The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 149: Path of the Puma

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with author and wildlife biologist Jim Williams, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: The MeatEater Podcast LIVE tour 2019; the sports car of the cat world; overshooting everything; the adventures of Boana Jim; the GI Bill and how it helped spur wildlife management degree programs in America; the genetic debate around the Florida panther; lumpers and splitters; the meat with feet; how much room does a mountain lion need?; the grizzly bear that didn’t den; when a lion kills livestock; landscape level changes and South American puma management efforts; and more.The MeatEater Podcast LIVE is going on tour! Get your tickets here.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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In your book, Path of the Puma, we've got to talk about that name. We will. But I'll tell you the thing that surprised me most about that book, like the singular fact that I would have never imagined is that you're saying in here that like at the end of the last ice age, so the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, when we lost all the crazy animals everybody likes to think about, like mammoths and mastodons,

did North America lost mountain lions? Yes. Well, so the genetic work that's been done is that mountain lions and other species retracted south for a little while and then recolonized a second time so if you show if you had shown up um if you had shown up on the great plains or the rockies or anywhere in what we now consider like the lower 48 there was a period in time 9 000 years ago 10 000 years ago

whatever when you wouldn't have found a mountain lion potentially yes but there were other species of cats here too there was an american lion yeah they went extinct too cheetah yes at different times i mean we don't know exactly but with the fossil record and now with some of the genetic work with the cats yes there was a big retraction where perhaps they weren't there depending upon where you were and then refilled in like filled back in from south america well yeah you got a the central american land bridge and the conditions that were there that were conducive to not only cats they need something to eat they have to have prey so there was probably some mix of you know is there food in the grocery store or are there shoppers you know or both and

and yes that that's the current thought and right now so they refilled in and is it true that now or was it true at the time of european contact or is it both i I guess, that mountain lions enjoy the widest distribution of any land mammal in the Western Hemisphere? Yes, yes, you're correct on both counts. And if you think about it, there was always native cultures present and mountain lions, and there's a whole bunch of different names for mountain lions as humans, and depending upon tribal culture and ancestor stories, there's lots of different names depending upon where you're at in the United States and which tribe. They play a significant role in pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas. And then, of you know as this country was settled by white europeans for the most part yeah the cats were here from coast to coast and slowly but surely you know we were

really effective at at reducing a whole host of species uh moving west yeah i want to talk about that project of a limit that are very successful but not totally successful efforts to eliminate them from the face of the earth but what so they can extend from you talk about in your book that's why i kind of set the table here a little bit you talk about in your book there's an area in patagonia where they prey on penguins and then they're all the way up into southern yukon yes so and they're like they're like it's a continuous there's like a continuous strand of them extending that distance yeah pretty much so it's fascinating to me and as a wildlife biologist and particularly working in montana or you know in the western united states per se se, to find my colleagues down there

picking cats up with penguins in their mouth. And these aren't the ice penguins you think of. These are the Magellanic penguins. But they're very similar. They're a penguin. And they nest in these colonies like a prairie dog colony right on the coast. And what you have to remember with a cat,

with a puma, and by the way, a mountain lion, a cougar, a puma, it's all the same thing. We'll talk about subspecies if you want. Yeah, let's make that. No, subspecies and popular names are things I want to get into quick. Well, so back to the penguins, though. If you think about it, this animal, it's a very efficient stalk and ambush predator. And they typically, in most of the research that's been done,

take the most vulnerable and abundant prey. And Kenny Logan, a researcher in New Mexico, worked on cats for a long time. That was actually his quote, and it bears out in every single project. So if penguins are there, it shouldn't surprise us, but to me, it looked very awkward to see a penguin in a puma's mouth on a camera trap photo. Oh, yeah, man.

And then you go north. You mentioned the Yukon. So unlike a lynx, or even they're more similar to a bobcat, a puma is. But unlike a lynx, which is built for the cold, deep snow, they're light. They got thick fur. The whole hair lynx relationship. A mountain lion's kind of the sports car of the cats. Their fur's shorter. They need a lot of meat. They're going

to sink in the snow. So where they can get around and where they can be effective at finding food is going to be limited a little bit moving north. So historically, about central BC, Alberta, there's kind of a line. But as we've explored and opened up habitat for oil and gas, there are strips of land that produce all of a sudden deer and elk food, and deer and elk can move north. Well, on the backs of deer and elk, these cats have punched north into the pretty far north. In fact, the furthest north was a cat that was found frozen in the back of an old car.

I read about that in your book, but I didn't even understand it. Yeah, it probably curled up in there. Probably thought it was a, you know, cats like cover. We can talk about that too. But probably thought it was a great place to rest and starve to death. Cats will starve to death. Cats will starve to death. Mountain lions do every year, depending upon where they're at and their plane of health and winter condition and

prey abundance, they can starve. If they don't eat, they die. Didn't one turn up, I remember reading this years ago, that one turned up in the McKenzie Delta, but its ears have been frozen off? That's pretty common. I've handled cats even here in Montana with the tips of the tail the tips of the ears uh you know winters we we live a pretty

cushy life we're not out there you know nature a friend of ours just uh a hound handler i don't know if he killed it or a friend killed it but they killed one that only had uh have three toes and what do you think yeah that's right or do you think it could have been frostbite or and lose it to that i'd be guessing yeah yeah all the above yeah okay no i i found him you know i've had a cat i talk about him in the book as a male old yes the helmet named him you know and i call it cat number six or whatever but it's just you know as biologists you're trying to name stuff but you know my howman they named every single animal because they know and they can relate to that and and he was missing an eyeball

i mean he probably lost it in a fight with another male would be my guess you know yeah that was an interesting story reading about old hoss another cool story yeah another cool story in the book is that this i know this wasn't you but there's an eyewitness account of a lion we got let's the next thing we talk about is let's talk about names and let's settle on a name a lion mountain lion is on a mule deer someone sees this the mule deer bucks the lion off and then they get in a scuffle and he actually sticks the lion with his antler? That happened right out, if you look out your window here in Bozeman, on the top of the bridges. There were some mule deer researchers flying radioed mule deer,

and they were spinning and got to watch that whole scenario unfold up on the divide here. And then you got to witness from a helicopter a lion bust a move on a bighorn but then lost the bighorn. Yeah, it was kind of our fault. You messed the hunt up. We were doing an annual sheep survey, and I had a graduate student down there. That's the chapter on Terry Yank and the work in the Gates of the Mountains there.

But my pilot was about to retire, and it was one of his last flights. And we were flying sheep, and it just so happened, the capture crew and the graduate student coming down the hill for the morning. When you fly, you have to go with the crackadon, where it's less windy, it's safer, and the animals are out, right? And so we're kind of going up this mountain slowly, looking at different sheep. And out of the corner of my eye, I could see a couple hound boxes on trucks coming down along. The Beartooth Game Rink's got a long, muddy road, but you just kind of see it. But you're back on the task at hand. We're looking at sheep,

and I see this flash going up below me. And I thought, what? And I took a look. And this is back before digital cameras. I had one of those 35 millimeter Pentax at my feet. It was a little more clunky. And I got that thing up, and I yelled, lion. And my pilot, he was very good. And he was just on it in a second. And it looked like a big male just racing right up on a bighorn ram. And of course, the ram went one way and we're in the chopper. And the cat went the other and stopped and turned around. And he literally looked at us almost in disgust.

But then it was like, what the heck is that? We're in a chopper. Pretty noisy. The houndsman then treed the cat right well it's kind of a funny story so my my pilot was you know near retirement he was mature and uh and and i told him i said you know the capture crew's here get back down to the headquarters where the old ranch buildings and the and the guys were just pulling in with the dogs and the tranquilizers and the gear. And so he took the helicopter and we just bombed down and landed. And I said, you're going to believe this was a cat right up there in the knoll. And they're like, huh? And they start yanking dogs and leashes out of boxes. And they got their gear and the grad students ready to go. And off they go on foot up the drainage, following the helmin and we kept the dogs on leash here you just don't turn them loose until you get a track or they they get

a real good scent right kind of shortly leash them and uh my pilot's like let's just sit right here he goes we're i'm too old for this he goes we're gonna fly up there so we you know it's on the wildlife management area so we waited and sure enough, the cat treed immediately. The dogs, you know, bayed tree pretty quick. And it was kind of a grunt to get up there. And away they went. And as soon as we could hear those dogs barking treed, that's the term the Howman use, they're barking treed. We hopped in that topper. I've never done this before. It almost felt guilty. We flew up, landed on the top, turned it off. And I walked down and, and, uh, you know know there's the cat in the tree and we started to process it it was kind of a crazy day combination big horn mountain lion day yeah hey uh real quick before we get into the names um lay out uh how you

spent your career i mean you spent your career immersed in wildlife but just give us a quick sketch of that okay so um i guess what first it's kind of it's kind of cheesy but when i was a kid you know when when color films and back in the early 70s and and no joke my parents took me to an old disney movie called charlie the lonesome cougar i never knew then clearly they ended up spending a career in and out of people and cats at that time but to this day it's still as cheesy as all get out, but I still love it. That was your inspiration. Oh, well, I mean, you know, I love like that is a cool species. That's a cool animal. And I was

born in the farm country of Iowa. And I always looked to the West and I knew bears and moose and lynx were out there. And, but, you know, we're in Iowa, we have pheasants and deer were not that common when I was, I was born in 61, you know, and my dad was on the football team for the Hawkeyes in Iowa city. And, and, uh, but I, I get that for fishing game magazine as a kid, you know, that was the greatest magazine. Yeah. Written a couple of stories in there years ago. And, and, uh, but I, I get that and I couldn't wait for it. And we had a little muskrat trap line, right. Got me out, but, uh, eventually, you know, farm country, you know, had some difficulties. My And we had a little muskrat trap line, right? Got me out. But eventually, farm country had some difficulties.

My parents- You were a muskrat trapper? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got a hat, a little trooper hat. Some run around with a bunch of Victor number one, single long springs, no doubt. Yes. And then coni bears weren't too popular until later.

And actually had a great time on a trap line at Freezeout here in Montana when I was a field biologist out of Great Falls. Just thousands of muskrats there. We had a brilliant system. I was lucky to get one one year, although it was minus zero. But yeah, it's just another cool experience. But yeah, so I went from Iowa.

I landed in San Diego with my mom. You kind of overshot everything. I did. And went a little too far south. But you know what? I loved it. I mean, it was four blocks from the beach, Pacific Beach. And I learned how to longboard.

And kind of eventually a friend of mine gave me a mask. And I stuck that mask on and looked underwater. And wow, it was just the marine life inspired me. So that meant I got to get a biology degree. It was marine biology. It was my undergrad. A lot of events, SeaWorld and OceanWorld, a lot of different jobs I had.

Eventually, I finished my undergrad at Florida State. I started at San Diego State, finished at Florida State. My dad went there from Iowa, right? And his wife, Jetty. And so I got to Florida, and I got my marine biology degree, and I ended up working for another oceanarium called Ocean World. It was a very small 1960s, 50s-looking place. Really the kind of place where they got, like, tanks with fish

and tourists come look at them? Oh, yeah. And I enjoyed people, and I got hired. They knew I worked at SeaWorld, so I got hired to do the dolphin show and a sea lion show. I had to wrestle alligators. They didn't tell me that when I got the job, but that was interesting. You were a showman.

Oh, yeah. I got friends. My nickname was Bawana Jim. It was pretty funny. In fact, in the alligator show, they even had a little spiel that they'd say, Jim was abandoned as a child in the Everglades and raised by the Seminole tribe. Oh, really? They had to wrestle alligators. I had blonde hair, blue eyed, right?

It was kind of hokey, but nonetheless, paid the bills. That was in the mid-'80s and right before Yellowstone burnt in 88. I'll never forget. I came back to my apartment in Fort Lauderdale. There's a bunch of bullet holes all over kind of the garage. Like someone shot your garage open. Correct. This is that Miami Vice cigarette boat days.

And his apartment was on a little canal. And some kind of crime went bad. And I thought, enough. And cable TV just came out. And I think it was out of Atlanta. It's the crash course in American history. Yeah. So TV came on. and I saw that nature,

I don't know what it was called, science, nature, a discovery. It was the first one, and they had the Craighead brothers working that bear in the park, and the bear comes off the drug prematurely, and both brothers, you know, they were putting a radio call. They were experimenting with the first tranquilizers and radio callers. They jump in this old station wagon in Yellowstone, and that bear just pile drives into it, charging it mad.

And I just remember thinking, wow. That's a life for me. Oh, man, that's just really cool. I want to go out west. I still had that yearning to go out west, right? And so this is pre-Google, pre-computer. Well, the mainframe computers were around. We had punch cards.

But so I got to the library, to the card catalog, right? And I pulled out papers from schools around Yellowstone, right? I was inspired. And I landed on Bozeman. And that's how I found, huh, who wrote something on bears and big game and elk and Harold Pickton. Huh. Okay. So I went, got home, called him. And no joke, I just said, hey, this is Jim. I want to go to graduate school. I want to work on bears, elk, deer, sheep, something. And he goes, where are you calling from? And I said, well, Florida. What do you do, Mr. Williams? I'm a gator wrestler. I said, I'm a dolphin trainer, is what I told him. And there was this long pregnant pause. And he goes, do you know, it snows in Montana. I'm like, oh, God. Anyway, he goes, you don't have a chance in hell unless

you show up and get relationships. I got a line of, God. Anyway, he goes, you don't have a chance in hell unless you show up and get relationships. I got a line of students from here and all over the world. Bozeman's kind of the mecca for wildlife work here. We're very lucky with the colleges here for wildlife and fishery. So, okay, I'd loaded everything into my Jeep, hung an old shark jaw on my mirror, drove out west, and eventually walked into his office, and he about fell out of his chair. And anyway, still a dear friend today, and he about fell out of his chair. And anyway, still a dear friend today, and he showed up at one of my book signings in Seattle, which was kind of heartwarming too. But that's how I got to Montana 30 years ago, 88, right when Yellowstone was burning. And jumped into lion work.

Well, I came, he actually had me working on bighorn sheep, black bear moose, trying to create a funded study to get a master's degree, right? It's got to be funded. You've got to have a stipend. And I had a lot of projects that were, like, really good, but then they'd stop. And then one day I walked into his office. He called me in, and he goes, sit down. And he throws this Morris Hornacker.

He's kind of the patron saint of pumas on the planet. Did all the original work and another dear friend. But he throws his monograph from Idaho, the first study ever done on on puma's mountain lions if you will uh on my lap and i looked at that and i'll never forget i looked at him i said oh yeah and he goes well you got to pass the test i had to go up meet the biologist in augusta and you know florida and california i'm like okay this would be good and i drove up there and we hit it off right away. And so, yeah, then from then on, whether it was working on cats directly, supporting students working on cats, working on hunting seasons for cats, working with South Americans and cats, 30 years goes by in a blink.

Pretty quick. So catamount. Here we are. Yeah. I'll say a name for one, and then you say a name name for one and then you say a name for one and then you say a name for one we'll see how if we can get around twice paint painter catamount panther cougar puma pangy mountain lion i'm out two and a half yeah he's tapping out what did we miss let me think um you did cut him out right yeah like in back in boone's day daniel boone's day they said painter

yeah painters yep and there's some south american names too that's what i'm drawing a blank uh puma panji oh sis quit me oh yeah my colleagues on the on salish and kootenai tribes and i'm mispronouncing that and and uh but what does the word mean it's their word for mountain lion okay uh why are there so many names i personally think think that as humans, you know, when we, you know, we evolved and came out of, radiated out of Africa, right? And you had your hunter-gatherers originally.

And I think that as humans around the planet, we hold these both prey species and predators or large carnivores in very high regard and and we as because we're humans and typically not the prey now we associate with the predators and i think when you do that whether it's native cultures or or or around the world or even today people kind of associate if you're a deer hunter you know you realize how clumsy you are versus a mountain lion and how they are not. I just think people create folklore and stories and campfire stories because we can associate and relate to them a little bit.

As a deer hunter, when you're pursuing deer, you're kind of doing what a mountain lion's doing. and i imagine through time snow leopards tigers cats the same these different cultures around the planet all have different um folklore stories on how they relate to that uh fellow carnivore really it's kind of surprising and the name thing i don't want to be it's death but it's interesting to me because uh mule deer right not a hell of a lot of ways. You know, most things there's not. But then you have these kind of like examples like that, this thing that carried so many titles with it, so many names with it.

You know, wolverines, right? I mean, besides indigenous languages, but like in our popular vernacular, there's no option. But you'll be sitting around talking to guys that like mountain lions and people be like mountain lions, and people will be calling them lions, cats, cougars.

The same people will use the same different words. And you would describe at the time of European contact, let's just use that like a baseline. We kind of touched on that there might have been a dark age for mountain lions prior to the arrival of man or contemporaneous with the rival man where they got knocked back and still had some strongholds in south america but like european contact coast to coast right coast to coast and lower 48 side to side top to bottom how was it how what enabled us to damage them so bad? Well, I think two things.

We had kind of a collectively, the settlers, the European settlers are referred to as white visitors and strangers. We had kind of a colonial method to our madness. It was pretty much eliminate anything. There was good animals and bad animals. And the good animals provided food, and the bad animals would compete with us for that food. And I think not only mountain lions, but all carnivores, wolves included, with poisons and bounties. We were pretty effective.

And frankly, we were pretty effective with the ungulates of whales. Yeah, I was going to say a contradiction there is we eliminated a lot of good ones too. But you know what? We eliminated the good ones on accident. And we eliminated the bad ones very intentionally. Oh, yeah. And today, that's still pervasive today. I mean, it's human nature in my mind. If a fellow hunter, whether it's a person or an animal, competes with us for our groceries or what we like to do, it sets up conflict to some degree. using poisons and bounties and most of those were eliminated in about 1960 but there was a period especially on the wildlife restoration days you got to remember world war ii right after it ended

the gi bill was created and that created a lot of graduate programs for fish and wildlife biologists right that was a big turning point um once they got here it was it was restore bighorns it was restore mountain goats, restore elk. Believe it or not, restore whitetail deer and mule deer and antelope, which are pretty common now. That's interesting. I never heard that idea about so many guys coming in and getting the opportunity to go to college. Yeah, and?

Help create wildlife programs. Some states, believe it or not, Stephen, there was a directive to come home and create more meat on the landscape wild meat for our boys when they got home from the war and so and then you have Adelio Poe creating this initial game management programs and others and you had this kind of almost magical nexus I don't know if it happened today of creating the academic program but most important creating the funding mechanism of the pitman robertson act where it's a user pay system right and and the creating the actual wildlife and fisheries management kind of programs in the country and a funding mechanism together then wildlife was able to

take off state by state do you understand how you, I've read about the wolfers who would poison wolves and how, and I don't know, you know, I don't like fact check this that carefully, but it just seems like to be a thing you, it just seems to be like generally accepted. hunters eliminated bison some of them transitioned quite smoothly into being predator guys wolfers and i'd read about how they would take a animal take an ungulate they're a buffalo or whatever and kill it but very quickly inject strychnine into its circulatory system so that while its heart's still pumping it would lace the entire body and then they would the wolfers would let that sit and then go out and look around and collect up poison stuff is that your understanding of how because everybody likes to talk about poisoning grizzlies poisoning mountain lions but what is that like what was the actual delivery mechanism well that that's good and i have not heard that although it i don't know if that makes sense i've read it but

i love it's true it's kind of makes sense but poison lace baits and again we got to think about right now we think about cattle on the landscape and i'm talking the west primarily yeah but it was domestic sheep back in the day right back when most of these that's what god that's what got them yeah and domestic sheep can almost they're kind of fragile uh especially when it comes to even small carnivores around coyotes you know bobcats i mean uh domestic sheep uh and they all had herders and protecting flocks of domestic sheep in mountainous areas is extremely difficult more so than cattle even and so poison was a common way to control predators. And again, it was that whole concept of good animals and bad animals.

Lacing baits. Yeah, lacing poison baits. But what happened is it's indiscriminate killing. So not only do you kill the bear, but you kill the fisher, the martin, the wolverine, the eagle. You kill anything that comes around depending upon the poison that was used at the time so it's some it's it is indiscriminate and even birds of prey and and so it was very effective and then you throw a bounty on top of that yeah explain how those systems work well depending upon the state and depending upon the government at the time trappers hunters were paid for pelts you know to turn them in and and and frankly that's probably created an

economic activity in that point in time in our country to you know go out and learn how to kill cats kill bears was it good coyotes um i don't know i assume it probably was i mean look at there were some pretty tough times and some pretty rural remote places i mean montana is still frankly remote now think about it it. Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, 150 years ago, it probably was good money for them, or it was survival. Probably not a lot of jobs around. But there were still bounty systems up through the 1960s, right? Correct. Yeah. And I think, yes. And there was kind of a staggered rate of eliminating those. And again, I'm going to go back to the field of wildlife management

was created right and world war ii ended the biologists got here and then this whole concept of not just pure game management but the whole notion of ecology and systems kind of came on board and that some of the bad animals which are predators that talking about cats one of many had a role to play in the ecosystem and aldo leopold you know talks about it in sand county almanac yeah the mountain and the green yeah three screen fire yeah green fire dying in the wool side yeah but it took him a long time to get there right and so that's the thing i think a lot of people well anybody that's read his book knows but you know he went out, like when he moved out west, he went out to kill predators. His day was spent.

He just burned his time up trying to eliminate predators from the landscape. And it had some epiphanies around that. Oh, yeah. Well, once biologists started looking at the habitat and the landscape as a baseline versus the species, that changed a lot. Then that whole notion of systems, ecosystems came about, and landscape ecology, and what role carnivores play. And you feel that that thinking helped usher out the bounty phase?

Yeah, well, a little bit. But if you want to go there, I'll tell you my thoughts on what happened. And I think I'm right. It's pretty arrogant, but because it's- Well, let me stack a question in there before you do that. Okay. Because I feel like it's going to segue. How bad did it get for lion?

Like how low did lion numbers get? Very low. They were, and Dr. Morris Hornock, who I mentioned earlier, is kind of the patron saint of pumas. That's what I call him in my book, but he's a dear friend, a bird hunting fool. And he's even still hunting elk and he's long retired. But he had to work in Idaho in the largest wilderness area left in the United States to get a large enough sample to make it statistically valid to say anything scientifically about cats. That was the first study in the 60s. He couldn't find them anywhere. He couldn't find a population large enough, or he didn't lose a sample every time he put some marks out. This is the early radio callers, right? And ear tags.

They were all getting shot still back in the 60s. And he had to go into the Frank Church or something to find a reasonable population yes big absolutely so they were really knocked back you got landowner tolerance you got bounties you had poisons and there was this you know generations of thought you know of these good animals and bad animals and but entirely eliminated from the eastern u.s except florida as i understand it correct yes um that's interesting too yes there's some there's some pretty remote country in florida even today in central florida on those large swampy ranches between the insects and the plants they're pretty harsh for humans you can be pretty tough to get in there and you can see why there

is some impenetrable areas yeah but so so basically like for any like for any practical purpose or any ecological viability, never mind genetic extinction, but ecological viability, basically everything from the Rockies East, excluding a small portion of Florida. Or Texas down in the very bottom, a little bit in the middle but yeah still yeah west texas they were like eliminated correct that's it yeah that's that's as i understand now that doesn't mean that every odd year mountain lions just like wolves disperse a long ways oh yeah take one shows up but for all that's what i want to talk about is another thing i'd like to get to eventually if we have time, is what used to be dismissed in the early 2000s even,

dismisses every lion that showed up in a weird spot. Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan was always an escape pet but then it'd be like man it must be a hell of a lot of people letting full-grown clawed seemingly very wild bellies full of deer meat mouth lines loose i'm sure it's they show up in freak places they just get up and go so so but to answer your question about what if you No, I was going to make sure that you hit this point. Yeah, because it's my opinion. What you think saved them. Yeah, what I think.

But I wanted people to know how bad it got in order to talk about what saved them. Real bad. Yeah. And so what I think happened, you had this tradition of it's very difficult to run cats. And that's a term where you turn a trailing hound loose that's specially trained to smell the scent of a cat, which we're not capable as humans of doing that, right? But these dogs are.

They're canids, right? They're like a bear. They see the world through their nose. And so they switched from bounties to some recreational chasing to train those, and there became a culture of hound men and hound women, but hound men primarily. And as that culture and not occupation, but recreational activity evolved and became more popular in each Western state, it's something to do in the winter. It's fun to go out. You have all

of a sudden people enjoying a mountain lion on the landscape and enjoying that relationship with the hound and the cat in the woods because these hounds and cats will take you to places you've never been. And I think what happened that, well, I know what happened. I know what happened in Montana is all of a sudden, with the science coming on in the biologists in the 60s and 70s, we're starting to study more things, right? But all of a sudden, you have a user group that is now not biologists. They're pretty rural in nature.

They're pretty tough. It's extremely difficult to do, advocating for a mountain lion. And that had never happened before outside of maybe someone just thinking they're a cool animal. So now you have this culture. And the culture of running cats with trailing hounds in Montana, particularly where I live in northwest Montana, goes back over 100 years.

We have a long winter, and there are houndmen and families and houndwomen that have dogs, and they'll tree and photograph cats all winter long for six months. I was hanging out with a houndsman yesterday morning. He's treed 200. Yeah.

He's killed two and regrets regrets the second one really in that that's wishes he hadn't done it they they steven and they you asked me the question i think it was the howman they carried the they punched above their weight politically you know with the regulators whether it was state fish and wildlife commissions how so just a deep connection to the like like a their families had a long track record on the land if i go in and make a comment as a biologist you know yeah okay yeah okay i'm a biologist yeah i am you know it's looking at science papers and research but if i go in there and i'm a howman and i known and i've known your family for three generations and you're a legislator and i'm a howman and my family's been there.

Who are they going to listen to more? Well, all of a sudden, you've got these tough, very in-the-woods, all winter long. Gun-toting. Everything. Everything. They're loggers. They're miners. You name it.

They're ranchers, even, in some cases, in some states. But all of a sudden, you have a user group that really treasures the opportunity to have that dog-cat relationship all winter long. Well, that's a game changer in my mind. Then they, along with the biologists in about 1971, together worked the state commissions in each state to make them game animals. So you got rid of bounties in the early 60s for the most part, but that as soon as cats became a legally classified game animal, this is a big deal, because once that happens in a state, now you have a game warden that protects them with the law that any state commission adopts.

All of a sudden, they're treated like a deer. Seasons, quotas. And out of season take, all of a sudden, it's illegal. That is a game changer, and it was the Howman, working with the department biologists in these states, that was this wonderful relationship that that made that happen in my mind and to this day and in my country you know i write a little i have a whole chapter on season setting in there it gets kind of wild kind of

western at times but to this day the hound men the hound handlers uh if you will are the uh most stringent advocates for cats on the landscape, and they watch every move we make if we think we're killing or prescribing too many females or too many cats in an area. It's the hound handlers that are front and center, inhaling at the Capitol or at a meeting, and beating on the table saying, you know, listen to me, I'm in the woods all winter, this is important to me. That's why I think we have cats. You know, there's a ceiling of natural density that they don't pretty much go above. But cats recovered because of this good science that was done.

You know, Morris Hornacker started a whole host of students. And we had advocates in the Hellman that could influence the local legislators to not eliminate them. You probably get a lot of people that have a hard time believing that or understanding that when you tell that to them. So on my book tour, I was in Boston. slaters yeah to not eliminate them you probably get a lot of people that have a hard time believing that or understanding that when you when you tell that to them so on my book tour i was in boston new york and and uh chicago california vancouver bc i love telling that story in fact there's some dear friends that are i would put them more in the mutualist their animal protection they're not

hunters they'll never then i won't say never, but they'll probably never, ever hunt in a legal season. And they'd be more almost an animal rights kind of philosophy toward a cat. They just want to know they're there, kind of almost a spiritual value. But when I tell them that story, and a couple of the friends have found out on their own attending meetings and seeing it happen firsthand, they get it. And so it's this interesting conundrum of this user group that now and again will take the cat. They don't take a cat every year. Yeah, and they're the first people. The hound handlers are the first people, the animal rights people go after when they want

to attack a state's hunting and fishing rights. Correct. Because it's an easy sell. Yeah. Shooting lions out of a tree. Yes. Who would support such a thing? So as biologists, and so you're pushing that button in me right now, we manage populations

and habitat, not individuals. As humans, it's so, I mean, it's natural. I don't want to be, if I was a whitetail buck, I don't want to be the buck that's going to get taken. We put human emotions on things, right? But science and data, science is a science, you know, it's, is a method of investigation, right? Do you look at the data that's produced? It's heartless. It's population management. You can, animals can die and the populations are fine and grow.

But as soon as we put, you know, then you get into fair chase and ethics and how do you define that? A lot of personal values on it. That's when it gets wonky in the social realm. That tends to be those fights. What always frustrates me is when those social values try to bleed into the rigorous data on the population management side and can trump it. And that's where you see sometimes in courts. And that will never go away. As long as there's people here, that's going to happen. There was a quote from your book

that I wanted to wedge in at an appropriate time, but I missed my chance. It had to do with when we were deliberately trying to wipe them off the face of the earth, mountain lions. You had a quote where you said, if we ranched worms, we'd declare war on robins. It kind of goes, that was a good line line man because it really does like demonstrate a um it's like a thing about us and it happens on it happens in a broad large scale way like sort of a national agenda right or you have codified state sanctioned efforts that you talked about to eliminate them from the landscape but it it's also really personal, too. You go out and plant a garden, and you see a rabbit get in that garden, it'll turn anyone into a killer.

Yeah, well, look at that. We have a sense of the things that are ours that we're cultivating, and we take it in a real bad way when wildlife steps in and complicates the process. Yeah, it's human. Look at Bozeman, Missoula, Cal, Spell with deer in town and trying to grow flowers. You know, of course, you invest in it. It's part of us as humans. Can you real quick talk about, we kind of laid out like how bad things got and how things started to get better.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. What happened with Florida? The inbreeding. Yeah, so it gets complicated. And I'm less familiar with Florida because I've spent my career out here, although I did live there. Yeah, I should point out to listeners, you spent your career mostly here, but also you spend a ton of time now in Patagonia.

Yeah, well, in Florida, I did my undergrad at Florida State and actually have some dear friends. The mountain lion biologist world is pretty small. We get together every three years at these workshops. And Florida is kind of fascinating. You look at the footprint of mankind on that state. It's giant, right? Yeah. And so what's left is a pretty wild place.

It's the middle of Florida. There's kind of a corridor. I see there's some conservation groups working on a connectivity corridor up and down the middle and on the coast, the Gulf Coast. And then that everglades up, there's some St. John's River. There's some wild stuff there. But you get any population down to where it's effective breeding size, it's just too few females, too few males. Inbreeding can be an issue. And with the modern tools we have with genetics, you can monitor that. And that's what happened there. They got into what biologists call a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck somewhat. How small?

Oh, I can tell you off the top of my head. Sub 50, right? Yeah. Well, I was going to say 50. But the good news is now, my two buddies that run the program down there, they're actually... Transportation's a big problem. They still get hit on the road. But they're dealing with panther, Florida panther conflicts. Did we use that word earlier? Yeah, I think we did. We used panther.

Yeah, yeah. Now that we're back east, I'm referring to them as panthers. But my two friends, they're dealing with some ag conflicts. That's actually a good sign. It's more work for them. But they've had some reproduction. Well, they've gotten up enough where their back's been a pain in the ass. Yeah, and it's still nowhere near recovered. It depends how you define recovery and distribution and population.

But they're starting to have conflicts. And so that's a good sign. But it took a lot of work and a lot of intervention and a lot of tlc down there but but think about the future look at the traffic and the highways and the and the and the highway mortalities they're always going to have that issue yeah and they're doing a lot of work with with um underpass overpass situations but uh you talked about that when they went through that bottleneck they they had they developed some irregularities that you could see with the naked eye. Yeah.

Kinks, tails, and cowlicks. Yeah. Yeah, so different species are going to exhibit. There's phenotypic traits and genotypic. They're going to, how the genetics are expressed on yourself is going to vary with species. But yeah, they noticed some abnormalities that they attributed to the too few cats and i remember in solving and i know this

isn't your your area of expertise but i remember trying to solve that problem they brought in some lions from west texas and i remember that raised this question of okay here's this distinct population has been genetically isolated the florida panther um what makes the florida panther the florida panther when you truck some some cougars from west texas and cut them loose there is it now is a florida panther just a panther that lives in florida or is it something else i remember people were like you know what the debate at this point is silly because if we don't do this you're not gonna have they're gone yeah they're gone so you're gonna have a corrupted population or you're gonna have no population so there are some brilliant cat geneticists uh

o'brien and melanie culver and And I talk about Melanie in the book, but we can, the geneticists can look at the composition of these. And she, so a fun story, again, this is rolling it back. When I started grad school in 88, 89, there was, I think, 30 some subspecies of mountain lions, right? And these are the museum biologists that measure all the skulls and they're kind of called splitters, right? And there's lumpers, right? There's lumpers and splitters. When it came to museum biologists- And my brother says there's lumpers and splitters and they know who they are. Yeah. Well, that's all fine and dandy until DNA technology came on board, right? So I remember Montana had Felis concolor misulensis,

and Colorado had Felis concolor hippolestus, I believe. Yeah, but there's no barrier between those. No, well, that's where they split it until they put radios on them. And then a Montana cat got shot in Colorado and vice versa. Oh, really? Yeah, so then Melanie Culver.

A collared cat. I mean, you talk about this in your book a collared cat in montana gets killed by a hundred colorado yeah they take from colorado so they're not even they're not even moving in the same direction no no it's just they're they distribute their their their dna on the landscape through dispersal both males and females males to a larger, and they can flat out boogie. But when that happened, it kind of threw everything out the window with the skull traits and others, and they were very well-intentioned. But with DNA, Melanie Culver and her team got down to roughly six, and that's still evolving today, by the way. But all of a sudden, you have all these subspecies, and all of a sudden,

okay, you've got a Patagonia 1, one one up north and you know four maybe less in the middle that's going to evolve as as science changes the genetic technology and tools change but it really shrinks it down a little bit this is this is way beyond the scope of this conversation and i wish my brother my brother's an ecologist and i wish he was here to articulate his annoyance but i'm going to try to articulate his annoyance which will be to his annoyance dragon but he's like we're so in love with dna right now and we're so in love with genetics right now that we're we're taking this new thing we used to have this like this linnaean system we used to name things on morphology or what it looked like to us or how it interacted with this environment and that used to be suitable and then we get this new shiny toy

and we're throwing away all of these ideas that made sense at the time in favor of this new shiny thing that we're like, this will be, this is more important than all of that. And the, the, a way that it kind of like, I guess the way that we're, it winds up having some teeth is this conversation around, I don't know if you're familiar in Alaska, they're trying to do a wood bison.

Yes. Yes. Reintroduction. There's a big debate about when they were there, where they went. And, but it's like, no, cause there's planes bison yes yes reintroduction there's a big debate about when they were there where they went and but it's like no because there's plains bison there that were brought in on a truck and they're thriving in four places but they want to establish a new population of this other kind that kind of belong there but geneticists look at it and they're like it's it's all the same damn thing like they've gotten rid of

like there's bison bison bison bison bison athabasca bison bison pennsylvania's whatever and so you're using the splitting you're using the splitting to sort of sell an idea to a population of people where you're like we need to do this because this is the right thing to do because this is the right kind we're gonna put the right kind in the right place and we'll get the bad kind out of the right place and meanwhile these other people are whispering in the other ear being like this is all mental masturbation yeah it's the same damn animal well it's i they can all breed there's not enough genetic dissimilarity to even be engaging this conversation but then it's also at the same

time driving policy. It's kind of a mess. And I know this is beyond the scope of the conversation, but it's interesting. Yeah. And no, it actually relates to cats and what we're talking about as well. But I think personally for me, and again, I'm kind of more, you think where I came up 30 years ago almost, and where we're at now with these kids coming out of graduate school that are just top-notch geneticists. I think we need both. I think you need the natural history, the relationships, and what influenced this species and what drives its behaviors. And you also need to explain it.

You know, look at the building blocks. You know, we can look at DNA now. And we also have traditional ecological knowledge, the tribal stories passed down from generation. I think we need to put all those in a vat personally. I always try and do and look at it all as I try and make my own opinions, but to rely solely on DNA, although you can kind of go to the bank with that science, but there is, what does that mean in the environment right it's real easy to separate you know alleles it's not easy but you can do it but what's that mean in the

environment and and what should relate what should be used more to in policy or court decisions or as biologists you know so those questions are are kind of unanswered or you know i mean that they're going to play out into the future as as we can um as those tools are improved but what's exciting is it does answer some pretty paramount questions that we were making guesses at as as biologists years ago but you're right it's it's a balance but you could go grab a lion from the southern tip of argentina and breed it with one from northern bc correct they'd throw like viable offspring my that would be my guess no one's maybe wrong but no one's tried this yeah well in zoos they probably happen yeah but they're very similar i mean phenotyp they look, they're a little lighter in color down there

and they're a little larger, but they're a little more angular to me anyway. But they look cat's, cat's, cat kind of, even behaviorally. I want to get into behavior a little bit. How does a lion kill something? They're a stock ambush predator. You think about a wolf or a coyote,

they're going to run, they're cursorial, they run their prey down, typically. What was the word you just used? Cursorial, they're going to run. They're running. You ever hear that word, Yanni? No. Cursorial? Like a courser. Well, we'd have to look it up. Now you're going to ask me something I don't know. Maybe I misused the term, but they run their prey down. Now, cats, they're built to sneak in close, a short rush of speed to ambush the animal and take it down, typically by a lethal bite to the trachea, the windpipe area. And I know they'll approach frontally because I've seen video of it, but they prefer to come from the side or back, right?

Well, I think they'll do whatever they need to do. Okay. So their avenue of approach doesn't really matter to them? I think they'll do whatever they need to do. Okay. So their avenue of approach doesn't really matter to them? I think cover is really key. There are many forms of stocking cover. There's rocks and trees and grass, but also light if it's dark, right? So depending upon how when a prey species is vulnerable in different landscapes. What this habitat structure is, they've evolved to figure out how to take down food. If they don't take them down, they're dead.

Mechanically, what are they doing when they kill something? How are they using their body to kill? If you grab a mountain lion, the paw, the front paw, and you press those digit pads, those claws, the retractable claws are going to come right out. They're just hooks. They're kind of like a bunch of little meat hooks and so they'll make contact and i've never witnessed it and that's one thing i've always wanted to see yeah very few people have frankly you know now with cell phones you can see um videos now and again but um oh there's

some stunning video yes with tracks in the snow or even even the decoys. I love the decoys when they have the archery decoys of a buck and a lion comes in and smacks it. I mean, it's pretty cool. But you can see the tracks in the snow. And they typically make contact and either knock the animal over. Or even in South America, you can watch on video in those open habitats in the parks where they're visible. They're going to wrap around to the trachea and essentially close the windpipe

until they stop kicking. But they eat small mammals too. They've eaten birds, but primarily a deer-sized animal up here, a camel, the wild camels down there. My friend Floyd, who's a houndsman in Arizona, he's got quite a list of things that when he's trailing lions, has seen where they've eaten. Yeah, they're going to get their food where they can.

Are you talking about they like to eat porcupines? Oh, yeah, actually. How do they do that? So porcupines are funny you brought that up. So we look at grizzly bears. People are concerned about bears, loons. You could go through a list of species, right, caribou? But one that's flying under the radar that has flat out disappeared west of the divide in Montana is porcupines.

Is that right? Yeah, there was campaigns by timber companies to eliminate them for tree damage. Yeah, they girdle trees. Yeah, but you get them low enough, cats also eat them too. And back when I started in 89, 90, almost every cat you handled had porcupine quills in its mouth or in its nose. Rarely now. We see them a little bit, but something happened to porcupines, disease, predation, poisons, habitat, or a combination. We don't know.

That's research that needs to be done, frankly, west of the divide. You go east of the divide in the coolies, you can find them everywhere. But in the deep green, something's going on. Porcupines are diminishing. There's no Rocky Mountain Porcupine Foundation. No. And they're actually, they kind of have the life history. They're more similar probably to a bear. They have a slow reproducing life history. So they're a little more vulnerable that way. But your question about cats and porcupines, they can take a claw on the underside and open them up but uh oh yeah every almost every cat you handled a while back had quills in its nose not anymore other strange things i've seen uh trail cam photos of lions carrying sandhill cranes like just rattle off a little bit of the things you've

seen to me oh one of the funniest things that ever happened to me as i was cleaning scotch you'd float their their poop in the water and you separate different samples right and you float it in some water and all these teeny little hooky claws they were house cats you know they lead house cats and it turns out i then i looked at i remember looking at the data way back as a student and it was right near some cabins so it was eating cats you know but they But they'll take whatever they can get. If a dog barks, it's typically safe. Typically, not always, but they'll eat whatever, the most abundant and vulnerable prey.

But I've had them do marmots. I've had them do grouse over the years. They've taken mountain goats. They've taken bighorn sheep. They've even taken moose, domestic horses, big males. There's been damaged cattle at times, although less often up here. I feel as though I found where one killed a turkey one time. That wouldn't surprise me. How much do they need to eat?

You talk about this a fair bit. Well, most of the research, most of the literature right now is a deer-sized animal a week, typically, for a female. And if there's lactation demands, they have kittens, they're trying to provide nutrition for at least that. And for a male, I've seen them go a couple weeks. And in the literature, it varies. And every now and again, you see a little surplus killing but typically a deer sized animal a week and you could stretch that to two weeks in some cases but right in there so each one's good for about a deer a week yeah and again they can be greater than a week as well it could be two weeks depends on the that nutritional plane of the cat

is it a male or female does have kids or not yeah but roughly if you had to pick a number yes yeah you say how they um there's variability between animals oh yeah their preferences talk about that and also can you touch on something you explain the book about that they have there's variability between animals, but then each individual animal has variability throughout the year. Yeah. So it's pretty fascinating to actually think of how, let's use the Sun River Wildlife Management Area out of Augusta as an example. In summer, there's not a lot of elk there. There's a few, but they're all back in the Chinese wall in the middle of the Bob Marshall Wilderness, right? So the meat with feet, if you will, are dispersed,

and it can actually be a tougher time. And again, I didn't have a sample size on that project large enough to make any determinations, but they tended to take these other species like rabbits and grouse and deer. During the summer months. Yeah, yeah, when things are spread out everywhere. In the winter, 2,000 head elk would be down on that wildlife management area.

Well, all of a sudden, it's like salmon and bears in Alaska, right? All the food's concentrated in one area. And cats aren't as social cats per se, although we're learning more. There's researchers in Wyoming with cameras that are learning some fascinating things about behavior. But for the most part, they avoid each other spatially and temporally, or temporally but not spatially. They share in the same area but at different times. They're still not like African cats, just, you know, all the cats just grouping up.

But there are familial relationships that are being discovered now in some projects by some researchers, you as we as we sit here but for the most part the time of the year the winter their food is concentrated and summer it's dispersed the only way in in whitetail deer systems like western montana you have a little more abundance and a little more less concentration in many areas because whitetails are a little different you know they're more continuous in their distribution, even within their yards. Yeah.

It seems like, from looking at what you talk about in here, it seems that if presented with them, they really like whitetail deer. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of meat out there. Those are the perfect cougar food unit, if you will. It's the perfect size. Just the right size, right abundance, right distribution. And I think that's why in northwest Montana

with whitetail deer, cats were never eliminated. There were still Rolos areas in wild country with deer that weren't eliminated either. The deer weren't. That was a big deal. If you eliminate the prey, you're not going to have the predators. And there was always deer in northwest Montana,

whitetails in particular. How are you doing, Yanni? Are all your needs being met over there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you're comfortable? Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Interesting thing you said in your book, too. You said a lot of cats can have four or five kits, but they'll narrow it down and just raise two. Do they kill them? No. Typically, the average litter size is two. It can be a little more, a little less. But it's interesting.

So for any mammal, you're going to have lactation. And there's going to be how much of the resource do you get that's going to determine how many in the litter survive, plus a whole host of other variables. You've got temperature of the winter and other competitors. A male comes around. There's a lot of things that can happen. Wolves, now with cats. Yeah, I want to talk about that. And that's an interesting dance.

But at least typically it's 2 to 2.5 in the literature and every project I've known about or been involved with. So it's not like they're having 10 kittens. Gotcha. But you do talk about some having four. It's been documented, yeah, but most common is a couple. And even those cases with multiples, you see them wind up only bringing two to maturity? Well, no.

Like I showed a video last night and a presentation of this really generates phone calls. But you had mom and she had four adult size, 12-month-old kittens. They look like adults, but you can tell they're a little different looking. But all of a sudden, you got five lions walking on your security camera. They're high def. They all seem to be big. That generates a phone call. And so she's pulled off. And talk about a good provider and the prey availability in that area and the tolerance, that's a family of five. And that's not normal, but it happens. Yeah.

Yeah, four. It's a little bit random, too, in terms of what are the resources available to feed those cats and how effective of a teacher is that mother for those kittens. They have to take down live prey once they're that size. You know, and I know there are a bunch of exceptions to what I'm going to say, and you explore the exceptions. But you talk about there's sort of a self-limiting aspect to lion population demographics where they're not comfortable

with a lot of overlap and they're they will you and you go to great like pains to show the cases when they do yeah like they're all sudden there is six of them together whatever but like and generally speaking they're very they have like a place to hang out and particularly the males are not real comfortable generally speaking with other males being in their zone and it makes it that you can kind of use that to extrapolate populations in general and that it also sort of like sort of sets a ceiling on how sets a ceiling to how many lions can exist anyways exactly boy you're you're a biologist at heart. No, I just read a good book. I read a good book called Path of the Pool. Okay, good. Well, so yeah, I've heard my

whole career from deer and elk hunters. Again, we're competing with them for fun and for food, right? That there's cats everywhere. Okay. How did you come to that determination and where and in what areas because animals leave tracks. And it turns out in all of the telemetry studies, virtually almost all of them from here and the same is down in Argentina and Chile, there's about two to four resident adults per hundred square kilometers. And now with DNA technology and cameras, you can detect the fluid layer of transients moving around that don't stay and get a radio collar. But they're still on the landscape, right? You can get up to about six. But that's the ceiling.

Use the perfect word. So they're kind of, to some degree, behaviorally limited. So those fears about just having cat after cat after cat, that doesn't happen. It's never happened. They'll commit fratricide. Yeah. And, well, the males kill each other. Kittens can be killed, but particularly with males, and they starve. If they get pushed into marginal habitats that don't have prey,

or they'll get hit by a car, or they're not tolerated, and they get taken out, it's a tough world for a stock ambush predator. You think about what's really cool about Mount Alliance, and I like this. Unlike a lot of the other big cats, they take down prey that are their size or bigger. You know, right? That's pretty hard to do. Yeah. Day in and week in and week out. And you don't do that, you die. You know? And so, but you're right, Stephen, there is a ceiling. So in most states, then it boils down to, okay, whether you're in a park or wilderness where the maximum is going to be in that higher range most state biologists are gonna go okay where are we with our legal hunting legally sanctioned hunting program are we close to a natural density are kind of the middle or are we low and that's

where you go out and work with you deer hunters and your howman and it becomes a little more social but you gather these people are in the woods right and and you get the data you can as a biologist combined with what people see. And then what is your objective? Do you want them close to a natural density? Well, and this is a nice quick example, but in Western Montana, where we have fewer cattle and ranches, where there are howmen and pretty remote areas, you can manage closer to a natural density. You get into eastern Montana by the Dakotas, it's all private land. And agricultural depredation on cattle and sheep are a big deal. You're kind of managing, whether you like it or not, you don't have a choice to

landowner tolerance, right? Those ranches are huge. But that's the driving management factor. You got landowner tolerance out there, and here it's a different system because it's corporate timberland and forest. And in the middle, look at the highwoods, the little belts and some of these island ranges. It's a little bit in between. You get to kind of hedge your bet. And so the science is easy here. And our timing of our seasons don't start until December. So the whole concept of vulnerability to younger cats and kittens that is in some states you know we were kind of a ahead of the curve there you know it depends on you what you want how as society as as humans what do we want on the landscape and that's different if you're a rancher you're a deer hunter you're an animal advocate or you know or a howman you know per se it just becomes social

almost you know what annoys me and it doesn't annoy me bad about you because you don't really do it that bad but it annoys me about what some people do lying like like lying advocates and i could i regard myself as a lying advocate because i like generally for me earlier talking about like you know subspecies and ways we think about management and repopulating animals, I generally look at my baseline is where was stuff at the time of European contact? And I generally would like to see it put back that way. Where like an unachievable goal

would be to recover wildlife to where the current distribution matches the historic distribution this is like if i had to like put my personal goals in a sentence that's kind of my goal and i realize it's unachievable real complicated all that but it's just a succinct way of thinking about it but people that are the other kind of lion advocate where they're in they're really interested they're very protective of individual lines they don't want they're not they don't think population level they just think like that i don't want anything to happen to that one therefore people shouldn't hunt or whatever they're always talking about lions as like the ultimate predators you know

everybody uses that term but then they're also they also want to simultaneously tell you that they have no impact on game animals. But then they also want to point out, oh, because we got rid of the predators, now we have too many deer. And the same person will tell you all of these contradictory things. Yes. I've heard all those too. All those contradictions. And the bottom line is whether it's you or I chasing a whitetail around

or a cat or a wolf or a bear, we all have an impact. We all leave a footprint, right? That's nonsense. We all leave a footprint. And the question is, how does that affect what we like and want? And that's what it boils down to. Cats impact prey? They have to.

They eat them. There are some isolated populations of bighorn sheep or caribou that are relic populations where cats are a significant concern and wolves because it's kind of a proximate ultimate thing. Ultimately, it was the hand of man in our footprint that kind of fragmented everything. But now that we want to save this little batch of caribou or bighorn sheep, you know, you got to worry about the cats and the wolves that are there too, because every animal in a population of 10 is a big deal, right? But in the big picture, it's all relative, you know, deer herd or an elk herd and hunters and hunting cultures, you know, what do we want to tolerate out there in terms of a natural system? And I would argue to both of you that Montana, your baseline that you kind of go to, Montana and Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks way back in the 40s, they're way ahead of their time. It's closer to that baseline you have than any other state in the lower 48.

Distribution. Everything, and not by accident. Habitat conservation, carnivoreore systems and it was organic and i think this is real important um for your listeners i think that hey tell them because because in montana way back in the 40s it access was such a big deal and it was for people that had money and that didn't had the same opportunity to play outside and today it's still the same there's issues but whether you're rich or poor in montana you have opportunity to participate in some unbelievable uh whether you're a wildlife viewer a wildlife hunter doesn't matter whether you're an angler we have stream access you have

access it's not why are you not rolling all the other western states in this well because you don't feel that i mean you don't feel idaho to some degree but i i would submit and i have lots of friends in both states so they they would challenge me perhaps on this but i would submit to you that in montana way back we were the first state to require a graduate degree to create when while when they when we transitioned from purely enforcement that happened across the west and added biologists right and we had a fish while fish biologists as well you had to have a graduate degree in montana when unlike jackson hole where you concentrate thousands of elk and and disease is an issue up here now as well. But in Montana, for game damage, we didn't just feed elk. They bought wildlife management areas.

Well, what that did, you know what that did? Not only to provide access in their special places, it anchored winter migrations. Well, maybe they were thinking about it in the 40s, but the Sun River elk herd, the Judith River, the Beartooth, all of a sudden by alleviating, putting elk on buying a property and all the neighboring ranchers, you have to be a partner with fences and weeds and grazing. But giving those elk a place to go or deer, you anchored a 40-mile migration, which that's a big deal now. Everyone's looking at migrations.

And Montana started doing that in the 40s. Block management, the public hunting concept, perfect. But we were one of the first to do that as well. Stream access, show me another state that's got our stream access law through private land. No, this place kicks ass on stream access. You add it all together. My colleagues at FWP kind of look at it as a Montana model. The North American model was coined not too long ago.

I'd submit to you that in Montana, long before we were born, for whatever reason, Montana's pretty progressive when it comes to fish and wildlife conservation. And that's why we enjoy the diversity we have today. Now, the whole world has discovered that in this outdoor recreation economy.

And we're going to face challenges as more and more people want to enjoy what we have here. Yeah, they'll destroy it. At least we have Colorado to look at as an example. Yeah, yes, absolutely. We can learn from their mistakes. Well, and if you look at Colorado's Rocky Mountain Front, you look at even Alberta's Rocky Mountain Front to some degree,

they're pretty developed, whether it's energy or homes. Look at Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. These ranchers have held these ranches and it's not easy and and these ranchers have made sacrifices to recover things like grizzly bears and tolerated elk so we have three quarter or two-thirds of montana's private land and they're i found a micro they're very proud of the wildlife they have on it yeah you know and that's different in south america it's all about sheep and so they tend to eliminate everything down there right so montana we live in a unique place in my mind we're very fortunate so how far will how far will uh will lion travel okay and i know some just probably hang tight right but now you talk

about something really striking out and doing some weird trips. Yes. Like how much room does he need to survive, he, she? And then what will they do to find their spot? So for females, kind of in that 50 to 80 different projects kind of zone in on different home range sites where they move in a year. And males have had them up to 150 square miles but you know it's very well male is 150 square miles too but and it can be smaller but but there's male home ranges are typically larger than females and if you can

picture typically in most of the studies the female home ranges are stacked in there with some overlap right you have daughter mother, and different tolerance, if they're hunted or not, all sorts of variables. But males have a larger polygon overlaid over the top, and they typically don't overlap as much, typically. Now there are, we're learning more with cameras on group associations that are surprising people in some of the work in Wyoming right now. But males typically don't overlap. They're not that social. They're a little taller, but not that social, and they fight. So you have a layer of males on the landscape and a layer of females. So when a kitten is born, and if it's a male, and you got a resident male there, and you leave, you're going to have to leave because that

territory, that area is claimed. You're going to strike out on your own. And most of the radio caller work we've done, the department did some work in the garnets. It was fascinating. Virtually every cat dispersed, male and female, if I remember correctly. Males further. But I, for instance, one time I marked a cat

at the benchmark airstrip that had a crooked tail, like an electrical circuit symbol. It was damaged, probably frostbitten somehow. And so it was real identifiable. I put a radio on on it never found it again and and after the project was done and i was working as a biologist in great falls i got a call from the wildlife manager in missoula and you got you're missing a cat you know and one of his helmet had treed this cat you know near missoula in the blackfoot and that was a female and but i mean she she went through the wilderness over the scapegoat but the males how many they'll go. How many miles did you travel? Oh, they can go 30,

40 miles. But typically they don't go as far as the males. We've had males go from bottom of the front to the north end of the front, from the Beartooth game range across the little belts. They, one of the first ear, before radio callers were available, we had Hauman marking and ear tagging cats up in the flathead. And one would be marked in the flathead and it would be taken. You get point of mark and point of death. That's all you get with an ear tag, right? Yeah.

And it would be shot in the Clark Fork by Thompson Falls. Those are males. And so there's constantly fluid layer. They're doing like 100- 100 mile jaunts perhaps yes what do you think triggers that and maybe you guys have done science to show it but i mean i mean we're just guessing yeah that it's a young male and that somehow he knows that he can't survive because it's the territory he's taken the kittens typically stay with their mother in that 12 to 18 month range typically and there's exceptions so they'll stay with their mother in that 12 to 18-month range, typically, and there's exceptions.

So they'll stay with their mom for a year? Year to year and a half. Because they have to learn how to kill and take down live prey, right? It's not like a fawn where you hop out and they're grazing right away. This is a learning curve to be with mom. And if they're orphaned at too young of an age, they're not going to make it. They don't know how to take deer down. But at about that 12 to 18-month age, sometimes longer, they take off and disperse.

And it's just, you know, why? I'd be hard to explain. So right now, that's what science knows. It's just that at that age, they just go. They travel. The science that's in my brain, that's what I know. Yeah, there might be others that would be able to answer that for you better. But that's, to my knowledge, yeah's that's the dispersal age and they move

and they cross they're crossing highways going through towns linear riparian highways that's what i call like the sun river the teton you know the marias or even the yellowstone or the missouri that's how they get into the midwest and then you look at the black hill so you got these island ranges that have cats now then you have the black Hills that's pumping them out. That's a finite area. Every cat almost dispersed. That's kind of a jumping off point for some of these riparian areas to get to Missouri and Iowa. And some random number square east. Yeah.

And they are only going to exist if we tolerate them there. A lot more roads. Not a lot of wild country like here. A little bit. But the further east you go, they're doing it on the backs of white-tailed deer typically but you know as soon as we know they're there they tend to be eliminated but you talked about in the book about how that is a key to their success is how they can hide they can be there and we always heard stories of like how oh yeah the game biologist knew that in some city park there's been a mountain lion for 10 years but nobody said anything and

i don't know if those yeah you hear a lot of those stories but a way to think about it is like you have uh okay idaho wyoming montana you got 1800 grizzlies how many of those sons bitches you see yeah not many no you see a boatload of them you mean we saw seven in three days but then you got one trip you got exponentially you got exponentially more mountain lions out there yeah and it'd take you a lifetime to rack up seeing seven of them right just saying they're secretive yes well they're secretive. Yes. Well, they're the ghost of the forest.

They always have been. Now, there is an exception down in Patagonia in those open parks. You can watch them in the middle of the day when they're not shut out. I'm not ready yet, but I do want to talk about it. Anyway, I just had to point that out. For sure. So the other thing I'd say when you're dispersal, you've got to think from a species survival.

How do you distribute your DNA across the landscape? Dispersal for many species is a common mechanism, and cats, wolves go even further. Heck, we have wolf biologists, they show up in Alberta. We have a BAMF that originated in Montana, or vice versa, 250 miles. It's crazy, but that moves the DNA around the landscape, right? Yeah, and florida's shown

they are susceptible to not having a good genetic exchange because some things can hack it oh yeah see could do damn sure can we're just talking about how six of those spawned a population of 15 000 well wild horse island and sheep i mean it's you know it's a pretty small founder population there but it's fun fun to go out and see them but what what does that say about us this is a question for you two what does that say about us as humanity if the only reason lions are expanding when all the other large cats are declining is because we don't know they're there yeah yeah when people like you said well you know what i heard recently um where i grew up i grew up in a town called twin lake

michigan was a lot different when i grew up there than it is now like a lot of places in the country but man you did when i was a kid you had to go a long way to find a black bear and now a black bear just spent his whole summer around where i grew up and i was talking to my mother about this and i thought for sure the story was going to be how right away the neighbor killed it. But everyone just loved it. They were real excited to have him running around. I was like, so people weren't scared and shooting at it all the time?

She's like, no, it just became a thing. It was kind of cool if you were the one whose yard it was in. So it was like just a different change. There is some change in perception that you imagine at a time i hate to say it but i feel like even in my i don't know i don't want to say it what would happen in my time but people would have been i think people as much as people freak out about

lions and bears still and they have like irrational fears of them i think there's also the the irrational fears of some individuals seems to go up but then there's also this thing that's happening where people's like tolerance seems to be going up these two things that are they fight with one another but they sort of happen in tandem it seems television and social media have played a huge role in bringing a lot of species into people's living rooms where they weren't before. You just had family culture. You know, in your book, you talk about, speaking of dispersal, you talk about putting a collar. I can't remember if it was you or someone put a collar on a female, and then right away she drowned in the river.

Oh, yeah. That happens, too. They do swim. But they have accidents. oh yeah a lot more drowning whether it's predation drowning falling to a lesser degree you've had um you know starving you know life's tough you know in the wild you lose collared animals to predation collared lions will get yeah i had a male kill another male actually and a couple times that's pretty common in some studies with collared animals taking males primarily you know one of the funniest things about your that's not the right word an interesting

thing that came to my mind about your book was right now for the future of mountain lions in north america there's's some good news and bad news. Where they don't do well, as we increase the number of wolves and increase the number of grizzlies, lions don't do well with those things. But then lions seem to do well with climate change. So they have a pro and a con right now right more habitats opening up to them they're sort of like rooting for they're like rooting for global warming because it opens up more habitat for them but increased like presence as we grow the presence of wolves

and grizzlies is tough you can take on either of those ideas in whatever order you want well i think first off climate change so it's a good and perhaps a perhaps good and and definitely a bad new story depending on how you look at it but some animals are winners like carp are going to do well yeah yeah well typically here locally the exotic species you know just by nature they're exotic and not native tend to be more adaptable because they persisted here when they didn't evolve there, right? But for climate change, it's a big deal if they're prey. Lions are driven by their prey.

If there are climate change impacts on mule deer and white-tailed deer and elk, well, then that's bad. But in terms of distribution, yeah, if it warms up up north and temperature and deer and elk can punch into the boreal forest which is kind of a caribou wolf a moose system up there after a certain point but as that becomes a whitetail system a whitetail deer or elk system up come the cats can come up on the back and so that's their frontier like the south they've already got south taken care of their frontier is to the north correct and to the east yeah that's

a good point especially up north there's a lot of room and then as it was the other question that was the climate change oh yeah talk about how they don't do well with wolves and grizzlies or it hurts them um yeah that just came up in a bunch of meetings where we have a new mountain lion management plan out it's really good by the way talk about that later if you want but behaviorally let's use the North Fork of the Flathead Tony Ruth I talked about her in the book she credible biologist credible field biologist the North Fork is off the charts North Fork it's a western side of Glacier Park it's off the charts one of the wildest places in the lower 48 it has a natural density of grizzly

bears. It has a natural density of black bears. It has a natural density of wolves. And it has a natural density of mountain lions, right? And after you read Jim's chapter about it, you will want to go there and check it out. Well, and you want to get a huckleberry bear claw at that, at Polaris too, right? Did you see that in there? I still, to this day, when I have a biologist wants to go up there, I'm thinking, bear claw, if in pulverist too right did you see that in there that's i still to this day when i have a biologist wants to go up there i'm thinking bear claw if that's open we used to hunt we used to chase black bears uh up in that neck of the woods there and always be swinging into pulver on our way back home you know the best bakery around i mean hands down but anyway be that as it may yeah so you have what i call it i referred to it as a predator party but

it's quite fascinating in terms of relationships that we're still going to learn more about. But take, for instance, one of the biologists, I think she was a graduate student, was able to observe a grizzly bear that didn't den, actually perhaps a couple, because they were usurping mountain lion and wolf kills on

the landscape you know it's that cost benefit analysis do you go into den is it worth it or is it not worth it you know as long as you can put fuel in the tank and you're in the black you know you don't have to den but bears typically revolve in the in most of meat vegetation primarily you know when that disappears they go in the hole right for six months and live off their fat right well all of a sudden you have all these carnivores that are recovered in the North Fork, and there's meat out there. Well, they had a bear that didn't den.

And Diane Boyd is our wolf biologist still today, and Tony Ruth was working on the cats, and I love that chapter because can you imagine as a mountain lion, you take down a deer. It's like, and I use the phrase, you're in a grocery store shopping, looking for criminals over your shoulder. You take a deer down, and you got to look over your head because wolves will kill a lion, a pack of wolves.

And so they got meat down, and then you throw a grizzly bear on top of that. Then the poor cat's got to go make another killer starve. And indeed, she had photos up there she shared with me and and i've seen it but i have not seen the grizzlies that winter but you can have a wolf track and a lion track and a grizzly bear track in the snow on the same slide back in the kodachrome 64 days you know yeah and but that's crazy i mean you imagine cross-country skiing in the middle of winter and oh there's a big male grizzly you're not thinking about that right no but uh you have wolves coursing the landscape looking for

their food they can usurp a lion off their kill and then you throw bears in the mix and in summer they're all out and then that relationship plays out in a different way you know because you got kittens and cubs and vegetation and but it's those those relationships it's a are fascinating it's a there's no wilder place yeah and then that and i think if you put that to a lot of hunters they would look and say oh so now the lions are killing even more deer now yes yeah and in fact a lot of hunters which is obviously true because they're losing they're they kill it they lose and they kill no one they lose and they kill no one yep and then so you got up in the north fork what's interesting is half it's in a park so that's not an issue you know and they get millions of dollars

come to the you know to the park for people to watch wildlife so that's a different economy then you have the economy of hunting that frankly pays if you hunt you pay my salary in Montana I work for a state agency right and not taxes hunting licenses so when I have hunters come up and say boy there's just too much being taken and in some some areas, yeah, they have a point. And what can you do about it legally? And what can you do about it really? And because there's other variables too. With hunting, you've got weather, you've got winter severity, you have forage conditions, summer drought. There's just this whole host of variables. But where they are right is you know if you have animals that are taking deer and elk that we want to take it you know that's competition now is that a population driver

what is the level of impact that's where the that's where the debate usually starts you know speaking of the you mentioned the park you're talking about glacier national park you had an interesting statistic around glacier that only one in 42 000 visitors to glacier national park will have a lion encounter yeah so that's seeing one one in 42 000 which is amazing actually and you want to talk about some secretive critters man yeah and the the rangers to have this lion information system they track and we looked at almost 15 years of data there just kind of because you hear the rumors and they had done that in other parks so we were curious and and we we looked at him and and the number one thing they do is just see it the incidents and and and conflicts and attacks it's it's off the charts low 0.001 chance but uh yeah very few people even see him

bears are a lot more visible. Oh, yeah. They just care a lot less about you seeing them, it seems. You don't see them, but they see you. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. I'm sure. 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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Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. You explain in your book, and you don't need to explain how it came to happen, but you explain in your book that through your career and different projects and programs you were involved in,

you had an opportunity to do some exchange work where you were going down to look at this animal you know very well pumas you're going down to look at pumas in patagonia and talk about lessons that we've learned around management and likewise biologists from chile and argentina were coming coming up to work up here. And you talk about a lot of the differences down there, different challenges they face. Can you sketch that out a little bit? Because it's funny because no sooner did I read your book

and then I read this article about the kind of mind-boggling amount of predation on domestic sheep that happens in Chile and Argentina. Yeah we're really fortunate in the United States to have that public land component that is Forest Service, BLM, and school trust. We have national parks and we have private but we have that middle area of public land, and that's where a lot of us recreate and hunt on in addition to private land. You go to South America, particularly Patagonia, it's either private or it's a park. So there's no in-between.

They don't have that culture of public hunting. They don't have that model of hunters paying for wildlife recovery that happened here, conservation. And that's the envy. Our system, frankly, is the envy. This North American model in Canada and the United States, it's the envy of many other countries around the world because it's a stable funding model. They don't have that down there. So parks are a big deal.

And you go off the park, you're on giant ranches, and most of them are domestic sheep, right? It's like New Zealand, big sheep ranches. There are cat populations down there that live almost entirely on non-native prey that's what i couldn't that's crazy that's what i couldn't believe is that uh it wasn't like here we view when a lion or some wolves okay i got a question i'm gonna interrupt my own thoughts there's someone i forgot about have you do you encounter often where a lion will begin feeding on an animal before the animal's dead or do they like them to

be stone dead for to eat them you know i've never seen that act my assumption is and is that they're that they you know close that windpipe until they stop kicking then they start eating i mean you never know and then how do they enter a carcass when it's dead you know it's interesting so i always look at lions are pluckers. So if we are with, you have lots of carnivores, people want to know it's like forensic work, right? And most of our biologists go out there. Well, lions tend to just like a house cat. They kind of, they, they grab some hair and spit it out and had some hair and spit. You'll see a big hair pile around where a lion's done it. Where are they working on the body? Oh, they start right in the cavity,

the heart, the lungs, some of those little tasty things they'll get first sometimes they'll open up a haunch but they'll open a chest cavity up right away and bears can peel hide back right and they screw around a little more cats are going to pluck around and then when they're done they're going to cover it up typically and and they'll use anything snow vegetation and patagonia rocks if there's no vegetation they tend to and then you're going to minimize all the other species that are come in and utilize that meat right and you can stay unmolested and eat for a couple days or you'll drag it into a bush but um yeah they i my guess is just just a guess that you know because i've never seen them killing this looking at the tracks and reading all the literature and friends that they're closing the trachea until they stop wiggling and then

they can eat right yeah uh okay back to what i was saying here when one one little bear line whatever kills livestock it's generally considered like atypical you know for the for the particular animal like they don't just subsist on it oh yeah correct but that's really surprising that you talk about that that it seems like you have like there's lines that's what they do for a living and that's their day in day out food is livestock yeah so there are these huge domestic sheep ranches they're the size of national parks up here or larger and that's millions of anchors yeah other huge yes and you and and that's and you'll see you know some of the park stories the creation in the book as well

that's the good news is you make it you make a change down there with the ranch it's gonna be a landscape change with one landowner but domestic sheep out there and and they're very they eliminate the native winako, and the winako is like a llama. It's a camel, a camelid. And if you hybridize and domesticate, you can kind of end up with a llama in a crooked sort of way. But the wild version is called a winako, and it looks like a llama, right?

Yeah, and there's like a llama and a wild version, and then there's like an alpaca wild. Vicuña is the alpaca wild version. It's all camels and cats in Patagonia, right? And vicuñas are the north end. Camels and cats. Yeah, it's different than here when it comes to pumas, right? We're talking mountain lion up here, puma there,

same thing, subspecies, right? So these pumas down there, and I call them puma the second half of the book. I call them mountain lions the first half because, you know, we're here. And then I wanted readers to feel it. We switched to pumas for the second half. I thought that was great. For the Patagonian portion. Yeah, I like that. And I had to convince my editors of that, and they got it. But I think it adds a little. You're in South America. So yes, they eat 100% non-native prey, European hares and domestic sheep down there in some cases. And that's a problem. So there's generations of cowboys called

gauchos, the gaucho culture, they're very tough, just like our cowboys or ranch hands. And they have been raised to kill every lion or puma they find, and other species as well, anything that could be a threat to sheep. And they run hounds down there too, right? Yeah, they do now, but even, I mean, they'll walk them down there. They'll ride them down on a horse. It's crazy. They're very tough and they're very good at what they do.

So that's a problem. Tolerance isn't there on agricultural ranches for the most part. That's why I tell the story of Chris and Doug Tompkins buying these ranches, turning them into parks, giving them back to the government. Then all of a sudden, they're tolerated. Yeah, you're saying that because these ranches are being so big,

that a single purchase can create what we would imagine to be a national park. Or larger, larger than Yosemite, one purchase. And you do a few of them. It's interesting. I just saw a statistic now because Doug passed away in a kayaking accident about five years ago, and Chris is carrying it on, his legacy. And Doug is now being celebrated in Chile and Argentina.

They're accepting him. It's amazing. The governments are accepting him when they didn't trust the process to begin with. But they have now donated to be public land that all of us, native Chileans, Argentinos, can enjoy, larger than the size of Switzerland. They took their personal wealth and put it all in the park.

So where that's important is now you can rewild it. It doesn't have domestic sheep anymore. The winakos can recover. The pumas can recover when mule deer they have an ain't they have a really interesting deer that looks like our mule deer with smaller antlers a little more of a bulbous face yeah crazy looking dude yeah when mule is how they pronounce it and it's like a caribou just kind of stands there they're very not afraid of anything domestic dogs can take them down and it's an issue but they can recover and so it has to be a park there's no in between down there right now although that could change someday with you know the concept of conservation easements like we have here

yeah and tax laws but right now it's my understanding you know it's almost got to be a protected area or it's a ranch so you work a lot. My friends that have been, you mentioned, I've had 25 years of exchanges, been very fortunate from Argentina scientists and Chilean going back and forth and get to share these stories, what works, what doesn't. And they invest in private land work like we do now down there and you get landscape level change with one family if they decide to, for instance, only kill the offending puma. So that happens up here, right? They will historically go out and kill every cat in the ranch.

But if you tell them, just kill the offending cat. The others are being good and eating the few wanako that are on the hill. And that's all of a sudden a landscape-level change. But it's messy conservation. It's like drinking coffee and fixing fence up here. Down there, it's drinking mate and talking to a sheep rancher and the gauchos and but they're doing it but what i couldn't gather from your book is that lion or pumas aren't hurting down there right i mean like

or are they or are they not because it seemed like on one hand you're talking about social tolerance and preservation but on the other hand, you're painting a picture that seems like there's a puma behind every rock. They were. They were hurting. Can I add to that too? Because it seems like for hundreds of years, the gauchos have been trained and brought up to kill every lion. How were there any left?

In protected areas. In the parks? Yeah, you look at some of those government-established parks before, not talking the Tompkins parks that are now government parks, but it either had to be a European landowner that didn't, you know, or a Chilean or Argentine landowner that didn't believe in that, but most of them with sheep were going to control the cats. They had to be protected areas. So what's happened here since the 60s has also happened down there. But on the backs of domestic sheep, they were even persecuted in protected areas to some degree.

There was differences in laws in Chile and Argentina, still are today. And they've become more of a conflict, a permanent conflict, where the gauchos are constantly taking out the cats at the edge of these parks for fear of predation on their domestic sheep. But they seem to be increasing in distribution down there based on my colleagues and my experience listening to them. Which is causing increased conflict. Correct. Correct.

And therein lies either job security if if you're a conflict biologist, or a big problem, you know, if you're a gaucho and a rancher. And it's messy conservation, you know. How do you recover a native carnivore if that's your goal when there's no native prey? Yeah. And all the prey is economic value, right? That's where your book gets interesting. It's awkward. And then European hares are larger than our hares there are cats that almost exclusively exist on european hares they're a little more of a meat packet and but it's a patagonia unraveled with

these huge domestic biologically unraveled with these huge domestic sheep ranches but slowly those biologists down there have these visions of rewilding, you know, ranch at a time, community at a time. So my biggest thing, my whole career, my book, I haven't been a research biologist my whole career. You know, I've done a little bit of what I call both. I was a management biologist. That's messy. That's where you set seasons and go to communities. Down there, same as up here, if conservation isn't accepted locally, it's not durable. Flat out, it won't last. And so what they're doing down there is trying to make, you know, how do you get a ranch to tolerate winakos? When they think they're going to compete

and eat the grass, their sheep eat. But if they have winakos, perhaps the pumas are going to predate less on their sheep and do the winakos. That's where they're going right now. And indeed, they're going to try and tease that out. But that's how messy it is. It involves people and economic value. Do you regard yourself as a conflict biologist? No. Now I'm kind of support staff at this point in my career. But I like, Stephen, I'm the way, what I my my entire career on is i really like people i enjoy people a lot of biologists don't you know depends on what floats your boat right i like people i've liked landowners i've like helmet i've like hunters i like animal rights people i like them all i love the relationship ship of people to conservation and my

bias is it's got to be very local. And when it's local, it's conflict. So yeah, I've been involved in a lot of my staff bear conflicts in Northwest Montana. It's a big deal, right? We have phenomenal staff, but it'll never go away. Lion conflicts actually are much, pretty much winter. Well, as soon as I say that, I can think of summer events, but where the residential footprint has been allowed to expand in western Montana into former deer and elk habitat, into the trees, everyone wants their postcard, those conflicts are going to be there forever. You would have to go scorched earth on bears and lions and wolves to eliminate the conflict because the homes are in the wrong place. They're where the deer are. They're where the elk are. So given that the

homes aren't going to move, we have to constantly, and in my mind, it'll be multiple generations, work with people, the churn of turnover, how to live with these wildlife species. That's here. It's all livestock down there. And we have more nationally. In your book, you kind of paint picture of that it's going to require tolerance you know when you talk about a lot of places that tolerance is growing and you talk about you know the idea that um increasing populations of other predators you don't put this as a negative just a matter of fact that you know expanding populations of wolves expanding populations of grizzlies um can have a negative impact on lions.

That issues around climate can affect populations. But with all these areas of concern that you point out, we have more now in more places than at any time in 100 plus years yeah we i mean they're like something clicked well and they're just they're just showing up everywhere well i'll get on my soapbox again for hunters legal hunters um hunters paid this country created a mechanism whereby hunters could pay for the recovery of the prey and you recovery the the grocery store, the cats are going to be fine. The shoppers show up. Whether we like it or not, those shoppers are there because we can't see them. But it was deer and elk hunters that put their money and still do,

whether it's working with game damage or buying winter ranges as wildlife management areas or funding surveys. Once the prey were recovered in this country then carnivores started so you feel that that's what's oh it's huge that's what's going on oh it's huge it's unique in the world um you know canada the united states has that model of funding for conservation you know i've told this story a thousand times i hesitate to even tell it again but it's quick enough where i get away with it is and even my friend doug dern and was in in Wisconsin, he talks about when he was a little kid, if you saw a deer track, you told your dad about it.

And now they've got, in an almost alarming way, they have the opposite problem. They're talking 75 deer per square mile of habitat disease issues but yeah you'd go home be like i saw a deer track dad and this guy this isn't some old codger i mean this guy's still kicking right along yeah i don't got a daughter in college and he remembers that right this isn't like some 120 year old dude telling you a story what worries me most is you get look at canada geese white-tailed deer to some degree when they get to become almost a nuisance level we take it for granted we take for granted what it took to recovery this incredible uh valued wild commodity that we enjoy in deer and elk and all the other species with them that all happened uh by design not by in deer and elk and all the other species with them. That all happened

by design, not by accident. And when they become nuisance levels, it's easy to kind of brush off what it took to get them here. So lions, bears, wolves, whatever, that all started because people funded the habitat work that supported the prey for these species. And I don't think we can ever forget that. and it's not it's not common around the world yeah yeah yanni what do you got i'm done i'm tapped out common oh man i got a bunch if we got time rip a couple out give me your best one i don't know where to start i'm gonna rate i'm gonna rate your questions oh good i've been looking for that well uh we'll start off with the tolerance thing i tried to slip it in

earlier but didn't get the opportunity um but do you feel like the tolerance or we have some friends that are handlers and biologists and they feel like with the increased tolerance that we're having a little bit more um hard encounters as they call it and being like the two that have happened recently in Washington and in Oregon, right, where people are dying at the jaws of the lion. Is that just coincidence, or do you think there's something there? Personally, I think it's random.

I think there are more people, and you look at where there are more humans, and there are more humans playing outdoors, and we're encouraging people to play outdoors. It's a great thing. You're going to get random stochastic encounters like that. I don't think there's, personally, there's a relationship there.

I think there's just more people playing outside. But it was uncanny for Washington to have its first ever, or first in 94 years, person killed by a lion and then its neighboring state to have the first in state history first in 94 years, person killed by a lion, and then its neighboring state to have the first in state history within a couple months of each other? Yeah, when it was quiet for like 10 years in the country.

It invites people to be like, oh, what's going on here? Well, it makes way the recesses of our monkey brains fire off with great white sharks, lions, bears. When, you know, I just saw a thing on TV, bee stings cause more deaths. Then, you know, we're not afraid of bees, really. Oh, the real killer is domestic dogs. Yeah, or dogs. You ever see those figures? Oh, my God.

And, well, I like to run at lunch and jog, and I'm terrified when the wrong dog is coming after me. But the point is. It's irrational, man. It is. Yeah, you drive around, you know, anyone that's out on the road Friday night around midnight, you know, you want to talk about a sketchy time oh yeah sketchy sketchy encounters and a lot of my journalist friends you know they write a story

about grizzly bears or lions it'll go ap because people love it people love it they write it about white-tailed deer it's not but people in in the different cultures and and with carnivores and our relationship to them um it's always going to be a big deal like a white shark you know although that's that terrifies me i still on board you know and i have a 30-foot missile below you with a brain that big yeah listen there are there are um when it comes to that there's a lot of irrational fear but there are high exposure activities correct i am not annoyed when surfers or abalone divers can talk about great white sharks yeah i am annoyed when some person that like now and then will go take a swim on the coast and then talk about sharks yeah when a archery elk hunter talks about grizzlies that doesn't annoy me when someone who you know drives a mile out of

town and takes a little walk in the woods every few weeks and they talk about them then i get a little annoyed they're a high exposure group oh yes yeah you're absolutely correct so like a northern california surfer i'm all ears if you want to talk about sharks but but yeah your point is i i think it was I think it was random. Other than what isn't random is the human population's growing and that outdoor recreation economy. That's how we market it in our communities here. It's big business.

More than ag even now, the latest statistics that are being passed around. So you're going to probably have more of these random events. Good question, Yanni. Hit us with another one. You're on a roll. Can you get on a roll with just one? around so you're going to probably have more of these random events you know right good question yanni this is another one all right you're on a roll um you can't get on a roll with just one no i appreciate the praise for and how many times just in the last 90 minutes you've given praise to hunters for like helping this whole thing along to get to where we are that's great to hear right we often hear that in now in the upcoming classes of young biologists there aren't as many hunters in those classes so one is that true and then two do you is that a perceived

problem by you yeah i you know it had you know i was a wildlife after i left the field as a wildlife biologist i was the wildlife program manager for 17 years up in northwest montana so i had to hire right and i'd always go to wildlife society meetings like a coach doing a draft. And, yeah, the field is much more diverse. It was all white, and it was all white males for the most part. Montana was the exception. We had a handful of professional women. Now in Montana, our management biologists and wildlife,

it's probably almost 50- men and women and and as whether they hunt or not um isn't as important as their relationship with people and working with them i think yes perhaps i don't know i haven't don't know the data i'd be making it up but um when we what i used to hire you know what you're getting at is you know i want someone that can build relationships with everyone and translate that science into the communities for local conservation so it lasts, whether it's seasons or habitat or research, you name it.

You have to be willing to work with those groups. And if you can't work with hunters, you're going to have a problem because that's you paying your salary. But that doesn't really translate into whether you hunt or not. How okay are you with population management and working with people is more important but perhaps yeah you see nationally i think montana's holding our own a little more with hunting recruitment than some of the areas

where it's declining and that whole farm to table movement has actually caused a spike and in our hunter ed classes more women are wanting to take their own meat cut it up themselves and serve it to their friends with only them having touched it that's kind of cool that's been a recent thing in the last five ten years but but the but the national trends i think you're right they're they're declining and you see it in young biologists too then less less hunters coming through the well not necessarily here i think. I think people come here in part because they know the hunting is pretty affordable and the opportunities are here. And in the graduate school cultures that are there,

most of them... I learned how to hunt in grad school. Big game. I ran a muskrat trap line. But we didn't have deer when I was born. San Diego, where are you going to hunt there, right? You fish. But they pick it up in grad school if they haven't already, typically.

And that's what I found. Hit them another one, Yanni. Okay. Still on a roll? Did you like that one? Well, you pointed out that you couldn't be on one earlier, but now that you've hit two, you're on a roll. I like the first one better.

Okay. I want to talk a little bit about – I give the first one like an eight. Back to – The second one like an eight. Back to – The second one like a five. Back to the sport of chasing cats with dogs. Do you feel like there's any negative effect to the cats? Most – yeah, yeah.

Most of the research is no. You may be – whether it's stress or behavior or affecting life history traits by pursuing them with a dog. And actually, if you think about it, you know, those hound handlers have to raise those puppies. They have to follow them.

But what it does allow you to do, and it does it with the researchers too, we use the same dogs, same hound men in most cases. It allows you to be discriminant. The animal's up there. Is it a male or a female? How old is it?

Whether it's a legally sanctioned take where they can, when you kill an animal, legalese is you reduce it to your possession, right? That allows you to tell if it's a male season or a female season,

depending upon the science you're using, to manage that population. You can actually see the animal and do that. And as a biologist, the researcher, do you need a radio on a female or male? You can do that and as a biologist you know do you know the researcher do you need a a radio on a female or male you can do that you need hounds to to see them they're like ghosts they magically appear with these dogs sometimes it's 10 minutes sometimes it's 10 hours

and they say in there they take you to places you will never go yeah we've experienced that on just a few cat hunts that we've been on but But yeah, somehow when you're out chasing elk, looking for elk and mule deer, you don't end up where you chase those dogs. Yep. Just never, never. What else did I have for you? Zap with one more. Unless you're tapped out.

No, I'm not tapped out. There was a line there where you said that killing lions disrupts the field, the field social order, or killing lions, and then it may lead to more human-cat conflict. So that's a concept that's come about with researchers relatively recently in the last 10 years. And it's that, and I've seen it referred to as juvenile delinquent hypothesis, but it's a little more complicated than that. But picture a large male, you pull him out, right, let's say right out of Bozeman, and you have a large male that's very mature and he's he's king of his world right

over here and then you take him out whether it's a conflict you know he killed a goat or whatever all of a sudden you got two three four males temporarily until it sorts out in there all of a sudden you have four mouths instead of one so you have this there's it's disruptive because they're trying to sort out whose territory it's going to be. You might actually have more teeth on the landscape temporarily by taking an old guy out. I mean, this is a very heavily hunted area. Everything around here gets pounded. There's no way that you have a situation where you're going to have some male that's going to set up shop and rule the roost for five, six years. Well, and again, I'd have to look at the data because

i'm a data guy yeah to see but i'm just telling you this is true because i just said that sentence one of the chapters in in my book that i'm frankly i'm very proud of is called locals only and it's how a season is set if you're a student it is the i've rarely seen in any book in any article how biologists set seasons working with commissions and communities. And I thought it was really interesting. And it could be a textbook in a class because we moved to limited entry on cats. And there was a lot of issues because there was money involved with some of the, we call

it a December dash for cash, you know, when that was happening. You know, they're very valuable for non-residents. But we couldn't shut the seasons down. You know, we couldn't do it. It was a supply and demand problem. So we went to limited entry, and we even have male-female subquotas to address. Like tag draws. Tag draws.

And that's random to the point of being cruel. Some people draw it three years in a row. Another won't draw one in three years, right? It's just random. But what it allows us as biologists to do, as an agency to do, is you can take the best science in the world we got this brand new mountain lion management plan that's out there you've probably seen it circulating this two weeks best science frankly on the planet doesn't get to what you want but we can take that

science on a density once you decide in an area what you want and you can give a prescription of males and females that you think, depending upon your objectives, can be taken off the landscape to address that problem that you mentioned, Stephen. And that took, and it's unique where we're at. We could do it because we're mostly public land or corporate timberland. But that took a limited entry draw to manage that. Now, some areas with landowner tolerance, clearly that wouldn't work, right? You need Hellman in there.

But incidentally, that line in the management plan, a guy named Jay Colby wrote it. You got to meet him. He's a wonderful guy. He's a biologist now in white sulfur. He volunteered for me almost 30 years ago, around 1990. He was this tall, skinny kid, bandana, but he had legs twice as long as mine. And he'd take off and go do anything we needed him to do and here at this point in my career he just wrote the line plan i think it's kind of cool that's great and he's from i think he might be from michigan somewhere back east but anyway we have this plan out now very sharp brains yeah okay whatever whatever but but here we know montana again is at the forefront for mountain lion management. There's more science in that plan. We worked with the University of Montana than any other state, I'd argue,

or province in the country or north and south America. It's very good. It doesn't get to what you want. That's community. That's messy. That's what still has to be fought out at a local level. But it's got the science there. So it's a privilege.

I always take hunting as a privilege. We have to have the best science to do it and uh and this does that in terms of people you know being concerned on the other side i feel like they need to send that send some of that plan down and i don't even want you to comment on this but they need to send that plan down to arizona i feel like they're kind of approaching it the wrong way down there man um and i talked and that's coming from houndsman yeah it i hear that from houndsman it it it the wrong way down there man um and i talked and that's coming from houndsman yeah it i hear that from houndsman it it it the set from what i understand and i'm jumping into areas i know very little about that's why i gave you an hour thank you the cattle component is huge and for whatever reason there's a lot more cattle depredation down there and and historically in

new mexico low game densities man yeah and a whole bunch of, it's a different system. And that's one I'm very unfamiliar with. But yeah, interesting. Although I did think this plan is something every state could look at because it's got some really cool population models in there that takes the data we can collect on cats. Again, they're like ghosts. You're limited on the data you can collect on cats again they're like ghosts you're limited on the data you can collect

on them yeah and then and then uses the best scientific techniques to kind of chug out you know where your different scenarios could be depending on what you want on the landscape have you ever heard the word oh go ahead oh no keep going if you have you ever heard the word concluder no you're too early because check out this no i'm not double segue i got oh you're gonna double segue that's new to me it's a double segue i want to hear it might be the first time ever that's intriguing um because speak of them being uh ghosts not only do you don't see them but you can't smell them no and as for Steve, the most interesting thing in the book was that he couldn't understand

or he didn't know that they had completely left the North American continent for a time period. To me, the most interesting thing in the book was that I didn't know how actually little they smelled and why it would be advantageous in multiple spaces in their world. That was a double segue? Well, yeah, because I included your most interesting thing about the book.

Yeah, that's right. And the ghost-likeness. Yeah, you doubled up. Doubled up. You made it extra smooth. I don't know about that. But I guess the question is, was there an aha moment for you? I'm sure you learned

about the fact that they didn't have scent but did you ever just like have one and you're tranquilized and stuck your nose in it and go wow oh yeah well like literally you can't smell this thing the only time i could smell them really is if you're climbing a tree in the year and you know they're tranquilized and they're stressed but it's a you know it's a dissociative tranquilizer they they kind of their muscles tighten so they don't follow the tree, right? You got to climb up and they urinate all over you. You can smell that. But the cats are really clean.

They're pretty clean. Even bears are pretty clean unless they've been rolling around in a culvert trap full of bait. Do you feel like they're so clean that they could be coming in upwind of prey? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I wonder if deer, that'd be good to know. Do deer wind? How likely are deer to wind a lion?

Yeah, I would probably say unlikely or lions would have went extinct. But I don't know. Yeah, do they play? I don't know. You know what you ought to do when you retire is do a study or do a study to see if they play the wind. Yeah, I want to be a technician when I retire. I want to roll back into the field.

I think that's a good thing. Two lines play the wind. That's a good idea, yeah. Anything gets you outside too. That would be a tough study to do. I know. You got to think about that one. Yeah.

So, concluders. A concluder is an opportunity where you get to i don't even have one right now but i'm still going to invite you to a concluder is an opportunity where you like you come in and you're like man i hope these guys ask me about x yeah and then we never do so a concluder it gives you the opportunity to just bring up something totally without prompt or it could be that you developed a concluder throughout the course of the conversation and you keep trying to wedge it in but you can't find a good place to wedge it in. Okay.

So now, without even needing a segue, you can just bring up some random thought. Yeah, I think, you know, for both of you, I think, you know, we all, and you hit on it real well, is how fortunate we are in Montana to have the habitats primarily to support, to even have the discussion about all these species. And bison are still on the horizon as where we're going to tolerate them in Montana or not. But for the most part, Montana's been pretty amazing. The one thing I think, and you two have covered pretty much everything in North America, in

particular that people don't realize it was Howman that had such a role in protecting and bringing back and being watchdogs for mountain lion conservation. That's not intuitive for most folks. No, definitely not. And they do, and they still do today. And I guess I would add in the South American component, what Chris Tompkins is doing down there is off the charts, different than anyone else on planet Earth with her own personal wealth.

She's doing, in my mind, equivalent to what Teddy Roosevelt did when he created the Forest Service and the parks. She's doing it almost to that scale and still going strong with local countries, local governments now celebrating and accepting those public lands because that's huge. Because then people down there, rich or poor, those parks are going to be the great equalizers. People get married near them. The businesses and the economies are going to thrive around the parks and you're going

to have South American native species come back. And so we tend to be, we're lucky here in Montana, but some amazing stuff is going on in South America with Christian Saucedo's in all those chapters. He's their conservation director, and I really liked profiling Christian. So if you read the book, I hope you enjoy some of the challenges they're facing there

because their landscape is very similar to Montana. I kind of call Patagonia Montana on steroids. Yeah, just the Andes are immense, but the species are goofy from my perspective because they're so different. Big ass birds. Flamingos and flying by glaciers and camels and cats. It's just a crazy mix of biology down there.

But that's what makes it kind of magical in my mind. And the food, the wine, everything's good down there. And I can't wait to go back there too. You two have covered, I'm impressed you've covered the food, the wine, everything's good down there. And I can't wait to go back there too. But you two have covered, I'm impressed you've covered most all the real, especially the complicated topics. All right. So hit us with the name of your book one more time and your name. So Jim Williams, I've been a wildlife biologist my entire career. I'm the regional supervisor now for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, kind of end of career. Had a wonderful career. It's a

unique state. My book's called Path of the Puma. And it half the book's Montana stories and the Northern Rockies and the other half Patagonia, Argentina, and Chile. And Puma's another wildlife and parks down there. Where should they go buy it?

Is it on Amazon? Yeah, of course. It's available. They don't miss much. much no it's available in all bookstores online you can just google it patagonia the so it's really cool too patagonia the clothing company actually uh published that and i know they've been getting involved with backcountry hunters and anglers recently you can get it on their website too but uh they didn't cut any corners what i'm so i'm glad asked. Here's my concluder. Double concluder.

Double concluder, yeah, thank you. Is that if you're going to write a book, and I've written a lot of science articles and popular magazine articles, but I wanted to write one good book. I've been very fortunate. Patagonia said, what do you need? And so I want color photos. I want maps to geo-reference readers.

The photographs in that book are stunning. And if you just read the photos and the captions from front to back, you'll learn something. For those that don't have any attention span. The photos of like my kind of my favorite type class of photo is like predators eating dead stuff. Oh, yeah. It's a great flip through on predators eating dead stuff. They did it amazing. The same two women that did the Patagonia catalogs for 20 years,

30 years, did the photos in the book and worked with me. And the ability to geo-reference as you read in a map was very important. And so they had a young couple maps for good, create the six maps. And I was really proud of it. And they surprised me. And I'll show you two here. And of course, I'm not a detail person. I didn't pick up on it for about three weeks. but they embossed a Puma print in the cover.

Nice. Isn't that cool? To scale. Very. Isn't that neat? They spread it. It's a real quality book. I'm old-fashioned.

I like to hold a book in my hand still. It just feels good. I'm pretty proud of it. I appreciate you two allowing me on today to talk about it. Congratulations. It's no small feat. Jim Williams, Path of the Puma. Thank you very much. you two allowing me on today to talk about it. Congratulations. No small feat. Okay. Jim Williams, Path of the Puma.

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