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. Don't let moose lick your cars. That's right, Canadians, it's that time of year again when the road maintenance vehicles start dropping salt on icy stretches of highway along with rolling out the signs that say don't let moose lick your vehicles. Seems like common sense, but hey, is it common? Social media would say otherwise. A rebounding moose population around Jasper, Alberta has led to increasing incidents of moose using subar us like lollipops. To the Canada moose to grow to twelve hundred pounds and stand over seven ft tall at the shoulder, so when that sub is a rocking, don't get out of your vehicle. Tourists have reportedly been traveling to the area specifically to have their vehicles licked, which, if not against the law, darn sure sounds like it should be, or at least a transaction that takes part in a part of town that's not on the way to church. That social media gold better be worth it. Because Jasper National Park has increased the fine for intentional car licking to a maximum of twenty dollars US, which begs the question what does it cost for only part of the car? Maybe just a hub cap or a fender job. At any rate, it's not worth disturbing the wildlife and slowing down traffic causing potentially hazardous situations for your next selfie. After all, your big social media post is just somebody else's job. This week, we've got turkey talk, LWCF, deer donations, and frisky belugas. But first I'm gonna tell you about my week. And my week, as you know, is sponsored by Steel Power Equipment. Remember if you have a clean, quiet, battery powered, no stinking powerful steel saw under the seat of your truck, anytime you're heading out into the woods, you just feel better about yourself. I do anyway. In fact, I'm charging some batteries right now, just in case. This Friends and Neighbors is the Cow's weekend review Thanksgiving episode, Well, it will be a post Thanksgiving episode. I am currently gearing up and heading into the woods for the last days of the Montana General Big Game season. I would love to get one more mule deer in the freezer. And call good. But I have a few family members that would enjoy elk meat. So despite not exactly wanting another elk on my back, if I bump into one, the you know the work will begin. Tradition is something that is synonymous with our holidays. No matter you're creed or religion, we all have things that we do every year. My thing is being in the woods. Occasionally I've dropped in on some family to help with leftovers, but I've got a standing date in the deer elk woods, maybe a duck blind, which is, as it turns out, a really safe and selfish yet self less act. All of the sudden, Thank you COVID. I'm no hero. Despite the cold temps in the remote places I try to go. To assure a lack of people with moderate chances at game, my tradition is likely better than getting together around the dinner table and pretending I can hear all the different converse stations going on. Sure, I want to see everyone, but a big portion of my family works in healthcare, and they are assuring us that the Montana healthcare system is overloaded with COVID cases. So don't be adding to the problem here. Are you a lout and clear. I love you, fam, but I'll see you next year. Provided that is my freezer is full. Then hopefully this Thanksgiving has been a great one for everyone with a little more outside time built in. The Turkey Day traditions of watching football or TV in general never really gripped me, especially if he gets sucked into these reality survivor shows that force the storyline of man versus nature, where nature is something to be beaten and feared. If you, like me, get put off by things like that, yet you know that there is still plenty left to learn. Releasing December one, is our brand new incredibly Awesome Meat Eat add to Wilderness Skills and Survival book, just something I thought you should know. You'll learn hard earned advice from accomplished outdoors men and women, including river guides, lifelong hunters, mountaineers, emergency room doctors, and wild foods experts, things like how to effectively find and treat water, how to gear up for any outdoor venture, white cooking accidents mess way more people up than grizzlies, how to deal with porcupine quills in your dog, roast meat on the fire, and how to develop a mindset that keeps you calm, rational and focused during your most stressful moments. We could all use a little bit of that. After all, Thanksgiving is just the warm up to the big show of Christmas. And if you think your family goes crazy at Thanksgiving, we all know they're certifiably insane when it comes to Christmas. Can I re feel your eight knocked for you, get you something to eat, drive you out to the middle of nowhere, leave you for dead? Now what you really want to hear? The snort report that little yellow lab is closing in on seven months. She's doing great. She's been resting on the bird front and accompanying me on some big game hunts. She froze your little butt off on an overnight trip last weekend, but she conveniently fits into my sleeping bag, which is great for her and not that RESTful for me. I'm a total sissy for the record. But the big news is once we get this big game stuff out of the way, is we are gearing up to do a few days of pheasant hunting. Really get focused, run her little tail wagon rear end off. I will definitely keep you posted on this one. I'm meeting up with a few friends who have been quarantined and COVID tested. I'm knocking on wood because anything can happen, but I want this trip to happen. And if you're interested in following along with this one, I'll tell you right now. I'm admittedly not awesome at the social media game, but I will be doing my best to take you all along with me for a December rooster road trip, talking conservation and habitat with pheasants forever, and doing some serious cooking with a buddy many of you will recognize. Tune in to see who it is. Plus lots and lots of snort. She's pumped, She's gonna get after the roosters. Be sure to follow us at Old Cal four oh six. That's O L C A L four oh six on Instagram to follow this rooster road trip. Moving on. We've been stabbed right in the back, or maybe in the front, to be honest, it's confusing. Recently, East Secretarial Order three three eight eight from David Bernhardt's Secretary of the Interior, regarding the use of Land and Water Conservation Fund has some language that causes serious concern. If you have been a listener to this show, you know about the Great American Outdoors Act, within which, amongst a lot of other things, was full and permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund or LWCF, LWCF being a primary, no cost to the taxpayer tool to fund access projects, improvements, and land acquisition. LWCF funds have been used for ballpark shooting ranges, bike pass easements through private land to public land, boat ramps, and much more in all fifty states. Good things if you like your out of doors time. Inside the freshly printed Secretarial Order three eight, which outlines how l w CF funds are to be spent and what qualifies for l w CF, are many good points, in fact, I would say spot on, but there are a few that are very confusing and very concerning. The confusion comes from the fact that a cabinet that repeatedly says less red tape, less bureaucuracy, less government over each added Section four item seven, which reads, in order to receive or qualify for land and water funds, a written expression of support by both the affected governor and local county or county government equivalent is required for the acquisition of land, water or interest in land or water under the federal LWCF program, meaning that if you, the owner of a private piece of ground something we hold quite dear in this country, wishes to use l w CF for a project, you have applied, forked up the match in cash for the grant, crossed your tease. Whether or not you get those funds to complete your project on your land would now depend on your relationship with your county commissioner or possibly the governor of your state. Now, aside from the fact that the Trump administration took on the Great American Outdoors Act and passed it while accepting a lot of paths on the back, now it seems they're saying, you can have the l w CF, we just want to make it really hard to access it. So here's some obstacles to make it even more difficult and more daunting. This should irk you, This should get under your skin as an infringement of your private property rights. The plausible reason for this, I believe, is to protect the county tax fund. Development creates more revenue than agricultural land, and agricultural land creates more revenue than federal land. This is the argument that accounts purely for the property tax, not cash coming in from gas sales and restaurants and uh, you know, flat tires and stuff when folks are out hunting and fishing. The other implication here would be that someone in state government, from the county level up to the governor, could catch wind of your project and say no for any reason. Maybe you want, as a private landowner to provide an ease mont through your property to a river, but your neighbors along that river enjoy that lack of access, so they have petition, either the county or the governor, and they get to tell you what you get to do with your private land. This is very interesting to me because I live in the state of Montana, a state where we have an incumbent state Senator, Steve Daines, who has cited against historical ease months to public lands, and we just elected a governor, Greg gen Forte, who is on the record trying to get rid of a public river access site adjacent to his personal property because he didn't want people using the river next to his home. Now, another reason that you may hear as to the necessity of a county or state level sign off in regards to the use of LWCF for land acquisition is essentially a government overreach argument. Or the very same argument turned on its ear. You don't want the Feds coming in here to take more land away from the state. Well, unfortunately, that's just not how these things work. It's not some random federal agent in d C who puts their thumb on the map and says, this spot, we're going to take it. It starts with a member of your community going, Holy hell, I worked my whole life keeping the farm together, and now the kids want to break it up. I wish there was another way this same landowner would like to see their ranch that they sweated and bled over continue on as such, not as a subdivision. For instance, they search out the path to conservation easement. The typical end game would be to protect the land from development and get that land protected long term by getting it acquired at the state or federal level. In between the landowner and the state or the Feds, the property can be held by a number of nonprofit groups like the Wilderness Trust or the Trust Republic Lands. Many many other trusts exist out there. There are several big, old, beautiful places that are Wildlife Management areas or BLM ground that I hunt on here in the state of Montana that are full of hunting opportunities that would have been locked off to everyone if it were not for this type of transaction, funded in part by the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Sabonoso Wilderness in New Mexico, which was our only landlocked wilderness area in the United States, was only open to the public through such a transaction. The rim Rock Rose Ranch was acquired by the Wilderness Trust through funds that it gathered by many, many, many people making donations, and that land was the key stone piece to finally allowing public access to totally locked off public land. The Wilderness Trust, however, could only hold onto the property long enough to get it into federal hands, in this case the BLM. The owners of the rim Rock Rose Ranch preferred to see that ranch and the wilderness beyond it enjoyed by the public rather than sold off piece by piece amongst their kids. Seems like they are in that right. The issue counties run into when lands are sold to a federal entity, as it reduces the amount of taxable income earning land in these low population count typically less money for road maintenance, schools, etcetera. To the point where some did not see the beauty and generosity in opening up a multi generational ranch to the public for recreation as a win, but instead a monetary loss and maybe another step towards the shuttering of a badly outdated school in need of funds. The question is do the recreators spend enough in the county when they visit that land to offset that tax revenue loss. Now, to hammer this point in and even a little bit deeper, I personally know of two examples that are ongoing here in the Montana that would make this secretarial order extremely interesting. Both of which are large to large ish multigenerational family ranches, on both of which the last generation that actually wanted to ranch still do so. They still run the day to day operations and their will into their nine das. They have miraculously survived heart attacks, cancers, the normal agrarian maladies, not to mention rold trucks, tractors, exploding livestock, good credit, bad credit, long enough to keep the ranch expanding and healthy. And what keeps them going is knowing that none of their kids want the place unless they can sell it off. These folks aren't working on these properties into their nineties to see them be sold and broken up. The other thing these ranches have in common is they both have their mineral rights intact, and they both almost certainly have a hell of an economic boom to the county underneath lots of jobs underneath the cow pastures and prairie. However, if these ranchers have their way, these jobs will never be realized, as they do not want their land developed. They want to keep that land intact, and they want people to be able to come out and appreciate it. You could see speculate rather that if a county commissioner could choose to increase the economic wealth of the county by voting against one of these ranchers and their plans for their land, they could stall them out right there in their nineties. They can't live forever. Hopefully deal with the kids and get a mind going in town as opposed to just you know, a bunch of freeloading hunters going out there and enjoying the place. Now, secretarial orders are relatively easy to reverse or negate. Provided we have a new Secretary of the Interior next year, I would imagine section four, paragraph seven of s O three three eight eight would be part of that list that heads to the round file. So If that's the case, we're just crying in the mud until then. However, if section four paragraph seven were not reversed, or if let's say, we see similar bills pop up on the state level, because you know, David Bernhardt didn't come up with this stuff on his own, it represents someone's interests, then we need need to make sure that our congressional and state representatives know that our county commissioners and even our governors do not have the right to tell us what we can and cannot do with our private property. Moving on. In the past, we've done turkey stats here on the Weekend Review, but we're nothing if not flexible. Has also been a bonanza year for Tofu. After two or three percent growth a year for the past decade or so, Tofu sales for Nasoya, the country's number one brand, have gone up so far this year, and according to their VP of Sales, J. Tuscano, it could have been fIF if they could only have kept up with demand. Now, we can't say for sure how many Thanksgiving dinners were entirely replaced with to fur keys, but we're clearly living in a different reality. Not that we have anything in particular against tofu here at Cow's we can review, but I prefer my protein on two legs, not you know something that I got to collect in a big bundle and then boil forever and then skim off the proteins and compacted into something that resembles what was just walking around on two legs. That's just me. Anyway, Enough with toe Furkey's We're gonna jump over to the Don't Feed the Wildlife desk in response to a flock of emails I received about Penny the Turkey, a once wild bird living until recently in Bloomington, Minnesota. You know this story. A wild animals habitat overlaps with ours. People get a kick out of sea In this animal around, a name is bestowed, People feed the animal, and people take photos and share them on social media. For a while, everything seems to be going great. Here's a hint. It always turns bad for the animal. So it went with Penny the turkey. According to Minneapolis Star Tribune, where as of this writing, Penny story is the most read article on the website. Bloomingtonians became extremely attached to this bird. Hallmark Dry Cleaners in town even held a special named after him, where if you brought in one feather comforter, you could get a second one cleaned for a penny. That's clever marketing. Unfortunately, you also know where this story went from here. After getting used to people feeding him, Penny became more and more fearless, approaching and eventually harassing people for food. Freaked out civilians placed more and more calls to the local Department of Natural Resources asking them to resolve the situation, and the last straw came when Penny attacked a motorcyclist at an area gas station. Attacking a biker that must have been one kick and chicken. Unfortunately, once this behavior has learned, it can't be unlearned, and so relocating Penny would have just brought the problem to a new spot and so on. Minnesota d n R eventually came out and did what you have to do. At the end of the fed animal story, some local residents put up a memorial for Penny, and many others are letting the world know that they're upset with the d n R. However, as you know, in my opinion, they should have been upset with themselves, as feeding that turkey cooked that bird long before the d n R got ahold of them. Because my appeals to people not to feed wildlife have fallen on deaf ears. Maybe I should try another strategy. Hey, turkeys out there, you dear the bears, especially you black bears. I know the French fries people are offering you seem like a great idea, but don't fall for it. There's nothing but heartbreak in the end. I don't think that's gonna work either. I understand people getting attached to a particular animal, as you know, I am hopelessly an embarrassing attached to the good old snort dog. And I understand that the timing of the d n r's resolution of the penny problem so near to Thanksgiving is a bit of a downer. But it does strike me as strange that the people protesting pennies passing probably partook in a turkey on their Thanksgiving tables this year, and there are no roadside memorials for those butter balls. Well, at least for a moment here on this show. We will remember those other birds too now, because for whatever reason, holidays and anthropomorphism, the bestowing of human traits and feelings on animals go hand in hand. We're gonna do a little Thanksgiving time segment here, because it's tempting to think that animals of all kinds have been taking a bit of revenge on human beings, perhaps on behalf of penny, let's say, because it's Thanksgiving and the rest of their Turkey brethren. For example, Newsweek and other outlets have reported that in the past several months, orcas off the coast of Portugal have taken to approaching passing boats and repeatedly ramming into them, sometimes for as long as two hours at a stretch. There have been over forty of the incidents in the past six months, and the problem has gotten so bad that the Portuguese Coast Guard has restricted boat traffic off the Atlantic coast near port To. A sailor named David Smith filmed one of the incidents, and I tell you it is something, no, not something that the sailor from Portugal's name was David Smith. I'm sure that's not an alias anyway. Watching the whales turn upside down to show the white underside of their bellies and tails, then hearing and feeling the thuds against the hole and rudder of the boat must have been terrifying and fascinating to experience its firsthand, and after two hours it must have been bizarrely tedious as well. We should call them incidents instead of attacks. Because it's not clear that the behavior is aggressive. Some biologists suspect it may be a particularly rough form of play. We all remember that one kid on the playground who just wouldn't stop on the Merry go round until everyone wanted to throw up. And apparently with a couple of these ships, the orc has spun them around in a similar fashion. No one has much of an idea why the orcas are doing this, and to be honest, if I could ram ships until they spun in circles, maybe I would do so just for fun too. But because no one can tell me for certain that I'm wrong, I'm just floating the theory that these orca has heard about Penny's treatment and aren't taking it lying down. The revolution isn't televised, it may just be on sonar. Animal revenge even seems to be coming from beyond the grave, or at least, in the case of one hunter in Indiana, beyond the double long shot. After harvesting a white tail buck earlier this month, sixty year old Haggy of Dillsborough loaded said buck up on an a t V. Unfortunately, Haggy tried to take the a t V up to steep of an incline and rolled the vehicle over the deer's antler, punctured Haggi's right side in the process. Thankfully, the injuries weren't life threatening and Haggy was in stable condition when the Greensburg News and other outlets reported the story again, a hunter wounded by an animal right on the heels of Penny's story. Coincidence, I think. So here's a quick story for you, one near and dear to my heart. Get it, well, not exactly my heart either, You'll just have to listen up. Way back in the guiding days, packing a bowl off a mountain in New Mexico when a pack strap exploded, which allowed the weight of the meat and head to shift, which sent me down the mountain where I ultimately landed on the bull's rack in a very uncomfortable sort of yoga pose possibly best described as camel. I was assessing any injuries while keeping my back arched so the times of the bull didn't puncture my back until my fellow guide arrived on the scene and helped pick me up. Not much was said as it was like ninety degrees and we had a cloud of hornets following us. It wasn't until later that week that my guide buddy confessed, and when he came upon me lying beneath the trail, he had a full view of my genitals, my growing area. As it was so hot, I hadn't been wearing any bass layers and one of the bulls, Tinnes must have shot between my legs and gore it opened my pants. Also not a case of animal revenge unless that bull had a real twisted mind and was ultimately out to get my guide buddy by witness too indecent exposure. The image of his dangling participle still burned in my eyes anyway. Harm caused by wild game is also at issue in a recent controversy in central Maryland, where ann Arundel County has started an innovative venison donation program. As with many of these programs around the country, trace amounts of lead from hunters bullets in the No Nations have been caused for some concerns. Several states and counties X ray that donated meat to find and discard any contaminated parts. Lead bullets do fragment when they hit an animal, sometimes sending trace amounts of lead surprisingly far from the wound channel. Just cutting away the obvious bullet damage doesn't get rid of it all. I don't personally believe we full grown, formed adult hunters should have to be too concerned about out the trace amount of lead, especially because most folks out there are not eating venison three meals a day every day. However, as we've covered in the past and multiple times, the much bigger risk, as I see it, is two scavengers, especially raptors like the California condor. As you likely know, you have to use non lead bullets to take game of any kind in California because scavengers like the condor can come closer to eating three meals a day that consists of gut piles and cut away portions of hunters kills. So if you are a hunter in a a county, Maryland and you have recently taken a buck with some trusty cor lock, I think you should enjoy that game meet with a peaceful mind. However, a couple of things about this Maryland venison donation program do make me pause. First, even though I might personally choose to take a bit of risk by eating venison with a dash of lead every so often, the people receiving venison through the donation program aren't making that same choice. Although I believe the benefits far away, the risks and X raying all that meat could be cost prohibitive. Those eating donated food have the right to know what's in it. More interestingly, though, is the incentive program that the county has come up with. They give hunters fifty dollars per dear that's donated. Somehow, even though the lead content and the meat is the same, that bounty and the motivation to get the bounty leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I should get over it. If more hunters are willing to provide more food to more people in need, that's a good thing, right And still it seems to come maybe a little too close to market hunting for my comfort, Not that my comfort is the most important thing here, but still, maybe there can be some happy medium. We admit that copper bullets are a better choice for shooting at targets that will become food. And last I checked a box of Federal Trophy Premium copper and three oh eight retailed for Maybe instead of a cash payout, a a county Maryland could provide hunters with the AMMO necessary to make sure no one is eating lead, not wildlife, not the hunters themselves, and not their neighbors at the local food bank. I will admit this plan could be open to manipulation. A resident hunting license cost in Maryland, and with the price of AMMO these days, a person could just show up with a license, get the box of shells, and turn around and make a tidy little profit. You know, like all plans and their foundation phase, they need some work. But instead of forking over a fifty bill for a deer, I think there's some other options here. Moving on, you duck hunters out there have undoubtedly noticed that bag limits on blue bills A. K. Scott have gotten tighter and tighter in recent years. Scientists have been studying the decline of blue bills with con sarned for decades. Populations have fallen from about seven million in ninety to around three and a half million today. Some would call that although there's no single cause of the decline, researchers have observed that, similar to the egrets we discussed in last episode, blue bills have been suffering from elevated levels of contaminants in their systems selenium in particular. This may be because a larger and larger proportion of the scalps diet is made up of zebra muscles, an invasive bivalve that has taken over in many waterways along the ducks migration route, including the Great Lakes. The same cycle that happens with egrets happens with ducks. Contaminants go into the environment, the filter feeders, like the muscles, pick up the contaminants, and then they pass that up to the next predator, in this case scop And with so many other factors working against duck reproduction, including loss of habitat and chain engine climate, the higher levels and contaminants put one more obstacle in the way, and we hunters see fewer of them and have fewer opportunities to get that meat into the freezer. One thing always to remember, no bright line exists separating us and our well being from these animals and their well being. The same water sheds that give them water give us water. The same things that contaminate their food contaminate our food. When we protect habitat for wildlife. We're also protecting ourselves and keeping that nasty stuff out of ourselves and our friends and our parents and our kids and everyone. I want to thank Alex C for writing in and making sure our heads were screwed on straight on that one after the eGRID episode. And I think we can take this one step further and suggest to state agencies that maybe the SCOP could be the poster child for telling people not to dump contaminants and water ways. You know, instead of a stop sign, it would be a scops line. That's all I've got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you are the selfless type of conservationists we know you are, tell a friend about Cal's weeken review, and most importantly, let me know what's going on in your neck of the woods by writing in to a s k C a L that's asked Cal at the meat Eater dot com. Thanks a bunch. I hope you had a fantastic Thanksgiving and we'll talk to you next week.

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