00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Kel. New York State is home to its first free ranging bison heard since the seventeen hundreds. The herd is comprised of forty five calves, seven cows, and three bowls, for a total of seventy five animals. The thing is they aren't supposed to be free ranging. They broke a gate and released themselves from a farm and Sharon Springs, New York, released themselves on their own recognisance, so to speak. Perhaps they they no longer felt their former institution had anything left to offer them anyway. The farm is located about forty five miles from Albany, New York. The owner of the bison is working in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Conservation and the state police to get the herd back. Suddenly free of their lifelong confinement, the herd is starting to break up into smaller groups, making them more difficult to locate. Bison were originally killed off from the eastern part of the country as they were a good source of food and hides, and they competed with domestic livestock for feed. Seems little has changed in three hundred years. The locals of Otsego County, New York, are concerned about the destruction of hay crops in the area, as well as the intimidating nature of a two thousand pound bison bull. It appears that New York's roaming bison are soon to be extirpated once again. But if for some reason, these bison were to make a couple of lucky moves, they might find their way to some pretty good sized pieces of state ground preserves and wildlife management areas nearby. At the time of this podcast, the bison have been on the lamb for over a week. Though their fields have sustained some damage, the folks of Otsego County have had the unique experience of watching bison walk wherever they please for the first time in about three hundred years. A good reminder that Buffalo, New York wasn't named for the chicken wings. This week, we're gonna talk about catfish, radioactive wildlife, sturgeon, and the BLM. At first, I'm gonna tell you about my week. I went back to the beautiful state of Tennessee to join folks from the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Foundation and talk Asian carp and invasive species. Holy cats, did I have an incredible time, so much so that I just can't talk about at all. So first off, I'm gonna do some housekeeping. Then I'm going to talk about just one of the many Tennessee fishing adventures I went on so onto the housekeeping portion in the last episode of Cal's Weekend Review, episode thirteen, that dealt with free buffalo rads, giant worms, and a manner of other things. I wrongfully and heinously named the lead singer of the death metal band Cannibal Corps as Alex Webster. Alex Webster is, in fact the bassist for Cannibal Corpse. The lead vocalist is, of course, George Court Scrinder Fisher. Apologies to all of you out there in death metal lamp. My next screw up. I got my units of measure mixed up on my Grizzer Bear facts. Although Grizzlies have been clocked it up to forty one miles per hour, they have not, as I stated last week, been sprinting at sixty miles per hour. I, to be completely honest, do not care about this mix up as I don't think it matters in regards to tourist proximity to wildlife, but I love talking about grizzlies and this is another opportunity to do so. The fastest human on Earth can travel at about twenty seven miles per hour on an optimal surface. Jamaica's Hussain Bolt has the current world record for the hundred meter sprint at an astounding nine point five eight seconds US saying would have been traveling about thirty nine point six ft per second. Grizzly bears have been recorded running forty one miles per hour, so even if we shave a bit off and agree to a pace of fifty feet second or thirty four miles an hour, the grizzly would cover one meters in six point five six seconds. The human is going to lose the hundred meter deaf dash every time, so you know, keep your damn distance from animals in the park. Okay, back to Tennessee for one quick story about catfish noodling or hogging or boxing, whatever you call it. The technique is the same hand fishing for catfish, the angler's hand in this case mine is used as the rod reel and bait. In the spring, catfish seek out holes and submerged logs, stumps, mud banks, or, in this case, man made submerged boxes to spawn. These nest sites typically have a single point of entry, and the catfish protects its nest from intruders by facing the whole. The angler attempts to block the entrance while inserting a hand into the nest, provoking the catfish to defend its site by by eating the intruding member. When the catfish bites, the angler is supposed to grab the lower lip of the cat This was explained to me like grabbing a suitcase handle. Then get the blocking hand through the hole onto the lip of the cat or the back of the jaw or gil plate. Two hands on the cat is the golden rule. Apparently, if they do not make catfish noodlers that are capable of one hand catch us. The bite is, in my estimation, shockingly violent and powerful, but the real rodeo begins when the tail comes free of the hole or box. In this case, a solo angler will lock their legs around the fish's tail in order to immobilize it. Imagine a full body bear hug only underwater and with a fish. I had a spotter and a coach, Damian Loveless, who clamped onto the tail and we kicked for the surface. This is a seriously strange sport. I've been face to face with grizzly bears, screaming bull elk and all manner of other things, but this was just different. You insert your hand into a confined, muddy space and wait for an unseen fish to bite it violently. That said, I found it oddly transformative. If this sounds like something you want to experience, give Dennis Redden and Damian Loveless of shout. They're good guys to hang with and they know their stuff. Most catfish grabbing is catch and release. These are big, successfully reproducing fish, and they are great to admire and let go to swim off and make more big asked catfish. When the cat grabbed my arm in this instance, I freaked out and felt one of my fingers snap part of a gill. At that point, my head kind of cleared from the adrenaline, and I decided I would not be letting go of this piste off fish no matter what. If it was gonna die, I was going to be the one eating it, not some snapping turtle and then grabbed the cat firmly by the gills, shot my left hand in and secured the head by the gill plate. Damien seized the cat by the tail, and now I have the better part of a twenty eight pound catfish in the freezer and a nasty looking road rash type situation on my forearm best described as friction burn delivered by eighty grit sandpaper. Moving on, but sticking with the topic of gills, some recent viral videos on Facebook and YouTube have inspired anglers to start keeping a bottle of mountain dew on them at all times. And no, it's not for the caffeine and sugar high. Instead, fishermen are supposed to use this magical elixir as a healing agent to save fish with bleeding gills. Those promoting this theory claim that dumping soda on a fish's wound will stop the hemorrhaging by a cauterization. These anglers have their hearts in the right place, but not their heads. If it were true that soda cauterizes gills, then that would stop their gas exchange, which is crucial for fish to you know, breathe. What these anglers are accomplishing is overhandling fish and introducing a foreign substant to their delicate gills. As one aquatic ecologist told Meat Eater in an interview, my initial take is that the civic nature of soda is bad for sensitive gilt tissues. The best thing one could do is get the fish back in water that's the appropriate temp. This soda on fish gills debate will soon come to an end, though. Carlton University in Canada is halfway through a study testing this theory. Their research is scheduled to wrap up sometime this summer, but the lead biologist has said that he's not ready to make any predictions quite yet until there's a definitive answer. We'd prefer that you swiftly dispatch immortally wounded fish and put it in a cooler next to your soda, rather than giving it a mountain dew baptism and sending it off into a watery grave. For more on this subject, check out Spencer new Hors article at the meat eater dot com titled stop Pouring soda on Fish gills. For more on mountain dew, Here's a fun fact for you. One of the original slogans for the soda introduced in nineteen forty was thick. If we do end up finding that soda pop helps fish, they just might bring that one back. If you're into pop culture, what the kids are watching on the tube, you're probably like my buddies and have already binge watched the HBO series Chernobyl. Well, these next quick hitters are just for you. And as bonus, if you're into doing things in the out of doors, these next quick hitters are for you too. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred back in April of nine six and is considered to be the worst nuclear disaster in history. A meltdown of reactors four and three resulted in heavy amounts of radioactive contamination across parts of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and many other countries depending on where the wind blew. Pripy It was one of the worker towns that was immediately evacuated, with little human activity in the thousand plus mile Chernobyl exclusion zone. For three decades, wild animals have taken refuge there. One survey in the area documented horses, wolves, badgers, swans, moose, elk, turtles, deer, foxes, beavers, boares, bison, mink hairs, otters, links, eagles, rodents, storks, bats and owls. You there's a grab bag of oddities among the radioactive cripiate critters, including cows with toxic milk, owls with soft beaks, mink with sterile sperm, eagles with visible tumors, badgers with smaller brains, rabbits with cataracts, pigs with five legs, and catfish with two jaws. No word on if any teenage turtles with ninja skills that love pizza or spiders passing on incredible abilities to puny high school kids have ever been discovered. Mutations and nuclear fallout be damned. Many wild animals are obviously booming in the exclusion zone. Specifically, those at the top of the food chain are thriving wolves and bears, now outnumbered the amount of humans working around chernobyl and fox and raccoon dog populations are on their eyes quick sidebar Here a raccoon dog is neither a dog nor a raccoon. The raccoon dog is found throughout Asia and is closely related to the fox. Another couple of fun facts. The raccoon dog is the only canid that hibernates, and in Japanese folklore, the raccoon dog is called tanuki. The tanuki is often depicted with a giant scrotum, which represents good luck with money for some reason unknown to me. Now that you know that, we can get back to radioactive animals, scientists have found that an ultra rare Eurasian Links has taken shelter in the Chernobyl site. The fifty to sixty pound Links was nearly driven to extinction by over hunting, but now there are hundreds of them taking advantage of the lack of humans. Speaking of cats, if your animal loving soft heart is crying out for the animals of Chernobyl, there's a nonprofit that recently announced you can now adopt a radioactive cat or dog virtually adopt. That is, by virtually adopting a dog or cat, you're paying for food, vaccinations, in spay and neuter campaigns. For just a hundred you'll be considered a hero adopter and awarded with an adoption certificate of four by six framed image of your stray and eight dogs of Chernobyl postcards. As all of you know, I'm a proponent of fixing feral cats. So this adoption program for sad eyed pets is old cal and probably Sarah McLaughlin approved. Just kidding, of course, if you want to help stray critters, I believe in doing so locally. Moving over to the big fish desk, those of you who follow the Meat Eater social media accounts may be familiar with Jeffrey. My name is jeff You can call me Jeffrey, the obnoxious fishing character we invented to promote some of our website articles. Hey camera lady, my mustache is up here. Folks seem to think that Jeffrey was my disappointing little brother, maybe unwanted, illegitimate love child. He's not. His real name is Carl. He works in our production department. He plays the base and is an actual real life fan of the death metal band Cannibal Corpse. I'm not joking, and he's a very nice guy. Oh that one's firm, real floppy. Anyway, if you watch those videos, you'll know that Jeffrey is all about catching dinosaurs, and a group of kids in a Dina, Minnesota, I believe they call it a Dina, a suburb of Minneapolis, actually did catch a kind of dinosaur. Recently. The pack of free arranging children were having a little unsupervised summertime fun practice we strongly support here at Meat Eater. The kids were playing on a Mini Haha creek when one of them spotted an enormous fish finning in the skinny water. One adventurous youth fashioned a slipknot snare with a length of rope he must have fished out of his dad's garage. Then the procope shous little buggers slipped the rope over the fish and found himself attached to a six foot long lake sturgeon, roughly seven times the kid's age. The kids did what curious children are wont to do and dragged the poor beast up on shore to examine it, but soon remembered that the fish can't breathe out of water. They didn't want to kill such a cool critter and released it back into the creek. A little bit banged up, but otherwise all right. You can watch all this for yourself on YouTube. The question, though, is how did an approximately seventy year old lake sturgeon wind up in a small suburban creek with no known sturgeon population. Lake sturgeon are native to the Mississippi River, into which Mini Haha creek does eventually flow, but a waterfall blocks fish from swimming up the creek. The only other explanation is that it came downstream from Lake Minnetonka. Though the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has never found any evidence of a live sturgeon in that lake, rumors of their exist distance are widespread. For now, local DNR officers around the hunt for the sturgeon with hopes of capturing it and relocating it to the Mississippi where maybe it can reunite with others of its kind and helped perpetuate the species. I for one, loves so many elements about this story, but particularly the part where suburban kids got to interact with an enormous wild fish that's rare these days. Sturgeon are incredibly cool prehistoric creatures going back two hundred million years. Instead of scales, they have rows of bony plates called scoots, similar to the skin of a crocodile or bird feet. North America has nine different species of sturgeon, though most of them are now vulnerable, threatened, or endangered. In the eighteen hundred, sturgeon could be found up and down the East coast from Labrador to Florida. Across the Gulf Coast from Tampa to Louisiana, on the West coast from California to British Columbia, throughout the Great Lakes, and in the Missouri River system clear up to Montana and Idaho. Adult sturgeon spend most of their time feeding either in very large lakes or marine estuaries, and then migrate up rivers to spawn. Your average sturgeon can grow to somewhere between seven and twelve feet in length and weigh in at several hundred pounds, but particularly large varieties like the fabled beluga sturgeon, can grow upwards of eighteen feet long and push the scales at over four thousand pounds. Sturgeon routinely live more than a hundred years. Long. Lived species like these are particularly vulnerable because they don't reach sexual maturity for quite some time, up to twenty years of age, a detriment for making new sturgeon fast. Sometimes I kind of wish that reproductive age limit were true for people too, but anyway, a lot can happen to a big gas fish in twenty years before they even get a chance to perpetuate their genetics. In the early twentieth century, this thing, called caviar became a popular delicacy, caviar being a fancy word for fish eggs, usually sturgeon eggs. During that time, the US became the primary exporter of caviar to Europe, and enterprising folks all over the country made a good living commercially harvesting every species of sturgeon. That is, of course, until there weren't enough left to viably harvest, at which point the caviary industry here went bust. Sturgeon eggs are still a big deal, though, and the most highly prized eggs from the Caspian Sea sell for more than ten thousand dollars a pound. These days, all our American sturgeon are protected, except for white sturgeon in certain places on the West coast or the fish are still in pretty good shape. The appearance of one adult lake sturgeon and one Midwestern creek is hardly valid evidence of a species wide rebound, but these fish have experienced something of a comeback in the past couple of decades, and heartwarming stories like this one that happened to go viral can do a great deal to boost people's awareness. It's safe to say that this particular fish made for a unique summer break and created big sturgeon fans out of some kids from a Dina, Minnesota. I'm gonna leave you with one more quick one before we wrap up. Just something or someone rather to keep tabs on. A man named William Perry Pendley has been made the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, or the BLM. This new BLM head is making folks very nervous, some folks very excited. I suppose the BLM oversees an incredible two forty five million surface acres of public land in the US. On these lands you will find everything from incredible recreational opportunities like hunting, skiing, and whatever else you can think of to have a good time. You will also find folks grazing livestock, generating power, and digging for gold. Sometimes in some areas, a mix of all these activities are taking place at the same time. Chances are if you are the get outside and do stuff type of person, you appreciate vast and beautiful some times desolate landscapes, or you eat domestic meats or consumed goods. In general, you are connected to BLM ground. The reason this fellow William Perry Pendley is making folks nervous. Is He's been very outspoken about America's public lands as and he thinks they should be privately held by individuals like no longer public. Lots of questions have been raised as to how a person with these types of ideas could be at the helm of roughly ten percent of the ground in America, the ground that feeds us, keeps us happy and healthy, and gives us power for our towns and cities. I certainly did not have an answer to that, but I do know that this situation is something we as co owners of these public grounds, need to keep an eye on. So go out enjoy your public lands and waters this week. Breathe deep that clean air, take stock of our collective holdings. And if you know suspect things start happening on BLM ground, just call your duly elected officials and let them know how much that BLM ground means to you and how badly you do not want it messed up or in the worst case scenario, sold to some dude or corporation or other country. Maybe that's gonna put a big old no trespassing sign on it. Well that's all I've got for this week. Thanks for listening to Cal's weekend review. Please let me know where I've screwed up and what I should be paying attention to by writing into a s k C A L at the meat Eater dot com that's asked Cal at the meat Eater dot com please subscribe leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand star. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you next week.

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