00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now here's kel beaver walks into a bar or subway or rather, and there's no joke, that's all. Just a beaver walks into the subway in Toronto, which resulted in the subway stop of Royal York being shut down temporarily by the Toronto Transit Authority or t T a anti discrimination lawsuit pending. Tis the season to find beavers in abnormal places. Adult beavers kick their young out of the dens in the spring to disperse to new locations with high water runoff associated with melting snow and rain. That's right. You can't blame this young beaver for hanging out in the subway, but you can blame its parents. Years ago, well, bird hunting a large piece of high dry block land management out in eastern Montana, I was shocked to find a beaver carcass laying underneath the tall sage right in amongst the prickly pear cactus miles from consistent water. Seemed wildly out of place and kind of conjured up the images of lone cowboys crawling through the high prairie being beat down by the sun in search of water. Cool clear water wood would be nice. More recently, my girlfriend and I headed out on a mission to retrieve a supposed road killed beaver near Three Forks, Montana, which, on one hand I suppose you could call odd, but if you think about the history of beaver and the Three Forks of the Missouri, it's kind of fitting. We did not locate the beaver, but we did swing into the Sack of jewiah In because they have great poutine. That's right, French fries, gravy cheese cards, just like they have in Canada. And you were starting to think this had nothing to do with Toronto. He is truly a master of his craft. Anyway, some very nice person or persons bought us dinner. Don't know who you are, but thank you, and to the rest of you, be on the lookout for beavers and strange places, even if you can't put your hands on one, something good may come out of it. Happened to us anyway. This week we've got listener emails, wildlife, crime and wisdom. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as this podcast is sponsored by the amazing people at Steel Power Equipment. It does not matter if you're an urban flower box, high rise gardener or a wood fueled boiler burner. Steel has something for you. So the next time you go past that classic orange Steel sign, stop in, buy something and tell them you heard about Steel on your favorite podcast, Cal's wee Can Review. Then tell them what Our's Weekend Review is. It's a podcast and they should listen to it. Everybody wins get a new friend out of it. My goodness, this is the one hundredth episode of Cal's Weekend Review, which is just a number but also a bit of milestone, and milestone should get a moment of reflection. The average we Can review is right in the neighborhood of about thirty four hundred words on paper, meaning that somewhere in the neighborhood of three words or several steeny paperback romance novels worth of words have been typed or panned over the chorus of one hundred episodes. For reference, the Wizard of Oz was forty words. Legends of the Fall, the novel by Jim Harrison, which comes to mind as I look out my Montana window to early spring Snowstorms was only two five twenty four words. Two in the Shade by Tom mcgwain, just to shade over fifty thousand words. I'm not comparing myself to these writers, mind you. I'm just pointing out there is a living to be made doing a lot less. I'm comparing word count, not skill, so give me a break, not that full of myself. We are going to depart from the regular format of Cal's Weekend Review because it's the one episode. Then we'll get back to the fast, fun wildlife news on episode one oh one, I promise. Before we get to a couple of stories harvested from the Ask Cal email, I want to thank Fill the engineer, car In the producer, and Alex Tilney, the writer, as well as Hayden Sammic. Alex has been contributing to the podcast research and writing for a few weeks, but has recently selfishly chosen to take a break because of a newborn baby. News does not stop for reproduction, Alex. Congrats to you and Sarah though, and again, thank you to the whole team for doing so much work. I appreciate you and everybody who writes in the Ask Cow email. Those two and I need to thank you folks too. Thank you to everyone who downloads this and subscribes and shares and writes into the Cow's We Can Review podcast, and those that have been tuning in to the Cow in the Field series. We've released Grizzlies and rewards for Rainbows in Idaho. This week we are traveling to Louisiana with Jared Serinier of Beyond the Levies and Captain Jarreau Brewer to catch fish and hunt what the bayou has to offer while we look at the effects of salt water intrusion and land loss. Check that out at the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Moving on to the Ask cal email desk, or maybe we'll call it anecdotes because it is the season and it's a good reminder that it's not just a bunch of old folks in the woods. Will writes in We woke up at four am and got all set up before light. We were set up with a strutter in three hands because I had watched a three pack of Tom's run a lone bird out of the field the night before. Over the next forty five minutes, seven Tom's, three Jake's and two bearded hands was seven or eight other hands made their way out, gobbling, strutting, fighting the whole show, but all out of range. We watched the birds do circles over the next couple of hours until my friend looks out the back window and says, oh, no, Tom, sixty yards the silent bird had got right in on us on the wrong side of the blind. Had he kept on his original course, he would have fed out in front of us, But let's face it, these birds seldom do what we want them to. Instead, he walked right to fifteen yards directly behind us, where we had no open windows in our ground blind, and made a left turn, showing no real interest in our fake friends we had laid out for him. I decided we needed to try and make a move, so I stood my son up and started slowly peeling a window open to maybe get a shot somehow. After the commotion of shuffling gear and maneuvering my four ft tall, fifty pounds son to a standing position on my chair, the bird was still only twenty yards away. You see him, yep, daddy, calmly, with the stealth of your normal every day running the mill six pound man, I eased the gun out the window, got right over my son's shoulder, and before I could ask, I felt him move the dot and the barrel over the bird and hold steady. I told him if he's on, pulled the trigger nice and boom. I knew as soon as the gun went off what had happened. The pattern ripped through the mud and wheat low and right. I felt him jerked the trigger and peek as the tom ran out to sixty yards and did a slow circle to join the rest of the birds just a hundred and fifty yards away. It was a great morning, and we came away with no bird. I thought about it a couple of days now, and I'm not disappointed at all. I would have thought I would have had some sort of disappointment if this happened on my son's first hunt, but I'm not, and I think it's because it was everything I wanted it to be. The morning lived up to our excitement from the night before. A bird would have been cool, But there's a huge part of me that wants my son to earn this stuff. When we started hunting birds in Lower Michigan, we'd sometimes go days without seeing or hearing a bird, and we had to hunt hard. My son just walked more turkeys and one morning than I probably saw in my first three years of turkey hunting. It was great. I couldn't be happier with the morning. And sometimes new turkey hunters aren't that young, Matt writes in imagine a place full of anti hunters and anti gun folks. Add onto that no hunting on Sundays, no hunting for turkeys after twelve pm, and limited public land. On this day, I brought my buddy Diddy, a first time hunter, into the turkey woods. He was placed in an advent contageous position, which is what you do with first timers five out of six times. In this situation. The birds come to us from the other side of a two hundred year old rock wall. Did he is facing the wall head on at twelve o'clock? I'm facing the woods at his nine o'clock position. Birds are gobbling in the dark, and I can tell did he is excited? I say two rules? Did he? Don't move, and don't shoot until I say so. The sun crests the trees and the birds are off the roost. The birds closest to us were not interested, and they followed some hands across the road and into some neighboring property did. He gets disappointed and later told me he was thinking, why the hell did I get up with this guy? Been there? Eventually I hear birds two to three hundred yards away responding to soft yelps, but not coming. So I start making a racket excited yelps, clucks, purrs, any sound I can get out of that diaphragm call. Five minutes later, two tom's come running around a dirt pile like usain bolt wings tucked back, heads pined in our direction, a flat out race to come and bang my twenty trio of decoys. They come to a screeching halt, twenty ft from the rock wall and thirty ft from us. The bird on the left is a world record. The bird on the right is a stud as well. The turks begin moving and are about to swap positions. Then they both rip out a gobble and I see did he's butt leave the ground in surprise. As soon as his behind touches the earth, he touches off a shot without permission. The bird on the right flops, and the six bearded potential world record takes one last look at me before he decides it's time to boogie. I roll right, come up on one knee, click my safety off, and shoot before he reaches full throttle. Did he is so fired up he hardly knows what's happened. I immediately tell him to put his gun on safe. Out of breath. He says, oh yeah, thank you, good idea. Two birds in the bag by nine am. We took all the measurements on my bird and sent them into s C. I sure enough, new world record. It did not make the National Wild Turkey Federation World Record because they include weight as a measure, and some of the Southern birds are coming in over thirty five pounds. I believe this bird was twenty four to twenty six pounds frozen. Even at live weight, he would not have beaten the n w t F records. I included this one because it's hard to take first timers in the woods, regardless of age. But maybe a six bearded world record turkey doesn't round the corner like you saying bolt. If you don't next up, throw a little news at you the crime desk, because we cover this beat often and it is a good reminder that we want justice, which is a punishment that fits the crime. If I could show you the search result. It's when I type in poaching in the email search box. The theme that quickly emerges is that the guilty party got off too easy. Well, here's a part of a letter from a poacher. All the context I'll give you is this. This is a first time offender, first time lawbreaker, who, owning up to his crime, pled guilty as opposed to putting up a fight in court, and probably didn't quite realize what he was pleading guilty too, or all that was involved. Here's the letter. I was given three years of probation and find seven thousand dollars plus attorney's fees and court costs. I'm told the buck is hanging in the d n R office with an engraving that reads poached. Dear. I couldn't go to a bar or a restaurant without people whispering about it. I couldn't sit in our family spot at church anymore. Sure my friends and family believed me and corrected people's accusations at first, but after a while even they stopped defending me, and who could blame them. It's been over three years and I have since moved, but I went home last weekend for my grandmother's funeral, and the first thing someone comes up to talk to me about was poaching. Dear. Seven thousand dollars is a lot of money, but what's more expensive is my reputation in a place where public land run scarce, I will never again be able to gain permission to hunt anyone's private land. I served my country in the US Army Airborne for seven years, with multiple awards and decorations citing my integrity, honor, courage, and dedication to duty. But none of that matters because now I'm just a poacher. I'm not writing this with any hopes of changing the past or rectifying any mistakes. It's too late for that. I guess I'm half writing to explain myself and my story. So in the future, when you hear a story about a poacher, you take it with a grain of salt and half so that people who aren't really worried about breaking the law, or who don't invest time into really reading the regulations can see what the consequences of that are and change their ways before it's too late. My advice is this, know the laws of what and where you're hunting, whether you think it's right or wrong. Doesn't matter. Be safe, ask specific questions about what you plan to hunt and how, and if you are ever in doubt when being questioned, say nothing and get a lawyer. It'll be cheaper than the alternative. Next at the crime desk, Governor greg A k A greg for Montana gy and Forte made some headlines for trapping a colored wolf that had belonged to a Yellowstone Park pack. If you're reading headlines out there, it sounds like you went into the park and trapped wolf, but that's not the case at all. The gov had not fully read the requirements for wolf trapping. It seems he possessed a trapper's license but had not completed the required Wolf Trappers Online course and was issued warning. Moving on to the bad bill desk. The stay to Vermont known for being super rural. That's an inside joke. I've chased a lady to Vermont at one point in my life, and that seemed to be the state word or theme. Rural. We're so rural, mud season, sugar season. Rural life moves a little slower, and that's the way we like it. Anyway, would create an Environmental Stewardship board that would oversee among other things, the Vermont fishing game. My experience, when legislators are attempting to oversee or add more controls to state phishing game, it typically means that phishing game is doing a good job of equally pissing everybody off on behalf of wildlife. If you are a Vermont or rural or not, you should take a hard look at h seems as if if it passes, you'll be adding some redundancy to the office of the Redundancy Office. This bill was introduced in part by represent out of Sheldon of Middlebury, Vermont, which I only bring up because if you were to chuck a rock in any bar in the Rocky Mountain West that services an outdoor recreation type crowd, you got a darn good chance of hitting somebody from Middlebury, Vermont. Next up the migrator desk. Wisdom, the at least seventy year old lace and albatross that we covered way back on episode one, has, as we covered in another episode, successfully hatched a new chick. Wisdom may be the oldest known bird in the world, but she is still very much in the game. In February, on Midway Atoll, located at the far northern end of the Hawaiian Archipelago, she hatched yet another chick, believed to be her thirty six albatross made for life as a general rule, but Wisdom isn't a death do us part type, And truthfully, the animals that are are an exception, not the rule. And think about that. We say a lot animals made for life, but you know, life is like the life of a partner anyway. Wisdom's current egg rearing partner has been meeting her on midway and co tending the nest since two thousand twelve. Albatross will take turns alternately tending the nest and flying, sometimes up to a thousand miles in a single day to collect food. The first albatross was banded in this very same spot back in and since then over two thousand albatross have been banded, giving scientists a gargageant amount of data over the years. But Wisdom is special because with her longevity has come well wisdom or an ability to adapt to a world an ocean that is much different than it was when she was a chick. Shipping traffic, plastics, ghost fishing gear. She somehow avoids it all, including an earthquake driven tsunami that killed two thousand adults and juvenile lazing and blackfooted albatross. She even managed to help her chick survives somehow. The u S Geological Survey, the agency that oversees worldwide migratory bird banding, has banded well over sixty four million birds altogether. They've outfitted Wisdom with a total of six bands over the years. She's not wearing six bands all at once. This mark and recapture study has helped us understand the connection between breeding and nesting grounds. Why events and regulations in Alaska, the Yukon, Canada, as well as Texas and Mexico affect regulations in Montana, Iowa, Arkansas, et cetera. Bands are more than just ornaments for your call lanyard and your ego who knew. The USGS estimates that Wisdom has flown well over three million miles since her original banding. Wisdom has not only outlived her original mate, but also the first scientist who places the band to round her leg in nineteen Chandler Robbins, was the first researcher's name. He passed away in two thousand seventeen and as an NPR pointed out Dwight D. Eisenhower was the president not to get to mccabb But it's possible that the chick Wisdom just hatched will outlive me and most of the people listening to this show right now. To check back in on Wisdom's seventy year old chick, watch out for Cal's weekend Review episode three thousand, seven hundred and forty. Moving on, and pay attention to this last story of episode one hundred from Lucas and Washington State. My dad grew up in Argentina, trapping songbirds with glue traps, killing pigeons with sling shots, and hunting her rabbits with dogs, horses, and whips. He was a man who made his own way in the world. He raised five kids while running a concrete business that for the majority of the time was just him. On one job, he popped a hernia while brooming to expose aggregate concrete and continued to broom with one hand while the other pressed in the hernia until the job was finished. At seventy, he decided to have a double knee surgery in hopes that he could continue fishing and hunting and doing the things he loved. A few weeks ago, my dad went duck hunting with me and a friend who had never gone before. We had an amazing morning, so much so that the next weekend, my buddy wanted to go again, so I invited my dad along once more. We were hunting public land and had to trek our way to a blind four months after double knee surgery, and my dad kept up with us through a mucky field and knee deep water. My friend and I through decoys and went to join him in the blind. Instantly birds were everywhere. Ten minutes until shooting time, the birds zooming around us, and my dad just kept saying, oh my guy, Oh my guy, which was his way of saying, oh my god. He was blowing his widgeon call when he stopped and said, I'm going to pass out. Then his head fell forward. We tried to wake him and performed CPR, but he was gone right at legal shooting time, Nine one one was called and eventually I ran and grabbed the med team to guide him to the blind. They also trekked through the mud and water in their regular uniforms, no waiters, and after four hours, my dad's body was brought out with swans flying the path above him instead of ashes. I'm keeping his duck calls. Figured he spat so much in them that there's enough of him in there for me. Thank you so much for listening and sticking with us here at Cal's weekend Review for one hundred episodes. We'll get back to our regular programming next week. If you are loving what you're hearing, tell a friend or two, and most importantly, don't forget to let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods by writing in to a s k c a L. That's asked Cal at the Meat Eater dot com. We'll talk to you next week. M