00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening to Hunt Don't Meet e podcast, you can't predict anything presented by first light, Go farther, stay longer ed Arnett, I didn't know until I don't think I knew till now. He used to be a bat like a bat biologist. I did, But I just can't picture because I figured. I always figure you um that your biology interests are dovetailed with your hunting interests, but bats that's not really the case. They certainly were. I grew up always wanting to be a biologist and wanting to study big game like most biologist A lot of biologists do, and uh I F I did my master's on big orange cheap so I fulfilled that for a long time. And UH when I went to work at in the Pacific Northwest, I started working a lot more on nine game issues. And when I worked to work for Timber Company Warehouser, I really started engaging in bat research. My PhD was on UH bats and forest management did a lot of work on wind energy and bats. And before I came to t RCP and got to meet you, guys. I was running conservation programs for Bat Conservation International and led a bunch of research on wind energy and back kills across the country. So you mean like bats running into um windmills or not wind mills, but they're being hit by the turning blades. They don't run into them. Bats have a very unique echolocation system and they helps them sea in the dark. And if there's too many of them that run into things, there would be what I'd call losers and Darwin's causino. They're not supposed to run into things, so they're getting hit by the turbans. So what was what was wire Houser's interest in bats? So you know, like if you if for you listeners, if you got a ream of printer paper laying around, there's a very good chance if you go look at that printer paper, it will say wire Houser on it was their interest in UH in bats. So back in when I UH finished up my graduate program on my big run Cheap study, I went to the Northwest and I was working for the Forest Service, then went to work with Warehouser. The reason I mentioned the Forest Service job as I started that literally a month after they listed the Northern spot at owl and a couple of years later, um I uh I basically um applied for this job and got it, and um you know, at that time, spotted owl's were driving a lot of the issues for this forest product. Yeah, okay, good ahead, I got a comment. But it's an endangered species issue. And so my job we were hired on basically to look at all of the managed forest and all the different kind is wildlife that use managed forests, and how in fact managed forest provide habitat or don't, and what we could do in a in a intensively managed forest context to manage all these species that could be listed in the future. Back at that time they were called Category two species, which all that really meant was there was a designation that they could be listed in the future. So Warehouser hired a bunch of people, myself included, to look at things beyond just spotted owl another endangered species issues because in their mind, all the trouble that spotted owl, all the controversy and trouble and just bad for business stuff that the spotted owl brought onto the logging industry, they were thinking of themselves, what's the next thing that's going to come up, and how can we get out ahead of that. That's exactly right, which is like being a responsible player, right, Yeah, exactly. They were thinking ahead of the game, whatever their regardless of their motivation. Of the motive. Yeah, obviously there were business ties to that, community relationships and those kind of being good neighbors and that kind of stuff, but the reality was it was all about you know, the future, licensed to operate and at that time and there still are today a number of species that are potentially going to be listed. So I did most of my work. I shifted from most of the work on four legged ungulets and you know, other four legged critters to nothing but songbirds, amphibians in stream amphibians in particular those that utilize small streams and forests, and bats. So that's how I got into it. And uh, one thing led to another and started working pretty intensively on bats and developed a PhD dissertation project on it, and the rest is history. So what was the what was the vulnerability of the bats? Like what was the harvest timber? Harvests? Like they were what do they needed? What were they using timber for? Next? What they need? Yeah, they need them for roosting. Um for both maternity roots where they have their young. Yeah, some old roots behind x full eating bark. So the crevices in bark. And you've seen this walking around the woods, dead trees, they'll go into woodpecker holes. Sometimes they'll uh just a just a slight crack and a live tree can create a place for bats. So they either roost during the night, you know, they do what's called night roosting. But they also have maternity colonies. And sometimes you'll be walking around next time you're out to Ponderosa Pine forest, you might see a big slab of bark peeling off of dead tree. There might be two or three hundred bats under that thing, just depending on how big their what species of bat is this so um, it could be any any of a number of species. There's what we call the crevice roosting species, and that could be anything from big brown to little brown bats. What's called the long eared myotis. That was the pictures you were looking at a little while ago in my house. That was a long eared myotis getting a drink of water. Uh. There's several of them that use uh use those crevices. I'm guilty of having not paid a whole hell of attention to bats in my life. I didn't either take like I got that hunting fishing problem that you get, where like I I spent a lot of time observing, thinking about, reading about talking about game, either game species or like charismatic animals. Right, so animals that maybe animals that sort of have something to do with hunting and fishing, even if they're only a peripheral player. Right, Like I'm not gonna hunt humpback whales, but I'm interested in humpback whales because when I'm out fishing salmon and haliban and whatnot, I'm observing humpbacks and watching them fish, and so they sort of enter my consciousness. Right, But like, the bat has never had a real in hold with me, and and it does it for most people. I mean, most hunters probably wondering if they could hit him with a shotgun when they're running around in the evening, you know. But the reality is they're ridiculously important to ecosystems, and the insectivorous bad to eat insects at a rate that can all oftentimes render the uh U render That's maybe not the right word, but lessen the need for pesticides and in agricultural systems because they eat so many insects. There's some studies in Texas that demonstrate it's into the multi billions of dollars in terms of loss or the reduction of agricultural pests. Um they but they also important pollinators. They're important seed dispersers across the world. They eat just about everything, those that eat blood, those that eat fish. Some have specialized hooks for catching fish. All the bad pictures you've seen around my players there, they're all insectivorous bats, but they play a vital role. And you know, the interesting thing, we started calling things like this. You know you've heard LBJ the little brown jobs for dickey birds. Oh yeah, and then uh and then in the LBMs in mycology lb M little brown mushrooms, little brown mushrooms. Like if you're out mush mushroom hunting and you see a little brown mushroom, it's like, just keep walking. You'll never positively identify that thing. Or that's kind of like the just a term like we got your you know, morals, corals, bleats, LBMs, little brown mushroom. We started calling bats and other things like them. They are not so charismatic, microfuno. But they're critical. They're absolutely critical. And it started, Yeah, I start getting you to think about ecosystems and and you know, biological communities and systems. Everything's interconnected. Elder Leopold called the cogs and wheels, cogs on the wheels exactly right. You know, I was in Um, I was in the say shells. You know where to say shells are like they sit off if you imagine if you went due east out of Somalia, wig at hell in the Indian Ocean. To say shells are so far removed that no one even knew they had never been colonized. No one knew about them until they came up with like intercontinental shipping. Like no indigenous people as wasn't like the Polynesian Islands, where indigenous people eventually found all the like Hawaii and everything. No one ever stepped foot on the stay shells until someone showed up in like in a full on ship. No one knew they were there, but we were there. The only native mammal on the say shells is the bat. Yeah, big huge freaking bats. Yeah that's what they were. Come out at night, look like a jet, like a bat the kind of bat that would like bite your neck, could kill you, but not like fruit in in some some countries are still consumption of bats. Yeah, that was one of the few times I ever paid attention to a bat. And my kids like to go on They like it to me to go on YouTube and pull up videos of Aboriginal Australians hunting baths boomerangs, which is like, if you've got kids, that's big ship to a kid. Hit the back of the boomerang is endlessly fascinating to children. That's a hell of a lot of skill to These guys are good man. They round them up and cook them. Um, So we have like I can't remember where we left off we're talking to we're talking about stage gross. Yes you want, I gotta I know where we're left off. Go ahead, I wrote it down. How long ago was it that we had a sage grouse conversation? A year ago and maybe a month? Okay, so we're doing a year ago checking on something. And here's why, here's why you should care. Here's why you should care about stage grouse. Besides the fact that it's just like a it passes the test that I put out earlier. The test I put out, We're like, I'm interested in things that have hunting efficient implications. So there's that with sage grouse. So you know, this is a game bird, the largest grouse species we have. Um, it's a very it's an iconic bird that is symbolizes is kind of of a symbol of a certain biome or a certain habitat type of the great sage brush sees um. And also it's really important to watch because earlier we're talking about the spotted out. If you're only remember the spotted owl debate, the spotted owl be kind of came to this sort of bird that was a proxy for a broader argument. And the broader argument was about, um, to what level do we inconvenience are commercial activities? To what degree are we willing to inconvenience are commercial activities out of deference to wildlife? Is that fair? Ed? That's very fair. So it became like it became this symbol of a national debate about if we had to turn we can make money doing something, but that we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna perhaps lose species of wildlife in order to make that money. Is it worthwhile or not? Like do we push ahead or do we pull back? And it was sad for the bird because here's this bird has no idea any of this is going on. But the bird becomes like a maligned creature. Yeah, the bird becomes like the punchline to a joke or a threat. Sure, there was a lot of that going around in the nineties. Yeah, and it want to be like the bird's reputation kind of suffered and in a way, like if you think about these sort of debates, we're sort of in a current thing now with you know, we're security now like gray wolves, okay, where the gray wolve sort of stands in as a symbol of this bigger argument about do are we gonna allow an animal beyond the landscape that is so inconvenient to some people live Like it's an inconvenient to livestock producers and a lot of hunters perceived it as being very inconvenient to them, And so what is our tolerance level going to be of this species? And it suffers in a similar way that the spotted owl suffering. It's always sad to see this happen where the wolf, like this animal that cannot that would be incapable of comprehending the debate that he's in. Like wolves exist without the knowledge that this conversation is taking place. They don't know. They have know, like if they don't know anything else of the world, to be on their own experience. Like if you ask a wolf in Wyoming, he doesn't know that there's a bunch in Alaska, but they're missing from other areas. It's just like way outside. He just like understands his little realm. But meanwhile we're talking about them. Is this big and become this big single and it becomes something that winds up being like the animal itself becomes controversial when all he's doing is putting us in a situation where we need to discuss our tolerances, but he becomes sort of a victim of it. That's all like a preface to say that right now, if you want to understand wildlife politics and kind of where we're headed and the kind of conversations that we're going to continue to have, the current version, the current spotted out like today's spotted out real quickly, wad what happened to? How's the spotted all doing now? Is he good? No? They're not off the list? Um and just to add one quick thing to that. You know, they became the poster child, and in my view, um really kind of zembled the metaphor if you can't see the forest because of the trees in Freddy and everybody focused on spotted owls, but it was really about that ecosystem and about accelerated harvest of old growth forest and how important old growth forests were. We learned a lot about, you know, at that time, there wasn't an immense amount of research, particularly in managed forest, and I think we learned a lot about, you know, how you can manage structural features and habitat features for the animal without necessarily having older forests, but you have older forest conditions. And but what I think a lot of people realized in with the spotted owl as the poster child, that this is about an ecosystem that's vital to so many different creatures and you can manage you can you can preserve old growth forest, but you can also learn and also manage for habitat in managed forests as well. Yeah, and in the same way that that spotted owl became a poster child or symbolic of old growth forest, we're gonna talk about now like with sage grouse. The sage grouse is sort of standing in as this as the poster child of sagebrush. Yep, and like a better one. I think that would ring with more people. Perhaps would be if the if, the if the American prong horn or antelope. We're in as rough of a spot as the as the sage grouse is. I think people might be seeing this different, more well known creature and kind more like there's just like kind of like a cooler it's just bigger, it's more recognizable. You know, you should picture people that animal. They're gonna know. To start a conversation about stage grouse, you almost gotta be like, okay, here's what one looks like, because a lot of people don't really know, right. But to wrap up the point I was making earlier and leading into this, this conversation that we're having about in like economically inconvenient animals and what and how much do we curtail activities in order to ensure that we don't drive species to extinction, and we about extinction, it's we're talking about making things gone forever. This conversation will always be going on. It's just the players will change. That's right on the wildlife and the human front. Yeah, the wildlife. And it's good because you know what at a time, if we hadn't figured out electricity, um, and we were driving and when we were driving uh, some whales to extinction and driving some whales to near extinction in order to make fuel oil for city lamps, we would have been having this conversation in the eighteen hundreds instead of what we did. But the whale was saved by electricity or probably no, yeah, by the other thing. No, not electricity, yeah, but but fossil fuels. So, which is at the heart of this discussion, which we exchanged what you have to bring even more full circuit wines about this. So we're gonna talk about stage grouss. But remember we're talking about stage guss. We're talking about a current version of something that will always be happening in our society, in our country, which is a country that places a tremendous value on wildlife and also we play a tremendous value on economic prosperity. You know, Um, if I may, before I tell you where we left off and start into that. You also made a point in the last podcast that really hammers home on this because you were talking about you'd think if you went to the Philippines or some other place you could just catch the hell out of fish, and not always the case. And there's that linkage between, uh, that social and economic component with conservation that's vital. I mean, we want wildlife in this country. We have um a variety of laws and principles that we work from to keep wildlife. We have, you know, the legacy at Theodore Roosevelt and and all of the people that he worked with and we're colleagues with, and thereafter that, you know, define that social um desire to have wildlife in our landscapes, and then we've been trying to figure out that economic balance ever since. But make no mistake, if we had five million people in the US and hardly any resources, we wouldn't have very many wildlife either. That's the funny thing I find like this is uh, you know, like guys that like to get all ready for like societal collapse, like prepper type of guys there are real fired up about having the right kind of hunting guns. Like you see him online debating like what's the perfect gun for post apocalyptic hunting scenarios. It'd be like, dude, post apocalyptic scenarios or like societal collapses in failed states generally mean there is no wildlife. You don't have a failure, you don't have like robust wildlife within a failed state. That's right, the first thing that goes And that was your point. What was I thought about that? Well, that was the whole point of I thought. You know, the discussion about the Philippines where you're talking about going fishing and hard to confine the fish because they poperished scenario I was reading on. I just turned into the frontier days again are coming through the road. You know this one guy, this one prep rouse reading no one time he was talking about he's like laying it out for his buddies and he's like, hey, here's the thing though, man, in a real post apocalyptic, you know, societal collapse scenario, you need a gun that's real good for rats and dogs. Because he was like he's planning on he's gonna be eating these rats, but he thinks that the dogs are gonna be out trying to kill you, that the dogs are gonna pack up. Like this is the level of detail, like like like like prepper guys get into He's got it all sorted out. But all right, so a year ago, where was the Can you just lay out for me what's going on with stage grouse? Okay, what's going on in general? What was going on a year ago? And then we're gonna focus on what happened since a year ago. Okay, So when you and Ronnie were out hunting and we hooked up and talked about stage grouse, it was days literally days after the um decision was made as a not warranted decision by the Fish and Wildlife Service to list and provide protections under the Endangered Species Act for sage grouse, meaning they they looked at the stage grouse issue and tried to figure out, like, do we need to make give them a Danger Species Act protection? Correct all the numbers and said, you know what, we thought we might need to, but we don't. Well they didn't run. They ran a lot of numbers, but there was a lot that went into that that we'll get into on what it took to get to that decision. But not everything was in place, and that's why it's so important for our talk today about what still isn't yet in place per se and what's being considered. But what led up to that where decades of research, a lot of concern back at the nineties from biologists not not not you know, uh ngo, I got it's killing me. I gotta interrupt. You go ahead. Can you back up a hundred fifty years? Oh man? Not not detail level, but tell how like I know it's impossible staying and like this kind of question drives biologist nuts. How many of these birds were there? Where were they living? And how much has their habitat been reduced? And how much has their numbers been reduced? So people kind of understanding, well, how this even came to be? Yep, Um, they are an obligate of sage brush, which means they cannot live without sage brush in their lives. So you didn't have them in the east or the south, or in Illinois or you know, in the mid heart of the Midwest, you know. So so went the stage grounse as sage brush did. So they were everywhere where there was sage brush. And at that time there were fourteen states I believe at least three provinces um that had extensive sage brush habitat. There was an estimate, and I remember we talked about this because you asked me if I knew where the sixty million bisons figure came from. It was gues estimated. I'll say, at best sixteen million stage grouse at the turn of the century, you know, you know, before the turn of the century, before Europeans, who knows if in the sagebrush like portions of the sage brush sees were like the hundredth meridian in west, in the Great Plains and in the Great Basin. Yep, that's right, and they no longer exists in three states, and now we have them in eleven states. It's estimated that about fifty of the habitat has been lost, and that was one of the metrics that led the service to consider the species for listening. They've lost half their habitat. It's been fragmented, it's been degradated. Um, there's all kinds of threats to the remaining habitat, and the numbers have been going down for a long time now, as you well know. UM. Game bird populations fluctuate on an annual basis, sometime on you know, eight to ten year cycles, but it's all tied to precipitation and the quality of the habitat and the right rain could double their numbers. The wrong hailstorm could have exactly yeah, that's exactly right. And so they always have these oscillations on any given year. But the long term trend has been about one percent decline since nineteen six up until the last figure in that particular um study that that I often referenced through the Western Association of Fish and Wilife Agencies was in the numbers went up quite a bit. Uh this year they're they're down more so, they fluctuate, but the long term trend has been down, and that's largely because they've been losing habitat. And even if their sage brush out there, it doesn't necessarily mean it's quality and good condition that that renders it suitable for the birds. So that's part of the reason that they were even being considered to be listed in the first place. We were down somewhere in the neighborhood of two to four hundred thousand birds, which in of itself isn't necessarily an alarmingly low number. But the longer you kick that can down the road, the more likely it is to go down to maybe a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand, and then all of a sudden, you're at fifty going, oh ship, Now what do we do? And it may be irreversible at that point in time. Would you call uh sage grouse an indicator species? Yes, and we often refer to him that. Another term would be an umbrella species, whereby if you if you manage habitat across a landscape for that particular species, you're very likely to encompass a variety of other critters that that live in that system. We often use that term. What's the term? It's like, it's not there's a term. It's it's like a similar like Bergman's rule or Bergman's principle has got a name attached to it. But there's a term for when you have like like with um passenger pigeons, you can have three billion of them and they're fine, but somehow you can't have fifty thousand of them. M hmm. It's like a word for this that just sounds like a tipping point. There's a point at which there's a point at which like you could never maintain you could maintain a species, and we now know you couldn't maintain a species of ten passenger pigeons. Yeah, it has to be that there has to be like a million or none. Oh, I see what you're saying, and I'm not I'm not sure. I can tell you. One term some types people confuse with the indicator species is keystone. That's very different. If if sage grouse were to somehow miraculously go away, and we certainly hope they don't, I doubt there is a key stone effect. If you take wolves out of an ecosystem, and we saw this with the Yello stone, you can have cast our beaver, for example, you can have huge impacts on other other parts of the systems. That makes sense. Yeah, if the sage grouse goes, you're not likely to see some like cascading series of you won't see like some ecological collapse. However, though, um, if sage grouse go, that means their habitats gone. So my guests would be a lot of other species would go with them, not because they went, but because if it's because the stage brush is gone. At the stage brush is gone, you're gonna lose twenty seven that's exactly right, or some some profound number of you know, and as we've discussed before to the question on the indicator species, there's three hundred and fifty at least three hundred fifty species of plants and animals that are dependent on the stage rust ecosystem in some way, shape or form, and including some big time game animals exactly mule deer animal. Yeah, and we probably both have stories on chasing deer and busting sage. I got a current one from this buck. My cousin and I just killed and satres busting up all over the place while we're trying to put a sneak on the stamp deer. So they utilize the same systems. Alright, So back to our timeline. Uh So the Department of a Tier at the time, Sally Jewel, no, Secretary Sally Jewel inherited that from Ken's Sal's are Ken's sales are kind of started all this with the you know, um and may uh some good headway with the states and then and then Secretary Jewel came in afterwards. Um uh. The states were working on their individual state plans back in two thousand tens when this really kicked off, because there was in fact a lawsuit that that said what what happened back prior to the decision, the bird was determined to be warranted for protections under the essay, but precluded. And what that meant was they definitely warranted those protections, but there were a bunch of other species that had higher priority that were ahead of them. So that's what the precluded part means now. And that was the wake up call to the states into industry that you better sort this out or it's gonna get real bad for you. That's right, And what really kicked that off. And you'll hear a lot of people talk about the sue and settle scenario. There's no doubt there was a lawsuit that forced the decision and Judge Windmill, who was the federal uh judge that was handed this uh this lawsuit said no fish and wilife service. You're gonna go back and you're gonna you're gonna actually make a determination, but I'm gonna give you five years to do it. So that's where that whole timeline came in. If that hadn't happened, who knows how serious people would have taken this. You always got a good christ got to have a good crisis, you know, to start doing something. It seems like our histories replete with that, unfortunately. But the proactive is always got to be a little less than the than the reactive. So this was a reaction that lawsuit, and everybody did take it serious and started putting state plans together, the federal start agencies start working on their federal plans. The services trying to get their head around how this is all going to stitch together into a comprehensive strategy that would get them either to a warrant it or not warrant a decision. And just let me just step into some people follow the kind of like when I say that with a wake up call, like if a species, like let's say the stage gross, if the sage grouse were to get listed and and get Endangered Species Act protections, that is gonna shut down a lot of land use activities in places that are vital to sage grouse. So one thing is damn sure is gonna happen is you're not gonna hunt them anymore. So hunting seasons are done done. What it also done is a lot of cattle grazing sheep grazing operations are gonna be affected, probably, but primarily is going to be like energy development, energy extraction, that industry is gonna be just locked out of a lot of places. Let me say a wake up call. These guys might have never paid any attention to sage grouse hunters, definitely do. Someone says, you know what, I see a I sense a long term problem for sage grouse. I'm gonna say that I'm gonna I'm gonna argue that they that they should be listened under the ESA, and I'm gonna soothe the Feds for having not done it. The Feds look at it, they come up to a settlement that says we need time to determine to to figure out this is true or not. Now all these groups from guys that sportsman's groups like the hunt them and any other business in states that host this business are like, holy shit, if this goes down, our economy goes down. So we now are all of a sudden real interested in sage grouse. Thus the impending crisis that kick started. Everybody the hammer, It's like the hammer over your head is the es A. And now there's a big movement to try to make the s A the hammerings not so hammer like this was. But that's a whole other conversations a conversation. But yeah, pull some teeth out of that jaw Well to bring that full circle backrobab. We started this with how I got into bats. That's exactly what Warehousers saw with what happened with the spotted owl. It literally shut down entire community. We're not talking just you know, three of us getting kicked off our job. We're talking entire parts of states going you know, having true economic collapse. And and the industry saw the kinds of revenues that were wrapped up in in the protection zones, and they said, okay, we can't do this again. Let's start, let's start being more proactive. That's why I was hired to study mats. It seems haigh because one of the beautiful things about America's that there's some like elements of America that values wildlife so highly. But so okay, so to get back on track here, so I want to make sure we get discovered. So so that's all going on, and you were you were just getting too okay. The States started to be like, who what what's the stage? Gross? Um? You I mean to describe a stre were getting to the well of sudden getting really interested. Why why do we care about this? Creator? Yeah, So you know, the States started putting their plans, and make make no mistake, the state biologists been watching this for a long time. It just sometimes it takes that looming crisis. They were aware, they were aware of it, and they had they were been doing things research, monitoring, some habitat projects, those kinds of things, but there wasn't a you know, a comprehensive strategy for many of the states. Wyoming led the way they started it in two thousand eight UM, and then other states followed. And so you had all these state level efforts going on. You had the federal agencies putting their plans together, and then in two thousand and ten you had something pretty extraordinary, which was the National UH Natural Natural Resources Conservation Service in OURCS put an initiative together called the States Grouse Initiative that was pumping millions and millions of dollars into private landowners to incentivize them to change their grazing practices. Do UH do some fencing and water type projects that were favorable to stags, grouse, all kinds of different things, cut juniper trees, and it incentivized conservation on private lands. So you have those three legs of that stool that kind of put together made a good, solid, comprehensive package in addition to a fire strategy, a fire fighting strategy that crossed political boundaries between Feds and states and counties. And I don't want to get into that because that's an extensive conversation in of itself, but just make no mistake, firefighting wasn't always as coordinated, and it probably still has some issues today. But at least there's a plan in a strategy in place to try to fight fire in the Great Basin in particular, where fire is a huge threat to sage grouse habitat, and in fact, I think in Nevada they lost well over a million and a half acres just this year. So you could say it's not working, but the other ship beats it out. Yeah, yeah, well and cheat grass comes back. And it's a vicious cycle with that cheat grass because it's a real flashy fuel that burns, burns even more extensive than so, so you have catastrophic fire destroys the stage brush, and the stage brush just never gets the leg up because it's getting beat up by It takes a long time to come back, and it varies, you know, some it depends on precipitation, elevation and the vegetation community. Right, so you've got site potential on any given piece of land that you can grow certain kinds of vegetation really well and sometimes you can't. And that you know, as you go up in elevation and to get into like Mountain big sage systems with with higher precipitation, um, they have more resistance and resilience if you will, to fires and they come back more readily than out in you know, parts of the Great Basin for just as an example where there's much lower precipitation, different soil regime, that kind of thing. But anyway, all those legs of that stool were really important for the Fish and Wildlife Service to say, Okay, we've got federal plans that are pretty solid, um, we've got a lot of state plans uh varying degrees of ability to address all these different threats to sage grouse. We've got these private land efforts, lots of money going into that, and we've got this firefighting strategy. That's what got them in a comprehensive way to that not warranted decision. None of those things probably could have stood alone on their own. You needed that comprehensive nature. So they were they were able to say, like, all right, we trust all these like inner like these interrelated plans and parts that you've put in place. We trust that that you're going to recover stage girls. That's in essence, That's exactly what they said. Now and when that announcement king, So it was a big deal, like you know, you had the governors from several states, oh collected, there's a big speech that people. Were people really thinking that they didn't know what the answer was going to be? Um, like how serious were they on the stage? No, don't care about the stage that like that here, but I mean like like was it did you know all along? Like here's a predict okay, like here's another issue, like I anticipate that pebble mind in Bristol Bay will not happen. I believe it will never happen. Now, were there people that said the listing will never happen? Or was it really like people really felt that. I don't think that anybody felt that it was a real possibility. Yeah, no, I that was an absolutely real possibility, no question about that. Sorry I didn't follow your line there. I Um no, I don't think anybody sat back and said that's never gonna happen. They may have in two thousand ten UM or even before that, but I can sure you're leading up to it, everybody knew that that was was a very strong possibility, and I don't think anybody really knew up until the day of the announcement except those of us that were really working on it extensively. I felt, just as a biologist just thinking about what the determinations have threatened and endangered mean, and you know the criteria by which they decide those um you know, I thought about it in that context. I thought about it in what I could see playing out on the landscape. I didn't think they could get a warranted They should get a warranted. I felt that it would be not warranted with all of those pieces in place. However, if they're looking at the same data you're looking at, you feel like it should be. I feel I didn't feel I didn't think they could withstand legally a suit if they did list the bird with all that in place, I really, I really felt like we had enough to Now that gets to the question of Okay, how much is enough? What do you want? I mean, grouse do you want, we're not gonna have sixteen million again or whatever the hell the number one was. So you're saying that that, uh, you're saying it. Had they said we're gonna list the stage growth, you felt that that you could have beat him in court. I think if someone would have sued to say that was an inappropriate decision, as was done with lesser prayer chickens a few years ago, that um that the court would have said, no, I think there is enough here. You you you're gonna have to go not warranted. Um now, mind you, after they not warranted was was put in place. Lawsuits came on both ends of the extreme. You had. You had the hard left, some of the hard left environmental groups that sued because I didn't think it was enough, and some of the industry groups suited because I thought it was too much. Yeah, everyone thinks at the mark because I got somewhere in the middle. Yeah I had. I recently had a politician telling me that he always knows when he's found his spot when the far left and the far right are about the same. Mad, because then I know I've probably got about where I need to be. But but it was like it was generally in the in the hunting and like in the sportsman world. In the hunting world, it was generally applauded the not necessary because people were so euphoric about, uh, the fact that all these like disparate groups came together on behalf of this bird. So people thought, like this new conservation strategy that you it, that that people could come together, sportsmen's groups, industry, the political world could come together see a problem coming down the line, address the problem effectively and not need to get into the game of of of using the Endangered Species Act. That we were gonna like solve problems in some kind of way of like working together. Everyone's making a little bit of sacrifice, everyone's putting up with a little bit of inconvenience and stopping and preventing it from becoming a cultural war. And and I want to talk about that just a little bit because I experienced firsthand both the spot of owl approach and in that era and and sage grouse, and there they were very different, and you hit the nail right on the head. We brought all of these groups together to talk about this. Now it wasn't as proactive and and uh as as maybe we needed to maybe that should have started back in two thousand five or two thousand we could got ahead of the curve even better. But it's not that back in the days of the spotted owl that the regulatory agencies weren't talking to the industry. They were talking to counties, they were talking to all the different factions. It's just it was just different back then. You know, it wasn't as comprehensive and cohesive as it feels like the sage grouse effort was. And mind you, there's a whole lot more players on the sage grouse front than there were on the timber and you know, the on the spotted owl issue, and that really wound up being kind of a one size fits all. Do you hear that rhetoric all the time, one size fits all federal top down. That's really not how it was. Some will argue with me, and that's fine. They can argue all they want. But the reality is the sage grouse issue was a little bit more organic and a little bit more UH, you know, driven by state level UH players and local working groups, collaborations with the states and the fits and the and the counties and all the different industries. The sportsman's groups were involved. Hell, we weren't involved with spotted owls um because guys like me, they aren't interested that nobody was going to shoot a spoted owl, you know. And and uh, but you know, we weren't thinking as big about ecosystems. Then if you think about spotted owlgy you start thinking about tu leolk for example, or some other you know, or other types of species that we might hunt in in old growth forest systems. But we weren't thinking like that. We weren't even invited to the table the sportsman's groups. And you know that that plan not to get too far down the spotted out path. But the reality is that plan came down after a presidential summit that Clinton held. They brought some players together. Yeah, they brought some players together. Then the FEDS went back and wrote it and implemented it specifically to federal lands. It's not the private lands weren't considered or somehow regulated, but they weren't part of the bigger picture strategy. And I can remember even having discussions when I was doing some of my batwork talking about um, you know the role of private lands and endangered species in the Northwest, and and spotted owls weren't on our lands, weren't even necessarily considered as part of the recovery process because it was all about reserve systems on federal lands. Okay, so that really was kind of a one size fits all kind of a strategy. And back to your question, how they do and they're not doing so good, And maybe if we would have done it like the sage grouse way back then in the nineteen eighties, it might have been a different outcome because they weren't even really considering private lands that much. Private lands were still regulated, but it was just kind of written off that the managed forest doesn't provide anything for spotted owls and we've got to conserve them this way with a preservation system. That's not at all what happened with the sage grouse. And again, kind of the point I was trying to make is we've always talked to these different factions, but we never we haven't done it in a way we did with with the sage grouse issue. It's a new way of doing and conservation. I think it's the way we have to do it with anything this at the stage forward landscape scale, multiple species, and everybody at the table from the front end. And that doesn't mean every individual or every group, but you get those diverse voices in on the front end sportsmen, groups, industry, and that's how you're going to get to making both both ends of the extremes mad, probably because you find enough players that are willing to work to a compromise to the middle. Yeah, that's what this was in my humble opinion. And then and then what happened a month or so after we spoke last year, We had an election. So where we left off, you gave us a hypothetical, like you like to do, We're gonna bury ourselves in a time capsule right here in this spot where we were doing that podcast out in the sticks in five years from now, where we're gonna be. And I expressed lots of optimism. And I didn't say it then, but I'd say, now, oh, we're all gonna go hunt in sage grouse and do a celebratory hunt. I was pretty optimistic because I felt, like I told you earlier, I felt like they got to a not warranted in a legitimate and credible way. It wasn't perfect um and everybody sacrifice something, but we got a good comprehensive strategy that I didn't feel um was going to yield stage grouse winding up on the you know, the threatened or an injured species list at some point down the road if it was implemented. That's the key. So earlier he said, crunching the numbers. Well, part of that was crunching the numbers to see what the trends in the habitat and what the trends in the in the numbers of sage grouse were doing. But what the Fishing Wilife Service used extensively in this decision, it was something called the Peace Policy PEC, the Policy for to the Policy to Evaluate Conservation Effects. It's policy that was put in place in the early two thousands, and what it basically says is that when we make a decision about it, and we the Fishing Wildlife Service, are making a decision about a threatened or endangered species, we will look at things that may manifest in the future. There's some regulatory certainty or some kind of administrative policy or some level of certainty that these things are going to be implemented in the future, and we can consider that as part of our decision. And I can assure you. That was extensively used in this particular decision because the federal plans haven't played out yet. So like to go to some guy, you're gonna buy the house from the guy, and you're like, man, you know the porch has fallen off the guys that listen, bro, I'm gonna fix this porch before the sale goes through. And you're like, okay, I'm trusting that the ports is gonna be fixed. And you come back and the house, go on and do the deal because the guy is going to fix the porch. So what happens when you come back and it's not fixed you yet? Man? There was no assurance. No, But if you sign that in a contract, in the agreement that you sign when you buy a house, it's like, we agree to these things. You come back, it better be fixed or you're gonna sue your ass. That's the It's a pretty good metaphor because that's basically what the Fishing Wilife Service looked at. I've got signed federal plans. These are amendments to the Resource Management Plans for the BLM and the Forest Plans for the Forest Service that codifies they're going to do these things. That's an assurance to the service that something's going to happen in the right direction. Um. That when we left off before, it was kind of like there was a lot of promises had been made, but the fulfillment stage hadn't begun, that's right, and we were like, what six eight days after they've been signed, ink was hardly dry. Now, if I pop out of that timecats up there in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming where we all are hut in stats grouse and we were chatting about this, I don't know. I think it's uh, it's up in the air a little bit, but I'm still optimistic that we're going to do the right thing. And what has happened since then, we had an election and a change in the administration. Secretary Zinci is now in charge of the Department of Interior. UM. A couple of things that happened in between there somewhere and about January or February. Remember we've talked about some of the bad language, and you've helped us with some of this on the National Defense Authorization Act and some of these bad writers on these policies that basically was handing over UH management authority to the States gave gugnatorial veto power over any decision on stage, brush lands and the federal lands. Those kinds of things not not necessarily the best policy that we would we would agree with, and we advocated pretty strongly against that. We'd only seen that come out of the House in February. We saw a centate version of that, and that that woke us up a little bit that now all of a sudden, there may be some potential traction here on both houses, like where the House and Senate, So the US House and Senate, your congressman and senators coming and saying, you know, on second thought, let's not do what we said we're going to do. The stay at the stage goes, yeah, let's do something different. Let's let's hand it back over to the different on different climate, now, different political climate, different administration. I wish I kind of wish I hadn't said all that ship because it's not kind of inconvenient, But that that woke us up a little bit, and only to the extent there were political motivations for the why that was done and such, and they don't need to get into it. But the reality was we now had a House and Senate version threatening some pretty bad legislation. So one of the things we thought would be interesting and we worked with the Department of Interior at the time for us to get a secretary. We knew there were issues with the States. Let me back up just a little bit. I mean, look, not everybody got what they wanted. Some of the grazing community was unhappy with certain prescriptions and some things that were playing out in the plans. Um there were mining is interests that were fired up. Um, there was um and this gets a little bit in the weeds, but there was a designate, a prescription if you will, in these stage grounse amendments that were solidified in September of that added a designation called focal areas. Now what these were. There's about thirty five million acres across BLM land of what's called priority habitat. It receives the highest priority and the most restrictive types of prescriptions to manage sage brush. You can't occupy the surface a certain number of miles or some buffer distance around the breeding grounds for for sage grounse um, other kinds of prescriptions that just basically try to keep it intact in in in in good habitat, quality and condition. So on top of that, about a third of those acres, about ten million acres of that was scheduled for what was called these focal areas, and it would and they had to, uh are they The suggestion was to withdraw them from mining. So basically it removes them from the eighteen seventy two mining law. Now this gets complicated, but all you have to know about the eighteen seventy two mining law, I mean it was kind of a land rush, kind of a of a prospector's um law back in the eighteen seventies, where you know, allowed people you and I go out and stake a claim on public lands. We just go out and look. It allows people to go look for for um minerals without even asking the federal government's permission. Now, you can't do anything with it until you get permission. That's a permitting issue and such. But it allows you to go stake a claim, and if you have a valid claim um, it takes precedence over surface rights. So subsurface can always take precedent over surface rights. So if I literally really didn't own my and my four acres here in the back lot there, if I didn't own my mineral rights. Literally, an oil and gas company, if they owned my mineral rights, they could come in and put a well right back there in my yard today because your because your service rights cannot obstruct their ability to get there. And that goes back to the Mineral Leasing while Act of ninety I believe as well. So so this was a way. So they had ten million acres and they and they wanted to withdraw all um, withdraw those acres from mineral claim. And basically but ten million acres we would be withdrawn from mineral claim. How many million acres would be with drawn if the bird had been lifted. That's a really good point. Um, Yeah, it could have been a lot more. It would have been a lot more. Potentially hundreds of millions. Um, I mean hundreds of millions, but there's only a couple hundred million. But it's certainly wherever there were minerals in stage, it would have been impacted, no question. And really what it was it was it was it was a reserve. Ecologically speaking, the concept is sound. You know, you're trying to get it's really the only way the Fish and Wildlife Service can get ahead of the eighteen seventy two mining law is to withdraw those mineral right opportunity, you know, those opportunities way on the front end of planning. And that's what they were really trying to do is saying, these are the this is the best of the best habitat. This is where we'd like to see minerals withdrawn. And these are basically reserves for sage brush. And it also set prioritization of you know, a variety of other things vegetation management, firefighting, all those kinds of things. But I can tell you that dropping that designation on top and keep in mind it's a subset of the priority habitat, so it's already designated as priority habitat and already has various restrictions around it that are codified in the in the resource man. It's just like instead is super protected. It's super duper protected, exactly so and um, if they went away, it would just take the dooper away really so. Um. But by law you have to do an environmental impact statement um on the withdrawal specifically, And to make a long story short, and Nevada the this went to the courts, UH mining industry and other suit on that and basically the court said, no, you have to go back and do you violated the National Environmental Policy Act. You have to go back and do a supplemental e I S Environmental Impact Statement to supplement the ones that are already existing, and and so that was decided, and then the mineral withdraw part of that was decided was basically decided upon a not very long ago, a couple of months ago, where the BLM just said, we're not gonna, We're not gonna. We're going with the no action alternative of this e I S, which is we're not going to withdraw minerals from these areas. So that was the decision that was made. So now you have these focal areas, but you can still do mining claims within them. So basically they're managed just as if they're priority habitat. Very little has changed. But that designation of focal areas came down pretty pretty late in the game, and it made a lot of the states mad and a lot of the players, man, and it's become a hot button issue states and industry players. Yeah, and it it really has become a hot button issue. A couple other things that are in those plans um that are you know, there's argument from the oil and gas industry about density disturbance caps. There's a maximum amount of disturbance that you can have in a particular landscape because sage grouse are very sensitive to infrastructure development and disturbance from vehicles and all the things that go with developing an oil and gas well or wind facility or anything else. So there's caps to that and buffers around the lacking areas or the breeding sites where males go to to find find the girls, and they're very sensitive that disturbance. So there have been the science basically supports that, you know, once you get over a certain amount of disturbance, you're gonna start seeing, you know, plumbering population numbers of males at least attending the lex which theoretically track with the population. So there's arguments about that. There were concerns about grazing prescriptions. Notably, there's a seven inch double height that desires to have about seven inches of grass available when the birds are nesting for nesting covers so they can avoid predators. Um, everybody's hung up on that seven inches. There's actually quite a bit of flexibility in the plans, but there are many that want that removed, which would take an amendment. It would take a full blown plan amendment. And so there's all kinds of concerns that were generated and that led um Mr Zinky to do a review of the plans, and we we were supportive of a secretarial order that tried to address these issues with the states rather than blowing it up with this bad legislation I was leading to alluding to earlier, where we now have a house and a center version. It's like, okay, this has got a little more attraction than I used to. A better way would be for the Secretary to try to address these very specific issues that that may or may not affect grouse, you know deeply in the long run. Maybe it's just adjusting the boundaries a little bit, or or changing changing a few pieces of the prescription. You still get the same outcome in the long run, but you get rid of this toxic language, that kind of stuff. So they quietly come in, what are the problems? How can we fix the problems not really damaging the plan? Right, And you're hopeful for that kind of treatment, yeah, exactly. And what we were really hoping for, well, and we were hoping that the Secretary of Order would be very specific to the issues. But what it did was it called to put together a review team, and that review team consisted of the Fishing Wilife Service and BLM and some other players that were charged with basically looking at all these plans and listening to the states, listening to the stakeholders, and try to determine what the issues really were. Now, that in of itself is not an egregious act. If you or I were voted into Secretary of Interior next next time around, pointed appointed. Yeah, I mean you'd want to you'd want to take a look at what the predecessors did and just make some assessments. There's nothing wrong with that. But our concern was how Mr Zinky was starting to talk about sage grouse. He was talking about managing population numbers, and he was talking about captive rearing programs to predator control, all these kinds of things that people have talked about and thought about a lot. But he wasn't talking about him the way biologists would talk about him. He was actually talking about him, in my opinion, as if they were going to be mitigation tools to open up oil and gas. But you just captive, rear a few birds and throw them outain. All's good and well, okay, But here here getting into an important piece that we need to back up. Yea, because the original plan to recover sage grouse dealt with not going out and just counting up birds, right, So not going out and saying like how many birds should we have? But it came down and looking like how much how many birds and how much available habitat Because a hail storm at the wrong on the wrong day in the spring, a hail storm can cut your population in half, that's right, by cracking the eggs. All this stuff is habitat based, So you can destroy a whole. You can destroy a whole like brewd like you know, what do you call a bunch of brood? You can destroy like a whole area is brood clutch and then when they hatch, so you can have a bad hail storm on just the wrong day cracks thousands of bird eggs, let's say, and so then you have a falling population. If you just go by bird numbers, it's not particularly telling because you could have a really good situation where you like, there's so much habitat, so much food, I have no doubt the next spring we're gonna totally rebound because all this stuff the hard to get ships there. The birds will be fine if you give them the habitat. And this is what conservation always comes down. It's like it generally when people are talking about like a conservation issue, the the wildlife populations respond to the habitat. Yeah, it's jeney. Watch habitat. If you look at the work, like if you can look at the work that Rocky Mountain out Foundation does, the work the National Wild Turkey Federation does, Duck's Unlimited. Oftentimes, these organizations are very focused on available habitat, knowing that the animals will take care of themselves. That's right if you give them a place to do it. So so the idea of like the recovery plan for sage grouse was really focused on habitat. The new idea is, you know what, let's just count birds and we will raise them in a pen and turn them loose and then count. So if we don't get the number that we want, will make it that we get the number we want by just letting them go like chickens and then counting at the right moment and be like see they're all there, which is fatally flawed and doomed, doomed to fail, but almost kind of cynical. It's like, oh, you want birds, do you here you go, buddy tomorrow. Which if we learned anything and other wild birds and other wild bird recoveries, is that pen raised birds don't work. That's right, especially for native grouse in the wild. Turkey, they spent millions thinking they were going to recover the wild turkey introduction program and the one and then what it wound up taking was it want up taking that you would capture birds, capture wild birds whose ants esters were wild and move those birds into new areas and you would recover the population. That's what it took. With turkeys, they spent the Turkey Federation in many states spent a small fortune learning that lesson at Water's prairie chicken. I mean, the only reason we really still have any at Water's prairie chicken is because of a captive wearing program. But they can't get the birds that have been captively reared to then raise their own young out in the wild. Something that's lost. So you just gotta keep dumping them, and you're in this perpetual cycle of having to put birds on the landscapes to say that we still have Atwater's prairie chickens. Yeah, if you want to get a census, if you'd be interesting, it might even exist so much a drop of map that shows like the ringneck pheasant is not as much as you see like pheasants, pheasants, peasants in America. The ringneck feasant is not a native bird. Right if you'd made a map showing the usual to have a map of the US with one color showing where we have pheasants and one color showing where we would have since if it wasn't for releasing programs, Yeah, that'd be an interesting and interesting map. Chuckers too. I can tell you the one, The part that shows where we'd have birds it wasn't for supplemental stocking would be way, way, way smaller than the part showing where peasants are. Yep, it would you know where they first reintroduced peasants Lambt Valley, Oregon? They first place they were introduced in young guns. Um, yeah, and young guns he kicks up pheasant. Yeah, and remember thinking where there's peasants around back then? Yeah? Or that too, Uh, they get their stuff on button in the last and Mohicans they kill a red deer, red stag that's right in the east. Yeah, it's hard to pull that kind of stuff over on hunting guys. That's right. Like we watched movies and we're like, we always know when we smell something fishy with the wildlife. They used to like watching the old Johnny White Smueller Tar San movies and I'd hear a bird in the background. Oh, that's a freaking pilated woodpecker. Not endemic to Africa, I'm pretty sure. Alright, So yeah, so they get the idea. Yeah, you were just getting to the the incoming secretary starts talking about birds in a way that it doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound like we're on this sort of thing about how we're going to save the bird by that's right, protecting habitat, that's right. And you've also got an administration that is promoting energy. It was independence, now it's dominance. We just saw report come out recently from the Department Material on energy burdens and as you get you guys might imagine just about anything could be considered a burden to development. Um, so there's a lot of things aligning that make us concerned and nervous about this amendment process. And you know, it's no different than opening up the Endangered Species Act or any piece of legislation. If it's targeted and specific to increasing efficiency and effectiveness and those kinds of things. That's hard to argue. But you know, everybody starts to want to hang an ornament on the Christmas tree and all of a sudden it falls down, So you know the motivations behind um the review. In my opinion, we're fine and solid. I'd want to review things that a predecessor had done before. But how that plays out is going to be interesting because we have yet. As I said about the Peace policy earlier, that not warranted decision was predicated heavily on things being implemented into the future, and not all BLM offices are implementing the plans in their fullest extent. There's a lot of confusion right now about where this is all gonna go. And you know, some some states and some offices are moving right ahead and some are still trying to figure it out. So but regardless, we have we have yet to see full blown implementation across the board, across age lands of these plants. So that's kind of weird short sighted that's going on right where if you have an administration come in, who an administration come in where they're like they they are not really worried about the bird, more worried about industry, and then you let the bird falter. You need to like think ahead because we have a thing that happens in this country where we have wild political vacillations, the pendulum swing as what we call, and someone else might come in in four years or in eight years. Another person is going to come in and they're gonna have their own appointee for the Secretary of Interior, and they're gonna look and be like, sons of bitches never did do the sage grouse thing. Right now, I am going to list them. Yeah. The fact that people go like, oh, the current climate will always be here, so let's just screw this whole sage grouse thing. You think that you'd still be real interested in solving the problem because you're not always going to have your people in charge. Well, you're you're interjecting long term thinking and rational thoughts, Stephen. Everybody thinks that way, you know, I mean, you know sometimes they just three thinks out to the next quarter and that's a year out maybe. Now that's long term thinking and planning. And look what happened with the Spotted Ault. Now that we've used that as our one of our talking points in this that pendulum swung hard, and too far hard in my opinion. I mean, we haven't seen meaningful timber harvest in a lot of places, particularly northwest, but for a long time since then. I mean, we've got old growth logging just just shut down. But a lot of logging on public lands is shut down. There's not much of a timber industry here in the Rocky Mountains either, quite frankly a little bit. But you know, you as you guys drive around and hut, you can see dead trees, lots of standing forest. You know, there's there's just it was a big pendulum swinging back then. Um, But prior to that, it was swung the other direction. They were they were cutting federal lands as if they were private lands to some extent. So and then, and make no mistake, the industry was warned well before the listing of the Spotted All. I know, the people that did the warning back in the seventies, they said, look, this is gonna be an issue for wars and we need to deal with it. And really about the only thing that happened in the in the years to come right before the listing was increased, accelerated timber harvest, which exacerbated the issue. So almost almost in a in a in a gosh, if we don't have the in the sense of, if we don't even have the habitat, we don't have to worry about this. But it didn't quite work out that that that that that like thinking of the next quarter, like profit earnings for the next quarter, next year, and very few people looking at what business like in five years, and this pendulum now is going to swing back eventually. Just listen. It's there's no way if they don't get if they don't get serious about this problem, there's no way that in four years someone's not gonna say, like, some of a bit, you should have got more serious about this problem. That's right, And you know, I'm still hopeful back to our time capsule thing five years from now. I'm still hopeful because we haven't nothing's really been done yet. Um it's but the stage is set and so the amendment process. Let me back up a little bit. So this report comes out UM Midsummer, so from the Secretary of the Secretarial Order came out and said, we're going to review these plans and look at them all, look at all these issues. It generated a list of issues that people had and then this review team, which is a very credible group of individuals, put together a matrix of actions. So some of them were short terms, some of them were long term. So for example, UM, if they wanted to completely eliminate these focal areas, it would require a plan amendment. If they wanted to change certain prescriptions in UM the grazing section, that might require an amendment. Now, the amendment process in BLM planning is extensive, at minimum probably eighteen months, it could go out for another three years. So some of these things that need to be fixed, we felt a lot of those things could be fixed with just clarification, training, better instruction, and here's how you need to implement these things. Others UM might require a plan amendment. But our position was, why don't you let this play out a little bit and just actually implement the plans, gather some information and see what needs to be fixed. Then, but there's a rush you know, people are kind of looking at the clock and this administration may or may not be around in and it's going to take three years probably to get through this amendment process. So now what's happening is there's they're going to open up the plans potentially for an amendment process. Right now, they're taking public comment on um the federal plans and whether they should be amended and changed basically, so you've got them codified now in the current resource management plan that was that was changed in September fifteen that got us to the not warranted. Now they're looking at change in it. We haven't even hardly gotten started yet. So so where's the where's the like the sportsman community add on this? Now? Well, if you look at like like the hunter based conservation community, where do they tend to be on what should be happening? Well, I know of no mainstream or or other type organization that is engaged or cognizantly cognizant aware of the issue that really wants this opened up, except a couple of fringe element type groups. But the vast majority of the sports and groups don't want to to open these plans up. They want to get them implemented, I mean, everybody refined, implemented. Sure. I mean, look, no credible scientists or biologists would say that it's a bad idea to make something better if you got data to prove it. I mean, but the problem is they don't have a lot of existing information to demonstrate that something will or will not work. So, for example, if the industry wants to come back and say, well, gosh, you know, we don't think this disturbance cap of a maximum of five cent in some landscape area is correct. We think it should be. They don't have any data to prove that, I can assure you, but they may a lobby to have it changed. They just don't have any scientific information to back And that's kind of been our position from day one. If there is science underpinning a buffer distance or a disturbance cap in an area or whatever the prescription is, let's use that to improve the plans. But there's a lot of those areas that, in my humble opinion, don't have that science, and it's it's not supported and substantiated. A lot of times, what we'll hear industry say is that a lot of the energy studies and there's probably twenty five plus studies that have looked at energy impacts on grouse. None of them say energy development is good for grouse. That's one bit of information. All of them collectively pretty much say that it's negative at some level. And you know, I'm a scientist. I can pick or at least I used to be practitioning scientists. I can. I can find a hole in every piece of every study that's out there. I mean, ecology isn't perfect, and you can find a hole in a study. But the weight of evidence, this is like the way I like to couch this. The weight of evidence is very clear that energy development at certain levels has an impact on the bird. There's just no denying that. But one of the arguments is that while all those studies looked at the old technology, now we've got the new technology where we can put multiple pads on our multiple wells on a pad, which is true. Um, we have less disturbance on the landscape. That's true as well, but at some level that doesn't That argue doesn't matter. It's still disturbance on the landscape and the birds are going to respond at some level to that disturbance, So it doesn't matter if you're drilling horizontally three miles out or straight down three it's still infrastructure and they're still disturbance. So um, you know, they're going to have to demonstrate that it's more than just a new technology that you know, they have information that would demonstrate there's a reason you can shrink those those buffers or or expand them or whatever, and I haven't seen that information yet. So but there's a lot of efforts that are ongoing now and new science that's coming. But but the bottom line is we've got to implement these plans, and you know, there's some tweaking of the plans that can happen right now that it's like I said, if if the focal area boundaries were you know, to somehow that disappear, I don't think grouse are going to disappear. I also don't know that it's necessary to completely open up the plans to do that, but that may be where they go. But the thing people have to remember is that it's just a sub designation within that broader designation of priority habitat. All of that habitat is still going to be managed, you know, unless those prescriptions change. That's our concern. So what's what's the next step for people and what what should people be If people are folowing this issue, what's the thing they should be doing now? Well, the public needs to to express their and our sportsmen's community need to express themselves. We've got an open action alert now. And basically what we're saying is that, you know, some target it at amendments that are supported with scientific information you know could be acceptable, but don't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Here and by the way, Governor's meeting hick and Looper, who you've shared the stage with and know their work quite well. Republican and Democrat, yep, both working on sage grouse. They're saying the same things. Let let the plans work, let the collaboration work. Don't make this a federal top down war on the West. Is some proclaim on on different sides of the aisle, I mean, it's not that different. Let this play out and work. Some targeted changes can be acceptable, but don't don't be making major wholescale changes. So we've got an open action alert now, um, and you can just go to the Theater Roosevelt Conservation Partnership's website and take action on sage grouse, and basically what it says is that we don't want to see whole scale changes. We want to see this collaboration work um targeted changes maybe in the future. But that's kind of what it basically says. So that's what they should be doing. But they should also, you know, people should just be aware and paying attention to And it kind of comes back to what you said, this is a new way of conservation in my opinion, and many of my colleagues and many of the people you talked to say the same thing. Uh, you know, the way the stage grouse plans and this whole manifestation of conservation strategy to get to that not warranted decision really was a miracle and and really a a major milestone in contemporary wildline. It was such a piece of good news. Man, it was like this euphoric moment. It was. And again, not everybody got what they wanted, and some of the fringe elements are really pissed and fired up. But the bottom line is it was a hell of an effort to get it there. Now we've got to make it manifest on the landscape because right now there's a lot of areas that are just paper birds and paper habitat. It's all in in a document until it manifests on the ground. That's when we get real habitat and real birds. That's what we got to have happen. You think, from my personal perspective that the always makes me think of is that if you're like like hunters and fishermen, really it's those that you don't have a political home. No, this is me talking to person. I want to implicate you in this, but like you don't have a political home because the political world is too dirty, like from the left. Okay, like that again, I'm not implicating eding this observation at all, but from the left, from the Democrats side, you have like an atmosphere that's not like this is culturally oftentimes culturally hostile to hunters. Like right now, there's a thing in Arizona. Is a referendum coming up in Arizona. It's a band lion hunting and bobcats. I promise you a Republican did not put that up right. Okay, So we're always getting attacked on the Democrat side, You're always gonna attacked culturally. People are trying to restrict your rights, mess with wildlife management. Give like New Jersey cat ladies sort of an outside outsized voice, and how we managed wildlife in America banned certain hunting practices. You're just getting attacked all of time there firearms issues, and then from the Republican side, Roys gonna attack on habitat issues. Yeah, it's like I want to start a new political party, call like the Roosevelt Party, which is gonna be like any kind of any kind of yeah, the Bull Moose Party. Any social issue would be like, no comment, It'll be fiscally conservative, robust, military like ardently pro habitat. I like that, and like a socially liberal social libertarian social libertarian listen, privacy of your own home, bro, like a strong respect for that, but jelly social issues, no comment. You'll figure it out on your own privately. Please. But uh it just sucks, man, And I know, like I know it. Give mean people in the political world, like who are like people who are willing to work in a bipartisan way from the right and from the left to come to like good decisions and like have wildlife in mind. Like those people do exist, but those people are generally regarded as like very quiet individuals. Yeah, that, and most people in America, like I can't understand people who speak in a pragmatic, quiet way. They can only understand just like in like loud insanity or not understand. But but they like it because it's like, oh, I get that. I can get that so easily. That's easy for me to understand. Complicated ship. I don't want to. I don't have time for complicated ship. I want the one sentence fixed, and you wind up. It just gets so frustrating, man. And these are complicated issues, right, and they're hard to put in one sentence, but you have to because I mean, you guys do this and in television all the time, you've got a message in a way that resonates with a much broader audience than than the three of us sitting here. And I had to do that when I was doing my science. Now that I'm glad we brought up the warehouse or connection, we'll just come back to that because I you know, I remember being a scientist in that organization. But you had to also be a pretty good communicator with those that didn't want to know. They just didn't want to underdo about all your science. I was even told one time it's like, we hired you because we thought you were a good scientist. I want to hear all that ship about statistics and such. Tell me what it means, what the bottom line is, Why should we care? What's the bottom line for the business, and how can we fix it? So you've got to You've gotta break things down and make it important to to not in this case managers, but to the public. It's like, why is it important? Why should you give a shit about sage grouse? And not that many people probably do in the big picture until you put it in a broader context. Because how we learned to address the sage grouse issue, It's gonna it's gonna have implications for every other situation when this comes up, and this will continuously come up. And right now we're talking about it with sage grouse, We're talking about it with wolves in the Upper Gray Lakes, We're talking about it with grizzly bears. Tomorrow. I don't even know who we're gonna be telling. My prediction is the Northern Great Plains and the short grass prairie, that prairie system there is going to be the next sage brush and sage crouse and ducks right well, and sharp tail grouse, prarie chickens. Yeah, we had a big conversation ducks a long time ago. But you know the Prey Pahole region, ye, so yeah, and look at the well, look at the look at the baking, look at wind development in that kind of that that area is considered the Saudi Arabia wind. The only reason it has been developed extensively. There's no transmission right now. So so it's like there's a lot forthcoming and big. But to get into a situation where we can look at conservation issues and look at wildlife issues and sort of make like a template for how to approach long term issues that will insulate them a little bit from wild political vacillations. And I think we know how to do it. I mean, I'm not gonna tell you all the sciences there, but I've been playing this game a long time, and you know, the reality is, we've got the tools. We've got a good chunk of the science. We know conceptually how to do adaptive management, which is learning by doing. We do something on the ground, we monitor it, and then we fix it and do something. You know, We've got all those kinds of tools and now we really know who all the players need to be. We just need to incentivize the conservation efforts and make every give everybody's skin in the game. And I've always said that if we've got to make conservation and investment not an impediment, and we're doing that, you know, in a lot of ways. But we need to do it more because we're not growing any more acres. No, I can tell you that we're losing acres and look at Ghost the Ghost, it's we're losing acres. We're not gonna grow anymore. We've gotta do good with what we got for sure. And it's like it's even it's even more complicated because I feel like, you know, Secretary Zink, he's done a lot of great stuff with access this using other things. So it's like he's in a situation where you kind of it's like getting heat on one thing, right, and you're trying to like satisfy and do something clearly trying to do some good things for sportsman's access and other issues, and getting hammered on other stuff. So it's like it's a hard for a person to find that happy ground where just the radical right and the radical left or Piste, it wasn't being very difficult for political operators to work in this situation. And just to look at the Sage Gross site, like, here's another complicated thing. Those people like like the people in industry have been screwed before, and Western and states have been screwed before, as they keep getting screwed on wolf, on the wolf issue and on the grizzlieshoe where you like you came and said, we agreed, we agreed what grizzly bear recovery looks like. We talked about it twenty years ago. We've met that for thirteen years goal post. So it's like, and we made a plan on wolves. Do you remember we talked about what wolf recovery would look like, we achieved it. Why do we still have to talk about it now? So they do get screwed on stuff. Yeah, it's like and I think screwing them on those things coming from the rat they're coming from like screwing him from the radical left perspective winds up making people put up walls and not wanting to have conversations that could be more effective. Well, it's probably one of the consequences of partisan politics. And we're very partisan now and that pendulum swings back. My fear is that it swings back the other direction too far. Can't we figure out a space in the middle my new political party, Yeah exactly, I like that parties in the middle, the one in the middle. Well, I'd sign up for that party. Yeah. When I get that party going and we got the House, Senate, White House, I to have all that. We have, all the Supreme Court nominees. Wildlife's gonna be solid, man. Well, good hunting and fishing, and we'll make conservation and investment for everybody's future. And in good mountain lion seasons and all appropriate locations. Any concluding thoughts, Well, yeah, you were telling me the other day we were talking about um uh mountain men, I believe, right, And how like everybody's talking about how you want to go back in time, like see what the country was like back then, right, and everybody has these like visions, right, and that's what we hope for. Well, I think like now is the time to try to like look to the future and think like that our kids are gonna want to go. Man. I wish I could have seen what that sage for see was like back then. Wish I could have seen all that. That was pretty damn cool, and we need to really keep that and you know, like keep thinking about that because it's so easy, I think, to forget with all the just it is, the partisan stuff of it, you know, and you just couldn't get wrapped up in emotions and just think about the big picture. Doesn't matter what political party you're affiliated with. Like, we all want to look back and kind of we wish we could see what this country looks like a hundred years ago. Right, Yeah, that's story. That's almost something that people like universally agree about. People who are interested in I mean, this is a wide net right. People are interested in wildlife, hunting, American history, Western history, pioneer history, Dan Boone, whatever, people are interested to that sort of ship generally are like, holy smokes man, it would have been great to see what Lewis and Clark saw. So pay attention to that little part of your brain because that a little part of your brain is telling you something important. Do you want to strive for a future that works looks more like that or less like that? Yeah, the catches don't don't hang up on it ever looking like that again, But think about what it did look like and what you could do to make it look as close to that as possible into the future, because it ain't gonna be the same. You have this conversation about antelope. If we listing like mule deer listing, are they going to give es a listening to the mule deer because we weren't paying attention to when for people first started bringing up to us thirty years ago that the mulder is gonna need some little teeny bit of help. Well, I've told you this, I told I think we talked about this in the last cast on on Stage Grouse. This wasn't a shock. This didn't manifest in two thousand five or ten, and wasn't court or I mean, it was court ordered, but that's not what the driver was. The driver was we drag our damn feet for a couple of three decades when we were warned, same thing was spotted els, the industry was warned, but there was no hammer immediately hovering right over the head. And that's the problem. We've been reactive throughout the history of wildlife management, and there's just so many examples of that, and we're damn lucky we got what we got. Back to the whole notion of what other countries have or don't have. So we have a lot of incentive in this country to have conservation and wildlife. Well we got to get out of and we've been having these conversations a lot on the ESA. I've been working with Governor meads Uh Endangered Species Act Initiative from the day it started, and now we're into a little bit more conversation about how do we avoid having to use the endangered species in the first place. Was was one of my fundamental tenants when I gave testimony in the first conference. We think we figured out how to avoid using it, which was on like bringing a bunch of people together to figure out how everybody's going to give a little bit to make the things and being more proactive and putting money on the front. It's like going into the mechanic after you drove the vehicle for three more thousand miles with low oil change. Yeah exactly, it's like, oh, you blew your engine, which just probably could have done that for forty bucks just early when it was just come down to an oil chain. Exactly. You know, just to return to a thought man, and this is kind of me just operating my own mind. But like Eldo Leopold in Sand County, Alman, Eldo Leopold talks about, Okay, I'm gonna bring this up and now I got now content trap. I gotta dig a little bit deeper. Aldo le post talking about technology. He's talking especially about hunting technology, and he was saying that like that, you can't improve the well. You can't improve the pump without improving the well. Yeah, he's not talking about oil rings, talking about water, but meaning if you're gonna make it easier and easier and easier to extract more and more and more water, you're gonna have to figure out a way to make the well better, two deeper and better, because you will suck that some bit dry if you're not thinking about both. And when I think about that's like kinds of winds up being that that partisan battle I was talking about earlier. I feel that like that from the right, we're like the right side of me, Okay, the right leaning, right wing leaning side of me is usually very interested in like improving the pump, yeah, right, improving access democratically allocated public access to wildlife, like I like that to resources for us to use renewable resources, wild resources. The left leaning side of me. It's like, and let's make the well deep and wide. Ye, well and and too Yanni's point on the legacy. One of my favorite quotes that Roosevelt had was about conservation and stating that it means preservation and development. And he recognized the rights. Maybe he didn't say rights, but he recognized the needs to use these resources, but he didn't appreciate or recognize the rights to steal those from future generations. Paraphrasing a lot there. But conservation is about development and preservation. We've talked with the thousand times before. But when I'm gonna tell the story again, Uh, Theodore Roosevelt right was very interested in in preserving wildlife and saving wildlife and so. And there had been a argument where someone said, so if the wildlife if is as you're saying, that wildlife belongs to the American people, we're Americans. Let us in there and let us go get it all since it's ours anyways, And he says, well, yes, it belongs to you, but it also belongs to those in the womb of time. It's not all yours right now, some of yours right now, some is for those who will follow. Man, do we need Leopold and Roosevelt back? Don't we? Somebody? Some big thinker puts it when when speaking of his family farmer has been in his family for generations, and when when thinking when thinking about decisions around his family farm, he says, of him and his siblings, you know, he'll be like, it's not ours, it's our turn. It's our turn. YEA. A great way to think about it. You know, I don't know if Doug made that up or not, but he likes it and I like it. It doesn't matter. It's profound. You an you got any final thoughts? Then I just hope I kill an elk next week. I need to fill my freezer and take from today and and uh leave a little for tomorrow, leave a little for tomorrow. It's been great talking again. It's my fourth time. You guys need to come up with a five Timers jacket or something. If we ever do this your past like Saturday Night five Timers. What we'll do is in a year, we're gonna come talk to you anywhere. We're at fifty two episodes from now, We're gonna come to talk to you about stage grouse again, we'll see where we're at. I hope we're in a good place. I'm still optimistic, but cautious optimism. I hope that next year we're talking about they'll keep this bird's sage growls will be banging into the windows. There's so many out there that just like apparently flying around and coming in the house and throwing them out the door. Maybe maybe, I mean I think that, uh, you know, as this defines the conservation model for the future, we need to learn from it and grow and build and and look to the next one. And you don't make the same mistakes twice. Isn't that the definition of insanity. Keep trying the same thing over and hoping to get a different result doesn't work. I've learned from the mistakes in the past. Thanks again, in fifty two episodes from now, we will talking to you. I appreciate you guys, keep doing what you're doing. Thanks that. Okay, a couple of things though, before you go, oh, yeah, we appreciate all the reviews and the ratings. You guys are killing it on that. But I know, because I see how many there are, that there are still thousands of you out there that have not written a view and have not given us a rating, And Steve prefer ed just raise his hands. You give a rating it, Steve, he prefersday if you just do the five star one. If you're not gonna do the five star one, don't bother. Oh yeah, don't give it like a low rating. I don't care what kind of rating. No, no, don't just give it. Just go I always say, just to make it easy, pole, go to the right most star and click it. You've never given a rating it. I've never seen the stars on what I'm listening. By the way I'm listening to it. Here's the thing people don't realize. Why people don't realize how helpful it is to us to go and give the damn five star rating ring whatever you want. No one's gonna care. But I would think that you'd be on it, being like man been on the show four times, love it. Give these guys six stars, give him sick. But you guys know everything you do is six star, ten star. Go and give ratings. We'll go find it. But I'm not on iTunes. That's maybe what we give it. That doesn't matter. Give it a geting, however you listen Stitcher iTunes. I mean there's like the vast like those two cover the vast majority of people. You can go to the to the meat eater dot com and listen right there. However you're doing it, go give it mega five star rating and then you know, write your thoughts on want to read your thoughts? Just put down yeah the stars? What be on the lookout for the meat eater dot com Big Black Friday sale, it's coming at you. You get a Meatator podcast T shirt. That's the Friday after Thanksgiving. If you're not hip to Black Friday, and that means that, um, it's today that people like to shop. That's right, I believe after Black Friday, now there's a Cyber Monday and that's when you buy ship online. So do all that. What else? Ni um, if you're looking for a pocket knife, you need to go to benchmate and check out their pocket knife, especially check out their new bug out. I just got a bug out. It's a sweet little knife. It's light, it's simple. I like it. The only reason I got one it's come to be a dumbass. And I walked into the airport with my with my G ten on my on my clip on my belt. So I to leave it, so you gotta new you got the new bug out, like a super lightweight little knife, like super let's say, having like a paper clip on your pocket. Exactly exactly did you hear something about this? Said the in the Ketchkan airport, it's like the thing that brings me the most happiness in all the world outside of my own children. And is it? In the Catchcan airport there's a display and there's a display of of stuff they've confiscated from people. There's in this display is a is a full on brass knuckles dagger kid. Yeah, man, guys like traveling with a brass knuckles dagger. It's the greatest played one of those cases. But I've never it's just the greatest. Like, what do you mean I can't have uh, maybe I can't bring this on Yeah, And it's got a really nice fancy bench made knife in there. Oh yeah, there's some there's some like quality blades in there too. But there's some crazy stuff that people try to bring on planes. Well, ask Ronnie Beam about that. Sometimes I don't want to go into details, but you might want to ask him, like about t s A rules, how to get letters from the T s A what else? That's all I got five stars. Hey check this out. Last time we asked for stars, a bunch of people came and gave stars. And it's good for us. So it's really helpful. I don't want to I'm not explain all why, but it's good to give them their stars. Also, as long as we're on the subject, you helping me us is if you go on all the time and you're like now and then you're like, oh, I'm gonna go listen to the Meat Eater podcast. Uh, subscribe, right, that's hugely helpful. If you subscribe and it just comes to you automatically, that's good for you because it eases you into good listening, and it's good for us because it's just it's like, it's like a demonstration of of of reach. So subscribe five stars Black Friday, right with the Monday, the Monday Cyber Monday. And it also thought your support. Uh. There's so many great conservation groups out there that generally you'll find speak with a pretty unified voice. So if if you're a hunter or a fisherman and you're and you're hearing about complicated things and you're reluctant or leary about wading into something and advocating a certain viewpoint without knowing all the sides. It is a smart idea to just kind of go and do a survey about where leading national conservation groups, like where are they making stands on certain issues? And I think that you'll find that on a lot of these issues, you'll find like a pretty good cohesion around reasonable policies and policy solutions. Uh. I like the work of the trc P, just as I like the work of many conservation groups, some of which I've named here today, but um check them out, check out others too, and go sort of gather up like how people in the conservation space and the hunting and fishing space, how are they looking at wildlife issues, resource management issues? And begin to educate yourself that way and you, hopefully we will find groups that kind of resonate with you and you can throw your support behind them. But start out but just kind of like take a look at sort of the national picture of how these conversations are going and and start to learn about it. And then you'll want to I think hopefully you want to start exercising, uh, you know, flexing some of your personal muscle by by getting behind these groups and making good hunting and fishing for not just you, but your kids and their kids. Right. That's it for me, and I can tell you it makes a difference everything Steve said, having worked in this arena now it works and it does make a difference. Stars, the five stars, the six stars works even better. The five stars works, but conservation advocacy works to it really does, and we make sure it works by amplifying your boys. So appreciate you saying that. Alright, stay tuned

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