00:00:08 Speaker 1: From Media's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's Kel. This week we celebrated Memorial Day. I being a history nerd, a bit of a Civil War nerd, and a guy who likes to eat stuff off the ground, found this fascinating. Six d and twenty thousand soldiers died during the Civil War. For every three soldiers killed in battle, five more died from disease. Due to blockades of Southern ports, which limited supplies of literally anything not manufactured in the Southern States, Southerners had to get inventive and find alternatives for a lot of things, like medicine. Recently, team of researchers tested the antiseptic properties of some of the plants used on the battlefield, white oak to a poplar, two trees, and the Devil's walking stick, a shrub. Extracts were taken from each and used on three species of bacteria common to wound infections, staff le caucus Arius ace and eto Bacter bamani and club cela new monia. Can you believe I write this stuff for myself? I can't make it harder anyway. All of the plants tested, white oak, tulip poplar, and the Devil's Walking stick were shown to inhibit the growth of all three bacteria. While the plants didn't kill the bacteria, they did make them more susceptible to antibiotics. Researchers found that the use of these plants as a topical treatment likely saved some lives then and could potentially help do so now. Just another reason to keep our woods and waters healthy. Moving on, starting out with a real interesting quick hitter. The Boone and Crockett Club just recognized a ram taken from Hell's Canyon three years ago as the biggest ever killed in Idaho, but the state of Idaho is refusing to recognize it as an official state record. This shouldn't be too surprising because there always seems to be some tension around records. Where the issue du jure comes from is the fact that the hunter is a member of the nez Perst tribe and was hunting on a treaty right, not with an I d f G issued the lottery tag. The hunter who killed the ram and question has been hunting big horns in Hell's Canyon since the mid seventies and has killed ten rams nine of those ranked as trophies by Boone and Crockett standards, this last one landing at number twenty six all time. The Boone and Crockett Club has no problem entering this ram into the record book. It will be interesting to see if Idaho Fish and Game changes their tune. I personally wouldn't mind if they did. Records are made to be broken. Coming up, we've got tasty songbirds, pigs invading from the north, some monkey business, bad news, black bears, and sharks. But first, I'm gonna tell you about my week. I took advantage of the long weekend to drive seven hours without leaving the state of Montana, met up with some friends to attempt a fresh water spear fishing expedition to Fort Peck Reservoir. If you've never heard of Fort Peck, that's fine, but you should know it's the fifth largest man made lake in the US and sports more coastline than the state of California. On top of that, Fort Peck held the title as the world's largest earth and dam until the late seventies. That's not ringing a bell. You may want a reference Granddad's old pile of Life magazines. The damn Spillway made the cover back in nineteen thirty nine. The amount of effort that went into this structure in a place that many would call the middle of nowhere is just amazing. However, you may never go to Fort Peck as I didn't catch or spear of fish. Fifty degree water full of sediment didn't produce much opportunity, and as my buddy Matt Granella will tell you, the fishing is always slow. And if you were to ask him about the just general recreational boat opportunity on Fort Peck, he may respond with the pecker can get a bit choppy. That's a reference to eastern Montana wind and Fort Peck wave action. Of course, keep in mind, despite the rough roads serious lack of infrastructure, I think it's a beautiful spot and you probably want to take information from a large man with the small Corgi under his arm with a grain of salt. Anyway, moving off, folks in Vermont are enamored with a doughnut loving bear. I was naive enough to hope that the bear in question had taken advantage of a dumpster behind a semi rural donut shop that, sadly, being my best case scenario, this female black bears AMERICANUS is on the slow train to euthanasia conducted by US people. Joke mainly in the Latin name contains both America and ain't us kind of almost as if our coddling of wildlife is making an ass out of our critters. I'll admit I've got a soft spot for the America in black bear. I found the black bear isn't often underrated, but amazing critter to watch. Fortunately or not, they can make a good living in what we call the urban interface, the area where trees, grass, and solitude collide with paved mountain parked cars. This is where the black bear finds trouble in the form of garbage cans, bird feeders, and, as in Vermont, intentional and deliberate feeding. This type of human behavior frequently leads to dead bears, as bears make the connection between people and easy meals are tolerance for these urban encounters go down. One broken bird feeder was a neat way to observe a bear, but not two broken bird feeders, or, as sometimes happens, a black bear in your garage, going through your stuff, or maybe in your actual home. According to a two thousand fifteen study released by US Fish and Wildlife the American black bears the most abundant bear species on the planet. Populations are currently at their highest level in the past one years, with the North American population estimated at a out seven hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand. As humans expand into bear habitat, more conflicts arise. A huge factor in what becomes a problem bear is human indifference and then human perception. Simply put, if a bear keeps knocking over a bird feeder or trash can, the feeder or trash can needs to be removed, not refilled. If seeing a bear in the backyard or on your street is reported as threatening, not just a bear on the move, that bear could be lethally removed or killed, as US Heathens call it. In Colorado, a woman was bitten by a black bear while hiking near Aspen. The details aren't real deep on this one yet, but from the sounds of it, the hiker and her husband were being respectful of the bear by moving off the trail as the bear came through. As the bear passed, it came in and bit the woman on the thigh, then apparently went about its day. The bear is reported to be two hundred to three hundred pounds and the hiker is unharmed. Before I go on, I do want to point out this is the same state that the trail Runner mount lion attack came out of. We talked about that in episode one of the Weekend Review. That cat was initially reported by news outlets as a hundred plus pound mountain lion. Later it turned into a twenty four pound mountain lion kitten. I make this point because there is no need for exaggeration when it comes to animal attacks, as wild animals can do serious damage at any size, even as juveniles. A two hundred to three hundred pound black bear like we have in this case is not a juvenile animal and makes for a very serious encounter. Colorado Parks and Wildlife have called in US Wildlife Services to help trap and kill the bear, as the bears demonstrated aggressive behavior. I don't want to seem like I'm overly protective, as I love to eat these bears and I wouldn't mind a nice black bear rug to throw over the back of the couch even but I obviously have questions here, like how how is this lady unharmed? If that part is true, I've had much smaller yellow labs in this bear with much harder mouths. If our hiker, who again appears to have tried to keep a respectful distance, didn't get harmed, it seems as if this bear demonstrated incredible restraint, and don't you hike in the woods for a bit of that. Who knows what the heck could happen type of feeling. For comparison. In Yellowstone National Park, her last grizzly bear caused hiker death was August of two thousand fifteen. In this incident, it was determined that the bear attacked the couple hiking because they were too close to her in her cubs. The husband took the attack while the wife went unharmed. Yellowstone National Park officials decided that in this case, the humans were at fault, the sow and cubs reacted in a natural way, and we're left to continue being grizzlies. In one case, you have a bear that kills a man, another a bear that bites a woman in a way that leaves aroundhearmed. In the case the human death, the bearon or young are allowed to go about their lives. The case of the bite and run. Trained professionals are attempting to trap and kill the bear. There are some differences national park versus national forest, maybe proximity to town. The similarities, however, are humans bumping into bears just being bears? Moving on? Scientists from Germany recently discovered a particular band of chimpanzees and gabon. They have adapted a unique eating habit, smashing tortoises against trees and scooping up the meat. These findings may promote new fields of study regarding distinctive subcultures of primates, their use of tools, and ability to pass those skills down to future generations. But it's also just straight up fascinating and probably a bit more gruesome than many grade ape levels can handle. One of the authors of this study, Tobias Deshner, had this to say. They see this as a hard shell object with some interesting thing inside and need to crack it open and other Monkey news. Researchers in Senegal experiment with flying drones over troops of green monkeys. The monkeys responded with the vocalization similar to the vocalization used by verbant monkeys to warn each other about approaching eagles. Verbant monkeys actually have a quote word for snakes, leopards, and eagles and respond accordingly to the words by taking appropriate evasive action. The thing is, green monkeys weren't known to have a vocalization for eagles, as eagles don't prey on them, but the drone triggered the vocalization from the monkeys, leaving researchers to question whether language is genetically hardwired for them, a vestigial trait, so to speak. When they played the new vocalization back to other troops of green monkeys, they scammed the skies and ran for cover. Pretty cool. My friend Steve ates some monkey meat once from a red howler in South America, still feels guilty about it. So far on the Weekend Review, we've covered both tigers and birds extensively. Oddly enough, those two species intersected sharks tiger sharks to be exact, and one of my all time favorite movies, Jaws, the slightly nerdy shark Guy Hooper played by Richard Dreyfuss, refers to the tiger shark as the garbage can of the ocean, and it's kind of true. Tiger sharks are known to eat all sorts of stuff, tires, chicken coope complete with chickens, oranges, fish, sharks, turtles, plastic sea snakes, and if you remember that scene from Jaws, the occasional license plate a tiger shark is hoisted on the dock for all the tourists to see confirmation that the man eater has been killed. When Hooper, again played by Richard Dreyfuss, convinces Sheriff Brody to perform a late night examination of stomach contents, they find a couple of fish heads, a tin can, and a license plate from Louisiana. Enough about Jaws, although I could go on and on, So where the hell of the birds come in? Mississippi State University's Coastal Research and Extension Center report just published an analysis of a hundred and five tiger sharks stomach contents. Now, with all the odd items we just listed from Jaws as a sort of fictional, though reasonable seeming benchmark, I still find this next bit surprising. Of the hundred and five sharks yielded ten land based bird species, again land based, not marine birds, house wrens, marsh wrens, barn swallows, Eastern meadow larks, Eastern kingbirds, or Tyrannus Tyrannus just a fun Latin name for you. Birds are living dinosaur theorists, swamp sparrows, common yellow throat, yellow bellied sapsuckers, white winged doves, and brown thrashers. Birds you would see at the feeder in the backyard keeping a watch out for house cats, not tiger sharks. The standing theory for how these tiger sharks are adding land based birds to their diet is as these bird species migrated across the Gulf, migration being a strenuous activity for birds, with many in weekend conditions, any number of weather occurrences can bring these land birds down into the Gulf. If this sounds too random, first considered that an estimated two billion birds across the Gulf every year, and that, according to bird watching survey is conducted by Cornell University, peaks and bird sightings of the species eaten match perfectly with when the samples were taken August through November, a prime time for migrating songbirds and maybe not so coincidentally, a time when there are three times more juvenile tiger sharks in the Northern Gulf. Something to consider. Many of the sharks with birds in their stomachs were juvenile sharks, which dovetails nicely with the question why do mother tiger sharks give birth to their young in the open gulf instead of in protected bay? Is is it possible that a land living bird migration has determined where sharks swim. Keep in mind the biggest tiger sharks are female. Some have been recorded over sixteen feet and close to two thousand pounds your average barn swallow point six ounces. While we don't know if mama tiger sharks are choosing to give birth to their live young and the open ocean, trusting that they'll be well fed by barn swallows or wrens falling in big numbers from the sky, we do know that tiger sharks aren't the only ones enjoying songbirds. Take a look at what's happening across the Atlantic Ocean. The Orderlon is a member of the bunting family. Average weight point seven ounces. A little songbird, they have long been prized not for their song, but for their taste, and not by tiger sharks, but by affluent diners. Traditionally, the Orderlon, once captured, is four sped grain until fattened well beyond its normal size, then drown and brandy simultaneously dispatched marinated. Then the Orderlon is cooked and served whole. Diners who ate this tiny bird traditionally placed a napkin over their heads while eating. Purpose of the napkin is supposedly to prevent the aroma of the bird from escaping, or to hide one's face from God during this shameful act. If you don't care for the state of the bunting or how you may eventually meet your maker, the napkin would be used to hide oneself from other diners as you spit out a bone or two, beat bones and testines and feet all in one bite. One infamous diner, Anthony Bourdain, said this of the Orderlon. Experience with every bite, as the thin bones and layers of fat, meat, skin, and organs com pact in on themselves, there are sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavors figs, armagnac, dark flesh, slightly infused with the salty taste of my own blood as my mouth is pricked by the sharp bones. Doesn't that sound like an experi ariants napkin on head or not? Here's the issue with this shameful act due to habitat loss, changing agricultural practices, climate change, and the appetite of these gastro elites. Europe's Ordolan population has declined by eighty eight percent between nineteen eighty and two thousand sixteen during the migration of the Ordolon bunting as they make their way from the Baltic States, Finland and Scandinavia to North Africa, and estimated three hundred thousand of the birds passed through southwestern France. There, poachers catch around one tenth of migration thirty thousand birds. These black market poachers use a combination of live bait birds and cages and miss NEETs. The live birds distract and lure the wild birds into the nets. Missed nets are typically light nylon or polyester webbing strung across a gap in the brush. Slightly loose. The nets are hard to see. The birds will run into the loose netting, where they will get tangled in the mesh or drop into the kind of buckets the material creates. The birds are unable to escape, but alive and for the most part unharmed. Biologists and ornithologists use these nets in studies all the time. Across most of the EU. This trapping of Orderlon Bunting's has been illegal since nineteen seventy nine. France was reluctant to get on board with the band. They didn't adopt it until seven and then only loosely enforced it until two thousand seven. The lack of daisical approach to enforcement could be a testament to the fact that the birds are so damned tasty no one really cares if hunting hurts the bird population as a whole or not. In wildlife markets, a single ordlan can bring in one hundred euros about a hundred eleven u s dollars. They often wait less than an ounce. As the bird numbers continue to decline, these market prices will start to climb. The Orderlon Bunting of France may rest its fate on the belly of well the French, but this song bird fetish isn't just French. According to bird Life International, more than five million birds are poached in Italy every year, putting the French to shame. I really risk being an elitist here, but a lot of what is driving this is the established legal sale of wildlife. For instance, in Malta, you can catch and sell golden plovers and song threshes, but you can't trap or sell finches. Some of these birds are going straight into the family pot, but millions are being sold, both legally and illegally. Anyone who's familiar with the story of wildlife conservation in American can tell you that hunting can both hurt and help wildlife populations. Just as the white tailed deer, which was nearly exterminated by hunters and then rebuilt to populations that far exceed any point in the continent's history, wild pigs have any interesting story as well, though not as easy to conceptualize. First off, all pigs, from the one in your Illinois barn to the razorback running wild and South Texas to a genuine Siberian hog in Siberia are all sious scrap. It's just one species. Their native to Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the Greek Isles, and introduced by humans virtually everywhere else Australia, Hawaii, Patagonia, Mexico, the southern US, California, and on again, off again all over the rest of the US except the last bastion of pig free land, the Northern Rockies, but now they're coming. That's right, Canadian bacon may soon be readily available in Montana. And the best part, the bacon may import itself. That's a terrible joke that I'll stop right now. I know my Canuck friends will hate me for it. Something to do with the fact that Canadian bacon isn't a Canadian term. Apparently there's a pork shortage in the UK and the mid eighteen hundreds, and they use a lot of Canadian pork. Just a fun fact for you while I'm at it. Here's a few more. A group of pigs is called a sounder, the term for when a pig buries itself in the snow, a pig glue. I just can't help myself. Back to pig wild swine hogs, that is, wild big populations have been growing steadily in Saskatchewan for almost thirty years. I'm a huge fan of hunting in Canada. Years ago, I heard the rumors firsthand. Only, as it turns out, these pigtails weren't rumors at all. European wild boy brought in for food or for game. Farms have slowly built populations away from people. Getting away from people in Saskatchewan is not hard to do, which is why Saskatchewan, much of Canada is so darned great great for hunting, fishing, Tim Horton's catchup flavored chips, real fruit bars, moose head lagger, and growing pigs apparently looking south, though wild pigs already cause extreme amounts of damage basically everywhere else in the US estimated damage at over a billion and a half dollars a year. Still, some in Montana may be thinking that a wild pig population in the state could say them a trip to Texas or California for that hog in the freezer. Well, the state is way ahead of you on this one. If you grow look in the Montana state hunting regulations right now, you would find pig hunting is illegal. At first impression, this may sound like a pig protection measure, Well it's not. Hunters are bad at eradicating pigs. Furthermore, it's been proven that hunters are good at spreading pigs. That's right. More and more, it's been found that hunters love to talk about killing off pigs and the devastation that they bring the agricultural community. But boy, you know they're kind of tasty and uh, by the way, those pigs are really fun to hunt. That's why pig hunting is illegal in Montana and why this is not a new tactic to stop the spread of pigs in the US. In fact, Montana is joining the states of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Nevada and making the hunting of this costly invasive species illegal. If this still doesn't sound right to you, maybe these states learned to lessen from our friends over in year and their bird dilemma. Folks tend to follow the rules a little better, whistle a different tune, if you will, when they can't make a profit off of critter. Thanks a bunch. This has been Cal's weekend review. Let me know how I'm doing and what I've missed and messed up at Ask Cal at the meat eater dot com. That's a s k C A l at the meat eater dot com. If you loved what you heard, go to wherever podcasts or downloaded, streamed or listened to subscribe and leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand start. Thanks again and see you next week.

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