The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 877: Does Predator Management Actually Work?

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Mike Bodenchuk. Topics discussed: Predator-prey dynamics; predator impact and wildlife management from a strategic removal perspective; predator snails; predation rates impacted by nearly a dozen factors; how coyote management is ineffective if not time-targeted after breeding pairs mate; controlling wolves by controlling pack size; how recreational hunting is absolutely insufficient at managing the wild hog population, but hunters shooting young sows can still be helpful; linear habitats; 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.

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No compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's f-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, joined today by Mike Bowdenchuk, professional biologist, 45-year's professional experience

in private state and federal government services. Now, you recently retired from A-FIS. That's great. Animal, plant, and health inspection services. That's right, yep. You spent how many years doing that? I've been 34 years with A-FIS. I've spent about 10 in the private sector and four with state government before that.

Okay. And currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist. That's correct. But your area of expertise, and this is how you were recommended to us by many people, not only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in predator, prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management. You bet. Aphas does a lot of predator control around the state or predation control.

actually. We don't control numbers as much as we do, the ones that are actually killing. Got it. But I've done that really my whole career. Yeah. But besides when you were a DJ? Yeah, no, that was a long time. What was up with that? Yeah, in high school, I had a job. I think they just needed somebody who could read and talk, and I could do both. So you were a DJ? I was a DJ for a couple of years. What state you grew up in?

New Mexico. I lived in New Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country after that. So as a kid, you cut your teeth like hunting and trapping? Yeah, I did actually. Growing up, I got to hunt deer back when we had a lot of deer. Right in New Mexico, in the 70s, there was a lot of deer. And I got to do that. I started trapping when I was 11 years old. So what you were to that have been?

Oh, man, 68. Oh, okay. So, yeah. So I've been trapping for a long time. And then you eventually got into that kind of work, professional? Yeah, you know, when I, Went to college, that's all I want to do was become a wildlife biologist. I wanted to work outdoors.

And that's when I graduated college, jobs with the game department were on a hiring freeze and a job came open with the predator control program in New Mexico. So I started with that outfit. After four years, I was guiding hunters on the side and went into the private sector guiding and managing ranches in Texas. Okay. Doing some consulting work down in old Mexico and Sonora. Oh, you did?

Yeah, yeah. There was a center for desert ecology. We built a zoo down there in Armacillo and moved some animals into it. Captured Ponghorn in San Luis Potoc. He did a lot of work in Mexico over the years. After my kids were born, I decided maybe I needed a job that had health insurance. I came back to government work in Mississippi as a beaver trapper. And then South Dakota spent 13 years in Utah.

mostly predator management. The deer herds crashed there in 1992, 93, and I moved in there just after that. So we started doing predator control for domestic sheep protection, but also for mule deer, pronghorn protection, big horn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep into it, studying predator to prey relationships.

Yeah. Let me hit you with one that I wasn't expecting to ask you about, but I was just reading about it yesterday. Have you spent much time working in Alaska? I've been up to Alaska several times, but never, never, you know, a month at a time, just a couple weeks here and there. There's a little, there's a, you know, there's a constantly a Bruhan, I'll ask about predator management around coyote stuff,

but I was reading about, um, some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bare control to try to reestablish a caribou herd that had gone through like a 94% decline. Yeah. That is, it is a, it is a. worldwide phenomenon. I was an invited speaker at the first European trapping conference. Okay. And they were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer.

What do we do with that? Yeah. I'm working with a group in Alberta that's trying to standardize predation management to protect wildlife. That deal in Alaska is a long brewing controversy going way back. But predators can put prey in a predator pit when the prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't drop off. That's when we have a predator pet and that's what they're trying to reverse.

In Alaska, it's interesting because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually support subsistence use. And so it's a real tussle between our, well, are you eating caribou or can you eat a bear? Yeah, I got it, got it. But in those areas, they are doing bear removals and some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time. The bears are hard on them. And it's working, right? We've seen some of those cariboo herds and we'll chat in the herds up about 25%.

Yeah, that's one I'm talking about. That was one that had the 94% decline, and now it's kind of coming out of it. And there's a naturally cyclical element to it, but I think you can probably take, you can probably take the bottoms. You can probably round the bottoms off with control. Or decrease the timeline, right? In Wyoming, pronghorn will die in a severe winter. We know that. That's the limiting factor is winter.

But do we want to wait seven years for them to come back up, or do we want to bump them up in two or three years? You know, that's when we're talking about predation management on wildlife. Yeah, yeah. What predator have you spent the most time on in your career? Without a doubt, coyotes, right? I actually trapped coyotes and hunted coyotes for fur when I was in college back when college was cheap and fur was valuable.

And I spent most of my time around coyote management and all the rest. But I spent a lot of time with mountain lines. I did postgraduate work on mountain lines in New Mexico and had hounds for 30 years. So I spent a lot of time online work. You know, you just mentioned college being when college was different amounts of money. I always tell people this. This is no joke, man. When I got out of high school, I didn't think I was going to go to college.

I kicked around going to the Army. And then, like, decided to go to college. And I remember we had a community college. We called it 13th grade. And I went down there. And I'm not kidding you, man. I went down there and wrote a check for $600 at like a cashier window. Yeah.

Yeah. To pay my tuition. Yeah. My tuition was $600 for a semester. And I like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all talking about put our kids going to college, knowing how expensive it is. I'm like, well, 600 bucks. Yeah.

A semester. I sold a Bobcat in the spring of 79 for 300 bucks and walked across campus with that check and paid off the last of that semester's bill. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's those days are gone now. You know, on Kyle's man, here's a conversation I have people all the time is, you get a guy, you know, you get a well-meaning landowner, right?

farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself, the ranch manager himself, the ranch himself, whatever. And they have the idea that, like, they want to help their deer population out. They want to increase their turkey population or whatever. And they'll occasionally in November shoot a coyote. Right? Because they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to help out. Or you'll say to a farmer, you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there. We saw a couple of coyotes.

You didn't shoot him? you know yeah and you have this conversation you're like like listen man i don't have any problem with you doing whatever you want to do but that doesn't matter right like like this kind of stuff is so it's it's like timing and intensity dependent absolutely yeah can you explain that a little bit from a professional perspective of when like how do people kind of view predator control and what does predator control look like when it's done in a professional sense sure and it's it is very very complicated i don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole but it's a deep rabbit hole sure man that's why i'm asking about it yeah predators impact prey in one of two different ways the

first one is how many get eaten right and that's what we'd studied for 50 years okay how many deer fonds get eaten by coyotes. Okay. Many deer, adult deer get eaten by mountain lions. And, and no kidding. Decades of research, the very first wildlife monograph is about the P.N.'s Basin, and they followed deer, radio color deer, followed them around. Where is this?

Pian's Basin, northwest Colorado. Okay. And if a deer starved to death, they said, see, it's habitat related. And if a deer was killed by coyotes, they said, see, it's predation. Okay. And that's what we understood about predator management or predatory impacts for a long time. Really, when we started putting wolves in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts. And the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those prey animals to avoid predation.

Okay. So wolves didn't eat elk on the northern deer herd or northern elk herd near as much as they changed their behavior. Instead of them being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want, they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation, but they're starving to death in what we used to consider a mild winter. I got it. And that secondary impact is probably as important as the primary impact. Okay. So shooting a coyote in the fall, is that going to help anything? If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down, then maybe, very small maybe. If primary, very impacts are there. There's absolutely no impact whatsoever. Coyotes get replaced. They're very

resilient as a species and they can they can come back from from any kind of pressure up to 65% removal. You'll have them back within a single year. Sixty five percent removal. 65% removal. Yeah. They bounce back in a single breeding season. Yeah. And this is this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic system. to look at predation because they can't leave, right? Fish can't get up and walk out. And so there's been a couple of studies where they had, you know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it.

And the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring. And they put in just a couple of predatory fish in that system and all the algae eaters go to the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have any algae eaters in it. And you have an algae bloom. And think about that. If you understand food pyramids and all the rest,

that's the basis of life being directed by a predator species. Yeah. Because they can't do what they want no more. They can't safely go out there. They change their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment, and I love this one, they had snails in an aquarium with growing plants. And the snails will feed up and down the stock of that plant,

including the terminal bud at the tip of, of the plant. They eat it. And they keep the plants crop back. Okay. They didn't introduce snail predators. They introduced the smell of snail predators. They had snail predators in another aquarium. They circulated that water over there. Really? What's the snail predator? Some other kind of fish that it'll crunch the shells. And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the plant and the plants grew up and choked out the system. Because they can smell those sons of bitches in there. They can smell them.

I may not be giving snails enough credit for their thought process. Yeah, yeah. But that's an evolutionary thing, right? It's, yeah, because they didn't watch their body get munched by a fish. That was it. That's evolution.

And that's the, that's the yin and yang of predation, right? It shapes the predator. It shapes the prey. Yeah, when things get out of whack, when people interfere, then predators can have an impact on them.

Yeah. Another fascinating deal. When I was in Utah, they asked me to identify why predators have an impact and what would we do to manage that impact. And I started looking at mountain lions and deer and mountain lions kill deer. That's their job. That's how they evolved. Deer evolved feeding mountain lines. That's the relationship.

But mountain lions kill bucks in greater percentage than their percentage in the population. If bucks are 20% of a population, it might be 30%, 35% of what lions kill. And the reasons for that are multiple, but bucks are solitary, bucks move more so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups, so it's, you know, they don't have a defense of a lot of eyes. Yeah, because you would think, just on that point, I've seen that before. Yeah. And heard that before. But you would think in some ways, the fact that it's for much of the year, it's armed with antlers.

you would think in some ways that would offset that. And maybe it does. Maybe if they didn't have antlers, it would be even worse. But you'd see in some ways, I feel like I'm surprised that doesn't turn a cat off. Yeah, it doesn't turn a cat off. They just don't care. They're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders and biting where they need to bite. You don't need the antlers.

No, I've seen them kill adult bull elk. Yeah. You know, with antlers. Yeah. So, Mountlines, though, will kill dope. and fawns in relative abundance to each other. And so if there's a hundred funds... Explain that again?

They killed doze and fons in relative abundance to each other. So you take the buck mortality out of it. Yeah. If you got 100 fons per hundred doze, which we never have. Yeah. Half of what a lion kills is going to be fongs and half will be doze. Is that right? If you had that ratio.

They don't care. Right? Because you don't know what's in his head, but that's what you see. It's just availability. It's, they're equally vulnerable to predation. Understood. So it's just whatever, whatever he comes on, the closest one to the bushes, right? Yeah, yeah.

What we found out, though, is that when predator, or when, when, when fawn numbers are down, lion mortality is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age dose, and that can drive a population down. Explain that to me again. I got confused there. The, the model that I had to. When deer numbers are down. When, when fawn numbers are down, when you get below 50 fawns per 100 doves,

I see. What a lion's killing is two-thirds of what the non-bucks are adult breeding-age dough. Only one-third is fawns. If they're killing fawns, it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still got some that are coming up to be breeding-age. I got you. If they're killing breeding-age does, you can see the whole population depressed because they're the ones that are feeding, you know, young into the system. Like that's when it's having.

like a sort of a greater population level impact. Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official lion population was about 3,000 based on densities and all the rest. The official deer population was 300,000 or about one line for every 100 deer. When fawn ratios got below 50 fawns per 100 doze, the population was declining because lions were killing doves. Yeah.

Lions aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The reason the fawn ratios were low was because coyotes were eating the fawns. Got it. So when we started doing predator management in the book cliffs in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after the coyotes. We tried to get our fawn numbers up above 50 fawns per hundred dose. We get above 60, 70 fawns per 100 dose. The lions can eat whatever they want to eat and you don't notice the difference.

Yep. So you got two predators working on the same population, but they're hitting different levels of, the population, one's eating fulms and the other's eating adult dose, it can depress that population as well. Got it. So there's all kinds of factors. We identified 18 factors that affect predation rates.

Give me some more. Linear habitat. Okay. So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can find every duck nest if they have to nest on the edge of that diet. Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up because this is in our notes, this linear. I'd never heard this concept before.

Yeah. So what's more linear than a beach? Yeah. A beach. Sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach. Yeah. And one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that beach, can find 100% of the nets. Got it.

Which also gets to what do you do about it. You can remove 90% of the coyotes and still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat, you've got to be really, really intensive. other factors like herd size and age right when wolves were killing elk in yellowstone the average age of the elk that were being shot by hunters cow elk was about five but the average age that the wolves were eating was like 11 that's because they're at the back of the herd the 11 year olds are the slower ones at the back of the herds that's the one the wolves were targeting and pulling down so they're not equally distributing that predation

effort over the whole population you can lose some 11-year-olds. You start losing your 5-year-olds and your population is going to decline because that's the reproductive capacity of that herd right there. Got it, got it. So it's a fascinating, fascinating picture.

Some of the factors involve the predators. Coyotes, you probably know this, but coyotes don't breed until their second year. Okay. So right out on the landscape, you've got the current year's pups, which are like 50% of the population numerically. You've got the last year's coyotes,

the yearlings that are out there, transient coyotes between territories, trying to stay out of everybody's way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial coyotes are like 20% of the population, two-year-olds and up. Those coyotes are the ones that are doing most of the killing of wildlife. Really?

Those are the coyotes. Yeah, you've got a four-year-old pair that's been on that territory for three breeding seasons. They're going to know where to go hunt phones. They're the ones that are the most active at killing. Just so they got the most experience. They've got the most experience and they're feeding pups. Okay. In experiments with livestock predation, when you remove the pups from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days.

Got it. It's provisioning those pups. And you think about it, coyotes, pups are born right around. around April 15th, deer fongs hit the ground the end of June, 1st of July. Those pups got to eat meat. Those coyotes are killing as fast as they can to provision their pups. You know, I got to just keep your train of thought. Yeah.

But the idea of buddy mine who's a songwriter, he says, hey, I got a coyote question for you. And I don't know where he's got. I don't even know. He didn't even ask him this has to do with something he's writing. But he happens to be a songwriter. And he happens to have called me and asked me this question, with no explanation of why he was asking, but he said,

do you ever see, and I didn't really have a great answer for him. I could just tell him anecdotally, or I could just tell my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said, do you ever see a coyote, take a step to dispatch something?

Or do they just kind of like grab it and start eating it? She's talking about why do you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still looking around? You know what I mean? Like some things, if you think of like a terrier, right? If a terrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing.

Yeah. A lion, like, a terrier sinks his teeth into the neck. You actually see him seed his teeth into the neck and shake it. Yep. Right? A lion is like, a lion is thinking, I'm going to kill this thing. Yep. And I know how to kill it.

And I know where, you know, like, I know what I'm going to do. And top priorities, it's going to die. But a coyote just seems to not be interested in in dispatching something. And for his sake, what's the answer? Coyotes do kill them. They're a coursing predator, mostly.

And this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're a coursing predator. They chase down their game. And when they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They don't have thumbs. They're not like a lion that's got claws. So they grab it with their mouth. Once they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done.

they don't have to kill it right away. Yeah. In fact, they're not going to kill it until they're ready to eat it sometimes. So it is like it's not their instinct. So just right away make it dead. No. Uh,

they're, they're going to grab it. They're going to pack it off. You know, with baby lambs, they'll shake them once maybe, bite the top of the head. But they're,

they're moving food is what they're doing. Yeah. Food's still alive. If they're taking it back to a, to a den, the, pups will kill it. He'll get around to killing it later.

Okay. Red foxes can't do that, right? Everything that a red fox eats is small. And so when they grab it, it dies and they take it back. And red foxes will cash their food around a den. Coyotes don't. They just go back and either puke it up if they ate meat or just drop it and the pups will tear it into it.

Okay. But it's a difference just in size and in what they're trying to do at the time. Got it. In the wintertime, when they're growing, grab something. They'll eat it right away. Yeah. In the summertime, they may be packing it back to the den site, and that's what they're trying to do. Renno mishap? That's embarrassing. You know what's not embarrassing? Using FIG for Home Improvement

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up, but they only last 24 hours. Head to Firstlight.com starting May 14 and reload. That's firstlight.com. Go get after it. What do you guys see when you look at with coyotes? With fawn predation versus adult. Let's just stick to whitetail deer for a minute. What do you see when you look at?

And maybe I'm wrong. but it seemed if I had to take a guess at it is when I've picked up and there's so much false information about this floating around out there and so much myth and legend but like that in the north they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer in the south they don't they don't seem to kill adult deer as much like what what of that is true and not true so we talked about the 18 factors and one of those other factors is alternative prey okay I lived in mississippi for two years and trapped beavers down there and and worked on some coyote problems when I was there and I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a rabbit call. I could howl them up and they'd

come out. Uh-huh. But I never called one with a rabbit call. And I think the answer is they don't know what rabbits are. They're living in such a food rich environment in Mississippi. In Mississippi, they can eat grapes, they can eat persimmons, they can eat all this other food that they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that grows in the south. I talked about them being a coursing predator, not in Mississippi, not in South Texas. I wondered for my whole career until I moved back to Texas, how you can have six coyotes per square mile and still have white-tailed deer in South Texas. Well, he sure can't do a rabbit in South Texas.

Oh, yeah, they do. But coyotes in South Texas are more of like an ecologically more, like a fox. They're a pounce predator. They go up and down the cinderos, and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it, a cotton rat, they'll pounce on that. And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote, all they has to do is turn left and go out

through the brush, and the coyote can't see him anymore. Got it. So we've got white tails in South Texas, but the coyotes are 20-pound coyotes, and they pounce. We've got all that other alternative prey. I see. So, at your issue, you know, what else is going on out there?

Are the packs larger because they have to hunt because they have to hunt deer? Yeah. Whereas elsewhere, the packs are kind of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating jack rabbits. And that's only a meal for one. And you feel that that's true? Yeah. They don't need, like if they have tons of stuff, they don't need to pack up. They don't need to pack up.

Their territories get smaller. They tolerate more overlap. lap in territory. We've got territories in South Texas where we've got radio collars on coyotes, 300 acres. Is that right? That's tiny. That's tiny.

Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's fascinating. And other coyotes right on top of them. Huh. Because everything they need is on that 300 acres.

Yeah. So they don't. They're more lenient about other ones coming in because there's enough food. There's enough food. Yeah. Another coyote territory thing, but I'm going down different. No, no, this is great. In the 60s, there was a coyote study with VHF collars,

and they mapped out where the coyote territories were based on all the locations, and they had a picture of what that looked like. In the whatever the decade, we're calling it after 2000, 40 years later, they went in there with GPS collars and did the same study. and the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me, they had the same boundaries. Oh, really? Yeah, they didn't shift over when one coyote pair disappeared.

Another coyote pair would pick it up. And whatever they were seeing out there on the landscape, they maintained the same boundaries. 40 years, that's 20 coyote generations. Now, I wonder, like, there's no way to answer this probably. But picture that you had somehow magically were able to pull them all out. Okay?

Like the shake of a wand and they're all out. And then you replace them with totally different ones. Then I wonder would they find those same? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like is the territory thing inherited? Is there some logic to it that a coyote understands that we don't understand? A coyote sees the landscape different.

Yeah. Because we tend to think of like fence lines. Yeah, fence lines and roads. Because we'll always be talking about, oh, he came off the neighbor's place. As though the deer has some comprehension. I mean, like, as though like he's like, I'm going over to the neighbor's place now. You know, it's just like the way we like view, you know,

isn't how they see it, isn't how they experience it. We talk some about not only the pack size, but individual animal size, right? They get larger as they go north, you know, away from the equator or south away from the equator. But their prey also decides their, their individual size some. I've been working with wolves in Michigan, Minnesota,

and wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that eat white-tailed deer. In the same place? In the same plate. What? Just a few miles apart, 15 miles apart. You're kidding me. No, no.

Huh. What are you doing with wolves up there? Radio collars. We're handling wolves, putting radio collars on them. How are you catching them? Foothold traps. Yeah. What trap do you?

I'm using Mb 750 on wolves the Alaskin with a bigger bigger offset. We had another wolf researcher on and I asked for that question. She said MB 752. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a good stout travi. It's got to have got to beaers. Yeah.

Back foot. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. But. And you're out like you just like walk me through going out and catching a wolf in Michigan. Like what are you doing? Well, um, we're working.

in a wilderness area. Yeah. So we're doing this out of a backpack. Okay. You don't pack 12 of those traps on your back and go for a walk. You know, take four or five of them out there. And there are traditional places where they walk. But if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting a trap.

Okay. You're just wasting a lot of time, setting, hoping that something's going to come by here. Yeah. Because we're putting radio colors on, we're running those traps every day. Got it. So you can only have. so many traps out in a day and still get to that wolf before noon and get him processed and out of the trap.

How many sets do you guys wrong when you're doing that? A dozen, 15. Okay. You know. Then you get it. We get the wolf. You call the biologist or whoever. Are you working it up yourself?

We're working it up ourselves. Okay. It's a team effort. I mean, just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work the wolf up. It's usually a two, three person team. What month are you doing this in? May. usually. We'll be doing some late this month.

You'll be up there this month, yeah. Yeah, the end of this month and first part of June still. And what do you find in with those collars? Are you analyzing the data, too, or are you just collecting it? I get to see it, but we've got other biologists that are analyzing the data. They've got territories. They make some pretty good extra territorial movements. They'll go over here and try and poach a girlfriend or come back.

We caught a pair of wolves one night. It was a male and a female, three-year-old male and two-year-old female. And I felt like they were packmates. We put collars on both of them. And as soon as we turned them loose, they split. And one went back to another pack's territory. He was a member of that pack, and he was over there trying to poach a girlfriend. You're kidding me, really?

We just happened to catch him on date night. Yeah. Really? Yeah, that was fascinating. I'd have never guessed that if we didn't put the collars on them. Yeah. What do you see in that nowadays with, I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's Upper Peninsula long time ago? Yeah.

But what are they seeing nowadays with those populations there? I think they're kind of stable. I mean, they've filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers are kind of low. So there's not a lot of groceries left. You don't see, I think every breeding pair is still having litter, but you don't see a lot of young wolves coming up. They're filled in. Yeah, they've filled in.

You know, here's the thing I'd like to talk to you about, about predator prey relationships. So you may be familiar with this story where you're familiar with the Hudson Bay Company. Oh, yeah. Okay. So Hudson Bay Company, I think it was like the oldest corporation, you know, dissolved now, right? But it was, you know, for a while it was like the oldest corporation out there just for, for listeners' sake. What used to happen is like in Canada, and this would happen in the, in a minor way in the U.S., but Canada, they would give these sort of charters or commissions to company, basically like corporate charters.

And they would say, you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company, and it had all these different names over time. But Hudson Bay Company was they had a monopoly to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in Hudson Bay. And they kept meticulous records. So you're familiar with like that snowshoe hairs follow this up, down cycle. of seven to ten years, seven years. There's all these different debates about what drives it like, it seems to be like I think the consensus nowadays

what drives it as plant toxins. As plants get overconsumed, they produce more toxins, they produce more toxins, the rabbits lay off and so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go back through time and track the link cycle and see that the link cycle

follows the snowshoe hair cycle. And you can see how many links are coming through their trading posts. Right. And they look and it's like it's spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down kind of in line with rabbits. Right. But or hairs. But here's my question. How long is the delay? I think a lot of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't. they would look like predator management doesn't matter because if all the deer are dead, right?

If there's no deer left, then the predators will die. Yeah. Okay. That's what I was taught when I went to college in the 70s. Yeah. So prey drives the predator numbers. And we were shown those very graphs, those very data. There's another famous study Paul Errington did with muskrats and mink.

Okay. When muskrats go up, make numbers go up when muskrats crash mink numbers crash yeah but they can't be those lines aren't traveling like this they're about a year behind okay that that's what's it there has to be a delay and and it has to do with kitten survival for links okay so that the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and kitten numbers don't survive in the down swing they just starve to death and dispersal If you look at non-target links take in Idaho, for example, they're catching links out in the deserts where there aren't any links in Bobcat sets.

When you have a snowshoe hair crash and the links have to disperse, they leave. Got it. So it's not always dying. Yeah. And that's what we were all taught. And that actually works in a single predator, single prey system. Okay. I don't get to work in those systems.

I've got coyotes. I got mountain lions. I got all kinds of predators. So single predators, single prey, let's take like, just to help you understand what we're saying. We've talked about this on past shows like Isle Royal. Yeah. And Lake Superior's this kind of famous example of, it's like you basically, there's moose and there's wolves. And beaver.

Okay. Oh, okay. You got beaver, but only half the year, right? They're under ice the rest of the year. So that's not even single predators. They whack the heck out of the beavers, too. Okay. Yeah.

So beavers are a favorite food of wolves. Yeah. So continue that thought, though, like that the situations where you don't have single prey, single predator. So in the famous lion study that Hornocker did in Idaho, the lions didn't kill elk. Okay. Because there weren't many elk back then. There were hundreds and hundreds of deer and almost no elk. Now that in total systems changed.

There's very few deer and a lot of elk. And the elk are buffering the lions. to where the lions can still find something to eat and keep the deer numbers low. Got it. In a study on the spider ranch in northern Arizona, lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought. The lions didn't cause the crash.

Yeah. But a couple of years of no phone survival and the deer herds way down, lions just switched over to cattle. Got it. All the lions on the study area that weren't killing cattle when there were a lot of deer switched to cattle. every single one. And so the line numbers didn't go down.

Got it. So that's the actual system, right, that we're worried about is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick on the one that's depressed enough to keep them in that predator pit. That's when we have to step in and remove them. And it's got to be very specific, right? You go out there and kill a bunch of yearling coyotes and not deal with the pair that's raising those pups,

you haven't done a darn thing. I'll go one further. We do a lot of predator management around Pronghorn. Yep. Very well documented. If you've got pronged horn herd that might have 25 fons per hundred dows if you do predator,

coyote removal, effective coyote removal, you can get them up to about 50 fons. You could about double that fawn survival, if you do it well. one state insisted that we do that work at the first of May. Because that's when the fawns start dropping in May. So they only wanted coyotes removed in May.

Well, if you go out there with an airplane, you go out there with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes in May, you're going to find male coyotes that are provisioning pups. The females right there tied to the den. Okay. If you get, she's in the hole with those pups and you're out there killing, males, you have no impact whatsoever. Got it.

You got to get the reproduction. The time to get those is before she has the pup. And if you can remove her, another coyote will take her place, but they won't have pups in that territory that year. That'll be a safe zone for pronghorn to fawn. My buddy does that work for an imperiled pronghorn population. And he goes down to his camp. I feel like he's in his camps.

There's like the peak day when they drop fawns. Yeah. I feel like he's in his camp six weeks. Yeah. Prior, six weeks post. Something like that, some schedule like that. Right. Like, well, in advance, you know.

Yeah, no, you know, that's a time. I'd like to see it. We did aerial removals on deer faunting range between January and March. Mm-hmm. And removing it, especially here in the mountains, um, couts that live above 7,000 foot in January are the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down. with the groceries.

But you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain that time of year. But why are they up there, though? They can't afford to leave. If they leave, somebody else is going to take their place. You think so?

Oh, I've seen it, man. I've seen that so much where you'd be up so high and, like, the snow's crusted. Yeah. And you're like, why? What are they doing? They're digging down to old kills.

They're, I don't know, eating juniper bear. I have no idea, but about 7,000 foot and above, it's all territorial coyotes. So you go up there in January, February,

March. Territory bonds are established. The pair bonds are there. You get fresh, you know you can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes and livestock losses that year cut in half. Really? Bond losses are cut way down.

Other coyotes will take their place. But those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any pups born in that territory that year. Yeah. And you're golden. If you did it in November, there'd be another pair of coyotes in there by January. and you'd still have pups.

So the timing is critical to when you get that. The coyotes you remove are critical. It's literally got to be the adult female. If you can get her out of there before she whelps, you've got a pretty clear sailing all through falling season. But if you kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's going to kill just as bad as if they were both. Is that right?

Yeah. What do you see, do you ever see a situation where, let's say you have like good high deer numbers. Yeah. Okay, so if you have a long historical trend, and you kind of know like what, what, you have data over decades and you know like what low looks like for deer elk numbers. Say white tail deer, you know what low looks like.

You know what high looks like. And you're plugging along in good, stable country. In those cases, do you generally feel like there's no, there's no point in doing predator removal? Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some relationship to carrying capacity. And carrying capacity changes over the years, right? I mean, things dry out, you get a fire, and you have to reshuffle the whole deck

because you don't know what the right carrying capacity is. And this is an aside, but agencies have to decide every year where are we going to spend our money. We're going to spend it on habitat work. We're going to spend it on predator control. And the world, according to Mike, you do habitat work all the time. You do habitat work for next year, for five years down the road. If you're pushing junipers to create more brows for deer, you still got to do that. You do predator management if you have unused habitat today.

Got it. If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah, we had a three-step process to decide if a predator plan was necessary. Okay. If we were 50% of our herd objective or less and had 50 phones per 100 dose or fewer and had a three-year stable to declining trend, then that would be a unit that we would consider for predator management. If you had an increasing trend, but you still met the first two,

you could let it go. You could see if they'd get there on their own. You would put your resources someplace else. but if it met all three of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management. What cases in your career have you seen where, like I mentioned earlier, a buddy mine is working on a pronghorn deal.

I mean, they have, like, he's working, I don't want to, yeah, I don't want, I just didn't ask him if I could talk about, you know, I don't know how much he wants to be happening about this, but he's an area where the numbers are exceptionally low. Yeah, right? So he's doing. and we're timed removals

in hopes of lifting them up. How often in your career have you seen where you had where nothing was working? Okay, and you're seeing like a desert big horn population collapsing, you're seeing a meal to your population collapsing, whatever. And you come in

and do the work and then you see immediate benefits from predator removal. Immediate. Do you ever do it where you come in and you do predate removal? and you realize it was something different? Like it doesn't move the needle? Yeah, it can be something different.

And predators aren't the only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor like it's a single issue, but everything else is working on them at the same time. When we start predator management for, let's say, prong horn or mule deer, white tail, I told the agencies, I'm not going to do it for less than three years. The fauns I save in year, one won't contribute their own farms until year three. Okay.

They get bred as yearlings and they drop it the beginning of, on their second birthday, if you will. Yep. So, so we've got to, to see any kind of moving the needle. It takes at least three years with a species like that. Got it. We see it a little bit quicker in waterfowl. Okay. You know, the, the Bear River refuge in Utah used to produce 80,000 ducklings.

Okay. most of the flyways cinnamon teal came out of that particular system. And they had a flood in the 80s that completely put the refuge underwater. Okay. When they came back, when the floodwaters receded, they built dikes. Again, that linear habitat to control the water to prevent the refuge from flooding. But all the nesting habitat became dikes. At the same time raccoons and red foxes came in, neither of those were native predators.

in that system. What caused those to come in like that? I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People brought them into chasing with hounds.

Is that right? The red fox actually... I know that happens the pigs, but I didn't know that happens of raccoons. Well, that's how we got rabies in the northeast.

It was Florida coons being moved up there. The red fox, you could actually watch their march across the landscape. Yeah. In fact,

there's an... Aldo Leopold wrote a book called Game Survey. He's, he dedicates several pages in that book to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got maps and years and in all the rest. So it's, it's been going on since the 40s,

but red foxes just naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems. But they produced nothing for two decades. After that, they were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance.

We radio collared stuff and watched them. And when we started removing the predators, the duck numbers came up. Okay. But ducks have like an 80% fidelity to the site they were born at. Okay. So we went 20 years without producing any ducks. What are the chances we're going to go from zero to 80,000 in one year? Yeah.

None. Got it. We had to have some ducks that were raised there, come back, and start raising their own ducks. And so it's a long-term, processed. If you're saving sea turtles, what are you doing, man? It might take 50 years before you actually see the sea turtle population rebound because they've got to be 20 years old to breed in the first place. Have you ever worked on sea turtles? Oh yeah. Yeah, we did feral hog removals for sea turtles. What would that look like? Again, sea turtles nest in May. Okay. You can kill hogs.

They'll still swim out to the islands or get to the beaches. We would go. in there at the end of April an aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could on the that had access to those beaches. And it's kind of easy in a saltwater ecosystem because the pigs have to drink freshwater. You know

where the freshwater is. You can go get all the pigs around that. Yeah. But, but hogs would reinvest the island by the next year. But all we had to do was give it 45 days worth a protection. Got it. And those,

those little eggs would hatch and make their way out to the sea. That seems to me like the one predator control project you can work on where you're not going to get sued by like Center for Biological Diversity or something because they're all going to agree that sea turtles are cute. And hogs are awful.

And they're probably going to agree that hogs are bad. Yeah. But any other thing, they're like, no, no, no, no. I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes down there and they said, you know, their controversies aren't, should we do it? Their controversies are, how do we do it humanely? You know, their red foxes are invasive and their impact in the native hairs are invasive.

Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody talks about should we. It's just the arguments over, do we use poison? Well, they had that little problem where they had school kids out getting house cats and that caused like a little bit of a stir up. Well, that's an image. But, yeah, the cat people are a little crazy. Yes, they are. A little too relaxed during yoga?

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So what was the sea turtle? There's a Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle that's being restored in Texas. And so, but there's work done in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's, again, raccoons, it's coyotes, it's, it's, feral hogs. Now I know what I was going to ask you about. It seems, I hesitate to use the word fashion. Yeah. But it seems fashionable right now.

Like I wish my buddy Yanni was here because he's in he's all up in this right now. There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that want turkeys on the ground, more turkeys are real hip to like reducing raccoon numbers. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I've paid attention to this because if you look at when fur prices are high. Okay.

So let's see you go back to 78 to 82. Yeah. Right. there is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance. Like if I go back to the county, the counties where I grew up, raccoon abundance in like 84, 1984, 1986, I mean, you'd get excited if you found a raccoon dentry

because everybody's running raccoons because they were valuable. Everybody's running them with dogs and everybody's trapping them. Because you're trapping in those days. dollars like $20 raccoons, $30 raccoons, $40 raccoons. There were no raccoons. And you go, I shouldn't say it, there were no, but it was like competitive to get them. You go there now, man. I mean, it's nothing but raccoons.

It's just like the roads are littered with raccoons. There's raccoons all over because those fur prices, people aren't out getting them. And so it seems like more and more guys now are interested in trying to go out and put all kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down to, to help their wild turkeys. That's what they feel like they're doing. Are they being impactful? Sure. They are. If they if they do it on a big enough scale. So we looked at, uh, not to, not to leave turkeys, we'll come back to it, but we looked at pheasants. Okay. In Utah. And pheasants are farm field birds, right? They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas, one in northern Utah,

one in southern Utah. In southern Utah, we went from sagebrush. on the east, a sagebrush on the west, and just picked the valley floor. Okay. Had some natural choke points where roads or rivers came in, where we could kind of say, this area is a study unit, 16, 17 square miles. Yeah, where you can sort of block it off with some kind of natural feature. And after the first year, we mapped where we caught all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest.

And after the first year, we would get red fox. is still back in the center of the area, but raccoons and skunks were all on the edges. They were coming in from the boundaries. And so we made a difference. We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas, in those treatment areas, compared to the no treatment areas.

We had four sites. By going after foxes, raccoons, and skunks. Those were our three nest predators. And foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the same study in northern Utah, but our study areas were on section lines, four square miles. Okay.

And we had six, three no treatments, three treatments. We kind of staggered them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four square miles, it's two by two. The center of that unit's only one mile from the edge. Yeah. And we did not change the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per hundred trap nights,

it was the same at the end of the project as it was at the beginning. We would kill a raccoon and another one show up for the funeral, right? Okay. It's good coon habitat. Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in an area as you've got groceries. Skunks aren't territorial. So if it's good habitat, you have to work bigger than that.

When the fur was valuable, trappers were all over the place. There was competition, like you say, not just for the animals, but for the animals. the space to go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made a difference. So if my buddy Yanni is doing raccoon work on 40 acres. He might help one nest. He's not going to, yeah. They're coming from everywhere.

They're finding a way in. They're coming from everywhere, and he'll probably remove as much at the end as he does at the beginning. So tell me again, like what is the center of the circle? Like, what, What is the radius of the circle need to look like? Meaning if you're trying to restore turkeys in the, okay, there's a 40-acre area. You had a 40-acre area of great turkey habitat.

You've got roost trees. You got nesting cover. You got food. What does the radius need to look like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure at the center of the circle? So if we're talking about Rio Grande turkeys and they're in the valley, I would do the valley and I would have, I want to have seven, ten miles of valley that you would be working up and down because the turkeys are going to pick their own habitat. Yeah, yeah. That might be a meaningful management area. 40 acres isn't going to get it.

Huh. And this is, I mean, to me, again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory may impact a few deer. But the deer also select where they're going to go fawn. The turkeys select where they're going to go nest based on the abundance of predators or that secondary risk we had. One of the Ph.D studies that was done on ducks at Bear River Refuge,

they built predator exclosure, 40-acre exclosures. Okay. And outside the exclosure, where the predators were going, they had no nesting. Inside the exclosure, they had a nest for every two acres. The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing was, it's fenced. It's a fenced exclosure. They would still try to dig underneath the fence.

Okay. So we had to kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed more predators per acre protected there. than we did out on the outside. We're still thinning the outside predators. Really? But the cost in predators was higher simply because it attracted the animals. They picked their nesting site.

And that's what might be working for Yanni. We biologists do studies like dummy nests, right? You put out a bunch of eggs. You make a fake nest and then monitor it with a camera, go back and see if it gets a And, you know, did Ravens get it or did coyotes? Oh, just see who's doing what? Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it. A turkey lays an egg today and walks away.

And tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it and she walks away. And she comes back a third day. And if a predator got those two eggs, she's got to go find a new place to nest. She doesn't just keep putting them in the same place. Okay. And so her body's going to tell her when she's had enough. But she may do that four or five times if nest predators are getting those eggs while she, before she even starts incubated.

I got it. I didn't know this about them. I mean, it totally makes sense. And I know that, that habit of that they don't incubate until they get their whole nest. Until they get the whole clutch. But I never knew that she would abandon. She, she'll abandon that site.

And so nest site selection is important. Quail are a big thing in Texas, right? South Texas. Bob White Quail have to have their nest within 10 feet of bare ground because those chicks are an inch tall when they're born, they can't walk through the thick grass. They lead them out into the open where they grab grasshoppers as baby chicks.

They don't feed them. They have to feed themselves. Well, if that hen gets bumped by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quail to make a difference at all. But if she gets bumped by coyotes, if her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to build that clutch, then she's going to select less attractive sight. for nest success

just because of that secondary predator impact. And so when we talk about coyote control for quail, they don't need enough to make it worthwhile. Maybe if the nest site selection is being affected

in the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got to do raccoon control, you've got to do gray fox control because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators may start showing up. So you do total predation management if you're trying to do quail nest protection

in Texas. Some time ago, over a year ago, we had a researcher on about quail. Yeah. About just the general shittiness of the nation's quail population right now. Right. I mean, there are bright spots, but there's far more

there's far more dark spots than bright spots. You've got states that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states that used to be good to quail hunting, now it's not. You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting. Now there's no quail, right? This story is all over the Bob White, Quail's territory.

We had a research around from Texas, and he'd been working on, he'd been working on a FDA-approved, failing to think of the right word, man, like what would you call, like a treatment for a parasite? Right, eyeworm. Yep, eyeworm. That's right.

Yep. Okay. So he was working on a medicated feed. And there was some superlimate. relative around it, if I remember right, it was the first time the FDA had approved a medicated feed that you could put out for a parasite.

Yeah. Yeah, an anti-parasite. And he had found in some areas that this was, you could have a positive impact. Okay. Now this upset, this upset all kinds of quail people. Because in their mind, it's like, habitat, habitat,

habitat. Remember you said like Mike's rule always habitat? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And They were insulted or put off, but by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail. Right. Because anything else is a band-aid. Right. So on the quail question, if you look across the Bob White Quail's territory, do you feel that predation is, if it's death by a thousand cuts, is predation one of those cuts on Bob White Quail? I think nest predation in in many cases and the secondary predation impacts.

Okay. I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in the private sector for quail. Okay. And we removed all the nest predators. We removed house cats. We removed bobcats. We, we, everything. And we got quail to one to two acres, wild bobwhites.

You could flush 20 coveys in a morning. Okay. It was a good deal. Were you doing the parasit? treatment too? No. No, we didn't. I don't think we had them at that time. I never noticed eyeworms in any of the birds that we harvested. Um, but it, it, it, it, we had good habitat too, right? Yep. It was the predator. You had empty good habitat. We had empty good habitat. I don't know that I could have got them any higher than two, one to two acres. Um, when you're saying one to two acres,

what do you mean? One bird to every two acres of, of habitat on the ranch. So what's that come out to like covey per acre? A covey of birds might use 10 acres. Okay. And we had some places where we had overlap in covies. Yep. And there's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We had birds that would leave this,

Covey and go join this one and back and forth. Oh, yeah. No, they're not all the same all the time. Like they'd get sick of their bodies and go join a new covey? Yeah, if you look at some of the research that's done on that, it looks like a wiring diagram for an old Toyota radio. Really? Wires going everywhere.

You're kidding me. went over here for three days and then came over here. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. You picture it being like, you don't picture. An intact. You're cruising around.

No. No. If they're, if they're, it dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that shuffling that goes on. I see. But yeah, that that's, you, I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah. Yep. And what we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what we used to consider shitty

habitat. They would start going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage, and do just fine out there in the absence of mammalian predators. But what we know about sage grouse is in the presence of predators.

They have to have this tall sage and they have to have this and that. And of course we've got a huge number of ravens in the west, right? So that's a changing factor. But when you do that work, they'll start picking their own nests sites based on what's good.

Yeah. We see that with turkeys, too. We want to come back to turkeys. Turkeys will pick their nest site based on the presence or absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study, but we did it the way a turkey does. We went and put cameras out, let the wildlife get used to the cameras, and they went out and put one egg in front of it. Okay.

And came back the next day and put a second egg. And we even went so far as to use a golf ball retriever to place the eggs. So we weren't leaving tracks in and out to this nest to help them. We had 15 nests. We studied them for 15 days, putting the eggs in one day at one at a time. And we only had one nest survived that without getting predated. Really? One of the 15.

The rest of them got whacked. Some of them got whacked multiple days, you know. So the turkey would quit and go somewhere. else and then quit that place and go somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest site selection. And that doesn't always favor the chick survival. You know, you've done a lot of work on wild hogs. Yeah, I was considered a predator expert for a long time. Now I'm a hog expert, and that's not a promotion. I'm going the wrong direction. You're a hog expert. Yeah. Okay, let me ask you a super, like, wide general question.

are we at a point in this country where hogs have gotten where they're going to get? Yes. You think so? I mean, there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them in a truck. Yeah, they could set up shop. But we've eliminated hogs. The government has eliminated hogs in a number of states where they had new populations.

We've got some resolve to keep them out of those places. and we're never going to eliminate them in some states. Texas is one of those. We're never going to eliminate them there. What did you make of in the north and they're talking about, did you follow this story in the north? Like this whole like,

this whole Canadian super hog deal? Yeah, I do the guy who coined that term. What do you, what, tell everybody what that was. It sounds like bullshit to me. There are hogs that can winter in Canada

and I can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me, so I don't know how they do it. But here's the deal about that. Like, just, just for, I'm going to tell you something you already know. I mean, if you go look at, if you go just Google up images of hogs in Siberia,

there's endless images of hogs walking around in deep snow. And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian wild boar as a farm animal to be raised in that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs. So that's what they were doing. They were trying to expand agriculture. They were. They were. They were.

But the market collapsed on that. Okay. And so a lot of those pigs are just releases from the farms. They're highly genetically linked to Eurasian pigs. And that's the super pig part, right? They can survive in that environment. They'll make snow caves and stuff like that. And they do well.

Eurasian pigs only breed once a year. Okay. Eurasian pigs have smaller litters. So the Eurasian pigs, on native habitats. So when you're talking about a pig in his endemic range, he breeds once a year. Yep. Like a deer. Right. Huh. And that's probably, you know, again, evolutionary. Right. They don't want to drop young in the middle of the winter. That's right. If they did, they didn't survive. And so those pigs didn't breed. So they learned to drop them on one food was abundant. Right. The, uh, the wildhog that we have in, in the U.S. is, is a mixture of Eurasian blood and. And, domestic strains and

what we call heritage breeds back back when Hatfields and McCoys were were feuding with each other that was over actually a pig and they turned them loose they ear-notched them they'd turn them loose and then they'd gather them in the fall

when they could smoke the meat, smoke the bacon and preserve it you're here the War of the Pig I think it was called the War of the Pig out on San Juan Island Island no same thing yeah

some dude I can't remember the details. They shot somebody else's pig. Yeah, like people had pigs running around. Yeah. And it kind of, there's an understanding who owned what or whatever. And yeah. Some American shot some Brit's pig or a Brit shot an American's pig.

Now a big fuss broke out. Yeah. Well, and, and so our pigs, we see in, in the wild in Texas, at least, we see three litters every two years, about a seven month interval between litters. And we see upwards of six pigs per litter in those litters. So you could see the difference. between Canada's pig problem and our pig problem, just mathematically. That's why they haven't caught up to us yet.

But Canada has learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and meetings with Canadians, and they say, we don't want to be Texas. We want to get on top of our pigs early on. One of your former colleagues, we both know Parker Hall. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I remember I was putting a similar question to Parker Hall about pigs and pig management.

And he had an interesting perspective. He, he told me, and tell me if you disagree or disagree with this, but the way he put it to me is, he said, if it was up to the pig, right, the whole country's pig territory. Yeah. But he said, but in a lot of areas, we're just able to get them. Right. You know, a lot of it's like, if they were there, they would be vulnerable to people getting them, to finding them, right? Like, meaning in open, like, in more open country without. certain attributes. And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas where it's possible to

go and take care of an outbreak. And that could be messing up some of his perspective. And he said, in some places, the terrain, vegetation is such that you just can't get them. And there's public resolve, right? I mean, you've got to actually have the will to get them. When the government had the, what we call the Farm Bill program, there's a feral, a wild pig eradication control pilot project that was created by the last farm bill. They said, show us some demonstration areas where we can really make a difference. Okay. And in Texas, we said, yeah, we think we could do this.

We had one area right up on the Oklahoma border, and Oklahoma had a site on the other side. So we're working on them from both sides of the Red River. And even with a free program, even with all the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about 30% of the land was signed up. Yeah. So there are landowners who want to keep their hogs. Oh. And unless we're going to say there's a foreign animal disease and we're going to come on your land, whether you like it or not, we're never going to eradicate pigs in those areas.

This, a hobby of mine, a hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I know that complain about pigs or that, that let us hunt pigs or whatever. Yeah. I'm always like, if you could, again, if you could wave a magic wand and have all the pigs be gone forever, would you do it? And I don't think I've met anyone who has yet said to me, I would wave it. The thing is usually, I just wish there weren't as many. Yeah. No, that's it. And I worked in Texas the first time when I was in the private sector.

There were about a million pigs in Texas. When I came back, there was about three million pigs in Texas. And the difference is remarkable. You know, if we could get them back to a million, we could tolerate the damage that they do. We could manage those numbers. At 3 million, the pig bomb has gone off. It's a critical mass.

Yeah, but something weird culturally has happened. I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in Texas around pigs, meaning there's an industry now. There's like a hog hunting industry. Sure. You know? Yeah. I think that there are a lot of people in Texas that are sort of, that are justifying behaviors,

motivating behaviors around pig removal, but they're rooting for the pigs. Sure. Because they've built an economy around the pigs. They're cropping them. Those helicopter operators will come in there until the landowner, we're helping you. But they're selling a seat at $1,500 an hour. They've got to have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat. So they're not coming back there next week to shoot them again.

they're going somewhere else. Yeah. And so, but, but the, the narrative to the, to the, to the would-be hog hunter going down to Texas is, oh, we're going to do this, we're going to do that because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But then you look at the guys running the outfits, I'm like, this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. This is, he's built a whole business around pigs. So the guy with the cornfield wants the pigs go.

Yeah. And he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs are living. The habitats over here on his neighbor and they're coming out of a, a canyon or they're coming out of a swamp and hitting the corn and then going back. That guy is selling hunts. This guy has the damage. Yeah. Renno mishap?

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They're also dropping new daily deals. So keep checking back. Something new will pop up, but they only last 24 hours. Head to Firstlight.com starting May 14 and reload. That's firstlight.com. Go get after it. Another thing I remember learning about pigs, and maybe you know if this is still happening or not,

is you'd see now and then a state would seemingly counterintuitively. A state would come in and say, no pig hunting. Pig hunting is not allowed. Right. Right. No one's allowed to hunt pigs. And he'd like, well, why would they not want them to hunt the pigs if there's, because

wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the pigs because you don't want the pigs? But what they're finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home. They have such a hell of a good time in Texas that when they go back to Missouri, they're like, throw a couple hogs in the truck. And that was an area of spread. Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains. But when they opened it up statewide, populations started popping up everywhere.

Got it. When they closed it on the western side of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving hogs for that. I got to preface my next statement with this. I'm a hunter. First and foremost, that's at the core of who I am. Good to meet you. I'm a hunter.

My wife was a taxidermist. Her whole, she made a living that way. I was an outfitter for 10 years full time. My firstborn child is named Hunter. Okay. That can backfire. Hunting has never capped a wild pig population anywhere in the world. Yeah.

Okay. They can outproduce bullets. Yeah. I understand. So anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine. But if you get to the kind of damage that we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck. One thing hitting another, hitting another.

There's got to be some level of control. Like recreational hunting is not going to dig you out of that. No, and we can't barbecue our way out of the problem, right? We've got a big problem down there. It takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple landowners and work at the same time. They can make a difference, but it's the problem gets big. Yeah.

Banning hunting, Kansas. has done it. Missouri went through quite a bit, even in occupier, banning hog hunting, is to reduce the incentive to go move pigs. That's what they're trying to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs,

but Alberta's got a bounty on pigs, and they're using it as a way to gather data on where they are. Got it. If there wasn't a bounty, then nobody would report the pigs and they'd start to get up. So somebody's going to shoot one of those $100 pigs, and now we know where that is.

Got a little pocket maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's all kinds of approaches, whether you're a high density state or a low density state. And we killed all the pigs in Washington like three different times. Is that right? We killed them all. Somebody went and got them again and brought them back.

And they went to the same source because the genetics match. Oh, those genetic, those maps that show source areas. Yeah. That the area, I think the area around, I can't remember if it was around Dallas or around Austin. Yeah. Seems to land a lot of pigs. in certain places around the country. And there's a couple of the little hot spots

where you can tell like where guys are sourcing them. Sure. And bumping them out of state. Yeah, both genetics and disease-wise too, right? Oh, you track the diseases. Hogs got pseudo-rabies and we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona being moved to Colorado. Because they carry that rabies with them.

Sudo-rabies, yeah. Got it. I don't understand pseudo-rubis. The technical name, or the common name, Ojuski's disease, it's a virus. It's a herpes virus that pigs have. Okay. So once they get it, they've always got it the rest of their life.

Got it. They got antibodies to it. But they shed that virus for like a 10 to 15 day period after they contract it, build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three weeks of age. It'll cause abortions in sows. Okay. But adult pigs, even little pigs, it will get over it. It's fatal to dogs.

Oh, is that right? We have hunting dogs that encounter pigs that are shedding the virus. that die from the disease. It can be fatal to wildlife. You want to talk about public will, start killing off people's dogs? There'll be public will. Oh, yeah. No, there's some dog owners, even hog dog owners who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog.

I got a friend in Los Angeles. She lives in, like, L.A. L.A. Yeah. And she's always sending me, like, the other day she sends me a picture where she's got her shoes outside her door, you know. But she sends me a picture, there's just one shoe outside her door. and out in her yard as a chewed-up shoe. I'm like, are you sure a coyote? She sends me pictures.

I mean, she said, no, dude, these coyotes are all over. And she says, you used to come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man, I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed. He's trapped coyotes in L.A. And she goes, no, because people like their pets more than they like. She says, it's flipped. It's flipped. It's flipped.

case with the Salt Lake Police Department. They were working with the Denver Police Department. They thought there were some serial cat mutilators that were, you know, cutting cats in half, and the skin was cut with a sharp deal. And it was a year-long investigation. And they finally came and asked me, what do you think? And I said, well, that, they showed me a picture. So what killed this?

I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or lungs, and it's been fed on by a bird. how do you know we'll see where the fur's removed they took me to a veterinarian's office where we thawed out a cat and i said it's going to be crunched on the brisket not on the back is why when a cat gets attacked by a coyote they roll over on their back and try to scratch the face sure enough had puncture marks they've over a year they were looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes doing it the whole time okay yeah i got three areas three more areas I want to ask you about. Yeah.

Cattle mutilations. Yeah. You know, I don't spend much time on it. I want to ask you about sort of the, what maybe is a myth, but like sort of the old, like the old kind of westerns and stuff where there was a specific wolf,

a specific grizzly, a specific lion that's wreaking havoc through the county. Yep. And then lastly, a little bit of philosophical question. But let's start with, let's start with the the myth or not of the individual animal.

Okay. Right. How often do you see that? Not often anymore. Okay. But when we were in the business of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard to get. Okay. And they became somewhat mythical.

They, you know, they brought in multiple people after them. I went to Australia in 2003 and worked on Dingo's day. down there. And they took me to one place and they said, this dingo's been killing sheep for two years. Okay. And the way they trap is they bring their dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure. And so the dog would go over and pee on a rock and scratch at it. And they make the set. And they put a set right there. And they said this, every time we set traps, the thing moves out and goes somewhere else.

Okay. And so, and I looked at every say, this is an old male. They said he's 80 kilometers from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence. you know, and he's 80 kilometers from the next known dingo, but we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's an old male. And your dog's coming in here and peeing on that rock is a territorial challenge. He's leaving because of that. Oh.

They said, okay, wise guy. Well, what is going on? What would you do? And I couldn't think of it right off. I don't know what you feed a dingo in Australia. Grind up a kangaroo. Give him food something. Yeah.

But it came to me at night. All canines like horsehook. If you're around a ferry or get some horsehift and take it home to your dog, they go crazy. So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make it a little paste out of it and put it in a dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by. Oh, really? Instead of using a territorial marker, they were using, they used something else and they caught him right away. And he was an old male.

Yeah. Those old legendary animals are kind of like that, right? an old wolf that's just traveling the country looking for females. And if you go in there and you give them a cow to eat, they're not going to eat the cow. They're looking for another female or they've been kicked out of a territory. They're 100 miles away from another wolf pack. Got it. And they're afraid of their own shadow.

So they're particularly hard to catch. Do you ever see a situation where when you have those like the mythic animal and he's got a name or whatever, you know, and no one can catch him? Everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal. Yeah. Do you see, do you ever see those real differences in behavior? Meaning that,

let's say you're working a, there's a desert bighorn recovery project going on somewhere, and you're losing desert bighorns. Does it ever wind up being that it's like a cat? Without a question. Like a lion is doing that. Without question. Okay.

Individual behavior is the hardest thing to account for. We put California big horns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah. And there weren't many lines there. They'd had a pretty aggressive season, but we knew there was a Tom up there. We knew there was a female up there looking at the tracks. Put radios on every big horn. And we had kind of a three strike in your out rule,

or two strikes in 30 days in your out. Okay. And the Tom killed almost immediately. Within the first week, he killed a U. and we could tell it was him where the sheep died. He was gone for about five days. He came back and killed another one. That's two strikes in 30 days we started after him.

He actually got a third sheep before we could catch him. Okay. And the day we caught him with the hounds, he was traveling with a female. Okay. Side by side. I think he bred her that day because she had littered her afterwards.

But that line we removed after three kills in like 14 days. she lived in the middle of those sheep, and for the rest of the collar life, she never killed a big one. Is that right? And she's raising kittens. She's got high nutritional requirement.

And she had the physical capability. She had the physical capability. Because she killed a cow elk if she wanted to. Yeah. It's just the individual behavior. That Tom knew where to go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd go get a lion or go get a big horn. But we also see the opposite, right?

for the in those lone wolf deals you know this wolf's been killing here for 20 years i bet he hadn't oh they don't live that long right that's what's funny but that's kind of what i was getting out with the mythical animal too is you see these me my me my buddy browdy we've looked at somebody's narratives you know or just like this old bear you know old eframe or whatever yeah yeah and it'd be that for 40 years he terrorized this valley you know i'm just like i don't feel that that's the same bear No, I don't think so. You know, he'd been, that might be his grandson. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, I wanted to ask you about that. Oh, cattle mutilation. You were talking, the reason I brought that up is you were talking about having people coming to you with dead animals. Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, hey, what happened here?

Right. And there's some forensics, you know, it'd be like, a lot. Was it drug up under a bush and buried? What was eaten? How did the animal, you know, where did the predator enter the animal? What did it go after first? All that kind of stuff. Right.

Can tell a tale. Right. do you when when people come up with these these inexplicable carcasses uh where they're like you know you get a rancher and he's like i never see anything like this you know and it was cut this way or whatever have you ever seen um have you ever seen carcasses where and i don't want to get i don't want to get like i'm not in any way inviting if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation i'm generally annoyed by the paranormal world But have you ever seen carcasses where you're just like, I have no idea what would have done that?

Yeah. The ones that I have been called to, we could explain. Okay. And it's usually a multi-pronged explanation, right? This cow was killed by lightning and fed on by a bear. I see. And so there's two different things going on and you're not getting the same signal that, you know, there's that. Yeah.

There's that. But there are things in cattle mutilations that I read about that I've never. not seen like the tongue missing. Yeah. Just the tongue missing. You know, rigor mortis sets in pretty fast. Oh, that job's locked. And it's hard to get in that.

How did that happen? I don't know that I can explain that, but that's not what I've seen. Yeah. Um, I investigated a suspected wolf kill right on the Utah, Wyoming border in a cow. And that cow had hemorrhaging right above her hawks. Okay. Yearling, uh, heifer come off the mouth. mountain and big hole in it.

And when we skinned the cow, that's the only bruising that we found. I think the darn thing was killed by team ropers. Oh, you're kidding. You know, and some cowboy was out there practicing and jerked her down too hard or something, but there was just no other bruising. When you were saying like hemorrhaging there, I didn't know if you meant like bid up. You mean just under skin bleeding? Under the skin bleeding.

Oh. But it was in a straight line. Both legs at the same point. Yeah, man. Someone's going, oh, that wasn't me. But someone having some fun and got a little rough. Yeah. Yeah.

No kidding. So there's, there's, you know, everything I've seen I've been able to explain is, as multiple, most cases, multiple explanations. You know, carrying, fed on is carrying, but killed by something else. Lightning kills are the hardest ones to explain because there'll be four of them dead under a tree. Sure. you know earlier i mentioned you something uh i made a joke about if you're doing wild hog work for sea turtles yeah you're gonna have you're gonna have a high level of buying right public buying sure you know because people i don't want to use the word fetishize i'm not thinking the right word but but there's you

know there's strong public sentiment about turtles yeah sea turtles right like people being like i don't want to use a drinking straw because it might get a sea turtle. People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog removal to save endangered sea turtles, you're going to find high public acceptance, not universal, but high public acceptance.

I would say in other cases where you have, um, you know, an imperiled or an ESA protected species and you're doing predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle work, but you're still going to have, high level of acceptance, you know. For me personally,

people will say, well, you're just killing coyotes so you can have more antelope to hunt. And I'm like, my response to that is

yes, there's more to it, but yes, I'm okay with that. Right? I'm okay with that. Yeah. I'm okay. with the idea that if we have a big game species that people like the hunt, rely on, it has cultural value, and if it's going down and you can do predator work to help recover it and bring the numbers back up because there's a strong social interest in having high numbers and you're not having long-term negative population impacts on the predator. In my mind, I'm like, yes, guilty is charged. I don't think that. that is bad.

Yeah. A negative thing to do. What has been your view on that, like, through your career? If you're doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work, you know, than you would in helping a guy out that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked at it throughout your career? Somebody was famously said, if public opinion was all that mattered, California would have nothing but predators.

And North Dakota wouldn't have any. Yeah. Public opinion is just part of the equation. You've got to have the social license to do what you do. Yeah. Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context of habitat. Okay. So if there is available habitat and if we as a group through our game department

said we want 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline, then we should work towards getting 10,000 deer on the Manti skyline. That's an objective that's set through a public process and all the rest. Yeah. I've had people in Texas ask me to protect their deer and their ranch is overgrazed and they're feeding deer to keep them a lot. And that's not the problem, right? Got it. Protecting their deer might be the reason it's so overgrazed or they got a browse line.

Yeah. And so if it's in the context of the habitat and if we have the social license, our game department has said we want this or we have a landowner who's conscientious about meeting their objectives, Absolutely. We should be deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal. We had a internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in West Texas. They had to do transplants to bring them back in. And the first couple of years of transplants were horrible because the predators were eating all the fawns. We went in there and started removing those fonds, removing those predators.

Bobcats actually were a big predator on. On pronghorn. Is that right? That's hard a picture. Out in the flats, but they're pretty good at it. And once we did that, we got the herds back up. We talked about when do you start predator management. You've got to have an exit strategy, too.

When do you stop? If we do it for five years and we haven't moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else. If we've done it and we get to where we're 80% of carrying capacity or 80% of our objective, then maybe we can leave that herd alone and go somewhere else. So you've got to have it. have an exit strategy for this too. And that's, that's, you know, should be done in the planning process. We'll do this for this long or until we see these results.

Yeah. And you're, um, you're, you're, you work in the private sector now. Yeah. Yep. Who are your clients? So I'm working, uh, on a research project with Safari Club foundation right now. We're putting radio collars on lines and putting cameras out in West Texas, trying, in South Texas as well, trying to get a handle on, on, on,

lion populations. You know, the research. Just descriptive, like what's out there? Yeah, distribution and abundance, basically. Lines in South Texas are fascinating. They just use the riverine corridors. Okay. So I'm going to pick a number and I guarantee it's wrong, but we might only have 100

lines in South Texas, but we may only have habitat for a hundred lions in South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution. Okay. And habitat fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else. oil fields and power lines, everything, tends to disrupt some of that. Landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches. That's a problem. I'm working with the Outfitters Association in Canadian Province

to try and get some of the predator management back into their wildlife management scheme, whether it's stuff that the outfitters themselves are doing is individual outfitters. You know, they've got regulated territories. not everybody can go to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey, look, I want more elk, I want to reduce my wolves. Well, what does that look like? Just, again, shoot one in November, are you actually going to go out there and target the pack? So we're building some strategies there.

I'm working for some individual landowners in Texas that have got mostly high fence properties, and the predators are impacting their genetic selection. These guys are farming deer. essentially. Oh, they're farming deer. They're outside. They're inside the fence, but they're, they're free roaming inside the fence, but they've invested in the genetics.

And that's, that's a little different than just the capacity. We still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got 80, 90 fowls per hundred doze. You better be shooting a lot of doze this fall because we can't feed that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the genetics and letting them decide rather than the coyotes decide which funds to get. How do people find you? Word of mouth a lot. I mean, I had a pretty good following when I was with USDA. A lot of

landowners know who I am. So I work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers on some of that. So some of those landowners already know me. So if there was some dude, some landowner somewhere and he wanted to talk to you about a problem he had or if he's trying to figure out if he has a problem, he'd just type in Mike Bowden, Chuck and he'd find you? He probably would. Yeah. There's a lot there on the. Not all those flattering either. The animal rights activists know how to find it too. They got your name.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, I sure appreciate you coming on top about all this stuff. Oh, yeah. No, predators are my life's work. And understanding how it works is probably important. You know, a lot of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do is critical.

Yeah, I think that's all fascinating. Yeah. I'd like to have you back on in the future. Good. Yeah. Just you got to keep a little running tab of stuff to talk about when you get up to six or seven. Let me know. Okay.

All right. All right. Mike Bowdenchuk. What do you go by? Mike? Mike. Mike. Mike Bowdenchuk. Thanks, man. Yep. Great. All right, quick word from the folks at first light. Their spring reload sale kicks off May 14, and it's a good one.

Up to 30% off some of my favorite pieces, the stuff I actually wear. From merino wool base layers for those cold mornings to the Yuma layers, when you're working hard, need to stay dry from the inside out. whether it's foundation pieces, pants, or outerwear. This is a good time to build out your kit for the seasons ahead. This is gear that earns its spot in my pack. Here's the thing. They're also dropping new daily deals, so keep checking back.

Something new will pop up, but they only last 24 hours. Head to Firstlight.com starting May 14 and reload. That's firstlight.com. Go get after it. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.