The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 354: If There's Lead In The Air, There's Hope In The Heart

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Chris Parish, Ryan Callaghan, Sean Weaver, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: How Steve still insists on his theory that D&D created today's falconry community; spending 19 hours hunting per single grouse harvested in NY State; MeatEater's Campfire Stories 2: Narrow Misses and More Close Calls is out!; go get our brand new EZ SUK'R cow elk call from Phelps Game Calls; a reminder to submit your project to our Land Access Initiative; FirstLite's partnership with Delta Waterfowl; profile pictures and differing opinions on what's offensive; green crab whiskey and eating invasive species; lead shot and waterfowl die offs; getting thrown in jail for shooting red tails; how the lead issue is definitely not just a condor issue; the story of AC-9; chelation and depuration as great Scrabble words; supplement tubs; how condors returned to the same caves their ancestors had lived in during the Pleistocene; hunters responding; being uneasy about bans; following the science and when science becomes weaponized; the North American Non-lead Partnership and Hunting With Non-lead; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt.

First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Hey there, I'm Giannis Petelis, and I'm here to read an ad for you today because Steve is up at the fish shack having fun with all of his friends, catching salmon, spearing salmon, diving for scallops, trying to catch halibut. Just general, you know, good Southeast Alaska fun. But not me. I'm here in the podcast studio reading this ad for you. All right, but listen up. Very serious.

You should get fired up because this is big. This ad here that I'm about to tell you. Are you listening? All right. It's the first ever organization wide, meaning everything under the meat eater umbrella, meaning the meat eater store, Phelps, FHF, and First Light. It's all on sale August 2nd through the 4th.

Okay. What's cool about this is that now under the new shopping experience that you can find on our website, you can do all your shopping in one place, put it all into one cart. And the big kicker here is that you only pay for shipping one time. I've done a little bit of surfing on the new Meteor website, but Phil has says he's been down in the rabbit hole a few times. Why do you like that new website so much? I mean, I think listeners know I'm usually not the one to be able to speak to this, the stuff that we sell on our, sell on our website. I'm a relatively new hunter. You know, I'm not too deep in the waters, but man, if you, if you have not been to the website in the

last few weeks, since it's been updated, if maybe the last time you shopped was before last year's hunting season, check it out. It's great. It's very aesthetically pleasing. Like I'd say if you had a choice to take a plane to New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art or go to themeateater.com and check out our new store, that's a toss-up. I'd say check out the store. It's way cheaper, way easier. Okay.

I was going to say like go shopping on Amazon versus shopping at the Meteater store. Oh, no. I don't want to compare us to Amazon. I'm comparing us to MoMA. Okay. Okay. A couple of the items that you can find that will be for sale is going to be, uh, like let's start with a meat eater store. I want to mention that everything that we, that is on there is curated by the team. Okay. Cal helps Seth Morris, Chester, myself, even Steve weighs in a little bit on what we should be carrying in that store. Okay. But it's all like really solid stuff. And even though I might not like use every piece that's on there, somebody in the company has said, I love that gear. I want us to sell that. Okay? At the Meteor store, there's Vortex Optics,

Trauma Kits, Booze Cutting Boards, and our logo wear. You're going to buy the Trauma Kit first and then the Cutting Board, but when you're at home, you're probably going to be using the Cutting Board and then need your Trauma Kit. So, think about that. Be prepared.

First Light, 20-40% off almost everything, including 20% off the Uncompagri 2.0 jacket, which is probably the piece that I use the most out of the whole First Light lineup. FHF, 20% off the bino harness. Phelps, up to 50% off select items, including 40% off all Renegade Bugle Tubes. So if you're not ready to go metal yet, get yourself a Renegade Bugle Tube at almost half off. This might entice you to buy a metal tube at regular price and then get a 40% off Renegade Bugle Tube and try them both side by side. All right, so remember, you got three days, August 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. You can buy it all in one place.

Pay for shipping only once. Four brands, one cart. Get it. It's going to be the season opener sale of all season opener sales. That's a tongue twister. All right. Thank you for listening. All right, everybody. You know we go all the way to the top.

We go all the way to the top on this show, and that's why we have the president and CEO, the lead figure of the Peregrine Fund here with us today, Chris Parrish. Before we get into it, Chris, Corinne, I gather you contest the idea that D&D is the primary driver of falconry? We just got to put this thing to bed once and for all. Now let me tell you my evidence. Okay. My evidence is this. Well, you asked me.

Now you're going to load your question. Here's my evidence. Do you not listen to the show, Chris? I do. I have a family member. I'm trying to keep it distant so if the person's listening, they don't know I'm talking about them. Like the person that I'm going to get to in a minute.

I have a family member who had a roommate who they were way into D&D, and that involved them first having like a lot of serpents. Horrible roommates. They had serpents, and that was like a D of serpents horrible roommates they had serpents and that was like a dnd thing and then pretty soon they graduated to falconry because they wanted to look like a wizard gotcha and i heard that that was a pretty common path and then um developed my theory that the bulk of falconers outside of the middle east american American falconers are driven down that path through D&D. Well, I'm so glad you asked.

Because, well, to be fair, I mean, I've been with the Peregrine Fund for 22 years. It was founded by falconers. Falconery is a huge part of the way and how we do our business. But I had to ask Corinne what D&D is. So let's start there. Dungeons and

Dragons, everybody. Okay, if I say Dungeons and Dragons, you know what I'm talking about, right? I know about, I know the word, yeah, the phrase. But all your members aren't into that? I don't think any of them are. The falconry community is right now applauding. Yeah, no, the falconry community, I mean, if you look at the history of falconry and you want to talk about the U.S.'s history in falconry,

you have to go back to the conservation movement and how that's tied to falconry because falconry of three, 4,000 years ago. Yeah. That's Turkey, Syria, Iran, what we call it today. And it's in all the, as, as soon as art and any art form, whether it's written or pictographs, petroglyphs, anything like that, you see falconry, you see depictions of husbandry of animals that are depicted as being used to catch prey. Were the Egyptians into it? Absolutely. Because they got a lot of falcons and stuff in there. Yeah.

No, they're highly revered. Do they have hieroglyphics that suggest that's what they were doing with them? Well, not just that they were keeping them as part of a menagerie? Yeah, because they're on the fist in many of these. The birds are on the fist and the quarry's hanging from their glove, much as you'd see today. I didn't know those guys were big into D&D.

I was going to say, is there any cuneiform of a many-sided die? Of a many-sided die? I'm not following you. That's it. It's a tool in D&D. Okay, okay. I only just put that together right now

because I'm not familiar. Well, you guys. But I remember there was like certain dudes in high school. I don't want to name them. Certain dudes in high school of which I was friends. I was friends with that. You know, you got like your jocks, right? Your stoners, headbangers.

Ranch kids. Well, we had farm kids. Yeah. Yeah, your D&D guys. Who crossed over with headbangers, weirdly, but not stoners. Well, I'm betting that Aldo Leopold probably didn't know about D&D and he said falconry

was the perfect sport. Oh, come on. Really? Really. Aldo Leopold? Yeah. Yeah, well, he's, you know, there's a dark side to Aldo Leopold that people don't realize.

So. Taking like 75 yard Hail Marys with his bow, with his, with his like 75 yard Hail Marys with a long bow at deer and like, just kind of shooting over that way to see what happens and stuff. People hunted different back then, but he liked falconry. Yeah.

Well, I mean, he said it was the perfect, the perfect sport. Fran Hammerstrom, one of his, uh, uh, I think she was a PhD student. She became one of the, one of the very first ladies in conservation and was awarded by the National Wildlife Federation or whatever it was before it became NWF in, uh, in Wisconsin for her work. And she was a Falconer and had great writings about it. And I'm surprised that, that given, uh, you know, the, the, your, uh, literate nature of understanding and looking at all these things that, that you didn't have more of those, you know, early Falconers in the U S and, and understood what that was. Craig heads, for example, you talk about, oh, they were into that. Do you know that I wrote with an Indian Prince?

I'm going to send you a book. Do you know that, I think it was under the Clinton administration, they considered hitting bin Laden at a falconry camp. I did not. But didn't because there were certain high-level Saudi Arabian people present in that camp and they didn't hit the falconry camp. I could be messing up a small part of this, but I don't think I'm messing up a big part of it.

Well, I tell you, as much as you guys travel, when you're through Boise, Idaho, come to the World Center for Birds of Prey, and on that campus we share it with the Archives of Falconery, and we can tell you everything about falconry as far back as you want to go. Do you think that – And there's not a single piece of evidence about not a many-sided die in the building. Steve, have you

changed your mind? I never changed my mind, man. I mean, do you think the issue is that they don't want to admit it? They don't want to admit they're into D&D? It's like TLC or something like that. Sorry, Falconry community.

This little bit of evidence here, this little bit of evidence doesn't look well, but I need to do my counter research now. I'm not putting it to bed yet. Am I in a strong position right now? No. We're going to get so many emails. It's never stopped you before. The funny thing is...

I got to think about it more. The good thing is your follow-up argument can come after Chris has left. Yeah, well, there's a quote I heard from someone who once said, okay, so I'm wrong. Am I right? Oh, I want to talk about this real quick. Did you see this thing Pat Durkin sent? There's a study.

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. Okay. Here's the name of the study. Locally procured wild game culinary trends in the U.S. A study of the roughed grouse as entree and accompanying nutritional analysis and this paper in the in the heading gets into how uh people who are into wild foods are always extolling the virtues of wild foods but oftentimes their claims are not well substantiated in an academic sense meaning like what is actually in game meat is it different right like you might be like eating rough grouse better than eating chicken man you know um and the

usda has this thing that's like massive thing of all the new like mineral composition calories makeup of all these foods and these guys did the work to add the roughed grouse so now you'd be able to find all the nutritional data of roughed grouse in this usda database of foods i'm just gonna give you a high a high level So, Rough Grouse, compared to highly consumed domestic boneless Here's where it gets weird. Okay. Compared to highly consumed domestic boneless

skinless chicken breast meat, Rough Grouse has more protein per 100 gram serving, less calories, and significantly less total fat and saturated fat. The cholesterol content of grouse is also lower than domestic chicken. Much of the vitamin and mineral content of rough grouse compared to chicken were similar with grouse having slightly higher amounts of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, riboflavin, And it goes on.

But what it gets into, the main thing is it gets into the health implications of hunting rough grouse. Of the people who participated in the survey, this makes hunting rough grouse seem like a daunting thing. And it is. Depending on your approach. Depending on your approach, the particulars of the year. survey hunters participating the survey logged 25 hours of field during the 2017-2018 season they on average took about nine trips of field for the season and has spent about three hours of field per trip so that's like the rough breakdown of how, so the average rough grouse hunter is spending 27 hours, 25 hours hunting rough grouse. You generally, each outing for rough grouse is 4.5 miles of walking.

Now, if you ran all those stats on eating chicken. We would be a different nation. Here's the thing about the toughness of grouse hunting. So in New York State, okay, this is the New York State 2017-2018. The hunters spent an average of 19 hours hunting per bird harvested. Wow. That's a lot of walking.

That is some dim ass grouse hunting. That's why a lot of people aren't drawn to upland game, upland bird hunting. Chukar will cure you. It burns people out real fast. And then when they get something, they're like, all of that. Cal burns people out real fast. And then when they get something, they're like, all of that. Like calories lost to calorie gain.

Less than a pigeon worth of meat. Oh, it'd burn way ass more calories than getting out of a roughhouse. But that's like averages. You know what I mean? Who knows? Right. I think you could run it in different places. Like you could run that for the western UP of Michigan, the

Western upper peninsula of Michigan. And I think you'd wind up with some highly, some very different statistics. That just makes me question though. My dedication as a hunter, because man, if I went out and I got one grouse in 19 hours on average, cause I mean what you're hunting for maybe like with dogs, like five or six, maybe

hours a day. So what that'd be four days, one grout. No. I feel like I do better than that on deer. Yeah. Oh, if people remember, so Meat Eater Campfire Stories, Close Calls, Volume 2. And I'll point out that book, that audio project

accomplished something particular for its genre because normally when a book goes to audio like normally when you buy an audiobook you're buying an audiobook of a book that exists in print so when you look at the audiobook bestseller list like the new york times bestseller list for audiobooks is typically audiobooks that were books so there's the awareness of the book as a print edition and it makes like an audio edition but campfire stories debuted and stuck there as a new york times bestseller in audio even though it wasn't even a damn book volume two is out now uh it releases august 2nd but of course you can go and pre-order the thing right now and it's uh

meat eater stories narrow misses and more close calls and again it's like a an immersive audio experience better than the first one um we have on there our friend kimmy werner who tells a story that involved her and a mentor of hers and she violates a pact because they had agreed to never tell the story that's my favorite one yeah it's great there's a phenomenal story a near-death experience from our very own clay newcomb me and my son have a story we also have stories from a guy who saved his friend's life by shooting at him a guy who got into hand and shooting himself in the leg duck hunting which is a crazy story and his life was saved by his dog you're not callahan i did hear that good dog good dog if you're listening good dog yeah snort owesio and after that rattlesnake incident a sheep hunter who got uh

so horribly cliffhung in california that near very near death cliffhung experience just a really really great collection the guy who almost died from his own error that was that one it's hard to listen real hard yeah I gotta tell you this is some hard to listen to check it out but no it's like it's just like it's a lot of it's just skin crawling but then you know the amount of blood it's like a Quentin Tarantino it's like a quick yeah yeah but it's called narrow misses and more close calls right if it was just everybody died in the end one it'd be hard to get the stories. Right. Them being all dead and everything. But the amount of bloodshed in here, it is.

It's like watching Kill Bill. Yeah, some stories in particular. It's like listening to Kill Bill. I don't want to spoil anything about it, but that one that you mentioned where someone had to shoot at his friend to save him. Just listen. It was hard for me to listen to that one. Yeah. But it's just a great

story. Really just interesting. So that's out. Meteor's Campfire Stories. What we're going to do to get a taste for the series, last time we released the Campfire Stories we put Sam Lawry's The Mud Puddle and just built it on the end of the show. So in keeping with that tradition

we're going to do The Best Shot of My Life. That's a spearfishing one. Cam Kirkconnell. About the guy, well, I don't want to spoil it. Yeah. Just stay tuned until the end because it's awesome. It's got everything in it. You're going to hear, um, yeah.

We're going to tag it on the end of the show. You'll be so titillated by this little freebie that you'll run out and want to get the whole damn thing so you can have all those hours and it's it's hours of phenomenal stories polished and really like experiential kind of musical score and you're you're immersed yeah and polished not like some dude up there hemming and Hahn. We obsess over every minute of the content. Yeah, we do.

We really did, everyone. Our good friend Jason Phelps over at Phelps Game Calls just came out with... I'll tell you this. At one time or another, I kind of pointed this out, driving around in friends' cars and you know how everybody has a bunch of junk in their car on the dashboard or the glove box.

I have experimented with probably every, every elk call, every cow call. I'm not saying mastered or like even made a passable sound with, I have experimented with probably every cow call on the market at some point or another over my lifetime. I think that, uh, in my view, Phelps is easy sucker is the easiest cow call I have ever used under this category that makes a wide variety of sounds. I probably need to get one cause I have a hard time. Listen, I don't understand. I don't get the mechanics of it, normally so like over the years people come out with bite and blow calls that are like monos

they make a sound and everyone that uses them all makes that same sound it becomes something of a joke like a good call will come out and a couple of years later people will laugh about when you make when you blow that call the alcohol go the other direction because they're like oh shit it's one of those dudes that one call. Um, where you lose that problem is with a diaphragm because you have like a, like a tremendous vocabulary with a diaphragm.

But this one is like one of the problems, a lot of bite and blow calls to are exposed read calls is it's so hard to get like the pressures of how much pressure with your lips or teeth you're putting on it how much air you're putting through it it's just a pain in the ass and this is coming from a guy who thinks game calls are a pain in the ass in general uh holy shit dude cal's gonna cal's gonna suck on it. Oh, Steven. It's like you don't. You don't. I'm knowing you too well.

You don't blow on it. You just like, and it's not even like you're sucking. It's like an inhale. Do you like hyperventilate? No. Listen. It's like an inhale, and it's hands-free. It's like a green rubber. It's called the Easy S, and like slight and it's hands free. It's just,

it's like a green rubber. It's called the easy sucker. Do you like it? Steve's screwing this up a little bit. Okay, go ahead. Okay. So the more complex a call,

the, the, the wider range of noises you're, you're going to be able to make, but the more time you need to get into it and, uh, and really start playing because they're like a musical instrument, a kazoo in the hands of someone who actually has messed around with a kazoo a bunch can make that thing sound appealing.

Yep, there's people who really play the kazoo. After you get Ron DeSantis and Chris Pratt and who's the gal from MSNBC I always want to get on the show? Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow. The Rock. Get us a good kazoo player. Okay.

35 minutes of pure kazoo, easy listening. This is... I called in Cal's dog. Inhale. Cal call. But it's got a bite component to it it so you can actually create some different tones and pitches volumes is that included in tones and pitches well i i think there is you know there's a limitation on this which is good as far as like your overall volume i was messing around with this

and you can do like some some little uh bull sounds too and some estrus cows and stuff. Phelps can do, but he doesn't like to say. He doesn't like to recommend it for bull. Holy cow. Oh. He was way out there. I think I need to get myself one of those. I can't blow on it.

Dude, they're so much fun, man. They look really sharp, too. The easy estrous call, I still have a hard time with that one. Yeah, for the volume, you can actually get a different insert, right? Like, I think Phelps has a different insert. Yeah, so there's reads. Yeah, you can get a different, like a louder call. Yeah, so you can switch them out.

You can take the biggest jackass on the planet. I'm trying to segue into my kids. Unrelated to that, unrelated to that, you can take my children and they can make cow calls with it. Steve's saying they have the experience level of a jackass.

Jackasses or my children can crank. You're going to pay for that one. You can do a lot of playing around with this. He wraps up his kids all the time. The monotone, do everything yourself cow calls are the ones that I certainly stay away from.

And I like to pick up one new cow call a year. You do? Yep. And just mess around with it and try to find something different. And everybody has like a different read, thickness of read, length of read etc that makes a different pitch and call so um yeah i need that one yeah and i feel like we all have that hunting

buddy too that you just know you're gonna have to call for all the time right like you're always gonna be the guy in the back calling for him because he's just not going to call. Like I brought that home, gave it to my wife and it was like within a two minute. This is unrelated to what you're just saying. I wouldn't say it's unrelated. No, but, and then like within a.

Or take my wife. Or take my wife for example. But in like a two minute timeframe, I'm like, you're going to be able to call for me. Like you're legitimately going to be able to call for me. You're legitimately going to be able to call for me now. It's awesome. I love it, dude. I'm throwing my other

shit in the garbage. Or in a box. In my garage. I do point out, since this is an inhale cow call, there's definitely room for an exhale cow call. Of which Phelps makes several external read calls that are really, really good. If you want to pick up a call,

if you want to pick up a call and make a, like, and make very passable cow calls very quickly and not just one sound, but a variety of sounds, I would be like this. And then just waste your breath exhaling for no reason. And I would say that if I thought Phelps was the, was the biggest asshole in the world,

I still say the same thing thing because it's like an objective reality. It's a good one. I like a minimum of two external read calls because you can definitely jam them up with gunk and spit and

dirt and all the pollen and bugs and I can keep going on with this list um and this this this is a fun one this is a fun one to add to the lanyard uh cal do a plea do do uh i don't want to say one last land access initiative so here's the deal folks we've been running the land access initiative for quite a while it It's a sweet program. We've had some success under our belt with the Shiloh Pond Project. We're looking for the next one.

We're still in the active looking phase. We've gotten a lot of suggestions, but honestly, very few out of probably six or 700 submissions at this point of solid solid this is the place this is what we want to do like like a project we've had ideas of projects that frankly we just don't have time for you're looking for a whole non-profit organization that can focus their time on this of which there are so many so get off your keister and and i've forward these on to my friends in those positions but we are looking for a place that is open to an easement outright purchase something that will provide more public access to hunting and fishing

we got a lot of awesome stuff in the works. We got some cash in the fund right now. We got a lot of partners on board to make this happen. Oh, we had a, we had an amazing donation offer. We have people that want to help so bad that they're giving away houses, little tiny ones that you can trap out of. That place is sweet though, man.

Yeah. Super, super awesome. So go to the conservation page at themeateater.com. Click on land access and submit a... The phones are ringing off the hook over here. Okay? Damn! Okay, get in line.

It's 1-800-GET-LAND right now. 1-800. That's right. Watch the Jerry Lewis tell them not to phone. Okay, get in line. It's 1-800-GET-LAND right now. 1-800. That's right. Click a submit to land access initiative. And we want to find that perfect thing where we can jump in and help create more access to hunting and fishing. Garrett told me about a couple of the ones that are in there. We have several very good ways to spend money.

I think, you know, we just want to find the perfect thing. But we have an absolutely phenomenal project here in the state of Montana, in northwest Montana, that the Trust for Public Lands is working on, which would be a system of easements that would provide access for the myriad of land of many uses activities from firewood cutting to fishing to snowmobiling in perpetuity, which is super cool and attractive. There's some incredible projects that, uh, ducks and limited is working on in,

in, uh, Iowa, for instance, that are, are, would be money well spent. So if you have something that you just want

to get active on, please submit it to the meat eater land access initiative. I want to give the dude a plug, even though we haven't moved on yet. Naughty Log Homes, K-N-A-U-G-H-T-Y, Naughty Log Homes. They want to donate a log trapper's cabin.

I can't remember the dimensions of it. Donating a log trapper's cabin to the, to the auction house of oddities. They are serious. So one of a kind log home. That's a really cool name. Yeah. Just saying. No.

You see Sean, uh, knots in wood. Sisters, sisters, sisters, Oregon. Donate the whole damn thing. That's cool. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. That's big. That's a great offer. Oh, Sean, you ready to lay out this, talk about Delta Waterfowl?

Yes, sir. Yeah. And Cal can speak to this too. But we are, First Light is partnering with Delta Waterfowl for camo for conservation. As a lot of you probably, well, you probably heard on the last podcast and seen on social media and all that, that First Light's waterfowl pattern, Typha, is out. And a portion of the sales from that are going to Delta Waterfowl. Um, which, you know, I'm stoked about because I love Delta. I've talked about Delta a lot in these duck reports and they've been great guys.

Yeah, they share a lot of information with you on the duck reports. Yeah. Yeah. They're, and I mean, the, the big reason those guys love helping so much is they're duck hunters. I mean, they call themselves the duck hunters organization, but they really are. They are. Their organization is about helping duck hunters and they're still research

organization. They have their four pillars, duck production, R3, habitat conservation, and research and education. But like their research and education stuff is really keyed and focused on applicable science right ways that they can actually

um you know benefit duck habitat duck numbers the whole bit so it's nice to be working with them great man so go buy some typha, kick some money toward Delta. We're just gonna make a donation to Delta too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think every duck hunter should be with what the two big duck hunting orgs have done for waterfowlers. Every duck hunter should be a member of both anyway. So.

So camo for conservation. First light. Right now, prior to Typha, if you bought Spectre, anything in the Spectre camouflage pattern, which is our camo for folks who like to hide in trees, a percentage of every sale goes to NDA, which used to be QDMA. National Deer Alliance. And now, and NDA, and now itMA. National Deer Alliance. And now, and NDA, and now it's just National Deer Alliance. On the waterfowl side of things,

anything in the type of pattern, a percentage of that purchase goes to Delta waterfowl. So, you get to feel real good about buying some unparalleled duck hunting camouflage and just stuff that's going to keep you warm and dry when you need to be warm and dry. But you're going to feel doubly good knowing that that cash is going to go make more ducks. those things about Delta that they talk about all the time is it was founded with the idea of, I want to replace times two or times three, every duck I take off the landscape. And so you're buying, uh, clothing that you're ideally going to go out and, um, remove some ducks from

and some geese from the, uh, waters and waters and airways of America. But with that purchase, you're going to slide some money back to putting them back out times two or three. Good. Good. Okay, we got a guy wrote in from Alaska. So he has this to say. He wants people to weigh in on this.

He says, to give some background, I am in the military, stationed in Alaska, and work for a three-letter organization that I will omit from this email. Boy, that makes you really start thinking. I'm starting to think all the three. BLM.

It ain't IRS. Anyways, recently this spring i was successful in a brown bear hunt and have since updated my skype profile of course on our classified computers with a photo of me kneeling next to my bear pictures very tasteful not displaying any blood guts etc well on fridays he goes on to say we use skype to conduct virtual meetings weekly to highlight mission successes for each work center in the building i am currently the highest ranking enlisted person in my work center and am in charge of the missions we conduct so i was speaking on my team's behalf and obviously my profile photo popped up indicating who was speaking.

No video on these Skype calls. Shortly after the meeting, my three-letter civilian boss came down to talk to me about mission-related stuff when he was pulled aside by another three-letter civilian. She instructed him that he needs to speak to his team about displaying profile photos with dead animals and that it is offensive to people. He spoke to me about this, instructed me not to change the profile as my photo is not offensive and I am not displaying the bear in a disrespectful way. My question is, if this escalates into something bigger down the road, do I stand my ground and try to push back or do I simply just give in and change it? He goes on to say, in my opinion, I don't understand how this photo is offensive. When my profile photo for the last year has been a photo of me holding a big silver salmon I caught with my fly rod.

At what, at one point, does a dead bear trump a dead fish is it the anthropomorphizing of bears and not salmon meanwhile we all walk around in coyote brown suede leather boots the military is literally walking around with dead animals on our feet half the civilians sit in luxury leather chairs at their desks i'm just trying to figure out if it's something I should stand my ground on or just be the bigger person and change my profile now. Here's my take on it. I have a take too after you.

If there was a rule, if there was a pre-existing rule dictating guidelines for your profile picture and this broke a pre-existing profile picture guideline rule then you should change your rule but if you're being singled out for this and nothing else i would fight back on it yeah my my take is a little more broad like in scope than that you're in the military which is purpose is to conduct violence yet we're like offended the i don't understand how people in the military are offended by a dead animal in a profile picture but the whole point of the military you don't get like culturally why that would that that's surprising to me culturally it's surprising well and it's a little bit ironic to think about an organization that exists for

like violence i i think all great points but um i would take it down i would put up something very very milquetoast that is mildly appealing to everyone who sees it if it's the three-letter organization we're talking about, we're talking about regime changes. We're talking about the ability to impact gross national product of any country

on the planet. The Culinary Institute of America. We're talking about Zero Dark Thirty. You're an enlisted man. Change your profile pics. Not worth it. Oh, like this bigger fishlisted man. Okay. Change your profile pics. Not worth it. Oh, like just bigger fish to fry. Yeah.

They're the organization that's going to fry the fish. Bigger bear meat. Bigger bear meats to fry. Yeah. Here's why I think you're wrong, Cal. That was so matter of fact. Yeah. I don't think this is an issue of compliance. i don't think this is an issue of like compliance

i don't think it's like an issue of rules like i think this is kind of semantics and like one of the things we deal with a lot on this podcast when we bring up is like different predator hunting getting closed down for no reason at all all over the place and And I feel like one of our jobs is to normalize it a little bit, right? Like, so it's not just so, you know, like toxic whenever you do see it. I feel like folding on something like this, taking down the picture or not being able to embrace something that's a huge part of your life. It detracts from the normalization of something that then we come on here and we tell people like no it's a thing that people do and should be respected and there's a key in the language used here is the individuals claiming not that it violates protocol or not that it violates picture rules they said it is offensive and i think that

allowing people just to run around willy-nilly declaring yeah like to declaring something that might offend me as being categorically offensive i think is is running rampant do you mean like you can declare people things that the people would never even agree with so to say like it's offensive like let's let let's be clear. You find it offensive, but there are probably things about you that would be deeply offensive to me. You have a picture of your third wife on your profile picture. That's offensive to me. Why, why have you been married three times?

I find that very offensive. Take that down. No one would ever ask that of somebody. Right. Or like, I see that you have a picture of yourself not at church on Sunday. That's deeply offensive to me. Yeah, you could make. This is on internal encrypted channels.

That's like a language thing. That's people stating as fact. Regime change. You can swap out a dictator. So it's use the I word, everybody. But that's my point, Cal,

is like, it is insane that the people who exist to swap out dictators are getting offended by a bear picture. I think we're obviously getting real into this.

Let's move on to the crab desk. Yeah. I mean, why are you closing your computer, Cal? Oh, because I'm well read up on this crab situation.

But you weren't on the other situation? I was working on some other things. That's what I was getting at. That's what I was getting at. Do you have gum for everybody? I want to tee up this next segment. If there's one thing the media loves, not TV, but if there's one thing the media loves, not TV, but there's one thing newspapers and magazines love.

It is a story about someone utilizing an invasive species as a, for something or another. Hit it, Cal. Yes. That, I mean, that's, that's a great, there's a good couple of question marks in this story. So, uh, this distilling company in conjunction, I guess I'm not all that read up on this. Anyway. He's quietly opening his computer back up. Yeah, quietly opening my computer back up.

So there's this green crab, this invasive green crab. They came over in the 1800s, we think, in the ballast of boats. Yeah, I was surprised I had never heard of this crab. And the thing. After 200 years of being here. When you do hear about it though, they're like, they are horror, they're horribly destructive on

mollusks. They eat clams and, and, uh, mussels and stuff like that. So obviously it's dipping into some other folks pocketbooks there. They are prolific and they're, they an edible crab but they're so small the yield is really bad so if you ever gone to a crab house and started picking crabs eventually you might get sick of picking crabs and that's why folks aren't eating a lot of these green crabs

well in this case new hampshire distilling took up the problem and turned and this is where I really diverge on this. Here's where I don't like the language. Tamworth distilling's crab trapper. It's not taking up the problem. Like, it's not taking up the problem. Capitalizing.

Do you know what I mean? It's like Okay. What do you mean? I thought... What do you mean by that? It's not taking up the problem. It'd be like if I started eating... Let's say I eat dandelion salads. Okay, fair.

Now I get what you mean. You took up the problem of dandelions in America. He's been eating a dandelion salad at night. But I'm only one man. Did I take up the problem of dandelions or am I eating a dandelion salad at night? No, that's fair. I get what you mean. Go on, Kel.

So anyway, they started with the bourbon base and then they added in this green crab stock along with like bay seasoning and kind of classic crab stuff. And what you end up with is what they call something better than what the hell is the fireball no no I'm not interested before I can't even smell fireball crab trapper green crab flavored whiskey wait where does it say that that's a comparison? Fireball is nasty. Just eat a stick of Big Red. I was just back at my hometown.

I went to my hometown gas station, and the guy in front of me, which made me feel so much like I was in my hometown, the guy in front of me bought a fistful of lotto tickets and then asked for a bottle of Fireball, and they asked if he wanted it chilled or room temp. And he was able to walk out with a fistful of tickets and a cold bottle of Fireball. I can't even stomach drinking that

in the summertime either. It's like maybe in January ice fishing. That's just gross. There still is a bar called the Dew Drop Inn outside of West Glacier. And they did off-sale liquor, so you could buy a bottle of liquor there. And this is the only place this has ever happened to me, but if you go in there and buy a bottle

of liquor at the bar, they say, would you like cups and ice with that? I love America. You're like, not with it, but I'd like it in addition to. Have you been on the Kaibab right there in Fredonia? You come down the hill off the Kaibab plateau

and it's the center of the universe. Judd Otto, guns, ammo, lotto, and beer. Okay. It's the center of the universe. Judd Otto. Guns, ammo, lotto, and beer. Okay, so there is a good snippet here on the green crab. They are probably one of the most successful invasive species that we have in North America, at least in the marine world. They can eat about 40 mussels a day, just one crab. Holy shit. Each bottle has a pound of green crabs in it.

That's impressive. That's impressive. That is impressive. And my immediate deal, I sent this to some folks in the culinary world because I wanted to understand if there's, what is the demand for like a good crab stock? Yeah. So, you know, you don't go through the worry of picking everybody. You just turn it all into a giant vat of crab stock. If there would be like a, you know, canned crab stock type of market, I imagine there is. And that seems like a hell of a lot better way to go than making it into something better than fireball.

I wonder what the hangovers are like. Like if you got a seat. Feeling crabby, bro. Yeah. Wake up in the morning, feel like you're rolling on a boat. Yeah. Yeah, except for you're walking sideways everywhere you go. We probably can't get this here in Montana.

If anyone at Tamworth Distilling wants to send us a bottle at Meteor, please email us. A marine biologist goes on to say, like, you know, it's unlikely that this whiskey, this whiskey bottle and enterprise is going to have a serious impact. But she says, someone goes on to point out, I'm not reading it carefully to know who points it out. They go on to point out, if you factor in producing fishing bait with green crabs, whiskey with green crabs, fish sauce with green crabs, and just more and more incentivize the use um could be good you know one of the invasives that i felt that you could most like uh kind of get after in a way that felt productive is shooting lionfish yeah because you go like in the bahamas we just rent a boat and go out and cruise for coral heads and it's just sand sand sand sand, sand, sand. And then there's coral heads. You can see them from a million miles away on a sunny day.

And you'd go to a coral head and every coral head you go to, it'd be like a lionfish or two lionfish. And they're easy to get. Yeah. They're like, they just stand their ground. It's not in their mind to get away. They stand their ground. And so you'd shoot them and you'd be like,

this coral head is free of lionfish. And then you move on to the next one and shoot those, move on to the next one and shoot those. And it seemed like, well, God, he seems to be able to kill them all. But man, they haven't gotten that problem solved yet. No, the incentive, that's when Steve started

the intro to this segment here, he is correct. Like we love talking about like good uses for these invasives and, and the one that they've gotten the most use out of by and large of something that we see as a real problem are, it would be the Asian carp species. And so there's some school, some collegiate school programs that their culinary programs

utilize, you know, several thousand pounds of fish every year, um, in their, their meal halls and they're making actual you know tasty stuff but then in kentucky tennessee ohio there's some actual per pound incentivized fisheries and and processing facilities for these fish where they've actually in there's enough incentive government incentive that folks who commercially harvest uh catfish or buffalo or paddlefish which they call spoonbill out there can switch over net sizes and start targeting specifically the Asian carp, which there are some food markets for,

and there's some fertilizer markets for and stuff like that. Uh, and it's definitely something that we, we need to get a hold of, which is why, you know, crabby whiskey gets some, get some headlines and it says that there is no, uh, no real market around green crabs. So if something got started, it would be the first ever. Yeah. Um, I'm gonna give you some very dated insight into the carp problem, the, the, the Asian carp problem and differentiating it from the

common European carp, which in fast solve our waters, many of our waters. I spent some days with a guy that was a commercial netter. Okay. He was doing a lot of stuff that would wind up, he was catching a lot of those carp and his primary buyer was using them for making gefilte fish. So like canned fish preparation. And they're very concerned in those waterways

about not catching like the native fish. I'll add that we caught a beaver, but that's just a side note. And so they'd regulate mesh size. Okay. And he had to use whatever, like an eight inch mesh or some shit, like a huge mesh.

That way all the bass, right? Like large moths, bluegills, crappies, everything can get through the mesh. It was a big enough mesh to catch the really big carp. And he said you could go into a stretch, the commercial guys could go into a big stretch of river with that high, that big mesh netting and really get it where you're not catching carp anymore. Like you'd catch them. It's just very, the way they use these sayings is very effective oh after they come through you're not catching they can work an area let's say you use an eight inch mesh you can work an area with an eight inch mesh where you're like we're just not

catching them like we did we must be having a positive impact but then researchers would point out the biomass of the carp doesn't change like the the poundage per mile of carp in these stretches doesn't change it's just not comprised of big ones right and so they'd be like we need to be able to use smaller mesh we need to be able to use do a six inch mesh and then people be like well you know could have ramifications for bass or whatever and they use the sitch and then you kick ass with the new mesh and then your catch slows. Meanwhile, per mile, same poundage of carp.

Which, which is why you see the. Like it's a, it's carrying capacity, right? In this conversation around carp specifically, you see a lot of prevention in the form of how do we get these fish to not spawn where you see like those bubble curtains and aerators and stuff that, uh, try to divert fish from areas where they would spawn.

Got it. Yeah. It's a hell of a problem. I visited that electric barrier on Lake Michigan. We were trying to keep them from entering the Great Lakes. I don't know if that's still up and running or

not. A guy, when I, when I was talking to people on that cart problem, he was saying, like I was like, what would actually fix the thing? And he said, what would actually fix the thing and we'd never use it or be able to use it and you wouldn't have public appetite for it? He goes, I could imagine there's got to be some kind of

virus or something that's particular, but who's going to be the guy that pours that into the river? Who wants to play with the viruses right now? He's like, if you really, there maybe is some pathogen. Our controlled studies say that nothing will go wrong. Nothing bad happens. sweepstakes law that makes it that they can't join our northern brothers

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OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. All right, Sean, we're going to segue into raptors uh amy lead ammunition yep and we're gonna kick it off with sean's duck report oh shut up got anything else to say i say it's duck season and i say fire you bet you had mentioned i don know, a month ago or something, do a duck report on lead poison. Duck sound health. The lead shot ban, what led up to it, whether it was successful.

So, Chris, if I get something wrong here, which I'm pretty sure I don't have anything wrong, you're going to have to correct me because this comes from your world, really. I was raised at a time. Do you remember what year it happened? Yeah, they tried several times, but when it ultimately happened was 1985. Oh, because you know what's interesting? My first legal duck season was in 1986, and there were people that were not duck hunting.

They were like quitting duck hunting out of protest. Yeah, and some of them stuck. Some of them just never came back. Okay. Which is wild. Lay it on us. Okay, so the lead shot ban was a gradual crescendo.

Late 1800s, there started being reports of lead poisoning and waterfowl. In the 1800s? Late 1800s, yeah. They had a mass kill. Because guys like me and Spencer with them punt guns. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, it was mostly like commercial market areas that were punt gunning whole lakes. Texas, 1874, they really started reporting it. Really? Mm-hmm. And then in the early 1900s it turned into mass die-offs because smoking wasn't even bad for you back then it's a surprise

I don't mean to be glue about it it's just surprising that at that time there was like the level of sophistication to take dead waterfowl and determine cause of death right and relate it to a related to a heavy metal and some of them weren't even making the correlation necessarily right away they were like there's a bunch of dead ducks here and then they do a necropsy and find they just also happen to have lead in their gizzards got it and that that's really where it started um then you get into the early 1900s and they started having like mass kills um hundreds and hundreds of birds on a single body of water repeatedly seasonally yeah and yeah it definitely kept going faster and faster and more and more

uh am i correct in this that the the issue with ducks is that ducks are as they gather grit for their gizzard they are finding lead shot and ingesting the lead and like ingesting the lead for grit for their gizzard. This isn't that they're all carrying around stray pellets. Well, it's no, it's not from, it's definitely not from wounder, wounded hunter wound. It's, it's mostly ingestion. Good. So they're like picking, they see something like, oh, that'd make a piece of great piece of great piece of grit for my crop.

Yeah. And I mean, they're getting it in both their gizzard and their stomach. It's not like just as. So they're picking up while they feed. They're picking it up while they feed. And people think, oh, how are they picking up that tiny little pellet in this big lake? But it doesn't get to their stomach without going through their gizzard. Well, what I mean is like that

they're finding the lead shot in both places. Got it. It's not just poisoning them in the gizzard. Yeah. It'll pass, it's passing intact. Yeah. Into the gut. And there's a lot of comparison photos that

the fish and wildlife service had that shows like a normal duck's healthy stomach and healthy gizzard to a to a lead poisoned one. But, you know, one of the big pushbacks from Hunter, and I did not realize how controversial this was until I started really digging and see this was interpreted by a lot of outdoorsman as a anti-hunter, anti-second amendment government overreach movement. Was not positioned as that. Or was positioned as that. Hunters thought that's what it was. Sure, yeah.

Right? But, and you know, one of their big arguments was, how is a duck picking up stray pellets? You know, their tiny little pellet. Because I've never seen it. Cause right, right. But. Well, that's, we've had a lot of people write in and be like, I have checked every stomach and

every gizzard of every duck and they've killed a lot of ducks and like, and I found a pellet. So, you know, I started. It's anecdotal, but we hear that, right? Right. Yeah. But when you start breaking down like how much lead's being dispersed on the environment, you know, there's half pound. So the average back then was a half pound of shot being, you know, shot by a hunter per bird bagged, which comes out to 1400 pellets of number six lead.

And, you know, that's per bird you shoot. Overall, their estimate was 2400 tons of lead shot being put into wetlands a year by waterfowl hunters. And what year was that? That was in the 50s. Okay. I think. The guy that did this big study on this was a guy named Frank Belrose, and he was the one that really brought it into, like,

we got to do something about this. We need a management plan about lead shot. And that was in 1959. Yeah, like one of these things you have here, in one Lake Michigan blue bill die-off, 10 stomachs were examined that held anywhere from 40 to 80 lead pellets per bird. But I'm not saying that this guy is cooking the books, but people are still hunting ducks.

Yeah. But there's not like, why is that? Why are the crops and stomachs not full of shot? I think one thing that would be really interesting to look at here would be your, your hunter distribution, right? Like, and methods of hunting during this

study time, because I do have to wonder if there's higher concentrations on certain marshes, bodies of water, then, then we could have, how that distribution of actual hunting activity varies from then until today. Well, Sean hit him with that little detail you got in there, uh, that little detail about a heavily hunted wetland.

Yeah. So, and, and that was a big part of it. You know, the argument is now a lot of that lead shot has been covered up by sediment because that, so they did a bunch of sampling of major wetland areas that were like huge waterfowl hunting destinations. And they found some of those to have over 100,000 pellets per acre in the top three inches of the bottom sediment, which is so many.

See, Sean did a good job because here now I'm looking in here. Okay, from 1938 to 1954. Which is so many. Oh, see, Sean did a good job because here now I'm looking in here. Oh. Okay. From 1938 to 1954, they examined 36,000 gizzards. Mm-hmm. 6.6%. Between 1938 and 1954, a sample size of 36,000 gizzards, 6.6%. Ingestion, right.6% ingestion, right?

Had lead in them. With mallards, 7%. So there you go. Go kill a hundred. So here's the test for someone now. Someone who's going to be like, bullshit, man. Get a hundred ducks. Check every gizzard.

Especially if you hunt like a ref you hunt like a ref you like like you hunt a place that gets hunted okay go to a place that gets haunted shoot 100 ducks and see if you find seven percent that got a steel or bismuth pellet in their gut be interesting if it's constant through time yeah yeah and so okay where, where it kind of like really got to the point of people having to do something about it was these die-offs started becoming highly visible, right? You had TV and, um, one that like was right. Perfect. That they're kind of the right time in the seventies when this was getting talked about more and more. And I think it was the national wildlife Federation had already started trying to push for a lead ban. Fish and wildlife service wanted a lead ban,

but they couldn't get it done. Um, Lake Puckaway, Wisconsin. They end up with like over 3000 geese dead that were wintering there and the what ultimately what they said happened was these geese wintered on a part of the lake that was shallow and had a lot of hunter um hunter use and what year was this i can't remember exactly what year that was it was either the late 70s or early 80s but it was right during the peak of the discussions around it so

the debate was heating up and then there's all sudden on tv you know that a bunch of volunteers collecting thousands of dead geese 3 000 dead geese in a lake that had 118 000 lead pellets per acre and three inches top three inches that's just so wild it's a lot of dead geese i'm trying to picture like um an acre is a good size chunk of ground i'd like to see a density map like if you did a one hand if you took your two hands and did a scoop of muck, you're probably grabbing one. And I'm sure, yeah. And I'm sure it would probably be, there would be something about how it lays out, right? There would be areas probably with a lot higher density just by how someone hunts the area or whatnot.

Yep. But, you know. Oh, yeah. Prevailing wind, right? Yeah. Just like, I mean, just like if you're, uh. That's a good point. Someone who, uh, knows where to look on an old

pond for arrowheads, for bird points. It oftentimes has a lot to do with the prevailing wind. Oh, got it. For the area. Mm. Find your shotgun pellets around that same spot too.

So, but you know, know uh bellrose's point was not that these mass die offs are like a population threat it's that there are so many other factors that come in once waterfowl start dying from lead poisoning um for example takes them two weeks to die they start getting weird isolating themselves hiding in the weeds making themselves more susceptible to predators in addition to that then you have you know he even pointed to like you can't even really count or know exactly how many botulism outbreaks, for example, are because a lead poison duck dies and then you end up with a botulism outbreak because. Because of why?

Well, just ultimately if the more, you know, the more you have waterfowl dying in random places. Increased abundance of carrion. Oh God. Okay. Overloading the system where scavengers are cleaning it up. There's great examples about that, but that's a different one.

And so they tried to ban lead in 76. The Stevens Amendment blocked it, kicked that back to the states. And then that's where Raptors came in and bald eagles in 1985 what happened in 1985 well they had 65 bald eagles from 1980 to 1985 died from lead poisoning and the National Wildlife Federation was, sued Fish and Wildlife Service for a ban on lead shot referencing bald eagle deaths. And they actually blocked the suit because then fish,

once that suit was like happening, Fish and Wildlife Service said, okay, we'll ban lead so this court case doesn't happen. The National Wildlife Federation led the suit. Mm-hmm. Yep. And it never, it got dismissed.

But. I got that right. Because bald eagles at that time were an ESA. Mm-hmm. They were an endangered species. That same year they got kicked to threatened, I think. But yeah, they were on the usa still and of course why do people care because the replacement was steel shot and it didn't work as good as lead shot yeah that's what people said well yeah more expensive just did right but um okay that is a

steel shot there's stuff now that works phenomenally well. Yeah. But I think like any, you know, you had to switch to bigger pellets. Yep. Right? So you used to use sixes and leads and all of a sudden you're using twos and fours. So you're throwing, I want to say less lead out there, less material out there.

You're throwing out less material per shot with, with a smaller number of lethal things flying toward the target in the air yeah this is a whole it just is this is a whole nother duck report though um it's talking about like the steel shot lethality table and all the work tom roster did going into showing that steel is far more effective than it gets credit for. Okay. Well, and wounding loss and harvest rates actually, while they did decline initially after the ban, what they posited was based on their observations is as hunters learned how to use the new tool,

wounding loss actually was less with steel than it was. Because they're like, I don't have lead, so I can't take that Hail Mary. I can't shoot 70 yards anymore. And a big part of that is, you know, lead and steel shoot differently. Yeah, the speed of steel. Everything about how you shoot as a shooter is

different um and it was not you know like one of the things that when people talk about the pitman robertson act i really like to point out that people were like really excited about it hunters wanted it right when when the they don't maybe some don't now according to what's the name of the news the guy in clive and georgia we covered that yeah yeah so but what's the name? According to the news. Clyde. Clyde in Georgia? We covered that. Yeah. But it's like part of the story of Pittman-Robertson and the excise tax on ammunition, that it was brought by the rod and gun clubs of America.

They wanted this. They willingly did this, right? And this was not, we lose sight of it now, but this was not a popular thing. No, I mean, there was definitely some waterfowl and, and, you know, bought in on the Bell Rose study and seeing how, how bad lead shot could be on waterfowl numbers. But also there was a lot, a lot of people that just don't want to quit shooting grandpa's gun with the fixed full choke and the 30 inch barrel. Right. Oh, you know, real quick, tell me about the guy that, uh,

tell us a story about the guy, you know, that was jailed for shooting a red tail. Well, hold on. I think that Sean's point there is, is a great one that doesn't get brought up hardly at all is the fact that not only were you forced to use a different ammunition, there is a ton of guns in use, like heavily in use that could not shoot steel. Couldn't shoot a pellet that that's hard. At the time. Too hard on the barrel. At that time. At that time.

Well, because the loads hadn't been developed. I mean, you look at what they've done in Europe in the last 10 years, they are shooting steel out of Parkers and Purdy's, but they're adjusting the loads. So by adjusting the loads and decreasing the pressures, you can still,

you, the, it's not that you can't shoot them. You can't shoot the loads that they had then. Well, I mean, here in America is bigger is better. Okay. And I'm going to shoot a two and a half ounce load. You know, to be fair.

You know what's funny about the bigger is better thing is, uh, I was talking to, uh, the guy called the jet doctor and we were talking about, I was having a a guy called the jet doctor, and we were talking about, I was having a problem matching a jet outboard to a flat bottom boat. You remember my whole trial and tribulation. And I, one day,

was entertaining over the phone with the jet doctor the idea that perhaps there's like, is it perhaps too much engine for the boat? And he said, I've been in this business 40 years. I've never had a guy come to me and tell me he wants, he needs a smaller motor. Yeah. Now you see walleye boats with 400 horsepower

racing motors on them. It's like unbelievable. All right. Talk about the red tail dude real quick. Um. Or slow, I don't care. Oh, well, there's not much to it. I was a little bit wrong on that.

It was not one red tail. It was one. It was one red tail. It was one red tail with a game warden with him was the problem. Yeah. So he, uh, he was working at a pheasant hunting farm, you know, in South Dakota, like a lot of people do. And was shooting red tails while he was out guiding pheasants because, you know. Red tails eat pheasants.

Yeah, pheasant hunters hate red tails. And, well, that's a gross. Okay, you know what I mean, though. Yeah. Like. You'll hear stories. I would hear stories from guys like. I would hear stories from the generation prior to

me who'd be like if you hunt on so-and-so's farm he gets mad if you don't shoot the red tails right which is like a i'm sure it's still out there but i think that there was a time when well they used to pay bounties on them right there was a time when it was like you were doing the right thing for the planet by killing every raptor you saw yeah because chicken farmers would thank you you know whatever and uh yeah so i don't i i don't know exactly how many he shot but he did get like six months federal prison time plus three months probation plus or no not uh three months house house arrest plus four years probation, big fine. Yeah.

We were talking about this. You could, he could have killed his wife and landed in jail for less time. Yeah. I mean, he did some, he did some, I mean, that's serious time. Six months in federal prison. What are you in here for?

Shot a hawk with a game warden. And I think what they really got him on was after he shot it he then picked it up moved it and buried it which is like even on top of all that on top of all that losses hunting privileges four years okay well the sad thing is for a lot of those things, there are depredation permits for instances, you know, I'm not saying that justifying the killing of raptors, but where it does, you know, that's different than wanton shooting. That where I grew up too, the same thing. You go out there and every third telephone pole's got a red tail at it. Mm-hmm. And I said, man, but that's changed in my lifetime.

That's changed drastically. Yeah. Okay, give me your spiel on, I don't want it to be a spiel. Which one do you want? Don't deliver it like a spiel. All right. He never does. He won't. Okay. And Chris, for this. I'm trying to think where't want it to be a spiel. Which one do you want? Don't deliver it like a spiel. All right. He never does. He won't.

Okay. And Chris, for this, talk into the microphone. Okay. All right. I can hear myself breathing. I didn't know I breathed so loud. Let's approach it this way. All right.

When people are talking about lead in the environment today from hunters and shooters, there is a widespread idea that this has something to do with the California condor. Oh, God. That's okay. That's the lead in. Raise your hand. Well, no, I'm trying to find an avenue approach. Raise your hand if you feel that if you're made aware of the issue years ago in relation to the california condor okay everybody

okay even chris races i'm relatively new no okay well, unfortunately, people think that this lead issue, lead from hunting or the otherwise shooting of animals, whether it's depredation, whatever you want, whichever category, it's assumed that it's only a problem because of the condor. And that was people's avenue to introduction. Absolutely. And from a scientific perspective, because we were focused on the condor, because it was a species at such heightened level of endangerment, only 22 birds left, and trying to figure out what was going on with them and saving them from extinction. Not just for the sake of saving them, but for understanding what the hell's going on. Because the condor, you could argue that the condor has been on the road to extinction since well before the, the end of the last ice age, right? That's a, that's a point I hear that with, well, you'll get into it.

Yeah. Like with the megafauna extinctions. Oh yeah. Okay. All that stuff. Yeah. And the range reduction that was observed based on the recovery of, of fossilized remains and

all that stuff. That's, that's what we use as inference. We don't know that's what happened. We just have inference that there was a tremendous range reduction. Condor bones have been found in Florida, upstate New York, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, all over the place. But that's like- It was a ubiquitous bird. Well, it was widespread.

And as you come to know more about the condor, and this is the key, as you come to know more about the condor, you come to know more about the fact that they can fly states away in a couple of days. They can fly up to 600 miles in a couple of days. And then by the time we biologists get up there to go find out what the hell it's doing, it's on its way back. So that then tells you it's not that condors were so dense they were all across the U.S. They had the ability to travel widely. And of course, it would be seasonal based on all their biology. Learning about the natural history of a species, a single species, anytime you study it to the level we've studied condors, you learn more things about the greater environment. That's the benefit of the scientific process and what we glean from studying

a species. We did happen to come to find out that the number one cause of mortality for the California condor, range-wide in the reintroduction since 1992, is lead poisoning. Now, there were suppositions. Throw in here how that's determined. Well, when birds are tracked with telemetry, when they're tracked with telemetry, both GPS and VHF telemetry, because honestly, because there are so few of them, you can track them on an individual basis.

And because they were so endangered that the birds are monitored at individual basis. So when I came onto the scene as a state biologist for Arizona Game and Fish, there were six of us out there in February of 1997 watching six condors. And those were the first birds released December 12th, 1996, which I thought was cool as hell because we're out in the Vermilion Cliffs, which is also a really cool sheep spot. So, you know, like we're going to scan for condors and while they're sitting there, we can scan for sheep and there's some pronghorn there and we're getting paid for this. I didn't know you could have this as a career. But anyway, my point is we had six people watching six condors.

And while that might seem crazy, because do you really need to study them that much to really, you know, understand. Well, I would argue that, yes, if you want to know what affects their survival or lack thereof, you do need to study them that way. So as we study them and we're able to monitor the way in which a species that once ranged in the Grand Canyon region, we're now reintroducing them. And there's all these big questions out there. Will they find enough food? Because one of the early posits in the 30s as to why their populations were declining is because there wasn't enough food anymore. The bird's too big. Or the bird's too big, or they eat too much and they can't fly afterwards. Or all these different things that you hear these old wives tell.

That's such a wild one. And for me, look, I grew up outside of Bakersfield, California in a little farming community. So it was the oil field and the farm and cattle. That's where I grew up. To me, the way I was introduced to the California condor is, oh, it's an endangered

species. It's going to ruin our life. Right? And so as I studied more and more biology, because of my interest in hunting and angling only, and then I found out you could have a career in it. And the more and more I studied, I realized that, you know what, the problem wasn't the species. And the problem wasn't us ignorant, you know, hillbillies or rednecks out in Buttonwillow. The problem was there's a disconnect between science and the people of the communities.

And there's a lack of trust because of this inability to communicate. Because one of the ranchers that I worked for was a son of an original homesteader in the southern San Joaquin Valley. He, as a kid, saw as many as 50 condors on a cow carcass as a kid. He had natural history in his experience and knew more about condors than the people who were studying them right as the last one was taken out of the wild in the 80s. And I thought, man, if we could just get these two folks talking, there would be a shared understanding of the landscape and what's happening that would be far greater than just science or just somebody who says, yeah, they're on their way out because that way out. Cause that's the way of the, you know, that's the way of God's creatures.

They go extinct. So we would have thought, had we not studied the species, we could have thought that they were just on their way out. Hit real quick. You just said it, but the last one was taken out of the wild. I think it's important people, important point

to get that, like, there were so few that they were, all the living ones were collected. Well, yeah, because they were declining so steeply and that's only been since, you know, since they started being studied and studied in earnest in the twenties, thirties, and really a pivotal study by Carl Koford in the forties. Well, there was a break cause he had to go to war, but when he got back, he finished it up. That's the way folks were back then. Anyway, the population was in such deep, steep decline. And there were all these theories. One is there's not enough food. The other is, you know, goofy things like they're so dumb, they're just not surviving. Well, from a

biologist, a burgeoning biologist like myself and kind of a kid of the landscape, I was like, you know, would nature really produce a loser? Because it seems to me evolutionary biology hones and polishes every species to its finest representation as a wild animal. So why all of a sudden are they struggling? It's got to be a major imposition on the landscape or something that's going on. And then there were people said, oh, it's LA, you know, they lost their habitat. Or condors are so sensitive that if they see somebody and they're sitting on their nest, they'll abandon their nest.

But once again, from just basic biology and my experiences as a hunter and angler, I was like, does nature build something like that? It doesn't make sense to me. Right. Or find me the other comparison. Yeah. Because if one behaves like that, there's something else. Well, there are a host of things that are sensitive to development. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because if one behaves like that, there's something else. Well, there are a host of things that are sensitive to development.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Oh yeah. And there's that little town, you know, Los Angeles right there in the core heart of the range, right? Yeah. But if you look at.

That like, that they eat so much and they can't walk around and get killed. Okay. I'm like, well, but that would always have been the case. And. But the idea that habitat, the idea that you had like a habitat issue doesn't seem to be as silly as like some other other things you oh no you can rank them you can

rank them but i'll but i'll tell you i'll give you a few examples about how by reintroducing the birds and studying them to the degree that we have we've really narrowed it down set aside you know there were also some who said and if you look at the early writings and, um, Audubon, for example, I'm not, I'm not bashing Audubon here, but Audubon was against the, the collection of the birds and starting a captive flock. And, and you, I know you've probably read this.

It was in, uh, Matheson's book. America's, what was it called? Wildlife in America. I read it, but I don't remember it. Yeah. He talks about that, that, that look, we need to, to, to conserve these birds and prevent their extinction and then maybe understand why they were going extinct because it may not only benefit that species, it may benefit our understanding of the ecosystem, which

would be far greater use, but you have to collect these birds and retain them in captivity so that you can go and figure out what the problem was. Because by the time they were studied intensively, their population was already in such a steep decline that a captive population was the only thing that saved them from extinction. So December, Easter Sunday, 1987, the last

wild condor was captured and removed from the wild. How'd they catch it? You got to go check this out. You guys would dig this. A pit trap. They dig a hole, dig a hole, put a netting across you, fill it with debris and things to hide,

and put a dripping, rotting carcass on top of that and lie under it in wait so when the bird comes and lands, you can grab it by the legs. Who's the guy that grabbed that? I think it was Pete Bloom. That's a great thing to have on your tombstone. Yeah, right. Grab the last con.

Greatest catch on earth. It's one of the same ways that falconers. He's still alive? Pete Bloom, yeah. How old is he? Yeah, I don't know. He's the generation. I look up to him as one of the gods in the world of conservation biology because of the stuff that they were doing back then. Huh.

So, so anyway. I'm going to find that feller. That bird that was captured, the last one, AC9, stands for adult condor nine because we're into labeling shit, right? I like all those names. Yeah. So AC9 was this ninth condor given a number. And now every condor produced since then, and we're up into the 11 and 1200s now. Huh.

Both for birds produced in the wild and in captivity. Every bird has a number. So AC9 was captured, added to the captive flock. Luckily, the people running the captive propagation programs, the ones who really started it at Los Angeles Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park or Zoo Global or what they were called. It's still the same outfit. They just changed their names. Well, that all started and they had that captive flock. AC9 was put in and paired up with a female, which again is not natural.

And you have to understand too about the reproductive biology. Condors take eight years before they're able to reproduce in the wild. They're capable of it at five and six respectively for males and females, but they're usually not successful until eight years of age. So they have a very slow rate of reproduction, which also lends to why weren't they able to respond naturally in the wild to increase causes of mortality? Because they don't produce quickly enough and they're a long lived species. So it's the difference between a K and our selected species.

Anyway, go off on all kinds of tangents. So. I mean, like if a muskrat's alive a few months, it's throwing babies off. Oh yeah. But these things got to tough it out for. Yeah. Close to a decade.

Yeah. So to replace themselves and they only lay, well, not they, it's only the female. I don't know if you knew that. Hmm. But. I read that, I read that that. I read that somewhere. I read that somewhere.

I always say they, and my daughters pointed out, it's like, dad, the male doesn't lay anything. I'm like, I know that. Like, yeah, but you say they, the pair. Well, okay. They have an egg that the female lays and then they incubate it together.

It takes like 57 days and then the thing hatches. And then six months later, it finally is ready to leave the nest and. Sit in the nest for six months? Six months. Wow. Yeah.

And then after it fledges, the parents take care of it for an additional year. So now you really have the currency of exchange for, you know, the, the game of replacing yourself for condors. That's very limiting, but in captivity, they could get the birds to breed annually. And not only that, but they could prey upon another thing we learned about a lot of different

birds. They multiple clutch. If they lose their first egg to predation in the wild, the female is able to recycle and lay another fertile egg. Sometimes that can happen two or three times if their nest is predated. But of course, all these things in nature, they would have had to have laid it early enough. Anyway, I know I'm geeking out on that part of it but we take advantage of a guy that didn't want to talk about condors you got you got it all oh i love talking about condors but you talked but you started it with lead and then condors which i'll tell you why that's that's a bad idea i don't know well you were getting down to six of you watching six birds yeah six of us watching six birds we learned a lot so by multiple um you um, you know, um, double clutching, which were,

some of us probably old enough to, we think that has a different meaning. Oh, I don't know about double clutching. Yeah, right. Well, double clutching in birds is getting two in the same, same year, same season. So you put the other egg in the incubator, you raise it up. Well, you don't want it to imprint on people. So they use the puppet to make sure that it was fed and nurtured until it was then put into a foster care. And then you take those young and you release them to the wild.

Then we release them to the wild. We put transmitters on them. We watched them. Now I'm back to the six people watching six birds. And you're like, now we'll find out what happens to these sons of bitches. Exactly. And as we did, we found out it took them several years to occupy in behavior and in space. What we now think is natural behavior because

it's, it's not very, you know, the, we're seeing like a 70, 80 mile home range. These birds are moving seasonally around following the food. So during hunting season, they eat the hell out of gut piles. It's a great food source. During calving season, they're eating the, the

drop calves, the ones that don't survive. They're eating the, the remains left behind. All of these things are things we're learning because birds like AC9, last one captured, put into captivity, produce so many young, artificially enhanced, because we love to play with things as we learn about it. So we've been able to exponentially grow the population in a short period of time to maximize the return on investment of the cost of this, to pump these birds out and then monitor them. Well, here's a neat thing about a testament to the condor's resiliency. AC9 finally was so well represented. And we have a team of geneticists that monitor this to make sure that for every

release site, they have an equal representation of genetic diversity so that if we lose one population to some catastrophe, we still have that genetic stock somewhere, either in captivity in Arizona and Utah or in California and Baja. Those are the three main groups. So in your dozen egg carton, there's a lot of parents represented in that dozen egg carton. Well, as many as you can have, because there were only, you know, the all-time low was 22 individuals in 1982. So from those 22 came the breeding stock for the entire population today, which begs the question of, is there enough genetic diversity

for them to be viable in the first place? Luckily in avian species, that's not as much of an issue as it is with primates. So the Mauritius kestrel is probably the best example. That was down to four birds in the island of Mauritius. And now that bird's been brought back to over

400 pairs. It's either 400 birds or 400 pairs. That's a hell of a bottleneck. Yeah. But as you start studying now with our capacities in science to study, to look back using genetics, to look back and see what that bottleneck was and how many family groups there are.

Well, the Andean condor, the closest living relative to the California condor, it too went through a bottleneck that has like three or four family groups is all they have. Same thing with California condor, it too went through a bottleneck that has like three or four family groups is all they have. Same thing with California condor. Anyway, my point about AC9 is he was so well represented, they decided, why don't we re-release him?

He came from the wild. Let's put him back out there. Damned if he didn't get back released and start breeding in the wild again and took a new mate and continue to produce young. He was probably pretty good at the reproducing part at this point. Well, because he had been, yeah, he'd been doing it on an annual basis. He had to work for it out there.

Right. My point is people think that the condor is so fragile. And I think people have that misconception that all endangered species are so fragile and that's why they're endangered. That's not the case. Species get endangered and we get uppity as people when change is too rapid because too rapid a change causes us to get tense about it, which, and too rapid a change for wildlife interrupts their ability to respond to it. Like if there's a new cause of mortality. And so I'm, I'm prefacing all this stuff because it's going to matter when we talk about lead, but what I know about lead is mostly from my work with condors

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and this gets back to finally answering your question. And I do hear you and I'm not ignoring you. How do you know about lead? How do you know how many birds die of lead? We had a bird drop out of a tree in South south end of the Grand Canyon in the summer of 2000. They went and recovered the bird, took it in. They did an e-cropsy, an autopsy for wildlife.

Did an e-cropsy come to find out the bird had lead pellets in its digestive system, meaning it had consumed something in its digestive system. It consumed that meat that had pellets, which is odd because it's summertime and it's the Grand Canyon.

So what the hell's going on there? Well, I got my ideas and I almost got fired for it at Game and Fish, but that's another story. Now we know that I looked at the x-ray and I was like, that's number six and sevens. I know those are sevens because I've reloaded a hell of a lot of them. And that's a six. And I see some of those in duck hunting. That's sixes and sevens. What in the world's going on there? One bird had 33 pellets in its stomach. Turns out after that bird, we got the diagnosis back. Pellets, not fragments. Lead pellets.

Now we're going to get to fragments. That's a whole nother venue. And it's way more conclusive than where in the hell these pellets come from. So after that bird gets diagnosed, we see a couple of other birds looking lethargic, which is similar to any other vertebrate species and how they respond with, in lead poisoning. We're starting to see it like, man, something's wrong with this bird. It's lethargic. It's not going anywhere.

It's not feeding with the rest of the birds. You go in and we're like, well, let's trap the population. We found 13 birds after trapping the population in 2000. I can't remember what the total was, but we had 13 birds that had pellets in their gut and some of them were sick and we had to chelate them. So luckily you can chelate. It's the same process we use. What does that mean? Yeah. Chelating is the, is the, basically it's a, you inject a solution and humans, they do it through IV and the root word keel is claw and it, and it molecularly binds to the lead and then can be passed through the

system. So in condors, we just give them two injections a day in the intermuscular injections in the pec. And then it helps to reduce the lead. It depurates more quickly because if it doesn't get taken out of the system, like other vertebrate systems, lead precipitates out of the bloodstream into the organs, into the bone and brain, where there's an increasing difficulty of getting rid of it. Because the half-life of lead in blood is like 14 days. Half-life of lead in the brain might be 40 years. So it can start doing real damage with accumulations over a lifetime. Can we define depurate? Oh, gosh, yeah. I can't believe that I used words that I have to define. No, it's cool. No, people get to learn stuff.

You're kicking ass and scrabble. Depuration is the ability or the way in which an element, in this case, it precipitates out of the system. So there are different ways. Some of it is through waste. Some of it is through being locked up in other compartments. Okay, great. So, sorry, snort. I thought that was you for a minute, Steve.

She was just decorating something. So we learned that lead poisoning, in fact, is something that reared its ugly head in our reintroduction program in Arizona. Now, this wasn't unknown. There were studies in the 80s where they found a few birds, and this gets back to another thing I was talking about earlier. They found a few birds. And this gets back to another thing I was talking about earlier. They found a few birds near waterways and they had such huge crops that it looked like they had gorged themselves. But one of the effects that lead poisoning has on a condor is,

like other vertebrate species, there are neural impacts. There are neural pathways that are blocked and you get paralysis. And this happens with humans and lead poisoning as well. So the condors digestive system is paralyzed. Therefore, the sphincter that controls the food from the crop that goes down through the proventriculus and the ventriculus and into the gut, it can't function anymore. So they're starving essentially, and they can't, they're still eating more and more and more. And so they're starving essentially, and they can't, they, they, they're still eating more and

more and more. And so they're filling up this huge crop and because they're in a weakened state, because they're not processing food, they can't fly. And because they can't fly and they're not processing food, they usually don't need metabolic water because they could, I mean, they don't need water because they can get water through the metabolic processes of, of processing their food. So if they're not getting the benefit of their food, they're eating themselves into this engorged state and they're not getting the moisture they need to go to water. So these birds were found. I learned this when I was doing my dissertation research. And so we found that these birds would be there with this huge crop and they couldn't fly. It wasn't because they'd overeaten. It's because they were dying. It wasn't because they'd overeaten.

It's because they were dying of lead poisoning. Yeah. And they'd be collected near water. Yeah. Yeah. And that's common. So over and out. So you're like, here's where this wives' tale came from.

Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. That was the point I wanted to come all the way back to. So as I started researching this, and because, you know, when birds go silent on telemetry or GPS, when their gym GPS is moving around as we expect them to, and bam, they stop and they're there for two weeks, something's wrong.

You go there and we started putting this together. It's like, is there a Creek? Yep. Go to that Creek, hike up that Creek. We're going to find that bird. So you get your VHF telemetry. You'd either fly it first to kind of narrow it down. And then we'd go in by, by, you know, ATV and then hike in the rest. And then we would, we would find that bird. And sure

enough, it's got a full crop and it smells because the crop is soured, which is not normal for, I mean, it's when you smell like a, like a peregrine, that's just eating, that's just eating a meal. It doesn't smell what people think it smells like, Ooh, it's dead meat or it's red meat. It has a sweet smell, just like a good piece of elk does, you know. And condors, when they're scavenging, they're scavenging on carcasses when they're new because they find them by eyesight, not by their smell.

And so their big bill allows them to tear into carcasses that other scavenging species like turkey vultures can't do. So condors are eating fresher carrion if there is such a thing. So they usually don't stink. You can smell when they're sick and they have a soured crop. And you can see it because it looks like a big balloon. So we're learning all this stuff.

And then I start reading these old papers from the 80s where they said, well, we know lead poisoning could be a contributing factor. Well, as it turns out, lead poisoning is the number one factor. And so for us, that's how we came to our understanding of lead poisoning and how it could have really contributed to the steep decline in near extinction. And so rather than resting on that, we went to our partners at Arizona Game and Fish and Utah Division of Wildlife and said, hey, folks, we've been monitoring these birds now since 1996. And beginning in 2002, when the condors found the Kaibab Plateau and they started feeding on gut piles in like, this was the seasonal thing you did. It's like state fair in Bakersfield, right? Everybody goes there.

Well, hunting season on the Kaibab, all the condors, you can see all their location data if they're wearing GPSs or we're tracking them with VHF. They all go to the Kaibab. And we get a signal, and a stationary signal means they're either perched or they're perched because they're feeding. Well, you have to wait a while because they stop and rest and then fly quite a bit. But if they're there for a couple hours and there's five or six birds, you go there and you rush up, and there you are at a camp, at a hunter's camp. And there's a bloody greasy spot in the pine needles over there. And there's a bunch of condors with big fat crops and the hunters are long gone. And there's the bones,

there's the hide and the condors are fat and happy. You're like, great. It's a great food source. Until we started seeing seasonally high levels of lead peaking, coinciding with the hunting season. So we took and sampled the birds' blood every time we caught them so that we could have samples of blood year round. And sure enough, we saw a spike that coincided with October, November, which was when the two deer hunts are on the Kaibab. But you're not seeing deaths at this point?

Oh no, no. Deaths were creeping along. And then after like two or three years of consistent use of the Kaibab, you could count on it. We were going to lose six to 10 condors a year to lead poisoning. And that's when, Steve, we finally found the pictures in the radiographs. We got an x-ray machine. And if a bird was sick and it had a high blood lead level, we would x-ray it and sure as hell we'd find fragments. And then we started asking the question of, okay, but wait a second.

Is this because of wounding loss? We didn't yet understand the relationship between gut piles. So being lifelong hunters and being, you know, the Peregrine Fund is founded by hunters, falconers, who don't do D&D. Oh, wait. We found it. So they say. So we said, well, hell hell let's do a study because because wounding loss we know is only about 10 11 percent in deer hunting we looked at studies all over the place and like we're not

talking about 10 or 11 percent of the deer harvested being the source of lead poisoning that accounts for 80 of the condor flock having high lead levels we're talking about something more ubiquitous on the landscape we're going to figure out how much lead there can be. So we did our first study where we went and shot 30 deer up in Wyoming at one of our board members places. And sure enough, this was another point in my personal wildlife career is like, are you kidding me? We're all got five doe fawn permits and we're going to go do this study and we're going to shoot all these deer. We're going to x-ray them whole. We're going to shoot them with everything from a 243 to 300 wind mag, x-ray them whole. Then we're going to go do this study and we're going to shoot all these deer. We're going to x-ray them whole. We're going to shoot them with everything from a 243 to 300 win mag, x-ray them whole. Then we're going to gut them into a supplement tub.

If any of you know what that is, you know, they find them out in the field all the time. We throw it in the supplement tub. Then we're going to x-ray the supplement tub. It's that thing that you briefly know as an animal and you throw your binoculars on it. Yes. You're like, what the hell is a big bucket doing out there? Especially when you're hog hunting in California. Yeah.

So, so we started x-raying these carcasses of deer whole at a vet, with a veterinarian up there. And we put an arrow shaft through the wound channel so we could hold it perfectly straight up and down. So that the wound channel was in a columnar fashion so that when we had the x-ray, we could also see if fragmentation occurred, how far those fragments got away from the bullet's path. So we were started being blown away with just that alone. And we're like, man, that's a lot of, that's a lot of lead, but still most, we take the deer out of the, we gut it in Arizona, we gut it and we take it out of the field and so we're like well let's do the gut piles this blew our minds and we're lifelong hunters we x-rayed those

fragments and and i'll give you i won't say the names of the manufacturers because i don't want to pick on anybody but anyway a soft point lead core bullet that uh everybody has probably used in their life and most common on the shelf it It's said to retain 64% to 68% of its mass. Damn sure does. It's perfect. The mushroom looks beautiful. When you x-ray that gut pile, and people say, not probably your listeners, they say, well, I don't shoot them in the guts.

Well, you know what I mean. Everything fore and aft of the diaphragm is what we call the gut pile. What you're leaving on the ground. What you're leaving on the ground, or the grullock if you're in Ireland or whatever. No, that's diaphragm is what we call the gut pile. What you're leaving on the ground. What you're leaving on the ground or the grullock if you're in, you know, Ireland or whatever. No, that's, that's diaphragm back. Grullock is?

Yeah. It's diaphragm back. All right. Well, see, there you go. There's a trivia question. Yeah, there you go. Get that in there. I hope he does ask about that.

So anyway, um, the, when we x-rayed the gut piles, that's what blew our minds. A single shot from say a, a 130-grain, 270, soft lead core tip bullet could produce as many as 400 fragments from a single shot. Holy cow. It looks like a snowstorm. And so I started investigating and looking into the snowstorm, you know, I didn't know what to call it at the time, but I said, well, there's got to be fragmentation studies, you know, elsewhere, especially during wartime, because unfortunately, it's not like you see on the John Wayne flicks, you know, take a shot of whiskey, bite this stick, I'll get that bullet out. Well, you might get the core of the slug out, but you're not getting the

lead out. And there's what was defined in wartime as the snowstorm effect, which was the fragmentation that occurs. And it's basically the stripping off of the front end of that bullet as it comes in hot with its highest velocity. And as it begins to lose velocity because it's losing mass, little pieces are being stripped off and it looks like this little galaxy. And that's what these x-rays look like. Let me hit you with some whataboutisms.

You bet. like uh let me hit you with some what about isms you bet what was going on like when the hide hunters and the commercial hunters yeah were we shedding like shit loads of condors i don't know if you look at the condors estimated decline and you look at our increase in those activities it looks like an inverse relationship. Why an inverse relationship? Oh, got it. Maybe I said that wrong. No, the hunting activity is going up and then the inverse of that would be the...

So someone could have, if you had the right toolkit, you could have in 1870 gone out and found lead contamination in condors and might have charted a declining. If I, if I was a betting man and I had the money to bet, I'd be betting on that. Because look, and that's the beauty of this study. We weren't looking for lead to be the problem.

We were looking and open to the idea of what, what are the problems that contribute to, maybe it is the lack of genetic are the problems that contribute to, maybe it is the lack of genetic variability, stuff like that. We were thinking that. And there were people who said that, oh, these birds hatched in captivity. They're not going to know how to breed. And I was like, again, would nature produce something like that in just a few generations? And get this, some of the birds we released when they became of breeding age

at five and six years of age, they chose caves in the Grand Canyon that later through investigation of those caves were used by their ancestors in the Pleistocene. There were faunal remains that were carried there likely by condors because you're not going to get a Harrison's mountain goat tooth, you know, in one of those caves on the sheer red wall. That's what I'm thinking about. Yeah. And they found condor remains. And those condors that were hatched in captivity, who by some people's assertions, you know, they're not going to know what to do. Well, yeah, they did.

And they did it just like, you know, they're great, great, great, great, whatever, did. So we became more and more confident that what we're seeing is more indicative of what a wild condor is doing. Like people said, well, there's not enough food out there. Again, I think about that. And a lot of what I think about is the conversations you guys have had on this podcast. Wait a second. We're at the peak of productivity on the landscape right now with respect to carrion, the potential for carrion. Wildlife populations of deer and elk and turkeys and whatever else you want to talk about, the age of conservation has produced an abundance of biomass of potential carrion. And then you add from the years of the

Spaniards on through to today, the introduction of domestic stock and the stocking rates we use on the landscape, I would posit that there might be more potential carry-in today than there might have been right after the end of the last ice age. When you factor in livestock, it's interesting. Oh, absolutely. Oh, sure. Now, there's also- Because in a lot of areas, you're constantly making sure that you're hitting max capacity.

Yeah, and people have made the argument, I think it's worthy. The most, you know, with the, the advent of veterinary care, the loss rates are, are much less too. So one could argue, you know, I'm just saying that from what we've seen in observing the condors, we put food out there when we release

birds because our management tool is the release site. If we can't keep them coming back to the release site, we can't go trap them. They're damn hard to trap once they're out in the field. We thought, well, we don't want them to become dependent on the food that we put out. So like five, six months after, this is in the early years, we'd put the food out there. We'd move it every night, make them work for it, make them have to do what they're going to have to do in the landscape to survive. And then later we found that it doesn't matter what

you do and how much food's there. Come the flying season, as soon as March and April hit in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah and the winds pick up, hey, fuel's cheap. Condors are gliding birds. They have nine and a half foot wingspan. They're going to use it and they're going to go and they're going to feed elsewhere. So they're not dependent on the food. So we're beginning to answer these original questions. Was it their reproductive biology? Was it the amount of food on the landscape? And then, you know, people saying that they're, they, they're so, um, uh, they're so vulnerable to, to people. Does that make sense? For as long as humans have hunted in North America, condors have been here and condors follow

scavengers. I mean, follow predators. So I would argue that, wait a second, condors aren't looking at us as a predator. And with the birds we see produced today, they're not afraid of humans, which is another major problem when it comes to people that have shot condors, which still happens today, unfortunately. But they're not fearful of humans because we're a predator. And they probably followed predators. Can you imagine in one of those old buffalo jumps? They don't look at us as a predator of them. Of them.

But they look at us as a predator that produces carrion. We're a food source. So can you imagine one of those buffalo jumps if there were condors that extended out into the plains, which is entirely possible, and how that would have supported a population of condors long after, you know, the natives left. And there's, there's so many tangents here. Well, yeah. Well, this, this is all great, but in the interest of time, let's, let's jump to something. You bet. Out of that research, and I'm sure that there was plenty of fighting and suing. Okay. But out of that research, we get what I brought up initially.

Right. Hunters and their ammunition. Yeah. And we came to know about the Condor recovery area and folks were introduced to the idea of the first, the first widespread ammo restriction since the waterfowl. The first widespread ammo restriction since the waterfowl era. All right. Since 1986. All right.

You're jumping straight. I'm going to have to back you up though, because you're jumping straight to the ban in California, I assume. Yeah. Wasn't that like, well, it's spread to other places, right? Like portions of Arizona were in the condo recovery area. No. Yeah. The, the recovery, the addressing the lead issue as it was, um, uh, defined by condors

addressing that began in Arizona and Utah long before the ban in California. It did. Yeah. And our approach was entirely differently. Okay. Well, that's what I was trying to do. I don't know the history. I'm just trying to, I don't, I'm just wanting to bump along. And like I said, in. Okay. Well, that's what I was trying to do. I don't know the history. I just want to bump along, like I said, in the interest of time.

You bet. So let me give you the fast track. So from early 2000s, 2004, 2005, we did the deer study, put out a few more studies showing the coincidence of increased lead exposure and lead caused mortality in the hunting season. And then we went to Arizona Game and Fish. We built a program to share this information with hunters and ask hunters that they would consider using non-lead. Arizona Game and Fish took it a step further and said, hey, if you get drawn for a Kaibab

tag, which is a one, once a decade thing, if you're lucky, we're going to also give you two free boxes, non-lead ammunition. We need your help to address this problem for condors. Within three years, the Arizona Game and Fish reached 80% voluntary participation. Really? That's cool. Within three years.

See, and the reason I back you up is because nobody knows this part of the condor and lead story. All they know is what happened in California. And I'm going to get to that for the sake of time. But for the last 12 years. I didn't know.

I never, I didn't know about the ammo. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that there was a voluntary component to it. Right. It's not a voluntary component. It was comprised of voluntary activities.

And, and to be further, I don't even know what to say, to, to be a better bunch of conservation scientists and wildlife managers who are all hunters, we said, and if you just can't get the stuff to shoot in your gun, or we don't have the right caliber, you can still help prevent that potential exposure and that prevent potential poisoning by hauling your gut pile out of the field. And when we first proposed that some people like who the hell's going to haul a gut pile out of the field? I was like, well, if you make that Cabela's gift certificate, they might win big enough.

I can tell you a lot of folks that would. And it worked. That's so great. Even with the ammunition shortages of late, which I know is something you wanted to talk about and the price and availability, even with that being an imposition last year, the hunters in Arizona continued to participate and they just transitioned. If they couldn't get the ammo, they still participated and helped wildlife

because they were asked to do so. And we incentivized it to say, thank you. And even though there was fewer rounds of non-lit ammo available for use last year, we saw the same 87% annual participation. 87. It's 87% annual over that 12 year time period. So nobody talks about that. And so when it all started in California, it started because litigious based groups who quote unquote do conservation started with California because California was easy pickings because of the way the politics are there. And so when those groups started threatening litigation and saying, you have to do a ban or else, I ended up over there talking to the commission on two separate occasions on behalf of the Condor program and the research

that had really put a lot of this on the map. And I was there at the commission meeting saying, no, no, no, we're saying this information is new and it's real and it's worthy of consideration, but we're saying the assumption that a ban is the only solution, we're not quite convinced. And we have a perfect case in point here in Arizona and later into Utah that shows that you can work with hunters and ask for their help and share with them the information and you can seek maybe higher rates of participation, then you may even get with compliance with the law, especially if it comes from the angle of approach that it's coming. So the, the, the crap deal for the way that went down in California and the crap deal for why I'm hesitant to talk about lead and condors,

unless we do it the right way, which sharing our story, I think is a better way, is that it turned into a political quagmire where if you were talking about non-lead today, you're talking about, oh, you're a condor lover. And I even had a mutual friend, I won't say his name here, but a mutual friend of ours. He said, yeah, but you're a raptor nut. I said, no, I'm not. I'm a hunter conservation nut. The condor or another species is symbolic of what we as a society are capable the guy we're talking about real smart he's damn smart yeah and very uh energetic and you yeah yeah anybody and he'll know that i'm talking about him because when he talks about this issue he knows i'm going to call him right after i right after the the Ooh, I almost gave too much away right after some

of their media, um, uh, uh, outputs, uh, go, go live. Got it. I gave way too much anyway. Um, beep. Yeah, there you go. So, so for me, and I told him this, I said, what I love about this is the fact that we can combine hunting and conservation and science all together and own it. We can walk away on this issue of lead poisoning and how it affects the condor or the eagle, because there's those recent studies that you reported on, Cal, with limitations to the eagle populations and going down those paths of the arguments. Well, eagles are doing great, so how can lead be a problem? Well, it's like, yeah, humans are too, so COVID doesn't matter, right? Just the logic we use today, we really have to shape this conversation. And if we as hunters who believe we are leading the way in conservation,

if we're not out there in the front talking about it, then it will go by the wayside of those groups who have the loudest voice, those groups who spend their money on campaigns and litigation and telling everybody they're saving the condor by passing this law. But the reality of it is, and what we were guarding against and warning against when they were petitioning and cow, fish, and wildlife was put in a tight spot because they're going to be sued if they don't do something. And I was very proud to be a biologist, a scientist who was there saying, hey, I did some of that work. My name is on those papers. And I'm telling you, I'm not sure a ban will solve the problem.

It'll change the law, which sounds good. But if people think that it's all mocked up and it's about an attack on our rights as hunters, I won't say we predicted it. It was obvious. Nobody had to predict it. And when that happened that way. What the perception would be. Oh, absolutely. And now, guess what?

Lead poisoning is still occurring where lead is banned. And to those people who believe that the ban was the only solution, I said to them, so if you are successful in your ban, you have your parade in the streets, you say you solved the problem. You know the crappy thing for us who are out there monitoring and watching and taking care of these condors, they're still going to be lead poisoned. And they're still going to be lead poisoned because people are going to say, yeah, I realize it's a law, but I think it's bullshit. So I'm not going to worry about it.

And it's unenforceable. Can you tell the difference between a polymer tip solid copper bullet versus a polymer tip lead core copper jacket? You mean in the field? Yeah. You can't tell. So there are all of these issues that we were pointing out and saying, guys, don't get the cart before the horse here. Do what we're doing.

And not because we were right, but because we were seeing success. Hunters are responding in kind. We're the only people at the study and the study has this type of results. Right. So. Right. And then we would say, and then finally I would just say i know i'm i'm going on too long about this too but um i said if hunters are the only ones that can solve this problem so do you want to alienate them

that's an interesting point because that's part of the waterfowl ban was that north dakota game and fish kind of hung their hat on that they did like uh they put on shooting clinics for hunters and they're like we're gonna teach you how to shoot with steel we're gonna teach you that steel isn't some awful thing and you know they spent the time and money to to work with hunters put on two day, like shooting clinics, show them lead poisoning, all this, and the hunters leave it. And they're, they're positive about it. So I'm so glad you brought that up because that is the foundation that I've laid for you and what we experienced in Arizona and Utah is the philosophy and foundation that

gave rise to the North American Non-Lead Partnership. And I hope someday we can come back with my co-founder Leland Brown and talk about that partnership because that's exactly what we're doing. So state agencies are, rightfully so, they're concerned about the public perception about how big a deal is this led thing? Do we need to do anything? And we're saying, hey, we can help you with that. We've already done it. And we did it in the range of the condor where it's even more contentious. But if you want to have this conversation about the potential for lead exposure and how to prevent the potential for lead exposure as an opportunity for an ethically-minded, conservation-minded hunter,

we can give you confidence that this will resonate well with them. Let me lay one on you. I'll start out by saying, you can comment on this comment, but I'll start out by saying this goes beyond, the problem with lead poisoning, I don't even want to use value,

I don't want to use value-laden terminology. Raptors, besides condors can and do die from lead ingestion absolutely okay yep um people who are uneasy or outright opposed to bands as we discussed in california where it moves it beyond hunter choice. Okay. And you just raised your hand. So people who oppose lead bans.

Yeah. And I don't oppose it, but go ahead. Some people do. Yeah. Okay. I'm very, like, I'm not, I'm highly, highly uneasy with the idea of a lead ban. Me too. highly uneasy with the idea of a lead band me too when you could get with compliance and technology gradually land in a similar place so to the point where now if you had someone like if you come to

me and said i could shoot uh lead or bismuth right be like i'll shoot business well it's really expensive but it performs well so you have a technology function outside of any conversation like outside of any conversation about lead i know a lot of guys that shoot copper bullets yeah okay yeah outside of it like they could be not even aware of the debate absolutely but they're switching for issues of performance and other stuff okay yep there's a cost factor but I'm straying from what my point is going to be. Someone who's going to come and say like, I am going to resist any kind of mandate that tells shooters what they have to use.

And someone says, well, what about the fact that, that Raptors die from lead? They would say, uh, Raptors die from collisions with glass. Raptors die from wind turbines. Raptors get hit by vehicles and die. Raptors die all manner of ways. They die from colliding with fences. Um, why is there not a conversation about, we can't have fences, we can't have glass windshields, we can't have glass sky rises. Why do you seem to not care about all these significant causes of death, but you care about this one? And they'll say this, we're not talking about population level impact.

They might say, this is an argument and they're saying sure some die they all die eventually many die from many causes but short of there being population level impact it doesn't matter beautiful i'm glad you brought this up okay so that's that's a way of that's a not a fringe fringe, not a fringe viewpoint. No. And what I would, what I would enter into that, because there's, there's several things you need to unpack there. The first of which is, yes, lead is not in

many cases, a population limiting effect for those other raptors. It's only proven to be so right now. Well, it can affect populations. That's that latest paper in science pretty much nailed that. And the condor is obviously affected at population limiting level, but they're all affecting population. But you can't say it's not either. But the argument, it shouldn't be about that.

There are programs to educate and mitigate for all those other causes of mortality. Look at the stuff we're seeing about feral cats right now. Not that they're out killing eagles, but my point is there are programs out there. Just hasn't been proven yet. But there are programs that do address it. The sticking point is, are there programs out there? You know, a lot of the feral cat problem is addressed by lead. I won't get into the details of a law enforcement interview I had one time about the way I learned to shoot and whether it did or did not have anything to do with feral cats, but I won't get into that.

The point is, is we're not talking about we, we at the Non-Lead Partnership or the Peregrine Fund or any of our partners. And now we have over 40 partners, including one of your close outfits, First Light is one of our partners. We're not out there saying that a band's a solution. We're out there saying education, outreach, educating yourself, being able to make an informed decision. We are confident based on our experience in Arizona, Utah, now Oregon, beginning in Washington, two new partners to the two original state agencies. We are confident that if you provide that information and you shape a path forward through, yes, incentives work great and it's fun to maybe win something, that you can change people's perceptions, their awareness, and that can lead to changes in behavior without

telling them what to do. And me as a hunter, and that's why I'm so passionate about this, I want us to have our cake and eat it too. I want us to say, when we say that hunters are the original conservationists, yeah, are they continuing to be? I hope what we're doing represents that because I want to be a hunter leading the way in conservation and far greater than any single species that we've prevented extinction from or brought back to take them off of the endangered species list. All of those are testaments of what we're capable of. The way in which we go about it is the process that will see us through to the challenges in the future.

It's well beyond a single species and it's beyond a single issue like lead poisoning. There are other issues that are way bigger on the, on the scale of things for wildlife management agencies to be dealing with. I understand that. That's why I think we, as a nonprofit, for example, at the Peregrine Fund, that's why we, we put our two cents in. We show our, our, we lead by example by saying, we'll help you with that. That's why we co-founded the non-lead partnership. You know what I forgot to do when i was laying out my no thing i forgot to include this one which winds up in there and you can continue unpacking the whole thing it'll be like uh the bald eagle yeah okay what was the what was the thing we did to save the bald eagle what was

the the thing called silent spring and all that oh well you're are you talking about ddt or yeah no no what was it what was the end that made their eggs their eggshells ddt and dde which is the residue that's okay yeah eggshell thinning okay well i mean the peregrine falcon is probably a better example of that but yeah yeah i mean the peregrine falcon was was was far greater affected i mean it was really oh yeah yeah the peregrine falcon we we nearly lost because of that and that obviously is thus the names, oh yeah, the peregrine falcon, we nearly lost because of that. And that obviously is thus the namesake of our organization, the Peregrine Fund. But that's why we were founded. Those falconers who noticed that populations of peregrines were plummeting and wondering why and thought, well, we've got to be able to breed these birds in captivity and

repopulate those areas, but we got to find out the problem. And then DDT was identified as the problem. And even though the science was there, kind of like what you were talking about with a hundred years of lead, lead information, even though the science was there, one of the things that put it on the map was Silent Spring, you know, and like, like Belrose, you know, Belrose was the guy who finally got it through to everyone. He was the Rachel Carson of. I would argue that he was the guy at the time people finally came around to, to really accepting what was going on. He was the Rachel Carson of – I would argue that he was the guy at the time people finally came around to really accepting what was going on. He was the expert at the time. But it's never one person that finally did it.

Because you don't introduce something that's controversial that is going to require a great amount of change in human societies that is listened to. They hear the case and they say, yeah, we're going to do it. And then they do it. No. You hear about it and the first one's called a radical, and then later on they're immortalized and talk, you know. Or like Teddy Roosevelt. You end up carving his face into the side of a mountain.

Right, right. For making a lot of wilderness, making a lot of forest and wilderness, and then everyone, every politician since then wants to compare himself to a guy that was ridiculed in his day. his day and that's exactly you beat tree hugging a son of a bitch on the plane exactly so uh but let me finish my bald eagle thing i haven't even gotten there yet oh sorry recently there was a news story we can go all day man well there's a news story that got all kinds of press i mean in the last month or two something about like a prevalency of lead and eagles.

And people are like, holy shit, these eagles all got lead. And someone pointed out, hold on a minute, aren't we talking about the same bird that we quite famously removed from the Endangered Species Act protection because it's recovered? And now it's everywhere and you don't even comment on bald eagles anymore? Is this the bird we're talking about that's getting killed by lead? they do in a they do in alaska they comment about that bird yeah like i at our fish shack i think someone once counted 27 right in a collection of trees but i'm saying that so like on one hand the the media is running with this bald eagle thing on the other hand people were like behold i thought that was like one of the great conservation success stories how bad could the lead be yep yeah absolutely and that's my point it's not about does it affect a single species to the point where they might we might lose them that's not the stake of the game the game is understanding

and having the information to be able to comprehend the system and be able to make wise choices. Yeah. Because what's the, one of the first tenants of, of hunter education, know your, know your. Target and beyond. Target and beyond. Well, there's a new dimension to this. And I won't, I won't. That's a good point.

I won't steal this because this is Leland Brown, my co-founder that works for the Oregon Zoo. For what's beyond the target. Yeah. This is a new dimension. We own that bullet. We're responsible to make sure it hits the target we intend to kill. And if we do our job and we know our equipment, it does its job. What about after we leave and the remains of that bullet are there?

All we want to do is make sure people know that there's a potential, potential for that to poison a bird. Now, if it does poison a bird, does that mean that we're going to lose that species that ate it? That's not the point, folks. It's like leaving trash in the forest, right? We're not telling people, let's ban, it is banned. You can't leave trash in the forest. It doesn't mean that's what people do. Yeah. It doesn't mean something's going to die. Pick up your paper, right? I mean, it's a good thing to do for ecosystem health. We want people to think about it that way. Not that if we don't do it, we'll lose a species. I think that paradigm

of that style of conservation is over. Because one, the science is still science. It's still evolving. And there's still the peer reviewed process that tests the science and our assumptions of what we know. That's an ever ongoing thing. But the thing is, the way we do conservation, because now people don't trust the science and they don't know who to trust when they're talking about whatever, you know, PhD on this side and on that side of every issue. We need, this is a new paradigm of conservation. And I think we just have to go back and do the hard work in earning relationships and trust so that you can share it in the way that in some form or fashion we've been able to share here today. You've got to build that trust before people are going to change their behavior.

Because once again, just like those species that don't adapt well to major perturbations in an environment, we don't adapt well to major change either. Yeah. You're not a human physiologist. No. And that's, I know you're going to ask about human health. No. Let's do it.

I'm not even going to ask about it. I'm going to comment on it. All right. Uh, no one has been able to tie in a way that, that achieves some sort of academic consensus. No one has been able to tie hunting, eating wild game meat with adverse health effects due to lead. In fact, I remember they did this thing where they went and looked at North Dakota hunters to see how much lead they had. And they're like, Oh, some of these hunters have elevated lead. But on average, they had less lead in their system than urbanites who don't eat wild game. Because exposure comes from a variety of ways.

Lead paint, soil, all the leaded gasoline that was burning for all those years. So I don't even want to get into the, and because you're not a human physiologist, you can comment on it. But I think it's like, you can comment on it. Not that I need to tell you what to comment on. Let me put it this way. Do you contest, do you contest my statement if I say there is no proof that hunters are suffering healthy facts, not, not lead in their system, are suffering healthy facts greater than the American public in general. No, I would not contest that. But what I would say is, and this is the way I treat this issue,

because if you lead with the human health issue and you try to tell people what's good for them, it's bad news. Yeah, but you're not here to talk about human health. Exactly. I'm trying to get to a different point, but I don't want to just leave. I don't want to just drop a hand grenade here and then walk away, right?

Yeah, I'll catch it. So, yeah. Would I contest that? Based on my interpretation of the science, I would say I don't contest that. The studies aren't conclusive that if you hunt and you eat the meat that you eat, that you are suffering del with our understanding of lead and its effects on humans, um, the, the median allowed blood or the allowed blood lead level when I was a kid and you were a kid, I might be a little older than you, um, was like 25. I can figure it out if you tell me how old you are. 25 micrograms per deciliter. Um, that's, that's pretty, pretty high. The safe level today, um, when you look at that CDC study, the one that followed the one you're talking about, they said zero. And so while they, zero. How about none?

How about none? Because really, when you think about it, there's no species ever studied organism that uses, that lead is a use of, except us, because it's great for ammo. So when you look at all the, yeah. So when you look at all the like stuff, so when you look at all the, like, stuff like magnesium, potassium, like there's no, there's no, like, you didn't get your daily lead. Yeah, right. You don't think that way.

So, Steve, the way I answer that question, and just to really, and again, we have some other mutual friends that have been on the podcast, and they have very strong feelings about it. You can't say that it is affecting human health. then i hear the argument well you can't say it's not because when you have a lead poisoning amount an amount of measurable lead in your system how do you determine where it came from unless you're doing isotopic analyses and again does it matter here's where i go to but we but okay but you can't sit here and and like i said we can't be like the hell out of this chair we can't be doing we can't be like the follow. I've been sitting the hell out of this chair.

We can't be doing the follow the science. Listen to the science. Follow the science. Okay. Let's all agree to follow the science. Okay. If we're going to agree to follow the science, there's not a human health risk. It's supposition.

You could argue that. Yeah. You could argue that. So let's keep. And people do. Okay. Yeah. So if we, because I almost roll my eyes now when someone says they're going to follow the science.

They don't want to listen to the science. I'm like, you know why? Because science is weaponized. They've burned. Like, if I was going to look, not that the scientific community is monolithic. If I was going to give advice to the scientific community as a monolithic unit, I would say, don't let your research be weaponized. Because it's so weaponized that when someone says follow the science, you can reasonably say who's. Exactly.

I agree. And what you need to do is use the products of science as a way of informing yourself. But it doesn't mean it's the Holy Grail. I remember asking a researcher buddy of mine. He's working on something. I said, what do you hope happens? He goes, I don't hope anything happens. What are you talking about?

What do I hope happens? Yeah. Yeah. Right. No. And what all I. I was like, like man i would be rooting for that shit man i would point out too that like following the science if you do want to do that that means actually like clicking the links in the article that grabbed your attention opening up the actual paper and then reading that paper yeah you usually find that the paper is a lot less explosive than when it got picked up by the news agencies. Sometimes you read it two or three different times to find out how that article that you started out with actually has anything to do with this paper.

Yeah, absolutely. And so the way I usually answer that question is like, man, let me tell you about my experience. I had two youngsters at home when we were doing that deer study and we were shooting all those deer. And because we'd shoot eight or 10 deer a day and we'd process them all, it'd take us all day. We wanted their carcass, the carcasses to be shipped out to the processors to make sure we had 30 different processors. So it wasn't biased by the. Oh, by methodology. Yeah.

Yeah. So that meant we had two days off from shooting more deer. Well, we had hauled butt up to Montana with our bird dogs and shotguns and go hunt, hunt upland birds because it was in the right season. Led all of our shit up. Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Hey, that's from Arizona, man.

Anyway, um, we'd go do that. And my wife said, I called her, I said, man, I got, not only we're going to have all the deer meat from the study, I mean, five tags worth of Dauphons and it's all going to be cut and packaged professionally, which, okay, it's either good or bad, but I like doing my own. It's easy. Yeah, it's easy. We're going to come home and I've got Sharptail, I got Pheasant, I got Huns, and we're probably going to kill a few ducks with Falcons too, to boot. And she goes, what'd you hunt the upland birds with? I was like a shotgun well what'd you use i was like well i used a 410 on the huns and the 20 on the sharp tails and and it was the end of of uh of uh sage grouse season and and i got a sage grouse with my

12. she's like no dummy what'd you use. I was like, I don't know. They were double A's, something good, you know? She goes, lead? I was like, yeah. Oh, right. Well, I have an x-ray. Let me x-ray the carcasses. Because she was putting it in my face that, are you thinking? Yeah.

I was like, you know, that's a damn good point. I wasn't thinking. So, yeah, maybe I'll try steel. And I tried steel. And I've been using it ever since. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that

they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, way points and tracking. That's right. You were always talking about, uh, we're always talking about on X here on the meat eater podcast. Now you, um, you guys in the great white North can, can be part of it. Be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Like I said, I'm only saying this to tee something up. Because I'm kind of teeing like what. I can't wait till you get there.

Well, it's not as explosive as you might think. What I'm trying to tee up is if. Like that research. What is your ask of your peers? Like your peers being hunters. What is your ask of your peers, like your peers being hunters, what is your ask? But I want you to say that, like considering that, um, if, if, if you can't look them in the straight in the eye, okay. You can't look a hunter straight in the eye and say, you are imperiling your family's health. It's not my business. Okay okay i'd never do that well

and you'd have a hard time making the case yeah you would yeah so i'm not gonna tell you that but and i'm not gonna tell you that you're having population i'm not gonna tell you that you're gonna put the bald eagle back on the endangered species list but we as, are killing some number of birds by putting lead out on the landscape in gut piles. It's not a debatable point. What you want to do about that is your business. Are you like, hey, tough shit? Are you like, well, if it's six and one half, if it's six and one half dozen the other, maybe I don't want to do that. What is the ask?

I think the ask is to, one, educate yourself before you make a decision. You want to make an informed decision. And there's a lot of information out there to make a decision. I have confidence that when the information is shared with hunters, they make good decisions for wildlife. So, and, and I'll, I'll also add a little, another little, little salt and pepper here, a little extra spice that, you know, the rest of the world is watching. And if the hunter, and you gave one of these options or these, uh, alternative responses, like I don't give a shit. Okay. Careful. Don't say you don't give a shit because if you happen to be the hunter who the rest of the world is watching that is not a hunter, worse yet if they're an anti-hunter, and they can say, well, look, he said they don't care.

Because it's not population limiting, they don't care if they kill a few eagles. That's a tough place to be. So I guard against that by telling people, well, there's a great way to representing the conservation ethical hunters. If you say, yeah, I educated myself and I do take some precautions because I don't want to harm wildlife while I'm deliberately taking other wildlife that I'm targeting. I think that's the norm like do you do you feel that hunters would be rewarded in a legal sense like rewarded by the legislation if they were demonstrating a year over year reduction in certain activities or do you feel that in the end they're going to get hit by in the end they're going to get hit by bans no matter what they do?

I hope not. I fear that if we don't mobilize and educate ourselves and come to some consensus about what best practices are when it comes to the potential for lead exposure in wildlife, I think we're more vulnerable than ever to a ban. I, you know, our, our statement is we don't support legislation or litigation to solve this problem. I've had some good buddies of mine who I would assume that would never support a ban say, well, it's just time. I was like, whoa, well, um, I don't know that it is because I don't have the confidence

that hunters understand the problem. If I thought hunters really understood the potential for lead exposure and we as a populace said, we don't give a shit, we don't care, I wouldn't be working so hard in this effort. Got it. But I don't believe it's the case because everywhere we go, even wildlife professionals, I'm not picking on them either. You go and talk about it and they're like, oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, I think, do you mind if I jump in here real quick, Steve? Don't be hard to get one edgewise. Yeah, you got to pick your moments. I think something that would help me, Chris, because first off, I'll preface, I am a, I use both copper and lead. Yep.

Um, I think, you know, the waterfowl story going from lead to steel has like, man, massive die offs. We need to stop this now. We're going to steal. I think what would help somebody like me with making these decisions decisions because i have educated myself to a moderate level on this and i'm not he knows more about guns and ammo than anybody i know that's awesome um yeah uh and um and i'm not a blatant like i do care about the wildlife right so when i hear like well if you just educate yourself like it's a very easy decision yep um for me i have not come to the same conclusion uh because part of my decision making has to do with that bullets

performance i should can you stop for a minute yeah this is garrett long speaking oh yeah sorry he's just been hanging out yeah i've just been hanging out here um part of this has to do with that bullets performance downrange so a lot of, and I'm not trying to make parallels to steel and lead, right? Because I know it's easy to jump there, but there's a very obvious case with the waterfowl side. I know that at a certain speed, my copper bullet isn't going to do what it's designed to do. I think a lot of people don't understand that. They get their 6.5 Creedmoor. A lot of people don't get that a copper bullet,

you get beyond, depending on the length of barrel and everything like that, but you get beyond about 300-ish yards, you're going to have performance, you can have performance-related issues with that bullet, right? With any bullet, depending on its construction. With any bullet, but it's more likely because of how hard copper is. There's a higher likelihood that it's not going to expand. So for me, when I'm making my kind of lead copper decision, part of that is

mortality rate on the animal I'm hunting and likelihood of recovery. You bet. Right. And so I think something that would help folks like me that are in this position, right, that if we just had copper and lead ammo, and it's like, they're equally just as good, You bet. Right. And so I think something that would help folks like me that are in this position, right. That if, if we just had copper and lead ammo and it's like, they're equally just as good. And it was like, you choose one or the other. Well, I think you're right. The decision is a lot easier, but they're not just like one another.

What would help me is what, what is the level of risk, right? When you say like, Steve brought it up earlier, like we know there's eagles dying from gut piles, right? Somewhere at some point. Okay. But like, do we know that frequency and that level of risk? Because I know that I might hit a deer on the way home, right? And that's calculated in me driving, right? Yeah.

But it's, it's probably not likely. And I think that would help me come to that decision a little easier. You know, you know, a good parallel, in me driving. Right. Yeah. But it's probably not likely. And I think that would help me come to that decision a little easier. You know a good parallel what you're talking about with the Switch? Remember like BPA-free

water bottles? Mm-hmm. Be like, you can't even look and tell the difference between the water bottles. They cost the same. One's BPA-free.

You made Switch, they made Switching so easy. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. It's like, it still holds water. Right, right, right. It still costs the same amount of money right i can't tell from looking at it but right it just becomes like people don't sit

around arguing about it right right yeah so so i guess i'm maybe i didn't um what you point out is is very worthy of you know and depending on, the bullet and what its composition is, copper and whatever, then, um, some of them, you know, the monolithics, the solids that don't have all the prescoring and all that stuff. Yeah. You need 18, 1900 feet per second to get that bullet to open up like it's supposed to. Um, but now there are other companies making bullets that, that will fully expand if not fragment into, you know, eight or 10 pieces that I would never use on game meat that I attended to eat. I mean, those bullets will, will do what they're supposed to at way lower. So you're absolutely right. You have to know your tools and you have to know the capabilities. The first time I shot a, uh,

all copper, the first time I shot an all copper bullet was like a decade ago i remember i shot a stag with it a red stag with it he didn't know he'd been hit yeah he eventually fell over and it looked like someone like shoved a it looked like he took a field point arrow and ran it through him yeah and that was about 600 yards away but it's just come a long way since then it has and i think something that would be interesting too is, because man, my lead bullets at a certain range, like when I'm out of range,

I know what they're going to do more than likely, right? Like, and it's going to be very catastrophic. And we're doing a test on this actually in a couple of weeks on different bullet types and how they react to bone

and things like that and speed. But like, I would love to also see the data on a bonded bullet, right? We know it data on a bonded bullet right we know it's lead right but we know its retention is a lot higher right than that of a normal lead soft core bullet so it'd just be interesting to intertwine that to see like what's my level of risk in choosing this and and how does that compare to my perceived potential of losing an animal because of that? Yeah, you bet. I don't have a massive, like, I don't have massive ballistics expertise just for that sake.

But I have, like, I do a lot of big game hunting. And shooting, like, trophy copper, federal trophy copper, I've yet to have, I what i get like a handful of big game animals every year and i've yet to be like that son of a bitch and bull like never in fact it'll usually bring the opposite where people like hunting coos here but it's like i can't believe you're shooting with 300 wind mag and blah blah right it makes mushrooms perfectly makes a perfect hole through them things fall over there's not a bunch of superfluous damage and a giant wound channel, but it mushroomed. I just had like,

I'm sure you can find extremes, but in terms of like the performance thing, just me as a dude out hunting and pretty normal Western big game situations, I haven't encountered the issue. And I think for a guy like you that, um, shoots a big gun, a 300 wind mag that goes pretty damn fast and you don't reach outside a certain yardage, like you have a fairly close, like, like that makes total sense. That's when I use copper,

right? I love it. I think it's when you get beyond that into different caliber types that it matters. Yeah. Out to the shots where I'm like, let's try to stay closer. No, I hear you. I'm glad you brought that up because I wouldn't have remembered to bring that up. And it's a valid point. And again, it is to me just as simple as know your tools, know the information, and make an informed decision. And I think the impact from us just doing that as a hunting populace, it will make an impact. It will make a difference, which may make it more defensible, back to your comment,

Steve, that we don't need to be told what to do. We can operate as hunters, as the conservationists that we claim to be. We can do that with all of these things. Tell people we're out of time. Tell people- I get that all the time where if they want to find out more about the organizations you're involved in or if they want to read more about you bet um whatever yeah uh you think they should go read about you bet i know you've done a bunch of work on comparative ballistics and stuff so just tell people where to find what you guys work on. Yeah. I'll give you two, nonleadpartnership.org and the huntingwithnonlead.org. Those are two of the co-founders. Oregon Zoo, because they have a program there that our co-founder Leland Brown runs. Those are three good resources and you can get ahold of us and we'll come do a ballistics

demo. We'll bring ballistics gel, we'll bring a bullet trap. We did one of those years ago and I'd love to talk more with you offline about the bonded bullets because yes, they do retain their weight, but there's some interesting things about that. So nonletpartnership.org, the Peregrine Fund, any of our other partners, Arizona Game and Fish is a great resource.

They've been at this a long time. Utah Division of Wildlife. And Softies down in Arizona. Yeah, softies. Boy, you're going to pay for that one. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I'd say huntingwithnonlead.org is probably one of the best resources. And I also want to plug another closer to here outfit that started up with a colleague of ours, Brian Bedrosian, and they started one up. It's called Sporting Lead Free in Wyoming. And it's another one that, not pushing for bans, pushing for sharing information and pushing for movements that show we can take that information

and make really good decisions for wildlife. All right, everybody. Chris Parrish, president and CEO of the Peregrine Fund. Thank you very much, man. You sticking around for trivia? Yeah, sure. I think you'll do good, but I don't think you'll win. I probably won. You saw that last week. I'm not good at it. Thank you very much, man. You sticking around for trivia? Yeah, sure. I think you'll do good, but I don't think you'll win.

I probably won. You said that last week. I'm not good. To our last guest. But no, I'm saying that because I think you might win. Really? Because Brody's not here.

Oh, okay. Stick around for trivia. No, Brody's, I think, going to be here. And don't forget to stay tuned to get an exclusive first listen to one of the stories on our new

Campfire Stories audiobook, Narrow Escapes, and more close calls. first listen to one of the stories on our new Campfire Stories audiobook, Narrow Escapes and More Close Calls. The Best Shot of My Life by Cameron Kirkconnell A lot of the stories we're dealing with in this collection originally came to us in just little snippets, like little details of stories. In a couple cases, we would later find out

that the details originally provided to us weren't actually part of the story at all. In other cases, we might have just gotten a little snippet of a story that was in fact the most tantalizing bit. This story here is an example of the latter. Our next storyteller, Cameron Kirkconnell, is friends with the spearfisher woman, Kimmy Werner, who you heard from earlier. And earlier I mentioned how Kimmy keeps a lot of things to herself. She lets experiences in the ocean oftentimes just stay between her and the water.

Cameron is guided by that same principle and was not particularly eager to talk about this. In the end, he decided to tell us his story because he feels as though it might be helpful to other people who could wind up in a similarly dangerous position. He is anything but a glory seeker. However, perhaps to his own embarrassment, I'll point out that his actions and bravery were recognized by the United States Coast Guard. I caught a little bit of the story and I knew that if the part I heard was right, this story just couldn't be ignored. We had to go track it down and I'm glad we did. And I think you'll be glad as well. I'm Cameron Kirkconnell. I'm a professional spearfishing guide.

And my family is from the Cayman Islands, so we grew up spearfishing and around the water. And I grew up doing nothing but wanting to be on the water. At the time this story takes place, I was working down in Boca Grande as a tarpon guide, you know, helping people catch tarpon. Whenever I had a chance, when I was off of work, I would go and spear. And I saw a really good day of weather coming in where it's going to be like flat calm. And there were some other guys at the marina that had a good boat that we could run way offshore to these really good spots. So I called a buddy of mine, Steve, who was up at University of Florida.

I was like, dude, come down. Like, it's going to be like banner conditions. I've got everything. Just show up. He was a really good diver. And it's hard to find other guys that are good at diving. So he drove through the night after having a pretty big July 4th and came down and met me. And I think he probably had about two or three hours of sleep by the time he got there. So he

was pretty whipped. This day, we were diving about 60 miles off the West coast of Florida on a spot that was in about 180 feet of water. And during that time of year, the water is usually nice and blue. Even in 180 feet of water, you can usually see far enough down to see some good fish and the fish will come up mid water. So you're not diving all the way to the bottom on a free dive, which is breath hold diving, but you're actually chumming them up. Chumming, what we do is we will take another fish or a bait fish, cut it up into small pieces and slowly toss a couple of pieces out. So the boat was anchored and we would throw like three pieces of chum, wait 30 seconds, three more pieces of chum, wait 30 seconds. And what that does is it sinks down

and eventually it's going to go all the way to the bottom. You figure if you're a fish in 180 feet of water and you smell this delicious, you know, chum coming down this chunks of fish, you're going to eat those little pieces. And then you're going to look up and be like, Oh, so it's coming from up there. And then you follow that trail all the way up. So you can be out in a hundred or 200 feet of water and bring fish that are usually bottom fish nearly to the surface. So all the way up into range of what we can do free diving by chumming. We had just an epic day. Like the water conditions were awesome.

It was really clear, beautiful blue. Both of us shot our biggest amberjacks and the one that i shot i remember distinctly i dove down and shot it at about 70 80 feet and i was in 150 feet of water and the fish ended up weighing i think 105 or 107 pounds so i can remember like you know celebrate with steve on the surface and then he shot another one his best. So it was getting towards the end of the day and we anchored up on a new spot and we were chumming for a while and getting in the water. So the current was going straight off the back of the boat.

So for the first 30 foot of depth, the current was going straight back and there was only about 30 foot of visibility in there. Below that, there was a current that was going exactly 90 degrees perpendicular to it, and it was crystal blue water. And there was a group of Kubera snappers, which are a big, powerful snapper that fight really hard and are really difficult to get. And they really wouldn't come up over about 100 feet. So Steve and I talked about it, and we decided that, you know, because of the rigs that we were using, which was spear guns with a 100-foot float line and a buoy,

we weren't going to be able to get them with that rig. So a spear gun is basically a piece of wood with a trigger mechanism and rubber bands that propel a metal shaft with a barb on it. And when it's loaded, it's like a rubber band gun. You had a kid except it slings out a metal shaft. So that spear has a hole in it and you tie a line off to that. And then you've got about 15 to 30 feet of slack line that's attached to the gun. And then that is clipped off to a float line, which is a line that goes from the gun all the way to the surface. And you can have all kinds of different lengths of float lines and materials.

But for what we were doing this day, we had a hundred foot float line. And then on the surface, we have a float, which is a big inflatable buoy that looks like a lifeguard float so that when you shoot a fish, you don't have to fight them while you're down there. You can shoot them, keep the gun in your hands. The line comes away from it and the line is attached to the buoy. So you can relax, get to the surface. But the problem we were having is because of the way the currents were and the depths that we were diving, that buoy was coming tight each time. And I was like just out of range of shooting that really big snapper and the other fish that were down deep. So we theorized the only way to do this was to use the fishing reel that was in the boat,

clip that off to the gun and to the line. So if that fish came up to 115 or 120 feet, I'd be able to get to it, shoot it, and then be able to let go and just free ascend to the surface without having to fight anything. And the guys in the boat would be attached to it and be able to crank it up. So in order to give me enough slack to go deep enough to shoot one of these fish, we rigged the line from the spear actually to the fishing reel. So we talked it over with the guys in the boat and said, look, I'm going to go down. I'm going to make this dive. Steve's going to stay on the surface and watch me. I'm going to shoot this fish. And when you feel a tug, you guys crank this thing up. And we all decided this was a pretty good plan. And up until that day, and

until now, I've never done that again. It's amazing that we actually did it on, on that occasion. It could not have been timed better. At this point in the day, Steve was kind of getting a little bit tired and I was the stronger, deeper diver. I told Steve, I'm going to rest up. You watch me. And I'm holding onto the back of the boat. Currents flowing past. I'm trying to relax every muscle in my body. Every muscle that you're tensing is burning oxygen. So I'm totally relaxed, chilling on the surface and just waiting, doing nice, relaxed breaths, like you do in yoga, um, to oxygenate your body, lower your, your heart rate. And then for the last 30 seconds, I'm doing a series of breaths before my last giant breath which is belly chest shoulder and then going

and during that time of waiting for me i think steve got bored and made a dive and i kind of noticed it out of the corner of my eye and didn't think much of it because there were pelagic fish wahoos and mackerel and rainbow runners and stuff that would come by every once in a while so i was like he's just he's just going to shoot something shallow or he's just going to look or whatever like i know he's focused on watching me because my next dive is probably going to be over 100 foot so i kick down nice and slow when you make a perfectly efficient relaxed dive as soon as you hold your breath and invert and start kicking down, you can do three feet per second for your dive. So to get to 90 feet, it's going to take you 30 seconds.

Then you sit down there and relax. And my general routine is just about that. It's like 30 seconds down, spend 30 or 45 seconds down, and then 30 seconds back up. So my average dive is about a minute and a half, a minute 45. After about 25, 30 seconds, I'm down at 70, 80 feet.

And sitting there waiting, and a nice school of snappers came up. There was four really good fish that at the time would have been one of my best Kubera snappers came up. There was four like really good fish that at the time would have been one of my best Kubera snappers. I'm sitting there looking at these snappers and my mind has always been so focused on records and I always say like in order to get a hundred pound fish you got to let all the 90 pound fish swim past and at the time I knew the record was a few pounds off of one that we had seen that had a huge white mark on his face. So down there, say 30 seconds or so, and I'm

drifting, you know, from 75 feet down. So it's towards the end of my dive. I've got this school snapper here, but I still haven't seen the big one, the big one with the white spot on his face. And that's the one I really wanted. So, um, getting ready to head to surf. And I was like, I'm going to go ahead and shoot one of these other snapper. Just then out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of white and I turned to look and in the distance, 60 or 70 plus feet away, is the white handle of Steve's gun, which is still loaded, heading straight for the bottom like a rocket. And I was like, oh, God, that's not good.

And I look and above that, just on the edge of my visibility, is Steve in a seated position floating down towards the bottom. And I immediately know that he has blacked out. When you hold your breath too long and you're on land, eventually you're going to pass out. But on land, your body is going to know that you're outside, there's air against your face, you're going to take another breath. In the water, your body also knows that, hey, I'm in the water. Your body has a kind of a self-preservation

system that protects you and your vocal cords closed. So you're not taking in any water. And basically it's like closing your laptop. It goes into a sleep mode. So you pass out, you're not conscious, your heart is still beating, but you're not breathing. So this is the state that Steve is in. The water was 180 feet deep, and he was sinking at such a rate that I could not go to the surface and take another breath and come down and get him because he would be gone forever. I knew then that I had one chance, and that was right now, to try and save him. At the very least, recover his body. We didn't have any scuba tanks on the boat. We had no way of getting him. I had no one else on the surface, no one else to help me. Him and I were the only divers. So I dropped my weight belt, and I kick steadily towards him. He is maybe 60 or 70 feet away, which is a huge distance to swim horizontally underwater, even if I had been planning to do that on a dive.

And then I knew that I had 30 seconds of breath to get back to the surface. Having to tack on that additional 20 seconds working, like having to kick horizontally is a big deal. And one second makes a difference. Normally when you help somebody that is blacked out, you go and grab them and bring them to the surface. And you can imagine the exertion it would take to bring someone's body up from 70 or 80 feet, which is where he would have been like when I got to him. And I knew there was just no way, like it was absolutely impossible for me to do that. Like 100% I would have died too and no one, you know, would have ever found us as I'm closing the distance towards him in my mind I'm like the only option I have here is to shoot him we had talked you know over the years with

different you know friends around the world that in a situation like this, it was totally hopeless that we would just shoot each other. And at least then you'd be rigidly connected to him. The guy'd probably be pretty mad at you for shooting him, but at least you saved his life and you were attached to him. So I started kicking towards Steve. So now, and this is going through my mind in milliseconds,

I'm trying to calculate, can I get to him, who's pretty far away, and then from there go to the surface? knowing that this was the only chance that I was going to have to be able to get a hold of him and secure him kind of overshadowed that. And I knew that I had to do something. I had to try because I figured he's going to die either way. As I got about halfway there, I was like, I'm going to shoot him in the calf. I'm a pretty good shot. I'm going to shoot him in the calf. That way there's no major arteries or anything in there. I can punch through it and I'll have a good hold of him. So as I'm getting closer to him, I get about 25 feet away and his whole body rotates towards me. And my heart just sank because there's no way I'm shooting him in the chest or the abdomen or the thigh, and I was worried that the shin bones would be too hard to punch through at the distance, and I didn't have any more breath.

I didn't have any more time. So I made a split-second decision and aimed just in front of his toes and shot him through the fin. As soon as I shot, I let go of my spear gun and now the line is attached to the boat and I look to the surface and I'll never forget. I'll never forget that feeling when I looked at the surface and knew that I wasn't gonna make it either just absolute the most dreadful feeling I've ever felt my life seeing the surface knowing how much air I had and knowing there was no way I was going to make it. I think it was probably 80 foot down at the time.

And I kicked away immediately and thought back to my training and my free diving that I'd done and went into the absolute most efficient, perfect technique I possibly could. And that is your hands above your head, tight against your ears, hands overlapping, and just basically making yourself a perfect arrow. And started kicking steadily up, trying to relax, sniffing the air out of my mask as I went up, trying to get every little bit of it. And I hit the surface, and with my first breath screamed at the boat, which is the absolute worst thing to do. You need to take recovery breaths and get the CO2 out of your system and get air back in. So when I screamed like that, I started to pass out myself. And again, I remembered the freediving training and

when pilots pull G's when they're flying their jets, to keep from passing out, they do something called a hook breath, which is and you do five of those and it pressurizes, brings out O2 back in, gets the CO2 out. And those breaths saved my life. Because when I surfaced, I was more than 100 foot behind the boat, down current and away from, you know, the guys and anybody that could help me.

So now I'm conscious and I'm hauling ass for the boat. I'm swimming as hard as I can for the boat, yelling at them the whole way. Cut the anchor line, pull it up, cut the anchor line, Steve's on it. Those guys are cranking like crazy. They're hooting and hollering, thinking they've got the fish of a lifetime that I've just speared, this giant 100-plus Cubera snapper. I climb on the back of the boat, immediately start throwing coolers and bean bags and crap off the back of the boat to make room

and telling them, cut the anchor line, get on the radio, call the Coast Guard, crank this up. It has Steve on it. He's blacked out. We're going to have to revive him. I need you guys to help me. And they're looking at me like, what?

They're just, they can't even wrap their heads around it. and they're looking at me like what they're just they can't even wrap their heads around it so they're cranking i mean this rod is bent like we got the fish of a lifetime coming up and up comes steve backwards spin first and we grab his ankle grab his arms and pull him And his skin was the worst color, blue, gray of death I've ever seen. He was bleeding from his eyes, his ears, his nose. And out of his mouth was this orange, foamy, horrible blood just foaming out of his mouth. He had a white rash guard on at the time. And within a couple seconds, like his whole rash guard was orange. So we pull him up on the back of his mouth. He had a white rash guard on at the time. And within a couple seconds, like his whole rash guard was orange. So we pull him up on the back of the boat and I lay him on

the back of the boat. And you can imagine like my adrenaline was, you know, going pretty hard. So I checked to see if he has a pulse and he had a very, very faint pulse. He wasn't breathing. I took his mask off. And when someone does blackout, the quickest, easiest way to bring them back is to blow across their cheeks because you have sensors in your cheeks that tell you, hey, I'm in the air. I can breathe. So I blew across his cheeks, opened his airway, tapped on his cheek. And I was talking to him, say, breathe, Steve, breathe. You're okay. Breathe. So I did two or three cycles of that.

And he was a hundred percent unresponsive. In spearfishing, I've saved nine or 10 people now. Every single other person that I've helped recover from a blackout within the first two breaths has come back. They would come back immediately. In my mind, I'm like, this is really, really bad. Like I've never seen anything like this. So I opened his airway again, nothing's happening. So there was so much orange foam in his mouth, like this bloody foam. I was like, maybe I'll roll him on his side. So I rolled him on his side and just this horrible orange foam is just leaking out of his mouth.

And just as I'm getting ready to do rescue breaths, which is, you know, like the CPR breaths, he goes... And I was like, oh, my God, that was... That was like the death, you know, the death breath that you hear about and you read about. And he did that. The one time, and there was a pause.

And he took what I would say is a 1% breath. I blew on his face hard again. I said, breathe, Steve, breathe. He took a little bit more of a breath. And that orange foam was just coming out. And you could hear it like just gurgling in his lungs. Like there's no room in his lungs, you know, for even any air. So he started breathing slowly like that, 1 two and five percent breaths ten percent fifteen percent and he's still unconscious and i got him down into the boat we got the anchor line off

we got the coast guard on on the radio and i told the guys just as fast as you can go, head towards Tampa, head towards land. Coast Guard helicopter was on its way. So he's unconscious for 15 or 20 minutes. Still that orange foam's coming out. And finally, he kind of comes to. And the first thing he said is thank you. And, uh, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you black out and you're unconscious, you have amnesia.

So people that have blacked out don't remember anything. So last thing he remembers, he was, you know, 10, 15 feet from the surface and then lights out. And this is the next thing is me holding him in my arms. And I held him and we zoomed in as fast as that boat could go. And the helicopter came when we were about 40 miles offshore, lowered the basket, put him in the basket.

And I'd been on the radio with them trying to explain to the Coast Guard the whole time. He's blacked out. It's a free diving thing. He needs oxygen immediately, and you just got to get him to the hospital. So they lower the basket, put him in the basket in the front of the boat, lift him off, put him in, and they just, poof, they're out of sight. They're gone. And I just sat down in the boat and just totally broke down and couldn't really talk to anybody in the boat.

And it was tough. So Steve got to the hospital. He was in the ICU for three or four days. His lungs were almost completely full of fluids, and there was a big risk of secondary drowning. So he was in there for a while. He made a full recovery, no brain damage or anything. He played football at University of Florida for another two

years or so. And him and I are still friends. He's actually my insurance broker and a really good buddy of mine. We still dive together. The tough thing about blackouts and free diving is, you're basically watching your friend die. And it's all on you in that moment to make the right decisions in a very short period of time to save their lives. I wish I never had to shoot him in the fin, but I'm glad it turned out the way it did, obviously. It's the best shot of my life. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are 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.