00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X. You know we had a guy. We had a guy right in that He's a He's a nudist. You know, do I know what a new this is? My kids they were wondering what nudists where and I had to explain it to him. Um, how much time do you have to spend in the nude to be a nudist? That's what I don't understand, the percentage of the day. That's why when I ran, when I was talking to my kids, I left it to be that a nudist, Um, I kind of let it be that, like a nudist would be someone who would sort of go out of their way to do their chosen activities in a place that would allow them to do them nude like that was sort of where I drew it is nude when possible. I just looked it up. I had watched the intro of a nudist documentary. That's as far as I got. That makes me, and that makes me largely a nudist. No, no, because you'd be nude right now. No, I'd get in all kinds of trouble, like from a like an HR type thing. Phil doesn't need to Phil, Phil would complain. Probably the Oxford Dictionary just defines it as a person who does not wear any clothes because they believe this is more natural and healthy. Yeah, you know, I'm not. I'm not a nudist, but um, we got a talk about with our kids. I was explained to them that there is a there's a thing that happens like because like if they were kind of one night, why do they wear pajamas? I'm gonna get to this nudie that rode in, But they're talking about, like why do we wear pajamas? And I said that people tend to begin life in pajamas and they end life in pajamas. But then there's a long, long window in the middle when you don't wear pajamas. I find I think that's accurate, Like you spend decades not in pajamas. I don't know like when it ends and begins, but you you start and end in pjs. Yeah, if I wear him now, it's more like to have Sunday brunch or something, you know, at the house. Yeah, I can't. I don't even I haven't owned a pair of pajamas, probably since I would got rid of my Superman pajamas. The reason I'm right about this guy's he l counts in the nude. He says, he's. He says, I've une with trad bows, compound bows, rifles. Being nude is the most difficult obstacle i'veter on it myself. He checked into it. Says his nudity is completely legal where he hunts um. He says, you have to be very careful about where you pick. He leaves his shoes on. He says he's been a nudist for many years, and he says one of the main things that you wouldn't think about is just your awareness of wind direction mm hmm is enhanced. You got a lot of receptors. He says. It's it's very free, and he says you pick your routes very carefully. Has he had any kills in the nude? I don't think so. He's got a nudist friend who also hunts different state, also hunts naked. I wonder if they have to wear hunter orange during a modern firearm season. That's when you get that, you get that body paint. Man, if that's all they wear, Uh, ladies and Gentlemanell's Bart, George Bart, how's it going going. Well, I'm gonna you know, we've got a couple of days to cover before we start talking about your work, your recent work. But so all the caribou. Last time we had you on, we talked about Mountain cariboo that are in the Lower Fort which had at the time had like shrank srank, shrank, shrank until there was kind of a couple in Idaho. Yeah, that's been They are gone, like gone gone. We're pretty sure they're gone, gone, gone. Yeah. Um, we did get a little surprised. Oh, I can't even remember when it was. It's been eighteen months or so ago. A couple of caribou turned up in northern Montana. Um, just a fleeting glimpse, you know, they passed through, you know, photographs they were able to document them and then never saw them again. Where do you think they came from? Probably out of the purse cells. But nobody really knows. Um. So that's a lot ask cariboo documented in the lower forty eight and they're actually in Montana. What year was that, I said, it's about eighteen months ago. I think it is right when all the self right when the selker occurred was just yeah, I remember seeing that they had turned up there, and I didn't I never really heard what the story was. Nobody knows the story. They there's no conclusion to that story. They just disappeared. What was the nail on the coffin for the Selkirk. We're not exactly sure they were, you know, there's I think when we talked, there was what a dozen caribou left in that herd, and we were putting together a big project to do a maternal pen and put together a whole bunch of pretty heavy handed management actions. And that march, when we were about to really get going with captures and stuff like that, we started our census and we only found three cows. Um obviously none of them were pregnant, so that everything got put on hold. We completed our senses, only found the three. We found three over in the purcels. I think two of them were bulls. So we decided we'd better get those animals together, and then moved them all north up to revel Stoke and put them in the maternal pin that they have in place up there. Um, put collars on them obviously, and then let Actually it was a kind of a stroke of luck. One of the resident animals from the revel Stoke area dropped down close to the penning site about the time they were being placed, and they captured her and put her in the pen to kind of help them acclimate or whatever. Hopefully the mother up to her, and that did work. They followed her back up to the top and as far as we know right now, they're alive and doing well. And that heard m hm. So the last of the Selkirk Mountains don't live in the last the Selkirk Caribou don't really live in the Selkirks anymore. They're up north, man, I invite you. What was the name of that episode, bart and we covered this whole thing. I don't know it was. We always give them qute, clever names that are hard to remember. Yeah, I think it was number forty three, but I'm not sure. Um, a guy at a guy that guy know that works at Old Town Canoes sent me this article about a dude, a hunter who became the first World Slam recipient across four categories. So everyone knows, um, everyone knows that I happened to be a turkey super slam holder now almost two times super Slam holder. What what? What? What? I what? What that is? Is I have gotten? There's there's there's this notion that there are five subspecies of wild turkeys and and they have in different places, you know, and I've gotten them all and once I get another Florida one I'll have I'll be a two time super slam holder. A world Slam holder is a fellow who gets all five of the you know, all five of our wild turkeys, and then it goes down to get this all five subspecies of our just you know, American wild turkey, and then you go down to Central America or you know, bleeze southern Yucatan area and you get yourself what's called an oscillated turkey, which is a whole different species of turkey. At the point you get an oscillated turkey, you become a world Slam holder. And there's an article about this dude. What's really funny as he's standing there doing a grip and grin with a turkey, and it described the caption says that it's a deceased so he's holding his turkey, says that he poses with a deceased oscillated turkey. Deceased, but so the dude, So this is what the dude did. Though, this is kind of like I can't tell. I can't tell if I think this is the greatest or what thing. So he's done the world slam, So all five North Americans, you know, all all five American wild turkey subspecies, and then the oscillated turkey he's got four times. He's done it with a bow, a crossbow, a modern firearm, and a muzzle loader. So he's he's like a four time for like, I don't know, at what point you're hunting turkeys and at what point you're just sort of checking things off a list. I don't know. I think he's still hunting turkeys. I mean he's out there having fun, still chasing gobblers every time, just choosing a different different fires. I saw it wasn't a gripping. Granted was a picture of a dead turkey today on Instagram, and uh, it was with a pistol shotgun, and I was like, I could get like that, you know, because it's obviously shorter range, you know, easy to pack around. Check the dude a decade to get it done. M So that's what I wish I was better at math six times four four twenty four. So he's getting two point four turkeys per year to work towards the That makes it seem very achievable. Yeah, not crazy heard on the pocket book either, if you think of it that way. Mike Petrasca, congrats, Mike. That's good. When I retire, man, I'm gonna be hot on that dude's heels. Um. Oh, you know, this is the last thing I'm gonna bring up and the this is the last part of the last installment of our I shouldn't say are the Yeah, the ongoing story of like our flip flops appropriate footwear. This has been beaten to death, but you got room from one last Sure, you never know he might learn something. So dude, he's out like supposedly scouting for turkeys, and which he says, comes down to sit in the back of a drinking beer, listening for gobbles at night and his dog. He doesn't put the he doesn't put an e collar on his dog, and his dog just sized to get up and take off and heads out into a swamp. He he's got his flip flops on. So the dog goes off in the swamp and it's like knee deep muck. And because he has his flip flops on, he can't go in there after it, but his body he's got sneakers on, goes in there after it. The go out the flip flops, takes his flip flops off so he can run and runs around on the road and in so doing encounters the neighbor and scores a hunting permission on the neighbor's place. So it's sort of like an inadvertent uh af fect. You were in flip flops, Scalel's got him on right now and inverted upside to to run around flip flops. Uh oh, companies, I want to talk about two real quick back when when people used to just freely fly around the country on um airplanes back in the long long ago. Yeah, the boy, you just get on an airplane and just go where the hell you felt like, no mask, nothing, I travel Yanni. I keep wanting to bring this up with Yannie. I realized Yanni is a Yanni's a he's like a chatter, like you like to chit chat with your seatmates, m more so than than I'm comfortable doing, more so than you, that's for sure. And uh, I keep my I never like brought this up with you life, like, yeah, that's talking with someone. They're talking behind me. I can hear him talking, and yeah, he's telling them all about just different stuff and what he's coming from doing. And Yannie gets to talking about game meat, wild game meating. I laughed about this because the woman he's sitting to, sitting next to you, tries to up him, and I even wrote it down in my nose and she told him my favorite meat of all time is kangaroo. Yeah. I remember that too, because I didn't realize you're sitting in front of me until much later in the flight. But I remember when she said that. I said, is that right? And I opened my book and she's like, don't what you be telling me about this wild game? You know? I also heard this, do it? Like this interesting story on an airplane not long ago, one of my final flights, and the guy was it was like we were on a plane there's a bunch of dudes going down to We're going home from the Midge, Minnesota, And there was a bunch of Minnesota dudes going down to watch their team do spring training in Florida, which that that is a trip I cannot I cannot imagine. Did you know that people did this prior to that? No, No, they're real excited. They're traveling down to watch people practice playing baseball in Florida. But he was observing to someone how the area where their Minnesota team carries on this activity that he was talking about how it got built up over the years, and he was saying, how you used to be when you went down there, it was all cows and now it's all buildings. And I started thinking about that. Um, remember the old cows, not condos, the bumber stick are. Yeah, you still see a few around this town. I never think of that like applied to Florida, But like that, the cattle operations replaced by just buildings. I look at like every day, I look friendly when I look at cows. I think I feel like more affection toward than normal. Um. Over time, So Bart, what's going on? Man? What else has happening? We got a bunch of stuff to talk about about your mountain lion, crazy mountain lion projects. Yeah, that's been the highlight of my spring. The you know, the COVID stuff is everything kind of weird right now at work, But are you able to get out and do your work still? Kind of Uh, not as much as I'd like. I'm really working like two or three days a week. We don't have childcare available, so my wife and I are kind of fighting over who gets to go to work and who stays home with kids. Got both both of us are supposed to be doing our jobs. But we do have callers out working, but we're still generating quite a bit of data. Like you have you have collars on how many mountain lions. We have five callers out right now. But so these these collars are on a like a five week rotation, So I really don't want more than about four or five because we have to see every one of these cats every week, and that's quite a bit of work, you know, capturing five cats a week. Oh man, you gotta go. You gotta go catch the cat and mess with it every week to put a new collar on it. We don't have to put a new collar on it that once it's collared, though, we revisit that cat once a week tree it, basically approach it and tree it to do what just to grab that data point. So we're measuring the distance. I can get into the details now if you if you want to get a little far ahead of yourself, am I okay? But but here's no, I'm not getting into the details of what you doing yet. I'm just trying to understand, uh, in today's day, in this day and age, what like I thought, you just put them on it and then you just sit back and reap the information the caller and faller research. No, we're not doing that. This is pretty hands on as far as big cat research goes. So we're looking at these cats every week and we are then measuring their response to that. Okay, so let's let's let's let's back up. Let's yeah, we we can't. We can't start there. Okay, you tell me where to start, Well, I can tell you about the project. Project. So the reason the project is occurring because UM, we're seeing lots of depredations. I'm seeing lots of cats hanging around um X urban you know, urban interface areas. UM depredations depredations on what typically small livestock and pets. Typically the way those work, um, a cat kills whatever X number of sheep or a couple of llamas or whatever eats its phil cashes the carcass you know, near the pasture usually and then just lays around, comes back and feeds that night. By the time we get the call, usually it's a day or two. Um. And we started noticing that the cats are right there, Like we would turn the dogs loose from the carcass and they'd have the cat caught, and like thirty seconds sometimes cataby laying two yards away, bedded someplace near the carcass, um, totally not concerned about us pulling in with the pickups and our voices and the dogs making a racket on the box and barking and everything else that's going on. Um. So it kind of got me wondering, like, what's it take. Why are these cats not concerned about all of this goings on that's happening so close to them? Why aren't they running away from all that noise? And then you know, the next question was out, how close can we it to these cats if we don't know it, how close are we walking up to these cats and and maybe never knowing it. Um. They got a couple of questions, all right when they killed someone's dog, Like, is a dog small enough where they don't kind of like eat some and stash it and then come back and feed on it some more. Or do you see him doing that with house dogs? Well, it depends on the size of the dog. A small dog they'll just pick up and walk off with. Oftentimes we don't find, you know, a carcass cashed away if it's a docks in or something. We have found big dogs. We had a like a pit bull that was killed and mostly eaten, and that cat hung around on that carcass for a couple of days eating it before we caught him. And that was some dude's dog. Yeah, it's actually a service dog dog. Yeah. They let it out to pee and the middle of the night and the cat was just laying there waiting and grabbed it and packed it up the hill a few hundred yards and eight him. Obviously, a cat like that I wouldn't want in my study. I get a little alley about running dog killers. Um, because we're running them with dogs. I don't want one of my hounds to get out in front and encounter a bad cat like that. Uh, and then tell me where this is kind of happening where you're doing your work, just so people understand. Like where we are on the map, we're up in northeast Washington, So Spokane, Washington is where I live, north all the way to Canada and then out towards like Lake Roosevelt, Lincoln County. Um, so we have a five county area that we're kind of working in. Pretty rural, Yeah, pretty rural. We have cats close to town. Um had a cat callar like ten minutes away from my house and like I said, I'm right on the north side of Spokane. Um. You know you could see the city from where that cat lived. We have another one right now that's working over by like Mount Spokane, Ski area between there in the city. So rural but not remote. Definitely that kind of wildland urban interface, you know, ex urban however you want to describe it. A lot of white tails to write, lots of white tails, lots of edge habitat, a lot of turkeys there. Um. But yeah, just broken landscape, a lot of small landowners. Ten and twenty acre parcels are very common. When you say Uh, dog killers. Have you found like habitual dog eating cats, like cats that have kind of started to specialize on I don't think that they have started to specialize on hunting and you know, preying on dogs. But I think cats do start to figure things out once they work. And it might have been with a coyote or something, but some sometimes I think those cats do figure out that they can turn and fight a single dog and and pretty easily take care of that problem. Gotcha. Uh do you have Do you see where they kill many lions or lamas, because that's the thing off. I was a mountain lionman. I wouldn't eat anything but lamas. When they get them, do they give them? They just twist that neck. Oh yeah, they grabbed that big long neck anywhere. I think it's probably works with them. Uh. We see a lot of lamas, Yeah, a lot of alpacas, to which I guess are slightly smaller than a full sized lama. We had one cat it was a big, young tom hundred and sixty pound tom cat and he's only like three years old, right outside of Spokane. That killed fourteen alpacas over over the course of the sweaters. You could make with that and they were. It was a strange one because a cat must have spent quite a bit of time there. He had moved between three different pastures to kill all of these alpacas a period of time to take him to kill all those alpacas, I think just overnight. But it was like a battle scene. There's just carcasses everywhere. It was awful. He knows how uh surplus like there's people that, Um, there's depending on how you feel about predators, right, depends on whether you're that whether you embrace or try to deny the thing of surplus killing. Yeah, there's it's well documented. Um with livestock, we see, I would venture your guests. More than half of our depredations right now are multiple animals. What does it like? What do you think? I know, you don't know what he's thinking, But what is he thinking when he wants to when he goes in and kills fourteen al pack Because it's just that he's wired, you know, like it's opportunity and he can't really picture his future food needs or is he like this is a hoot, this is great fun. Yeah, I mean it doesn't make sense for him, right, Like I knew that if I Yeah, I would look at that as a savings account if I was a lion and just come back when I was hungry, but rather than kill them all at once. Um, yeah, I don't know what he's thinking. I think it's just irresistible. I think all those animals running around in a frenzy, and they're sort of in a you know, frenzy themselves, and I don't think they can help themselves at that point. How does he how is he killing the alpaca? Is typically bites to the neck and head, not typically almost every single time bites to the neck and head. Was the owner of the alpac is pretty distraught? Yeah? They were distraught? My brother, he would my brother would. I can't imagine he'd be catatonic man if he came out and all of his lamas are dead. Yeah, well there. I mean, there's a financial value, right, But the bigger thing is a lot of these animals they have a lot more value than just the finances. There are a lot of these people count on their goats and their sheep for meat or for four h show animals, for their kids and other things. Most of our depredations aren't on big like whatever corporate ranches, or something. These are like ten acre places with a couple of animals, and you know that they used to feed their family or do whatever with so yeah, typically the landowner is pretty upset about it. How do people the people that lose their dog, do they tend to be that this is like I'm just asking for a girl's generalization here. Do people to lose their dog tend to be circumspect and and sort of be like, well, he's just that lions just trying to make a living, and you know, I can't really blame them. Are they like do they want blood? They want its head on a on a spike, like what's there? General, most of the time, if it's a dog, like you know, particularly a pet dog, not a working dog, people are pretty fired up. They want that cat dead. That's been our experience we have. You know, that's the other issue. When they kill dogs. It's hard for us because you know, if they kill a goat, most people, you know, they understand what we're doing and you know that we're going to catch this cat and probably kill it. So they'll let us leave that goat tied out. You know, we'll tie it to a tree, put it. You know, can't trail camera on. It will come back the next morning, and if that cat's hit it, we'll go catch it and kill it. It's hard to talk somebody into letting us do that with their dogs. Yeah, they don't want their dog bees as bait and I I understand that. Um, I would be that way too. So yeah, dogs are a little different than small livestock. Typically, you gotta wonder if a cat starts out with a llama or an alpaca as pray species, if that cat tries to move on to something else, it has a very steep learning curve ahead of it due to the margin of error for the length and size of the neck. Oh yeah, like an alpaca and a little teeny enclosure. Yeah, I got kill it with my teeth, you know, I just gotta get it in the neck. Now, move over to a badger that has I don't know, I don't think that there are very many lines that get that opportunity enough. Um, you know, if they kill an alpaca, typically we have to respond pretty quickly. I say we, it's really the w DFW enforcement that responds, um. And then you guys met Bruce. Bruce does a lot of those I help with as many as I can, and we go out and help enforcement take care of that cat. And can you guys do anything with with the carcass at that point? Do you guys? Not? Really? Um? Unfortunately, most of those animals. Sometimes if the landowner has a tag um or once a cat, sometimes they can get it um if they request that animal. But typically no, we've had a handful of them donated to the tribes. Um. You know, the tribes will make use of that cat and the meat and the hide and the bones and different things. What do you do with them? Just burn them up? Yeah? They just go in the dump with the road killed deer and everything else. And people don't fish them out of the dump. Well maybe they do. I don't. I wouldn't else they did. I don't know, man, I don't want to see who this was. But a good friend of mine, he um. When he was in college, he was working on these nets surveys, these fish surveys where they go out and set nets uh in lakes and what they were supposed to do is they're not supposed to use the fish. They had to just dump the fish because they put it put you put out gil nets for surveys and he would. He would. They'd go out in the work truck and dump the fish. He'd come home, get his regular vehicle, wait an hour and go back and get the fish, and then take the fish back home and flame him and freeze him. Couldn't bring himself to dump fils fish. What kind of fish were we talking about? He he liked it, he was he was kind of a white fish specialists. He'd like to go get the white fish out of there with other stuff too. Yeah, his initials were m d and he had a thirty thirty, so we called him m d Ye. You had a point. Yeah, you were going to say something Yanni's take. Just stroking his beard. Yeah, because again it's it's not something I'm used to. Its found a new thing on space. Um No, I don't think I did. Just having a glance over even you'd happened to be glancing this drect. No, you like I thought you had, like think you started to say maybe that, Maybe he didn't. I spoke to on the disposal side of things. I spoke to Montana game warden, longtime game warden, and somebody in his area hit a abnormally large black bear and killed it, and he went to his normal disposal site, which was a sharp turn on the highway, um where he'd give critters that hev ho because he didn't he couldn't stomach taking them to a dump. He thought it was too disrespectful to take animals just throw them in with all the plastics and ship like that. Yeah. Um, but he did. And he said, he said, his physics were a little off on just how big this bear was. And uh so he slit it out of the back of the truck. Down mountain it went, and he drove off. And the next day he got from the town police department, he got a phone call saying, hey, we have a very large black bear that must have rolled off the mountain above town that is now on the bike path. It did the whole hill. It did the whole hill. Remember that very that chainsaw commercials like that, Like some dude coming down the switchbacks and his chainsaw rolls out the back of his truck and eventually like finaggles his way down all the switchbacks and there's a sauce landing in a mud puddles, still running. Yes, is it running? No, it was not running. He picks up and starts with one crank. No, okay, so here you are. You got a dead alpaca tied to a tree mark. Yeah about it. So when we show up show up the next morning. Typically the cat comes back and feeds overnight. Um, we check trail camera if we have one out. If we don't, we just walked dogs over to the to the alpaca and h turn loose from that spot. And it's kind of you know, without snow, it's typically just up to the dogs to figure out the end track and the out track, which way the cat came from and went. But what we're seeing is these cats are just laying around pretty close to us the whole just listening. Um. And we're not sneaking around out there. We're at a house, we're at a farm with the dog box in the back of the truck and yapping dogs and people talking at normal voices, and um, it was shocking how close the cats would be to us. Sometimes we would hear there were times where we heard the jump race where the dogs ran into the cat while he was just laying around in a bed listening to this whole racket that we were making. But and is that would that not be like when you could you'd like to run lions as the hell of a start to a sentence, Listen, you like to run lions out in the very remote wilderness areas too down and then right? Is that not the same though? They're like when you find if you find where he just killed elk Um, is he more inclined to as you approach scoot out? Like? Is this something that's peculiar? Is this a behavior that you were curious about because you felt that it was counter to what you'd see in other areas or aren't you factoring in the proximity to to to the proximity to a suburb people. Does that make any sense? That was a bad sense? If I think I can clarify. I think what you're saying is that you were oblivious to it, right, And you were only realizing this because some of those cats were collared. We were on the well, no, we were. We realized that when the dogs would jump that cat so close to us. But you got me wondering, like, what would it take for this cat to be afraid of people like you don't obviously, we don't want cats hanging out two feet from people's houses, laying around in the brush listening to people listening to engines and dogs bark and whatever else that goes on to the house or a farm. So is that normal cat behavior or is that some level of habituation? I got you, I got you, all right. That kind of answers my stupid, my not well articulated question of meaning. Uh, are you curious about um? Is that just like ambivalence to human presence a factor of just exposure to humans? Or do you think it might be innate and cats? But you're gonna find You're gonna probably explain how you're going to find that out, Well, we hope. So whether or not we find out if it's just normal cat behavior that's innate two cats, or or if it's a learned behavior. I don't know if we'll pin that down necessarily, but we are going to know whether or not we can change that behavior and and modify the way they respond after being chased around by dogs and and yelled at by people in different things. You guys are in Montana, you know where they've chased cats around. I'm sure any cat that gets within Bozeman city limits probably has some eyes on it pretty fast. If there's snow, especially, there's a lot of there's an active community of hound hunters there that are going to go chase that cat and get a look at it. They probably won't kill it, particularly if it's a female. But um, those cats, they get looked at a lot, they get chased around, harassed by hound hunters. Washington doesn't have that. We're chasing cats that have very very likely never been pursued by a dog we're chasing. We're chasing cats that have probably never had a negative interaction with a person at all. So, um, that's another one of the questions, because it's how it's been how many years since they banned Uh, it's been how many years since they banned lion hunting with dogs in Washington? Over twenty now. I think they've banned it in ninety six, remember, so long enough ago. There's no cat living today that remembers those times. Yeah, yeah, any of those any cat that was legally pursued, And um, you know, I say that because they're I don't know if people are out bootlegging around or chasing cats. That used to be a problem. Right after the right after they made it illegal, there was still a lot of hound hunters around and they were pretty upset about it, and I think that probably happened more than um. The hound hunting ranks in Washington now are pretty slim. There's not a lot of people that still keep dogs because the opportunities are really tough. Okay, so you get curious about this, like why do these cats just not care? What's your next step? Well, we started kind of think about ways to protect you know, the farms and pets and small livestock that we kind of suspect that are going to get picked off by cats. And a lot of times, like real, a real common narrative when we showed up at the site of a depredation would be this landowner that would say, you know, oh yeah, such and such saw this cat a couple of days ago, and my kids saw it when he was walking to the bus yesterday, and you know, it's been around um, but nobody. There's no method to track those cats down and do anything about them. They're just sightings, right, And it's kind of a meaningless metric. So the state wasn't really responding to a sighting because that's just a cat being a cat until it actually does something. There's no real reason for them to send somebody out to chase it and get a look at it. So I kind of got to thinking like, all right, well, if that cat's hanging around this farm for a couple of days and you know, showing up on whatever porch or something like that, that's probably going to cause a problem sooner or later. It's obviously showing that it's not that concerned about people and noise and all the things that we have going on on a farm. So the project then kind of got started, like, all right, so when these cats show up and they're being cited, I want to know about it, and I want to come out and chase them and see if they come back to that spot. Um. So initially it was a little bit of a geographic thing, but really it's a stretch to think that that cat is going to make a connection between hanging around a farm and then all of a sudden, you know, twelve hours later, here comes these dogs and pop it up a tree, and then here comes these people yelling at it and stressing it out. Um, it's a stretch for the cat to make that connection back to that original sighting that might have been the previous day. So it really became more of a behavior study. How does this cat respond over time if we do this, um, you know, how does it respond to this stimuli, which in this case is your voice, Steve over time if we pursue it and give this negative interaction every time it hears that human voice. Yeah, I love that you're using this podcast. Who's gonna who cares enough about this research mark to pay for it? That's a good question. It's a it's a shoe string operation right now. We're looking for funding. If you guys know any plays the ground money. Imagine like the Los Angeles Pet Owners Association. Okay, so you're saying this is on your own dimeond that the Washington Game of Fish isn't helping you out. You have a bartworks to the tribe, I know, but he also does work for the game of fish, correct with these probably animals, So a lot of the fishing game is the manager of the wildlife in the state. Spell tribe has a pretty keen interest in cougar stuff right now because we have um a reservation that's smack dab in the middle of prime winter habitat, and we have had years where we've had terrible problems with cougars on the reservation. UM In yards at bus stops and all the things that you hear about. So my initial kind of seed money came from the the U CUT Group, which is the Upper Columbia United Tribes. It's a consortium of five tribes UM in North Idaho and Northeast Washington. So that was the initial seed money for the research. UM. I've got a couple of grants outstanding right now. But it doesn't cost that much what we're doing. Um I said, we only had to. We bought six collars. I've got uh that w Buddy would bury his company doing the garment stuff for me. He's been real super helpful with Alva Tech. Um questions that I've got with garment, and we're using their equipment. I think it's on loan, but they're not going to get a lot of it back because it just gets trashed out there in the woods for a month on a cat. Um. Yeah, we're just kind of piecing it together as we go. Okay, so keep going on, keep going on the story here, so you explain how you work and how you use how you use this this this podcast to help Okay. So as we're designing this project, we're starting to you know, we're one question tends to lead to another, and that's where we ended up. So we have all these questions starting to pile up and all the the protocol that we ended up settling on to try to answer as many questions as possible. I'll try to describe um succinctly, but we we capture a cat that's been sited. So Washington Department of Fishing Wildlife, the enforcement group is cooperating with us pretty well. So um, they are the ones fielding the calls for sightings or depredations or whatever. So when there's a cat hanging around a farm or a home that's spotted under a porch or wherever that it probably shouldn't be, they call me and then we get our stuff together and go get a look at this cat and we go capture the cat. It's you know, Bruce is volunteering for the project and put a ton of hours into it, and I, UM, we'll go out and capture this cat and get it in a tree, and then we make a decision if it's a cat that we want to add to the project. We're really looking for adult cats. We don't want sub adults that are still with their mom, and we don't want lactating females. I don't want to disrupt um a cat that's actively nursing or feeding young. So we take this at we end up. We darted, put a collar on it, and we put it. Explain that darting process real quick. Uh So we just use a you know, it's an air gun, and we're we're working on a drug formulation. I think I'm actually really excited about because a lot of people use ketamine zylazine on cats. We're trying to save some money. We're trying to do some things different and test some different stuff, and um use a safer drug. Keta means a little bit dangerous and it's also evidently a street drug that we have to be really careful about. So we're using a drug called bam um that we've used on sheep successfully, so we're testing that on the cats and um, it seems to be working real well. So we're darting this cat. When you when someone uses ketemine, what are the what like? What are they? What's it like? What what's the what are they after? I have no idea. UM, I know for cats, it's a it's it looks like it looks like It would suck when you see a cat under ketemine because they're like rigid and uncomfortable, and then when they recover their drooling in their heads, bobbing around and they could they just staggering. It looks awful. Um I can't. So you know, you never like, you never like put a little give a little squirt in your mouth because you don't want to replicate that experience of the cat. It doesn't know. It does not look like they're having a good time at all. I was really hoping you guys were gonna go into like the marijuana side of things, like super shot of CBD, just get them high. Yeah, we can try. Um uh, people use ether and knock cats out. I've heard of the old timers doing that. Um starting fluid. Basically they'll knock a cat out to get it out of a trap or something. And then did you hear the story we had on this show one time about a guy that got accidentally shot by the tranquil as You're gone, No, Yeah, it was quite an ordeal for him. Yeah, it could be very dangerous. They had to pack him down on a mule. They had to load the guy up on a mule and pack him out of the mountains. I thought he's gonna die shot by dart. That's another reason I would you trying to experiment with his bam. Yeah, um, I would get that wrong if I told you it's a three drug formulation. It's beautourphin al I think at a pamazole and metatomadine. Um. So it's a three drugs mixed one. It's made by a wildlife vet in Colorado. It's a great product, super safe. They're using it on moose and sheep and deer and other things. The one thing it does have it's reverse herble. So if I was to dart myself, I could also reverse myself. You can carry like you can carry like a vial of antidote. Right, so I have a reversal agent. Um. I'll get back to darting the cat and we'll talk about reversing it and everything else. But um, so it's a dark the cat. We get it in the right tree. So if it's in a super high tree someplace where it's going to get injured, if it comes out of the tree, we'll jump it out of that tree and put dogs on it right away. So they put a lot of pressure on it and get it to grab another tree. When you do that, typically that cats running from those dogs and it's gonna grab the first tree it can get to. It's so it's less likely that's going to pick a great bit. But how do you climb at the top? How do you prompt it when it's when it finds a tree and it goes into a tree and it's the wrong tree, it's gonna fall, presumably right, it's gonna fall and get hurt if you tranquilize it. How do you how do you willfully prompt it to jump to another tree, to jump to the ground. So we've done in a couple of ways. Um, Sometimes you can just bang on that tree with a stick or a log, and that I think that vibration drives them a little bit crazy and they'll just climb out. If they haven't been treed very much and they are pretty nervous, it's easy to get them to jump. We also carry a paintball gun and you can rattle the tree above them or actually shoot the cat with the paintballs and they'll come out of the tree and try to get them in a better tree. Right, So I want them in, you know, I don't want them over about you know, thirty five ft high, and then we carry climbing equipment because sometimes they go down in the tree. But once so I deliver the dart and we get this tar pung out and it's like you would expect. It's a big you know, I don't know if it's canvas or not, but it's that kind of heavy cotton material. Hey, do you have to hit him in any special spot with that dart? I always try to hit him in the hamstring. You can, you can shoot him in the shoulder, but there's just more connective tissue and more likelihood of an injury. So I always try to shoot him right in the hamstring or yeah, the butt, and that's a big muscle group. I'm using a one and a half inch long needle, so it's a big needle and you have to get into a pretty deep muscle. Um. So these are just pressurized darts that are reusable. Um. So, once the dart hits you know, typically the dart comes out of the cat um in the tree. It's not barbed or anything like that, so the drugs delivered dart typically falls out of the tree. We get our tarp up and just watching that cat. About half the time they go down and they're stuck in the tree and we have to climb up, tie a rope around him and push him out of the tree down into the tarp. How long is it to put that cat asleep? That depends typically. If so, the BAM itself is going to take like ten minutes, which seems like an eternity when you're out there. Um, we have decided we have started adding a really small dose of ketamine to that BAM. Um, and it's a low dose ketamine. It's a one a hundred milligrams per mill leader ketamine. So it's like the stuff that used on horses. Um. We put just a whisper of that in there, and that knocks him out way faster. So those two drugs really work together well. And they'll go down on about two and a half minutes with that, And then you guys are like fireman catching someone jumping out of a window pretty much. Yeah, we'll tie the tarp up and hold the tarp up in the corners, do whatever and catch it when it lands. Um. So you had a funny dark story. I had one of those just a week ago. I was shot a cat and we're we look at the cat the through the scope of our air rifle, you know, and I could see the plunger wasn't all the way down on the dart, which is a concern because it means there's still half the drugs and the dart. It also means the cat only got half the delivery. So we're wondering if we're gonna have to dart him again. And um, he started looking like he was going to come out of the tree. He was getting pretty heavy, his head was hanging. So we've gotten position with the dart and the cat started moving around, and that I wasn't paying attention to the cat. I was looking at the tarp and I felt something. I thought a stick landed on me. And I looked down and that dart had come out of the tree and stuck in my palm like a with half the drug still in it, and the sleeve was off and his pressure eyes. I was like, oh my god, this is gonna be embarrassing. But it didn't. It didn't. Um, I just cleaned I cleaned it up, of course, and nowadays everybody has hand sanitizer in every pocket, so I pulled it out and smeared some hand sanitizer in there, and UM kept a pretty close eye on it. And I don't think I got any of the drug at all. I didn't feel like I did any So you you've got a lot of practice shooting cats with darts, though, right, Like, how many cats? This is a two part question? Teeny up for what's the first part of the question, how many cats have you darted? UM, I'm not sure where I'm at right now. So we have, oh, probably twenty cats so far. We're permitted for thirty five this year. You in your whole career, I figured you would have shot more than that. Yeah, beyond this study. Uh, Now, I didn't really shoot very many when I was helping the state. UM, that was typically their their biologists delivering the drugs on that I was just I was just doing the capture part with the dogs. So this project is really my most of my cat darting. I've darted sheep and deer and some other things, but UM, for this one, probably twenty cats and probably oh, I think three or four of those cats we've had to handle three different times, most of them twice. So I don't know how many darts I've delivered fifty or sixty, I guess. And since they're reusable, have you identified the lucky dart? Like, what is the dart that comes out of like that one is gonna that puts Tabby down? Um? We have identified a couple of unlucky darts. I don't know. Um, we don't have one that I like better than the others. But we always test them before we load the drugs, and sometimes those you know, it's just a syringe, right, and sometimes those plungers and get sticky and things like that. So we're always testing them and that has helped. But I had a terrible time the first cat we treat. I missed twice before I got a dart in it, and the gun was shooting like a foot high, and I I sighted the gun in on the flat, like a total rookie move, you know, I just took it out in the lawn and sighted it in. And that's a very different trajectory than shooting almost straight up into a tree. So I was shooting over the cat and it was launching these eighteen dollar darts full, you know, forty worth the drugs out into the stratosphere. UM. So that was embarrassing, But we've got it dialed in now, I haven't missed a cat in a long time. Good for you. Okay. So the cat falls out of the tree, lands on the trampoline the cop. Yeah, if the lot of times the cat comes out still has some life in it, we tied up. We just put a loop around its hind leg and tied to the tree and let the drugs take the full effect. Um. The dogs are tied back a hundred or so yards to kind of lower stimulation. We tell people to be quiet and not talk, not stimulate the cat. Um they are. They're really paying it like visual stimulation will really bother them when they're anesthesia has taken effect, and it will it will slow down the effects of the drugs. So we get a head cover on them as soon as it's kind of safe right and there and their head can still be up. They really want to get away from you at that point. They're not like trying to fight or anything. They just want to walk away. Um. So we get a head cover on and that really seems to subdue them, and they relax pretty fast once their eyes are covered. So we call her the cat. We're using the regular survey caller that you see on every wildlife project, right, the big GPS collar weighs like whatever. I don't know how many grams, but they're big. And on that we're we're fixing the garment unit. So we're putting that that other garment UM T five tracking unit, which basically the same thing you get from a UM same thing for a dog. Right, we're fixing that to the Vectronics survey caller and with that unit were able to get two second data on the cat. And then what does so on a survey caller, I'm getting data every four hours, so I kind of have an idea where that cat lives. On a four hour rippet, you know, every four hours I get a point. So over time you get really good data. But I only have a month. I'm not trying to determine home range or any of that stuff. I just want to know where that cats at right now out. So with a with this garment, it's the same thing I use on a dog. I have a handheld that shows that cat's location, shows my location, it shows the dog's location. So when I'm in the field, I have this real time data on the cat and I know within two seconds where that cat's at and when it's moving and how fast, so you basically, I mean, you know right where he is, that everything I know exactly. It's UM so, to my knowledge, is the first time anybody's done this with cats anyway, with that kind of data and that kind of field capability. But bart why even attached the regular GPS collar because battery life is an issue with the garments. We're still working on how long. We don't really know how long a battery will last. In the winter time, it seems like we're getting about a month out of one of those batteries right now. It's extended out to about six weeks, I think. But I just didn't want to have a cat running around with a dead caller on it and have no way to go recapture the cat. So that normal survey caller has the four hour data and um VHF capability, so it lasts. You know, I get two years of battery life out of that unit, UM compared to that other collar where I'm getting two second data and it's just going through the battery fast. When this cat wakes up from getting tranquilized. I know this isn't the object of your study, but when when you tranquilize the mountainlin. Um, you put the collar on it, it's effective immediately right, you can just start tracking him instantaneously. How far does he go and how long? How much time goes by before he's back to like acting like a mountline. I with this, with the ban, the recovery is fast. I think they start acting normal far more quickly than they do with the ketamine capture. I think that that ketamine capture really it causes you know, for lack of a better terms, I hangover for that cat that lasts a day or two with the BAM, we see movement pretty quick. Um, once they recover because we reverse it. Remember, So we reverse that cat and within about three minutes that cat is on its feet and running away from us. And how far will he run before he goes? Like? How far does the hall ask before he like chills out again? Not far? Maybe a hundred or two yards. I mean it doesn't just run for miles just nope. So they move away from us and we get out of there. And so before I leave, I put that garment caller to sleep mode, so that saves the battery life. And when I want to go find that cat again, I use the VHF on the electronics collar. I get close and I used my handheld garment unit to just wake that collar up so it's in wake mode, and then I started generating that two seconds data, so I'm not logging data all the time. It's only when it's awake. So it's kind of a nice function to save battery on that unit. So how much time will elapse before you go back to look at it. I've been trying to give him at least five days after capture to go re to go have another look at that cat to recapture it. And typically how far away are they from where you've originally caught them. You know, we've had a couple of cats that live on the same mountain the whole time we we've studied them, and then we've had others that bounce around, you know, six, eight, ten miles over the course of that week. So it just really depends on the cat and also the time of year. You know, the cat that lived on one mountain the whole project was in the middle of winters up north, but by Calville, Washington, deep Snow had a nice piece of winter range for deer, and that cat was just living right above the deer. I had no reason to leave. And then after you tranquilize them and collar them, what's as soon as you've seen him actually kill a big game animal or kill a large animal after that, I'm not sure. I haven't really paid attention to that. I know one cat we collared her, so we were approaching her to call her, and she had just killed a deer. The deer was actually hadn't even been dragged too a cash It was laying in an open field basically or meadow up in the mountain, so she had just made a kill. We callared her, and later that day she was on that deer and drug it into the brush and and ate on it for about a week. So so pretty quick turnaround to going back to normal. Yeah, she started acting normal pretty quick. Oh yeah, that's amazing. Like you did that to a person, do it, they'd be whacked out for the longest time. Man, Yeah, the BC A counselor. Yeah, yeah, well we would be thinking about it too much. She's just her belly started growling and she said, oh yeah, that's right, killed the deer this morning. All right, I think I can ask a good prompting question, um kind of what are the like the data points then that you're actually looking for now that you've you've you've probably got the data point of like where you caught it right at your start, and then so what are the data points? And then next time you go in that you're capturing. So there's really there's three important data points that I'm gathering. And that's more important than the actual point is that the distances in between them. So when a week after we put a collar on a cat, we go, we approach that cat, and when I'm within about four hundred yards, I start the podcast on an ad decibel little bluetooth speaker. Do you play the intro because it's gonna think it's tree has fallen down. I don't play the intro. It's actually I've only used like two podcasts, don't I don't. I'm not out there that long, so um so you don't pick your favorite parts. Now. I've just got one podcast that's been playing for the same for the cats for quite a while. Okay, okay, what do you mind me asking real quick? Like what's going on in the show. It was the Polar Expedition show, all people eating each other and everything that's turns a cat man. Yeah, they don't like that. And then the other one was that gentleman that wrote the book about Davy Crockett. Yeah, which, yeah, I listened to. I mean, I want to read that book now. After listening to you at eighty decibels for an hour and a half talk about it, it's like, I feel like I have to read it. Um. So I approached the cat from about four yards I'll start that podcast, and I started approaching the cat on it basically a direct line, and I know exactly where it's at. I've got it on the handheld and i know where I'm at, and I don't have dogs with me or anything else. I'm just walking up to the cat with this human voice playing the important data is back backup, and he's like in a predictable place. Are you like, oh, he's he's in a cliff, or he's in you know what I mean, or they just like our in just weird places. If it's in the middle of the day, which we're trying to trying to capture cats or recapture cats in the middle of the day, it's a pretty predictable place. And we're starting to make some connections that way about. Um, wind cats are on the move compared to wind cats are in a bed. How they respond. But there's a little bit of individuality that way too. Um. Some cats are a little more comfortable laying out in a less of a thicket, and some cats really hole into some gnarly little thickets or rock overhangs and things like that, so they like it. They like to lay in the thicket. We Yeah, there are some cats that lay in a thicket that's like impenetrable thickets, And when they're in one of those, they feel very safe. You could walk right up to them, got you, Okay, So I don't mean to derail you there. I was just curious about. No, but what's the more open location look like? Uh, penetrable thicket? Okay, So it's never like you just laid out in the sun in the midle of a hundred yard grassy meadow. No, they we do find them laying an open forest on occasion, but tip if they are, it's like at the base of a tree with heavy with branches. I feel like when we chase those first day we chased lines with you in northern Idaho, didn't we find two beds that were in a pretty open for forest. Yeah, that was open forest, are up up against you know, old growth cedar trees. I mean they had some cover. They're still so they like some covered. They like a thicket, they're like a rocky spot. Yeah, we find them in all of those things. Over hung rocks. We've had a couple of cats that we walked right up to that we're in over hung rocks. Um, we actually had one Monday that was we got within thirty yards of she was laid up in a rock pile. Okay, so you start playing this sing and walking towards him, and you start playing it at four yards, Yeah, four yards. I turned the podcast on. I approached them in the most direct line. How loud is it? How how loud is it for you? Like you're playing it to It's like, that's an annoying level for you. Yeah, it's it's annoying. It's an outside voice for sure. Um, it's not a it's not a shout necessarily, but it's a loud talk for sure. If we were talking, if we were walking in the woods talking at that level, it would be annoying, probably it. Um, So they're hearing it from quite a ways. So as we approached this cat. The important data that I grab is how close do I get to the cat before it gets to its feet and leaves? So I grabbed at that point, I stopped, I get my location, pin that I get the cat's location. I pined that, and then I just watched that cat, and I keep the speaker playing and I just stand still, and I'll let that cat move away however it chooses. Whatever that flight looks like, however much energy it wants to put into escaping my approach, and the cat moves away and I get Typically that happens within about oh ten minutes. And once that cat stops moving for you know, I don't have a set amount of time, but once it's hanging out in an area and not really going anywhere, I called at the end of the mobilization, and I grabbed that distance. So the two important measurements really are the distance from me the stimuli, and the distance of the flight. And then I hop on the radio. I walk up to where that cat was laying around. I hop on the radio, and uh, tell, Bruce kicked the dogs loose. The dogs are now trained to like track me. If I ever get lost, of dogs are gonna find me in a second. They they know what's going on now, so they track me to the site of the cat's bed, and once they get there, they take off and go treat that cat. What are the distances, like the cats responding at what distance typically, so we are seeing those distances extend over the course of the project for all pretty much every cat the first time, the first time we approach a cat. So Monday was an exciting day. Monday was the first cat that I've walked up on and actually looked at before it ran away from me. And it's the first time. It's the first hazing. That's kind of what we're calling this, the first hazing event. Um. The cat had been captured once. It was pretty calm at capture. UM. So last Monday, I went out and I walked up to that cat and I'm watching the GPS and it's pretty thick. They're not terribly thick. You can certainly see, you know, forty or fifty yards in the forest. And I'm watching the GPS and like, man, I'm getting pretty close to this cat. He ought to be. It's like that scene. It's like that scene in Red Don when the dudes in the white suits the rooskis in the white suits start tracking that kid down right. Yeah, it was unnerving. I'm looking at my GPS and it like, is this thing updating? Right? Like, what's going on here? Do you get nervous? Do you get nervous around mountainlines? Um? I had my gun out, I had my gun out of its holster. Yeah, I was nervous. Um. I mean when I was close, I got within nineteen feet of him. Ho he smokes. He's just as laying there listening to the podcast. He's like, dude, this is fascinating. Yeah, I can't get enough of this guy. So he was bedded underneath the kind of a leaning log, and I hopped up on top of the log to get a better view and get a little bit of elevation. And when I did, the end of the log moved, and I think that unnerved him and he ran out from underneath that. Um. So that's the first one that I've actually watched run away. And then he sorry to be clear, this was the first time you had gone in right after this cat, after this cat. This is the first time it's been exposed to this stimuli. So it run it ran off and only went seventy five and stopped and would not move. And I'm like, really, now I'm unnerved at this point. So I'm holler and I'm watching the GPS very closely to make sure it's not circling me or coming back to me or something, because it knows I'm there. It has seen me. It's here and me and now here's me, holler and added over the podcast. Um. And it sat there for a long time, I mean several minutes at seventy and finally I'm like, well, I guess we have to turn the dogs loose. It's that's that's it's flight. That's what it's gonna do. It's not gonna run from me. Oh yeah, yeah, I got just so you marked down his his his flight. Yeah, that's pretty close. So the dogs treat it within about four hundred yards, and UM, at the first at the first hazing event, we shoot him with a paintball gun. We tie all the dogs back, take him back to the truck, and we shoot that cat with a paintball gun to give it a to reinforce that negative stimuli, and holler at it, you know, and kind of try to stress it out a little bit. That first capture event. So I'll see what he does. We're gonna go after him again next week, and I'll probably take somebody with me this time, just because and presumably he'll I think he's gonna I think he's going to get out of there. Yeah, that has been our experience the first the first time we approach a cat, they let us get quite close. Um. I we have not had one flea from outside of a hundred yards yet, so we're within a hundreds of anything right now the first time. And we have complete data I think on eight cats now and pretty much across the boarder complete me. You've done it four or five weeks in a row. Yes, So that's mats that have been collared, hazed four or five times and then uncollared and released. And are you seeing that it grow every time? Not every time? UM. We do have a couple of negative data points. We have a couple of cats that let us get a little bit closer, you know, on the third or fourth event. Um. Some of those are easily explained. Some one of those cats was sitting down by a creek in a thicket. Probably didn't hear us with that running water right next to it. Um. Let us get pretty close. Another one was up with them. It was a tom a big tom ud seventy pound cat that had a female and they were laid up in a rock pile together. And he let me get quite close before they mobilized, which I want to say that, which is to say as well, that she let you get quite close. That was an interesting deal for sure, because he left first. He was in a little town called Ion up north, and he was in a wood shed when we darted him. Actually he was in the woodshed and we couldn't get him out. He shot him with a slingshot to get him to run out of the woodshed, and I couldn't get a dart in him when he was running out, and he went into a car port and was hiding under a boat, and I tried to get a dart in in there, and he squirted out the back of that and went under a deck and we ended up having to dig deep snow. It's chest deep snow. We had to dig a tunnel kind of down underneath the deck and he I got a dart in him there. Um, So that guy had some experience with people, and he lived in very close proximity to a little town and the first time we when after him, he was up in these rocky cliffy, this terrible spot, walk around and hunt and you know in the GPS and you're looking at data from overhead, you know, so fifteen yards might mean a hundred or two hundred vertical feet if it's cliffs, which is in this case is what it was, so that data is difficult to explain. Um. Yeah, I got within forty of him, but he was uphill of me in this overhang with a with a female that you know, line of sight would have been a hundred meters or something, so difficult. So he left and I circled around and I got up on top of the cliff and I found his tracks, and I was sitting on his tracks, and at this point I didn't know there was another cat there. So I was sitting on his tracks, just kind of watching the garment unit and filling out my daddas sheet and grabbing data that I needed. And he got out a few hundred yards and I still had the podcast playing, and I hear something to my side and I look over and there that female is walking on his tracks straight at me and maybe fifteen ft from me, and slips down through that same little crack in the rocks that that mail had just used to escape. It kind of seemed like without a care in the world about me, and you're making noise because you're still playing the noise she's walking toward. Yeah, she walked right up close to me, but it was Yeah, her desire to follow that Tom's tracks was pretty strong. She pretty much ignored me to do that. And we got eyes on him twice before he went in a tree that day. He was just pretty bold. Cat. I'm surprised that I don't picture you're gonna have a continued problem, uh, funding your work. I don't think so. A lot of people will be like really interested in this and how to because the thing about it's not like rats, right, It's not like where you have just thousands and thousands of them and there's nothing you can do, Like what do you have mountain lion problems or mountain lions that you want in areas where they're imperiled and not doing well. You're talking about like a small number of animals, so you could actually go through and give them some white glove of service, so to speak, and and and and be targeted about it. And it will still make sense, you know, I mean, because there's so few of them. It's not like it's not insurmountable to go into an area that has a lot of lion problems and and adjust some lion behavior, right. Yeah, And had a biologist from California reach out to me and he's got some interest in replicating the project down near San Francisco on a one of the big reserves that they have a lot of what they believe are habituated cougars. Cougars that are kind of just laying around in day use areas, um and sort of don't have a care in the world about people. And I don't tend to make a whole bunch of promises about what we can do. But I can, like I did promise him, Like if there's a cat laying in a day use area, I promise I can change that cat's behavior to not do that anymore. Like we can we can adjust that cat's attitude really quickly with dogs and paintballs. Have you messed with I know that? Like I support using the podcast, think it's a great idea, it's a great touch. But have you um experimented with other stimul others stimuli, like do they hear free like like a dog for instance? Do they hear frequencies that humans can't hear? I don't know that. Um. I have considered using the sound of dogs barking rather than a human voice to approach the cat and see how they respond, not like a not like a hounds bang, but like you know, a border collie happen around, or something that's going to hear I mean fairly regularly. If we get to a point in the project where we have good enough data and solid enough data with the human voice stimuli, we will switch to another sound, but it will probably be either like the sound of equipment droning on like a four wheeler, or like dog barking, or something that cats are going to hear that would have a management It would be a management action, right, like something you could tell people. You could tell people like, YEA, once we do this, this cat is probably not going to go close to your barking dogs or whatever. I had a friend who uses to design soundscapes and films, and when you're watching a movie, you know, and there's people sort of driving around and you're hearing the sounds of the city, he would like design those just just the ambiance sound you know in films. So yeah, like it just that that you'd make a soundscape of just human activity, you know, doors shutting, kids whatever, people yelling at their kids would be like my house, yeah, and get him use of that noise, right, And then the obvious thing that you know, if you let's say you did this over the course of time in an area. Um, it's a small area. This isn't something that I expect to happen across the whole region or something. But it would be interesting then to see how cats responded to just a speaker at a house or out in the woods, say, see how they moved around the landscape, to see if they avoided that or just passed through like they always have. And is there a thing you can do to them that they really really hate? Touch them? Yeah, if you can get contact with them that paintball or anything like that just drives them crazy. They hate that. They don't like it. No, you change your shot placement when you're doing the negative reinforcement a game, for like point of the shoulder or something. Something that's gonna chip of the nose bruise. Yeah. Um, when I'm when I'm shooting a paintball. So that's I was kind of experimenting with this permanent paint that foresters use. They mark trees with this stuff, and it lasts quite a while on a tree. Um. So I bought some of these fancy paintballs with permanent paint in them, and I wanted to see how long that would last on a cat. Just so if we had a cat that was causing trouble in an area of sighting, I didn't have a caller available or whatever. All right, we'll go. We'll go mark this thing and if it you know, without having to drug it and handle it. We're not going to put an ear tag in it or anything else. If that cat shows up, hopefully the people that see it would be able to say yeah. As it turns out, I had a bunch of blue paint on its side, so I wanted to see how long that paint would last. And it turns out it's not that effective. It comes off fairly quickly. But I was trying to shoot the cat forward in the body where it wouldn't be able to reach back and lick that stuff off. So I was shooting him in the front of the shoulder, neck and back. It's kind of where I was aiming. But I don't know if that. I mean, anybody that's played paintball and knows the things they staying. They're not gonna break skin on a cougar for sure, but they do sting and making contact with that cat drives him crazy. Have any of the cats that you got right now? How often you have a cat that has a collar on and then it gets killed somehow or another while like unrelated to your activity. So that big tom cat that I was talking about in the cliff just a minute ago, he got killed. He took off after that day and walked all the way into Canada about ten miles north of the border, and got himself killed by a legal hunter up there. Yeah, so I got that collar back. Um. And then another cat was down here close to Spokane. It was a cat that Were you pissed at the guy shot your collared lion? No, I don't care. It was a whatever. That's the that's the deal. He's was he aware that it had a collar? Oh yeah, now he knew I had a caller. I think he's a little bit nervous. He was like, he's a little bit resisent to to call me, and you know, on the caller has my name and phone number and says whatever, please call it. Found it took a little I actually saw it on Facebook before I think I actually I think I actually reached out to him first. Um, but I think I'm not mad. Just by any chance that color lying you shot right, Well, that's got you know, that's a caller plus the garment caller plus all the data that's on it, which is you know, that's three or four days of work worth a data that's stored on that garment. You know that I really want. So yeah, I called him and I'm like, hey, look, congratulations, that's a big cat. I can I can send you some pictures of them if you want, you know, pictures of him in a wood shed and pictures of him in a tree and whatever, pictures of him with anesthetized and whatever else. So once he knew that I was not mad and I was also a hunter, and you know, congratulated him on such an awesome cat he was, he softened up a little bit and sent me my collar back and that was a Yeah, it was a really nice cat. Man. It's cooler for him too, because he can be like I can tell you exactly what that cat's been doing. You don't have to. Yeah, he'd be like, and he ran over to this tree, and then he ran over this that's right. Yeah, I had an ear tag into I don't know if they I'm sure they pulled that out for the taxi ermist. But get a little jewelry too. Wow, And and remind me getting how many cats you got running around right now? I got five on their right now. So I haven't really got into a couple of parts of the project that are fairly important one of them. Um. So once that cat runs, I'm getting the I'm getting screwed route on this deal as far as seeing cougars other than happening upon one here and there. Um, I don't understand what do you mean by that. I'm not even going to the tree anymore. So Bruce and the other gang walks to the tree, and I am now measuring the habitat. So I'm grabbing all this data from the flight of the cat. So once that cat runs away. Once that cat runs, I measure the distance. You know, let's say it goes two yards or whatever meters. Um. I then lay out a tape and I measure the slope, So did that cat run uphill or downhill? I grab a slope measurement, and then I grab um the basil area measurement. So it's a forestry measurement that kind of tells you the forest type, will give you a rough idea how wooded it is, and then also shrub component, and you know if it's a thicket or if it's running through fairly open stuff or down the road or whatever. So I'm trying to describe, then how much energy that cat used to escape? Are you taking note of the wind to wind direction? I have a wind noise factor that's just one through five. And does he play the wind when he runs? Oh? I haven't. No, I haven't paid attention to that man. Yeah, because maybe he always he always goes into the wind. It would be an interesting thing to start to test some of that, as far as circling up wind or downwind of him too. I should have been a scientist, man, You should have been a scientist. You should come along to have all kinds of science things I'd figure out. Yeah, that'd be fun to circle give him, give him the wind advantage and see if they mobilize more quickly or not. Yeah, So I'm grabbing all of this habitat data for the escape path, and I'll use that UM to kind of help describe distance with you know, capital D distance then, so rather than just a linear measurement, it will include all of this other stuff like if it ran up and over a cliff, that might only be a couple hundred yards, but it's a definitely more energy to escape than just jogging down a two track road. UM. And then I'm also grabbing some data when we get to the tree, uh, kind of measuring the behavior of that cat. And we have we've kind of had to develop this scale, but I don't I think it'll be useful when we're done. We'll have a lot of it. How that cat's responding in the tree. How is it snarling, is it urinating? Is it jump bailing out and finding a different tree, How high is it in the tree, is it moving around? Whatever? So we measure all that stuff for a number of times per five minutes that it's tree, and we're seeing that number change as well. The cats tend to by the end of the project tree quite a bit higher and be quite a bit calmer where they're not dancing around in the tree. They kind of know the routine by about the fourth or fifth time we're capturing them. It's like they just grab a tree before the dogs are very close to them, and they climb way up high and they're just like laid out, relaxed when we get there. That's not going to bowl well for them when they're traveled like that one, when they're traveling into hunted areas, they're gonna make them. They're gonna make them easy pickings. Maybe. I mean it might also have implications in wolf country, which almost everything in northeast Washington is wolf country now. So I don't know how that'll, if that will play out, or how it would. Oh yeah, because you were mentioned that that that you find that cats that have exposure to wolves. You were wondering if it changes their attitude about whether or not they need to get into a tree or not. Yeah. Maybe. Um, I think no, that's well documented that a single wolf is trouble for a cat, like if is in trouble if it encounters a cat. A cat'll kill a wolf when it gets the opportunity, as long as there's not a bunch of them. Um, And I think it's not a far stretch to imagine those cats learning that on a single wolf a couple of times in their life, and then all of a sudden, this single dog shows up that's half as big as a wolf. You happen and they're just like, well, I'll just kill that because I've done this before. So a lion will kill a single wolf, yes, not vice versa. Oh, one on one, it's a no contest lions or yeah, they're deadly at all five ends. Huh, yeah, that wolf doesn't have a chance. Well, it's interesting. I wouldn't think, I guess, I don't know. I mean, unless it's a subadult line or something else. An adult lion versus adult wolf, I'd say lion every single time. So what's next? Man? Um, Well, hold on, I gotta I feel like we You told us about the negative changes in in the couple of the data points right when you went back subsequently, But what on average is the change after the hazing for the third, fourth, and fifth times you come in there with the podcast going yeah, um, good question. The biggest The biggest change almost always occurs on the second hazing, So that cat the second time it happens, I think they're still pretty freaked out. And it's been two of both the flight initiation and the flight distance. And we've had some that like don't stop running. We've had some cats once they mobilized, they run like nine hundred yards along ways. Um, so they're getting out of there by the end of the project. These cats, without exception, we haven't had any cat let us get closer over the course of the project. We've just had a couple. When I say a couple of data points, I mean like outliers, Like we caught this cat four times and one of them was a negative distance. Yeah, so of the you know, let's say we have eight cats with full data, you know, four to five points each. You know those points are positive and two is a pretty standard increase. So that's why you feel so confident if you you had a problem line that was hanging out in a day used area, that you you could go in there and do this for a month and that would cure his that habit of his or s. And I think you know the other reason that second might be so significant, that second hazing event might that increase might be so significant because at the first hazing event we shoot him with paintballs. If we did that every time, that distance might just contendue to increase until as soon as that cat heart Steve's voice at hauled ass. Oh so you guys don't continue that the paintball. Now we just shoot at the one time? Was that? I don't know. I kind of feel bad shooting him every time, Like I don't want I don't know. I just need to learn whether or not it works. I don't need to torture a cat. Yeah, you don want to make a man hater out of what? Yeah? So again this I want this to have management implications where when a cat's hanging around a farm and it gets sited, they can call somebody with dogs and say, all right, go treat this cat and shoot it with paintballs, and we have a and have a reasonable expectation of how that cat is going to respond in the future. If you give it a known if you give it a stimuli that it can associate right well, and then replicate that, then then you have to turn around and replicate that stimuli to get the desired effect out of it. Well, I don't think you would have to. I mean I don't think let's say whatever, after this project said and done, and um we get a call, say, there's a cat on the edge of a neighborhood, can you go chase it out of there. I don't think we would have to go approach that cat with a voice recording or anything else. I think we could go capture that cat, bang on the tree, shoot it with paintballs, and it would make the association between our because we're talking while we're at the tree. I mean, it's hearing human voices the whole time, right, It would make that association that way. It is interesting though, because I mean you said in the beginning that some of these cats were hanging out so close to these you know, urban interface kill sites where they're likely hearing a lot of human voices too. So you're fighting against this kind of maybe not a positive, uh interaction, but it's kind of like this background noise of human ranch work, farmwork. But I can still go down and pick off alpaca or a dog or something like that, right, Yeah, And you know that's one of the real that's one of the misconceptions of having a terrible time with on this project. A lot of people think that I'm going out and trying to chase his cat away from a farm with the expectation that it's not going to come back to the farm or that area, and that's not really it. What I want is that cat to avoid all of these human associations. Um And I don't know if we'll get there or not, not for all of the cats, not for all the time, but I think there is an argument to be made that the cats being messed with are going to behave better. Is there a version of this you could attempt on grizzlies? Not with my dogs. They do this. They tell on dogs if you go, if you try to run a grizzly with dogs, they're just hard on the dogs. I've never done it, but I have heard stories about people getting on them. Um And I guess they're long runners. They're straight line long runners like a black barrel tend to circle, and a grizzly barrel just lying out and go. And then of course they don't climb, they just bay and fight. So I mean people certainly do it. There's like famous hound hunters from back in the day that collected bounties on grizzly bears by using dogs, and I don't think we have good records of how many dogs they went through over the course of that time, but probably a lot. Yeah, I mean black bears are tough on dogs. Mean, black bear is a tough thing for a dog to handle. Have you lost the dogs lately? No, We've had good luck with dogs. Actually, I've still got Whisper. She's twelve. Nosies nine Radar die to cancer two years ago. And what's the one who got what's the one who got mauled up? Pretty good? Nosy? Yeah, she's hanging in there. She was with me to listen Monday. She'd treated two cats with me. Does she Oh, she hates him, Yeah, she's She was kind of hateful little dog before that whole reck and now she's now she's full of it. I got and oh, sorry, go ahead, go on with the dogs. I got a question for you. It's out there though. Okay. Yeah, we had and we had a litter of pups. Actually, remember Bruce has had that big red dog, Gus. We've read him back to Tipsy who those were the two cats that were at your tree, Steve Guss and Tipsy Um, So we've read those two dogs together. Yeah, they were awesome. We have a good litter of pups out of them, and they've been on a lot of cats like, um, those pups are doing most of the work right now. I think they've seen well sixty three cats so far since January one um that we've treated, So they're getting a lot of exercise. Cal what's your question you have to fire you have to fire out question. Yeah, this this would fall firmly in the final thoughts type of I got this new neighbor, California guy, just the guy that throws all the good stuff in the dumpster. Okay, um, real, real, nice guy. He's got a place that butts up to the Hearst Castle, which is now California State Park and Hurst William Randolph Hurst. Tons of cash through the twenties thirties built up this incredible place. I had this giant zoo and wildlife menagerie, and there's all these stories going around that when the financial hard times of the thirties caught up to him Uh, one solution that they came across was to release a bunch of animals, the animals that they couldn't give away. And my neighbor claims that they have trail camera pictures of the descendants of hers Uh jaguar population that have now crossbread with the California mountain lions in the area, and they're getting black mountain lions that are noticeably larger than your typical mountain lion. H I have my doubts. Come on, I mean, if they're getting trail camera pictures, just ask them to produce those. Let's see it. Um, does that exist though, Jaguar mountain lion hybrids or cross breeding of any sort. Have you ever heard of that? I've never heard of that. And if I mean they share range, they share habitat and the southwest right, Yeah, I mean they we would probably know if that happened. Yeah, they share habitat like across the I think the entirety of the jaguars range. Yeah. Probably. I mean, no, they do, I know they do now I think about it. But anyway, I give this guy your cellphone number. So yeah, alright, Bart, George, you got any more questions for Bart? No, I'm good, Bart. Thanks for chatting with us. Yeah, man, I hope you. I hope your money comes through because it's interesting. But see, I'm trying to figure out what it means, uh, what it means in general, because I don't know if it means um like doesn't mean that this will be like a thing that winds up being used against people hunting mountain lions with dogs. Well, this will national geographic reports on this. Will they be able to twist it into a you see, people shouldn't be able to hunt mountain lions with dogs. I gotta think this through for a minute. I hope not. I mean, I think it's Ultimately I wanted to lead to another tool for wildlife managers that are dealing with potential public safety conflicts and depredation issues, you know, like that that park or reserve down in California. I want them to have a tool to be able to say with some level of certainty, like, look, we can save these cats lives in the future. If these cats get in trouble, if they get in a mix up with a person, they're gonna die. Like that's that's a certainty. UM. In Northeast Washington, when a cat kills livestock, it dies. So if we can keep that from happening, and you know, let's say it only works of the time, that's still that's a lot of cats, um that we can keep out there on the landscape and um, you know, available to sport hunters and available for whatever other purpose. That was good. Little I liked that, man, It was a good little twist in the end. That was good. All right, Bart George, How long is it gonna be till you come back on again and tells what you're out your next how long you've be doing this for it and go on to something else that might be interesting. Um, well, I'll be working on this probably for another year or so. Um. Still doing some cariboo work if you want to have a talk about cariboo. There's still some in the Central Selk Works and working with International Cariboo Foundation trying to help out a group up at the Arrow Lakes um save a herd that's down to about twenty four animals. Got some callers out on that heard this year, so we know that there's at least nine cows up there and a couple of calves alive, but the census wasn't complete because damn shut down stuff Canada. Also, so what about personal hunting? You hunt in spring bear? Is here? No? I usually hunt Idaho spring bears and they won't let us come across the border. Nowadays they cut off all the non resident taxies Washington. Our season, yeah, our season will be open here in a couple of days for turkeys. I'll probably go try to pick a couple of them up on my way to work. Are they letting non residents come to Washington for what? Turkeys? Extremely late turkey season that you told? Yeah, probably it's that's it's turkeys in June. June. Man, that's crazy. I an't. I I don't like hunting turkeys after May first, once some mosquitoes are out and the ticks are out, which I've already found some of those. I kind of shy away from turkey on but I'll probably try to get out. It's the only show in town right now for us. The last question, you're married, right? Oh? Yeah, two kids? I was getting to is where you're at with the kid thing right now? Yeah? We Uh, my wife and I have two boys, two and a half and seven months, so we're pretty busy. And ever, the older boy has been able to tag along on a few cougar hunts. He was in a backpack with me the other day when we treate a cat for work. Um so he knows the routine. He'll be has year old say or do when they see a cat in a tree. Um. Well, the more concerning part was before we saw the cat. I was approaching the cat, had the podcast playing, and he's got a stick back there, and he's banging around hitting everything with a stick as we're walking in the backpack. Um, and he knows we're he knows kind of what we're doing. He has an idea that we're out looking for a cougar, but he doesn't know the routine yet. So we march along and he starts saying, I see a cougar. I see a cougar. And I'm I'm close to the cat, you know, I'm within about sixty yards. I'm like, ship, is this call or not working? Does he actually see a cougar? And I'm like trying to ask him where and I can't see where he's pointing. But he hadn't he was just telling stories. So when he when we get to the tree, he's excited about I keep a distance obviously, I'm not handling cats with him, Um, But we get to the tree, will stay a little ways back and let Bruce to all the heavy lifting at the tree and then just call the dogs to us when we're done. He's excited about it. Good future scientists. Yeah, maybe all right? Man, thanks again for joining us Bart we'll talk later hecks later.

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