00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, this is Cal's Week in Review with Ryan Cal Callahan, presented by First Light. Here's Cal. AI is far from a perfect tool. We all know that, especially when it comes to backcountry travel. This, at least, is one of the big takeaways from a recent report published in Wildfile that details a couple of recent instances in which advice from AI chatbots contributed to folks getting into dangerous situations. For example, in one case, three 20-year-old hikers in Northern California called for a rescue after relying on poor advice from Google's AI chatbot Gemini while attempting to summit Mount Shasta. The trio didn't bring enough food, overestimated their fitness levels, and summited at 7.30 p.m., only to become lost and have to hunker down on the mountain in the dark overnight. Fortunately, search and rescue found them the next morning. We get plenty of people who come unprepared or don't do any research at all. To these guys' credit, they did try. But I think they kind of turned off their brains, said Nick Myers, U.S. Forest Service Program Manager of the Mount Shasta Wilderness Climbing and Avalanche Center. In another instance, Meyer and his team found a man wandering around a trailhead after AI had generated an inaccurate map of the nearby mountain. And in yet another instance, a 16-year-old was rescued from what's known as the Widowmaker Arret from the back of Crown Mountain in British Columbia after using Claude, another AI language model, to plan his outing. AI is now known to both hallucinate or create incorrect details and tell users what they want to hear even if it's against their own interests, among other issues with the technology. The Y.O. File Report also cites a statistic from Grand Teton National Park that the number of tourists who report using AI has risen from 0 to 26% over the past year, and that number is only expected to climb there and elsewhere. Of course, it should be noted that AI is just the latest phase of the proliferation of online resources that facilitate backcountry travel. Tech tools have helped new folks get into the outdoors who otherwise may not have in recent years, and this is something that is largely good. At the same time, I hate to see folks getting into dangerous situations because they're using flawed tools. This is a reminder to do your due diligence before going into the backcountry, and also for those of us who have spent a lot of time out there, to be generous about mentoring and sharing our expertise with those who don't have it. I'm a big believer in the fact that if you want folks to behave the way you do out there, which I presume is respectfully, you best give them a hand. I'm going to tell you about my week, and my week has been interesting as always. As you may be aware, midterm elections happened, and I am sure many of you are thinking, well, what the heck comes next? One positive thing for folks who like public land, Mike Lee is out as chair of Senate Natural Resources as the Republican Party lost the Senate majority. Martin Heinrich, who has a fantastic track record of being on the right side of public land issues, expanding access and the conservation of public lands, and is a real deal in life hunter and angler and even a wildlife photographer, will be stepping in as the new chair. Committee chairs have a ton of power. They can basically dictate what gets read and what does not. So lots and lots and lots of changes across the Senate, the House, state governments, all across the country. Lots of speculation based off of gossip and historical patterns as to who and what cabinet members are actually going to stick around. Meaning there could be turnover in many offices that matter to the hunting and angling public. It's a potential reshuffling of the deck that may not end for a while. And then there's always the interesting thing that when a majority flips, you get people who just say that they're not going to come back to work, which is somehow allowed and totally crazy. Turnover in these cabinet appointees, and the reason that you have this turnover is you were appointed by a Republican. Now the Democrats have the majority. You could well expect a higher level of oversight into your past actions and current actions. And many of these appointees, that's not what they signed up for. They came in with an idea of what they wanted to do. They had kind of like the red carpet to go do that. And now they're going to get a lot more questions. And there's many folks in the past administrations when things like this happen, just go, okay, I'm not here for this. Not the job I signed up for. Don't like questions. What has not changed is there's a bunch of things that are floating out there, like the ball's been kicked. And we have travel management rule revision dangling in the air. We have a wilderness review, a wilderness study area review. We have million-plus public comments submitted on roadless rule. We have other things that need to get done, like a River Runs Through It Act, for instance. Recovering America's Wildlife Act. A bunch, a bunch of really good stuff. Really impactful, nonpartisan conservation things that will benefit everybody. We still need to work on those and make them happen. And, you know, the only setback when you have this type of reshuffle is you have people who used to be up to snuff on this, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, that are now gone and you have to re-educate a whole new staff. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. And we got to get all this good stuff done faster than, you know, data center development moves. Listener and occasional heckler Mike Sheffer wrote in with notice of a natural gas pipeline going through and massive generators going on the Perkins game lands in Davie County, North Carolina. The Backcountry Hunters and Anglers North Carolina chapter has been engaging on this one. Ultimately, the game lands are private, with the state public access agreement allowing public hunting four days a week, which has now been cut to two days a week, and when the project is rolling, zero days a week. If anyone is interested in preserving just under 1,700 acres of working lands and hunting habitat in the Tar Heel State, please reach out. On the public side of the fence, the federally managed lands, The AI-driven land grab is on as well. Just this morning, ProPublica released an article outlining all of the public disclosures of appointed public land managers across Forest Service, BLM, EPA. Their personal investments in both AI and AI infrastructure development companies, which may, the people at ProPublica allude, influence decisions to develop our shared public lands without public input, as was the case with Lee Zeldin at the EPA, who introduced a rule earlier this year that would prevent public comment on clean air permitting for data centers and other industries, and just introduced in the Senate this week a permitting reform bill that has all the kids talking, specifically about Section 14 of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act and how the proposed reforms within the act will affect the NEPA process. Clean Water Act, ESA. There's some good stuff in this one. There's some stuff that should raise your eyebrows and get you to ask common sense questions as to the why and the how. This is moving semi-quick. There's plenty of hurdles. We'll get into it more when and if it progresses. All in all... I mean, I was optimistic about getting stuff done before midterms. I think the midterm reshuffle mirrors Trump 1. During Trump 1, we were able to get a lot of good things done as a conservation community because there was a lot of gridlock out there between the R's and the D's on all sorts of other things. And we prove over and over and over again that our public lands are nonpartisan issues. and we can hopefully get some good things done here on the back half of this Trump administration. So that's the forecast. Just to jump back over to travel management, as I said last week, and I'll say again this week, and if you saw the Meat Eater News episode, I said on there, travel management plans are still in place. It's up to you to ride responsibly, know what roads and trails are open to what, It is full-blown hunting season. Bad deeds on public lands are going to be associated with hunters. If you do encounter illegal motorized use, please document it. Take that information to the game warden or to your Forest Service law enforcement officer if your info leads to a citation. You could be in the running for $ 500 through the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Illegal Motorized Use Rewards Program. Which, you know, is one of those things I just wish didn't exist. Because the goal is to have everybody understand that the rules and regulations out there allow us to have all these super fun, different pursuits and go out and do them in a manner in which we can depend on. Like we know that the quality of habitat is there that produces the opportunity. that we need to put some meat in the freezer. And travel management is a huge, huge, huge part of how we keep public wildlife on public land during hunting season, which provides that opportunity. So it also keeps them out of conflict on that farm and ranch egg ground. All right. Moving on to the news. While we often talk about the impacts of drought on fish and wildlife in the West, we don't typically discuss the natural phenomenon of drought in relation to the Southeast, but there can certainly be drought there too. Officials in Old Arkansas are warning hunters that 14 consecutive months of drought are negatively affecting the state's wildlife and could make waterfowl hunting difficult, particularly in the early season. Arkansas, if you didn't know, is widely considered one of the best waterfowling states in the country, and if you haven't experienced a traditional flooded timber hunt there, well, you should. Just probably not this year. Many parts of the state are in a deficit of over 20 inches of rainfall. As a result, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission officials have only been able to flood 42% of their moist soil units and only 5 to 10 of their 47 waterfowl rice incentive conservation enhancement program hunt locations. This means hunting could be tough in the early season and those challenging conditions could persist if timely rains do not arrive. If that's the case, ducks and geese that historically winter in the land of opportunity may instead push further south to wetlands along the Gulf Coast or go to river systems in parts of Tennessee and Alabama. I just got myself a couple dozen, nothing too crazy, but a couple dozen Dave Smith duck decoys. And I am jonesing to use them. Probably next week. Jumping over to the crime desk. If you've been listening to the podcast recently, you probably remember a couple of cases in which outfitters have been bad actors, such as a Texas outfitter who illegally baited ponds for waterfowl hunts before pleading guilty to violating the Lacey Act. That one was in episode 503. This week, we have more potential illegal behavior by so-called outfitters. In Pennsylvania this September, an archery hunter killed a potential state record bull elk, a massive 8x8 typical. Pennsylvania, by the way, has a small elk population, and drawing an elk tag there is extremely hard. When he drew the once-in-a-lifetime tag, Mike Svarla hired an outfitter, and the decision seemed to pay off with a trophy critter. But just a couple of weeks after the hunt, the Pennsylvania Game Commission filed trespassing citations for the two guides, Mike Conaway and Abner Drunkenmiller, who helped Svarla kill the bull. Allegedly, Conaway and Druckenmiller took Sparla onto private property that they did not have permission to be on. Both of them have pled not guilty and will soon see their day in court. The hunter was not cited. At this point, charges are only going to be filed on the guides. Harold Mailhorn, Pennsylvania Game Commission North Central Regional Law Enforcement Supervisor, told GoErie, A hunter hiring a guide is no different than one of us going out west and hiring a guide. We're expecting them to take us places where we have permission to hunt. At this point, we have no indication that the hunter was not aware that they didn't have permission to be there. This is an interesting one. You should write in. I think this is very compassionate, generous of the Pennsylvania Game Commission to behave in this way. And I certainly don't want to see this dude's elk taken away. But it's a little bit of a can of worms position. As we talk about often, hunting is like the ultimate responsibility sport. It's always up to you to know where you are and what you're doing. And we've covered many, many cases here on the Week in Review where it definitely seemed like the clients were going to shady outfits to take advantage of the shadiness with the idea that if they were ever caught, they would just point fingers at the outfit or even though they knew they were, you know, taking a little more than they should. A-S-K-C-A-L. That's AskCal at TheMeatEater.com. Jumping over to the big fish desk, two SoCal anglers recently caught the fish of a lifetime, a 13-foot, 595-pound blue marlin. Mike Mackenbeck and Matt McKinga were trolling 12 miles off the coast of San Pedro. The fish came up and smashed the surface, skipping black bart lure about 30 minutes after we started. I thought at first it was a striped marlin until it jumped, then I knew it was huge. There was no controlling that fish as it ran 400 yards of line off a reel in one minute. The duo had been using relatively light wahoo tackle. They chased the marlin with the boat and took turns fighting it. By the time they brought it next to their boat, the fish had died from exhaustion. So they lashed it, old man in the sea style, to their 20-foot boat and motored to shore with their trophy. This kind of catch is pretty darn rare off the coast of California and the fish was likely only in the area because of the warm waters El Nino brought with it. Some folks can be critical of marlin fishermen because people don't always eat their catches. That's not the case this time. Quote, we spent hours processing the marlin into steaks and gave a lot of it to neighbors and friends, said Mackenbeck. We grilled marlin steaks that night and had a great cookout. Good job, boys. That's the way to do it. What do soiled underwear and soil health have in common? Well, I can understand if your heart doesn't start pounding with excitement. Still, if you were to rank the issues that are most important to people and animals, dirt would be right there at the top. Without fertile soil teeming with microbes, plants don't grow, and animals, including humans, don't grow either. So scientists in Zurich, Switzerland, came up with an idea to make dirt a little more attention-grabbing. They buried 2,000 pair of underwear in fields, lawns, gardens, and every other kind of soil they could find, and left them there for two months. When they dug them up, they had a perfect illustration of the biological activity of the different locations. Where there were thriving biomes of creepy crawlies, the skivvies had decomposed almost entirely, but where the dirt was closer to sterile, the unmentionables emerged almost entirely intact. This gave the scientists a clear demonstration of how each ecosystem was functioning, and it got a lot more eyeballs on the topic than the samples they usually collect. After all, we're talking about it right now, right? The medium is funny, but the message is clear. Soil biodiversity is in trouble, especially in monoculture farmland and residential lawns. Things look a lot better in people's gardens, where soil is regularly turned and compost is added. That's true in Switzerland and true here as well. If you can, try growing something in whatever space you have available, even if it's just your own windowsill. Instead of decomposed undies, you might be able to dig up some carrots or potatoes or And get yourself just a little bit closer as to how food is made. Jumping over the deer management desk, a tale of two states. You could call this North Dakota versus New York. Over in North Dakota, the Game and Fish Department has put a pause on hunters taking any antlerless deer in four game units in the southern part of the state. They're also offering refunds and restored bonus points for any hunters who want to turn in their licenses for the season in a wider area in the southwest. These measures are in response to a series of very hard years for the whitetail population. Since 2021, drought and epizootic hemorrhagic disease, or EHD, have combined to knock back deer in North Dakota significantly, and EHD continues to take a significant toll. Since early August of this year, more than 160 reports of EHD have come into the game and fish department, and at least 350 EHD deaths have been recorded among the state's ungulates. Officials are hoping that pulling the lever of reducing hunter harvest can reverse the trend and get the state's deer herd to recover. At the other end of the spectrum, the Department of Environmental Protection in New York State is recommending a series of interventions aimed at knocking back the number of deer at all costs. In 2024, the state legislature approved the so-called Urban Deer Management Pilot Program, which relaxed restrictions around taking deer under deer damage permits in places where their populations have gotten out of control. that allowed contractors in two towns along Long Island to place bait within 300 feet of a road, to take deer from a public highway, to use a spotlight, and to reduce the hunting setback distance from occupied structures. Although these measures have resulted in more deer killed, the problem is still raging, and so the DEC recently released a report urging the legislature to allow even more deer reduction and to permit places like airports, college campuses, and municipal parks These recommendations would allow so-called nuisance wildlife specialists to shoot a firearm from a stopped vehicle equipped with an elevated shooting platform that would create a downward trajectory for any projectiles. The recommendations would remove restrictions on rifles in parts of the state where you can currently only shoot shotguns and crossbows, and contractors would also be able to use thermal detection devices. Suppressors would also be permitted to both to protect the hearing of the shooters, to disturb the neighbors as little as possible, and to kill more deer by not spooking them with the sound of the shot. Now, I defer to the expertise of the professionals at wildlife management agencies, and so I'm willing to go along with these measures, but it hurts to think of all this venison going to waste. New York has passed crossbow reform and overhauled its antlerless permitting system this year, so that is progress in the right direction. But I wish we were just a bunch of game feasts away from a balanced ecosystem. Well, maybe one day. With midterms now over, you're likely very relieved that your phone is not buzzing every two seconds with fundraising texts, but I have some good news from the world of political chicanery. Researchers at the Yale School of Management have adapted the software currently used for gerrymandering voting maps into a tool that identifies parcels of habitat that can be connected into wildlife corridors. Politicos use their tools to analyze huge volumes of election and demographic data to create the perfect geographical shapes to minimize the votes of the other party. But this new habitat software uses that same analysis to identify blocks of land that agencies can acquire to connect existing protected land into longer migration routes. The amount of data we're talking about is enormous. Millions of small scattered parcels, special population counts, camera trap images, climate and ecosystem characteristics, land valuations and availability, and on and on. Earlier models couldn't handle this amount of information. and this often meant unusable results or suggestions to buy land that was way too expensive. This new software has not only found completely novel routes to connect habitat, but also big savings. One earlier migration corridor was reanalyzed with a solution that would cost $ 25 million less to acquire than the previous plan. So far, the Yale researchers have only tested their software in Canada, but the applications for wildlife management in the U.S. and across the world are clear. I, for one, would love to see it if the same systems that have split voters apart in this country were able to bring animals back together. In the midst of all the election news last week, Amendment 83 in Colorado was defeated by a little more than 10 points. The measure would have created a constitutional amendment protecting the right to hunt fish in the centennial state, and it would have made hunting the preferred means of managing wildlife there. Passing this amendment would have protected hunting and trapping from any future state legislature statutes and voter ballot initiatives, so losing on this one is too bad, but not necessarily a disaster. Colorado is now going to get a new governor and Democrat, Phil Weiser. Although Weiser publicly opposed Amendment 83, he will succeed Jared Polis, who has been openly sympathetic to animal rights groups. Sympathetic, I'd say promotional of animal rights groups. We don't know yet exactly how Weiser will govern, but he's likely to appoint members to the State Parks and Wildlife Commission that are more supportive of scientifically backed management and the North American model of wildlife conservation. No matter what, we have to keep showing up and advancing our issues and showcasing everything that hunters, trappers, and anglers do to fight for animals and their habitat. We also have to stick up for the expertise of Colorado Parks and Wildlife. There is no finish line in the game of staying involved. Conservation never sleeps. I think old Doug Durant said that. Long-time listeners know I'm no fan of drones, even for recovering lost deer. It's just too easy for them to surveil game in violation of fair chase, and when I'm outside, I never want to hear that dang thing. But unfortunately, my personal opinion doesn't dictate the course of history, and over the last couple years, drone use has skyrocketed for everything. Ownership, use, recovery, scouting, whatever. Spying on your neighbors. Now the neighbors are fighting back. A company called Midwest Deer Surveys is marketing a device that will scan the airspace above your property, locate any drones flying over, and read the transmission data to find the location of the drone and its pilot, the make and serial number of the drone, and other identifying information. The user gets this info on their phone and can then track the pilot down. But anti-drone surveillance systems are not cheap. The package being sold by Midwest Deer Survey is start at around $ 5, 000 and run all the way up to $ 12, 000. But if you spent serious money on a hunting property and the habitat maintenance to attract big bucks, maybe that sounds like a bargain. I think we need drone jammers built right into our cell phones. Somebody's got to come up with an app for that. I'd love to hear your thoughts. A-S-K-C-A-L, that's AskCal at TheMeatEater.com. That's all I got for you this week. Got to take off, tour a, you know, babysitting facility, childcare thing here, you know. I hope everybody gets out in the woods this weekend. Be kind, be safe, have fun, breathe deep of what America's public lands have to offer. They are awesome. That's all I got for you. Thanks again. We'll talk to you next week. Write in to askcal, that's askcalathemeateater.com. Let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods. You know, I want to hear from you and I appreciate it. Thanks again. Talk to you next week.