00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me ea podcast coming in you shirtless, severely vote bitten and in my case underwear listening past. You can't predict anything. Okay, first, we're on top of where we're at. We're gonna go micro to macro. How did it come to be that we're in the wind River Outdoor Company of Lander, Wyoming? Is that to me anyone? I don't care. I mean, I don't know, honest doesn't know. Well, I'd say it was a year ago. I wrote into um, you guys over email on your from whatever contacts were in the website, and I said, well, what's it gonna take to get Steve to come out to our banquet here for the newly Fanatics Foundation, And um, I believe it was Michelle Jorgenson replied and said, well here's what here's what you need to do and plan it out. And so I think it was exactly a year ago we kind of ink the deal and and off you were here. So, uh, this journey and you just contact your local hunt and fishing shop. Well yeah, so, uh, Ron Hansen here, who's the owner of Windover Outdoor Company, talked to him and and he was interested in being a sponsor of the banquet of which you're speaking at tonight, and so um he sponsored that which allows us to financially put together a banquet that will raise a bunch of money for mule deer as opposed to just throwing a giant party and having people having fun. Well, they're gonna have fun and we're gonna raise money for mule deer. So yeah, talk talk real quick about the foundation and how sort of where it fits into the where it fits into the mule deer landscape. Yeah, so newly Fanatics Foundation, I'm just gonna go ahead and and hit our our mission specifically, our our mission is to ensure the conservation of mule do and provide such supportive services to Sound wildlife management and the sport of hunting to further the UH provide supportive services to further sound wildlife management and sport hunting. So we really work in what I would say are three arenas. We work in um AH supporting and funding research which the other people on on here today we'll speak to a little bit more. Um We also work and provide support to habitat enhancements when we get the opportunity, and then kind of our third sector is just recruitment and retention of new and existing conservationists. And we had your brother on before you did. Yeah, you know, he's the well I'm the better looking oak leaf. Yeah yeah, yeah, he was on talking about he was on talking about wolves because he's a research but we talked a lot about catching them. Yeah, how to catch wolves. Yeah, he's Uh. John and I have have really good conversations. I mean that that's one thing that I've always enjoyed is with my father being a biologist and of course John as well, and then being exposed to to these guys, the other biologists and researchers around it, it really helps to kind of give me a bigger picture of of what's going on ecologically, and and that makes for fun conversations. Do you guys want to let's introduce our our other guys here? Hit it. Kevin Montith, I'm a professor at the University of Wyoming. And what's your How did you come to be doing that? So? I came to be So I'm actually just a small town redneck kid from northeastern South Dakota. Uh. Grew up hunting and fishing, living outdoors and didn't know anything any better. Found out there's a wildlife school in South Dakota, and I thought, well, surely I'll go there to be a game warden. And because that's all I knew, I had no idea there was a world besides being a game warden. I mean, I grew up in a town of five people, high school graduating classes twelve. It seems like all the kids that hunting fish like when we were all kids, I wanted to be No one knew what it meant, but they all wanted to be either a game warden or a wildlife biologist. Yeah. Well, and I didn't even know wildlife biologists. All I knew was game war It's a very very not you were getting checked by them all the time or no, No, we weren't those kids. We weren't those kids. But yeah, just so, I mean, relatively poor family, didn't travel a lot, just wasn't exposed too much in the outside world, and it was actually just gonna go to tech school, the auto mechanic or something like that. I found out there was a wildlife school, so went there and began to learn that there's a lot more to the story than just that, and became involved with some research projects as an undergrad and fell in love with research, worked really hard, was told by many that the field is really tough and and there's very few jobs out there, and if you want the jobs, you gotta do this, this, and this, you gotta bust your tail. You gotta put yourself at the top of the list. So through that time and through the rest of my duration there, I fell in love with research, worked really hard to try to put myself on the top of the list. Um, and got bachelor's and master's degrees there, went on to Idaho State. Uh, did my PhD there, worked on mule deer in California. For that was your PhD. So it's unpopulation dynamics a mule deer in this year in Nevadas of California. Yeah, and so when I did my master's work, um, which hopefully maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more later. But I actually worked on captive whitetail deer. We did a lot of nutrition related work and so and then I it was hands on every day with deer, so literally living with deer. And although you know it may seem sometimes like while they're captive animals, so they're not real dear. Um, you'd be amazed at what you can learn by literally just interacting with animals at that level on a daily basis, and the powerful things that you can do because of that. So through that and instilled in me an appreciation for nutrition. Uh. And then we took that and then basically applied a lot of what I learned there to free ranging mule deer in this year Nevadas of California UM long term individual based work tracking animals through time, which has really kind of become a foundation for a lot of what UM we try to do in my program here within Wyoming. And so finish my PhD there, came here as a post talc with with Matt actually and then just begun to sort of build some rapport in a research program here and then and then ultimately moved up in a couple of different positions to the UM being a professor as am now in the hop School of Environment Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Let me ask you a quick question, UM, because you have exposure to both Mulder and California. Is it true that if a Columbia blacktail deer crosses I five in an eastward direction, he becomes a Mulder? Sure? No, that's now now, I mean because according to like the record books, that's true. Yeah, well, so you know how we understand what I'm saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying. You know how we are as people. We need to be able to draw lines and categorize things right and when those but in the real world, those lines are very blurry. They're they're not hard lines. Um. It's it's the same with when you know, we sit down and have conservator conversations about subspecies. How many subspecies of white tailed deer are there, how many subspecies of meal they're out there? Generally over time, Generally, over time, especially since genetic work has come into play, the subspecies world has become less crowded in the lumpers. I feel like the lumpers are winning, you think. So we went from like seven Canada geese to two. We went from like, lord knows how many bears to two. We went from like six kinds of bison to one. Yeah, but probably one, maybe two. I think a lot of that is It's interesting. He depends upon what scientists you talk to actually, and how those hairs are being split as as we go through time, And it's amazing how much work is done out there right now to establish those sorts of things and and for the for so, for example, for the animals themselves, Um, it may not matter as much to them, it matters a lot for us as to how we potentially define that. So if we have something that's apparently unique, but there's not very many of them, then we're gonna care a lot a lot more by those few about those few, exactly. And so that's where the importance comes in. Whereas in the perhaps in the grand scheme of things, where there's few, but then we we determine that, oh, well, they're just the same as these over here. Okay, well it doesn't matter that much. That's where taxonomy becomes weaponized. Yeah, it's exactly right, And it's a for for me. For me, I'm all four if it helps, if it helps, I'm all four. Weaponizing taxonomy in the cases where it helps what it makes what I want to happen possible? Yeah, yeah, but then I hate it when it interferes what I wanted to happen. Um, So okay, okay, So let me put it a different way. Let's say a deer, a mule deer, blacktail deer, whatever, hell it is gets hit by a car in the center of I five. Is there a way Is there a way for someone to say that is an X. Well, genetically perhaps they would be able to say, he leans black tail. Yeah, that's exactly he leans mulder. That's exactly right. But it could be a confused picture. Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, certainly, yeah, yeah yeah. And that's where like so for example, Booting Crockett Club and actually colleagues of mine and others have been have worked pretty hard to be able to help in identifying those sorts of things, especially hybrids, uh, and in trying to make sure that what gets in the record books is actually what we all think it is. So it's so it's really to me, it's an interesting thing because it's a it's something that that we as as humans have sort of um brought into that realm to allow us to make appropriate decisions, which which is good, um, but but it's interesting too. It just depends upon the decision that's being made, whether it's something that where does it go in a record book versus is it a small population that we need to protect because they're somehow unique in some way and you need to be able to retain them in that way. My brother is a ecologist and a statistician, and um, he worries that and talking about how like in in in genetics rewriting all of our understanding of taxonomy. He kind of he he looks at a little bit, not professionally, but just conversate like just for fun that It's like we're in love with a shiny new thing and we had the we have these systems that sort of made sense to us about morphology, land use, like just like things where people looking like that's different than that, but we're in love with this shiny new object that's in some ways overcomes our logic. We're like, oh, so, I guess it's not different, even though everyone would agree that it is, because someone can tell us now that you know, because this new technology trumped all of our earlier observations about sort of how we understood the landscape and understood creatures to be that like a grizzly, you know, to like a grizzly to brown bear. We do this thing, We do these trivia questions at our live events, and we always do. We always have people name six of the world's eight bears. Has there every honest is there? Ever been a time when someone didn't say, no grizzly bear, brown bear, no kid ever Yeah never Yeah yeah, because to us they're different. Yeah yeah, but now they're not. Now you're wrong to think that they're different. Okay, let's move on with our introductions. You honestly you're here, Yeah, good morning. Yeah. My name is Matt Kaufman. So I'm a professor also at the University of Wyoming. Um, I've been there about thirteen years and uh, yeah and so, and my focus recently has been big game migration, ngulate migration. Are you the guy that made it fashionable? Um? I guess I've he's modest, but everyone else nodded their head. Yes, I've contributed to that for sure, But no, no, I mean there's uh for a variety of reasons. I think you know, Wyoming has sort of uh done a lot of migration work. Like how did that come to be? Well, I think it's it's it's it's partly like a sort of a perfect storm. On the one hand, you have Wyoming is a small state about five people a little more. Um, it's a state in which for species like mule, deer, elk, and pronghorn they need to migrate on this landscape. So so migration is sort of the optimal strategy. And then also migrations still exist because there's so few people and such wide open spaces and so so you have a lot of animals migrating, a lot of herds migrating to start with. Ah, and then you've just had kind of uh more interest in it in part because um, in part because we have a lot of development in the state, energy development, and so researchers and managers are kind of racing to stay ahead of the development and understand how animals are using the landscape. And so that that's led to a lot of coloring studies and a lot of discoveries of migrations um. And then and then there's also just kind of a few iconic migrations in Wyoming that have sort of captured the imagination of the public, like the Path of the Prong Horn and which goes from the Upper Green River basin down your Pinedale, and it's kind of unique because it goes up over this mouth range between the grove ons and the winds and down into Jackson Hole and Grantiton National Park summer an yeah, yeah, and and it's just a few you know, it's like three animals or something, but they follow this really narrow path. And and that work was really popularized by a photographer named Joe Reese and a writer named Emily and Ascelin and they kind of like told that story in in in pictures and essays and emilyne followed the entire path and and and wrote about it, and so like they brought that migration to people's imagination. And there's a big story in High Country News that culminated with their work. And and then my colleague Hall Sawyer discovered this this world's longest mule deer migration, which we call the Red Desert to Hoback migration, um hundred fifty miles from the Red Desert and Wyoming down near the town of Rock Springs or a little town of Superior up almost to Jackson. And you know, in another sort of amazing discovery, and they had something they had kind of like evaded understanding even though it has always gone on like yeah, yeah, And that's the thing I think that, uh, that's sort of we're all learning with these collering studies, is that like, obviously there's lots of people who who pay attention to Wyman's wildlife, and there's you know, professimals that manage our wildlife. But it's very difficult to understand, you know, where a migration goes from from start to finish. Ah, you know, unless unless you either follow them with GPS callers or you follow them on foot. And you know we don't follow them on on foot anymore. Right, So you might be in one place and or you're looking at the winter range and you know, you know, uh, the fall or early winter comes up and all of a sudden, a lot of animals show up, and so you know they're coming from somewhere, right, or like I've spoken to ranchers who who sit right on this migration corridor, and you know, they knew about the corridor. They're like, yeah, I can sit on my porch and I can see hundred animals a day, you know, move move across in this quarter. I knew that there was a quarter here, but they didn't know that, you know, from their ranch and extended you know, sixty miles down to the Red Desert and another ninety miles up to the upper Hoback. Right, you don't see that full picture until you until you put the collars on the animals and and they reveal the you know, the length of their journey. We just had a conversation with a guy in Colorado who had that that localized micro understanding of mule deer movements where he was explaining in great detail what needs to happen with the snow, and then that a lot of them come through. He had like a uh Matt Cook's ranch manager. They got like a forty acre family property which sits right by I think a home Deepot or something like that. Remember they shot a mulder that actually died in the home Deepot park a lot or something. But he had this like really detailed understanding of like what needs to happen, and then all of a sudden tons of muled your crosses forty acre plot, but then no sort of sense of you know, where it ends. But he just knows like on his place, all of a sudden they all show up and then they're all gone. Right you know, Um what real quick though? For people explain why mulder you have to move? You said, that's that you have a lot of migration and wyoming. What are the factors that make them bump around? Yeah? So um, so I like to think of Wyoming and and actually a lot of the West is like this. It's a it's a habitat of mountains and plains and for for species like mule here, that's kind of a that's kind of a problem because, um, you know, these animals want to be up in the mountains because that's where all the best food is produced. That's where all the best forage is produced. You get, um, you know that the mountains are really productive. They're fed by massive amounts of snow melt. So, but you can't live out their year round because you know they would they would die if trying to move to the span on that just a little bit more because I know that like the ranchers too, when I worked on a ranch guiding in Colorado, and they were like always like wanting to get those cattle up into the high country as soon as possible because they would just put on the you know, the pounds faster that way. What else is it besides a bunch of moisture up there? Yeah, well, Kevin, maybe the nutritional experts maybe answer that question. Well, a lot of it, of course, even as you drive through any of this country and just look, I mean, the habitat the assemblages. The habitats between the low country and the high country are very different, and especially for especially for mule deer, in particular getting them up into the high countries where a lot of the more lush forages, and so mule deer are a fairly small ruminant so they're in their digestive system, uh, they're they're uniquely adapted to have a symbiotic relationship with these bacteria in their guts that ultimately aid them in digesting their forage. But given how in part given how small they are, they're what we call concentrate selectors, meaning they need higher claw lity food. So, for example, a mule deer isn't going to persist out on a range where you put cattle and just eat grass the entire year round. They're not going to make it. They just can't. They can't adjust, they can't, they cannot digest that food as readily, and so ideally they have access to either brows like they do on winter range, or they get up in that summer range habitat and and have either lush new grass when it's early early growing phases or um for communities. And it's really the forbes On that higher, higher elevation country along with even the shrubs still up in that country. That really gets them high energy, easy to digest, high in protein, and they can really then not only finance reproduction but put on fat um during those summer intervals. Is there a measurement in wildlife that is like a gut per body size ratio essentially, and so so that's that's the relative index when we when oftentimes when we talk about digestive morphology and their ability to maintain what we call throughput or basically how quickly the food passes through an animal, and so um that tends to that tends to increase in correspondence with body size in general. But what we generally know is that those larger animals have a greater gut capacity relative to their body mass, therefore allowing them to basically have have slower, longer retention time. They can keep the food in their gut longer, which gives them more time to digest that food, which is important on a lower quality for it, like if you're eating primarily grass, well, yeah, like if you look at when you open up a cab, we were a mountain goat, it's just like a huge damn gut compared to other things that there's real you know, they kind of bulge out in the middle yep, yep, and it's and it's late. So so going from concentrate selector to what we call intermediate foragers like an elk elk is the classic sort of versatile you immediate forager can kind of go both directions from subsisting on mostly grass to also eating a lot of woody brows those sorts of things, to the the bulk feeders or the grass ruffage eaters like our like our bison for example, that are just ultimately like a bison. If you put bison in a tall forb community that a mule deer is just gonna thrive on, they're gonna have malabsorption gut problems, um and they're not going to be able to digest it properly because it's going to pass through them so quickly and they're not designed to do that. So they need that bulkier, high biomass lots of food, but that's of generally lower quality than on a mule deer is gonna live on. Thus, the importance of how habitat feeds into each one of these species somewhat uniquely or in some ways, its ultimately ends in the same same result as far as them garnering energy to survive, but what they need to be able to do that differs across the board. So if they can't be if a mule deer can't be can't spend its whole year down in the bottom like in the sagebrush flats, or doesn't want to, how is it okay for it to spend four or five months down there in the winter? Good Well, So that's also that's a that's a great point. It's also a little bit of a misnomer two, because deer actually can spend the entire year down in those low elevation basins, and in fact we do. We have lots of deer from the Red Desert to Hoback deer that Matt was talking about, there's a segment of that population that ultimately lives on winter range all year round. And even in our our deer that we work on in the Wyoming Range, the vast majority of them migrate up into those high elevation basins up in the high country, but we still have a lot of them that persist on that lower elevation. What you would just call winter range, like why in the world are they here? But even those ones at lower elevation, they're still catching some of that green up early in the year. And then then in all honesty, they're they're eating a lot of sage brush, and not only during the winter, but all all through the summer as well, stage brush, even though like as you drive across Wyoming, we're kind of like, oh, the stage brushes everywhere. It's just this crappy bush that's lives in the deserts. And yet not only for prong horn, but mule there too, like it's their main staple, especially all winter long, and even for those animals that live at lower elevation. But what we're learning as well is that those low elevation animals perhaps have somewhat of a different strategy and a different kind of connection to their environment as our high elevation animals do. And these are things where beginning to appreciate more and more. There's a huge there are multiple solutions to the problems that animals encounter within the environments they live in, and we're just beginning to appreciate that more and more, as opposed to the more simplistic they have to go here, they have to do this, that sort of thing. No, there's actually multiple ways for them to live in the environments that they that they actually live in, from those that are resident live on a winter range all year round basically to those that are heading into the into the high elevation basis. Is there fluidity between the two groups or do they have like a they have a ridge and sense that I'm like this and you're like that like the mule, like you have the migrating population to mule, Do do do dear be like, oh you know what, this year, I'm gonna go with those guys on a long ass walk. Or do they tend to stick to their own course from generation to generation? Yeah, So with with mule dear, there's very little fluidity. It's h I mean, they learn that strategy from their mother and then from what we can see in our data, that's what they do their entire life. And even in cases like the Red Desert population that Kevin was just describing has three different strategies kind of the long fifty mile one, sixty mile one to the south winds, and then kind of this resident strategy. And we've never seen any switching between those strategies in you know, six or seven years of of of studying them so and and even within their strategy, you know, they make their migration up to some arrange and then oftentimes they walk in their same footsteps back down to winter range. And is it reasonable to assume that if you took all that, if you somehow removed all the mulder out of this area and grab some new ones from somewhere else and put the same number back, they would probably never figure that out. They would never they would never learn to replicate that route. Well not never, but it would take them a very long time. So we just we just uh, we just published a study last fall um where we took to sort of address this question because there's been this So there's kind of the spectrum of how animals learned to move and to migrate, right, and with birds, there's some genetic cues. Right With birds, you can do the experiment you were just talking about, and they do know the the appropriate time to migrate and the appropriate direction based on where they the place on the earth and where they're from. Right. But with the idea with mammals is that it has to be learned. And so we did this experiment where we took um all the transplanted bighorn sheep that had been transplanted into Idaho and Wyoming, and of course and many of those came from places like around here up in the winds where they were migratory, and so you know, and then looked at whether or not they all GPS collars. You could look at whether or not they were migratory in their new landscape, but they have no knowledge of And what you find is that, uh, basically all of the transplants wouldn't couldn't migrate, didn't migrate. But the ones that we have heards around Wyoming that have been extant that never went through that export extirpation, so have lived in these these mountains for two hundred years or more and the vast majority of them migrate and then then and so so that suggests that you have to learn how to migrate. And then in that data set, we also had animals that had just been recently released or other ones that have been east into new habitats thirty or forty or we also had some moose herds that have recolonized habitats seventy eight years ago. And so you look at this continuum of time since translocation, and there you can start to see that them learning how to migrate and learning how to use the landscape. And with with bighorn sheep, thirty or forty years, they're starting that they're they're trending towards migration. With moose, it takes seventy eight years for them to learn how to migrate. So it's not never but um, as one journalist put it, you know, we we essentially destroyed the ancestral knowledge that species like bighorn sheep had when we extort extirpated them across the west, because you know, in addistant to losing the herds, we lost all the knowledge that those animals had of how to migrate on the landscape. And they can get it back, but a d fifty mile migration, like what did it take in past experience of these animals to ever have learned how to do that? And interestingly for mule deer, so that that work was with sheep and moose, and at least for mule deer, with the work that we've done, they appear to be some of the most faithful. So basically, once they have a migratory route, that's it. They very rarely change or do anything, and we think, we think it comes, we think it's passed from mom to daughter, although interestingly we've never known that for certain. We're in the process of trying to do that right now by following mom and daughter pairs through time. So literally, UM, with some of the work we're doing collering newborn fawns within one day of age, those that survive, re catching them, putting a GPS caller on them, so we can follow mother and daughter in the years to come to see if those daughters ultimately stay with mom and then adopt that same migratory route, which is what we think happens. That's the working hypothesis, and it seems to be trending in that direction. But it also implies this this unique value of memory as well, and we have We had one animal from from this past year that I think helped helps demonstrate that in a pretty powerful way. It was a mother daughter pair that we had followed for a complete year. So born on summer range, migrate to winter range, and then mom and daughter migrate back up to summer range, and then mom gives birth again that year, and generally mule deer around birth. UM attempt to seek solitude, and they'll literally reject, kick away, beat the crap out of their previous I know, I know, it's so sad. Stand up exactly. I don't want you around anymore. So, perhaps not coincidentally, one week after mom gave birth again, that fawn from the previous year took off, went on a walk about for like forty five miles and in the right direction, no, in the wrong to action. So winter range basically winter range to summer range was was was south to north, and then that fawn continued going north for like forty five miles. We thought it was a dispersal, like, oh, Mom just kicked her off. She's going to head to a new summer range. She's gonna found find her place in this world, which is exciting in and of itself if that's what she did, right. But and this wasn't just like skirting around a mountain and then following the foothills. We're talking going from over nine thousand feet in elevation back down to five up and down around around ridges, a very elaborate route. She got to that end of that journey, and that took her. I think that took her like nine days she turned right days. Yeah, she turned sutably, passing all kinds of other mulder oh mule deer, all through all of that country and other migratory routes. And this would have been like third week in June. So most animals are not migrating anymore. They've set up shop. Most of the females are giving birth. So so although we can confirm it, there's no reason she would have been traveling with another deer during that time. It doesn't really make any sense. All the other deer had set up shop. But literally, she gets there, she turned, spends one day there, turns back around, and literally walks the exact same path all the way back to Mom in one week's time, literally the exact same path. And this is country she has never seen before in her entire life. She's never set foot in it. Mom never took her there, we've had her collared since day one, and literally walks the exact same path all the way back. There is no stinking way we could ever do that. And so yeah, so to us, what that communicates is that they may have this just amazing ability for spatial memory. So it could possibly be that that mother, that daughter could learn from mother maybe walk that route once and they got it just like that. We had one other mother daughter pair similarly, I think a sixty mile migratory route migrated to winter range and then at like eight months of age, mom was killed by a mountain lion on winter range. Fawn still lived and walk the same path all the way back up to some range that spring. Do you ever go have a look at that path, like physically walk it? So we were we didn't physically walk it because you know how the landscape funnels. Yeah, you know, for instance, you're out in the snow, right and you cut a set of boot tracks and you're like, oh, ship, similar guys here, and you keep hitting the same boot tracks all day long because that person is just sort of has the same sense of ridgelines openings, right, and just people would be interested to go walk it so and be like how much does it just how much is it the logical how much is it the logical path? And how often did it follow like a shitty route and then took the shitty route again? Yeah? So we so we literally so. One of my research associates, her name is Samantha Dunell, and a team of women actually this year. Our aim was to to do exactly that, to to set forth and walk one of the migratory routes of one of our collar deer, and this animal in particular, this to me, is what's phenomenal to her journey is about eighty five miles. It's dear one thirty nine, which is just a hundred and thirty nine deer that we've had radio marked in that population. She still alive. Yeah, in fact, she's pregnant with triplets. We just we just we just handled her just like five days ago. I don't know, I don't I don't know the answer to that. We can only hope. But she's interestingly pregnant with triplets. But she so she has about an eighty five mile journey, and she goes up and over the Wyoming Range, drops drops down, crosses the Grays River, up in over the Salt Range to where her summer ranges. And so she's literally crossing summer ranges and migratory routes of hundreds and hundreds of other deer to stay on her route to get to her summer range. And so it's seemingly and and a lot of what they do is seemingly not always that logical, but that's their out and so what they did is they took videographers with them. We're in the post production phases right now of working on putting that documentary film together, but literally to experience on the ground what the animals going through walking through that route, the experience that they have from how they're navigating some of the snow fields, to the foods that they're potentially seeing and experiencing, to the to the treacherous terrain, to the fences that are there, all those sorts of things. And our aim was to experience that ourselves, so we can hopefully help provide to a broader public some of that the connection between an animal and their environment. But in particular, if you imagine, I hope they don't disneyfy it. It's it's not gonna be disneyfy the movie. No, no disneyfication going on. No, I'm getting backed up on questions. Man. Let me tell you the two questions I have, and you can approach them. However, you guys want who pays for all this? And and and that's great, um that someone does. So how do you guys fund it? And into what do you say to someone who says that dear did that crazy little journey because you guys got it all whacked out by catching it and messing with it and putting a collar on it. Those are wildly diversion. Well let's take that what I was getting backed up. Yeah, let's take the first one first. And maybe, um, i'd kind of pitch it over to Jared here. Um because one of the I mean there are there are multiple supporters of this work, but one of the important ones are sportsman groups and UM Newly Fanatics Foundation has really been uh remarkable in their support of research and and kind of unique among sportsman groups in that. And I can't really speak to the history of this or why this got set up, but first one reason or another, UM, sportsman groups are much more interested in funding on the ground habitat work than they are funding research and and and I and that I think it's a short term and long term play. Right. Well, I fairly obvious results right away, right, I mean, you can do habits at work on your property and then a year later be like holy shit, right and right and yeah, yeah, and the and the vision is that you know, we're we're we're cutting through all of the you know, all the middleman, and we're just enhancing habitat and making things better for wildlife. And you know, as as researchers, we're in the business of like trying to figure out what's going on and and you know why a population is declining and uh, and that's and sometimes research is risky, right, and and sometimes you don't. You know, sometimes you come up with great answers. Sometimes you map a hundred and fifty mile migration and that spurs conservation actions. But sometimes you don't, and and then you know who invested in that research that didn't quite pan out. It's it's risky in that you might not we don't know the answers. But how is it? Because how is how is there any wrong answer? Well, I think there there's some interest and enticement in unlocking these big migrations. For example, the Eastern Greater Eastern Yellowstone Collar project that we are chapter helped the fund on this side of the wind rivers. A lot of those deer didn't migrate. In fact, the majority did not. They just use their habitat a little different between summer and winter, and so that lacks a little bit of the pizzaz when compared to a hundred fifty mile migrations that go from the desert floors to the tops of the mountain. But it's but it is equally important because then we have dear populations that interact with their landscape in a way that is a lot like a stock investor, you know, having a lot of verse versification, and how those deer use the landscape then kind of insulates us against climatic changes, whereas the big mountain deer probably are more susceptible to win are killed than the ones that stay in the desert, but they're also insulated from drought. So understanding that is important. It just lacks the sex appeal that the big migrations has. And and so I'd like to follow up with that, Jared, I mean, and with respect to this this what I posed. You know, I think newly fanatics is has been kind of unique in funding research and and I'm curious of your take of you know why that why that has been the case. Well, and that's what attracted me to the organization personally, is you know, we we can go out and do a lot of things. We can cut a lot of trees, we can do a lot of stuff. There's no certainty that that's going to do anything, especially for these wild populations. It's not you know the same as say when when people back east or they're managing a farm for whitetail, they do have instant results. A lot of what we've found over the years and what we've learned through the research is what we thought were productive of treatments or projects really didn't benefit these wild populations at all. And so one of the things I always stick to, and it's something that I just kind of keeping my head over and over and over again, is is basically science without action. It's just research, but moreover, action that isn't based in science is really an enterprise of fools because you can't you can't focus your dollars in a way that's responsive to the wildlife's need on landscape. Yeah, that's a good point. And and so then just kind of closing closing the loop on the on the funding question, right, So sportsman groups, you know, the other other big funder for our for our work has been Rocking Mountain Elk Foundation YEA, and especially in Wyoming, they've really kind of worked hand in hand with with our research teams at the University of Wyoming and and have helped you know, us discover these migrations. And now we're kind of getting to a I think a really great place where we recognize that those on the ground habitat projects that the groups like Army F want to fund and have been great champions for are now being informed by by the research by you know, we've identified this migration cord or, so now we can look at how to conserve a big ranch that is in the cord or that's gonna you know, be maximally beneficial for migrating elk. Now we can look at modifying fences or enhancing habitat that are on stopover sights and so uh So with Army F there's been this sort of great investment in in the science of of in this case elk migration, and now we're literally they're using that science to guide their their work on the ground and maximize like a finite budget exactly things exactly like exactly the right place. And the Wild Sheep Foundation is the other one that that we sort of have to mention here. They've been huge supporters of not only sort of like all of those reintroductions that that I mentioned that led to that that learning that migration and learning study, but lots of other research and Kevin's been involved in some of that as well. Yeah, basically it's not with any of this work, there's because of what it takes to get it done. There's really no one single entity that can just come to the table and say, Okay, let's go do it. Although I guess it's it could possibly happen, but it's very unlikely. And so ultimately with all these things, it's a big network in a big partnership. We may just bring the science to the table, but all the others on the other side of the table, we're all at the same table, and it's all everybody's playing their role, from the nonprofits that are helping contribute to it too. We have great agency partnerships from the way I'm and giving Fish Department to Bureau Land Management to Forest Service, UM, there's other other entities within the state. You guys get hard funding from your university or do you have to get everything through grants? No, all through grants. We don't have any hard funding that comes through the university, I guess except for my salary and then Matt salaries is paid for through us. You go out and finance all your projects. Yeah, yeah, okay, what about whacking animals out by uh by Colum because you know what, we were recently talking about a mortality study in the Everglades, which is really surprising about what kills you're in the everglades and uh a guy rolled in and he was like you. He was saying that by the simple fact of putting collars on them, you change the dynamic. And he had this thing. What was that study that came out? They were working on a thing after they're painting certain animals. Was it actually studied? You can't remember, they were like talking about it did, but it definitely seen. Yeah, so that they wash you. Why are you guys look so irritated. I was just thinking about painting some bucks and I'm saying, by hanging some damn thing on him, it changes like when a predator comes into a group of them, whether it recognizes it as an injury or whatever, that it changes the dynamic. Yeah. My dad did a lot of research on UH pheasants at one point in his life, and they were trying to figure out how many of these pheasants that they released made it, and all the pheasants were had a little armband, wristband on their leg, and he watched several predators key in on the ones that had the wristband something shiny take them out, And so it was biasing the research they were doing. Dudes, not like, I'm not going to shoot a deer with the collar on it. So they're doing a mortality study that factors in human mortality. But if you're sitting on the woods and deer comes through the collar, unless you know what's going on, most people are gonna think like, well, I don't. These guys just laid some callers on some really big deer, so you might want to think twice before you say that people shot him. Well, so we're in. I mean, definitely, there's been maths been working on deer over in the uh the Sierra Madres and had callers on bucks, and we just fixed a bunch of males with callers over in the Wyoming Range as well. And I certainly expect there are a couple really good deer that we that we're fortunate to put callers on, which were really excited to see where they go and what they do. But so in that scenario, there's but never mind, never mind the people shooting them or not shooting. Yeah, but I'm talking about like the idea, and I don't believe that. I don't I don't know what this is true. But you hear people say that when you do that, you scramble his brain. Yeah, so whatever, Yeah, a couple of different things associated with brain scrambling. So we did some work in this year in Nevadas of California, and we were doing um that deer work over the years and and through through doing subsequent helicopter surveys and wanting to get a good population estimate. It's important for us to be able to know whether or not an animal has a caller on So to do that to make sure we didn't miss a collared animal. So for example, you fly over a group and you didn't see the collar that was in it, which causes some problems for bias in your data. We have fixed orange bands around the top of the callers to make sure that we that's why they have those on them. Well, that's often times the reason, and so that's why we were doing it there. Um. But what we also learned subsequently is because of that bright orange, it was subtle, very subtle, but it was causing some bias immortality and in part associated with predation. So I will admit in that scenario that yes, there was some potential effect there with regards to that, But we don't affix big, bright orange collars on these animals anymore. Oftentimes they're brown or they're black. They may have a tag on it on one side, so we can I D them in the field, that sort of thing, um. But ultimately there's little effect with regards to that. Now, that's not brain scrambling. Um. The brain scrambling I made that. I know I made. The word choice was mine, but the sentiment the word choice is mine. But the sentiment is that as as a relative to the effect of affixing a collar on an animal. Now, we know from previous work, especially before the technology got to where it is today, that when we put a collar on an animal that was too heavy, it did have an effect on that animal um it. It's subsequently influenced their um their ability to perform, reproduce um a slight effect on survival thereafter, not huge, but it was a subtle effect. Technology has come along where we don't have that issue anymore, and so those effects really are not there. And even when you step back and you consider the capture handling process and the things that we do which we get like brain scrambling comments or questions like that. Sometimes have you heard other people say, I mean, maybe not use the term brain sam Generally it's using the term stress. You're overstressing them or or and so with with the work that that I do, we're oftentimes UM. The way I try to attempt to characterize it is is telling telling an individual story. And if I can take multiple individuals in a population and put all those stories together, a pattern of understanding begins to emerge. And so we do our best to follow individual animals through time, and oftentimes what we need to be able to do is to catch and rehandle that animal over time to assess the reproduction, to assess how fat are, their patterns of growth, those sorts of things. So we often catch animals UM multiple times and so and right now in a number of my studies, twice a year, so we can see that picture of that seasonal change in fat and condition and reproduction, for example, as we go through the seasons. And so many will say, well, as you continue to do that over time, you're just like adding more stress to their life and eventually the cumulative stress is going to be so high that you're gonna they're just gonna tip over the edge. But what what the the reality is is that, yes, I mean, I'm not gonna try to tell you a story that those capture events are not stressful. Certainly they are, but it's it's also it's very acute. So it's a short tim portal window. We do the capture, we handle the animal, we processes, they go back on their normal way. It's not like we continue to add the stair stepping cumulative stress that ultimately in the end tips them over. One of my favorite stories to tell. It's maybe seemingly anecdotable. We'd have a number a number of other animals that I could also tell a fairly simil their story, but to me, this one is the most powerful. And that's an animal that we had in our work during our study in the year in Nevadas of California, so a mule dear. She was part of that work from when it started to two thousand nine when we finished, and during that window of time, our aim through a number of the years was to handle animals once a year, but then we switched to twice a year, so that we could see that seasonal change your time. So during that window of time, we captured and handled that dear twenty one times. And so if you tell me that there's cumulative stress effects or whatever, that that we're affecting their viability through time to handle that animal twenty one times over that window. But the story gets even better. When she was twelve years old. Now this is an animal of known age. When she was twelve years old, she gave birth to triplets, and I call her all three of the of her fonds. She subsequently reared them all. At twelve years of age, she successfully weird all of them old dry dough. The old dry dough completely wrong, completely wrong, old dry dough, gave birth to triplets, raised them all. She was in very very poor shape that fall. They pretty much sucked her dry. But and we caught her that fall, not only in that fall, in that following spring continued to catch her twice a year fine and I call heed her single fond. That next spring. That faon died at thirty days of age to a bobcat. But ultimately in the end she lived a fifteen and a half years old. When she was killed by a mountain lion on winter range. And so by the time was how many fonds did she raised successfully if you measure success as me in how many like lifetime reproductive six I haven't done that, but I certainly could go do that because we practically have her whole life. But I don't. I don't know the answer to that or whatever exactly. I'd have to go back and look. But even in that year, she had a kid get killed by bobcat, she got killed by mom, She got killed by a mountain lion when she was fifteen and a half on winter range. And so by the time she was twelve, we had handled her over fifteen times. And yet she gave birth to triplets and reared them. I mean there, which is a huge feat in and of itself, did get pretty passive after So what's amazing is those animals that were the helicopter. So so I I was one of the years when she was in the year that she was thirteen, Um I would I was gunning and I caught her, and she's she's fairly passive. I shot a net over her that the one the back end of the net just touched her head and she just laid down, so she wasn't even really caught she but she just laid down, and I just got out of the helicopter and hobbled her and we processed her and just super calm and chill the entire time. And that's generally what we tend to see. Those animals that we've handled multiple times are just like, well, okay, we're doing this again and it's no big deal. Which she captured the same way every time, by a netgun from a helicopter every time, one times, similar to being abducted by aliens. Yeah, yeah, we hear that once in a while too. And then uh, you guys, tranquilis or don't tranquilize it? Do you need to tranquilized year, No, you do not know. And so generally, generally, if we don't have to sedate or tranquilize in any way, in my experience, it's better for the animal because they maintain all of their abilities to thermal regulate, to respond. Um, we don't cause that. You know that that cirin, there's that surgeon in gentle and we just not it back real fast again. Um, we were avoid that. And most importantly then when we let them go, they're fully aware completely, can do their own thing. They can navigate fences, can deal with predators, everything else. They're back on their way. So no drugging. Can you capture an ANTLERD Yeah, an ANTLERD buck and not drug? Yes, so there's no safety concern. Uh well, I mean they got bone on their head that you have to be careful of. Um, you can know it's can certainly be done, absolutely, and that's how with many of them that we captured and outfitted this fall. Yeah, they were in hard Antler and you can catch them within that gun and do it that way. Ye. Are you guys familiar with Valarious geist and stuff all year? What's his reputation? So it's so in my mind valarious guys and probably everybody would have a different opinion. But he was, Um, he's a brilliant scientist, without a doubt. But he's also so some and some scientists would say like, oh man, that guy, it was crazy. But interestingly, Vow guys to me was so creative and thoughtful that he postulated so many ideas that have become hypotheses that we've since tested or maybe still like some of the groundwork today. Now admittedly some of those were pretty far out there and pretty crazy, so yeah, OK, no way. But in all honesty, I think it was just his creative mind that he could come up with potential explanations to things that ultimately lead to ideas that we could test thereafter. Remember someone saying that he, um, we'll kind of like light a fuse and then leave the room by by tossing something that yeah, right, like here's the idea. Here's an idea. But before we of the brain scrambling, well, I mean all uh, I mean, I think Kevin gave a great description about the ways in which you know, these type of coloring activity activities don't or minimally disrupt the animals. But I don't want to lose the larger point here, which is that this is the way that we have advanced modern wildlife management for the last half a century. Right, So, almost everything that we know about how animals respond to roads, how animals respond to human hunting, predator prey interactions, disease interactions, competitive interactions, population dynamics, Capturing and coloring animals is the tools of the trade. This is this is the tool that has led to most of the sort of modern advancements in our understanding of wildlife management and wildlife biology, and so you know, and as we go forward, right like, we need these tools even more than ever, right because we are in most of the species we're talking about are hunted, but um, but we are in a biodversity crisis here and for the you know, for a lot of the game species. Yes, um, we're not worried about losing mule dear, but we are worried about losing mule dear migrations or you know, severing those migrations, and for and for lots of other species. We can think of ungulates in in Africa another species. You know, we are concerned about losing these these herds. And it's not going to because when we lose them, it's not going to be because we somehow, you know, stress them out a little bit too much by capturing one too many animals. It's it's going to be because we didn't understand what these animals needed in terms of their habitat requirements and their movement or requirements to live on this landscape. And we didn't understand what we were doing to alter that. So you know, that's what research gives us. Research gives us that understand ending and and you know, to me, that's to me, that's the big picture, and that's that's why we do this research. And there's lots of examples of that type of understanding being applied to better manage and conserve these species. And so you know, that's the flip side. You know, that's what I think about when we get criticized about, you know, the the acute stress that that we're putting these animals under. Yeah, I wanted to return to that, but I'm glad you got that taken care of. You're welcome. I was devil. I was definitely davocate. I was being the devil's advocate there. Um, I understand that well, and we'll even revisit that. Let you uh emphasize that point again. But the reason I'm bringing up val Geist is, you know, his thing, like his idea about how muleteer came into existence? Is that is that does that have? Is there academic consensus and his idea of how the sort of evolutionary path of the mule deer, you know, let me let me approach it is a completely different way. Let me approach a completely different way. How did mulder come to be what's through evolution, the evolutionary path that led to Mulder Well, and I just was curious to the same thing because I've read Val guys book and there was a yeah, he talks about basically it muled there across between blacktail and whitetailed deer and a really new species. And I even texted the biologists about it last night. He said he's like familiar with it, but wanted to go revisit the idea. So the under Geiss theory, they're basically been around ten thousand years splices Holli scene transition, and when I read that, I instantly thought, wow, I was skeptical. Um Also he has within anything with science, there's usually some counterpoints, and I got digging around and there's other theories of maybe glaciers separated deer and then they evolved into those those different different species that we know today. So there is too kind of counter theories. And I don't know if you guys know, it is pretty commonly held that they're fairly new species to the planet, um say, especially compared to white tailed deer who've been around, as I'm told a lot long like fairly unchanged for a long long time. I think that's the general consensus is that what is exactly what you said, being a fairly new species whatever whatever new actually means. Um. But with regards to that, yeah, and then historically the notions with you know, my the initials some of the mitochondrial DNA indicating that mule deer were more closely related to whitetailed deer as opposed to blacktail deer, and then more recent analyzes indicating that well, no, mule deer and blacktail deer are probably more closely related than our deer. It's just like and that's like our referenced our conversation before. As we begin to like, you know, split all these things up, it's like, okay, well fine, And interestingly, as far as like, ecologists tend to not dwell on those sorts of things a lot um in the arena of the geneticists and those sorts of things, there's lots of you know, those talk taxonomic related questions, how do these animals come about? Where do we where do we draw the lines? But as ecologists, we tend to we tend to dwell on some of those aspects um a lot less and focus more on the ecology connections of animals to their environment as as opposed to what should be split, what should be split, and where the splitters versus you become curious about it, I'm not that curious. Yeah, I just And I think it's because I think it's because just our level, our level, as we talked before, I mean, there's definitely some value within that relative to how unique is this versus that? And where do we draw these lines to seek to conserve and protect? And I guess I like to think of it more bigger picture, and I'm like, I think we want to be able to conserve essentially every everything we got, even those that even those that are not um small or isolated or or seemingly they are unique. Um, I guess I like, I think a little bit more big picture and in a bit differently of just the connection between an animal and their environments and within within those ways as opposed to the splits or the lumps or But if if say, like a mule deer, it's been on the planet much shorter period pretty much agreed to on that, does that then ecologically make them more sensitive to change and less able to adapt? That's a really good question. Well, it depends, it would depends upon how the various traits that that exists there have become potentially fixed and thus la and thus are more lacked in diversity. So something that's potentially newer as so long as there's traits for adaptation to act on that could lead to a viable strategy, then it's fine. That part doesn't really matter. Whereas if if various traits have become fixed and then something changes, then there's there's no there's no potential beneficial trait for that change to be able to operate on that leads to some benefit over time. Um So whether or not there's the diversity in those traits to allow that to happen, depending upon how long one has been around or not. I don't know that it necessarily makes them one more sensitive than than the other, but others could certainly argue it in the opposite direction. I'm gonna layout the damn geist flock. Are you familiar enough with it? The fact? Check me out it. We'll see. Okay, he's got this idea right, probably untestable. Are had this this long standing like very versatile population of white tailed deer that had always been and what's now the Southeast United States and climatic conditions were such that had enjoyed this westward expansion um and then climatic conditions were such that the middle ground faded out and you had this remnant population on the west coast, and this this in that expanding population retracted back to east and they enjoyed this long period of separation and eventually emerged the black tail deer in the white tail deer. And then climatic conditions were such that those populations were brought back together eastward and westward expansion. There was a hybridization event. It's very beautiful in its details. There's a hybridization event around the Rocky Mountain front or so, and then and then the retraction again, and it left this population of yeah, it's tidy, it's tidy, tidy, tidy, neat So tell me then, no, no, listen, I don't know, no, I no, no, Okay, So it's not it's not a question. It's not a question for you. Perhaps it's more of no hybrids, okay, white tail deer, meal deer hybrids. How do they do? I don't think they do very good? Right, they do terrible. Then they're not sexually they're not sexually viol generally not. And in fact I had one in captivity that we that because we have both meal deer and if you are white till the end a few meal there in captivity and we had um but got in with their white tail mule deer buck broke through the fence, got in with our white tailed does the one year and happened to knock one of them up until we ended up with a hybrid. Is that how hybridization occurs? It's a mule your buck in a white tailed dough or couldn't go the other way? Yeah, there's lots of speculation on that it can go the other way. So people, I mean, but like, so you've seen it happen. Have you seen have you seen both happen? We have evidence of that happening. I haven't seen it myself happened that way, we have evidence is known to have happened. Yeah. And the general theory, which probably comes from geist to um, is that because of the way white tailed deer rut and that they travel lots of country and then find one female and stick with it. That sort of thing, as opposed to the maybe more sometimes storm hair harem oriented a little bit, although they're not really lot, not quite a lot within meal there it's little bit of attending bond, but that it's more likely for a white tail to happen to encounter muleedr dough and then ultimately but yeah, yeah, but regardless like that hybrid even in captivity, it's actually pretty hilarious watching if it, if it got spooked a little bit and took off, it would like stop once and then sort of run and then like start again and then try to run again. Almost it's completely true. You hear those stories, but explain stotting because a lot of people are gonna know what that work is. So startting is where it is very common and mule dear and it's where the animal lands on all four feet at once and then pops up again. And the idea behind that, which probably comes from Val guys To, is that within within the more the more in his book, Oh yeah, no, I know he did. Yeah. Um, as they as they live in the more like shrubby ruggedy country and with some of the predators that they encounter there, that them bounding in between as opposed to the flat out open wide open run in open country that white till dere are that it's a better adaptation for them to aid predator by that popping up and down and so you don't see exactly and so it's that all all four fet bouncing. But yeah, what that hybrid would do is he would literally do that. He'd like stop once and then open up and then start again and then open up. Really bizarre. And so you can imagine that an adaptation like that is not really fit on either side of the spectrum where do you live and and be viable that way? But in general, to get back to your question, if that happened to me, those hybrids should be way more viable than they are. And the point is is they're not. And and that's one of the greatest challenges with regards to that idea. Um And unless reproductive isolation for whatever hundreds of thousands of years or whatever it is, was long enough to cause hybrids to not be viable from from that relationship, maybe, but it seems to me that they should be more viable than they are. If if that was the case, so good job, man, is it. At what point in time are you leaving val guys? Because I got oh no, yeah, but go ahead, man, you're not gonna go ahead. Yeah, I'm gonna go. I wanna know if they If they what about when they think about the shirking or shirk or idea that val guys has big into this. Yeah, that's the super How he turns into a super buck is that he removes himself from the breeding. Everybody else has burned up their fat reserves. He just kicks back, keeps eating and like just for years. He takes himself out for years of this, and so one day he emerges just the man. Yeah, nobody can mess with him. And at that point he can just spread his jeans everywhere so I can speak. You guys got a collar one of them suck? Well we should, yeah, we should potentially see that. So so back with the captive deer work that I did years ago, um, we we sort of we angled at a question along those lines, but not exactly like that. We're in. Our interests was in looking at how yearling males so kind of their first year coming into that age where they could potentially reproduce or participate in the rut, whether or not when a big adult male was around, if that suppressive effect of that hierarchy caused them to not engage in the rut, whereas in a scenario where we had yearling males with no big males around, just two yearling males and their access to females all by themselves, they can be the top dogs. And whether or not they then expended more resources in the rut. And so during the during that those windows of time, we separated them out into those groups like that, and we monitored their food intake, their changing body mass during the rut, and then also they're changing fat during the rut. And what was amazing to me is those yearling males, regardless of whether or not they had big males around, and by the way, they acted very differently those yearling males where they didn't have a big male around, you knew they were top dog. They acted like they were topped do oh yeah, oh crap yeah. Behaviorally it was very obvious. But interestingly, their forage intake in the mass they lost during the rut was no different, which to me was completely phenomenal. And in those big adult males, they were expending a lot of energy during the rut. Fact, those adult males like ford It four to seven years old, they could lose eight percent of their body mass in a week like, and they're literally and these are in a We're literally putting males in a four ft by eight foot what we call metabolic box during the day, allowing them out to interact in the mornings and evenings, putting them back in that box, food right in front of their face, as much of it as they want, and they eat almost nothing. So most of the mass loss associated with the rut, even though we think it's because they're running all over the place, is actually because it's it's voluntary hypophagia. They're not eating. They're simply not eating, and that's where most of the change occurs during the rut. But we learned from that work as well, so not only those dynamics with those yearling males, but also the bigger males, is that it's largely what we call state dependent. So a big male that has more fat reserves at the beginning of the year is going to expend more of those reserves in the rut than a male that is simply did not pack on as many reserves early in the year, or is younger and thus still growing. Therefore it doesn't have the fat reserve to expend because it was putting most of its energy into growth and body structure and body mass, and then it's going to expend less. So while the Shirker mail it could have been a big male that year and he went all out, but that's because he had it. It doesn't necessarily imply that he's been saving it up for years and then going all in and in all honesty with regards to a tactic wherein you would you know, attempt to contribute your genes to subsequent generations. If you wait that long, there you also could die and then contribute nothing as well. And so if you do that in a manner wherein in the years you have the resources to expend towards it, you by all means should probably engage to take advantage of that opportunity. Yeah, I don't I don't remember the Shirkert male, but it does seem like it's a little bit counterintuitive of the way. You know, he used it as like a way to explain, but you get like the biggest you want him to save up and then yeah, but the but the problem is that like an individual animal like, they don't know that that strategy is possible, right, So it's it's kind of a hard So you know, all the sort of evolution. He's like, you know how, I'm gonna play it boys, right, right, and for five years when I come back, and then at year four, you're dead, right, So you know, animals discount the uncertainty of the future, like they don't know what the future, their future reproductive possibilities are going to be. And so but I don't think he's proposing that there game in it. I think it's just a thing that like it's got low tea or whatever. I don't know. We should have the guy on, yes, but I'm ready to leave him. I'm GOODA we touched on that because that brought up some interesting stuff to listen to. This podcast is gonna be a good one. Wait, you haven't been listening so again? Yeah? Is it good that we move on? Please? Okay? UM, are you guys familiar with the idea that that at the time, like at the moment of European contact, um that shortly thereafter, we probably enjoyed the highest buffalo constant buffalo bison. I'm gonna use bison because you guys professionals, the highest bison population perhaps that ever existed on the continent because you had, you know, lost of the indigenous hunters on the landscape and their other landscape changes. And so we came in and sought us perhaps saw this like very momentary artificial thing of the you know, the much cited like thirty two or forty two or whatever fashionable number of bison that around the landscape, when we took it to be like, uh, yeah, yeah, used to be the fashionable number, used to be sixty millions gone down. Um. But anyways, we looked like holy smokes, is a ton of these things. But there's no reason to think that it had been like that for a long time. And there could have been factors that allowed this explosion and that allowed the animals to be in places they weren't, such as like the mound builders in the Ohio and Mississippi Valley. Um, they made effigy mounds to all the animals around. They never made an effigy mound to buffalo. Yet when the English came into those areas, they're all over to damn place. So people wonder what happened there. Had they moved into these places, why were they not represented an art um? Was this just a temporary phenomenon that they witnessed, So what what point do you feel we had the most mule deer X. Yeah, I mean it seems like it seems like that was that was probably the hey day. So that is a that's a legit idea. I mean, it seems like it's a you know, we don't have great uh data going back that far, but it definitely seems like that's kind of the the conventional wisdom because you had cultures, like you had indigenous cultures even that that focus like it's it's hard to imagine not you had indigenous cultures that seem to have focused on hunting big horns m m. Had indigenous cultures that focused on hunting doll sheep, which seems yeah, wild right, And you had people that like very much focused on all the things. But there's no sort of like mule deer society. Right well, you know it's uh, I mean, of course, like our our understanding of these things gets dimmer and dimmer the farther we go back, right, but they you've probably read that journal The Trapper by Osborne Russell, right, and and you know, so this was this was a trapper that was moving through the Greater Yellowstone Region in the eighteen thirties and he was you know, hunting beaver and and supplying beaver pelts uh to the regional markets, and and it's striking and and he was a fairly remarkable guy because he basically wrote down in enough detail his journeys every day that historians and could go back and and trace his path right of of where he was the entire season. Even he's been a couple of different years moving through that landscape, and and he wrote down every time they shot something. And what's remarkable is they're moving through the you know, the greater Yellowstone landscape, and whenever they need food, it's either bison or bighorn sheet. You know, yeah, needed, you know, needed to stop and make something shot of bison shot. He he has an observation somewhere up in the in the Gravant Rivers, which is the Gravant drainage, which is kind of would be sort of south of of the southeastern corner of Yellowstone where he's at Camp. And he and he makes an observation. He counts on the cliffs around Camp a thousand big horn sheep, which is just unimaginable today right from France's apartment, I'm not familiar. He's the historian he traveled with the Oglala Sioux in the forties and they go into the Black Hills and kill big horns with rocks to get above them. They get above them and roll rocks down to kill him. Crazy go Yeah, So I mean like like there, you wouldn't occasionally, you know, occasionally Russell reports killing a meal deer, occasionally an elk, and so I like, yeah, I mean that, and that's what if you're traveling through there now, would be like your main right, that's what you're gonna run into. Yeah, yeah, and so yeah, I's that, you know. It counts like that make me curious how much bison shaped the ecosystem and you know, modifying the habitat and and extantially competed with species like like mule deer and elk you know, and you know, interactions and dynamics that we have no way to really understand today. The school I found a school, a bison school at like literally going towards an elk bugle at nine thousand ft in heavy timber in the Madison Range, and you just you cannot picture it now, like what what that looked like when that thing died? And you know, it's just it's it's so confusing, right, um so yeah, when were there a bunch of them like the you know the idea are you familiar with the idea that they're like like that? The everyone talks about the mule dear heyday of the nineteen sixties that might have been, like, what were the factors that could have led to something like that? Yes, yes, don't like speculate about old timey stuff. It's because the speculation just tough for scientists, Like, Okay, I'm gonna go there. Well, because you get skittish, Well, you get skittish, and it's I mean, we're our job is to Our job is to um in our in, our passion ultimately is to talk science, use the evidence that we have to talk about that, and to hopefully help make sound decisions. No, it's true, I'm gonna I'm gonna speculate. Please let me speculate. So sixteen seventies, so many of referenced that as a potential eruption, right, interruptive dynamics sixties or sixties, seventies, sixties and seven, Yeah, in in that window and they're um in like the notion behind eruptive dynamics and ungulate populations it's not it's not a new idea. We know that that thing that that type of dynamic happens. And where it's most definitely in the word so eruptive dynamics, is just simply this notion where a great example is you you take some some ungulates, um, put them on an island, and they grow and grow, they just explode to great abundance, and then they subsequently crash and then we never see them recover to that abundance again, um, which is what you see when you introduce wild turkeys somewhere. Yeah, yeah, certainly. Yeah, it's the same sort of notion. It's this explosion, make use of this like brand new habitat that's that's been you know, unpioneered before you see them reach great abundance and then they subsequently predators aren't used to you yet. Lots of things. Yeah, potential ideal scenario. And so the notion of the sixties and seventies, which we're all potentially fond of. And I think there's a general like desire and thirst to have that great abundance of of mule deer again most most certainly UM and and but also for us as people, I think we all, we often look in the past and think, why wanted the way it was back then? We should have that number again. But the only way to potentially get that number again is for everything to be the exact same way it was back then. And things are very different that then. UM. Our forests were at different successional stages. UM. So forest management has definitely progressed through time. Um we've seen successful changes in those forests. Livestock grazing was potentially different, Predators were potentially different, climate regimes were different, our presence on the landscape was certainly different. Our use of habitat ourselves was different. Agriculture was different. So, like you, you begin to think through each one of those things that are different now than they were back then, and you begin and reflecting on that, you potentially begin to realize that, Okay, well maybe there were a lot of different things that potentially contributed to that great abundance at that point in time. And another one is even other other species of ungulus present on the landscape. I mean, we didn't have near the elk abundance back then as we do as we do now. Most certainly, and regardless, there's you know, the way the way you ultimately get that you get in abundance like that is, it starts from the ground level. The only way that you can get there and to maintain that much is to ultimately have that have the habitat and that nutrition and fundamental building block for populations. Now, maybe other things like presence of predators and other things interact to influence those things, but you ultimately do not get there unless you have that fundamental building block. And so for me most certainly that fundamental building block had to be different predators aside, all those other sort of human harvest, all those other things aside you had You had to have that fundamental building block to be able to get there. And I think that building block that be food, that being food, and use of that building block um today is is different than it was than it wasn't a success. I think you think about what led into that nineteen sixties eruptions, So you had probably landscape level disturbances occurring, and then you kind of swing in the mid nine nine team thirties or so, and then there's this relax and and the disturbance kind of stop slows down, and that habitat is allowed to mature to state that's very desirable for deer, and they just chase that habitat would be I'll go ahead and speculate because I'm not bound by the Shackles science, but um, I agree. I think it had to have been a disturbance regime followed by a relax And the great thing about the disturbance regime that happened that time is you didn't have all the external stressors that we have now, um be at cheat grass or other demands on the landscape. You had historically low predator populations. Yeah, I mean that that can could contribute to it. But like Kevin was saying, you still need the groceries to recruit the baby. So what what is an acceptable number of milder? I mean, because you want to having like a fatalism problem, right, Like if you ask me, if you asked me, like, what's the benchmark of what's the benchmark of what we should strive towards? If I never really had to come up with like, oh, okay, what's the ideal, I would say fourteen nine two? Is that a number a year, a year, a hundred years before you know, a hundred years before European contact. I don't know, Like what is the number if we say like, oh, we want wildlife, we want to make room for wildlife. We want to Like if you just say, like, my job is just to tell you what's going on and what's here. At some point, it's gonna lean into advocacy here, at some point it's gonna lean into preservation. So are you always just chasing the idea that I want to maintain what we have right now and that's what I would like to see happen, or you're are you trying to um? Are you trying to be to go back and and hit some like retroactive point to say like, no, we pushed it too far. Now it's we we've messed it up too much. We need to fix things. Or is it just I just want to capture what's here now and maintain that, or I'm willing to see us lose a bunch more and then come to some point when we want to stop the loss of wildlife. Generally, I know it's not your job, but as a human being, do you think about that? Does that motivate your thoughts as a scientist? Well, this is sort of uh, well, this is a difficult question, right there is the most difficult question I mean the right. So, I mean, I mean, one answer obviously is like for us, I mean, we're researchers, right, so our job is not to articulate how many meals here there should be on the landscape. Okay, so that's that's what he's here's the problem. Here's the problem. Here's the problem. I didn't say. It was that if you didn't care, if you didn't care, you wouldn't do what you did. I respect, I understand, I respect, I respect what you're saying, and I have because both my brothers are in the business here, and I'll always be like, what do you hope happens? Like, I don't hope anything happens. Um, you wouldn't be motivated if you didn't care about dear, you wouldn't be messing with them all the time. You'd be doing something different, right, right. Yeah, So that's one answer, right, obviously, one that you don't like. But I mean the other answer is that, um, right, we have to. So I think it's as when we when we manage these systems, it's just really hard. It's this sort of shifting baseline problem, right, It's it's really hard to go back. It's really hard to get the public too, imagine, you know, to get the public. And I've tried this to get the public to think about what Osborne Russell saw in those mountains outside of Yellowstone, Right, we don't nobody thinks about Nobody can even imagine a world in which someone at their camp could see a thousand big horn sheep on the cliffs about them. No, that nobody can imagine that. And that is not in the discussion when we think about how many big horn sheep we should have on the landscape today, right, and that ship is sailed, right, and and and so so I think that we so I mean, when I think about it practically, and when I think about conservation, I think about, you know, uh, how many? And it's for me, it's not so much how many mule deer, it's you know, where do we have mule deer? Where? Will will we have migratory mule deer? Where where? You know? Where? Where will we sort of continue to have these animals um making their best living by moving across the big landscapes of the American West. And when you think about that, like I think, you have to start in practical terms, you have to start with what we have now and and the conservation discussion, Like, we can argue about what it should be, but I think in practical terms, the only place that we can start with is conserving what we have now, right, I mean, it's it's it's called conservation for a reason, right, it's conserving. You can't conserve what you don't have, right, So we're conserving what we have now. And the notion, you know, I think that the big horn sheep people have been um. Of course, they have been tremendously successful in restoring big horn sheep, right, and so maybe that that's an example where they've been able to get the public and get sportsmen to imagine what the West used to look like and work towards you know, getting sheep back on those mountains again. And that's you know, that's been successful. They've been successful in restoring you know, bighorn sheep in lots of places where we used to have them but lost them, you know, went during European settlement. But with mule deer, yeah, I think it's a bit more. It's yeah, I think you have to start with with what you have now and and hope you don't slip slip further back. Two Then twenty years from now, we're having the same conservation question in this restoration about or about what we have now, which is far less than what we had twenty years prior. Um Anyways, that's that's how I think about it. My brother who works in Alaska, he talks about that they're they're still in uh he works with fisheries, and he says that there were still in the sort of the descriptive phase, just trying to understand what's here. There's a lot of things. They don't know what's there yet, no one's measured it. And he talks about how here he sees so much where we're in the rest down in Lower forty eight, we live a lot in the restoration space, the restoration phase, because we know what's there. Yeah, there's a lot of work here, like you know, Atlantic Atlantic sturge and whatever. There's a lot of work down here trying to restore populations. Which is kind of interesting because I don't know about you guys, but I feel like we're very much still in that descriptive phase when we're still discussing fifty mile migrations. It feels like we're we're learning as we're going along, and but we're also we have now all these societal pressures on these animals, and so we don't have the luxury maybe that we had before of just kind of unknowingly making mistakes and then I'm you know, I'm doing those mistakes later. Yeah, that's a good counterpoint to to his like casual observation is that people just found out about some of these you know, some of these things that we didn't know about. Yeah. The more I talked with these guys, the more lost I actually feel on the older and what I thought I knew. But it's a good of a lost man finding yourself lost. Can you touch on the idea real quick that that what happens to a fawn in utero is that's the right term. What happens to a fawn in utero will be then realized throughout its entire life, including whether or not it might turn into a big, huge, giant buck. I'd love to. Yeah, So the easiest way for me to do that is to actually tell a little bit of a story behind some some work that we did. And of course it ties back to like the size that animals ultimately tained, which a lot of us are are interested in as well. Um, and so we in South Dakota, there's two two different primary regions and habitats, So eastern South Dakota where I grew up, um crop agriculture dominated landscape, and then the beautiful Black Hills in southwestern South Dakota. And during that that, during that time, there was this general observation that and I don't know if you are you spent some time in the Black Hills, perhaps, but those deer are tiny. They look like little mini deer compared with deer in eastern South Dakota. No, I didn't know that, like maybe a hundred pound difference at adult white tailed I'm sorry white tailed deer story, but but it's the best story. It's probably the best example that we have that clearly demonstrates um this phenomena. And so the question was, and this is I think what's so powerful about this is I think as as people and as as as hunters and folks that appreciate the outdoors and think about big males and those sorts of things. When when we see big deer over here and we don't see dear, big big deer over here, well, it's because it's genetics. We got great genetics over here. For big bucks, and we don't have it over here. And so that was one of the questions with regards to deer in the Black Hills, Well, it must just be genetics that's making them that much smaller. And so we did what's called a common garden experiment where we took common garden common garden experiment where you take individuals from two different places, bring them into the same place, and raised them under the exact same environmental conditions. And in this scenario, we took newborn white tailed deer from the Black Hills, newborn white tailed deer from eastern South Dakota. UH. We raised them in captivity, hand raised them, offered them a high quality diet, and watched them grow all the way through to adulthood. And so we focused on males because of the questions UM. But we raised those newborn males all the way up to like seven eight years of age and watched their changes in body mass UH and antler size and low and behold, even though they were raised under identical conditions, they were radically different in body mass and antler size, like hundred pound difference over a hundred pound difference in body mass, and like fifty plus inches and antler size, huge, huge difference, um once they reached that peak size. So initially we thought, huh, okay, well maybe it is genetics. Then, because we had both males and females that we had hand raised, we then allowed them to breed in captivity, so we had black Hills, may else and females, males and females. Okay, yeah, you want to tell the rest of the story. I just got excited, dude. I love this story because to me, it's so powerful. So we allowed them to breed in captivity, and then we did the exact same thing again. We hand raised all of those back the ones. Okay, we didn't cross, no, no, I got you. I just want to make sure I'm clear on something. The ones that you took, Okay, the ones you took and took them for two different areas in raisins staying conditions. At What age were they? Sorry? Oh? So we we watched those males grow all the way up to seven eight years. What age did you bring them together? Oh? Newborns? We we literally we collected them from the wild as brand new babies, so like two days of age, that's one of two days we bottled bottle fed the funds. They're already weaned, and they weren't even weaned yet. No, no, no, literally right out of the gate. So the only the only influence before was basically mom's influence in utero. And that's why I wanted to understand, just like brand, spanking brand. And then they realized these different, that's right, that's right, that's exactly right. So bread them. We didn't cross East River Eastern South Dakota with Black Hills. We kept we kept them apart. So Black Hills males, Black Hills females, Eastern South Dakota males, Eastern South Dakota females, and then hand raised those offspring, the Eastern South Dakota males, so which means we now have first generation and second generation. Right, first generation came from the wild. The second generation were born in captivity. Right, the eastern South Dakota animals that we watched grow, those males were like exactly like their father's same body mass, same antler size, literally identical trajectory and growth. But the offspring from those Black Hills males at at peak body size and antler size, so like that five to six year age mark, those those male offspring were seventy pounds heavier than their dads and grew thirty two inches more antler than their dads, same diet as their dad's, oh, exact same environmental conditions. And I mean literally mom, mom and their mom and dad came from the wild, were small, but then got that much bigger and and under the exact same scenario. And we didn't see any change in those eastern South Dakota animals that your growth trajectory was identical. So literally like overt increase in antler size, over increase in body mass over that one generation within within captivity. Now the notion is, so all the animals we collected from the wild, where all the maternal environment they experienced were from wild mom, right, and that wild mom being in the Black Hills Black Hills Ponderosa pine dominated forest, pretty pretty crappy food source, yeah, mostly pine needles. Yeah. But then in captivity, once, once that fawn had grown up in captivity, it had realized the high high plane and nutrition. Now, although it never changed its pattern of growth then basically and we saw this with regards to birth masses all, it then began to pump what we call like the silver spoon effect into their offspring, and we've seen that saw that radical changing growth within that subsequent generations, which means it connects it all the way back to the maternal environment. We call it a negative maternal effect. Maybe it's related to epigenetics associated with like basically turning on or off jeanes, those sorts of things, but regardless, it ultimately stems from the nutrition that mom experienced. And and what that means is so even though we took those fawns from the wild brought them into captivity, because mom had basically set that trajectory for growth, it didn't matter how good it got later in those years, because it was as good as it's gonna get. Their Their growth was still quote unquote stunted. It still followed the trajectory that mom had set it on, like multiple generations down the line, right, And we oh, yeah, exactly. And so we suspect that if we had kept doing that, maybe over two or three generations, those Black Hills animals would have actually gotten to the size of those eastern South Dakota animals. But even with one subsequent generation after that improved conditions, they made up over seventy of the difference in antler and body size that occurred between animals from those two regions. So no genetic related influence. And I think, and I mean I probably I certainly did it historically. And you you hear folks say it all the time while we got genetics for big bucks over here, but we just don't have those genetics over here now. Our growing appreciation now is that is almost most certainly largely an effective nutrition and nutrition that's lasted over over many, many generations. I mean, we've done that work on white tailed deer, We've done work on sheep in the Sierra Nevadas of California, where over six different populations, we can explain over eighty percent of the differences in horn size across those six populations just by how fat females are, which is powerful, Oh yeah, no joke, Yeah yeah, over eighty percent of the difference. And and horn size varies markedly across this its populations, we can explain eighty percent of those difference just by basically how fat the moms are. And certainly that's just like a broad indicator of nutrition across those ranges. Yeah, physiological stress associated from nutrition and and those nutritional dynamics, And so I think I think over time, as as these stories begin to pile on that. For example, I've I've started saying that you know when we handle animals or we look at body mass. Body mass to me, isn't we think of that, Well, that's the condition of that animal. Well no, not really, body fat is the condition that animal. But how big it is is literally this long term signature of nutritional dynamics within that place on the landscape. And so as you go from one place to the next, Man, there's big animals here, they're smaller animals here. Well, that's part of how they're in tune and adapted to the environment that they live in. And if they were if they were trying to get as large as they are in in the better environ mean, they may not ever get there, or they may not ever it's gonna be another year or two before they get the chance to reproduce because they're focused on growing bigger. So the adaptation in is in nutritionally limited environment will be smaller and as a consequence of that, you can continue to be viable and you demand less resources through the year as well. So it reflects not only the underlying fundamental process of nutrition and how it feeds into growth and dynamics within population. But it's also a cool a cool way to think about how these animals are just uniquely adapted to the environments that they live in. We got a buddy who's uh, he manages a big white tailed property in South Texas, and he feels that like he likes to keep it's a little bit off topic, he likes to keep his buck numbers really low because he feels that bucks stressed, dear out. Mm hmm, buck stressed. You're out having a bunch of males running around stresses, and he feels they get fatter and healthier the less that's going on around him. Huh. Would Wouldn't that just be a factor of competition? Yes, that to me is certainly it's it's just more milds feeding and just so it's just more more individuals. You probably see the same thing. If he pulled females out of it, he pile those out too. Wow. Yeah, So I suspect it probably has more to do with that than anything. There's there's a number of ideas out there associated with particularly during the rut and rutting behavior and how that feeds into like buck ratio and how many big males you have and our young young males less experienced and therefore pushed females that much harder because their immature and don't know what they're doing, that sort of thing. And those results are a bit equivocal. There's not really a clear pattern that that emerges from that. So I have a feeling it's mostly associated with density and just more minds being there. Have you guys looked at well that that kind of ties into this. Have you guys looked at the effect of exposure two predators, not even mortality, but effects of exposure to predators on nutrition and on fat because I know, like like cattle ranchers will observe that even in the absence of wolves killing cattle cattle, you know, it's just anecdotal observation, they'll say that they don't get as fat as quickly because they're living with this constant stress and moving in unpredictable patterns that do you notice that in game animals, deer, elk whatever. Yeah, So this was a big question with when when when wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone and and we did a big project on this um that you know, same type of question that um that wolves were causing elk to you know, be more alert on the landscape, be more vigilant, not forage in risky places that might that might have higher food value and forage and less risky places that where there's not as much to eat. And um and this was this was sort of a big idea. Um we call it the you know, sort of the landscape of fear, you know, yeah, yeah uh. And so that that so there was this idea that elk were responding to this new landscape of fear that wolves had created in places like Yellowstone and and of course wolves do eat elk, but there there was this idea that there was this larger effect, a so called non consumptive effect, that this sort of wolf jitters kind of idea that elk just weren't weren't weren't living as well, weren't finding as much food, weren't spending as much time feeding because they're always alert to wolves and um uh. That idea got a lot of traction in the literature without very much empirical evidence to support it. And then we did a test which I think was fairly definitive. We basically had GPS colored elk, GPS colored wolves we could score for every elk um how often it came into contact with wolf, so sort of like it's encounter rate, right And and obviously the prediction is if you're coming into contact with wolves more frequently than and and this wolf jitters is a thing, then those animals should have less fat, that they should burn more fat through the winter, and it should be less pregnant. And uh we we captured all the all the animals assess their their rump fat and body condition through ultrasound and absolutely no effect. Can you go down to Colorado and test the theory that the massive increase in summer recreation is affecting here year round really now is affecting the health and well being of mungulates. Uh well we should. I bet you'd be able to find money to do that in Colorado, so we could. We did um basically something along those lines with with mule deer, but with an eye towards end energy development, which is not all that different. It's a human presence and at times somewhat unpredictable human presence those sorts of things. That's something we've been concerned with for some time. UM, and we we have known based on GPS caller data and a lot of work that Hal Sawyer, a colleague of ours here's in here in Wyoming, have done that the presence of human presence within those energy fields results in behavioral displacements. So they're using those areas next to well pads and roads um less on on their winter range. Uh. And so we we took that a step further, and we aim to address that question of is it like this chronic stressor that So, for example, animals that are exposed to more energy development are losing more fat over the winter. And so we did that with that too, you know, twice this twice a year capture to look at change and body fat over winter, those sorts of things, and then related that to exposure to energy development. And so interestingly there was nothing there which maybe speaks to some well let me go, let me keep going, what what I think is powerful? So the other thing. So we did not only that, but we took it one step further. And when you see this behavioral displacement, the question then and ultimately how that potentially links to the population could be through like this chronic stressor or it could be because they're functionally losing food and habitat on the landscape, and it's that food that's ultimately determining the carring capacity of their winter range. So what we did is we literally went on the ground and and measured measured sage brush, measured growth of stage brush as well as subsequent youth use of sage brush at the end of the winter. What's really interesting is that dear the way in which they select habitat and use habitat across those winter ranges. They're keying in on stage brush where we're getting more leader growth, and it's it's those new leaders each year that is really what's their primary staple if they can have it. So that's one thing that's powerful that tells either queuing and queuing in the food. But the other aspect of that is what was happening is that in those areas adjacent to or near the well pads or the roads where we were getting that disturbance, they were not using the food that was there as much as they were in areas um that didn't have that level of exposure. So what that means is that there's ultimately residual food that's left on the landscape that's not being used because of our our presence in that human disturbance, which means a functional loss in the carying capacity of that winter range. So with that displacement, not necessarily stressed, not necessarily stressed. So it's a food it's a food based link to the change in population and within that one herd in particular, we've observed um I think it's a thirty thirty six decrease in population size on that winter range as that energy development has come into play. Does it take a long time to realize it? No, I was over like at decade, So it didn't. Yeah, yeah, but it didn't. It really didn't take that long. But what that indicates to us is that based on that displacement, you're resulting in increase in density in the other adjacent areas where there's already dear and there's only so much food to go around. And so if you you have a grocery store that's feeding so many people and you take out one whole corner of the grocery store, there's you're not going to support as as many people. And in that instance, we're not going to support as many animals based on the groceries that are stored there is ultimately what it means. So it's not a stressor link, but it's a food based link. Do you translate that to recommendations? That's well, yes, we translate that into here's the realities of this, and so we've with that effort. We've also um because of the analyzes and the modeling that we did, we've been able to place that into hypothetical scenarios. So for example, if you based on a modeling of food distribution on the landscape and what we know about how dear use that food. If we put a road here in a well pad here, here's what that's gonna mean as far as an indirect food loss. Or if you if you place one big one here, or you have three other one three you know, three smaller ones as opposed to one big one. So we've taken that and translated that into those relationships to to derive a direct expectation as to what that's going to mean for food loss depending upon a build out plan, that sort of thing. And the hope is to simply be able to communicate the realities of it. I mean, we are humans living in this landscape. We're gonna affect it in some way, but ideally however we are, we're at least informed as to the effects that we're going to bring to the table, and that we can we can do it in a wise way, and when we can't, we can at least speak the realities. Okay, well, if we're going to do this, this is what this is gonna mean, and are we willing to accept that? And then if we are, we are. But ideally it's it's less walking around of that. Oh, it'll probably be okay sort of thing. Um, here's here's what's liable to happen. And I was gonna say that. So that work has been translated into yea, So how do we manage these fields? Right? So the result that Kevin was just describing as basically means that meal deer avoid human disturbance, and when you develop a gas field you can there are ways to minimize human disturbance. So the most disturbances when you're actively drilling the well. Then, um, we have wells that are producing, but but have trucks coming into constantly to call off the content sate, and we have wells where that condensate is being um taken off underground. And so this has led to a shift in the way that wells are managed, that the oil and gas wells are managed. We limit the time of drilling, and we've shifted from you know, pulling that condensate off underground so we don't have the truck traffic. And so you know, it's the it's the human activity in those in those fields that that that the animals are responding to. And so we so we now we now know that if we can reduce that human activity, we can reduce the impact on on wintering deer. And just to close the loop on the cattle wolf jitters question, we're sort of talked about three different cases here, right. So on the one hand, cattle not bred to to deal with predators right there. They're bred to either to put on fat and and grow grow fast, unlimited food to go to market, right and and so but and we kind of made this mistake when when wolves are reintroduced to Yellowstone, researchers and certainly the public thought well, this is this huge change that now now wolves are on landscape. Now there's a landscape of fear, right, But elk have other landscapes, like they have a landscape nutrition and they have a landscape of starvation that they also have to respond to and so you know, the reason you we didn't see any effect. One of the main reasons is that there's a risk of starving to death every winter for an elk and Yellowstone, and they need to make decisions that minimize that risk. They need to feed where you know, where they can still find food, and they need to not spend time and three foot of snow where they're going to burn a bunch of calories and then end up starving at the end of the winter. And wolves are new to us in Yellowstone, but they're not really new to elk. They still contain all the adaptations of living with wolves for millennia. So um, we think of wolves as being this novel um stress in this novel predation for elk, but in reality, you know, they're adapted to to live with these predators, but they're not adapted to live with energy development. And that's a very different kind of disturbance, right. That's always in the same place, like you know, the footprint and the human activity is at that well and at those roads. It's always in the same place. So it it can it can send a more common, more consistent que that that animals respond to and there you do see this result of you know, the mule that you're leaving the food behind that's close to the well pads. I don't think elk are leaving well I've tested this. I know that elk are not leaving food behind that are in play sis where where wolves frequent and where it's risky to forage because of wolves. They still find it because yeah, that that's a that's a stress, that's a sort of source of of of risk that they're adapted to to work with on the landscape. I just recently shared a um photograph of a graphic that was in the mule Deer Migration Assessment that was put out by the Wyoming Migration Initiative, and it's a it's a graphic that shows mule deer using winter range near Rock Springs, Wyoming, north of I eight and I A d literally formed, so it's like an The northern end of showing all the uth patterns is a morphous. It's just like, as you know, like how do you describe it? It looks like a head of cauliflower, right, It's just they're kind of going along natural land use patterns. The southern edge of the winter range is a straight line formed by a four lane divided highway. Yeah. Like it's just like it's like if you took a pair of scissors and cut off the landscape, what are the like in your mind? Like, what is it about that highway that they don't like? Yeah? So in that case, you know, uh, and and you know what you can't see in that graphic that you just described is that you know those animals travel a hundred and fifty miles from the north down to that winter range two. Then um, you know have have part of it truncated by interstates, have to come a hundred fifty miles. But then be like, but that I don't like. Right, So so Interstate eighty is, um there are um right away fences which are maybe eight inches high meal you jumpable by a mule deer. That's not the problem. The problem is that Interstate eighty has an incredible level of traffic, and so the animals have just learned that like, this is a this is a risky endeavor, and they don't for the most part. Uh, they don't try to cross Interstate eight because they're the traffic levels are just so high. So if you if you ceased traffic, they would obviously just walk right through. Oh yeah, because I was looking at photographs of because at first when I saw that picture, I was like, there has been another explanation, Like I thought that the south it was maybe like that, it's following the course of a large river. There's a giant bluff like you find in places. But then I and I voiced this to Jana's and he's like no, and he pulls up a photograph. There's no damn difference. Yeah. Yeah, So I mean they would, uh, they might not do it immediately, they have, you know, a bit of memory, but they would eventually, Yes, they would. They would cross it. Um if if the traffic the war of trucks or yeah, yeah, yeah, and that I mean, and if you if you travel that interstate, you you you know what I'm talking about. I mean, and oftentimes when you're driving on that interscape, you can just look down the road and it's just a line of semis in front of you and on in the other lane. What would a cost to do you have some familiarity with um overpasses, underpasses, what would cost to like if you just take that isolated spot. Okay, let's let's see you let me put it this way. Let's say you had all the morning in the world, what would you do to fix that spot? Yeah, so you can put in, uh, you can you can put in so you can put in underpasses or overpasses, and you know, and we've had a couple of those in Wyoming that have been really successful, uh underpass and scared the hell out of them. Well, so, yeah, it's interesting that you say that. So when so inter eight was created in the seventies, and there was there was like a smaller road. But then when they built the Interstate UM in the seventies, they knew that they were um that they were going to disrupt migrations. You know, they didn't have the maps of the migrations that we have now, but they knew that they were going to disrupt it, and so proactively they put in these tunnels underneath the interstate. But the tunnels are like I call them tunnels because I think that's what they look like to a mule deer. They're like ten ft wide by ten ft high. Yeah. And and and the Interstate, you know, is is two lanes here the big median and then two lanes. So they're long. And when you when you look through them, you know, you the afterlife. Yeah, you see this tiny light at the end of it, and uh yeah. So mule deer have not used those. You can imagine a bobcat might be like, yeah, go through there, right right, So so there's been monitoring that mule they have not used those. Um so underpasses, you know, but but there are options, right Like you could have a smaller underpass that goes through the eastbound lane, then it opens up into a into a fenced opening in the in the median, then you go through this. You know, that would be much more effective or overpasses. Those overpasses, um you know, I don't have exact numbers, but there four to five, eight to ten million um per probably to go all the way over. And why does it have to be before it ceases to be spooky to them? It doesn't have to be that wide. I think the a the one that I don't know if either you know, the one at Trappers Point. We have one over We have two overpasses news since two thousand twelve in Wyoming and they're both on that path of the Prong Horn migration that I mentioned earlier, and also a mule deer migration, and I'd say it's probably fifty or sixty feet wide feet feet, but it has but it also has burms on on the overpath, so if you're a prong horner meal deer, you can't really see the traffic on either side as you're going over it. I read somewhere too that when you burm it too steep, they don't like it too. Yeah, I could probably start making it goes out of some findings out of Europe where it when it's burned too steep, they feel like they're just afraid of they're afraid of like amber. It needs to I can't. I wish I remembered it better, but there's like a way that to make them feel at ease where they have sort of awareness of what's to the right most left as they pass into it. But fifty ft will do it. I thought you're gonna say, like fifty yards. Well, I mean, I'm I'm kind of guessing. I've never measured it, but but being up on those that feels like about what it is. It's not it's not like a football field. They're they're they're relatively small. But but the challenge with Interstate eight and you got to vegetate the thing. Uh, well they do in in like they're some up in Canada near Banff National Park. Those are vegetated. The ones are those are like stunning. Yeah. Yeah. The ones that we have are not. Um, I mean they're re vegetated. So there's some grass on it, but it's not like you got. But they're coming across the open country though it's not they're not coming out of the forest. And I mean he's not walking on concrete. No, No, it's got dirt and grass. Yeah. But just to circle back to the inter State Ada that so yes, where that red desert to hop back migration comes down the winter range that you were describing. You know, we could put a crossing structure there and I think those animals over time, difficult to say how long would discover it, move across it and discover probably what was a historical winter range that was lost when near State Ada was built. But for Pronghorn and elsewhere along the interstate at a quarter which cuts across the whole southern half of Wyoming, it's we have lost those migrations. They've been severed. And so now now and we a project looking at this, it's very difficult for us to identify where the where the animals used you know, where the ghost migrations are. Where do they used to cross the interstate? And where now if we put a crossing structure, will they rediscover it and red and restore those migrations. That's a good point, man. Everywhere else where we've done crossing structures in Wyoming, at least they've been places where the animals are still migrating, so they're still crossing the road. Mortalities are piling up there on the road, so they're showing us this is this is where we cross. And you put the crossing structure there and they learn how to use it really quickly. And those have been wildly successful. Tens of thousands of animals moved across those crossing structures. Is there an element of your work where you interface with historians who are familiar with oral tradition to try to piece together lost bits of knowledge about animal movements. Uh, We've we've been interested in doing that, and especially and and on that interstate ad project where we're trying to uh, you know, trying we can't use sort of we can call o the animals today, but those animals can't show us, right, So we're trying to get a hold of old timers who might have known where, you know, where some of those movements were. UM. We've also done we've done some work here on the Wind River Reservation and have done some UM interviews with tribal elders trying to understand what they knew about historical migrations. UM. And as you can imagine, it's it's challenging, which I guess. We don't have any examples yet where and I'd love, I'd love to to stumble upon this, right, I can tell you, Yeah, even with Pompey's Pillar along the Old Stone River east of Billings, Montana, No, people would always run into stuff there. But you go look and it makes sense. Yeah, people always run into elkom bison there because the north side of the rivers just giant sandstone bluffs and there's a creek comes down that forms a pass through the bluffs. And it was like people having shootouts there, people hunting there. People get there and they describe like as far as I can see you to the right and the left, you know, and even though that stuffs not that they're still they're not doing it now. But it's like very definite. But it's funny because you go there and look and you're like, oh, I can totally see it. Right. So it's it's reflected again and again in in the journals people who traveled through that this is like the spot right right, yeah, And so what we what what would be nice would be to you know, uncover some of that information which points to a historical corridor that we can then work they can increase our confidence in knowing that that's the right place to restore. And uh. A related example is at this, uh that path of the pronghorn where where that overpass was built. Is that the is that a place called Trapper's Point which was a historical rendezvous site. And and also um, when they widened that highway, uh two thousand, eight thousand nine, I think, um, now it was earlier than that. They anyways, they had to do an archaeological survey and they discovered a pronghorn kill site. I'm not and uh uh and what was unique? So they basically started finding bones after bones after bones, and they all had you know, butchering marks on them. And it was and it was right on the current. It's at the bottleneck where they migrate there. And in addition they found fetal bones, and the size of the fetal bones indicated that those aren't those prong horn would have been killed um during the spring migration when the winds were pregnant and those and those so so that suggests, you know, an an ancient kill site where early humans were ambushing prong horn, killing them butchering them in the spring, in the spring, right on the migration corridor. And they date um from five to eight thousand years ago. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, they have any idea how they were killing them? Well, the archaelogists probably have a sense. Feels like projectile points or if there's like net materials or what. Yeah, I we probably have to get their archologists archaeologists in here. You know. So what do we not hit? Johnnie? What have we not hit? Yeah? I know there's a there's a lot um. I've got a couple of follow up questions if you can't if we can affectively hit on those while we think of what we've missed. But um, all the way back to the when we're talking about the different types of like the migrate the different groups and mule do that migrate in different ways or don't migrate at all, do you guys? And without speculating if you guys looked into it or have any ideas on is that just like a greater species tactic to because I'm just thinking in my head like, well, of course it makes sense because if then one population gets wiped out because they all got stuck in the mountains, you still have all these other mule deer, these other five different migratory patterns that are going to survive. Like you guys thinking that way? Or what good question? So to be the dorky scientist, Um, is there such a thing? H imagine there probably is. You guys have been sitting here thinking that that whole time. So that notion. So that notion is what we would call a group selectionist argument, which means that where in natural selection and how processes operate, ultimately work at the individual level. So individuals don't generally have the greater species in their mind right, it's their their mode of operation is to survive, reproduce, pass on their genes to their progeny and so forth, as opposed to the like, well you go here and then I'll go up here and our species will survive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So that's that's what's called a group selection argument, which that that contradicts directly the notion of natural selection and how these processes operate. And it's pretty much been disproven, so it's more of But but the angle you're headed down is more of this kind of what we mentioned earlier, or the notion of a um a portfolio effect, wherein for the greater good of of the species or the population. That yes, when you have a number of viable tactics that are occurring as things change, there's some potential still viable tactic even if others become non viable, therefore maintaining the greater diversity, like in our minds from a conservation perspective, maintaining the greater diversity. This whole portfolio ensures that we have potential traits and going forward or behavioral tactics, those sorts of things that are potentially going to be viable in the future, what as it works for the animals themselves. It's clearly more of an individual tactic of this is what I do. Here's where I'm going to go. I'm gonna do my best given my environment um to do the sorts of things that that I do. And and if you think about that, and so if if migration is really inherited, especially mule deer, from mother to daughter, and it becomes functionally fixed once they inherit that this is what I'm gonna do, and I'm gonna do it every year, which is interesting. Clearly, it clearly relates to us a tactic or a strategy that has been viable for many generations and in hundreds of years. Therefore, clearly, you know, inheriting a route and doing what mom did, if that's the way it works, must be something that's allowed the species to persist all these many generations and is therefore really important and intuitively, although it seems like okay, then they must be less adaptable to change, well maybe at it. Also, if if mom has been successful and survived and she successfully raised you as as an offspring, well clearly that's been a viable strategy, so perhaps why once you adapt it? So that's that's perhaps one of the arguments behind this cross generational potential inheritance of a migratory route, and you're just doing that, you're in and you're out. It's a known thing. It worked for mom, it should work for me. It's worked for my mom's mom's might you know, in in many generations beyond. Assuming that that's how that process has come about, and as a consequence of that you end up which is multiple different tactics that exist within a single population that creates this grander portfolio. Are you guys from we talked about your night, but are you familiar with the like the southern resident killer whales in the migratory killer whales in the Puget Sound area? Not super familiar. So you have this this kind of interesting thing where you have there's a resident population around pus It Sound of killer whales or some folks calm or because that they're they're chinook specialists, and they're literally starving to death right now. Meanwhile, there's a population that rolls up and down the coast and their marine mammals, well they're more generals, but eat a lot of marine mammals and they're thriving. They have different languages, they avoid each other, and one is got fell into the trap, you know, and they won't they won't eat seals. So there it's also the situation where people treat them like they treat him as like humans regard them as this very separate thing, you know. And it's like this idea that uh I see, like I see a semblance of that, and what we're talking about with mule deer or some like figure out how to survive without need to move, and then some need to move, and at some point in time, the ones that need to move are going to be possibly become the vulnerable ones exactly. So it's nice to have different there's a pathways. Like people celebrate salmon for their fidelity to their natal stream, but one of the things that allows salmon to do well is that some don't have fidelity to the natal stream. They pioneer new rivers and like rivers change and they find new spots because some of them just screw up or whatever. Yeah, it's that diversity of tactics. And one of the things that I think about in this context is is climate change, right, and so like if you think about it, uh, you know, a resident animal when the when the climate change is like, they don't have many options, right. All they know is this this small landscape that they live on and as spring comes earlier there there's more snow or whatever climate change brings. The only place that they can adapt to that is within this small range that they know. But if you're a meal there makes a hundred fifty mile migration right well over that hundred fifty miles. I mean, you can you can almost choose whatever climate you want depending on where you want to be on that So they have a template that that they have detailed knowledge about, and they can they can exploit that landscape template um to their advantage. You know, when it's a drought, when it's a when it's a really you know, they can make advantage of when it's a really lush summer or when it's a really harsh winter. They've got they have a hundred fifty miles of options to choose from versus you know, the three or four square miles at the resident animals has and I think and to me, that's sort of one of you know, that's one of the reasons to maintain migration. It's also a reason to maintain sort of these diverse stratag geez like you sort of alluded to it in your in your in your question. Yeah, yeah, um, but I know it's very interesting reading that assessment was how narrow like parts of that migration got is that, I mean, it obviously is partially of just like what it is today. Yeah, and you guys have just figured it out recently and are looking at it. Do you think historically it might have been much wider? Is there any evidence for that? I mean, is it just because there is it's parallels a river and a highway and that's where the most more development is or do you think even you know, years ago, they were crossing right there at the same spot where the outlet is of the lake. Yeah. I I suspect that that that one. It probably has been like that for a really long time. And the you know, we don't so that's you know, very common for mule here that they we see them following along the same path. And uh, you know, there's there's a there's a h a sort of a lot of interest right now to understand sort of the benefit of sort of collective you know, how animals move together and and you can imagine that that there's benefits in a migration like that of the animals following within each other's footsteps. I mean sometimes when they go through, um, they're going over a little passes that in the spring still might have snow in the fall. When they come down they're basically playing this game to stay you know, they want to stay up in the mountains as long as possible. And they're playing this game too. They don't just rush down to winter range. They make their way down with each little snowstorm, with each drop in temperature, and then and they're trying to avoid getting stuck behind a big snowstorm. But if you do get stuck, um, having a hundred or two hundred animals go through that spot before you on that day makes it a lot less energetically costly. Have you're observed a caribou migration? Uh? You know only on YouTube. What's interesting about it is that depending on where you go, you can go into places where they are walking through like they're walking through someone where they're somewhere where they've never walked through before. They had this like very big they necessary big macro sense of where they're moving. But they take different routes and in some years will be like that. There would be places where they hadn't gone through in a decade and then they go through the area. But you'll watch them and you wake up one day and they're all using a pass for whatever reason, like ones that they're spread out so far apart that you might watch four comes through through all the course of the day, and they really tend to like some little pass and the next day you wake up and the whole line seems to have kind of shifted a mile, and then in the bulk of them seems to be taking some other thing where they're just like going by smell, and they like to go where the other ones have gone. But it's not fixed year to year. It's just a general sense of must be the those ones made it through, nothing bad happened to them, so I want to go that way. But then it meanders yeah, you know, yeah, and that's you know, of course, a very different landscape, much broader, sort of less topographically diverse than the sort of mountains and plains landscapes that the Meal they are migrating through. I think one point that's a good one to your question, your honest is, historically I think the common knowledge was really focused on winter range for Meal there and maintaining that winter range. And one thing that's been discovered with this migration route mapping is all the attributes of that migration are important to long term species viability, one being the bottlenext which you were speaking to. But the other one are when you're looking at those migration routes, all of a sudden things kinda stop and slow down and they spread out, and that's called stop over areas. And if you one of you guys could talk about the importance of stop over areas and what we've learned about that as far as the importance especially for me older but also all on gillets, that would be I think it's interesting thing to add to that question. Sure, yeah, So just in thinking about how animals move across the landscape, and in particular in the spring, we think about a migratory route and whether it's twenty miles or it's a hundred and fifty miles or two d plus miles, we just think it's well, animals are just going from winter to summer range. But interestingly, the vast majority of the time that they're quote unquote migrating, they're actually not just moving and walking on a path. They're actually held up on what what we've called stopovers, which are areas where they're largely spending time feeding. And we know the attributes associated with those stop stopovers are also areas that helped facilitate feeding. So over the long term. If you if you take and look at the landscape and you get how green up, for example, occurs every year. The stopovers that these mule deer are using. Our places that tend to consistently green up early every year typically don't have the level of snow deposition, are largely dry south southwesterly slopes. So it's those sweetheart spots on their way where they can stop and grab that lush new food that's coming along, and then they pace their migration, especially in the spring, in correspondence with that new wave of food as it comes up progressively along the landscape. So if you imagine staying in one spot, experiencing spring, getting that really great food, and then just it's gone right if you stay in that one spot, but if you follow it, you experience spring for a really long time as you move across the landscape, thus simply enhancing your energetic game. But I think what's interesting is, as you're alluding to, is that that migratory route isn't just a path they walk on. It's functional habitat as well well, where they're gleaning resources. And the other element that I think is really important that maybe kind of gets lost and all the you know, my, the the excitement and the phenomena associated with migration and walking across the long landscapes is the other really important thing to comprehend is that by functionally moving across the landscape and going to a different place and thus garnering different resources, it's a it's functionally for the population increasing that population's carrying capacity. So for example, if you put in I eight something new new, I A d somewhere and you clip off a migratory route and you remove all that summer range that those animals were using that summer range because those animals were going there, we're walking there using that food for how many months out of the year. That's part of the capacity of their range. So for example, as as we if we've lost migratory routes in some places, we have potentially created vacant habitat as in the food is there, which ultimately determines carrying capacity, but nobody knows to go there and use it. Therefore, what we can potentially sustain as far as the population level thereafter, is not as many animals because they're functional carrying capacity, their food based has been diminished because behaviorally they're not making use of it anymore. And to me, from a migratory perspective, like that's ultimately where the rubber meets the road. That's why we can help maintain robust populations is because by moving and integrating this huge landscape with into into their behavior and into their nutritional dynamics, they're functionally increasing the carrying capacity for the population by them doing that. In the moment we clip that off, there's no way we can sustain as many animals because we don't have the food based because they're not going there and using it, Which is really why you can think about migration and it's connected and it's connecting it to large viable populations because it's the food resources that they're that they're garnering by going and moving there. You wonder, it's a funny thing about migration because it kind of almost sets in your head like the wrong idea about it. But we hunt turkeys in areas where you could basically say the turkey's migrate uphill, but in his head, he's probably he's chasing young growth and as he does that for six weeks, he winds up at the top of the mountain and then things frost off. And start to die and fin Angles is way back down and he probably never like was like I'm going to head up to the top of that mountain. He's just like every day I'm maximizing my thing, or just making small jumps to the next place. I know, without really having this idea that like tomorrow we leave for the far away place. Right, It's like, well, okay, but in in Meal Deer, they do like this is something that we have shown they have. Yes, maybe they're not thinking tomorrow. You know, we're we're headed on this hundred and fifty mile journey. But they have a mental map, yes, have a mental map, and and the way we've and we've done sort of simulations, so the describe the behavior you were just describing of them, of the turkey, you know, following that fresh green grass and eventually making a migration. Right, We've asked that question of mule Deer, like, if you have perfect knowledge of what we call it the green wave, and in fact we call it surfing the green wave, I don't really like that. It's just it. Yeah, it doesn't really matter if you like it or not. Already entrenched in the literature. Um, so it sounds a little too zippy, we're battle boarding the green wave again, this ship is already sailed. H So uh, mule deer can't recreate a d fifty mile migration even when they know exactly where the green wave is. They have to have memory of that of that migration in order to do it. And and and the way you can think about that is like, if you just imagine a mule deer and a hundred fifty mile landscape, even if they know sort of where it's the best place to be at the best time during spring, that doesn't get them to where, you know, to this hundred fifty mile migration. What gets them to a fifty mile migration is the trials and heirs of their ancestors, who for generations and generations have done this. And and at some point one animal figured, hey, if you go this way, it's awesome, and there's all this green grass, or maybe it's worked the other way. There was a harsh winter, and they pushed further down to the red desert and then that and then they discovered that they learned that migration and discovered like, this is a great tactic, and then of course passed that onto their young and did well and and now we have the memory that now that heard has the knowledge of that hundred and fifty mile migration. So that's been an active sort of area of research and we and we initially asked that question that you sort of posed with the turkey. Um. I don't think you put it this way, but you had asked if the if the turkey serfed and it's O man. I was going to talk about I'm not going to get into it because we're gonna move into our we're gonna move into our closers. But I was going to bring up the idea of human migrations. Okay, so humans coming into the Western hemisphere and imagine bring you like the bearing Land Bridge. The first clan of people did not have the luxury of saying, hey, we're gonna go over there because they'll be sweet. They probably were born, lived and died on the bearing Land Bridge, probably not very aware that they were, over the course of generations heading to Patagonia. But it was just and then they would come to glaciers as they traveled the coast, presumably, and you had no notion of what was on the other side of the glacier, and you weren't being driven by warfare. You weren't being driven by starvation, but you one day I was like, man, you know, I gotta check it out. And so there is that little I don't even know where the connection is, but there is that little sense of of pioneering. And so you have the idea that that um, that species now today would maybe come up with some cool new way of using the landscape. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and she kind of yea yeah. And so what we're really so she's still alive. We just saw her the other day, and how she's old. Winner Winner has been tough, So that young exter Winner Winner has been tough. We sure hope that she can make it through the winter in that country. It's been it's been pretty hard on them. Um, they're they're in pretty rough shape. But we're super excited to see what she does. Is she not in this year? So that she's now she'll be two here in June. And interestingly, she's pregnant, so she bred is a yearling, which is really cool. It's not it doesn't always happen for mule deer, but so she's gonna give birth this year. Um for the first time. Mom is still alive. We saw her as well, um, and so we'll be really curious to see if she's gonna go and set up shopping your mom to give birth, or would she happen to go on that forty plus mile journey again, that's what she's gonna. She's gonna she kicks her phone out, fawn walks forty five and comes back again. Then you'll be honest something, yeah exactly, then you can publish a cool paper. So we're really excited to see what she's gonna do. Because by and large, what we know is that mule deer are not We don't think they're very good pioneers the evidence that we have, but we've been missing at early part of their life yet we really, we really have not explored that adequately yet. And so we're trying to do that now to see if is that their pioneering phase or is it really just this entrenched thing where they're just they're doing what mom is doing, uh, and gonna adopt that tactic. And then in reference to you know the notion earlier, it's not even it is learning, and it's learning what's viable, but it's also surviving and reproducing. If you happen to go do something and it turns out not to work. You're gone and so you don't have subsequent progeny that are gonna adopt that because because you're gone, bitch an idea, but you got dusted off, and then it's it's done. It's it's not gonna happen, and we're not going to see it in subsequent generation because because you're gone and you had no progeny to continue to adopt that adopt that tactic. So okay, we're gonna move into our concluders. A concluder is where you get to say whatever you want. Um, yeah, you want to start us off, I'm just gonna say thank you guys. You guys really just crushed it. Man, it's gonna be an awesome podcast. At this moment in my life, I'm like as interested in the science of mule here as I am killing big Bucks, which I don't think that. The whole time, I've been wondering if these guys would be good muleed your hunters or not. Oh gosh, I think they would be here. Yeah, I've been really wondering that. Well, that's what the guy told me, the guy that Vincent that gave me this copy of their migration assessment. He goes, uh, I don't even know if I should say this on remember Pat Dirk and talking about some of the cold blooded his killing his white tail hunters. You know, can't tell you what you're kind of tree they're sitting in. Yeah that's true. But no he said he was using this uh paper as a way to sort of figure out where he was going to go hunting. Good good luck. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. So yeah, that's my concluder, I think for me, and it speaks to your point. Honest. You know, I said, you get to talk about whatever you want, you're gonna delimit me. Yeah, can you make sure to talk about how people can support you and then that will support research. But I will, I will go into Meuly fanatics first, UM log Onto merely fanatics dot org. There's many ways to support us. We have a lot of raffles going on for commissioners, tags that go out to certain projects that we unfortunately didn't mention, but the Deer Alcohology Research Project was, which is a big project we're pushing UM that looks at all the multifaceted ways in which environments are influencing Meal deer nutritions specifically, and it's also taken a very hard look at the competition issues. So some of our raffle, our commissioner tag raffles are going towards that. We have one locally that we haven't allocated directly to a project, but it will go to our main three core mission areas UH, so they can get onto meuly fanatics dot org and support us. I think another one that I should mention that anybody in Wyoming can do to support migrations is by the Wylming Wildlife Migration UH Conservation license plate, which is a new license plate that we have in Wyoming where the purchaser pays eighty dollars extra on top of their usual licensing fees. Hundred fifty of that goes into a pot that will then be doled out to reduce and alleviate migration problems such as the I A DY one that you mentioned. So there's a lot of ways to not only support the organization but support migration also. The Migration Initiative has fundraisers, we do some sometimes we sell some commissioners tags or raffle commissioner tags to support them. So a lot of ways to get involved, not just coming to a banquet, which we're gonna have a lot of fun at tonight. Uh, the other way, and it's one that I want to speak to. That's a very important part and and and has been extremely rewarding for me is getting involved in starting a chapter locally. I get to meet these guys, I get to have my horizons expanded beyond just thinking big buck killers are cool. But really the biology is that where it's at and and that's the cool part. And that's really our responsibility within the North American Conservation models as hunters is to actually take time to learn some of the science before we we advocate and and participate in that role. But but there's just a lot of ways where people can get involved. And starting a chapter would be a great one. Where we have fourteen chapters across Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah and always our our guys in in the headquarters in Green River are always willing to support a new chapter and it's it is a rewarding endeavor. UM. Just an example, and I'll just go for no reason, couldn't be one in New Mexico, Absolutely not UM. And I'll just close with with what I find extremely rewarding is our chapter has gone through four funding cycles and we put nine grand back to Mulder specifically in the local area. I could have never done that by myself. So it's extremely rewarding to be able to as we work with the researchers, identify needs and put money back to those needs and be part of the solution. Great. I kind of feel like we forgot to talk about conservation. No I tried to. You didn't want to. I didn't because you're a scientist. Oh maybe, okay, maybe I maybe I missed your cues. Um. Well, so I I want to mention some of the conservation efforts, um before we end here. I mean we' we've talked a lot about different things and uh, and we talked a lot about migration. I think, um, what we've seen, you know, we we sort of started out talking about, you know, why are there so many migrations in Wyoming, right and U And one of those reasons is that is that you know Whyoming still a small state. But but it's changing and we're seeing you know, increased energy development. We're seeing growth of towns that literally are growing to sort of spill over into migration corridors. Um, and we're just starting to map those things. And I think, uh, one of the things, you know, for a variety of reasons, Wyoming has sort of been at the forefront of this and we've we've not one of the most exciting things about I think this whole sort of area of research is that we've now sort of proven up that we can maintain these migrations. Right. So, there have been examples in Wyoming of we talked a bit about the underpasses and overpasses those have been really success successful, have reduced mortality road mortality by eight to nine in some of these In some of these bottlenecks, there's h fencing projects, especially in the western part of the state, that are now being guided by by the science by where where the migration corridors are so limited resources, but if you know where the corridors are, you can focus your attention on modifying or moving fences that are within the cord or um. We're involved in a project with the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts that are bringing ten million dollars to conserve big private ranches in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, with the Wyoming portion that exclusively our ranches that fall within migration corridors, mapped migration corridors, and you know, those are the places that it's where it's most important that we limit, you know, residential development. Um that bottleneck that you mentioned, the Conservation Fund raised two million dollars after the after that magazine was put out and we identified the cord or the conservation that we we listed that as the number one risk for that herd forty five thousand, uh meal there squeezing through a quarter mile bottleneck between the town of Pinedale and Fremont, like this deep glacial lake complicated by a parcel of private land with a eight foot high woven wire elk fence on it. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't know. I had no idea until reading that about how many of these eight foot high fences Wyoming has to keep I'm getting I think, I don't know if it didn't explain that well, but from I get from it is just to keep elk off of agg and off of hay bales and whatnot. Is that and kind of funnel them into the feed grounds that they have established on that side of the state. Yeah. Yeah, so in that case, you have, yeah, the eight foot high fences there to keep elk where they're supplementally fed from spill on the forest from spilling down into private land. But then that then four to five thousand meal there migrating a hundred fifty miles have to navigate that fence as well. And uh. Anyways, that the identification of that bottleneck led to the Conservation Fund raising two million dollars to buy that plot of private uh land that was slated for lakeside development and turn it into a wildlife habitat management area, take down the fence, basically uncork the bottleneck and uh and now it's it exists in perpetuity. Yep. Yeah, the the land was was on the market. Yeah, that's great man. Yeah. So so you know, for me, um, like, we're sort of in a unique, uh a unique time in sort of the history of wildlife conservation in the American West, because this isn't this isn't a thorny problem like climate change. This is a relatively simple problem. We know how to map migration corridors, we know how to identify through and we know how to implement solutions. It's it's just a matter of you know, having this sort of political will and and conservation attention to getting it done. So so to me, that's sort of like that's happening in Wyoming and starting to happen in other parts of the West, and it's sort of a great example of sort of science based conservation. You guys have the coolest state in the lower forty eight. We like to think, well, I think it is. And I often tell people, if you want to understand wildlife in America, all you have to do is watch Wyoming. Like every major wildlife issue and from yes, a issues, migration is like like a it's a case study where you can look at energy like everything. Yeah, and a lot of it's still sort of functioning the way it used to um because because we have I mean, and it's not that Wyoming has done you know, has has been way advanced in its wildlife conservation or management. I think we've gotten a little bit of a free pass because there are so few people in Wyoming, half a million people in the entire state. That's the size of you know, most many metropolitan areas. It doesn't hurt. Okay, you can let your concluder rip. Now my concluder, Okay, I've just been waiting patiently. You got a good one. No, but we'll see so well. First off, I just want to say thanks guys. This has been great. Appreciate you guys taking the time allowing us to visit for a bit. And also I think I just wanna as well be able to say that, you know, we get to be here talking about some of the things that we've been doing, that we've been learning, some of the science in our professional opinions and those sorts of things. But at the same time, UM, there's no way that we would be here without UM the network, the partners UM that have ultimately made a lot of the work that we've been doing possible, like Jared's greup in really Fanatic Foundation and all the other various nonprofits and agency folks that are willing to UM see the value and research and allow us to go out there and do our best to help learn what what makes these animals tick, which to me is really important. I feel I'm very humbled and I feel very fortunate to be in the position that I'm in to be able to do that. But I'm fully aware that without everybody else that UM are maybe seemingly behind the scenes, but I don't really want them to be. UM. We we wouldn't be here having these conversations, and I feel very fortunate to be able to UM, to be able to do that. So I just want to thank all those that are out there that have have contributed in those ways and see the value and research UM and to channel Josh Corsi, President Meally Fanatic Foundation a little bit and he always says that we're only as good as the information that we have, and arguably, then as a consequence of that, the decisions we make are only as good as the information we have, which I think is a really powerful way to think about that, and hopefully we're getting there one step at a time of getting more of that information UM. But then as far as just other other thoughts, I think for me and in my career and in UM learning the things that that we've been able to learn, as well as just the perspectives that are out there, I think interestingly, and in the hunting industry too, we've our culture is changing. It seems like it's changing a lot. UM we've in in in weird ways sometimes too, I think UM we've characterized it as it becoming progressively more of a hornographic culture. It's been focused on the head gear as opposed to um and and maybe at sometimes in some instances losing touch a little bit with our true like naturalist hunting heritage, appreciating the outdoors and the open spaces for what they are. Um. And I mean, I love to kill a big deer or you know, a big elk or whatever, just as much as anybody. But I think sometimes it's, um, we've gone so far in that direction. We've just come by become so myopically focused on what's on the head and kind of lost the big picture as to what's behind the scenes that's even allowing that animal to exist in in that landscape. Uh and and just kind of um creating a culture. Perhaps that's losing touch a little bit. Um. And then along those same lines, as we've become I think sometimes myopically focused on that, it's also caused us to focus on genetics, which for me, unfortunately I'm I am the nutritional ecologist, but I think so so I'm perhaps biased, but I also know the realities from the work that we've done. And it's like, if we're gonna if we're just going to focus on genetics, like there's few links to the population itself, there's few links to reality, there's a few things that we can actually even do. And so if that's all that we can think about, is that you know that that individual had some fantastic genetics. I mean, even when the um the new world record big horn was found on wild Horse Island, there's a flurry of who sweet genetics coming from this country, and all I think is, man, No, it's an it's an island system, food phenomenal from out of the gate today one. I mean, if it's just genetics, and why didn't we produce a world record the first first year or two, you know, within the first decade that those animals were on that island. I'm virtually certain it's it's nutrition. I mean, sure the genetics needed to be there, but it's not just genetics that made that animal so huge. And so to me, I think that if there's a slight shift in angle to acknowledging for me, like what I've often said is I will have made an impact in my career broadly, just just beyond science. If someday our our our culture or hunting culture. When you know, somebody kills a giant mule deer out of the Wyoming range, that rather than having to see the articles that are referencing, Oh, it's some impressive genetics out of the wyoming range, impressive migration corridors well, or like that dude must have had an incredibly fat mom like that, that's it, you know, let's let's focus on fat moms. I mean seriously, like so to me too, because if if we're if we succeed in doing that, and it just taking the shift, like we can appreciate those things. But if we take the shift, the shift goes away from just the genetics and the myopic focus on the headgear, and it shifts it to the ground. It shifts us to the food, to the habitat, to nutrition, which is ultimately that building block, and I think can help get us places in a much quicker manner. And by appreciating those sorts of things from from that bottom up, that habitat driven perspective, because we're gonna make more conservation advances if we if we are thinking about that from the from the migratory routes to the value of the summer range to making sure we can maintain solid stage brush and pristine winter range, and we can acknowledge like whether climate changes affects the food and thus feeds into the population, or we have a bad winter and animals are burning fat reserves to survive, Like, well, we'll have a greater appreciation understanding for what's there and I think can have a better conversation at the table that that leads to more advances over the long term if if we're able to succeed eat in doing that. So it's all about fat moms. I think that horniography, or like the thirst for big giant bucks, um, does lead some people in down the path of being curious about ecology and being interested in these things, which is it's not the most direct path, but I have seen it can it can get there. I've seen that happen a lot. My final question, Okay, crystal ball game, right, Um, an hundred years, Like this is not a this is this is just speculation from you in just for you guys to think about, like in a hundred years, Like, do you think it's a given that things will be a lot worse in a hundred years for just for mulders specifically, do you think it's a given that there'll be a lot worse or do you think that in a hundred years, Um, that's too far years and fifty years will invariably be that, like things are just shitty or do you think in fifty years it could be like, Wow, man, mule deer kicking ass h. I mean, I hate to say it, but I two thousand and sixty nine, I think it's going to be worse. I think, I mean, we are we I mean, we we scrape away, cut up, erect barriers over you know, mule deer habitat every day, right, We're just we're on the slippery slope and were we're continuing to make the lives of meal deer and especially migratory meal deer harder, and so you know, for me, I mean that's what sort of motivates my research, is that is that I think we're to me, it's it's stopped bleeding. Yeah, like we're we're heading in that direction. And I don't know, you know what I was thinking about this the other day, I wonder if we like it. I'm often frustrated by the fact that we don't recognize that. I'm often frustrated by the fact that I think a lot of sportsmen don't recognize that, um that you know, there's seems to be more of a mentality of like, well, these mulity have always been here. I I hunted them, and I'm a kid, and you know, I'm still going to the same places. Maybe there's maybe there's less hard to say, hard to its hard to say, but you know, I think when when we look at when we look you know, migration is a great lens to look at these things. Those migrations are all getting harder. Everything we do to the landscape makes them harder. Um and so and and and and and and I think I wonder if we kind of as a as wildlife managers, I wonder if we kind of have this false sense of optimism generated from the success of the North American model. Right, Like, we went through this bottleneck. We we almost hunted all of these big game critters out of existence in North America. And then we developed policies and ways to regulate our harvest and we and we and we, yeah, we we brought them back right. Um, But that was you know, the turn of the century. There were far less people on this planet, and far less people in North America, and far less demands on these landscapes that that these that this wildlife um require. And I I think we I wonder if if we have a false sense of optimism that we we we we got through that. So you know, all of these sort of changes that we're seeing now are sort of temporary and we can we can come up with fixes of them. UM. But I'm not terribly optimistic. What and what motivates me is is that you know, we that we are on the slippery slope of making uh, making these habitats more more difficult, less profitable. Um. And so you know, in my view, we have a lot of work to do to figure out how how to how to stop the bleeding and how to sort of keep all this threaded together and stitched together as we go forward. Fifty years was a long time. I think the noteworthy part of that my mind is you think about this downward decline from the ninety sixties population whatever whatever you want to refer to that as UM. But to know that in Wyoming, the decline in Mulder since been about that says to me, there's an acceleration that's at starting to move at a breakneck pace. You don't have to be a mathematician to recognize that that can be a zero sum game pretty quickly and UH, from a conservation organization perspective. I think it's important to recognize that maybe we aren't in capable of reaching peaks, but we're definitely capable of drawn a line at the basement. And um, that's that's where we want to fit in, is to help stop that downturn and at least start to maintain hopefully a gradual increase later. Yeah, And I think I think that's a great point. And I still I'll fall back again to the how do we stop that downturn, which is ultimately going to come come down to the science side of it anyway, and there's there's still lots of questions associated with that and if that was an eruption, how far are we going to go down? And what are we gonna do? And I'm still I don't necessarily disagree with Matt either, but maybe maybe I'm a little more optimistic too, and that I think from from a sign. So for mule deer, although they've been declining, there's still they're still sort of a fairly common species, right, And so I think in some instances, as decisions are made there may be viewed a little bit as a common species. Well, if we give some here, if we give give away some here, it's okay because we have them in all these other places, whereas we can, I think, help gain that appreciation, helping still some of that appreciation by by also increase in understanding and how uniquely connected they're amazingly connected to the landscape, in the environment that they live in, and by helping understand that better and being able to relay that, I would hope that I still kind of think we're we're just pushing through almost to a breakthrough wherein we're getting to the point where mule deer and some of our other ungulates have much much more traction at the table when decisions are being made. And I truly think that that has a lot to do with the science and the communication of it. And we're we're beginning to to get to a point where we're learning these little nuanced mechanistic things that can make a huge different yet our difference yet are really interesting too and will help inspire people that to garner an appreciation for them and not just focus on economics, even though they're very economically valuable as well. So I still think we're getting to a point where maybe we're going to get a little bit of a breakthrough doesn't mean we're not gonna have some more bleeding um in the interim. But at the same time, I think as we have that little breakthrough as far as public sentiment appreciation those sorts of things, that there's also going to be additional lines of information from a scientific perspective that's going to help us help us do better to the benefit of meal there two and that could be managing other species, to managing habitat to even more motivation associate with um, conserving protecting migratory corridors, and the sorts of things. So I think it's one of the challenges and being human is to be able to have like a pessimistic, maybe you know, realistic, borderline pessimistic perception of what's going on, but then still wake up and do what you need to do. Remember the first time I ever sat in a meeting about making a TV show, the first thing out of someone's mouth as they were saying, like, it's impossible, it's almost never happens. Let's get started. You guys, thank you very much for joining