00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Kel. A proposal is now under consideration by the U. S. Department of the Interior that would prevent the hunting of moose and caribou in two areas Game Management Unit twenty three and A in northwest Alaska. Anyone not meeting criteria as a subsistence hunter in those areas will not be able to hunt. Those areas are roughly sixty million acres in size, meaning that these federal public lands would be closed not just out of state hunters, but also to any Alaska resident who is not a subsistence hunter. Here is one of the many catches you'll find when researching this topic. Subsistence is defined by the State of Alaska as customary and traditional uses of wild resources for various uses including food, shelter, fuel, clothing, tools, transportation, handicraft sharing, barter, and customary trade. However, federal and state laws currently differ in who qualifies for participation in subsistence fisheries and hunts. Under federal law, rural Alaska residents qualify for subsistence harvesting since nine, all Alaska residents have qualified under state law. That's taken from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game website, now from the BLM website. The statement is quote the customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild renewable resources for direct personal or family consumption as food, shelter, fuel, clothing, tools, or transportation. Basically the same statement as the State of Alaska, but it's li's rural in there long way of saying same but different. Actually what I call f print. Cariboo numbers in this area are well inside a healthy range, and non subsistence hunting makes up just two and a half percent of the total annual harvest, which begs the question what is the motivation behind the closure? Biology or social science? Alaska Fishing Game is fighting in court against a similar special action denying access to non subsistence hunters in another part of the state Game Management Unit thirteen, which we've already covered on an earlier episode. The Northwest Arctic Subsistence Regional Advisory Council making this proposal sites air travel to and from the area as a major disruptor of the Cariboo migration. If they can shut it down the limit the primarily nonresident or traveling resident hunters from flying in, and the migration will continue down faster to the subsistence hunter and make for easy pickings. That's the theory anyway, but biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game don't agree that hunter transportation services are to blame. Even still, several areas within units have been reserved only for subsistence hunters. Much of this beef comes down to geographical resentments. We can all relate to the feeling that outsiders are ruining our spot, whether it's other hunters turning up in that honey hole or hipsters invading our favorite bar. I'm not trying to make light of this situation, and the history of Indigenous people in this area makes resentment easy to understand. And then there's about a dozen other layers of resentment we could get into. But the bottom line is this. The North American model of conservation isn't supposed to run on resentment. It's supposed to run on biology, science, and dollars. Biologists need to make the decisions about how many animals can be taken. Locals, especially those close to and dependent on a resource, should absolutely be considered first when tag and opportunity allotments are decided, and non locals who spend on licenses, tags, transportation gear and the rest that provide funds to manage these animals and their habitat should stay in the game until a situation arises that says there is not enough. And this situation is not that we're just in a sticky wicket. Sticky wicket. Very few of the people listening to this will ever be able to fly up to Alaska and hunt caribou and moose, But right now we daydream occasionally that we'll get there, you know, one of these days. So we're more invested in making sure those animals are still there for a long time. If this proposal goes through on the heels of Game Management Unit thirteens closure to non subsistence hunters on federal lands, a disturbing trend and a bad precedent will be set and we could potentially see other areas closed for social reasons, not biological reasons. This episode of the Weekend Review will air after the public comment period for the proposal is officially closed. Sorry about that. I like to try to keep it weekly, but I gotta get out in Turkey hunt. You know, however, the Department of the Interior won't make its decision for a few more weeks, so you still have time to weigh in. If this is the first time you're hearing it, Sam Longren wrote a fantastic deep dive on this issue. Head over to the Meat Eater website not only to read that piece, but also to find the link that will take you to where you can comment on Special Action Request wus A twenty one dash zero one for units. If those forms have been closed by the time you hear this, don't give up this an important issue. Go to back Country Hunters and Anglers and submit a letter on this issue through their handy dandy web form. In addition, I would call the Department of Interiors Acting Policy Coordinator Robin Levine or right to the Acting Coordinator at Robin r O B B I N Underscore Levine L I V I N E at f W S dot G O V. That's an intro call to action for you. This week, we've got alligator around up, listener emails, whales, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week and my week as well as this podcast is brought to you by Steel Power Equipment, maker of the world's finest chainsaws. Whether you're earning a living in the woods or just brownie points in the backyard, the awesome people at Steel have something for you. Go to www dot Steele USA dot com and find a dealer near you. Just back from visiting my good buddy Johnny all Red with the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Foundation. Out there in Tennessee, we chase turkeys with daniel prue It and chef Michael Hunter. You should follow Danielle and Mike on Instagram and prepare to drool. Also, if you are in the state of Tennessee and have a few bucks to spare for wildlife and conservation, Tennessee Wildlife Resource Foundation is as efficient of a nonprofit as you will find, of every dollar donated goes into the program, not towards administrative costs. So if you're interested in supporting wildlife and keeping it local, check out Tennessee Wildlife Resource Foundation. On our way home from Tennessee, we stopped and spoke with one of the business owners that supports t w RF, all of Sinclair Chocolate Company on Fatherland Street in Nashville, Tennessee. Duck fat caramels. I do not like sweets, but duck fat caramels I can get behind. They don't stick to your teeth. And the owner there, Scott, is a fun fellow to talk to. And as for the turkey woods, they were great. We picked Morrel's wild garlic, lots of ticks and picked up three turkeys and three days. Can't ask for much more. I picked up my bird by utilizing a classic creek bed sneak maneuver. After he hung up at about eighty yards. Instead of coming directly into Michael and I had set up like the hens that had pitched out of the roost tree above us, he came in at a sneaky ninety degree angle, which gave him a perfect look at two cameo clad tree stumps with shotgun silhouettes pointed ominously toward two hand turkeys, one of them real, the other the Dave Smith variety. When he turned his back, I slid into the creek and got back within calling distance, and, as luck would have it, in between him and some Tom's he was wanting to group back up with. I started calling to the Tom's on the ridge above and ignoring his gobbles. Eventually, even though he knew better, he came sliding in silent to find that him that wasn't talking to him, but was talking to the other boys, and that, my friends, was all she wrote, the last mistake he ever made. Seven nine shot t s s wicked on those birds. Moving on to listener emails. Bowl kelp. Another great bowl kelp and boozing combo is using the stipe to make an organic and biodegradable beer bong that pairs perfectly with Mexican beers since it's nice and naturally salty. Fresh kelp is obviously best of all the things I've learned over the years commercial fishing, this is one I thought I'd never be prompted to share. We all learned something here today. So next up, bear measure utes. My reference to Boone and Crockett measure length is nose to occiput, which is the back of skull, and width is cheek to cheek, which are the temporal bones. And I screwed that up and called it the occipital bone, which the occiput would be the tip of the back of the head. So when you measure a bear under the Boone and Crockett system. You run from the tip of the nose to the tip of the oxi put or the back of the head, and from the outermost points on the cheek bones, which would be the temporal bones. That one came in courtesy of the sweary Angler on Instagram. She says she's a science medical nerd who has a pain in her occiput today from work. He says, you can't aunt. Phil says you can. Lastly, from trade. In your latest episode of Cow's We Can Review, you gave a quick plug for Clay Newcome's Bear Grease podcast. In describing the augural episode, you said it was about mountain lions east of the Mississippi. As a lifelong resident of Arkansas and someone in possession of various mapping services from on X to my grandfather's old rand McNally atlas, I would like to point out that Arkansas is most definitely west of the Mississippi River. Thank you, Trey. Next up, we've got an American alligator round up. A twelve foot long, four hundred and forty five pound American alligator was just taken during a hunt on private land along the Edisto River in South Carolina. The man who killed the gator wanted the meat, head, and hide, which are all common trophy parts of a gator, but the stomach contents turned out to be of trophy status as well. Inside the gators stomach was a spark plug, a bullet casing, lots of turtle shells, a few bobcat claws, and five tags from dog callers. The owners of Cordrey's butcher Shop and Robin Ll, South Carolina found a few tags that were still legible, with one number that's still worked. The previous owner of the dog tags confirmed that he had lost some dogs while hunting the same area twenty four years prior. What that gator wouldn't have given for some silium husk or meta musel. Huh, twenty four year gut ache? Maybe a good reason to second guess eating deer hunting dogs. While looking at this, it came across a few interesting gator facts for you. Alligator nests are warmed through the decay of vegetation. The microbial breakdown of organic material creates friction, which produces heat. In this case, swamp grasses layered on and in between mud layers that seal the eggs from the outside world break down and produce heat. If anyone listening has a compost pile, you know exactly what I'm talking about, which is thermal decomposition. The temperature of the nest not only determines how many nestlings hatch, but what sex they will be when they do. Low temps and high temps produce female alligators, whereas the median temps between thirty one point five and thirty five degrees celsius produce males. So you could say, or come to the conclusion rather that males are more even tempered. Well, the females, well, they can be both hot and cold. And I'm just talking alligators to be clear. Primary predators of alligators are alligators. They're cannibalistic and territorial. As juveniles, they are targets of wading birds, snapping turtles, raccoons, otters, and fish. If you are one of the select few bass fishermen that own a baby gator swim bait, you know what I'm talking about. As eggs, the mother gator can crush them in the nest rack. Coons will dig them up, as will hogs, otters, and bears. In some states Florida and possibly Georgia, at this point, also have the Argentine tego lizard and egg eating and digging invasive species to contend with. The American alligator was listed on the Endangered Species Act of nineteen seventy three despite years of attempted state regulation, including the implementation of a license and tag system and the flat outclosing of alligator hunting in South Carolina ten years prior in nineteen sixty three. According to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, federal regulation through the Lacy Act increased penalties for the possession, sale, and transportation of American alligator parts, and that is likely what helped restore this species. After years on the s A, the gator was downlisted to threatened in nine seven, and South Carolina's first hunting season returned to the state in thirty, two years after its closure. Alligators are currently present from Texas east along the Gulf Coast, up the Mississippi River into Arkansas and Oklahoma, around the tip of Florida, and north to southern North Carolina, which is the only Gulf state where gators are present without a hunting season. Oklahoma just recently confirmed nesting of American alligators in that state. There is no hunting season there, but they do have a state record alligator car, which also has big teeth, scaled armor, can breathe there, lives in much of the same habitat and has been around unchanged for much of the same time. That record car is two hundred and fifty four pounds twelve ounces, over eight feet in length and a girth of forty four inches. That is a big old dinosaur fish, and by old I mean at least one hundred million years as a species, which may make it one of our better examples of If an ain't broke, don't fix it. There are reports from the state of North Carolina of eleven foot gators crossing roads and of course snatching dogs from their owners leashes in golf course housing developments. Georgia, where there is an alligator season, reports a state record gator of fourteen feet one and three quarter inches and seven hundred pounds. That gator came out of Lake you falla which is famous for a number of reasons, but I know it because of that great James McMurtry song Choctaw Bingo. James, if you're listening, and I know you are sorry to hear about your pops for someone not knowing him, all I can say is lonesome Dove and Cadillac Jack or classics. Yeah, I thought of As a writer of Alto I've been denouncing cowboys and calling them fascists and uh, doing everything I can to get away from being a writer about the cowboy. But somehow it draws me back because it's such a Central American image, central American western type. You gotta deal with the way, one way or another. Florida has a separate category for weight and overall length, which in my opinion, as an attempt to let more people be a winner. Isn't that nice? Of course, splitting categories like that does create that coveted spot of overall champ for some hunter to The Florida length record is a fourteen foot three and a half inch male from Brevard County. The weight record is from Orange Lake at thirteen ft ten and a half inches but one thousand and forty three pounds. The Alabama record was set in two thousand fifteen and came out of the Alabama River with a monstrous fifteen ft long, one thousand eleven pound gator caught in a sixteen foot boat. By the way, Mississippi claims a fourteen ft one and a quarter inch seven hundred and sixty six pound gator with a tail girth measurement of forty three inches, which is the okay, the Arkansas state record gator was just claimed in the two thousand twenty season. That gator came out of Marissatch Lake outside of Arkansas Post, Arkansas. Now I'm sure you don't need me to tell you about Arkansas Post Arkansas. I mean you know it was the first European settlement the Lower Mississippi Valley founded in sixteen eighty six and was the Arkansas Territories capital before folks were even talking about Little Rock. Anyway. This big gator was taken with one of only thirty eight public hunting permits and wade in at eight hundred pounds while measuring thirteen feet eleven and a half inches, which is nice but not quite a fourteen foot or is it the longest alligator on record? The overall title holder was recorded somewhat unofficially in Louisiana. That gator measured nineteen feet two in is long and had an estimated weight of over two thousand pounds. This was however, reported in eighteen ninety and it's possible that this estimate grew over time. Louisiana's second largest or modern day gator is thirteen feet four inches seven hundred and sixty pounds. Finally, Texas claims a fourteen foot, nine hundred pound gator taken in two thousand sixteen. I'm telling you all of this because, well, it's awesome knowledge. I love knowing that there are reptiles growing somewhere in the southeast that breach a thousand pounds. People, including myself, throw the word dinosaur around a lot. The last dinosaurs probably roamed the earth about sixty six million years ago. The American alligator or alligator mississippiensis, when compared to fossils of alligators from five to twelve million years ago, is basically the same and really old, but misses the age of dinosaurs, unlike our friend, the alligator gar. Unlike a lot of other species, we have lots of fossils to compare modern day bones too. That's due to the fact that alligators lose a lot of teeth. They're a polyphyodont, which is what we would call a ten dollar word, but it just means their teeth grow, fallout and are continually replaced depending on what the gator is up to. They can produce and rotate through hundreds, even thousands of teeth in a good long lifetime, while on its average day, that old gator may have as many as eighty teeth in its mouth. They're also homodonts, which means, unlike us, their teeth are all basically the same, all grabbers, conical shaped teeth, no grinders. These fossils are very similar to older alligators that did go back further than twelve million years ago, such as they're recently discovered dino sukus shwimmery we were, which of course came out of similar fossils found in Alabama and Mississippi. Similar that is, but different in many ways, especially scale. If you want to call a gator a dinosaur, you're talking about a gator with teeth the size of bananas and an overall length of thirty three feet or more. The modern American alligator may sport a tooth that goes as long as four inches in length for reference, That, my friends, is the gator that tussled with the dinosaurs and would unfortunately make those modern state records seem undersized. The other fun thing to think about. Is this dino gator swam right here in Montana and New Jersey, which is kind of like that old joke, where does a thirty three ft gator swim wherever it pleases? That's been your American alligator round up. Hard to find a good gator round up anywhere other than Cal's weaken review. Moving on their surveillance side effects desk, scientists are actively monitoring a gray whale off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, who has developed an infection at the site of a satellite monitoring tag it was stuck with several months ago. To tag a gray whale, you pull up beside the forty ft long, thirty ton beheemoth and shoot it with a dark containing a tracker about the size of a lightsaber or you know, let's call it your standard framing hammer handle. With the vast majority of whale tags, they stay embedded and unnoticed by the whale for years. In this case, though, the state of the skin infection and the fact that the whale was coughing up mucus concerned scientists enough that they darted the whale again, this time with antibiotics, which will likely be the next step in co of a vaccine delivery. Although this particular tag is causing a problem, the data we get from tagging all kinds of animals is absolutely priceless. There are several species who wouldn't have survived without the information scientists have collected for monitoring devices. Grizzly bears would arguably be a great example. But nothing is perfect, and in biology, just as in particle physics, every time you study something, you risk changing the thing you're studying. Female Australian zebra finches, for example, were shown to be less responsive to the mating dances of male finches who had been fitted with colorful tags. Those are some fashion conscious lady finches and they ruined a great study. But back to the gray whale off the coast of Canada. The infection around the tag and the mucus production are expected to clear up soon, but the animal will remain under observation for the next several weeks. In the meantime, fisherman's friend is working on a cherry cough drop the size of a snowmobile. Moving on, congratulations to Wolfgang Kratzenburg of Verona, Kentucky, first for having a great name and second for recently catching the Kentucky State records sagay. The sagay is a hybrid of a sagger and a walleye, too closely related but distinct species of freshwater fish native to Canada and the Northern US. While while I typically stick to lakes, sager prefer rivers and streams, and in recent decades, habitat disruption and rising water temperatures have been hard on both, but the hybrid of the two has proven hardier than either original fish. Sagay tolerates warmer water better and their eggs grow faster, so Kentucky has been hatching and stocking lakes with sagay since two thousand thirteen. We've often talked about how tough it can be to battle invasive hybrids mill foil tiger salamanders, burmese and indian python mixes, even invasive calorie pear trees. When two species are able to team up and use the most effective attributes of each other, survival rates go up. In the case of the saga, this combo creates a fish that is just fantastic to go after. According to the Kentucky Fish and Game Press release, Wolfgang and his son Jeffrey put in a heroic struggle to get this whopper in the boat, which was only overshadowed by their amount of effort to get the fish officially weighed. The duo called ten different stores before finally finding a costco willing to move their trade certified scale out to the parking lot to record the official weight of nine pounds five ounces, eight point eight ounces better than the previous record. So here's a hat tip to the Cats and Bergs for a job well done, and also for what I imagine were some extremely tasty fried filets. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. As per usual, get ahold of me and tell me what's going on in your neck of the woods by writing in to a s k C. A L. Let's ask Cal at the meat eater dot com. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next week.

Save this episode