The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 145: A Life of Service

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

Missoula, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Idaho Department of Fish and Game Director Virgil Moore, the author and poet Chris Dombrowski, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: open season on pine squirrels in Idaho; Steve's Mexican roadkill bonefish encounter; managing deer for opportunity versus quality; the unfortunate reality of why Idaho's winter steelhead season has been closed; the ongoing fight around grizzly bear delisting; multi-state game and fish agencies working together; caribou flirting with the U.S. border and conservation triage; the surprising issues attached to public apathy; counting wildlife; legitimate and illegitimate gripes about fish and game agencies; preference points as a pyramid scheme; 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. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, Virgil, let's just start out and have you just get right into it and introduce yourself.

Like, right off, before anybody even says anything interesting. Thanks, Steve. I'm Virgil Mooreore i'm director at idaho fish and game it's a greatest job in the world like that's the top that's the top dog individual well i have i have bosses but yeah in our agency um the director uh oversees the operations of the entire agency and you guys in the crowning achievement of your career, right, is this passage of the new pine squirrel season? Well, I won't say it's a crowning achievement. Can you explain that real quick, though?

Yeah, a couple of years ago, one of our commissioners just asked the question, can we kill pine squirrels? You know, they're commonly known as red squirrels. And the answer was, well, they're protected wildlife. And then he goes, why? I don't know. It's always been that way. Yeah, this came up because I was just talking about how last night

we were eating some pine squirrels for dinner. And I was saying how everywhere that i've ever lived lists the pine squirrel or red squirrel um as a non-protected non-game species meaning no close season right no bag limit and i would have never have guessed that idaho was an exception to that because like people don't really get after them you know they're a common household pest because if a squirrel gets in your attic it's probably a pine squirrel right in the northern tier states um they pray a surprising thing is they pray on snowshoe hare leverets do you know that no in in alberta they did a mortality study on snowshoe hares and most of the ones that went missing were found in pine squirrel mittens.

I got a buddy that watched one kill a bird one time. So they're predators. Yeah, they like to kill snowshoe hare leverets. And they like to eat baby birds out of nests. But mostly they eat pine seeds. Yep, their stashes, their mittens, whatever you want to call them, become an important food source in the winter for some birds and other wildlife because they get into those stashes. Yeah, and you see grizzlies in the spring will come out and excavate them.

They'll pull them all out. So then you guys realize there's no season for them. And what kind of magic needs to happen to make it? It's not as easy as just waving a wand and saying the season's open. We had to go through rulemaking to make them non-protected first, and then we had to go through the process of proposing a season, getting public comment, and then the commission approving it. They just finally approved that at their last commission meeting,

so we will have a pine squirrel season. And a bag limit. And a bag limit, yeah. So you guys are going from one extreme to the other it's eight per day 24 in possession so and it's got an open season uh that'll be from august 30th through march 31st so you know there's a closed period and that conforms with our open season for other um rabbits and other small game. So just for consistency reasons, we kept all of that the same. You're going to run them like small game.

Yep. Do you guys have any regulations around, and I don't imagine you have thriving populations of fox and gray squirrels. We do have thriving populations of fox and gray squirrels, mostly in urban areas. And there is no protection on those. You can kill as many of those as you want. Because they're a non-native that came in.

They're a non-native, non-protected wildlife. Because most of them are in urban areas where discharge of firearms is prohibited, that we don't see much use of them, although there are a few folks that utilize them. I mean, I'm a Missouri native. I was raised probably the first thing I killed was either a rabbit or a squirrel. So one of the two had to be what I was shooting at. Yeah, exactly.

Next to Virgil, Chris. Hey, Steve. Chris is just hanging out. Chris is an old friend of mine. You should come on the show a lot more. I want to, Chris. Hey, Steve. Chris is just hanging out. Chris is an old friend of mine. You should come on the show a lot more. I want to, yeah. I mean, my friends, I'm not a big podcast listener. I watch the show, the Meat Eater show all the time,

but my friends listen to it all the time. I told them what I was doing today. They said, seriously, are you kidding me? Are you an anti-podcast listener? No, I'm not. But to steal an old favorite phrase of yours that you stole from Ian Frazier, you know, hunting or fishing is something I'd rather do than talk about. Yeah.

So, um, I'm not anti-podcast. I just, I write a lot and I need, uh, when I'm done writing, I need to get out of the word world, you know? Yeah. Just listen to silence. Right. For sure. You know, I remember reading somewhere that people were saying you can't appreciate music without appreciating silence because music is an inter listen to silence. Right, for sure. You know, I remember reading somewhere that people were saying,

you can't appreciate music without appreciating silence because music is an interruption of silence. Sure, I bet John Cage would love that, right? I don't know who said it. Oh, well. I'm just going to act like I said that. Okay. I remember an old squirrel Hassenfopper meal that you made. Do you remember that?

Yeah, man. Yeah. We used to get after them right here in town. Right here. But, you know, live trap nuisance squirrelisance squirrels oh is that how you're getting them in other ways we go we go out of state we go out of state to hunt we'd go you know hunt them around uh plug your book real quick okay well my my last book is called body of water it's a non-fiction book from milkweed Editions

about really that centers around a man named David Pinder who was the first Bahamian bone fishing guide. He went to, he grew up on a small island called Deepwater Key. And in 1958, a rich Floridian man named Gil Drake. A rich what man? A Floridian man named Gil Drake actually bought an island from the

crown um the english crown called deepwater key and hired david pender to excavate the mangroves from the island and over time hired pender to be his first fishing guide bonefish guide in the bahamas so pender made about five dollars a day at the time and uh over the last 50 or so years the bonefishing industry has become the crux of the ecotourism industry in the bahamas so 150 million dollars a year basically this little fish that we used to throw into uh purina food bags has become the crux of an island the entire island's economy really first bonefish i ever saw and this is way after bonefish became what bonefish are the first one i ever saw was laying dead on the side of the road where was that mexico right yeah dead on the side of the road like the weirdest thing i was like oh it's not how you want to see your first bonefish no and the ardea buddy of mine from hawaii sent me a picture with just a

classic grip and grin with a whole bunch of dead bonefish laying there because they make fish patties out of them they call it oil uh-huh then they don't they catch them out in deep water yeah huge bonefish huge bonefish my brother caught a big bonefish in 100 feet of water in hawaii right yeah so they don't act like they're like a flats fish there. They act like they're just a fish to eat, a bony-ass fish to eat. Right. I remember your discussion in Meat Eater, the book, about your first experience releasing these fish.

That's when I found my first dead one on the side of the road. Like, oh, hey, roadkill bonefish. And then caught my first ones and let them go. Meanwhile like killed every other fish we didn't know what it was right right to like fuel our journey to let bonefish go because you got to eat something right we pull fish out like what's that i don't know eat it and let all that let all those ones go did you ever end up eating a bonefish yeah i've eaten bonefish one what was it like you said just boning pain fine white flesh totally fine you had to pick it to quote ian frazier again who i think might have stole this from john mcphee but he talked about eating roe shad

right and he said it's kind of like fixing a watch like picking the meat oh sure like all the bones you know he says it feels like you're like dismaning a watch to get it apart but yeah i ate one down there barracuda i ate a lot of those kind of fish but it's a cool book we should maybe sometime dedicate a whole conversation about the books it tells the story about a fish that no one cares about becoming a fish that's like a billion dollar industry yeah we should i'll come back anytime i'm glad you're living in bozeman now i remember when you used to speaking of picking fish remember fishing for white fish and making let's talk about that yesterday oh yeah tedious but great recipe you know um on down the line well you guys

have headsets on what are you doing just monitoring they're just taking pictures virgil brings staff with them yeah entourage oh yeah let's go ahead then we're gonna then we're gonna dive into well then we're gonna dive into all things uh fisheries and wildlife management janice patelis from the meat eater crew uh virgil can you start out i have a thousand things to ask you one of the questions i want to ask you later once we get going is when you hear hunters and anglers talk bad about fish and game what are the most legitimate complaints and what are the least legitimate complaints but i don't want to talk about that yet but just know that that's coming so dig deep to try to like give a thing like what is the most legitimate complaint that

you found in your career in a lifetime of service but i think first i think it'd be interesting to talk about where your department sort of ends and you can make it general you can like idaho right is your area of expertise but you probably have enough exposure from all the other agencies to like like where does what is a game commission and what is its relationship to your department and and how do you move from one of those i think that this is this is something that's not well understood and it might be a good basis for the conversation here it that really is and and certainly our game commission, Idaho Fish and Game Commission, is integral to our agency. They are the policy and regulatory setting body for the Department of Fish and Game. As director, I set as the director of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

I'm also a non-voting member of the Idaho Fish and Game Commission. My other title is Secretary of Fish and Game. I'm also a non-voting member of the Idaho Fish and Game Commission. My other title is Secretary of Fish and Game. And that interfaces the department through the director and the commission. In Idaho, the director serves at the pleasure of the commission, a seven-person board appointed by the governor for staggered four-year terms. They can be appointed to two terms, confirmed by the Senate. Confirmed by the state Senate? Our commissioners are. Okay. As a director appointed by a commission, I do not have to go through that political process with the legislature. They do that. And so that's the firewall or the buffer that's there.

But the governor selects those commissioners. And the governor selects the commissioners. The commissioner selects you, the director. Correct. And you have a term limit of two terms. For the commissioners. So they can serve two four-year terms and then they term out. The director has

no term limit we can so you can keep going and going you can keep going but it's not a lifetime appointment no it's uh you serve at the pleasure and so at any time four commissioners decide they want somebody new you've got your walking papers how many commissioners are there seven and that varies okay but they set the rules. Yes. So for instance, we talked about, and I don't want to put too much into this because it's a pretty small issue. Pine squirrel season. Right.

That has to go through the commission, right? Correct. But the commission draws so much of their information from the department. Absolutely. Because the commission is not doing out game surveys. No. So that's where the department and commission are linked. In 1938, the first initiative in the state of Idaho was approved by voters in the state that created the commission. Okay. Prior to 1938, we were formed as an agency in 1899, the Department of Fish and Game. Prior

to that, the director was appointed by the governor. It was completely partisan. And most of the staff. It was like the spoils of war. Right. And many of the staff were nonprofessional. And it was a very partisan structure. Decline of trying to recover elk herds, trying to get hunting back and going in the 20s and 30s

failed miserably because we didn't have that professional workforce out there doing the survey work. The initiative formed the commission and put the commission in its position of hiring the director and gave very specific roles to each body. And the department access staff and managers of that public trust that's out there, the commission is the trust holder along with the legislature. They are the ones that are responsible for how to how to uh deal with that trust uh we just make recommendations and manage it per their direction so up until the time pine squirrels were protected that was the direction then they decided as the uh trust manager they wanted to do something different we said there's not a problem biologically. They went on with the rules.

And so we interact very closely with our commission. How often does the commission butt heads with the department? Meaning, presumably there's people on the commission who have an ax to grind, right? Because they're from different walks of life. It happens. We don't see it a lot. Generally, the commission tries to work as a team together, but they are appointed to represent geographic areas of the state. They're pretty much, they have a district and that district is

very similar to our administrative regions. So we've got seven of those. And every so often you see a difference in the way that the commissioners themselves want to go. As director, I manage the agency to make recommendations. Where we have a disconnect is if, for some reason, through public input, somebody wants a season change. Like someone saying, hey, I'm seeing fewer and fewer deer. Right. And then you look and you're like, he actually is probably seeing fewer and fewer deer. Let's say it's legitimate. And as an individual, I suspect that that's the case. They are seeing. But our survey work, we look at it and we go, you know, we killed more deer last year in that unit than we've ever killed before. Our survey information says that the buck-dough ratios in there are above policy.

And so you have that disconnect between what you see in the spot you hunt and what we see when we try to manage a larger piece of real estate yeah and so that goes to the commission they get public input all the time like that we're in the middle of it right now with some deer setting stuff that's going on like tell me what you mean white-tailed deer we're we're adopting a new white-tailed deer plan and in that process the question of do we know what we're talking about in this particular piece of real estate versus what the data is for game management units on a larger piece. And so the commission is in a situation where the biological information would suggest one thing and what individuals that are motivated to get involved in the decision-making process show up at a public meeting, say,

that isn't right. And you know what? They're probably not wrong about where they're hunting, what they see. Their specific spot. But does that mean that that's the way it is everywhere? And that's the kind of wisdom and balancing that the commission has to go through to sort through, here's the science as we're trying to present it to you, and here's the commission has to go through to sort through, here's the science as we're trying to present it to you, and here's the public input that has some varied

input. We can tell you all about this, but I can't say that what Joe Hunter over here sees is incorrect. And so that is where the beauty of the commission process is. They're there to balance out perhaps the scientific information that we provide them with some of the input from the public of what they desire as trust users. They're the ones who get the benefit of that public trust of wildlife. We manage it. The commission is a trustee for that. And so we go back and forth through that process constantly with our commission. Most of the time, 99 and nine-tenths

percent of what is out there for public input, we get good public input, we get agreement with the biological information, it goes through. we just approved fishing regulations for three years a new fish management plan for six years at this last commission meeting two weeks ago okay took 15 minutes no dissenting anything it took a year no people pounding their shoes took a year of public input to get to that point but by the time we got to that point we didn't have any issues that's not true with our deer elk and other wildlife management issues we had no dissenting votes on pine squirrels so that one went pretty easy people are cool on pine squirrels so far it brings people together man so far bring people together but but uh white-tailed deer are a big thing right now. Tell me what, because there's a lot of them, not a lot of them?

We're seeing, because of the way hunting occurs in Idaho with the ability to move around, we have a white-tail tag for the late-season white-tail hunt that you have to decide whether you're going to hunt during the early mule deer and general deer season or whether you want to hunt whitetail only, and you get that whitetail tag. A lot of people prefer whitetail. I do. And consequently, they all go to these really neat spots. And so they're seeing a lot more hunters.

Good. So you're out there driving around where you go by and you see six camps in a spot you didn't see but one camp four or five years ago, then you go out hunting and you don't see the deer. Immediately, there's a problem. And this is occurring in the Clearwater and several other units around. That coupled with loss of access on private lands creates this uh perception that hunting for me isn't as good as it used to be and that perception is correct for that person if people are attributing this to forcing people to make this decision about what they want to hunt that's part of it they're also saying there's too many non-residents. Yeah. And non-residents can be both people from out of state as well as people like myself from Boise coming up into their area to hunt.

And it's that social tension that comes with using a resource out there. And as users, you've probably all seen that. I know I do. You see it whether you're fishing or hunting. I get away from it by hunting later in the season so I don't have to deal with it. Or I fish later in the season or during the shoulder periods. Montana, as an example, has their shoulder hunting seasons that they use right now to try to distribute some of that. We try to use our regulations to do that.

But at some point, we still have the people seeing something different than what our biological data. So some of the – and I'll jump to your question. What are the legitimate complaints? Can I first add something? Sure. One of the writers that writes for us on our website, Pat Durkin, did a piece for us about comparing success rates, Hunter success rates,

with surveys about Hunter satisfaction. Right. He's, the basic, I mean, just to really take something long and complex and make it short is people are just generally not happy. Not happy. Like, you take a relative picture year to year of, like, what was good hunting and bad hunting, and then ask people to put a personal spin on it, they generally view it as being more negative than it was.

I wouldn't totally agree with that. You don't totally agree with that? No, I don't. Our survey that we recently did on mule deer and whitetail hunters. Everybody's happy. No, I'm not going to say everybody's happy. Couldn't be better. But most people are satisfied or very satisfied.

Is that right? Based on the survey work we did. It varies depending on the geography. It varies on what they're after. One of the things that we are in Idaho by commission direction, we're an opportunity state. We're all about being able to hunt every year. We're all about giving people that chance to get out there. And to accomplish that, we have to have that ability to hunt every year. You're going to have fewer older growth animals than you would

if if you didn't go for that opportunity and so that is a couple minutes on that so i'm going to come is on an opportunity state versus a on a a quality state yeah like grab grab a you feel okay utah has uh and this is based on their public input down there, and a large number of hunters there and different productivity chose years ago to go with a quality system that produced a larger proportion of the herd as four-point animals. Gotcha. Idaho has quality.

Don't get me wrong. It's just we manage the productivity of that herd so that we can utilize that productivity for as many hunters as possible while still producing a pretty good number of four-point animals whether they're mule deer or white tail we talk about this too as being like some states are kind of split right like colorado's quality on mule deer opportunity on elk right correct yeah and and part of it has to do with the number of animals that are there in general our mule deer haven't been doing as well as our elk although in idaho with uh with some of the work we've been doing as well as the easy winters we've had and the

better survival on fawns uh our mule deer are really up but half of our deer harvest is whitetail in idaho the other half is all those dudes up in the panhandle and it's because we got a lot of them and and people are turning on to them because they taste better now that's just my that's my bias i'll put it this way when my wife is not a hunter but she is a consumer yeah and when i go hunting i generally get orders as to what she prefers that i bring home and and uh a white tail are much higher on the list than a stinky old mule deer as she puts it okay now i find them both very flavorful yeah i like the flavor they're both distinct and different and enjoy eating both of them.

When she puts in a ticket, she puts in a whitetail ticket. Just keep telling her, just get your own ticket and come out hunting with me. How long have you guys been married? Really? I want to get into your bio for a minute,

but lay a good piece of marriage advice on us. Listen to your spouse. Really? Bring home a whitetail. That's all I'll on us. Listen to your spouse. Really? Bring home a white tail. That's all it takes. Home white tails. Can I ask a question about, so when you guys are prioritizing an initiative

or the new squirrel listing, I mean, are you thinking, well, that's going to be an economic boon for the state? I mean, the squirrel thing? I'm kidding a little bit. But how much are you prioritizing revenue, potential revenue over the resource? Certainly, Idaho gets no general funds. Our revenue is generated by predominantly licensed sales,

as well as contract money and the excise tax on hang-in fishing equipment, Pittman-Robertson and Daniel Johnson. What's the contract money? Contract money is mitigation money like from Bonneville Power to operate hatcheries for the mitigation of dams, Idaho Power, Avista, gosh, you name it. We get contract money to work with BPA as an example. We've got contract money to do sage-grouse work for the Fish and Wildlife Service. But a lot of it, most of it's mitigation money to operate hatcheries for hydropower development. Meaning the hydropower development impedes fish movements, and they've got to make up for that by running hatcheries. Correct.

And then the state runs the hatcheries for them. we operate the hatcheries that they built for those facilities and and so that's a huge piece of our budget but as far as uh the discretionary funds that we get it's almost all license money a little tiny bit off of non-game license plate sales we have a license plate system and that generates together about two million dollars that runs that non-game program that we have in the state. So back to your question about what do we get, do we take economics into consideration? If it was a conservation issue where you should hunt or not hunt, the answer is no. But when you're looking at the way you conduct a hunt, the way you set seasons, how you allocate those tags to residents and non-residents, definitely revenue is on the table as an item

to take a look at. But by and large, the commission isn't as concerned with revenue as they are the social aspects of how this affects hunters in the field. I can give you an example. We can dive into this. I mean, the commission just recently closed steelhead fishing in the state of Idaho. And the economic effects of that are huge. I got emails from guys who are pissed off about that. Well, I got a lot of emails. I'm sure you got more than I did. We had a public meeting last week in Riggins.

Now, Riggins is on the Salmon River, a very small community that has mostly natural resource-based economy. It used to be timber. That's gone. Now it's hunting and fishing. I mean, and whitewater rafting on the main Salmon River. And the closure of a winter steelhead fishery is millions of dollars to a community that is probably getting a third of their financial revenue

from steelhead fishing, another third from Chinook, and the rest of it from other outdoor-based recreation activities. And so it hits a community like that hard over Christmas. Goodness, who's Grinch here? And I get it. I'm guessing why, but talk about what precipitated the closure. It wasn't that people decided it was mean to catch steelhead.

No, we got served with a notice of intent to be sued about 45 days ago. Who was bringing the suit? Oh, it was a group of five fish advocacy groups and river groups that felt like that the what we call mixed stock fishery where we fish on the hatchery fish, these mitigation fish. And there are wild listed steelhead in the river with them felt that our fishery was harming those wild fish. Technically, the problem is we don't have a permit to have that mixed stock fishery was harming those wild fish. Technically, the problem is we don't have a permit to have that mixed stock fishery. It expired in 2010. The federal agency responsible for that permit, National Marine Fishery Service, has failed to issue that permit to us since 2010. We have submitted it every year. We have complied with the terms of the permit, but they have been working on other areas that were very important for permitting.

And I can get into the technicalities of that, but the point is we are guilty of not having a permit. So here we're getting a notice, NOAA or National Marine Fisheries Service says, go ahead and fish without the permit. Comply with the terms you submitted. We don't have time to go through the process to give you that permit, but we're not going to prosecute you under the Endangered Species Act. The Endangered Species Act has a citizen's lawsuit feature in it that allows private citizens to sue somebody violating it.

That was, I mean, this has been going on for eight years, and then we get this notice of intent to sue. If you go to court and are found to be guilty, I guess you would say, or not in compliance, then the state has to pay all the legal fees of the plaintiffs. And knowing what we knew, we felt that it was not useful to go through a legal defense when we really didn't have the permit trying to convince a judge. And in all likelihood, the plaintiffs would have asked the judge for an emergency closure while this order while while they started and the end result would be we would be paying legal fees and we would have a closed steelhead system by closing the season we preclude them from taking

us to court okay so now the decision to open it back up is still with the commission. The permit will be done in March next spring. In the meantime, you're going to get a black eye, right? Yeah, and deservedly so. You deserve it? We probably could have been a little more aggressive with seeing that this could happen. But frankly, I knew for, well, I've been director for eight years and the whole time I knew we'd been playing, doing this.

And I felt because National Marine Fisheries Service wasn't going to prosecute us, that we were okay. I never thought about our conservation friends and these other entities taking us to court. Well, they did. Are these angler-based groups? A couple of them are angler-based groups? A couple of them are angler-based groups. A couple of them are river-based groups.

The angler groups desiring more wild fish? Yeah, they've got a different agenda. And I'll be honest with you, part of the agenda, they were willing to not sue us if we agreed to go to no bait, single barbless hooks, fly fishing only, ban the use of boats. So they were trying to say this was a conservation issue, but then they had this string of things that would have precluded most of our steelhead anglers from going fishing just so that group could get out there.

Yeah. The catch and release group basically and are the people of riggins and that whole kind of valley there are they upset mostly at you guys we're they're upset that we allowed this to get to where it is but at the public meeting we had last week going into town there was a sign um you know public meeting so and so place such and such time and they had the name of one of these groups just plastered on there said not welcome so yeah the they're they're doing i have a meeting tomorrow with the board of one of these groups the season doesn't take effect until december the 7, I think, is when it closes.

Pearl Harbor, man. I know. That's a symbolic date. Terrible date. But we've got a little bit of time in here. We're still negotiating. We had a negotiated settlement two weeks ago, and then when all of the plaintiffs left, they came back a day later and said, no, we're going to back away from our agreement.

I got a couple quick questions. First for Chris, you're a fishing guide. Yeah. Do you stray over to that country at all? I do not. No, I grew up that far down river. No, I grew up steelheading in Michigan. So, um, we don't have these problems.

No, we don't have these problems, but, um, no, I'm still lying the bank with them down there. Right. Uh, I spent most, most of the winter writing. So as soon as I'm off the river in late October, I'm hanging up the rods and the waders and chasing the bird dog around. But do you hear guys griping about this? Oh, I didn't even know about it,

which tells you how much I've been in the woods in the last month or so. But most of the single Missoula fishing guides head over there for a good month and drag a trailer over and... Take part. Right, for sure. It's fascinating to me and surprising, too. Now, here's my question for you, Virgil, on this issue. The average letter writer who writes in with a complaint,

let's say you were to take all those people and make a pool of them. So forget the average. You're going to take a pool of all the people that have written a letter of complaint. How many of those individuals, if you had to guess, what percentage of those individuals would be able to articulate the issue to the extent that you just articulated it to me right now? Is it well understood or do you find, or are you baffled by how not well understood it is? I'm baffled by how not well understood it is. We're pushing the envelope. This closure only occurred less than two weeks ago.

In fact, it'll be two weeks ago Wednesday, this coming Wednesday. And so we're trying to get the word out there. The form letters that I've been inundated with simply aren't accurate. The misunderstanding that there is a conservation benefit to this closure is wrong. Okay, that there is a catch and release mortality on these listed steelhead, but that is less than 3% of handling. And that's a worst case scenario. That's what number they're at right now? That's what we use in our permit. And we predict that three out of a hundred fish handled may die as a result of that catch and release fishery. And that's the impact that we will have on these wild fish while we're catching and

keeping hatchery fish okay and it's something all the states do i mean washington has their permit in hand they got a couple years ago they got theirs first so the washington part of the snake river will stay open even though ours will close because it's border water. Oregon doesn't have their permit for this fishery, but they're going to continue to fish because they didn't get sued. And so it's a very selective legal action. Who's going to continue to fish? The state of Oregon will continue to fish,

as will Washington on the Snake River portion. Our Salmon River and Clearwater Rivers would be the ones that are predominantly affected by this as well as Idaho licensed anglers who fish Hell's Canyon, the Snake River portion. But you could continue to fish by buying a Washington license. That's the absurdity of some of this. But the bottom line is the catch and release fishery is not the issue here.

This is partially a social issue. This is partially an issue of these advocacy groups trying to make a point that Idaho isn't doing enough as a state on downriver issues. And so they're hitting us at home with illegal action on our sport fisheries. And it really doesn't hurt the department. It hurts the local communities. Right. I mean, you gave some percentages, but what's the dollar figure roughly? You know, in the town of Riggins, we've done the economic evaluation. And I'm going to say the town of Riggins for this winter fishery

is a million and a half dollars if my numbers. Now, it doesn't sound like a lot of money. Yeah, but how many people live there? No, I mean, there's less than a thousand people there. In the wintertime, there's probably half that. It winds up being a big chunk of change when you factor in population. Right. It is a big deal.

Clearwater, you know, or Fino, that area there, it gets hit hard. And the outfitters and guides that rely on that and cater to that. I mean, I got a heartfelt letter from a guide up on the Clearwater. And he said, gosh, it couldn't come at a worse time. He goes, I don't make a lot of money during this period of time, but it's going to cost me $5,000 in the next six weeks and it's going to ruin my Christmas with my kids. Gosh, I just almost get into tears over something like that. And it's like, well, dang, should we have not closed it, let it go to court, fought and tried to keep it open as long as possible.

We're still having that active discussion right now. But these actions that appear to be just about the department and its management really are about people and the people who use the resource and the communities that benefit from those resources. 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.

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OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Walk me through how you wound up where you are now. Were you aiming through your career in fish and wildlife to wind up in this position?

Or you just kind of did what made sense? Yeah, by training, I'm a fisheries scientist i was worked as a fisheries biologist undergraduate degrees in education i taught high school came to idaho worked on fish on steelhead as a matter of fact in my garage you got a background yeah and i worked on steelhead and cutthroat um got on with the department over 40 years ago and worked on the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho on cutthroat trout in the late 70s and early 80s on a problem we were having there with declining numbers and size of fish. And got an opportunity to manage that fishery for about seven years. And that included that area that I was manager over,

included the Henry's Fork and the South Fork of the Snake and some of that greatest fishing country in the world. Maybe Montana's close, but since we're in Montana, I'll give them a little credit for having good fisheries. You can have the prize and the tourists. But the bottom line is then I just worked my way up when I had an opportunity and various positions as state fish manager, fishery research manager. I was bureau chief over our communications program for a while, fisheries chief.

I did a stint in Oregon as director for a year. I went over there and learned a lot. I consider it now as a one-year sabbatical to a different state and had an opportunity to come back to Idaho as a deputy director and turned into a director's job. So it's a really short bio when you get down to it, it's just a lot of different opportunities and jobs, but it's all doing the same thing. It's working with people to manage their resources, to provide what they want, while having that foundation in our mission statement, which is preserve, protect, perpetuate, and manage. For the benefit of the people, that resource can only be used when it's preserved, protected, and perpetuated. And when it is used, its primary use is hunting, fishing, and trapping. That is in the code that formed our agency that was given to us in 1938 by the people of the state.

It was approved by 73% of the people in the state in 1938. A lot of people said, well, that's dated. You know, that was, gosh, that was 80 some odd years. I guess it was 80 years ago. And it's no longer valid. Well, in 2012, we had an initiative or we had a constitutional amendment amendment the right to hunt fish and trap and in that amendment it had the right to hunt fish and trap is held in a to be a right for the people as a whole not individuals as much and that the primary method of managing wildlife in the state of idaho is hunting fishing, and trapping. So,

if you're going to manage wildlife populations, you do it with hunting, fishing, and trapping. That got approved by 75% of the people. Public hunting and fishing and trapping. Public hunting and fishing and trapping. Rather than government-sponsored shooting. Right. They want the public to do it. That was approved by 75% of the people in 2012. Now, if that isn't an endorsement of the 1938 initiative, move it forward. So what we in Idaho have is the benefit of knowing from a participation in an election what it is the really big goals are. And that makes my job easy. If you flip the card over I gave you, on the back, there is our mission statement that's in code. That's the whole thing written out there.

And it's three sentences long. Is it on the back of everybody's card? No, it's on the back of mine. That's your personal. But that's something I do so that I can, because whenever I doubt what's going on, I just flip that over and read through it again. It's like, okay, everything I need to know is right there. So in Idaho, I'm switching gears here a little bit. In Idaho, when you get an email and the subject line is steelhead

or the subject line is grizzly bears, which one are you more like, oh, no? Do you know what I mean? Because this is like you spend a lot of time on these two certainly um endangered species as a whole and um those two add in sage grouse and uh yeah that's occupied a fair amount of uh our time um i will take the steelhead one any day of the week over grizzly bear because you have a lot of personal well i have some of that and we have more biologic we have it's less uh value laden relative to managing fish okay you know a wild steelhead is a phenomenal creature i mean they are there's nothing like them. On the end of a fly rod and any kind of tackle, they're just awesome. Yeah, they've been cruising around on the ocean.

Now they're here up in the mountains. And a hatchery steelhead isn't far below that. But certainly to have that creature in your hand. But they're still generally not thought of as individuals. They're thought of as a population as a run as a school you know that type that's a good point man they're like they're part of a right and and consequently the emotional attachment to them doesn't go to the individual level with megafauna with big animals you know bears bears wolves uh cougars uh you name it uh deer and elk

um large much lesser degree than the other ones you named right well i guess you're doing it in order yeah you're ordering them out we call them charismatic megafauna you know big charismatic critters and and they come with a whole different set of values where people try to humanize those animals and their behavior and consequently having a discussion about biology with folks who have that becomes way more difficult can you sketch out um and go back as far as you want you can go all the way back to 1974, whatever the hell it was, or you can go back the last two or three years, but sketch out where Idaho sits and where things stand right now and do the grizzly one.

And you can personalize it. You can editorialize it however you want to do it, but just tell a little narrative. We should be celebrating the recovery of grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. We should be ready to celebrate the delisting of grizzly bears here in the northern Rockies, in the northern continental divide, just north of where we're at here in Missoula right now. But I know in the tri-state area there, we have an excellent grizzly bear population

that's properly managed. We've got exceeded the management goals. We've answered every scientific question in a legal arena and to still have those bears on the list because of legal issues judicial issues to me undermines the whole benefit of the endangeredangered Species Act. The agency that's in charge of, like the agency that oversees the population right now, they're saying it should be delisted. Correct.

Fish and Wildlife Service themselves believes it should be delisted. They're the ones who delisted it. They've been told to relist them until such time as they answer these legal questions. Now, we will get them delisted, okay? Whether it was last year, whether it's next year or three years out, because the population is secure.

Nothing about answering these legal questions. But this isn't about whether the population is secure or not. It is about the fact that folks do not believe that the management tool of choice, again, going back to our constitutional amendment, is hunting. So when we have more bears or problem bears, our choice is to have a hunter go out

and take care of that versus having our staff go out and trap the bear and get rid of it. Now, we're going to have to do a combination, but I would much prefer to use a hunter who buys a license and a tag to go out on his own time to take that animal and keep the population and check for the social needs of the communities around there than send one of my staff out there to trap the bear and then euthanize it unceremoniously. I believe that we have a lot more respect for that wildlife we interact with

in that manner than we do with wildlife that we just euthanize in a manner to kind of take care of that nuisance. Do you right now feel as though do you feel as though the fight around grizzly bear delisting will wind up being worse than what happened around wolves or do you feel like it'll follow that same pattern of you had like some stops and starts you had some lawsuits but eventually wound up at least in idaho montana wyoming you wound up with delisted wolves and regulated hunting um or do you think this is fundamentally different and will play out in a different way in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, you wound up with delisted wolves and regulated hunting. Or do you think this is fundamentally different and will play out in a different way? It's, I think it's fundamentally the same. And I do think it'll play out in a similar manner, but the anti-hunting aspects of it is even larger.

You think so? With grizzly bears than it is with wolves although it's very large with with wolves uh it's um it's a very strong uh community of people out there who believe in their values yeah and uh at the same time it's it's part of where the frustration is because delisted wildlife normal wildlife are under the sovereign trust responsibilities of each individual state, there are a lot of people that don't believe they're being heard and their needs are being addressed by our commission. And I can tell you they're being heard.

What needs do you mean? What groups of people? I'll give you they're being hurt. What needs do you mean? What groups of people? Give you an example. One of the things that we were told they wanted was a buffer around Yellowstone Park. So we wouldn't have a celebrity bear going outside of the boundary and getting shot and then running back into the park. And so I get that. As though the park's not big enough already it needs to become bigger and so the park we and but they're saying well you ignored us when we ask for that no we didn't

ignore it we took it into serious consideration and looked at it and said it was unmanageable to do because grizzly bears can roam as much as 16 to 25 miles outside of the park. And a wounded animal could go right back in, whether it is a hundred yards from the border, at the border, or five miles out, you know, and it just wasn't a tenable thing for us to address relative to that. But they were heard. It was discussed, but the decision didn't go the way they wanted it. So they want to federalize management of these species. And under the Endangered Species Act, that's the Fish and Wildlife Service or it's National Marine Fisheries Service for fish and pinnipeds for seals and sea lions. And they want to federalize as many species as possible so the state doesn't have the final say.

And I believe at core, that's a lot of what's going on here. When the delisting happened in Bearsburg, what now has proven to be temporarily delisted, you had three states that were looking at assuming management. You had Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. And you wound up having like three, what appeared to me to be three very different responses to this in the hunting question. Where Montana was fixing to sort of sit out the hunting season.

And I felt that that was kind of a lame move. This is just me personally talking. I'm not speaking for Virgil in the Idaho fishing game or anyone, just personally. I thought it was kind of a lame move this is just me personally talking i'm not i'm just not virgil i'm not speaking for virgil in the idaho fishing game or anyone just personally i thought it was kind of a lame move because they were sort of be like i don't want the black eye i don't want to be caught in the controversy i'm gonna see how it plays out with idaho and wyoming now wyoming has kind of hosts more of that little subset of the population of bears they host more than anyone else they were pretty aggressive they were talking about 20 like you know harvesting 24 killing 24 grizzly bears idaho in a curious way came in where they were going to issue a tag that's symbolic right it's symbolic but that was

our allocation so the tri-state plan that we all three have agreed to allocates the available mortality to the states based on the size of the geography. Idaho only has 16% of that grizzly bear range. And so we get a smaller portion of that available mortality to utilize. So it wasn't just a symbolic gesture. No, no, no. It wasn't like we want to do it but we don't really want to do it so we'll do one our allocation was like 1.4 or 1.5 bears okay and you wanted to come in on yeah had a i would have liked to borrowed a half a bear from montana or

wyoming so that i could get to montana's allocation was have been? It was like seven or eight, I think. Was it? It may have been in the teens. I don't remember. But it's intermediate to Wyoming being the largest, Montana the next, and Idaho the smallest. How much do you talk to those guys? A lot. Oh, yeah.

Do you guys get in fights? No. We really don't. I will tell you that the tri-state working relations between Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are top-notch. We formed that during the wolf delisting things, and we continually have constant and routine interactions. But the other thing you have to understand is with states is we don't all manage exactly the same to get the same output the way i structure our hunting seasons under the the ability may be different than the way wyoming or montana does it but it's still under the same state sovereignty

trying to provide for the needs of the people that they have. And as long as it is above the bounds of conservation, there's really nothing wrong with that. It's the way Utah does trophy. There's nothing wrong with what Utah is doing with their trophy mule deer management. That's what they chose to do. There's nothing wrong with Idaho doing our management as opportunity. That's what we chose to do. The differences are actually great to have because each state is an experiment in wildlife

management above that conservation threshold that we can learn from each other. Well, imagine you have to share information all the time. We share information all the time. We have a group we call the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. And that group, we come together twice a year and interact with each other a lot. We'll have a meeting coming up in early January, and that's where I'll meet with Montana and Wyoming again to discuss grizzly bear issues and how to move forward. Were you guys on the grizzly bear thing, did you issue the tag?

We did issue the tag. Did you keep the person anonymous uh yes we well the name is available but any other information about them is not by state law uh that then they had to call them up and i guess he so the commission took action at the last commission meeting to rain check that um opportunity to that individual for next year. Okay. Because it was suspended by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Once they were relisted, they can't have directed sport mortality under ESA. Does Idaho have salvage requirements for black bears?

Meat salvage requirements? Not meat. The commission changed the meat retrieval portion of that one decade or so ago is that right yeah and so i'm guessing they weren't going to do a meat salvage requirement on grizzly bears no that is not part of the requirement and again that's some of the variation you get from among states someone told me how they were in a meeting and it was like a it was a public comment period and some hunters were saying well you know we should do a you know we're proposing this idea of a meat salvage requirement right and some of the people

who were opposing the hunt were sort of saying like uh what's the term i'm looking for when you say don't like not infantilize what does the word indulge no that's not it that's term I'm looking for? When you say don't, like not infantilize. What is the word? Indulge. No, that's not it. That's what I'm looking for. I don't know. They're saying like,

don't, you know, don't. Doggone it, man. Callahan was telling me this story and I can't remember the word they used for it. But they're kind of like, don't do this phony symbolic thing

to greenwash this. Correct. But I can't remember the word that he said that was used but they were sort of like rather than them rather than the the opposition figures saying like yes i oppose the hunt but if there is going to be one i agree that there should be a meat salvage requirement they wanted to make sure it looked as bad as possible agreed i don't know because that's going to confuse things too much i'd rather there wasn't because it's easier for us to bash it right you know certainly one of

the things that we know as wildlife managers uh for you and as hunters on your behalf is that support for hunting that is for traditional consumptive purposes in the united states is very high a recent survey that i saw presented that was uh presented this last spring showed that over 70 of the american public is supportive of traditional regulated hunting activities where consumption is part of it yeah depending then on and that's been pretty stable we don't have to win support as hunters we just have to keep it part of what you're talking about steve is how do we regulate our own behavior so we maintain that support for that traditional hunting-based activity that we so value. I believe that the use of a red squirrel where you described the meal you got off of it is in keeping with that traditional activity that we know gives us a lot of support, whether people hunt or not we do know from other surveys that when you label this trophy hunting when all you're out there for is the trophy without the consumptive very

confusing term it is a very conserving but support from the public surveyed across the united states United States drops into the mid-20s. And so the anti-hunters are trying to portray grizzly bear hunting as a trophy activity, not a population management activity, not anything else. And successfully then they turn the tables. We have to, as hunters, take a look at how we interact with the wildlife that we take, the almost spiritual aspect of both taking that life as well as the consumption, whether it's the use of the fur or the meat or the bone in whatever manner. We've got to take and keep that front and center as we propose changes in hunting seasons and how we interact with our wildlife and fish for that matter so just to wrap up on grizzlies if you look at a crystal ball

and be dead honest okay don't tell me what you want to happen be dead honest where is it going to wind up they'll be delisted it'll take another year or two to work through the legal system. We'll persist on that simply because the population itself is so strong. I mean, all the habitat's occupied. It's actually plateaued out. And as long as we're able to delist it based on that distinct population segment that it was listed under for that Yellowstone ecosystem. The same will be true for the Northern Continental Divide that takes in Glacier National Park. That will get delisted at some point as well. Other populations that we've got, like in the Selkirks,

these little populations that are reliant on Canada, we don't believe we'll ever achieve the populations that are called for in the recovery plans because they're so small and isolated it's hard to picture it's hard to pick the northern cascades which might might or might not have one in it like at this very second right a good example of that and so uh but you think that the the greater yellowstone in the northern continental divide where you have like maybe 800 maybe a thousand the other one yeah i mean um i don't know what's in the northern continental divide but i think the fashionable gas is around a thousand and so the answer is yeah yeah there's uh nothing to be gained by not delisting them and there's a lot to be gained by doing that it's a success of ESA.

All the financial and human resources going into the ESA process go away, and we can put our efforts on something else that's more important and get on with it. And that's been my complaint about how ESA has been used, is it's being used to achieve other needs. It's just like this lawsuit over our steelhead permit. They're not suing us for conservation purposes on steelhead. They're suing us to get other things that they haven't,

don't feel they've been heard on. And that's a misuse of the Endangered Species Act. That's the thing that saddens me about seeing how the Endangered Species Act is used. It's oftentimes in these big public battles becomes about something very different than what it's supposed to be talking about. Like the conversations we're having around grizzlies right now, we're not having a conversation about whether the populations were covered. It's just that I know what I want. People can look at's just that like i know what i want you know that people can look at say i know what i want um i'm not really interested in the main question that governs that like population stability but i'm going to use components of

the esa as a tool to get what i want correct and what i want is i damn sure don't want some redneck shooting a grizzly bear. Certainly. It's like their perspective on it. That's, I understand that. And we've seen that social angst over large predatory wildlife goes down tremendously when they have a ticket in their pocket, a permit to kill that because the control shifted from the Fish and Wildlife Service to the hunter himself or herself, as the case may be. We saw it with wolves. Oh, my gosh.

The angst over wolves and the predation they were having on both livestock as well as wildlife was huge. The number of letters we got from sportsmen was unbelievable. As soon as we opened a season and people could buy a permit, that went way down. And wolves went back extinct again, right? Yeah, right. No. No, not even close. I mean, we dropped their numbers by a few hundred.

We're cropping them off. But it changed behavior a lot, though. It did change their behavior, but we have reduced livestock depredations. That's what I mean. And we've shifted their behavior around. They now understand what humans are and tend to stay away. We still have hotspot problems with wolf predation, but most of it's on our ungulates, on our deer and elk.

It's not as much on livestock. We've really used hunting as well as directed kill by our agency and its staff and U.S. Wildlife Services to reduce that tremendously. And we're making some inroads on elk management as well. We're killing enough of them that elk populations have jumped back up in some areas. Because the panhandle got devastated. It did, and it still has some holes. I mean, we've got 27 elk zones in the state.

And of that, seven of them aren't meeting objectives. Five of those are almost certainly the result of predation. Two of them, a combination of that and other factors. So we've changed that. Originally, we were at, I think, 11 zones weren't meeting objectives. And so we've pushed that back down to a lower number. And those are mostly backcountry units. We can't, we're not getting enough hunters in there. We don't have livestock in there, so we don't have wildlife services in there directly killing animals at our request.

We're trying that in the Lolo zone, just over the hill here, where we sent wildlife services in there as an experiment to kill wolves, to try to reduce their numbers to a point we can see elk populations come back up. where we sent wildlife services in there as an experiment to kill wolves, to try to reduce their numbers to a point we can see elk populations come back up. So you can use wildlife services like that. It doesn't have to be ag. It doesn't have to be agriculture.

No, no. We use them. In fact, I prefer to use them. They're cheaper and better at it than our staff are because they've got the right equipment and training to get in and get that taken care of to handle that. And we have found that we can remove enough wolves to get a response, but it's a garden weeding operation. I mean, they're very productive. They come back,

so you got to go back in there. And what we need is to get enough hunters and trappers in there once we get the numbers down to keep the numbers down so we don't have to keep paying a third entity or our own staff to go in there and do that and whether we can get there in a place like the lolo or the middle fork of the salmon or the cellway and some of these really thick backcountry panhandle units is yet to be seen. We're working with the trappers in the state to try to enhance their ability to get in there by changing some season structures, bag limits, trap check limits, and stuff like that. We're working very closely to adjust those to try to get to a better place with being able to use sport trapping as a means of control as well. And I'm pretty excited about that.

But we've only been at this now for, I guess, eight, nine years. And we've only been out from underneath the umbrella of the Fish and Wildlife Service. We had a five-year probationary period where we couldn't do a lot of things. So we've really only been at this about three years with trying some new stuff. And you're going to see us continue to do that. What do you think will end up happening in the Northern Great Lakes? I know this is like, we're getting like way outside of your purview, but do you think that there's light at the end of the tunnel? There is a bill in Congress to delist wolves nationwide across the board.

They're just done. Whether that stands a chance of getting through in this. I think it's a little too elastic. Yeah, all I know is in that particular area, that's probably their best chance for delisting because of the way the judicial order is is on them up there it's a little different um but it's it's going to be there out they don't have a population problem there it's it's it's again they're tied up in this legal mess that they they can't get out and there it's around the question of distinct population segments i don't want to get us terribly into the weeds,

but there it winds up being again, it's like nitpicking little legal things. They're not arguing about the main question. The main question being like, are there enough wolves? There's plenty of wolves within that geography. There's no benefit being derived of ESA. That's where I think the question – it's the nuances of the Endangered Species Act and somebody arguing over the definition of a distinct population segment or some other aspect of ESA that many attorneys are very good at arguing in a court of law. And it's not relevant.

It's a great benefit to their pocket. Probably, yeah, given the way they're reimbursed. There's a number of scholarly articles on the reimbursement of the legal people that are taking these suits. It's a cottage industry. I can imagine being an ESA lawyer. But at the same time, it is their right to take those legal actions. That's just the way it is.

Until Congress decides to change something on that, it's what we have to deal with. I don't want to be mistaken for someone who wants to blow the whole system up. I just want it to all end the way I want it to end. I'm not adversarial to the process.

I'm like a sports fan, process. I just always root. I'm like a sports fan, right? You appreciate the rules, but you're just rooting for your own team. So I just like to see it end up in a way that I want it to end up. But I want to jump into another one. Until the other day when someone, they

officially verify that a mountain caribou came down to Montana, right? I missed that. I'm still back with the grizzly that was uh on the golf course in stevensville if you heard about that too yeah yeah i think you're right i think you're right i think they verified it i think some guys had found this is up in the yak yeah they'd found some flirting with the board and i think they might have it might be lured them over it might be verified that one step foot into Montana, which would be the first time since the 20s or something.

But Idaho had the, except for that, and I don't know enough about that to know how freakish that is if it's one that just packed up and strayed 100 miles. But Idaho has been the state in the lower 48. Idaho's been the state where we have had over the last decades we've had some number of caribou flirting with the border and if you we're going to have a caribou in the u.s it was presumably i mean it was going to be one in idaho and that population is suffering do you see what's your take on it? Is this like a big meaningful thing or does it

wind up being that it was such kind of a little bit of a fluke and you can't read too much into it that they're now not there? Like give me the mile high perspective on it. From my standpoint, this was almost preordained given the limitations of the habitat, given the small, low productivity of the herd, and the fact that it was reliant predominantly on Canada with a few animals coming in. The critical mass we needed of 30 to 60 animals, we achieved, I think, the mid-30s a number of years ago, and then we've been on a downhill slide since.

So having a population of three or four, you're not... In fact, Canada's going to come in and take those animals and remove them. That's what I'm saying. To put them in protective custody to try to preserve the genetics and use those animals to breed some more in captive rearing,

and then reintroduce them at some other point to bolster the remaining population. Part of the problem was predation. With the establishment of wolves in that area, in addition to the already existing cougar population that was there, it tipped them over. It was that combination of factors. And at one point, we had actually given permission to Canada to hire people to come in and kill wolves in northern Idaho. And they did that.

But that wasn't enough because it's not just wolves. It was a combination of wolves and probably black bears on the young ones as well as cougar in there. And because their habitat is so small, it was easy for the predators to pick on them there. And so this was preordained. From my standpoint, Steve, it's also an appropriate action. One of the things- Which action is appropriate? Just basically saying we're done.

We can't do anymore. We're going to triage this out. And this is a situation where we did not know how to overcome the limitations to that population. We took those animals and put them into a captive rearing situation. Maybe we'll figure it out, but we've decided that the use of resources for those few animals that were declining near extinction was not a good use of resources. Let's go into the captive rearing game. Let's try to see if we can understand this in the future as we work more, get better at managing other factors, habitat, predation, what have you. And then we can put the resources to managing something we know

how to fix yeah for some other species and that that idea of conservation triage uh under esa is controversial as the dickens there's folks like myself that think it's the way you go we do it medically you'd punt on something there are yeah some of them you just say i don't know what to do and no amount of money poured on it is going to make any difference because we don't know what to do. Because what would a reasonable number of population be in that? I can't tell you what the recovery plan was. I think for the Idaho portion, it was just around 100 animals. You're flirting around a dozen seven to a dozen right and then it just it went down to

single digits and you know and it was a time where they were either going to go away on their own or we take the few and you couldn't and you didn't see a way to buy your way out of it no not with there wasn't any way and to do it uh effectively and so the canadians chose to offer this opportunity and boom, they're out. So that's that idea that there are, did we give up on them? Not totally. But we recognized there was nothing more to be done right at this moment in time with that species. We damn near got there with sockeye salmon. I mean, I was on the original sockeye recovery team when we got down to

one male, Lonesome Larry, came back one year. We had four fish come back the next year. We had zero another year and then seven. I mean, that was a four-year span and that's a complete generation. One, zero, four, and seven. Right. For the returning population of sockeye. Of sockeye salmon coming back to Redfish Lake in Idaho. Okay. We took all of those fish out of their natural habitat, put them in a hatchery in Eagle, Idaho, and expanded their genetics such that we did not go into what's called inbreeding depression. We used every trick in the book,

and there were some really amazing tricks that our staff used. Now we're stocking millions of fish in there to try to build that population back up while we expand the population. Millions of fish that came from those? Yes. I can't do any simple math, but the dozen or so, whatever it was. Yeah, from those 13 fish that we had.

Did I add right? That's four, five, Yeah, from those 13 fish that we had. Did I add right? That's four, five, seven, yeah, 12 fish that we had to work with. We now have a full-blown hatchery operating that we built with BPA mitigation money. And it was expensive. But we didn't waste our time trying to produce them on site because the numbers were too small. And numerically, we couldn't get over the hurdle. Well, fish are different, man, because you can't go pull 100 eggs out of a caribou. That's true.

You know? Nope. We can get 4,000 eggs out of a sockeye. And consequently, it is a different game from that standpoint. But my point being is we have to make some of these hard decisions at some point in time not to spend money certain ways or human resources as the case may be and move forward.

That's conservation triage where we make those decisions versus everything's important. We got to pour all the resources into it, but there's not enough to take care of it. When you, you've been at this game a long time in this business, right? Yeah.

And now you're in kind of a pinnacle position. When you look at like these tough decisions, do you imagine that there are some that will haunt you or that you'll have a sort of legacy as the guy who like do you think about that where do you feel like you're so sort of part of a process right and if it wasn't you would be someone else and that person would probably end up doing the same thing or do you feel like you're putting like the personal like virgil moore stamp on things that are going to affect future generations and they'll look back and be like, that was the guy that messed it all up. Or conversely, the guy that made it perfect. Well, I'll take responsibility for the screw-ups because that's the way it works.

But the successes are never a single person. They're always a group. But the successes that I've been part of that I'm most proud of are forming strong collaboratives among all of the users out there that can agree on how to move forward. And that's a challenge given the divisiveness in society today, but the closer you get people to the resource on the ground, the easier it is for them to all focus on what they love. So if we're talking about trying to manage Yellowstone cutthroat across its entire range, gosh, that's a big area across several states. But if you want to talk about managing Yellowstone cutthroat in the south fork of the snake i can bring those users together we can sit down and form up a collaborative we've done it on the clearwater we've done it in the oahis we've done it on the kootenai river we've done it

in in montana with the blackfoot initiative the ones that i'm familiar with and that is the challenge is to find the right sizing of bringing people together that care about that place that land the and the right size you mean like the sort of the geographical the geographic size that people can embrace some of them are massive like the hawaiis it's a big geography but it's it's a resource people can embrace and get their mind around as they try to come up with solutions to maintaining lifestyle and wildlife resources and plant resources down there. with conservation groups, working with other NGOs to keep a lifestyle on the ground because everybody cares about that sagebrush community down there. We see it in the Clearwater Basin. People care about that resource there and the lifestyle it has. It's hard. It takes a lot of work. That's what I'm most proud of of every collaborative that i've ever been associated

with that has been successful is because everybody came together with that common value and and it's a really satisfying things and that isn't dependent on an individual then if that person leaves yeah it has momentum of its own uh So you feel that some problems, like if you look at just like cutthroat in general, it's just too, like it has to be approached on the micro level. I think the management schemes for that level need to be. The issues associated with the south fork of the snake and maintaining the spawning tributaries there and dealing with the rainbow trout intergression

are unique to that area and require localized work. And public buy-in. Right, public buy-in. The way Wyoming is doing it is different because their geography is different. The way Yellowstone Park is doing it is different. And it's its own community up there with Yellowstone Cutthroat. Montana has a slightly different approach on it.

But it's all getting at the same thing, and it's relying on that. Now, we have a tri-state agreement on Yellowstone Cutthroat that we put in place in the 80s and said, here's the things we all agree on are going to be common definitions and common management concepts. We're going to manage for purity of cutthroat, and that purity is defined this way, you know, by what proportion of integration is there and how we use those fish and transport them around. We agreed on those basic concepts, but then we went out and built these management things on a localized basis. I'm curious about, if I can interrupt, just something you said about those collaborative efforts. I mean, if you had to pinpoint something that made them work, because I've been part of plenty of collaborations that didn't work, what would it be?

It's usually some big controversy. The one that I'm – no, I'm serious. And sometimes we're right at the middle of it. And that's where I take responsibility for being at fault. And I'll do this on behalf of my agency more than anything. But years ago in the Henry's Fork drainage,

we've got Island Park Reservoir. Island Park Reservoir gets Utah chubs in them. That ties up the biomass and our ability to grow hatchery fish in there for sport fishing. You got to back up on that one. People aren't going to know what you're talking about. Okay. I mean, some people know about this. Okay. Well, anyway, we get competition between fish species and non-game species like Utah chub, which is an exotic. We're in there eating all of the zooplankton and food and tying it up in their bodies.

Biomass, I'm sorry. I did get carried away. No, no, no, no. Just like what the Utah chub was and it was non-native. A Utah chub is a minnow. It's a great big minnow. And they got dumped in there somehow. And they got in there probably through bait buckets and what have you.

But the bottom line is we have periodically gone in there and poisoned that system with a poison called rotenone. It's an extract out of a root from South America, and it blocks the oxygen uptake at the cellular level in the brain, and they just die. Do you know, me and you, I haven't even done some South American fish poisoning. That's where we learned it from the natives down there, yeah. Yeah, I know that world. So I haven't done that. I'd like to go sometime.

I'm telling you what, man, it's fascinating. And anyway, in the process of doing the one that I, the last one of these, we drew Island Park Reservoir way down. And we do that to limit the amount of poison that has to be put in the system and then detoxed as it flows out of there. And we usually close the dam, draw it down, dump the toxin in, do all the tributaries, try to kill the chubs, close the gates on the dam and possible to save money. They drew the pool down so low it cut through the sediment that had built up in the reservoir, and all that sediment flushed into the Henry's Fork

at Harriman Ranch, the fly fishing mecca down there. And it accumulated terribly. And that covered up all the habitat. And it did. It created some problems. That created such a public outcry about the Bureau of Reclamation and Fish and Game mismanaging this reservoir and having effects on the wild trout fishery in the Henry's Fork below that the Henry's Fork Coalition formed up under guidance of the Henry Fork Foundation, as well as the local irrigators there that were upset. And they formed one of the most successful collaboratives we have today and included everybody in it. But it was an incident that created that. And if you look

around, you'll find often there was an incident or an activity or a legal action that caused something that finally brought people together because they know we got to fix this so this doesn't happen again and that's just one example of the henry's fork watershed council forming up and that was gosh 30 years ago and they had input from irrigators too yeah they're a big i don't know i want water and you boys need to figure out the fishing situation and so fast forward the dam was rebuilt a hydro project was put on it a few years later and because of that collaborative the needs of the fish and the irrigators were worked out among the collaborative and fed to the agencies so we could implement them as trust managers for them. And that's the way it should be.

Too often, we get put in a position of, why did you make that decision? Instead of implementing things that the community as a whole comes up with. I see our agency and our staff as catalysts, if at all possible, for catalyzing that kind of community interaction so we can come up with these. Certainly, ultimately, the commission may be making some of these decisions, but trying to get people to come together instead of us standing in the middle of the circle getting shot at by all sides because they're dissatisfied with what we're proposing

to try to balance everything out. We're better if we're part of the circle and everybody comes up with an idea that's implementable in consensus or as much as you can. Now that works until somebody doesn't consent. Then you get these tangents out there. But it is, by and large, working very well.

It's where the focus is right now in natural resource management of our public lands, especially in the resources on those public lands. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX x club y'all do you find areas where there's a lot of public apathy

and it surprises you by the lack of input yes i'm always amazed on certain issues that you think are just going to blow things up yeah We'll put a proposal or an idea out there. We have nothing. We'll have a public meeting or a workshop. Three people will show up. Because there's no big event. I think what we're doing right here, though, with a podcast, what we can do with social media to try to get this information out on a broader sense.

Because I'm old enough, I still like to sit down and have a cup of coffee and read my paper. But I'm realizing now that my paper is only three pages long. And if I'm going to really get any information, I'm going to have to sit down at least with my tablet and my cup of coffee and read through that. And if I've got a tablet, then I can hot link in to the next level of information if I desire. And that might lead me then to some of these other discussion groups and information from folks like yourself that are going to help us hopefully engage people in a different manner of community as we work forward with these things. Part of the reason these folks

are here the two staff are to help us with that in terms of how do we get how do we do that how do we communicate better i came up during an era where we did a magazine and we had a tv show no one does magazines that's how you kept the public right that in newspaper articles. I mean, it was all print or media driven under an analog system. We need to, and are transgressing, you know, getting into the digital stuff. I think the building we're in here right now is an example of that digital technology. Yeah, we're at the, we're at not quite the Onyx World Headquarters because it just moved next door. Oh, okay. Well, we're at their annex.

Yeah, we're at the annex. One thing I was going to throw in there um you know you mentioned apathy i've been to some of those meetings where two or three people in fact this summer i think i talked to you about this stuff the deq is doing on the upper clark fork and yeah um you know if you go down to the bar you go down to charlie b's everyone will talk about it everybody every fishing guide's got an opinion about it but i think some of that apathy is derived from the fact that no one knows who's really accountable for stuff i mean you tell the story about the reservoir getting drawn down and this massive sediment coming out um you know i i would imagine i don't know that this for a fact but that that fishing community down there was probably going, who's accountable for this?

Who's making up for this money that we're losing, et cetera, et cetera. And I think some of that apathy comes out of the fact that people figure, well, no matter what they say. There's not a clear player. Right. Yeah. I think that that's true because you hear so many of these issues, some of the ones we've touched on today, you hear people talk about them and they're very passionate about it.

But the minute they open their mouth, I'm like, you know what? You're not equipped to talk about this, bro. Just by a handful of things you just said, like you're behind, you're not caught up. Yeah. And I mean, Virgil, you articulated that, those collaborations so well. And it sounds like when those people come together, there has to be some level of compromise in those different entities? Collaborative management by its nature is give and take.

But it also builds on relationships and understanding, a core understanding that my need and value really isn't that much different. Example being the rancher who has a piece of property but relies on the public sagebrush grasses to have his lifestyle, his ranching lifestyle. I mean he's got a ranch but he needs to graze cattle right i mean he's grazing public lands right and and he values that environment because it's home he knows it as well as anybody because he's lived there for maybe three or four generations uh in his family and we can't exclude their needs and be successful example being sage grouse sage grouse need water for an important part of their brood rearing even in idaho with all the public lands we have which is 63 federal another five percent of state i mean it's huge uh almost all the water is on private land that's what was homesteaded.

And so if you put a rancher out of business because you're saying you can't graze up here because of endangered species, and they pull their whole operation into their little piece of land that has all the water, and they begin to feed there and utilize all the habitat up, the sage-grouse suffer in the long run because it's disconnected. We need the community. Now they get that. What's good for the herd is good for the bird is the catchphrase that we use now.

Yeah, like cows not condos, right? Right. And that's exactly right. We want these operational ranches out there that are part of the landscape and can be managed in conjunction with the other resources we value. They've seen it in the past. They know it can be done.

We've seen it. And so now it's just a matter of being sure we don't restrict any of our activities to the point that everybody just gives up and goes home. And that's collaboration. That's the thing I warn about all the time or think about when thinking about wildlife issues is what happens when you create, the damage that's done when you create a spotted owl. Where the spotted owl, a conversation around the spotted owl,

the spotted owl like ceased to be a bird and it became like this symbol of something and it became like a thing of animosity and it became a symbol of divisiveness. And when you allow some of these conflicts to go to fester and don't strive for some compromise and like people coming to a mutual understanding of what they need to go, you wind up having these like wildlife fatalities in terms of like what the species stands for. And it's painful to watch it happen. If you've heard the howl of a wolf, right? It's beautiful,

but it's painful to watch it happen where people like, when I hear that noise, I think about like my needs not being listened to, man. And that's the only thing I'm hearing right there. And it sucks to see that happen to, to wildlife. And I think that the way that had that off is to usually,

you know, these ways of like finding out like what you need but also giving room to other people to also live their lives and have their needs be met and it's like it's hard to do i used to not look at these issues that way when i was younger i looked at them in a very rigid way we're like i was right you were wrong and you were stupid and i was real smart and i was then do it you know and then the more you round and watch successes and failures around some of the stuff the more you round and watch successes and failures around some of the stuff the more you realize man is you're never going to get there with that

attitude that's correct i agree we never got to the question what are some like big fit what are the fish and game gripes fish game don't know what they're talking about they killed all the elk like the ones that are legitimate right uh. We want more big fish. You know, that would be putting it. There's no big fish. Simplistically. But certainly if the legitimate complaint, you ask what the legitimate complaint is. And it would be that we don't know everything about the spot you hunt. When you come to me and you say, do you know how many deer or what the buck dough ratio

is in, you know, Timber Creek of unit five? I'm going to go, no, but I can tell you what the buck dough ratio is in units three, four, and five overall from the combined survey work we've done. But no, we don't know that and it is a legitimate complaint that we have set management goals based on larger survey units and this person's complaint is you don't know what you're talking about relative to timber creek because i sat the same blind for 25 years and I always see X and this year I saw Y. And it's legitimate from the standpoint of what they see. We talked about

that earlier. And what we're trying to do now is look at different ways of censusing wildlife to understanding what's out there. Going from the traditional site-based survey work where we have to see them, count them, kill them, assess them, whatever the case may be, to something that provides a different level of that. I mean, remote cameras. It's still kind of seeing, but we can get a lot more of them out there. I mean, I just saw them bringing a truckload of remote cameras into our office that we boxed up and sent out to all the regions. I mean, hundreds of these things that we're putting out in Matrix to try to get better understanding of what's in Timber Creek, as an example, versus just the larger units based on aerial flights. We're using hair snags and scat analysis, pulling DNA out of these animals so that we can track families.

We can tell you by looking at DNA from wolf scats whether or not that represents a family unit and whether or not they were successful with getting a pair, getting a brood off. Just by getting proper sampling of pieces speed at which we can do things from when I started my career is, I can't even fathom it. I mean, DNA analysis is a good example. We have the DNA makeup of every hatchery fish we stock out. And it's amazing that we have parental-based stock analysis. You take a fish in the ocean, I can take a fin clip or a swab off of that fish. I can run an analysis and I can tell you which hatchery it came out of and which female produced it. And that, and I can do it darn near in a couple of days yeah uh i mean it would have taken you months to pull something like that off before and not with that specificity but i got a lab full of people that

are cranking this stuff out and it's going on all over the place and and we're advancing and trying to push the limit that's the science that's the science fiction almost of wildlife management as we move forward. It doesn't eliminate the hands-on stuff, the trapping of animals to put collars on them so we can go in and assess how they died, whether it was predation, natural, whatever. Get better at that. We still have a lot of that, the fun stuff, jumping out of a helicopter on a calf elk and wrestling it to the ground, catching fish in a trap and putting tags on them. That stuff's fun. Handling wildlife is really a kick.

It's what got me into this business and learning from that. But we're trying to get better at this. And, you know, drone technology and infrared technology isn't quite there yet. But, I mean, these satellite collars we put on elk now, they beam up to a satellite, back down to the computer, they're instantly on a map and we can program them to do it every five minutes, every hour, every 10 hours, depending on what we want. And we're able to use that to help landowners understand where an elk herd is relative to depredation on their haystack. And that's real-time management while we track some stuff

around. You're working toward being able to tell that guy what's going on in front of his blind. That's the legitimate complaint. We've heard it. We're working on it using technology and trying to put more resources into it. Fortunately, in Idaho, our finances are secure for the time being. We went through a low like everybody else when the economy tanked. Our revenues dropped by 25%. Real quick, why are you tied to the economy? That's a good question, Steve. We're tied to the economy because half of's good question steve we're tied to the economy because half of our licensed revenue comes from non-residents okay but they're only 10 percent

of our hunters and in the past say that again i want people to hear this half of our revenue our licensed revenue which is around 44 million dollars a of that, a little over half of it, comes from non-resident hunters. Who comprise? 10%. Now, we have a lot of non-resident fishermen, but they don't generate nearly the same money because they're buying one-day products. It's a high-volume, low-cost product. So when the economy goes south,

people are like, I can't go to Idaho hunting this year. We did not realize how sensitive it was we'd never seen it before but when the economy tanked in 2009 we have a quota on non-resident hunting permits in idaho it's uh 13,500 elk tags 15,500 deer tags. When those are gone for general hunting, they're gone. We've never sold, we've never not sold those out up until 2009. No kidding. No kidding.

We always sold them out. So half of our revenue was guaranteed. And that year they didn't go. And we did three things. We raised the price of non-resident fees. so we didn't have to raise them on resident. Our elk herds tanked because of predation and other habitat-related issues. And the economy tanked. All three of those things combined over a four-year period to drive our revenues down by $9 million.

It was huge. it was huge it was huge and what we found is oh non-residents are elastic and they're coming here and further analysis showed that was partially the perception that our elk herds had collapsed and it wasn't worth it the other part was a big portion of those people who stayed away were skilled trades folks. Construction. Construction got hit hardest. And those guys were selling their trucks to feed the family. They were not working because the housing market collapsed.

And as soon as the economy started coming up, about a year behind that, and then – People got over the price increase and started hunting again. And we discounted non-resident products. We marketed to them. But the last two years, we've sold all of our non-resident product out again. Does the state keep track? I mean, I'm sure they do. and Outfitters Association just put out a report that said the outdoor recreation industry in Montana brings in like 7.1 billion annually we have those numbers for hunting and fishing in

Idaho I believe the direct economic benefit is 1.4 billion. Okay. Idaho has an economy of about 66 billion. So that gives you some sense of where it fits. It's a pretty sizable number. And then wildlife viewing adds about another 600 million to that. So we're about a $2 billion economic activity in the state on a wildlife-based economic activity. All outdoor-based recreation is, I think, it's $6 billion. Okay, it's at that $6 billion figure. So, you know, just under 10% of the economy of the state is outdoor-based,

and a third of that is based on wildlife. So it's, yeah, it's important, and we can of that is based on wildlife so it's yeah it's important and we can drill that down we've done the surveys if you want to know how much people what the economic benefits are somebody fishing um uh henry's lake i can go to the file and pull that information up and tell you how many fish they caught how much money they spent how much money spent on groceries and housing we've got that information from surveys and we can give it to county commissioners. We can give it to local working group, and it's big. It's big.

So tell me a classification of gripe that you feel is illegitimate. Like what's the thing you guys in your business, people are like, oh, fishing game, and you're like, man man that just isn't fair there's probably two one is you never listen okay you never listen to us you never do what i want done and and i get it but it's not a legitimate complaint given the amount of public input that our agency seeks. The requirements for public input of a state agency are minimal. I mean, it's like one public meeting before the commission makes a decision. Gosh, we have dozens if not hundreds of public meetings over a year in advance of regulation setting opportunities for input electronically and other ways.

So I don't consider those to be legitimate complaints because there's so many opportunities. What that might mean is I told them my opinion and it wasn't reflected in what ultimately happened. So the other one is you don't know what you're talking about. In other words, we'll do a survey, whether it's a social survey that asks for, Steve, you get a survey from us and it says, are you satisfied with deer hunting?

Would you be satisfied with fewer large bucks, but more hunting opportunity. A bunch of social science questions that we work with the university to design. And they go back and they go, we don't believe any of this. It doesn't conform with my opinion, so we don't believe it. And we see the same thing from deer and elk population surveys. They go, because they didn't see it, we don't believe that. You do not know what you're talking about.

That is not a legitimate complaint. We are a science-based organization, whether it's social science, whether it's biological science. I'll stand on our science, and I can tell you, having been in a leadership role in a state agency for over a decade and working nationally among my peers and other state agencies, I can tell you that in the Intermountain West, we have some of the finest fish and wildlife scientists in the world. And in Idaho, we know more about predation management and ungulate management than just about anybody in the world i mean we're we're on top of the game and and i'm proud of that now do we have things we don't know absolutely do we have more to learn and more to do

absolutely but don't say we don't know what we're doing just understand we don't know what we're doing. Just understand we don't know everything, and we're still trying to get that. So that would be what I would consider. The other thing that really bothers me that I consider is when people personalize their interaction with department staff. I don't like Steve. Steve didn't approach me properly. That very well could be. And every complaint I get of a negative interaction with staff is fully investigated and responded to. And so I end up knowing that most of these are not legitimate. In fact, it's very seldom that I find one in the time that I've spent investigating these over the last 20 years that you find a complaint.

It's usually because the individual didn't get the outcome, whether it was he got a citation or he got information he didn't want or whatever the case may be. And ultimately, when you go back through and find the facts, it's not there. And that doesn't mean that the person didn't feel that way, but that didn't actually happen that way. That's one of the advantages of tape recorders and video cams. It pretty much takes care of. I've actually seen people look at those and go oh i had no idea i did that you know they don't remember that part of it you know that's it's uh

we have selective memory as humans and it's just the way it happens sometimes has there been um what did we miss were you saying anything you were dying to get into that we didn't get in well i i will say one of the other things that i think is important and important to all of you guys around the table is public access. Certainly in a public land state, we tend to think of and take our public access. But we also have a huge amount of private land. And in Idaho, we had an out-of-state person from Texas come in and buy up, gosh, 100,000 plus acres of timberland and immediately fenced and closed it all to public access where the corporate timber company had allowed public access on it before. huge eye-opener to sportsmen and us to suddenly have lost a big chunk of a hunting unit that was very important to folks. And it caused us to really start thinking about how do we enhance our ability to protect these large corporate lands from being closed so that the public can

continue to enjoy the wildlife that they own that we manage for them on those private lands as well so two years ago the legislature uh gave us some additional funds with a fee increase we asked for uh part of it went to pay for depredation damage the fee increase meaning the license increase license fee increase yeah it's like what you're doing with that money what we're doing and a part of it was to enhance what we call Access Yes. It's a program we've had for a lot of years, but it was bubbling along with $300,000 to $400,000. Most of it coming in from our lottery, big game tag, Super Hunt. People would buy those chances, and that was funding our Access Yes program.

Now you pay money on every license sold whether it's hunting fishing it's a five dollar fee a portion of that five dollars about half of it goes into the access account and now we're we've added about 1.4 million uh to that account uh so effectively tripling uh what we've got available for access, yes. And that money goes toward making private lands, be they corporate or just private deeded properties, giving public access to that. Right, either to that land to hunt and fish

or through that land to get to public lands. Either way, we can do it either way. We've had real success for upland bird hunting and stuff like that around the Boise area and some of the southern part of the state. We've not had a lot of success in the large corporate lands in the center and northern part of the state. We also had a threat to state lands. Our state lands are about 4 million or about 2.4 million acres. And they were under threat of lease for exclusive use. We had some people saying, I want to lease this state section that's next to my private land for exclusive use for hunting and fishing. So far, we've been able to sidestep that, but state law requires the Department of lands to generate maximum revenue for schools

yeah for the school trust fund there's some guys willing to pay more than what the public system can pay we don't have any choice so we just signed an agreement with department of lands approved by the land board and our commission that we use a portion of that access yes money we're paying departmental lands for all access to their lands um every bit of it for hunting fishing and wildlife-based recreation so we've preserved the opportunity now and diminished the likelihood of an adverse exclusive use agreement on those lands. That's going to cost us about $300,000 a year. Do you feel all in all you guys are right now every year adding to accessible acreage? Do you think you're at a net loss when all things are considered?

I hope to announce shortly that we have an agreement on private timber land that will secure access to another million acres of land in the next couple of weeks. And with that agreement, we will have a net gain. That's good so we're using that additional money and we went out for uh proposals uh for what we call large corporate land holders what would you propose to us for a fee that we could pay you to gain access for hunting and fishing to your large corporate lands. We have those proposals. We're evaluating those proposals. We're very close to agreeing to some of those proposals at this point in time that will add in excess of a million acres. Congratulations.

Yeah, I'm really proud of that and the staff work that went into it. My hat's off to our legislature for allowing that increase to be dedicated to that purpose as well. But it's a biggie. And I see that as giving us the annual financial resources needed to secure this into the future. So I just wanted to get that in there, Steve, that of all the things we hear from sportsmen, even in a public state, is access. They want more access. Or I lost my access, like you said.

Somebody shut it down. A private entity bought that 40 acres or 120 or 360 or whatever it is, and it's now posted uh it's it's important that we're actually meeting here at the onyx place because this idea of where are you at and trespass is very important and private landowners are very sensitive to trespass but how do you know there's some posting requirements but it's still in a big open state like this where you wander up one side of the mountain down the other and you come in on the backside and you walk up to a fence that's next to the road and it's posted and you didn't see anything when you came down the other side. Where is it your responsibility to know where you're at versus the landowner's responsibility to post? And we're moving – I'd say you have a high responsibility to know.

I agree. In Idaho, there is some posting responsibilities of the private landowner on non-agricultural land, basically timber and rangeland. But I think we're very quickly moving to the point where you've got to know where you're at all the time. It's your much easier now. It is, but again, does everybody carry, you know, a smartphone or a GPS around with them? No. Most of us do that are avid, but not everybody else does. And so part of it is getting the mapping, getting the information out there. And again, the technology to do that. And certainly talking about it, letting people know that in Idaho, you can go on our website and we have a hunt planner. You say, I want to go hunt white-tailed deer and I want to hunt it in Timber Creek. And I use my example again.

It'll pull up the maps and show you. It is an excellent spot. Is that as good as Dry Creek? Yeah, right. That's better. And it'll tell you the land ownership. It'll tell you the regulations. It'll tell you everything about that piece of land, tell you the land ownership it'll tell you the regulations it'll tell you

everything about that piece of land however you want to scale it to look at what you can do in that area and couple that with these machines and and uh some other third-party software so you know where you're at all the time yeah you're good to go and and i've still got i would have to say dozens that's probably hundreds of quad maps that are folded up and in the under the seat of my under the seat of my truck and i pull those things out and jam them in my backpack i still carry a real compass with me because these things aren't reliable the batteries go dead you don't have Oh, I forgot to download that so it was on resident. I still value paper maps. I think they still have a role.

I agree. And I think it's something that we as mentors to hunters should be teaching them. want to say about Idaho being the opportunity state and the need for us as hunters and anglers to mentor people in, to teach them the ethics and the responsible interaction with wildlife, the respect for that wildlife, live or dead, that needs to be there as we utilize it, consume it, enjoy it, revel in the experiences around the campfire, which we all do. Those are important. I'm proud to say that in Idaho, we have a thing called the passport. If you're a hunter and you know somebody that's never hunted,

and it doesn't make any difference whether they're a kid or an adult. Somebody moves into town and sees that you're a hunter, I would really like to go up, but they don't have hunter ed or anything else. You can go down to the license vendor, and as a hunter, you can sponsor that person and get a passport. That is, what's the cost of it? $3.75? $1.75. Then you can, if you want to take them deer hunting, you buy a deer tag to go with it.

You go out and shoot birds. They're good for how long? That year. And then that person has to get it together and go take it on their safety. It's a one-time opportunity to mentor somebody, but it's great. It gets this obstacle of gosh i'd really like to go with you but i don't have for sure okay i can get that for you you're ready to go

we came up again we came up against that over thanksgiving weekend because um we were all kind of half doing thanksgiving family stuff we're all kind of half hunting and we ran out of deer tags we started looking at people who didn't have a tag and be like we gotta get this person licensed up and this is a way you can do it if you had a newbie that had never hunted before just take them down and get it and they've got to be accompanied by a licensed hunter yeah but it's neat and you can take kids as young as eight that haven't had a chance to do hunter ed if you're a parent or a guardian or whatever. Is that where it is in Idaho?

A kid can hunt deer or whatever at eight years of age? They can hunt small game and birds. They can't hunt deer until they're 10. Okay, good. Which is the break off. That's what I thought. Yeah. Yanni, I know you just broke your silence, but what else is on your mind, man?

Kind of on the opportunity theme, Idaho does trophy species where you can only apply for one of the – there's three, right? You guys do goat, sheep, and moose. Were you around when that was first placed, that system? And then just what are your general thoughts on it? Because we really like it i mean i i like the way that it's set up that you guys don't do the bonus points and the preference points and all that to deal with that big mess um and then they put the once in lifetime back in the once in a lifetime that's correct we no longer call them trophy species

they're once in a lifetime species again getting at that perception meaning you can really never draw it again not not for a once in a lifetime so example of that and the answer is yeah i was around and our commission has the authority to do bonus points they they look at it about every five to six years it comes back up uh and every time we provide them the the information about what it means they always have backed away from it in idaho but you make a lot of money doing bonus points right from a financial standpoint i will tell you the last time this came up about seven years ago when we were tanking financially, it was looking pretty darn good to me as a director trying to figure out how to keep from getting deeper into the hole. But it is a pyramid scheme from a sportsman standpoint. I'll be honest with you.

Depending on which method you use, there's so many different ways to do it. getting the opportunity to use your points if it goes up sequentially every year because more people are getting into it you've created a pyramid scheme that those who get in first or near the bottom are okay but those who come into the bottom may have four five six years before they even get to that point and depending on how many jam into it, it may not get there for some species. And that's what we looked at is for very hard to draw species, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, you may not get there even with bonus points. Oh, yeah. You know how many bonus points I'm going into the Montana bighorn sheep draw this year?

Because they square them here. Not enough? No, I'm going in with 324 points right and so lifetimes were the bonus points that i still run into sub one percent chance to draw on the tag and that's what you get into is the squaring thing the other methods of trying to make sure everybody in there eventually gets one um but the commission has chosen our commission, and this has gone back as far as 25 years ago when it first came up. I remember I was a fisheries guy at the time when I heard the first discussion, and we've continued to give that presentation over the years to new commissions as they come on.

And that presentation is, by the way, online on our website. Oh, really? So if you ever want will look at it it has some gaming stuff in there that helps you understand how the various techniques work and what the end result is it does work okay for moderate level uh controlled hunts ones that have under 20 to 1 odds and if it's less than 5 to 1 odds, you don't need it anyway. You're going to get one in a couple of years without that. But in that intermediate range, it works really good to guarantee if you'll stay in there for three to five years, you'll get a tag.

On the higher than 20 to 1, it falls apart. And that's part of the problem is where do you use it and how do you apply it relative to that? So our commission has just chosen to stay away from it. But there's no guarantee it'll stay like that. No, none whatsoever. That could change. Overall, are the constituents happy? It's a split.

We have what I would consider a mobile group of hunters that moves around multiple states and hunts. We have a lot of our majority of our hunters just hunt in Idaho. The folks who move around to other states like points because they can pile them up in all the different states. And they spend a lot of money accumulating that, buying tags and what have you, so they can accumulate that. They seem to like that because they've covered their board. The residents don't necessarily. They're more place-oriented with the way they do things, and they just want to know that they've got an equal chance with everybody else

and that their kid or grandkid has that equal chance like everybody else. So, yeah, and then back to the once in a lifetime. I just killed a moose last year, a nice bull, on the south fork of the snake. You drew a tag? I drew a tag after seven years. No, it took me seven years. No, you got it because you're the retirement gift. Yeah, right.

It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. So seven years in you drew one i drew one killed a nice bull last year i'm done now i can put in for a cow tag if we've got a population that is growing too fast and we want to take some cows out that's not limited uh but you're done on moose i'm done on moose in idaho yeah we just had a friend who drew she must be what prior 30s right yeah i'd say early and to be done you're just done yeah so bighorn sheep we have two species so you can get one for each the desert bighorn and the rocky mountain to bighorn so you can have two opportunities there but mountain goat one and you're done. You know what's pretty terrible?

In this state, they made it that you can buy bonus points now whether you're in the draw or not. So even though my kids aren't old enough to actually hunt, I got them all numbers. They can start buying. They can take their allowance or their dad

can just do it for them and buy them bonus points. So when they're like like 20 my little kid could have 17 bonus points that's horrible i'm taking advantage of it because it's there it's but it's horrible i felt guilty doing it it's what just eventually gains the system and blows it up oh yeah is because of that they shouldn't let they shouldn't let people like me do stuff like that. You know you're part of the problem. You're going to go ahead and do it anyway. Yeah.

In this state, they assign... So when you get an ALS, there's a customer number. And your customer number is your birthday. And then the number after it is how many people with your birthday have it. So meaning when the ALS system came in, my ALS number is number three, meaning I was the third guy with my birthday

to get to apply for a number. Now they're assigning numbers that are up in the hundreds, right? But when my little kids who are three, five, and eight, I went down to get them ALS numbers and they're all number one. Like no one with those, I know I'm ahead of the game because no one with that birthday has gone and done it yet. So they're all number one like no one with those so i know i'm ahead of the game because no one with that birthday has gone and done it yet right so they're gonna kill it i just can't

decide how far i'm gonna run with this because i do feel guilty about it and i almost might even not do it i can't decide well you'll get like me at some stage you'll have to do that with your grandchildren so as it goes it's gonna's going to get expensive. Yeah, right. There's a multiplication. One other follow-up question. When the economy tanked and you're trying to figure out a way to get some more money, did dedicated sales tax ever come up? Because there's a couple of states that have done very well with that. We've looked at it.

Oh, gosh. Five years ago, we did a thing called the Wildlife Summit, and it was trying to bring all folks together to talk about wildlife on a statewide basis. And an outcome of that was trying to build understanding of the needs of all wildlife and that we weren't able to generate enough revenue to take care of the needs of the 80% of non-game and other wildlife that was out there. What I call a loose coffee clutch of conservation groups. We did a survey of Idahoans to see whether or not they would support an initiative that would either dedicate a portion of the sales tax or support an increase. The increase was less than 50%. People just weren't willing to do that.

It was slightly over 50% of the folks were willing to support a dedicated portion of the existing sales tax okay so uh the the the folks that know the politics of initiatives and everything said that given where we were at in the political cycle with elections and everything else that that was not probably they could get the signatures to get it on the ballot but they weren't sure whether it would make it and it depends on whether or not you have an entity that's well funded that will oppose it if you don't have any well-funded opposition you can run these things through but because we're getting at sales tax, whether it's an increase or a piece of the existing, opposition was going to be huge. And so that particular loose coffee clutch of folks backed away from that at this point in time for the state of Idaho. The beautiful people of Missouri pulled it off.

They did. And being a Missourian, I was in college during the time that that stuff was going forward. And it took them 12 years of trying different ways. I didn't know that. They tell the story like it was like everybody rallied around and got her done. Right. Because when it passed, it passed with, I mean, not quite unanimous, but it was a high support.

12 years? It did. The pass was, I mean, not quite unanimous, but it was high numbers. But it was a high support. 12 years? It did. They went with a pop tax and a beer tax and failed on that. They tried all kinds of things before they came up with the one-eighth of 1% sales tax increase, which has been the gold standard. Florida does a real estate transfer tax. Every time a piece of real estate sells, there's a piece of that. Fee, you know, all those fees you pay when you buy a piece of property.

Well, there's a little piece of that in there now that goes to the wildlife fund. And that's working for them down there. It went down when things tanked, but it went back up. Arkansas and Iowa went with a similar sales tax system as Missouri. And Arkansas got theirs through. Iowa got theirs through, but they didn't fund it. So, you know, the mechanism's there, but they didn't initiate it. Since most everybody that dips likes to hunt and fish, they should just have a dip tax. I'm with you on that. So there is a solution though. I don't want to leave this before I

speak to a solution that's live in congress right now and it's called restoring america's wildlife act and it's following it would it would take the uh royalties from oil and gas and mining onshore onshore offshore it's all of that royalties and and that royalty package is around 12 14 billion a year right now um it would dedicate 1.3 billion of that into the pitman robertson fund a subset of it which would double the fund it would double the fund and it would then that money would come back to the states based on the size of the state and the population. Very similar to the way we do PR for hunting, which is the number of hunting licenses and the size of the state. Comes back to the state to manage.

A very familiar mechanism for the states to get financial resources to manage all wildlife. And that's a reallocation, that's not a new tax. That's a reallocation. That's not a new tax. That's a reallocation of a fund. It is the fund that the Land and Water Conservation Fund taps into right now. And so there is legislation.

Our own Senator Risch in the state of Idaho is sponsoring it on the Senate side. It's got over 100 co-sponsors on the House side right now. it's got good bipartisan support it does the the house support is in 105 and it's split almost equally down the middle the the co-sponsorship on the senate side i'm not as sure of but the co-sponsors the four i'm familiar with are bipartisan so and the senate works different than the House on that stuff anyway.

So we're hoping that they'll get to get a major hearing on this. We've had some smaller hearings, but it's moving forward. It was classified as a moonshot to get it through this Congress between now and the time they adjourn in December. But it's still live. And Senator Risch is trying to get a hearing going on it. This would be huge. For a state like Idaho, if we got our allocation, it would be on the order of $15 to $17 million annually. So take that.

Our total DJPR allocation is about that much so it puts the the uh wildlife diversity non-game program on the same footing and allows us to have the resources to manage all wildlife populations the fear a lot of hunters and anglers fear loss of control of their commissions and departments. Oh, yeah, man. I feel that. And it's not an illegitimate fear. But I go back to my home state of Missouri and see what happened there. I mean, they pumped $110 million a year into their budget. It's the majority of their budget.

They got about another $60 million 60 million i think in license sales and then other money in there they're about twice as big budget wise as the state of idaho with with what they've got back there but hunting and fishing is better and stronger there now as a result of having that collaborative of all users getting things done. And so when you look at the case histories of states that have had this additional money, Florida being the other example, hunting and fishing there is actually booming with those additional resources. It will mean some changes in how we go about interacting with the public on allocation of budget, but certainly I don't think it's to be feared. It's to be managed. Yeah, that'd be my perspective on it. I understand

the viewpoint of people being leery about new voices sitting around the table, new voices at the table. I get that. I still think it's better to go with the money and play the game however you need to play it, but to go with the extra funding and then sort the rest out after the fact, or at least go into it with the right kind of mind frame. Well, our track record, where we have financial resources and focus, if there's a sensitive species out there,

I can keep them off the list or I can get them off the list. With that kind of financial resources, I know we can do it because we've done it. And I would be anxious to see that pulled off. We'll see. Again, it's a moonshot, but it's live and it's moving forward. We've been two years moving this forward. The group that put it together was a group called the Blue Ribbon Panel. And Johnny Morris from Bass Pro, now Cabela's too, was the co-chair along with a former governor, Friedenthal, from Wyoming.

And most everybody on that panel were NGOs and private business. It wasn't a bunch of government folks. They're the ones that looked at this and said, yeah. And then their first recommendation was this $1.3 billion. That's where we focused. The second one is increasing our relevancy to all people about wildlife management. Money goes a long ways to helping that, but certainly how do we as hunters and anglers show that the use of hunting, fishing, and trapping for wildlife management is relevant

to everybody? And I think that's a big part of the challenge that we have in the future as hunters and anglers is to maintain relevancy. We've got the support. We've got that mid-70s support for traditional hunting, even higher for fishing. We just got to hang on to it and we do it by doing what we know as hunters and anglers we are and that's conservationist first

and we lead the way with our own actions and activities to get this stuff done. Got any final thoughts, Chris? Man, no, Virgil's just schooling me all day. It's fantastic. Virgil for Department of Interior or something, right? No, that means DC. It's a great place to visit. I've learned a ton.

One of the last thing I was going to ask you maybe was, so your Access Yes program. Yes. Is Idaho Fish and Game the only state entity in charge of procuring more public access? We have the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation that has responsibility for trail access for both motorized and foot travel. And we work very closely with them. They also have responsibility for some boating access. We have our own boating access program. They have theirs.

Counties have some responsibility because they get a piece of the DJ, Dangle Johnson funds. land-based hunting and fishing and trapping were it. The others are directed at more generalized recreation or motorized or powerboat recreation in that particular case. And compared to what we're putting on the table financially, it's a very small piece of that. It seems like in Idaho and Montana as well, the public economy benefits so much from our public land that more entities should be putting chips on the table to procure it, I think.

Some of the NGOs are huge players there. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. They do a ton for access. They do, and they've been very cooperative, collaborative. They've got money to bring to the table that don't match with anything you've got. And the Mule Deer Foundation, to a lesser degree, is part of that.

Those are the two primary players. Trout Unlimited does some for stream access for fishing. And we've got some other players in there, but I don't want to dismiss some of those NGOs that have been very focused and effective, particularly Rocky Mountain Elk with their initiative to get access through private land to public land. They've been able to really do some good things there. Awesome. All right.

Thank you. Thank you, man. We did a deep dive, man. It's a lot of fun. I enjoy this stuff. Fish eggs to Dingle Johnson. Yep, you got it all. Give me some more time.

We'll give you more. We'll have you back. I want to have you back. How long? You're retiring, right? I am. I'll be retiring in January. You're going to come back for a big shit-talking session.

I can talk. You're just going to cut loose. Better yet, I'll have you come over, and I don't know if this stuff works on the back of a jet boat while we're trolling for steelhead. It does. We can plug it all into an inverter, and we'll make this stuff work. Do a live fishing show? And we can do a live fishing show. We did a live ice fishing show one time. I can do that, too. I've got a place on Cascade Reservoir, and we can scoot right out on the ice and catch some of those trophy perch that we've got there. You're talking yellow perch? Yellow perch.

I saw him go like this when he said trophy perch. I want in. Well, we're pushing 18 inches, 18 and a half. Holy mackerel. Yeah, and it's still got two, three three year classes in there that are grown into that so yeah like whoa it's a fish you know it's a fish story i gotta get this right but no they are like walleye these things are huge i mean uh 14 and 16 inch perch are routine up there yeah you catch three of those and you got dinner that's great yeah it is, it is. It is great. So stay tuned and thank you again.

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