00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kell and now Here's kel. Homo erectus left a hand axe carved from a hippo bone in a one point four million year old layer of mud. This was recently excavated in Ethiopia by Tohoku University. A hand axe is a common tool that required minimal shaping but aided in a variety of tasks associated with what we would call dressing and butchering game. Most hand axes are about the size of your hand, no surprise there. One edge is for cutting and one edge is for holdinger holding against the back of your palm. The cutting edge has alternating flakes taken out of it that leave a sharp edge, and they're made from stone. So this one made from bone is a special find. In fact, this is only the second bone hand axe ever found. Of course, this find leads archaeologists to the fun question of why why make a tool out of a hippo bone when a more durable stone alternative was so widely available One point four million years ago, a hand axe maker decided to produce an alternative to that common household item, the stone hand axe. This particular Homo erectus could have been an innovator, could have thought bone was more pretty, could have been the first ron Pope Peel for all we know, tired of dull stone hand axes, the hippo bone, nomadic slices through scavenged or freshly killed meats as easily as you know, I mean, you get it, guarantee. For just I bring the us up because if you look at the wide, wide, wide world and variety of butchering tools and implements in the world today, the shape, sizes, variations and material options, you know, it's just fun to think that people commonheads have been thinking of different ways of doing this or that, maybe for a better product, or maybe just to be different for over one point four million years. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes folks just want to be different. This week we've got rabbits, condors, fish, ethics, elk, and so much more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I am recording this episode from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where we are currently working on a brand new season of doss Boat or in this case, dose Boat. If you've not seen the original season. It is our YouTube based fishing sea areas, so check it out. The main thread is taking an old boat and dressing it up as we moved from fishery to fishery, making modifications and learning about new species, tactics, techniques and issues. Here in Detroit Lakes we stopped at Lakeside True Value to get geared up. The folks at Lakeside helped us out with a bunch of odds and ends, including letting us rip the top off an old cabinet, taking an old Lakeside a rug that Miles Noulty and I used to turn into a casting deck on the new boat. This customer service and general hospitality is to be expected as Lakeside True Value is an official dealer of steel power equipment. I even noticed that they have an m s A one forty battery powered saw on their rental fleet in case you want to try out a powerful, clean, lightweight, battery powered saw. The topic we're checking out are fishing for is the big mouth buffalo, which, if you recall from a much earlier episode, is an indigenous and large sucker. The big mouth buffalo is often confused with the common carp or another waterways invasive carp and is thus lee targeted by bow fishers, shot and thrown away. However, we recently learned, and you may have heard this here on the Weekend Review, that the big mouth buffalo has a lot more going for it than many, including myself, had initially thought. This fish is not only the largest member of the sucker family that can weigh in routinely beyond sixty pounds, It tastes great, It is incredibly picky, but SIPs flies off the surface, and puts up an incredible fight on fly or conventional tackle. It is our oldest known fish. These big mouth buffalo are capable of living well. I mean to be honest, We don't know how old these fish can get, but we do know there are many many fish that are swimming around right now. At over one hundred and twelve years of age. These fish could hold the secret to aging with grace, as I recently, as in just a couple of hours ago, learned that even though they age, they don't show signs of muscle deterioration like other animals including us do. Currently, there is no limit in the amount of these centurion fish you can kill, and the folks that are studying them and consequently love the dang things. Only ask that if you are out shooting cart, know what you're shooting at. Identify your target before you let that arrow go. Make sure it's a cart and not a big mouth buffalo. There's lots more on this topic to tell you, but I'll save it for another episode. You know, I don't think it's too much to ask, just as an aside that you identify your target. The state's not helping you out here. Both fishers, they're bare minimum in the regulations, suggests the state doesn't even care about these things. All this uff I've learned about them. They're incredibly cool, but you, as a arrow flinging hunter of sorts, identifying your target should be ingrained in you. And a fish sitting there is nowhere near as hard as let's say, uh, flock of mallards flying by, or you know, surf scoters or golden eye flying in it like fifty So picking one from the other isn't that big of a deal. Again, you aren't required to keep these things, but they taste great. So if you do screw up and shoot one of these things taking home and eat it, jumping over to the small game desk. That's a pun, as this one is about rabbits and or, more specifically, a highly contagious virus that's killing a bunch of rabbits small game hunters. Take note, we've covered this one briefly before, so i'll prime you up before where we get going. The name of the illness is rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus type two or r h D V two, and it's so deadly that folks are calling it rabbit ebola, though it actually has nothing to do with ebola. It's just really bad. Here's what we know. The virus is a new souped up version of rabbit hemorrhagic disease, or r h D. That virus was first identified in China. What's interesting and unnerving about our h D is that rabbits might exhibit absolutely no symptoms. They just keel over and die. The virus spreads from rabbit to rabbit and through passive transfer. Passive transfer it would be like when a rabbit encounters the virus just in nature living on something else. Once in a rabbit, the virus causes a general infection of the organs. A rabbit will typically bleed from the nose and mouth immediately after death. Other than this, tell to el sign a rabbit carcass looks perfectly unharmed. The US had an r h D outbreak back in two thousand, but it was a minor issue compared to the impact r h D had on Asian rabbit populations. In China alone, the virus is believed to have killed in the ballpark of a hundred and forty million rabbits. R h D is a super disease of sorts. A recent New York Times article notes that the virus can live on dry cloth with no living host of any sort for over three months. That scary stuff. The virus can live in a dead rabbit for even longer than that. Imagine if covid survived for three months on surfaces. No, I don't like that, there'd be no mitigating it. The r h d's long life helps explain why it's so contagious among rabbits. The virus is also impervious to freezing, so it doesn't go away in winter. As a result, the mortality rate can be as high as one Now, the new version of r h D seems even worse than the original. As I mentioned, it's r h d V two, as inversion two. According to the U s d A. The new virus first appeared in New York City sometime in February, so just a few months ago. Scientists are pretty darned concerned, and for good reason. What happened is that back in February, about eleven domestic rabbits at a Manhattan animal hospital suddenly expired. No one really knew why, which was weird, But the following months got, you know, a little weirder. In March, r h d V two somehow managed to do something crazy. It jumped to wild rabbits. Here in the US, wild rabbits and hares in New Mexico started dying first. Not long after, a group of thirty dead rabbits was reportedly found near Fort Bliss, Texas. Then the same thing happened in other states Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Washington. By early this month, the virus had reached California, where it still seems to be spreading. I'll pump the brakes real quick. You need to understand something, so stick with me. Most domesticated pet rabbits are European rabbits. That's the common name for the species or rick talagusquniculus. When you buy your kid a little bunny at the feed store, that's most likely what you're getting a European rabbit. Wild cotton tails and jack rabbits like the sort you hunt are totally different species than these domestic rabbits. Jack rabbits are actually hairs, which are not at all like rabbits. Hairs change their fur color depending on the season. Rabbits don't. Hairs, are solitary and live above ground, whereas most rabbits hang out in groups and live in burrows. Anyway, the important thing to know is that wild rabbits and hairs are not the same thing as domestic rabbits, and because of that, wild rabbits and hairs were unaffected by the original r HD rabbit virus. It's a really big deal that the new virus r h d V two jump species, and at this point it's still hard to know what the implications might be. R h d V two actually has a lower mortality rate than our h D but that's not a good thing because it means more live rabbits are hopping around with it, infecting other rabbits, and more rabbits in total may die. Here's another wrinkle. There's a vaccine for r h D and for our h D V two, but neither are available in the United States, you know, for a bunch of bureaucratic reasons, and also, how are you going to distribute a vaccine to a bunch of wild rabbits. Thousands of rabbits and hairs have died so far right now, it looks as though all we can do is hope that the US doesn't see the same sort of death numbers that China did with the original r h D outbreak, millions of dead rabbits. If you're a big game hunter, the freezer is full of red meat, and those little white cotton tail loins get to be pretty darn special. If you happen across any dead abbots that are suspiciously good looking, maybe with a little blood on their mouths or noses, it would be a great idea to contact your state's Fishing Game or Department of Natural Resources. Here in the Western States, we've got elk all over the place. The same used to be true in the Appalachian States, especially in the eastern part of Kentucky. As you may or may not recall from your high school history class. Daniel Boone was one of the first settlers to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap and settle Kentucky. That was back in the seventeen sixties. Well. On his famous expedition, he saw scores of elk just grazing and hanging out in blue grass meadows, along with buffalo and bear by the way. Once more settlers moved in market hunting habitat, destruction and non existent management practices quickly threatened the elk. A similar situation played out throughout much of the country with a bunch of different species, as least buffalo mountain lions. By the time John James Audubon, you know, the animal painter, founder of the Ottubon Society, visited Kentucky in eighteen ten, elk had been largely wiped out. Within thirty years they would be totally gone. Of course, this all happened back in the days before Congress passed all our great conservation laws like the Lacy Act of nineteen hundred and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of eighteen and long before the North American model of wildlife conservation was established. Anyway, there's good news today elk are on the rise once again in Kentucky. The New York Times recently published an article about how elk have not only rebounded, but are also helping bring economic life to Kentucky, and sportsmen have played a huge part in the whole thing. Another great conservations success story from conservation failure. Here's the gist. In the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation or r m e F offered to fund a multimillion dollar plan to airlift fift hundred elk and begin to restore Kentucky's native heard. The catch was that farmers in western Kentucky weren't exactly into the whole idea. Why would you not want elk back? Well, try and making a living off of feeding animals and uh, all of a sudden having to feed a bunch of animals that you didn't exactly right into the family business plan. Well, there was farmer opposition, so they had to find a safe place for the elk back. Before this time, in the heyday of cola, Kentucky, coal companies would just blast the top off of mountains. They would then take all the rebel and debris from blowing these mountains up and just fill up the nearby valley. This created a patchwork, a kind of flatten hilly land. In the ninet nineties, the Kentucky coal industry basically nosedived and a bunch of mining areas were abandoned. Now, hilltop removal or mountaintop removal is not a good idea, but in this case it did turn Kentucky into a perfectly good place to release a bunch of elk. That's because elk really liked That makes a mountainous terrain and plateaus, whether they're artificial or not. Plus, most Kentucky's abandoned coal mines were in the eastern part of the state and away from the aforementioned miners, so that's where the elk went. This is an interesting aside. If you ever find yourself speaking publicly about the effects of open pit mines or in this case, hilltop mining techniques and their effects on wildlife, these coal country elk examples always come up. Is this, like, boy, if mining is bad, And to be clear, not all mining's bad. It can be done responsibly. It's just you know, expensive. But anyway, the arguments like boy, if mining is bad, you gotta tell all these elk on these Kentucky mines to get out, and the argument just like conveniently leaves out the fact that in order to have this conservation success, these areas of the country had to be completely elk less, as in zero for more than two hundred years. Imagine drown that elk tag and having to wait two hundred years. Nevertheless, this plan succeeded fast forward twenty three years from the original fift hundred elk release in Kentucky is now home to thirteen thousand elk. That's eleven thousand, five hundred more elk than two decades ago. The animals are so abundant that this season, Kentucky will have six hundred elk hunting tags up for grabs. Earlier, I mentioned economic life in Kentucky. By the state's estimate, elk site seeing tours and elk hunting guides now add five million to the local economy. The New Time story I mentioned spotlight at a nonprofit called Boone's Readge. It's a nature reserve. The reserve is being built on reclaimed mind land, and its owners are hoping to attract one million annual visitors and generate a hundred and fifty million per year. The biggest selling point is a chance to spot in milk. If there were that type of money in guiding elk when I was doing it, I wouldn't be here right now. Moving on to the raptor desk. Earlier this month, officials confirmed that the California condors had returned to Sequoia National Park for the first time in fifty years, which is huge news, and not just because this bird has an almost ten foot wingspan, you know, which is huge. The California condor is a big vulture. It ranks among the world's largest flying birds, and it is the largest in North America. Adults way about twenty four pounds, and again can have a ten foot wingspan. A big old eagle in comparison, has a seven and a half foot wing span in ways about fourteen pounds, So we're talking about a really massive bird here. The only living bird species that has a whider wing span than the California condor is the wandering albatross, which hangs out near Australia. The wandering albatross travels almost seventy five thousand miles a year. Adult wingspan can be as large as twelve feet tip to tip, and that bird weighs twenty four pounds as an adult. You may find it interesting that a difference of about two feet in wingspan, which is a lot, still supports roughly the same amount of weight. Now, if you're trying to picture what the condor looks like, imagine a huge black vulture with a bright orange head. They also have big patches of white, almost like raw shack ink blots under their wings. The California condor, as the name implies, is native to California, as well as to Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. The Lewis and Clark expedition even killed one of the birds near the mouth of the Columbia River in what is now Washington State. The expedition even accurately guessed that the bird was the largest flying species in North America. Here's why news about Takoya National Park is relevant. The condor suffered a major die off in the twentieth century, owning to poaching, habitat destruction, poisoning of several different types, including lead poisoning. Scientists believe that lead ammal specifically was to blame, not so much from folks shooting them, although that did occur, but the birds are scavengers and they gut piles. Gut piles from hunter kills contained lead. We've covered this many, many, many times. The reason we can eat lead to some degree and have it passed through our body is because the pH level, the amount of acid we have in our guts is nowhere near as strong as the bird guts, and the bird guts can break that lead own and absorb it into the blood in a really short amount of time. If you recall about this time, bald eagles experienced a similar die off by eating D D T laced fish. Some of the original bills to ban or restrict led AMMO for hunting purposes were because of the California condor, which was somewhat controversial at the time and I'm sure still is to some of you at home. At any rate, there were only nine wild condoors left in the world, and about eighteen in captivity. In other words, they were functionally extinct. Over the next two years, the remaining wild condoors were captured and taken to zoos. The US Fish and Wildlife Service then launched an extensive captive breeding program, spending some twenty five million dollars to save the giant vulture. Within nine years, the captive condoors had produced more than one hundred eggs, which you know shouldn't be that surprising considering you don't fly owned all day looking for dead stuff. You don't have a whole lot of options how you're going to spend your time. In January, to California condors were released into the wild, kick starting a massive reintroduction effort. As of two thousand nineteen, California had about two hundred wild California condors. They are now believed to be about three hundred and thirty seven birds in the wild back to Sequoia National Park. The fact that four California condors showed up in Sequoia this spring further testifies three introduction success. And it's just kind of a excuse the expression, another feather in our conservation cap. I'm excited to see condors continue to expand back in their historic range. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks for listening as per usual. If I'm missing anything, or you just want to let me know what's happening in your neck of the woods, please get a hold of me 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're loving the weekend review, thank you and please tell a friend. Also this week, I'd like to say a special thanks to j R. Sullivan for helping me with a little bit of research. Thanks for listening, and have a great week

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