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 in now Here's kel Strange seeds from China, Uzbekistan and other origins are invading the US. Hundreds of households across the country have been getting unmarked seed packages in the mail, and those numbers are expected to grow. Reasons why these seed packets have sprouted in people's mailboxes range from a terrorist plot to spread noxious weeds or invasive bugs that would be a blight on our nation's agriculture, or possibly something called a brushing scam, which is when a company sends unsolicited products to people and then they generate reviews on their behalf. Either way, state officials are urging those that have received these mysterious seeds to keep them in a sealed bag and call your local Department of Agriculture. Whatever you do, do not plant them or throw them away in a fashion that could allow the seeds to spread. If you've had your head buried in the potting soil and are coming to this thorny situation late, and maybe you've already planted these mystery seeds, please heed the advice of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture, which is as soon as they come up. I recommend those plants be killed, use some type of herbicide, spray them, and if anything comes back, spray it. Do not let those plants grow. The risk is too great. Sounds serious to me. If you get unsolicited seeds in the mail, please do the right thing and notify your Department of Agriculture. Prevention is an easier solution than herbicide. Let's hope the Department of Egg gets to the root of this issue quick. This week we've got pebble mine, whooping cranes, and access. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I know everyone loves hearing about my Steel chainsaws, particularly those battery powered saws that are clean, quiet, powerful and dependable. Well, starting Monday, August ten, you will have one heck of an opportunity in front of you. Only at the meat Eater dot com we are having a fund raising access providing auction. I have personally assembled my ms A two twenty c battery powered saw. My good friends at Steel are providing a full kit of personal protective equipment including chaps, gloves, helmet system, glasses, and a duffel bag to hold everything. They may even throw a couple of other things in there. But wait, there's more. You could get it for half price because this is an auction, but you know you should pay beyond full price because this is a fundraiser for access, all right, but wait, there's still more. I am also throwing in an original bench made altitude knife that has brought me a ton of luck in the mountains, and a personal copy of a must have conservation book, an entirely synthetic fish, and to top it all off, my beloved public land owner, back country Hunters and Anglers T shirt. I will even write a nice note on the bar of the chainsaw. Just for you. We're auctioning off Steven Ronnello's rifle and accuse deer mount that he got with that rifle. Jannest Pitelis is throwing in the backpack right off of his back, his lucky hunting cap, and a couple other items. And for those of you who want to support land access in a big way and get something truly unique, we are auctioning off Doss Boat, the original boat from season one of our Doss Boat YouTube series. WHOA All proceeds are going to the purchase of the Shiloh Pond property in Maine to provide more hunting and fishing for America. If you don't want stuff and you want to contribute, please go to High Peaks Alliance and donate to them directly help us help you get this done. It's a really good thing. The main project is incredibly cool and as I've said right here on this show before, of Maine's forest ground is privately held. The entire state is private. They have currently a system of de facto public access on non posted private ground, but you know, times are changing and a lot of that stuff is starting to get posted. So it's critical for folks who enjoy getting outside, being in the out of doors, as I like to say, that we start identifying these chunks of ground and getting them into a truly public circumstance. Next up, we're gonna take a quick stop the correction desk. It's a tough one for me. We're going to correct the pronunciation of John Muir's name. Last week I mentioned the Sierra Club and their attempt to address the faults of its founder, John Muir. Muir is how we pronounce it in Montana, all Right, Phil is going to help me out with this one. Muir, your mirror, your mirror, your John Muir, John Moore mirror, Sorry you saying it? How saying it? Mirror? John Muir, John Muir, John Muir, John Moore. More. He's hopeless, Jess, Come on, it's happy hour at the poorhouse and wings are on me. Yeah. I think I nailed it on that last one. Moving on heading north to Alaska? Are a k desk if we want to get hip this one. Courtesy of Sam Longdren. On July, the Trump administration's Army Corps of Engineers released its final environmental impact statement regarding the Pebble Mine, setting the massive Southwest Alaska copper and gold project on track to receive the permits needed to break ground, perhaps within the month. Hunters, anglers, commercial fishermen, and area tribes have fiercely opposed the project for decades, but yesterday that chorus gained a loud and influential voice. The president's eldest son, responding to a tweet from Nick Eyer's former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, Donald from Junior tweeted as a sportsman who has spent plenty of time in the area. I agree on the headwaters of Bristol Bay and the surrounding fisheries are too unique and fragile to take any chances with hashtag pebble mine. Don Jr. Is just one of millions of visitors to Bristol Bay, but the only one who can call the President Dad. So this is a really good deal. Got a guy on the inside, so to speak. The Trump administration is still deciding whether to issue the critical Clean Water Act permit, and could do so this month unless the Commander in Chief decides to intercede. The last time a scientific review process was completed was in two thousand thirteen. The administration began the process of severely restricting the project due to grave concerns about the possible impacts the project would have, mainly on water quality and fisheries in the region. The Trump administration getaway with those his findings and began a new The latest analysis found that under normal conditions, the MIND would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers and result in long term changes to the health of the commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay. Now you tell me which part of that statement is scarier. The fact that with one administration, the review says that this is not okay. The next administration and analysis says, oh no, it's totally okay. Why is there never any middle ground? But to back up a bit, I do think the scariest part of that last statement is normal conditions. If you have ever spent any amount of time in Alaska, what's considered normal is sometimes scarily subjective and always a very broad definition. For example, I once climbed in the back seat of a super cub on a very blustery day to look down own and see a bottle of peppermint schnaps sticking out of the back of the pilot's seat. When I notioned in the direction of the bottle to the friends sitting next to me, who happens to be an Alaskan resident, his face seemed to say, Hey, that's normal, friends and neighbors, that's not normal. The pebble deposit, estimated to be one of the largest golden copper loads on Earth, sits on a high saddle dividing Upper Telaric Creek from the south fork of the Coctouli River. The Telaric described to me as a sexy, sexy, big Rainbow Stream drains into the massive Lake Iliamna. Lake Iliamna feeds the quee Jack River and finally Bristol Bay. The Cooktoo Lee drains into the Mulchatna, a major tributary of the Nagac, the Nish and the Quey. That's the hip Way, as saying, Nishigak and quee Jack produced the majority of the Bristol Bay. Sake I run the largest and most valuable wild salmon fishery on the planet, generating a one point five billion dollars sustainable economy and fourteen thousand good jobs every year. The proposed MIND would carve a one mile wide, one third mile deep hole in this wilderness landscape. According to Mike heat Wall, a spokesman for Pebble, the project would require building a gas pipeline all the way across cook Inlet, a new port adjacent to Catnain National Park, an eighty mile hall road to the mine, thirteen square miles of tailing ponds and facilities at the mine, and a two hundred and seventy megawatt power plant, all in order to extract seventy million tons of rock every year. Even if the Mind's tailing ponds never leak their toxic slurry, which in this seismically active area many believe is an absolute certainty. The development and road building would destroy the wild character of the Bristol Bay region and to sturb and display as much of its wildlife. The commercial fishing community aren't the only ones who stand to suffer should this fishery collapse. Several native tribes also depend on subsistence harvests of all five species of salmon. Outside of salmon, just the shortlist here, there's dolly Vardon pike, grayling lake trout, halibut, and some of the world's largest native rainbow trout, not to mention moose, caribou, brown bears, wolves, wolverines. I'm saying this region's got a lot to offer. Trout Unlimited and many other conservation groups have been aggressively petitioning the White House and other politicians about Pebble. On May, they delivered a letter to President Trump signed by two hundred and fifty outdoors businesses and groups and more than thirty thousand hunters and anglers, begging him to deny the Clean Water Act permit. Alaska Governor Mike Dunlevy said that his state will also provide a thorough analysis of the MIND proposal. Although he has expressed his support for the MIND in the past, both of Alaska's U S Senators Murkowski and Sullivan have said they are reviewing the Environmental Impact Statement document to see whether it meets the high bar of scientific rigor and offers adequate protection for Bristol Bay. Neither his outright condemned the MIND in the past. Meat Eater Our business is just one of the outdoors businesses asking President Trump to deny the Pebble partnerships permits. Stephen Ronnella, my friend, the company founder and leader, recently recorded a podcast with Donald Trump Jr. He said, decisions important as this one should transcend economic and political concerns, and this is a quote here. The fact that folks from such a wide variety of backgrounds and political persuasions are speaking out together against the Pebble Mind gives me hope, and not just hope that will finally defeat the Mind, but hope that partisanship does have its limits and that certain ideals are more important than party affiliations. Lately, I've been pondering a theory or concept that I'm going to call environmental nationalism. We have a patriotic duty to protect our nation. Guarding her natural ecosystems is a major part of that end quote. If you want your voice heard on this matter, one way to do so is by visiting Save Bristol Bay dot org. Once you're done there, go ahead and let your elected officials know how you feel and that they should also be urging the President to intervene on this one. For more information, please go to the meat Eater dot com and read this fine bit of journalism by Sam Longren in its entirety. Moving over to the ever popular law enforcement desk, a man named Constantine and an unnamed youth, shot apparel, whooping grands and a Kadia Parish, Louisiana, May of two thousand sixteen. At Katia Parish is just west of Lafayette, Louisiana. If a Katia Parish sounds familiar to you, it is probably because Acadia is home to the third best selling Cajun record artist of all time, Sydney Brown. His album Noir Shall Say two Step Pastache to Nah Nah, Well, I don't have to tell you is kind of a big deal. Guarantee you, I got the pronunciation right on that one. Why I do this to myself is you know, because I love you people anyway. Constantine, after adamantly denying his involvement in the killing of the cranes, eventually confessed in two thousand eighteen. The judge just last Thursday handed down an impressive penalty of a ten thousand dollar fine plus an additional seventy five thousand dollars in restitution to Louisiana, while life and fish five years probation and a suspension of hunting and fishing privileges until three hundred and sixty hours of community service have been completed. For the facts of the case, according to the Department of Justice, made twenty two thousand sixteen, Constantine and a juvenile, using twenty two caliber rifles shot at a pair of whooping cranes located in the field within a Kadia Parish, Louisiana. One of the cranes, identified as L five fifteen, fell dead in the field, and Constantine and his accomplice retrieved its carcass. The other crane, identified as L three fifteen, flew too far north into another field so that it could not be retrieved, but investigators later recovered its carcass after retrieving L five fifteens carcass, The pair noticed that had had transponders on its legs and received information that the bird was a whooping crane. I do want to interject real quick here for my non hunting audience. No, it is not considered normal, reasonable, or ethical to shoot at an animal first and then identify it later. Moving on, Constantine and the juvenile transported the carcass to the Juveniles residents, where they severed the legs from L. Five fifteen carcass and removed the transponders. They then transported the knife carcass, severed legs and transponders along a nearby road, and discarded the evidence. You heard it right. They threw away the most expensive meal they're ever going to have a chance to eat. The last person convicted of killing a whooping crane prior to Constant in Louisiana was in two thousand fourteen. That person was sentenced to fine and forty five days in jail. Again. According to the Department of Justice, Lane Thomas Thibodeaux was charged with one count of taking a migratory bird for which there is no season, one count of taking migratory game bird during closed season, one count of taking migratory game birds from a motor vehicle, as in he shot from a vehicle, one count of wanton waste of migratory game birds as in he didn't eat the birds, and one count of taking game birds without state hunting license. According to the guilty plea, Thibodeau shot at a group of birds on November two, two thousand fourteen, near Crawfish Pond and Vermillion Parish. The shot crippled the whooping crane, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act. Thibodeaux admitted to shooting and killing multiple ducks from the driver's seat of a moving vehicle on a public road during the close season. Thibodeau did not retrieve the ducks carcasses from the field, and he did not possess the required Louisiana hunting license to step in here again, a state hunting license and probably everywhere except for Texas, does not give you the ability to shoot animals from a moving vehicle and leave them to lay. A couple more things we should break down in regards to these sentences. Is a sentence forty five days in jail and versus a sentence of zero jail time and an eighty five thousand dollar fine plus a bunch of community service you know, might pencil out for some people's tax brackets. Might be better to spend time in the clink versus paying that out, or it may be nothing to you to pay eighty five thousand dollars. So I do want to point out that the median household income and Vermillion parish is only about thirty four thousand dollars a year. It's about thirty two thousand in Katia Parish. Those are household incomes, not individual incomes. My mentioning of the earnings as additional context is in relation to the weight of the fines, not in any way a justification of the killing of the wildlife, just to say. And the other thing I should mention here and I can't believe I haven't yet, is whooping cranes. If you don't know, our giant, awesome dinosaur birds that stand about five ft tall and stretch their wings to about seven and a half feet in width. They also have a wide diet that can include small mammals, crustaceans, small birds, reptiles, and amphibians, as well as what we would consider the normal bird fare of grains and vertebrates and seeds. Some do speculate that the whooping crane actually ingest more animal protein than the other crane species. In fact, one wintering location in Ransas, Texas noted that the crane's primary food source were blue crabs. Now, although the whooping crane is again a very big bird, whooping crane numbers likely were never very big. When it comes to birds, we tend to think of them flying at some point in the millions, but unless that happened prior to European contact here in North America, the whooping cranes historic population at its height was only about ten thousand birds. These cranes were reduced through the usual method of over of us in habitat destruction, to only about fifteen wild birds. Even now, where we sit at the height of whooping crane recovery, the entire population is only eight hundred or so birds. That eight hundred number is the entire living population, as in a mix of captive and wild birds. In order to grow these crane numbers from fifteen individuals to eight hundred, it has taken serious slow work. Conservation efforts around the crane started back in the late nineteen thirties. Independent groups, zoos, state and federal agencies have tried hand rearing chicks in vitro fertilization, teaching migration by having juvenile cranes follow ultra light aircraft that have been dressed up like cranes, humans dressed as cranes trying to act as surrogate parents. They've re established migratory populations, they've re established non migratory populations, and despite all of this effort, time and money, the crane population continues to grow very very slowly, and there are a bunch of years in there where it didn't grow at all. All this to say, the restoration of whooping cranes is very hands on and very expensive. According to the International Crane Foundation, it can cost around a hundred thousand dollars to raise, release, and monitor one crane. Part of the reason for the difference in penalties is the transportation factor. One of my most hated wildlife crimes that have want and waste, which is leaving those birds dead in the field does not violate the Lacy Act, but like our para did with the hefty fine, going out and retrieving a bird constitutes transporting of an endangered species. Which does violate the Lacy Act, which you think about that, it's a little twisted shooting leaving a bird gets you less of a penalty than if you shoot and retrieve what you shot. The other reason here is if you are a crane, Louisiana is a pretty dangerous place to hang out. Fourteen of the roughly one and forty seven cranes that have been released in Louisiana have been consequently shot in Louisiana, which is odd when you consider that Louisiana historically at the highest population of whooping cranes in the US, hosting both a migratory and a non migratory population. And I know the Cajun folks that I know are big into history. You would think Louisiana's would consider these birds a bit of their culture and something to protect and be proud of. Now, I'm gonna jump back to the economics here, because it gets glossed over sometimes. It costs roughly one hundred thousand dollars to raise a whooping crane. The average median household income in the two parishes mentioned again is only about let's say, thirty two dollars a year, and the cranes eat a lot of the same things that people do. This doesn't justify the shooting, does not justify the waste, but it does possibly suggest that part of the crane program should be dedicated to finding ways to encourage more local investment where the cranes and the people meet. Whoop, there it is hard to say that with a straight face. Alright, Moving on to the interacting with wildlife desk. Picture this. You're enjoying a lovely family vacation just north of the border in Ontario at the iconic North Star Village on the shore of historic Winnipeg River. During the cool mornings, you're enjoying one of Canada's best fisheries, targeting walleye bass, northern pike and muskie. But in the afternoons it gets hot and you're looking to take a dip. You confidently stride chest deep into the water near the doe. Just another summer afternoon at the lake. Right. Kim Driver is a seasonal regular at the resort and an experienced angler. She never saw it coming. On July, Kim and her husband Terry were taking the aforementioned mid day dip when Kim felt a sharp pain in her leg. She thought it may have been a turtle she had seen swimming nearby, but it turns out that a near forty inch long muskie had crashed into her calf and decided to take a bite. She started flailing and punching as the fish drug her under the water. I'll say that again, the muskie drug a grown adult human underwater. When she came back up screaming, there was blood everywhere, her calf was gashed, and she had cuts on her hands from punching the fish. This was clearly no casual encounter. Kim's calf now requires plastic surgery that will take up to six weeks. Kim said quote, I can't sleep at night. I have horrible nightmares, and I wake up in a sweat screaming. It was scary. I'll bet muskelunge as they're sometimes called, and as we've covered before, our ambush predators and can reach speeds of nearly thirty miles per hour in short bursts with flat, hard heads full of ultra sharp teeth. These apex predators shouldn't be taken lightly. That said, locals and most biologists insist that these attacks are extremely rare. There's still a debate over whether muskies pose a real threat to other fish and to humans. But if you're willing to have this debate, I don't think you should have it with Kim. I don't think you'd have a leg to stand on. As this debate continues, we're muskier, native, and invasive. We should just remember that every once in a while, maybe in the lake next to you, that big trophy fish you are pursuing could decide to pursue you. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks a bunch for listening. As you know, you can always get ahold of me at a s k C a L. That's asked cal at the meat eater dot com. Let me know what I'm getting right, what I'm messing up, and most importantly, what's going on with you in your neck of the woods. If you're loving what you're hearing, please tell some friends and most importantly, get outside. Thanks a bunch, I'll talk to you next week.