00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware listening podcast. You can't predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That's f I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, Join today by Mike Bowdenchuck professional wildlife biologist forty five years professional experience and private, state and federal government services. 00:00:52 Speaker 2: Are you recently retired from. 00:00:53 Speaker 1: APHIS that's Animal Plant and Health Inspection Services. 00:00:57 Speaker 2: That's right, yep, you spent how many years doing that? 00:00:59 Speaker 3: I've been plenty four years with APHIS. I've spent about ten in the private sector and four with state government before that. 00:01:05 Speaker 1: Okay, and currently work as a private consulting wildlife biologist. That's correct. But your area of expertise, and this is how you were recommended to us by many people, not only wildlife capture, but you spent your whole career in predator prey interactions, predator management, invasive species management. 00:01:25 Speaker 3: You bet Aphis does a lot of predator control around the state, or predator predation control. Actually, we don't control numbers as much as we do the ones that are actually killing. 00:01:35 Speaker 2: Got it. 00:01:36 Speaker 3: But I've done that really my whole career. 00:01:39 Speaker 1: You know. 00:01:39 Speaker 2: But besides, when you were a DJ. 00:01:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that was a long time. 00:01:44 Speaker 2: What was up with that? 00:01:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been in high school. I had a job. I think they just needed somebody who could read and talk and I could do both. 00:01:51 Speaker 1: So so you were a DJ. I was a DJ for a couple of years. Yeah, what stage? 00:01:55 Speaker 3: You grew up in New Mexico. I lived in New Mexico for quite a while and moved around the country after that. 00:02:00 Speaker 1: So as a kid you cut your teeth like hunting and trapping. 00:02:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, I did actually growing up. I got to hunt deer back when we had a lot of deer right in New Mexico in the seventies. There was a lot of deer, and I got to do that. I started trapping when I was eleven years old. So what year to that had been, oh, man sixty eight? Oh okay, So yeah, so I've been trapping for a long time and. 00:02:25 Speaker 2: Then eventually got into that kind of work professional. 00:02:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, you know. When I went to college, that's all I wanted to do was become a wildlife biologist. I wanted to work outdoors, and that's when I graduated college. Jobs with game Department were on a hiring freeze, and a job came open with the predator control program in New Mexico, so I started with that outfit. After four years, I was getting hunters on the side and went into the private sector, guiding and managing ranches in Texas, doing some consulting work down in Old Mexico and Sonora. Well you did, yeah, yeah, there was a center for desert ecology. We built a zoo down there in Norma, seou and moved some animals into it, captured pronghorn in San Lui. 00:03:10 Speaker 1: Suppos. 00:03:10 Speaker 3: Did a lot of a lot of work in Mexico over the years. After my kids were born, I decided maybe I needed a job that had health insurance. 00:03:19 Speaker 2: Got it. 00:03:19 Speaker 3: I came back to government work in Mississippi as a beaver trapper, and then South Dakota. Spent thirteen years in Utah, mostly predator management. The deer herds crash there in nineteen ninety two ninety three, and I moved in there just after that, so we started doing preader control for domestic sheep protection, but also from you deer pronghorn protection, big horn sheep restoration. And that's how I got this deep into it, studying predator pray relationships. 00:03:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, let me hit you with one that wasn't expecting to ask you about. But I was just reading about it yesterday. Have you spent much time working in Alaska. 00:03:55 Speaker 3: I've been up to Alaska several times, but never never, you know, a month at a time. 00:04:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, a couple of weeks here and there. There's a little there's a it was a constantly a brew hanl ask about predator management around coyote stuff. But I was reading about some conflict and some lawsuits around doing bear control to try to re establish a caribou herd that had gone through like a ninety four percent decline. 00:04:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, that it is a worldwide phenomenon. I was an invited speaker at the first European Trapping Conference and they were saying, look, our endangered wolves are eating our endangered reindeer. But what do we do with that? Yeah, I'm working with a group in Alberta that's trying to to standardize predation management to protect wildlife. That that deal in Alaska is a long brewing controversy going way back. But but predators can put prey in a predator pit. When the prey drop off because environmental conditions and the predators don't drop off, that's when we have a predator pit. And that's what they're trying to reverse in Alaska. It's interesting because it gets to their constitution. They have to actually support subsistence use yep. And so it's a real tussle between our well, are you eating caribou or can you eat a bear? 00:05:23 Speaker 1: Yeah? I got it, got it. 00:05:24 Speaker 3: But in those areas they are doing bear removals and some wolf removals to protect caribou, especially at calving time. The bears are hard on them and it's working right. We've seen some of those caribou herds and will chatting the herds up about twenty five percent. 00:05:37 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. 00:05:38 Speaker 1: That was the one that had the ninety four percent decline and now it's kind of coming out of it. And there's a naturally cyclical element to it. But I think you can probably take you can probably take the bottoms, You can probably round the bottoms off with control or decrease the timeline. 00:05:54 Speaker 3: Right in Wyoming, prong horn will die in a severe winter. We know that that's the limiting factor winter. But do we want to wait seven years for them to come back up or do we want to bump them up in two or three years? You know that's when we're talking about predation management on wildlife. 00:06:09 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:06:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, what pratory have you spent the most time on in your. 00:06:13 Speaker 3: Career, without a doubt, coyotes, right. I actually trapped coyotes and hunting coyotes for fur when I was in college, back when college was cheap and fur was valuable, And I spent most of my time around coyote management and all the rest. But I spent a lot of time with mountain lions. I did postgraduate work on mountain lions in New Mexico and had hounds for thirty years, So I spent a lot of time online work. 00:06:38 Speaker 1: You know you had spent college, being when college was different amounts of money. 00:06:42 Speaker 2: I always tell people that this is no joke. 00:06:44 Speaker 1: Man. When I got out of high school, I didn't think I was going to go to college, got kicked around going to the army and then like decided to go to college. And I remember we had a community college. We called it thirteenth grade. And I went down there, and I'm not kidding you, man, I went down there and wrote a check for six hundred dollars at like a cashier window, Yeah, to pay my tuition. Yeah, my tuition was six hundred dollars for a semester, and I like scratched out a check. So now my wife's all talking about putting our kids going to college, knowing how expensive it is, I'm like six hundred bucks. 00:07:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, semester Ice little to Bob gat In in the spring of seventy nine for three hundred bucks and walked across campus with that check and paid off the last of that semester's mill. 00:07:33 Speaker 1: Is that right? 00:07:34 Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's Those days are gone now, you know. 00:07:39 Speaker 2: On Kyle's Man. 00:07:40 Speaker 1: Here's the conversation I have people all the time, is, uh, you get a guy, you know, you get a well meaning landowner, right, farm manager, ranch manager, the farmer himself, the ranch manager himself, the ranch himself, whatever, and they have the idea that like they want to help their dear population now, they want to increase their turkey population or whatever. And they'll occasionally in November shoot a kyo, right because they're thinking like, well, you know, trying to help out help Yeah. Or you'll say to a farmer you'd be like, oh, you know, I was out there, we saw a couple kyles. You didn't shoot them, you know, Yeah, and you have this conversation You're like like, listen, man, I don't have any problem with you doing whatever you want to do. But that doesn't matter, right, Like, like this kind of stuff is so it's it's like timing and intensity dependent. Absolutely. 00:08:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:08:42 Speaker 1: Can you explain that a little bit from a professional perspective of when, like how do people kind of view predator control and what does predator control look like when it's done in a professional sense? Sure? 00:08:58 Speaker 3: And it's it is very very comp I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, but it's a deep rabbit hole. 00:09:03 Speaker 2: Sure, man, That's what I'm asking about it. 00:09:05 Speaker 3: Yeah. Predators impact prey in one of two different ways. The first one is how many get eaten? Right, And that's what we'd studied for fifty years. How many deer fons get eaten by coyotes and a deer adult deer get eaten by mountain lions and no kidding, decades of research. The very first wildlife monograph is about the Pants basin and they followed deer radio coolor deer followed them around Pants basin northwest Colorado. And if a deer starved to death, they said, see it's habitat related. And if a deer was killed by coyotes, they said, see it's predation. And that's what we understood about predator management or predator impacts for a long time. Really, when we started putting wolves in Yellowstone, we started looking at other predation impacts. And the secondary impacts of predation are behavioral changes in those prey animals to avoid predation. So wolves didn't eat elk on the Northern deer herd or northern elk herd near as much as they change their behavior. Instead of them being out in the meadows getting all the grass they want, they're now standing on the slopes where they can escape predation, but they're starving to death in what we used to consider a mild winter. I got it, and that secondary impact is probably as important as the primary impact. So shooting a coyote in the fall is that going to help anything. If secondary impacts are what's knocking those numbers down, then maybe very small. 00:10:42 Speaker 1: Maybe. 00:10:43 Speaker 3: If primary impacts are there, there's absolutely no impact whatsoever. Coyotes get replaced. They're very resilient as a specie, and they can come back from any kind of pressure up to sixty five percent removal. You'll have them back within a single. 00:11:03 Speaker 1: Remove. 00:11:03 Speaker 3: Yeah, they bounce back in a single breeding season. And this is this is neat research stuff. Researchers like aquatic systems to look at predation because they can't leave, right, fish can't. 00:11:18 Speaker 1: Get all that. 00:11:19 Speaker 3: And so there's been a couple of studies where they had, you know, a lake with algae eating fish out in it, and the fish were evenly distributed in the lake and they ate the algae and they kept algae blooms from occurring. And they put in just a couple of predatory fish in that system and all the algae eaters go to the thick cover and that open water now doesn't have any algae eaters in it, and you have an algae bloom. And think about that. If you understand food pyramids and all the rest, that's the basis of life being directed by a predator species because. 00:11:55 Speaker 2: They can't do what they want no more. 00:11:57 Speaker 3: They can't they can't safely go out there. They change their behavior and it changes the ecosystem. In another experiment, and I love this one, they had snails in an aquarium with with growing plants, and the snails will feed up and down the stock of that plant, including the terminal bud at the tip of the plant. They eat it and they keep the plants crop back. They didn't introduce snail predators, they introduced the smell of snail predators. They had its snail preadors another aquarium. They circulated that water over there. 00:12:27 Speaker 2: Really, what's the snail predator? 00:12:29 Speaker 3: Some other kind of fish that that'll crunch the shells? And those snails retreated to the basal clump of the plant and the plants grew up and choked out the systems. 00:12:39 Speaker 2: They can smell those sons of bitches. 00:12:40 Speaker 3: They can smell them. I may not be giving snails enough credit for their thought process, but that's an evolutionary thing, right, It's yeah, that was it. That's it. That's evolution, and that's the that's the ying and yang of predation, right. It shapes the predator, It shapes the prey. When things get out of whack, when people interfere, then then predators can have an impact on them. Yeah, another fascinating deal. When I was in Utah, they asked me to identify why predators have an impact and what would we do to manage that impact. And I started looking at mountain lions and deer, and mountains kill deer, that's their job, that's how they evolve. Deer evolved feeding mountain liones. That that's that's the relationship. But mountain lions kill bucks in greater percentage than the percentage in the population. If bucks are twenty percent of a population, it might be thirty thirty five percent of what lines killed. And the reasons for that are multiple. But bucks are solitary, Bucks move more, so they're easier to detect. They don't get in big groups, so it's you know, they don't have a defensive of a lot of eyes. 00:13:54 Speaker 1: Yeah, because you would think just on that point, I've seen that before, yeah, and heard that before. But you would think in some ways, the fact that it's for much of the year it's armed with antlers, you would think in some ways that would offset that, and maybe it does. Maybe it'd be maybe if they didn't have if they didn't have antlers, to be even worse. But you'd see in some ways, I feel like I'm surprised that doesn't turn a cat off. 00:14:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't turn a cat off. 00:14:25 Speaker 1: There. 00:14:26 Speaker 3: They're they're pretty adept at grabbing them over the shoulders and biting where they need to bite. 00:14:32 Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, you'll need the antlers or no. 00:14:34 Speaker 3: I've seen them kill adult bull elk, you know, with antlers. So mountainin z O will killed dozen fawns and relative abundance to each other. And and so if there's a. 00:14:46 Speaker 1: Hundred songs, explain it again. 00:14:48 Speaker 3: They killed dozen fawns and relative abundance to each other. So you take the buck mortality out of it. If you got a hundred phones per one hundred doze, which we never have, half a wood a lion kill is going to be fons and half will be doze if you had that ratio. 00:15:05 Speaker 1: They don't care, right because you don't know what's in his head. But that's what you see. 00:15:09 Speaker 3: That's it's just availability. They're equally vulnerable to predation, so it's just whatever he comes on the closest one to the bushes, right. What we found out though, is that when predator or when fall numbers are down, lion mortality is additive to other mortality. They're killing breeding age dos and that can drive a population down. 00:15:36 Speaker 1: I explain that's me and I got confused there. 00:15:39 Speaker 2: The model that I had when numbers are down. 00:15:42 Speaker 3: When fall numbers are down, when you get below fifty falls per one hundred dos, what a lion's killing is two thirds of what the non bucks are adult breeding age doughs. Only one third is fonts. If they're killing fans, it doesn't have an impact on the population. You still got some that are coming up to be breeding. 00:16:00 Speaker 1: Age I got you. 00:16:01 Speaker 3: If they're killing breeding age dose, you can see the whole population depressed because they're the ones that are that are feeding in, you know, young into the system. 00:16:10 Speaker 1: Like that's when it's happened, like a sort of a greater population level impact. 00:16:13 Speaker 3: Right. When we modeled this in Utah, the official line population was about three thousand based on densities and all the rest. The official deer population was three hundred thousand, or about one line for every one hundred deer. When faun ratios got blowed fifty falls per hundred doze. The population was declining because lions were killing does yep. Lions aren't nearly as abundant on the landscape as coyotes. The reason the faun ratios were low was because coyotes were eating the falls. 00:16:45 Speaker 2: Got it. 00:16:46 Speaker 3: So when we started doing predator management in the book Cliffs in the Henry Mountains, we went in there after the coyotes. We tried to get our fahone numbers up above fifty falls per hundred doze. We get above sixty seventy falls per hundred doze. Lions can eat whatever they want to eat and you don't notice the difference. So you got two predators working on the same population, but they're hitting different levels of the population. One's eating fams and the others eating adult dose. It can depress that population as. 00:17:16 Speaker 1: Well, got it. 00:17:17 Speaker 3: So there's all kinds of factors. We identified eighteen factors that affect predation rates. Give me some more linear habitat. So a predator, a single predator walking a dike can find every duck nest if they have to nest on the edge of you. 00:17:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm glad you brought this up, because this is in our notes. This linear I've never heard this concept before. 00:17:39 Speaker 3: Yeah, so what's more linear than a beach? A beach sea turtles have to lay their eggs on the beach, and one coyote, one sounder of feral hogs walking that beach can find one hundred percent of the nest. Got it, Which also gets to what do you do about it? You can remove ninety percent of the coyotes, but one still lose all the nests. If you've got linear habitat's you've got to be really really intensive other factors like herd size and age. Right when wolves were killing elk and Yellowstone, the average age of the elk that were being shot by hunters cowilk was about five, but the average age that the wolves were eaten was like eleven. That's because they're at the back of the herd. The eleven year olds are the slower ones at the back of the herds. That's the one the wolves you're sharketing and pulling down, so they're not equally distributing that predation effort over the whole population. You can lose some eleven year olds, you start losing your five year olds, and your population is going to decline because that's the reproductive capacity of that herd right there. 00:18:45 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:18:46 Speaker 3: It's a fascinating, fascinating picture. Some of the some of the factors involve the predators, coyotes. You probably know this, but coyotes don't breed till their second year, So right out on the landscape, you've got the current year's pups, which are like fifty percent of the population. Numerically, you've got the last year's coyotes, the yearlings that are out there, transient coyotes between territories trying to stay out of everybody's way and not get attacked by the territorial coyotes. Territorial coyotes are like twenty percent of the population. Two year olds and up. Those coyotes are the ones that are doing most of the killing of wildlife. Bose are the coyotes. Yeah, you got a four year old pair that's been on that territory for three breeding seasons. They're going to know where to go hunt. Phones they're the ones that are the most active at killing. 00:19:46 Speaker 2: Just think they got the most experience. 00:19:47 Speaker 3: They've got the most experience, and they're feeding pups. In experiments with livestock predation, when when you remove the pups from the equation, the adult coyotes quit killing within two days. 00:19:59 Speaker 1: Got it visioning. 00:20:00 Speaker 3: Those pups and you think about it. Kyote pups are born right around April fifteenth, deer phones hit the ground the end of June, first of July. Those pups got to eat meat. Those kyotes are killing as fast as they can to provision their pups. 00:20:15 Speaker 2: You know, I gotta just keep your train of thought. 00:20:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, But the idea of buddy of mine, who's a songwriter, he says, hey, I got a kyote question for you. 00:20:25 Speaker 2: And I don't know where he's got I don't even know. 00:20:26 Speaker 1: He didn't even I didn't even ask him that this has to do with something he's writing. But he happens to be a songwriter and he happens to have called me and asked me this question, but no explanation of why he was asking. But he said, do you ever see And I didn't have great answer for him. I could just tell him anecdotally, or I could just tell my opinion on it, theory on it. But he said, do you ever see a kyote take a step to dispatch something? Or do they just kind of like grab it and start eating it. She's talking about, why do you see him walking around with a rabbit that's still looking around. You know, I mean like some things. If you think of like a terrier, right when if a tarrier grabs something, he knows what he's doing. A lion, like a terrier, sinks his teeth into the neck. You actually see him seat his teeth into the neck and shake it. Right. A lion is like a lion is thinking, I'm going to kill this thing, and I know how to kill it, and I know where, like I know what I'm gonna do in top priority is it's going to die. But a kyote just seems to not be interested in dispatching something, and for his sake, what's the answer. 00:21:42 Speaker 3: Coyotes. Coyotes do kill them. They're they're a coursing predator mostly, and this is another fascinating part about it. Mostly they're a coursing predator. They chase down their game and when they grab it, they're grabbing it with their mouth. They don't have thumbs. That they're not like a lion that's got claws, so they grab it with their mouth. Once they have it in their mouth, they're kind of done. They don't have to kill it right away. In fact, they're not going to kill it till they're ready to eat it sometimes. 00:22:10 Speaker 2: So it is like it's not their instinct make it no huh. 00:22:15 Speaker 3: They they're they're gonna grab it, they're gonna pack it off, you know. With with baby lambs, they'll they'll shake them once, maybe bite the top of the head. But they're they're moving food, is what they're doing. If food's still alive, if they're taking it back to a to a den, the pups will kill it. 00:22:34 Speaker 2: You get around to kill it later. 00:22:36 Speaker 3: Red foxes can't do that, right. Everything that red fox eats is small, and so when they grab it, it dies and they take it back, and red foxes will cash their food around a den. Kyotes don't. They just go back and either puke it up if if that's if they ate meat, or just drop it and the pups will tear it into it. But it's it's it's a difference just in size and what they're trying to do at the time. 00:23:01 Speaker 2: Got it. 00:23:02 Speaker 3: In the winter time, when they grab something, they'll eat it right away. Yeah, in the summertime, they may be packing it back to the den site, and that's what they're trying to do. 00:23:11 Speaker 1: What do you guys, see when you look at with coyotes with fawn predation versus adult Let's just stick to white tail deer for a minute. Yeah, like what do you see when you look at And maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed if I had to take a guess at it, thisrom when I picked up And there's so much false information about this floating around out there, and so much myth and legend. But like that, in the North they run in bigger groups and they'll kill deer. In the South they don't. They don't seem to kill adult deer as much. Like what of that is true and not true? 00:23:49 Speaker 3: So we talked about the eighteen factors, and one of those other factors is alternative prey. 00:23:54 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:23:54 Speaker 3: I lived in Mississippi for two years and trap beavers down there and worked on some problems when I was there, And I never called a coyote in Mississippi with a rabbit call. I could hal them up and they'd come out, but I never called one with a rabbit call. And I think the answer is they don't know what rabbits are. They're living in such a food rich environment in Mississippi and Mississippi Delta, they can eat grapes, they can eat per simons, they can eat all this other food that they're not hunting rabbits in that thick, thick forest that grows in the South. I talked about them being a coursing predator. Not in Mississippi, not in South Texas. I wondered for my whole career until I moved back to Texas, how you can have six coyotes per square mile and still have white tailed deer in South Texas. 00:24:47 Speaker 2: Well, you sure come do a rabbit in South Texas. 00:24:49 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they do. But coyotes in South Texas are more like an ecologically, more like a fox. They're a pounce predator. They go up and down the cinderos and and if a rabbit squirts out, they grab it. Cotton rat, they'll pounce on that. 00:25:04 Speaker 1: Huh. 00:25:05 Speaker 3: And if a deer wants to get away from a coyote, all they have to do is turn left and go out through the through the brush, and the coyote can't seem anymore. 00:25:13 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:25:14 Speaker 3: So we've got white tails in South Texas, But the coyotes are twenty pound coyotes and they pounce. We've got all that other alternative prey. I see, So at your issue, you know what else is going on out there? Are the packs larger because they have to hunt, because they have to hunt deer, whereas elsewhere the packs are kind of smaller because they're eating cotton rats and they're eating jack rabbits and that's only a meal for one. 00:25:44 Speaker 2: And you feel that that's true. 00:25:46 Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't need like if they have tons of stuff, they don't need to pack up. 00:25:50 Speaker 3: They don't need to pack up. Their territories get smaller. They tolerate more overlap in territory. Huh. We've got territories in South Texas where we've got radio call on kyotes three hundred acres. 00:26:02 Speaker 1: Is that right? 00:26:04 Speaker 3: Acres? 00:26:04 Speaker 1: Yeah? 00:26:05 Speaker 3: Yeah really Yeah, it's fascinating and other kyotes right on top of them, huh, because everything they need is on that three hundred acres. 00:26:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, so they they don't. They're more leaning about other ones coming in because there's enough food. There's enough food. 00:26:23 Speaker 3: Yeah, another coyote territory thing, but I'm going down different. 00:26:29 Speaker 1: This is great. 00:26:29 Speaker 3: In the sixties, there was a coyote study with VHF. Collars, and they mapped out where the coyote territories were based on all the locations, and they had had a picture of what that looked like in the whatever the decade we're calling it. After two thousand, forty years later they went in there with GPS collars and did the same study, and the territories were the same size. But fascinating to me, they had the same boundaries. Oh really, Yeah, they didn't left over. When one coyo pair disappeared, another coyo pair would pick it up, and whatever they were seeing out there on the landscape, they maintained the same. Kid huny forty years, that's twenty coy generations. 00:27:13 Speaker 1: Now, I wonder, like, there's no way to answer this, probably, but picture that you had. 00:27:19 Speaker 2: Somehow magically we're able. 00:27:21 Speaker 1: To pull them all out, okay, like the shake of a wand and they're all out, and then you replace them with totally different ones. Then I wonder would they find those same? I mean, yeah, like, is the territory thing inherited? There is there some logic to it that a kyo understands that we don't under say. 00:27:41 Speaker 3: Coyotes sees it the landscape differently. 00:27:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, because we tend to think of like fence lines. 00:27:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, fence lines and roads because I could. 00:27:48 Speaker 1: Talk about, oh, he came off the neighbor's place, as though the deer has some comprehension. I mean, like as though like he's like, yeah, I'm going over to the neighbor's place. 00:27:56 Speaker 3: Now. 00:27:58 Speaker 1: You know. It's just like the way we like view you know, isn't how they see it, doesn't how they experience it. 00:28:05 Speaker 3: We talked some about not only the pack size, but individual animal size. Right, they get larger as they go north, you know, away from the equator or south away from the equator, but their prey also decides their individual size. I've been working with wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and and wolves that eat moose are considerably larger than wolves that eat white tailed deer in the same place, in the same place. What just a few miles apart? Fifteen miles apart? 00:28:37 Speaker 2: Your kidding? 00:28:38 Speaker 3: No? 00:28:39 Speaker 1: No, h So wait, what are you doing with wolves up there? 00:28:42 Speaker 3: Radio collars? We're handling wolves, putting radio collars on them. Are you catching them foothold drafts? 00:28:48 Speaker 2: No? What draft you use? 00:28:50 Speaker 3: I'm using MB seven fifty on wolves the Alaskan with a bigger offset. 00:28:58 Speaker 1: We had another wolf researcher on and I asked her that question. She said, MB seven fifty two. 00:29:02 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a it's a it's a good stout trap. It's kind of for years yeah, backfoot Yeah yeah, huh. 00:29:12 Speaker 1: But and you just and you're out like you just. They kept walking me through going out and catching a wolf in Michigan, like, what are you doing? 00:29:17 Speaker 3: Well, we're working in wilderness area. Yeah, so we're doing this out of a backpack. Okay, you don't pack twelve of those traps on your back and go for a walk. You know, take four or five of them out there, and there are traditional places where they walk. But if i'm if I don't have fresh sign, I'm not setting a trap. You're just wasting a lot of time setting hoping that something's going to come by here. Because we're putting radio colors on, we're running those traps every day, got it. So you can only have so many traps out in a day and still get to that wolf before noon and getting processed and out of the trap. 00:29:55 Speaker 1: Let me sets you guys, roam when you're doing that a dozen okay, you know, and then you get it, we get the wolf, you call the biologist or whoever. Are you working it up yourself? 00:30:06 Speaker 3: We're working it up ourselves. It's a team effort. I mean just carrying trapping equipment plus the equipment to work the wolf up. It's it's usually two to three person team. 00:30:15 Speaker 2: What month are you doing to them? 00:30:18 Speaker 3: May? Usually we'll be doing some this late this. 00:30:22 Speaker 1: Month, and you'll be up there this month. 00:30:24 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the end of this month and the first part of gins. 00:30:26 Speaker 1: And what are you finding with those collars? Are you analyzing the data too? Are you just collecting it? 00:30:30 Speaker 3: I get to see it, but we've got other biologists that are analyzing the data. They've got territories. They make some pretty good extra territorial movements. They'll go over here and try and poach a girlfriend or come back. We caught a pair of wolves one night. It was a male and a female, three year old male and two year old female, and I felt like they were pack mates. We put collars on both of them, and as soon as we turn them loose, they split and one went back to another pack's territory. He was a member of that pack, and he was a they're trying to poach your girlfriend? 00:31:01 Speaker 2: You're kidding me? Really, No, it just happened. 00:31:03 Speaker 3: We just happened to catch them on Date Night. Yeah really, Yeah, that was fascinating. I'd never guess that if we didn't put the collars on. 00:31:10 Speaker 2: What are you seeing that nowadays? 00:31:12 Speaker 1: With I remember cutting my first wolf track in Michigan's Upper Peninsula a long time ago. But what are they seeing nowadays at those populations there. 00:31:21 Speaker 3: I think they're kind of stable. I mean they've they've filled up all the available habitat and the deer numbers are kind of low, so there's not a lot of groceries left. You don't see I think every breeding pair is still having a litter, but you don't see a lot of young wolves coming up there. 00:31:38 Speaker 1: They filled in, Yeah, they filled in. You know, here's the thing I'd like to talk to you about about predator prey relationships. So you might maybe familiar with this story where you a the Hudson Bay Company. Oh yeah, okay, So Hudson Bay Company and it was like the oldest corporation you know dissolved now right, you know for a while, like the oldest court operation out there. Just for listener's sake, what used to have it is like in Canada, and this would happen in a minor way in the US and Canada. They would give these sort of charters or commissions to company, basically corporate charters yep. And they would say, you have exclusive authority to conduct the fur trade in such and such region. And Hudson Bay Company and it had all these different names over time, but Hudson Bay Company was was they had them. They had a monopoly to conduct the fur trade and everything that flowed in Hudson Bay. And they kept meticulous records, so you're familiar with like that snowshoe hares follow this up down cycle of seven to ten years, seven years. There's all these different debates about what drives it, like it seems to be like I think the consensus nowadays what drives it as plant toxins that as plants get over consumed, they produce more toxins, they produce more toxins, the rabbits lay off, and so it drives these rabbits into this cycle. Hudson Bay Company kept such accurate records that they could go back through time and track the link cycle and see that the link cycle follows the snowshoe hair cycle. And you see like how many links are coming through their trading posts, right, And they look and it's like it's spikes and goes down and spikes and goes down, kind of in line with rabbits, but or hairs. Here's my question, how long is the delay mecause I think a lot of people would look and say, well, predator management doesn't They would look like predator management doesn't matter because if all the deer are dead, right, if there's no deer left, then the predators will die. 00:33:59 Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay, that's what I was taught when I went to college in the seventies. Yeah, so prey drives the predator numbers, and and we were shown those very grass, those very data. There's another famous study Paul Arrington did with muskrats and mink when when muskrat mink numbers go up, when muskrats crash, mink numbers crash. 00:34:20 Speaker 1: Yeah, but they can't beat those lines aren't traveling like this, They're about a year behind. Okay, that's what There has to be a delay. 00:34:29 Speaker 3: And it has to do with kitten survival for links, so that the kitten numbers survive in the upswing and kitten numbers don't survive in the downswing, death and dispersal. If you look at non target links, take in Idaho, for example, they're catching links out in the deserts where there aren't any links, and Bobcat sets when you have a snowshoe hair crash and the links have to disperse, they. 00:34:58 Speaker 1: Leave, got it. 00:34:59 Speaker 3: So it's not not always dying, ye, And that's what we were all taught, and that that actually works in a single predator, single prey system. Okay, I don't get to work in those systems. I've got I got mountain lions, i got all kinds of predators. 00:35:15 Speaker 2: So single predators, single prey. 00:35:16 Speaker 1: Let's take like, just to help you understand what we're saying, we've we've talked about this on past shows. 00:35:21 Speaker 2: Like Isle Royal. 00:35:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, and in Lake Superiors is kind of famous example of it's like you basically there's moose, and there's wolves and beaver. 00:35:30 Speaker 3: Okay, you got you got beaver, but only half the year, right, they're under. 00:35:34 Speaker 1: Ice the rest of the year, So that's not even single predators. 00:35:36 Speaker 3: They whacked the heck out of the beavers too, Okay, yeah, okay, beaver's are a favorite food to wolves. 00:35:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:35:43 Speaker 1: So so continue that thought though, like that that the situations where you don't have single prey, single predators. 00:35:49 Speaker 3: So so in the famous line study that Hornocker did in Idaho, that the lions didn't kill elk okay because there weren't many elk. Back then, there were hundreds and hundreds of deer and almost no elk. Now that total systems changed, there's very few deer and a lot of elk, and the elk are buffering the lions to where the lions can still find something to eat and keep the deer numbers low. 00:36:19 Speaker 2: Got it. 00:36:19 Speaker 3: In a study on the Spider Ranch in northern Arizona, lions killed deer when the deer herd crashed in a drought. The lines didn't cause the crash, but a couple of years of no phone survival and the deer herd's way down, lions just switched over to cattle. 00:36:35 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:36:36 Speaker 3: All the lions on the study area that weren't killing cattle when there were a lot of deer switched to cattle, every single one, and so the line numbers didn't go down. 00:36:46 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:36:47 Speaker 3: So that's the actual system, right that we're worried about is when predators have multiple prey and they can pick on the one that's depressed enough to keep them in that predator pit. That's when we have to get step in and remove them. And it's got to be very specific. Right, you go out there and kill a bunch of yearly in coyotes and and not deal with the pair that's raising those pups, you haven't done a darn thing. I'll go one further. We do a lot of predator management around pronghorn YEP, very well documented. If you've got pronghorn herd that might have twenty five fons per one hundred dos, if you do kyote removal effective chyote removal, you can get up to about fifty fonts. You can about double that phone survival if you do it well. One state insisted that we do that work at the first of May because that's when the phones start dropping in May, so they only wanted coyotes removed in May. If you go out there with an airplane, you go out there with a predator call and you start looking for coyotes in May, you're going to find male coyotes that are provisioning pups. The female was right there tied to the den. Okay, if you get it, she's in the hole with those pups, and you're out there killing males you have no impact whatsoever. 00:38:09 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:38:10 Speaker 3: You got to get the reproduction. The time to get those is before she has the pup and if you can remove her, another capital take her place. But they won't have pupps in that territory that year. That'll be a safe low for prong horns to fawn. 00:38:25 Speaker 1: My buddy does that work for an imperiled prong horned population. And he goes down to his camp. I feel like he's in his camps. There's like the peak day when they drop fawns. Yeah, I feel like he's in his camp six weeks yeah, prior six weeks post something like that. Some schedule like that, right, like, well in advance, you know. 00:38:44 Speaker 3: Yeah, no, you that's the time I'd like to see it. We did aerial removals on deer fawning range between January and March and removing it, especially here in the mountains. Kyotes that live above seven thousand foot in January are the territory holders. The juveniles migrate down with the groceries. But you'll find coyotes at the top of the mountain that time of year. 00:39:10 Speaker 2: But why are they up there though they. 00:39:12 Speaker 3: Can't afford to leave? If they leave somebody else is going to take their place. 00:39:16 Speaker 1: You think, so, oh, I've seen it. I've seen so much where you be up so high and like the snow's crusted. Yeah, and you're like, why what are they doing. 00:39:24 Speaker 3: They're digging down to old kills. They're I don't know, eating juniper. I have no idea, but about seven thousand foot and above, it's all territorial kyotes. So you go up there in January, February, March, territory bonds are established, the pair bonds are there. You get fresh though, you can track down two coyotes. You kill those two coyotes, and livestock losses that year cut in half. Really, fawn losses are cut way down. Other coyotes will take their place, but those coyotes aren't provisioning pups. There won't be any pups born in that territory that year. Yeah, and you're golden. If you did it in November, there'd be another pair of coyotes in there by January and you'd still have pupps. So the timing is critical to when you get that. The coyotes you remove are critical. It's it's literally got to be the adult female. If you can get her out of there before shee whelps. You've got a pretty clear sailing all all through falling season. But if you kill the male and leave her feeding those pups, she's gonna kill just as bad as if they were both. 00:40:30 Speaker 2: Is that right? 00:40:30 Speaker 1: Yeah? What do you see? Do you ever see a situation where, let's say you have like good high deer numbers? Yeah, okay, So if you have a long historical trend. 00:40:42 Speaker 2: And you kind of know, like what what. 00:40:46 Speaker 1: You have data over decades, and you know like what low looks like for deer out numbers, say white tail deer, you know what low looks like, you know what high looks like, and you're plugging along in good stable country. In those cases, do you generally feel like there's no there's no point in doing predator removal? 00:41:05 Speaker 3: Yep, I absolutely do. You've got to be at some relationship to carrying capacity and carrying capacity changes over the years, right, I mean things dry out, you get a fire, and you have to reshuffle the whole deck because you don't know what the carrying the right carring capacity is. And this is in aside, but agencies have to decide every year where are we going to spend our money, and we're going to spend it on habitat work. We're going to spend it on predator control and the world. According to Mike, you do habitat work all the time. You do habitat work for next year, for five years down the road. If you're pushing junipers to create more brows for deer, you still got to do that. You do predator management. If you have unused habitat today, got it. If you're below carrying capacity. When we did this in Utah, we had a three step process to decide if a predator plan was necessary. 00:42:03 Speaker 1: Okay, if we were fifty. 00:42:06 Speaker 3: Percent of our hurt objective or less, and had fifty phones per one hundred dos or fewer, and had a three year stable to declining trend, then that would be a unit that we would consider for predator management. Okay, if you had an increasing trend but you still met the first two, you could let it go. You could see if they'd get there on their own. 00:42:30 Speaker 1: You would put. 00:42:31 Speaker 3: Your resources someplace else. But if it met all three of those tests, then it's time to do some predation management. 00:42:38 Speaker 1: What cases in your career have you seen where, like I mentioned earlier, Buddy mine is working on a pronghorn deal. I mean they have like he's working. I don't want to, Yeah, I don't want I just didn't ask him if I could talk about you know, yeah, I don't know how much he wants yapping about this. But he's an area with the numbers are exceptionally low, right, so he's doing work timed removals in hopes of lifting them up. How often in your career have you seen where you had where nothing was working, okay, and you're seeing like a desert big horn population collapsing, you're seeing a meal deer population collapsing, whatever, and you come in and do the work, and then you see immediate benefits from from predator removal. 00:43:28 Speaker 3: Immediate. 00:43:30 Speaker 1: Do you ever do it where you come in and you do predator removal and you realize it was something different, Like it it doesn't move the needle. 00:43:37 Speaker 3: Yeah, it can be something different. And predators aren't the only limiting factor out there. We talk about limiting factor like it's a single issue, but everything else is working on them at the same time. When we start predator management for let's say, prong horn or mule deer, white tail, I told the agencies, I'm not going to do it for less than three years. The fawns I save in year one won't contribute their own farms until year three. They get bread as yearlings, and they drop it the beginning on their second birthday, if you will. So we've got to see any kind of moving the needle. It takes at least three years. With a species like that, got it. 00:44:22 Speaker 1: We see it a little bit quicker. 00:44:24 Speaker 3: In waterfowl, you know, the Bear River Refuge in Utah used to produce eighty thousand ducklings. Most of the flyways cinnamon teel came out of that particular system, and they had a flood in the eighties that completely put the refuge under water. When they came back the floodwaters receded, they built dikes again that linear habitat to control the water to prevent the refuge from flooding, But all the nesting habitat became dikes at the same time. Raccoons and red fo just came in. Neither of those were native predators in that system. 00:45:03 Speaker 2: Will cause those to come in like that. 00:45:05 Speaker 3: I think people moved the raccoons for hunting purposes. People brought them into chasing with hounds. The red fox. 00:45:13 Speaker 2: I know that Hans the pigs, but I know I didn't know that has. 00:45:15 Speaker 3: Well, that's how we got rabies in the northeast. It was Florida coons being moved up there. The red fox. You could actually watch their march across across the landscape. In fact, there's an out of Leopold wrote a book called Game Survey. He dedicates several pages in that book to red foxes displacing native gray foxes. And he's got maps in years in all the rest. So it's been going on since the forties. But red fox has just naturally migrated across the continent and got into those systems. But they produced nothing. For two decades after that, they were producing nothing. They were doing predator studies. We had high raccoon abundance, high red fox abundance. We radio collared stuff and watch them. And when we started removing the predators, the duck numbers came up. Okay, but ducks have like an eighty percent fidelity to the site they were born at. Okay, So we went twenty years without producing any ducks. What are the chances we're going to go from zero to eighty thousand in one year? 00:46:23 Speaker 1: Yah? None God. 00:46:24 Speaker 3: We had to have some ducks that were raised there come back and start raising their own ducks. And so it's a it's a long term process. If you're saving sea turtles, what are you doing? 00:46:35 Speaker 1: Man? 00:46:35 Speaker 3: It might take fifty years before you actually see the sea turtle population rebound because because they got to be twenty years old to breed. 00:46:43 Speaker 1: In the first place. 00:46:45 Speaker 2: Have you ever worked on sea turtles? 00:46:46 Speaker 1: Oh? 00:46:46 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we did feral hog removals for sea turtles. 00:46:49 Speaker 1: And what'd that look like again? 00:46:52 Speaker 3: Sea turtles nest in may. You kill hogs, they'll still swim out to the islands or get to the beaches. We would go in there at the end of April and aerial gun as many feral hogs as we could, all though that had access to those beaches. And it's kind of easy in a saltwater ecosystem because the pigs have to drink fresh water. You know where the fresh water is, you can go get all the pigs around that. But hogs would reinfest the island by the next year. But all we had to do is give it forty five days worth a protection, got it, And those those little eggs would hatch and make their way back to the sea. 00:47:34 Speaker 1: That seems to me like the one predator control project you work on where you're not going to get sued my Like's Center for Biological Diversity or something, because they're all going to agree that sea turtles are cute and hogs are and they're probably going to agree that hogs are bad. 00:47:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, but any other thing they're like, no, no, no. 00:47:51 Speaker 3: I went to Australia and did some work with dingoes down there, and they said, you know, their controversies aren't should we do it? Their controversies are how do we do it? 00:47:58 Speaker 1: Humanly? 00:48:00 Speaker 3: Know they're there. Red foxes are invasive and they're impacting. The native hairs are invasive. Feral hogs are invasive. Nobody talks about should we it's just the arguments over do we use poison? 00:48:12 Speaker 1: Well, they had that little problem where they had school kids out getting house cats and that caused like a little bit of age. 00:48:17 Speaker 3: But yeah, the cat people are a little crazy, Yes they are. 00:48:24 Speaker 1: Sea turtle work, yeah, yeah, So what was the sea turtle? 00:48:27 Speaker 3: Uh, there's a Kemp's Ridley sea turtle that's being restored in Texas, Okay, and so but uh, there's work done in Florida for green sea turtles. And it's again raccoons, it's coyotes, it's it's a farrel hogs. 00:48:42 Speaker 1: Now, I know what I was gonna ask about. It seems that I hesitate to use the word fashion Yeah, but it seems fashionable right now. Like I wish my buddy Yanni was here because he's he's all. 00:48:53 Speaker 2: Up in this right now. 00:48:54 Speaker 1: There's a lot of awareness right now where guys that want turkeys on the ground more turkeys are real hip to like reducing raccoon numbers, right yeah. And I've paid attention to this because if you look at when fur prices are high. Okay, so let's say you go back to seventy eight to eighty two, right there is there is a remarkable difference between raccoon abundance. Like if I go back to the county, the counties where I grew up, raccoon abundance in like eighty four, nineteen eighty four, nineteen eighty six. I mean, you'd get excited if you found a raccooned entry because everybody is running raccoons because they're valuable. Everybody's running them with dogs, and everybody's trapping them because you're trapping in those days, dollars like twenty dollars raccoons, thirty dollars raccoons, forty dollars raccoons. There were no raccoons, and you go, I shouldn't say there were no, but it was like competitive to get them. 00:50:00 Speaker 2: You go there now, man, I mean. 00:50:02 Speaker 1: It's nothing but raccoons, right, It's just like the rolls are littered with raccoons a raccoons all over because those fur prices, people. 00:50:08 Speaker 2: Aren't out getting them. 00:50:10 Speaker 1: And so it seems like more and more guys now are interested in trying to go out and put all kinds of coon cuffs out to bring coon numbers down to help their wild turkeys. So that's what they feel like they're doing. Are they being impactful? 00:50:25 Speaker 3: Sure they are if they if they do it on a big enough scale. So we looked at not to not to leave turkeys, we come back to it, but we looked at pheasants in Utah, and pheasants are farmfield birds, right, They're not living in the sagebrush in Utah. They're down in the valley bottoms. And we had two different project areas, one in northern Utah, one in southern Utah and southern Utah. We went from sagebrush on the east to sagebrush on the west and just picked the valley floor had some natural choke points where roads or rivers came in where we could and to say this area is a study unit sixteen seventeen square. 00:51:06 Speaker 1: Mile, Yeah, where you could sort of block it off with some kind of natural feature. 00:51:09 Speaker 3: And after the first year we mapped where we caught all our animals. We did track abundance and all the rest. And after the first year we would get red foxes still back in the center of the area, but raccoons and skunks were all on the edges. They were coming in from the boundaries, and so we made a difference. We doubled pheasant abundance in those areas, in those treatment areas compared to the no treatment areas. 00:51:35 Speaker 1: We had foresights by going after foxes. 00:51:41 Speaker 3: Raccoons, and skunks. Those were our three nest predators, and foxes would eat the adults as well. We did the same study in northern Utah, but our study areas were on section lines four square miles, okay, and we had six three no treatments, three treatments. We kind of stabbed them like a checkerboard. And if you understand four score miles, it's two by two. The center of that unit's only one mile from the edge. And we did not change the pheasant numbers there. And when you looked at our catch per unit effort, our number of raccoons killed per one hundred trap nights, it was the same at the end of the project as it was at the beginning. We would kill a raccoon and another one show up for the funeral, Right, Okay, that's it's good coon habitat. Coons aren't territorial. You can have as many coons in an area as you've got groceries. Okay, Skunks aren't territorial. So if it's good habitat, had you have to work bigger than that. When the fur was valuable, trappers were all over the place. There was competition, like you say, not just for the animals, but for the space to go get them. And on a landscape basis, it made a difference. 00:52:54 Speaker 1: So if my body, Yannie, is doing raccoon work on forty eighters. 00:53:02 Speaker 3: He might help one nest. 00:53:07 Speaker 2: It's just they're coming from everywhere, and they're finding. 00:53:09 Speaker 3: Coming from everywhere, and he'll probably remove as much at the end as he does at the beginning. 00:53:14 Speaker 1: So tell me again, like, what is the center of the circle, Like, what is the what is the radius of the circle need to look like? Meaning, if you're trying to restore turkeys in the Okay, there's a forty acre area, you have a forty acre area of great turkey habitat, you got roost trees, you got nesting cover, you got food. What is the radius need to look like in your mind before you're starting to alleviate pressure at the center of the circle. 00:53:46 Speaker 3: So if we're talking about rio grand turkeys in there in the valley, okay, I would do the valley and I would have I want to have seven ten miles of valley that you would be working up and down because the turkeys are going to pick. Yeah, yeah, that might be a meaningful management area. Forty acres isn't going to get it. Huh. And this is I mean to me again, this is fascinating stuff. What scale do you have to be at to be effective? A coyote territory may impact a few deer, but the deer also select where they're going to go fall. The turkeys select where they're going to go nest based on the abundance of predators or that secondary risk. We had one of the PhD studies that was done on ducks at. 00:54:38 Speaker 1: Bear River Refuge. 00:54:39 Speaker 3: They built predator exclosure forty acre exclosures and outside the exclosure where the predators were going. They had no nesting Inside the exclosure, they had a nest for every two acres. The ducks really picked that spot. But the goofy thing was it's fin it's a fenced exclosure. They would still try to dig underneath the fence, so we had to kill predators that were digging under the fences. We killed more predators per acre protected there than we did out on the outside. We're still we're still finning the outside predators. 00:55:17 Speaker 1: Really, but the. 00:55:18 Speaker 3: Cost in predators was higher simply because it attracted the animals. They picked their nesting site, and that's what might be working for Yanni. We biologists do studies like dummy nests. Right, you put out a bunch of eggs, you put out you make a fake nest and then monitor it with a camera or go back and see if it gets attacked and you know, did ravens get it or did who's doing what? Yeah, that ain't how a turkey does it. A turkey lays an egg today and walks away, and tomorrow she comes back and puts another egg beside it, and she walks away, and she comes back a third day. And if a predator got those two eggs, she's got to go find a new place to nest. She doesn't just keep putting them in the same place, okay, And so her body's gonna tell her when she's had enough, But she may do that four or five times if nest predators are getting those eggs while she before she even starts incubating. 00:56:21 Speaker 2: I got it. I didn't know this about them. Totally makes sense. 00:56:23 Speaker 1: And I know that that habit of that they don't incubate until they get their whole, until they get the whole clutch. 00:56:28 Speaker 2: I never knew that she would abandon. 00:56:30 Speaker 3: She'll abandon that site. And so nest sites selection is important. Quail are a big thing in Texas. 00:56:36 Speaker 1: Right Santa Texas. 00:56:37 Speaker 3: Bob Boy. Quail have to have their nest within ten feet of bare ground because those chicks are an inch tall when they're born, they can't walk through the thick grass. They lead them out into the open where they grab grasshoppers as baby chick that they don't feed them, they have to feed themselves. Well, if that hen gets bumped by coyotes, I don't think coyotes eat enough quailed make a difference at all. But she gets bumped by coyotes. If her eggs are disappearing when she's trying to build that clutch, then she's going to select less attractive sites for nest success just because of that secondary predator impact. And so when we talk about coyote control for quail, it's they don't need enough to make it worthwhile. Well, maybe if the nest site selection is being affected in the secondary effects. If you're doing that, you also got to do raccoon control. You got to do gray fox control, because if you kill all the coyotes, these other predators may start chilling up. So you do total predation management if you're trying to do quail ness protection. 00:57:42 Speaker 1: In Texas, some time ago, over a year ago, we had a researcher on about quail. 00:57:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, about just the general. 00:57:54 Speaker 1: I don't know shittiness of the nation's quail population right now, right, I mean, there are bright spots, there's far more. There's far more dark spots than bright spots. You got states that have more restrictions on quail hunting. You got states that used to be good at quail hunting, now it's not. You got guys that grew up with great quail hunting. Now there's no quail. Right. This story is just all over the Bob White quails territory. We had a research around from Texas and he'd been working on he'd been working on a FDA approved I'm failing to think of the right word, man, Like, what would you call like a treatment for a parasite? 00:58:37 Speaker 2: Yep, I worm, that's right, yep. 00:58:39 Speaker 1: Okay. So he was working on a medicated feed and there was some superlative around it. If I remember right, it was the first time the FDA had approved a medicated feed you could put out for a while. 00:58:52 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, an anti parasite. 00:58:56 Speaker 1: And he had found in some areas that this was you could have a positive impact. 00:59:01 Speaker 2: Okay, Now this upset. 00:59:04 Speaker 1: This upset all kinds of quail people because in their minds like habitat, habitat, habitat. Membory said, like Mike's rule, always habitat, And they were insulted or put off, but by the idea that anyone would have the audacity to talk about anything other than habitat when it comes to quail, right, because anything else is a band aid, right, right. So on the quail question, if you look across the Bob White quails territory, do you feel that predation is if it's death by a thousand cuts, is predation one of those cuts? 00:59:45 Speaker 2: I'm Bob White qail. 00:59:46 Speaker 3: I think nest predation in many cases and the secondary predation impacts. 00:59:53 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:59:54 Speaker 3: I managed a ranch in Texas when I was in the private sector for quail, okay, and we removed all the nest preaderors, We removed housecats, we removed bobcats, everything, and we got quailed to one to two acres wild bob whites. You could flush twenty covees in in the morning. It is a good deal. 01:00:15 Speaker 2: Were you doing the parasite treatment too? 01:00:17 Speaker 3: No, No, we didn't. I don't think we had them at that time. I never noticed eye worms in any of the birds that we harvested. But it it it. We had good habitat too, right. 01:00:28 Speaker 1: Yep, it was the empty you had empty good habits. 01:00:32 Speaker 3: You had empty good habitat. I don't know that I could have got them any higher than one to two acres. 01:00:38 Speaker 2: When are you saying one to two acres? 01:00:39 Speaker 1: What do you mean one. 01:00:39 Speaker 3: Bird to every two acres of habitat on the rand? 01:00:43 Speaker 2: So what's that come out to? Like covey per acre? 01:00:47 Speaker 3: A covey of birds might use ten acres. And we had some places where we had overlap in covees yep, And there's there's some interesting stuff about covey fidelity. We had birds that would leave this covey and go join the whening back and forth. Oh yeah, No, they're not all the same all the time. 01:01:04 Speaker 2: But they'd get sick of their bodies and go join a new covey. 01:01:06 Speaker 3: Yeah. If you look at some of the research that's done on that, it looks like a wiring diagram for an old Toyota radio, you know, wires going everywhere. This game went over here for three days and then came over here and oh yeah, and intact if they're if they're dense on the landscape, there's a lot of that shuffling that goes on. I see, But yeah, that that's you. I think that secondary impacts are affecting that. We did predator removals to protect sage grouse in Utah, And what we found was sage grouse would start nesting in what we used to consider shitty habitat just they would start going out into grasses in black sage, which is short sage, and do just find out there in the absence of a million predators. But what we know about sage grouse is in the present predators they have to have this tall sage, and they have to have this and that. And of course we got a huge number of ravens in the west right, so that's a changing factor. But when you do that work, they'll start picking their own nest sites based on what's good. We see that with turkeys too. I wanted to come back to turkeys. Turkeys will pick their nest site based on the presence or absence of predators. We did a nest, a dummy nest study, but we did it the way a turkey does. We went and put cameras out let the wildlife get used to the cameras. They went out and put one egg in front of it, and came back the next day and put a second egg. And we even went so far as as to use a golf ball retriever to place the eggs. So we weren't leaving tracks in and out to this nest them. We had fifteen nests. We studied them for fifteen days, putting the eggs in one day at one at a time, and we only had one nest survived that without getting predated. 01:03:01 Speaker 1: Really one of the fifteen. 01:03:03 Speaker 3: The rest of them got whacked. Some of them got whacked multiple days, you know. Yeah, so the turkey would quit and go somewhere else, and then quit that place and go somewhere else. And so the abundance of predators may not be killing turkeys, but they're affecting their nest site selection and that doesn't always favor the chick survival. 01:03:21 Speaker 2: Yep, you've done a lot of work on wild hogs. 01:03:25 Speaker 3: Yeah. I was considered a predator expert for a long time. Now I'm a hog expert, and that's not a promotion yet I'm going the wrong direction. 01:03:32 Speaker 2: Your hog expert. 01:03:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, Okay, let me ask you a super like wide general question. Are we at a point in this country where hogs have gotten where they're going to get? Yes, you think so. 01:03:47 Speaker 3: I mean there is vacant habitat there. Somebody moved them in a truck. Yeah, they would, they would, they could set up shop. But but we've eliminated hogs. The government has eliminated hogs in number of states where they had new populations. We've got some resolve to keep them out of those places, and we're never going to eliminate them in some states. Texas is one of those. We're never going to eliminate them there. 01:04:13 Speaker 1: What did you make of in the north and they're talking about did you follow this story in the door like this whole like this whole Canadian super hog deal? 01:04:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. 01:04:21 Speaker 1: The guy who coined that term, what do you tell everybody what that was? 01:04:26 Speaker 2: Well, that like bullshit to me. 01:04:27 Speaker 3: There are hogs that can winter in Canada and I can't winter in Canada and I'd have a house around me, so I don't know how. 01:04:34 Speaker 1: But here's the deal about that, Like, just just for I'm gonna tell you something you already know. I mean, if you go look at if you go just google up images of hogs in Siberia, there's endless images of hogs walking around in deep snow. 01:04:48 Speaker 3: And that's what Canada has. Canada had an experiment for a number of years where they brought in pure Eurasian wild boar as a farm animal to be raised in that environment where they can't raise our domestic strains of pigs. 01:05:03 Speaker 2: So that's what they were doing. 01:05:05 Speaker 1: They're trying to span agricultural They were production, yeah, but. 01:05:09 Speaker 3: The market collapsed on that, and so a lot of those pigs are just releases from the farms. They're highly genetically linked to Eurasian pigs and and that's the super pig part, right. They can survive in that environment. They'll make snow caves and stuff like that, and and they do well. Eurasian pigs only breed once a year. Eurasian pigs are smaller. 01:05:33 Speaker 1: Litters, so you're Eurasian like the Eurasian pigs on native habitats. When you're talking about a pig in his endemic range, he breeds once a year like a deer, right, huh. 01:05:45 Speaker 3: And that's probably, you know, again, evolutionary, right. 01:05:49 Speaker 1: They don't they don't want to drop young in the middle of the. 01:05:51 Speaker 3: Winter, that's right. If they did, they didn't survive, And so those pigs didn't. 01:05:55 Speaker 1: Breed, so the drop them when food was a bunch. Right. 01:06:00 Speaker 3: The wild hog that we have in the US is a mixture of Eurasian blood and domestic strains and and what we call heritage breeds. Back back when Hatfields and McCoy's were feuding with each other, that was over actually a pig, and they turned them loose, they ear notched them, they'd turn them loose, and then they'd gather them in the fall when they could smoke the meat, smoke the bacon and preserve it. 01:06:28 Speaker 1: You hear the War the Pig, I think it was called the War the Pig out on San Juan Island. No, No, same thing. Yeah, I can't remember the details. Shot somebody else. People had pigs running around and the kind of there was an understanding who owned water or whatever. And yeah, some American shot some Brits pig, or a brit shot an American's pig. 01:06:48 Speaker 2: Now big foss broke out. 01:06:50 Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and and and so our pigs we see in the wild in Texas at least we see three litters every two years, about seven month interval between litters, and we see upwards of six pigs per litter in those litters. So you could see the difference between Canada's pig problem and our pig problem is mathematically that's why they haven't caught up to us yet. But Canada has learned their lessons. I've been on podcasts and meetings with Canadians and they said, we don't want to be Texas. We want to get on top of our pigs early on. 01:07:24 Speaker 2: So one of your former colleagues we both know, Parker Hall. Yeah, yeah, okay. 01:07:30 Speaker 1: I remember I was putting a similar question to Parker Hall about pigs and pig management, and he had an interesting perspective, he told me, and to if you disagree or disagree with this, but the way he put it to me is he said, if it was up to the pig right, the whole country's pig territory. 01:07:49 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:07:50 Speaker 1: But he said, but in a lot of areas were just able to get them right. You know, a lot of it's like if they were there, they would be vulnerable to people getting them to finding them right, like meaning in open like in more open country without certain attributes. And so if you have an outbreak, there are areas where it's possible to go and take care of an outbreak. And that could be messing up some of his perspective. And he said, in some places, the terrain vegetation is such that you just can't get them. 01:08:22 Speaker 3: And there's there's public resolve, right, I mean, you've got to actually have the will to get them. When the government had the what we called the Farm Bill program, there's a far wild pig eradication control pilot project that was created by the last Farm Bill. They said, show us some demonstration areas where we can really make a difference. And in Texas we said, yeah, we think we could do this. We had one area right up on the Oklahoma border, and Oklahoma had a site on the other side. So we're working on them from both sides of the Red River. And even with a free program, even with all the damage that pigs do to agriculture, only about thirty percent of the land was signed up. Yeah, so there are landowners who want to keep their hogs. 01:09:09 Speaker 1: Oh and. 01:09:11 Speaker 3: Unless we're gonna say there's a foreign animal disease and we're gonna come on your land whether you like it or not, we're never going to eradicate pigs in those areas. 01:09:20 Speaker 2: This is a hobby of mine. 01:09:22 Speaker 1: A hobby of mine is to ask landowners that I know to complain about pigs or that let us hunt pigs or whatever. Yeah. I'm was like, if you could again, if you could wave a magic wand and have all the pigs be gone forever? 01:09:39 Speaker 2: Would you do it? 01:09:40 Speaker 1: And I don't think I've met anyone who is yet said to me, I would wave it. The thing is usually I just wish there weren't as many. 01:09:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that's it. And I've worked in Texas the first time. When I was in the private sector, there are about a million pigs in Texas. When I came back, there was about three million pigs in Texas. And the difference is remark Yeah, you know, if we could get them back to a million, we could, we could tolerate the damage that they do. We could manage those numbers. At three million, the pig bomb has gone off. It's it's it's a critical mass. 01:10:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, but something weird culturally has happened. 01:10:15 Speaker 1: There's I think there's a lot of intellectual dishonesty in taxes around pigs, meaning there's an industry. 01:10:26 Speaker 2: Now there's there's like a hog hunting industry. 01:10:29 Speaker 1: Sure, you know, yeah, I think that there are a lot of people in Texas that are sort of that are justifying behaviors, motivating behaviors around pig removal, but they're rooting for the pigs. 01:10:42 Speaker 2: Sure, because they've built an economy around. 01:10:44 Speaker 3: Them, cropping them. Those helicopter operators will come in there until the landowner. We're helping you. But they're selling the seat at fifteen hundred dollars an hour. They got to have enough pigs to justify that guy sitting in that seat. So they're not coming back there next week to shoot them again, and they're going somewhere else. 01:11:01 Speaker 1: Yeah and so, but but it's but the narrative to the to the would be hog hunter going down to Texas is, Oh, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do that because they're overpopulated and we're there to help. But then you look at the guys running the outfits. I'm like, this guy doesn't want the pigs gone. Is he's built the whole business around pigs. So the guy with the cornfield wants the pigs gone. 01:11:22 Speaker 3: Yeah, and he doesn't have the habitat where the pigs are living. The habitat's over here on his neighbor. And they're coming out of a canyon or they're coming out of a swamp and hitting the corner and then going back. Yeah, that guy is selling hunts. This guy has the damage. 01:11:37 Speaker 1: Ye. Another thing I remember learning about pigs and maybe you know if this is still happening or not, is you'd see now and then a state would would seemingly counterintuitively, yep, a state would come in and say no pig hunting. Pig hunting is not allowed, right right, No one's allowed to hunt pigs. And he'd be like, well, why would they I want them to hunt the pigs if there's because wouldn't it be a good idea to hunt the pigs because you don't want the pigs. But what they're finding is pig hunting is motivating people to bring pigs home. They have such a hell of a good time in Texas that when they go back to Missouri, they like throw a couple of hogs in the trucks. And that was the area of spread. 01:12:22 Speaker 3: Tennessee's got really good data. They've always had a hog season on the eastern side in the Appalachian Mountains book. When they opened it up statewide, populations started popping up everywhere, got it. When they closed it on the western side of the state, those populations disappeared. People were moving hogs. 01:12:40 Speaker 1: For that. 01:12:41 Speaker 3: I got to preface my next statement with this, I'm a hunter. Yeah, First and foremost that's at the core of who I am. 01:12:49 Speaker 1: Good to meet you, that's. 01:12:50 Speaker 3: I'm a hunter. My wife was a taxidermist her whole She made a living that way. I was an outfitter for ten years full time. My first born child is named Hunter. 01:13:02 Speaker 2: Okay, that can backfire. 01:13:04 Speaker 3: Hunting has never capped a wild pig population anywhere in the world. Yeah, okay, they can outproduce bullets. 01:13:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, I understand. 01:13:14 Speaker 3: So anybody who kills a pig is a friend of mine. But if you get to the kind of damage that we see in Texas, the kind of ecological train wreck, one thing hitting another hitting another, there's got to be some level of control. 01:13:28 Speaker 2: Like recreational hunting is not going to dig out of it. 01:13:31 Speaker 3: And we can't barbecue our way out of the problem. Right, We've got We've got a big problem down there. It takes a concerted effort. You have to sign up multiple landowners and work at the same time. They can make a difference, but it's it's the problem gets big. Yeah, banning hunting Kansas has done at Missouri went through quite a bit. Even in banning hog hunting is to reduce the incentive to go move pigs that's what they're trying to do. I'm not a fan of bounties for pigs, but how Berta's got a bounty on pigs and they're using it as a way to gather data on where they are. God, if there was a bounty, then nobody had report the pigs and they'd start to get up. So somebody's gonna shoot one of those hundred dollars pigs and now we know where they. 01:14:20 Speaker 2: Got a little pocket maybe. 01:14:21 Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's there's all kinds of approaches, whether you're a high density state or a low density state. And we killed all the pigs in Washington like three different times, is that right? We killed them all, somebody went and got them again and brought them back, and they went to the same source. Because the genetics. 01:14:39 Speaker 1: Map, those maps that show source areas that the area I think the area around I can't remember if it was around Dallas or around Austin seems to land a lot of pigs in certain places around the country. And there's a couple other little hot spots where you can tell like where guys are sourcing them and bumping them out of state. 01:14:59 Speaker 3: Yeah, both genetics and disease wise too, right, got pseudo rabies, and we find Texas pigs being moved to Arizona being moved. 01:15:07 Speaker 1: To Colorade because they carry that ravee pseudo rabies. Yeah yeah, I don't understand. 01:15:12 Speaker 3: Rabies is the technical name it's or the common name Azyuski's disease. It's a virus. It's a herpes virus that pigs have, so once they get it, they've always got it the rest of their life. Got it, they got antibodies to it, but they shed that virus for like a ten to fifteen day period after they contract it, build up the antibodies. It's fatal to piglets under three weeks of age. It's it'll cause abortions in South but adult pigs, even little pigs will get over it. It's fatal to dogs. Have hunting dogs that encounter pigs that are shedding the virus that die from the disease. It's it could be fatal to wildlife. 01:15:53 Speaker 1: You want to talk about public will start killing off people's dogs or be public will Oh. 01:15:58 Speaker 3: Yeah, no. There's some dog owners, even hog dog owners, who now don't like pigs because that was their favorite dog. 01:16:05 Speaker 2: I got a friend in Los Angeles. 01:16:07 Speaker 1: She listened like La La, Yeah, and uh, she's always send me Like the other day she sends me a picture where she's got her shoes outside her door, you know, but she sends me pictures just one shoe outside her door and out in her yard as. 01:16:20 Speaker 2: A chewed up shoe. Like, are you shoot a coyote? 01:16:23 Speaker 1: She sends me pictures, you know, I mean, she said, no, dude, these kyotes are all over And she says, used to come out here and trap coyotes. And I said, man, I feel like that'd be a good way to get killed, trapped. Kylets in LA And she goes, no, because people like their pets, yea, more than they like. She says, it's flipped. It's flipped where now that I feel the threat to their pets. So she said, all that goodwill to kyotes is kind of going out the window. 01:16:47 Speaker 3: Well, And I worked a case with the Salt Lake Police Department. They were working with a Denver police department. They thought there were some cereal cap mutlaters that were that were you know, cutting cat that's in half and the skin was cut with a sharp deal And it was a year long investigation and they finally came and asked me, what do you think? And I said, well that that. They showed me a picture, said what killed this? I said, well, that cat doesn't have a liver or lungs and it's been fed on by a bird that how do you know? We'll see where the furs removed. They took me to a veterinarian's office where we thought out a cat and I said, it's going to be crunched on the brisket, not on the back. Why when a cat gets attacked by a coyote they roll over on their back and try to scratch the face. Sure enough had puncture marks. They over a year they were looking for some satanic cats mutilators and it was coyotes doing it the whole time. 01:17:43 Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I got three areas. Three more areas. I want to ask you about cattle mutilations. Yeah, you know, I spend much time on it. I want to ask you about sort of the what maybe is a myth like so the old like the old kind of westerns and stuff where there was a specific wolf, a specific grizzly, a specific lion that's wreaking havoc through the county yep and then lastly a little bit a philosophical question. But let's start with let's start with the myth or not of the individual animal. 01:18:24 Speaker 2: Okay, right, how often do you see that? 01:18:28 Speaker 3: Not often anymore. But when we were in the business of eradicating wolves, those last wolves were very, very hard to get, okay, and they became somewhat mythical. They you know, they brought in multiple people after him. I went to Australia in two thousand and three and worked on dingoes down there, and they took me to one place and they said, this dingo's been killing. 01:18:50 Speaker 1: Sheep for two years. 01:18:52 Speaker 3: And the way they trap is they they bring their dogs with them. They didn't have any commercial lure, and so the dog would go over and peel on a. 01:19:00 Speaker 1: Rock and scratch at it. 01:19:02 Speaker 3: And they put a set right there, and they said this, every time we set traps, the thing moves out and go somewhere else. And so I looked at it and said, this is an old male. They said, he's eighty kilometers from the next known dingo. We're inside the fence, you know, and he's eighty kilometers from the next known dingo, but we can't get him. He's legendary. I said, well, it's an old male, and your dog's coming in here and peeing on that rock is a territorial challenge. He's leaving because of that. Oh they said, okay, wise guy, well what is going on? 01:19:36 Speaker 1: What would you do? 01:19:37 Speaker 3: And I couldn't think of it right off. I don't know what you feed a dingo in Australia, Yeah, grind up a kangaroo, give him food something. But it came to me at night. All canines like horse hoof. If you're around a ferrier, get some horse hoof and take it home to your dog. 01:19:53 Speaker 1: They go crazy. 01:19:55 Speaker 3: So take some horse hoof, get it wet, make it a little paste out of it, and put in a dirt hole. They caught him the next time he came by. Oh really, Instead of using a territorial marker they were using, they use something else, and they caught him right away. And he was an old male. 01:20:10 Speaker 2: Yeah. 01:20:11 Speaker 3: Those old legendary animals are kind of like that, right, An old wolf that's just traveling the country looking for females. And if you go in there and you give them a cow to eat, they're not going to eat the cow. They're they're looking for another female, or they've been kicked out of a territory, they're one hundred miles away from another wolf pack, got it, And they're afraid of their own shadows, so they're particularly hard to catch. 01:20:35 Speaker 1: Do you ever see a situation where when you have those like the mythic animal and he's got a name or whatever, you know, and no one can catch him, and everyone blames every livestock death on the same animal. Yeah, do you see do you ever see those real differences in behavior, meaning that, let's say you're working a there's a desert big horned recovery project going on somewhere and you're losings. Does it ever wind up being that it's like a cat without a question, like a lion is doing that without question. 01:21:08 Speaker 3: The individual behavior is the hardest thing to account for. We put California big horns on the Stansbury Mountains in Utah, and there weren't many lines there. They'd had a pretty aggressive season, but we knew there was a tom up there that we knew there was a female up there looking at the tracks. Put radios on every big horn, and we had kind of a three strike in your out rule or two strikes in thirty days in you're out. And the tom killed almost immediately. Within the first week, he killed a you and we could tell it was him where the sheep died. He was gone for about five days. He came back and killed another one. That's two strikes in thirty days. We started after him. He actually got a third sheep before we could catch him. And the day we caught him with the hounds, he was traveling with a female side by side. I think he bred her that day because she had a little afterwards. But that line we removed after three kills in like fourteen days. She lived in the middle of those sheep and for the rest of the collar life. 01:22:16 Speaker 1: She never killed a bigness, is that right? 01:22:18 Speaker 3: And she's raising kittens, she's got high nutrition. 01:22:21 Speaker 1: And she had the physical capability, physical capability. 01:22:24 Speaker 2: She killed Kyle el because she wanted. 01:22:25 Speaker 3: Yeah, just the individual behavior that Tom knew where to go find a snack. Every time he got hungry, he'd go get a line or go get a big horn. But we also see the opposite, right for in those lone wolf deals. You know, this wolf's been killing here for twenty years. I bet he hadn't. 01:22:45 Speaker 2: Oh they don't. 01:22:46 Speaker 1: Live that long, right, That's what's funny. But that's kind of what I was getting at with the mythical animal too. 01:22:50 Speaker 2: You see these be my buddy Brody. 01:22:54 Speaker 1: We've looked at somebody these narratives, you know, where there was like this old bear frame or whatever. Yeah, and it'd be that that for forty years he terrorized his valley. 01:23:04 Speaker 2: You know, it's like, I don't feel that that's the same barrier. 01:23:06 Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. 01:23:07 Speaker 1: You know he'd been that might be his grandson, Yeah right, yeah, uh okay, I want to ask you about that, Oh, cattle mutilations you were talking about, the reason I brought that up is you were talking about having people come. 01:23:18 Speaker 2: To you with dead animals. 01:23:19 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:23:20 Speaker 2: Yeah, and and they're like, hey, what happened here? 01:23:23 Speaker 1: Right? 01:23:23 Speaker 2: And there's some forensics. 01:23:24 Speaker 1: You know, it'll be like it was a drug up under a bush and buried, what was eaten? How did the animal? You know, where did the predd or enter the animal? What did it go after first? All that kind of stuff can tell a tale, right, do you when when people come up with these these inexplicable carcasses, uh where they're like, you know, you get a rancher and he's like, I never see anything like this, you know, and it was cut this way or whatever. 01:23:51 Speaker 2: Have you ever seen have you ever seen carcasses. 01:23:56 Speaker 1: Where and I don't want to get I don't want to get in like I'm not in any way inviting if you don't want to have like a paranormal conversation. 01:24:03 Speaker 2: I'm just generally annoyed by the paranormal world. 01:24:06 Speaker 1: But have you ever seen carcasses where you just like, I have no idea what to have done that? 01:24:10 Speaker 3: Yeah, the ones that I have been called to, we could explain, and it's usually a multi pronged explanation. Right, this cow was killed by lightning and fed on by a bear, and so there's two different things going on, and you're not getting the same signal that you know there's. 01:24:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, there's that. 01:24:32 Speaker 3: But there are things in cattle mutilations that I read about that I've not seen, like the tongue missing, just the tongue missing, you know, rigor mortis sets in pretty fast and it's hard to get in that. How did that happen? I don't know that I can explain that, but that's not what I've seen. I investigated a suspected wolf kill right on the Utah Wyoming border in the cow and that cow had himmer gene right above her hawks. Okay, yearling uh halfer come off the mountain and big hole in it, and and and when we skinned the cow, that's the only bruising that we found. I think the darn thing was killed by team ropers all, you know, and some cowboy was out there practicing and jerked her down too hard or something. 01:25:25 Speaker 1: But there was there was just no other bruising. When you were saying like hamrhaging there, I didn't know if you meant like bid up, you mean just under skin bleeding. 01:25:33 Speaker 3: Skin bleeding, but it was in a straight line on both legs at the same point of going, oh with me. 01:25:40 Speaker 1: But someone fun and got a little rough Yeah, yeah, no, kid. 01:25:45 Speaker 3: So there's there's you know, everything I've seen I've been able to explain is as multiple most cases, multiple explanations, you know, carrying fed on his carrying, but killed by something else. Lightning gills are the hardest ones to explain because they'll be four of them dead under a tree. 01:26:05 Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, you know earlier I mentioned you something. 01:26:11 Speaker 1: I made a joke about if you're doing wild hog work for sea turtles, you're going to have you're going to have a high level of buying public buying, sure, you know, because people I don't want to use the word fetishized. I'm not thinking the right word, but there's you know, there's strong public sentiment about turtles sea turtles, right, like people being like I don't want to use a drink and straw because it might get a sea turtle. People are very aware of sea turtle issues. And then pigs are easy to vilify. So if you're doing hog removal to saving dangered sea turtles, you're going to find like high public acceptance, not universal, but high public acceptance. I would say in other cases where you have you know, an imperiled or an eesa protected species and you're doing predator work, you have not as much as sea turtle where where you're still gonna have a high level of acceptance. You know, for me personally, people will say, well, you're just killing coyotes so you can have more analope to hunt, and I'm like, my response to that is, yes, there's more to it, but yes. 01:27:29 Speaker 2: I'm okay with that, right, I'm okay with that. 01:27:31 Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm okay with the idea that if we have a big game species that people like to hunt, rely on has cultural value and if it's going down and you can do predator work to help recover it and bring the numbers back up because there's a strong social interest in having high numbers and you're not having long term negative population impacts. I'm the predator in my mind. I'm like, yes, guiltiest charged. I don't think that that is bad. Yeah, a negative thing to do. What has been your view on that through your career? If you're doing endangered turtles, do you feel more invigorated around the work, you know than you would and helping a guy out that wants more deer? Like, how have you generally looked at it throughout your career? 01:28:22 Speaker 3: Somebody once famously said, if public opinion is all that mattered, California would have nothing, but predators in North Dakota wouldn't have any. Yeah, public opinion is just part of the equation. You've got to have the social license to do what you do. 01:28:37 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:28:38 Speaker 3: Beyond that, though, I'm looking at it in the context of habitat. So if there is available habitat, and if we as a group, through our game department, said we want ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline, then we should work towards getting ten thousand deer on the Manti skyline. That's an objective that's set through a public process and all the rest. I've had people in Texas ask me to protect their deer and their ranch is overgrazed and they're feeding deer to keep them alive. And that's not the problem, right God, protecting their deer might be the reason it's so overgrased, or they got a brows line. And so if it's in the context of the habitat, and if we have the social license, our game department has said we want this, or we have a landowner who's conscientious about meeting their objectives, absolutely we should be deciding what that looks like and then moving towards that goal. We had a internal parasite wipe out the pronghorn in West Texas. They had to do transplants to bring them back in, and the first couple of years of transplants were horrible because the predators were eating all the fonts. We went in there and started removing those funds, removing those predators. Bobcats actually were a big predator on problems picture in the flats, but they're pretty good at it. And once we did that, we got the herds back up. We talked about when do you start predator management? You got to have an exit strategy too, when do you stop. If we do it for five years and we haven't moved the needle, maybe we'll go somewhere else. If we've done it and we get to where we're eighty percent of carrying capacity or eighty percent of our objective, then maybe we can leave that hurt alone and go somewhere else. So you got to have an exit strategy for this too. And that's that's you know, should be done in the planning process. We'll do this for this long or until we see these results. 01:30:41 Speaker 2: And you're. 01:30:44 Speaker 1: You're you work in the private sector now, yeah, yep, and who are your clients? 01:30:48 Speaker 3: So I'm working on a research project with Saphari Club Foundation right now. We're putting radio callers onlines and putting cameras out in West Texas, trying South Texas as well, trying to get a handle online populations. 01:31:02 Speaker 1: You know the reason subscriptive what's out there? 01:31:04 Speaker 3: Yeah, distribution in abundance. Basically, lines in South Texas are fascinating. They just use the riverine corridors. So I'm going to pick a number and I guarantee it's wrong. But we might only have one hundred lines in South Texas, but we may only have habitat for one hundred lines in South Texas. They're very limited in their distribution and habitat fragmentation is more of a risk than hunting or anything else. Oil fields and power lines, everything tends to disrupt some of that. Landowners selling big ranches into smaller ranches. Yeah, that's a problem. I'm working with the Outfitters Association of Canadian Province try and get some of the predator management back into their wildlife management scheme. Whether it's stuff that the outfitters themselves are doing, is individual outfitters. You know they've got they've got regulated territories. Not everybody can go to the same place. So this outfitter can say, hey, look I want I want more elk, I want to reduce my wolves. Well what does that look like? Just again shoot one in November? Are you actually going to go out there and target the panic? So so we're building some some strategies there. I'm working for some individual landowners in Texas that that have got mostly high fence properties and the predators are impacting their genetics selection. These guys are farming deer. 01:32:29 Speaker 4: Essentially, they're outside, they're inside the fence, but they're they're they're free roaming inside the fence, but they've invested in the genetics. 01:32:39 Speaker 3: And that's that's a little different than just the capacity. We still crop that herd pretty heavily. We got eighty ninety phons per one hundred doze. You better be shooting a lot of does this fall because we can't feed that many deer on the landscape. But we're protecting the genetics and letting them decide rather than the kayitch decide which fonds to get. 01:33:00 Speaker 2: How do people find you? 01:33:02 Speaker 3: Uh, word of mouth a lot. I mean I had a pretty good following move when I was with USDA. A lot of landowners know who I am, so I work with Texas Farm Bureau and sheep and goat raisers on some of that, So some of those landowners already know me. 01:33:16 Speaker 1: So if there was some dudes, some landowners somewhere and he wanted to talk to you about a problem you had, or if you're trying to figure out if he has a problem, he just type in Mike Bowdenchuck and he'd find you. 01:33:25 Speaker 3: He probably would. Yeah, there's there's a lot there on the not all of those flattering either. The animal rights activists know how to find. 01:33:32 Speaker 1: Jam Yeah yeah, yeah, Well man, I sure appreciate you coming on top of all this stuff. 01:33:37 Speaker 3: Oh yeah, No, predators are my life's work, and understanding how it works is probably important. You know, a lot of sportsmen want to do something, but what you do is is critical. 01:33:48 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:33:48 Speaker 2: I think that's all fascinating. 01:33:50 Speaker 1: Yeah. 01:33:50 Speaker 2: I like to have you back on in the future. 01:33:52 Speaker 1: Good. Yeah, well, we'll just you got to keep a little running tab of stuff to talk about when you get up to six or seven let me know, okay, all right, all right, Mike Bowden, Chuck, Michael Buden, Chuck, Where do you go bout Mike, Mike, Mike Bowden Chuck. Thanks man, great

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