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Speaker 1: From Meat Eaters World Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, this is Cal’s Week in Review with Ryan Cal Callahan, presented by First Light. Here’s Cal. There’s an unusual bighorn sheep on the land in Montana. That’s a sheep joke. In Montana, Fish, Wildlife, and Parks officials are concerned According to a recent Facebook post, Fish, Wildlife, and Parks is seeking help from the public to locate a hybridized female Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep that went missing from a private alternative livestock facility near Vaughn in early September. If you’re wondering what alternative livestock is, well, as you know, the definition gets broader and broader every day. It used to be purple hair and nose rings. Now it’s, you know, polyamory and God knows what else. Anyway, more power to you, sheep. Now, how will you know if a female bighorn sheep is not wild? It’s described as weighing 120 pounds, primarily white in color, and has a red ear tag. Officials are worried about the hybrid critter coming into contact with and spreading disease or pathogens into wild herds. Now, Vaughn, Montana, V-A-U-G-H-N, not like wild thing Rick Vaughn, is the site of the property where Arthur Jack Shoebarth became nationally famous after getting busted for illegally importing Marco Polo Argali sheep from Central Asia in an attempt to create a hybrid called the Mountain King. Get that whole story on episode 260. I’m not sure exactly what the crossover here is, if any. Probably isn’t, other than Vaughn seems to be a good sheep capital. If you see this missing sheep, that’s another sheep joke for you, tell FWP. First, I’m going to tell you about my week, and my week has been spent out on the long and lonesome road. We started our adventure at the St. Anthony Dunes in an Overland modified Can-Am Defender. I can’t really tell you what the modifications are, other than it’s got real big tires. The transmission was built around having oversized tires. Suspension, slightly modified. All of these are like stock parts, just not necessarily meant to be on a Can-Am Defender. And it’s very, very comfortable. And there’s a rooftop tent, one of those GFC rooftop tents, which I’ve been rocking on the big truck for quite a while on this thing, which makes it slightly top heavy. But again, the engineers at Can-Am kind of, you know, figured that out. Man, it makes setup take down very, very fast. It’s a pretty sweet deal. And I’m sure it’s got a bunch of other stuff on this thing that make it super fancy pants. All I know is it’s a pretty sweet ride. It’s very, very comfortable on nasty roads. Not exactly a sand machine, which we found out down at the St. Anthony Dunes. Now, the Dunes is a really interesting place. It is a wilderness study area that, for the majority of the year, is open to true off-road, cross-country travel. Drive wherever the hell you want, as fast as you want, as long as it’s on sand. And man, we met up with a group of dudes who build their own cars. They disassemble VWs. They reassemble them into dune buggies or sand rails. And we rode with those boys. And oh my gosh, it was fun. So much fun. Cannot believe that there’s people golfing in their later years when you could be out doing something like that. But back to overlanding. Okay, this is my first overlanding trip. which is what this Can-Am was built for. If you don’t know what overlanding is, it’s driving on dirt between two points. Sometimes there’s like designated routes and trails that you can follow, or you can just do what we did and connect a bunch of roads and trails and make your own route. The key to overlanding though is you have to be unsupported. which just means that you’re not stopping and buying stuff like water and hotel rooms and hamburgers, right? You’re camping along the way and you’re carrying all your stuff with you. Now, this used to be known as car camping. I’m just putting that out there in case you’re confused. Now, I’m not knocking overlanding at all because everybody knows that car camping is awesome. And our particular car camping scenario, We messed around in the dunes, talked to a bunch of folks, talked about migration corridors, talked about just how much fun people are having out there. And then we did put the Can-Ams on a trailer and we went straight north, essentially, to some big chunks of BLM. From there, my buddy Tate Morgan of Gambler 500 and Sons of Smokey fame jumped in with us and we loaded all of his stuff in. And we drove for, gosh, almost 300 miles to the location I’m at right now, which is just south of the little city of rocks, north of Bliss, Idaho. So we went through and over the Lemhi Range, the Passimeroi, the Lost, went all the way down to almost Cary, Idaho, put the Can-Ams on trailers again, and then bounced over south of Fairfield. went back on the dirt, and drove all the way down here to almost bliss. And then I think we’re going to throw these machines back on the darn trailers and roll over just to skip. There’s just too much pavement and highway and stuff. And we’re going to go down to a fence pole in the Owyhee region, which is awesome, and help backcountry hunters and anglers out, pull some derelict fence off of our public lands. The point of this whole thing is to just talk about access and public lands and see what’s out there, right? So as you know, I’ve been talking like a mash cat on roadless rule rescission and travel management rule revision for quite a while now. And going out on Idaho’s public lands, our public lands, the terrain and everything, like it’s, it’s just awesome. Wickedly steep. And plenty of people around, you know, but just brought up a bunch of good feelings. But not having that bull tag in my pocket allowed me to really focus on the road. And brothers and sisters, let me tell you, there is a hell of a lot of road across our public lands. So, you know, we’ve been talking about this number 370,000 miles of public roads on public land. Well, if you pull up your map, and we were using OnX Off-Road and OnX Hunt. I mean, there’s sections of BLM where there’s so many roads on the map, it’s confusing visually, route planning-wise. And then when you’re on the landscape driving through it, there’s a bunch more roads that are not on the map, user-generated roads, or just something that is derelict or whatever. I mean, it’s crazy. There are so… many roads and trails out there and we were keeping you know this these can-ams are like full-size vehicles uh these big defenders uh and they’re not that big but they’re they’re too wide for like your off-road trail designation they’re you’re still in your like your four by four jeep category high clearance vehicle so really that’s open to any full-size vehicle should you dare and And in many ways, we weren’t doing anything wild and crazy, but there’s just some sections of road that would be very scary in my full-size truck because they’re old, narrow, winding mine roads that go over very high passes with very steep drops on the side. And then there’s other sections like this one through Little City Rocks where it would just beat the hell out of you. Just slow going, not fun, in my opinion. So Tate Morgan, Sons of Smokey, they really made their name off the fact that they do the largest public lands cleanups, trash pickups in North America. I covered it on our YouTube channel last summer. Extremely awesome. Gambler 500, the whole crew, the whole community, big, wild, diverse crowd coming out, having tons of fun. Just fun. But they’re also doing the stewardship work of just clearing trash off of public lands. And some of it’s big and nasty and certainly says, boy, a professional should come out and do this. They kind of throw that back in people’s faces. And the volunteers, the end users of our public lands are also the stewards of our public lands. And they’re not waiting for Ranger Rick to pop out from behind a tree and come clean up a bunch of trash. We started picking up trash on this trip. And, you know, by and large, it wasn’t a very trashy route. You know, we were pretty far away from population centers, so your illegal dumpers aren’t up there dumping couches and stuff like that. But, you know, Coors Light cans, I’d say, were predominant out there. Bush Light in a couple areas. Only one Michelob Ultra. Go figure. A couple of Coors Yellow Bellies. You know, the list goes on. But, you can’t really get anywhere if you’re going to really focus on picking up every single bit of trash. I had the intent of marking every road that’s not on the map because the notice of intent for travel management rule revision says that they’re going to do a survey and they want to survey and make sure That, you know, all the roads that people use are open. And then there’s this expectation of maintaining those to the public standard, right? And I dropped a post on Instagram the other day and people were like, oh, Idaho roads are crap. I’ll tell you, this 300 mile route that we’re not done yet, still got 100 miles left to go. I’m recording from the cab of the Can-Am. These roads have been phenomenal. And then there’s just obviously some that… You really, really, really need a serious reason to go over. But the expectation of having anybody maintain these things to where anybody can go over them is just insane. Insane. I mean, we came across signposts in the desert where you’re like, why, why, why do we have a Bureau of Land Management signpost out here? you know, boat ramps and public bathrooms that have to be maintained in the absolute middle of nowhere on a reservoir that has no water in it, right? It’s a changing landscape and very revelatory trip for me. And again, it’s not over. But I will tell you, if we tried to get this far, we’ve done this in four and a half days, maybe five days. And just the act of stopping and dropping a pin on every user-generated road, this trip would have taken two weeks. No exaggeration. That’s just pinning roads that are not showing up on the map as legal roads. Pretty, pretty wild. I’m going to get on with the news here, kids. I could talk about this for a long time. We are putting it up on the Meat Eater YouTube channel. Pretty wild. I will tell you, just being honest, I made this comment to old Garrett Smith, old Dirt. I did a lot of driving around in places where I was wishing I was in elk camp. And as far as just overlanding for the sake of overlanding, it would be a seasonal thing for me. Because I guarantee you if I was sitting in elk camp, I wouldn’t be wishing I was on a cross-mountainous range dirt road car camping trip instead. All right. I’m sounding a little hoarse today because I’ve been sucking dirt for days. Executive orders. You might have heard by now, the Trump administration announced an executive order with implications for sportsmen and women across the country. The order is known as reinvigorating America’s hunting heritage and does a couple of different things. For one, It aims to expand public access with a provision to encourage easements and land exchanges to create access to previously landlocked federal land. Thumbs up. It improves access by stating the intent to allow hunting in Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho and the Castle Mountains National Monument in Florida. Some folks aren’t going to be happy about that. At Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, we pushed to maintain hunting access at Castle Mountain when it was designated by the Obama administration in 2016. And some hunting was maintained, but we lost, I can’t remember it now, 20,000 or 90,000 acres. I know that’s a big range. And we’ve been working constantly trying to get it back, including having a bill in Congress to get that hunting access back. But that one went nowhere. So both of these things are good things. I’ll tell you just from my time in Idaho, this Craters of the Moon National Monument situation, not including hunting as a historic use, is a huge reason as to why people do not trust monument designations. Because just like every monument, that one was made by bringing all the user groups to the table. There was a basic understanding that hunting would be included. at least in some portion of Craters of the Moon. If you’ve ever been there, it’s super, super awesome, lava flow country, and you should go and check it out. Some of it would just not be conducive for hunting. A lot of the other parts definitely have quail and chukar and Hungarian partridge and sage grouse and big nasty mule deer elk out there in the desert. staring at people’s alfalfa fields, so it would be a good thing to have hunting out there. The executive order also prioritizes using public volunteers to manage invasive species. My assumption is, like, the mountain goat situation in Grand Teton National Park, invasive pythons in Big Cypress National Preserve down there in Florida. Lots of details to come on this. Okay, so we’re talking broad scope. The executive order mandates a review of high-demand river access lotteries on Forest Service land. This one’s pretty funny. It’s like a nod to hunting tag draws. Many of you probably don’t know that there’s a lottery, just like big game draws, to go down certain rivers that get a lot of use and often have sensitive ecosystems. You get a float permit out of your lottery, get a bunch of buddies together. It’s super, super fun. Executive order mentions reducing movement barriers and improving connectivity for wildlife migration corridors. Big thumbs up there. Big mention of lead ammunition and tackle. Nobody really knows exactly what it means. Obviously, we’re not going to start shooting lead for waterfowl. This is one of those political football issues. We’ve covered it a bunch, a bunch, a bunch. Please use copper ammunition if you’re in, you know, one of these very relatively scarce areas where you maybe have a desert sheep tag. where a California condor could come down and eat on it. Those situations where an individual can impact the population. Now, a lot of this, interestingly enough, would be better served if the roadless rule remained intact, and it would be better served if we maintained clear guard rails on our travel management rule. So largely good, lots to figure out. I’d say the admin kind of hit this one out of the park, and truly this executive order was written in a much, much better way than a lot of previous executive orders. Moving on, north to Alaska. An Alaska teenager survived multiple days and nights in the Bering Sea after a fishing skiff capsized off the coast of a remote Siberian village. The 15-year-old survivor had been fishing for halibut with his older brother and their cousin when the boat capsized. Tragically, the other boys did not survive the ordeal, with one of them drowning and the other one, I think, not being recovered. In total, the 15-year-old, who did survive, was lost at sea for nearly three days in frigid water. He’s one hell of a tough kid. Jumping over to academia. There’s been a push in recent years to put numbers on the values of recreational opportunities. The logic of doing so is simple. When extractive industries talk about the economics of their operations, we can bring the economic impact of other uses of public lands and wildlife to the table too. That’s one way of saying it. The other way of saying it is, if we are going to look at the economic value of anything that happens on our public lands, There’s a good argument to assign economic value to every other thing out there. So there’s just a level way of talking about things. It’s like math. On that note, researchers at the University of Wyoming just released a natural wealth valuation that puts the collective value of just Wyoming’s elk, mule deer and pronghorn at six billion dollars. Associate Professor Jake Hotchard says that this evaluation is a little bit different from other economic impact studies in that it includes the costs of the wildlife, such as the annual fish and game budget, that it accounts both for the present and future value to society of the state’s big game populations. It also provides rationale for doubling down on safeguarding those populations. Quote, if we invest in a migration corridor today, That’s going to create some additional value every year going forward. His findings have yet to be peer reviewed. And while I’m largely a fan of this kind of work because it like gives people something tangible, if they’re not directly associated, I think anybody who is directly associated has their layers of dirt and sand and blood under your fingertips from really being in there on our public resources, wildlife, water, You know that invaluable is the only way to put this down because you get your recreation dollar, you get your therapy dollar, you get your grocery dollar, you get your exercise dollar, mental health all wrapped into one. And then you tie, in many cases, certainly for me, all the generations together. through what many would call like sporting heritage. You know, this is something that we do as a family. This is how we bring people into our family, our culture, how we cook, all the things. So it’s very, very hard to calculate. But good work over there at University of Wyoming. jumping across the border to her Canadian friends. The escalating trade war between the U.S. and Canada may soon create another casualty, American hunters traveling north of the border. Last week, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt issued a series of governmental responses to recent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Most of them were internal economic initiatives, but one in particular stood out. Holt’s office stated that the government could, quote, As someone who loves Canada, I can say that I would hate to see a ban like this go into effect, but the impact would be way worse for local outfitters and for the revenue of Canadian wildlife agencies. Debbie Norton of Oxbow Adventures in New Brunswick told the CBC that blocking Americans from buying hunting licenses would be crippling for her business. She went on, quote, Over 90% of business in the hunting and fishing outfitter industry in the province comes from Americans. A ban would have a tremendous impact, particularly in rural New Brunswick, because that’s where the industry operates. American participation in New Brunswick hunts has grown significantly since COVID-19, According to the CBC, the number of non-resident moose and deer licenses has almost tripled in the last five years. The province doesn’t track non-resident bear tags, but black bears are a huge draw for hunters to go up north. Man, we all know that public wildlife does not see three-strand barbed wire fences or international borders. We’re all connected on this North American continent here. If you’ve never been up anywhere from the Yukon down to the border, Canada’s got amazing opportunities in the hunting and fishing space. Gorgeous. A new study by Scottish biologists is demonstrating the ways that sea lice from salmon farming operations can escape containment and get into wild salmon migration streams. The scientists tracked the lice from farming operations near the Isle of Skye along river and ocean currents and extending into the travel routes of wild salmon smolt. They showed that this was a problem not just from a single farm that had containment failures, but instead from a number of different farms, all contributing to a larger buildup on these migration routes. The lice numbers were highest along the coast, and so they actually threatened sea trout more than salmon because trout spend more of their life cycle in shallower coastal waters. Most of the time, wild fish are less susceptible to lice because they can swim freely, making it hard for larval lice to attach to them. But if concentrations of lice larvae get high enough in the wild, they could attach to passing fish in significant numbers. Fish lice are actually a kind of crustacean and have evolved to eat the skin and blood of their fish hosts. Once they infect farm fish, they can wipe out an entire operation by causing permanent lesions, and often the cures for lice infestations are worse than the disease. Sea lice have also developed a resistance to the most common compounds used to kill them, which also damage the salmon themselves. Farmers can add chemicals that prevent the lice from molting, but that same chemical often spreads to nearby wild crabs, shrimp, and lobsters and prevents them from molting as well. Moving on to the black bear desk. As our nation’s black bears, the American black bear, keep packing on the pounds in preparation for winter denning, Bear conflict news shows no sign of slowing down. Last month, a New Mexico man was killed by a black bear that had broken into his home. Only the second black bear-related death in New Mexico in the last hundred years. Colorado has already seen 10 black bear attacks this year. Last week, Kathleen Barron, camper in the Rio Grande National Forest in Colorado, was awakened by something crashing into the outside of her tent. Spoiler alert, black bear. That something turned out to have a big set of jaws. which bit her through the fabric of the tent before she punched the animal in the face with her free hand. She told the Colorado Sun, quote, and that’s when he growled and let go. I didn’t pull my arm out of his mouth. He just let go of it. Barron is an experienced outdoors woman who says she didn’t have any food inside the tent. She’s also a medic, and so even though she said her arm felt like an elephant sat on it, she was able to assess the injury and drive to get help. Although the bite was serious, doctors expect her to make a full recovery. Now, this attack happened at 5.30 in the morning. Over in Durango, Colorado, another bear ruined someone’s night by opening a window that had been left open just a crack to let in some fresh air. At 2 a.m., the bear forced to open the window and crashed through a window screen, landing on the bed of a 17-year-old girl. The girl wisely huddled down underneath her blankets as the bear clawed at her. The bear left once, then returned, and then got out of there for good. CPW District Wildlife Manager Luke Clancy told the press, quote, Based on what we know happened in this encounter, the victim is very lucky she had multiple blankets covering her when the bear swiped at her. We’re going to dig up some historical data and see what the trends say here. Typically, and I know this is true across the West right now, but we are seeing, you know, berry crop failures due to drought and other factors. Harder to get food, bears are more stressed, more active. Tale as old as time. Jumping over to the archaeology desk, where Chinese scientists have recently made big discoveries about the Denisovans, a mysterious hominid who lived from about 200,000 years ago to around 30,000 years ago, overlapping and integrating with anatomically modern humans in what’s now Asia. Until recently, all we knew about the Denisovans came from DNA analysis. We knew that they had dark hair and dark skin, and that they were shorter and stockier than Homo sapiens and more similar to Neanderthals. Notably, both Neanderthal and Denisovans had brains roughly as big as ours, so they were likely pretty bright. I know you’re thinking right now, just because you got a brain as big as yours doesn’t mean you’re smart. Now what’s so exciting about this new find is that we finally have artifacts made by Denisovans along with their remains, and it turns out that we have a whole lot in common. Along with arm bones, skull fragments, and teeth, archaeologists also found stone and antler tools and weapons. Turns out that the Denisovans hunted water buffalo, red deer, sika deer, and the gar, which is an enormous relative of the American bison. The same site also held animal bones with the cracking patterns that mean Denisovans did something else I love, which is eat bone marrow. The cave where these artifacts were found is in southwest China. showing that Denisovans had a much wider distribution than we thought until now. Most of the other relevant sites are further north and west. I’m looking forward to more archaeology news coming out of China before too long. Several other Stone Age sites have been discovered there in the past, including one that held wooden tools that are 300,000 years old. If you think that’s a long way back, consider the fossilized feather discovered recently by scientists in Montana. which date all the way back to the Mesozoic era, 66 million years ago. The feather was almost perfectly preserved inside a theropod coprolite. We’ve covered coprolites before, we’re going to do it again because they’re awesome. Coprolite is fossilized poop, in this case, fossilized dinosaur poop. The find is particularly amazing because the feather is anatomically modern, meaning that it has the same structure of many feathers fluttering around today, with a central quill and veins extending outward from it. What’s even more amazing is that fish scales from a gar were also found in the feathers, likely left over from the bird’s last meal, before it also became a meal. It was a dog-eat-dog world back then. Or a dinosaur-eat-bird-fish-eat-world-eat. Yes. You know what I’m saying. This find is a major advance for paleontology. And a good reminder, you are what you eat. And somebody could be making assumptions about what you are. If you don’t clean up that diet, you’re going to be looking at your coprolites, dude. That’s all I got for you this week. Thank you so much for listening. And remember to write in to askcal, that’s askcal at themeateater.com. Also, I think by the time you hear this, we’re going to be almost at the very, very end of our forged and found auction over at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Please go over there, get some bid ins. We had a bunch of buddies, very musically talented buddies, come out of the woodwork and chip in some tickets and meet and greets and sign merch. Really cool folks. You’ll love them. They’re on my playlist. So, you know, I’m hip. Yeah, check her out. Get a membership. Thanks a bunch. Talk to you next week. Write in. Let me know what’s going on in your neck of the woods. Love you. Bye. Thank you.
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