00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now here's cal to one urban Canadian turkey. It's spring. Love is in the air, and there is no one to share it with. I am, of course, talking about an actual bird, not whichever human example you're thinking of, Canadian or not. I'm speaking specifically about Turk Diggler, the lone turkey of Ramsey, a community within Calgary, Alberta. If you don't get that reference, do not look up the movie Boogie Nights. You aren't old enough. I'm a big, bright, shining star. Turk Diggler made his public debut in two thousand nineteen. It seems he may have been a gift to a rancher at the famous Calgary Stampede, but he flew the coup before that rancher could take him home. Turk hung around the Stampede grounds for a bit and then eventually made his way into suburbia. He made an immediate splash simply by being a wild turkey in an urban setting. By appearance, he is your ordinary wild turkey. But what makes him special is he's the only wild turkey calling Calgary home a flock all by himself. As the old outfitter would say, when spring rolls around the time of turkey mating season, he only has himself to impress with his well preened plumage. He does this by staring at his reflection in businesses and home windows within Ramsey Star. This year, when Turk returned to strut his stuff, attention grew and the question came up, why don't we get him a mate? It appears that many of his Facebook fans at the page loyal followers of the Ramsey Turkey agree. However, Alberta Fish and Wildlife seemed to think that the wild bird should be eated as such and left to figure out his love life on his own, which is probably a good idea considering how many places called wildlife agencies for turkey removal, not installment, so to speak. One of something is easier to make cute than a flock of something perching or pooping on your vehicle. Celebrity status can be good for some animals. One other example I can think of is Lonesome Larry, the singular male soaky salmon that made the eight hundred miles spawning trip from the Pacific Ocean, up the Columbia, up the salmon through eight Damns waterfalls, sea lions, eagles and anglers, all the way to Idaho's Redfish Lake, only to find no other salmon made the trip that year. Male or female. Larry was used as a bumper sticker, a beer, and countless other things to symbolize a need to fund Soaky recovery in Idaho. In Turk's case, he gets a little police protection. In one YouTube video, a local law enforcement officer was interviewed as he kept a watchful eye on the celebrity bird after responding to a call from the shopkeeper who said, I've got a turkey at the gas pump who refuses to move and refuses to buy gas, which is pretty cute, I'll admit so. To all you Calgary residents, remember the headline is hook him up, as in find him a willing mate. Don't confuse it the way I did at first glance. One letter makes a big difference, kind of like a good brine in a few hours in the smoker does type of difference. This week, we've got Ancient Food Living with Wildlife Questions, Grizzly Bears, Clean Water Act, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week, as you know, is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. I've got to tell you about one Week in Review listener who wrote in with a serious confession. He does not own a screwdriver, nor does he possess the ability to use one much less steel chainsaw. However, he wanted to help support his favorite podcast and conservation, so he purchased a new MS three sixty two chainsaw and donated it to the California Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. On top of that, this selfless individual with incredibly good taste purchased a Duck stamp. If you have a physics professor named Rod at C s U LB, you had better treat him well. We hope there are more like you. Thank you, Rod. Yes, I made it out and did some turkey hunting. No, I did not get a turkey. However, two of my good friends got their very first birds, and that is even better. In fact, they were not the only ones. To all of you first time turkey hunters who wrote in, congratulations, I hope you stick with it. More than that, I hope you noticed how special those early mornings in the Turkey woods are now stay at home so I can get my birds. I do have to tell you that we maintain social distancing. On this last trip, we drove separately. We ate separately. We had individual tents or truck beds, and I'm not gonna lie. That made things a little bit more difficult, but we still got out and enjoyed some outside time together. One of these folks was Garrett Smith, a k A. Dirt Myth on the Instagram. Old Dirt used his recently deceased grandfather's shotgun and managed to get a Jake and a Tom Turkey with it, a model eighteen nine seven Winchester manufactured in nineteen eleven. So we got a one and two year old bird with a hundred nine year old shotgun. Alright, too much to cover this week, so let's get some really exciting and timely news. First, black bear hunters in the Grangeville area of Idaho, be bear aware. You have a confirmed grizzly bear in the woods with you. Now. This isn't the first time in recent years a grizz has wandered through the north half of Idaho, but this is happening right now. This particular bear is traveling and there is no telling where it might end up. Through genetic testing, we know that this bear is likely the same grizz that was captured and collared by US Fish and Wildlife as a year lane on the British Columbia border in two thousand seventeen. That's about two hundred and sixty miles north of Grangeville, as the crow flies, and one incredibly arduous journey for those of us stuck on the ground. If you have ever been to the Panhandle of Idaho you know what I mean. This area almost killed the Lewis and Clark expedition and successfully stopped many other non famous people of European ancestry. Since. If indeed the Grangeville Grizz is the same bear, it is now four years old. It has traveled from the BC border through parts of the Panhandle. It's wandered through the Thompson Falls area of Montana, and of course, most recently, all the way down to the Fish Creek Meadows area about seven miles south of Grangeville. This bear has potentially covered an incredible amount of country without any negative human interaction, which I honestly find very unlikely, as I myself have crossed Highway two hundred, Interstate ninety, and Highway twelve, just as this grizz has done many times, and I cannot say the same. In other words, this grizzly is better at avoiding human conflict than most people. So if you happen to cut a grizz track or see this grizzly bear firsthand, leave it be. If this bear happens to hit your bear bait, look at how fortunate you are to see a griz munching away on something that isn't you, and leave it alone. Furthermore, if you find a big bear in your rifle sites this season, and for whatever reason you feel a little unsure, let it go. Idaho is full of black bears. You'll find another one. Fall bear fat is better anyway, quick stop at the archaeology desk. A stone chest disguised as a stone building block was recently discovered at the ancient site of dare L Bahari, located on the west bank of the Nile, across from lux Ur, Egypt. Inside this stone chest were several packages, one of which contained a mummified goose. I found this interesting that the prospect of roast goose in the afterlife was worth the trouble of mummifying one. After all, goose can get a bad rap. That's a that's a mummy joke. Moving on to the California desk, recently, a notice of public input was posted in regards to California Fishing Game, raising the possibility of delaying some sport fishing openings within that state due to the lack of medical services in rural communities. During this very short lived teleconference public meeting, participants refused to mute their lines, overloading the Fishing Game Commission, who promptly canceled and rescheduled. Many news outlets carried this story, all stating that fishermen shouting everything from make fishing grade again to racist remarks referencing hate groups such as the k k K, refused to be polite and allow the meeting to even begin. Now. To speak, frankly, every sport, profession, hobby, even religion has its jackasses. I do not care what example you pick, there will be some individual within that group that you don't really want to be associated with. Some of the folks that apparently would not let this meeting move forward were genuinely the bad apples in the California fishing community. But I have got to be honest, I just cannot believe that all of this negative crud was from fishermen, fishermen who took the time to phone in and be part of the process. In all of my years of guiding, fishing and being around fisherman, I never had a single person step on my boat and shout on behalf of hate groups or political parties. Everyone I fish with or have taken fishing were there for the resource to fish, which typically means forgetting all the rest of the stuff like party politics. Furthermore, there have been plenty of documented cases right there in the state of California of participants on teleconference type town hall meetings that were not actually a part of the group and just looking to disrupt the goings on. In one case, in the California town of Laguna Beach, a city council meeting that included the entirety of the city council was crashed by someone performing lewd sexual acts in the aftermath of this teleconference or online meeting. I never saw the mention of the entirety of the Laguna Beach citizenry being lumped in with the people disrupting the meeting. If I had to venture a guess, those people uh performing for the city council didn't actually have any interest in what the Laguna Beach City Council had to say. As of now, there is no statewide fishing ban in California. I am not writing this incident off. Hunters and fishers have typically been very good at regulating each other's behavior, and we need to keep doing so, especially as we see added regulations and sometimes closures in these strange times. Moving on, but sticking with fish news. Sometime in the nineteen eighties, Yellowstone Lake, located inside Yellowstone National Park, was stocked illegally with a non native and invasive species to its waters, the lake trout. The native Yellowstone cutthroat population has consequently dropped since then to around less than ten percent of its historic population. In other words, it has been hurting. Yellowstone National Park estimates that adult lake trout can eat forty one cutthroat per year. On top of that, the Yellowstone cutthroat is more susceptible to its natural predators than the lake trout due to its habits. The cutthroat can be eaten by eagles, bears, and otters and are particularly susceptible to these predators when spawning in the lake's shallow tributaries. In other words, the cutthroat need help. Lake trout tend to move deeper in the lake, making them less vulnerable to airborne predators, and their spawning habits don't put them at risk from grizzlies. Lake trout aren't that picky of a fish when it comes to picking the right lure, which is probably why they got dumped into the lake in the first place. Although anglers take about twenty thousand lake trout out of the lake annually, angler catch only accounts for five of total harvest at an expanse of around two million dollars a year. An intensive gill netting program has been running since that program has removed three point four million fish. Gill Nets are deployed at depths that maximize catch of lake trout and minimize the by catch of native cutthroat. That is twenty six years of gill netting. So where are we now? Trout unlimited? Dave Sweet reports that the Science Review Panel for the Fisheries of Yellowstone National Park stated at their more recent meeting that adult and sexually mature Lake trout now represent only about two of the total lake trout population. Those big adult fish are the ones that matter most because they do both the breeding and the bulk of the eating of native cuts. Gill Netting needs to continue again at roughly two million dollars a year, but according to Dr Michael Hanson, a member of the panel and retired fisheries biologist, nowhere else has seen the kind of adult lake trout collapse at the rate that has been achieved on Yellowstone Lake, not on the Great Lakes, not on Lake Pondera. Although even the National Park Service state's that lake trout will likely always be a part of Yellowstone Lake, the goal of flipping the pecking order is now visible. Restoring these truly beautiful cutthroat to former numbers that greatly outweigh the lake trout numbers will reduce the gill net program to fewer days on the water with much less cost. This is the pace of conservation. Don't transport live fish. For more info on this one, please check out Trout Unlimited and their film on this subject, The Return. Next up Living with Wildlife, an article that came out recently in The Atlantic brings up the concept of living with wildlife, not like on the couch type of living with wildlife, Hey, can you pass the remote? The concept of wild ng which essentially means finding some give and take with wildlife and the urban interface, recognizing that the idea of returning a landscape that has been thoroughly peopled for hundreds or thousands of years to a quote natural state is not likely and kind of a moving target if you think about it. In Italy, groups are selectively pruning abandoned apple trees so the trees continue to produce fruit in order to provide food for bears. Something completely unknown to myself is there has been a population of Marsican brown bear or Apennine brown bear living in Italy, a real deal four hundred fifty pound grizzly bear. This Italian brown bear is a disconnected population of the Eurasian brown bear that is currently relegated to or very near to, the Abrutso National Forest. If you're familiar with the country of Italy and its geography, the Abrutso National Forest and it's critically endangered population of brown bears is located right above the boot about mid Shin. If you are not familiar with the geography of Italy. The park is about two hours east of Rome. Anyway, The point is apples are not natural in this area. People brought them in, cultivated them, and abandoned them. The Marskan brown bear has been around much longer than the modern hybridized apple varieties planted by man. Apples are not part of the historic diet, which in many cases would mean get rid of those trees. We cannot have nature if we don't have everything natural. If you're like me and not currently raising honey or sheep near the Brutzo and think it would be cool to see the Marskin brown bear returned to historic high numbers, the question becomes what part of history are we returning it to and who gets to choose. Here's another question to ask. Do the existing population of bears care if their food is historically as it should be? This is local? Yes, absolutely, I'm gonna see and it's local. I doubt it. To the bears roaming the apenning right now. Fruit is food, and those apple trees have been around their entire existence and their parents existence. This much diminished population only about sixty bears are left, needs a little boost. So what's the harm. I suppose you could argue that without people maintaining the apple trees, they will eventually quit producing food, and the bears will have lost a food source they may have been depended on, not a long term solution. In other words, perhaps another argument would be the smell of man is associated with the trees in some way, which could potentially lead the bears into conflict. Realistically, though, the likely argument is if we don't take the idea of natural far enough back in time, we could be forced to include things we don't like to see or don't find palatable as a natural part of the landscape. The apple tree was brought here by a farmer, as was his plow and harrow, which are not nearly as pretty as they sit and rest on the landscape. You see what I'm saying. That's an opinion piece for everyone, just something to think over onto. This week's called action. The Clean Water Act, which we have covered many times, is still a political football. The Trump administration has removed most of the Obama era language that never got implemented due to lawsuits and lack of enforcement. The new Trump era changes will likely get grid locked by a new wave of lawsuits, and it is all ridiculous, however, so you know what the new rule does is remove protections for intermittent streams and waters that do not provide annual flow to a traditionally navigable waterway. Navigable is the word of the day when it comes to the Clean Water Act, and what you will hear as an example of water threatened by the new navigable Water rule is our Prairie Pothole region. An abundance of our drinkable water and edible, watchable wildlife depend on this area. Unfortunately, this is a bunch of depressions in the ground that sometimes fill, sometimes don't with water, and again, unfortunately, what that water doesn't do is contribute surface water flow annually into navigable water ways or water ways that flow into a territorial sea or tradition navigable water in a typical year, either directly or indirectly through other tributaries, jurisdictional lakes, ponds or impoundments, or adjacent wetlands, which under the new rule makes the Prairie Pothole region and other individual bodies of water um hung out to dry, so to speak. If you think this is absurd, as I do, please right in, call in an email your congressional representatives today and tell them that you, in fact enjoy clean water, and you probably know some other folks who do too. You like shore birds and frogs and tasty fish, and waterfowl and upland birds, and you want to see those things protected, not only for yourself, but for the rest of us and those that come after us. Moving on to the ever popular cat desk. At this point, if you've been listening to Cal's Weekend Review, you know without question how damnage domestic cats are to our wildlife. Recently, that topic popped up once again with a new study out of North Carolina State University that tracked nine hundred domestic house cats. Researchers were initially optimistic about the small range of these domestic predators until they took into account the repeated predation Within those tiny ranges. Domestic cats are essentially over pressuring their resources. This differs from wild cats that have a large territory in which they likely not by choice, spread their predatory love around. Considering that many homes within the study areas also have cats that were not part of the study, the data once again points to an incredibly simple solution for the protection of native wildlife. Keep your cats inside. Nothing new. Remember in the US alone and estimated two point four billion birds a year twelve point three billion small mammals a year. And all you have to do, cat fanciers is keep Tabby inside. If that story doesn't tickle your cat fancy, maybe this one out of Yellowstone National Park will I know you fans of Monty python will like. In a study released in the journal Environmental Conservation in March, researchers tested twenty eight mountain lions that call the Greater Yellowstone home between two thousand five and two thousand fourteen. Twelve of these cats tested positive for plague bring out. Eight of these positive tests were collected from eleven dead cats, and four positive tests from a sample of seventeen live cats. Plague and mountain lions is not anything new. A researcher in Arizona picked up a dead cat in two thousand seven and was infected while performing a necropsy on the animal. A couple of interesting takeaways from this study is that the cats do not always die when they contract plague. In fact, quite the opposite. Several lines in the study tested positive than negative, then positive again over the course of the study, meaning that the cats can build some antibodies to the historically deadly disease, and they can potentially act as an indicator for when plague is present in the Yellowstone ecosystem. But who is coming in contact with Mount lions enough for this to be helpful hound hunters, folks who run cats with dogs, that's who. During the time of this study, a boy scout was infected with plague in the Teton area. It is possible that this infection or other infections in the future, could be prevented by using some citizens science, utilizing Mount Lion hunters to bring in testable samples from their kills, or providing the people who just like to run cats with hounds the necessary equipment to pull samples from live cats when they have them. Tread could potentially provide an early warning system for folks like me that like to wander around the woods picking up just about anything we find. Thanks for listening. That's all I've got for you this week. Let me know what I'm missing by writing in to A s K C. A L. At The Meat Eater dot com. If you love what you're hearing, please subscribe and tell a friend I'll talk to you next week.

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