00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Media Doors World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's we Can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Kel. Recently, a pair of trains outside of Glacier National Park hit and killed three grizzly bears. The sound cubs all Ursus arctas horribilius, one of the best Latin names out there, were walking the tracks grazing on the green grass just east of Mariah's Pass when a train struck and killed the two two pound female. Later that day, at the same location, the two male yearlings were struck and killed by another train. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials inspected the site and determined that there were no unnatural attractants like spilled grain, grease, or anything else, just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had to hear about this incident, but trains killing bears on the tracks isn't a new occurrence. This week more bears, the amazing correlation between fish stocking and swan poop smugglers, and more. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. I wrapped up a trip to Florida with a hot lap to Bend, Oregon, where I got to hang out with some great folks with back country hunters and anglers. Then proceeded onto Montana for a couple of days fishing on the Big Hole River. Got to clear up one thing from my Florida trip. We did a lot of late night eating at this place called the Lazy Flamingo. For those of you who aren't hip on the subject of flamingos, a group of flamingos is called the Flamboyance. You can pick out the Lazy Flamingo and a Flamboyance relatively easily. It's the one standing on two feet. Anyway, we ate at this establishment mostly for the fact that it's a great place, but also for the fact that it's one of the only places on Santa bell Island that serves food later than eight pm. Like all other places on Santa Bell, you can't get a plastic straw at the Lazy Flamingo. You may recall that video of folks pulling a plastic straw from a sea turtles nose. Well, after that video went around, folks started giving up on plastic drinking straws. To be clear, I think this is great. Roughly five hundred million plastic drinking straws are used in the US every day. Straws are the eleventh most found piece of trash in our oceans. We need to seriously cut back on our ridiculous and kind of weirdly childish if you think about it, use of straws that we suck out of for a couple of minutes and then throw away. But what I don't understand is every damned meal at the Lazy Flamingo is served with plastic utensils. Do we really need a video of someone slowly pulling a plastic fork out of the orifice of a threatened species to instigate cutting back on this single use utensil nonsense as well? Think of last week's podcast. Whether you like the plastic or hate it, you're eating it roughly one credit cards worth of plastic a year, folks. Anyway, enough of that, back to bears and trains. In my younger days, I did some guiding out of West Glacier, Montana. That town is located on the same railroad tracks the grizz Method Demise on, just a bit to the west of Mariah's Pass. One day, I was chatting with an old cadre that had gotten his first train engineering job with what was then the Burlington Northern Railroad. His first day driving the train, he killed the grizzly. It had been raining heavily when the young engineer, operating under the supervision of a senior railway man, started through one of the train tunnels just outside of West Glacier. As they started to come out of the tunnel, a grizzly stood up in the middle of the tracks, and the engineer watched helplessly as they hit and killed the grizz. I remember being a little shocked when he told me how happy he was when he realized it was a bear, even though grizz populations in and around the park were healthy animals, and national park settings tend to be discussed with the higher level of a steam than those across the street in a plain old national forest. For whatever reason, when I asked this old engineer why it was so happy that it was quote only a grizz he told me that when the bears suddenly stood in front of the train, it looked like an old hobo in an overcoat soaked with rain. He sincerely thought, on his first day of being a train engineer, he had just killed a man taking refuge in the train tunnel. He was so convinced and shaken he had to wait for the more experienced railroader to tell him what had just happened before he could calm down. Heck of a first day on the job. Some years later, another bear story on the same tracks made headlines. A train hauling corn derailed, spilling four hundred and sixty nine thousand bushels for twelve thousand metric tons of corn. If you're more comfortable with that approximation. The corn wasn't salvageable, so it was just pushed off the tracks and covered. As spring thaw came around, conditions became right for fermentation of the corn, which made for quite the critter attractive. One observer claimed to have witnessed twenty grizzly bears feeding at the spill site at one time. Bears were really taking advantage of this fermented sour mash situation to the point of being very comfortable around passing trains. Some witnesses believe the bears to be visibly intoxicated as well. In fact, one firsthand account talks about a grizz noticeably drunk sunning his belly in the middle of the tracks. Refusing to move reminds me a bit of that Grateful Dead song Casey Jones, only instead of the conductor high on cocaine, you've got grizzlies high on fermented corn. Whether the bears were drunk or just too comfortable with trains, we don't know, but this congregation resulted in the depths of at least nine grizz by train between Because of incidents like this, a joint effort between park officials, Montana Fishing Game, and the railroad resulted in the Great Northern Stewardship Area. Burlington Northern Santa Fe have taken measures to reduce food growing on tracks and food like spilled grain from trains being deposited on tracks. They even have a truck fitted with a vacuum to pick up spilled grain and a crew to pick up carcasses of animals hit by trains that could attract more bears. Looking at the numbers, the efforts are paying off. Between two thousand ten and two thousand fifteen, only four grids were killed. When you think of the role the railroad has played in America, particularly to the West, this story kind of gives a person a bit of full circle hope. Railroad cruise were known to do a lot of pot hunting during construction. Bill Cody being one famous contract hunter who supplied the railroad cruise of the Kansas Pacific Line with bison. Bill Cody stacked up four thousand, two hundred and eighty two bison in just eighteen months, earning him the now famous nickname Buffalo Bill. Once the track was laid, the train brought civilization with it, which actually made things worse for wildlife, as market hunting supplied boomtown restaurants and tables, which often meant the decimation of wildlife. There are a few stories of wholesale wildlife destruction by a train in modern times. In recent memory, the Big Winner of two thousand eleven, combined with drifting snow and poor antelope decision making created a situation where a train met heard of antelope on a snow blown section of track, ultimately killing two seventy of the snowbound animals. Moving on, you remember the movie eight Mile, the story of Marshall Mathers, young Eminem cuts his teeth and underground rap battles in and around Detroit, well over in New York City places like Brooklyn and Queens Apparently the same thing is happening only with birds. Don't worry, I'm not gonna bore you with something as mundane as an old fashioned cock fight. I'm talking about underground birds singing competitions. Apparently folks will gather in secret to place bets on the number of songs birds can sing within a given time frame. Yes, we are talking what the Dutch call vincoin sport, or that we meaning them who do it, call speed singing or finch racing. I realized that this may not sound newsworthy, after all, betting on birds singing sounds a little tame or played even. But as always, when wild animals and money get involved, bad things happen. Just recently, for examp Apple, a man was apprehended at New York's JFK Airport with thirty four live Guyanese finches stuffed inside plastic hair rollers, each bird supposedly valued at three thousand dollars. This is ringing some bells. That's because JFK customs officials may refer to this as the old hair roller trick. Back in December of two thousand eighteen, a man was caught with seventy live finches and hair rollers. Apparently the money is just too good to stop trying, but not good enough to come up with a new smuggling trick. A top notch finch with a good pedigree can go for ten thousand dollars. Sticking with birds and tall tales, we ran a story here at the meat eater dot com on the theory that ducks transport fish from pond to pond. The ducks, as they swim, collect fish eggs on their legs. The eggs stick to the duck, and upon landing on a new body of water, the fish eggs are shaken loose to proliferate. This was an old timer theory on the seemingly sudden appearance of strange fish and farm ponds, or new species being introduced to certain bodies of water. There are some problems with this theory, most of which are covered at the meat eater dot Com, and most of which involved the fish egg being on a duck. But what happens if that fish egg is in the duck we still don't know. But we do know about a fish egg in a swan. That's right, dispersal via swan poop researchers who are apparently vexed by this same how did fish get to this pond question? Put together a study. They put six hundred and fifty fish eggs mixed into corn feed and fed a group of coscar Rabba swans. The swans produced fifty five fecal samples in which five eggs were found to have made it through four geese. Of these five eggs, one ultimately hatched forty nine days later. Now, this was a carefully executed study with fish eggs known for their resilience, but it worked. Swans at least are capable of delivering a live fish from one place to another. I ain't shipping you swimming over to the law enforcement desk, Florida. Man, just kidding. It's a woman and she was only visiting Florida. Chose to ignore the signs, yellow tape and sticks that closed an area of Miami Beach to people from April to November. Loggerhead, leather back and green sea turtles nest on Miami Beach. All of America's sea turtles are protected by the Endangered Species Act. This gal decided, for some reason to quote stomp around the sea turtles nests and even prod one with a stick. What do you get for something like that, she now faces a felony charge of molesting marine turtles or eggs. I'm not sure if that puts around some sort of a national registry for turtle perversion or not. Bad joke. Here are a few facts to let you know why this is a serious deal, and estimated one in one thousand hatchlings will survive to reproduce. Leatherback turtles are significantly larger than other turtle species and are pelagic or open water turtles. Their size help some maintain temperature. Hatchlings do not have sex chromosomes. Their gender is determined by the temperature of the nest, known as the pivotal temperature, which varies amongst the different species. Warmer temperatures produce females. Colder temperatures produce males. But you didn't know that, I shure didn't. But if you want to get all anthropomorphic and slightly misogynistic, you could say something along the lines of, so that's why women always complain about being cold. Forget that one and remember this. Turtle hatchlings grow a small temporary tooth on their beak that helps them break out of the shell. That tooth is called a car uncle. Next up on the law enforcement beat and staying salty, a South Carolina man has been arrested for leaving his marks on sharks. Doesn't sound newsworthy quite yet does. As you know, researchers will use a variety of skin or cartilage tags when tracking sharks. The tags will typically release or dissolve over time, doing no harm to the shark. This guy was using a branding iron frozen beyond freezing or red hot via propane torch to leave a custom brand on sharks in his area. Some of these marked sharks were picked up by other anglers who reported their catch to South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. The angler with the brand was ultimately caught and charged with illegal tagging of game fish. The charge comes with a maximum punishment of thirty days in jail and a two fine. No word yet, if the anglers picking up the branded sharks will be charged with wrestling. That's a joke. That's custom for you folks with the intimate knowledge of livestock practices and who live in Western mandatory branding states, and who are quick to the punch, so to speak. So you three people can thank me later onto the last topic from the law Enforcement Desk. September of last year, just outside of Aspen, Colorado, a man attempted to burn down his neighbor's ranch after a hunter had legally oild a black bear for food on that property. The failed arsonist had apparently enjoyed watching the bear when it was on his own property prior to the incident, as well as the morning of the enraged neighbor and soon to be failed arsonist, apparently in retaliation to legal bear hunting, berated the hunter's children and dallased part of the ranch and gasoline. I bring this up now because of Pitkin County District judge just sentenced the man to two years probation, a fine, sixty hours of community service, as well as a mandatory anger management evaluation. If anyone has seen what a wildfire can do to a ranch, with it sometimes complete destruction of human life livestock property, this sentence seems a bit light. Typically from what I've seen, a light sentence implies that the perpetrator owned up to their actions, took full responsibility, and vowed to stay within the confines of the law from here until eternity. The judge weighs the conviction with which you made your statement, takes that into consideration, and he could get a break on your sentence ticket from me, a guy who may have gotten a parking ticket or two, or speeding ticket, who then disappeared into the woods for a few months, only to return to civilization with a bench warrant for my arrest. Ownership and honesty certainly helped me in front of those judges. Well, listen to the enraged neighbors attorney's statement speaking on behalf of his client, the man who just pled guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct and felony attempted arson quote. Was his conduct appropriate? Not entirely and he has conceded that. Again, from my personal experience, if I had made a statement to those Montana judges along the lines of Judge I've come around to considering the concession that perhaps my actions were somewhat wrong, my ass would still be in the clank anyway. Was his conduct appropriate? The answer is no, not morally, not legally. But this man's lack of ownership of his actions and the wimpy sentence carried out by judge isn't what really bothers me here. This part time Miami resident and attempted arsonist is messing with ownership of animals. Although a person cannot legally go from one piece of property to the next without permission, our wildlife can and does. Obviously. In the United States, wildlife is owned by the people and managed by the state. If that bear were to be on let's say a city or county owned piece of ground like a cemetery that morning, a state park, midday an individual's backyard, and onto national park or national forest ground that evening, ownership of the animal doesn't change. We, the citizens of the US, own the wildlife. That state sets up the rules and regulations to properly manage that wildlife. If you are a private landowner, you can restrict the access of others to that wildlife while it's on your property, but it's not yours now. If you're into owning the wildlife on your land, you're in luck. That model exists as well. You can jump across the pond and explore the year pan model of game management, where the game belongs to the estate. Access to that game typically comes with wealth and privilege. Here in the good old US, you can only take legal ownership of an animal through the strictures established by your state through legal hunting, fishing, trapping with the proper permits, tags, stamps, et cetera, purchased at a price set by the state, with that money paid for all the stuff going to said state in order to support wildlife. It's a nice little system works well, don't try to subvert it. To repeat some stats here from the U S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the American black bear is the most abundant bear species on the planet. In Colorado, they're an estimated seventeen to twenty thousand black bears, and in the period between two thousand nine and two thousand fourteen, and average of two hundred and seventy five bears were killed either by wildlife officials or by landowners who had been issued depredation tags for the specific purpose of killing a specific problem bear. Point being that having a lot of bears means that some bears are inevitably going to die, with far more getting killed by other bears than people enjoy them at a population level. Don't obsess over the individual. Appreciate their freedom to rome, appreciate their owner list status, but don't go trying to roast out other humans with gasoline or berrate their children over legal activity that ultimately supports the animals at a population wide level. Do I really have to explain this? Thanks for listening to Cal's wee Can review. That's all I've got for you this week. As per usual, spread the word man. If you like this stuff, subscribe, download, listen anywhere podcasts are streamed or downloadable. Leave me a review. If you have any questions or concerns, right in to ask Cal. That's a s k C A L. At the Meat eater dot com. Tell me what I'm doing right, Tell me what I'm doing wrong. Go to iTunes, hit that furthest right hand star and subscribe. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. M.

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