i think it's getting rid of the white tails and others saying hey i'd really like to shoot a white tail who's got the who's got the louder voice well right now i think it's getting rid of the white tails i mean there are certain areas in the state that they've done unlimited tags okay oftentimes on private land you know the big problem is i mean if you know a white tail from a mule deer and you've seen enough of them it's easy to tell the difference some people haven't seen enough of them and we worry about somebody shooting the wrong one if if they aren't familiar with it but there's been discussions going on we have a few people with private land here that they're like hey i really like seeing the whitetails they're neat i don't want to get rid of them and we have other people that say can i shoot and when you say like as far as

the confusion you're talking about if you were to issue whitetail only tags for this area you'd be worried that people would shoot mule deer yeah but as it stands now i'm just buying a deer tag for this area so if i saw a whitetail i'm good to shoot it yes yeah it's an interesting point about not being able to see them because there's, like, I grew up all around whitetails and hunting whitetails. And when I first moved out west, when I saw a deer for a couple years, I would have to sort of like look at it, you know, consciously like look at it to figure out what I was looking at. As familiar as I was with one, the sort of search patterns or the clues I saw in the animal were more like when you see a deer, it's just a deer. Cause there's not an option in Michigan. They're all whitetails.

And it actually took me a little while of like looking at both to get to where you just like instantly and instinctively know one from the other. It doesn't come automatically. You can have deep familiarity. Just like I think you can have deep familiarity with looking at black bears all the time and probably very quickly confuse a grizzly for a black bear, you need to have a lot of experience of looking at both. Right. Because if not, when you see it, an idea jumps in your mind but you're not like separating the two

of them out right so you can see that like whitetail like guys who just hunt whitetails all the time could make a snap decision and shoot a mule deer because when they look they just see deer yeah exactly they see deer they you know if the antlers are there it's much easier yeah most guys are going to see that that rack just doesn't look right but if they're hunting antlerless you know they they aren't thinking wow those ears look small that head looks small yeah you know the whole animal looks small it's like ah it's just a yearling i'll take it yeah so what else man here you are bro do you have a genuine game warden from your home area. I don't know. We've covered a lot of ground.

Oh, you know what we didn't touch on is he was, Bill, I think we want to talk to Bill about some declining elk numbers mostly. Oh, yeah. And what the reasoning is behind that. Because I know, you know, when yannis lived in this area and and we're you know we were both doing a lot of elk hunting around here it was very easy to pick up an extra cow tag i mean to the point where some were going unsold and now we're to the point where the tags have been reduced a bunch and you guys have some concerns about certain elk herds. Yeah, Colorado has what?

I mean, vastly more elk than any other state. Yeah, what is the latest? A hundred grand more than the next state, I think, than Montana. Is it still hovering in that 200,000? It's almost 300. I think it's more like 230. Oh, is it? Yeah. Is it? Yeah. Well, I think it's more like 230. Oh, is it? Yeah.

Is it? Yeah. We came down from when we used to be around 250. We've reduced it since then. But you've been actively reducing the numbers by issuing more cow tags. Right. In a lot of the units we were. Trying to reduce the herd numbers because of conflicts.

But now you've got some concerns about certain... Yeah, we've got some big concerns in certain areas. This is one of the areas from what we call E16, which is the units 45, 44, 444, and I think it's 47 on the Aspen side that we've just seen a significant decline since 2002 when that elk occurred. I mean, almost 50% decline. What's going on there? Grizz. Grizz and whitetails, yeah. You know, it'd be wonderful if you could say there was just one thing,

but as with most things in wildlife, there's never just one silver bullet that this is what's causing it. But certainly the big part we feel we're seeing is the human encroachment development ski areas. You know, it used to be known for its winter recreation in this area. Now it's known for the summer recreation. So loss of habitat. Loss of habitat, fragmentation of habitat. I mean, the same thing we talked about with shed hunters. Any of you guys that have had kids, you know, if your kids are fussy and you're the only parent in the house and you sit down and try to have dinner, you don't get a whole lot of dinner because you're up dealing with the kids. So it's no different for deer or

elk that they're trying to fill their belly in the summer and a group of recreationists come through and disturb them 20 minutes later there's another group so instead of feeding above the alpine maybe for three or four hours in the morning they get an hour worth and then they have to go back lay down in the trees and then they come out try and do it at night this this whole other form of recreation of recreating at night we used to have a rafting at night with night vision goggles that was a big thing and then now you have mountain bike races and 24-hour running races so you have people out at night training for those and it's just getting to the point where the animals don't have a time to be alone. Solitude's important to them.

The chance to feed at every possibility is important to them, not having to move and burn energy. Then you add upon that there hasn't been much habitat improvement done. We haven't had any big fires. You add predators in the mix. We know from our study we did in the 90s in the Upper Eagle Valley that if humans go in during the calving season in the calving areas, we can drop the cow-calf ratio down by almost half too. But going back to the bear-lion thing we were talking about earlier, that's an increasing

number of bears and lions that's having an effect too. I mean, we know that bears and lions are very effective predators on calves and fawns. And we've had more than enough radio collared adult cows killed by lions in the winter to know they're pretty effective on them in the winter. And you get to that point where you get your population low enough. Normally, it's considered that predators aren't a huge issue if you have a healthy population. It's what we call a compensatory mortality. In other words, they're going to kill 50 elk, but probably 40 of those elk were going to die anyways. Something else might have killed them. They might have had a wounding loss. They break a leg. They starve. But when you get to a certain level, you kind of reach that straw that breaks the camel's back,

and every animal you lose, it doesn't matter how you lose it, is an additive effect. There's no longer enough animals to say it's compensatory. So what we've done in this unit, we've cut the licenses up to last year down by 75%. This year, we took the cow licenses down to 10 cow licenses in every season. Wow. So there's going to be a lot of people that were used to getting cow tags in those units. They are now. Wow, 10 a season.

10 a season. Per GMU. Per GMU, yep. So like first season for elk, you can hunt the whole data analysis unit. So you buy one license and it's good for all those units. In the second season, when you buy a license for 45, it's only good for 45. So there's 10 cow tags in 45 in the second season. Third season, there's 10. In the fourth season, there's 10. So I mean, it's a huge cut in the number of licenses we're looking to run it up the chain of command and through the commission to look at maybe limiting bull licenses maybe doing what they did in the flat tops limiting archery licenses it might go to a totally limited elk unit to reduce all of that pressure in addition to that i would propose that only hunters are allowed to ever go into the woods. Okay, sure.

Those are some big changes. Those are huge changes. And we're seeing it. We just met with our research group a couple weeks ago. They're looking at drumming up some funding to try to get some collars put on cows. And we'll also put a vaginally inserted transmitter so when they calve, that transmitter will come out. It'll send a signal they're calving, and then we'll go in and capture the calf and put a collar on that calf and determine what happens to that calf.

Does it die because of a predator? Does it just die because it was in bad shape? Does it make it through? Does it make it through the predator? Does it just die because it was in bad shape? Does it make it through? Does it make it through the first two months and then die? Does it make it to winter and then die? Figure out when are we losing these calves? When you're doing something like that, how many tags or collars do you have to have out in order for it to begin to be helpful? Well, I mean, that's way outside of my knowledge.

But the number they're talking about is like 60. Okay. So at that point, you can start to get a good picture. You start to get a picture. I mean, then you rely on the computers. You put all the information in the computer with some parameters, and it spits out what it should be seeing. Is that trend statewide, or is it region specific? Is there areas in Colorado where the elk are just kicking ass?

In Meeker, they're doing good. And it's funny you ask that because just across the road in what we call E12, which is 35, 36, and 361, I-70 is the only thing that separates them. Not a blockage for predators to move, not a blockage for wintertime or summertime. And that elk herd was pretty well maintaining itself. This year was a strange year with the snowfall. We had some issues getting a helicopter permit. But we were running in the high 30s, low 40s for a winter cow-calf ratio. This year on the other side, all of a sudden it went to 28. Explain that for a minute. How many calves per

100 cows. Okay. So you would normally want to see in the winter above 40 calves per 100 cows to have a healthy population. And on the north side of I-70 we were maintaining that pretty easy at what number at 40 to 50 so that's basically like almost year olds they're nine months old or whatever when you're counting them right yeah we're counting in december and january okay right um they made it through the hunting season by the made it through the hunting season you know december is still a lot of winter to go and spring to go so you you can always lose some. But we do, in certain areas, more on deer than elk. But in certain areas, we have deer herds that they have enough collars on them. They can tell us that the fawn mortality in this area was 30% and the doe mortality was 5% or 10%.

The nice thing about the south side of I-70 is we had over 300 marked animals from starting in about 1984 until about 2000. So we knew a lot about those elk. We knew what their survival was. We were watching elk that had no teeth left in their head produce calves year after year. And then in a really bad winter, the cows would succumb to that bad winter. But we were getting cows we thought were 20 years plus being reproductively successful. So we had all that information to see that herd all of a sudden plummet like it has, and on the other side of the highway it was staying pretty stable.

Now, like I say, this year was a different year in our counts. We didn't get to count on the south side of I-70. We only did the north side. There was very little snow. It makes the animals harder to find. But we went from 40 cows per 100 cows down to 28. So something's happened in that unit that, bang, all of a sudden we've seen it. We've watched on the south side of I-70 this just kind of steady decline, even though we keep reducing the licenses every year, the herd keeps going down. Now to see it on the other side, it's like, okay, something's going on.

They're seeing it in Montrose. They're seeing it, I think, down in the San Luis Valley. Steamboat, I think, is saying they're starting to see kind of the same thing. Meeker, the elk herd's doing great. And, I mean, the only reason an elk herd is going to decline like that is a calf recruitment issue, right? Right. Well, I mean, it could decline like that in a severe winter. You could lose adults too.

But yeah, it's just like everything else. If you don't have any young of the year coming up, you're in trouble. And part of the reason we did the study we did in the Upper Eagle Valley is those elk were totally available to you in the summer. They were all above the alpine. You could put people out with a spotting scope, and one or two people could watch a group of 200 to 300 elk and see how many calves were nursing on the cows. I mean, we had radio-collared cows, and we would have to watch that cow for over 300 minutes to see if a calf nursed. Lots of times in the first 10 minutes you get there, you'd see a calf nurse, so you know that's a successful cow. Sometimes on the ones that were barren, you had to watch them the full 300 to say after 300 minutes, we never saw that cow nurse a calf.

So we would go up. We did this search there because, one, we had the ski areas to be able to kind of keep people out. It allowed us to keep one area that there was no interaction with people, and the other area we brought people in to go due to disturbance. Then they were available to us in the summer to watch. So we went out last year because we've been talking for two or three years of doing a recreation impact study. What is the impact of recreation on trails to these elk? We wanted to see if we could get the same results they got out of the Starkey Research Area that the Forest Service has. So we went up

and flew last year in a fixed wing and in places where I normally would see two to three hundred elk, we saw none. We put in two and a half hours of flying and we saw 18 elk in the alpine they did the next week they did the frying pan and they i think they saw 22 elk in the alpine so either the elk were if they were there at all they were feeding before daylight and by daylight they were gone it was not unusual when we were flying to see people hiking they were already at the top of the mountain at 7 a.m in the morning so what so peep just so people know you were flying over alpine high country like treeless meadows yeah so if you weren't seeing elk they may have been

in the timber already could have been down below in the timber but you know from doing it since 1984 they normally would be out till 10 o'clock in the morning and But, you know, from doing it since 1984, they normally would be out till 10 o'clock in the morning. And if there's a snow field, because the bugs, they like to lay on the snow field to stay cool and it keeps the bugs away from them. I mean, they weren't even on the snow fields. It was just nothing. So summer recreation, you're thinking.

Loving it to death, man. Loving it to death. I mean, if you look at it, if you've lived here long enough or you do that recreation, I mean, it's 24-7, 365 days a year there's recreation in this valley now. And if you look at Montrose, it's the same thing. Each one of these towns wants to become a summer recreation mecca. So do you foresee any, like, I mean, do you issue daily permits for certain areas for recreational use? Or, like, I mean, what would be the way, just limit use somehow is what would be?

Well, limit use, but also educate the people. I mean, we did a town avail, ran a nice program, a wildlife forum this winter. I was there. The Forest Service was there. There was two private consultants there. And we addressed those type of issues. And the Forest Service provided, I mean, just an amazing figure that they had a trail that was closed for elk calving and mule deer migration, closed in the spring. And so they went out and put a camera on it.

And in 10 days, they found 200 people on the trail. So it's like, hey, here's a closed trail trying to give these animals a space to go, and 200 people used it. And that was just on one section of the trail. There was other sections they could have been on and not seen that camera. Well, out of that, there was enough hunters, mountain bikers, and hikers, trail runners that runners that said well what can we do and so the forest service got them to be volunteers and they're standing on those trail closures on weekends they put up gates so it's not just a sign now it's a gate but these guys are standing there guys and gals are standing there saying this trail is closed if you want a mountain bike you should go here if you want to

hike you ought to go there so just more education, making people understand that you are the impact. They did an interesting study on Antelope Island in Utah, where they went out and they talked to the people that were recreating. And they said, yeah, you're a mountain biker. Do you think you have any impact on it? No. But those horseback riders, they screw up everything. Ask the horseback riders, those hikers, it's them. They screw it all up. Point the finger at everyone else. Ask the hikers, it's the mountain bike riders. Nobody thought they were the impact. It was always somebody else. And it's, I mean, I understand that type of thinking on it. And it's like, it's just me and my dog. We just walked up the trail at nine o'clock in the morning.

There wasn't anybody else there. Well, but you weren't there at 10 o'clock when three other people did, or at 10.30 when four people did. I mean, every hour there's somebody on that trail and that kind of constant irritation and disturbance is tough on animals. It's interesting through talking about all this

from black bears and mountain lions having conflicts in town to you know agricultural practices that might allow white-tailed deer to thrive in a place they hadn't thrived before um the issue of what is like you know mountain summer recreation have on wildlife uh you know no one can fool themselves anymore into thinking that there's anything in the lower 48 that like is just like isolated right you know like just at a cursory glance like of course like humans have impacted everything but just in these little detailed ways, we are in a position where we just have to own up to the fact that we impact virtually all aspects of the wildlife world.

And need to, in some ways, like measure what that impact is. And then times take like what are going to be like unpopular decisions around how to control it like with the shed hunting issue i mean it's all it's like people love to be outdoors they love to be around wildlife they want to participate in in you know the world of wildlife but my god does it come at a cost man well and you can't and you can't tell people hands off because then you don't want to encourage apathy.

It's almost worse if no one cared. I mean, the Forest Service and our organization and all the state game and fish, I mean, you see it all the time. Get out in nature. Get your kids outside. They learn much better if they're in nature. So we're trying to get the people out, but we have to understand that as we do that, there's an impact and we have to give them the tools on how to deal with those impacts. And a big thing you hear, you hear it all the time at public meetings

that those deer don't care. They stay in my yard every day. They don't care if I'm there. They don't care if my dog comes. And we've told people, if the animal changes its behavior, you're too close you've done something wrong back up what we haven't told him is that whole physiological part of it that

just because the deer's standing there if he's standing there looking at you he's gone from maybe a green state of alertment to a yellow state he's ready to flee he's not eating so he's not getting calories and if he has to flee then that's an impact on him. But we haven't done a good job of saying what those physiological impacts are. The fact of a deer and elk standing up, from laying down to standing up is a 25% increase in calorie output. So if you think about it, every time you walk by them, if all they do is stand up, you increase their calorie output for that period to 25%. It doesn't take long if they get stood up 10 or 12 times a day that you've really put a drain on their calories. And that's our fault. We haven't done a good job putting that out

and getting people to understand that. We understand it ourselves. If you walk by a guy's house that has a giant Doberman pincher that charges that gate, even though you know he can't get through that gate, your heart rate goes up, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, your respiration goes up, and it's like you know that animal can't get to you. But you went through that physiological reflex. Nothing you can do about it. the you know the the the animal in my yard i feel that like that's something that you would i spent a lot of energy trying a lot of time trying to counter is people that have this idea like well how could development be bad for wildlife because i have a deer i have a turkey

i have an elk that comes into my yard and And it's, you need to, like, when people have that mentality, you really need to try to invite them to view a much bigger picture. That the fact that there's, you know, a deer hanging out in your yard doesn't mean that the answer to more deer would be clearly to build more yards. Right. Right. It's kind of like you have to, if you're going to think that way or look at it that way, you have to go a little bit deeper into some long term trends and thinking about what that deer's whole life cycle is and how it uses the landscape throughout the year.

But I think that it almost like does like when people get comfortable with that idea, it almost does a disservice to wildlife management. You know, yeah. And like there must be tons of them there's one in my yard and i mean you have to go back and say well before your house there was 20 there yeah now there's one and the other 19 couldn't stand to be next to your house anymore so they left or they died yeah i mean that's the question we get all the time when we talk about the reduction in elk numbers well where did they go? They didn't go anywhere. We don't see the herds next door jumping up in population numbers. These animals are dead.

They're gone. There isn't Shangri-La over the next ridge for them to live at. I mean, every place that has elk, their elk are there, and they're trying to use it. If you move other elk in on them, you just double-stressed them. Yeah. And it's the same with, you know on them, you just double stressed them. Yeah. And it's the same with, you know, yeah, there's deer in my yard.

You know, if you go and you followed those deer, it's like, well, they probably don't live as long as a deer in the wild because they get hit by cars. They're more stressed. They're more susceptible to disease. They're probably not eating foods that are the best for them because somebody's probably feeding them Cheetos or something. So you have all of these things that build up. And there was actually some stuff done in Chicago on raccoons, of all things. And raccoons were becoming obese. They were getting diabetes.

Their teeth were rotting because they were eating so much human food. They weren't getting their normal diet. They were becoming like us. They were becoming just like us. They were eating human food. They weren't getting their normal diet. They're becoming like us. They're becoming just like us. They were eating human food. They became a human. If they could sit home on the couch with a remote and a bag of Cheetos, they were pretty happy.

All right, you guys got any more? Man, I'm good. I got a follow-up. Go ahead. I killed a cow this year. I don't know what the problem was, but clean kill. She ended up being chewy. I haven't had a chewy elk in a while, right?

But, like, every single cut is just, like, even the tenderloin is just, like, a little too al dente, right? So I figure you've killed a lot of elk. You've seen a lot of elk. You've eaten a lot of elk. You know that there's elk out there, like you said, without teeth in their head. They're 20-plus-year-old cows. Do you have any thoughts on what sometimes produces chewy elk?

Well, yeah, I mean, they're just thoughts. Sure. Nothing based in fact. But on 30-some years of experience of hunting and eating elk. I mean, the big thing is what happened to that elk the hour before you killed it. Did it come from the ridge side on the other side and run all the way? Was it hyped up that it was all excited? You see it a lot with antelope that, you know, people will go out and they shoot an antelope that came.

It's like, yeah, I was standing out there in the sagebrush. This antelope came busting over the ridge right to me and i shot it man it was terrible well maybe that antelope been running for 30 minutes so all the adrenaline's pumped in his body it's got all the lactic acid it's got all this stuff going on so so i think that's a big factor in it you don't know i mean the elk could look like hey there's a good layer of fat on it it looks healthy the teeth look good but that doesn't mean at some point in the time that that elk wasn't suffering some other stress or some other problems. Interesting, I don't see a lot of ticks on our animals here, but when we were trapping elk every day, it was amazing. When we started in 84 and ended in the

mid-90s, during that 10 or 12- year period, we started seeing more and more ticks on elk in the winter than we'd ever seen before. Enough that we were writing it down on our data sheets, this elk is full of ticks. So you don't know if in the summer they were impacted by ticks, you know, just what was going on with them. Something was stressing them out. Something's usually stressing them out. I mean, when you see it see it especially in hogs that if you get a hog before slaughter that's too hot or it's stressed on that white meat you'll see red dots through it and that's a sign that that animal was stressed before it was killed and that really affects the quality of the meat yeah i didn't feel like the last time i had a chewy animal it was a it was a mule deer buck. And I didn't put, didn't the first shot miss completely.

It ran. I shot it. There was some more shooting that went on. And 15 minutes later, the animal was dead. It didn't die easily. And yeah, it was a tough, tough eating animal. And I just feel like, yeah, all those chemicals surging through that. And livestock slaughter, they go through,

there's a lot of steps in the process to alleviate stress during livestock slaughter. From a meat, I mean, not just from a humane perspective, from a meat quality perspective to alleviate stress. So as far as age being a factor? I think it's a factor, man. You do? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's a factor, man. You do? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it's a factor,

but it's not a guaranteed factor that a toothless one's going to be tough. Yeah. I mean, I think we've all shot an animal that we thought was a yearling, two-year-old maybe, and it's like it just didn't taste as good. I mean, I've shot some bighorn sheep that were eight and 10 years old. They tasted great. You've drawn more than one bighorn sheep tag? I've drawn two. Isorn sheep that were 8 and 10 years old. They tasted great.

You've drawn more than one bighorn sheep tag? I've drawn two. Is that because you work for the state? Yeah. Did you do two bighorn tags in your lifetime? Yeah. Wow. Well, one was a Nanny sheep.

One was a ram tag. You got to understand, he's in a position where he's all mad because he didn't draw any good tags this year. I just suffered through a horrible tag draw season. Well, I didn't draw my moose tag, so I'm right there with you. Okay. I feel like I've been isolated out and picked on this year by the permit draw systems.

So you cool? You shot a tough old cow? Yeah. Still eating her. Was it old? I didn't go and have her aged. Well, but what did the teeth look like? I mean, they look good or they look poor?

Oh, yeah, they look good. I think you got to know what you're doing to really look at those teeth, man. Well, I mean, are they all there? Are they uniform? She had all her teeth. Yeah. Have you, she's already had time to freeze her age and that hasn't helped? No.

You know, it might just be that you're just going to have to just grind it. Grind it up. Oh, no, definitely. And listen, like – Is the flavor good? Yeah, it's fine. And when you cook a roast the proper way, it's eating fine, but you're just like, gosh, just a little too – Just got to sharpen your knife more and go a little thinner, gosh just a little yeah two just got a sharp knife more and go a little thinner man yeah totally you got a slicer uh no but uh yeah we're out of

burger so it's like perfect you know i'll be taking a bunch of roasts out and just turn it into burger because the flavor is good and you grind it's like who really cares right or cook it and just slice it thin thin thin. But you know what? I do have a little bit in my freezer of that. I had never experienced, and you hear stories about it, and it's where all this stuff perpetuates from are these mule deer, right? The sagey, gamey, ga, ga, ga. Well, listen.

Well, I heard the whole story. It was like one guy shot it. It went over the ridge. He decided not to even follow up, so his buddy went over there feeling bad guy shot it. It went over the ridge. He decided not to even follow up. So his buddy went over there feeling bad, killed it. The guy didn't brought it to the guy. He didn't want it. It sat out in the sun for a day.

Eventually my neighbor ends up with it. He's like, I'll take it. So I helped him. It didn't smell bad or anything when we butchered it. Um, but taking these packages of ground meat out, like when you open the package of ground meat, you can smell it right then and there. You cook it, it's bad. So stressing it, taking care of it, it can definitely happen.

I've told the story a hundred times. I don't know if I've told it on this digital radio program, but about my buck that fell into a sinkhole. Yeah, you told that one. Worst buck I ever ate because I couldn't recover it quickly. Down in a sinkhole. Well, my Colorado moose is eating great.

Oh, yeah. Rub it in. It was a cow, not a bull. Yeah. The thing I get so sick of is that big mule deer bucks don't taste good. When you get that, like a nice big mule deer buck and he's got a bunch of fat on his rump. Yeah. Listen thing I get so sick of is that big mule deer bucks don't taste good. When you get that, like a nice big mule deer buck,

and he's got a bunch of fat on his rump. Yeah. Listen, my wife, who doesn't care at all about deer antlers, doesn't even get it. She can't tell a big one from a little one when they're sitting right in front of her. She's like, it just looks like the same like all the other ones. Doesn't care. She likes that meat.

The big old mule deer buck meat. Only going by this. When I make dinner, shit like when i make dinner okay when i make dinner if that's what it is she's like that is so good what is that loves it she wouldn't like the bucks yana shoots she doesn't like uh like white like whitetail meat she feels it's a little too mild a little too bland you know i shot me she doesn't really every time i cook moose i don't even tell her what it is but she'll eat it and she's like what is that and i'll be like moose she's like ah you know it's something about it yeah i shot a yearling cow last december and it was surprising

how mild it was like because you get used to eating stuff you know you're shooting older elk or bucks or whatever you get used to that just flavor and that thing was like vealish you know it was so and even the meat was lighter than you'd expect to see and and it was mild like i know you said it before it's like almost to the point where it's not that it tastes bad it's just so mild there's almost nothing the egg gets to the point of being a little bland yeah yeah pound for pound i don't i don't like i wouldn't trade it because i like to eat the animals that i shot or next best thing is the animals that my buddy shot when i was with him kind of thing just yeah mentally so i wouldn't like literally do these trades but you know pound for pound

i would swap out like three four year old-old mule deer meat. I would trade elk to get that back. I like it. You got preferences? Antelope. That's my wife's favorite. So you like that flavor? As long as you treat it right.

No, I think that we put in the freezer, what was it, a mule deer? It's so hard to tell because we come home from working and we're always divvying up meat. But I had two antelope in the freezer, and it's by far been a favorite this year for everybody. And I haven't noticed a difference in bigger bucks and does and that at all. But, you know, I mean, within 15 minutes of hitting the ground, that sucker's in a cooler. Right.

Yeah, I got you. Did you draw an antelope tag yesterday? I did not. So you just got to find out like everybody else. I got to fight it just like everybody else. Just like Steve. I'm fighting like on the moose. I've been fighting since there's been a moose season in Colorado for it.

And there's some people in the valley that have drawn their bull tag and now their cow tags. So when they're doing the draw, do they call up? Do your colleagues call up and be like, Bill, great news? No. You just got to check your email. Just got to check your email. Just like a regular old guy.

Just like Steve Rinella. That's horrible, man. Yeah, no, there's no benefit one way at all. It'd look pretty bad. It would look pretty bad if you did it. That's another conspiracy theory. Oh, I've heard that one plenty. Oh, yeah.

Yep. All right, anyone else? Any last things? Officer Andre, you have any final things you didn't get to say? Be safe out there. Be safe out there. Self-report. Self-report.

When you make a mistake. Everybody's going to make a mistake. Just do the right thing. Turn yourself in. I think everybody would be happy with the outcome when you do that. Try to hide it. You aren't going to be happy with the outcome. And if you have to say if and if you have to say if

if you have to say if probably shouldn't do it all right thank you very much for joining us all right thank you hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

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