00:00:08 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ryan kel Kelly. Now Here's Kel. A flock of ravens is called an unkindness in Greek and Norse mythology. Ravens or corvus corax are spies and messengers for both Apollo and Odin. That could explain why some folks think ravens are potents or omens, usually bad ones. Interesting stuff, but mythology isn't exactly science. What we know for sure is that ravens and their crow cousins are smart. You can distinguish between the two by body size and tail feathers. The tail feathers of a raven are uneven, with central feathers that are longer than the outside feathers, creating the appearance of a wedge in flight. Crow tail feathers, on the other hand, are even, resulting in a uniform fan. I can also tell you that, contrary to popular belief, crows are pretty darn tasty. You can read all about that in the article I Ate Crow at the meat eater dot com. For those of you who adhere to Scripture, the Law of Moses found in Leviticus states that ravens are forbidden as food, so you had better watch those tail feathers and your local hunting regulations. Anyhow, ravens have wild researchers with their problem solving abilities and capacity for complex thinking. For example, ravens generally hunt or scavenge by themselves, but if one gets into an ownership dispute over a carcass with other scavengers like crows, magpies, or vultures, that solo raven will enlist a larger group of ravens to help secure that claim. If a raven comes across a carcass that's too tough to get into, ravens have been known to call in scavengers like wolves or coyotes to assist wolves or coyotes being able to tear through a tough hide more efficiently than a raven. One time, while hunting elk in the sweet Grass Hills not too far north at Great Falls, Montana, we noted that ravens would circle high above the elk herd and call emphatically as soon as the elk left the timber. The birds made a very consistent reference to the location of alcohol week, so consistent that you just knew this wasn't coincidence. My conclusion at that time and now to this observed elk raven relationship behavior was that the ravens were using US human hunters to leave behind a big, tasty gut pile, exactly as the ravens have been using wolves and coyotes to provide an easy meal. This inner species quid pro quel in the elk woods is something that is stuck with me. Over the years, ravens have been observed pulling up ice fisherman's lines to eat the bait off of hooks, flying into open cars to pull lunches from the shopping bags inside, and even employing tools. Ravens have been documented using sticks to fish out bugs from holes or French fries from cracks too deep for beaks. In one famous study, ravens demonstrated an ability to plan for the future, an ability we had selfishly reserved for only US humans and a few great apes. Over the course of some training, ravens were given a choice of a small bit of food or a tool. If they ignored the food and shows the tool, the ravens could utilize the tool to get better food later on. Over seventy ravens in this study selected the tool and waited for the better food. Pretty neat, especially when you consider that human children and great apes tended to demonstrate a much lower rate of long term planning in this same experiment. I bring all this super cool stuff up to tell you that ravens are proving damned hard to kill, to the point of having to bring out drones. Let's pray silicone over eggs in the ravens nest to suffocate them. This sounds cruel, and honestly it is. But ravens are expanding in numbers, moving into new ranges, and picking on the desert tortoise, a threatened species. In one case, researchers found a collection of over two hundred and fifty desert tortoise shells under one nest in a period of four years. Sounds like a lot, it is. Population studies found a decline of study found two hundred tortoises per square mile. Current studies have found one or two. I have high hopes for the tortoise, but that Edgar allan Pope poem where the ravens call nevermore, Nevermore, keeps coming to me. I wish I could remember the name of that poem. Well, it'll come to me this week Ravens Red Tide, follow up on the Year of the cap Plastics, and a bunch of really cool plant info. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. Flew down to southwest Florida, just in time to beat the last snow of summer in Bozeman, or at least what we're all hoping will be the last snow of summer. Florida sounds great and it is, but when it's snowing at home the Florida heat, it hits you like a hot, wet brick to the head. I came down to get a bit of fishing in and meet up with some friends that run Captains for Clean Water. Captains for Clean Water is a young nonprofit that advocates and raises money for a number of things that will lead to improved long term water quality, healthy habitat, and wildlife. If you dig that sort of thing, I would check them out. I also got to meet up with my friend Ed Anderson, who is currently doing the Artist in Residency gig at the j and Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. Ed is a great guy and one hell of a painter. He puts a lot of joy and appreciation into the fish, landscapes and wildlife he paints. That stuff wants to jump off the canvas. The local refuge crowd likes to compare Ed to Ding Darling himself, though Ed likes to quickly point out that Ding has a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, which is pretty good for a cartoonist. I need to stop here and say that if you want to call yourself a conservationist, you should damn well know who Jay Norwood Darling is. This is the man who was called the best friend of duck ever had, which also makes him the best friend a duck hunter ever had. Jay and Darling or Ding, the name he signed his cartoons by, was the original artist for the duck stamp and the man who gets the lion's share of the credit for the duck stamped Act of four. The duck stamp is a mandatory purchase if you want to hunt migratory birds in the US, and I highly encourage voluntary purchases even if you don't hunt ducks. The funds from your duck stamp go directly to wildlife work. For every dollar you spend on federal duck stamps, cents goes directly to purchase habitat, conservation, ease, mints, or towards the National Wildlife Refuge system. Since nineteen thirty four, six million and acres have been acquired using federal duck stamp revenues. More than three hundred National Wildlife refuges were created or expanded using federal duck stamp dollars. That's a good and efficient use of funds. If you like wildlife, habitat and clean water. By a duck stamp does a hell of a lot more for wildlife than wasting your money on Peter. And who knows, maybe one of these days you'll be able to get a duck stamp that was painted by my friend Ed. Spent a good bit of time chasing Tarpin and the ding Darling Refuge with Ed and some of the fishing guys here at meat Eater Sam Longren and Miles Nulty. We even managed to hook a few. This is a spot that gets a million visitors a year. By the way, while fishing is permitted on the refuge, hunting is not, which seems kind of ironic considering the legacy of the man the place is named after. Though hunting is not a recreational opportunity at the Ding Darling Refuge. That's not the case for every refuge. In fact, the Trump administration just proposed a plan that could been up additional wildlife refuge and fish hatchery acres to hunting and fishing. The proposal will be up for public comment shortly. Please look out for it and comment in the positive. Now, if you're thinking hunting and fishing and a refuge is crazy for whatever reason, I'll point out that hunting is currently allowed on three hundred and seventy seven wildlife refuges. With the passing of this proposal, that number would increase to three two. Fishing opportunity already exists on three twelve refuges. This proposal would make it three Eighteen. Fish hatchery ground has not been open to hunting and fishing before, and the public would get access to some part of fifteen of those federal hatcheries. This is exactly what hunting and fishing needs. There is typically a refuge within an hour of most metropolitan areas, and this proposal would increase access to the outdoors across one point four million acres of land that's already public. Again, for you, skeptics. Just like the refuges that currently allow hunting and fishing, or any public ground for that matter, the new refuges and hatcheries in this proposal would only allow hunting and fishing where it makes sense to do so. Don't go thinking you'll have a duck hunter hiding behind an interpretive sign on the birdwatchers boardwalk, or a fisherman dangling worms through the netting of the fish hatchery runs. We need areas that give complete refuge to our wildlife places where folks don't go venture. This proposal isn't getting rid of those sanctuary type places, so let's get it past again. I love this refuge and hatchery proposal. Once we get it through, maybe Secretary of the Interior Burnhart will get another proposal together in regards to all the other land we own but can't access. Over three million acres of public land in Wyoming, one point five four million acres in Montana, five and fifty four thousand acres in New Mexico, and the list goes on. We citizens pay for a little over nine and a half million acres of public land the general public can't touch. But I'll tell you the story of landlocked ground. Another time over to the paleontology desk. Perma frost is a layer of subsurface ground that remains frozen throughout the year. Some of this soil or even rock has been frozen continuously for many thousands of years, kind of like your freezer at home. If you were to put something in the perma frost and leave it, it would be preserved, but it would also slowly slowly decay as the environment changes and perma frost melts. In places like Siberia. All sorts of interesting things have started to emerge from this long term cold storage. Scores of mammoths have been unearthed. Forty two thousand year old full from an ancient horse was found with liquid blood in its veins and urine and it's bladder, and just recently, intact adult wolfhead complete with fur, flesh, brain, and teeth was uncovered. The wolf roamed in the time of the Pleistocene and was likely two to four years old. This is the first time a wolf head has been found with this level of preservation. The head will be analyzed and compared to modern wolves to study changes within the species. This discovery is amazing and as an old fossil and shed antler Hunter. I have to say I'm jealous of such an amazing fine. It also brings up a lot of questions, like where's the body? Back to the Florida Desk. South Florida, before the age of putting dams on every waterway possible, used to basically be one big, wide river. The headwaters started around Orlando, and the water flowed down to kiss Me River, into Lake Ochechobee, then through the famous river of grass called the Everglades, finally terminating into Florida Bay, all the way down by the Florida Keys. Beginning in the nineteen twenties and working through to the nineteen sixties, the Army Corps of Engineers straightened to kiss Me River and built series of dikes around Lake Ochechobee to minimize flooding and provide consistent irrigation for the giant sugarcane plantations nearby. Interesting historical note here the first dike, a five foot earthen barrier, not the current thirty foot concrete barrier, failed Back in the Lake Ochechobee hurricane hit so hard the dike blew with enough forest to wash away an entire town floodwaters exceeded twenty feet in some areas. One firsthand account recalled climbing to the second story of a home to get out of the rising water, only to chop a hole through the roof with an axe to escape drowning. The Lake Ochechobee hurricane ultimately killed an estimated three thousand people. That's our third deadliest natural disaster, behind the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the Galveston, Texas Hurricane in US history, and the start of the Army Corps of Engineers taking Florida flood control to another level, literally back to the much more recent past. Lake Okeechobee has been held at a high water level for decades to provide water for the sugar cane fields in case of drought. Then in the early two thousands, a series of mega rainstorms dumped a bunch of water upstream, threatening to overrun the dikes, just like in ninety. So the Army Corps started releasing hundreds of billions of gallons of excess water through canals east and west of the lake into the St. Lucy and Kaloosa Hatchee rivers, dumping that much fresh water into salt water at This unnatural rate is probably is problematic to plants and wildlife that depends on a balanced level of salinity. But when you factor in fertilizers and other nutrients the fresh water is carrying from development and agricultural runoff, the issues get more severe severe like blue green algae or cyanobacteria. When the algae is flushed out of Lake Ochechobee along with the fresh water out in the salt water, it starts to decay. During decomposition, neurotoxins are released that can be poisonous for humans to even smell. In July and August of two thousand eighteen, Florida's southwest coast was the epicenter of a massive red tide bloom. Red tide is a toxic algae that depletes the water of oxygen, among other things. This particular algae bloom killed metric tons of marine life, including tarp and snook, redfish, sea trout, goliath groupers, sea turtles, dolphins, more than a hundred manatees. Even a twenty five ft long whale shark was found dead on Santa Bell during the red tide. Even the damned sandworms were dying. You might have heard about it on the news. Red tide is caused by naturally occurring micro organism called Carennia brevas. It happens all the time all over the world. In fact, in Alabama they call a red tide at jubilee for must go down and collect the freshly incapacitated fish on the shorelines. I've heard a kind of beach party atmosphere can break out under the right conditions, folks taking gasping fish from the shoreline directly to the cooler or the friar. Not so sure about that type of party, but it certainly sounds efficient, and enough lime and alcohol will at least leave you thinking that it was the booze, not the fish that hurt you. The folks in this part of Florida, however, we're not having a party or a jubilee, as nobody wants to come spend money in a tourist town that stinks like dead manatees and fish. On top of that, these kind folks that work and monitor and educate here at the j enn Ding Darling Refuge have found that over fifty of the pollutants found here at the refuge come from a creek called fish Eating Creek, which happens to be the only gap in the dike at Lake Okachobee. Lots of information here, some fingers being pointed, lots of questions being asked. The most important thing is that folks are recognizing that this area is special, and like most special things, you have to work to find solutions to keep it so. If you've ever enjoyed this gorgeous area or dreamed of hooking a snook or a tarpan, call your representatives in Congress, or donate to the groups and the trenches of this issue, like captains for clean Water. Moving on. Biologists and Canada recently found the first evidence of vertebrate eating plants in North America. Picture plants in Ontario's Algonquin Park have long been known to consume insects and spiders, but scientists recently discovered that they also trap juvenile salamanders. The plants bell shaped leaves, collect rainwater spiked with digestive enzymes. The young amphibians may be attracted to the bugs collected in these deadly pools, or they may dive into them and they found a good hiding place from larger predators. Once they fall in, they can't get out and soon realized they made a poor life choice, as they're slowly consumed by weak acid. On the subject of carnivorous adaptation, let's talk about dragonfish. They're creepy predators that look a lot like the interior mouth that snaps at the camera and the movie Aliens. They lure their prey in with a glowing protuberance that juts out from under their chins and wags enticon ly in the pure dark of the deep ocean. May look at that and get the sudden realization of where humans figured out how to fish themselves. Marine biologists recently noticed that their teeth are completely translucent, so when bait fish and crustaceans start going toward the light, they don't notice the giant fangs glinting just behind something else that might be glinting in the light of dragonfish lures. At the bottom of the deepest seas is a whole lot of micro plastic. Until recently, most folks assume that microplastics in the ocean were concentrated in upper water column like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an island of floating trash somewhere between the size of Texas and the size of Russia. But a new study shows that the highest concentration of plastic collects well below the surface, between two hundred and six hundreds down the tiny bits of plastic are routinely consumed by small crustaceans, which are then eaten by larger fish and so on up the food chain, which is why a different study this week found that the average American consumes between seventy four thousand and a hundred and twenty one thousand plastic particles every year, which translates to somewhere around a credit card a week. No one knows the long term health impacts of ingesting plastic, since plastic itself is a pretty new substance here on planet Earth. Health officials are concerned, however, that they could release toxins or cause cans or kind of makes you think differently about those bowls of fake fruit some people put out on their tables. Since we're on the subject of consuming things you probably shouldn't, I'd like to follow up on a story from a few weeks back. Remember the guy in Colorado who rescued a baby lion from a snow bank, took it home to thought out, then nearly killed it by feeding at a broad wurst. Well. After three months of rehab, that little guy was sent back to where he belongs, the great Wide Open. You might want to avoid cooking German sausage in the back country at southern Colorado for a while, just in case that cap developed a taste for it. Further south than San Diego, meteorologists detected a massive cloud on radar, despite the fact that skies were clear with no expected incoming weather. Turns out it wasn't a rain cloud at all, but an eighty mile wide swarm of ladybugs. The National Weather Service tweeted the large echo showing up on so Cal radar this evening is not precipitation, but actually a cloud of ladybugs. Ladybugs are important for farmers because they eat aphids, thrips, scales, and other soft bodied insects that attack crops. Unfortunately, this swarm was headed south to feast on pess eating Mexican crops. Maybe we'll make a wall tall enough to keep them back here at home. To stay on the topic of desirable species, leaving California, three South Korean men were charged with stealing more than six hundred thousand worth of wild plants from public lands and North cal dad Leia is a genus of succulent perennial that have become extremely popular as house plants. The suspects, who are thought to be part of an international black market plants smuggling ring, were caught with more than thirty seven hundred specimens, each of which can be worth more than fifty dollars. The squat plants with spiky blue green leaves have become a status symbol in Korea, China and Japan, but they play a much more important role in their native habitat. Dad Leia varieties claim to the wind swept cliffs of northern California, where they help prevent soil erosion. Two of the three suspects have subsequently fled the country, leaving their acquaintance to face a potential ten year stint in the prison system by himself. Maybe they'll have a garden. All right, That's all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening to Cal's wee can review as per usual. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, please send them to me at ask Cal. That's a s k c A l. At the Meat Eater dot com, go to wherever podcasts or downloaded, streamed, viewed. Hit subscribe and leave me a review by hitting that furthest right hand start. We'll talk to you next week. Do we not dat

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