00:00:02 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Col'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. The National Park Service uses thirty five hundred miles of toilet paper and Yellowstone National Park every year. That's right, folks, this is the kind of hard hitting news you expect from Cow's weekend Review. I'm here to deliver the facts, no crap. Yellowstone employees are stocking up on industrial sized rolls of toilet paper in preparation for the explosive increase in visitors this summer. According to a recent announcement from the Park Service, there are more than four hundred and twenty two toilets at Yellowstone, and each one of them gets cleaned every day and restocked with at scratchy single ply paper everyone loves to hate. Keeping everything clean during the summer can often be the number one or two biggest task, especially at the most popular service areas, but park staff put a smile on and roll with it. In two thousand twenty one, more than four point eight six million people visited Yellowstone, which according to my calculations, means that each visitor accounted for about four ft of t P. If you can't quite grasp that thirty miles of toilet paper is enough to cover the distance from Key West to Seattle. If that doesn't float your boat, try this one. Thirty five hundred miles of toilet paper means that you could t p the Empire State Building with several layers. Two thousand twenty one was a record setting year for National Parks tourism, and two thousand twenty two could be more of the same. In any case, the Park Service will be ready to do visitors a solid and keep that toilet paper stocked. This week the map Land Act Ticks carp and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week, and ladies and gentlemen, you just won't hardly believe it, but here's a highlighter two for you. I finally got to eat at Die Dewey or Die Do. I'm not even sure how he says it, but the food is fantastic. That's Chef Jesse Griffith's play Us in downtown Austin, Texas. They source everything, they make it all from scratch, it's unbelievable. And if you think that's unbelievable, I listened to Stranglehold, you know the song by Ted Nugent, Yeah, that one, and he was playing it. If you spend a lot of time in the high school weight room hoping to thicken up, you know, so you didn't get the snot beat out of on the football field, then you probably know Ted Nugent Stranglehold. Anyway, Ted Nugent played it just for me, I mean, and the folks I was with, like Phil and Kuran and Steve, And he played it in his office and his office is probably decorated exactly how you'd think. After that, we watched a scimitar horned rix charge of truck while defending a newborn calf, put my bare feet inside fossilized dinosaur footprints. Drink So Tall, which is likely the base of the first beer ever made in North America and makes a fine liquor when distilled. We did that at the Desert Door Distillery and ate again at the food truck. They're called Eden West Quail Sandwich is Neil Geyberger's. The list goes on and it is absolutely fantastic. I could fill up the whole podcast with it, We made her back downtown, watched old Joe Rogan embraces new Austin, Texas home and his Austin, Texas crowd up on the comedy stage, and then Steven Ronella and I topped it off by entertaining the idea of setting up a table at the side of the coming soon do You Whole Foods here in Bos Angeles, Montana and soliciting signatures for a citizens referendum that would turn Yellowstone National Park into a wilderness area, And then of course discussed the pros and cons of that one food music controversy, high fences, low fences, history, biology, paleontology, and anthropology, both modern and prehistoric, which is I'm sure it's just kind of Texas to some, but it made me happy to be home, mostly because I'm super proud, joyful even to announce the return of the Land Access Initiative. For you longtime listeners, you'll recall the Shiloh Pond project where we as in all of us, helped to close a much needed funding gap to preserve in perpetuity public access and public land through a listener submission. Brent West of the High Peaks Alliance helped us identify the project, and all of us raised and don't aided seventy dollars to help secure the land for American freedom. Now we're doing it all again, and here's the really amazing news. We already have over ninety dollars in the land access pot. So go to the meat eater dot com, hit the conservation tab and click on Land Access Initiative to help us identify our next spot. All we're looking to do is provide more access to hunting and fishing for America. So get on. Listeners can submit a place that needs more access for public hunting and fishing, you'll be a hero. Moving on to the legislation desk. Last week, the U. S. House of Representatives past the map Land Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan position of four fourteen to nine votes. As we've covered several times on this program, the map Land Act would fund the digitization of public land data. This includes information related to legal easements on public land, boundary information, and transportation restrictions. Digitizing this information will help hunters and anglers more easily access public and identify thousands of public easements that aren't currently listed anywhere online. If that sounds like a good idea to you, get on the phone with your U. S. Senator and tell them to vote for S. Nine zero four, the map Land Act. Elsewhere, in Washington d c Utah, Senator Mike Lee is about to introduce a bill that would make it easier for local governments to privatize public land. The bill hasn't been formally introduced, but a recent news report on the Spectrum lays out the basics. Dubbed the Houses Act, the legislation is being promoted as a way to ease the rising cost of housing by allowing developers to build homes on BLM land. Right now, BLM land can only be old to private entities if there are no work or traffic rights, The land is isolated from other BLM land, and it was acquired for outdated purposes. Under Senator Lee's new bill, those guardrails go away. Only existing rights on a parcel of land would disqualify that property from being developed. The text of the bill hasn't been released yet, but if it's coming from Mike Lee's office, it isn't likely to help public hunting or angling. Keep your eyeballs peeled for the Houses Act and we will too. Speaking weird Things from Utah, I have a few quick updates on the Utah Lake Island project. I discussed an episode one to recap. An out of state company has submitted a proposal to create thirty four man made island spanning some eighteen thousand acres on Utah Lake. The company, Lake Restoration Solutions, claims that their plan will create new residential housing for Utah's and improve water quality. In response to this proposal, the Utah legislature past two bills this year. One would require that any remediation project be approved by the Utah Senate, House, and Governor, rather than just the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, which currently controls the process. Another bill creates the Utah Lake Authority, which will have more power than the current commission that oversees the lake. Both bills could create headaches for Lake Restoration Solutions on the state level, but they're also facing a hurdle at the federal level. The company announced just last week that the U. S. Army Corps engineers will require an environmental impact statement. This is standard procedure for a project like this, but it will allow a third party contractor to verify or dispute the claims that Lake Restoration Solutions is making. So if you're one of the folks who keeps writing in on this issue, I think that's good news for the time being. If you want a bit more information on the history of this, please go back and listen to episode one twenty spoiler alert, I talk about poop up in Maine. It looks like Sunday hunting isn't going anywhere this year. The Legislature's Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee voted eight to three on March fifteen to oppose the bill, which means it's unlikely to be taken up in either chamber. A recent survey by the main Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife found that thirty percent of the general population supports Sunday hunting, while of hunters support sunday hunting if landowner permission is required. Support among the general population also rises to which kind of says something about the state of Maine and the hunters there right kind of reminds you of um, somebody's folks saying like, well, did you guys have permission to go do that? Is it okay with Jimmy's parents? If you go anyway. Eleven State's still restricts Sunday hunting in some way, but those laws are slowly being rolled back. Pennsylvania has been relaxing Sunday hunting restrictions on Sundays and some species. In Virginia pass this year a bill that allows Sunday hunting on public lands. In other news, the U. S. Senate voted this month to make daylight savings time permanent. I don't know about you, but the time change always messes with my head. I'd welcome not having to think about losing or gaining an hour twice a year, but the bill has obvious benefits for hunters and anglers as well. Permanent daylight savings means an extra hour asleep before you have to beat the white tail to the tree stand in, an extra hour in the evening to do a little angling or squirrel hunting after work. I'm kind of a fan of this bill, though I do understand that hunting and fishing aren't the only things we have to think about. I've seen some studies suggesting that more kids get in car rex having to drive to school on dark mornings, and apparently everyone hated it when we made daylight savings time permanent for two years in the nineteen seventies. The measure will become law if the U. S. House votes in favor, but right now it doesn't look like they'll be taking it up anytime soon. Moving on to the fishing desk. In Wisconsin, this month, wholesale fish dealer Ping Lee was convicted for illegally selling invasive carp, the first case ever in the state, for three particular non native carp species. If you read this headline and saw the stock photo that went along with it, which is of course carp leaping out of the river with guys holding nets and boats and seeming to be no end of these fishing invasives, you could have been thinking, what the heck is going on? Who would get a ticket for this? Lots of states encourage anglers to go after and eat fish that are having a disproportionate impact on the landscape, So why not take the next step and be able to order wild caught big head carp at that romantic seafood place you're gonna go to. You may be thinking, shouldn't we be celebrating ping Lee as a trailblazer trying to solve a major ecosystem problem with haute cuisine. Unfortunately, Lee wasn't taking carp out of Wisconsin's rivers, and he's no folk hero far armed. In wildcot carp are already popular as a food fish, and they're most valuable when they're transported alive. In many retail markets, a shopper will select a live fish from a tank and the fishmonger will dispatch it on the spot. And that's exactly how some carp have spread so disastrously. Live fish truck to new areas that then escape and become established in the wild. The laws that Lee violated require wholesale fish dealers to transport fish already gutted or with their gills severed, proof that they are dead and not gonna go make more carp in places they shouldn't. In two thousand eighteen alone, Lee transported and sold over nine thousand pounds of fish that flouted these laws. For these infractions, Lee will pay more than thirteen thousand dollars in fines, which is a lot of fish sticks down at the rusty scupper. Speaking of more fish than you can shake a fork at, two Kentucky anglers recently pulled in and nine pound blue at fish out of the Ohio River eleven more pounds, and they would have beat the state record, which was set in two thousand eighteen. As reported in Kentucky Field Magazine, Michael Robinson and Terry Raymer have their catfish angling very dialed in. On March fifteenth, in the past four years in a row, they have put a fish over eighty pounds in the boat. Further research on blue cat fish angling turned up hand line fisherman Zachary Gustufson, who, if the online outlet hand line fishing dot Com can be trusted, leaves Robinson and Raymer in the dust, although we could not find another source verifying the feat. On June five, Goose Stafson apparently pulled in a one hundred and seven pound blue catfish from the Potomac on fifteen pound test and seems to have come away with all of his fingers, which is a win. If any listeners out there have more corroborating info on Zachary Gustufson, please please right in. Over On the Fraser River up in beautiful British Columbia, on March six, fishing guide Eve Bisson and angler Dan Lawyer caught a white sturgeon estimated at six hundred pounds and eleven ft long. Lawyer told the USA Today that as he pulled the fish in and started to understand its proportions, he was quote shocked, surprised, excited, amazed, and scared. Damn. I can believe it. The Frasier is not a river you want to capsize a boat in, and that fish could do it. We know a lot about white sturgeon because a very thorough tagging program has been underway in the Frasier since in Bisson tagged this monster before releasing it. We know, for example, that sturgeon in the estuaries of the Fraser are remarkably sedentary, especially in the winter. A two thousand seventeen study found that sixty seven percent moved only one point nine kilometers or one point one eight miles per month. I clocked more than that just going back and forth to the fridge all day. The estimated world record is also out of the Fraser. Believe it or not, this fish, caught by Chad Helmer is thought to be a possible thousand pound sturgeon, and last stop on our fish round up is a major call to action. Don't sleep on this one. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is considering a new amendment to its stripe bass management plan, and we anglers need to show up to make sure our interests are represented. For some of you, that sentence may have sounded like complete gobbledegook, so stay with me for a bit of background. Stripe bass are a species as American as white tailed deer. Many Native American groups established seasonal fishing villages on coastlines to catch up migrating stripers, and the pilgrims of the Massachusetts Colony use them for food and fertilizer to survive their first several years on an unfamiliar continent. Their sheer volume in this area astounded European observers. John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown, wrote the following in sixteen fourteen. I have seen such multitudes that it seemed one might go over their backs dry shod. That is, so many stripers that you could walk across and without getting your feet wet or maybe your brass buckled shoes. Today some people go after stripe bass with yachts the size of mcmansion's, loaded down with a silicon valley's worth of electronics, but other people have just as good a luck surfcasting from the beach. These fish are so fun that they've been introduced all across the country for a crash course and the joys of stripe bass. Head on over to the YouTube and watch Yours Truly and Joe Surmelie on episode one of Doss Boats season three. After the abundance that John Smith described, I bet you'll be able to predict what happened next. By then, seventies, after generations of over fishing and pollution, stripe bass populations collapsed and everyone with an interest in the species, commercial fishing, the charter and guiding industry, anglers and conservationists knew they needed to act. That's where the organization I mentioned earlier comes in the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Through collaboration and deliberation and votes and forcing of conservation measures, the a s m f C had put together the Fisheries Management Plan in one By five, the first mandatory conservation measures were established and they worked. By only ten years later, the Atlantic coastal stripe bass stocks were declared fully recovered. But we're not out of the woods yet. Now we're in a bit of a similar situation to the seventies. Stripe bass populations are again headed downhill, and everyone who gives a crap is figuring out what to do through the a S m f C. The new amendment to the Management Plan, Amendment seven, was approved for public comment earlier this year, and the draft includes a complex menu of options, some good, some bad. The good options would strengthen the plans management triggers or the specific situations that require the a S MFC to act, and would implement measures to rebuild the stock immediately and maintain abundance once that stock is recovered. The bad options would allow the Commission to defer management action or remove important management triggers entirely. Atlantic stripe bass are anadromus, meaning that like salmon, they live much of their life in the ocean, but migrate through estuaries into fresh water in order to spawn. Protecting that migration and particularly female bass of reproductive age, is the key to healthy population levels. This is challenging with strape bass, as females have to reach six years old before they become mature and produce significant numbers of eggs in certain years. This migration and reproduction are a big success in these classes, as they're known, are the ones that establish a durable population that allows the stock to survive less successful years. Unfortunately, we have had a string of tough reproductive seasons without an abundant class lately, and so protecting mature females is particularly important right now and in coming years. The most important measurement to determine whether the species is healthy or in trouble is female spawning stock biomass or ss B. The other key metric is phishing mortality, and the draft Amendment seven includes options that set these indicators as triggers to action. Conservation groups like back country hunters and Anglers are advocating for the quickest intervention if phishing mortality exceeds the current established threshold or if the SSB continues to decrease. These s s B numbers have been going in the wrong direction since the mid two thousand's, and we're due for another biomass report very soon. N seven could also determine if the a s MFC must implement a new tenure plan to get spawning stock biomass back to a healthy level once these triggers are set off, As you can imagine an organization this complex with this much responsibility tends to move deliberately fancy word for slow. Under the current management plan, the board is not required to initiate a rebuilding plan when a trigger is tripped, and that in action is exactly what happened back in two thousand nineteen when the stock assessment indicated troubling declines, which is why Amendment seven would require the board to implement a rebuilding plan within two years of any future incidents. To get mature female biomass back to where it needs to be, fishing mortality must go down, which means effective catching release. Not all catching release is effective. Studies have shown that nine percent of stripers released alive will die, which in two thousand nineteen, for instance, was about two point five nine million dead fish, which is why proper handling education is part of Amendment seven. Now this is as thin as I can make this argument. It's a very complex topic. We're skipping over a whole bunch of stuff, like, uh, you know how much the landscape has changed water quality conditions bait stocks. I urge you to go do some research and understand more. Head over to the news section of the b h A website and click on the article from March twenty three titled Stripe Bass Conservation Amendments seven Priorities. If your curiosity flourishes from there, I cannot recommend enough the blog one Angler's Voyage dot blogspot dot com, where attorney and saltwater angler Charles Whitwok goes through all the ins and outs of the stripe bass recovery. In I would say, masterful, d tale, But do this fast, as the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is taking public comment on Amendment seven only until April fifteen, so send an email to comments that's plural at a s MFC dot org urging the Commission to recover the Atlantic stripe bass and to adjust the management plan to ensure the stocks stays abundant long term. Moving on to the tick desk. That's right, it's Turkey season. Spring is sprung and those little blood suckers are coming out for you. Female ticks captain a laboratory in New York survived for a record breaking twenty seven years, according to a paper recently published in the Journal of Medical Entomology. The ticks were deprived of food for eight of those years, and one of them managed to reproduce four years after the last mail had died. In six Julian Shephard, an associate professor of biological science at Binghamton Uni Versity, received a group of ticks collected from a semi desert area of Kenya. He kept those ticks in a stable habitat set up in his lab and fed them on rabbits, mice, and drawn rat blood. Then in four he stopped feeding them all together. The male ticks survived for four years without food, but three of the female ticks survived for another four years. At that point, Shepherd started feeding them again, and two of them continued to survive until two thousand three. Even More amazingly, after Shepherd started the feedings again, in one of the females laid a batch of eggs. The last male had died four years earlier, meaning and he may want to take a deep breath here, that she had stored the male ticks sperm inside her over that time period, just you know, for this type of occasion. At the time of the paper's publication, the ticks from the batch of eggs were still alive and well twenty six year after they were born. A statistic. Nobody wants to hear it's horrifying. But wait, there's more. Shepherd believes the longevity of these ticks is a record for any species of tick. This species, Argus brumpty, is a type of soft tick that hails from the drier areas of eastern and southern Africa. They feed on a wide variety of small to large mammals and lizards and reside in shallow caves, rocky areas, or dust bath areas used by large mammals. Unlike North American ticks, Argus brumpty is not reported to carry any disease agents. However, Shepherd reports from personal experience that its bike causes substantial painful lesions, with after effects sometimes persisting for many months and even years. So one silver lining of the study is that you're not likely to run into any Argus brumpty while sitting in the North American woods with your slate call unless they get out and you know they will. Mm hmmm. Can you feel them crawling up your pant leg huh, down your collar? Uh huh. Fortunately, the species of ticks here in North America cannot live nearly as long. Most ticks take three years, which is two years, three hundred and sixty four days too long to complete their life cycle, and they die if they can't find a host at each life stage. All of that to say, be safe this spring. Get some permethrin, some backwoods deet coat your socks, coat your cuffs, get a super comfy neck gator from First Light, and douse that thing. Indep. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember right in at 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. The last thing I gotta tell you, we flew in into a tornado in Texas, and I guarantee those folks we're looking for clear, quiet, burly, super handy steel chainsaw. You maybe too, so go to www dot steel Dealers dot com and find a local, knowledgeable steel dealer near you. They'll get you set up with what you need and they won't send you home with what you don't. Thanks again, and I'll talk to you next week.

Save this episode