00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediator's World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we can review with Ruyan Kel Kelly and now Here's Kel. Would it surprise you to know that the animals are responsible for moving more dirt than any other animal on Earth can also fly. It's not a mole, vole, earthworm, armadillo, badger, or burrower of any sort. It's a songbird. Australia's learbird or liar bird spends its time moving dirt, debris and leaf litter on the forest floor in search of mostly invertebrates, but it has with a lot of birds. They will eat what is in front of them, which can also include lizards and small mammals. Known primarily for their singing, lyre birds have the ability to mimic a huge range of songs and noises. The lire bird is about the size of a raven, making it one of the largest songbirds on the planet. In fact, the males have a twenty eight inch tail fan almost like a pheasant peacock combo, which led many to mistake them for jungle foul instead of songbirds. During mating season, the males will sing and strut, fanning their tail feathers for up to six hours a day. The more complex the song, the better chance of calling in a female. The songs are a compilation of lire bird songs, other bird songs, and basically anything that happens in the woods. Researchers have counted up to seventy two different bird songs in one lire bird song session. That's like a teenage e D M DJ with a d d if our. Older listeners would like that last line broken down. That's an electronic dance music is jockey with a tension deficit disorder. I have no idea what you're talking about. I'd be lying if I didn't say. I went down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole filled with lyrebirds mimicking humans, animals, camera clicks, sirens, and possibly the best example of layer bird mimicry chainsaws at work, complete with engines revving and trees cracking and falling. No, I don't believe the chainsaws being mimicked were steel chainsaws, because you don't need to sing and to have a steel chainsaw to attract a mate. You just need the chainsaw. Anyway, The point is on top of the beautiful long tail fan fancy dancing and complex vocal arrangements. It is now estimated that a liar bird population studied in Australia you is accountable for moving a hundred and fifty five tons of soil and leaf litter, or eleven standard dump truck loads of material in twelve months. In order to obtain this estimate, a liar bird population was studied. The researchers fenced out lire birds from certain areas and found that soil compassion was thirty three percent higher in non lire bird areas. The leaf litter blocking the sun from the soil was three times as deep. Anyone with a rhodo tiller and a garden plot knows that a little turnover helps produce more food annually. In short, this is real good for the forest floor. The beaver has long been our go to ecosystem engineer example. By dropping trees creating dams, the beaver literally changes the landscape. The busy beaver character is often depicted with a hard hat and a hammer or shovel, just to represent lawn care hardware businesses. The lire bird is the dancing, earth moving ecosystem engineer alternative, Like if those bulldoz are operators you pass on highway projects were prone to six hours singing competitions with self choreograph dance routines. Can't wait to see the business that adopts that example. This week stories from the Woods, Wolves, bears, and birds. But first, I'm gonna tell you about my week. My week and this podcast are brought to you by Steel Power Equipment. Steel the number one chainsaw to imitate. Nine out of ten superb lire birds agree. First up, the sausage is done. Sausage making is great while you're doing it, but it's even better when you finally put everything away. Marguez sweet Italian a Thai sausage called Law which if you've not been making cold tie salads for dinner in the summer heat, well you need to get on that rice noodles, lots of fresh aromatics, and the game of your choice or in this case, Law sausage and a batch of Mexican Terisa with the real deal new Mexico red chilies. All of these sausages are course ground with about pork fat added to it. Listen up, I'm gonna give you three fresh tips to tuck away for your next sausage making adventure. The trick with game sausages is either to incorporate the fat and the meat fully, as in, you take your meat and your fat and you run it through the grinder on course, and then you mix it all together, and then you put it back in the grinder and you run it through the grinder with a fine plate which mixes it again, and then you mix it all again. Or you go the full emultification route, which is a little bit messy and you're like really blending the stuff together, like with a kitchen aid or something, all this in order to kind of make the meat and the fat almost indistinguishable. Or if you're sticking with horse grind like I do, you cook your sausages gently, aim for a hundred and forty degrees, don't pop the casing. You'll be poaching your game meat and all the tasty spices in a little pig fat filled tube made of pigg or lamb and testine. If you get hotter or you lose your fat, you still end up with dry meat. It'll be flavorful and good, but will be dry. And the third thing, use real casings. Don't go in for this collagen stuff. In my opinion, it just will not do. For those of you who right now are pooh poohing the use of domestic fat with wild game, I hear you. I've ground lots of elk fat into elk sausage and had some really good results, only the back fat, not the cavity fat. But you know the thing is, I don't eat sausage every day or every week. I give most of it away. And in the words of the iconic character Vincent Vega from pulp fiction, bacon taste good. Pork chops taste good. Now for the update people actually care about. The dog update. Snorts World Snort the just about four and a half month old yellow lap she learned a couple of things this last week. She got her first retrieve, which was absolutely incredible. We've been running out after work, driving an hour to hunt for forty five minutes and having pretty good luck locating Hungarian partridge. The Hungarian partridge or hunt is a non native game bird we love, so we think of it as native. Isn't that interesting. It is also called the gray partridge or English partridge. They hang out in small groups called cuvees, and they're about the size of a softball. Anyway, we bumped a group twice. Snort was fairly oblivious but having a great time hopping cactus and chasing grasshoppers. The third time, we got up to them, this time in much taller sage brush, so tall Snort couldn't even see anything. I got a shot. We were close enough that she heard the birds get up, bang, thump. She stood next to me. I gave her the go command, and much to my surprise, she walked into the floating feathers, got excited, passed through them, dug into the sage brush, and came directly back to me and put a houn in my hand. I was ecstatic. She thought that was pretty cool. Then I pulled the liver out of the hun and fed it to her, and she thought that was really really cool. The next lesson she learned, sometimes when the gun goes off, there is no dead bird and no dead birds liver to eat, because I missed that. Lab life is a tough one. Right now, it's all fun and games and making sure she enjoys this stuff for right and laying the groundwork of obedience that ties into hunting. Pretty darn fun. We've been on a few more walks with the shotgun, and uh, she's still chasing butterflies and grasshoppers. Moving onto the mail desk. Last week we covered the topic of wolf reintroduction in Colorado. In response to that podcast, I got an email that contained links to three peer reviewed studies on the topic of genetic swamping. I'm gonna dig into this subject more, so I'll make it brief now. Another very reasonable argument against reintroduction of gray wolves to Colorado is actual Mexican wolves. The Mexican wolf has been discussed here a number of times. Mexican wolf recovery is going reasonably well. The population has a steady and higher than expected growth rate. However, the numbers are not strong enough to maintain genetic diversity if they had to compete with the larger gray wolf. In this case, the larger gray wolf would be coming in from Colorado, so wrap your head around this. The pro to not reintroducing wolves to Colorado would be to grow more wolves on the southern edge of Colorado. So when gray wolves do make it to southern Colorado, the Mexican wolf will be genetically diversified and fortified enough numbers wise to maintain their identity. I'm only bringing this up now as I've found that this topic is a reasonable one, and for whatever reason, this genetic swamping argument is completely absent from all of the articles dealing with the Colorado wolf reintroduction subject. I just don't know why, but I'll find out Next up, Chris writes in with elk, earthquakes and fighter jets, this is just for you folks in the Elk Woods. I was on my second elk hunt ever, first time going solo, took five days, but I finally got into a giant heard way back in the book. The first stock I put on was foiled by a mule deer dough that came between me and the herd and then spooked. The second attempt was blown up by a group of four fighter jets flying a low altitude pattern, and my third and final attempt was swiftly ended when an earthquake rumbled the area, scaring the crap out of me and the whole herd of elk. Besides the general bad luck of the day, it was probably the most fun I've ever had in the woods. I interacted with dozens of alk all day and got a heck of a workout, climbing every mountain in the area to try to get a shot. I left with another helping of tag soup, but I'll be back for another try next year. Sounds like when they made Chris, they forgot to put in the quick never give up, never surrendering. Moving on to the national park's desk, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the afternoon of September eleven, two hikers, Max and Jack got more than they bargained for when traveling on a remote backcountry trail. In fact, it was the remote nature of the spot that lured them. They had been hiking the a t or Appalachian Trail, and each day they had seen a handful of people, not a ton, but more than they had wanted for a true back country experience. As with some National parks, camping is only allowed at designated sites, and some campsites are reservation only, even the ones that are only accessible by foot. Max and Jack were less than pleased. Unhappy with what they found as they descended into the camp site they had looked forward to the most. As Jack said, the toughest spots to get to are the best. Instead of a feeling of solitude provided by a lonesome creekside camp site, they spotted an empty tent, a cook stove, obvious signs of an area peopled. To add to their disappointment, the people who were doing the people and were not around, but their stuff was and it was not up to code as in the camp was you know, kind of a mess. Not how a responsible backcountry hiker would leave a site, especially in bear country, but they didn't see the other party anywhere. These sites are equipped with bear cables, which is a high line to hang your food stuff from. The missing hiker hadn't used it. The scene looked like the hiker had woken, made some coffee, hung his food bag conveniently, and went on day hike, leaving gear irresponsibly spread out in bear country to make matters worse. As the pair went to gather water from the stream, they found the reason you don't leave a messy camp staring at them from the other side, a black bear. The bear wasn't interested in leaving, and it looked as if he had been chewing on a nylon bear bag. The proof is in the pudding. Messy camp attracts bear, bear gets rewarded. Now the bear won't leave. Max ran up and down the trail in both directions for half a mile or so, Thinking that the responsible party should be here to deal with this, but no one could be found. Jack and Max decided that they should try to haze the bear further from the campsite and maybe what they thought was the food bag on the other side of the creek. The bear was reluctant to react, reluctant to leave, but he did grab the bag and give it a tug, and it appeared heavy, which is when Jack thought, what could someone pack on their back all the way in here that is heavy enough for the bear to not be able to move? Yet that heavy thing fits in a bear bag, but it does not contain the tempt sleeping set up, stove and the other food bag. That's when they noticed the shoes, and let me tell you, food stuffed into a bear bag typically doesn't have bright red shoes. Shocked, they rushed to find an area with cell phone signal so they could call for help. This took them an additional twelve miles. They eventually reached authorities and rangers arrived around midnight to find the body of Patrick Madurra, forty three, of Elgin, Illinois, in the act of being eaten by the bear. Rangers killed the two pound bore and closed a section of Hazel Creek Trail and Campsite eighty two, which falls on the North Carolina side of the park. It's unclear if the bear mauled Madurra while he was still alive or was just scavenging on his remains, and autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday at the North Carolina Chief Medical Examiner's Office, and Raleigh Park officials said they could take several weeks two months to get the results. Parks spokeswoman Jamie Sanders told Knox News that Madeira had a backcountry reservation for a multi night trip and was scheduled to stay alone at camps night eight two. On the night of September eight, officials found one tent and one sleeping bag at the site. Quote our wildlife biologists, who are experts in dealing with bear human conflict, believe that once a bear is scavenged on human remains, there's a high potential that they're going to continue that behavior. That was told the Ashville Citizen Times. It would be a good guest to say that this bear didn't kill Madura. Even though Great Smoking Mountains National Park has a population of some six hundred black bears. It has only known five bear attacks in its entire history, with just one ending in a fatality. After speaking with Max and Jack and looking at the Park Service report, it sounds as if Mr. Elgin could very have likely had a pre existing medical condition and had been experiencing some medical issues. That's just speculation. We'll find out more when the coroner's report comes out. Mr Elgin was late to a remote campsite that this pair of twenty four year old hikers picked out for its remoteness and even still took some serious effort to get to. He was late not by a couple hours, but likely by a couple of days. His campsite was left in an in use state, as in, it wasn't destroyed, It wasn't really a mass It was just you know, the way you'd leave a tent if you were going to take a leak in the woods, not go on a backcountry hike away from it, especially in bear country. Again, this black bear was likely just being a black bear scavenging around and found a lot of food pre winter. Jack and Max would like to leave you with this carry bear spray, and I'll give him one more bit of credit. Here they carried sharpie's and paper and before they took off to go find authorities, they were able to mark the trail on both sides of the camp site in an attempt to let any other hikers know that there is a bear and it could be protecting a meal, which makes them, in my book anyway, you know, smarter than the average bear. Good job fellas. You can find both these guys on Instagram at Jackson Polston a k Patches oh Hula, Han Polston and Maximilian Bouchane all of one word real creative Max. Moving on to the ornithology desk, the woodpecker desk could be exact, which you know has a lot of holes in it, where we're taking a hard look at the wild world of acorn woodpeckers. These birds don't mess around. They've got a game of throne style turf war strategy that is violent and sometimes fatal. While it's very rare for any bird to understand complex social relationships, acorn woodpeckers do just that, and they have an intimate knowledge of the relationships between a bunch of different individuals. SaHas Barb and Avian biologists at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and co author of this crazy new study published in the Journal of Current Biology. Barb and his colleagues focused on a specific population that lives year round in Carmel Valley, California, fitting them with tiny radio transmitters to track their movements and figure out the complex nature of the battles between peckers and a little over a year, researchers observed thirty six birds and the ensuing power struggles that would make the Roman Empire jealous. These birds don't look like marauding savages. Males have a clownish face with a red cap and a whitish forehead, while female support a black cap. They live in large groups and gather acorns by the hundreds to wedge them into holes they made in tree trunks or telephone polls. They expertly catch insects on the wing and give racous waca waca calls frequently. That must be where the you know, the character from the Muppets, got it? What out? What up? All of this sounds normal, right Here comes the fun part. These birds are very territorial, and when a vague and see opens up in a territory after a bird's death, there is often a fierce fight between rival groups of brothers and sisters. These crazy flying battles can involve more than forty birds and can last for days. Some are warriors and other spectators, but all acorn woodpeckers spend a ton of energy on these tussles for dominance. Barb told Popular Science, it seems like these power struggles are really important sources of social information. Our best guess is they get some juicy tidbits out of it. Imagine getting in a fist fight every time you need to know who's dating who. The trees where the birds store. All those acorns are the eventual prizes in these scraps, and they can be held for multiple generations. Barb says these aren't casual encounters. Acorn woodpeckers are vicious, often gouging or pecking out an opponents I and potentially killing any who stand in their way. I imagine watching an acorn do its thing would be like switching between episodes of Vikings and Hoarders, each scene as shocking as the next. Just remember, be nice to your neighbors and don't take an acorn from a woodpecker. Moving on to the seldom visited Hawaii desk. You know Hawaii bright colored flora, sandy beaches, palm trees, and some of the most hospitable folks around. I can hear the ocean waves now so peaceful. Oh and did I mention hordes of deadly wildcats massacring and endangered birds that should be on a T shirt. I came for the sand, I stayed for the bird massacre. Well that's what happened last month on the island of Kauai, according to the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. If you've ever listened to this show before, you know what I think about feral and non feral feelines, and they're unbelievable death toll on our bird populations. But now it's gone too far. They're whacking endangered native Hawaiian birds. In this case, it was a single cat that eight nine birds trail cameras cod that cat killing Hawaiian Petrols, a large dark gray, brown and white sea bird. Among all of the factors that have brought petrols to endangered status, they're threatened by habitat from development, small Asian mongooses and rats, all of which feed on the helpless chicks. Feral cats still maybe their biggest predator. According to a Hawaii d n l R Facebook post, over the course of three days in a remote area of the unowned A Polli Natural Area Reserve, one cat, photographed on multiple trail cameras, killed at least nine endangered Hawaiian petrol chicks. The team working in the area found the partially eaten baby birds outside their burrows. They were just over a month old. This is a devastating incident for all of us, said the project coordinator for the Kawai Endangered Sea Bird Recovery Project. Without active in management, cat kills used to be widespread and commonplace in our mountain seabird colonies, but we have seen a huge drop in these incidents in managed colonies in recent years thanks to the hard work and dedication of predator control teams and land managers. However, as this incident clearly shows, just one cat getting into a colony can result in the deaths of a large number of these vulnerable birds in a very short time. The Hawaii Invasive Species Council says that feral cats have established populations on all eight of the main Hawaiian islands and contribute to widespread ecological disruptions that threatened native Hawaiian wildlife. In short, feral cats are a huge threat to Hawaii's unique wildlife. In addition to direct predation, feral cats also spread a potentially lethal parasite, Toxoplasma gandhi that contaminates terrestrial, freshwater and marine environments and has been showed in negatively impact birds and mammals, including humans. Do you ever wonder why they say pregnant women shouldn't take out the litter box? There you have it. What can we do about this? Well, here's a list. Spaying newter pet cats, keep the damn things inside, don't feed the outside ones, speak ill of, don't respect folks that let pets go. If you know somebody who has an outdoor cat, make sure the dang thing wears a bell. Do all of this, and your local songbirds and you know, podcasters will thank you every calm around. I mean, that's all I've got for you this week, Thanks so much for listening. As per usual, you can find 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, let me know what's going on. In your neck of the woods. Thanks again, I'll talk to you next week.

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