00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show. This week, we’ve got the NRA in continued legal trouble. We’ve got does it really help to make fish drink pop? What is beach access? And why do some wealthy folks hate it so damn bad. Spencer reports on an outbreak of mushroom poisonings and deaths in California and me Steve is troubled by the word outbreak in that context, but we will see. We’ve got Despite what you’ve read, there is in fact no evidence of jaguar pups living right now in Arizona. And it happened a hunter in Alaska killed the first ever mule deer killed by a hunter in Alaska. Plus a whole lot more. But first, what is first? Oh? Walleyes?
00:00:56
Speaker 2: Oh, we’re going Walleyes first.
00:00:57
Speaker 1: Well, I don’t know what else is first?
00:00:58
Speaker 3: He rcpon giveaway.
00:01:00
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is something I’ve talked about all the time. I’m gonna start talking about the interview show too. Right now, go to if you want to win the annual Turkey Hunt giveaway, go down to.
00:01:13
Speaker 3: Phil.
00:01:13
Speaker 1: What camera is it when I’m not talking to that thing?
00:01:17
Speaker 4: Well, that’s that’s your camera always. I’ll switch it to Spencer and Randall if they’re talking, I’ll spit switch it to Brody if he’s talking.
00:01:22
Speaker 1: But that one is me, that one is you. Okay, I got confused because of that thing we got sitting there. Yeah. Sorry. If you want to win this year’s Turkey Hunt Giveaway, where me and Janna’s take you turkey hunting, we do everything but wipe your bottom like we bring in a cook that cooks for you. We’ll help you get tie your boots. All your expenses are paid. Jannis and I will cater to your every need and desire when you win. And we have years worth of winners to back us up on this. So you buy raffle tickets. Go to TRCP dot org, go to the Turkey Hunt Giveaway or the Spring Fundraiser Summer fundraiser they call it.
00:02:01
Speaker 5: If you go to the head undergiving, it’s like the first thing blow your cursor.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: Buy your tickets. Okay, someone wins every year. If you win, you and a friend. You could take your husband, you take your wife, you can take your best friend. Last year we had a couple of brother in laws. Right whoever you want to pick. We cover your airfare, we cover your tag, We cover your food, We cover your lodging. You pay nothing, You leave your wallet at home.
00:02:28
Speaker 3: Did they bring a gun?
00:02:30
Speaker 1: We have in the past brought a gun. We’ve in the past. We’ve had in the past where we brought a gun. We had a guy bring basically a coach gun. He had a ten gage, single shot, sawed off gun. He missed with it, and then we had him switch.
00:02:48
Speaker 3: Gun actional.
00:02:49
Speaker 5: I was cheering for that guy.
00:02:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, I see anything like it. Under seeing like it. I thought that turkey was gonna be not alive anymore after the shot inclusive boom, but the turkey is unfazed. I’m not sure what happened.
00:03:04
Speaker 2: I think you ought to bring some of the last tss ammo in the world for that hunt.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: We’ll supply your ammo. We’ll supply your ammo. Wow. All you do is you and your friends show up, eat good food that you don’t have to cook, eat off dishes you don’t have to clean, and have fun.
00:03:19
Speaker 3: Who’s doing the calling on these hunts?
00:03:22
Speaker 1: I hunt with one. We do a little deal. This year we drew Straws, so I had my guy, Yanni had his guy, but we switch it up. But my guy got his turkey in ten minutes. Wow, Yannie’s guy got his turkey that afternoon. Our guys this year got their birds first. We had two three nights, two days to hunt. But in the past, if we’ve had a bad couple of days, we always we work it out.
00:03:44
Speaker 3: So you’re calling though, yeah, got it.
00:03:48
Speaker 1: Well, Yanni’s calling, I’m calling. And then if and then when our guy got a bird, then we started hunting for the chef. The intention was the chef would get his bird and I’d start hunting too. But it’s it’s busy, it’s packed in. If you get your bird right away, there’s still plenty of hunting to be done because we’re gonna switch to me hunting. It’s a great time. Go buy your raffle tickets. It goes to a good cause. All the money goes to t RCP, like like we we take care of the expenses. All the raffle money goes straight to TRCP, whose slogan is guaranteeing Americans quality places the hunting fish.
00:04:26
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
00:04:27
Speaker 1: That’s it for that.
00:04:28
Speaker 3: Speaking of Teddy, I don’t know the rest of that. There’s something with Teddy Roosevelt merchant here, but I don’t know this talk about it.
00:04:35
Speaker 1: Oh okay, I’m sorry.
00:04:36
Speaker 5: Uh well, I was going to talk about the roadless rule, which I don’t know where you are in the dock.
00:04:44
Speaker 1: Why did you say?
00:04:45
Speaker 3: Says Oh, someone deleted it said TRCP Hunt Giveaways and Teddy Merch.
00:04:50
Speaker 1: He’s going by memory.
00:04:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you’re following the news, Mike Lee is up to his old tricks. And he introduced an amendment into the Wildfire Prevention Act of twenty twenty five that would nullify the roadless Rule.
00:05:07
Speaker 1: And so this and that dude loves him a road man.
00:05:11
Speaker 5: I mean it must be nice.
00:05:12
Speaker 6: He just.
00:05:14
Speaker 1: Loves then.
00:05:15
Speaker 5: I wish I had one thing in my life that I was so single minded and passionate about as he has what he has in doing bad things to public lands.
00:05:27
Speaker 2: What was the quote you heard from someone just recently. It’s not a resource if you can’t research or if.
00:05:32
Speaker 3: You can’t access it.
00:05:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:05:34
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, in any event, that got slipped into this bill as an amendment. And so the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted eleven to nine to adopt the amendment and advance it. So it’s now going to go to the Senate for a full vote. So get out there. Make your voice heard. Let your senators know that you oppose the nullification of the roadless rule. You can take action at I haven’t checked this, but I assume almost all major conservation groups hook and bullet groups have action alerts on their websites BHA, TRCP. Let your lawmakers know how you feel about it, one way or the other. I’m not going to tell you how to weigh in, but old Mike Lee just constant, constantly churning to turn back the tide. So that’s good.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: Walley spear in Michigan. This is a news This is actually a Newsy item. Four years ago, Michigan opened up its first spearfishing season for what had traditionally been regarded as game fish. So you’ve always been able to spearfish for non game fish rough fish. I don’t use the word trash fish, but people like that word. Which included some non native things like Eurasian carp asiatic cart and some game thing and some native things like native sucker species both in all that, but a few years ago, Michigan opened up a initially provisional spearfishing season for three coveted game fish. Coveted game fish being walleye Lake Trout Northern Pike, not salmon for some reason, but Walleye Lake Trout Northern Pike. And they opened it up where they took basically the Michigan shoreline of southern Lake Michigan and the northern shoreline the northern shoreline of Michigan’s stretch of Lake Huron and did these test seasons and Angler’s spearfishermen could get a free stamp with their fishing license, and they had to do monthly reporting to report on their activities. What they found over that time, to sum it up, and I talked about it before, what they found over that time is the harvest is negligible, and effort, instead of going up as the new opportunity came in, effort went down. So people were thinking they wanted to go and then and then we’re finding that they weren’t going. They were giving out about four thousand they were giving out about four thousand spearfish stamps. Of those, a few hundred people went once. Of those, I think one hundred and eighteen people like got a fish, okay.
00:08:27
Speaker 2: And just but despite all that, there was a big pushback from some hooking line.
00:08:32
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, I don’t know that you’d there was pushback. I don’t know that it would be big pushback, and there’s some continued pushback. Yeah, there was some pushback. For context though, So Saganaw Bay, here’s my Michigan map okay, I was brought up right here, this is Saganawba right for context. Last year, Roden reel anglers caught five hundred thousand walleye out of Saginawba in the entire state, in all open waters for spearfishing, so not Saginaw Bay, but of all waters open to spearfishing, last year, spearfishermen killed four hundred and thirty walleye, less than one percent of less than one percent. They killed zero point zero eight six percent of the walleye. But keep in mind it’s apples and oranges. Five hundred thousand got caught out of Saginaw Bay. Four hundred and thirty got caught out of here and here. Okay, negligible harps. However, now there’s this part. We went out to hit it. I went my buddy Greg fonz went who’s been on the show a bunch, and we were hosted by Jonathan Dirtka, who was instrumental in establishing the spear fishing season, and we set up a little contest where we fished against a couple of Roden real anglers, Chester the Divestor and Seth and man, did we just beat him real bad? Every day? Beat them real bad.
00:10:23
Speaker 2: Came back to Montana or his tail touched.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: They were pouting from day one. Beat them bad.
00:10:31
Speaker 3: Give me an example of the pouting. It’s just like body legs.
00:10:35
Speaker 1: What kind of pouting?
00:10:36
Speaker 3: Say something to you, like.
00:10:38
Speaker 1: Trying out, like trying out a lot of ideas. You know, Well, first it was the first day it was real Sonny and calm to Sonny and Sonny too calm. Next day was cloudy, was overcast and windy.
00:10:54
Speaker 3: To cloudy to windy.
00:10:55
Speaker 1: But then it was like whatever. Then it became this big like local intel. You know, we had local intel. They didn’t have local intel. They had an opportunity for it, but they didn’t. They didn’t want it. Then it became just whatever.
00:11:09
Speaker 2: I want to know, Like, what’s a rough comparison to doing the walleye thing compared to like whatever dive in dive in a rig like as.
00:11:19
Speaker 1: Far as well we dove wreck like saltwater fish? That are they more?
00:11:26
Speaker 2: Are they spookier? Are they more chill.
00:11:28
Speaker 1: Get into that. Yeah, that’s a great question. First, I want to touch on this so well, the first thing we did is we went and drifted at a river mouth, not a river mouth. If you get down to the bottom of Lake Huron. Uh So, like Lake Superior flows into Lake here On through what’s called the Saint Mary’s River. It’s like you almost think of like a narrow strait right where the lake spills down some twenty feet well at the bottom of Lake here On it flows down into Lake Erie and they call that overflow the Saint Clair ver yep. So they drew the spearfishing line kind of at the mouth at the head of the Saint Clair River, but the current is already picking up pretty good down there, and the whole damn lake next down and forms like a like a big river and it flows out into Eerie. So it’s a river, but it’s kind of like a narrow spot in the lakes. There’s a lighthouse that marks the spearfishing border. Can’t go past that lighthouse. But by then there’s a plenty of current. So we’re doing drifts. We’re dropping in and doing drifts, so you drop in, breathe up dive down twenty feet of water and just ride the current. Big old sturgeon down there. But the current is so strong you can’t turn around. I blow past the sturgeon. I blow past the sturgeon, and I try to go back up and check it out. You can’t get back right, I’m blowing back tackle the mount of tackle. I blew past. There’s three bottom bouncers snagged down a log, laying like. The bottom bouncers are laying together, touching like tackle like. You wouldn’t believe down there. You could open a tackle shop with the tackle on those trees and tires and whatnot laying down there in the bottom. But as you’re blowing, every time you dive down, you’re just zipping down the bottom. And there’s there’s when I say this, don’t think I’m like saying throwing out a number. There are thousands of white suckers spawning on gravel.
00:13:31
Speaker 3: Did you shoot some of them?
00:13:32
Speaker 1: No? No? Well yes, because I missed the walleye and hit a sucker on accident. Yeah, I mean thousands of white suckers. With my hand, I’m showing you how that what they’re doing. They’re in the current. The ones you know as their mill team. They’re like, you come down through those schools the suckers, and the walleye are laying in with the suckers. So it’s just you just got suckers parting like you’re like Moses and the suckers, the red sea dude, and in mixed in with them are wally dogs. And we do a bunch of drifts and gotta limit a walleye. But there’s rotten real dudes cleaning up two right, right, But there’s small walleyes. They’re eaters then, and that part of the lake it’s like size limited fourteen. I think it’s a fourteen minimum, something like that. Five a day. So we got three guys on guns. We’re only fishing two guys at a time because that’s the tournament rule. So one guy’s operating the boat, two guys are drifting and we get our fish. Then we go out to a wreck somewhere else and dive a wreck and those in forty feet of water, and got three burbot off that wreck, hiding in the wreck. M The next day we start just go to a whole different area to start hunting for walleye. And I always think of like, you know, when your fishing walleye and someone gets one, you get real excited, so you think you’re gonna get another one in this area. You would go, you would kick two hundred yards, say, and there’d be oh walleye, I mean, ah walleye. Once you find him, it is not hard to get them. You. When you find him, you are gonna get a shot. He’s not gonna spo There’s a ninety percent chance when you find him you will get a very good shot at him.
00:15:21
Speaker 2: In that area where they bigger, even though there’s.
00:15:23
Speaker 1: A nice walls. Then we’re in a nice wills, but few and far between. That’s day two. We don’t get that many, but we get some good ones, a bunch of small mouth which you can’t shoot. But you go along and they’d be like, oh walleye by itself, no other walleye anywhere around, separated by what seems to be hundreds of yards of no walleye, oh walleye. And you find them, there’s a there’s a nine and ten chance you’re gonna get a shot. You might miss. There’s a nine and ten chance he’s gonna not spook bad like they are not suspecting that you’re gonna shoot at him. Day three, we’re doing that and all of a sudden, we’re just into them, I mean lots of Biggins. Then the guy we’re with that was instrumental in bringing on this opportunity, he started to get uneasy because he’s like, man, this.
00:16:21
Speaker 2: Is when you’re trying to make the argument of negligible take.
00:16:29
Speaker 1: And but it was the ones it’s like we had it all. We had clarity. It’s it’s very cold water. We just had we had good water clarity which never happened. Just like everything came together perfectly. And man, did we have a day that I will I will remember the rest of my life.
00:16:49
Speaker 2: Did any party you feel bad about spearing those things?
00:16:52
Speaker 3: No?
00:16:53
Speaker 1: No, I’ll remember that day for the rest of my life. It’s just one of those days. It was one of those days.
00:16:59
Speaker 3: I was texting with man X, who was there with you guys on this shoot. And I don’t know if it was his joke or if it was a joke that you guys were making to each other ten times a day when you’d like punch each other in the shoulder. But I had asked Max how the fishing was going. He said they were biting really good on spring steel horizontal very fast presentation. I thought that was fun. Kudos to whoever came up with that. I enjoyed that bit you did. That was a good joke.
00:17:25
Speaker 1: I was telling them to tell to text Seth because they were struggling. I was saying, maybe tell them the spring steel horizontal very fast presentation seems to be I like that. It seems to be working. I was amused. Unbelievable, just like one of those days of fishing, the likes of which you probably never see again.
00:17:46
Speaker 2: You’re gonna do it again?
00:17:49
Speaker 1: I don’t know. Yeah, if I lived there, you won’t be able to keep me out of the water. I live there, wouldn’t be able to keep out of the water. A downside don’t want to take too much time on this, but a downside to it would be this, see I’m from there. I guess if you’re from there, you can hack on it. There is a monotony. There’s a monotony to the environment when it comes to being underwater in a fresh water environment like in salt water, like a diving or reef or something. You’re down there and you’re just like, oh my god, oh my god.
00:18:29
Speaker 3: Even if it’s.
00:18:31
Speaker 1: Like whatever. You know, you’re half scared shot. You’re just like suckers, Yeah, you know, and you’re seeing stuff. You gotta go look it up, you don’t, you know what you know what I mean, it’s just a lot going on. There’s always a right, there’s just a lot going on. It’s a very dynamic environment. It’s dangerous more dan there’s it’s just a it’s an enthralling dynamic environment. Some of those areas in some of those areas in the Great Lakes are not I mean, let’s just be frank. There’s some areas that are desert like. There’s some areas that are desert like out in the Great Lakes proper and the Great Lakes Popper, like the stretch of Lake Michigan I grew up on. If you went out and did big drifts out there, up and down the between the sandbars, you could not go hundreds of yards about seeing anything. You could go miles without encountering a fish. It’s a very places are very sterile. So you’re hunting a very sterile environment, right, and that it’s just it’s just a little bit different.
00:19:34
Speaker 2: Did you come across either of the other two legal game fish species?
00:19:40
Speaker 1: Never let it Yeah, we went and dove one day for Lakers and and my what I gather is that they they’re they’re not into the whole thing. Lakers do not want you to shoot at them. So what these what these guys are saying. And they’ve gotten a couple, they’re saying, Lakers are like, nah, I’m out. So Jonathan saw a Laker and all he saw of that Laker is that Laker being like, I’m out. But Walleye, for whatever reason, in a Walleye’s head, that’s not what he’s thinking. But a Laker is like, yeah, I don’t know what that is, but I don’t like it. And we didn’t try for northerns. Yeah. Yeah. A weird thing with this whole deal. When it started, they were using flashers for lake trout and it seemed like that was effect like very effective, and the state very quickly said no flashers, but you can use a flasher rotten reel fishing.
00:20:38
Speaker 3: How would you use a flasher spearin?
00:20:39
Speaker 1: You just like suspend it vertically, So you tie a big string of flashers or a flasher on a booie and you just drift and work the flasher and then dive down to the flasher and you’re just bringing fish up checking the flasher out. So at first you could do that, and they had some good luck, like you could like lakers have come from a long ways and they’d interact with the flasher. Then you could dive down get the blaker. But then right away they’re like, oh, never mind, no flashers. But they didn’t do that for rodden reel guys. You could run flashers all day long and then put a hook behind them, and why because flashers weren’t really good and lure lake trout. And then the lake trout gets lured and he bites your hook and you catch them and that’s cool. But if you’re spearfishing, uh uh, it’s a weird, weird deal that you can flasher for roden reel, but you cannot flasher for spearfishing. And you know how, check this out. Guess how many of the lakers the spearfisherm are killing annually? Take a guess a dozen? No, seven?
00:21:43
Speaker 2: No, getting.
00:21:46
Speaker 1: They are killing they and into the four year average is that the spearfishermen are killing five lake trout a year. The spearfishermen are killing nineteen northerns a year. On average, but you can’t use a flasher.
00:22:02
Speaker 3: Does the Michigan have a like is there?
00:22:04
Speaker 1: It’s insane?
00:22:05
Speaker 2: Is there a fishing season? Both spiros and rod and real guys have to like, is there a walleye season?
00:22:11
Speaker 1: If it’s open, it’s open.
00:22:13
Speaker 2: You guys have seasons there. It’s not like yea, yeah.
00:22:17
Speaker 1: When we were there, Northeast weren’t open. I’d go with spidos, spiro, you’re a spiro. It’s a spiro.
00:22:23
Speaker 2: I picked that up along the way. I’m not one.
00:22:26
Speaker 1: It’s a spiro. I’m sorry. It’s too late. It’s like you can’t like think of a new word for like something that’s.
00:22:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s like.
00:22:38
Speaker 1: It’s too late. They already got a name for it’s computer spiro. That’s my report. That’s my report. I would like to see them open up salmon. I would like to see it that you could chum and I’d like to see it that you could use flashers. And I think it’s insanity that you can use a flasher for rod and reel fishing, but you can’t use a flasher for spearfish.
00:22:55
Speaker 2: It’s open for all of the three native game fish species, but the non native salmon is not.
00:23:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think if you open it for salmon, I think you’ll find that the spear fishing harvest is about a salmon a year. Yeah, it’ll be about a salmony.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: Depends how close you can get to a river mouth at certain times in the year.
00:23:15
Speaker 1: It’d be great, man, Just like most people aren’t most people, like I mean, let’s be frank, most people do not have the dedication in physical fitness required to free dive in fifty degree water.
00:23:32
Speaker 2: Yep, it’s just they just don’t or interest, and you don’t want amateurs trying that stuff.
00:23:39
Speaker 1: You got you can catch Walleye and I don’t have a problem with it. You can catch Walleye shit faced with the TV on and you’re not breaking a rule. No one’d be like, well, that’s what’s the challenge. Now you’re ship face.
00:23:54
Speaker 2: Ship face, but king rule.
00:23:56
Speaker 1: But a dude that wants to climb in fifty degree water and die down to the bottom and thirty feet of water where the water is now thirty two degrees because of the thermal cline and beat himself up like that, it’s like knock yourself out, bro.
00:24:09
Speaker 5: Well, if Seth had bested you in this feet I think we could have done a rematch where you’re fishing it shit faced watching TV whilee anglers.
00:24:18
Speaker 1: But well, that’s what they do because they got forward facing sonar to hear. They also brought up an ethics thing. They wanted to introduce an ethics conversation. It’s like, hummett, aren’t you the guy with forward like aren’t you the guy live scoping walleyes?
00:24:33
Speaker 2: Which is basically like looking at them, you know, the same as you’re doing them fishing.
00:24:38
Speaker 1: If you want to see a side profile what them fishing looks like. Here’s what them fishing looks like. Can you get me fill yep? This is what them fishing looks like. Because they’re watching, it’s like you know what I’m saying. Yeah, they’re going like.
00:24:53
Speaker 6: Oh oh oh, oh there he is.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: That’s that.
00:25:05
Speaker 5: That does seem harder to do a cross drunk.
00:25:08
Speaker 1: Anyhow, I’m done talking about that. Did I conclude that we have a phenomenal time? Oh, I gotta tell you the funniest part of it. I’ll cut some news, I’ll cut one of my new stories out to make more time for this. Here’s the funniest part. There’s a restaurant right where we’re staying and they do that deal where you can bring your fish and they cook it. So the night before they’re down and they brought their burbot down there and some wally dogs down there and they cook them all up. Well, I get a big old so like a bourbon is a true cod. Oh, while we were there, we made a T shirt where it’s already done. It’s a Bourbot. It’s a Bourbot and it says load to loada which is Lenayan name in italics, and it says a k a and it has all the bourbot’s names. Oh good, it’s a fish of a thousand names.
00:25:56
Speaker 2: Like we do that a lot.
00:25:58
Speaker 1: I’m explaining to the boys sold out. I’m explaining to the boys how cod have huge livers and the oil in that liver is like a buoyancy mechanism. So if you’re pregnant and you’re eating cod liver oil, so your baby’s real smart. CODs have big livers and a Berba is the only fresh water cod. So I pulled this big honk liver out of this thing, and I’m telling the boys, like, you can actually eat this. It’s not good, but it’s interesting. So it makes its way into the restaurant, and I’m thinking, well, I’m going to go in and I’m gonna slice it as you do your real thin You slice the reliver real thin, and you put it on a hot cast iron skillet and fry the oil out of it, and you basically make like a cod.
00:26:43
Speaker 3: Crack I can see where this is going.
00:26:44
Speaker 1: You make a cod liver crackling. Well, the fellas go into the cook and they’re like, oh, he he just wants you to fry this liver, red eyes in my hand. He batters it. He batters the liver like just the liver, and it’s basically like your deep frying oil. It’s like if you took oil, it could bread oil and the like, if you could somehow like get oil cold enough to be solid and then bread it and deep fry it. That’s basically what he makes. And the lady comes out. She’s like, I don’t know what how you’re gonna do with that?
00:27:19
Speaker 3: What did you do with that thing?
00:27:20
Speaker 1: We tried to eat spoonfuls of it. Yet to eat it to spoon it was repugnant. But I was telling her, I’m like, listen, man, I mean, it’s not your fault, but that’s not you know, yeah, I just you know, it’s funny. Then she fried our burber up and our wally.
00:27:39
Speaker 5: Dogs get a hint of liver with that.
00:27:42
Speaker 1: That’s what someone was saying. Someone’s like, now we’re eating out of the same oil that had that. Damn god liver. God, she was a lot of fun, all the gall that open to own that restaurant.
00:27:55
Speaker 3: Your news here, we got a nick from an email from Nick in Pennsylvania. He says, fishing at a local state park, a group of anglers on shore, he catches a largemouth bass. He was using a Texas rigged worm, and in the hook set he makes, he damages the large mouth’s gills and the bass shows up bleeding when he gets it to shore, and he says, there’s an old couple next to him fishing, and they reach for their styrofoam cup of Coca cola and say, well, here’s what you do. You pour that on the gills and that’ll fix it up right. They’ll swim away happy and healthy.
00:28:28
Speaker 1: I’m familiar, okay, not with his story, but Nick is.
00:28:33
Speaker 3: He is a little bit hesitant to do it, but the old lady insists, and so he like doesn’t want to have a confrontation in front of these kids and stuff, and so he just goes with it. She pours a coke on the gills, he releases the fish away, and he says he was so bothered by the whole thing that he just left after that because he was like it was like kind of gross. I don’t really like how that all played out. I think the social interaction and also what did I just do to this fish? The woman insisted that she has seen this work on muskies. It’s how you fix a fish’s bleeding gills. So Nick writes in says, did I handle this? Okay, what do you guys think I wrote about this? I’m not interested in.
00:29:09
Speaker 1: That question, which question what he ought to have done? Oh okay, I’m interested in why what is that about?
00:29:18
Speaker 3: This started on Facebook about a decade ago. There was a couple viral videos. One of them was from this musky guide in Canada and he says, here’s what you do if you gill hook a fish and he pours I think it was diet coke. Diet coke was like his drink of choice.
00:29:34
Speaker 2: I don’t understand how that happens the first time, Like, how did someone like I got an idea here.
00:29:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that’s what you’re saying.
00:29:44
Speaker 3: Anyway, this guy figured out, he saw somebody figure it out. He pours the diet coke on the muskies gills, musky swims away, and he says, voila, that’s how you save a fish’s life. Video got one point two million views. I know that number because I wrote about this shortly after to Tom about this theory, and that that was the number that I had at the time. It’s probably tripled that by now. But basically, these folks would say, you have a fish with a gill injury, you pour soda on it. It cauterizes the wound and allows the fish to swim away. That’s that’s the science behind it, like the.
00:30:15
Speaker 2: Acid in the coke or something.
00:30:17
Speaker 3: Yes, I think you could. You could envision in your head if you were to pour a soda across a fish, it would just sizzle, right, and that’s like doing the cauterizing of the gills. This is what these proponents would say of this. I was like, no, that that sounds really dumb. So I interviewed some fish biologists.
00:30:34
Speaker 1: A fish doctor, what do you think.
00:30:36
Speaker 3: About this fish doctor of pouring soda on a wounded fish’s gills.
00:30:42
Speaker 1: Uh.
00:30:42
Speaker 3: And basically they’re all like, this is as dumb as it sounds. You should not do this one. You’re over handling a stressed fish, particularly if it’s like a northern or a muskie, and they have that slime. That slime is coming off on your hands. They need that to survive. That fights off like because of the shallow warm water they live in. That’s fighting off different infections they might encounter up there and make some faster musky and pike. They need that to survive. That slime on them. So you’re over handling the fish. Not good for them. You’re introducing a foreign substance to a very sensitive part of the fish’s body, its gills, particularly one that’s acidic, like Brody pointed out, also not good for them. And finally, if it was working out like what they say, you’re cauterizing the gills. Well, the fish’s gills are doing gas exchange, so you’re just cauterizing their whole gas exchange system. They kind of need that to breathe. So if that’s what you’re witnessing happening, you’re probably not improving the fish’s health. So I wrote about this after interviewing these biologists a year later. Some biologists actually study this. What they do is they take some fish. I think it was pike that they worked on. This was in twenty twenty. They took a player’s and they wounded the fish’s gills. They then poured soda on it.
00:31:54
Speaker 1: Oh, this is as bad as testing shampoo on little rabbits.
00:31:57
Speaker 3: Yes, they and then they released the wounded fish into a tank and they observe it for a half hour and watch what happens.
00:32:04
Speaker 1: Uh.
00:32:04
Speaker 3: They determined that it did nothing. Oh, that there was no improvement to the fish’s health.
00:32:09
Speaker 1: But no detriment.
00:32:11
Speaker 3: I don’t know that they knew that. I don’t think that was like a takeaway that they came away with. But they were not helping. And again, if we go back to things about like you’re you’re over handling the fish. It’s already stressed out. Just get it back in the water. Fish their blood will naturally clot in water. And so if you are witnessing what you think is something working when you’re pouring soda on it, you’re just like witnessing the fish’s body doing its own thing without your soda being present.
00:32:39
Speaker 4: Just simply because pouring soda on it makes a similar sound to a hot iron cotter, something like, oh, it must be doing it.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so the one I talked about John and Phil this perk fill up John Anderson, Musky guide from Canada.
00:32:55
Speaker 6: Uh.
00:32:55
Speaker 3: Even after this came out, he said, Uh, No, I don’t believe the biologists. Actually, and he’s so the campaign it’s called save a million fish, and this is like the main pillar of this campaign is you pour soda on fishkills.
00:33:07
Speaker 1: Uh? But what so he is?
00:33:09
Speaker 3: He said? He said, he’s purtisonally witnessed at work on eighteen muskies, so he knows that it works, and he doesn’t.
00:33:15
Speaker 1: He doesn’t, but he would have to be living in a place where he could run two realities at once.
00:33:21
Speaker 3: He must be doing that, yeah, only only saying that the like just because the fish live doesn’t mean it lived because he poured coke on it. No, and the science or the like, your your witnessing event is about two seconds after that fish. You have no idea what it does after that. Save a million fish, Save a million fish. John said that he still like has dyes at coke with him so he can perform this diet coke. Diet coke. No, actually, I think it was diet coke is what he used to do. I think maybe he transitioned to just a carbonated water. Now that’s what Johnny cauterizes.
00:33:56
Speaker 1: Just the bubbles.
00:33:57
Speaker 3: The bubbles are cau film, make the sizzle sounding.
00:34:00
Speaker 1: You’re good at it. That was ready.
00:34:03
Speaker 2: But yeah, but this guy wants to know if he should have ignored that lady and just let it go.
00:34:08
Speaker 1: Now that I know what I know. Like, for instance, one time, my daughter got all bit up by hornets and a lot of people had advice about what she ought to do, and a lot of it I knew wasn’t gonna work, but I was just like that, sure, you know, they like put motor oil on them. I’m like, okay, Like, I know it’s not gonna work, but I want to be rude. But in this case, I feel like he would he would have, knowing what I now know, I would say. I think he’d say, ma’am, I appreciate it. Having done a little research into this, I know it’s well intentioned. I don’t think that that’s the best thing for this bass. I caught him. I kind of got the bass into this situation. This is my this is my deal here. You know, this is my program, and I’m gonna have to do what makes sense to me, which is putting the fish back in.
00:34:56
Speaker 5: I love this guy’s style, though he had an unpleasant social interaction left.
00:35:00
Speaker 3: Yeah a strange detail. He does provide about this couple who tries to save the fish with the soda. They said they were fishing with children’s fishing rods. General know that I’ve witnessed this.
00:35:12
Speaker 1: My wife would call that avoidance. He has an avoidance problem. Or if she was, if that was if she was criticizing me for something, she’d be like, you’re having avoidance. That’s where you get mad and walk off, or something like that.
00:35:26
Speaker 3: Don’t pour soda on fish gills.
00:35:28
Speaker 1: There you go.
00:35:31
Speaker 2: Eating bears that eat rotten bait. This is a quick one, I think, pretty easy. One guy writes in I just got my first archery bear in Saskatchewan. I’ve tried bear meat Saskatchewan. Try I’ve tried bear meat, and I enjoy it. I was looking forward to filling my freezer with something other than venison for a little variety. However, the outfitter baits with meat scraps from the butcher. They’re not kept in a freezer at camp, so they get a little rotten. He highly recommended I do not eat the meat from bears because of this. I was a little disappointed. Do you think that bear meat would be okay and just and just make sure that it’s thoroughly cooked. Do I need to find an outfit or that has a better baiting process that is more conducive to better bear to better bear meat for the freezer. Bears eat rotten meat all the time, whether it’s o a bait station or not. Yes, deer carcasses, elk carcasses, road killed raccon, whatever they can find other dead bears, So that’s not going to have an effect on whether the meat is safe or Now most of the.
00:36:35
Speaker 5: Meat they eat is probably rotten.
00:36:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a persistent idea, though yes too, there’s two things go on. I got to final, not final.
00:36:44
Speaker 3: I have all you can say. What you’re gonna say.
00:36:48
Speaker 1: This idea that like, if it ate something that you’re then eating what it ate, right, you are, but you’re not. Yeah, if you shoot ducks that were running around on a cattle opera where they’re graining cattle your winter, those ducks are eating cattles where I recommend that you eat cowshit. No, can you eat a duck that might have ate some Yes, if if there’s all kinds of things to eat, all kinds of things, it’s not the same as you eating it. If a wild pig eats a rattlesnake and they will, or a havelina eats a rattlesnake, you’re like, can’t eat him. I’ll be poisoned by the rattlesnake. It’s just like you’re not. It’s going through a whole it’s going through a whole digestive process and then through complex chemistry that I can’t explain, is later converted into muscle and you’re eating it. It’s not like a direct fac simile of what it ate. Yeah.
00:37:40
Speaker 5: I go through this all the time because my dogs go out and eat shit, and then they come in and give me kisses. And I tell people, it’s not like I ate shit.
00:37:47
Speaker 2: That is, I just can’t.
00:37:54
Speaker 5: Can’t dogs that eat dog shit, phagi, some of them suffered from it.
00:38:01
Speaker 2: Okay, we’re not just I have some like kind of experience in this area.
00:38:10
Speaker 1: I got one big last final point. When you’re ready for you move on.
00:38:13
Speaker 2: I don’t want to throw shade at this outfitter. But I hunted with an outfitter in Idaho on a It was like a group like industry hunt thing where it was hounds and bait baited bear hunt and there’s like, I don’t know, six or seven hunters at that camp. I was the only one that kept the meat from the bear I killed. Everyone killed bears. The outfitter same thing like, ah, the meat is no good, it’ll make you sick, blah blah blah. I am thoroughly convinced that in that case that outfitter was looking to get out of doing the work of dealing without me.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: It is I’ve never hunted there and can’t. I ne’re done the Canada bare thing. But report after report from people I know well, people that I know and trust, I’ve heard report after report of outfitters telling clients that they’ll try out you can’t bring it back. What do you mean, I can’t bring it back? Well, you shouldn’t bring it back. It’s not good. It’s like there is a culture, not ubiquitous, but there is a culture of trying to talk people out, and it’s because it’s just to dig it and they come up with all these reasons why you can’t use it. I have friends that have been where they’re like I don’t understand, Like I just want it. You can’t have it, No, I looked, I can’t have it. Well you can, but you don’t, right.
00:39:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. And when I when I, it was like a surprise to these people that I like shocking that I would want to keep this thing. So I would tell this guy, like, if you’re going to book another hunt up there with a different outfit, or like, be clear up front that you’re.
00:40:03
Speaker 3: Very interested in keeping the meat.
00:40:05
Speaker 2: Get that sorted out from the start.
00:40:07
Speaker 1: But to get more specifically into his question, like sure it it’s not. If it’s eating rotten meat, it’s not a safety issue for her. It could be a palatability issue. Like I got a buddy that killed a I got a buddy that killed a black bear here, killed a black bear off a rotten cow, all full of maggots and stuff. He was feeding on it, and he said, man, you could always smell it on that meat, and there’s real off pudding. It’s not a safety issue. It’s a palatability issue. If I was baiting bears, I would want to bait bears. I would bait bears or something where I’m like, if I’m gonna do this and feed them, I’m going to feed them something that kind of adds to the quality the same way, the same way, you know, the same way you’re doing cattle production, or the same way you doing wagou production or whatever. Like, there’s certain feeds that give you a certain result big grain fat, and Kyle’s tastes pretty damn good. They got good fat on him. Some people like it, some people don’t. But it’s like a result from what you feed it. And so sure I could picture that I was gonna feed it all stuff that I thought was gonna yield like a good flavorful fat, Like if I could feed it grain and molasses, I’d probably feed it grain and molasses. Yep, you got this next one, Steve, Oh, this is a note. Yeah, Okay. He says he was listening to the last week’s news show and we were talking about dying from pea fast, chemicals and fish. He was thinking about time he about died. He says that our show intro is more dangerous than pea fast. So he says, I was standing at the top of the ladder listening to the Meat Eater podcast one after another. I was under a bunch of willow oak trees that were the inevitable cause of claws clogged gutters. There was the long pause between episodes per usual, and he’s talking about like the show intro. Well, he’s up there, and here’s in the show intro. There’s the tree falling. We’ve gotten multiple reports from people about this yep, that the tree falling noise led him to believe that the willow was breaking and he about stumbled and fell off his ladder. We had a guy sitting in his tree stambo hunting one time and the same thing happened to him. He was just kind of waiting for things to mellow out, listening to the show and heard that tree crack and thought it this tree was coming down.
00:42:41
Speaker 3: I have a buddy who swears his dog is triggered by it. I don’t know if the dog thinks the tree is falling, but whatever that specific noise is, he’s just not into it.
00:42:49
Speaker 1: Doesn’t like that sound doesn’t bode well. So out of the news. Now here’s kind of a perennial news story that keeps popping up. But it’s popped up again, and it’s about Lee trouble for the NRA. So let’s kind of a little bit of a long I’m gonna try to do a simplified version of a long story. The New York Attorney General. There’s an attorney general in New York named Letitia James. Latitia James is kind of I mean, she’s famous for a handful of things, but one of the things she’s famous for is she went after the Trump business very heavily for a claim that they had falsified real estate values in order to apply for loans, so basically overstating the value of collateral in order to get loans. And so after Trump’s first term, when everybody was trying to prosecute him for all this kind of stuff. Everybody’s looking for any reason to prosecute him, she was one of the people trying to prosecute him. And then the tip then it got turned because during Trump too, they’re like, hey, we’re gonna go use the legal system to target her the way she is the legal system to target Oh, so then they’re going after her about I can’t remember what the hell they’re going after her about, but anyhow, that little saga, So if you recognize the name Latisa James. That has to do with this kind of law fair retribution, counter retribution between her office and Trump administration, Trump business empire. She really wanted to go after the National Rifle Association, So how do you go after a nonprofit? So what she wanted to do she wanted to attack the NRA, and she comes up with this idea of looking at how they’re utilizing money.
00:44:41
Speaker 2: And like, an important detail is NRA was headquartered in New York, right.
00:44:47
Speaker 1: So it was her business because it was a nonprofit stationed or certified in New York. So the nonprofit is under New York law, you can form a nonprofit and establish it in all kinds of different places, but they happen to be certified or basically chartered, incorporated whatever under New York law. So she’s not really interested in I mean, in all honesty, she’s not interested in how the NRA is governed. She is interested in tearing down the NRA. And doing this, she uncovers a bunch of bad spending practices and makes this case that the NRA is defrauding its membership by blowing money on things they should be blown on. Okay, And so Susan what she wants. She wants to say the malfeasans is so bad, the NRA is defrauding their membership so bad that they should be basically killed as an organization. She doesn’t get that. What she gets is that the long time president is it president? Is it called president or CEO? And you’re at the NRA. I believe president, says CEO. Okay, Wayne LaPier. Everyone you’ve seen Wayne LaPier your whole life. The guy ran the NRA for thirty some years. Okay. What comes out of this is that Wayne Lapierre owes the organization four point three million dollars. Okay, So the claim is Wayne LaPier misspent four point three million dollars and owes it back to the organization. He appealed it. So when you’re seeing it pop up in the news again, now is the appeal failed. Some other things got thrown out, but the appeal failed, and it still is like Lapierre owes the org back four point three million dollars. The spending, so some examples of the spending here be like this. This generated a ton of headlines. Wayne LaPier spent two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars so again, two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars on wardrobe, okay, at a Beverly Hills.
00:47:09
Speaker 3: Boutique custom made designer suits.
00:47:11
Speaker 1: Yeah. The argument on his part is, Hey, I play a role, I’m on TV, I need to look a certain way, and that these are basically costumes that I must wear. People being like that is insane. Two hundred and seventy five thousand dollars for some suits for wardrobe is excessive. Okay. There was a there was a some restaurant tabs at an Italian restaurant, like a five three hundred and ninety eight dollars restaurant tab a place they had a cigar bar. There was some gifts like Wayne Lapierre bought gifts for people or friends of the organization, Like he bought someone a twelve hundred dollars handbag and build it back to the NRA. He bought someone a pair of eight hundred and sixty dollars candlesticks, build it back to the NRA. Some of these things seem kind of nitpicky, and I don’t really get the problem. At his home, he has security people at his home. The security guys were getting bid up real bad by Skeeters. So he spends eight hundred and ten bucks on a Skeeter control package, saying, Hey, the Skeeters are tearing up the security guards. It’s eight hundred bucks. I don’t know that feels you know, I don’t know.
00:48:38
Speaker 5: But he also like took his family on a vacation.
00:48:40
Speaker 1: Right, here’s the one that got Here’s the one that feels a little a little nutty. So after the Sandy Hook shooting, there was two mass shootings that kind of came close together. And Wayne LaPier, who has a security detail and the organization, did say to Wayne LaPier, like, it’s not safe for you to fly commercial as the head of the organization when there’s so much animosity toward the organization around the gun rights debate. It was agreed to for security purposes he should not fly commercial. Well, after those shootings, he had said, well, I’m gonna skip what he said. He went on a very expensive trip to the Bahamas, Okay, and stayed on a super yacht owned by a contractor who has done one hundred million dollars in contract work for the NRA. Builds some airfare to the NRA and goes to the Bahamas and does a lengthy vacation, which it’s a vacation that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in total. When pressed on it, La Pierre said it was a safety, a security vacation that after the Sandy Hook shooting, things were so hot, I had to get somewhere to protect my safety, and I knew I could protect my safety if I went into the Bahamas and stayed on this super yacht. But then it’s like, but how is it that you were also at a family member’s wedding while you were there? That was pre planned? So for that reason, some of this caused like a lot of internal upheaval and internal strife within the NRA and some people. Even though Latista James is in no way trying to help the NRA, she’s not like, oh I feel bad, this is really terrible that they’re misusing their funds. She’s going like, I want to kill the NRA. How could I kill them? Well, I’ll kill them over this pretending like I’m trying to help members and protect member money. But it brings all this embarrassing stuff. It’s caused a ton of trouble for the NRA. And then within this fight there’s this other fight. They use a main PR firm, so that so here’s the NRA is a nonprofit organization, but much of their work is done by a PR firm, which is a for profit organization. So what you have in nonprofit land is you wind up going like, Okay, we’ll take tons of money and hand it to our PR firm, I mean hundreds of millions of dollars and hand it to the PR firm, and then.
00:51:30
Speaker 3: The PR firm Ackerman McQueen.
00:51:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, Ackerman McQueen. The PR firm because their for profit will then do a bunch of the weird things m hm, because hey, we’re just paying them all this retainer money and then they do the things, and so it gives you like these ways to get around stuff. All this has been quite scandalous.
00:51:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, there’s and then they they also tried to hide a lot of this. There’s a quote from someone in the NRA saying we have to be careful because Wayne wants to get through the whole year, saying he hasn’t used private aircraft.
00:52:04
Speaker 1: Ye, so it’s just like real bad. They knew it was bad. Certain people, like longtime staff people within the organization start there starts to be a lot of turning on each other within the organization, and then the organization has a foundation, and there’s tons of bickering within the foundation. But the thing here, since twenty nineteen, the NRA’s revenue is down forty six percent since twenty nineteen. Member dues member dues at the NRA since twenty nineteen have dropped fifty seven point five percent. Before the RA became like a really a gun rights organization, it was a safety and training organization. Their safety and training spend twenty seven and a half percent declined since twenty nineteen. Part of what made well, let me so, they’re legislative spending. Okay, money they spend on lobbying, lobbying, I mean campaigns.
00:53:10
Speaker 2: Spending time when they’re an extremely powerful lobby in.
00:53:13
Speaker 1: DC, they were. That’s what I was going to kind of close on here is well, let me say this at first, their legislative spending, so the core money spent to like influence legislation is down by over fifty percent from twenty nineteen. But so twenty nineteen was an AWF election year, but down by or fifty percent, so like core mission spending down, I mean they are in a tough spot to the point where they’re liquidating investment assets in order to cover expenses right now. But they were probably and maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think I’m wrong. I think that they were at the height of their powers, probably the most effective nonprofit organization in American history. I cannot think of a rival in terms of just how effectively and tenaciously they defended Second Amendment rights. Can you imagine if, like the wildlife conservation movement had a organization of that power.
00:54:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean the NRA like had the advantage of just having to focus on a very narrow single issue.
00:54:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, and never having anything that doesn’t like.
00:54:28
Speaker 2: The track from what they you know, what they were able to ACCOMPLI.
00:54:32
Speaker 1: Part of the current split within the NRA is between it’s like the split within the Iranian regime. It’s a split between like the old Garden hardliners, right, And so there’s a there’s there’s like Wayne Lop people that came up with Wayne Lapierre and and like his vision, like his mandate. I’m not saying they like the spending the spending issues, but like that vision. It’s like a real like rigid, take no prisoners, like non negotiable defense Second Amendment rights to all offense right that want that, And there’s a version that wants a there’s a faction that wants a softer version more well of general public opinion. And they’re and they’re duking it out. But yeah, they were, I mean, bar none Like I challenge someone to think of a of a nonprofit that that that defended its core mission as effectively as the enter like I used to have. This is the crazy part. Back in these days, they would come after. They would come not just enemies, they come after you for not being friendly enough. I used to have people within this come after me because that wasn’t like I’m like, I make a show we run around with guns. But I somehow wasn’t like pro gun. That’s all I ever do is play with guns. But I wasn’t pro gun. Yet they had so much money they were going attacking the pro gun people. Do you know what I’m saying. They’d be like, dude, we’ve we’ve gotten all the anti gun people. Now we’re going to go get some of the the gun gonna after the gun guys. And now it’s just different.
00:56:12
Speaker 2: And your research did what did it attribute that that you know, just fall off and membership and dollars.
00:56:19
Speaker 1: I’m glad you brought that up. I don’t know I have. It’s two things. One, there was just a lot of I mean this, the in fighting, the financial stuff made a lot of people hesitant. I think that people have alternatives now in defending their secondment rights, more local organizations, whatever.
00:56:39
Speaker 5: People have alternative gun owners America.
00:56:42
Speaker 1: Politically, it’s it’s tricky politically. You like, what happens is if you had a if you had someone come into so in two years, let’s say in two years you have a very hardcore gun legislation candidate emerge on the Democratic ticket. Okay, someone that’s going to campaign gun Sorry, you get the Democrats put forward a guy and he’s campaigning on gun control. Of course you’re going to see a spike. Yeah, in the gun business. There’s a thing in the gun business called the Trump slump. And people don’t feel with Trump in office, people don’t feel that their gun rights are at risk. So gun spending goes down, Ammunition spending goes down because people feel secure and having the rights they have. But what’s weird is this huge decline since twenty nineteen, included four years of Biden, a gun control president. So I could see if I was looking at some chart that showed over the last eighteen months since Trump won that there’s been a decline, but this decline was through a gun control administration.
00:57:57
Speaker 5: Well, I think the I mean, I think the financial impropriety had to heaven. Well they I think they came out for the first time in nineteen, Like I think this is like a five year running story.
00:58:08
Speaker 1: Yes, the first big wave.
00:58:10
Speaker 5: And I mean I think like there’s a lot of people that died in the wool guard carrying members who saw the NRA suits thing at fifteen hundred dollars a night hotels, yeah, and pulled their bucks.
00:58:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:58:24
Speaker 2: And I just wondered if it was like an aging aging out of membership. This is changing demographics, you know.
00:58:32
Speaker 3: According to federal election filings, fifty six percent of NRA donors reported their occupation as retired. So I think they’re probably just dying out. It is like one of the one of the elements of this too.
00:58:46
Speaker 1: M So, most of the James case, most of the James to sum up, most of Latsia James’s case has not gone the way she wanted, but there’s still this obligation that Pierre Owes this money back to the organization. Not only that, as it stands right now, he can’t have a position. He cannot have a formal leadership position within the NRA for ten years. He can do fundraising, he can volunteer, he can write op eds, but he can’t have a formal leadership position within the organization for a decade after thirty years of being at the HELM. But he resigned right when the thing, when this corruption case came up. I’m gonna skip the Lake Michigan Beach dispute.
00:59:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, let’s hear about some mushroom deaths.
00:59:34
Speaker 3: Forgers in California can’t stop eating poisonous mushrooms. We’ll talk about it. From November November twenty twenty five to May twenty twenty six, that’s a seven month span, there were forty nine reported cases of wild mushroom poisonings in the state. Officials are saying it’s the largest outbreak of mushroom associated poisonings in California history, the largest outbreak in American history, in one of the largest outbreaks in modern global history.
01:00:03
Speaker 1: It’s not an outbreak.
01:00:05
Speaker 3: This is go ahead. I’ll tell you the verbiage.
01:00:09
Speaker 1: I’ll tell you. I’ll take it up there.
01:00:10
Speaker 3: Here’s here’s the verbiage that California you uses. This is from their California Department of Public Health outbreak of severe illness and death linked to ingestion of poisonous wild mushrooms. The CDC says the California poison Control System has responded to an outbreak of thirty nine cases of amatox and mushroom poisoning. That’s the verbiage that they use. I don’t think it’s regious, because, like if there was a salmonilla outbreak, you would call it a salmonila outbreak from lettuce at Costco or whatever. But I think that’s the language that they’re applying the same thing here.
01:00:45
Speaker 2: I think this goes back to zombie deer in Turkey’s ambushing people. Just like using the wrong word.
01:00:51
Speaker 1: I would call it a bunch of dudes messing up. I would say California is growing mushroom poisoning. Streak of dudes messing up is the biggest ever in the US.
01:01:03
Speaker 3: The largest in American history. Of those forty nine cases, four have resulted in death in another four have required a liver transplant. Victims in this lash of poisonings range from age nineteen months to eighty four nineteen months nineteen months babies. Most of the poisonings are from counties on California Central Coast and San Francisco Bay. The mushrooms were picked in urban parks, wreck areas, nature preserves, national forests, state lands, and at least one case a National park, so coming from urban and very much wilderness areas. The two primary culprits are the Western Destroying Angel and the death cap, both of which are species of Amanita mushrooms. We’re looking at those two mushrooms here, death cap on the left. That is an invasive mushroom that showed up I think in the nineteen thirties, likely on some lumber from Europe. And then the Western Destroying Angel, which is native.
01:02:04
Speaker 2: Now are they mistaken those for something else?
01:02:06
Speaker 3: Spencer, We’ll get to the reasons why.
01:02:09
Speaker 5: Or are they thinking, oh, that’s a Western destroying angel. Why don’t I try so.
01:02:13
Speaker 1: You know, honey, can you go grab the baby, give it some Western destroying Some.
01:02:19
Speaker 2: People might if they don’t know, they’ll just be like mushrooms, I’m want to eat.
01:02:22
Speaker 3: It to some of the reasons. And second, if you’re not familiar amanita mushrooms are they are mushroom classic. They are. You know. They have a straight stock with a big cap. It’s got very defined gills underneath. The most well known of the amanita species is a fly a garrick, which is a red cap with white warts. This would be like if you told the cartoonists to make a mushroom for a kid’s book. This is what they use. Super Mario mushroom is a fly a garrick mushroom.
01:02:47
Speaker 1: Oh, that thing is used widely in art. And I’ll point out that you should mention the nice little gift I got you.
01:02:52
Speaker 3: Oh, Steve got me a gift where you were in the state of Washington, d C. And he brought me home a nice little serving tray that has an amanita musquerra or flying garrick on it.
01:03:04
Speaker 1: It’s the best kind of gift when you see someone and you just you see something and just yeah, kindness of your heart.
01:03:10
Speaker 3: It was a kind gift. I was.
01:03:12
Speaker 2: I was.
01:03:12
Speaker 3: I think both of our wives were actually probably more moved by it than we were.
01:03:17
Speaker 1: Because my wife was astounded.
01:03:19
Speaker 3: She was, and then my wife when I told her the story, she was like, Oh, that that’s so nice, and that she also liked. Hearing that. Katie was like, uh, you know, amused by please Steve, yes do it? Uh and my wife hearing that that interaction happened. Friend, Yeah, no it was. It made an impact beyond just Steven.
01:03:38
Speaker 1: I was like, I got half mind to do a nice thing for Spencer. I don’t know.
01:03:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, Uh, this this is mushroom classic that is the most famous Amanita. Uh. It’s It’s like the one that shows up all over pop culture. It’s what Mario eats to level up. It’s the mushroom that Toad’s head is based off of. It’s what Alice in Wonderland eats to grow bigger or smaller. It’s feature in the older scrolls as a magical item. It’s what the Smurfs live inside of. That that is pop culture’s mushroom. It allows Steve to tell his favorite antidote about the fly garrick about the Reindeers.
01:04:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it’s it’s got hallucinogenic characteristics, and these guys in Siberia figured out you could feed it to a reindeer and then drink that reindeer’s piss and you trip. Yeah, this is truth.
01:04:26
Speaker 3: And if Santa Claus is of course real. But folks who say he isn’t, they say that those shepherds came up with Santa Claus after drinking the tainted urine while they were tripping off of the fly Garrick urine.
01:04:41
Speaker 1: That’s why he’s red and white.
01:04:42
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, and like the reindeer were flying that they were tending to.
01:04:47
Speaker 1: So, oh, it’s definitely true.
01:04:49
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, Santa is real, but of course if he wasn’t, they would say this is where it was created with these.
01:04:55
Speaker 1: Why you’re telling me is true? I just know it’s true.
01:04:57
Speaker 5: Yes, I’m thinking we ditched this year’s Family Feud Trivia and we film a special episode of Well.
01:05:05
Speaker 3: To Steve’s credit, I was. I was also, I’m surprised by this. When we were doing part of My Plate a few years ago, I found some fly Garrick’s in Montana prior to us filming, and I said, Steve, if I find more, can we eat them for the show? Is that okay? Fully expecting you to say no, And then I could be a martyr and be like if and Steve would let me eat the hallucingenic mushrooms. Steve said, go for it. I excited again. I was moved that Steve would let me make a YouTube video eating the fly garret mushrooms. Now, if you want to do that, we’re not you don’t do it. But if you want to do it, you have to boil them. You toss out that water, you boil them a second time, and then you can ingest small amounts of the fly.
01:05:43
Speaker 1: Again.
01:05:44
Speaker 3: Don’t do it, Yeah, don’t do this.
01:05:45
Speaker 1: But a question, Yeah, I want to wedge your question in here. This is fascinating, you know how like we just girls out of the ground. Yeah, but they used to have laws about even though it’s a plant, like most plants out in the woods, you can just eat them. But then they may but you can’t eat that plant, right, and then certain other drugs come out of the ground and they say you can’t eat that. Sure, or you could take right during prohibition, you could leave an apple land around and it turns into booze. They’d be like, you can’t drink that, yeah, and you’d be like, what’s just growing out in the woods. Why not If you were run around eating those, you’re not breaking a law.
01:06:23
Speaker 3: Probably not, I bet if you were to like sell them at a park on the bench, you’d be breaking the law. Then that’s where like the line gets drawn. But I think if you were, just if I gave them to Brody, I don’t think the law gets broken in that instance.
01:06:35
Speaker 2: Unless you would you could prove you were trying to kill me.
01:06:38
Speaker 1: Sure.
01:06:38
Speaker 3: So again, that is a fly of Garrick. That is a type of amanita mushroom that we’re discussing closely related to the death cap and the destroying angel. Amanita mushrooms are what are causing all these poisons. Put to put this into perspective, the United States has about fifty cases of amanita poisonings each year. California hit that number itself in seven months. So why the surge of poisonings Brody. There seems to be two contributing factors. One is that the area has simply had more amanita mushrooms this year. Typically in central and northern California, amanita are around in December and January, and they’re kind of limited to that short window This year due to some unusual rains, they were showing up early and staying late. I talked to one forger I know in Yuba County. Her name is Ellen. She said that this last foraging season had the most amanitas she’s ever seen.
01:07:29
Speaker 1: In her life.
01:07:30
Speaker 3: That goes for the edible varieties and the poisonous varieties. She said her local forging friends are seeing the same thing this year. Ellen also said that typically she doesn’t see a lot of death camps at higher l elevations. Death camps are the invasive ones. So maybe this is how long it’s taken for them to spread to some higher elevations in the Sierra Nevadas, or maybe it was just the weather this year that allowed them to grow so prevalent. So reason number one, there are a lot more am need is out this year. Reason number two, most of the victims are foreigners. California has reported that forty nine victims speak seven different languages, so many of them are relying on foraging knowledge from Central America or Eastern Europe, not realizing that they’re picking a mushroom that has the word death in it. The state is taking some action to spread awareness. Napa County is now running radio ads and three languages to warn of poisonous mushrooms. California has updated flyers that warn about amanita poisonings to include nine different languages now and they are making that signage more prevalent. Here three examples English, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. So you’ll start now seeing these around some national parks and city parks, other places common for foraging. So this is what California is trying to do to stop this. Just talk about it a lot. Tips to avoid mushroom poisonings if your a new forager, stick to the fool proof form morals Chantrell’s Chicken of the woods puffballs, as the name implies, those are the easy to identify ones that are found across the continent. Once you’ve mastered those, you you can learn a few more oysters, bullets, pheasant backs, headed the woods. If you know the fool proof four in those four I just mentioned that will get you through ninety percent of scenarios when you’re wondering if I should eat this when you’re looking at a mushroom. And then the last tip is when looking at puffballs, do a cross section on them. That simply means you cut it in half vertically, going from what would be like the head of the mushroom down to its toes. Some poisonous mushrooms from the Amanita family or vomitters, they will look like a puffball when they’re a juvenile mushroom. We’re looking at one here. This you can see is a small mushroom that from the outside would look just like a junior puffball.
01:09:54
Speaker 1: Now this I did not know.
01:09:55
Speaker 3: You cut this in happen cut it in half. You do the cross section. If you see any gaps in there, or if you see what appears to be like someone took a stamp and they put a different mushroom in there, that is a juvenile amanita or a juvenile vomitter. That is one you don’t mess with. But from the outside it looks just like a puffball.
01:10:14
Speaker 1: I’m seeing something vaguely sexual.
01:10:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a puffball.
01:10:17
Speaker 1: Just be white.
01:10:18
Speaker 2: There’s nothing.
01:10:18
Speaker 3: The next picture, Phil, this is what a puffball will look like. It is just solid white flesh from one side to the other. Yeah, it’s total fishy.
01:10:27
Speaker 2: Steve and I’m are on a turkey hunt with the kids.
01:10:28
Speaker 3: A few years back.
01:10:29
Speaker 2: We found some of those giant ass puffballs. Very underwhelming.
01:10:33
Speaker 3: Man, so do the cross section thing. I saved a co worker at worker who texted me one day. They’re like, this is certainly a puffball, right, and so it looks like it cut in half and send me a picture of that. And they did, and it was an amanita. So I’m like, yeah, don’t eat that one. So it’s easy to happen.
01:10:50
Speaker 1: That’s a good bit of information right there.
01:10:52
Speaker 3: And remember, there’s old mushroom hunters, there’s bold mushroom huns. There are no old bold mushroom hunters.
01:10:57
Speaker 1: Oh. My only thought here is I’m all for putting your kids in all kinds of situations. That that, and I don’t want to blame the victim that something just strikes me as unusual. There nineteen month old, nineteen months old.
01:11:12
Speaker 3: There was also some of the folks involved in these poisonings I had were labeled as unhoused. So just like grabbing what was accessible in a park. I don’t know that that was the case with the toddler in this story, but it but it played a role among the forty nine victims.
01:11:29
Speaker 2: Okay, case you haven’t heard, the first ever mule deer was killed by a hunter in Alaska. This happened in mid April, so just like six six, eight weeks ago Spring hunt. Yep. I assume he must I didn’t really figure this part out. He must have been bear hunting. I’m assuming no man him.
01:11:50
Speaker 1: They’ve been seeing him around. They just hadn’t gotten a chance. I got it out of his yard.
01:11:54
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, so Skagway resident, and can you pull up that Yeah? There you go there it is just the dough mule deer.
01:12:03
Speaker 3: There. Can you pull up that map?
01:12:06
Speaker 1: Phil?
01:12:07
Speaker 4: I don’t think I sent him, but I’ll find it.
01:12:10
Speaker 3: I sent it to you.
01:12:12
Speaker 2: If not, i’ll This guy, this guy’s name is west and Nelson. He killed this deer neared Skagway, which is kind of sits at the top of the arm of Southeast Alaska like that, that coastal stretch of southeast Alaska.
01:12:28
Speaker 1: And I think, like any true Southeast Alaska, looks like he went for the old headshot.
01:12:34
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Necker had you yep, yep.
01:12:38
Speaker 1: That’s that’s proof that he’s a he’s a low He’s in a grey hooded sweatshirt.
01:12:42
Speaker 2: And so got he got the first one ever in Alaska that they know of that hunter has killed. This dough had previously raised a fawn, but it was not pregnant at the time of harvest. According to Alaska Fishing Game uh Nelson gave gave Fishing Game biological sam bulls had hired all that stuff they wanted to to kind of dissect and look at. He also kept the meat. In Alaska, mulder are classic classified as a non native species with no established historical range. They’re not native to the state of Alaska. Therefore, there’s no close season, no bag limit. Hunters are encouraged to shoot them if they see them. Wildlife officials kind of are classifying this event as like a management like a milestone occurrence of a new species showing up, and also a management opportunity because it helps like see what’s going on with the species and what those deer might be carrying into Alaska. If you’re wondering, this isn’t the first deer mule deer that showed up in Alaska. They’ve been there before.
01:13:54
Speaker 1: One got hit on the road.
01:13:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, they one got hit in twenty seventeen. One got hit on the highway near North Pole, Alaska. Occasional sightings go back to at least the seventies. Three mule deer reported north of Delta Junction in twenty thirteen, so it’s just like something that’s kind of happening more and more. We’ve talked about this with with Mountain lions just a.
01:14:17
Speaker 1: Little while back coming down the Stacqin River yep, yep.
01:14:21
Speaker 2: But the most recent sightings have kind of clustered around that the Skagway Haines Eagle area. They’ve been seen as far north as Fairbanks, So they’re kind of like all along that western border of the Yukon.
01:14:36
Speaker 1: Territory points of entry, Like the south ones are probably coming down the Staqine, yeah, and the north ones are coming in along. I think the northern ones are coming in along the Alaska Highway yep.
01:14:50
Speaker 2: Yeah. And that’s that’s one of the reasons they give, like for why they’re they’re coming into Alaska’s human development, like building roads and giving them avenues for easy avenues for travel. All these deer, again are coming from the Yukons. The mule deer date back almost one hundred years than late nineteen thirties in the Yukon territory. They’re not native, they kind of moved in there on their own, and they believe that there’s about a thousand mule deer in the Yukon territory right now, so this is probably gonna keep happening. Biologists pointed a few different factors for why they’re coming in warmer winners reduce snow depths. Agricultural expansion is a big one, so like they’re able to move into these area and the areas and find food sources on farms. Then again we talked about road construction gives them travel avenues and then just natural dispersal. This kind of surprised me when I looked into it, like why Alaska would not want mule deer to become a established The main reason I thought would be CWD. It’s actually winter ticks is what they’re worried about the most, because winter ticks have devastated moose populations in New England and the northern tier of the United United States Minnesota and then into Canada as well.
01:16:18
Speaker 1: I had that completely wrong as well. In fact, I’ve even said to people, yeah that as you see more and more and they made that rule, you can shoot them whenever you see one. I’ve told people because they’re concerned about disease coming in, and they are. But what I was reading from there, like you’re saying, yeah, primary concern is the tip like tip load yep.
01:16:41
Speaker 2: So they’re worried about them carrying both parasites and pathogens into the state. Some other concerns are mule deer didn’t involve in Alaska, so biologists don’t really know what impact they might have on an ecosystem, like with brow species and things like that, how they might interact with moose, caribous, the native uh native blacktail deer. So it’s a story to follow. We’ll see what happens. I think it’s not gonna be the first. It’s not gonna be the last mule deer that hunters kill in Alaska.
01:17:14
Speaker 3: What a white tail might be next. They’re the same fear over them walking in. I think it.
01:17:19
Speaker 2: I mean, it could happen, but I think, you know, the mule deer thing is something they’re going to have to deal with for sure.
01:17:26
Speaker 1: Uh. I I totally support what they’re doing, Like I get it. It’s it’s like, I think they’re doing the right thing. Just a thought. I don’t know. The non native is like if something’s walking in, if something’s yeah, if something’s walking in on its feet. Not to question the decision they made. I think it’s the right decision, but it’s it’s kind of like I wouldn’t say non native.
01:17:53
Speaker 2: Not at this point, it’s natural dissal. It would just be like, historically they weren’t present.
01:17:58
Speaker 1: Historically not present. Now I’d be like, well they’re native now, nobody dropped them off the native there, and but I I I totally get why they’re doing what they’re doing, and that you could also argue that it is human caused, if it’s agriculture, road construction, whatever, that you’d be like, it is human cause it’s not. It’s not as weird, it’s not as direct as if you put them in a box and turn them loose.
01:18:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re not going to find a state that like manages game resources like better than Alaska as far as like providing food resources for their residents and things. And then like that’s I think a big concern here.
01:18:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have challenges. Nobody’s perfect, but I I am generally a big fan of Alaska’s approach to fish game.
01:18:54
Speaker 2: And it’s tough for me. But like with mule deer, they’re like my favorite animal. They’re they’re struggling and a lot of their range. To see him kind of be painted that’s a bad guy here is tough, but it’s what Alaska us to do.
01:19:06
Speaker 3: Here was an article from quite a while ago from Alaska. It says they had reputable reports of white tails near Hyder and Haynes.
01:19:14
Speaker 1: Oh, that was wrong.
01:19:15
Speaker 2: Haines is one of the areas reputable reports.
01:19:19
Speaker 3: Reputable reports, they said they have not had one confirmed.
01:19:21
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so I was maybe wrong.
01:19:24
Speaker 3: This direct quote is they are basically within spitting distance of the border, so probably.
01:19:29
Speaker 2: The same area there.
01:19:31
Speaker 3: The mule there coming from roy Church Well area biologists for Juno.
01:19:36
Speaker 5: Oh, okay, so it’s mostly wrong, but unconfirmed, unconfirmed.
01:19:42
Speaker 3: That was from twenty nineteen.
01:19:43
Speaker 1: It’s unconfirmed that I was mostly wrong.
01:19:46
Speaker 5: Yeah, let’s let’s make sure that reputable reports still fall into the category of unconfirmed.
01:19:52
Speaker 2: Sure you got uh, you got more mule deer stuff for us, Randall.
01:19:57
Speaker 5: You want me to do it or should we? Should we keep our power.
01:20:00
Speaker 1: Dry man, It’s up to you, buddy. You’ve been sitting there. I don’t know. Let’s do it.
01:20:05
Speaker 5: Let’s do it because I’ve fulfilled a lifelong dream, well not a lifelong dream. Maybe five years now. I’ve wanted to introduce my wife to Kevin Monteeth and I finally did it this weekend.
01:20:15
Speaker 1: Wow, and please take her over his house sometime. Well.
01:20:19
Speaker 5: Laramie is a good, good little drive but we went down to the Wyoming Range. Kevin Monteeth is a biologist at the University of Wyoming and a taxi ermist and a wonderful human being and multiple podcast guests, multiple podcast guests, brilliant guy. It’s always just like you walk away from many times bet with him having learned something like substantive about something that you thought you knew about and that you really care about.
01:20:44
Speaker 3: So, Kevin.
01:20:45
Speaker 5: One of the projects that’s that falls into the umbrel of Kevin’s big operation. There is a collaring dear study in the Wyoming Range of Montana, and the Rebecca Rafferty is running that program. She’s a PhD student there, and so they captured deer and collar them multiple times a year. In March, they captured some of these collar deer and the dose they ultrasound and to check them for pregnancy.
01:21:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, are they collaring them for that migration study or just general.
01:21:18
Speaker 5: A bunch of different studies. They’re looking at migration. I mean, the main thing that they’re interested in is how the animals use the landscape and the relationship between what’s interesting about this has been going on for ten years and so they have like multi generational data of dose, their health, their offspring, the success of their offspring and all that. And so one key moment in the annual cycle of that study is when these does in March, when they check them for pregnancy. The ones that are pregnant, they fit with what they call VIT, which is evaginally implanted transmitter kind of looks like a giant iud and it as a thermometer in it, And when a pregnant dough begins to give birth, it’s like right, it’s right outside of the cervix, And when a pregnant dough begins to give birth, it drops that transmitter, and as that transmitter cools down, as it’s no longer being warmed by the internal temperature of her body, it starts giving off a signal. And so these guys, Rebecca basically lives down there. Kevin kind of drops in and out because he has all kinds of other stuff going on. But they’re chasing down birth sites as they happen within hours and going and checking on the fawns, putting collars on the fawns. And so I’ve always wanted to get down there and do this. We drove down on Friday and we timed it so that this is usually the peak of the fawning season. It’s been super early this year and they don’t really have a clear explanation of why. But the hypothesis is that it has to do with a full.
01:22:59
Speaker 3: Moon during the run.
01:23:01
Speaker 5: Well, no, that was a joke. Yeah, I mean, well, the interesting thing is they know so when they when they ulter sound them in March, they know when they were fertilized based on the size of the eye that they can measure in the ultrasounds. So like they know when these when these deer were conceived, and then they can draw that out and say they’ll be born this date.
01:23:20
Speaker 2: But it’s interesting though that the rut fell a couple of weeks later than normal.
01:23:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, but but it was a weird winner.
01:23:27
Speaker 1: Yeah.
01:23:28
Speaker 5: So so what they’re seeing and a lot of this I might just be mistranslating from the scientists speak, but what they’re seeing is that these deer this year got to their their summer ground super earlier, their fawning ground super early, and some of them are just giving birth when they get there rather than waiting until their their fawns are fully developed.
01:23:49
Speaker 1: So yeah, so they had.
01:23:51
Speaker 5: This was supposed to be the peak weekend and they had already colored ninety one fawns, so they had less than ten fawns to go. Like, they had really good rates of pregnancy, especially among younger does this year, but they’re all the fawns are just dropping pretty early and they are seeing It’s not like they’re all underdeveloped, but they He was saying that sort of as a percentage of the overall, there’s probably more premature fawns this year. So we drove down Friday and they said, we think we have one for tomorrow morning, Phil, if you can pull up that first map. So so the green dot there is where the transmitter dropped.
01:24:37
Speaker 1: So we those are at nine thousand feet.
01:24:39
Speaker 5: The top of that is ten ten hundred feet.
01:24:43
Speaker 1: So this deer.
01:24:44
Speaker 5: I knew we were in trouble because they said this is this is a deer they call sheep deer because every year she drops her fawns up in the cliffs and before the head is she’s trying to get down the cliffs to get to the fawns. But we hiked in and we sat that blue waypoint there. We kind of sat there waiting for another transmission. So once the vit drops, they wait for collar day to upload to see if she’s hanging out around there or if she moved, and kind of she she missed her nine am data upload, just depending on how she could link up with the satellite. So we sat around until one and then all of a sudden we had this waypoint way over there. If you look on the map, we were kind of sitting on top across this little draw from where the VT dropped, and then we realized we had to go over the top and drop down this avalanche choot and then sidehill across this really nasty stuff. And like we we had a dot on the map where she had been milling around at one o’clock and we went over there and sure enough, I mean, this is like steep, brushy stuff. I fell a few times, it was. It was like very vertical. And we get over to that spot and Phil, you can go to the next slide there so that that yellow dot is where she had been milling around, and that red dot is actually where the where the fawns were. Next next photo these funds.
01:26:17
Speaker 1: So so this was tough.
01:26:19
Speaker 5: So you can see this is like the perfect deer bed. I mean you if you walk like ten feet in any direction of that, you’re going to be hanging on to branches. It was just a little bench in this like you could have laid a sleeping bag down and covered the whole thing, but there this little bench on the side of this face. One fawn was stillborn. And then this guy was small, I think he was. He was right around two kilos, so he’s going to have a rough a rough go like that was pretty disheartening after that long day.
01:26:51
Speaker 1: But we.
01:26:53
Speaker 5: You know, when they when they get him, they take some samples of blood hair for genetic analysis and traditional profiles. They measure them. They measure like the size of the fawn, they measure the hoof growth so they have a better sense of like how long they’ve been on the ground. This one was definitely on the ground for less than eight hours when we walked up on it.
01:27:13
Speaker 2: And that does nowhere around like blowing at your end.
01:27:17
Speaker 5: We never saw her. We never saw her. We never saw sheep dear, which is a good thing, because I have been rather upset with her because she just, like he was saying that some of these does when they dropped that transmitter, like a lot of them will stay there and give birth. But she dropped her transmitter and then just took off across this mountain side from like this great little bench at.
01:27:36
Speaker 1: The top to just this hell hole.
01:27:40
Speaker 5: So that was a long day. We got back after dark, hiked like three thousand feet and probably nine miles or something like that to get to her, and then and then the next day go to the next one. Phil Okay, So the next day we had another transmitter that got dropped, and this one was going to be in a much more As you can see, this is a great place to give birth. But so this one we hiked up there and we thought she was still around. So we actually he pulled out the telemetry wand you know, to identify where the dough actually was. It was kind of in this this big curve in a closed road, and so we circled the road around and eventually we saw her. She stood up with her collar on, kind of right where Sydney’s sitting there, and she bounded off about fifty yards. We walked down and then Kevin and I were looking for the fawn, and we walked right through that little gap that’s lit up in the trees and Sydney Sidney’s like you got We walked within two feet.
01:28:52
Speaker 1: Of this thing.
01:28:53
Speaker 5: It’s right at her feet there, Phil. If you go to the next picture, that’s so that’s actually another one. That’s we had to walk around and find the second one. This was about like twenty yards away, but the dough stayed close. We could still hear her circling around us and all that. So next picture, Phil, there’s the first fawn we found, just tucked in the tucked in the brush. And when you walk up on them, they they’re like main defense is I forget the name something breaking cardia, which means like when they when you walk up on them, their heart rate drops like sixty percent, and they they don’t even blink their eyes. They’re almost like in this state of suspended animation. And so we got these two. They’re nice and healthy. They’re they’re like almost twice as heavy as that other one.
01:29:44
Speaker 2: They do when you’re handling them, do they nothing nothing.
01:29:47
Speaker 5: What’s interesting is he said that these and this is what we observed. The ones that are like little and maybe not gonna make it. Those ones will move a leg here in there, but the big, healthy ones just do nothing. See, you know, we picked them up, moved them to a safe spot to measure him and everything like that, and then Phil, if you go to the next one, Yeah, there’s the two fawns and we’re fitting them with collars there, so they’ll fit these with collars. Then they’ll recapture them, put different collars on them, and uh, next one.
01:30:24
Speaker 3: Those things just have like eternal handling at some point if they’re always getting captured, Yeah, collared captured.
01:30:29
Speaker 1: That’s that’s the interesting thing is you know, like when you have a piece of information but you shouldn’t tell people the truth. Yeah, well I have one of those. They tell you that, oh, don’t touch it because the mom will never come back. Right. They tell you that because you shouldn’t be touching it, right, But it’s not true. No, yeah, we these they do all this, yeah, and put a collar on it and the mom comes right back.
01:30:55
Speaker 5: And we so before touching him, you know, you pick up dirt and you rub it all over hands, you grab grass, you rub it all over your hands to try to mask your scent. Oh, for sure, she was watching us. She was watching us. The other really crazy thing is that you think where I mean, and this is all stuff that you know sort of theoretically, but you think like, oh, yeah, of course, deer clean up the birth site, like you’ve heard about them eating the after birth and all that stuff, Like that earlier photo where that little deer is just laying in that bed, things bone dry. She’s consumed all of the after birth. There’s no fluids anywhere, there’s no hair anywhere.
01:31:34
Speaker 1: I was wonder about why they look so clean. They don’t look all slimy. She cleans them totally to avoid scent. And so you walk up on these things and it’s like just the hand of God drop them on the side of the mountain. There’s no like evidence of birth, So I don’t know if there’s more. Yeah, this is measuring the measuring the hoofs and then is there anything else?
01:31:59
Speaker 5: Phil, Yeah, I mean just just unbelievable, like they’re and like the first day was a little challenging because there’s the stillborn and the one that was pretty like but super cool, and just the amount of information that they have about these animals and and how mom behaves around them, how they rear them up. You know, like he has data on the grandmothers and great grandmothers of these animals and where they give birth and all that stuff. But it’s kind of funny they have. They have such an intimate knowledge of these deer that they can tell you all about how they use this, how they use that cheap deer obviously has a reputation for just giving birth and and uh, just really just a pretty incredible weekend if you love deer.
01:32:48
Speaker 1: Like it was.
01:32:48
Speaker 5: You walk in there and at first, there’s this part in the back of your mind it’s like I shouldn’t be here, like I’m intruding, and like it is sensitive stuff, right, like you you don’t want people to go out and handle these things, like you should never go out and handle these fawns. You should let them alone. But once you get to measuring them and thinking about what all this means, it it was just a really powerful experience. So I don’t know if I have another photo.
01:33:15
Speaker 1: I feel last one.
01:33:16
Speaker 5: But the other disheartening thing is we uh to get to those deer. We hiked up this closed OHB route and we when we put that second one back, we started walking around to see if we could find the transmitter at the birth site, which is about one hundred yards away, and that little fawn got up and started walking and we said, all right, we’re just going to back out. We don’t want to pressure him or anything. So we turned around and walked out and we got like two hundred yards down the trail and I hear something and there’s five side by sides playing loud music, drinking.
01:33:52
Speaker 1: Beers like Walleye Fishermen.
01:33:55
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we you know, and the road is very clearly closed. So we go back down to the truck and then they come bombing back down. There’s the big gate that says no OHV behind this line. They they drive over the vegetation to get around the gate, and four of them peel off, and the one guy stops right in the road, like you could see half mile road in either direction. He stops right in the road, right next to us, as close as he could get to us without pulling off the road over to our vehicles. Just comes out, lights a cigarette, takes a piss right in front of us, cranks his music up, and then throws gravel and fucking takes off down the road. And I just thought, yeah, like it was just the most blatant like disrespect and violation.
01:34:36
Speaker 1: A photo of them.
01:34:38
Speaker 5: It was it was too late at that point, but it was just like one of these things is like you you realize the rules exist for a reason, because like I felt like we were kind of you know, we were in her space, right and then hear these guys are just wrecking shit. So that was kind of a sour note at the end of it. But man, very cool stuff. Big thanks to Kevin and Rebecca.
01:35:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want to listen to a podcast, go listen to the episodes when oh man, Kevin monteeze Been I’m the sure.
01:35:06
Speaker 5: Yeah, he has got some more stuff that I talked to him this weekend about that would be a good episode.
01:35:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, podcast so good. We’ll curl your hair.
01:35:14
Speaker 3: My observation on those photos is they don’t grow into their ears ever, Like they’re just born with giant and then they just have giants silly years their whole life.
01:35:25
Speaker 1: Everybody, thanks tuning in listening. Man, We’re gonna bump a couple of these stories till next week’s episode. We’ll have some fresh He’s in there as well. Thanks and talk to you soon.
Read the full article here