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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana.
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Speaker 2: This is Col’s Week in Review with Ryan col Callahan, presented.
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Speaker 1: By First Light.
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Speaker 2: Here’s Col.
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Speaker 1: Down in Alabama. They’ve been having some slow news these days, and by that I mean there’s been a whole lot of news, but just about a very slow subject. Big thanks to listener Jimmy Styles and Anthony Crow for sending this one in. It seems that an Iowa man named Aidan throns Him traveled down to Alabama to catch a critically endangered kind of turtle to sell on the black market. The flattened musk turtle only lives in a single river drainage in north central Alabama, the Black Warrior River system. Life has not been easy for flattened musk turtle, and not just because it looks like a regular turtle who got caughton of ice. The species actually uses its squish shape to fit into rock crevices to find snails and crustaceans to snack on, as well as to take refuge from predators. As the Black Warrior River area has been dammed for hydro electricity and mineral extraction, many of the clear flowing waterways have widened and silt from nearby coal mining has filled in those crevices, giving the flat and musk turtles nowhere to go. But as the name suggests, this reptile has sophisticated defenses. When under threat, it secretes a foul smelling substance to discourage predators from taking a bite. Despite the risk of stinky secretions, the rare turtle is in high demand by collectors, according to authorities. Aidan Thronston Throng to the Sun anyway he’s a poacher allegedly caught several of them on August fifth in the area of Highway two seventy eight in County Road seventy three. He’s been charged with twenty counts of violating the protection of the species and one hundred and four counts of taking or selling a protected species. Experts say that there are so few flattened musk turtles in existence that this one individual will have a major impact on the species as a whole. We talked about this all the time. Don’t let individuals dictate the species right, but at times when things get rough, like in the case of the few flattened musk turtles in existence, you can have an individual loss that has a species wide Impact listener. Jimmy Styles also let us know that Alabama has some of the highest turtle diversity anywhere on Earth. I hope bringing this alleged poacher to justice will help keep it that way. This week, we’ve got the border Wall, primitive camping updates, Blue Mountain Forest Rules, Michigan Voicemails, Bear’s Ears revisited, and the Roadless Rule. But first, I’m going to tell you about my week. In my week, well, I’m talking to you from all Indiana here, newly minted site of the Kanka Kei Jamboree, put on by a bunch of awesome EVA staffers down here, And I’ll tell you on the BHA front, our staff likes each other so much and they’re so averse to spending member dollars on frivolities that we got eleven people standing in a fore bed house. Don’t tell the airbnb owners. We’ll do because we’re very respectful and clean in everything. But there’s a lot of body in here. A couple of things are happening, okay. Starting a few days ago, we got word that they’re finally going to open up Roadless Rule decision for public comment. This is something we hoped we’d never get to because we were encouraging individuals high up in the administration to come way down to where the common folk live and actually see roadless areas and understand that to get to roadless areas you take roads. So, oh my gosh, there’s roads and trails that exist in roadless areas. Also, look at all the fire mitigation work that happens within roadless areas. Also, look at all the motorized use, look at the multi use. Oh and by god, there’s elk and deer and all the cool things that make people like me with a growing dad bod and beer gut want to get back out there and improve myself to put some dinner on the table. Well, that never happened, and they just got more and more entrenched on the fact that all us folks, the end users out here on America’s public lands, all want this one thing, which is to rescind the two thousand and one roadless rule. Now, the public comment period open September twenty one, and we’ll run for thirty days, and I just want to let all of you know that roadless does not mean unmanaged. The two thousand and one roadless rule allows for important management activities such as hazardous fuels reduction and habitat restoration. They provide incredible hunting and fishing opportunities on top of all the non hunting and fishing recreational opportunities and grazing as well. We have all sorts of people who like to talk about what we got to do for roadless because of wildfires. Well, the data just doesn’t support that. We get a lot more fire activity where there already are roads and humans because humans are causing a lot more fires than Mamma nature are. Fiscally, the Forest Service already manages roughly three hundred and seventy thousand miles of roads and has at current times a ten point eight billion dollar deferred maintenance backlog. New roads that the public demand to be maintained add long term maintenance obligations to our ten point eight billion dollar backlog that we already have, and if you’re watching the news, we also just cross the forty trillion dollar national debt threshold. And it’s because of these roads that needed constant maintenance that Republicans help create the roadless Rule back in two thousand and one. For folks on this Yere podcast that like their hunting and fishing. One of the biggest things that you got to remember is travel management is wildlife management. And if you think that’s too much of a stretch, we can try it a different way. Travel management is the hammer in the tool belt of a wildlife manager on big chunks of public land. What can go where and when, and the effects that it has on our whole diverse wildlife array. And here’s all the data that we have about grizzly bears and roads, about elk and roads, and mule deer and roads, and the fact that our wolves love hunting elk off of road systems and established trail systems that humans maintain. As we talked about a few episodes when we talked about the Blue Mountains, which we’re going to get into a little bit more here. Two, ma’am, if you want to keep public elk on public land where they are accessible to hunting during hunting season, you better have a good travel management plan that carves out areas free from full sized vehicle access. You keep big herds of elk on public land by giving them areas away from roads and spoiler alert, we’re talking a mile from a road, an active road not a big stretch still highly accessible by folks who can just walk a little bit. This one’s extremely disappointing to me. If you can’t tell on top of this, and you can shoot me down on this because I’m staring into the magic eight ball, it would not surprise me one iota at all. If in conjunction with this roadless rule noise, we finally see another shoe drop in the form of the anticipated travel management rule. Given enough runway and proper staffing and funding of our federal land management agencies, he could be prepared for an open unless closed policy, meaning that we go out there and we make sure that all the roads and trails that need to be maintained as non motorized are properly inventoried and marked, so we maintain this balance of multi use on our public lands which mitigates conflict and mitigates noxious weeds and mitigates fire. And if your public land grazer listening to this here, show you know darn good and well the big wave of human recreational access makes life hard on you too. This is a time where you’ve got to weigh in. I’m talking Call your congressional representative, call your Senator, use action alerts from great groups such as backcountry hunters and anglers. Trout Unlimited is doing a heck of a job on roadless rule. Go to the Federal Register dot gov and leave a well articulated comment. Can be as simple as, hey, you may not know it, but these roadless areas, myself and all the hunters I know, we go specifically to these spots. We spend money at the communities outside of these areas. And the reason that we do this is because there are not roads in there. The elk like those spots. If those spots don’t exist, I don’t go to those towns and spend that money. I have to go find other areas. It may be in the not too far future that all we got left is capital w wilderness, and there’s a big gap in between. We got elk in the wilderness, and we got elk on private ground in the front country, and you got all the roads you want in between. Balance use is responsible use. Let’s not let one form of access define access for all. Travel management is wildlife management. But for now, when you’re listening to this podcas Cat, you can go find an action alert. We may have texted it to you. You may have got it via email. If not, go to Backcountry Hunters dot org. And if you end up and dinking around on the old federal portal the Federal Register dot gov search r im oh five ninety six dash A D sixty six or dock at FS DASH twenty twenty five DASH zero zero zero one will include a link in the podcast show notes. I make it easier for you there, man. All this stuff is here because we demanded it. We were living in some really good times, and it’s because people stood up and said Nope, that’s not gonna work. It is why we have all the opportunities we have today. It is now our time to draw a hard line here too and say enough is enough. We have a mosaic of opportunities, some easy, some hard. Some you can access through foot or horse, some through bicycle, some through motorized bike, e bikes, whatever the hell you want to call him. Side by sides, we’re spoiled rotten. But what does not work is everything everywhere, all at once. I don’t care what your format access is. It ain’t going to be fun. And that critter count is going to go down and down and down. All right, Moving on for Now. Last week we saw some very concerning footage out of Texas where activists recorded bulldozers and excavators breaking ground in the Santa Atlna Canyon of Big Bend National Park for the construction of Trump’s border wall. After an enormous outcry, the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection has now said that he’s pausing all construction and will visit the park to meet with stakeholders. The machinery had been working at the foot of the canyon’s iconic fifteen hundred foot cliffs along the Rio Grande River. Big Bend is, of course, the largest and most visited national park in the Lone Stars date, the Trump administration’s plans to build border protection infrastructure through Big ben Park have stirred controversy in both parties, and the maps issued by Customs and Border Protection have been revised several times over the past year, making it confusing to know what implementation of the wall might look like. And despite a fall off and attempted border crossing since the start of the second Trump administration, Congress still added forty six and a half billion dollars to last year’s so called Big Beautiful Spending Bill for construction of the wall. In February of this year, plans issued by Customs and Border Protection showed a thirty foot steel ballard extending across territory that already has steep cliffs blocking transit from the south. After intense backlash, CVP proposed a more modest plan for two hundred miles of newly constructed patrol roads and six foot tall vehicle barriers. Needless to say, all this man made construction violates the park’s rules, but the Department of Homeland Security waived several federal environmental and cultural protection laws to force the plan through. The recordings from last week show bulldozers and excavators clearing the way for the road and erecting the vehicle barriers. I’m all for border security, but we got these big lumps of fat on our shoulders we call brains, and we’re Americans. We can do this better. Big Bend is the largest protected area of the Chuahuan Desert ecosystem, a one of a kind mix of desert and semi desert grasslands, desert scrub and woodlands, montane chaparral, and montane woodlands. If you’ve ever wanted to see the so called Sky Islands, which is like little mountain ranges that are all green surrounded by desert. This is one of the places to do it. Human development in this area threatens over twelve hundred species of plants, four hundred and fifty species of birds, fifty six species of reptiles, and seventy five species of mammals. Once you mess that up, you just can’t get it back. If you’ve never been down to this part of the world, it is truly different and gorgeous. You gotta do it now, right now. We have attention on this spot due to public outcry. Okay, going outside making some noise, So all you Loan Star staters out there, one of the probably most influential things that you can do is write a letter. Send an email to old Greg Abbott, your governor, as well as your new Senate nominee Ken Paxton, and let him know how you feel about border wall construction in Big Ben National Park. We’ll put the contact info in the show notes. We’re smart enough cretors to keep the people out and let the animals in. Heads up for you listeners out there who like to spend time outdoors in Vermont, the state is updating its rules for so called primitive camping on state lands, and they’re asking for the public to weigh in. When you hear the term primitive camping, you might think we’re talking building a shelter out of sticks and moss or lighting a fire with a bow drill. But this is just camping away from amenities like water service, electric hookups, track pick up. You can still keep your inflatable sleeping pad and your jet boil. You can just get out to more remote locations and get used to life without quite so many conveniences. But because primitive camping means folks getting further away from services, it’s even more important that they act responsibly. That means packing out every shred of trash, minimizing impacts to soil and waterways, and mining their p’s and queues when making and extinguishing campfires, and more importantly, when you go take a poop. The Vermont Department of Forest, Parks and w REC has therefore issued a series of proposed updates to the rules governing primitive camping. The existing rules were last updated in nineteen ninety three, so they are due for a revision. Here are the highlights of the proposed changes. Campers will now have to camp two hundred feet from rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands, up from one hundred feet. People will also not be able to use any live wood for campfires, only dead and down trees. The rule change would also update how guidelines are enforced. Fish and wildlife wardens and other law enforcement officers would now be able to issue notices of trespassed to violators. Making sure the people who love the outdoors aren’t hurting the outdoors really matters, and these updates seem reasonable. No matter how you feel, make sure you get involved. There are two in person hearings on the matter coming up, as well as an online comment form to fill out. Head over to FPR dot Vermont dot gov to make your voice heard. Jumping over to the Blue Mountain Forest Rules, the US Forest Service has drafted a much needed management plan for the malhur Umatilla and Wallawa Whitman National Forests, altogether almost five million acres of prime elk habitat all. That is good news, but the bad news is that nowhere in the proposed management plan is there any mention of roads. That’s right, there is no travel management plan as part of the overall management plan. This is extremely frustrating because other than this massive issue, there’s a lot of agreement about how these forests should be managed. Logging in these areas has until now been fairly restricted, and that’s led to timber building up that makes the areas vulnerable to wildfire. The dense trees have also blocked light to the forest floor, which means limited growth and forage for the elk. So increased logging would mean jobs, fire mitigation and eventually really get elk habitat. But when there is no guidance on who can drive wear, the most likely default is if you can get a vehicle in there, go for it. Especially in sensitive elk habitat, those critters will flee from the noise and activity and migrate onto private ground where US hunters can’t reach them. We’re already seeing this happen elsewhere in Oregon and all across the West. This is a big one.
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Speaker 2: Gang.
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Speaker 1: We’ve got to go over to the USDA comment form to make sure we get a travel management plan there. We’ll post that comment plan as well as a great deep dive on the issue written by Natalie Krebs over at Outdoor Life to recap it quickly. This is a great example of user groups coming to the table coming up with a management plan in it being a winner effective. They provided sanctuary for the elk on public ground. More hunters got access to public elk on public ground, there was less damage to the private ground, and it was great. Now the logging can happen, it should happen, but without a travel management plan in place, everything will be default open and there goes the elk sanctuary, which means they are going to be back on private ground, which means there’s going to be less access to public elk and very few public elk on public ground. This is one of the areas that all the data exists, so get your public comment in rolling over to the voicemail desk. A couple of weeks ago, episode four to eighty seven, to be specific, we talked about a controversial new law in Michigan. Basically, state legislators passed a bill to permit the backyard feeding of deer, despite the fact that Michigan prohibits hunters from using bait piles because it’s known to increase the spread of infections diseases like CWD and bovine TB. Because you’re artificially congregating deer. Well, we asked y’all to write in your thoughts, and listener Justin did just that. Here’s what he had to say.
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Speaker 2: Hey, Cal, I’m calling in from Michigan Open County. My name is Justin and I am completely in agreeance with Steve who wrote in last week about Michigan’s new law about the recreational feeding. I agree that there is a complete lack of consistency and the fact that there’s no difference between deer congregating three hundred feet away from my residence versus twenty five thirty yards from my deer stand. But one is okay and one’s not. I feel like this is a slap in the face to all hunters in Michigan. I understand that this policy has not come from the DNR. It’s come from politicians, which I also don’t like. I understand that they have the power to implement wildlife policy, but it’s not their job to. I think wildlife policy should be based on science, and I do not see the science in this whatsoever. Why can I a feed deer outside of my house for recreational viewing, but I can’t shoot over a bait pile in a tree stand you know it just it’s it’s the lack of consistency, uh and really lack of intelligence from you know, from the way I see it. Well, yeah, you you wanted the opinion, you got it, big fan man, Hope falls Well, say.
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Speaker 1: Thanks for writing in, Justin for calling in. I’m right there with you. And of course, deer feeding and baiting is a hot button issue and it gets wrapped up in like family history and heritage and tradition and all those things, and it extends well beyond the Wolverine State. And part of me gets that, but the other part of me says that this little conundrum here is just a symptom. It’s not the disease, right, And I think the disease is letting politics and politicians infiltrate wildlife management. Give me a call, let me know what you think. Four h six two two zero six four four one. That’s four h six two two zero six four four one, or ask cl that’s Ascal at the meeater dot com. Some items have come to light in the weeks since we talked about President Trump’s executive actions to drastically reduce the sizes of Grand Staircase escalone and Bearziers National Monuments, and they show the corporate and potentially even illegal machinations behind the move. When Trump slashed the designations, many conservationists worried he was doing it to open up the area to mineral extraction. Well, within about a month of the announcement, at least nine new mining claims have been staked on the land that was in the former designation, including seven claims from Utah based Kimberley Mining that were filed the very next day after Trump’s pronouncement. While this news is no surprise, there’s another story developing. Two several congressional Democrats have opened an investigation into Energy Fuels over potential insider trading. Energy Fuels is a Denver based company that operates the nation’s only remain conventional uranium processing mill, and it situated just a mile from the previous Bear’s Ears boundary. On July seven, less than a week before Trump’s July thirteen announcement, Energy Fuel CEO Ross Bapu bought seventy four thousand shares of his own company’s shares. Board chair Bruce Hanson acquired four thousand shares the next day. The trades have raised suspicion that Bapu and Hanson acted after privately receiving word of President Trump’s forthcoming announcement. Quote. We understand that monument boundaries were redrawn in a way that could benefit Energy Fuels, and that your stock purchase was the largest insider stock purchase in the company’s history, wrote representatives Jared Huffman and Maxim Dexter. Energy Fuels hired external lobbying representation, which gave the company direct pathways an influence into policy conversations that would impact its bottom line. Insider trading, by the way, involves buying or selling a public company stock using material information that is private and not publicly available that can substantially impact an investor’s decision of whether to buy or sell stock. The punishments for doing so can be severe, as the illegal practice undermines public trust and the fair operation of financial markets. Remember when old Martha Stewart got thrown in jail. The outcome of this investigation won’t impact the executive orders, but it reeks of nefarious activity, which you know, is just like what happens in Washington. I hate to say it, guys and gals, but I’m not too riled up about that just seems to be like these how the folks play the game. I don’t think it should exist, but I do want to point out you can’t hunt big old narley mule deer bucks, or turkeys or big horn sheet inside an active mining operation. And moving on to the Boundary Waters. On August eighteen, Minnesota Governor Tim Wallas issued an executive order that stands to prevent the development of a controversial sulfide or copper mine in the headwaters of the famed Wilderness Canoe Area. His order directs stately agencies not to issue permits or leases in about three hundred and fifty square miles of the Superior National Forest encompassing the Rainy River Watershed’s headwaters. The order also halts the review of any ongoing environmental reviews of mineral extraction operations in the area. As an act at Walls’s order stands to stop a controversial copper nickel mining project put forward by Twin Medals, a subsidiary of Chilean mining conglomerate and Topagasta.
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Speaker 2: Quote.
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Speaker 1: I’m using my full executive authority to protect the waters and wildlife of the Boundary Waters and to ensure the outfitter, small businesses, and communities that depend on it continue to thrive for generations to come, said Walls in a statement. It’s our duty as Minnesotan’s to ensure the sacred place remains wild, pristine, and unharmed. The move is the latest in a year’s long back and forth over mining development in the Rainy River watershed, which most recently culminated with Congress using the Congressional Review Act to repeal a twenty year mining moratorium there in April. Following that vote, conservationists and their attention to state led efforts to block the mind. Walls’s order also directs the Minnesota dn R to draft legislation to permanently banned mining in the headwaters. The eventual passage of such a bill is unclear given how polarizing the issue is, but it would be a big deal. It should be noted that Walls is retiring at the end of the year, and whoever is elected to be in Minnesota’s next governor will have the option to keep the executive order or issue a contradicting one. This is definitely something Minnesota voters need to keep in mind when they head to the ballot come November will continue tracking this story. Important to note here that there’s a state layer and a federal layer. The governor here state layer, and whatever is done at the state level can definitely definitely slow things down and impact whether or not antop a gas to aka Twin Medals wants to develop. On the federal layer, the largest deposit is federal. You know, if you like clean water and wilderness areas and hunting and fishing, and you understand that water flows downhill, this is a good step in the right direction. It’s not the whole mcgilla. Lots of commenting and comment periods and folks are writing in and asking and telling me, hey, they don’t listen to me anyway, what the hell’s the point. Well, people are listening. Some of those people need to grow a little courage, right, have a little you know, fire in the belly. And when it comes to things like the Boundary Waters Canoe area and the amount of comments and calling and emails that people put in, it did fire people up, and ultimately that got squashed in the eleventh hour. But people paid attention and those same people could very well go, oh my gosh, this stuff is so important. Even if I don’t personally care about it. I’m going to run on these ish shoes and make sure that I deliver. That’s a possibility, okay here on the roadless comment period, and that I think the impending Travel Management Rule comment period that’s coming up. Showing people that we care just enough to write in a comment at the Federal Register dot gov. Use these action alerts, sign those form letters, create social media posts. That really is powerful stuff, and it is a part of the record, particularly those comments at the Federal Register, and it creates this portfolio, right, this roadmap for people to look back and go, oh my god. Originally over six hundred thousand people commented, and now a million people commented, and then two million people commented, And by god, it seems like the bulk of the American people love their public lands, public water, and public wildlife. Maybe instead of listening to folks who aren’t tied in to the resources at the ground level, we should start listening to the people who go out and make a living and play and recreate on our national for US and our Bureau of Land Management lands and our wilderness areas and our Bureau of wreck Lands and listen to what they want and if you don’t believe a single thing I just said. I promise you, if we were to stay silent on this stuff and nobody commented, it would be front page news and people would be out there pointing to it and say, see, nobody even cared. We told you so. So you may not like it, you may not be motivated to think that you’re making a difference, but I promise you it adds up and we can use this stuff for good. It can be painfully slow, but you got a way in. As I have said many many times, if you don’t, somebody else will, and you probably aren’t gonna like what they have to say. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to write into a sk C a L. That’s Ascal at the Meat eater dot com. If you don’t feel like right, then you can always give me a phone call. Certainly safer when you’re driving four oh six two two zero six four four one. That’s four oh six two two zero six four four one. And to everybody who came out to the Greater Camp Kaki Jamboree, Hebra and Indiana, thank you so much. It was great seeing you. I appreciate each and every one of you. We’re all public landowners. We all got a stake in this. Let’s stick together. Thanks again, we’ll talk to you next week.
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