00:00:02 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cal's weekend review, presented by Steel. Steel products are available only at authorized dealers. For more, go to Steel Dealers dot com. Now here's your host, Ryan cal Callahan, a Michigan woman, suffered numerous puncture wounds after being attacked by a white tail buck last month. She survived, but the wounds to her hip, right leg, and left hand required twenty one stitches. That deer was out to fight, she told The Oregonian. It was trying to kill me. It wasn't trying to be nice to me, that's for sure. It's a very dangerous deer, and you, ma'am, are one tough cookie. If you look up images of the deer online, you'll see it was a young buck with a spike on one side and three points on the other. It's also wearing an orange collar. Michigan wildlife officials believed that collar could be the key to explaining the deer's behavior. Here's what happened. On Sunday, September four year old Patty Willis was walking out to her chicken coop when she turned and saw a deer charging at her antler's down. Fortunately for Willis, she noticed the deer before it struck, so she was able to prepare for the attack. She told The Oregonian that the deer hit her in the chest. She flew back ten ft and she managed to grab the deer by the antlers. Again. My goodness, lady, you are tough. Imagine if she would have turned and ran and the deer got her in the back. She screamed as it pinned her to the ground, and her son ran outside and chased the deer away. Her husband shot at the deer with his handgun, and he believes he missed. They rushed Willis to the hospital. She stayed there for three days before returning home. When the Michigan Department of Natural Resources heard about the incident, they pretty quickly developed the theory about how this deer lost its fear of humans. In June of two thousand, twenty dn R officials received a complaint about a family at a nearby residence who had taken in a font. They were treating it quote almost as if it was a pet. Dn R District Law Supervisor Lieutenant Brandon Keith told The Oregonian. Another neighbor about a mile from the attack reported a deer in their backyard in September of this year, and d n R officials believed the original pet deer lost its fear of humans and has been hanging around the neighborhood now. To be fair, d n R officials can't say for sure whether the deer in this incident is the same dear that was adopted by the nearby family. Keith said the family had complied with the d n R when informed that adopting wildlife is illegal in Michigan, and d NR biologist released it into the wild. When officials asked the family whether they had outfitted their deer with an orange collar, they told officials that their son had quote developed a bond with their adopted deer, and they couldn't say whether he had given it a collar. Further complicating matters is the fact that, according to Kief, dear lovers sometimes put collars on white tail with the hope of protecting them from hunters. If hunters see a deer with the collar, the thinking goes, they'll take a pass, whether because they think it's illegal or because they don't want to take a deer that's already been captured. I don't think this practice is very common, considering how difficult it can be to capture it deer, but the Michigan DNRS said this theory might also explain the recent attack. If you ask me, it doesn't really matter whether the buck got its orange collar from a nearby family or a nearby animal rights activist. Most people have an understandable desire to protect wildlife, but ironically, improper actions such as this have the opposite effect. Acclimating wildlife to humans puts them in danger, whether you're talking about a large predator like a grizzly bear or a seemingly safe animal like a white tail. Their fear of people keeps them out of trouble. When humans and wildlife mix, wildlife almost never come out on top, unless you're talking specifically about the attack portion of this story. Even though Willis suffered serious injuries during her encounter, the offending deer won't be given a second chance if dn R officials catch up to it. Keith told me that they aren't sure whether Willis's husband hit the deer with his handgun. If they find it, it will be euthanized. Keith didn't say exactly how, but my money is on buck shot. I understood that reference. This week, we've got what the hell is going on in Wisconsin, the migrator desk, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week was, you know, crane marsala, crane leg colne fee, both of which I neglected to tell you about last week. But it's very appro oprea this week, and you'll soon find out why. Crane marsala right, Like very very simple. Take your crane breast, cut it against the grain, and like two and a half inch thick steaks. Pound that stuff flat. Throw just a tiny bit a dusting, if you will, of flour, salt, and pepper. I like to let it rest. You do that on both sides, and then you slide that into You can use butter or a high heat oil, and all you're looking to do is kind of like brown those things. Leave them raw in the middle, as raw as you can, as long as they're well browned on both sides. Set that off to the side. Then this is not the traditional marsala way, but I like to throw in a little bit of garlic, a little tab of butter, and then when that stuff starts to get to brown you put in your Marsala wine. The trick to Marsala is very very simple. Okay, just get something good in the wine department. Don't get like the cooking wine stuff because it also just you know, tastes like burned alcohol. Get good marsala. Dump that in there, scrape your pan. You can use a whisk if you want to get fancy. Then you take your nice little brown filets, slide them into the same pan, get that sauce on there, take it off the heat, and that stuff will warm up to a perfect medium rare and everybody's happy. Crane Marsala, kids, It is a d light would do quite nicely in any any any restaurants. That's really nice. Now, the most under utilized portion of game birds is the legs. In fact, here in my home state of Montana, the Department of Wildlife just did a shameful act which is not even categorized migratory bird legs as food. It's true. Look at the regulations. Now, everyone listening to this show, is you know, a conservationist, a true sportsman or sportswoman or sports person. On top of that, you know you're just not a waster, okay, and you can recognize good looking meat when you see it. It is absolutely true as well that birds that do a lot of walking on tall, stilt like legs have legs that you can use to pound intent steaks. All right. Now, I've often used that turn of phrase for like bear shanks, okay, animals that dig for a living. The crane maybe the match to an old black bear shank. It is more tendon than meat at first glance. However, the old old trick of simmering something in pork fat works unbelievably well for crane legs. Now there's a traditional method and the non traditional method. I like a non traditional method because it's just like way easier to deal with the fat. So all you do, suvi, you got your vacuum, seal eggs, you got pork fat, and you got salt. That's it. Slide your legs into the bag, be very you know, conscious of broken bones, and make sure you don't puncture your bag. Put your pork fat in there. I like to liquefy at first, which is just heating fat up right, and it turns into the liquid. Dump that in to where you're sure that when you seal that bag, the fat will fully cover the meat. I also pre salt the legs just so you know. And that's it. And then I just put that in the suv bath at a hundred and fifty three degrees for twenty four hours, all right. And then when you pull that stuff out, you can drain the fat off if you want. You can pour just a little tiny bit in the pan, shred your meat. All those tendons come out and they are still like wire, like a veritable fortress around the meat. And then you crisp that meat up under the broiler and it is just a sinful, good meal. You will never throw a crane leg away again. It is absolutely worth taking. If you want to argue with me on this point right in to a s K C A L. That's asked how at the meteor dot Com. On top of that, every high high has a low low And as you know, the old snort dogs, snort Kiss and I have been riding a pretty high high. As far as locating and shooting birds, well, uh, we're in a bit of a dry spell. Reality has come home to roost. We've done a lot of walking, not a lot of trigger pulling, and there's even been a couple of misses in there. I think it's mental. Moving on, we got one listener email in regards to some cooking that I did on my Instagram account. But bear with me, this is gonna be u pertinent. Okay. The listener wrote in and said I would trade a testicle for that sandwich. This is when we're ours to some corned goose rubens that I made the other night. I'm very, very proud of this corned goose because this is the only batch that I've made that tastes exactly like corned beef. I think there was like a little bit too much curing salt in there, like after you eat the sandwich, a little salt after taste. If anybody in the butchering game knows what I'm talking about, let me know. I'd still be interested in some more scientific ratios. Anyway, unbelievably good corn goose. I'm salivating at the thought of getting more geese, and this person wants to trade a testicle for a corned goose sandwich, which normally I would say no to. But we are in the midst of the meat eater auction house of oddities. Okay, we take in all sorts of strange stuff. And auction it off only at the meat eater dot com. Okay, just go to the meat eater dot com check out the auction house of Oddities. You can find all sorts of outdoor related, hunting related, fishing related cool things from puppies to bones, to furs, to paintings to sketches, things that will fancy up your cabin, possibly your love life. It will keep your face from getting every dollar spent there, Every single dollar spent will go to the Meat Eater Land Access Initiative. You remember, that's where we provide more access to people who love to hunt, fish, people who love to be outside. It's a great way to spend buck and get something memorable. Moving on to the wildfire desk. A few weeks back, I explained how wildfires don't usually pose a population level threat to wildlife. Most critters can either escape or hide from a fire, and most fires don't decimate habitat to the point that it can't rebound in the spring. Well, there's some exceptions to every rule of nature, and today I'm gonna cover one of them, or an aspect of one of them. A new study published in the Ecology found that wildfires in the Western US significantly impede waterfowl flying along the Pacific Flyway. This delay can double migration time and forces birds to find more food in unfamiliar areas. In the worst case scenario, birds die along the way or can't reproduce quickly enough to maintain populations. Now you might be thinking to yourself, well, of course, wildfires produced tons of smoke, and that smoke must harm birds that travel along well established migration corridors. The studies findings make intuitive sense, but as the authors point out, setting a wildfire and releasing a few geese won't exactly fly with the general public without any way to create a controlled experiment by all, just before this year have had to guess how wildfires affect migration patterns. Fortunately, the authors of this paper had attached GPS collars to tool greater white fronted geese all the way back in two thousand eighteen that pre US data showed them how the geese migrated without wildfires along their route, and four GPS collars were still transmitting this year. This fortunate coincidence provided hard data on how geese respond to wildfires. In previous years, the birds took a well established route between the Cook Inlet in Alaska and Summer Lake in Oregon. This year, three of the birds had to hunker down on the Pacific Ocean for fifty two to seventy two hours before the smoke cleared. When the birds began moving inland and encountered smoke, they tried to fly over it or had to make stopovers in non traditional habitat. One poor goose seems to have gotten lost. He got through the heart of the fire, but continued following prevailing winds within the smoke plume until he found himself in Idaho, where a tool goose occurrence has never been confirmed until now. Of course, he eventually made it back to Summer Lake, but like the rest of the four geese, he doubled his migration time. Instead of the usual four day excursion, the geese took a nine day journey that added four hundred and seventy miles to the flight path. Maybe this doesn't seem that profound to you, but take into consideration that on a quote normal migration birds die. The act of migration is extremely taxing. Dr John Colucci of Ducks Unlimited notes that an average sized female hand mallard will burn one point eight million galories during a normal hundred mile migration from Saskatchewan to Louisiana. Migratory birds have an incredible ability to pack on fat fuel quick when they land and feed. But if you consider the case of our colored geese, where the migration was prolonged by almost five hundred miles, or if you compared it to the mallards six hundred thousand calories, you can see why this is a major concern. The authors of Migration smoke study ran the numbers, and they estimate that the geese needed between twenty eight and forty two additional hours of foraging to compensate for the extra calories they burned thanks to all the smoke. Finding that additional chow is complicated by the fact that these geese had to stop in areas they've never visited before. If you've ever tried to find a decent Hamburger in a town you've never been to, you know what I'm talking about. You're gonna burn some fuel driving around town scoping places out. But bad Hamburger is only a minor annoyance for the tuly goose. It's a bigger deal. There are only about fifteen thousand individuals in the entire subspecies, and California has listed them as a species of Special concern. The authors of this study point out that birds like the twoly goose have a super specific migration pattern, and if they're forced to change that pattern, it could increase the probability that their population declines. Even More, studies have shown that female geese that arrive malnourished or late to the nesting grounds will likely not be able to lay eggs, or possibly even survived the egg laying process. All the more reason to help out and enhance habitat in your neck of the woods. You never know who may drop by next up on the migration corridor. As you know, I recently went after sandhill crane's for the first time. Having a bird with a six and a half foot wingspan glide into your spread is an experience you don't soon forget, and I am now a big, big fan. That's why a recent bill aiming to introduce a sandhill crane season in Wisconsin caught my eye. Or maybe it was because Ted Nugent a k a. Teddy Nuggets a ka The News a k a. The Motor City mad Map was on the docket of speakers at the hearing that tends to move a news item up in the algorithm, especially in that part of the world a few sandhill crane facts. After being nearly extirpated across the country by the nineteen thirties, American sandhill cranes have made an amazing comeback with the help of conservationists. There are now an estimated five hundred thousand of them who make the long migration from Mexico all the way up to Siberia and back every year, flying up to four hundred miles a day. They follow the same four flyways that other migratory birds like ducks and geese use, and their populations are now so healthy that all the states in the Central Flyaway, which are the Plaine States from Texas to Montana, have a sandhill crane season except for Nebraska. Nebraska is a key stopover point in the migration. A full eight percent of North American cranes use a seventy five mile stretch of the states Platte River during their spring migration. In fact, the name sandhill crane comes from Nebraska's Sandhills area, which borders this stopover zone. The call of the sandhill crane is especially cool sort of a rooster crossed with a plane card and the spokes of your If any kids do that anymore, Phil hit us with a crane call please. Cranes are able to make this unique sound because their tracheas or wind pipes are coiled into their stern hum or breastbone, and air forced through the coil structure causes that deep staccato. Philm maybe one more crand noise. Maybe make this one the sound of cranes and love. I've heard people say that too much. I don't know there, And speaking of crans and love, cranes know how to literally shake a tail feather on the dance floor in pairs. They bob their heads, sweep their wings in and out, and sort of prance around. I'm not recommending that you try this at the club, but it can't look any goofier than what you're currently doing. Cranes dance more frequently during mating season, but they also do a year round, so ornithologists speculate it creates group cohesion and just maybe a bird version of fun. As we mentioned before, the birds have likely existed in their present anatomical form for almost two and a half million years. Although Leopold said of them quote, they live not in the constricted present, but in the wider reaches of time. A crane marsh holds a paleontological patent of nobility, one in the march of AONs that, although so hot right now, he always could turn a phrase anyway. A sandhill crane season in Wisconsin would be a great thing. First of all, bird hunters would get some fantastic table fair. You've heard me talk about it. You've no doubt heard the crane's nickname, Rearby of the Sky. Next, controlling crane numbers would give the states farmers a break. Cranes do an number on corn crops when they come through in the spring, eating newly planted seeds. You can treat seed with a chemical deterrent, but that's expensive, time consuming, and not always effective. Three other states in the Mississippi Flyway already have a crane season, Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee, so adding Wisconsin would make sense. However, cranes reproduce in Wisconsin, they only pass through those other states, and so the opposition to the hunt has centered around not interfering with reproduction. However, with the species now thriving, the science is clearly on the side of opening Wisconsin season keeping mind, hunters we hunt a lot of things when they're trying to reproduce, right, we know we can do this and maintain and more than likely increase the population. Here's kind of where this crane thing gets interesting, and it's back, of course to the news and his role as frontman for Hunter Nation based out of Kansas. Hunter Nation has brought a lot of attention and momentum to this hunt, which I'm like, hey, right on huge. On the other hand, I do question the approach. First, the out of state group, Hunter Nation didn't coordinate with any of the Wisconsin based conservation orgs that have spent years building support for crane hunt. We spoke with Tony Blackler of the Wisconsin Conservation Congress, a group of in state hunters that advises the Department of Natural Resources. We were very appreciative Tony's time on the phone, as he'd just come in from grouse hunting in nearby checka Margan Nicolette National Forest remember a s k c L at the mediator dot com. Blackler sales that the w c C and several other groups have worked with legislators since the mid two thousands to establish a sandhill crane season, first introducing a bill in two thousand eleven. As crane numbers have continued to grow, all parties involved have been optimistic that a bill would has this session. Blackler emphasizes that cranes are already killed under depredation permits to protect farmers crops, but without a sanctioned season, those dead birds have to be incinerated, a terrible waste that people all across the ideological spectrum want to avoid. Do you need more of a reason to allow crane hunt? Wasting a crane is unfathomable to me. Again, darned tasty bird and no coincidence that I already hit this, and it's our overarching theme after years of careful effort to build the necessary support. Blackler was frustrated that Hunter Nation had come in suddenly with guns of blazing. He worried that introducing bills so quickly can lead to mistakes in the legislation, and he said, quote, there were people who were aligned with us and who are on our team to implement the hunt, and this event made it hard for them to be on the team. You will recall that Hunter Nation suthed the State of Wisconsin last February on the grounds that not allowing a wolf hunt was violating a previous state law signed in two thousand twelve stating that wolf hunts are mandatory in the state of Wisconsin as long as wolves are not federally listed as an endangered species. That legal action has turned into a great example of when charging ahead may not be as good as crawling. Although Februaries wolf hunt will likely not hurt the Wisconsin wolf population in the long run, it did hurt wolf hunters, hunters in general, and the reputation of the state Department of Natural Resources when nearly double the quota set for wolves were turned in. In short, it was a public relations disaster. The wolf hunt was forced through, and in regards to all the things wildlife managers talk about science, management, trust control, it looked sloppy. Some outlets even call that bloodthirsty. And as everyone feared, a Wisconsin judge just ruled that the November wolf hunt is off. All right, listen to this. The devil's in the details, so pay attention. Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Frost ruled the way the DNR applied Wisconsin's wolf hunt law is unconstitutional. In his ruling, Frost said he's not over ruling the state's wolf hunt law and thinks it can be lawfully applied. In fact, he is ordering the d n R to set the new wolf hunt quota to zero for the time being. So technically there is a hunt. It's just that there are no wolves allowed to be taken during the hunt. And quote, the d n R needs to stop it. They need to actually comply with the law. They need to regulate the hunt. They need to develop a wolf management plan. They need to implement the rules so they can regulate the hunt. They need to be part of that oversight. Prob says that keeps the law constitutional. Judge Frost said, So with that recent court ruling in mind, the next tactic of hunter nation also becomes more questionable. The crane bill was introduced amongst twelve other bills in a package, one of which would legalize concealed carry of a handgun without a permit. Now, no matter how ardent a defender of Second Amendment rights you might be, you can also see how the bundling of a crane hunting bill, along with the political hot potato of permitless concealed carry could make you question how serious they are about just hunting cranes. In regards to a crane hunting season, It's important to note that there is currently bipartisan support of the hunt itself. That means both sides of the aisle. Another odd offshoot of this political soup in Wisconsin is that Hunter Nation has also supported Fred Praine, who is technically the previous as chair of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, to refuse to resign once his successor was named by the incoming Democratic governor. Brain's position is that if he resigns, the board will be by majority Democrat instead of by a majority Republican, which if you're advising the natural resources of the state, you should be independent, in my mind, independently biased for wildlife and hunting and fishing. Now, I will say it, one tactic Hunter Nation uses that I can appreciate is that they treat every local attack on hunting as an attack on hunters everywhere. That all for one, one for all approach is part of why the Second Amendment movement has been so successful. You know, sometimes Idaho trout anglers don't exactly rush to the defense of Florida bear hunters who are at risk of losing their hunt, just as all gun owners don't write in or call their state representative in favor of crane hunts. I'm just kind of running all this. I asked you because historically, the biggest conservation wins. And when I say historically, you gotta remember, like last administration have happened by focusing on the issue at hand and creating as big a tent as possible to protect, acquire, enhance wildlife and habitat. We have held our own against committed anti hunters by bringing sympathetic non hunters and those who might vote against us on other issues to our side on behalf of wildlife and wild places. This approach to conservation has proven successful, but I do admit it takes a long time. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write in to a s k C A L that's asked cal at the Meat Eater dot com and let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. Also, if you're in need of a ton of firewood for deer camp, clean shooting lanes, or a powerful leaf blower to blow the leaves and all the rest of that Halloween costume stuff off your lawn. Go to www dot steel dealers dot com and find a local, knowledgeable, fantastic steel dealer near you. I promise you they will get you set up with what you need, the best tools on the market to get the job done efficiently. Thanks again and I'll talk to you next week.

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