00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hey, if you're wondering why this episode of Cow's Weekend Review has been served up to you when you thought you were just subscribing to the Meat Eater podcast, it's because we're playing dirty pool in the podcast space. I promised to never do this to you again for the next year. Let's say, uh maast six months year, I won't do this to you again. Well, all I'm doing is we're serving us in here even though you don't subscribe, because I honestly believe that you will be glad to find out about it. So I'm violating some trust by wedging in a show you don't subscribe to into here, but I'm doing it with your own best interest because I think you're gonna come out thinking like man, Cal's Weekend Review is the perfect compliment to the Meat Eater podcast. Cal being Ryan cal Callahan, who's always on the Mediator podcast anyway. So if you like media podcast, no one probably like Cal. Right, Cal, I hope. So he's sitting right here playing dirty pool with me, So tell them what they ought to do. Cal, Like, you're gonna listen to the show. It'll start in a minute. You'll know it starts because it's like a Newsy sound intro, and then you'll listen to the show and you'll be like, holy smokes, this is the greatest show I've ever listened to. And then you will you will track that show down wherever podcasts are available to be streamed or downloaded, same way you track down the Meat Eat podcast. And you're gonna subscribe and leave me a review. Yeah, click the right most star. We're getting write whatever the hell you want. Just make sure you click the right most star and then say whatever you Felix and we don't care about that part, uh is it? Enjoy Cal's We Can Review, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening from me to do his World News headquarters in Bozeman, Montana. This is Kel's We Can Review with rutting Kel Kelly and now here's Kel. This week we're talking about, among other things, copper lights. A copper light is a classy name for old poop fossilized feces. If you are the issuer, the layer downer of a copper light, you are its author. Biologists and anthropologists are interested in copper lights because they are evidence of the animal's behavior rather than morphology, as in you can tell what it's been eating, which is telling in addition to old, dried up dumb. Today, I'm going to touch on fish, birds, poachers, snakes, ticks, getting drunk, and general outdoors goings on. But before we get into the news from the big wide world. First, I'm gonna tell you about my world. How As it turns out, I'm still recovering from my turkey hunt in the spring Green Hills outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I woke up the other morning with a Tennessee tick, a hitchhiker, if you will, embedded in my armpit. This was troubling for a number of reasons. One is being in your mid thirties, it just doesn't feel great to question your ability to clean yourself. And then there's the simple creepy feeling of discovering parasites on yourself. On my way home from Tennessee, um sitting Nashville Airport, this is where it gets real exciting. Hacking away at my emails and the Delta lounge, I feel an itch and find a tick embedded on the back of my arm. Thought, man, that sucks. Then I felt another drop out of my rapidly receding hairline and onto my shoulder. This was enough tick activity to get me fully grossed out, up out of my seat into action. So there I am completely stripped naked in the bathroom of the Delta Lounge performing a full on tick check where I find a tick embedded in my screw them. I only bring this up because I am big on honesty and quite sincerely. When a man finds a disease carrying parasite and what the old timers would call your soft parts, it's a real sinking feeling. Ticks attached themselves to hosts by questing, which is climbing to advantage point that allow them to either grab or drop onto an animal as they pass by. Ticks can carry a number of diseases, most notable being limes disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which are both bacterial infections that are introduced to humans through contact with the offending tick. Ticks need to be attached for twenty four hours or longer in order to transmit so catch Mearly prevalence of tick born illnesses is steadily increasing in the US. For instance, there's been an over three x increase in confirmed limes cases since now onto fish yea For those of you waiting on the Minnesota white fish record to be broken, it's been a long time of coming. Quick facts about the Lake white fish is it is the most commercially valuable freshwater fish in Canada. Here in the States, it's sometimes regarded as a trash fish, but Europeans are mad about the row. Commercial white fisherman who harvest the fish trip with trap nets can make as much or more from exporting caveat as they do selling filets. Anyhow, the Minnesota white fish record from has been busted by a first time ice angler. His thirteen pound, nine point one ounce whitefish came in at almost thirty inches in length and twenty two inches and girt. In Montana, we'd call that a big whitey. While the angler was new to ice fishing, he's an old hand at noodling. For flathead catfish, noodling or tickling is when you catch a flathead by inserting a hand into their mouth and allow them to bite down on your hand. When the cat bites, you haul it from the water. The catfish noodling record is eighty five pounds two ounces. The all time flathead record for regular fishing with your standard old rought and real set up is over a hundred and twenty three pounds. That fish was from Kansas. If you think pulling fish through the ice or grabbing them by the mouth sounds cruel, or if you think who cares, it's just a fish, take a look at the case of Michael ray Hinson, not to be confused with the wonderful Texas musician Mike A. P. Hinson. Michael ray Hinson was charged with one count of abandonment of an animal and three counts of misdemeanor cruelty to animals. Hanson was evicted from his home in New Hanover County, North Carolina, and left behind a neglected six in oscar fish. Authorities found the oscar in deplorable conditions with parasitic hole in the head disease. Yes, hole in the head ease, apparently a common problem encountered by aquarium enthusiasts. Good thing for handsome. New Hanover County District Attorney Ben David determined that animal cruelty statutes don't apply to fish. As the d A stated, we take a very dim view of anyone who would abuse any creature, great or small. Think about that the next time you see a bunch of goldfish and plastic bags at the fair or Heaven forbid in the bottom of your fishing bucket. Speaking of protections for fish, check this one out. It probably goes without saying that fish in the desert are rare, but would you guess that Death Valley is home to the rarest gnome fish on Earth. The Devil's Whole, located not all that far from Las Vegas, Nevada, is part of the Ash Meadows Complex, which is in turn part of the Death Valley National Park. Complex is comprised of seeps and springs that bring fossil water, which is water that seeped into the aquifer millennia go to the surface. What could be more tempting than water in the desert? Right right, the Devil's Hole is a series lee protected place ten foot fences, highly controlled, highly monitched. In two thousand sixteen, small group of board drunk and armed desert dwellers decided, for reasons unknown, to go for a swim. The boys get through the fence and in short order we've gotten the illegal Skinny Dipper and Devil's Hole. This Skinny Dipper is a convicted felon in possession of a shotgun. During a swim, he manages to step onto the small shelf of rock that is the epicenter of life at Devil's Hole. When the National Park Service crew is made aware of this violation, they show up to investigate. As it turns out, and it looks as though the disturbance of the pool and Devil's Hole resulted in the death of a rare pup fish. When I say rare, I mean the Devil's Whole pupfish is one of the rarest fish on the planet. This tiny, shimmery blue fish is only found there in the waters of Devil's Hole. The Devil's Whole pupfish has been on the Endangered Species list since the list was created. While we don't know for absolute certain that this fellow killed the pub fish, circumstantial evidence is pointing very decidedly in that direction. So what's the punishment if you learn anything here? Let it be this, don't go drinking and messing with the Endangered Species Act. Our skinny Dipper was finally sentenced recently and got nine months in the clink for the ESSA violation, four months for the trespassing and destruction of property, and has to pay fourteen thousand in restitution to the National Park Service, and to top it all off, the Queen Mother of all punishments. Upon release, the devil's whole Skinny Dipper will be forbidden to enter federal public lands for the rest of his life. And this is where I start to feel bad for our Dipper. This guy and his buddies made really bad decisions. Deplorable when you think about wiping a species off the face of the earth for the sake of drunken, dumbassary things that will likely regret for the rest of their lives. And should mind you, but imagine you live in Nevada and you've been banned for life from eighty four point nine percent of your home state eighty four point nine as the percentage of federally managed land in Nevada. You've basically been sentenced to live in Las Vegas. And that sounds cruel and unusual to me. In the spirit of reform, I'd rather see the Dipper sentence to cleaning up the desert as opposed to being banned from. Let's go from a little blue fish to the big and tooth the alligator gar a couple of guys on brazos who every landed a seven foot seven inch alligator gar, weighing in at a hundred and ninety eight pounds. The head alone weight twenty five. Now this sounds like a beast, but the world record came out of Texas and went two hundred and seventy nine pounds. These creatures date back to the Cretaceous period, meaning alligator gar have been swimming for at least sixty six million years. If you watch the movie Jurassic World, the dinosaur that jumps out of the water and eats the t rex hybrid at the end, that's Mosasaur. The mosasaur and the gar swam at the same time. Obviously, the gar is still around and the Mosesaur isn't. And that's how we get the term living fossil. Some of our favorite living fossils horseshoe crabs, snapping turtles, possums, and the tastiest evolved, the American prong horn antelope. Here's a few more fun facts about the gar. Scales that stretch are called a lasmoid scales. Scales that don't ganoid scales car have ganoid scales. They can hack a serious bite without effect. One reason the gar may have stood the test time is. In addition to regular old fish gills, the gar has a specialized swim bladder that acts like a lung. This specialized swim bladder allows the guard to sit air from the surface. Because of this, the guard can inhabit low oxygen water other fish can't. I just flipped a few flies at another gar species, the spotted gar down in Texas a few weeks ago on the Lino River. Really need fish, you should definitely check them out. White public lands, as I was saying, Nevada has a good chunk of them. But soon the Sheep Range mountains that is which you can see from the airplane wind when you're landing in Vegas may soon be closed off to the public. Ouch Right now, the US military is asking for an additional two thousand acres of the mountain range for bombing practice. That's the size of two thousand, two hundred and fifty Disneylands if you include the new Star Wars expansion. There are a few problems with this, one being that these mountains happen to be some of the best desert big horn sheep habitat in the world. Once upon a time, it's estimated that we had around two million big horn sheep. That's both rocky mountain and desert big horns. Thanks to unregulated market hunting, habitat loss, and disease, the ladder of which remains the primary threat to sheep, that number was whittled down to roughly fifteen thousand by nineteen hundred. Now we're back up to around seventy THO. Sure, not perfect, but we're out of the big Horn dark ages and getting there. Any sheep that's still on the mountain is there because we fought for it. That's certainly true of the sheep range big horns. For decades, conservation organizations such as Well Chief Foundation have worked their asses off to conserve the sheep range. And it's six hundred desert bighorn habitat improvements, water improvements, and plenty of other hot, sweaty work. We're talking hundreds of regular folks donting time and money on behalf of wildlife. Let's not piss that away. Get off your butts and act now. Call your elected officials if you care about desert bighorns and public access of wild places. I understand the needs of national defense, but let's play the long game here. What's wild should stay wild. We're not going to run out of degraded landscapes, so don't worry about that and the war on wild cheap. Now we're going to talk about things that should be and things that shouldn't be up near our northern border with Canada. Out in Lake Superior is Ile Royal National Park. Ile Royal is a remote island chain in the northwest corner of the Lake, a car free Michigan wilderness where, at least now days, moose and wolves room Somewhat mysteriously. Moose first showed up on the island in the early nineteen hundreds. Either they walked across the ice to get there, or someone brought them out there and cut them loose. Wolves showed up in nine having crossed an ice bridge between mainland Ontario and the island. Things have been up and down since then. The wolf population got as high as fifty, but recently dropped to just two in bread as all get out. Meanwhile, moose are kicking acts at a current estimated population of around fifteen hundred. The National Park Service recently released four gray wolves to help the wolf population out, and they're preparing to deliver twenty or thirty more Over, the next five years at a cost of two million dollars. You might wonder why we'd be flying animals back and forth to a national park. Parks are supposed to be places where nature is allowed to run a course unimpeded by man. Granted, it sounds a little bit like zoo keeping. Well, in this case, it has to be with ice and cold weather. Ice bridges between the mainland and Ile Royal we're more common in past decades, which allowed some sporadic coming and going of critters, but times have changed now It's seldom freezes good enough. From until two thousand eleven, a solid ice bridge formed only once in two thousand eight. From two thousand thirteen to two thousand seventeen, Ile Royal was connected to the mainland only twice, and in those instances only for a few days. Somewhat ironically, one of the wolves that was flown out to save the wolves that can't get replenished due to a lack of ice, promptly left the island on you guessed at an ice bridge. It's real complicated out there on Io Royl. You want to know something that's also pretty interesting. Up until the twenties and thirties, the island was home to lynx in caribou, both of which banished without any restocking efforts from US. Humans. Are we smarter now? We're just different on the floor. According to a two thousand four study of all mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish in southern Florida are non native. We're talking iguanas, snakeheads, telapia, parakeets, and over a hundred and fifty other species. Florida even has feral monkeys climbing around. It's the non indigenous species capital of the United States. I'll add that Florida means land of flowers in Spanish, so that's nice. Returning to non natives. They've got the Burmese python living down there. The biggest has been recorded at over twenty three ft in length and two hundred pounds in their native range of Southeast Asia. They didn't think they could get that big in Florida, at least until now. In Big Cyprus National Preserve, researchers captured a seventeen foot female python that weighed over a hundred and forty pounds and held seventy three eggs. They caught it using the Judas method In the Bible of Judas portrays Jesus in Florida. Judas was a male python with the tracking device that they released so he could go out and do what male pythons want to do, which is fine females, given some time tracking back down see who he's hanging with. In this case, it was the hundred and forty pound girlfriend, confirming beyond doubt that Florida can grow a big snake. Big snakes can only get big by eating wealth. According to studies by the U. S Geological Survey and Everglades National Park, there has been a ninety nine point three percent decrease in raccoon observation and ninety eight point nine percent decrease and impossum observations, and an eighty seven and a half percent decrease in bobcat observations. The most recent surveys have shown that marsh rabbits, cotton tail rabbits, and foxes have quote effectively disappeared. Of course, non natives cost us more than just native wildlife. According to the Nature Conservancy, invasive species cost the United States about one hundred billion dollars per year over West to Florida. A few states. You've got Texas, SA they're all proud and beautiful rattlesnakes, oil rigs, shipload of tigers. If you don't know what I'm talking about and I mentioned tigers, you should have listened to last week's episode of this show. Also, poachers doing it for the Graham Instagram. That is, deeds done for the Graham might lead a poacher to time behind bars. Recently, the Texas Operation Game Thief Wildlife Crime Stoppers hotline started buzzing about an illegally taking wild turkey. The perpetrator spotted the bird, rolled the windows down, squeezed off a shell, and ended the life of a spring turk. Apparently, this wizard of multitasking caught it all on video and loaded it up for his I G followers. Common sense would dictate that you, first off, should not roll down the window of your hunting rig to blast a turkey or any animal for that matter. In most states, shooting for the roadway in any fashion is illegal. Secondly, don't post your illegal activity to Instagram and share with the world. I appreciate the easy job you were making for the game wardens, but I don't want to be associated with you as part of the hunting community. More from Texas. Remember that opening bit about copper lights. Here's why I brought that up. In the late nineteen sixties, archaeologists collected over a thousand samples of human produced copper lights at the Canajo Shelter in southwest Texas. Just recently, these samples were re examined by an archaeological team from Texas, A and M. In one of the samples, they found a small road apparently eating a hole, which for the people living around Canajo Shelter was not abnormal. Life in the desert has its challenges, and another sample, the team did get a surprise, a surprise in the form of what appeared to be a whole rattlesnake, including the snake's hide head and a one centimeter long fanct. According to the authors of the report, quote we proposed is that a likely explanation for the ingestion of an entire snake is that the individual did so for a distinctly ceremonial or ritualistic purpose. End quote. You know there's a joke in the archaeological community. Is something you've dug up doesn't make sense, Call it ritualistic or ceremonial, and move on. The thing is I can think of a few things I've ingested that we're certainly not ceremonial or ritualistic, though they'd still make it tough for anyone to propose a likely explanation for my behavior from our technology desk, engineers at Cornell Lab of Ornithology have created, at the request of a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California Davis, a sage grouse femba. The request for these lovely robotic ladies of the sage was inspired by the desire to understand sage grouse breeding habits, specifically how man made disturbances affect breeding efforts on and around lex which are communal breeding areas where male sage grouse compete for females through elaborate sexual displays. Scientists remotely drive these robotic bird renditions, which sport an external frame that's wrapped with female sage grouse skin and feathers, and further fitted with all terrain wheels. The mechanized love birds are fitted with camera to capture male behavior up close and personal, sometimes too close. Streading males have repeatedly mounted and attempted to breathe these female robots. Then again, they've also been reported to mount an old, dried up cow patty, tough times for sage grouse love making. And lastly, a word from that wonderful Texas musician I mentioned earlier, Mica p Handsome again. Don't confuse him with Michael Ray Handsome, the guy who neglected his pet fish, Graham Paws born on a cold summer's day. No New Chicago any special place thanks to tuning in next week. Find out more about all this fascinating information at the meat eater dot com and email me at ask Cal at the meat eater dot com

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