00:00:08 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now here's Kel. This week, we're gonna attempt to feed two birds with one stone, or if you're still into species language, kill two birds with one stone. If you're confused by my opener, that's something from our friends at Peter. We all know about racist and sexist language, which is language that denigrates certain people. Well, Peta is wanting to take on specious language which denigrates animals by getting us to stop saying old timey phrases such as bring home the bacon. So on this week's wee Can Review, I'm bringing home the bagels. Before we get into the news from the Big wide World, which is going to include a few cool things about birds and some not so cool things about cats. I'm gonna start with news from my world. Just got back from Tennessee. It was in bed down to talk Turkey with the folks from PBS television series Reconnecting Roots. Uh, the host gave McCaulay had never been hunting, so we set out to get him his very first bird. We got a tremendous amount of help from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Foundation, a nonprofit attached to the Tennessee Department of Fish and Wildlife. I gotta tell you, Tennessee pretty much bowled me over because it was ultra green and beautiful. Um. And you know that song Crimson and clover over and over, Well that is happening just outside of Nashville right now. So if you're around, get out there and check it out. It is gorgeous. If you've never hunted turkeys, here are some interesting facts. Turkeys are omnivorous. They will eat anything snails, snakes, mice, salamanders, even crayfish plucked from underwater. Turkeys, of course, had been nearly wiped out of Tennessee by the early nineteen hundreds do the unrestricted hunting and the destruction of habitat. Many other states, including Michigan, for one, lost their turkeys entirely. Now, due to major reintroduction efforts by the Wild Turkey Federation and other sportsman's groups and state wildlife agencies, the wild turkey can be found in every county in Tennessee and in every state except Alaska. That's about ten more states than where turkeys could be found when Columbus quote discovered America. It's estimated that this country has around seven million wild turkeys total. That seems like a lot until you put it in the context of domestic turkey production and consumption. Back in two thousand eleven, Americans consumed about seven d and thirty six million pounds of turkey meat. That's a couple of pounds of turkey meat for every American. But what we really like his chicken. In two thousand sixteen, Americans consumed over ninety pounds of chicken per person. Onto a particular bird that was in the news lately, a Florida man was killed, stomped to death, it seems, by his pet Cassewary in Alachua County. The cast wary, a native to New Guinea, can stand about six ft tall and way a hundred and thirty pounds. Oddly enough, much like the wild turkey, the cast where he has incredibly strong legs capable of propelling the bird to speeds around thirty miles per hour. According to the deceased own wishes, the offending cass Wary and around a hundred other specimens of exotic wildlife owned by the man are all being auctioned off. Get your bids in, but keep in mind if you want to get into the cast wary game. Florida limits ownership of the birds to those with prior cast wary experience. Here's another cool bird story. It's about a lazing albatrouse named Wisdom. Wisdom the albatross nest every year on Midway Aptole. Midway Atoll is a two point four square mile piece of coral about midway between North America and Asia. Of all the world's albatross species nest there well. Wisdom was first banded on that island back in At that time, she was an estimated five years old. Las and albatross are wide ranging birds, and Wisdom has probably traveled around three million miles in her lifetime. She's currently a whopping sixty eight years old, making her the oldest known wild bird in the world, and she's still rearing chicks. There could be older birds, for sure, but we haven't heard from them until we do. Hats off to Wisdom, quick news hit on street pigeons or Columbo Olibya. Municipalities have attempted to eradicate these birds across the country, but they do have their admirers. Armando, an uncommonly fast homing pigeon, which is the same thing taxonomically speaking as a street pigeon, just fetched one point four million dollars at auction. That's a lot of scratch. Now, according to the Chinese calendar, we're in the Year of the Pig, but if you listen to the news, you might think we're in the Year of the cat. I feel compelled here to point out that cats taste a lot like pig, but that's for another discussion. This year, Washington State had its first ever case in state history of a mountain lion killing a human being. Oregon had its first case of a mountain lion killing a human in over ninety years. We all heard about the jogger in Colorado who strangled the young mountain lion that attacked him while he was running well. Another Colorado man recently made the news by bringing home a mountain lion kitten and feeding at bratwurst. He posted it on social media where he said he released it, but wildlife officials found out still living in the home and not doing well speaking at house cats. I study published in two thousand thirteen at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in conjunction with the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that outdoor cats that's both feral cats and pet cats that you let out at your home at night, killed two point four billion birds a year in the US, making Tabby the leading human cause source of bird mortality in the country. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature i u c N lists house cats as one of the world's most harmful invasive species. How harmful. U c N has directly linked outdoor cats to the eradication of sixty three species of birds, reptiles, and small mammals worldwide. I don't care if you live down the street from the most bird hunting bird hunter in the world. That hunter has less of an impact on birds in the US than the neighbor letting their cat out at night. The situation with house cats is so bad in Australia that the government there is attempt to kill two million feral house cats in that country. They're paying bounties on cats and part of the plan involves dropping poison sausages from the air. No word on whether they'll be using bratwurst on British Columbia, where the anti hunting organization Defenders of Wildlife are campaigning and all cat hunting in British Columbia. That's Mount Lion, Linx and Bobcat, which are all stable and thriving. I think it's a bad move and unnecessary, but Defenders of Wildlife are doing one thing I agree with. Along with Sierra Club, they're part of the lawsuit against Grand Teton National Park. Grand Teton is located outside Jackson Hold, Wyoming. The lawsuit is aimed at forcing them to end the elk feeding program. Why stop feeding? Feeding stations cause animals to group together in unnaturally high densities, making the situation perfect for the spread of wildlife diseases. Last year, a road killed mule deer found inside Ground Teton National Park tested positive for chronic wasting disease. C w D has now been found in twenty six states and poses a serious risk to deer and elk. It's time we started taking CWD way more seriously than we have been. Now back to cats, where we're gonna linger for the rest of the episode. A couple of teens in Texas, Houston to be exact, slipped into an abandoned house to smoke some weed as team they want to do, and found it inside a genuine tiger locked up in a cage in the garage. I can imagine them thinking, am I really baked? Or is that a tiger? Well it was, and the kids did the right thing, called the cops. The officers found the cap, got it fed, watered, and released it back into the Texas night just kidding. The tiger was taken to a facility to be cared for. Texas is home to an estimated five to seven thousand tigers, so many they don't exactly know how many of there are. Remember this is Texas where recently in the DFW they found a wallaby walk in the street and caught a guy with a bucket full of live Asian swamp eels. Charges pending for the eels apparently eels or where they draw the line down there? Up in Montana, a bobcat recently walked into a bar and butte and had stomach parasites and need to be put down. Not sure if it described to that old wives tale about whiskey fixing up problems with creepy Crawley's in your gut, But if you've ever been to Bute, I'm sure you're having no problem believing the truth of this story. It's not surprising that a cat can make it from the wilderness to a city bar considering this story about a mount lion that was killed by a car in Connecticut back in two thousand eleven. Well this year, we finally learned that that cat was almost certainly from South Dakota and traveled over fifteen hundred miles from its original home to its place of death. Genetic and forensic evidence suggests that it left South Dakota and traveled up through Michigan's Upper Peninsula into Canada, and then backed down into the Eastern US. The cat was packing a load of porcupine quills in its skin when it died about an hour's drive from New York City. Speaking of cities, l A and Mumbai have something strange and common. Both places are categorized as mega cities, meaning they have over ten llion residents and bull cities have large predators living within city limits. L A has the mountain lion, Mumbai the leopard, and estimated forty one leopards live in Mumbai, residing in a forty square mile area encompassed by Sanjay Gandhi National Park. The park has a full time human population of two fifty thousand people in addition to being one of the most visited parks in the world. The l a cat population is a little more disjointed. The cats are broken into what are known as island ecosystems in the Santa Monica Mountains. The Santa Monica Mountains are surrounded by dense human populations and some of the busiest highway and interstate systems in the US, so think of them as islands of habitat in a sea of people. The blacktail deer represents over nine of the diet of these lions, with coyotes, foxes, and the occasional domestic critter like a goat, sheep, ostrich or lama mixed in and house cats. In turn, the predator of mountain lions is mountain lions. The second top predator of mountain lions are humans via are automobiles. Cats get hit on the highway. Here's where these causes of mortality get interesting, and that they're linked. Dominant males want to make sure that their own individual genes get passed along as much as possible. They kill Kitton's probably in order to bring the female mother back into sexual receptivity, and they kill subordinate males to diminish competition. In order for young mountain lions to make it, they often need to find their own territory, which means striking out for new ground. But remember those highways. That's right deadly for migrating cats. Mount lions are having an extremely difficult time getting across the highways of l A. Take the case of a mountain lion named P. Twenty two who lives in Griffith Park, where the famous Hollywood sign sits. The park is only six and a half square miles. P twenty two doesn't leave it. Compare that to the mount lion who traveled fift miles from South Dakota to Connecticut, and take into consideration that both these male cats are interested in the exact same things food and cats are the opposite sex. To find those things, these l A cats need greater connectivity with both habitat and mountain lions outside of the city. They need a way to roam, to come and go. This would give young mountain lions a chance to find their own territories, and it would allow for some much needed genetic diversity from new mountain lions coming in. Currently, the cats in this area are breeding with cousins and siblings and their own young, which creates major problems. That's why there have been repeated efforts to establish a wildlife corridor in the forum of an overpass over the one oh one. The next time that issue comes up, I say vote for it. Get that thing funded. I've been to l A and you folks could use a little more connectivity. Thanks for listening. 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