The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 162: Landscape of Fear

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Dr. Kevin Monteith, Dr. Matt Kaufmann, Jared Oakleaf, and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: genetics that rewrite our understanding of animals; big game guts; learning how to migrate; who pays for wildlife research?; brain scrambling, extreme sports, and wildlife capture; advancing modern wildlife management; how the rut kills bucks and bulls; the strange and far-ranging journeys of deer; the mule deer heyday; lighting a fuse and leaving the room; why scientists hate to speculate; eruptive dynamics; surfing the green wave; climate change; the importance of migration corridors and stopover areas; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We host the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, first we're going to talk about where we're at, and we're going to go micro to macro.

How did it come to be that we're in the Wind River Outdoor Company of Lander, Wyoming? Is that to me? Anyone, I don't care. I mean, I don't know. Giannis doesn't know. Well, I'd say it was a year ago I wrote into you guys over email from whatever contacts were in the website, and I said, well, what's it going to take to get Steve to come out to our banquet here for the Muley Fanatics Foundation? And I believe it was Michelle Jorgensen replied and said, well, here's what you need to do and plan it out. And so I think it was exactly a year ago,

we kind of inked the deal and off you were here. So it's been a long journey. And you just contacted your local hunting and fishing shop? Well, yeah. So Ron Hanson here, who's the owner of Wind River Outdoor Company, talked to him, and he was interested in being a sponsor of the banquet of which you're speaking at tonight. And so he sponsored that, which allows us to financially put together a banquet

that will raise a bunch of money for mule deer as opposed to just throwing a giant party and people having fun. Well, they're going to have fun, and we're going to raise money for mule deer. So, yeah, talk real quick about the foundation and sort of where it fits into the mule deer landscape. Yeah, so Muley Fanatics Foundation, I'm just going to go ahead and hit our mission specifically. Our mission is to ensure the conservation of mule deer and provide such supportive services to sound wildlife management and the sport of hunting. To further provide supportive services to further sound wildlife management and sport hunting.

So we really work in what I would say are three arenas. We work in supporting and funding research, which the other people on here today will speak to a little bit more. We also work and provide support to habitat enhancements when we get the opportunity. And then kind of our third sector is just recruitment and retention of new and existing conservationists. And we had your brother on before. You did. Yeah.

You know, he's the, well, I'm the better looking oak leaf. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. better looking oak leaf yeah yeah sure yeah yeah he was on talking about uh he was on talking about wolves yep yeah he's a researcher but we talked a lot about catching them yeah how to catch wolves yeah he's uh and john and i have have really good conversations i mean that that's one thing that i've always enjoyed is with my father being a biologist and of course, John as well, and then being exposed to these guys, the

other biologists and researchers around it, it really helps to kind of give me a bigger picture of what's going on ecologically. And that makes for fun conversations. Yeah. Do you guys want to, let's introduce our, our, uh, other guys here. Hit it. Kevin Monteith. I'm a professor at the university of Wyoming. And what's your, uh, how'd you come to be doing that? So I came to be, so I'm a, actually just a small town redneck kid from Northeastern South Dakota. Uh, grew up hunting and fishing, living outdoors and didn't know anything any better. Found out there was a wildlife school in South Dakota and thought, well, surely I'll go there

to be a game warden. And that's all I knew. I had no idea there was a world besides being a game warden. I mean, I grew up in a town of 500 people. My high school graduating class was 12. Seems like all the kids that hunt and fish, like we were all kids everyone to be no one knew what it meant but they all wanted to be either a game warden or a wildlife biologist. Yeah well and I didn't even know wildlife biologists all I knew is game wardens. So very very nice. You were getting checked by them all the time or? No no we weren't those kids we weren't those kids. Hiding from. But yeah just so I mean a relatively poor family didn't travel a lot, just wasn't exposed to much in the outside world and was actually just going to go to tech school, be

auto mechanic or something like that. Found out there was a wildlife school. So went there and began to learn that there's a lot more to the story than just that and became involved with some research projects as an undergrad and fell in love with research, worked really hard, was told by many that the field is really tough and there's very few jobs out there. And if you want the jobs, you got to do this, this, and this. You got to bust your tail, got to put yourself at the top of the list. So through that time and through the rest of my duration there, I fell in love with research, worked really hard to try to put myself on the top of the list, and got bachelor's and master's degrees there, went on to Idaho State, did my PhD there, worked on mule deer in California for that. What was your PhD on?

So it's on population dynamics of mule deer in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Oh, really? Yeah, and so when I did my master's work, which hopefully maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but I actually worked on captive whitetail deer. We did a lot of nutrition related work. And so, and then I, it was hands-on every day with deer. So literally living with deer. And although, you know, it may seem sometimes like, well, they're captive animals, so they're not real deer. You'd be amazed at what you can learn by literally just interacting with animals at that level on a daily basis and the powerful things that you can do because of that. So through that, it instilled in me an appreciation for nutrition. And then we took that and then basically applied a lot of what

I learned there to free ranging mule deer in the Sierra Nevadas of California. Long term, individual based work, tracking animals through time, which has really kind of become a foundation for a lot of what we try to do in my program here within Wyoming. And so, finished my PhD there, came here as a postdoc with Matt, actually, and then just begun to sort of build some rapport in a research program here, and then ultimately moved up in a couple different positions to being a professor, as I am am now in the Hobbs School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Let me ask you a quick question because you have exposure to both mule deer and California is it true that if a Columbia black-tailed deer crosses I-5 in an eastward direction, he becomes a mule deer?

Sure. No. That's not true? No, no. I mean, there is... Because according to the record books, that's true. Yeah, well, so you know how we are... You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, no, I know what you're saying.

You know how we are as people. We need to be able to draw lines and categorize things, right? Yeah. And when those... But in the real world those lines are very blurry they're they're not hard lines um it's it's the same with when you know we sit down and have conservation or conversations about subspecies how many subspecies of white-tailed deer are there how many subspecies of mule deer out there well

generally over time generally over time especially since genetic work has come into play, the subspecies world has become less crowded. I feel like the lumpers are winning. You think so? I don't know. What about grouse? We went from like 27 Canada geese to two. We went from like Lord knows how many bears to two. We went from like six kinds

of bison to one, probably one, maybe two. I think a lot of that too is, it's interesting. It depends upon what scientists you talk to actually, and how those hairs are being split as we go through time. And it's amazing how much work is done out there right now to establish those sorts of things. And so, for example, for the animals themselves, it may not matter as much to them. It matters a lot for us as to how we potentially define that. So if we have something that's apparently unique, but there's not very many of them, then we're going to care a lot more about those few. Exactly. And so that's where the importance comes in.

Whereas perhaps in the grand scheme of things where there's few, but then we determine that, oh, well, they're just the same as these over here. Okay, well, it doesn't matter that much. Oh, yeah, that's where taxonomy becomes weaponized. Yeah, it's exactly right. And for me, for me, I'm all for if it helps. I'm all for weaponizing tax i'm all for if it helps if it helps i'm all for weaponizing taxonomy in the cases where it helps what i where it makes what i want to happen possible

yeah yeah but then i hate it when it interferes with what i want to happen um so okay okay so let me put it a different way let's say a deer a mule deer blacktail deer whatever the hell it is gets hit by a car in the center of i-5 is there a way is there a way for someone to say that is a x well genetically perhaps they would be able to say he leans blacktail yeah that's exactly or he leans mule deer that's exactly right yeah but it could be a confused picture oh yeah absolutely yeah certainly yeah yeah yeah and that's where like so for example boone and crockett club and actually colleagues of mine and others have been have worked pretty hard to be able to help in identifying those sorts of things especially hybrids uh and in trying to make sure that what gets in the record books is actually what we all think it is.

Yeah, I got you. So it's really, to me, it's an interesting thing because it's something that we as humans have sort of brought into that realm to allow us to make appropriate decisions, which is good, but it's interesting too. It just depends upon the decision that's being made, whether it's something that where does it go in a record book versus is it a small population that we need to protect because they're somehow unique in some way and we need to be able to retain them in that way. worries that in talking about how like in in genetics rewriting all of our understanding of taxonomy he kind of he he looks at it a little bit not professionally but just conversate like just for fun that it's like we're in love with a shiny new thing and we had the we have these systems that sort of made sense to us about morphology land use like just like things where people look and be like that's different than that but we're in love with this shiny new

object that's in some ways overcomes our logic we're like oh so i guess it's not different even though everyone would agree that it is right because someone can tell us now that you know yeah this new technology trumped all of our earlier observations about sort of how we understood the landscape and understood creatures. To be like a grizzly and a brown bear. We do these trivia questions at our live events, and we always have people name six of the world's eight bears. Giannis, has there ever been a time when someone didn't say grizzly bear, brown bear?

No kidding. Ever? Yeah. Never. Yeah. Because to us, they're different. Yeah. Yeah.

But now they're not. Yeah. Now you're wrong to think that they're different. Okay. Let's move on with our introductions. Giannis, you're here. Yeah, good morning. Matt?

Yeah, my name is Matt Kaufman. So I'm a professor also at the University of Wyoming. I've been there about 13 years. And yeah, and my focus recently has been big game migration, ungulate migration. Are you the guy that made it fashionable? Everybody else is nodding their head at the table. He's modest, but everyone else nodded their head, yes.

I've contributed to that, for sure. But no, I mean, for a variety of reasons, I think, you know, Wyoming has sort of done a lot of migration work. Yeah, like how did that come to be? Well, I think it's partly like a sort of a perfect storm. On the one hand, you have Wyoming is a small state, about 500,000 people, a little more. It's a state in which for species like mule deer, elk, and pronghorn, they need to migrate on this landscape. So migration is sort of the optimal strategy. And then also, migration still exists because there's so few people and such wide open spaces. And so you have a lot of animals migrating, a lot of herds migrating to start with.

And then you've just had kind of more interest in it, in part because we have a lot of development in the state, energy development. And so researchers and managers are kind of racing to stay ahead of the development and understand how animals are using the landscape. And so that's led to a lot of collaring studies and a lot of discoveries of migrations. And then there's also just kind of a few iconic migrations in Wyoming that have sort of captured the imagination of the public, like the Path of the Pronghorn,

which goes from the upper Green River Basin down near Pinedale. And it's kind of unique because it goes up over this mountain range between the Gros Vents and the winds and down into Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park for summer. High country antelope, man. Yep. Yep. And it's just a few, you know, it's like 300 animals or something, but they follow this

really narrow path. And that work was really popularized by a photographer named Joe Reese and a writer named Emmeline Oslin. And they kind of like told that story in pictures and essays. And Emmeline followed the entire path and wrote about it. And so they brought that migration

to people's imagination. And there's a big story in High Country News that culminated with their work. And then my colleague, Hall Sawyer, discovered this world's longest mule deer migration, which we call the Red Desert to Hoback migration, 150 miles from the Red Desert in Wyoming down near the town of Rock Springs, or a little town of Superior, up almost to Jackson. And another sort of amazing discovery. And that had kind of evaded understanding, even though it has always gone on. Yeah, yeah.

And that's the thing I think that uh that sort of we're all learning with these collaring studies is that like obviously there's lots of people who who pay attention to wyoming's wildlife and there's you know professionals that manage uh our wildlife but it's very difficult to understand you know where a migration goes from from to finish, unless you either follow them with GPS collars or you follow them on foot. And we don't follow them on foot anymore, right? So you might be in one place or you're looking at the winter range and you know the fall or early winter comes up and all of a sudden a lot the winter range and you know, you know, the fall or early winter comes up and all of a sudden a lot of animals show up. And so, you know, they're coming from

somewhere, right? Or like I've spoken to ranchers who sit right on this migration corridor and, you know, they knew about the corridor. They're like, yeah, I can sit on my porch and I can see a hundred animals a day, you know, move across this corridor. I knew that there was a corridor here, but they didn't know that from their ranch, it extended 60 miles down to the Red Desert and another 90 miles up to the upper Hoback. You don't see that full picture until you put the collars on the animals and they reveal the length of their journey journey we just had a conversation with a guy in colorado who had that that localized micro understanding of mule deer movements where he was explaining in great detail what needs to happen with the snow and then a lot of them come through he had like a uh matt cook's ranch manager right they got like a 40-acre family property,

which sits right by, I think, a Home Depot or something like that. Remember they shot a mule deer that actually died in the Home Depot parking lot or something? But he had this really detailed understanding of what needs to happen, and then all of a sudden tons of mule deer cross his 40-acre plot. But then no sort of sense of where it ends. But he just knows on his his place all of a sudden they all show up and then they're all gone right you know um what uh real quick though for people

explain why mule deer have to move you said that it's that you have a lot of migration in wyoming what are the factors that make them bump around yeah so um so i i like to think of wyoming and actually a lot of the west is like this. It's a habitat of mountains and plains. And for species like mule deer, that's kind of a problem because these animals want to be up in the mountains because that's where all the best food is produced. That's where all the best forage is produced. The mountains are really productive.

They're fed by massive amounts of snow melt so but you can't live up there year-round because you know they would they would die if trying to move through can you expand on that just a little bit more because i know that like the ranchers too when i worked on a ranch guiding in colorado and they were like always like wanting to get those cattle up into the high country as soon as possible because they would just put on the you know the pounds faster that way what else is it besides a bunch of moisture up there? Yeah, well, Kevin should maybe, the nutritional expert should maybe answer that question. Well, a lot of it, of course, even as you drive through any of this country and just look,

I mean, the habitat, the assemblages of habitats between the low country and the high country are very different. And especially for mule deer in particular, getting them up into the low country and the high country are very different. And especially for mule deer in particular, getting them up into the high country is where a lot of the more lush forage is. And so mule deer are a fairly small ruminant. So their digestive system, they're uniquely adapted to have a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria in their guts that ultimately aid them in digesting their forage. But given how, in part, given how small they are, they're what we call concentrate selectors, meaning they need higher quality food. So for example, a mule deer isn't going to persist out on a range where you put cattle and just eat grass the entire year round. They're not going to make

it. They just can't, they can't adjust, they can't, they cannot digest that food as readily. And so ideally they have access to either browse like they do on winter range, or they get up in that summer range habitat and have either lush new grass when it's early, early growing phases or forb communities. And it's really the forbs on that higher, higher elevation country, along with even the shrubs still up in that country that really gets them high energy, easy to digest, high in protein, and they can really then not only finance reproduction but put on fat during those summer intervals. Is there a measurement in wildlife that is like a gut per body size ratio? Essentially. And so that's the relative index when oftentimes

when we talk about digestive morphology and their ability to maintain what we call throughput or basically how quickly the food passes through an animal. And so that tends to increase in correspondence with body size in general. But what we generally know is that those larger animals have a greater gut capacity relative to their body mass, therefore allowing them to basically have slower, longer retention time. They can keep the food in their gut longer, which gives them more time to digest that food which is important on a lower quality for like if you're eating primarily grass well yeah like if you look at when you open up a caribou or a mountain goat it's just like a huge damn gut

compared to other things that there's real you know they kind of bulge out in the middle yep yep and it's and it's like so so going from concentrate selector to what we call intermediate foragers like an elk elk is the classic sort of versatile intermediate forager it can kind of go both directions from subsisting on on mostly grass to also eating a lot of woody browse those sorts of things to the the bulk feeders or the grass roughage eaters like our likeison, for example, that are just ultimately like a bison. If you put bison in a tall forb community that a mule deer is just going to thrive on, they're going to have malabsorption, gut problems, and they're not going to be able to digest it properly because it's going to pass through them so quickly and

they're not designed to do that. So they need that bulkier, high biomass, lots of food, but that's going to pass through them so quickly, and they're not designed to do that. So they need that bulkier, high biomass, lots of food, but that's of generally lower quality than what a mule deer is going to live on. Thus, the importance of how habitat feeds into each one of these species somewhat uniquely or in some ways, it ultimately ends in the same result as far as them garnering energy to survive, but what they need to be able to do that differs across the board. So if they can't be, if a mule deer can't be, can't spend its whole year down in the bottom, like in the sagebrush flats, or doesn't want to, how is it okay for it to spend four or five months down there in the winter? Good. Well, so that's also, that's a, that's a great point. It's also a little bit of a misnomer too, because deer actually can

spend the entire year down in those low elevation basins. And in fact, we do, we have lots of deer from the Red Desert to Hoback deer that Matt was talking about. There's a segment of that population that ultimately lives on winter range all year round. And even in our deer that we work on in the Wyoming range, the vast majority of them migrate up into those high elevation basins up in the high country. But we still have a lot of them that persist on that lower elevation, what you would just call winter range. Like, why in the world are they here? But even those ones at lower elevation, they're still catching some of that green up early in the year. And then in all honesty, they're eating a lot of sagebrush.

And not only during the winter,'re eating a lot of sagebrush. So not only during the winter, but all through the summer as well. Sagebrush, even though like as you drive across Wyoming, we're kind of like, oh, the sagebrush is everywhere. It's just this crappy bush that lives in the deserts. And yet not only for pronghorn, but mule deer too, like it's their main staple, especially all winter long. And even for those animals that live at lower elevation. But what we're learning as well is that those low elevation animals perhaps have somewhat of a different strategy and a different kind of connection to their environment as our high elevation animals do. And these are things we're beginning to appreciate more and more. There's a huge, there are multiple solutions to the problems that animals

encounter within the environments they live in. And we're just beginning to appreciate that more and more as opposed to the more simplistic, they have to go here, they have to do this, that sort of thing. No, there's actually multiple ways for them to live in the environments that they actually live in. From those that are resident, live on a winter range all year round, basically, to those that are heading into the on a winter range all year round, basically, to those that are heading into the high elevation basins. Is there fluidity between the two groups or do they have a rigid sense that I'm like this and you're like that?

Like the mule deer, like you have the migrating population of mule deer. Do deer be like, oh, you know what? This year I'm going to go with those guys on a long ass walk or do they tend to stick to their own course from generation to generation yeah so with mule deer there's very little fluidity it's uh i mean they they learn that

strategy from their mother and then from what we can see in our data that's what they do their entire life and even in cases like the the Desert population that Kevin was just describing has three different strategies, kind of the long, the 150-mile one, a 60-mile one to the south winds, and then kind of this resident strategy. And we've never seen any switching between those strategies in six or seven years of studying them. And even within their strategy, they make their migration up to summer range

and then oftentimes they walk in their same footsteps back down to winter range. And is it reasonable to assume that if you took all, that if you somehow removed all the mule deer out of this area and grabbed some new ones from somewhere else and put the same number back, they would probably never figure that out.

They would never learn to replicate that route. Well, not never, but it would take them a very long time. So we just published a study last fall where we took, to sort of address this question, because there's been this, so there's kind of the spectrum of how animals learn to move and to migrate right and and with birds there's some genetic cues right with birds you can do the

experiment you were just talking about and they do know the the appropriate time to migrate and the appropriate direction based on where they the place on the earth and where they're from right but with the idea with mammals is that it has to be learned and so we did this experiment where we took all the transplanted bighorn sheep that had been transplanted into Idaho and Wyoming and of course and many of those came from places like around here up in the, where they were migratory. And then looked at whether or not they were migratory in their new landscape that they have no knowledge of.

And what you find is that basically all of the transplants couldn't migrate, didn't migrate. But the ones we have herds around Wyoming that have been extant, that never went through that extirpation, so have lived in these mountains for 200 years or more, and the vast majority of them migrate. And so that suggests that you have to learn how to migrate. And then in that data set, we also had animals that had just been recently released or other ones that had been released into new habitats, 30 or 40. We also had some moose herds that have recolonized habitats 70, 80 years ago.

And so you look at this continuum of time since translocation, and there you can start to see that them learning how to migrate and learning how to use the landscape. And with bighorn sheep, 30 or 40 years, they're starting, they're trending towards migration. With moose, it takes 70, 80 years for them to learn how to migrate. So it's not never, but as one journalist put it, you know, we essentially destroyed the ancestral knowledge that species like bighorn sheep had when we extirpated them across the West. Because, you know, in addition to losing the herds, we lost all the knowledge that those animals had of how to migrate on the landscape. And they can get it back, but 150-mile migration,

like what did it take in the past experience of these animals to ever have learned how to do that? And interestingly, for mule deer, so that work was with sheep and moose, and at least for mule deer with the work that we've done, they appear to be with sheep and moose. And at least for mule deer, with the work that we've done, they appear to be some of the most faithful. So basically, once they have a migratory route, that's it. They very rarely change or do anything. And we think it comes, we think it's passed from mom to daughter. Although interestingly, we've never known that for certain. We're in the process of trying to do that right now by following mom and daughter pairs through time. So literally with some of the work we're doing, collaring newborn fawns within one day of age, those that survive, re-catching them, putting a GPS collar

on them so we can follow mother and daughter in the years to come to see if those daughters ultimately stay with mom and then adopt that same migratory route, which is what we think happens. That's the working hypothesis, and it seems to be trending in that direction. But it also implies this unique value of memory as well. And we had one animal from this past year that I think helps demonstrate that in a pretty powerful way. It was a mother-daughter pair that we had followed for a complete year. So born on summer range, migrate to winter range, and then mom and daughter migrate back up to summer range. And then mom gives birth again that year. And generally mule deer around birth attempt to seek solitude and they'll literally reject, kick away,

beat the crap out of their previous years. I know, I know. It's so sad to watch them stand up on their back, pounding on them, punch their offspring. Exactly. I don't want you around anymore. Perhaps not coincidentally, one week after mom gave birth again that fawn from the previous year took off went on a walkabout for like 45 miles and so in the right direction no in the wrong direction so winter range basically winter range to summer range was was was south to north and then that fawn continued going north for like 45 miles we thought it was a dispersal like, oh, mom just kicked her off. She's going to head to a new summer range. She's going to find her place in this world, which is exciting in and

of itself if that's what she did, right? But, and this wasn't just like skirting around a mountain and then following the foothills. We're talking going from over 9,000 feet in elevation back down to five, up and down, around ridges a very elaborate route she got to that end of that journey and that took her I think that took her like nine days she turned right back 45 miles in nine days yeah she turned presumably passing all kinds of other mule deer oh mule deer all through all of that country and other migratory routes and this would have been like third week in June. So most animals are not migrating anymore. They've set up shop. Most of the females are giving birth. So although

we can't confirm it, there's no reason she would have been traveling with another deer during that time. It doesn't really make any sense. All the other deer had set up shop. But literally she gets there. She spends one day there, turns back around and literally walks the exact same path all the way back to mom in one week's time. Literally the exact same path. And this is country she has never seen before in her entire life. She's never set foot in it. Mom never took her there. We've had her collared since day one and literally walks the exact same path all the way back. There is no stinking way we could ever do that. And so to us, what that communicates is that

they may have this just amazing ability for spatial memory. So it could possibly be that that mother, that daughter could learn from mother, maybe walk that route once and they got it just like that we had one other mother-daughter pair similarly i think a 60 mile migratory route migrated to winter range and then at like eight months of age mom was killed by a mountain lion on winter range fawn still lived and walked the same path all the way back up to summer range that spring did you ever go have a look at that path like physically walk it so we we didn't physically walk it because you know how the landscape funnels yeah you know for instance you're out in the snow right yeah and you cut a set of boot tracks and you're like oh shit some of our guys here and you keep hitting the same boot tracks all day long

yeah because that person is just sort of has the same sense of ridgelines, openings, right? And just people, it'd be interesting to go walk it and be like, how much is it the logical path? And how often did it follow like a shitty route and then took the shitty route again? Yeah. So one of my research associates, her name is Samantha Dwannell and a team of women actually this year, our aim was to, to do exactly that, to, to set forth and walk one of the migratory routes of one of our collar deer. And this animal in particular, this to me is what's phenomenal too. Her journey is about 85 miles. It's deer 139, which is just 139th deer that we've had radio marked in that population. She's still alive. She's still alive. Yeah. In

fact, she's pregnant with triplets. We just, we just, we just handled her just like five days ago. Was it a nice buck that she bred with? I don't know. I don't, I don't know the answer to that. We can only hope, but she's interestingly pregnant with triplets. But she, so she has about an 85 mile journey and she goes up and over the Wyoming range, drops down, crosses the Grays River up and over the salt range to where her summer range is. And so she's literally crossing summer ranges and migratory routes of hundreds and hundreds of other deer to stay on her route to get to her summer range. And so it's seemingly, and a lot of what they do is seemingly not always that logical, but that's

their route. And so what they did is they took videographers with them. We're in the post-production phases right now of working on putting that documentary film together, but literally to experience on the ground what the animal's going through, walking through that route, the experience that they have from how they're navigating some of the snow fields to the foods that they're potentially seeing and experiencing to the treacherous terrain, to the fences that are there, all those sorts of things. And our aim was to experience that ourselves

so we can hopefully help provide to a broader public some of that, the connection between an animal and their environment. But in particular, if you imagine- I hope they don't Disney-fy it. It's not going to be Disney-fy. Like the Lost Pet movies? No, no Disney-fication going on, no.

I'm getting backed up on questions, man. Let me tell you the two questions I have, and you can approach them however you guys want. Who pays for all this? And that's great that someone does. questions i have and you can approach them however you guys want who pays for all this and and and that's great um that someone does so how do you guys fund it and then two what do you say to someone who says that deer did that crazy little journey because you guys got it all whacked out by catching it and messing with it and putting a collar on it

those are wildly diverse. Oh, yeah. No, I know. But I was getting backed up. Yeah. Let's take the first one first, and maybe I'd kind of pitch it over to Jared here, because one of the, I mean, there are multiple supporters of this work,

but one of the important ones are sportsmen groups, and Muley Fanatics Foundation has really been remarkable in their support of research and kind of unique among sportsman groups. And I can't really speak to the history of this or why this got set up, but for one reason or another, sportsman groups are much more interested

in funding on-the-ground habitat work than they are funding research. And that's... I think it's a short-term and long-term play, right? Well, I... The fairly obvious results right away versus what's to come. Right. Because you can do habitat work on your property,

and then a year later, you'll be like, holy shit. Yeah. Right. It works. Right. Because you can do habitat work on your property, and then a year later, be like, holy shit. Yeah. Right. It works. Right. Yeah. And the vision is that we're cutting through all of the middlemen, and we're just enhancing habitat and making things better for wildlife.

And as researchers, we're in the business of trying to figure out what's going on and why a population is declining. And sometimes research is risky, right? And sometimes you come up with great answers. Sometimes you map 150 mile migration and that spurs conservation actions, but sometimes you don't. And then, you know, who invested in that research that didn't quite pan out? Well, it's risky in that you might not discover. We don't know the answers. Yeah, but how is it risky?

Because how is there any wrong answer? Well, I think there's some interest and enticement in unlocking these big migrations. For example, the greater eastern Yellowstone collar project that our chapter helped to fund on this side of the Wind Rivers, a lot of those deer didn't migrate. In fact, the majority did not. They just used their habitat a little different between summer and winter. And so that lacks a little bit of the pizzazz when compared to 150 mile migrations that go from the desert floors to the tops of the mountain. But it is equally important

because then we have deer populations that interact with their landscape in a way that is a lot like a stock investor. Having a lot of diversification in how those deer use the landscape, then kind of insulates us against climatic changes. Whereas the big mountain deer probably are more susceptible to winter kill than the ones that stay in the desert. But they're also insulated from drought. So understanding that is important. It just lacks the sex appeal that the big migrations has.

So I'd like to follow up with that, Jared. I mean, with respect to this, what I posed is, I think Muley Fanatics has been kind of unique in funding research. And I'm curious of your take of why that has been the case. Well, and that's what attracted me to the organization personally is, we can go out and do a lot of things.

We can cut a lot of trees. We can do a lot of stuff. There's no certainty that that's going to do anything, especially for these wild populations. It's not, you know, the same as, say, when people back east or they're managing a farm for whitetail, they do have instant results. A lot of what we found over the years and what we've learned through the research is what we thought were productive treatments or projects really didn't benefit these wild populations at all. And so one of the things I always stick to, and it's something that I just kind of keep in my head over and over and over again, is basically science without action. It's just research. But moreover, action that isn't based in science is really an enterprise of fools because you can't focus your dollars in a way

that's responsive to the wildlife's need on the landscape. Yeah, that's a good point. And so then just kind of closing closing the loop on the on the funding question right so sportsman groups you know the other other big funder for our for our work has been rocky mountain elk foundation is that right yep and especially in wyoming they've really kind of worked uh hand in hand with with our research teams at the University of Wyoming and have helped us discover these migrations. And now we're kind of getting to, I think, a really great place where we recognize that those on-the-ground habitat projects

that groups like RMEF want to fund and have been great champions for are now being informed by the research. We've identified this migration corridor, so now we can look at how to conserve a big ranch that is in the corridor that's going to be maximally beneficial for migrating elk. Now we can look at modifying fences or enhancing habitat that are on stopover sites. And so with RMEF, there's been this sort of great investment in the science of, in this case, elk migration. And now we're literally, they're using that science to guide their work on the ground.

Yeah, it lets you maximize like a finite budget. Exactly. And do things exactly, like in exactly the right place. Yeah, and Wild Sheep Foundation is the other one that we sort of have to mention here. They've been huge supporters of not only sort of like all of those reintroductions that I mentioned that led to that learning, that migration and learning study, but lots of other research. And Kevin's been involved in some of that as well. Yeah, basically it's not, with any of this work, there's, because of what it takes to get it done, there's really no one single entity that can just come to the table and say, okay, let's go do it. Although I guess it could possibly happen, but it's very unlikely. And so ultimately with all these things, it's a big network and a big partnership.

We may just bring the science to the table, but all the others on the other side of the table, we're all at the same table. And it's all, everybody's playing their role from the non-profits that are helping contribute to it to we have great agency partnerships from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to Bureau of Land Management to Forest Service there's other other entities within the state. Do you guys get hard funding from your university or do you have to get everything through grants? No all through grants we don't have any hard funding that comes through the university i guess except for my salary and then matt salaries is paid for through us you go out and finance all your projects yeah yeah yeah okay what about whacking animals out by uh yeah by column because

you know what we were recently talking about a mortality study in the everglades which is really surprising about what kills deer in the everglades. And a guy wrote in and he was like, you, he was saying that by the simple fact of putting collars on them, you change the dynamic. And he had this thing. What was that study that came out? They were working on a thing in Africa. They were painting certain animals. Yeah.

But I think it was anecdotal. Was it actually studied? I don't know. I can't remember. They were like on a thing in Africa. They were painting certain animals. Yeah, but I think it was anecdotal. Was it actually studied? I don't know. I can't remember. They were talking about it. But it definitely seemed, yeah, so that they could wash the animals. Why do you guys look so irritated? We are.

I was just thinking about painting some bucks when they're young. Yeah, I'm saying by hanging some damn thing on them. Yeah, sure. It changes. When a predator comes into a group of them, whether it recognizes it as an injury or whatever, that it changes the dynamic. Yeah.

No, my dad did a lot of research on pheasants at one point in his life, and they were trying to figure out how many of these pheasants that they released made it. And all the pheasants had a little wristband on their leg, and he watched several predators key in on the ones that had the wristband, something shiny, take them out. And so it was biasing the research they were doing. Or dude's not, like, I'm not going to shoot a deer with a collar on it.

So they're doing a mortality study that factors in human mortality. But if you're sitting out in the woods and a deer comes through the collar, unless you know what's going on, most people are going to think like, well, I don't. These guys just laid some collars on some really big deer. So you might want to think twice before you say that. And people shot them? Well, I mean, definitely there's been, Matt's been working on deer over in the Sierra Madres and had collars on bucks. And we just fixed a bunch of males with collars over in the Wyoming range as

well. And I certainly expect some big tankers. There were a couple of really good deer that we, that we were fortunate to put collars on, which were real excited to see where they go and what they do. But, so in that scenario, there's, but nevermind, nevermind the people shooting them or not shooting. Yeah. But I'm talking about like the idea. And I don't believe that I don't, I don't know that this is true,

but you hear people say that when you do that, you scramble his brain or whatever. Yeah, a couple of different things associated with brain scrambling. So we did some work in this year in Nevadas of California, and we were doing that deer work over the years. And through doing subsequent helicopter surveys and wanting to get a good population estimate, it's important for us to be able to know whether or not an animal has a collar

on. So to do that, to make sure we didn't miss a collared animal. So for example, you fly over a group and you didn't see the collar that was in it, which causes some problems for bias in your data. We affixed orange bands around the top of the collars to make sure that we- Oh, that's why they have those on them? Well, that's oftentimes the reason. And so that's why we were doing it there. But what we also learned subsequently is because of that bright orange, it was subtle, very subtle, but it was causing some bias in mortality and in part associated with predation. So I will admit in that scenario that yes, there some potential uh effect there with regards to that but we don't

affix big bright orange collars on these animals anymore oftentimes they're brown or they're black they may have a tag on it on one side so we can id them in the field that sort of thing um but ultimately there's little effect with regards to that now that's not brain scrambling um the the brain scrambling. The brain scrambling- I made that up. I know you did. The word choice was mine, but the sentiment is others. Relative to the effect of affixing a collar on an animal. Now, we know from previous work, especially before the technology got to where it is today, that when we put a collar on an animal that was too heavy, it did have an effect on that

animal. It subsequently influenced their ability to perform, reproduce, a slight effect on survival thereafter. Not huge, but it was a subtle effect. Technology has come along where we don't have that issue anymore. And so those effects really are not there. And even when you step back and you consider the capture handling process and the things that we do, which we get like brain scrambling comments or questions like that sometimes. Have you heard other people say brain scrambling? I mean, maybe not use the term brain scrambling. What's the preferred term? Generally, it's using the term stress. You're overstressing them. I like that. And so with the work that I do, we're oftentimes, the way I try to attempt to characterize it is telling an individual story. And if I can take multiple individuals in a population and put all those stories together, a pattern of understanding begins to emerge.

And so we do our best to follow individual animals through time. And oftentimes, what we need to be able to do is to catch and rehandle that animal over time to assess the reproduction, to assess how fat they are, their patterns of growth, those sorts of things. So we often catch animals multiple times. And so, and right now in a number of my studies, twice a year. So we can see that picture of that seasonal change in fat and condition and reproduction, for example, as we go through the seasons. And so many will say, well, as you continue to do that over time, you're just like adding more stress to their life. And eventually the cumulative stress is going to be so high that they're just going to tip over the edge. But what the reality is, is that, yes, I mean, I'm not going to try to tell you a story that those capture events are not stressful. Certainly they are.

But it's also, it's very acute. So it's a short temporal window. We do the capture. We handle the animal. We process this. They go back on their normal way. It's not like we continue to add this stair-stepping cumulative stress that ultimately in the end tips them over. One of my favorite stories to tell, it's maybe seemingly anecdotal, but we'd have a number of other animals that I

could also tell a fairly similar story, but to me this one is the most powerful. And that's an animal that we had in our work during our study in the Sierra Nevadas of California, so a mule deer. She was part of that work from 1997 when it started to 2009 when we finished. And during that window of time, our aim through a number of the years was to handle animals once a year, but then we switched to twice a year so that we could see that seasonal change through time. So during that window of time, we captured and handled that deer 21 times. And so if you tell me that there's cumulative stress effects or whatever that we're affecting their viability through time to handle that animal 21 times over that window, but the story gets even better. When she was 12 years old, now this is an animal of known age.

When she was 12 years old, she gave birth to triplets and I collared all three of her fawns. She subsequently reared them all at 12 years of age. She successfully reared all of them. Old dry doe. The old dry doe. Completely wrong. Completely wrong. Old dry doe gave birth to triplets, raised them all.

She was in very, very poor shape that fall. They pretty much sucked her dry. And we caught her that fall. Not only in that fall, in that following spring, continued to catch her twice a year. And I collared her single, in that following spring, continued to catch her twice a year. And I collared her single fawn that next spring. That fawn died at 30 days of age to a bobcat. But ultimately in the end, she lived to 15 and a half years old when she was killed by a mountain lion on winter range. And so by the time she was- How many fawns did she raise successfully? If you

measure success as being- How many like lifetime reproductive six i'd have i haven't done that but i certainly could go do that because we practically have her whole life but i don't i don't know the answer to that like how many she weaned or whatever yeah exactly i'd have to go back and look but even in that year she had a kid get killed by bobcat and she got killed by mountain she got killed by a mountain lion when she was 15 and a half on winter range and so by the time she was 12, we had handled her over 15 times. And yet she gave birth to triplets and reared them. I mean, which is a huge feat in and of itself. Did she get pretty passive after you started? So what's amazing is those animals that we-

Here's that helicopter he's laid down. Yeah, exactly. So I was one of the years when she was, and the year that she was 13, I was gunning and I caught her and she's fairly passive. I shot a net over her that the one, the back end of the net just touched her head and she just laid down. So she wasn't even really caught, but she just laid down and I just got out of the helicopter

and hobbled her and we processed her and just super calm and chill the entire time. And that's generally what we tend to see of those animals that we've handled multiple times are just like, well, okay, we're doing this again. And it's no big deal. Which she captured the same way every time. By a net gun from a helicopter every time, 21 times. Similar to being abducted by aliens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We hear that once in a while too. And then you guys tranquilize it or don't tranquilize it no do you need to tranquilize deer no you do not no and so generally generally if we don't have to sedate or tranquilize in any way in my experience it's better for the

animal because they maintain all of their abilities to thermal regulate to respond um we don't cause that you know that that cert there's that surge in the genital, and then we just knock it back real fast again. We avoid that. And most importantly, then when we let them go, they're fully aware, completely can do their own thing. They can navigate fences, can deal with predators, everything else. They're back on their way. So no drugging. Can you capture an antlered buck and not drug it yes yes so there's no safety concern uh well i mean they got bone on their head that you have to be careful of yeah um you can no it can certainly be done absolutely yeah and that's how with many of them that we

captured and outfitted this fall yeah they were in hard antler and you can catch them with a net gun and do it that way yeah are you guys you guys familiar with Valerius Geist? You've been reading his stuff all year. What's his reputation? So in my mind, Valerius Geist, and probably everybody would have a different opinion, but he's a brilliant scientist, without a doubt. But he's also, and some scientists would say like,

oh man, that guy was crazy. But interestingly, Val Geist to me was so creative and thoughtful that he postulated so many ideas that have become hypotheses that we've since tested or maybe still lay some of the groundwork today. Now, admittedly, some of those were pretty far out there and pretty crazy. It's like, okay, no way. But in all honesty, I think it was just his creative mind that he could come up with potential explanations to things that ultimately led to ideas that we could test thereafter. I remember someone saying that he will kind of like light a fuse and then leave the room.

By tossing something in it. Yeah, right. By like, something in it. Yeah, right? By like, here's an idea, here's an idea. Yeah, yeah. But before we leave the brain scrambling. Oh, yeah, please. Well, I mean, I think Kevin gave a great description about the ways in which these type of collaring activities

don't or minimally disrupt the animals. But I don't want to lose the larger point here, which is that this is the way that we have advanced modern wildlife management for the last half a century, right? So almost everything that we know about how animals respond to roads, how animals respond to human hunting,

predator-prey interactions, disease interactions, competitive interactions, population dynamics. Capturing and collaring animals is the tools of the trade. This is the tool that has led to most of the sort of modern advancements in our understanding of wildlife management and wildlife biology. And as we go forward, we need these tools even more than ever, because we are, most of the species we're talking about are hunted, but we are in a biodiversity crisis here. And for a lot of the game species, yes, we're not worried about losing mule deer, but we are worried about losing mule deer migrations or severing those migrations. And for lots of other species, we can think of ungulates in Africa and other species. We are concerned about losing

these herds. And when we lose them, it's not going to be because we somehow stress them out a little bit too much by capturing one too many animals. It's going to be because we didn't understand what these animals needed

in terms of their habitat requirements, their movement requirements to live on this landscape. And we didn't understand what we were doing to alter that. So, you know, that's what research gives us. Research gives us that understanding. And, you know, to me, that's the big picture. And that's why we do this research. And there's lots of examples of that type of understanding being applied to better manage and conserve these

species. And so, you know, that's the flip side. You know, that's what I think about when we get criticized about, you know, the acute stress that we're putting these animals under. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes, and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Yeah, I wanted to return to that, but I'm glad you got that

taken care of. You're welcome. I was devil's advocate, man. I was being the devil's advocate there. I understand that well, and we'll even revisit that and let you emphasize that point again. But the reason I'm bringing up Val Geist is, you know his thing, like his idea about how mule deer came into existence.

Is that, does that have, is there academic consensus on his idea of how the sort of evolutionary path of the mule deer? Let me approach this a completely different way. Let me approach this a completely different way. How did mule deer come to be? What's the evolutionary path that led to mule deer well and i just was curious of the same thing because i've read val guy's book and there was a you know he talks about basically it mule deer were crossed between black tail and white tail deer yeah and are really new species and i even texted a biologist about it last night.

He's like familiar with it, but wanted to go revisit the idea. Yeah. So under Geist theory, they're basically been around 10,000 years. Yeah, so it's a Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Right. And when I read that, I instantly thought, well, I was skeptical. Also, as with anything with science, there's usually some counterpoints. And I got digging around and there's other theories of maybe glaciers separated deer.

And then they evolved into those different species that we know today. So there is two kind of counter theories. And I don't know if you guys know, is it pretty commonly held that they're fairly new species to the planet? Say, especially compared to whitetail deer who've been around, as I'm told, a lot longer. Like fairly unchanged for a long, long time. I think that's the general consensus.

Is that what? Is exactly what you said, being a fairly new species, whatever new actually means. But with regards to that, yeah. And then historically, the notions with the initial, some of the mitochondrial DNA indicating that mule deer were more closely related to white-tailed deer as opposed to black-tailed deer, and then more recent analyses indicating that, well, no, mule deer and black closely related to white-tailed deer as opposed to black-tailed deer and then more recent analyses indicating that well no mule deer and black-tailed deer are probably more closely related than our white-tailed deer it's just like and that's like i referenced our conversation before as we begin to like you know split all these things up it's like okay well fine and interestingly as far as like ecologists tend to not dwell on those sorts of things a lot

in the arena of the geneticists and those sorts of things there's lots of you know those taxonomic related questions how do these animals come about where do we where do we draw the lines but as ecologists we tend to we tend to dwell on some of those aspects a lot less and focus more on the ecology connections of animals to their environment as opposed to what should be split what should be split and where the splitters versus we know you become curious about it i'm not that curious yeah i'm just and i think it's because i think it's because just our level our level as we talked before i mean there's definitely some value within that relative to how unique is this versus that and where do we draw these lines to seek to conserve and protect. And I guess I

like to think of it more bigger picture and I'm like, I think we want to be able to conserve essentially everything we got, even those that are not small or isolated or seemingly very unique. I guess I think a little bit more big picture and a bit differently of just the connection between an animal and their environment and within those ways as opposed to the splits or the lumps. But if, say, like a mule deer, it's been on the planet a much shorter period, pretty much agreed to on that. does that then ecologically make them more sensitive to change and less able to adapt that's a really good question well it depends it would depends upon how the various traits that

that exist there have become potentially fixed and thus are more lacked in diversity. So something that's potentially newer, so long as there's traits for adaptation to act on that could lead to a viable strategy, then it's fine. That part doesn't really matter. Whereas if various traits have become fixed and then something changes, then there's no potential beneficial trait for that change to be able to operate on that leads to some benefit over time. So whether or not there's the diversity in those traits to allow that to happen, depending upon how long one has been around or not,

I don't know that it necessarily makes them one more sensitive than the other, but others could certainly argue it in the opposite direction. I'm going to lay out the damn Geist Floss. Are you familiar enough with it to fact check me on it? We'll see. Okay, he's got this idea, right? Probably untestable. That you had this long-standing,

very versatile population of whitetail deer that had always been in what's now the southeast united states and climatic conditions were such that it enjoyed this westward expansion and then climatic conditions were such that the middle ground faded out and you had this remnant population on the west coast and this this in that expanding population retracted back east and they enjoyed this long period of separation and eventually emerged the blacktail deer and the whitetail deer and then climatic conditions were such that those populations were brought back together eastward and westward expansion there

was a hybridization event it's very beautiful in its details there's a hybridization event around the rocky mountain front or so and then and then the retraction again and it left this population of yeah it's tight it's tidy tidy tidy neat so tell me then i don't know listen i don't know no i i no okay so it's not it's not a question it's not a question for you perhaps it's more of no no lay it out act like it's my idea hybrids okay white-tailed deer mule deer hybrids how do they do i don't think they do very good right they do terrible and they're not sexually And they're not sexually viable? Generally not.

In fact, I had one in captivity because we had both mule deer and a few white-tailed deer and a few mule deer in captivity. And we had a mule deer buck broke through the fence, got in with our white-tailed does the one year, and happened to knock one of them up. And so we ended up with a hybrid. Is that how hybridization occurs? It's a mule deer buck and a whiteitetail doe or can it go the other way yeah there's lots of speculation on that it can go the other way so people i mean but like so you've seen it happen have you seen have you seen both happen no but we have evidence of that happening okay i

haven't seen it myself happen that way we have evidence but it's known to have happened yeah in the general theory which probably comes from geist too um is that because of the way white-tailed deer rut and that they travel lots of country and then find one female and stick with it that sort of thing as opposed to the maybe more sometimes storm harem oriented a little bit although they're not really a lot not quite a lot within mule deer it's still a bit of a tending bond, but that it's more likely for a whitetail to happen to counter a mule deer doe and then ultimately breed her. Yeah, yeah. But regardless, like that hybrid, even in captivity,

it's actually pretty hilarious watching if it got spooked a little bit and took off, it would like stot once and then sort of run and then like stot again and then try to run again so that is almost it's completely true you hear those stories but explain starting because a lot of people aren't gonna know what that word is so starting is where is very common in mule deer and it's where the animal lands on all four feet at once and then pops up again and the idea behind that which probably comes from valgeis too is that within within the more than the more definitely covered it in his book oh yeah no i know he did yeah um as they as they live in the more like

shrubby ruggedy country and with some of the predators that they encounter there that them bounding in between as opposed to the flat out open wide open run in open country that white tail deer are that it's a better adaptation for them to evade predators by that popping up and down and so you don't see them rough rocky ground exactly and so it's that all all four feet bouncing but yeah what that hybrid would do is he would literally do that he'd like stop once and then open up and then start again and then open up really bizarre and so you can imagine that an adaptation like that is not really fit on either side of the spectrum. Where do you live and be viable that way? But in general, to get back to

your question, if that happened, to me, those hybrids should be way more viable than they are. And the point is, is they're not. And that's one of the greatest challenges with regards to that idea um and unless reproductive isolation for whatever hundreds of thousands of years or whatever it is was long enough to cause hybrids to not be viable from from that relationship maybe but it seems to me that they should be more viable than they are if if that was the case so good job, man. At what point in time does it seem... Are you leaving Val Geist? Oh, no, yeah, but go ahead, man. You're not going to...

Go ahead. Yeah, I'm going to go. I want to know what they think about the shirking or shirker idea that Val Geist has. Yeah, Yanni's big into this. You guys know about this? You might have to remind me. That's the idea.

It's a super buck. How he turns into a super buck is that he removes himself from the breeding activity while everybody else is burning up their fat reserves. He just kicks back, keeps eating, and just takes himself out for years of this. And then comes in and runs the show. Until one day he emerges. Just the man the man yeah nobody can mess with him and at that point he can just spread his genes everywhere yeah so i can speak you guys got a collar one of them shirker bucks gotta find one first well we should yeah we should potentially see that so

so back with the captive deer work that i did years ago, we sort of, we angled at a question along those lines, but not exactly like that. Wherein our interest was in looking at how yearling males, so kind of their first year coming into that age where they could potentially reproduce or participate in the rut, whether or not when a big adult male was around, if that suppressive effect of that hierarchy caused them to not engage in the rut. Whereas in a scenario where we had yearling males with no big males around, just two yearling males and their access to females all by themselves, they can be the top dogs and whether or not they then expended more resources in the rut. And so during that, during that, those windows of time, we separated them out into those groups like that,

and we monitored their food intake, their change in body mass during the rut, and then also their change in fat during the rut. And what was amazing to me is those yearling males, regardless of whether or not they had big males around, and by the way, they acted very differently. Those yearling males, where they didn't have a big male around, you knew they were top dog. They acted like they were top dog. Is that right? Oh yeah. Oh crap. Yeah. Behaviorally, it was very obvious, but interestingly, their forage intake and the mass they lost during the rut was no different, which to me was

completely phenomenal. And in those big adult males, they were expending a lot of energy during the rut. In fact, those adult males, like four to seven years old, they could lose 8% of their body mass in a week. And they're literally, and these are males- 8% in a week. We're literally putting males in a four foot by eight foot, what we call a metabolic box during the day, allowing them out to interact in the mornings and evenings, putting them back in that box. Food right in front of their face, as much of it as they want, and they eat almost nothing.

So most of the mass loss associated with the rut, even though we think it's because they're running all over the place, is actually because it's voluntary hypophagia. They're not eating. They're simply not eating, and that's where most of the change occurs during the rut. But what we learn from that work as well, so not only those dynamics with those yearling males, but also the bigger males, is that it's largely what we call state dependent. So a big male that has more fat reserves at the beginning of the year is going to expend more of those reserves in the rut than a male that simply did not pack on as many reserves early in the year or is younger and thus still growing. Therefore, it doesn't have the fat reserve to expend because it

was putting most of its energy into growth and body structure and body mass. And then it's going to expend less. So while the shirker male, it could have been a big male that year and he went all out, but that's because he had it. It doesn't necessarily imply that he's been saving it up for years and then going all in. And in all honesty, with regards to a tactic wherein you would, you know, attempt to contribute your genes to subsequent generations, if you wait that long, you also could die and then contribute nothing as well. And so if you do that in a manner wherein in the years you have the resources to expend towards it you by all means should

probably engage uh to take advantage of that opportunity yeah i don't i don't remember the shirker male uh but it it does seem like it's a little bit counterintuitive of the way you know i think i'm correct he used it as like a way to explain big giant box you get like the biggest of the big you want them to save up right and then yeah yeah but the problem is is that like an individual animal like they don't know that that strategy is possible right so it's it's kind of a hard so you know all this sort of evolution he's like you know how i'm gonna play it boys right right you're not gonna see me for five years when i come back and then at year four you're dead right so you know animals discount the uncertainty of the

future like they don't know what the future their future reproductive possibilities are going to be and so i don't think he's proposing that they're gaming it. I think it's just a thing that it's got low T or whatever. I don't know. We should have the guy on. Yeah. Yes. But I'm ready to leave him. I'm glad we touched on that because that brought up some interesting stuff.

I'm going to have to listen to this podcast. This is going to be a good one. Wait, you haven't been listening? So again. Again. Gotcha. Is it good that we move on please okay um are you guys familiar with the idea that that at the time like at the moment of european contact um that shortly thereafter we probably enjoyed the highest

buffalo constant buffalo bison i'm gonna use bison because you guys are professionals the highest bison population perhaps that ever existed on the continent because you had you know lost 90 percent of the indigenous hunters on the landscape and their other landscape changes and so we came in and saw this perhaps saw this like very momentary artificial thing of the you know the the much cited like 32 or 42 or whatever fashionable number of bison that were on the landscape million and we took it to be like uh yeah yeah 32 million used to be the fashionable number used to be 60 million right it's gone down um but anyways we looked and like holy smokes there's a ton of these things but there's no reason to think that it had been like that for a long time and there could have been factors that allowed this explosion

and it allowed the animals to be in places they weren't such as like the mound builders in the ohio and mississippi valley um they made effigy mounds to all the animals around they never made an effigy mound to Buffalo. Yet when the English came into those areas, they were all over the damn place. So people wonder what happened there. Had they moved into these places? Why were they not represented in art? Was this just a temporary phenomenon that they witnessed?

So at what point do you feel we had the most mule deer? 1960? Yeah, I mean, it seems like that was probably the heyday. So that's a legit idea? I mean, it seems like it's a, I mean, we don't have great data going back that far, but it definitely seems like that's kind of the conventional wisdom. Because you had cultures, like you had indigenous cultures, even that focus, like it's hard to imagine now. You had indigenous cultures that seemed to have focused on hunting bighorns.

You had indigenous cultures that focused on hunting doll sheep, which seems wild, right? And you had people that like very much focused on all the things, but there's no sort of like mule deer society. Right. Well, you know, it's, I mean, of course, like our understanding of these things gets dimmer and dimmer the farther we go back, right? But you've probably read that that journal the trapper by osborne russell right and and you know so this was a this was a trapper that was moving through the greater yellowstone region in the 1830s and he was you know hunting beaver and and supplying beaver pelts uh to the regional markets and and it's striking and and he was a fairly remarkable guy because he basically wrote down in enough detail his journeys every day that historians could go back and trace his path of where he was the entire season, even a couple different years, moving through that landscape. And he wrote down every time they shot something. And what's remarkable is they're moving through the greater Yellowstone landscape,

and whenever they need food, it's either bison or bighorn sheep. Yeah. It's really surprising, man. Yeah. Needed to stop and make something, shot a bison. He has an observation somewhere up in the Gros Ventre rivers, which is the Gros Ventre drainage, which is kind of, would be sort of south of the southeastern corner of Yellowstone, where he's at camp. And he makes an observation,

he counts on the cliffs around camp, a thousand bighighorn sheep which is just unimaginable today right you've met francis parkman i'm not familiar he's the historian he traveled with the aglala sioux in the 1840s and they go into the black hills and kill bighorns with rocks they get above them they get above them and roll rocks down to kill them crazy geez yeah so anyways go on yeah so i mean like like there you wouldn't occasionally you know occasionally russell reports killing a a mule deer occasionally an elk and so like yeah i mean that and that's what if you're traveling through there now that'd be like that. And that's what, if you were traveling through there now, that'd be like your main. Right.

That's what you're going to run into. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, that, you know, accounts like that make me curious how much bison shaped the ecosystem and, you know, modified the habitat and potentially competed with species like mule deer and elk, you know, and, you know, interactions and dynamics that we have no way to really understand today.

The skull, I found a skull, a bison skull, literally going toward an elk bugle at 9,000 feet in heavy timber in the Madison Range. And you just cannot picture it now. Yeah. Like what, what that looked like when that thing died. And, you know, it's just, it's, it's so confusing. Right.

So, yeah. When were there a bunch of them? Like the, you know, the idea, are you familiar with the idea that they're like like that everyone talks about the mule deer heyday of the 1960s that might have been like what were the factors that could have led to something like that you guys you guys don't like speculating about old timey stuff it's because it's speculation just tough for scientists like okay i'm gonna go there well because you get skittish well you get skittish and it's i mean we're our job is to our job is to um in our in our passion ultimately is to talk science use the evidence that we have to talk about that and to hopefully help make

sound decisions and then when we get a person no it's true i'm gonna i'm gonna speculate please let me speculate so 1670 so many have referenced that as a potential eruption, right? In eruptive dynamics. Hold on, 1960s? The 60s, 70s. Oh, 60s and 70s. Yeah, in that window in there. And like the notion behind eruptive dynamics in ungulate populations, it's not a new idea.

We know that that type of dynamic happens and where it's most evident. Explain the word real quick. So eruptive dynamics is just simply this notion where a great example is you take some ungulates, put them on an island and they grow and grow. They just explode to great abundance and then they subsequently crash and then we never see them recover to that abundance again. Which is what you see when you introduce wild turkeys somewhere. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Yeah, it's the same sort of notion. It's this explosion, make use of this like brand new habitat that's been, you know, unpioneered

before. You see them reach great abundance and then they subsequently... Predators aren't used to you yet. Lots of things, yeah. Potential ideal scenario. And the notion of the the 60s and 70s which we're all potentially fond of and i think there's a general like desire and thirst to have that great abundance of of mule deer again most most certainly um and in but also for us as people i think we all we often look in the past and think, I want it the way it was back then. We should have that number again. But the only way to potentially get that number again is for everything to be the exact same way it was back then. And things were very different that then.

Our forests were at different successional stages. So forest management has definitely progressed through time. We've seen successional changes in those forests. Livestock grazing was potentially different. Predators were potentially different. Climate regimes were different. Our presence on the landscape was certainly different. Our use of habitat ourselves was different.

Agriculture was different. Agriculture was different. So you begin to think through each one of those things that are different now than they were back then. And you begin, and reflecting on that, you potentially begin to realize that, okay, well, maybe there were a lot of different things that potentially contributed to that great abundance at that point in time. And another one is even other species of ungulates present on the landscape. I mean, we didn't have near the elk abundance back then as we do now, most certainly. And regardless, there's, you know, the way you ultimately get that, you get an abundance like that, is it starts from the ground level. The only way that you can get there and to maintain that much is to ultimately have the habitat and that nutrition and fundamental

building block for populations. Now, maybe other things like presence of predators and other things interact to influence those things, but you ultimately do not get there unless you have that fundamental building block. And so for me, most certainly that fundamental building block had to be different. Predators aside, all those other sort of human harvest, all those other things aside, you had to have that fundamental building block to be able to get there. And I think that building block- That being food. That being food and use of that building block today is different than it was in the 60s and 70s. I think you think about what led into that 1960s eruption. So you had probably landscape level disturbances occurring, and then you kind of swing into mid 19301930s or so and then there's this relax

and the disturbance kind of stops, slows down. And that habitat's allowed to mature to a state that's very desirable for deer and they just chase that habitat. I'll go ahead and speculate because I'm not bound by the shackles of science, but I agree. I think it had to have been a disturbance regime followed by a relax

and the great thing about the disturbance regime that happened that time is you didn't have all the external stressors that we have now be it cheatgrass or other demands on the landscape you had historically low predator populations yeah i mean that that can could contribute to it but like kevin was saying you still need the groceries to recruit the babies so what what is an acceptable number of mule deer i mean because you want to have like a fatalism problem right like if if you ask me if you ask me like what's the benchmark of what we should strive toward? If I really had to come up with, okay, what's the ideal? I would say 1492.

1492, is that a number or a year? No. You want 1,492 meal a day? no you want 1492 I just like picking a year so I'd be like okay like 100 years 100 years before you know 100 years before European contact I don't know like what is the number if we say like oh we want wildlife we want to make room for wildlife we want to like if you just say like my job is to tell you what's going on and what's here at some point it's going to lean into advocacy or some point it's going to lean into preservation so are you always just chasing the idea that i want to maintain what we have right now and that's what i would like to see happen or you're are you trying to um are you trying to be to go back and and hit some like retroactive

point to say like no we pushed it too far now it's we we've messed it up too much we need to fix things or is it just i just want to capture what's here now and maintain that or i'm willing to see us lose a bunch more and then come to some point when we want to stop the loss of wildlife generally i know it's not your job but as a human being do you think about that does that motivate your thoughts as a scientist well this is sort of uh well this is sort of a difficult question, right? Sure, it's the most difficult question. Or one of them.

Right. So, I mean, one answer, obviously, is, like, for us, I mean, we're researchers, right? So our job is not to articulate how many mule deer there should be on the landscape, right? Yes. Okay, so that's one answer, right? Here's the problem. Here's the problem. Here's the problem.

I didn't say it was the only answer. If you't care if you didn't care you wouldn't do what you did i respect i understand i respect i respect what you're saying and i have because both my brothers are in the business here and i'll always be like what do you hope happens like i don't hope anything happens um you wouldn't be motivated if you didn't care about deer you wouldn't be messing with them all the time. You'd be doing something different. Right, right. Yeah, so that's one answer, right?

Obviously one that you don't like. But I mean, the other answer is that, right? We have to, so I think it's as, when we manage these systems, it's just just really hard it's this sort of shifting baseline problem right yeah it's it's really hard to go back it's really hard to get the public to imagine you know to get the public and i've tried this to get the public to think about what osborne russell saw in those mountains outside of Yellowstone, right? We don't, nobody thinks about, nobody can even imagine a world in which someone at their camp could see a thousand bighorn sheep on the cliffs above them. Nobody can imagine that. And that is not

in the discussion when we think about how many bighorn sheep we should have on the landscape today, right? And so that ship has sailed. Right, and so I think that we, so I mean, when I think about it practically, and when I think about conservation, I think about, you know, how many, and for me, it's not so much how many mule deer, it's, you know, where do we have muleule deer where will we have migratory mule deer where you know where where will we sort of continue to have these animals

making their best living by moving across the big landscapes of the American west and when you think about that like I think you have to start, in practical terms, you have to start with what we have now. And the conservation discussion, like, we can argue about what it should be, but I think in practical terms, the only place that we can start with is conserving what we have now, right? I mean, it's called conservation for a reason, right? It's conserving. You can't conserve what you don't have, right? So we're conserving what we have now. And the notion, you know, I think the bighorn sheep people have been, of course, they have been tremendously successful in restoring bighorn sheep, right? And so maybe that's an example where

they've been able to get the public and get sportsmen to imagine what the West used to look like and work towards, you know, getting sheep back on those mountains again. And that's, you know, that's been successful. They've been successful in restoring,ighorn sheep in lots of places where we used to have them but lost them during European settlement. But with mule deer, I think you have to start with what you have now and hope you don't slip further back to then 20 years from now we're having the same conservation question in this restoration about or about what we have now which is far less than what we had 20 years prior um anyways that's that's how i think about it uh my brother who works in Alaska, he talks about that there, they're still in the, he works with fisheries.

And he says that there, we're still in the sort of the descriptive phase. Just trying to understand what's here. There's a lot of things they don't know what's there yet. No one's measured it. And he talks about how here, he sees so much where we're in the rest,

down in lower 48. We live a lot in the restoration space, the restoration phase. Because we know what's there. Yeah, there's a lot of work here, like Atlantic sturgeon, whatever. There's a lot of work down here of trying to restore populations.

Which is kind of interesting because I don't know about you guys, but I feel like we're very much still in that descriptive phase when we're still discovering about this stuff for 150 mile migrations it feels like we're we're learning as we're going along and but we're also we have now all these societal pressures on these animals and so we don't have the luxury maybe that we had before of just kind of unknowingly making mistakes and then, you know, undoing those mistakes later. Yeah. That's a good counterpoint to his like casual observation

is that people just found out about some of these, you know, some of these things that we didn't know about. Yeah. The more I talk with these guys, the more lost I actually feel on mule deer and what I thought I knew, but it's a good level of loss, man. It's like finding yourself lost. Can you touch on the idea real quick that what happens to a fawn in utero? Is that the right term? Yeah, nice word. What happens to a fawn in utero

will be then realized throughout its entire life, including whether or not it might turn into a big, huge, giant buck. I'd love to. Yeah. Yeah. So the easiest way for me to do that is to actually tell a little bit of a story behind some, some work that we did. And of course it, it ties back to like the size that animals ultimately attain, which a lot of us are, are interested in as well. Um, so we, in South Dakota, there's two different primary regions and habitats. So Eastern South Dakota, where I grew up, crop agriculture dominated landscape, and then the beautiful Black Hills in Southwestern South

Dakota. And during that time, there was this general observation that, and I don't know if you spent some time in the Black Hills perhaps, but those deer are tiny. They look like little mini deer compared with deer in eastern South Dakota. No, I didn't know that. Like maybe a hundred pound difference. Mule deer? At adult. Whitetail deer.

Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. Whitetail deer, sorry. But it's the best story. It's probably the best example that we have that clearly demonstrates this phenomena. And so the question was, and this is, I think, what's so powerful about this is I think as people and as hunters and folks that appreciate the outdoors and think about big males and those sorts of things, when we see big deer over here and we don't see big deer over here, well, it's because it's genetics. We got great

genetics over here for big bucks and we don't have it over here. And so that was one of the questions with regards to deer in the Black Hills. Well, it must just be genetics that's making them that much smaller. And so we did what's called a common garden experiment where we took- Common garden? Common garden experiment where you take individuals from two different places, bring them into the same place and raise them under the exact same environmental conditions. And in this scenario, we took newborn white-tailed deer from the Black Hills, newborn white-tailed deer from eastern South Dakota. We raised them in captivity, hand-raised them, offered them a high-quality diet, and watched them grow all the way through to adulthood.

And so we focused on males because of the questions but we raised those newborn males all the way up to like seven eight years of age and watched their changes in body mass and antler size and lo and behold even though they were raised under identical conditions they were radically different in body mass and antler size like 100 pound difference over 100 pound difference in body mass and like 50 plus inches in antler size, like 100 pound difference, over 100 pound difference in body mass, and like 50 plus inches in antler size. Huge, huge difference once they reach that peak size. So initially we thought, huh, okay, well maybe it is genetics. Then because we had both males and females that we had hand raised, we then allowed them to breed in captivity. So we had Black Hills males and females, Eastern South Dakota males and females.

Okay. Yeah. Do you want to tell the rest of the story? No. Okay. I just got excited. Dude, I love this story because to me, it's so powerful.

So we allowed them to breed in captivity and then we did the exact same thing again. We hand raised all of those offspring. Oh, back up though. The ones, okay. We didn't cross. No, no, I got you. I just want

to make sure i'm clear on something yeah the ones that you took okay the ones you took and took them for two different areas yeah yeah raise them under the same conditions at what age were they sorry oh so we we watched those males grow all the way up to seven eight years i mean at what age did you bring them together oh newborns we we literally we collected them from the wild as brand new babies so like two days of age. One to two days. So we bottle fed the fawns. So they're already weaned.

They weren't even weaned yet. No, no, no. Literally right out of the gate. So the only influence before was basically mom's influence in utero. That's what I wanted to understand. So it was just like brand spanking new. Brand spanking new. And then they realized these different trajectories.

That's right. That's right. That's exactly right so bred them we didn't cross east river eastern south dakota with black hills we kept we kept them apart so black hills males black hills females eastern south dakota males eastern south dakota females and then hand raised those offspring the eastern south dakota male so which means we now have first generation and second generation right first generation came from the wild The second generation were born in captivity, right? The Eastern South Dakota animals that we watched grow, those males were like exactly like their fathers, same body mass, same antler size, literally identical trajectory and growth.

But the offspring from those Black Hills males at peak body size and antler size, so like that five to six year age mark, those male offspring were 70 pounds heavier than their dads and grew 32 inches more antler than their dads. Same diet as their dad's. Oh, exact same environmental conditions. And I mean, literally mom and their mom and dad came from the wild, were small, but then got that much bigger. And under the exact same scenario. And we didn't see any change in those Eastern South Dakota animals. The growth trajectory was identical. So literally like over 30% increase in antler size, over 40% increase in body mass over that one generation within captivity. Now the notion is, so all the animals we collected from the wild were all, the maternal environment they experienced were from wild mom, right? And that wild mom

being in the Black Hills, Black Hills, Ponderosa pine dominated forest pretty pretty crappy food source yeah mostly mostly pine needles mostly pine needles yeah but then in captivity once once that fawn had grown up in captivity it had realized a high high plane in nutrition now although it never changed its pattern of growth it then basically and we saw this with regards to birth mass as well it then began to pump what we call like the silver spoon effect into their offspring. And we saw that radical change in growth within that subsequent generations, which means it connects it all the way back to the maternal environment. We call it a negative maternal effect. Maybe it's related to epigenetics

associated with like basically turning on or off genes, those sorts of things. But regardless, it ultimately stems from the nutrition that mom experienced. And what that means is so even though we took those fawns from the wild, brought them into captivity, because mom had basically set that trajectory for growth, it didn't matter how good it got later in those years because it was as good as it's going to get. Their growth was still quote unquote stunted. It still followed the trajectory that mom had set it on. And even like multiple generations down the line, you're talking now. Well, right.

And so those Eastern ones. Oh yeah, exactly. And so we suspect that if we'd have kept doing that, maybe over two or three generations, those Black Hills animals would have actually gotten to the size of those Eastern South Dakota animals. But even with one subsequent generation after that improved conditions, they made up over 70% of the difference in antler and body size that occurred between animals from those two regions. So no genetic related influence. And I think, I mean, I probably, I certainly did it historically and you hear folks say it all the time. Well, we got genetics for big bucks over here, but we just don't have those

genetics over here. Now our growing appreciation now is that is almost most certainly largely an effect of nutrition and nutrition that's lasted over many, many generations. I mean, we've done that work on white-tailed deer. We've done work on sheep in the Sierra Nevadas of California where over six different populations, we can explain over 80% of the differences in horn size across those six populations just by how fat females are, which is powerful. Is that right?

Oh, yeah, no joke. Yeah, yeah, over 80% of the difference. And horn size varies markedly across those six populations. We can explain 80% of those difference just by basically how fat the moms are. And certainly, that's just like a broad indicator of nutrition across those ranges. Stress, probably. Yeah, physiological stress associated from nutrition and those nutritional dynamics. And so, I think over time, as these stories begin to pile on, that, for example, I've started saying that when we handle animals or we look at body mass, body mass to me isn't, we think of that, well, that's the condition of that animal.

Well, no, not really. Body fat is the condition of that animal. But how big it is is literally this long-term signature of nutritional dynamics within that place on the landscape. And so as you go from one place to the next, man, there's big animals here, there's smaller animals here. Well, that's part of how they're in tune and adapted to the environment that they live in. And if they were trying to get as large as they are in the better environment, they may not ever get there or they may not ever, it's going to be another year or two before they get the chance to reproduce because they're

focused on growing bigger. So the adaptation then is in nutritionally limited environment will be smaller. And as a consequence of that, you can continue to be viable and you demand less resources through the year as well. So it reflects not only the underlying fundamental process of nutrition and how it feeds into growth and dynamics within population, but it's also a cool way to think about how these animals are just uniquely adapted to the environments that they live in. We got a buddy who manages a big whitetail property in south texas and he feels that like he likes to keep this a little bit off topic he likes to keep his buck numbers really low because he feels that bucks stress deer out bucks stress deer out having a bunch of males running around stresses and he feels they get fatter and healthier the less that's going on around them huh wouldn't wouldn't that just be a factor of competition yes that to me is certainly it's just

more mouths feeding and just so it's just more more individuals you probably see the same thing if he pulled females out of that he pulls a pile of those out too well yeah so i i suspect it probably has more to do with that than anything there's there's a number of ideas out there associated with particularly during the rut and rutting behavior and how that feeds into like buck ratio and how many big males you have and are young males less experienced and therefore push females that much harder because they're immature and don't know what they're doing, that sort of thing. And those results are a bit equivocal. There's not really a clear pattern that emerges from that. So I have a feeling it's mostly associated with density and just more

mouths being there. Have you guys looked at, well, that kind of ties into this. Have you guys looked at the effect of exposure to predators, not even mortality, but effects of exposure to predators on nutrition and on fat. Because I know cattle ranchers will observe that even in the absence of wolves killing cattle, cattle, it's just anecdotal observation, they'll say they don't get as fat as quickly because they're living with this constant stress and moving in unpredictable patterns. Do you notice that in game animals, deer, elk, whatever? Yeah. So this was a big question when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone. And we did a big project on this.

Same type of question that wolves were causing elk, be more alert on the landscape, be more vigilant, not forage in risky places that might have higher food value and forage in less risky places where there's not as much to eat. And this was sort of a big idea. We call it the, you know, sort of the landscape of fear. I haven't heard that, but I like it. That'd be a good novel. Yeah, yeah. And so there was this idea that elk were responding to this new landscape of fear that wolves had created in places like Yellowstone. And of course, wolves do eat elk, but there was this idea that there was this larger effect, a so-called non-consumptive effect, that this sort of wolf jitters kind of idea, that elk just weren't living as well, weren't finding as much food, weren't spending as much time feeding because they were always alert to wolves. And that idea got a lot of traction in the literature without very much empirical

evidence to support it. And then we did a test, which I think was fairly definitive. We basically had GPS collared elk, GPS collared wolves. We could score for every elk how often it came into contact with wolves. So sort of like its encounter rate, right? And obviously the prediction is if you're coming into contact with wolves more frequently and this wolf jitters is a thing, then those animals should have less fat. They should burn more fat through the winter and should be less pregnant.

And we recaptured all the animals, assessed their rump fat and body condition through ultrasound and absolutely no effect. Can you go down to Colorado and test the theory that the massive increase in summer recreation is affecting the health? year round really now is affecting the health and well-being of ungulates uh well we should i bet you'd be able to find money to do that don't let us into colorado so we could we did um basically something along those lines with with mule deer but with an eye towards energy development, which is not all that different. It's a human presence and at times somewhat unpredictable human presence, those

sorts of things. And it's something we've been concerned with for some time. And we have known based on GPS caller data and a lot of work that Paul Sawyer, a colleague of ours here in Wyoming have done that the presence of human presence within those energy fields results in behavioral displacement. So they're using those areas next to well pads and roads less on their winter range. And so we took that a step further and we aim to address that question of, is it like this chronic stressor that, so for example, animals that are exposed to more energy development are losing more fat over the winter., so for example, animals that are exposed to more energy development are losing more fat over the winter. And so we did that with that twice a year capture

to look at change in body fat over winter, those sorts of things, and then related that to exposure to energy development. And so interestingly, there was nothing there, which maybe speaks to- Who paid for that? Well, let me keep going. Let me keep going. What I think is powerful. So the other thing, so we did not only that, but we took it one step further. And when you see this behavioral displacement, the question then, and ultimately how that potentially links to the population could be through like this chronic stressor, or it could be because they're functionally losing food and habitat on the landscape. And it's that food that's ultimately determining the carrying capacity of their winter

range. So what we did is we literally went on the ground and measured sagebrush, measured growth of sagebrush, as well as subsequent use of sagebrush at the end of the winter. What's really interesting is that deer, the way in which they select habitat and use habitat across those winter ranges, they're keying in on sagebrush where we're getting more leader growth. And it's those new leaders each year that is really what's their primary staple if they can have it. So that's one thing that's powerful that tells you they're cueing into food. But the other aspect of that is what was happening is that in those areas adjacent to

or near the well pads or the roads where we were getting that disturbance, they were not using the food that was there as much as they were in areas that didn't have that level of exposure. So what that means is that there's ultimately residual food that's left on the landscape that's not being

used because of our presence in that human disturbance, which means a functional loss in the carrying capacity of that winter range. So with that displacement... But not necessarily stress. Not necessarily stress. So it's a food-based link to the change in population. Within that one herd in particular, we've observed, I think it's a 36% to 40% decrease in population size on that winter range as that energy development has come into play. Does it take a long time to realize it? No, it was over like a decade. So it did.

I'd come at it. Yeah, yeah. But it really didn't take that long. But what that indicates to us is that based on that displacement, you're resulting in increase in density in the adjacent areas where there's already deer and there's only so much food to go around. And so if you have a grocery store that's feeding so many people and you take out one whole corner of the grocery store, you're not going to support as many people. And in that instance, we're not going to support as many animals based on the groceries that are stored there is ultimately what it means. So

it's not a stressor link, but it's a food-based link. Do you translate that to recommendations? That's, well, yes, we translate that into here's the realities of this. And so we've, with that effort, we've also, because of the analyses and the modeling that we did, we've been able to place that into hypothetical scenarios. So for example, if you, based on the modeling of food distribution on the landscape and what we know about how deer use that food, if we put a road here and a well pad here, here's what that's going to mean as far as an indirect food loss. Or if you place one big one here, or you have three other ones, three, you know, three smaller ones as opposed to one big one so we've taken that and translated that into those relationships to to derive a direct expectation as to what that's

going to mean for food loss depending upon a build-out plan that sort of thing and the hope is to simply be able to communicate the realities of it i mean we are humans living in this landscape we're going to affect it in some way but ideally ideally, however we are, we're at least informed as to the effects that we're going to bring to the table and that we can do it in a wise way. And when we can't, we can at least speak the realities. Okay, well, if we're going to do this, this is what this is going to mean. And are we willing to accept that? And then if we are, we are.

But ideally, it's less walking around of the, oh, it'll probably be okay sort of thing. Here's what's liable to happen. I took a... Oh, go ahead. I was going to say that. So that work has been translated into, yeah, so how do we manage these fields, right? So the result that Kevin was just describing is basically, it means that mule deer avoid human disturbance. And when you develop a gas field, you can... There are ways deer avoid human disturbance. And when you develop a gas field,

there are ways to minimize human disturbance. So the most disturbance is when you're actively drilling the well. Then we have wells that are producing, but have trucks coming in constantly to haul off the condensate. Then we have wells where that condensate is being taken off underground.

And so this has led to a shift in the way that wells are managed, that oil and gas wells are managed. We limit the time of drilling, and we've shifted from pulling that condensate off underground so we don't have the truck traffic. And so it's the human activity in those fields that the animals are responding to. And so we now know that if we can reduce that human activity, we can reduce the impact on wintering deer. And just to close the loop on the cattle wolf jitters question,

right? We're sort of talking about three different cases here, right? So on the one hand, cattle not bred to deal with predators, right? They're bred to put on fat and grow fast on limited food to go to market, right? And we kind of made this mistake when wolves were reintroduced to yellowstone researchers and certainly the public thought well this is this huge change that now now wolves are on landscape now there's a landscape of fear right but elk have other landscapes like they have a landscape of nutrition and they have a landscape of starvation that they also have to respond to and so you know the reason you we didn't see any effect, one of the main reasons is that

there is a risk of starving to death every winter for an elk in Yellowstone. And they need to make decisions that minimize that risk. They need to feed where, you know, where they can still find food. And they need to not spend time in three foot of snow where they're going to burn a bunch of calories and then end up starving at the end of the winter. And wolves are new to us in Yellowstone, but they're not really new to elk. They still contain all of the adaptations of living with wolves for millennia. So we think of wolves as being this novel stress and this novel predation for elk, but in reality, they're adapted to live with these predators,

but they're not adapted to live with energy development. And that's a very different kind of disturbance, right? That's always in the same place. Like, you know, the footprint and the human activity is at that well and at those roads is always in the same place. So it can send a more common more consistent cue that that animals respond to and there you do see this result of you know the mule deer leaving the food behind that's close to the

well pads i don't think elk are leaving well i've tested this i know that elk are not leaving food behind that are in places where where wolves frequent and where it's risky to forage because of wolves. They still find it because that's a stress. That's a sort of source of risk that they're adapted to work with on the landscape. I just recently shared a photograph of a graphic that was in the mule deer migration assessment that was put out by the Wyoming Migration Initiative. And it's a graphic that shows mule deer using winter range near Rock Springs, Wyoming, north of I-80. And I-80 literally forms. So it's like the northern end of showing all the use patterns is amorphous.

It's just like has, you know, like how do you describe it? It looks like it had a cauliflower, right? It's just they're kind of going along natural land use patterns. The southern edge of the winter range is a straight line formed by a four-lane divided highway. Yeah. It's like if you took a pair of scissors and cut off the landscape. Right. In your mind, what is it about that highway that they don't like?

Yeah. So, in that case, you know, and, you know, what you can't see in that graphic that you just described is that, you know, those animals traveled 150 miles from the north down to that winter range to then, you know, have part of it truncated by interstate so you have to come 150 miles but then be like but that i don't like right so so interstate 80 is um there are um right away fences which are maybe 42 48 inches high mule you know jumpable by a mule deer that's not the. The problem is that Interstate 80 has an incredible level of traffic. And so, the animals have just learned that

this is a risky endeavor. And they don't, for the most part, they don't try to cross Interstate 80 because the traffic levels are just so high. So if you ceased traffic, they would obviously just walk right through.

Oh, yeah. Because I was looking at photographs of it. Because at first, when I saw that picture, I was like, there has to be another explanation. Like, I thought that the South, it was maybe like that it's following the course of a large river or there's a giant bluff like you find in places. But then I voiced this to yannis and he's like no and he pulls up a photograph there's no damn difference right yeah yeah so i mean they would uh they might not do it immediately they have you know a bit of memory but they would eventually yes they would they would cross it um if if the traffic was diminished. It's the roar of trucks. Yeah, yeah.

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What would it cost to... Do you have some familiarity with overpasses, underpasses? What would it cost to... If you just take that isolated spot, okay? Let me put it this way. Let's say you had, let me put it this way. Let's say you had all the money in the world. What would you do to fix that spot? Yeah, so you can put in, you can put in, so you can put in underpasses or overpasses.

And, you know, and we've had a couple of those in Wyoming that have been really successful. God, it seems like underpasses scare the hell out of them. Well, so yeah, it's interesting that you say that. So Interstate 80 was created in the 70s. And there was like a smaller road, but then when they built the interstate in the 70s, they knew that they were going to

disrupt migrations. They didn't have the maps of the migrations that we have now, but they knew that they were going to disrupt it. And so proactively, they put in these tunnels underneath the interstate. But the tunnels are like, I call them tunnels because I think that's what they look like to a mule deer. They're like 10 foot wide by 10 foot high. It's more of a culvert. Yeah. And the interstate is two lanes here, the big median, and then two lanes. So they're long. And when you look through them, you see this tiny light at the end of it. And yeah, so mule deer have not used those. Yeah, you can imagine a bobcat might be like, yeah, I'll go through there.

Right, right. So there's been monitoring that mule deer have not used those. So underpasses, but there are options, right? Like you could have a smaller underpass that goes through the eastbound lane, then it opens up into a fenced opening in the median, then you go through this. That would be much more effective. Or overpasses. Those overpasses, I don't have exact numbers, but they're 4 to 5, 8 to 10 million per,

probably to go all the way over. How wide does it have to be before it ceases to be spooky to them? It doesn't have to be that wide. I think the one at Trapper's Point, we have two overpasses, new since 2012 in Wyoming, and they're both on that path of the pronghorn migration that I mentioned earlier, and also a mule deer migration. And I'd say it's probably 50 or 60 feet wide. Feet.

Feet. But it also has berms on the overpass. So if you're a pronghorn or mule deer, you can't really see the traffic on either side as you're going over it. I read somewhere, too, that when you berm it too steep, they don't like it, too. Yeah, they could probably start making it. I think that was out of some findings out of Europe where when it's bermed too steep,

they feel like they're just afraid of ambush. I wish I remembered it better. But there's like a way to make them feel at ease where they have sort of an awareness of what's to the right and what's to the left as they pass into it. But 50 feet will do it. I thought you were going to say like 50 yards. Well, I mean, I'm kind of guessing. I've never measured it, but being up on those, that feels like about what it is.

It's not like a football field. They're relatively small. But the challenge with interstate 80 is to- And then you've got to vegetate the thing? Well, they do in, like, there's some up in Canada near Banff National Park. Those are vegetated. I've seen those. Those are, like, stunning. Yeah, yeah. The ones that we have are not, i mean they're re-vegetated so there's some grass on it but it's not like you got but they're coming across open country though it's

not they're not coming out of the forest and i mean he's not walking on concrete no no no it's got dirt and grass yeah but just to circle back to the interstate 80 that so yes where that red desert to hoback migration comes down the winter range that you were describing, we could put a crossing structure there. And I think those animals over time, difficult to say how long, would discover it, move across it and discover probably what was a historical winter range that was lost when the Interstate 80 was built. But for pronghorn and elsewhere along the Interstate 80 corridor, which cuts across the whole southern half of Wyoming,

we have lost those migrations. They've been severed. And so now, and we have a project looking at this, it's very difficult for us to identify where the animals used, where the ghost migrations are. Where do they used to cross the interstate? And where now, if we put a crossing structure, will they rediscover it and restore those migrations?

That's a good point, man. Everywhere else where we've done crossing structures, in Wyoming at least, they've been places where the animals are still migrating. So they're still crossing the road. Mortalities are piling up there on the road. So they're showing us this is where we where we cross and you put the crossing structure there and they learn how to use it really quickly and those have been wildly successful tens of thousands of animals have moved across those crossing structures is there an element of your

work where you interface with historians who are familiar with oral tradition to try to piece together lost bits of knowledge about animal movements? We've been interested in doing that, and especially on that Interstate 80 project where we're trying to, you know, we can't use sort of, we can color the animals today, but those animals can't show us. Yeah. We're trying to get a hold of old-timers who might have known where some of those movements were. We've also done some work here on the Wind River Reservation and have done some interviews with tribal elders

trying to understand what they knew about historical migrations. And as you can imagine, it's challenging. I guess we don't have any examples yet where, and I'd love to stumble upon this, right? I can tell you one. Yeah? Are you familiar with Pompeii's Pillar along the Yellowstone River,

east of Billings, Montana? No. People would always run into stuff there. Uh-huh. But you go look and it makes sense. Yeah. People always run into elk and bison there because the north side of the river

is just giant sandstone bluffs. And there's a creek comes down that forms a pass through the bluffs. And it was like people having shootouts there, people hunting there, people get there and they describe like, as far as I can see to the right and the left. And even though that stuff's not, they're not doing it now, but it's like very definite.

But it's funny because you go there and look and you're like, oh, I can totally see it. It's reflected again and again in in in uh the journals of people who traveled through yep that this is like oh the spot right right yeah and so what we'd what what would be nice would be to you know uncover some of that information which points to a historical corridor that we can then work that we can increase our confidence in knowing that that's the right place to restore. And a related example is at this, that path of the pronghorn where that overpass was built

is at a place called Trapper's Point, which was a historical rendezvous site. And also, when they widened that highway, 2008, 2009, I think. No, it was earlier than that. Anyways, they had to do an archaeological survey, and they discovered a pronghorn kill site. You're kidding me. I'm not. And what was unique, so they basically started finding bones after bones after bones, and they all had butchering marks on them. And it was right on the current.

It's a bottleneck where they migrate there. And in addition, they found fetal bones. And the size of the fetal bones indicated that those pronghorn would have been killed during the spring migration when the pronghorn does were pregnant. So that suggests an ancient kill site where early humans were ambushing pronghorn, killing them, butchering them. In the spring. In the spring, right on the migration corridor,

and they date from 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. Wow, that's cool. Yeah. Do they have any idea how they were killing them? Well, the archaeologists probably have a sense. I wonder if it was like projectile points or if there's like net materials or what. Yeah.

We probably have to get the archaeologists in here. Yeah. So what did we not hit, Yanni? What did we not hit? I mean, there's a thousand things. Yeah, I know. There's a lot. I've got a couple follow-up questions, if I can hit on those while we think of what we've missed.

Yes. But all the way back to when we were talking about the different types of – the different groups of mule deer that migrate in different ways or don't migrate at all do you guys and without speculating if you guys looked into it or or have any like ideas on is that just like a greater species tactic to because i'm just thinking in my head like well of course it makes sense because if then one population gets wiped out because they all got stuck in the mountains you still have all these other mule deer these other five different migratory patterns that are going to survive like you guys thinking that way or well good question so to be the dorky scientist um is there such a thing oh i imagine there probably is you guys have been sitting here thinking that

that whole time so that notion so that notion is what we would call a group selectionist argument, which means that we're in natural selection and how processes operate ultimately work at the individual level. So individuals don't generally have the greater species in their mind, right? It's their mode of operation is to survive reproduce pass on their genes to their progeny and so forth as opposed to the like well you go here and then i'll go up here and our species will survive yeah i know a lot of guys like that yeah behave that way yeah yeah yeah so that's that's what's called a group selection argument, which that contradicts directly the notion of natural selection and how these processes operate. And it's pretty much been disproven.

So it's more of, but the angle you're headed down is more of this kind of what we mentioned earlier or the population that, yes, when you have a number of viable tactics that are occurring, as things change, there's some potential still viable tactic, even if others become non-viable. Therefore, maintaining the greater diversity, like in our minds from a conservation perspective, maintaining the greater diversity, this whole portfolio ensures that we have potential traits in going forward or behavioral tactics, those sorts of things that are potentially going to be viable in the future. But as it works for the animals themselves, it's clearly more of an individual tactic of, this is what I do. Here's where I'm going to go. I'm going to do my best given my environment to do the sorts of things that I do. And if you think about that, and so if migration is really inherited, especially mule deer from mother to daughter,

and it becomes functionally fixed once they inherit that, this is what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do it every year, which is interesting. It clearly relates to us a tactic or a strategy that has been viable for many generations and in hundreds of years. Therefore, clearly, you know, inheriting a route and doing what mom did, if that's the way it works, must be something that's allowed the species to persist all these many generations and is therefore really important. And intuitively, although it seems like, okay, then they must be less adaptable to change. Well, maybe, but it also, if mom has been successful and survived and she successfully raised you as an offspring, well, clearly that's been a viable strategy. So perhaps why wouldn't

you adapt it? So that's perhaps one of the arguments behind this cross-generational potential inheritance of a migratory route and you just doing that year in and year out. It's a known thing. It worked for mom. It should work for me. It's worked for my mom's moms in many generations beyond, assuming that that's how that process has come about. And as a consequence of that, you end up with just multiple different tactics that exist within a single population that creates this grander portfolio. Are you guys familiar? We talked about this the other night, but are you familiar with the, like the, the southern resident killer whales

and the migratory killer whales in the Puget Sound area? Not super familiar. So you have this kind of interesting thing where you have, there's a resident population around Puget Sound of killer whales or some folks call them orcas, that they're Chinook specialists. And they're literally starving to death right now meanwhile there's a population that roves up and down the coast and they're marine mammals well they're more generals but eat a lot of marine mammals and they're thriving they have different

languages they avoid each other and one is got fell into the trap right you know right and they won't they won't eat seals yeah yeah so there it's also the situation where people treat them like they treat them as like humans regard them as this very separate thing you know and it's like this idea that uh i see like i see a semblance of that and what we're talking about with mule deer where some like figure out how to survive without needing to move and then some need to move and at some point in time the ones that need to move are going to be possibly become the vulnerable ones exactly so it's nice to have different different pathways like people celebrate salmon for their fidelity to their natal stream but one of the things that allows salmon to do well is that some don't have fidelity to the natal stream right right they find

they pioneer new rivers and like rivers change and they find new spots because some of them just screw up or whatever. Yeah, it's that diversity of tactics. And one of the things that I think about in this context is climate change. And so if you think about it, a resident animal, when the climate changes, they don't have many options, right? All they know is this small landscape that they live on. And as spring comes earlier or there's more snow or whatever climate change brings, the only place that they can adapt to that is within this small range that they know. But if you're a mule deer that makes 150 mile migration right well over that 150 miles i mean you can you can almost choose

whatever climate you want depending on where you want to be on on that so they have a template that that they have detailed knowledge about and they and they can exploit that landscape template to their advantage when it's a drought, when it's a really lush summer, or when it's a really harsh winter. They have 150 miles of options to choose from, versus the three or four square miles that the resident animals has.

And I think, and to me, that's sort of one of, you know, that's one of the reasons to maintain migration. It's also a reason to maintain sort of these diverse strategies. Like you sort of alluded to it in your question. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know it's very interesting reading that assessment was how narrow parts of that migration got. Is that – I mean, it obviously is partially of just like what it is today. Spatially narrow? Yeah. And you guys have just figured it out recently and are looking at it. Do you think historically it might have been much wider? Is there any evidence for that?

I mean, is it just because there is parallels, a river and a highway, and that's where the most more development is? Or do you think even, you know, 300 years ago, they were crossing right there at the same spot where the outlet is at the lake? Yeah, I suspected that one. It probably has been like that for a really long time. So that's very common for mule deer that we see them following along the same path. a lot of interest right now to understand the benefit of collective, how animals move together. And you can imagine that there's benefits in a migration like that of the animals following within each other's footsteps. Sometimes when they go through, they're going over little passes that in the spring still might have snow.

In the fall when they come down, they're basically playing this game to stay. They want to stay up in the mountains as long as possible, and they're playing this game to, they don't just rush down to winter range. They make their way down with each little snowstorm, with each drop in temperature, and they're trying to avoid getting stuck behind a big snowstorm. But if you do get stuck,

having 100 or 200 animals go through that spot before you on that day makes it a lot less energetically costly. Have you observed a caribou migration? Only on YouTube. What's interesting about it is that depending on where you go, you can go into places where they are walking through, like they're walking through somewhere where they've never walked through before. They have this very big macro sense of where they're moving, but they take different routes.

And some years it would be like there would be places where they hadn't gone through in a decade, and then they go through the area. But you'll watch them, and you wake up one day, and they're all using a pass for whatever reason. They're spread out so far apart that you might watch 400 come through throughout the course of the day, and they really tend to like some little pass.

And the next day you wake up, and the whole line seems to have kind of shifted a mile and the bulk of them seems to be taking some other thing or they're just like going by smell and they like to go where the other ones have gone but it's not fixed year to year right it's just a general sense of must be that those ones made it through and nothing bad happened to them so i'm gonna go that way but then it meanders yeah you know yeah and that's you know of course a very different landscape oh yeah much broader sort of less topographically diverse than the sort of mountains and plains landscapes that the mule deer are migrating through i think one point that's a good one to your question, Giannis, is

historically, I think the common knowledge was really focused on winter range for mule deer and maintaining that winter range. And one thing that's been discovered with this migration route mapping is all the attributes of that migration are important to long-term species viability. One being the bottlenecks, which you were speaking to, but the other one are when you're looking at those migration routes, all of a sudden things kind of stop and slow down and they spread out. And that's called stopover areas. And if one of you guys could talk about the importance of stopover areas and what we've learned about that as far as the importance, especially for mule deer, but also all ungulates. That would be, I think, an interesting thing to add to that question.

Sure. Yeah. So just in thinking about how animals move across the landscape and in particular in the spring, we think about a migratory route and whether it's 20 miles or it's 150 miles or 200 plus miles, we just think it's, well, animals are just going from winter to summer range. But interestingly, the vast majority of the time that they're quote unquote migrating, they're actually not just moving and walking on a path. They're actually held up on what we've called stopovers, which are areas where they're largely spending time feeding. And we know the attributes associated with those stopovers are also areas that help facilitate feeding. So over the long term, if you take and look at the landscape and you look at how green up, for example, occurs every year,

the stopovers that these mule deer are using are places that tend to consistently green up early every year, typically don't have the level of snow deposition or largely dry south-southwesterly slopes. So it's those sweetheart spots on their way where they can stop and grab that lush new food that's coming along. And then they pace their migration, especially in the spring, in correspondence with that new wave of food as it comes up progressively along the landscape. So if you imagine staying in one spot, experiencing spring, getting that really great food, and then just it's gone, right? If you stay in that one spot. But if you follow it, you experience spring for a really long time as you move across the landscape, thus simply

enhancing your energetic gain. But I think what's interesting is, as you're alluding to, is that that migratory route isn't just a path they walk on. It's functional habitat as well, where they're gleaning resources. And the other element that I think is really important that maybe kind of gets lost in all the excitement and the phenomena associated with migration and walking across long landscapes is the other really important thing to comprehend is that by functionally moving across the landscape and going to a different place and thus garnering different resources, it's functionally for the population increasing that population's carrying capacity. So, for, if you put in a new I-80 somewhere

and you clip off a migratory route and you remove all that summer range that those animals were using, that summer range, because those animals were going there, were walking there using that food for how many months out of the year, that's part of the capacity of their range. So for example, if we've lost migratory routes in some places, we have potentially created vacant habitat. As in the food is there, which ultimately determines carrying capacity, but nobody knows to go there and use it. Therefore, what we can potentially sustain as far as a population level thereafter is not as many animals because their functional caring capacity, their food based has been diminished because behaviorally they're not making use of it anymore. And to me, from a migratory perspective, like that's ultimately where the rubber meets

the road. That's why we can help maintain robust populations is because by moving and integrating this huge landscape within to, into their behavior and into their nutritional dynamics, they're functionally increasing the carrying capacity for the population by them doing that. And the moment we clip that off, there's no way we can sustain as many animals because we don't have the food base because they're not going there and using it, which is really why you can think about migration and it's connecting it to large viable populations because it's the food resources that they're garnering by going and moving there.

Yeah. You wonder, it's a funny thing about migration because it kind of almost sets in your head like the wrong idea about it. But we hunt turkeys in areas where you you could basically say the turkeys migrate uphill but in his head he's probably he's chasing young growth sure and as he does that for six weeks he winds up at the top of the mountain and then things frost off and start to die and he finagles his way back down and he probably never like was like i'm gonna head up to the top of that mountain he's just like every day i'm going to head up to the top of that mountain. He's just like, every day I'm maximizing my thing

or just making small jumps to the next place I know without really having this idea that tomorrow we leave for the faraway place. Yeah, right. It's like, tomorrow. Okay, but in Mule Deer, this is something that we've shown. They have, yes, maybe they're not thinking tomorrow, you know, we're headed on this 150-mile journey. But they have a mental map. Yes, yeah.

They have a mental map. And the way we've, and we've done sort of simulations. simulations so the behavior you were just describing of them of the turkey you know following that fresh green grass and eventually making a migration right we've asked that question of mule deer okay like if you have perfect knowledge of we call it the green wave and in fact we call it surfing the green wave i don't really like that. Just because he doesn't like surfing. Yeah. It doesn't really matter if you like it or not. It's just like already entrenched in the literature.

Okay. It just sounds a little too zippy. But go on. I'm with you. I'm with you. Paddleboarding the Green Wave? Again, this ship is already sailed. Okay, surfing the green wave. So mule deer can't recreate a 150-mile migration

even when they know exactly where the green wave is. They have to have memory of that migration in order to do it. And the way you can think about that is, if you just imagine a mule deer and a 150-mile landscape, even if they know where it's the best place to be at the best time during spring, that doesn't get them to this 150-mile migration. the trials and errors of their ancestors who for generations and generations have done this and and at some point one animal figured hey if you go this way it's awesome and there's all this green grass or maybe it's worked the other way there was a harsh winter and they pushed further down to the red desert and then that they discovered that, they learned that migration and discovered like,

this is a great tactic. And then of course, passed that on to their young and did well. And now we have the memory, now that herd has the knowledge of that 150 mile migration. So that's been an active

sort of area of research. And we initially asked that question that you sort of posed with the turkey we and we initially asked that question that you sort of posed with the turkey um i don't think you put it this way but you had asked if the if the turkey surfed and um you would not answer it's oh man i was going to talk about i'm not going to get into it because we're going to move into our uh we're going to move into our closers. But I was going to bring up the idea of human migrations. So humans coming into the Western Hemisphere. And imagine Beringia, like the Bering Land Bridge.

The first clan of people did not have the luxury of saying, hey, we're going to go over there because it'll be sweet. They probably were born, lived, and died on the Bering land bridge, probably not very aware that they were, over the course of generations, heading to Patagonia. But it was just, and then they would come to glaciers as they traveled the coast, presumably, and you had no notion of what was on the other side of the glacier. And you weren't being driven by warfare. You weren't being driven by starvation. But you one

day was like, man, you know, I got to check it out. And so there is that little, I don't even know where the connection is, but there is that little sense of pioneering. And so you have the idea that species now, today, would maybe come up with some cool new way of using the landscape. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that doe, she kind of did a little bit of that.

She's still alive. We just saw her the other day. How is she? She's old. Winter has been tough. The youngster, winter's been tough. We sure hope that she can make it through the winter in that country. It's been pretty hard on them. They're in pretty rough shape.

We're super excited to see what she does. And this year, so that she's now, she'll be two here in June. And interestingly, she's pregnant. So she bred as a yearling, which is really cool. It doesn't always happen for mule deer. But so she's going to give birth this year for the first time. Mom is still alive. We saw her as well.

And so we'll be really curious to see if she's going to go and set up shop near mom to give birth, or would she happen to go on that 40 plus mile journey again? That's what I want to know, man. If she kicks her fawn out and that fawn walks 45 miles and comes back again, then you'll be on to something. Yeah, exactly. Then you can publish cool paper. So we're really excited to see what she's going to do because by and large, what we know is that mule deer are not, we don't think they're very good pioneers, the evidence that we have, but we've been missing that early part of their life yet. We really have not explored that adequately yet. And so we're trying to do that now to see if, is that their pioneering phase

or is it really just this entrenched thing where they're just, they're doing what mom is doing and going to adopt that tactic. And then in reference to, you know, the notion earlier, it's not even, it is learning and it's learning what's viable, but it's also surviving and reproducing. If you happen to go do something and it turns out not to work, you're gone. And so you don't have subsequent pro and it turns out not to work you're gone and so you don't have subsequent progeny that are going to adopt that because because you're gone like it might have been a bitching idea but you got dusted off yeah and then it's done it's it's not going to happen and we're not going to see it in subsequent generation because because you're gone and you had

no progeny to continue to adopt that adopt that tactic so okay we're gonna move into our concluders a concluder is where you get to say whatever you want um yeah you want to start us off sure i'm just gonna say thank you guys you guys really just crushed it man it's gonna be an awesome podcast at this moment in my life i'm like as interested in the science of mule deer as i am in killing big bucks which i don't think that's ever happened before. That's the conversion. That's the conversion. The whole time I've been wondering if these guys would be good mule deer hunters or not.

Oh, gosh, I think they would be. You think so? Yeah. I've been really wondering that. Well, that's what the guy told me, the guy that, Vincent, that gave me this copy of the mule deer migration assessment. He goes, I don't even know if I should say this on the air. Well, remember Pat Durkin talking about some of the cold-bloodedness,

killing his whitetail hunters he knows can't tell you what kind of tree they're sitting in? Yeah, that's true. That's true, too. But, no, he said he was using this paper as a way to sort of figure out where he was going to go hunting. Good luck. It doesn't work.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work. So yeah, that's my concluder. Okay. I think for me, and it speaks to your point, Giannis. You know how I said you get to talk about whatever you want? Yeah, you're going to limit me. Yeah. Can you make sure to talk about how people can support you

and then that'll support research? Sure. Or not you, but. I will go into Muley Fanatics first. Log on to muleyfanatics.org. There's many ways to support us. We have a lot of raffles going on for commissioner's tags that go out to certain projects that we unfortunately didn't mention. We're pushing that looks at all the multifaceted ways in which environments are influencing mule deer nutrition specifically. And it's also taken a very hard look at the elk competition issue.

So some of our raffle, our commissioner tag raffles are going towards that. We have one locally that we haven't allocated directly to a project, but it'll go to our main three core mission areas. So they can get on to mealyfanatics.org and support us. I think another one that I should mention that anybody in Wyoming can do to support migrations is buy the Wyoming Wildlife Migration Conservation License Plate, which is a new license plate that we have in Wyoming where the purchaser pays $180 extra on top of their usual licensing fees. $150 of that goes into a pot that'll then be doled out to reduce and alleviate migration problems such as the I-81 that you mentioned. So there's a lot of ways to

not only support the organization, but support migration. Also, the Migration Initiative has fundraisers. We do, sometimes we sell some commissioner tags or raffle commissioner tags to support them. So a lot of ways to get involved, not just coming to a banquet, which we're going to have a lot of fun at tonight. The other way, and it's one that I want to speak to that's a very important part and has been extremely rewarding for me, is getting involved in starting a chapter locally. I get to meet these guys. I get to have my horizons expanded beyond just thinking big buck killers are cool, but really the biology is where it's at. And that's the cool part. And that's really our responsibility within the North American conservation models as hunters is to actually take time to learn some of

the science before we advocate and participate in that role. But there's just a lot of ways where people can get involved and starting a chapter would be a great one where we have 14 chapters across Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. And always our guys in the headquarters in Green River are always willing to support a new chapter. And it is a rewarding endeavor. Just an example, and I'll just close. There's no reason there couldn't be one in New Mexico. Absolutely not. And I'll just close with what I find extremely rewarding is our chapter has gone through four funding cycles, and we've put $90,000 back to mule deer, specifically in the local area. Could have never done that by myself.

So it's extremely rewarding to be able to, as we work with the researchers, identify needs and put money back to those needs and be part of the solution. Great. I kind of feel like we forgot to talk about conservation. No, I tried to. You didn't want to missed your cues. Um, well, so I, I, I want to mention some of the conservation, uh, efforts, um, before we end here. I mean, we've, we've talked a lot about different things and, uh, and we've talked a lot about migration. I think, um, what we've seen, you know, we, we sort of started out talking about started out talking about why are there so many migrations in Wyoming, right? And one of those reasons is that Wyoming is still a small state, but it's changing. And we're seeing increased energy development.

We're seeing growth of towns that literally are growing to sort of spill over into migration corridors. And we're just starting to map those things. And I think one of the things, you know, for a variety of whole area of research is that we've now proven up that we can maintain these migrations. There have been examples in Wyoming of, we talked a bit about the underpasses and overpasses. Those have been really successful, have reduced road mortality by 80% to 90 percent in some of these bottlenecks. No kidding. Oh, that's great. There's fencing projects, especially in the western part of the state, that are now being

guided by the science, by where the migration corridors are. So there's limited resources, but if you know where the corridors are, you can focus your attention on modifying or removing fences that are within the corridor. We're involved in a project with the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts that are bringing $10 million to conserve big private ranches in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem with the Wyoming portion that exclusively are ranches that fall within migration corridors, mapped migration corridors. And you know those are the places that it's where it's most important that we limit you know residential development. That bottleneck that you mentioned, the conservation fund raised $2 million. After that magazine was put out and we identified the corridor, the conservation, we listed that as the number one risk for that herd.

Four to five thousand mule deer squeezing through a quarter mile bottleneck between the town of Pinedale and Fremont Lake, this deep glacial lake, complicated by a 360-acre parcel of private land with an eight-foot-high woven wire elk fence on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I had no idea until reading that about how many of these eight-foot-high fences Wyoming has to keep. I don't know if it didn't explain it that well,

but what I might get from it is just to keep elk off of ag and off of hay bales and whatnot. And kind of funnel them into the feed grounds that they have established on that side of the state. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So in that case, you have, yeah, the eight-foot-high fence is there to keep elk where they're supplementally fed on the forest from spilling down into private land. But then 4,000 to 5,000 mule deer migrating 150 miles have to navigate that fence as well. And anyways, the identification of that bottleneck led to the conservation fund raising $2 million to buy that 360-acre plot of private land

that was slated for lakeside development and turn it into a wildlife habitat management area, take down the fence, basically uncork the bottleneck, and now it exists in perpetuity. Willing seller, willing buyer? Yep. Yeah, the land was on the market. Really? Yeah. That's great, man., willing buyer? Yep. Yeah. The land was on the market. Really?

Yeah. That's great, man. Yeah. Wow. What a win. Yeah. So, you know, for me, like, we're sort of in a unique time in sort of the history of wildlife conservation in the American West, because this isn't a thorny problem like climate change.

This is a relatively simple problem. We know how to map migration corridors. We know how to identify threats. And we know how to implement solutions. It's just a matter of having the sort of political will and conservation attention to getting it done. So to me, that's happening in Wyoming and starting to happen in other parts of the West. And it's sort of a great example of science-based conservation. You guys have the coolest state in the lower 48. We like to think so. In Steve's opinion. Well well i think it is and

i often tell people if you want to understand wildlife in america all you have to do is watch wyoming like every major wildlife issue and from esa issues migration it's like a like a it's a case study where you can look at energy, like everything. Yeah, and a lot of it's still sort of functioning the way it used to. It's not that Wyoming has been way advanced in its wildlife conservation and management. I think we've gotten a little bit of a free pass because there are so few people in wyoming half a million people in the entire state that's the size of you know most many metropolitan areas yeah doesn't hurt that's right okay you can let your concluder rip now my concluder okay i've just been waiting patiently you got a good one no but we'll see

so well first off i just want to say thanks, guys. This has been great. Appreciate you guys taking the time, allowing us to visit for a bit. And also, I think I just want to as well be able to say that, you know, we get to be here talking about some of the things that we've been doing, that we've been learning some of the science and our professional opinions and those sorts of things. But at the same time, there's no way that we would be here without the network,

the partners that have ultimately made a lot of the work that we've been doing possible, like Jared's group, the Muley Fanatic Foundation, and all the other various nonprofits and agency folks that are willing to see the value in research and allow us to go out there and do our best to help learn what makes these animals tick, which to me is really important. I feel I'm very humbled and I feel very fortunate to be in the position that I'm in to be able to do that. But I'm fully aware that without everybody else that are maybe seemingly behind the scenes, but I don't really want them to be. We wouldn't be here having these conversations. And I feel very fortunate to be able to do that. So I just want to thank all those that are out there that have contributed in those ways.

And see the value in research. And to channel Josh Corsi, president of the Muley Fanatic Foundation, a little bit. He always says that we're only as good as the information that we have. And arguably then, as a consequence of that, the decisions we make are only as good as the information we have, which I think is a really powerful way to think about that, and hopefully we're getting there one step at a time of getting more of that information. But then as far as just other thoughts,

I think for me, in my career, and learning the things that we've been able able to learn as well as just the perspectives that are out there I think interestingly and in the hunting industry too we've our culture is changing it seems like it's changing a lot we've and in in weird ways sometimes too I think we've characterized it as it becoming progressively more of a hornographic culture, as in focused on the headgear, as opposed to, and maybe at some times, in some instances, losing touch a little bit with our true, like, naturalist hunting heritage, appreciating the outdoors and the open spaces for what they are. And I mean, I love to kill a big deer or, you know, a big elk or whatever, just as much as anybody. But I think sometimes it's, we've gone so far in that direction, we've just become so myopically focused on what's on the head and kind of lost the big picture as to what's behind the scenes that's even allowing that animal to exist in that landscape.

And just kind of creating a culture perhaps that's losing touch a little bit. And then along those same lines as we've become, I think sometimes myopically focused on that, it's also caused us to focus on genetics, which for me, unfortunately, I am the nutritional ecologist, but I think, so I'm perhaps biased, but I also know the realities from the work that we've done. And it's like, if we're just going to focus on genetics, there's few links to the population itself. There's few links to reality. There's few things that we can actually even do. And so, if that's all that we can think about is, oh, that individual had some fantastic genetics. I mean, even when the new world record big corn was found on Wild Horse Island,

there was a flurry of, whew, sweet genetics coming from this country. And all I can think is, man, no, it's an island system, food phenomenal from out of the gate to day one. I mean, if it's just genetics, then why didn't we produce a world record the first year or two, you know, or within the first decade that those animals were on that island? I'm virtually certain it's nutrition. I mean, sure, the genetics needed to be there, but it's not just genetics that made that animal so huge. And so, to me, I think that

if there's a slight shift in angle to acknowledging, for me, like what I've often said is I will have made an impact in my career broadly, just, just beyond science. If someday our, our, our culture, our hunting culture, when, you know, somebody kills a giant mule deer out of the Wyoming range that rather than having to see the articles that are referencing, Oh, some impressive genetics out of the Wyoming range, impressive migration corridors. Well, or like that dude must've had an incredibly fat mom. Like that's what, you know, let's focus on fat moms. I mean, seriously, like, so to me, because if we succeed in doing that

and just taking this shift, like we can appreciate those things, but if we take this shift, the shift goes away from just the genetics and the myopic focus on the head gear and it shifts it to the ground. It shifts this to the food, to the habitat, to nutrition, which is ultimately that building block and I think can help get thinking about that from the migratory routes to the value of the summer range to making sure we can maintain solid sagebrush in a pristine winter range. And we can acknowledge whether climate changes affects the food and thus feeds into the population, or we have a bad winter and animals are burning fat reserves to survive. We'll have a greater appreciation and understanding for what's there

and I think can have a better conversation at the table that leads to more advances over the long term if we're able to succeed in doing that. So it's all about fat moms. I think that hornography or the thirst for big giant bucks um does lead some people in down the path of being curious about ecology sure and being interested in these things sure which is it's not the most direct path yeah but i have seen but it can it can get there is what i have seen it was my gateway was yeah i've seen that happen a lot.

My final question. Okay, crystal ball game, right? In 100 years, like this is just speculation just for you guys to think about. Like in 100 years, like do you think it's a given that things will be a lot worse in 100 years? Just for Mule Deer specifically. Do you think it's a given that things will be a lot worse in 100 years for mule just for mule deer specifically do you think it's a given that they'll be a lot worse or do you think that in 100 years um that's too far 50 years in 50 years will it invariably be that like things are just shitty or do you think in 50 years it could be like, wow, man, mule deer are kicking ass?

I hate to say it, but I... 2069. I think it's going to be worse. I mean, we are... We... I mean, we scrape away, cut up, erect barriers over mule deer habitat every day. We're on the slippery slope, and we're continuing to make the lives of mule deer, and especially migratory mule deer, harder.

And so for me, that's what motivates my research, is that I think we're... To me, it's... Stop the bleeding. Yeah, we're heading in that direction. And I don't know. I was thinking about this the other day. I wonder if we... I don't know. I was thinking about this the other day. I'm often frustrated by the fact that we don't recognize that. I'm often frustrated by the fact that I think a mentality of like, well, these mule deer have always been here.

I hunted them when I'm a kid, and I'm still going to the same places. Maybe there's less. Hard to say. But I think when we look at migration as a great lens to look at these things, those migrations are all getting harder. Everything we do to the landscape makes them harder.

And so, and I think, I wonder if we kind of, as wildlife managers, I wonder if we kind of have this false sense of optimism generated from the success of the North American model, right? Like, we went through this bottleneck. We almost hunted all of these big game critters out of existence in North America. And then we developed policies and ways to regulate our harvest. And we're enjoying the good old days.

Yeah. And we, and we, yeah, we, we brought them back. Right. But that was, you know, the turn of the century. There were far less people on this planet and far less people in North America and far less demands on these landscapes that this wildlife require. And I wonder if we have a false sense of optimism that we got through that. So all of these sort of changes that we're seeing now are sort of temporary and we can, we can come up with fixes of them. But I, I'm not terribly optimistic. What, and what motivates me is, is that, you know, we, that we are on the slippery slope of making,

making these habitats more, more difficult, less profitable. And so, you know, in my view, we have a lot of work to do to figure out how to stop the bleeding and how to sort of keep all this threaded together and stitched together as we go forward. 50 years is a long time. I think the noteworthy part of that in my mind is you think about this downward decline from the 1960s population,

whatever you want to refer to that as. But to know that in Wyoming, the decline in mule deer since 1990 has been about 40%, that says to me there's an acceleration that's starting to move at a breakneck pace. You don't have to be a mathematician to recognize that that can be a zero-sum game pretty quickly. And from a conservation organization perspective, I think it's important to recognize that maybe we aren't capable of reaching peaks, but we're definitely capable of drawing a line at the basement. And that's where we want to fit in is to help stop that downturn and at least start to maintain hopefully a gradual increase later. Gavin? Yeah, and I think that's a great point.

And I still, I'll fall back again to the, how do we stop that downturn? Which is ultimately going to come down to the science side of it anyway. And there's still lots of lurking questions associated with that. And if that was an eruption, how far are we going to go down?

And what are we going to do? And I'm still, I don't necessarily disagree with Matt either, but maybe I'm a little more optimistic too in that I think from a science, so for mule deer, although they've been declining, they're still sort of a fairly common species, right? And so I think in some instances as decisions are made, there may be viewed a little bit as a common species. Well, if we give some here, if we give away some here, it's okay because we have them in all these other places. Whereas we can, I think, help gain that appreciation and help instill some of that appreciation by also increasing understanding and how uniquely connected. They're amazingly connected to the

landscape and the environment that they live in. And by helping understand that better and being able to relay that, I would hope that I still kind of think we're just pushing through almost to a breakthrough wherein we're getting to the point where mule deer and some of our other ungulates have much, much more traction at the table when decisions are being made. And I truly think that that has a lot to do with the science and the communication of it. And we're beginning to get to a point where we're learning these little nuanced mechanistic things that can make a huge difference yet are really interesting too and will help inspire people to garner an appreciation for them and not just focus on economics, even though

they're very economically valuable as well. So I still think we're getting to a point where maybe we're going to get a little bit of a breakthrough. It doesn't mean we're not going to have some more bleeding in the interim, but at the same time, I think as we have that little breakthrough, as far as public sentiment, appreciation, those sorts of things, that there's also going to be additional lines of information from a scientific perspective, that's going to going to help us do better to the benefit of mule deer too. And that could be managing other species to managing habitat to even more motivation associated with pessimistic, maybe realistic, borderline pessimistic perception of what's going on, but then still wake up and do what you need to do. I remember the first time I ever sat in a meeting about making a TV show,

the first thing out of someone's mouth is they were saying, it's impossible, this almost never happens, let's get started. Let's get after it. All right after you guys thank you very much for joining Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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