00:00:08 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now here's cal This week we're gonna talk about raptors and lead poisoning shrooms, US customs salmon. Little pouch has made out of fox faces and more for starters. Ever, wonder what the hell is taking so long in the U S customs line when you're coming into the United States. If you were wondering this the other day at L a X, a guy named Virgilio Martinez could be to blame. Martinez appeared on the Netflix series Chef's Table. He was coming into the US from his native Peru and ended up spending three hours in detention. What was the hold up? Virgilio was flying home with forty whole vacuum sealed piranhas, which he chose to describe on official forms as bones and flesh, thinking perhaps that grossly oversimplifying things might make them go smoother, as though agents are going to think, oh, just bones and flesh and let it slide. I'm trying to think of a joke here about carry on, get it, carry on. That's for you guys who love dad jokes. Those customs, guys see some strange things. They've seized the live tiger kittens, live otters, and in one instance, two hundred live tarantulas, all of which were confiscated. In this instance, the chef kept his fish. Following the fiasco. He cooked them at an event where he wanted to promote the eating of paratas. At this point, I'm sure he got more promotional bank out of his buck than he imagined. Switching from Peru slash l A to Georgia and from Anna to presidential Former President Jimmy Carter was heading out turkey hunting a couple of days ago and fell and busted his hip. He had surgery. He said his main concern is that he hasn't yet filled his turkey limit. He wants the state of Georgia to roll over his unused tags for next year, which would be a clear case of presidential overreach. Now I'm going to tell you about my week. Turns out President Carter isn't the only one with the health problem that kind of involves turkeys. I was telling a bunch of folks about a hemorrhoid issue that I had a couple of years ago, and I was telling it as I happened to be heading out turkey hunting, so blood and pain were fresh on my mind, and as it turns out, that's exactly what I would get. Blood, some of my own, some not, and pain also served two ways. Long story short, I wanted a bird and took refuge in the thickest, nastiest bramble choked creek bottom you can magine. I happened to be hunting with my good friend Garrett Smith Dirt Meth, who acted as the spotter as I belly crawled through the creek bottom. Once a clear turkey track was found in the gravel, along with a silked feather and a single drop of blood, which gave away the wounded turkey's probable route. Old Dirt repositioned to a spot along the escape path. Meanwhile, I continued my crawl, now in the actual creek, thinking this is really stupid. I've never heard of a turkey swimming well. As I came to a particularly thick spot from the upstream side, Dirt came to that same spot from the downstream side and pronounced, hey, I got him turkey down. Well, that good feeling didn't last long. The bird, who had just previously been announced deader than a wedge erupted up through the impenetrable undergrowth and directly through Dirt who was suspended above it. You know, on top of the brambles. We ended up with cuts, scrapes, Dirt got a stick in his nose which produced his own blood trail, and even a few ticks. I've had my share of easy hunts. They do happen, but this wasn't one of them. To be real clear, the cuts and scrapes don't compare to the hurt of losing a bird or any animal for that matter. Okay, moving on, Washington, Oregon recently received authorization to kill hundreds of marine mammals for the somewhat ironic purpose of saving marine mammals. They're trading the lives of sea lions for hopefully the lives of a population of killer whales known as the Southern resident pods in the heavily damned Columbia River basin. The Californian Stellar sea lions have been having hey day, eating variety of fish, including the whale's favorite food, chinook salmon. The Southern resident killer whales or salmon specialists, unlike their mammal eating transient cousins. They spend a lot of time near the mouth of the Columbia, and scientists link their decline to the concurrent declines of chinook salmon. Last year, only about three thousand chinook came back to the Columbia. That's down from an estimated nine million. Before the age of dams and industrial fishing, those fish were known to tip the scales past eight five pounds nowadays, and angler would count their lucky stars for a thirty pounder. Sea lions may take a big den out of the salmon runs on their way inland from the ocean, but predatory fish species may take even more before salmon small can make it to the salt water. Washington State is aware of this, and, along with Bonaba Power, has long offered a healthy bounty on northern pikemanow in the Columbia basin. This is rare because the pikemanow is a native fish. Some dedicated anglers have earned more than a hundred thousand in a year just from killing pike meadows. Now we're gonna kill sport fish to save sport fish. It's hard to understand, but doing so is worth the effort. Washington's governor just signed a bill into lock greatly liberalized regulations for walleye, channel catfish and baths non native fish which all prey on juvenile chinook. The state already did away with all size and bag limits on small mouth, large mouth walleye and channel cats in most of the Columbian Snake some of the best smally fishing in the country, but this new bill will do the same in any waters used by salmon. Salmon anglers feeling the pinch of e s A listings and closures may be glad to hear these steps are being taken. Other anglers, particularly those that plan on enjoying walleye, channel cats and bass into the long term future, are understandably miffed about this act of fishy favoritism. It's worth reminding people here of something that is really simple. If it weren't for the dams, we wouldn't be having salmon problems in the first place. Catfish are also getting in trouble way over in chess Peak Bay. Different catfish, this being the blue catfish, but the same idea around competition with native species. Maryland Department of Natural Resources is trying to rid the bay and its tributaries of the cats planted by anglers in the sixties. These sometimes massive, whiskered and decidedly tasty fish are causing damage to the ecosystem. Maryland State Game Management Agency came up with a creative solution to popularize the take of blue cats. Instead of simply discarding the blue cats they removed from the bay, they started to serve it to college students at the University of Maryland in order to turn people onto eating them. This flies in the face of that old adage about teaching kids to fish and giving them fish, but they're probably banking on one leading to the other. A revised idiom might be give a kid the taste for blue cats, he'll wipe those sons of bitches out of the ecosystem. This mirrors a program at the University of Illinois where students can snack on some of the Asian carp currently inundating waterways throughout the Mississippi River basin. If you can't beat them, eat them, said former Illinois Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Sanguinetti, who helped launch the program. University of Illinois is serving nine thousand to eleven thousand pounds of carpe a year. Taking things over to our Health and Wellness desk. A little plague news, which, if you think about it, has been more or less lacking since the Dark Ages of the fourteenth century. A few weeks back, a couple living in a remote area of Mongolia dined on raw marmot liver, a traditional dish, and contracted the Black Death. Died soon after the government ordered a quarantine of a hundred and eighteen people for six days. Tourists were stranded. Some panic ensued. Western news outlets reveled in the news with a sort of condescending tone meant to convey the impression that, no ship, you shouldn't eat raw marmot liver. But honestly, that doesn't strike me as an entirely unappealing or unusual idea. A few plague facts for you. The bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death, ran rampant through Europe in the fourteenth century, killing an estimated twenty million people. When the plague hit London in sixteen sixty five, one in five residents died from the disease. Your sinya pestis the bacteria that causes the plague maintains existence through a nasty cycle between the rodents and their fleas. Urban areas with higher rat populations have an increasingly high risk of plague. The last urban outbreak in the US was in Los Angeles through five and was directly caused by infected rats. So there's that now, a couple of quick hits for you. A bunch of frat boys over at Hofstra University in Nassau County are in trouble for forcing a dog to drink beer at a party. Administrators suspended the university's chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pie pending investigation. I'm wondering if anyone out there to seeing the movie Strange Brew brings that to mind in a way. Another quickie. The actress Anne Hathaway recently discussed breaking from years of veganism to enjoy a meal of salmon. She said that it was as though her brain rebooted like a computer. For days now, I've been trying to think about what I think about this, but I've got nothing. Just passing along is all. What's even cooler than that, ladies and gentlemen, is that researchers in North Carolina have identified the oldest living tree in the Eastern United States, bald Cyprus. The tree is part of a stand of ancient trees along a river course. The tree is an estimated two thousand, six hundred and twenty four years old, So when Jesus was born, that tree was six hundred and five years old. When the guy who ordered Christ's death, Paunches Pilot, was born, that tree was five nine three years old. Another way to express that age is that the tree has so far been alive about thirty three times longer than you can realistically hope to live, and it's still kicking, or rather standing there. Moving along to the latest from dudes Hunting in Texas. We should just call this the Texas Desk, as in over to our Texas desk. Four guys were recently convicted of hunting from a helicopter for big game took photos. Of course, it turns out it violates federal law. When you're in trouble for poaching and you end up in federal court, you really screwed up. I'm not normally an advocate for playing video games, but my god, some guys would be better off just going in that direction and avoiding the outdoors altogether. Now we're gonna jump over to our National Park desk, which sits a long way away from our Texas desk and uh talk about some eagles. You may have heard about the golden eagle that was found dead outside in Yellowstone National Park class December. Well, just recently, a bald eagle is found dead outside of Glacier National Park. Both of these birds were found to have severely elevated lead levels in their blood. The likely culprit in both cases has been determined to be bird scavenging on carcasses or gut piles containing lead bullet fragments. Bird mortality from lead poisoning has been happening for a long time, there's no denying it. But for an equally long time, folks have been debating the source of lead. People pointed to a well documented study conducted by Dr Myra Finkelstein, who observed a pair of condors ingesting lead based paint that had flaked off of a water tower, apparently out of boredom. Remember the Las and Albatroz from episode one of Col's Weekend Review. You're you're listening to that show right now, Well, they are apparently paint eaters as well. They're lead source of choice being the paint from old military buildings on Midway Atoll what do I mean by boredom? Well, messing around experimenting another bird species. The black vulture descends on Dutch Gap, West Virginia every year end. They cause all sorts of issues once the vultures picked apart in the asphalt shingled roof in an afternoon. There's even one case of vultures sitting on a car in a mall parking lot picking out the little rubber gasket around the vehicle's windshield until the windshield collapsed into the vehicle. The vultures then entered the vehicle and proceeded to pick apart the upholstery. Why did they do this because they have the time to do it. Life isn't that hard for them? Apparently, at least not the simple functionality of actually staying live Here at the meat eater, we get a lot of questions as to the who's and house of establishing the sources of lead from lead killed birds. It's a classic case of well, how in the hell do they know? Well, the answer is they and quotes don't definitively. However, the circumstantial evidence is, in my opinion, incredibly strong. I'll hit the bird behavior first. Eagles aren't for the most part lead pickers, not because they are too smart, but because they're too dumb, no time to waste, not too curious. On top of that, eagles make a seasonal transition from hunting to scavenging in the fall, a transition that coincides with a lot of big game rifle seasons. In the case of this one eagle in Yellowstone, it died of lead poisoning during hunting season. It traveled frequently in areas where there's a lot of hunting going on, and it's lead exposure had increased precipitously ahead of its death. So we have a spatial, temporal, and behavioral evidence that this bird was exposed to lead from spent ammunition, but they did not mind. You actually find bullet fragments or shotgun shot within its digestive track. So the EVS is circumstantial, correlative, and strong, but it is not causative. Is this in and of itself a condemnation of lead ammo? Airplanes kill eagles, wind turbans kill eagles. Fences and power lines kill eagles. Cars kill eagles. Discarded fishing nets kill eagles. Old fishing sinkers can kill eagles. Yet eagles are at a historic high. Populations are booming throughout the country. They're doing just fine, more than fine in some places. What does all this mean? How much were we willing to get inconvenience ourselves over a few dead eagles. Well, let's all think about that and get back to each other. And finally, this week, if you thought Denver couldn't get any weirder, or at least didn't need to get weirder, they've gone and decriminalized, which is a lot like legalized, but I guess different. Hallo snergetic mushrooms. The plan doesn't permit sale and purchase of mushrooms, but you're not gonna get busted for having a few in your pocket. Before you go getting all old mannish thinking about what the hell is wrong with the world today and kids these days and sodom and gomora and all that, consider what just came out of Bolivia. Archaeologists found a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together, which makes it the most badass pouch ever. The pouch ages back to around a thousand years ago, according to radio carbon dates. Inside this pouch was a collection of five psychoactive drugs, including cocaine, d MT and compounds associated with ayahuasca, and you guessed at magic mushrooms. Think back to last episode when we discussed how an anthropologist can't explain something it gets classified as spiritual or ritualistic. So of course they're saying this sack of drugs belonged to a shaman, not a regular old drug user. Mind you, makes me wonder if I found someone passed out on the sidewalk with a fox snout bag full of five different drugs, what I think differently about him or her if they said they were a shaman. Back to Denver, though, if you're worried about drugs and them saying magic mushrooms are okay now, and you're considering whatever horrible direction we're headed as a species, take some solace in the fact that we've apparently been heading that way for at least a thousand years, yet we managed to get here somehow, and we're okay. Hemorrhoids notwithstanding, life actually feels pretty good on top of that. I know a lot of great people, including a bunch of Denver just like me. They enjoy getting up out of bed in the morning, maybe doing some fishing or hunting, or going off to work I'm sure when they come back down they'll still like to do those things, So I'm just not gonna get all worked up about this mushroom deal they've got going on down in Denver. Hey. This has been Cal's weekend review. Thanks for listening. Now go anywhere podcasts can be downloaded or streamed, leave me a review, and hit that furthest right hand start. On top of that, if you have any questions or found any inaccuracies, be sure to send them my way at ask Cal at the meat eater dot com. That's asked Cal A s k C A L at the meat Eater dot com

Save this episode