00:00:10 Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Cow's Week in Review with Ryan cow Calaian Here's cal Greater sage grouse in the popular Jackson Hole area have been seriously dwindling thanks to habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive grass's, urbanization, and a whole slew of other issues. But a new program is giving biologists a tool to help the iconic game birds robo grouse Yep, you heard that right. Essentially, a team of high school students has created what Wyo File writer Angus ham Thurmer called mechanical avian Chippendale's to attempt to draw grouse to a recently restored lex site in Grand Teton National Park. A LEK site, which is l e k is a place birds gather to mix mingo and you know, make more birds. It's like a bar or a house party, but for iconic native sage grouse anyway. These robot birds are made with real sage grouse wings supplied from hunter surveys, as well as other feathers from fly tying supplies. The heads were three D printed, and the white breast foam reportedly came from the foam from a hello, fresh meal kit quote. It's kind of a franken bird, said Gary de Khett, who works with the nonprofit Wonder Institute, which helped with the project. The grouse were hooked up to car batteries each day during the spring breeding season to make them dance from five am to nine am. They kind of do a turn, turn, turned, then do their wing wing wing. According to Dakat now you'd probably best referenced in a YouTube video. The backstory on this situation is pretty fascinating. Back in the day, there was a big leck in Jackson Hole that was dubbed the Western Airlines Stripleck for its proximity to the Jackson Hole Airport. Well, since the leck was documented in nineteen fifty, the airport has expanded, paving, mowing, and otherwise infringing on key habitat. There have also been collisions between birds and airplanes, which pose a safety hazard for people. That's where the robogrouse come in. Biologists want a few remaining sage grouse to move to a new location for their safety and ours or yours if you fly into Jay Hole. They are trying to draw the birds away to a restored meadow three miles south of the airport. Leck Whether real grouse will actually get lured in by their mechanical imitations remains to be seen, but it is an innovative idea and apparently there's some precedent for it. The high school students in Jackson Hole took inspiration from a study in Sublet County, where several students successfully used paper mache grouse to lure birds away from drilling sites. The pilot program is just one of several initiatives seeking to help Jackson Hole's embattled sage grouse. In fact, the airport has budgeted one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in mitigation funds over the next two years to use with weed sprain programs and the habitat improvement of two historic lex sites and one satellite one. Let's hope all these efforts pay off or in the only grouse you'll see in Jackson Hole will be mechanical. And if for you naysayers that say sage grouse are tough to eat, wait till you bite into a metal one. This week, we've got elk, weasels, infestations, and so much more. But first I'm going to tell you about my week and my week was packed. We cooked up a full antalopine quarter for Easter. I let it cure in a dry brine of salt, rosemary, and garlic for about twelve hours, then put it on the pellet grill at three hundred and fifteen degrees for around four hours. I mop these things with olive oil, butter, lemon, more garlic every forty five minutes, Then every twenty minutes. As I get closer to medium rare, I'll let this thing rest for about thirty minutes. Serve with chimmy cherry and tazeki hot peed of bread, Yukon gold potatoes fried in wild duck fat, which I rend from all the internal fat you know that collects around like the gizzard and duck butts from last season. Then I put a packet of gelatin into a quart of turkey stock from last year's turkeys and pour that all over the spuds and let it reduce in the oven at four hundred and seventy five degrees. And you want to keep turning your potatoes, And if it all comes together right, you get crisp, gooey potatoes on the outside from all that collagen, and you get like very fluffy, melty potatoes on the inside. And that antelope is just like fork tender. It's amazing stuff, great sandwich meat for the rest of the week, and we fed a bunch of folks over here, including Old Austin, Chili, Clay Burrad and Aranda Williams. We also had about seven dogs in the house, which to me was fantastic. In addition to this, around the old grinder and knocked out a bunch of extra burger that we needed, and then set aside eight pounds of this is what was in the grind okay, duck gizzards, duck hearts, duck livers, pork belly, elkneck, and antelope trim. Then I took eight pounds of that. Why eight pounds, I have no idea. And I took that eight pound mix and I ground it with garlic, cilantro, green onions and egg, white pepper, soy sauce and a little seschwan peppercorn and made about two one hundred and fifty wantons with that mix right there. Wantons are great easy things. They freeze super well. If you don't like making wantons, that's just a great sausage recipe. I gave you and if you just drop them in some of your turkey stock, they make like an instant wanton soup. Something fun to do with your burger supply. Okay, On top of that, I want to talk Forest Service reorganization real quick. Oh, I know I talked about this last week, short version. Else I really don't care about what's going on in the back of house. On the front of house, however, the Forest Service is the management agency for our forests. They are who we work with when it comes to active forest management regarding fire mitigation, noxious weed or invasive specie mitigation, knocking back trees in areas that we need for bighorn sheep, mule deer, keeping forest projects out of salmon and bowl trout spawning streams. They're a hell of a recreation partner in America. You can reorganize the back of house all you want, but the expectations on the front of house remain the same. I'm hitting this just one more time because lots of people wrote in last week we need the Forest Service, We need them to do their jobs at this very high level of expectation. And again, you just got to wonder if the changes in the system starting last year with staff reduction, budget reduction, and the implementation of a fire policy that made us put out really good fire that had it been left to run with a reduced fuel loads in our for us, combined with this year's drought situation, is it really a good time to be moving your house? Just going to leave you with that? Moving on to the elk desk, how would you like to have live GPS collar data on your next elk hunt? If a new initiative moves forward in Wyoming, some hunters will have just that. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department wants to increase the harvest of the snake River bottom elk. These elk hangout in that river bottom all year instead of migrating in the summer to Yellowstone Grand Titan. The river bottom elk have less pressure from predators and higher CAF survival rates, but those local elk are hard for hunters to get to as they spend much of their time on private land during hunting season. To target them, wildlife managers are looking to increase a limited quota December hunt on the National Elk Refuge that was instituted last season, adding a second season in January. They will use live GPS color data from collar to elk to open and close areas during those seasons according to which elk are in which area. Officials are still working on hammering out the details and say that new closures could be implemented daily or every couple of days during the short seasons. It's sure to make for quite an unusual hunt for today's hunters, but it opens up an interesting question. Will the future of wildlife management use live GPS tracking data to further narrow down which wildlife population segments or even specific animals hunters target in the future. If you have thoughts, let me know by writing in to askcl that's Ascal at themeeater dot com. I'll throw one more little tidbit at you. This is a solution when we have all the elk tags in the world but haven't been able to allow hunters to get access to the elk that hang out on the private ground. So I understand if this doesn't sound fair or it sounds too techy to be real hunting, but kind of hats off to Wyoming to find outside the box situations. Moving on to the weasel desk, encouraging news from across the pond, The Irish island of Rathlin has officially eradicated invasive ferrets, winning a major victory for the nesting seabirds of the island, including the iconic Puffin the story of Rathland's ferrets will sound familiar. Rats stowed away with human immigrants to the island in the eighteen hundreds, and in the nineteen eighties ferrets were brought in to control the rats. Of course, defenseless birds who laid delicious eggs right there on the ground are way easier to go after than rats, and by twenty twenty one, seabird numbers had declined by seventy four percent since nineteen ninety nine. In twenty seventeen, a single ferret killed twenty seven puffins in just two days. But starting in twenty twenty one, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds began Project Life Raft, which set out seven thousand handmade traps across the five point six square mile island. The traps were initially baited but not set, allowing the ferrets to get accustomed to them. Then, over the course of just a few days, volunteers set large numbers of them all at once. The program's success has been confirmed by the project's mascot Woody, a one eyed red fox labrador specially trained to detect ferrets. It's not a fox, it's a labrador, a red labrador with one eye. Woody hasn't turned up a fare since October twenty twenty three. Conservation officials are now officially declaring the island ferret free. Hopefully they ran old Woody around the island clockwise and counterclockwise to account for that one eye. See, I know what you're thinking. Seabird numbers have already increased as a result. This is a world first. No other place has fully gotten rid of ferrets before now, and maybe some US islands can follow this example. Maybe we can get rid of signal crayfish on Kodiak Island or rats on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. And I just happen to know a yellow lab who would be overjoyed to play that role. There's big news for one of the most significant land management agencies in the country. Surprise, surprise, the US Department of bag announced a major overhaul for the US Forest Service. The changes are wide ranging, starting with the entire relocation of the headquarters from Washington, d C. To Salt Lake City. The Trump administration is billing the relocation's role as moving decision makers closer to the public land that they manage. Quote, moving the Forest Service closer to the forest we manage is an essential action that will improve our core mission of managing our forests while saving taxpayer dollars in boosting employee recruitment, said Secretary of Agriculture l Rawlins. Not everyone in the conservation world sees I to eye with Secretary Rawlins, however, with many instead arguing that the National Office's role is to coordinate resources and issue guidance, which can and should be done successfully in DC. They also worry that the relocation will cause the agency to lose experienced staff members who don't want to make the relocation, which is something that happened during a similar and ultimately failed effort to move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, during the first Trump administration. The relocation, aside, the overhaul, will reorganize many other facets of the Forest Service. It will close regional offices and shift authority to state offices, while maintaining operational service centers that will provide admin and technical support. It will also close most of its research stations and consolidate them to one research headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado. For a Service chief Tom Schultz says those changes will make the agency more streamlined and efficient. Meanwhile, others have raised serious concerns that the overhaul will impact important research, lead to the loss of key staff members, and simply caused more chaos during a time when the Forest Service has already weathered significant budget cuts in recent years, not to mention the persistent attacks on public lands by folks such as Mike Lee. If the reorganization is successful in doing what federal leaders say it will, that's great, But like I said in the top of the show, they have high expectations to live up to. Moving on to the old Neanderthal Desk, new details have emerged about the mystery of what happened to Europe's early human hunters, the Neanderthals. Although Neanderthal and Homo sapien co existed for tens of thousands of years and even interbred with one another, by about forty thousand years ago, we were the only people left standing. Some theorists believe that anatomically modern humans out hunted Neanderthal or even directly hunted them. To extinction, but new information exonerates us at least a little bit. The new information comes from the tiny bones of a fifty five thousand year old Neanderthal fetus that was discovered in the late nineteen sixties in southern Germany. Researchers recently sequenced as much of the DNA as they could from the remains and discovered that it belonged to a much older strand of Neanderthal DNA than was left by the time they were extinct. By comparing it to several other existing Neanderthal genomes, these scientists have reconstructed the timeline of an event that drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the species. At the height of the most recent Ice Age, advancing glaciers pushed the continence Neanderthals down into an isolated pocket called a refugia in the southern part of France. The population was confined for long enough that inbreeding likely took place. Once the glaciers retreated, the Neanderthals then went out and repopulated Europe, but they didn't have nearly as much genetic diversity as they did before, making them less able to adapt to changes in their environment and sure enough. Around forty thousand years ago, changes in climate likely reduced the population of place ants and animals they depended on, and they couldn't survive. This population bottleneck effect is often seen in animal populations. For example, the European bison bison bonasas was hunted almost to extinction by the end of the eighteen hundreds, and all existing animals today are descended from just twelve individuals. This lack of genetic diversity seems to be making existing European bison bowls much less fertile. Scientists are dating the glaciation event that narrow Neanderthals down to about sixty five thousand years ago, and Homo sapiens didn't show up in Europe until between fifty seven and forty five thousand years ago. It seems that even if we did hasten their decline, the reduction in genetic diversity would have finished them off even if we hadn't been around. Still, this doesn't answer the larger question of why all the other species of human died off. There are over twenty thousand species of butterfly in existence today, so why only one species of human? Let's hope even more genetic discoveries like this one can give us more answers moving on to the infestation desk. Although it's likely a little too late in the southern part of the US EU, listeners up north might have a few days left to control spotted lantern flies before they hatch. We've covered these critters before, but spotted lantern flies, or SLFs as they're known, are a plant hopper species native to China and Vietnam that spread of the US in the early two thousands. In their native habitat, they're controlled by a parasitic wasp who lay their eggs inside the bodies of the spotting lantern flies. The ideal host plant for the old SLF is the fast growing tree of heaven, also native to Asia, which city planners planted extensively throughout the northeast in eighteen hundreds to get some shade on the streets as fast as possible, so once the SLFs arrived here a century later, it had a cozy home ready and waiting to go. Lantern flies kill plants in two ways. First, they suck the sap out of the stems, leaves, and branches, and because they can swarm in such high numbers, they exhaust their hosts very quickly. Second as they eat, they excrete a gummy substance called honeydew, which creates the perfect environment for fungus and bacteria to grow. Black City mold is the most common infestation that falls behind lantern flies. So down in Virginia, they just wrapped up an event called Scrape for the Grape, where volunteers were invited to sixteen wineries and breweries in Loudun County, a particular hot spot for the SLF. Locals were given a scraper card and a short training on how to find and remove lantern fly egg sacks. They were rewarded with t shirts, bandanas, and samples of the booze that come from the grapes and hops that SLF's target. Over a thousand people took part and the event has grown over the past few years. Maybe more of you can get out there start squashing these suckers too. If you want to do a little SLF hunt on your own, google a picture the Tree of Heaven to get an idea of what it looks like, or find some grapevines or stone fruit trees you want to give a fighting chance SLF egg sacks can blend into tree bark, so look for lighter gray or brown masses on the underside of branches running parallel to their length. Once you find them, you can squirt some hand sanitizer into a zip lock bag and hold the bag right underneath the mass. Using expired credit card or the business card of someone you don't like very much, scrape the entire eggsack into the bag. Then squish those eggs together with the alcohol goo and they'll be dead. Repeat as much as you can. When you're done, seal left the bag and throw it in the trash. It was a particularly cold winter in the Northeast, which might reduce SLF numbers a bit, and maybe if you get all the neighborhood kids to pitch in, we could make a big dent on this spreading infestation. This winter's unprecedented warmth and lack of snow in the West has had major effects, including one. You may not be thinking of mountain lion hunting or harvest. Rather, the best way to follow lions is to find the tracks in fresh fallen snow. The imprint is an obvious visual clue, but the cold conditions also hold and preserve scent much better. Than bear dry ground. As reporting Wildfile, the hot, snowless conditions have led to fewer lion kills in Wyoming this year than any other time in almost a decade. You might think that lion hunters would be furious, but often it's the opposite. Wyoming Houndsman Association President Luke Worthington said, quote, we've saved hundreds alliance. I think it's a great thing. I was worried where mortality limits were at, and saving one hundred cats would be awesome. In recent years, Wyoming has significantly liberalized its lion hunting in an effort to increase deer and elk numbers, targeting fifty percent more cats in the western mountains of the state, as covered in Clay Newcomb's recent met Eater film. Utah also now allows lion hunting year round and without a tag. Lion hunters worry that their favorite quarry has been unfairly scapegoaded for declines and prey animal numbers, and now those hunters often pursue in tree lions without shooting them. Hunter Jason Reinhardt said quote, Contrary to what everyone says, there is not a lot of lion in every drainage they're not as renewable a resource as one might think of. Course, less snowfall also means less water, which will affect lions, deer, and elkal like. For more fantastic coverage of lion conservation and a very cool hunt, check out Clay Newcomb's latest film over at the Meat Eater YouTube channel. On top of that, you can hear Luke Worthington right here on this podcast from an interview last year. It was a good one, so track it down. That's all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write in to ask c Al that's Ascal at the meateater dot com and let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. You know we appreciate you. Thanks again. We'll talk to you next week.