The MeatEater Podcast - The MeatEater Podcast Presents: Cal's Week in Review, Episode 2

Episode Date: May 20, 2019

The MeatEater Podcast introduces the best thing to hit the internet--our network's new podcast, "Cal's Week in Review." This week, our very own Ryan "Cal" Callaghan brings you cool facts about old poop, fish, birds, ticks, poachers, snakes and a bunch of other cliff notes from the world of wildlife and conservation. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. Hey, if you're wondering why this episode of Cal's Week in Review has been served up to you, when you thought you were just subscribing to the Meat Eater podcast, it's because we're playing dirty pool in the podcast space. I promise to never do this to you again

for the next year, let's say. Man, six months, year, I won't do this to you again. All I'm doing is we're serving this in here, even though you don't subscribe, because I honestly believe that you will be glad to find out about it. So I'm violating some trust by wedging in a show you don't subscribe to into here, but I'm doing it with your own best interest because I think you're going to come out thinking like, man, Cal's Week in Review is the perfect compliment to the Meat Eater Podcast. Cal being Ryan Cal Callahan, who always on the Meteor podcast anyway so if you like Meteor podcast

you know and probably like Cal right Cal I hope so he's sitting right here playing dirty pool with me so tell them what they ought to do Cal like you're going to listen to the show it'll start in a minute you'll know it starts because it's like a newsy sound intro and then you'll listen to the show and you'll be like holy smokes this is the greatest show i've ever listened to and then you will you will track that show down wherever podcasts are available to be streamed or downloaded same way you track down the meat eater podcast and you're going to subscribe and leave me a review. Yeah. Click the right most star that we're going to write whatever the hell you

want, but just make sure you click the right most star and then say whatever you feel like saying that we don't care about that part. Uh, is it enjoy cows? We can review ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening. From Mediator's World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana,

this is Cal's Week in Review with Ryan Cal Callahan. Now, here's Cal. This week, we're talking about, among other things, coprolites. A coprolite is a classy name for old poop, fossilized feces. If you are the issuer, the layer downer of a coprolite, you are its author. Biologists and anthropologists are interested in coprolites because they are evidence of the animal's behavior rather than morphology, as in you can tell what it's been eating, which is telling. In addition to old dried up dung, today I'm going to touch on fish, birds,

poachers, snakes, ticks, getting drunk, and general outdoors goings-on. But before we get into the news from the big wide world, first I'm going to tell you about my world. As it turns out, I'm still recovering from my turkey hunt in the spring green hills outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I woke up the other morning with a Tennessee tick, a hitchhiker if you will, embedded in my armpit. This was troubling for a number of reasons. One is being in your mid-30s, it just doesn't feel great to question your ability to clean yourself. And then there's the simple creepy feeling of discovering parasites on yourself. On my way home from Tennessee, I'm sitting in Nashville airport. This is where it gets real exciting. Hacking away at my emails in the Delta lounge.

I feel an itch and find a tick embedded on the back of my arm. Thought, man, that sucks. Then I felt another drop out of my rapidly receding hairline and onto my shoulder. This was enough tick activity to get me fully grossed out, up out of my seat, into action. So there I am, completely stripped naked in the bathroom of the Delta Lounge, performing a full-on tick check, where I find a tick embedded in my scrotum. I only bring this up because I am big on honesty, and sincerely when a man finds a disease carrying parasite and what the old timers would call your soft parts it's a real sinking feeling. Ticks attach themselves

to hosts by questing which is climbing to a vantage point that will allow them to either grab or drop onto an animal as they pass by. Ticks can carry a number of diseases most notable being Lyme's disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which are both bacterial infections that are introduced to humans through contact with the offending tick. Ticks need to be attached for 24 hours or longer in order to transmit, so catch them early. Prevalence of tick-borne illnesses is steadily increasing in the U.S. For instance, there's been an over 3x increase in confirmed Lyme's cases since 1997. Now, on to fish. For those of you waiting on the Minnesota whitefish

record to be broken, it's been a long time coming. Quick facts about the lake whitefish is, it is the most commercially valuable freshwater fish in Canada. Here in the States, it's sometimes regarded as a trash fish, but Europeans are mad about the roe. Commercial white fishermen who harvest the fish with trap nets can make as much or more from exporting caviar as they do selling fillets. Anyhow, the Minnesota whitefish record from 1999 has been busted by a first-time ice angler. His 13-pound, 9.1-ounce whitefish came in at almost 30 inches in length and 22 inches in girth. In Montana, we'd call that a big whitey. While the angler was new to ice fishing, he's an old hand at noodling for flathead catfish. Noodling, or tickling, is when you catch a flathead by inserting a hand into their mouth

and allow them to bite down on your hand. When the cat bites, you haul it from the water. The catfish noodling record is 85 pounds, two ounces. The all-time flathead record for regular fishing with your standard old rod and reel setup is over 123 pounds. That fish was from Kansas. If you think pulling fish through the ice or grabbing them by the mouth sounds cruel, or if you think, who cares, it's just a fish, Take a look at the case of Michael Ray Hinson. Not to be confused with the wonderful Texas musician Micah P. Hinson. Michael Ray Hinson was charged with one count of abandonment of an animal and three counts of misdemeanor cruelty to animals. Hinson

was evicted from his home in New Hanover County, North Carolina and left behind a neglected six inch Oscar fish. Authorities found the Oscar in deplorable conditions with parasitic hole-in-the-head disease. Yes, hole-in-the-head disease. Apparently a common problem encountered by aquarium enthusiasts. Good thing for Hinson, new Hanover County District Attorney Ben David determined that animal cruelty statutes don't apply to fish. As the DA stated, we take a very dim view of anyone who would abuse any creature, great or small. Think about that the next time you see a bunch of goldfish in plastic bags at the fair, or heaven forbid,

in the bottom of your fishing bucket. Speaking of protections for fish, check this one out. It probably goes without saying that fish in the desert are rare, but would you guess that Death Valley is home to the rarest known fish on Earth? The Devil's Hole, located not all that far from Las Vegas, Nevada, is part of the Ash Meadows Complex, which is in turn part of the Death Valley National Park. The complex is comprised of seeps and springs that bring fossil water, which is water that seeped into the aquifer millennia ago, to the surface. What could be more tempting than water in the desert, right?

Right. The Devil's Hole is a seriously protected place. Ten-foot fences, highly controlled, highly monitored. In 2016, a small group of bored, drunk, and armed desert dwellers decided, for reasons unknown, to go for a swim. The boys get through the fence and in short order we've got an illegal skinny dipper in Devil's Hole. This skinny dipper is a convicted felon in possession of a shotgun. During a swim he manages to step onto the small shelf of rock that is the epicenter of life at Devil's Hole.

When the National Park Service crew is made aware of this violation, they show up to investigate. As it turns out, it looks as though the disturbance of the pool in Devil's Hole resulted in the death of a rare pupfish. When I say rare, I mean the Devil's Hole pupfish is one of the rarest fish on the planet. This tiny, shimmery blue fish is only found there, in the waters of Devil's Hole. The Devil's Hole pupfish has been on the endangered species list since the list was created. While we don't know for absolute certain that this fellow killed the pupfish, circumstantial evidence is pointing very decidedly in that direction. So what's the punishment? If you learn anything here, let it be this. Don't go drinking and messing with the Endangered Species Act.

Our skinny dipper was finally sentenced recently and got nine months in the clink for the ESA violation. Four months for the trespassing and destruction of property and has to pay $14,000 in restitution to the National Park Service. And to top it all off, the queen mother of all punishments upon release. The devil's whole skinny dipper will be forbidden to enter federal public lands for the rest of his life. And this is where I start to feel bad for our dipper. This guy and his buddies made really bad decisions. Deplorable. When you think about wiping a species off the face of the earth for the sake of drunken dumbassery,

things they'll likely regret for the rest of their lives and should, mind you. But imagine you live in Nevada and you've been banned for life from 84.9% of your home state. 84.9% is the percentage of federally managed land in Nevada. You've basically been sentenced to live in Las Vegas. And that sounds cruel and unusual to me. In the spirit of reform, I'd rather see the dipper sentenced to cleaning up the desert as opposed to being banned from it. Let's go from little blue fish to the big and toothy alligator gar. A couple of guys on the Brazos River landed a seven foot seven inch alligator gar weighing in at 198 pounds. The head alone weighed 25. Now this sounds like a beast, but the world record came out of Texas and went 279 pounds. These creatures date back to the Cretaceous period, meaning alligator gar have been swimming for at least 66 million years. If you watch the movie Jurassic World, the dinosaur that jumps out of the water and eats the T-Rex hybrid at the end, that's a Mosasaur. The Mosasaur and the gar

swam at the same time. Obviously, the gar is still around and the mosasaur is a clever girl. And that's how we get the term living fossil. Some of our favorite living fossils, horseshoe crabs, snapping turtles, possums, and the tastiest of all, the American pronghorn antelope. Here's a few more fun facts about the gar. Scales that stretch are called elasmoid scales. Scales that don't, ganoid scales. Gar have ganoid scales. They can hack a serious bite without effect. One reason the gar may have stood the test of time is in addition to regular old fish gills, the gar has a specialized swim bladder that acts like a lung. This specialized swim bladder allows the gar to sip air from the surface. Because of this, the gar can inhabit low oxygen

water other fish can't. I just flipped a few flies at another gar species, the spotted gar, down in Texas a few weeks ago on the Lionel River. Really neat fish. You should definitely check them out. Like public lands? As I was saying, Nevada has a good chunk of them, but soon the sheep range, mountains that is, which you can see from the airplane window when you're landing in Vegas, may soon be closed off to the public. Ouch. Right now the U.S. military is asking for an additional 225,000 acres of the mountain range for bombing practice. That's the size of 2,250 Disneyland's, if you include the new Star Wars expansion. There are a few problems with this, one being that these

mountains happen to be some of the best desert bighorn sheep habitat in the world. Once upon a time, it's estimated that we had around 2 million bighorn sheep. That's both Rocky Mountain and desert bighorns. Thanks to unregulated market hunting, habitat loss, and disease, the latter of which remains the primary threat to sheep, that number was whittled down to roughly 15,000 by 1900. Now we're back up to around 70,000. Sure, not perfect, but we're out of the bighorn dark ages and getting there. Any sheep that's still on the mountain is there because we fought for it. That's certainly true of the sheep range bighorns. For decades, conservation organizations such as Wild Sheep Foundation have worked their asses off to

conserve the sheep range and its 600 desert bighorn. Habitat improvements, water improvements, and plenty of other hot, sweaty work. We're talking hundreds of regular folks donating time and money on behalf of wildlife. Let's not piss that away. Get off your butts and act now. Call your elected officials if you care about desert bighorns and public access of wild places. I understand the needs of national defense, but let's play the long game here. What's wild should stay wild. We're not going to run out of degraded landscapes, so don't worry about that. End the war on wild sheep. Now we're going to talk about things that should be and things that shouldn't be. Up near our northern border with Canada, out in Lake

Superior, is Isle Royale National Park. Isle Royale is a remote island chain in the northwest corner of the lake, a car-free Michigan wilderness where, at least nowadays, moose and wolves roam. Somewhat mysteriously, moose first showed up on the island in the early 1900s. Either they walked across the ice to get there or someone brought them out there and cut them loose. Wolves showed up in 1948, having crossed an ice bridge between mainland Ontario and the island. Things have been up and down since then. The wolf population got as high as 50, but recently dropped to just two. Inbred as all get out. Meanwhile, moose are kicking ass at a current estimated population of around 1,500. The National Park Service recently released four gray wolves to help the wolf population out, and they're preparing to deliver 20 or 30 more over the next five years at a cost of $2 million.

You might wonder why we'd be flying animals back and forth to a national park. Parks are supposed to be places where nature is allowed to run national park. Parks are supposed to be places where nature is allowed to run a course unimpeded by man. Granted, it sounds a little bit like zoo keeping. Well, in this case, it has to do with ice and cold weather. Ice bridges between the mainland and Isle Royale were more common in past decades, which allowed some sporadic coming and going of critters. But times have changed. Now it seldom freezes good enough. From 1998 until 2011, a solid ice bridge formed only once, in 2008. From 2013 to 2017, Isle Royale was connected to the mainland only twice, and in those instances, only for a few days. Somewhat ironically, one of the wolves that was flown out

to save the wolves that can't get replenished due to a lack of ice promptly left the island on, you guessed it, an ice bridge. It's real complicated out there on Isle Royale. You want to know something that's also pretty interesting? Up until the 20s and 30s, the island was home to lynx and caribou, both of which vanished without any restocking efforts from us humans. Are we smarter now or just different? On to Florida. According to a 2004 study, 26% of all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish in southern Florida are non-native. We're talking iguanas, snakeheads, tilapia, parakeets, and over 150 other species. Florida even has feral monkeys climbing around. It's the non-indigenous species capital

of the United States. I'll add that Florida means land of flowers in Spanish, so that's nice. Returning to non-natives, they've got the Burmese python living down there. The biggest has been recorded at over 23 feet in length and 200 pounds in their native range of Southeast Asia. They didn't think they could get that big in Florida, at least until now. In Big Cypress National Preserve, researchers captured a 17-foot female python that weighed over 140 pounds and held 73 eggs. They caught it using the Judas method. In the Bible, Judas betrays Jesus. In Florida, Judas was a male python with a tracking device that they released so he could go out and do what male pythons want to do, which is find females, give them some time, track him back down,

see who he's hanging with. In this case, it was the 140-pound girlfriend, confirming, beyond doubt, that Florida can grow a big snake. Big snakes can only get big by eating well. According to studies by the U.S. Geological Survey and Everglades National Park, there has been a 99.3% decrease in raccoon observation, a 98.9% decrease in opossum observations, and an 87.5% decrease in bobcat observations. The most recent surveys have shown that marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes have, quote, effectively disappeared. Of course, non-natives cost us more than just native wildlife. According to the Nature Conservancy, invasive species cost the United States about $100 billion per year. Over west of Florida,

a few states, you've got Texas sitting there all proud and beautiful. Rattlesnakes, oil rigs, a shitload of tigers. If you don't know what I'm talking about, and I mentioned tigers, you should have listened to last week's episode of this show. Also, poachers. Doing it for the gram. Instagram, that is. Deeds done for the gram might lead a poacher to time behind bars. Recently, the Texas Operation Game Thief Wildlife Crime Stoppers hotline started buzzing about an illegally taken wild turkey. The perpetrator spotted the bird, rolled the windows down, squeezed off a shell, and ended the life of the spring turk. Apparently this wizard of multitasking

caught it all on video and loaded it up for his IG followers. Common sense would dictate that you, first off, should not roll down the window of your hunting rig to blast a turkey, or any animal for that matter. In most states, shooting for the roadway in any fashion is illegal. Secondly, don't post your illegal activity to Instagram and share with the world. I appreciate the easy job you were making for the game wardens, but I don't want to be associated with you as part of the hunting community. More from Texas. Remember that opening bit about coprolites? Here's why I brought that up. In the late 1960s, archaeologists collected over a thousand samples of human-produced coprolites

at the Conejo Shelter in southwest Texas. Just recently, these samples were re-examined by an archaeological team from Texas A&M. In one of the samples, they found a small rodent, apparently eaten whole, which, for the people living around Conejo Shelter, was not abnormal. Life in the desert has its challenges. In another sample, the team did get a surprise. A surprise in the form of what appeared to be a whole rattlesnake, including the snake's hide,

head, and a one centimeter long fang. According to the authors of the report, quote, we propose that a likely explanation for the ingestion of an entire snake is that the individual did so for a distinctly ceremonial or ritualistic purpose, end quote. You know, there's a joke in the archaeological community. Something you've dug up doesn't make sense, call it ritualistic or ceremonial and move on. Thing is, I can think of a few things I've ingested that were certainly not ceremonial or ritualistic, though they'd still make it tough for anyone to propose a likely explanation for my behavior. From our technology desk, engineers at Cornell Lab of Ornithology have created, at the request of a professor in the

Department of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis, a sage-grouse fembot. The request for these lovely robotic ladies of the sage was inspired by the desire to understand sage-grouse breeding habits, specifically how man-made disturbances affect breeding efforts on and around leks, which are communal breeding areas where male sage-grouse compete for females through elaborate sexual displays. Scientists remotely drive these robotic bird renditions, which sport an external frame that's wrapped with female sage-grouse skin and feathers and further fitted with all-terrain wheels. The mechanized lovebirds are fitted with a camera to capture male behavior up close and personal, sometimes too close. Strutting males have repeatedly mounted and attempted to breed

these female robots. Then again, they've also been reported to mount an old dried up cow patty. Tough times for sage-grouse lovemaking. And lastly, a word from that wonderful Texas musician I mentioned earlier, Micah P. Hinson. Again, don't confuse him with Michael Ray Hinson, the guy who neglected his pet fish. My grandpa was born on a cold summer's day. Not in New York, Chicago, or any special place. Thanks and tune in next week. Find out more about all this fascinating information at TheMeatEater.com and email me at AskCal

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

24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.