00:00:09 Speaker 1: From mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's Kel. The California legislature has passed two different pieces of legislation to further curb and regulate hunting. We covered the first one, a B two seven three, which will abolish all fur trapping just in the state of California, in an article on the mediator dot com. But there's a second one I feel inclined to discuss here, a B one two five, which will place a moratorium on all bobcat hunting until five years down the road. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife could potentially reopen the season after completing a new management plan. Opponents of the bill alleged that this is really just a hunting band cloaked in fox sheep skin. Creating a new management plan will cost roughly two and a half million money, They say the legislature won't allocate when the time comes, in which case bobcat hunting would remain permanently closed. Advocates for the bill claim that the bobcat hunting in the state is unnecessary and purely about killing trophy animals. For sport. Bobcat hunting bands have been popping up all over the country in recent years. A proposed ban in Colorado failed to pass this spring, but we're likely to see that one come up again. The issue with these bands isn't so much about the importance or popularity of hunting bobcats, but rather the lack of understanding of our model of conservation that's baked into this kind of rulemaking. Like it or not, North American conservation is intimately tied to hunting, fishing, and trapping. On a practical level, these activities provide the lion's share of money for land and habitat management and acquisition those tags and license as we buy, they fund the agencies that oversee all our wildlife. Sportsmen and women generously support nonprofit organizations that do great things for our wildlife and the place as they live. Beyond that, the people really working and advocating for wildlife species are the people with the most direct and intimate relationships to those animals that would be us, the hunters, anglers, and trappers. Regardless of your personal opinion on hunting, it's difficult to argue the effectiveness of American game management practices as those are deeply tied to hunting and hunters. Let's take bobcats as a case study. For much of this country's history, bobcats were treated as a nuisance species and nearly when extinct. Since the nineteen seventies, as a direct result of our model of conservation, their numbers have recovered. They are now believed to be over three million bobcats in the US. The population is doing well. Banning the limited bobcat hunting that we currently have won't help increase that population. Even the advocates of this band admit that fact hunters aren't killing so many cats that were impacting the species. Often when we see legislation like this, it's because people promote folk sing on an individual, not a species. That's not how wildlife management works. What it will do, however, is take away one more revenue opportunity to fund wildlife management and alienate one more group of folks who want to spend time in the woods. If California really want to do something great for bobcats, they dramatically increase the price of tags, which are currently way too low at less than four bucks, and use that money to protect critical habitat. It's a hard argument to wrap our heads around. But hunters shooting individual animals aren't hurting bobcats as a population. Land development kills a lot more animals than hunters, especially in California. I encourage everyone to read up and better understand the North American model of conservation so we can address these arguments as they continue to pop up, which they will. Also, let's get that damn wildlife overpass over the one on one. For the record, I'm not bashing California as a state. You all have lots of beautiful land and people. In fact, my one issue is that the people there are just a little too attractive, little too put together, if you will. I'm more of a road hard, put away, wet kind of guy. I'm a fan of things with scars and stories. Things you know. I've taken some beatings but still keep getting after it. Good time to remind you that Cal's Week and Review is powered by steel power equipment. My battery powered steel chainsaw looks like you might have tumbled down the side of a mountain, but it still works just as well as the day I got it, which is more than I can say for some other things I know have actually fallen off the side of a mountain, but I'll get to that later this week. We're covering the recovery of New York City's whales, vikings hunting, walrus is, michiganders, and moose and so much more. But first, let me tell you about my week. As I told you last week in episode twenty one, I stumbled into an amazing opportunity to hunt elk in New Mexico, the state I love. I'm actually sitting in a real, live New Mexicans living room recording this in Dattle, New Mexico. You know Dattle. It's right next to Pie Town. New Mexico is the only state I've heard of that opted to name a town through a TV show contest. You've probably heard of Truth or Consequences. New Mexico. Well, it used to be called Hot Springs. Then along came Bob Barker, and uh, I'm just not going to get into that because I've got a time to tell you about from this adventure. The high highs and low lows of elk hunting while surrounded by the state of Enchantment, which is the New Mexico state motto, which is amazing. Quick example of a high is calling in an incredibly large bowl, watching him drop off one mountain across a creek bed, climb the mountain on a direct line to me. Then a larger, unseen bowl comes out of the timber, cutting him off. The two bowls square off, smash antlers. The interloper from the opposite hillside spins the larger bowl in an incredibly athletic football esque move, maybe all of Naji Harris if you're an Obama fan. The bowl continues up the mountain at full speed, only to slow to a quiet cat like pace as he hunts out the source of the cow call in the high, sparse New Mexican timber, eventually stopping perfectly broadside, slightly out of breath at twenty yards. The only thing between himself and myself a few tangled, weather whipped branches, just enough to prevent any ethical shop no path from my arrow. At this point you can breathe again and actually study the amazing, beautiful, powerful animal in front of you. Watch him decipher his own set of clues. See the wheels turn as he figures out that he's been duped, maybe or mistaken. Maybe he comes to the conclusion that there were no cows looking for love on that mountain side. Lows come with the highs and I'll get him the real details. In an upcoming article on the meat Eator dot com, an arrow released nail Time Torrential Monsoon. I'm in afternoon nap on a spider nest, a bloodless blood trail, feeling the gears of my own head spin as I decipher the clues in front of me. I love el cunning. I also love what I describe as by catch, the things I find outside of my primary quarry. One find in New Mexico I always look forward to is the horned toad. There are fourteen species of horned lizards, all belonging to the family Iguana, day seven of which can be found in the American Southwest, but the horned lizards can be found from British Columbia to Guatemala. Aside from their spines, which can be soft or hard enough to actually rupture the throat of a snake, the horned toad is known for its ability to change colors to match its surroundings and their ability to shoot blood from their eyes as a defense mechanism, which they don't actually do unless they are incredibly stressed out, so you know it's a bad thing. If you can watch one, they'll shuffle themselves into the sand or lose dirt until only their heads and maybe a spine or two from their backs are exposed. They eat almost exclusively ants, typically seventy to a hundred per day. As you can imagine, ants are incredibly hard to digest, so they're Stumma actually takes up of their entire body a lot of undigestible matter there, so don't try and take them home, no matter how many ants you think you have on hand. This species is a character as they try like hell to get away, but once caught, seemed resigned to sit in your hand like fate will take care of them. And yes, the horn toad is actually a horned lizard, not a toad. New Mexico is home to the Texas horned lizard, the Mountain short horn and the round tailed horned lizard. The Texas horned lizard does not carry a side arm at all times, but it does have the ability to catch rain water with its back and shoot blood from its eyes as far as four ft. Both the Texas horned lizard and the round tailed horned lizard lay eggs while interestingly enough, the Mountain short horned lizard gives birth to live young. Anyway, it's really cool stuff and just another example of things you find with a great Elk tag in your pocket as an excuse, one more fun fact for you before we get into the serious stuff. I did a lot of hunting while overlooking the v l A. The v l A is an acronym that stands for very large Giree, which is a series of twenty seven independent radio telescope antennas, each of which has a dish diameter of eighty two ft in ways two thirty tons. The antennas are shaped in a y configuration, each arm being thirteen miles long. As you can imagine, this setup brings in a lot of information which I'm told is primarily used by astronomers to study the stars and told by some to probably track down those aliens that end up in the area fifty one. Better get your running shoes on anyway, Moving on and backing up. Last week we touched on how the Clean Water Act is about to be stripped down, allowing for more pollution and habitat destruction across America. If you need any further convincing that this is a bad idea, then let me tell you about a whale of a story out of New York City. Literally. In recent years, scientists and tourists alike have been pleasantly surprised by the growing number of whale pods in the New York Harbor. Twenty years ago, a humpback within eyesight of the city was an unimaginable seen, even though the area is part of their native range. Who would blame the whales for abandoning the Big Apple? Though, as National Geographic put it in a recent article, quote the waters around New York City where some of the most polluted in the world, a toxic stew of chemicals and garbage. Thanks to a successful environmental policy such as the Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and Clean Water Act, the whales have returned. When pollution levels started to fall, zooplankton started to rise. As zooplankton populations took off, so did men haden, an oily schooling fish that whales gorge on. In less than a decade, the whale population has increased by get ready seven thousand, five hundred and from five whales in two thousand eleven to three hundred and seventy seven whales in two thousand nineteen. It's a positive trend, but these whales need all the help they can get. Ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement in the New York Harbor are enormous threat to these enormous creatures, and any repeals to Clean Water Act threatens to negate their amazing progress. This is your regular reminder to call a congressman or woman today and tell them to get their heads straight on the Clean Water Act. Moving on, but sticking with big marine critters. Researchers have known for years that walrus has once called Iceland home. The large tusk creatures disappeared from the island about seven hundred years ago, and until recently it was assumed that the walrus has fled the area shortly after humans showed up, a behavior typical of marine life in the North Atlantic. In this hypothesis, the cows and calves would have been the first to leave, finding refuge with fellow walruses that lived on Greenland. The bulls would have followed soon thereafter, with the Icelandic group contributing to the large genetic community that exists among modern day walruses. However, fresh research suggests that Walruss didn't migrate off the island, but instead we're extrapated by vikings. That's a fancy word for killed by vikings. The smoking gun that supports this theory is carbon dated walrus bones and new genetic data. The carbon dated bones show that the walrus has disappeared shortly after Vikings arrived, and the new genetic data doesn't match that of walrus has found anywhere else in the world. Why did the Vikings wage war on these giant, slow creatures for their ivory? Of course, medieval hunting accounts note that walrus ivory was a valuable commodity at the time, and that ivory trade was a popular practice by Vikings. This is one of the earliest examples of commercially driven over exploitation and is a good reminder of how delicate our marine resources are. Vikings were able to eradicate an entire species off of a forty thousand square mile island, and did so without the help of guns, motorized ships, GPS, big fishing nets, or any other modern day convenience. I want you to think of that the next time somebody tells you that folks are trying to eradicate a species, typically right now, with all the tech oology at hand, would be pretty darn easy if we put our minds to it. On the subject of humans wiping out species, let me tell you about the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, which is home to millions of birds and tens of thousands of caribou. For clarity, the National Petroleum Reserve has absolutely nothing to do with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is the big store of oil that our government has stockpiled in case of emergency. Despite its confusing, and I might argue poorly chosen name, the National Petroleum Reserve, or NPR for short, is actually the largest chunk of public ground in the United States twenty two million acres. It's on Alaska's North Slope, just to the west of another huge block of public land, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anwar Handwar gets a lot of press, but it's larger neighbor goes mostly unmentioned. President Harding established the NPR back in ninety three after Native tribes showed Yankee sailors rock crude bubbling up from the ground, kind of like a far north version of the Jed Clamp. A story Black Goal, Texas Tea. That's a Beverly Hillbillies reference in case you missed it anyway back in the early twenties, or naval fleet was just switching from coal to oil power. The NPR was originally named Naval Petroleum Reserve Number four, as it was one of four sites around the country that held contingency fuel reserves for the Navy. The NPR got renamed in ninety six when Congress passed the Naval Reserves Petroleum Act and ownership of the land transferred from the Navy to the Bureau of Land Management. The following year, the BLM set aside three sections of the reserve as critical habitat for wildlife, specifically migratory birds and caribou. One of those sections, near boy I'm going to screw this up to check Puck Lake, is now slated for potential development. We're talking about a huge expanse of wetlands that makes for prime breeding habitat for shorebirds, waterfowl, owls, and other ground nesting birds. Think of it like Fort Lauderdale spring Break for birds. More than six million shore birds to sund on Alaska's North slope from all over the globe every summer just a party. Birds like the bar tailed godwit that make a seven thousand mild NonStop migration from New Zealand, the longest in the world, And like those hormone fueled college kids, there's a reason these birds go through all the trouble to travel so far from home to get away from prying eyes, so to speak. Only in the case of the birds, they're not trying to avoid parents, campus cops, or academic deans. They're trying to avoid predators, particularly foxes that have a keen taste for bird eggs. The current administration is trying to change the rules for development in this area and open up more of it to oil drilling and transportation in the form of roads and pipelines. Oil development in this area will disturb this massive avian orgy, and the same roads that carry in trucks and equipment will also give predators away in allowing them to plow through all the easy protein sitting in those ground nests. This matters because short bird populations aren't doing so well in general. Nearly sixt of North Americans issues and fifty percent worldwide are in long term decline. Much of the issues that these birds are facing are on the other end of their long migration routes, but up here they still have a safe place to get busy and raise their young. If we take away this last safe haven, we won't be doing them any favors. Then there's the fifty eight thousand caribou in the Techeck Puck herd that live in this area year round and are a stable of subsistence hunters. Caribou tend to avoid development and humans in general, since you know, those hunters harvest around four thousand of them per year, So no one's really sure how development might impact this herd. In fact, no one's totally sure how proposed development might impact the birds either, And that's really the main point. I get the need for oil independence that this particular place seems to have a lot of it, But we've had rules and restrictions for development of this incredible untouched landscape for several generations now, and they've worked out pretty well. Earlier this year, a coalition of five conservation groups and the local native village of I'm gonna call it nux Set. We'll have to print this one online, and U i Q s U T took the BLM to court, claiming that all the exploratory development they've been doing around the NPR, drilling test wells and building ice roads was done without the proper and necessary environmental studies. If that's any indication of how the broader project is going to happen, it seems like cause for concern. Before we go messing up something that's working pretty darn well, we should take the time to figure out what those impacts will be. To borrow a different land. Use analogy. You don't start a controlled burn without first being damn sure about the control part. Otherwise you're just setting stuff on fire. And finally, speaking of caribou, they are part of one of North America's largest science experiments, Ile Royale, which is a two seven square mile island in Lake Superior, something you may remember from way back on episode two of Cal's Weekend Review. It's owned by the state of Michigan, even though it's closer to Minnesota and Canada. You may recall mediators coverage of the island an episode one seventy two of the podcast or Steve, Jana, Spencer, new Heart and Pat Durkin discussed the island shrieking wolf population on Ile Royale. Native caribou were extirpated in the nineteen twenties. To replace the big deer, humans brought in an even bigger deer moose. The island's moose population is the highest it's been in twenty years, which is likely because the island's wolf population is the lowest it's been in one hundred years. To see how the increasing number of moose will affect i Rolls vegetation, researchers conducted a feces analysis of the moose for a closer look at their diet. What they learned is that moose are damn picky eaters. When conditions are favorable in predation and snow are in a factor, moose will eat the rarest of rare plants available. This means that if balsam fur is rare in their home range, they'll selectively eat it, but if it's the most common plan around, they'll opt for something else. Biologists aren't sure if the ile royl moose are just fancy eaters or if they biologically favor a balanced diet. The studies yes that it's the latter, and I can agree with that. I too try to have a balanced diet, you know, like a little elk with my walleye and a side of turkey with my white tail. All right, that's all I've got for you this week. Tell some friends. If you want more Cow's Week and review, leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand star and subscribe. Let me know how I'm doing at ask cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s k C a L at the meat Eater dot com. I'll talk to you next week.