00:00:09 Speaker 1: From Mediators World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can review with Ryan kel Kell in now Here's Kel News from the idiocy in our National Parks desk has been an absolute fire hose in as people cooped up from quarantine stream into the outdoors and make mayhem. According to Yellowstone Park officials, there have been three times the usual number of violations involving the park's hot springs this year, with no sign that the bad behavior is slowing, but justice is not far behind. This week, three men were fined, sentenced to probation, and banned from Yellowstone for two years for bringing raw chickens to the parks Shoshone geyser basin and submerging the chicken and boiling hot spring using a burlap sack to prepare dinner al fresco alfresco when referring to food means relaxed open air dining. But if you're in Italy, which is where the phrase comes from, alfresco can reference time spent in jail. That, my friends, is the type of language nuance that can make conversation riveting anyway, Dunking food and boiling liquid is a time honored cooking technique around the world, including in Japan, where it's known as shabu shabu. Paper thin cuts a beef for chicken or dropped into scalding broth, then eaten quickly along with noodles, tofu and vegetables. Delicious, but cooking in bur lap. Who smells burlap and thinks to themselves, that's just the magic ingredient I've been looking for. I want that smell on my food. And the bone headedness of introducing raw poultry into yellow stones geysers just gets worse from there. Yellow Stones water, superheated by the area's volcanic activity, is home to very specialized microbes named thermophiles, which are adapted to thrive in extreme high temperatures. These thermo files create the bright yellow, pink, and red crusts that are so distinctive to yellow stones springs, and mud pots. Some of these micro organisms, called cyanobacteria, were among the first life forms on Earth to develop photosynthesis, using sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow. The oxygen that they produced as a byproduct helped create the Earth's atmosphere, so we and every other air breathing creature on Earth literally owe ourselves to these little guys. It's not hard to see how bacteria from chickens could cause havoc with these native micro organisms. The three men who are convicted of the culinary caper also had to walk over these crusts of bacteria to get to the spot where they dunk the chicken, which is a violation of park rules and also extremely dangerous. Visitors to the park are scalded every year breaking through these crusts, and some have died from their burns. In court, the men used the tried and true defense of saying they didn't know what they were doing was against the law. They apparently thought the rule against introducing objects into the hot springs only applied to stuff you couldn't get out, like rocks or trash. Apparently they didn't know that this particular spring was closed to human traffic despite the signs and guidelines posted on the internet. Maybe that's true. Maybe they were acting in a good faith with absolutely no common sense. But still cooking and bur lap. Chicken skin is delicious. You want it rubbed up against bur lap. When asked by The New York Times how the chicken turned out, one of the men, Eric Romrell, responded, it was fantastic. Even if I might understand their other violations, and I'm not saying I can, this violation of the culinary arts is where I have to draw the line. Unfortunately, people putting foreign objects into the thermal features of Yellowstone Park has a long and not so glorious history. In fact, an eruption of ear spring in the southwest corner of the park in two thousand eighteen shot out trash and coins dating to the nineteen thirties. We people of might be stupid, but I guess it's reassuring to know that stupidity and hot springs, while not a right, is a legacy. This week we've got Hunter history, bad actors, and tech talk. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week, as you know, is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment, Steel the world's number one chainsaw. Remember, if you don't think a chainsaw is up your alley, even a clean, quiet, a powerful, battery powered steel, then you can always support the brand as well as this podcast, by picking up an incredibly versatile pair of pruning shears or lopping shears equally as good for breaking down small the big game as they are backyard branches and brambles. Anyway, I'm fresh back from vacation. I'm back, baby, and only short one toenail and a little skin off my cheek bone from frost bite, as well as some extra body fat. I've been packing around just for the occasion. You know. We flew into the frank Church Wilderness area met a couple of friends, one of whom was Brad Brooks of our Golly. If you're looking for game bags, give our Goaly a look. Wilderness hunts are special. To be clear, the frank is an odd wilderness as it is actually fairly roaded as well as air stripped to where the likelihood of bumping into people is quite high. But at the same time it is big, big country. It is tough off That line about throwing yourself against the wilderness always comes to mind when I'm in the frank. We had a great trip. We got good bucks, we hiked our butts off, we beat ourselves up, we pushed our limits. But if I'm being honest, those bucks could have been found a hell of a lot closer to town, closer to a hot shower and a truck. So why go through the literal ups and downs? Of frozen scree and avalanche shoots. Because it's hard. Life isn't always about easy. If the wilderness were easy, I wouldn't go back. Think about that kid's fishing pond, you know, darned good and well you'll catch a trout or catfish or whatever they stock. So eventually you don't fish there. You look for the places that offer a chance maybe of catching a fish. As I've said, there are a lot of people in the Frank Church Wilderness. As we've discussed many times on this podcast, the topic of changing the Wilderness Act to include other forms of travel, which would include wheeled vehicles, possibly even electric motorcycles people like to call e bikes. I think about this a lot because it would just change the nature of how I grew up. It would change the meaning of wilderness. And I always wonder who these people are and how easy they want life, and why why isn't it that they're happy with what they have? And how far will they take this argument? Well, while I was gone, the Hungry Horse News out of Hungry Horse, Montana, one of Montana's only Pulitzer Prize winning papers, published an article about a guy who drove his vehicle through the front doors, smashing them and down the aisle of the Super one Foods in Columbia Falls, Montana. He then turned around somehow at the meat counter and drove down another aisle to exit the store. This just happens to be one of the arguments I think of when defending the Wilderness Act. Why the hell can I drive my vehicle into the supermarket? Why is it only reserved for people who walk in those little electric carts. The driver was later found running naked through the halls of a nearby retirement home. And I know what you're thinking, Why the hell run? Why shouldn't he be able to drive? We're going straight the quad and into the gymnasium every day, moving on and sticking with the crime desk. We have to pause and take a little bit of pleasure. In a new development, in the case of David Lesh, the thirty five year old Colorado man who has become known as quote the worst tourist in the world. You may have heard of Lesh, the person caught and fine for jumping a snowmobile over a ramp in Colorado's closed Keystone ski area, and for riding a motorcycle and protected ass lands, and for trespassing in the state's highly sensitive and protected hanging lake. In front of a judge who was sentencing him for these violations, Lesh pledged that he would from then on follow all the rules that all the rest of us have to observe on our public lands, or should anyway. But then just nineteen days after the hearing, a photo surfaced showing Lesh relieving himself pooping in Maroon Bells Lake, which is part of the Aspen Area Watershed, a true beautiful gem and off limits. No one will be surprised when I say that Lesh posted photos of all these escapades to Instagram. What that says of him, I'll let you decide. I wouldn't touch you whither. But according to the Colorado Sun newspaper, his attorney requested to withdraw from representing him. If that tells you any thing, we can all be glad them that US Magistrate Gordon Gallagher through the book at Lesh, banning him from setting foot onto any of the one million acres of US Forest Service land for the foreseeable future and possibly forever. Several other cases are also proceeding against Lesh, so the legal system is likely not done with him, not that he has proven to have any respect for public land or the rules that go with them. A quick scroll of Mr Lesha's Instagram account will show that his defense is one of photoshop hype in regards to the swimming and crapping and closed watersheds. His attorney could have quit not for lack of moral character of Lesha's part, but for lack of Lesha's care to help himself. Doesn't want to go down with the ship if this is the situation, Yeah, David, you are an idiot, But even idiots can play on our public lands, so banishment from them would be a bit harsh. I do find it an interesting bit of context, though, that this guy made a living as a pro skier and now apparently fronts for outdoor clothing companies. Most ski areas in the West are not on private lands but on public land U S, forest service land. Typically, outdoor clothing needs to be used or at least marketed out of doors, which, again, if you are in that outdoor clothing buying demographic, you are typically a public land recreator. So what do you stand to gain by risking the respect of these places? It may seem like an overcooked yellow Stone hotpot chicken is worth a little broken thermo file bacterial crust, But what are the ramifications of the message it sends? Joke or not? Moving on to the anthropology desk. A few weeks ago, you may remember me talking about ancient cave pay innings, specifically about fingerprint analysis showing that both men and women participated in creating those spectacular pieces of art. Recently, a team of scientists published a study in the journal Science Advances that shows us more about collaboration between the sexes in prehistoric cultures, and this time on a topic very close to our hearts, big game hunting. In two thousand thirteen, a member of the Mullah Fasari community in the Peruvian Andes discovered a nine thousand year old burial site in excellent condition. One of the graves contained what archaeologists call a complete kit of hunting implements spear points, skinning, scraping and chopping tools. Scientists concluded that whoever was buried with such a complete arsenal, a person who the scientists gave the catchy name w MP six, must have been a capable and experienced hunter. Determining the sex of ancient skeletons has historically been difficult and imprecise, relying on bone measurements and context to categorize which bones belong to a male in which to a female, but recent advancements in tooth enamel analysis allow for much more precise categorization. Certain dental proteins revealed the x X or x Y chromosomes of the tooths owner, even if that owner has been dead for almost ten millennia. Women have x X chromosomes, men have X Y, and so this method is almost one accurate. This analysis revealed that the hunter in the Andean grave was a woman of about eighteen years old, giving further support to the idea that roles in the ancient world weren't as segregated as we may have previously thought. The studies authors went on to analyze twenty seven skeletons found across the Americas that were found with hunting implements and discovered that eleven of those skeletons were likely female and sixteen were likely male, suggesting that way back then there might have been much closer quality of the sexes when it came to bringing home the dinner. Although the data from this analysis isn't perfect and can't let us conclude with certainty that of ancient hunters were women. It does lead us to question our assumptions about who did the hunting before agriculture came along and changed everything. Many ancient skeletons have been categorized by archaeologists as male simply because they had hunting equipment buried with them. That's presumptuous of you. Yeah, totally. The female hunters, for instance, may have just been more frugal or less greedy in death. They chose to pass down their hunting equipment just like Grandpa and Dad did for me, instead of sticking it in the dirt. Heck, you could even guess, as there is no evidence to say otherwise, that the men buried with their hunting equipment couldn't fact to be like a good riddance to bad gear situation as opposed to that old anthropological catch all of ritual and religion could have been a good old fashioned timely What do we do with this dull knife and bent at laddle that always hooks our spears to the left? Yeah, just throw it in the hole? Go ahead, anthropologists prove me wrong. Getting to the base of this is going to be hard. Unfortunately, well preserved skeletons from the place to scene epic are extremely rare, and with such small sample size, it's hard to make well informed generalizations about much of anything when it comes to hypothesizing how an entire ancient culture may have functioned. But now that we can rely on better methods for finding out which hunters were female in which were male, I'm hoping for more digs, more ancient hunting kits, and the possibility that will uncover a much more narrow gender gap in our common ancestry. After all, if your ma is handy with a shotgun or bow or cast net, it's a little too convenient to chock it up to luck, isn't it. Moving on to the predator panopticon desk, take it for me. Trapping and coloring grizzly bears to track their migration and behavior is no easy or simple feat. You have to know the bears, know the country, acquire bait most often road kill, plan months in advance, and if you do catch one, then you get the magnificent reverent treat of covering yourself an old bait and feces as you work the bear up. You can see this firsthand almost on a future episode of Cow's We can review the YouTube series coming up this winner now. Although there are no long term negative health effects that have been observed for collared bears, in the short term it is a stressful sitch suation, despite biologist taking every effort to make it not stressful. Think about it. How would you like it if you walked into a restaurant and some biologists sticks you with the needle, which renders you in a coma like state of not quite knocked out. The biologist puts a necklace around your neck, tattoos the inside of your lip, puts an ear tag through your ear, a pit tag underneath your skin, draw some blood, cut some hair, takes a bunch of measurements. You know, I'm sure in what would feel like a very invasive and inappropriate way. Sure you got a meal out of the deal, but your day went a little fuzzy after that, and you end up with fashion choices you didn't make and can't be unpleasant to remove. For those of you thinking that's not my worst Tuesday, you are full of it. Even for the hardest of partiers, that's a rough night. I've been in some states where my awareness was not so aware, maybe even supported a bumper bruise upon finding clarity, but tattooed, pierced, and collared. That'll make your heart race no matter what species you are. And I'm missing tooth, so maybe there's a better way. This week to software developers and too, wildlife biologists published a study in the journal Ecology and Evolution showing the successful early use of bear i D. This isn't a dating app. Pay attention, it's a facial recognition technology that can identify individual bears. Over the past three years, the biologist Melanie Clapham captured over three thousand images of bears from camera traps she placed along night Inlet on the coast of British Columbia. Them she and her team showed those photos to artificial intelligence software so that the program could learn how to interpret the facial features of each bear, how far apart the eyes are, how long the muzzle is, and so on. The more photos the AI sees, the better it gets at distinguishing between each bear. The technology is similar to the facial recognition technology for human faces that airports or iPhones use, but the developers actually started with open source code from a program called dog Hipsterizer, which analyzes pictures of dogs in places buddy holly glasses and mustaches on the dog's faces, because well, why work on COVID nineteen vaccines when you can hipsterize dogs for a fraction of the startup cost. So you know they did. That is exactly what the Internet is for people. Although the technology isn't perfect yet, it's wrong about fifteen percent of the time. It will get better and better the more photos it sees, and could eventually track the movements and behavior of entire populations of bears, giving agencies and conservationists up to the minute information to guide land management to decisions. The nan Wacola's Council, a conservation group of the first Nations people in BC, is already starting to use bear i D. Dallas Smith, president of the Council, told CBC News the software is really helping us gain a foothold in taking over the management of grizzly bear interactions in our territories. Do yourself a favor. Navigate over to bear research dot org. That's b e A R Research All one word dot org to check out the results of the bear i D project as well as their progress. It's awesome. Although I'm on record opposing the naming of charismatic megafauna. People start making bad decisions about animals once they know them as Bond, Bond or c Solar whatever. Seeing how this team is combining tech and biology to tell Bella apart from Blonde Teddy and somehow resisting the urge to hipsterize them is stunning. This is low coal cost, low personnel, safe way to track, identify, and trace large, dangerous, amazing critters. I will officially check out of this one if they start popping up with buddy holly glasses and mustaches. However, what are you listening to? Missions? You know you got this once an' no change your life? I swear. The year has been a doozy in many many ways, but the out of control wildfires in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado and elsewhere have made life miserable for millions of US and for the wildlife of those states. And while people are to blame for starting several of these fires, including, as we've discussed before, exploding targets for baby gender reveal parties, lightning strikes play a huge role in starting outdoor conflagrations. If only the X Men character Storm really existed. You remember Storm, the super hero whose eyes turned milky white as she like levitated into the air, gathered electrical energy, not to mention other energy from the teens and the audience, and hurling it at the enemy's The character was played by halle Berry. If that existed in real life, she could swoop above the rockies as the clouds rolled in, catch the lightning and guide it to uh. I don't know David Lesh's cell phone. Something a little more productive than destructive. As fantastical as that seems, scientists working in Australia have developed the next best thing, a laser that can direct lightning strikes to specific targets. Americans aren't the only ones suffering from wildfires these days. Remember back to late two thousand nineteen and early Australia went through such bad wildfires that became known as the Black Summer, with over twenty million acres of the country burned and as many as three billion animals killed or displaced. Several of these Australian brush fires were started by lightning strikes. So if anyone has the motivation to make a lightning a little less destructive, the assees certainly do. These scientists were able to create the conditions of a lightning storm in their lab by placing two flat electrodes parallel to each other. In normal conditions, air particles between the electrodes will discharge electricity along random paths, typically toward the edges of the electrodes. But by heating channels in the air with an ultra precise laser, the scientists were able to create a kind of path of least resistance for the electricity, and thereby we're able to direct the discharges to tiny holes at the center of the electrode plates. Imagine if the electricity were a zamboni instead of an entire skating rink to wander around own down, the laser would create a hyper specific lose path for the zamboni to travel down. Okay, I admit this metaphor leaves something to be a desired, but I would also pay to see a zamboni sliding down a loose track. Is it an Olympic here yet? Love that stuff? But I digress. Although scientists have known about the ability of lasers to direct electrical discharge for years, this new technology uses much much less energy than in the past. Instead of needing laser equipment on the scale of a city block. This mechanism could redirect lightning with a tool no bigger than a regular old laser pointer that you might use for your power point presentation. Needless to say, you should definitely not shine this pointer in anyone's eyes, and it is likely to be overkill for creating a moving dot for your cat to chase around the main barrier. Now to successfully deploying this technology in actual storms is finding targets can safely absorb all that electricity. But this Australian team believes they could be only five to ten years away from guiding lightning to harmless fireproof patches instead of tinder dry forests, thereby stopping wildfires before they start. Now that we're on the way to crack in that code, maybe we can work on finding a different way for your negligent friends to tell everybody if they're having a boy or a girl. Then shooting exploding barrels filled the pink dye and lighting for ESTs on fire. How do we redirect those people? Why don't you make like a tree and get out of here? In all seriousness, as we combat increasingly large fires, it is easy to get in the mindset of us versus it when in fact, frequent naturally occurring fires are incredible for our land and our wildlife. Therefore, for us, they are healthy. Last year's burns a heck of a place for elk, mushrooms, mule deer, and there for me. Anyway, it is my hope that good solid land management will get us back in shape, hopefully before we're using fancy laser pointers to redirect lightning, and that management will include man and fire as it has for thousands of years. That's all I've got for you this week. Thanks so much for listening. It's good to be back as pre usual. Let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods by writing in to s k C. L that's a s k C. A. L ask Cal at the Meat Eater dot com. We'll talk to you next week.

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