00:00:09 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything, all right, Steve. I want you to do um two things, but you gotta do it in the in the order, in this order. Explain like what is the neutria and where are they from and all that, and then explain who you are and where you're from and all that. All right? Yeah? Sure. A neutria is a big semi aquatic rodent that's native to South America. At one time, it was highly prized for its fur, and it was introduced throughout the world and uh, fur farms and things like that to create a economic resource for rural folks. And similar to mink ranches and that sort of thing. It's intermediate in size between a muskrat and a beaver. Uh. For those familiar with our North American semi aquatic how many pounds? The average is probably between fifteen and seventeen pounds for an adult man. You know, they're big, Yeah, and uh, you know, I guess if I were to equate it too, yeah, compared to something probably a raccoon, Yeah, raccoon bigger than a woodchuck similar size to a raccoon. I think the biggest female that we caught was about twenty one pounds. And you know, when they're gravit and full of little ones, they can tip the scales higher than the males do. So what's the word you used, gravit? Pregnant? Gravit? Am I getting all academic here? Pregnant is grab think, so get out my thesaurus app check check. Um. So they're really kind of an interesting animal too, though. Uh A lot of people don't know this, but they get fascinated when they hear that the nipples on a female nutrient are located along their back, so the young can actually suckle when they're swimming in the water either. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. Um. You know, I have like a I've never laid eyes on a nutrient. You know, I hadn't either before I took this job that that I took to try to help eliminate them from the Chesapeake Bay. But they're a pretty pretty amazing animal, very adaptable. They're herbivores, as most rodents are. They dig up the roots and tubers, the underground parts of plants in the wetland ecosystems here, and in doing so, they expose it to tremendous erosion with the tidal influx of water and and what. So that's how muskrat feeds too, right, Yeah, I mean, yeah, muskrats will eat you know. One of the things that they're most known for is they'll eat cat tail roots and parts of cattails. But all I mean, they'll eat clams rarely, but mostly they eat aquatic vegetation and they when they're Yeah, the excavating from banks is what causes folks in trouble. With folks is their denning activities more than their feeding activities. Is they dig bank dens and make a under usually an underwater entrance, and then they'll burrow up into a bank and then make a big hollow in the bank. And then you know, some d to be like mowing his lawn and all of a sudden falls into a muskrat bank. Then that's what gets muskrats in trouble. Get free haircuts that I used to get free haircuts from some ladies that had a muskrat problem in their pond. That they're little haircuttery in Plattsburgh, New trapp mustgrats for haircuts. I've trapped muskrats. That was the muskrat man to them, and I got my haircut for free. So good. It's a bartery economy. So you all right, we'll get into this whole trap of things. So but now that now that you brought the subject, we're going to explore the fact you were trapped before you became a government trapper. I yes, I was. No, I guess now is the time you can tell us about who you are. I was wanted a little teaser about those back nipples. Oh yes, So I'm Steve ken Drott. I'm a wildlife biologist. I work for the U S Department of Agricultures Wildlife Services Program, so small agency, about two thousand people nationwide. That's it's UH within the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for UH in the US Department of Agriculture, and our primary mission is to provide federal leadership in the there resolving human wildlife conflicts. And our primary mission areas are to protect agriculture, human health and safety, property, and increasingly natural resources, which is how we're entwined with this whole nutrient eradication project to try to save the Chesapeake Bay marsh Lands. So I've been with that uh agency for about eighteen years now. I started out as a wildlife biologist at an airport, UH actually a military base in Virginia, and I also worked at two of the Washington d C. Airports. But in two thousand two I took this job in in Cambridge, Maryland. Hold on question, what's what's an airport needed biologist for? Well, so, uh, birds and planes both occupy the same airspace and uh oftentimes too great detriment to both the birds and the planes. So we actually have a very robust program throughout the country. Most of our major airports, we've got wildlife biologist station there working to provide guidance to the airport about how to minimize uh wildlife habitat and attractants on the airfield to keep them away from the runways and taxi ways. UH. Deer, coyotes, other mammals are also problems. They get on the runways and get hit by planes during takeoff and landing and and so on and so forth. So it's uh a pretty big human health and safety component of our program. Yeah, yeah, because that could be like a lot of deaths all at once. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, Yeah, the dude that had the dude that put the plane down in the Hudson. Yeah, several geese. Yep, miracle Alanna Hudson was the result of a bird strike with Canada geese. There's also a tragic air force accident back in Gosh, I don't even remember when that was now, it's been so long since I've worked on the airport stuff. But in elmendor Fell Air Force Base. Uh, a plane went down from that and killed quite a few service folks. So or Burkeley. Yeah, so it's you know, you know, not to scare the flying public. And now you guys will be on a plane soon. Not a lot to worry about. It's a it's a low risk but a high consequence kind of kind of thing. So, uh, it's something in our the airports take very seriously. The FAA takes very seriously. And uh, as a result, we've got a pretty robust program nationwide. Most biologists employed by your agency. Then, Yeah, and so our agency is kind of unique in that it's not it doesn't get a huge slug of federal appropriations or tax dollars to do the work we do. We work through cooperative agreements with other federal agencies, uh, municipalities, airports, that sort of thing, private individuals. Uh. So it's very much a cost sharing type program where the recipients of the services that we provide are paying for at least some portion, if not all, of the service that we provide. So we're not a regulatory agency like some of the other uh federal agencies of Fish and Wildlife Service that enforced regulations about endangered species and all that kind of thing. We're very much problem solving service orientation UM. And so yeah, it's uh, it's been a really interesting agency to work for. And this project in the Chesapeake Bay with the Nutria is funded by the Fish and Wildlife Service, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which is in the Department of Interior. Um, there are the folks that oversee the National Wildlife Refuge System. So so to jump into the new Tria, like just to lay the groundwork on the Nutria situation Chestpeake Bay, which is a pretty fascinating story. But how did it begin? Like when did they come in and why did they come in? So they were a side note, can they live? They can they adapt to northern climates or they like to have they or do they need warmer weather and not severe winters. They are limited in their northern distribution by by winter weather. However, here in Maryland is about the northernmost distribution on the east coast. But Neutria also they've been established in seventeen or eighteen different states in the US, introduced in a number more, but they haven't become established. A lot of people don't know that. Uh, your home city of Seattle and Portland, UM are home to the neutria as well. UM all over in the coastal wetlands and a lot of the lot of the parks in uh Portland, Oregon, people feed carrots and stuff like that. It's kind of crazy. So you don't have to go fired. I've never seen one, as I'd always lived in the northern tier states. Yeah. Now they're limited in the to the coastal distribution because the temporary climate. They Um, So where was I introduced? How and why did they come into how? And why did they come into the chess Chesspeake Bay like there for what reason? So the Nutria were brought to the chess Peak region in the nineteen forty three or thereabouts. UM. There was two entities that had nutrient brought in. The Blackwater actually had the refuge itself had a fur bear research station at one time, and they housed nutrient. They were doing uh nutrient research as well as muskrat and that sort of thing. But there are also some private uh entrepreneurs that were bringing nutria in to farm them and for some reason UH there that never really took off economically, and eventually the farms either went out of business and they released their animals, or the conditions just became dilapidated and they escaped and whatnot. With the dropping fur prices, no, that was quite a bit I think before the dropping fur prices, and so nutrient didn't really become of an ecological impact in the Chestspeake Bay region until probably the late nineteen sixties nineteen seventies. And that's pretty typical for a lot of introduced invasive species, is that they'll they'll exist at fairly low levels for an extended period of time and then begin to grow exponentially, and once they hit that sort of critical mass and numbers, then that population can just like explode and go through the roof. And so that's what happened throughout the nineteen seventies and eighties, and they estimated at one point that blackwater was probably homed over fifty thousand nutrient and UM. That corresponded with a very significant decline in UH emergent marsh lands at Chesspeake UH at the Chestpeake marsh Lands National Wildlife Complex or Refuge complex. But that black water unit of at one point was about thirteen thousand or so acres of wetlands and they lost about five thousand acres of that over the course of well between nineteen thirty eight and UM nineteen ninety nine or so, almost a half. Yeah, it's very significant. You look at the aerial photographs of the core of the heart of black Water Refuge and you can see that it's just been converted almost entirely to open water. So huge ecological impact. And you said Emergent marshes, Yeah, Emergent marshes are those uh wetlands where the plants actually emerge out of the water, so you look out and you see vegetation basically as opposed to like a lily pad type environment or that sort of thing. UM. So the typical marshes that we have here in the coastal regions of the Chesapeake bay are characterized by uh three square bulrush um cat tails in some of the more fresher headwaters of the this sort of drainage system, and the closer you get to the bay and higher selinities, you'll get more needle rush, salt hay um, those different types of plant communities. So the one that's really critical, and then probably from a wildlife perspective, one of the most valuable habitat types is the three square marsh. It produces a lot of seeds that are fed on by migrating birds and that sort of thing and play showed yesterday all the swamp. So if you roll it between your fingers, it's got it's very triangular in cross section, so um it's it tends to grow in very organic based soils and it basically accumulates is you know, pete over years and years and years of rotting vegetation sort of builds up this peat layer, so it doesn't have a real solid foundation, and they're where it's very vulnerable to erosion when nutria come in and start carving up that route map. So well, muskrat do feed on the same types of plants. Three squares very important for muskrat as well. They feed a little bit differently. Um nutria tend to dig up the tubers of the roots of the plants um and do it in a very concentrated area. And even more importantly, what they'll do is they'll dig swim channels kind of like a beaver does, to get from the tidal waterways into their feeding areas. What they're essentially doing is creating a little stream bed for the tide to get in and out so it penetrates further into their marsh. And then when it comes out, all that material that they've dug up is gathered and swept out to see more or less or at least out to the bay. Um. Oh, that's it. In Yeah, because I was hard, I was having hard to have picture how what they were doing was causing someone trouble. That's an interesting perspective on it, not perspective on it, but like an interesting The way to explain what's going on is those canals, like the same canals beavers dig. I never thought that as being a way for water just to snake its way further up into stuff, so you get higher salinity water penetrating further into what are typically brackish or even fresh water marks, because beavers will dig those things. You'll you'll see him hud yards long sometimes to to go access willow right, So that contributes to this erosion problem. What actually happens is that organic muck that this route mat is sort of floating on uh gets eroded from underneath, and the marsh begins to sink. And despite the fact that these are wetland plants, they're very susceptible too and intolerant of changes in the hydrology of the system. So all they need is sink is just a few fractions of an inch necessarily, and those plants can no longer survive. It turns into a different community, and in many cases it sinks so low that no plants can survive, and it just turns into this kind of open water wasteland that really doesn't produce much good habitat. You know, it's not deep enough all the time for a fish community to be really supported by it, and most of the fish that we tend to see using those those open water areas are also invasive species, carved and things like that. So but you know, it's not solely the nutrients fault that we've seen such wetland loss in the Chesapeake Bay region because there are a number of threats to this ecosystem, and that includes sea level rise, UM, land subsidence, through the withdrawal of underground aquifers for human consumption, congregation, and all that sort of thing um and so there's all these sort of multiple factors impacting the marshes, which can be fairly resilient until you put nutrient into the equation. And there's sort of the catalyst that that little uh that you know, your grandma's sweater that she needed for you when you're a kid, and you get a thread pulled on it, and all of a sudden, the whole thing on ravels. The new tria is the one pulling that thread, and that's all of the other things sort of compound when nutria introduced to the equation. So they did some really neat research back in the nineteen nineties trying to figure out the role that neutria played. And what they did was they went throughout the black Water system and they put in a bunch of fences, basically UM thirty exclusion fences that they buried into the ground so that the nutria couldn't swim under it or dig under it, and then they made sure there were no nutria within them, and they just monitored the vegetation around them, and they very quickly could see a distinct difference. Uh, they put them in areas where there were compromised by nutria, and outside the fences continue need to degrade and convert to this muddy open water, and inside the fence the plants came back. So it was a good indication that if we could eliminate nutrient from the equation, that the marsh could possibly restore itself. No real quick here do they banked in or where do they sleep at night? That's a great question. Um, they don't typically bank then. Um. In fact, many of the areas that they live in out in the open marsh don't have banks, so they just live on they don't And that's one of the reasons we think that they're limited in their northern distribution because they don't have that thermal refuge from cold weather. So what we would see layout they'll build like a little nest, just a platform of vegetation, like a muskrat feedbed. Yeah, exactly, And I've seen those built almost on stilts. When we have high water events. We had a hurricane in two thousand and two, I think Hurricane Isabella brought a six foot storm surge over the whole marsh, and when the waters were seated, we found nutria beds that were made out of frag Mighty's the invasive reed that you've been seeing lately. Um four ft off the surface of the marsh. All folded over and made a nice little platform so they could get up out of the water. But that doesn't provide thermal protection. So what we see in the wintertime with these critters is that they're very susceptible the cold weather. They'll get frost bite on their tails and over over the course of several years of a big adult nutria might only have a stub six inch tailor or less even um because it just gets frost bit. Females under physiological stress from the cold weather will actually abort their females or their fetuses, and so that's another element of nutrient. Why there's such a difficult species to deal with is because they reproduce extremely rapidly. They Nutria come into heat and are ready to breed within four or forty eight hours of giving birth, and they become sexually mature at about six months of age. So once a neutria hits six months of age, she's virtually pregnant for the rest of her life. And in the wintertime. If they clarify that when you first said that, I thought you meant um that the young were. You're saying a female will have a litter, and then that female within within a couple of days is ready to breed again. Absolutely yeah. And if her in her offspring can breed win howld at about six months of age, so you get it's about a four month gestation period, three to four months, and so they can produce like three litters a year. You're producing generations in a year. Yeah, oh yeah. And in these northern climates where we do see these period of stress on the animals where the females will abort their litters if they're pregnant, they'll come into the heat immediately after that. So it forces this sort of cyclic and seasonality to the to the breeding pattern in these northern climates where we tend to see big pulses of reproduction. Uh, litters born in like May October in January, and then usually the January litter doesn't really survive because there's these young are born at at a time of year where it just isn't conducive to survival. What so, what year was it? Remind me again what year they first may have gotten introduced here from early nineties, and what year was it when the explosion, Like you know, when you you're describing how they're just kind of putter long and all of a sudden their numbers get to a point where you can have this like all of a sudden, it's like exponential, right, you know, was the late nineteen sixties when they really started to notice, you know, nutrient and abundance, and then through the seventies and eighties that marsh lost really seemed to accelerate to the point where you could people were seeing it in their own lifetime. They were seeing the marshall. Yeah, definitely. I had employees on the project that were born and raised on the marshes of black Water, and they said when they were kids, they could have walked in tennis shoes from the Wildlife Drive on the black Water National Wildlife Refuge across to the property where they grew up. It's about a two or three mile distance probably, and the only place they would have gotten wet was where the Blackwater River coursed through that marsh. There's a high marsh, solid good, good ground and uh, that's a big lake. Now okay, yah, what year was it then that? Or let me ask this to how okay, what year was it when someone said, like, is there something we should be trying to do about this? And how many neutria werether at that moment? Yeah? Can you work in just like a general public perception into that answer to like, what was the public thinking and about it back then? Well? You know what, at first, I think that it wasn't perceived as such a problem because there was a fur market for for neutria, and people would go out in the wintertime and they would hunt and trap them and you know, get some money for their for their pelts. Um excuse me, but really from a wildlife perspective and from a local economy perspective, the muskrat is the king here and when you lose three square marks, you lose muskrat. And I think people started to realize that that, at least from the trapping community, that muskrat are much more desirable than neutria are. And so there was support even from you know, that element that we needed to do something about it. The big thing was the law some marshes at black Water in the surrounding Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area. So it was in the nineteen nineties that the various natural resource agencies that have a role in managing and conserving UH these important Chesapeake Bay resources got together and started thinking about, you know, what we could do to try to stem the loss and maybe even foster the recovery of the marsh. This, this whole project is not about killing nutrients, about restoring wetlands, UM, and that's the purpose of it. So it took some time to get all the people on board and to get congressional support for because this is a big initiative. You know, we're talking uh, you know, a quarter million acres of wetlands that we eventually have have treated across this uh, this landscape, so no small task. UM. They estimated population estimates UH somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand nutrient Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and they had some fairly good numbers to make estimates off through their trapping programs. Because black Water and Fishing Bay are both available to UH for trappers to to bid on. They control the the amount of trapping. Trappers can come in and bid on a lot like like like a chunk of ground within the refuge just to work for their own trap line, right. Um, And so they had harvest records and at one point they were paying uh not a bounty per se, but trappers that that did least the trapping units could turn in nutrient tails for a dollar fifty credit towards the total price of whatever they paid. So if a trapper paid, you know, fift undred bucks for a trapping unit and they caught what a hundred nutrient turn the tails and they could get a hundred and fifty dollars per tail and cover the cost of their least they couldn't they couldn't catch you know, five nutrient getting extra money. But that same guy would probably be that that same guy would probably stacking up muskrats in the hundreds. Yeah, yeah, for sure. These whitelands support quite high densities and muskrats. And these are high quality muskrats around here. Yeah, they're the chest Peake Bay region is renowned for the quality of the muskrat pelts. Yeah, I heard a guy, you're not, I mean, I were like in the early eight like the late seventies early eighties muskrats, you know, I mean got it's like, you know, extra large muskrats. You gotta imagine like the economic difference now and then like what it meant. But like seven or eight dollar muskrats in the late seventies early eighties, adjusted for inflation, is like a valuable animal for something that like an enterprising trapp or I mean, there was guys who would quite handily put um trap flesh and stretch upwards of a thousand or even more muskrats in a year. You can make a living trapping back then. Trapping muskrats. Now you're hard to press to make a living trap muskrats. You're hard press of paper, your expenses trap of muskrats. But at the time, it's just like an incredible thing. I caught the tail end of that, you know, I was coming into trap and just as the you know, I set my first muskrat trap and guys are already talking about the good old days. But it was still pretty good. It's not as good well, you know, in the market continues to fluctuate. We we've never seen prices like back then. But you know, in the time that I've been here. Muskrat pelts extra largess have have gone up to close to eight dollars and you know, five dollars with some regularity, and they you know, Peakin Valley over time. But there's also a market for the meats here as well. So by the time that surprised me to hear, yeah, by the time you sell the pelt and then you might get through four or five bucks for the meats as well. Uh uh, you're actually looking at ten or twelve dollars per muskrat. And there are people here that that make a significant part of their living off of muskrat. You know, it's a seasonal work. A lot of farmers will trapped during the winter when they're not tend in their fields and whatnot. A lot of waterman well trapped during that part of the year. So it's an important part of the local economy. And and you know a lot of people think that, you know, trapping is a anachronistic type thing, it's a dead art, and it's we don't need it in this modern society. But there's still folks here that that really rely on income for trapping. You know, Dorchester County is not a wealthy County. It's uh. The last time I looked, which was some years ago, that the media income was about two thous dollars a year. So someone's catching three four five thousand dollars worth of muskrat in a year. That's a significant chunk of their annual income. So it's important to people. It's not just a you know, a hobby or a pastime that people like to do. It's it's really important. And this is a point that I think is forgotten that those skills in the community, that understanding of the natural world that we live in. I think no one understands better than a trapper. You know, having a no one animal well enough and it's habitat well enough to be able to go out and catch it requires a certain amount of knowledge and know how, understanding and respect for the environment. And without those they're doing that ninety days in a role. Yeah, absolutely, a dedication. It's uh, it's hard work and having those skills, uh, I think are incredibly important to conservation today. And you can see it beyond what we did here, you know, are the nutrient eradication campaign that we mounted in conjunction with the Maryland d n R and the US Fish and Wildlife Service was essentially a systematic hunting and trapping program that we used paid employees to implement. So the problem was identified and funding was secured, and someone floated the idea of let's try to go kill all fifty thousand neutria, every last one of them dead. Yep, that was the goal. And what was the person if someone told me that, if if you asked me, if you asked me, like before I found out about this, if you'd ask me like, do you think in a not in an island, not in an island environment, but like in an open environment like this, do you think you could um mechanically remove an established population of a semi aquatic rodent? I would tend to say no, you couldn't. But people did it successfully accidentally with beavers in the on horseback, So so that was still would be daunting and would still be like, yeah, I don't know if you could really do it or not. And so wisely, the project began as a pilot study because we weren't sure if it was feasible or not, and certainly there were a lot of people, probably most people who thought it probably wasn't. But we were able to convince enough folks in the right places, uh, that it was a worthy endeavor, and we got the funding to to do it. It started with about a two year research project back in two thousand and At that time the project was being managed through the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, where they had a cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. It was part of the US Geological Surveys Research Branch, and it's so it started looking at things like trying to answer questions like, if you is there a density dependent response of nutria reproduction in response to intensive trapping pressure? So in other words, if you trap nutria, are they gonna just make more nutria faster? And so that was one of the areas of research. Um which there's alway the problem people find with trying to get rid of coyotes. Yeah, there are examples of species that do respond by increasing their reproductive rates, whether it's on a per individual basis by an increase in litter size, or if it's through an increasing proportion of the population breeding, because you're destructing the social dynamics of that species. Um. And some do it by increasing dispersal too, right. When you get that, yeah, well that's that sort of ties into the disrupting their social thing, you know, especially with coyotes. You know, if you have a saturated population of coyotes, they tend to suppress breeding in the younger animals and they form more family groups. And if you get a lot of mortality there, then the family unit breaks up and the young disperse and then you've got freedom to breed. So um. But with Nutria, the other thing they're looking at was trying to determine if there are any sort of parasite loads, that sort of things, sort of some basic ecological research on how this species exists in the chest Peak region, but also trying to estimate populations. And they found it challenging uh to catch enough animals to test some of their hypotheses with these things, because any market capture study requires large sample sizes to come up with a reliable estimate of what that population is. And it got to a point where I think the folks that were providing the funding wanted to see us move into the eradication phase. You know, let's see if we can get this done, get to the kid right exactly. So in two thousand two, Wildlife Services was asked to get involved as the implementing agency to to sort of carry out this plan. And it was very much an adaptive management type plan. And we started at Blackwater. That's where you know the problem originated. And uh, we actually had three main study areas that were used during the research phase that we started out on, and one was at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, the other was on Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area, and the third was on a private conservation property that was adjacent to the Fishing Bay and Blackwater complexes. So that that first summer that we got engaged, you know, we worked on trying to trap out the study areas that they had started doing all this research on. And and those weren't like enclosed areas though, no, no, not at and they were iceolated. They were tied into the other population correct, correct, So they were as I remember, they were about six acres uh sort of plots within the black Water, Fishing Bay and Tudor Farm system and that's where they had done the bulk of the market recapture studies and and that sort of thing. So we tried to go in and work out our trapping techniques to sort of clear out those areas and try to give some closure to the mark recapture stuff so that we could get all those tagged animals and account for them. It would this be a good time to explain how the like, I have no idea when you just say you're trapping neutral, Like, what did that look like? Yeah? Sure, so we use some pretty conventional for trapping techniques. Uh. The core of our trapping toolbox was the two twenty counter bear, which is an instant kill uh body gripping trap. It's commonly pretty near, yes, submerge, it's fast, Yes it is. Um. So you know we bought thousands of those things too. Yeah, we had fifteen fold wilife specialists running like Victors or Northwoods or just whoever. Yeah, I think Sleepy Creek. Actually, I think we we had quite a few traps from them. Um yeah, body grip and traps coming like serious sizes so like there's like the one hundred series sizes which are making muskrat. Two hundred series sizes are generally used for raccoon, otter neutria fishers, guys who use one tens on dry land, one tens for Martin Did I say MANK I think I did. Then the three hundred series are usually just beaver, but guys used three thirties also for wolverines, and some guys liked, uh, some guys like three thirties for otters because otters are harder defense into a two twenty, but they don't work as good because sometimes the otter can pop out of one of the jaws. You know, some people like two twenties on those. So they make any bigger is that the biggest? Never heard anying bigger than three thirty series count of beer? They actually do make a couple uh what do they call them? Six sixties or something like that, and it's like two three thirties welded together, so it's still got the ten inch jaw spread from top to bottom, but they're twice is wide. Yeah, that's good to throw in the measurements because the two twenties or eight right, seven inches I believe seven in Okay. Yeah, when you set this thing, this looks like a little wirior box right right then. But it's got springs out in the three thirty you can break your arm, man your arm. Yeah, it's they're not pleasant to have your appendage cut in. So you guys went out and bought a mountain in the two twenties. We bought a mount into two twenties and quite a few foothold traps as well. And what what were you doing up with those? What size traps? Uh, A lot of one and a half coil spring traps, but we also use some bigger So Neutria have a much bigger hind foot than they do front foot, very much like a beaver. And so the uh, the one and a half coil spring trap, which has about a four and a half inch jospread I think nutrius foot can span the entire trap. So unless you catch them by the front foot, you run the risk that that they might just spring a trap and not get caught. So we did have some larger traps that we used, number twos and threes. I think that we sometimes set if you were set for the hind leg. Yeah, so just just for context for people, like a one and a half double coil spring is a foothold trap, and that's the size generally used. That's like v go to trap for raccoon fox. Yeah, right, that that size critter. So and it's important to have uh different tools and your trapping toolbox because sometimes animals become trap shy. You know, if they see a certain uh type of trap in there. You know, some animals are less tolerant of new novelties in their environment. They'll sort of steer clear of them. So foothold trap is easier to camouflage and sort of disguise. Um. So we tended to catch the bulk of the animals that we captured in the two twenty conno bear. But when we had animals that were clearly you know, avoiding the body grouping traps, we would set the foothold traps. And were you setting those two twenties in the channels? Yeah, so we find those swing channels and paths through the marsh and just neck them down and stay in there. The perfect width, the size channel, perfect perfect width for the two twenty. It wasn't it wasn't quite rocket science to catch him. But would you guys use those uh those basically harness rigs to hold the two twenties so you can just stab it into the ground. No, we actually used bamboo poles mostly, So we wired the trap to a bamboo pole and then uh stuck it through the spring in the corner of the trap to provide some stabilization and also sort of a visual sort of guide to send the animal through. You're calling all this gear around what the canoe? A lot of it, well, yeah, mostly john boats actually, Um, there are the main waterways you can navigate through the marsh, but a lot of it was over the shoulder, just carrying stuff through the equipment through the marsh. The bamboo poles were kind of handy because you could you could uh spring the trap on the end of the bamboo pole and then gather you know, ten or a dozen polls up with traps on and throw him over your shoulder and carry him across the marsh. So and it's stuff like that kind of circle back to where I was going With the importance of maintaining these trapping skills in the community. We were very reliant on local knowledge and local trappers on this project to understand how to work in this marsh effectively and the techniques that that that work best. Because while trapping isn't rocket science, it's got a steep learning curve for a beginner and uh, you know, it can take people a long time to sort of figure things out, uh, and an experienced trapper can be very effective at selecting the species that they're trying to target and avoiding those other species that not but a novice trapper often is is uh not as selective. So having that expertise in the community, and this translates to much much beyond uh you know, nutrient eradication uh. For trappers were incredibly important to the restoration of a lot of uh endangered species in the United States, wolves being probably one of the most prime examples of that. You know, the last remaining Mexican wolves were caught by a trapper named Roy McBride and pulled into to captivity for a selective breeding program to build those populations up and restore them to the wild. The Yellowstone Wolf recovery effort was many of those wolves were captured and traps set by trappers. Soever some years ago some American fur trappers going down to help some governments in South America catch jaguars. Yep, yeah, they're uh, you know, a good trapper is a very valuable persons of the wildlife conservation community. Um. So were you a trapper before you got involved with he was trading muscratch for haircuts? Yep, Okay, yeah, I was uh certainly not a trapper in the sense that the folks here that you know, make a living off of But how I got started in it, and actually I had I grew up with somewhat of a negative opinion of trapping because my my grandfather was an avid bird hunter and always had bird dogs. Oh yeah, it was gays and he'd had a couple of dogs get caught in foothold trap there with the Humane Society trapping, So yeah, he he had sort of instilled in me this uh lack of appreciation, shall I say, for for trapping in general. But you know, I went to school for wildlife management, and I came out of that, Uh, I went into graduate school for uh wildlife ecology, and I was really dying to study carnivores. And I managed to land a position, a graduate research position at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forest We're doing coyote research, and you know, for the first time I had to figure out how to catch an animal with this sort of traditional for harvesting tools. I've done you know, trapping with cage traps for pine martin and other critters like that, but I'd never for research. Yeah, but I've never set you know, foothold traps, and so I had to learn how to do it to catch study animals for my project. And when you're making, you know, a stipend of eight hundred bucks a month, it doesn't quite make ends meet and learning a trap. And I'm also driving through all of this probably muskrat country, and I'm seeing farmers with problems with beavers and all that sort of stuff. And so I just started learning. And I was very fortunate to have a renowned fur buyer and trapper in the community that I was living in in upstate New York, Paul Grimshaw Grimshaw, and uh, he didn't exactly take me under his wing. He's kind of a ordinary old guy, but once you sort of connected with him, he'd start sharing knowledge. And so I learned a tremendous amount from him. I just go and watch and his wife's skin and stretch muskrat pelts, and just learned, you know, the kind of tricks of the trade for catching some of these other furbears. And and I was able to supplement my income, you know, not tremendous. I wasn't out there buying cars or anything with it. But when you make a hundred bucks a month, an extra month's salary, and in the course of a year. It really helped out quite a bit. So I was telling you honest the other day about I used to sell. I didn't flesh and stretch my own raccoons. He's like, no one likes doing that, you know. And I would sell him to a fur buyer who would who would uh got named Abe sell salicina Um. He was a tomato enthusiast who grew tomatoes and bought fur. And you would go into his selling raccoons and he'd be in there and he'd heat his he'd heat his barn with raccoon fat, no kidding, he'd open that door and take a job with that raccoon in there like black smoke. Well, you know it was it was neat to be in such proximity to it, to Paul Grimshaw because you know, he was an expert in putting up furs and whatnot. So you know, I put up my own fur from when I was doing that, and I enjoyed that part of It's kind of like put you in your own meat. You know, you're kind of taking that process from start to finish, and you know, you get more money for for when it's when it's put up properly get less when it's put up poorly. But um, I think they'd rather buy green fur than than poorly put up for But that's like that like lingo is uh green fur would be skinned but not flash and stretched if you sold a muskrat like guys would also sell muskrats in the round, which would mean just pull up at the end, run your line and drive up and sell the guy muskrats in the round. You might be selling them for half what you'd get if you sold them stretched exactly. So that was a real uh learning experience for me, And the thing I liked about it is that it really makes you step back and take time to learn about animals you normally wouldn't even think about. You know who thinks about muskrats unless you're trying to catch them. And then so just I learned a whole lot about the ecology of the region and and the behavior of the animals, and the importance of different habitat types than what lives there through this process of learning how to trap and uh so when you call. But when you caught wind of the you had to go apply for the new Tria job or was it just like fall into your lap No, I had to apply for it. So, you know, when I was working in the Virginia Wildlife Services program, every state has Wildlife Services has a program in every state just about and so I was working through the Virginia Division of Wildlife Services and we would have these annual conferences where all the different states surrounding would get together and intermingle. And for a couple of years there I was hearing them talk about this Nutria eradication study that they were undertaking in Maryland. And at the time, Maryland Wildlife Services wasn't getting involved. We had a state director at the time that was close to retirement and I think it wasn't really all that keen to take on this sort of massive project. Um. But he retired and a new guy came in and jumped on the opportunity to work with a fish and wildlife service and UH put this vacancy announcement out there, and Jesus sounded interesting to me. I had no idea what a new trio was. I had to look it up and I put my name in the hat. And I don't know how I got picked, but I did experience. Yeah, I guess so, um, but I feel very fortunate to have been selected for that position because it's the kind of thing that that doesn't happen too often in your career where you get to work on a project that just has sort of profound impacts on conservation and ecology and results that you can see on the ground. And so the position was and it was everything you liked. Man. Yeah. I was able to take all of the skills that I developed through my personal passions hunting and trapping and that sort of thing and sort of devote them to solving a conservation problem. And it really was rewarding to be able to do that. And also, you know, I have to give full credit to the guys that and Gales that really got this job done because I was not the trapper out there. I did trap some, but I was a project manager, so I was supervising the team. Uh uh, We're developing the strategies to you know, how to work and devote our resources across the landscape and you know, when is it time to move from this area to that area? That sort of thing. Making sure that guy's had all the equipment that they needed, the boats, the motors, the waiters, the traps, all that stuff. Um. So that was sort of my role, and uh, you know, the opportunity to supervisor was link to me. I didn't think so when I first got into wildlife that I really want to be managing people, but you know, realizing how much more you can accomplished by harnessing the energy of others. Ah, it was a neat opportunity. So I'm getting backed up on questions. They had a couple of quickies out of context, out of order. Were you hiring trapper trappers or you hiring or did that not? That's not how it worked, Like, you didn't come in and hire existing for trappers, so do the physical trapping. So the research phase of the project had hired some local trappers as part of the team. And when we came to develop methodologies, yeah, well to implement the research study that they designed. So that was primarily using cage traps, um and some foothold traps. Uh. But they did reach out to the local community and got a handful of folks that were uh you know, born and raised in the chest Peak Bay, knew how to trap and how to handle animals and all that stuff, and so we inherited when the Wildlife Services program took over they wanted to provide a home for those you know, employment for those folks that have dedicated themselves to the research phase of the project, and so we were able to hire them when we came on board. Not all of them chose to come with us, so I had some vacancies to fill, and you know, we put out vacancy announcements and uh we tried to recruit locally, and we also tried to recruit uh young wildlife professionals that we're just getting out of college and starting their careers. And I always strove to have a sort of a balance of the two because those uh, those greenhorns don't know what they're doing and they need someone to kind of show them the ropes and whatnot. But they bring a lot of energy and passion to their their work as well, um, and it helps them in their career steppe. And then our our sort of uh I always call them our veteran employees. They weren't military veterans necessarily, but but the folks that have been with a project from the beginning, and our folks that were that were taught on the Chess Peak, they went to the School of the Chesapeake, you know, to learn their trade, and so those folks would provide kind of the stability and the long term institutional knowledge that we needed to keep the project going because this is a long term project. So okay, so the second quickie and then I'm gonna get into a longer question. Um, what what do you guys do with all the nutrita that you trap? You probably can't utilize them because it's part of the government project, correct, So, and there was no market for them or anything like that. There's no use for the meats or anything. So at first we were instructed to remove all of the carcasses from the field and we're gonna compost them or bury them or or do something. Pardon me, but uh, we quickly found and at this time that that sort of rule was put in place, we had expected that there would be tens of thousands of nutrient that we were going to be catching. And when reality said in we started doing the trapping, had been coome become clear that the population had begun to decline and we weren't catching nearly the numbers that we expected. Began to decline because of the trapping. No, not necessarily. I think the population on its own had started sort of dwindling. And part of the probably reason is probably that they had eaten themselves out of house and home in many of these areas, so there's habitat that was no longer there. They were estimated to reach densities of gosh I should have boned up on some of my my memory here um eight to nine six to nine per square acre or per acre. So at those densities, uh, which are tremendous densities. You know, you could have seen thirty five to fifty thod neutrient blackwater, but wipe five thousand acres habitat off the map and got significantly fewer. So we were bringing the carcasses back, but there weren't that many of them, and there's a big concern for removing them from the marsh was the potential for avian and avian batuli is um with all these rotting carcasses out there potentially being fed on by birds. Yeah, just this massive carrying that that would potentially create problems for other wildlife. But it was very time consuming. They remove the animals from the field. You know, at fifteen pounds a piece, he gets four or five of them, you've got sixty pounds of carcasses that you're hauling around, So it was impeding our progress, and it didn't seem like there were numbers that would contribute to the kind of concerns that we initially had going into it. So we opted at that point to leave the carcasses out in the field, and very quickly the scavengers would would convert them back to you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, so it didn't turn out to be so much of an issue to have to remove them from the field, and that freed us up to you know, better to spend our time moving traps and carrying more traps out than carrying the exactly. So the longer question, no, I got that quickie. Uh, what was the public perception of the idea that we're gonna kill all the nutriments get rid of them wholesale? People like good idea or people like that's a horrible idea, not whether you can not whether it's plausible, but whether it's like advisable. Right, So, anytime you implement some sort of lethal management of wildlife populations, there's often a outcry of public sentiment that opposes that. But because of the ecological impact that these critters had and it was obvious to anyone familiar with this ecosystem. Uh, the ecological justification was so compelling that there was really very little backlash. Add to that that you know, it's basically a twenty pound rat doesn't generate a whole lot of sympathy, But that wasn't more. Yeah that that that's good information, And I like that you said it, but I meant I wasn't so much interested in those guys. I was interested in to people who actually liked the neutral But you no do both versions. I hadn't even intested you're you're talking about like the the animal welfare, because I'm talking about the guys who were out there perhaps hunting trapp and eating selling. So again back to muskrat is the king um Nutria had a pretty detrimental impact on muskrat populations, both and competition displacement competition, so Neutria UH would in the winter months in particular, dig into muskrat houses to try to seek refuge from UH cold weather or sit on top of them and basking the sun and whatnot, and they would basically destroy the muskrat house for muskrats. So, you know, we had a less valuable critter having a negative impact on a really important and so there was no opposition. So there was really no one who had any kind of reasonable widespread that you should We had, you know, one landowner that I worked with, and that's something I should mention too, is that this project would have been inconceivable without the support of private landowners because more than for the new tria that we eventually removed came from private land. So having their support was critical. Uh, as a federal agency, a non regulatory wildlife services can't just go on private property and conduct our work. We have to have their permission and blessing, and they have to prove all the methods that we use. So I had one farmer that we encountered who refused us access to his property because according to what he said was he liked to eat nutrient and I like to have him a little refrigerator out in the back forty where he could go and pluck some neutria for dinner on occasion. Um. Fortunately, it wasn't a big area and we were able to sort of trap around it and kind of pull the animals that were on his property off, so it didn't impede our progress in the long term. But what mostly come down to, I think is there's a fairly significant anti government sentiment in the community just about anywhere you go, but it's particularly noticeable here in Dorchester County. You know, there's a lot of government regulations with you know, wetlands and and harvested animals, fish, commercial fisheries and crabs and all that sort of thing. So there's just this sort of general resentment to government intrusion and peoples right, So there wasn't that opposition, um and then from the animal welfare side there also wasn't opposition, which is interesting because at the same time that we were undertaking this eradication campaign, the Maryland Department Natural Resources was trying to deal with a rapidly expanding mute swan population had reached, another non native species that does an aquatic ecosystems very much what neutria do to these uh wetland ecosystems. So they feed on the mute swans feed on the subaquatic uh submerged aquatic vegetation that's really critical habitat for all sorts of fish, crabs, and you know, it provides a nursery for all these juvenile species and they'll go in imagine we're talking about imagine the most beautiful, picturesque swan that you would just want to protect and cuddle exactly, like take pictures of and cuddle with. Yep. And they had been a population master of the marsh. They had reached populations as close to and explain like their explain their impact on ducks. So they're very aggressive birds, and they will chase native waterfall and shorebirds and displace them off of uh, the nesting grounds and feeding grounds and stuff. So they're they're pretty uh yeah, they'll play nice, they don't play He's like, you know, I'm gonna nest here, and no one's gonna nest within a hundred yards of my nest exactly. And so in response to that initiative that the Department at your Resources what's taking on, uh, there were animal welfare groups erecting uh billboards along Route fifty save our swans, and messages to the governor Andrew the ducks saved the swans manly. So to their credit, the DNR persisted and they have whittled that population down last I heard too, probably less than fifty. So that you know, we got to two big ecological problems that have been you know, dealt with in this region over the past, and a lot of that anti sentiment went into swans and not into roads. Yeah, it was perhaps a bit of a distraction, but you know, I I think that there's a an element. A lot of these groups are reliant on donations for uh their solvency, and people are much more willing to open their wallet for a big, beautiful white bird than brown twenty pound rat. But is it a weird because you're kind of defending I mean, it's not weird at all because people are people, and you look at things and you you know, we tend to like and admire animals that strike us as beautiful. But if you're if you're based on the idea that you're just defending sentient life, like you don't want to see damage come to sentient life. It shouldn't matter if it's a swan or a giant rodent. It's like it's a sentient being. Yeah, a man as a pig, as a dog, as a boy. But people uh really tend to um get very interested in defending things that are that are you know, instagram worthy creatures more sold than the ugly ones. Well in the cynic in me says, it's you know, it's driven more by money than it is by by commitment to the cause, because that's where you get funding. Who's gonna who's gonna pull out their wallet to save nutrient? Yeah? Um, So we were fortunate not to have to battle that sort of of opposition to the program. And much to our surprise, when we started reaching out to private landowners, when we kind of expected, given the government sentiments anti government sentiments, that we would have a hard time, people were opening their doors to us. Uh. You know, I can't tell you how many kitchens I sat in with my laptop, computer and a little slide show talking to farmers and other landowners about what we were attempting to do and why it was important for their assistance and whatnot. And hundreds, hundreds of landowners gave us access to tens of thousands of private acres of private property so that we could be successful in this, And a lot of them did it sort of begrudgingly. You know, they didn't think we'd be successful. Uh, maybe you could catch them all. No, hell no, you'll never get the last one. I don't even know why you guys are wasting all this government money on there. But as one farmer I remember distinctly said, but I'm not going to be the stick in the mud to keep you guys from from trying, so, you know, and we had a couple of key landowners that came on board early that sort of helped us set the stage. And you know, well, if if so and so let you on his property, I guess I'll let you on mine. And I think one of the most the biggest compliments I ever got working on this project over the twelve years that I was on it was from that farmer that said he didn't want to be the stick in the mud to stand in the way of trying to do this. But he had told me that there's no way in hell we were ever going to get the last ones or probably even make a dent in the population. And a couple of years after we had sort of swept through his area, um, I ran into him at a gas station. He came up to me and said, you know, I never thought i'd say this, but I've gotta I gotta eat some crow here. He said, I never thought you guys could have done what you did eliminating those New Tria so I've been out and he was a bird hunter and he would take his dogs and he used to take his labs out and and uh hunt new Trea in the marshes behind his house. And he said, I haven't seen a new tree in two years. And I don't know where they all went. But how you guys did it? But you know, it's it's an amazing thing that you've accomplished here. So and you know, it wasn't like we just went out and trapped one time and removed. It was a constant effort of going back and sweeping through and looking and making sure that we didn't leave anything behind. We'll back up to how back up to the first when he first isolated a test area and went for it. How long, like like roughly, how big was the test area? And how long did it take to wipe out the test area? And then how did you monitor it to see that you've got them all? So the test area began with these original six acre parcels or study sites, three of each. I think they're a total of I can't even remember now. Uh, there were three study sites on each property, and so we went in and we we just intensively trapped them off We created a grid across the entire UH study site, and then we deployed our trappers in sort of rose and columns, like a checkerboard type thing, and then we trapped across and saturated the whole area with traps. But these were basically islands in a sea of occupied habitat, so we very quickly could tell that that just immigration, we were creating a big population sink, but that if we were really going to do this and test the feasibility of eradication on a landscape scale, we couldn't do it on these little six hundred acre plots. So we finished those out just to provide closure to that research project, and then we sort of reimagined the whole landscape, and starting at the western edge of Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, we created a huge grid over that entire landscape. Forty acres about four or yards per side was the size of these trapping units, and we would stack our trappers up in in these rows and they would work east to west or west to east across the marsh, sequentially trapping each UH, trapping each grid square. So we basically had a swath of intensive trapping activity that kind of moved across the landscape. We call it rolling thunder because it sounded cool, right, So how many how many traps was rolling thunder running per night? And how many how many new trew we were stacking up per day? So we had we sat pretty heavily at the beginning. Um, there are a lot of new tree to catch. We wanted to remove them as quickly as possible, and so we uh, we would have hundreds each employee. We could have a couple of hundred traps out at any given time. So with fifteen employees working on it, you know, we we had a couple of thousand traps out at any any given point of time. And so what we do is we set the first row or column of of trapping grids up and then once that was saturated and things started to catch, you know, you'll see a really uh you'll catch a lot of animals at first, and then it'll start to dwindle off and tail off. So when we started to see that dwindling in the first row, we'd start taking some of those traps and rolling them into the second row and getting that one set up. So we just kind of leap frogged ourselves along and it worked quite well. And what we did looking at the numbers is that and this was one of the things that we tried to do at the very beginning of the research phase was this mark recapture population estimate. Uh. We found it was actually much more accurate to just go out and remove all the animals and one fell swoop and count them all. Um. And what it turns out is that we could trap out a particular grid in about three weeks time, and you know, so we would catch looking at the numbers over time, we'd catch about of all the animals that occupied that plot in the first week of trapping. By the end of the second week we tried captured. By the end of the third week, we've trapped about and then we would continue to catch onesies and twosies for that remaining five percent. Over the it might take an additional four weeks to get all those. So if you rolled into a new area it was real hot, and you did a main set and you got a few hundred traps in the water, what might the first catch be, like what percent trap of traps would be full? It depended on the trapper. There's a lot of variability there. Um. You know, some of the more experienced trappers would set fewer and more targeted, and others would set more broadly and trying to catch them out once. And I honestly, I can't tell you. I remember anybody that had a double digit day was feeling pretty good about their efforts. You know. You know what's the thing that I think of him when I used to trap muskrats is that when you went into an area, you couldn't if you were being like forward thinking, you wouldn't run more than two or you'd never run more than two or three nights because if you went into a marsh and and ice trapped a lot of isolated Okay, so if you went into a marsh and set up it's like I got a good number of muskrats the first night, you might so the first night's catch, so you sat during the day, let them sit overnight, check them the next day. That night you might run six full traps. I mean, if you knew what you're doing right the next night, you're gonna go back. And that's gonna drop down to if you if you were like a smart guy thinking about next year's season, you'd pull at that point. I could imagine and I know you never did this because it just wasn't it wasn't practical, and there's no motivation to do it. But I could imagine just now here listening to you, just imagine like, yeah, if you stayed in that marsh for two weeks, three weeks and kept running all those sets, you could absolutely yeah. But but there you're talking about isolated spots. It's hard. I mean, they obviously got there in the first place, but it's a you know, it's not it's not to matter them just swimming over to your area. They have to do it across land spring. You know, they'll migrate in the spring. But yeah, man, thinking about it now, I could totally picture you could just like but just for three weeks, nothing nothing, nothing. Oh here's another one, nothing nothing, there's another one. You'd eventually just probably get him. And so that is the most critical opponent. You know, there are a number of factors that you have to meet, criteria have to meet for eradication of any species to be feasible. So you know, in an eradication campaign like this, a trapping based eradication campaign, that's sort of like all the other kind of management things you hear about that eight percent of your energy is spent on this or whatnot. And what what we found out is that that like eight of our energy was spent capturing the last few animals in a population. They get trap shy on you, they get trap shy, and it's just, uh, you know, it gets down to fewer animals leave less signs, So where exactly are they? Um? And then that's a lot of activity on the marsh, so their their behavioral change will change the way they use the marsh, and they'll move and different times of the year there, you know, in the summertime they can go anywhere they want because there's an abundance of food everywhere. So you know, you'd find a little pocket and you'd set traps and then you did not catch anything and find that they've moved two hundred yards and so you gotta go find them. And are you guys toting around twenty two as well into shooting when you see them. Yeah, in the winter months in particular, we would uh do systematic hunting. So when the marsh froze, yeah, I don't know what that means, but when the uh, when the marsh would freeze in the wintertime, if we were so lucky, to get that and a little dusting of snow we could catch and we could shoot a lot of nutrient a short amount of time just getting out on that marsh and hunt them, you know. So that the whole concept of all of this energy being consumed using you know, catching the last few animals really forced us to think about uh kind of different strategies to find those remaining animals. And one of the things that you mentioned earlier asked if there was any opposition, and there actually was a little bit. Um there were some folks that thought that we should just offer a bounty and that the local trappers take care of the problem if you off for a bounty. Yeah, but they're only gonna they're not gonna chase after the last exactly. And so that was why we elected to we're essentially paying people to check empty traps, you know, the stuff they caught at the beginning. Well, that's that's the easy part. The hard part is catching the last few, and that's where we need to to keep that effort going. And so the the trick became how to find more efficiently those last remaining animals, And we tried a number of different things to do that. One of those was utilizing neutria themselves to find other neutria. So I had gone to some conferences and met with some folks that work internationally on invasive species eradication campaigns and whatnot. And in the gallopagus, they'd used Judas goats. So they had these goats that they captured and put radio collars on them, our gp S colors, and they let them go their social and gregarious creature. So they seek out other goats. And they would go up in a helicopter and find these Judas goats that they put out there, and then uh take out all of the other animals that all the new all the new friends that he'd made exactly. And so, knowing that nutria or social uh and sought out other nutria, I thought, oh, I wonder if this could work for us. So well, I'm pardon my ignorant ignorance. Where does the Judas um? What's like some kind of pagan household? You guessed it. That's how you do grow up, some kind of pagan household. So Judas betrayed Christ. Yeah, in the in the in the Last Supper painting. He's the only one that won't look at He's the only one not looking at Christ. Yeah, betrayed to the room. I'm glad he's here as the historian to answer that question. I know it was biblical, but I don't like to go too deep into that biblical stuff. So thank you well you have providing that insight. But but yeah, so we can't you here fell about name of Moses. Yeah, I didn't know how deep we had dive here. So we we actually got a special grant to look at whether or not this concept would be feasible because we didn't want to sort of detract from ongoing efforts to trap and remove by diverting funds. So we got some additional grant funding to support this effort from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and we captured a bunch of neutria. We had them surgically sterilized because we didn't want to be releasing animals that could then you know, escape us and begin breeding out there, and as quickly as they breed, we knew that could be a problem as as well as a perception issue. You know, here we are spending millions of dollars to so so they were all surgically sterilized. The males were vasectimized and the females had a tubal ligation. Had I had the former yeah, um, And then we put radio collars and in some instances they also had a GPS collar on them that stored the data that it collected on board. So at the time the technology was still pretty limiting that that we couldn't uh you know, these devices take a lot of power, and power means big batteries, and putting a big package on a smaller animal was especially one that's got the body confirmation of a nutrient, it's challenging. So we had these little devices custom made by a company in New Zealand that that made them recharge bowl and they would collect data for about a month and then it would store it all on board and we'd go back out and catch those animals and retrieve that GPS unit downloaded, and we could see everywhere that that neutria had been. Every ninety minutes it would collect the location. We could see where it had been over the past month. And he's an unfamiliar train when you turn them loose, correct we So the the intent here was to determine if we left nutria behind in areas we already tripped so we would release them into areas that we thought were devoid of nutria. Well o and behold, some of these animals started, uh, moving pretty widely across the landscape. They also, the color also had a standard radio transmitter, and so we could actually go out and track it on a day to day basis, so we would at least know the general vicinity they were in. And uh, we noticed, you know, after some wide movements across the landscape miles. Yeah, in some cases, uh, once they sort of sort of can elaborated into a smaller area, I thought, I wonder if there could be other nutrient there. You know, it's spending a lot of time in this one area. So we'd go out and we'd set our cage traps to try to catch these animals back and lo and behold, we caught a few animals that were not tagged. I was like, this could work in areas he thought you had trapped out right, So we knew there was a likelihood there are probably some animals. But you know, we had done the initial knockdown, uh, and we'd gone back through and it sort of mopped up. Those are kind of terminologies we used to describe the different phases of the eradication campaign, and so it wasn't a complete surprise to us, but it sure was handy to know where they were um from these critters. But the problem that we had tracking them on a daily basis with their radio collars is that because they moved so far, and because it's a thick vegetation environment and they're often in the water, so the signal from that device doesn't travel that far. You had to be pretty close to even to take the signal. So in cases where they might have moved two or three miles overnight, we would spend all day, you know, trying to find them. And so it turned out that while the technique worked to expose the existence of other nutrient in the environment, from an operational standpoint, it wasn't really practical. I mean the human resources that it took to just keep up with these animals. So what would have really been valuable was to have had a GPS collar that could, through either cell phone technology or satellite technology, relay that information to us remotely. And then so that exists for a lot of different species that it can carry that additional battery. I want to ask you questions not related to Nutria is related to tracking devices. So let's say, let's just say that, uh, you know that in your state there is a coloring program going on with elk, and you know there are some elk wearing collars. Um, what prevents a person who just likes to tinker with kind of stuff? What presents prevents a person from finding uh, from building up his own kid to go track that same to go track those same animals just to find out where elk hereds are so you can go on them. So a couple of things make it difficult. It's certainly not impossible, and that's been an issue in places, I'm sure. Um, But the FCC designates certain bandwidths for government research, and you know you can get these kinds of devices for hunting dogs and that sort of thing, So they sort of segregate the use categories of the different bandwidths, so that make it hurts or frequencies that that these things admit on. And so the the systems that are used for wildlife tracking, they're not generally available to the public. Um. And there it's fairly expensive too. So UM, it's it doesn't happen too often, but it's certainly can happen and there's no um so there would be like a there would be a component of law would come into it that you're using frequencies you're not supposed to use or is that just you know, I don't know. I don't even I've never had anybody say to me that they were trying to do this. This just always puzzled me that right that you always more if you would be like breaking a law to go out with a receiver of some sort and be like and also sort of tracking collared animals the same way that the researchers tracking them well, And so we had actually an interesting thing there. I'm not sure about the legality of it, but researchers in general, uh keep it really tightly in on color frequencies. You know, it's not for me aastion that they share readily, so they keep that pretty close to the vest so that you don't have problems like that. But we had we talked to the reason I first started thinking about this. Remember your friend up in Fairbanks who had all those moves collared. And one day I made a joke being like, I bet there's a lot of dudes and Fairbanks that like to track those moves with you because you just had ones that were out in honorable areas, you know, so sorry, go ahead. Well, so the way the government, the FCC divvys up these bandwidths, so like the federal government gets you know, one six, four dot whatever, and private or academic institutions get a totally different bandwidth. So in theory, you shouldn't have all of this sort of overlapping. Uh. You know, when when I call up a telemetry company and say order a little bunch of collars, I don't get to pick and choose my my frequencies. But I can be relatively assured that someone else who's doing research in the same area through a university is not going to be anywhere close to where I am because they're on a totally different bandwidth. But it turns out that you can get these errant signals. They're basically harmonics. I don't know exactly how it works. But there was another study going on in the area where we were doing Judas project that was looking at seka deer and so they had whole bunch of collars on seekret here and we had a whole bunch of collars on on neutria, and we were working in the same general area, and so we were out there looking. One day we got a nice strong signal on one of our nutria and we're going through and it's an area that we trapped out. We had a beautiful frozen marsh, snow all over the place, and we're tracking this thing um and we kept bumping the secret here and were like, no tracks in the snow from neutria, and we were like, what the heck is going on here? And so we started doing a little more digging, and finally I called the graduate student that was doing that project up. I said, do you buy any chance to have a secret deer down in this area? And he said that he did, And I asked him what the frequency was, and it was way off and it shouldn't even have been detectable on our radio system, but as it turns out, it was. We were getting these weird harmonics that would even though it was the wrong system, it still came in on our radio. Oh man. We had a whole bunch of data we had to throw out because it just we couldn't be sure that what we were tracking was was neutrient versus secret deer. So it was a little bit of a learning curve there, but it was really neat to be able to see how these animals used the landscape. Um, different animals released in different areas would move across the Blackwater Refuge system and it was amazing how similarly they used the landscape. You know, there are certain points almost every animal that we released, no matter where we released them, would pass by. So it gave us some insights on how we might utilize those points as either trapping sites or detection sites. Um. That's yeah. So you're saying the way that that the that the animals would be somehow funneled by the topography or landscape and whatever they're looking for would would bring them by the Yep. What would those features be points of points of land or channels, influence of too, tributaries, um, any sort of point that sticks out of So yeah, it was you'd give you a good idea where to look in the future. Exactly. So did it did it start to have as the project went along and you started to sort of get the sense like like holy shit, we maybe are going to catch them all? Did it feel like a hard stop? It was? It just like the son of like gradual wine down. Well, we had a lot of real estate to cover, so you know, when it was winding down in one area, we would move to another area, so you know, we'd get these sort of peaks and valleys in our capture eates. And that helped keep the staff sort of motivated because you know, even though their job as eradication, most trappers evaluate their success by how many critics I catch, And when you're trying to catch something that's not there, it's a pretty frustrating and real busting. No I would be if I had that job, I'll be really excited every time we moved into new area, and then then the and the guys were But eventually we hit all the known populations and it became this this is just drudgery of of kind of looking and looking and looking. And so when you're relying on an observer based system to find an animal, it's like looking for Bigfoot. You know, you might never see him, but you can't prove he doesn't exists. Right, that's the problem we had with big Foot. Yeah, exactly. So no one will ever believe you because you can't prove something doesn't exist. So one of the problems with an observer based system is that people get fatigued, they get bored, they're looking for something that needle in the haystack, they don't find it. They get distracted that maybe their text goes off and they happen to look at their phone while they drive by a floating nutrient turn in the water and they miss it. Right, So we wanted to develop some other detection techniques that wouldn't be so reliant on a human observer. The human observer is incredibly important. You can't get this work done without people. But you've got to come up with techniques that that sort of compensate for the weaknesses in different systems of detection. And so one of the things we had worked on that actually evolved from a trapping technique was the guys would would use what they called false beds. So they'd make a fake nutria bed along a waterway, set a foothold trap or a counter bear on it, and then the Nutria would come along and see that, and they're like, oh, hey, there's any trip. Yeah, yeah, just quick tech question, when you guys would set up a when you guys would set up a bed set like that, would you guys run a one way drown or locked down to a steak. Yeah, exactly. So we were required to check any trap that held an animal alive every twenty four hours, but we had an exemption that allowed us to go as long as seventies six I think, or maybe even ninety six hours if it was a killing trap. And so we did rely on the submersion sets to make sure that the animals were dead. And yeah, so we're talking about there is Imagine that you you got a trap set up at the surface of the water on a little better you could set set up just for illustrations sake. Imagine set on the Yeah, trap set on the bank of a river. That trap chain like the little tether of that trap has a thing called it one way slide on it. And then you drive a steak into the river bank right next to the trap and run a wire from that steak to another their steak that's driven down into the bottom of the river out in the deep water. And when the animal got hooked in that trap, especially aquatic road is instinctive, We're just gonna jump in the water and dive down to get away. So he runs that one way sliding lock down that wire, but it won't come back up right so that was an effective and important tool for us, and these these false beds became more and more important as a detection tool. So when we were going back through and and mopping up these areas, we didn't want to set traps if we didn't have good reason to believe there were new tria there. So we would just make these false beds and check them. But the problem is when the tide would come up and wash them away or the grass would grow up through them. So uh, one of the guys thought, well, hey, what if we put down a piece of plywood to keep the new grass froom growing up? And then well, that solved that problem, but it's still washed away on a high tide. So said, well what if we what if we put it on a little piece of styre foam and then so we we did that, and then we built a little rim around it to keep the wind and water from blowing stuff off the top, and we so he's this thing evolved into this detection platform that we would put these things out by the hundreds and check them for scat. And we wanted to get a sense of how nutrient interacted with these devices, so we put some remote trail cameras on them, and we got a couple interesting things, and they were staked with a fiberglass pul so if the water came up, they would actually float and they would so they would work all the time, whether the tide was higher down. And we got one video where to nutrient got on a single platform and they were twenty four inches square, so one it was already up there, and the second one got up and it was just too much weight and the whole thing kind of tipped sideways. Water swept over the whole thing, and then the first nutria got off and the second nutria got on and all the water and everything just kind of swept out the opening. We had one one side. It had an opening with a little brace on it that we could set a conterby trip out, so if we detected something, we could instantly turn it into a removal device. And so that got us thinking of like, man, we could be losing all these opportunities to detect sign if we're relying solely on the presence of scat to to do that. So one of the guys went back to the drawing board and came up with a really clever um use for snare cable or aircraft cable, and he took about a three or four inch piece of it and he frayed the ends of it, made a little tool to make it easy to do, and built it sort of bent all the little strands backwards, so it formed this like multi pronged, tiny little grappling hook. And then he built a little support wire like a snare support wire out of stainless steel welding rod and attached that to the platform and then made this little figure eight loop system on the end of the welding wire catch hair to put that snare in, and it would catch hair when the neutria brushed against it. So we we actually implemented that and then we used the cameras to determine what We actually did a little study looking at the detectability of neutria on these devices by the camera, by the presence of scat and by the presence of this hair snare, and the hair snare was like remarkably effective. It detected of the visits to the platform, whereas the was you don't know if he had reliable you don't know if he had to go or not exactly. So you know, all of these techniques sort of evolved out of necessity. And you know, this had never been done before using the tools that we had available to us anywhere in the world. There had been one successful eradication of neutria in England, but it was all done using bated cage traps on rafts, and so you know, we had to sort of forged our our own path on this and uh so all of this creativity stemming from our local trappers, uh was critical and sort of evolving our tools as the needs of the program changed as we approached eradication. So how many years into it or how many years did it take to get there? So we began trapping out the Coral black Water in two thousand and two. We trapped out the last known infested watershed in twenty oh gosh, I think the White Comico River was the last one we trapped out, and so I left the project in to take a promotion. And so the folks that have continued on in my absence have continued to look and they did clean out a few animals in that White Comical watershed the following year. But it has now been uh two and a half years since we've to the nutria anywhere in this ecosystem that we've trapped. Now, we've had some struggles. Uh, you know, funding. Uh, one of the criterias for eradication. Institutional support has to continue throughout the length of the project. So you've got to have that commitment to provide the resources to get the job done. But beencounters like to look at, you know, results, and the easiest result for them to measure is how many neutria we're catching. When you're not catching neutria, it's a lot easier to start sort of pulling back some of that funding. So we've had some issues there. The staff is about a third of what it was at the peak of our efforts, but we've tried to combat that by also increasing our efficiency. One of the things that I had started before I left the project was this concept of using scat sniffing dogs to to help us find neutria and more importantly in helping us find nutria, because we had used dogs throughout the program. To eliminate Autria is a hunting technique, but when you're trying to prove they call it proof of freedom in the the invasive species Proof that an area is free of an invasive species UM is to layer multiple detection technologies and techniques on top of each other to give you enhanced confidence that that there's nothing there. You know, you can never prove that they're gone, but by building a strong case of circumstantial evidence, you can reach a conclusion that's that the nutrient have been eradicated. Like human observation, no one's seen any They're not showing up in your fur catchers on your floats. Dogs aren't finding their droppings exactly, And so the dogs true value here is not in really finding nutria, although it would be important if they did. Their true values and is enhancing our confidence that they are in fact on um because their sense of smell is remarkable and a human observer can just is going off visual cues and you know, you walk through this marsh and you you know, you were in it today hunting for secret here, and imagine would be a good we were moved to probably seventy or eighty neutria from that general area right in front of where you were hunting. That that was all prime neutria habitant. Yep, that's the kind of stuff they liked. Yeah, So imagine having to cover like every inch of that marsh between where you were in that far wood line, and we had to scour that. And when you're down to maybe there's only one or two neutria left in there, what are the odds that that two, three, or even four people just walking back and forth they're actually gonna find that one little piece of scat or whatnot. So well, Steve had a dead deer d fifty yards from and you know, without GPS technology, hard to find that. Yeah, it's hard. I had to walk around here a little bit even, I like I shot away point from tree stand to where our thought he was, you know, just like bearing and in a distance. I walked over there and and I was like, I don't know, he's gotta being here somewhere, and just yeah, you can miss a lot. So right now, if I like, do you think that, if you know within twenty mile radius where we're sitting right now, you don't think there's a single living neutrient or do you think there's got to be one that you've you've missed? You know that wouldn't be one, right one. There's no worry to one boy and one girl exactly. And so what we know about their ability to reproduce and their detectability when they reached some sort of critical mass. Uh, we would reasonably expect to be able to find them if over the course of two years that you know, we've been looking that if they had sort of rebuilt a small population, we probably have detected it. I'm pretty confident of that. If you talk about a small population, you have to get in there and just like rapid response, get it out as as quickly as possible. So I'm actually I had a lot of confidence in the crew that we put together, in the folks that have remained on the project are really committed and talented, and I think that the fact that they're not finding anything is an indication that there's nothing to find. So how are those people that are still working at how are they coping with the job anymore? Well, so, you know, about five of them now are detected dog handlers, and and honestly, part of my rationale for for getting that tool off the ground is a bit of a morayal boost. People love to work with dogs, and so even if on a daily basis they're not getting their own personal satisfaction by finding a neutria, they're getting some satisfaction of working with a dog and training the dog and making sure the dog is is still up on on the top of things. UM. But even then it's it's a challenge, you know. The the the guys that have been with a project from the very beginning talk fondly of the good old days, you know, and they miss it. Be careful. One of them might just keep their jobs to retirement. I wish I could tell the story we heard the other day, not about neutria, but question already I have it is, UM, because I got one more main question? Then can you mind away from one more main one? UM? Have so other places that deal with neutria? Okay, looking at like you know, they still deal with in Louisiana to like have our other places that are dealing with infestations? Are they looking to what you guys did. Are you in exporting the technologies or is it just like so regionally specific. No, Actually, that's a great question. And one of the one of the criteria that was built into the funding legislation that supported this program from beginning was that that one of our missions was to help to educate everyone else is dealing with nutria with tools and techniques that can be helpful elsewhere. UM. So we've we put a lot of effort into outreach and working with other UH folks that are dealing with nutria. We still get a lot of calls from from people dealing with nutria. There's been a new outbreak or invasion in California where they had previously there's been a small population that had been eliminated, so they didn't think they had a problem, but I think stuff is now moving down from from the Northern States there and UH just this past summer, I was invited to visit UH Holland where they have a problem with Nutria invading from Germany, coming across the border and in infiltrating their canal system which is critical to life as they know it in Holland. So you know, we've we've shared this technology, these techniques with other folks about the world. But I started to talk earlier and I'm not sure I ever finished the thought on the sort of the biological criteria have to be able to meet UH in order for oh, yeah, I got yours be feasible, and one of those is you have to be able to put every animal at risk. And that's why getting the private landowners on board was so important. UM and oh gosh, all these thoughts running through my head. I've forgotten all the things that I used to be able to rattle off in all my slide presentations. But yeah, it's been a little while. Um, so you have to have techniques that are effective. So we you know, work on all these different, uh, different techniques, techniques that are socially acceptable. So you know, they're toxic ins that could be applied to eliminate nutria, but they're probably also going to eliminate a whole lot of other species. So so, uh, that's an important feature. But when you start looking at those criteria and applying them to other areas, we were very fortunate in um Maryland. The del Marva Peninsula, which is that land spit between the Chespeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean that's comprised of the state of Delaware and the eastern shore of the Chespeake portions of Maryland and Virginia is essentially an island, and the nutria that we had here were introduced. They didn't expand from somewhere else. It was an expanding population and they're limited in their northern distribution by winter weather. So essentially we had an island a big island, but it you know, it was an island that we could sort of get around and eliminate. So if you look at places like Louisiana, which have an almost identical ecological problem to what we have here, they have the same sort of coastal marshes, the same suite of plant species that are impacted, and the same effects of nutria, but it's orders of magnitudes greater than both in size and in numbers of nutria than we have here. They don't have a severe winners, so they've got more reproduction taking place, and they estimate in Louisiana, in the ten years the first ten years after nutria were introduced, as few as probably twenty animals had attained populations of twenty million UM. And they just they're everywhere, and they're in adjacent states. So there's there's just, uh, there's no way to get around the problem, you know. So that one uh, one of the other criteria is the risk of reinvasion needs to be near zero. So on the del Marva Peninsula we had that very low risk of reinvasion unless someone choose to bring one in Louisia, an unfortunately, uh, surrounded by a sea of Nutria, so they'll just had a constant influx. So they took a much different approach um and rather than hiring trappers to you know, trap down to a near zero population level, they looked at the history of Nutria trapping activities in relation to the firm market, and they established a bounty system based on historical PELP prices UH to encourage and incentivize trappers to UH pursue Nutria in the hopes that they could depress the population enough that they wouldn't see the amount of damage that they did. So they monitored that by conducting annual vegetation surveys and they take a helicopter fly these They had like miles of transax or something like that, and every time they reached a neutria, it's called to eat out. When they sort of destroy an area of marsh, that fly a circle around it, and they do that every year and measure the size of those circles and and if they were contracting, then they were sort of moving in the right direction. If they were getting bigger, they weren't taking enough neutria. So to put it in context with Maryland, over the life of the project, and you remember earlier I said, you know, as many as fifty thousand new tria on Blackwater Refuge alone. We've removed about fourteen thousand neutria over the lifespan of this project, far fewer than we anticipated at the beginning. UH. And if you compare that to Louisiana there uh incentive program they remove. Their goal is to remove about four hundred thousand new tria a year, and that seems to be enough the target that keeps that marsh damage at a somewhat acceptable level. So other places that have expressed an interest. UH. We've had visits from folks in South Korea, China, Israel. UM. We were invit did to participate in a big workshop in uh the Pacific Northwest if you probably ten years ago now um uh. But then it even crosses species. We were actually asked to come and consult on a beaver infestation problem in Gyodo, Fuego and Extreme South America, where they were introduced ironically about the same time that new trou were introduced here. We did a large ye you see cappy Barra yep, cav bar last winter man neutra actually pretty closely related to cappy bara. UM. But the Argentinian military brought North American beaver into establish of fur for military clothing. So they released them and they thought they'd have trappers go out, and well, it turns out they didn't have a trapping community. People didn't know what to do with them, and they expanded and proliferated, and now they're should have tried to introduce trappers too. Well that's cut a few cut a male and a female trapper loose over our Our agency has been approached about conducting some training activities down there to help kind of educate folks on how to effectively trap beaver and whatnot. But part of that is, you know, the goals eradication and and trapping for fur and trapping for eradication are two different for reasons we explored here tonight. Yeah. It's a good story, man, Yeah, it uh, it was a pretty exciting chapter in my career. And yeah, the story starts to make its own grave. You know, it's like just got like a lot to it. Man. Yeah, yann, what was your what was your conservation through eradication? Steve first told me. Now I was like, man, that's a ringer. Um. Now you pretty much answered it. But I was gonna ask like where the closest next population is to the south, and then you know if it could become this way. But it sounds like you have that the barrier of the uh Chests Speake Bay that they're not going to swim. They are in relatively close proximity. In Virginia Beach is probably the closest place that we know about. Virginia Beach has something. Yeah, that whole stretch that's southeast southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, that whole complex down on the Eblemarle Sound and Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, Madam Mesquite National Wildlife Refuge, and then right up into the intensively urbanized areas in Virginia Beach, all the the drainage systems and whatnot. There's a new Tria on the Naval Air Force bases down there. It's got alligators. Man. Well, in Louisiana, it is the h A lot of the the new tree trappers sell the carcasses to delligator farmers. So they get five bucks for the tail that they turn in and then they get a buck or two for the carcass that they provide. So so, but you know the Chestpeake Bay. The mouth of Chestpeake Bay is about fourteen miles. Why, that would be a pretty significant dispersal effort to get a nutrie to swim across that. Uh So, the narrowest point of the bay outside of the mouth of are the head of the bay where the Susquehanna River feeds into it is actually right here in Dorchester County. It's about four and a half miles across uh to Calvert County. And in the nineteen nineties they found a small population in a tributary of the Potomac River and the Maryland Department Natural Resources trapped about fifty animals out there and they've they've never seen a resurgence of that population, although occasionally we get reports. You guys need to move on the Norway rat eliminate rats. You know what interesting tidbit is. Uh My brother was telling me the anchorage is the world's largest port city with no rats. Interesting. And when they get a boat that comes in, if they if they inspect it, if they find rats on that boat does not touch shore. Yeah, well, you've been to New Zealand. Their biosecurity uh procedures are pretty remarkable. Fly in they put out literature about making sure your hiking boots don't have weed seeds and you're camping equipment. Yeah, did you get did you did you get messed with for having muddy boots coming in New Zealand. I don't know if we got. I can't remember now if we get it was a long time ago we got messed with, or if it was just protocol. But they basically took all my fishing gear, not not the flies and reels and polls themselves, but the you know, clothing type gear and all of our camping gear, and they took it into a room and I think you can actually watch it, and they basically fumigated it and then they put in a plastic bag to here you go have fun. Yeah. Yeah, they take their invasive species stuff pretty seriously, and they're not that they don't have a thousand invasive and they're working aggressively to try to eliminate them as much as possible. So, yeah, we saw traps all over the place for what they call stout, which is uh um Stevie. You any final things that fall so far out of context that you didn't get a chance to bring them up? Oh man, so much I was initially wondering if I could possibly talk about this for two hours, and but yeah, you know, I think that the one thing I'd like to just reiterate as a concluding thought is is a plea for people to you know, recognize the importance of traditionally urban or rural values and activities and the contributions they make to modern day conservation. You know, this project would have been extremely difficult without the local knowledge we were able to tap into through the trapping community. And uh, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that crosses species, and you know, it's a segment of our society that's much maligned and in their routinely efforts to eliminate trapping and the the kinds of traditional wildlife management tools that that that we've used, and you know, they still have an incredibly important place in a modern society. And and uh, I guess that's something even I think, Uh, non trapping sports people uh often don't think about trapping that much and don't have the support very ill there's a very uh ill advised group folks um that tried to This is my concluding thought that the last year, during the last election cycle, I tried to get through an initiative in Montana to ban trapping on public land. And you know, I thought of you know, I had in my in my pocket, like a dozen reasons why I thought that was a bad idea. One of the things in my pocket that one of the things that my pocket did not include was the one the director of the State Wildlife Agency UM came out and said, why uh would we be putting ourselves into a situation to pay government people to do something that you have other people paying us to go do, Speaking of beaver removal, He's like, we do not have the budget right to take care of all of the conflicts agricultural road other all of just the beaver conflicts alone. Yep, you got a whole squad of people out there who you know, are running like little small businesses traveling beavers, and you want to take that away from someone's gonna those beavers gonna cause problems and then we're gonna have government guys doing it. M You know, it was that that matter was soundly defeated. Yeah. I actually had a second concluding thought. Concluding concluding, want to just make sure I emphasize the importance of sort of partnerships in tackling monumental conservation issues like this, and without the joint efforts of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Maryland Department and Natural Resources, Tutor Farms, and the hundreds of private landowners that supported, as well as a ton of of several dozen of non governmental organizations like the Maryland Trappers Association and the Salesbury Zoo and other groups that were that sort of rally around the environment that that really helped to generate the support, to keep the funding in place, and and all that sort of thing. Those partnerships are just critical for um the successive programs like this right, so be a good partner. That's my final concluder. Thank you for listening. Thank you