The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 873: Clovis First, Saving The Great Lakes, and the World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

Steven Rinella, Brian Lynn of the Sportsmen’s Alliance, and the MeatEater crew discuss: Washington’s crooked Game Commission; Idaho hunting tech bans; the biggest and most hated wildlife crossing in the world; a plan to save Great Lakes whitefish; Clovis first; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Welcome to the news show, everybody. This week we've got news from Washington's Crooked Game Commission. Did a Secret Service canine handler get caught with his pants down? Hanoi Randall reports on Idaho hunting tech bands, which I'm generally sympathetic to.

The most hated wildlife crossing in the world, which is in California. A plan to save Great Lakes whitefish and Clovis. first is back, baby, plus more. Clovis what? Clovis first. It's a theory on the peopling of the Americas. Clovis first. Clovis first was there.

Then they killed it, and it's risen from the dead. I love it. Those people can't make up their minds, man. It's like the sealicant. That fell flat. Yeah, no, I got it. That's a good. That was a good joke.

It's like a Lazarus species. Yanni's back fishing in Key West. What's going on, Janus? It's funny. the like the second or third night after fishing I was on FaceTime with my gal and uh she's like how are you not burned up I'm like man I've just I've just learned after 47 years you put a bunch of SPF 50 on and you can just stay not red randall and max uh are a little bit chariard I put on SPF 100 on Sunday I thought it would balance out that spas zero at a point it tapers off doesn't

it is that like a like there's like a sun sunscreen scandal that maybe I'm not aware of? I'm not quite sure the science behind it all, but I, retroactively applying strong sunscreen after not having sunscreen doesn't actually, in fact, like I got burnt bad, I'm going to put it on. You need to invest in a 10 gallon hat, man. So is that the best, is that, that's what you got, that you got sun, that you didn't get sunburn? Mark King and I went down to Key West to do a little fishing with our good buddy, Jake Grimm,

that I think most of us here in this room know. Man, are you known? No, it always makes me feel left out when you say things like that. I still feel like the new guy. Well, that's good. It's fresh. Jake's the guy that took me under his wing for some hound hunting. I've had forgotten this. The whole way that we met Jake is that he was like an early meat eater fan

and was emailing us about going rabbit hunting with beagles in Montana. Do you remember that? That's not how I know. That's our first contact. No. It's not? No, it's not how I know him. His wife used to work with us.

I know, but that is after. Oh. Yeah, he was like Clay Newcomb. That's how we came about Clay Newcomb, too. He sent an email being like, y'all need to come to Arkansas to hunt squirrels and bears and deer. Look how that turned out. And you caught a tarpon. Yeah, so Mark and I...

They're almost caught a tarpurn, right? Yeah, catching tarp. You have the hand on the leader. Catching tarpment comes in many different versions. And yes. It is unfortunate, but fortunate. I've spent probably seven full days of my life standing on the bow of a boat looking for casting at tarpun. I've hooked one, jumped one, nowhere near catching one.

Literally the third cast of the trip. So first morning, it's still dark outside, kind of. Like, there's not enough. The sun's not high enough where you can actually see in the water. and all of a sudden we're like kind of getting ready because we're filming so we're getting ready to do like an intro scene and all of a sudden somebody looks over and goes oh my god they're right there

and like literally already within casting range and they're just when tarp and when they call tarpon happy they're almost not even moving they're just kind of sitting in one spot and bobbing in a way like in the current you know and so you know the yelling starts and you know Jake's like get the rod but be quiet

don't make a lot of noise when you move to the bow of the boat and so I grab a rod, get out on the bow, and literally the third cast. I'd never done this, Brody. Have you done this much where you cast and then instead of stripping with one hand, you put the rod in your armpit and then strip with both hands? You know what that works? I'm familiar, but I've never had occasion to do that. It's good because you won't screw up and trout set.

Yeah. Oh. If you set with a rod on a tarpon, it's not going to end. Yeah, I've hooked three and I've never got past the part where they jump out of the water. Yeah, that's a doubt. goes for most people. And I didn't even, I was even, I only became, I was, it happened so fast, I was only aware that it happened after it happened.

Yeah. It sort of dawned on me and the, and I'm like, after it was already gone, it was dawning on me. What it happened? The fish in the key, the tarpening in the keys. I mean, Yonis can tell you, but there's just like, the tarpening in the keys are hard, man. And I would love for someone to explain why there's so much harder to catch on fly in the

keys than they are in Mexico or Belize. Because I've caught shitloads of them. in Mexico and Belize. Never landed one in the keys. Go on, Yonis. Tell us. Another reason for the two-handed strip is because it keeps the fly moving. There's never

this. It's not going, yeah, you don't like let go and then have to reach up and pull again. But yeah, that moment, when that fish, it takes the fly, and then, you know, Jake's yelling at me to strip and you strip and you feel it come tight. From there,

the next three seconds, I think it's like the like violent and exciting and chaotic three seconds of fishing that I've ever experienced. Because like you know that you've attached yourself to something big. It's right there. It's in shallow water. You've got 50 feet of fly line that are, it's like half wrapped around your toes. And you're just hoping that as the fish runs and jumps,

that the line clears the deck and gets on the reel before it, you know, binds up. Because then later that same morning, Mark fed one, got him on. and we had a loop go around the reel and I tried to do everything I could to, you know, I'm trying to pull against a hundred pound fish to make a loop to, you know, bring it around the reel, and I just couldn't do it for him and it broke.

And it's just over. Mine ended this way. I fought him for an hour. It jumped twice. The big ones Jake said they don't jump too much. He guessed and made it. He's like, it was a solid 100. He's like, I don't know if it was 110 or 130,

but it was a really big tarpin in his mind. I fight him for an hour, which I was a little disappointed that I didn't fight him better. I had read all the Stu Aft articles and books. Do you know that name? No. Brody knows it. Down and dirty?

Yeah. Stoo Apt taught down and dirty, basically meaning that any time you're fighting any fish, but for this instance, Tarpin, is that any time that fish's head goes left, you bring your rod tip down and to the right. And when you turn him to the right, you bring your rod tip down into the left.

And you're basically not only tiring him out, but you're breaking the fish's will is what he thought. And so that he always... You're like in a psychological battle with him. He felt that like in 15 minutes, he could pretty much land any single tarpon by doing that. So I thought I was going to do that. I didn't do it.

But yeah, we chase him all across his basin, like a mile or something. And we get to the back of this basin. The water's getting shallow. We probably hooked him in five or six feet of water. and we're in like two to three feet of water now. And there's this little bridge that's kind of like in our periphery. We're not really paying attention to it. And there's a creek, you know, leaving the basin going out of it.

I guess depending on what the tide's doing, going in or out. But at this moment, it's going out into the creek. And somehow the tarpon just slowly moves and moves that direction. And we're kind of like, Jake's like off the polling platform and he's getting ready to anchor. And we're getting ready to literally like put our hands on the feet. fish. And I honestly think that there was just enough suction from that creek, that that hundred pounds of weight in the water gets pulled to that to that creek mouth and he goes under the bridge. So we pull the boat right up to it. The entire boat will fit under the bridge,

including the polling platform, except for the sort of holder bracket deal that sits on top of the polling platform that holds the, um, the pole itself. We'll just snap that. off. We discussed it and we thought that it might cause more damage to the platform if we just went for the snap. And so Jake just told me to hold the reel and bust him off. You never got a scale off it. No, I wasn't going to take a scale.

If you don't know, that's the thing they used to do like, I don't know. Well, they used to take its whole life in the dark ages. I've got a tarpen scale in my house. They used to take its whole life. Yeah, but you wouldn't take another one. No. And then they took a scale and now you just let it go and a shark eats it. that is the thing you worry about yeah we actually so we went offshore too a day and um where we fish these wrecks like it Jake was like look don't fight them fast just to be a tough guy like we you're

literally going to get more fillets if you guys can get these fish in as fast as possible so don't have a rabbit and we still luckily we're mostly catching benita which aren't really you know nobody really eats those anyways but uh we probably pulled in half dozen bonita where there was only front half of the fish left, you know. Yeah. But yeah, Jake had a great trip for us. We went dawn to dusk three days in a row. Offshore day we caught Mahi, Blackfin tuna, the Benita's,

and then we ended on mutton snapper. And we each got to catch one big old giant, like 15 to 20 pound mutton snapper, which was sweet. I thought it was weird that I didn't even get not only not invited, but didn't know. I mean there's like There's a lot of things that happened There's a lot of things that happened around here I don't think you know about

Didn't even know Yeah did you know Brody and I are both training for big running races Quick note from the last episode Yeah So The last episode of the news show We reported on a chimp civil war Yes

Randall reported on a chimp civil war Randall and Phil had made a Ken Burns spoof video about a chimp civil war. I think it's funny. We put in the show, I think it's funny. I go home and I'm laying in bed with my wife and I show my wife the video. She thinks it's funny. I send the video to Ken Burns, who's been on the show before.

And I've said, thought you get a kick out of this. He replies. Oh, I just did one of those for the Colbert show. Yes. Who, as I explained before the show, I think does too much facial humor. So then I'm like... Wait a minute. Like, he didn't do a chimp video for the Colbert show.

He did. He did. Really? Chimp, civil war. Write down. Okay. People haven't seen Randall's video yet. Right down to like banana jokes to like a handwriting of,

letter. Which I then thought, I wasn't aware. It seems like those guys would have mentioned that they stole the joke from a TV show. And then I was pissed. Did they steal it? They claim no. We have times down.

So Ken Burns is like, oh, yeah, here's the link to the thing. And I'm like, oh, my God, I had no idea. And he's like, hey, the more the merrier. and I'm like, dude, I had no idea that they stole your joke. You know Spencer always claims that Jeopardy is stealing questions from him? The New York Times steals all by reporting.

Yeah. So I would like to point out just how obviously linear this is. Can I finish my story? Yeah, please. Please. Then you can take it away. Yeah, yeah. Then Randall produces for me, it's not dated, but he produces for me a text dating back well before the Colbert thing

in which he says him and Phil are texting and he says I want to do it like a Ken Burns Civil War but there's no date on it so now I'm so embarrassed I'm sending this to Burns I'm trying to validate

you send that to Burns too yes I was embarrassed and he sent me exclamation points it made me laugh Well, it made me laugh too. But then I'm like, you can't run it. Yeah. And then as they're convincing me that they didn't steal the joke and that it was like, it was like, it was the two people.

And my wife's like, I don't think they stole it. I'm like, who? They is. Bill and Randall. Of course they didn't steal it. Can we let Randall talk about? How is that of course? I'm like, if there's two guys that watch Colbert, it's these two.

That's what I said to my wife. I haven't watched Colbert. I haven't. No, when you said, no one watches Colbert. When you sent me the email saying Colbert had done it, I thought the Colbert report isn't on the air anymore. I forgot that he was doing late night. I forgot, well, I forgot that he was doing late night now. Two more shows.

I was thinking about the comedy, the old comedy central show. When he used to pretend to be a right wing guy? Yeah. Oh, okay. So I will point out that, yeah, like, one, this news story was from about a month ago, and it kept getting booted. I texted Phil about covering this as Ken Burns. It kept getting booted because the administration kept doing more horrible things with the Forest Service and then the boundary waters.

And so I think in that text, I did say like, shit, we got to cover the boundary waters. We'll punt on the chip. You did. Brody said, it seems like something our audience wouldn't be aware of, so it'll still be fresh. Okay. But here's his proof. I mean, there's no date. We know that at some point at 1053 a.m.

Oh, I can find the date. Yeah, yeah. Randall says, if we had more time, I'd prefer to do it Ken Burns style and read a bunch of fake chimp letters over some mournful Phil music. Definitely need to talk boundary waters. And I'd like to say, I need to read a text from Phil. Well, there's a bunch of texts I'd love to read. That was on April. So, okay.

He says, Phil says, hold on, for a quick timeline. I had no idea, Steve and Ken Burns were having this conversation about like, oh, well, we should probably pull it. Like, are my guys frauds or not? Yeah. So we published the podcast episodes. Some of you may have heard it in the audio only version. We published a podcast episode. I immediately, I get a text from Randall and our content guy at like six in the morning saying, hey, do you guys know Colbert did this two weeks ago?

Randall and I start panicking and texting each other. It was my decision to pull the segment and Randall can. I wanted to pull it too because I. I was like, I texted Phil and I said, effing Colbert beat us to it. And then he said, this is crazy. I said, I know. Blah, blah, blah. Phil said, I've seen this happen with comedy writers.

And every time I think, yeah, right, you totally stole this. And I pointed out, there's a, there's a news story about a civil war among animals. If you want to make a spoof, you make a Ken Burns spoof. That's my wife said. I don't think that's true. And if you want to make a Ken Burns spoof, you're only obvious. options are gray and white, like sepia toned images, and then you fake writing a letter. Phil, this is my favorite text.

Phil says, I'd like to think he knows we're not so blatantly dumb as to rip something off from an incredibly well-known and popular show where it lives on the internet for everyone to easily find and seen. And the fact that we gave the thumbs up to send it to Ken Burns when he was part of the Colbert one. So we went on and on about this. I'm starting to believe you. I'm glad we're making some headway.

But isn't it nice to know that my wife believed you all along? You know what we should do? Yeah. I was horrified by this. Can you play the joke? I think we should play them both and see who, which one wins. I think copyright law.

Oh, there's 100 times better. It's way better. It's so much better. And all fairness. It's because we saw there. It's a thousand times better. There we go. Randall's is his, his, it's a thousand times better.

Um, just listeners, go find the Colbert one. Watch that. Yeah. Be disappointed. And you know, the funny thing was, it makes the same joke a bunch of times. Phil and I were, when we're texting with, we're texting with Barge about this that morning. And we're both like 100% we have to pull it. This just looks so stupid.

And then I was talking to Barge later and he goes, he goes, what convinces me that you didn't steal this is that if you'd stolen it, you would have been pointing out the different. differences between the two and you would have been like, I still think we could keep. But Phil and I were both just like so stunned by it. Our initial reaction was pull the whole thing. I'm going to crawl into a hole. And then after I watched the, after I watched the Colbert one, I was like, you know what? I actually think like ours is

good enough. You say it. It's better. Ours is better. And you know why Barge told me? He knew you were telling the truth. What's that? He said people aren't that good at lying. Oh, yeah. Well, he said they would have to be like pathologically good at lying. This is like my worst nightmare. The fact that you guys are having side conversations without my knowledge about whether or not we lied is like I want to stay in that hole that I crawled into.

Yeah, because I will. I know. I'm offended too, Phil. It was all happening at the same time, Phil. I'm like, hold up because I'm just to come clean. I'm saying to barge, hold on a minute. There's the same joke. There's a banana.

there's like a hand writing a letter and he's like but that's a Ken Burns documentary yeah it's just they'd have to be pathologically good at lying to like lie about this and I my

probably one of my favorite parts of the day was what I said to you like the most obvious spoof in the world civil war Ken Burns and and you said I wouldn't have gotten there I would have thought Guns and Rose is civil war out of Britain

the whole song. I don't need your chip war. But, yeah, because It feeds the furry. I woke up and saw the email from Ken Burns in my phone and I thought to myself. There's the little dead chip babies. In what world is something that I

produced? Like what, like some piece of content, in what world does Ken Ken Burns watch that? Like, that's a wild thing to me. Yeah, so the only thing he's ever watched that you made was you stealing his idea. And now I found out he's also read one of my texts.

Someday he's going to hear something else you did. And he's like, why do I know that name? Yeah, exactly. He's going to search back through his text. He's like, oh, that's the son of bitch that's sold my joke. Yeah. So anyway, this goes back to last week. When we found out, when we found out Colbert had done it, we had, I thought we had three options. One was to just run it without saying anything. And then I thought, well, people are going to think we stole their. Someone's going to make the connection and leave a comment and say, hey, Colbert just did this. Second option was to like record a quick disclaimer beforehand and be like, hey, so

I swear I came up with this. But enjoy, I guess. And I didn't want to do that either. So like the third option was we just pull it and we'll address it later. So that's what we're doing. I think we should show it. It's better than Colbert's and go watches on your own time. But here's the one that we ran last week. My dearest bubbles. I write to you from beneath a forest canopy that no longer feels like home.

The rainy season has come and gone eight times now since I last held your hand, and still this ruinous conflict shows no signs of relenting. What once seemed a temporary rift among brothers now portends, as the primatologists say, in a permanent fission of our community. The Western forces of Ngogoe press on with a ferocity that defies comprehension. 28 of our number have now fallen. 28 souls. The reports from the front are not fit for juvenile eyes.

Chimp genitals torn from the chimp genital places. How awful that the opposable thumbs we have been blessed with by our creator are now used for such unspeakable acts. The men now whisper of infants struck down in their innocence. The white tufts of hair on their rumps will never darken, as they typically do among our kind in their fifth year of life. At night, when the moon hangs low over the forest of Kibbali, I close my eyes and I am home. I hear the screeches of our brood, and I feel your sagittal crest under my elongated fingers. Our family, swinging peacefully amongst the trees in a behavior known as brockiation. In those moments, I imagine that none of this is real. I am merely living in a nightmare of war,

and I shall awake with you lying in the dirt beside me. First Sergeant Knuckles, third canopy regiment, Central Ngogo forces. It really is. It's, it's, listen.

A big part of being a man is admitting when you're wrong. I wasn't wrong. No, no, I was wrong. Oh, oh, okay. I, like, after 24 hours had passed, No, no, I'm trying to apologize. No, no, no.

But, like, I felt like after my blood pressure went down 24 hours later, I thought maybe we should have just done it. Maybe we should just played it. Maybe we overreacted. I never thought that you weren't being truthful. I just thought that I even was saying to Katie. She's like, there's no way they know about that. I'm like, there's no way they don't know about it. And I said, there's a thing with younger people that you'll come up, like someone will come up with an Instagram joke, for instance.

Or the example I use. used making it April Fool's joke that your company has a product that they don't actually have right someone did that it was funny people now feel it's like people are very free and easy with just doing the joke over and over and over and over like the new generations don't mind just stealing everything so I said I think that they're from like the generation when that's actually okay and she's like that's dumb that you think that but this is all happened very fast. I just, so I never thought that you were fibbing.

I thought that you just thought it was okay. No, absolutely. That's the thing. I was like horrified by it and just thought the world is ending. I have like a fear in the back of my mind sometimes that like, there's, you know, like that, that unintentionally, you know, you get something like this happens and you're just like, this is my worst nightmare. So thanks for standing by us

And thanks to the internet for all the good facts about chimpanzees that I learned while researching that I just wanted to search for like fun things about infant chimpanzees Yeah, you really mixed the vegetables with the meat on that one Yeah, I learned about the the rump of the tuft of fur, you know Did Katie think it was weird that you thought that that was a thing that the new generation will just repeat the same joke or the fact that No, she got, she understood that it's okay to steal jokes. And if someone has a funny joke on internet,

like if you're like, me every time I hear whatever. Right. And then everybody's like, hey, I'm going to do that too. She recognizes that that's the thing that you used to not do, but people do now. Yeah. Like the people steal stuff now in a way that they don't even feel guilty about it. And I don't even think it's stealing.

I think that like what the kids do now so often is there's a trend. and like if you don't do your version of that trend and post it, like you're not in the game. Yeah, but you're stealing other people's jokes. I don't know if it's a stealing. I think it's a participation. Like, you have to do it. The auction house of oddities is coming back out. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium.

This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic. Hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got that! Download the free IHeartRadio app. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles.

Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time, disco occasionally available now. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that goblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. The Archdell's Audities is going to be very good this time around. Could have been better. Why what happened? That raccoon. Oh, almost. The Arsnell's Obotids is almost great. We had a guy in Pennsylvania.

find an albino raccoon. Roadkill. Roadkill on the side of the road. He reports to Brody. Hey, there's a pure white raccoon dead on the road. Brody's like, grab it. We'll use it for the auction house of oddities. The guy then lets eight hours pass 80 degrees laying on the asphalt.

By the time it gets to our guys, it's got maggots coming out of it. So that's not in the auction house. But here's an interesting thing that is in the auction house. My old man had a... I think it was an 89 Ford F-150. When he died, I drove it for a while. Then I sold it to my buddy Matt Drost, who I had no idea is still driving that thing.

He's done with it. We just bought it from him. We're going to have an auction item called Steve's dad's shitty old truck filled with great new hunting gear. We're going to fill that truck full of hunting gear, new brand new hunting gear. And Mark Kenyon is going to drive it to your house. Wow.

Did I say how much he bought it for? I wish I would have done that. Can you bleep out when I said how much he bought it for? Yeah, I'll make a note. Are you going to do a little tune up and paint job on that thing? Already been done. Not paint. Already tuned up.

Yeah. Tuned up. I have photos of me and the old man doing gripping grins with rough grouse on the tailgate. It's like, yeah, that's in the auction house. What's not the auction house is our punt gun because we're selling that on the same auction we bought it from. Is it a sticker or an automatic? Auto loader. I'll tell you something.

My second date with my wife. That truck. Single bench seat? Yeah. Nice. No, it's got an extended cab. Oh, it does. I'm looking at pictures.

I don't see the extended cab. It's got an extended cab. You call me a liar? No, I'm just seeing. I'm telling you what I'm looking at. Oh, but doesn't have an extended cab? The ones I see. No, you're looking at my own man's?

No, I'm looking at pictures of 89 Ford F-W. What color is it? Green. Was. What, like, we're going to stuff it full of hunting gear. Yeah, all of our, all the stuff that's under the media umbrella or way more? Well, we're going to, Mark's going to dig deeper in that. You might want to put a few 55 gallon drums of gasoline.

I was going to say, maybe a, maybe we'll put a gallon of jug of fuel in there. A couple jugs of oil. And Mark's going to drive it to your house. This is a great auction item. We got tons of auction items in the, auction house this year. It's going to be a great auction. Try to think some other highlights from that thing. Oh, when we redid the new studio, all the leftover barn board, we got a 150

horsepower Honda outboard with about three hours on it. That's going in the auction house. You got to pay shipping. It's palletized. You just got to pay shipping. We'll ship it to you. It's going to be hot. We got to keep moving, Brody. Oh, my kid, my little kid got his first gobbler this past weekend. Speaking of Jake Gribb,

he's got a little little small chunk of land in central Montana that we went out and hunted. And Steve told me there was never any birds there. That's not what I said. I killed a bird there. You were like, it's the kind of place that doesn't have birds regularly. But they might be on the neighbors. Anyway,

when I got one there, we called it off the neighbors. I said there might not be one on it. Right. But there might be one on the neighbors. Anyway, he got one after. Is that of bad? I told them the same thing.

Okay. Yeah. We had a long morning of like listening to turkeys and not killing them. No, they were close. They just wouldn't cross the creek. So we had to do a big loop and get around them and we got in, got into their zone. And it was very strange because like we, I could hear one. strutting, like spitting and stuff, drumming,

like could not see him and he was like kind of behind us and I didn't want to turn. Anyway, we made another little move. And where that bird was, the grass was like almost hip high, very thick grass. Like kind of stuff you don't really see turkeys like moving around in. And then like six inches of neck and head pop up out of that grass and that was that. But the highlight of the trip was, uh, 10.

No, I'm, I got him on the 20. I'm over those four tens, man. It's like limited capabilities. Um, the highlight was maybe not that. It was the fight we had about seeing a wolf the night before. Um,

like he saw a wolf and you didn't. Well, it was a coyote, a very white, fluffy coyote. He was, and we got in a big fight because he would not believe that it was not a wolf. Did you make him cry?

No. Anyway. Steve said that, You were angry about getting that boy of turkey. You had a passion. You were so far enough. He had a passion. Here's the thing.

It's like. It was, I have to. I do because he, you didn't get one last year, which is his first available year to do so. And like, both of my boys are playing baseball,

and I'm training for that race that Steve doesn't want to talk about. I'm like, dudes, you guys have limited availability. Like, we got to make it happen. So it was perfect.

We got our chance. You got it done. Yeah. Join now by, we're joining remotely with Brian Lynn, VP of marketing and communications with the sportsman's alliance. If you're not aware of sportsmen's alliance, it's a very good organization that does a lot to defend, protect, hunter rights, trapper rights. Like, you have different different. organizations do different things. Like you have a lot of conservation organizations

that do stuff to preserve habitat. They do wildlife work. Sportsman's alliance has a lot of work to defend your rights as a hunter, as a fisherman from attacks coming from the animal rights world and other things. And just also just kind of just generally making sure that sportsmen interests are being represented

on the political, in the political sphere. And he's here to talk to us about something we've alluded to a bunch of over the years is what exactly, what in the world is going on with the state of Washington's game commission and why has there been so much distressing news

coming out of the state of Washington, such as that they lost their spring bear season back in 21, that there's new talk of bumping the start of the fall bear season because of this sort of fictitious idea that there's conflict in Washington between wildlife viewers and bear hunters,

which is not a true thing. So over to Brian. Thanks for joining us, man. You bet you. I happen to be here. So tell us real quick, like a high level. Like, why is there so much, um, why is there so much talk about Washington's

game commission? Like, what's going on with Washington's game commission? Why have we been talking about this for four years, it seems? Yeah, it's been longer than four years. It's been about six now. And it all goes back to Jay Inslee, our former governor. He and his wife were, uh, this was their pet project,

is to dismantle the game commission and bring in the, the animal rights movement and let them, run things here. And he did years and years worth of planting those seeds. And this is what we're reaping. And so what are some of the things that, what are some of the things that happened that have led to the current situation where we actually have some of these commissioners being investigated for a host of, I don't think it's, maybe you can correct me. I don't think it's criminal activity, but it's definitely malfeasance and, you know, a mild level of corruption at least.

Yeah, I would push it beyond a mild level. There's definitely corruption and collusion going on with the animal rights movement. We have the documents. We have the, we've put them out there. It's on the public page out there that we have. There's even potential felonies being committed by the former chairman, our chairwoman of the commission, about deleting records, text messages between commissioners. we put out there that they violated the Open Meetings Act in Washington by daisy chaining emails together and basically coming up with a game plan on how game commission meetings are going to run,

who's going to introduce what, where everybody stands on the vote while leaving other game commissioners out. They don't do it all on one email that would be a quorum, but they'll do it with three or four and then forward it on to, another one and say here's the plan. How many game commissioners is Washington have? They have nine. And how many were there to represent the animal rights or the, how many were there to represent the animal rights movement or the anti-hunting movement?

Like, what was the split? Well, right now it's, well, when it all happened, when this all went down, Spring Bear kind of was the impetus for it all. And at the time, there was only eight. on the commission. Okay. And the spring bear hunt is a special regulation hunt that had to be approved every year. When they voted on it, it was a 4-4 split.

Therefore, it didn't pass. It wasn't approved. Oh. So that's why it was canceled. It didn't actually get canceled. It just didn't get reinstated. I see. And that's what kind of kicked it all off.

Fast forward from there, about a year. And they wanted to make that permanent. Well, by that time, Jay Inslee had. put people back into place and reappointed or not reappointed. And it was about a five, four split then. And that's what it went into was they made a permanent change to cancel it about a year after that first initial pass. And so now it's canceled unless there's a biological reason.

And they try to make this weird distinction between recreation and wildlife management, which is if you know, you know, everybody looks at that. I was like, what are you talking about? Yeah, we reported on that last week, or I talked about that at length last week, where they put their, this idea that they're saying, there's no demonstrated management need, meaning they're saying there's no need to hunt black bears. I would say, but there's no need to fish walleye.

I would even argue that there is. There's no need to hunt turkeys. Like, that's not the, that's not, the standard that a wildlife species needs to hold up to. It's like we only hunt things that are deleterious. No. And even this, the spring bear hunt actually even breaks that idea even more because the whole piece of it, why they held it for the major reason, yes, recreation, but the biggest piece, it was only available in like three units, three areas. And that's where timber harvest took place because the bears were waking up and shredding the

trees up to like 75 trees a day i think they're shredding and so there's a need there's an economic need there's a resource need right there if that's the argument got it got it so tell me some of the things that the commissioners were doing around like like i've seen references to destruction of government property of having basically side meetings outside of the formal meetings removing public removing public input planning on disregarding public input can you get us hit us with a couple examples

yeah they were working I mean even they were working behind the scenes communicating with each other and working with Washington Wildlife First which is an offshoot of wildlife for all and their whole purpose is to

cause this disruption and to change game commissions nationwide to be quote unquote more representative and get other people's interests and use basically the popular vote to run game management. And so they would collude. They had a list of commissioners when they were filling empty seats that they wanted in the place, in place, ones they didn't, ones they'd put out there for decoys. They colluded with each other on votes and and yeah, they were just basically anything and everything

to do with advancing their ideology. They were pushing. They would even say this is an ethics issue for me. I don't care. I don't like it. What the science says, it doesn't matter. Melanie Rowland said that. Yeah, and you guys put out some information where the commissioners will be discussing

official business on official emails. And they would literally just say, let's take this over and then take commission business over to their private emails. Yeah, yeah. And they were told, I mean, the null memo came out and they were told not to use private emails. I think Lorna Smith was even using her husband's emails. So you're using private emails.

You're using your spouse's emails. You're discussing official business offline in chat rooms, you know, over text messages, phone calls, whatever, this is not how good government operates. I mean, you can even step back in Washington State and say, this isn't even about spring bear hunting. We have appealed to our PRA lawsuit, you know, to the appellate court. If this standard of government is upheld, all transparency and accountability in Washington is gone.

Like, good government is shot because the ruling in our case was, as long as they give you a couple of records, and tell you every three to nine months that they're still working on it, they can take as long as they want to to give you any public record request. In our case, it would have taken 5,000 years to get all of our records. I remember reading that. Yeah, at their proposed rate, yeah, you'd have been 5,000 years in to get the records. And then, frankly, like, a lot of the records are gone, right? Like, no one's ever going to see them.

I mean, we don't know, I guess. That's what happens when you can't get into it. you know and again the null memos showed that they were uh lorna and melanie especially were delaying things pretending they couldn't find it didn't know how to search their emails couldn't look this up or that up had deleted it oh that's destruction of property oh let me find it then then they found it oh but when the animal rights movement would put in a pra request they were on it just like that got it within days it took weeks and months so what's the next thing that's going to happen here Oh, there's a lot going on.

Like that's all what's happened. We have the PRA lawsuit that's going to appeal. The null memo that came out, you know, kind of last fall or so, that popped out. Well, they didn't give that to us in discovery when we filed our PRA lawsuit. So we filed sanctions against the department for doing that. And that hearing was moved from May 1st to, I'm not sure when it got kicked to, but that got moved back. So got those two lawsuits.

Washington Wildlife First and Lorna Smith, who's on the commission, have filed a First Amendment federal lawsuit against Kelly Susswin and Deputy Director Amy Windrow for First Amendment violations and saying that they chilled her speech and silenced her, which I don't know what they silenced because she hasn't quit talking in the five years she's been on there. And, you know, they're intimidating her when our records show the exact opposite. She was bullying staff. And, you know, there was people trying to stick up for the staff.

So they have that lawsuit going on. They've also sued Washington Wildlife First as also sued the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife over their game management plan. Sportsman's Alliance just stepped in as an intervener to make sure when that goes to trial, and there's discussions that sportsmen are represented. It's not just the department to end Washington Wildlife First doing this. We're going to watch out and make sure that hunters' interests are represented. And then where does, what's your level of optimism about the commission getting back, the commission getting back into like a firm footing where it's going to do a better job of managing wildlife as a renewable natural resource.

source. That depends wholly upon Governor Bob Ferguson. If it was Jay Inslee, I'd say zero. Okay. But with Ferguson, he pulled back to, you know, 11-59, 11-hour and 59 second. Be right before Inslee left, he appointed two fishing game commissioners who would have really tilted the balance. Ferguson, to his credit, came in, kicked those guys to the curb, put in two new ones who are fair and balanced and good and whatever. They listen to both sides. So we'll see. The investigation has been taking place. There's been an internal investigation going on for nine months now. It was due. Well, it got extended four times. It hit the governor's desk April 13th. And so the rumor is that it got sent back for revisions. I don't know what

that means. So supposedly sometime in mid to late May, that internal investigation is supposed to come out. And we'll see what Governor Ferguson does. Hopefully, he removes at the minimum, Lorna Smith and Melanie Rowland. And we'll see what happens with Barbara Baker and John Lemkew. But if we can get those four who have colluded and done other things off of there and just put people in there who understand and want to see wildlife do well and balance it all between the different competing forces, we'd be okay, but we'll see. All right, man, thank you for coming on and talking about it. You bet you.

Brian Lynn, VP of Marketing Communications at Sportsman's Alliance. If you want to find out more about Sportsman's Alliance, you can find them online and see about the different ways they engage on your behalf all around the country. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you. Experience Harry Styles, live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IHart Radio wants to send you and a mate across the pond,

with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got to! Download the free IHart Radio app. Listen to IHart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you at the show.

Kiss all the time. go occasionally available now. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Okay. Oh, Phil, can we pull that video up real quick? Yeah. So here's a video everybody's seen a thousand times. It's, you might have to fast forward it. This is like, if you've, on the news, if you've seen the video of the would-be political assassin who came into the White House correspondence dinner. So I watched this video four or five times. I'm exaggerating. I watched it three times. I watched it three times without ever realizing what I was looking at. Then a, a, I watched, a, A recent podcast guest texted me. If you listen to the show, we recently had on a canine handler, an LAP.

He trains apprehension dogs and other kinds of canine unit dogs for police departments. He was just on the podcast. This video comes out of the guy of the would-be assassin barging in to, you know, being it up. Oh, yep. Breaking in through security. And the guy's like, watch this. The canine handler isn't trusting the dog's instinct. And if you see this, this, when that suspect, he comes in, he's trying to find his way in.

Here he comes to, and he fires that one of the Secret Service guys with a shotgun. When that guy walks by, you see him walk by in the background, he has a can't. Canine, like, basically with its nose in his back pocket. And the handler is just walking along with the dog. And the dog's like, this guy, this guy, this guy. And the dude's just like missing it. Go back and play it. Watch.

That's the suspect. Yeah. Now watch that dog. That dog's like, hey, him, him, him. It could have cost that dude his life. And then his handler walks him back. And then two seconds later. Yep.

The dog's like, no, no, check this out. Check this out. Check this out. The handler's looking in there. Two seconds later, the guy emerges. Then the guy busts out of there with a shotgun. Isn't that wild? I would have never noticed that. And the, I guess like the dog is going off fear? No, he said that's a, he says it's a, he goes, he's not sure, but he said almost certainly it's a bomb dog. Yeah.

And he's smelling certain like, he's like vapor trailing, residues and gunpowder. But the interesting thing is Everybody there is armed So it's kind of funny that the dog is like No, no, no him him That's what I thought was weird Yeah But the dog is like glued to the guy

And that wild It's crazy because two seconds later He just emerges Yeah two seconds later There he is pulls his gun out The dog's like hey check him out That handler was looking at something A longer

Yeah Like he was interested in something In that room But then Yeah he said The guy says I feel like he was slow to pick up the queue He was slow to pick up the queue

Because his thing was, the guest thing was, you might doubt, he had a lot of examples of where the dog's like, nope, that's it. But people miss it. Meaning a dog comes into a room and he goes to a corner of a room and he hangs out. But you don't realize that what he's talking about is the suspects in the drop ceiling. He's like, the dog's not wrong. It's just, right?

The dog's like, no, right here. Here's a spot because the dog can't be like in the drop ceiling. But the dogs, and people look and be like, oh, there's nothing in here. you know so he's just talking about like knowing your dog so well that that you know what he's getting at yeah i mean you see it

this is a lot different but you see it even with hunting dogs like bird dogs when they like get birdie and you're like there's nothing there or and you don't trust or when your dog goes and sits by the door and you're like he just went out there's no way he needs to take a shit again and then five minutes later you have a mess ted turner died um

fourth largest landowner. Just down the road here. Yeah. So depending on how his will worked, his air, it could be that who's number five? Um, it could be that. Oh, you're saying if it gets broken up somehow, he'll be a,

number one landowner in America, Stan Cronkey. Sportsman Channel, outdoor channel, right? Stan Cronkey, number one land at $2,700. thousand acres the emerson family two million four hundred and forty thousand acres john malone two million two hundred thousand acres ted turner two million acres the reed family one million six hundred and fifteen thousand acres is number five so there could be a little disturbance this article just came out the other day there could be a little disturbance in the force here yeah i was asking earlier i want to know like if he's got because he's got you know

conservation minded, whether you like him or not. Very controversial figure. Whether he had it written up so that land remains as a conservation trust or whatever. There's no way it will not because that was of high priority to him. Controversial figure had a lot of lady troubles and whatnot, but a big conservationist. When you're at Jordan Budd's place, you're looking over at one of his properties. I've never been there.

You never been to Jordans? Her neighbor of the 2 million Blankety Blank Acres the dude owns Some of it is next to join Bucson neighbors with him What's that? Corinne's neighbors with him Yeah a couple weekends ago

His bison herd was like just Right behind River Road they were all hanging out Pretty cute There you go hundreds of them Randall Yeah there's a story It's been in the headlines the past week or two Idaho just spent about two

years working through one of the most comprehensive overhauls of hunting technology regulation across the country. And so that's good. Last month, Governor Little signed HB 939 into law, and that all got started with a public process, I think that started in 2024, with a working group made up of hunters, conservationists, wildlife managers who then produced a set of recommendations to the Fish and Game Commission. And then that threw a bunch of political input and all this stuff, they decided that that needed to be laws rather than just regs, I guess.

So the final law restricts drones, thermal imaging, night vision, and transmitting cell cams for hunting and scouting big game and up on birds from August 30th to December 31st each year. There's a carve out for wolves and mountain lions. Private and public? No, it's got to be just private or just public, right? I believe so. And so there's this carve out for these technologies for predator management and for recovery

of wounded game. One of the interesting things is that this working group, they were unanimous in their recommendations for drone restrictions. And they were one vote short of, you know, unanimity for the recommendations on thermal night vision and cell cams. So, um, like that they, they came to pretty strong conclusions, all the stakeholders, and then the end result is this bill. Um, for one of the interesting things is Idaho is one of the last states to, um, regulate thermals

for hunting ungulates. You know, they had obviously restrictions against hunting at night, but, um, the best of my knowledge, you could still use a thermal, like at dawn or whatever, to locate animals on the mountain. But that's now out. Drones, there's 45 of 50 states already that have restrictions on drone use. And actually, the carve out for game recovery kind of puts Idaho and I guess you'd call it more of like a liberal positioning compared to other states that don't allow drone recovery. Meaning you can put a thermal unit on a drone Yeah and then go be like well I'm trying to find the buck I lost

Right and so that one of the things with these technology bands When they have these carve outs It comes down to what you can prove in court and what the intentions are like as far as if a Conservation officer runs across someone flying a drone Did they wound a deer? Did they see a deer and then Not get a shot and then use the their drone to locate it right uh the same thing for like the wolves you know if if if you come across someone who has a thermal in their possession they say they're wolf hunting you know as i understand

it from talking to a former idaho uh game warden yesterday you know what you have to do as a as a warden is sort of ask them questions oh hey how's it going what are you doing uh you know and and sort of make a circumstantial argument okay about what they're using that thermal for based on where they are what time a year what kind of equipment they have all that stuff but um you know it's good i think that they're they're being proactive even if on some of this stuff they're a little late but i feel like as a hunting community there's been kind of a need for some record reconciliation around all these emergent technologies um and it's cool that the working group i think too was was hunters and all different stakeholders and they were on the same page.

They came, yeah, they, they, they had a, that it wasn't a split. Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, like a lot of this stuff, you know, when you, when you look at the considerations in terms of enforcement and whatever loopholes there are enforcing them, a lot of it will come down to social pressure and hunters sort of agreeing on what's fair chase and what's not and the fact that the working group was on the same page. I think bodes well for that.

So yeah, I mean, obviously like, if you look, 10, 15 years ago, the idea that you would have real-time camera traffic, keeping track of wildlife and places is sort of hard to fathom. Thermals have come a long way. Drones have come a long way, obviously. So there's always kind of an arms race between enforcement and fair chase principles and whatever technology is coming down the pipe. So in Idaho, they got together and they came to agreement and they got it done.

I've heard two interesting stories about one was told to me about drone use for hunting. One was told to me and one I read about the one that was told me was a guy was saying that they were using, they would use drones. This is in a drone legal state. What was a drone legal state? They would use a drone to when they had a target buck. They would use a thermal on a drone to find out where the buck bedded, which would influence how they set up on it. it because once they knew where it was bedded in its bedding area, then they could pick where best to spend the evening.

So that's how they were using it. The article I was reading was some guys got busted for tracking a deer of the drone. And when reading the article, neighbors kept saying, these guys have that drone over that buck all the time during hunting season. It's like a buck that a bunch of people knew about. When the game warden came out, they were doing it when the game warden came out. That was in a drone not legal state. and they were sighted and the game ward came out and sure enough it was like there's a drone over a woodlot

right and they were like tracking there's following this deer around to figure out where it was well and that's i mean that that's the funny thing is like if you have these carve outs for game recovery and i understand you want to recover animals if you if you wound them or whatever but had the warden come out and seen the drone flying they could have just said oh yeah we just got a bad shot on a dough it just so happens there's this big buck in the area right it's tricky man And like, I usually have such certainty about what I would do if I was emperor of the world. Like I'm supportive of, for instance, I'm supportive of being able to use a dog for recovery. Yeah.

I don't think that that's, I don't think that that's really a thing that's going to get abused. You know, I don't think guys are going to be running deer with dogs. Right. In states where it's not allowed and pretending that they're using a dog to track a wounded deer at night. I just like it's it's that's not an issue. Yeah. I don't believe. I'm very supportive of those rules where you allow a guy to track a dog,

to track a wounded deer of the dog. Man, I would have to sit long and hard to think about my thoughts on the drone recovery. Yeah. What's like the main reason that they're doing this? Like why do they think that they needed to do this? I think just, I think just public pressure.

You know, I think it's just a. talking, I think like there's a lot of states where I was just at a Boone and Crocket event last summer and that was a main topic of conversation was emergent technologies and fair chase. Yeah, why not? If you, why not go to like a north face and slope and like go to a north place and slope and buzz a drone around and be like, oh, the elk are bedded right there. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, like plenty of people going to do it. I already, I already talk to guys. Like, even guys I'm friendly with, I already talk to guys that, that elk hunting. They start a lot earlier now because they just thermal scan. They thermal scan in the morning. And anything that tips the balance in terms of efficacy, then down the road is going to result in reduced opportunity. Latvians, Latvians, all thermal scan.

In Latvia. Yes, yes. Yadhi says in Latvia, you don't even start hunting until you've done a thermal scan. Yeah. they like scan the area be like no next spot I mean that's I get it I just that's why the Russians don't like them

no comment I was just waiting to read the room before I said anything there thank you Randall yeah is it okay segment what I didn't like is you never really said like what are the rules

sure did did he like what are the rules restricts tone thermal imaging night vision transmitting trail cameras for hunting and scouting big game and open birds from August 30th December 31st great job thank you you said it Ralph top I just got confused well I had it further down but then I thought I should just get it out of the way up top maybe I should have returned to the end saved it to let no because in classic journalism all the main pertinent you load you top load it with the main pertinent stuff and then if you want like weird details yeah like if you read

about a politician being in a sex scandal and they're sending bad text messages and you're like well what was the text message you'll often find the actual substance of the text message is in the end of the article yeah right because they're sort of like most important to descending importance

so you wind up being like well where's the part about what he wrote and sometimes at the very bottom of the article what I would be like well I just put that right up top because that's what everybody's wondering yeah everybody's wondering that yeah but they'd be like like, well, that's of descending importance.

So, like, traditional newspaper journalism, it's like the main thing is, here's the rules. Here's the new rules. Yeah. And as you go down, it'd be like, here's how they put the group together and here's their findings. Also, these days, they want you to scroll past as many ads as possible before you get to the thing you want to see.

I'm going to try to apply that in my segment. Do it. You're going to go old school journalism or, or like? Old school. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Go ahead, Yanni.

Oh, my turn? Yeah, or I can talk about my thing. Oh, I'll just wait. Yeah, I'm fine going. My dad sent us an article. Michigan lawmakers made fun. Last ditch effort to save whitefish. I was like, oh, that's interesting.

Started digging into it. My God, those poor whitefish. Like, bad, bad, bad, bad. This is a 225-year-old story or so. Well, I don't know what caused the declines prior to the 80s. Do you know? Yeah.

Oh, please speak to that. The biggest, the, the most cataclysmic thing to happen to a lot of these native Great Lakes species is during the logging era. Mm-hmm. When they were making, when they were booming all of the logs,

so when they came in and logged the Great Lakes, yeah, they would boom all those logs out in the water. Okay. And they would shed their bark. And so all the bays, the river mouths, the spawning stuff was buried in sometimes 10 feet of bark. Then later came industrial pollution. And that was a big early hit, industrial pollutants and then the non-natives.

Right. So the non-natives is kind of where I'm going to pick up. Zebra mussels and quagal muscles, both kind of came in the same period of time. 80s, mid-80s, one, quagum muscles, late 80s. I guess let me back up. So this last-ditch effort that I read about, it's a good website. If everyone wants to read more,

these guys have really covered this for years now and done a good job. It's called bridgemichigan.com. Really, really did an excellent job covering all this stuff. But the Michigan State Senate is trying to get some money and appropriations bill.

was right now they just have like a placeholder amount of like a hundred bucks and like if it goes through or it goes farther they'll like actually put a number to it and something i one number i heard is like 50 million over the next 10 years so they're looking for a lot of money to do some to do some research on this um research and their idea of how to save them now or at least part of it because there's i guess there's specific strains within the great lakes that are doing uh worse than others and they're thinking of actually taking them out and then rearing them in hatcheries and then being able to hold on to some stock to then be able to repopulate the Great Lakes once the issue that I'm going to tell you about now is taking care of which is the muscles. Yeah, like a seed bank. Yeah, exactly.

Like the same way you'd store seeds in a cave. Like the seed bank is in Norway, the global seed bank. It sounds like a good place. It's somewhere in there. Anyways, you'd store these propagate and store these fish for later. So the muscles that are the big problem right now,

one guy I talked to pretty much said that if it's not sand and it's in less than 50 feet of water in Huron or Michigan, it's probably got a muscle on it. And not like a muscle, but covering, like it's a coating of muscles. What these muscles do is that they filter, the entire volume of Lake here on Lake Michigan every two weeks. That's incredible.

It's incredible to think of it that way, right? And what they're doing when they're filtering, they're feeding on phytoplankton and then all the other little microorganisms that would then eat phytoplankton don't have anything to eat. So you're basically cutting out the bottom of the food web, right? Or the bottom of the food chain. And stuff just can't move forward from there, right?

So the white fish have two issues with that. One is if they're spawning grounds or these reefs where they like to spawn, if they're covered in muscles, they can't spawn there. It just doesn't work. And two, because this water is filtered and somewhat clarified, it's brighter, right? And so the more sun gets down in there. And literally the young fish, when they're just little minnows on the beaches, they're literally getting sunburns that kill them.

Because they should have a more turbid water, right? The Great Lakes, like even now, I don't know if you've noticed it when the last time you went to Lake Michigan, but last time I was there a few years ago, it's a very stark difference in the clarity compared to when we were kids. Yeah, like all the microscopic food out,

then the sun penetrates more, causes more vegetation growth. The vegetation decomposes, makes the water oxygen pour. Some fish are winners. Like wall eyes? Yeah. Some fish are.

It's, I think it's a little short-sighted to look at it that way. I mean, they're winning right now. It seems like it's not something that's sustainable. That was a word that was thrown a lot around with the people that I talked to that just like we have to start thinking about sustainability if we want to

keep this thing going. I often describe. the Great Lakes as they have become an experimental aquarium. Yes. As one fisheries biologist I talked to, he said, we're trying to basically manage an ocean. Like it's just, it's a giant piece. So it's very hard to do is what I'm trying to say, you know, what he was trying to say by saying that is that it's just such a giant piece of water and you're trying to manage it. And yes, in some ways, it's like an experiment.

But I think that it's like, you can't. really control the experiment you also got like anglers who are way more interested in walleye smallmouth bass salmon steelhead yeah whitefish at this point right like yeah the sport fishing demand for white fish i think even if they're around probably wouldn't be that high you know yeah those lakes like if you go back if you go back to the 1800s 1700s 1700s, 1800s, the commercial fisheries in those lakes are things, like huge sturgeon commercial fishery, white fish commercial fishery, like different Ciscoes and other white species driving the commercial fishery and then the big one lake trout. What, what, what, what, what,

what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, was L'wives coming in, uh, lamp. Lamperey's, yeah. Once lamp rays made it over Niagara Falls, boom. Yeah. You know, so it's just like things come in. they shuffle everything. They got that whole effort underway to keep the Asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes. Like the Chicago sanitation canal

has an electric barrier to try to keep those out. If those jump, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting because I think it was like a penny per dollar dollar spent on those carp. One penny is spent on trying to deal with the muscles. So it's just like for whatever reason,

it's not top of mind. Because I don't know how, like, short of, like, they're talking about, so they're talking about banking these white fish species. This is just, yeah, this is one idea. One idea. Yeah, like bank, like bank them. And this is not a new idea. You remember that, Mike Ruel? Yeah.

He's a fisheries biologist. So he's gone in, like, they had big, in New Mexico, big forest fires where you have unique strains of cutthroat. And when a big fire goes, you know that when it rains, it's going to send all that silt and it's going to kill. the river. They have gone in ahead of that occurrence to get strains of cutthroats, to basically just go hold them. Because you know that the whole river is going to get nuked by ash. Let the river clean up. Let the vegetation come back with the thinking that you could then put the fish back, some of them back, when the habitat comes back,

or else you're going to lose yet another river's worth of cuts. So I get the idea. It's like just genetic banking. But the part where I get skeptical and I don't understand is I don't even know what the rough idea would be to get muscles under control in the Great Lakes short of that someone develops a virus or a pathogen. Which is being discussed. that trick doesn't get played. Yeah. Playing God can go wrong.

Yeah. Because that's already, so many of the Great Lakes problems are already come from people being like, I got an idea. Yeah, let's introduce this fish that'll eat that fish. The common carp. The common carp was intentionally introduced into the Great Lakes. When the other,

when the native fisheries collapsed, they were like, maybe these guys want to eat carp. And they put them in on purpose. and then people just never adopted it as a food source. And now they have a huge cart problem, spend tons of money trying to get rid of carp, and there you can get rid of cart with targeted poisoning. I don't, and I don't know, maybe someone has sort of the basic idea of what you do,

but I just don't know how you fix it. Well, a couple of the other things that they're testing and researching now, as far as getting rid of these muscles is one is a, Literally, they have a, like they're developing these scraping machines. We'll literally go in and scrape these reefs clean to create so that they hopefully can have habitat where these whitefish can do their spawning. Scrape and crush. The other thing that's getting, that's getting thrown out there and messed with and they're researching if it works is suffocating. They're like going down in there with tarps and covering, you know, large areas with tarps because they produce carbon dioxide.

And so if they can't get that fresh water in there, it literally it suffocates them. It's like the headache you get when you fall asleep down in your sleeping bag. I guess I haven't had that. I know that's a thing that you get, but I haven't had that. Yeah, I get like carbon dioxide poison. Yeah. So I talked to some fish use biologists. I also talked to a guide that Pat Durkin and I, or fished with when we did the

fir-hast-hissing tour, J.J. Malvitz. And then the fish processor, Dan Lindahl, who's, they're all in the same area, which is Green Bay. Green Bay is like this like really weird stronghold where the rest of the lakes have gone down something crazy from 2000 to 24. They went from 1.6 million pounds in 2000. This is like commercial catch of whitefish down to 200,000 in 2020. Well, in that same time period, Green Bay has gone from 100,000. to 800,000. It's going up.

What do they attribute that to? Well, Green Bay has a ton of rivers flowing into it. The fox, the monominy, and so that is providing those nutrients that we need. So the fisheries biologist was like, yeah, we basically need to figure out how to either produce that base level of the food web or how to, you know, keep the, you know, muscles from disrupting it. But that's what those fish need, you know? That being said, it's even in Green Bay, it's like they're saying it's on the decline.

And again, I didn't know how bad it was. But Dan was like white fish in the main lake in Maine Lake Michigan are all but extinct. Yeah. It's like, oh, what an amazing fish to you, man. I used to love fish in those things. Just like a great eating fish. Yeah. Beautiful fish.

I know a place here. We can go get them. So he, he is a commercial. fisherman now is only catching 20% of his quota. J.J. Malvitz, where the sports limit per day is 10, which is what it was when Pat and I were there, he's now recommending to clients, like, look, they don't freeze all that well.

Like, take what you only need. Like, how about five, you know, instead of doing 10? So, hopefully, everybody was kind of surprised at the DNR. Hatton dropped. You know, limits over in Michigan, they had really dropped the commercial limits, but according to Danny's like a little bit too, too little, too late, because he's like, there's no fish to catch anyways. So dropping commercial limits is not going to do anything at this point. But he wishes that Wisconsin, especially in that Green Bay area, would, you know, reduce harvest

a little bit overall. The caviar on those fish for a while, I'm not sure now, but I had some friends that were native fishermen, and they were doing better on the caviar than the meat. You know what they call that caviar? American gold. They were exporting it. It's good, man. I had a whole tub of it, man.

We were dipping cool ranch Doritos into that stuff. I had that much of it. Yeah. Not a mom owner. It's like a king. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you an mate

Across the Pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got it! Download the free IHart Radio app. Listen to IHart New Music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show.

Kiss all the time, disco occasionally available now. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record.

If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. I know we have stuff to get to.

I had breaking news, though, to my mind. To turn his back alive? No. I clicked on this link that Yanni shared about the whitefish, and I saw in the right-hand column, the next article most read. It says, after 89 years, Michigan hunting and fishing group is done. And I thought, surely, it's not Michigan. Conservation Clubs.

Yeah, they dissolved on Monday. I had no idea. That's sad. Yeah. We met some of those guys when we're in Ann Arbor. Yeah, that's been a while. I hope we'll end on some brighter news. But I did.

Well, 12 is back, baby. I asked everybody, like, what do you, what can you do or what do you wish, you know, people could do? And everybody kind of said, look, it's about showing that you care. So whether it's like calling, you know, your state. So if you're in Michigan, you know, you want to, you know, tell your state reps to, you know, pass the funding. And I think any Great Lake State, just like talk about it and make everybody know of this issue. The fisheries biologist said there's a ton of people working on it. NOAA, USGS, tribes, all the state wildlife agencies that touch the lake, a bunch of universities. And so there's people out there working on it. And I think the more people know, hopefully the more they care. I have a feeling that every federal agency you just named, when the next budget process is done, they will be just nothing but like a little smoke poof.

and that money will be maybe they'll fight and keep some of it but most of that money will be stripped I think you're at these dudes in these dudes in DC right now ain't a care they're gonna be like home at what whitefish screw that mm-hmm

got a war to fight instead Cloves first is back baby it's third time I said that this is okay so big news here out of the breaking news out of the Monteverde site in southern Chile

unexplain this whole thing or bad news for the Monteverade site in Chile depending on your perspective in March 2006 so just recently a guy that was on the podcast for Todd Serbel from University of Wyoming he's an archaeologist

he published a piece and there are two premier scientific journals the two premier scientific journals are nature and science okay. They published in science. A paper called I'll interpret all this so don't worry if this doesn't make any sense.

A mid-Holocene age for Monteverde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America. All right. Phil's going to pull up some images for me. There is a site in Chile where they have very good roast beef sandwiches with French cut green beans on them. I recommend it to anybody

who gets down there. There's a site in Chile called Monteverde. We have a map pulled up showing people. It's down in Chilean, Patagonia. It sits at the base of a little peninsula coming out into the Pacific Ocean. So way, like, pay attention to all this. Way, way, way south and South America.

Getting to the point where you're as far away from Siberia, is you can get in the Western Hemisphere. And we know that the first humans that entered North America came through Siberia. This in my mind is not a debatable point. No serious person is debating this. There were Siberians that came in. So here we have, we thought we had, or we have, one of the oldest known sites of human occupation being as far away as you can get from where they entered the continent.

the southern tip of South America. Monteverde has a bunch of sites, but there's one site called Monteverde II. Can we still look at a couple more pictures? Yeah, I'm not sure the order you want these. I put them in order. This is the Monteverde site. Okay, it's a creek bottom.

It's a lush creek bottom in Chilean Patagonia. How far is that from the ocean? 36 miles. Okay. There's an overhead view. It looks like a great place to hang out Yeah You can picture getting some ducks there

You can picture get some trout Turkeys maybe Not trout They started digging this site in the 1970s And they found that there were tent structures built there The tent structures were wrapped in leather Meaning that they were using leather cordage They found some remains

Of Pleistocene megafauna They found hearths Where they found campfire sites okay they dated it at 14,500 years ago okay which puts this at

1,500 years earlier than Clovis sites what's it before what's the general like margin for error and that kind of dating oh there is one I'm not sure what those margins but that's outside it was funny is the margin

are, the margins are flexible, meaning there are areas, there are eras where it's, the margin is wide, and there are areas where the margin is close, but when you get a bunch of samples and you date a whole bunch of samples, you get tighter and tighter margins. So they were throwing dates

here, 1,500 years earlier than clovisites. Now, the clovicites, there are many clobocytes from all over the country. When I talked earlier about, like, the humans that came in a North America, came out of Siberia. That's scientifically established.

No serious person argues that point. Another point that no serious person is going to argue is that there is a Clovis culture. Can you jump to my next picture? The next one I have is just is the t-shirt. Yeah. Pull it up. Great.

Okay. Here's one of our very own t-shirts at Me Eater. I was worn this this weekend. The Clovis Hunter's T-shirt. Those are Clovis projectile points. These Clovis projectile points, hell, let's go to the next picture. Is that, I think that that one didn't transfer. Steve, is that the hand next to the thing?

It's my, it's my house. Yeah, it was in the wrong photo format. Oh. I can bring it up a different way. Bring it up a different way. Hell. Yeah, sure. I'll keep talking.

Sure. Clovis points have come from all over the country. You got Clovis points from Washington State. You got Clovis points coming out of Florida. You got Clovis points coming out of New York. The Clovis culture was everywhere. That's a Clovis point hanging on my wall in my house. drawn by an archaeologist

and that's the actual size of that point. That is a honking Clovis point. Nice job Phil. Great job, Phil. Improvising. Working in a bind over there. Now, we know that we have Clovis sites all over the place. And there's always been

this leading debate in like Ice Age archaeology and anthropology is, did the Clovis culture show up from somewhere? Or was the Clovis culture an American-born phenomenon? Meaning, did Clovis hunters making these Clovis points, these like mammoth hunters, did they walk into the lower 48 as like a people with a technology, with a hunting lifestyle? Did they walk in here as them and then explode across the continent?

or was there some trickling of people a long time earlier that came into the continent and lived here for 2,000 years, 1,000 years, and out of that culture emerged this widespread Clovis culture. Because after Clovis, you see in the country, like Native American cultures after Clovis split into all these different societies. but it's like this idea that at a time across the whole country was a culture of people that were unified in their technologies and then over time they like evolved and split apart

and developed all these different ways of living but at a time there was like these big game hunters making these big honking points and they settled everything okay this debate is called like this debate would be was there was it Clovis first or was there a pre-Clovis culture and here's why this this Monteverde site's kind of interesting ask yourself what are the odds that you found the actual oldest site ever there's no way right there's no way so if you find one that's 14,500 years old what are you missing right

like we didn't find the first one and it wouldn't in the first one the oldest site wouldn't be as far away as you can get from the entry point meaning if that is legit what do we not know about in terms of who was running around here and when did they get here can you jump to my Alaska images yeah this is here I am this is a long time ago I spent some time up at what would have been the entry point so this is the western Brooks range this is what would have been the entry point to the first Americans as they entered our continent. As they entered the Western Hemisphere, I'm standing with a French-Canadian archaeologist, and we're standing in a tent ring. Okay, flip to the next image. Nope, not Mad Mel Campbell. We'll get to him.

I'll get to him. Here is this arrowhead hunting in the western Brooks range is the best possible place to arrowhead hunt because there's no one around to pick anything up. that's a that's a that's a paleo point just laying there look at that thing look at that thing and we would walk away we would walk away go to mad mill campbell this is our helicopter pilot after i wrote about this a private investigator reached out to be trying to find that man he's got some heavy he's got some heavy bear ordinance there it looks like yeah he didn't like bears So I'd be flying around this dude

I told his story But he They would take a cargo plane And kick fuel drums out on parachutes Because you're so far You can't get a helicopter there They'd kick fuel drums out on parachutes And parachute field

So we had fuel drums here and there Out on the tundra And me and that dude To land that helicopter And we'd get out and roll Those fuel drums back up to the You know And then hand pump the gas

Into the helicopter And he was scared To get attacked by a barrier While he was pumping gas So that's why he carried that. It's like a roo- Super Red Hawk. Yeah.

Yeah. And a private investigator was like, I'm really trying to find that man. Any idea what for? I do. Okay. Don't care to get into it. We'll chat afterwards.

Of these pre-Clovis sites, the archaeologist Todd Surable from University of Wyoming, he has always been a little suspicious. Here he is in this studio saying how, how come all of these really old crazy sites? He said he's explaining me. They're always weird. Why can't anyone find one of these really old pre-Clovis sites that is just normal?

I said to him, what is a normal site? Here he is. Back when the walls were white. And they're normal. Yeah, and they're normal. It's not weird shit. It's like chip stone around hearth features, butchered animal bone.

It's normal stuff. And what we call discrete, discrete stratigraphic levels, meaning they're just like really clear occupations if you're to look through them. Yeah. Yeah. What he's saying is,

so you heard them, a normal site. You have hearth features, mean campfire features. So you got datable charcoal. Stone, where they're making arrowheads or spear points. You got animal bones.

And he's saying you have layers that are not disturbed. If you go back to that site that I just had from the Western Brooks range, you're looking at a tent ring. Like, you can see the tent ring. Okay. So you have a fairly undisturbed, like, that's not all buckled under five feet of ground and it's been washed away by a river. Right? That surface right there is like a clean surface that hasn't been jostled around.

So what he's talking about is he wants sites where it hasn't been disturbed. You have stratigraphic layers. All right. He went down to this Mesa site, the Mata Verde's, not the Mesa sites in Western Brooks, right? Sorry. They just went down and applied a bunch of new dating technologies, that guess, down to the Monteverde site.

Guess what dates he's come back with? And this is advanced techniques published in science. 20,000 years. No. No. Nine. He's coming back saying it's not a normal site. It's a messed up site.

You got a bunch of stuff all mixed up. His date's for Monteverdi. And I want to back up a point I didn't make about Monteverde. We had one of the leading anthropologists on the peopling of the Americas is a guy named David Meltzer. And I love him. God bless you, David Meltzer. Meltzer went down with other people down to the Monteverde site. And the scientific community put their stamp of approval on Monteverde.

your kids history books may have been rewritten based on the Monteverida dates. Can I ask, is there the people that believe it's that old? Is there exclamation a kelp highway theory that they? Yes, great point. I should have brought this up. I meant to bring that. I think I had my notes, but I skipped it. If you've ever heard us talk about or people talk about a thing called the kelp highway,

here's what people are talking about. humans if humans were here 14,500 years ago down in southern Chile 14,500 years ago they couldn't have walked in because their path

would have been blocked by glaciers you could have been in the Brooks range you could have been up in you could have crossed from Siberian entered Alaska but you could not have walked south because you would have been blocked by glaciers so then people had to go like but they were here

because Monteverde. So we know they were here. Since we know they were here, how did they get here? They had to have taken boats. How could they have survived? Well, the kelp, the band of kelp in these inner coastal marine environments were so rich in fish and shellfish that people up in Japan and the allusions and Siberia would have built boats and they must have just boated the shoreline.

and they were up against shorelines that were glaciated, but somehow they were out and they were able to survive off marine resources and make their way south of the ice sheets because we know they were there, because we have these really old sites. The Clovis first idea was people showed up the minute the glaciers melted, and they walked in. Basically, there was a thing called the ice-free corridor, so the theory goes. There was an ice-free corridor.

People came down from Alaska, entered the Great Plains, right around Edmonton, Alberta, through a narrow opening in the glaciers and spilled onto the great plains, rained hell on megafauna, killed all the mammoths, spread around the whole country instantaneously. The richest hunting ground ever discovered by man gradually split apart into all these different cultures and languages, and that's how the story went. But sites like Monteveridate shot it all to hell, and then it entered this idea they must have bowed down. well, this new thing. And I'm done weighing in on this whole thing.

I'm just trying to deliver the facts. Or I'm just trying to deliver the debate. I'm done weighing in on it. I bought into Clovis first. I bought into the Kelp Highway. Now I'm done. I don't have any opinions. This new crew, and it wasn't just the University of Wyoming, people from Chile, all over the place.

4,200, they're saying that site isn't 14.5. It's 42 to 82. And it's all mixed up. It's all mixed up. Meaning it was discharred up. I had a great, I thought of it this morning. I was out turning over part of my garden. Okay.

I got the old dirt. I put down compost. I put down grass clippings. And in the spring, I turn it. So if you were to go down and dig down 12 inches down in my garden and be like, ha look at this piece of grass clipping it's as old as this other stuff laying next to it is it or did it get turned over the course of thousands of years it got turned floods or whatever flooding yeah and then imagine that there's a flood and it washes stuff that doesn't belong

there into there also when you get into like when you get into and i'm doing a any archaeologist would would hate everything I'm saying. I'm just trying to demonstrate some points. I'm not an expert in the field. But picture that out in your yard, you're digging around in your garden, and you find some old bone laying there. And you're like, huh, look at that. And you deposited it on the ground. And then later someone comes and finds your gardening area.

They find your skin cells all over. And they're like, good God. This man had a mammoth. Here's the mammoth's bone. Right next to his garden tool. And then they date the mammoth bone. Good God. He was using a steel gardening tool 14,000 years ago.

And a cell phone. Meaning stuff just gets mixed up. So in this paper they put out in explaining some of the things there is an idea that I don't know. Maybe it was reworking. People probably picked up fossils. Like if you were alive, 8,000 years ago, would you have thought a mammoth fossil was interesting and brought it home with you? Hmm.

I don't know. Maybe. I don't know. It's like when I find a beer bottle from the 60s or 70s. Or an old 30-a-sick shell. I found a really old beer one time and drank it. Remember that? Yonis?

I got sick. It wasn't quite that old. I drank a rowing out of a bank. Yeah. I drank a white claw that was unopened at the, the range cleanup last year. You guys are gross. Terrible.

Terrible mistake. Did you get sick? I didn't finish it. Anyhow. Clovis first might be back. That's what these guys, if you go back and listen to that episode, these guys were like,

I, in terms of people coming here 14,000, 15,000, 16,000 years ago, they're like, just generally, paraphrasing a very complicated conversation. They're generally like, show me a normal site.

It's really old. Show me a great site. Why do we have so many great Clovis sites? And everything older is, is wishy-washy or weird. Now, I mean, I feel like they have some explanations for that just because the older stuff is, the more likely it's, you know,

sure, it's very complicated. Time is rough on. stuff. The older it is, the less likely it's still around. But why do you see such an explosion of sites at 13,000? All of a sudden it's like, I don't know, why are there tons of 13,000-year-old sites? But no one can show me a normal 15,000-year-old site. When there's normal 13,000-year-old sites all over. This is the last point. I forgot to make it. This picture of us staying about this tent ring. I was invited here by a pre-Clovis enthusiast named Tony Baker invited me on this Bureau of Land Management survey, cultural survey.

He volunteers for this and he was, he spent a good part of his career. He retired as an oil executive and became obsessed with pre-Clovis. He became obsessed with who really were the first Americans. So he was always interested in finding he thought that someone up here was going to find, you know, a 25,000-year-old site, a 30,000-year-old site, something really old because it stands to reason. Wouldn't the oldest stuff be closest to where you entered the continent? Picture your kids come in the room with muddy shoes. where is most the mud at the door

it's an imperfect analogy that's all Clovis first spack baby I don't know I like it I like it I'm done having opinions about it I've been burning too many times

I don't believe that I can't chase the headlines I'm too gullible I was a big kelp highway guy I feel like a fool but why can't it be that the kelp highway existed and the other one like you know

I'm... The kelp highway, without really old sites, the kelp highway becomes a lot less interesting. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, couldn't have happened concurrently. Not that it happened way before, but that the same thing, that some of them went through the middle of the continent and some of them went down the coast. Yanni, before we started recording, was all excited about a woman being the first to win a race, some race. Mm-hmm. Okay. There's a thing about being first.

I'm interested Who was the first? What if it was a tie? It wasn't Just like Yanni and Brody Running. Who was the first American? And it was probably a little

cluster. It was it was it I'm going to go and say so I'm going to say I'm thinking I know to be true. It was not 100 people. A little family group. It was 30, 20, 30. The first Americans, it was 20 or 30 people.

They walked in killing mammoths or they boated and eating clams. Yep. Should we all be so lucky someday? I got to know. I got to know. You got to have to wait for that time machine to get built. I want to be with them when they do it. I want to be like, you boys don't even appreciate this.

We just crossed into America. let's crack a champagne they didn't know they crossed anywhere yeah really this is the last point i'll make about the the peopling of the americas generations generations would have been born and died in what is now the baring sea and not known they were going anywhere yep right you were born there you died maybe you died 200 miles east or east southeast of where you were born.

Maybe. Because you're always curious like what's over the next hill. Right. But you weren't like, Bob, let's go to America. I just got a feeling. They were just being like, it's always better hunting when we go kind of that way.

Because over there, like he's like, just watch. If we go into the next valley, you watch. If there's something there, I bet I can walk up and stab it. But in our valley, shit keeps running away. Because we've been here for two years. Let's go over there.

He's like, sure enough. Look, watch. I'll walk up and stab it. Drops it. And like that, like that, people found Chilean Patagonia. Because it's always better over that direction. Somebody probably said, my dad told me, if you go to the next valley.

You can kill more stuff. You know what dad always said? If you can't kill anything, go away's south-southeast. He says it's always better. That's right. Experience Harry Styles live in London, England, at Wembley Stadium.

This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you an mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, Hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got it! Download the free IHeart Radio app. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win.

Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles. Very excited to see you with the show. Kiss all the time, disco occasionally available now. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did.

And you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Thanks for joining the news show. We're not doing the Wildlife Crossings? Oh, yeah. He skipped right over me. No. I thought you were mad at me or something.

No. I skipped it? Yeah. Sorry. A little ways back. You skipped it way back before Yannis went. Oh, my fault. That's why I was caught off.

Oh, it's right there twice. Sorry. I didn't mean to do that. So jump in now. Yeah, please. All right, it's not the end of the show, guys. No, we'll clean it up. Clovis first is back, baby.

Yep. The headline is World's largest wildlife highway bridge crossing in California is nearly complete. That's not where I'm going to start. That's the recent headline. If you jump back to the 1990s, scientists identified Liberty Canyon in western Los Angeles County as a critical wildlife corridor that linked the Santa Monica Mountains to other ranges. A couple decades passed, and there's a lot of concern over habitat fragmentation,

especially concerning mountain lions. And this is something we've talked about in the past. the mountain lines in Los Angeles County, Southern California. Just pulled up that iconic image of that mountain line under the Hollywood sign. A lot of problems, one of the huge problems was they're getting hit by cars a lot. And in this particular spot, this like pinch point in Liberty Canyon, 300,000 vehicles daily go through this canyon on Highway 101. Yep.

My God. Yeah. Considering a lot of those are going through twice there and back. Sure, but it's a lot. And it's several lanes on each side, the highway there. So this idea starts to germinate about a wildlife overpass, which is kind of like when the idea of wildlife overpasses really started getting popular all over the place. And the reason you build these things are habitat connectivity, because interstates are like walls,

basically to a lot of wildlife. Sometimes literally, because you've got a fence on each side and then you've got a barrier down the center. Yeah, exactly. Another reason is to maintain critical migration quarters. Like we've talked about the Hoback to Red Desert mule deer migration in western Wyoming. And I'll circle back to that. But that's an example where wildlife overpasses have been used.

And then obviously it's to reduce roadkill. mortality. So this idea kind of germinates and the concept evolves into a large vegetated overpass spanning Liberty Canyon on U.S. 101 and the Agura Hills, which is western Los Angeles County, I believe. And so the idea comes and then bang some major private funding kicks in, which is going to allow the construction of this overpass. And that money came from the Annenberg Foundation, mostly, and some other private partners. So April 22, on Earth Day, groundbreaking begins on the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. A couple of years go by, there's like heavy structural work going on, millions of pounds of

concrete gets poured, the deck of the bridge gets built over 10 lanes of the highway, and the expected completion is, wow, 2025. How big is that sucker side to side? I'm going to I'll get I'll get there um so a couple of years go by they're building building building expected completion is 2025 to early 2026 um so 2025 was the final construction phase which was you know what you see there like habitat shaping and soil placements things like native vegetation um a million local seeds were planted and it's described as the world's wildlife, largest wildlife crossing, which we'll get to that.

And again, as far as size, Steve, 210 feet long, 170 feet wide, largest of its kind globally. You can see that it's made to, to like look natural, not just like a dirt bridge. Eight acres. Wow. Doesn't look like eight acres. Eight acres. Well, because they're not done with it. Yeah.

The species that they believe it will support will be Mount lions, deer, coyotes, bobcats, reptiles. It says birds. Well, I guess some birds, yeah. A big old Turk out there, strutting. Yeah. So anyway, they're building. And in 2025, as happens with construction projects, there starts to be delays and cost overruns. There was flooding that delayed it.

inflation, labor, supply chain stuff. So the budget goes up by about $21 million to $114 million total. What? $114 million. From what to what? Well, it went, oh, it got to $114 million with a $21 million overrun. Okay. So it was whatever, around 90 was the original budget.

So this year, it's nearing completion and wildlife are already appearing on the bridge pollinators and reptiles, birds, things like that. The planned opening is now December 2nd, 2026. So, you know, six or seven months from now. it's developed a little controversy throughout the years as it's been built and it was coined the bridge to nowhere by some right wing media and politicians stealing that term from the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska

that would have connected the town to the airport. I found out there's a lot of bridges to go over. Are there a lot of bridges in nowhere? Yeah, I don't know. That's a common thing? Yeah, got it. But this is like cost delays, like, time overrun, cost overrun, and the fact that it's not critical, this is a detail that kind of tells you a lot, I think, about the attitude towards wildlife, which is it's not critical infrastructure that benefits people.

But the thing is, is most of the money came from private and philanthropic funding. So it's not like the taxpayers are on the hook for the cost of this thing. Yeah. So I'm not sure why what the problem. In some people's minds, including some friends of mine, it's become like in their mind, emblematic of everything wrong with California. Right. Sure.

And I think because they look at the amount of money. They look at that you're basically connecting to overdeveloped pieces of habitat that are beyond repair. For a handful of mountain lines. Yeah. They point that it wouldn't have. happen if it wasn't for this would like it's it's happening because of the mountain lions yeah all of which out that doesn't round me up right if people want to spend their money making giant overpasses for wildlife i'm like great yeah exactly and we're going to talk about some other ones

um the until this one is finished the in colorado there's one called the i-25 greenland wildlife overpass do we have that phil that's it there that was that was completed last year and they were calling that one the largest in the world for a little while but that one is completed in use

i25 just south of Denver so again probably hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day and already thousands of animals crossings have been recorded there significant drop and collisions um really yep

what if you could trap that I don't think people are allowed on those things. Can't string snares on those trails and see what comes through. Another real, real famous one is the BAMP Wildlife Crossing System. Wow. And this is, they have like 40 of these things and it's overpasses and underpasses.

80 to 90% reduction in wildlife collisions there. Really? Yep. Over how many miles of road, though? Well. Like over that patch of road? I mean, I'm sure it's with 40 crossings, it's miles and miles and miles.

They made 40 of those. Yeah. In the Bamp area. Damn. So like these things work. They're becoming more popular. And like a comparison, I wanted to show like actual numbers for reductions in roadkill.

There's a series, Janus might remember these. There's a highway nine between Breckenridge, Colorado and Kremlin. Colorado about 10 to 15 years ago they started building a series of overpasses there can you pull those up Phil nice um hmm and you can pull up the second Phil's kicking ass man yeah there's there's a cool one um this was like a real bad spot for particularly for mule deer mortality in the winter but also elk um a lot of car crashes a lot of animals getting killed so

within five years of these wildlife overpasses being completed, reduced vehicle, mule deer, and elk collisions by 90% over a 10-mile stretch. Really? Wow. Crashes from over 30 annually to nearly zero. No kidding. Prevented hundreds of potential collisions and effectively reduced carcass counts by 90%. Wow. You know we should do?

I don't want to have an essay contest, but a bullet pointed email contest. Yes. If you hate, if you're one of the people that hates wildlife overpasses, and you think it demonstrates everything that's wrong with the world, send us a bullet pointed email and we'll have a contest. Yes. Who can have the best bullet pointed email that's so, that it better explains why it's so bad to have wildlife crossings. Before, before you send those bullet pointed emails, watch this video. going back to these previous ones crossing structure

the structures were crossed more than 45,000 times by elk moose, black bears, mountain lions, and other species. You have that video? So this is a video from a wildlife crossing in Utah. And I wish we could fast forward. I don't like how they decorated it. Yeah. This one's kind of, you know, not a good...

I would have done it way different than that. Like, I can scrub through it. It looks so... It looks suspicious. Like, if you start, this is one wildlife crossing. Pine squirrel, moose, porcupine, marmot, elk, cougar. Yep.

Some kind of ground squirrel, I don't know. A little baby mule deer. Man, they did a terrible job decorating it. But still, I mean, like, the things get used. It looks like if you gave your kid an aquarium and he put some sticks and rocks in there. It's just, I'm not buying it. The animals obviously are. There goes a coyote cutting through there.

Black bear cutting through there. So you get the picture. Firefly. Like this is just one small overpass in Utah. Bobcat. Oh, good. Back up. Cotton tail?

What is it? That's like a kind of mouse. Not a pike up, but, oh, there he is. Is he carrying something? Yeah, he was carrying something. He's carrying some shit he found dead on the road. They went down to the road and carried it up. But anyway, look at that thing.

You get the picture. Yeah, there's a, uh, damn, a former colleague of mine of TRCP. There's another bear. Daylight Hours is on a, the Colorado Wildlife and Transportation Alliance. He's a co-chair of it.

And he actually sent me a video a couple months ago that I watched they have on YouTube. That explains how effective these are and the need for additional funding. Oh, back up. Brody missed something important. What did I miss? Watch something spooks this bear. Here he's going. He sees it.

He stands up and boogies the other. A bigger bear on the other side of the bridge. Is it? I don't know. I'm saying. Like he winded, Gianni. Oh, no, he's going back. Ground blind.

He changed his mind. That's amazing. That's really cool. Yeah. You kind of dig into one and find all kinds of cool stuff about others. Why does it bring so much right wing hatred about wildlife crossings? Porcupine. I don't know.

I mean, I think it's what you said is very true. It's just like a reaction to something going on in California, right? It's just like that's the attitude. It's like a money thing too, but you know what? But if some private donor wants to kick down 100 million of their own money, like, come on. Yeah, wildlife costs money. Yeah. It costs money to have in world of history, it was like we had wild places because,

we hadn't gotten around to destroying them all yet. And now we have wild places because we've tried to have them. Yep. It's just switched. It's switched. You have them now because you're willing to make sacrifices for them. You used to have them because everybody was lucky. Yeah.

Now you have them because you try hard. There we go. That's the news, folks. Good job, Brody. That's a hell of a deal there. I want to go and redo that. Yeah. I'll let it set.

The animals obviously like it. Steve wants to draw a tag for that wildlife crossing. I drew the I-40 tag. Weapons restricted. All right, thanks to joining the news show. I know it was a long one, ladies and gentlemen, but that's how it goes. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts.

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