00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to this bonus episode of Backwoods University. As always this is a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. And a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast. And in this bonus episode, this bonus conversation, we’re going to be focusing pretty heavy on the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both portion of this show as we’ll be talking to a woman by the name of Maria Davidson who is a large carnivore biologist and specialist for the SCI Foundation. We talk about all things bears, grizzly bears, black bears, social dynamics, hunting issues, anti-hunting problems, all about it. We even have some Africa sneak into the conversation. I love having the opportunity to do these bonus episodes when the opportunity arises, and this was a perfect one. So without further ado, here’s Maria.
00:00:53
Speaker 2: Let’s get into it.
00:00:54
Speaker 3: My name is Maria Davidson. I’m the North American Large Carnivore Program Manager for Safari Club International Foundation.
00:01:03
Speaker 2: How long have you been in that role?
00:01:05
Speaker 4: Oh, gosh.
00:01:06
Speaker 3: I started with SCIF in spring of 22, so a little over.
00:01:13
Speaker 4: Four years now.
00:01:14
Speaker 3: Prior to coming to SCIF, I was the program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the majority of that position being about the Louisiana black bear. So I managed their black bear program, which included for the bulk of my career, the recovery of federally listed subspecies of American black bear. It’s the only one that’s ever been listed. So during my tenure, we launched through the recovery plan. I worked with U.S. Fish, other federal agencies, private landowners, and NGOs. And we recovered the Louisiana black bear and then subsequently it was delisted. And right before I retired from LDWF, I had worked the department all the way through the Coast Delisting Monitoring Plan, which has to be in place prior to delisting. So we had seven years of that, of management activities we had agreed to prior to the delisting. And then when I finished, turned in my last report, I retired and went to work for Safari Club International Foundation. but primarily because I developed a relationship with SCI and SCIF. After the bear was delisted in Louisiana, as is often the case, you’re aware, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was sued by multiple individuals and organizations on that delisting.
00:02:46
Speaker 4: They were sued twice, once in Washington, D.C., and once.
00:02:50
Speaker 3: In the middle district of the federal system in Louisiana. Safari Club International intervened in both lawsuits and really did ride in on a white horse and save the day. So during that process, it went on for approximately two years.
00:03:07
Speaker 4: I worked fairly closely with.
00:03:09
Speaker 3: With the litigation department within SCI, and I thought, this is it.
00:03:14
Speaker 4: This is where I’m supposed to be.
00:03:16
Speaker 3: I really felt I was with like minds and kindred spirits and fighting for the rights of hunters and basically just doing what’s right for wildlife management and wildlife conservation felt really good to me. And I was ending a career at LDWF. I’d been there 28 years and kind of ready to move on. And it just seemed like the perfect place to kind of put a pin in that and move on. So that’s exactly what I did during that process with SCI.
00:03:46
Speaker 4: I spent some.
00:03:47
Speaker 3: Time with their administration. And as what I was reminded just a couple of months ago, during an email exchange with the SCI CEO, Laird Hamblin, I ended my email with a PS, I’m going to be working for you in two years. And I actually, it only took about a year and a half, and they created this large carnivore position within the foundation, within the conservation program, and here I am. Yeah.
00:04:17
Speaker 1: Let me just tell you, you came out the gate talking about a subject that is near and dear to my heart personally, and then we’ll speak to directly the people that listen to this, not just Backwoods University, but this entire Bear Grease podcast feed within MeatEater. they’ve heard Clay talk about the black bear and kind of its whole story, particularly in Arkansas. And then I did an episode about a year ago on this show, talking about the black bear in Mississippi. And in that episode, I talked about kind of the story of the black bear in Arkansas and the story of the black bear in Louisiana and And in my opinion, from a wildlife conservationist point of view, there’s a lot of exciting things happening for black bears in Mississippi right now. We’ve had just, I think it was two weeks ago, there was a confirmed black bear sighting. I mean, like, they’re still culturally new enough down here that people just kind of get all wound up when they see them. But there was a bear come through less than, five minutes from my house. And in my lifetime, that has never been the case. So we have this growing black bear population, mostly along the Mississippi River, which of course, you know, we got a lot of those bears swam over from Louisiana, which you know, but we’ve talked about the recovery of black bears on this show and on this podcast feed quite a bit. So you’re coming out hot with good topics.
00:05:51
Speaker 4: Black bears are cool. Well, bears are cool. At least that, you know, I think so.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a topic I’m pretty familiar with, as you can imagine. When I started working on the bear program in Louisiana, that was 1999, somewhere in there. And so I worked with some of the original bear biologists from Arkansas. Rick Eastridge was there when I was there, and also Mississippi, and saw that whole progression. You know, the Louisiana black bear is a subspecies that extends into Mississippi. It does extend into Arkansas and.
00:06:33
Speaker 4: East Texas specifically.
00:06:35
Speaker 3: When US Fish listed the Louisiana black bear, however, they did not cross that Arkansas border. So Arkansas bears were never federally listed, you know, so they kind of had it a little bit easier. But, you know, it’s been interesting. As you can imagine, bear world and bear biologist world is fairly small. It’s a fairly small group of individuals, relatively speaking. And black bear population growth is not new or unique to Louisiana, Arkansas, or Mississippi. It is happening everywhere. The other thing that’s happening and has been for quite some time, population goals and objectives are not being met in many states in the southeast and the east.
00:07:22
Speaker 4: Because harvest is just not keeping up.
00:07:24
Speaker 3: And left to their own devices and suitable habitats, bear populations can grow relatively quickly. You know, anti-hunting groups love to talk about.
00:07:35
Speaker 4: How slow to reproduce.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: They are and such. And I guess if you compare them to smaller species or ungulates, that is in fact true. But over the course of a decade or even five years, that growth can happen at 20%, 15%, relatively high. And that’s what’s been going on in the South and the East as well. Yeah.
00:07:58
Speaker 1: It’s interesting you say that as well, because I’ve had some long conversations with Mississippi’s black bear biologists about that very subject. And You couldn’t be more correct. One about, I mean, just kind of the controversial nature of the species. But then when you hear these things get thrown around about how they can be so slow to recover, they compare it to like this like very high fecundity species. Like if you compare it to a whitetail deer that, you know, they can start dropping fawns in like the first year, I think it is, then sure. But I have no data to support this next statement, but my opinion here in Mississippi, it feels like we’re hitting some sort of inflection point with black bears. I don’t think we are just exploding, but we’re having a pretty strong growth in the population that’s been very encouraging to see. And I think especially Arkansas has had a bear season for a while. Louisiana, this will be their second.
00:09:00
Speaker 2: Year, I believe, with the bear season? Third year.
00:09:04
Speaker 1: I really do think in my lifetime, to be conservative about it, I think we’ll see some sort of season in Mississippi, just at the rate that the population seems to be growing.
00:09:14
Speaker 3: You know, bears are an interesting beast for many different reasons, but from the management perspective, one of the things that drives it is there is almost nobody on this planet who has a neutral opinion about bears.
00:09:32
Speaker 4: Or it’s just not been my experience.
00:09:34
Speaker 3: You either, you know, you have people who absolutely want to kill them all and you have people who.
00:09:41
Speaker 4: Want to love them all.
00:09:43
Speaker 3: And obviously those are disparate things and it’s difficult and taxing And challenging to be the management authority in the middle of those two very different opinions and putting blinders on and making decisions. decisions based on what is best for the management of the population within the structure that.
00:10:07
Speaker 4: You’re existing in.
00:10:09
Speaker 3: You know, to speak to hunting bears in Mississippi, you know, I can remember back to going into Mississippi and doing den.
00:10:17
Speaker 4: Work on my own bears.
00:10:18
Speaker 3: As you said, we had collared bears swim the river. I had collared bears oftentimes in Mississippi, and they didn’t have anybody.
00:10:25
Speaker 4: To do the bear work.
00:10:26
Speaker 3: So we would go over there and do our den visits over there. And an individual bear showing up in Wilkinson.
00:10:32
Speaker 4: County was a big deal and newsworthy. And of course, it’s not anymore.
00:10:37
Speaker 3: The other interesting thing that’s going to happen, and I think this is a guess, but it’s an educated guess based on my past experience, Mississippi has far better habitat for bears and much more suitable habitat than Louisiana does. So while Louisiana bears, I think, are going to be, for the most part, held within the Mississippi Alluvial Valley and in those areas adjacent to the Mississippi River and then down on the coast, Mississippi has got, in terms of just acreage, so much more. So once they really get kind of a toehold in those individual counties, they’re going to really expand, and they’re going to do so relatively rapidly. I’m sure you’ve been in those areas before. You know, the road densities are very low, relatively speaking. You know, the pressure, the human pressure is very low, relatively speaking, to other bear areas in the south and the southeast, which is going to allow for more bears. Just like Louisiana. Louisiana doesn’t have a huge number of bears. but they do have enough bears to sustain a harvest. And the one thing about bear populations, like many other wildlife species, you can monitor it. It’s just math at that point. If you monitor it appropriately, you can apply statistical models that’ll tell you how many you can offtake every year.
00:12:04
Speaker 4: It’s just math at that point.
00:12:06
Speaker 3: If you input no emotion and politics or anything else into it, but you know that you can offtake 10%, it’s not hard to do.
00:12:17
Speaker 4: So you just have to factor.
00:12:18
Speaker 3: In the societal norms and desires for the state or the management authority you’re working for. And even if Mississippi decided they had.
00:12:28
Speaker 4: 1,000 bears now, you could still easily harvest.
00:12:31
Speaker 3: Anywhere from 5% to 10% of those bears with no impact to the population.
00:12:36
Speaker 4: You would still continue to see a population growth.
00:12:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:12:41
Speaker 1: It’s so interesting talking about the difference. dynamics of it. And anecdotally, you might enjoy this fact, the first bear workup that I ever got to go on was a bear that had come from Louisiana. So my friend who’s the biologist was in contact with Louisiana wildlife and they had said, you know, I think she’d been over there for a while and they.
00:13:04
Speaker 2: Just switched her collar.
00:13:05
Speaker 1: Like they took the Louisiana collar off and they put a Mississippi collar on her because she had been over there for quite some time. But that was my, my first ever hands-on experience with a, uh, black bear was with a Louisiana collared bear, which I thought was, I thought was cool. Oh, it’s I, for someone like me, right. It’s you grow up, I grew up in central Mississippi. And so like, as you could imagine a big part of like, when you’re going through your state history classes in middle school and high school, of course, you hear the story over and over again of Theodore Roosevelt comes down and bear hunts with Holt Collier and You just hear, and you hear all these stories, but you’re like, nobody sees them anymore. You know, when I was young until fast forward to now, like, like we were saying here, I still live in central Mississippi. I’m a couple of hours away from the Delta. So bears are new where I live, but you go to something like Wilkinson County, some of those other areas that you referenced in the Delta and bears are not rare there, which.
00:14:07
Speaker 2: I think is just incredible. stupid cool.
00:14:09
Speaker 1: You know, it’s just, I mean, like you’re, you’re watching wildlife conservation happen in front of our eyes.
00:14:14
Speaker 2: That’s the phrase that, that I like to say.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: But what is interesting is people don’t seem to fall in an in-between with bears. They either love or they hate them because the, the anti-hunting part of it, I don’t, I don’t support it, but I’m not surprised by it. I’m just like, I guess the one that I’ve had to wrap my head around the most here is, uh, kind of, there’s, there’s a lot of the folks, like you alluded to it earlier. There’s some folks that they’re like, kill every.
00:14:40
Speaker 2: Single one of them. We don’t want them. They don’t need to be here.
00:14:44
Speaker 1: There’s this ongoing fake piece of news that floats around that the Mississippi department of wildlife is, is bringing them in and releasing them. I’m sure you’ve probably dealt with some of that as well, but, but that side of it, uh, still boggles me because, you know, I’m over here, like I’m excited about it. I’m like, you got a growing native wildlife population. you’re going to have a new hunting opportunity in the near future. Like what’s not to be happy about? But that whole kill every one of them mentality is, that still to this day is the hardest one for me to wrap my head around. I can’t figure out why these folks aren’t more excited, which most of them are. It’s some outliers that aren’t, but it does exist in some people.
00:15:27
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think having spent my entire career, so now basically my entire life in this industry and field, I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. At the most basic, let’s face it, predators have always been viewed to some extent that way by humans, just generationally, historically, for whatever reason, whether it be fear, competition, whatever. So there’s that component to it. But there’s a newer component now, and I believe it to be political, and it’s people believing that we are forcing these bears onto their properties through some type.
00:16:10
Speaker 4: Of government overreach.
00:16:12
Speaker 3: Why they insist on the narrative that the bears were brought there by helicopters in the middle of the night and that kind of stuff, because that just reiterates their point, right? That we have somehow infringed upon their rights. And again, I don’t know that there’s any way to combat that.
00:16:30
Speaker 4: I’ve seen it my entire career.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: The only thing I’ve ever known to do is kind of let the truth set you free and, you know, always remain as black and white and apolitical and just, you know, to the bones. This is the way things are. And be completely transparent and completely honest. And one of the reasons that I think we were successful in Louisiana and Mississippi for delisting the bears is we stayed true to that thought process. You know, we really proved the point that the Endangered Species Act, if left to how it is meant and how it is written, and you work it that way, it actually does work. We went into the process apolitical. We didn’t choose sides. We had these core missions and these recovery plans and management goals in place. And then we worked together to get them that way. You know, we were not combative with the federal government.
00:17:27
Speaker 4: We worked hand in hand.
00:17:29
Speaker 3: The recovery coordinator for the Louisiana Black Bear lived in the same town as I lived in.
00:17:33
Speaker 4: We worked together all the time.
00:17:36
Speaker 3: And the recovery of the Louisiana Black Bear to me, is more than just a success story for the conservation of that individual species. In my mind, it should be held up of, you know, see, it can work. The Endangered Species Act can work if you work it the way it’s intended to work and if people actually come to it with the best of intentions and not this future mindset of, well, we want it recovered, but we never want it hunted. You know, to me, I do find it strange, and I agree with you. What you see today at its core becomes people with a hyper focus of no matter how many of them we have, we will use every excuse in the book.
00:18:18
Speaker 4: To not hunt them. They shouldn’t be hunted.
00:18:22
Speaker 3: And I just find that odd and fascinating because the vast majority of these people are not vegans. They’re not vegetarians. And many of them even… believe in the sustainable use and hunting of other species. But when it comes to bears or even a larger thing, predators, they just can’t wrap their mind around it. And since they don’t want to do it, they think nobody else should. And I find that harmful to any type of collaborative recovery effort and, and meeting goals and objectives for, for basically any predator species, whether it be, you know, you can name them and they’re all controversial bears, mountain lions, wolves, they’re all controversial.
00:19:06
Speaker 4: And it’s because of that, that specific mindset.
00:19:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no doubt. It is, it’s fascinating.
00:19:13
Speaker 1: And it’s one of those things, it’s like, I don’t know if I’ll ever really have the answer to it, nor do I know if it’ll ever really stop. You know, you bring up the endangered species act and, and definitely I would a hundred percent agree with you. What happened with the black bears down here is if you, if you look at the, the endangered species act for, for what it is and for its original purpose, then I completely agree. Like that’s an example of like, this can work if it is used the way that it’s intended to be used. I would think where a lot of people get frustrated with the Endangered Species Act is another bear species that comes up all the time, which is the grizzly bear, which I’m sure you know all too well because when we originally started communicating about you coming on, I think the first person that reached out to me from the SCI Foundation said that you had been on some sort of collaring grizzly trip where y’all collared like 20 grids or something like that?
00:20:15
Speaker 4: I did.
00:20:16
Speaker 3: So I live in Wyoming, so the grizzly bear stuff is pretty near and dear to my heart. But the project you’re referring to is a predator prey project that we are doing in Spitsisi Wilderness Park in northern British Columbia. And I believe when you were speaking to our marketing person, I was still in British Columbia.
00:20:37
Speaker 4: You know, that area is so remote.
00:20:39
Speaker 3: That trapping bears is not really the way to go when you need to deploy collars. So we launched a two-week effort where we were helicopter darting bears in order to deploy all of those radio collars. So that’s exactly where I was.
00:20:53
Speaker 4: I was in the Spitsisi.
00:20:54
Speaker 3: Wilderness Park, helicopter darting grizzly bears, and I got to tell you, it did not suck.
00:21:00
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah. Now, let me just move to the side.
00:21:03
Speaker 1: Everything else I planned to ask you, and let’s just talk completely about helicopter darting grizzly bears like if that sounds that just sounds like a good time i mean i’m also enthused like and fascinated by what you know what value came out of that from a you know wildlife biology standpoint or research standpoint but it also just sounds really fun if i’m being honest.
00:21:28
Speaker 3: Well somebody texted me earlier today and said oh my friends think you have the like coolest job ever. And I said, well, while I appreciate that, they probably don’t see that 95% of my life is spent in front of my computer, like probably everybody else on the planet. Right. But, The project in BC is a predator-prey project. We wanted to look at the impact grizzly bears were having on those important ungulate species, most importantly caribou, you know, and they have caribou, moose, sheep in that area. So we were going about it two different ways, hoping that the data can inform each other. One would be a special GPS video collar that we put on these bears.
00:22:13
Speaker 4: So they’re wearing a video collar.
00:22:15
Speaker 3: That comes on during the calving season and the rut. So it will inform us specifically what those bears are doing during that timeframe. But when we capture the bears, we take blood and hair. And there’s some fairly complicated analysis you can do on stable isotopes in their blood and hair that can tell you what those animals have eaten over the past weeks as well as the past months.
00:22:41
Speaker 4: So when we go back.
00:22:42
Speaker 3: And we take those collars off and put another collar on there, we’ll take another batch of samples of blood and hair and then overlay those two. So we’ll have the collar data and the blood data and hair data to complement or contradict each other, whichever the case ends up being. And that will inform us not only what component of their diet is meat, because as you know, they’re not 100% carnivorous, but what kind of meat it is. You know, are they eating marmots? Are they eating caribou calves? Are they eating adult caribou? Some of those those tests they can do are pretty rigorous now and pretty technical. So like if you get blood and hair during the calving season, there’s some stable isotope tests out there that purport to tell you if that meat is actually a nursing ungulate. You know, it’s just the signature in the isotope itself. So it’s fascinating work and fun to do. And then, yeah, the whole thing of darting bears out of helicopters, just a great way to.
00:23:48
Speaker 4: Spend the day.
00:23:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say that is wildly fascinating, if I do say so myself.
00:23:56
Speaker 2: I say this.
00:23:57
Speaker 1: Next part knowing that it probably couldn’t be done, but still.
00:24:02
Speaker 2: So they’re video collars?
00:24:04
Speaker 4: Yes.
00:24:05
Speaker 2: Could you imagine?
00:24:06
Speaker 1: I understand immediately why this would be a hard no as an answer, but if you could take some of those videos and post them on the interwebs when you get something interesting, do you know how cool that would be?
00:24:18
Speaker 2: Oh, you will.
00:24:20
Speaker 4: We absolutely will.
00:24:23
Speaker 1: Oh, man.
00:24:24
Speaker 3: We don’t have any yet, or we, quite frankly, would have already done it. The video portion of the collar technology doesn’t upload. So a GPS collar uploads locations to a satellite, and then that location is downloaded back to us. So at any given time of the day, I can go on.
00:24:42
Speaker 4: My computer and see where those bears are.
00:24:44
Speaker 3: You know, for the last location that uploaded. But the video component of it is just store on board simply because of the battery requirement it would have taken to upload those videos onto, you know, up to a satellite. So I can’t access those videos until I get those collars back in my hot little hands. And yeah, I can’t wait.
00:25:06
Speaker 2: My goodness.
00:25:07
Speaker 1: I mean, I just think that would be some crazy cool video. I understand some people.
00:25:12
Speaker 4: I hope so. Stay tuned.
00:25:14
Speaker 1: I mean, where would you watch them at? Like when you get them, where would we be able to see them?
00:25:19
Speaker 3: SCIF has a YouTube channel and we’ll be uploading some of the videos to that. You’ll see some of them for sure. We’ll piece together some of that. We’re going to do, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to our convention in Nashville in January, but I will do a seminar on this project.
00:25:36
Speaker 4: And as part of that.
00:25:37
Speaker 3: We will upload a portion of those videos to that seminar.
00:25:42
Speaker 1: I’ve been to the convention before, and my wife and I are planning on coming this year.
00:25:48
Speaker 4: Great. Look, man, I’m there all week.
00:25:50
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:25:51
Speaker 2: No, that would be way cool.
00:25:53
Speaker 1: Isotopes can determine what they’re eating.
00:25:57
Speaker 3: Correct.
00:25:57
Speaker 2: That is wild.
00:25:59
Speaker 3: Well, you know, there’s so many tests that can be done on, you know, like for instance, when they take hair and they look back at, you know, what do they, they’ve got drug tests that can look at hair and they can tell you how long.
00:26:11
Speaker 4: Ago you were taking specific drugs.
00:26:13
Speaker 3: I don’t even know all of the different medical technology they can use on, on the air alone.
00:26:19
Speaker 4: But once you.
00:26:20
Speaker 3: Combine the blood in the hair, you not only get short term, but you get longer term as well, which is super helpful.
00:26:26
Speaker 1: What’s the long-term benefit? hope of this study? And then like, how long are y’all planning on doing this? Like how long are y’all planning on monitoring these bears in this way?
00:26:36
Speaker 3: Because what we really need is the video data in there to inform what those bears are doing, we will go back.
00:26:45
Speaker 4: In the fall.
00:26:46
Speaker 3: We’ll dart those bears again, change their collars out, and then begin assimilating all of the data off of the collars that we have in hand. We’ll let those bears go through the dent because in October, within another month or so, they’re going to be denting. And then they won’t be out again until April. So everything will just kind of be on sitting around clittling our thumbs, waiting for the bears to wake up.
00:27:09
Speaker 4: So in April, when they come back.
00:27:10
Speaker 3: Out, you know, they will immediately go into the spring and they’ll start with just vegetation. But it doesn’t take them long to switch to meat if that’s what they’re going to do. And then specifically, it will cover the time frame of calving season. And what we do is the video portion of that collar obviously can’t run.
00:27:34
Speaker 4: All the time.
00:27:34
Speaker 3: It would run out of battery immediately. So you have to program it for it to capture short bursts. So handling time of a carcass is maybe not well published, but it is a published known entity. So we’ve decided that if a bear could completely from start to finish take care of a caribou carcass, meaning from the time he starts actually chasing it to killing it, packing it around or whatever he’s going to do with it, and consume it, you need no more for sure than 45 minutes. And it, quite frankly, could be lower than that. So you program your cameras accordingly depending upon the season. So by the time a bear emerges from the den in April, somewhere in there, and then goes through calving season all the way through the end of June, beginning of July, we’ll go back out there the end of July-ish, somewhere in there in the summertime in 27, and grab those collars again. take another sample of hair and blood, and then that’s the end of that.
00:28:42
Speaker 4: Say goodbye, bears.
00:28:43
Speaker 3: And then we’ll have a fairly significant amount of data to be able to inform those questions.
00:28:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. That is wildly fascinating. I really do. I look forward to seeing some.
00:28:55
Speaker 3: Of that video.
00:28:55
Speaker 4: It won’t be long. It’ll be a relatively short turnaround.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: That’s way cool.
00:28:59
Speaker 1: Grizzlies, man, that talk about, like, I feel like, and this is anecdotal, this isn’t me basing this off of any sort of data. This is just me and my personal interest. I feel like both black bears and grizzly bears, they just.
00:29:16
Speaker 2: Seem to be culturally everywhere right now. At home, they’re growing.
00:29:21
Speaker 1: We already talked about that. And then grizz, you have this… It’s kind of a similar thing from what I’m looking at. You have this seemingly growing population… influx with the endangered species list you have some people that are like we should never hunt these things you have some people that are like we should shoot every one of them you have some people, you know, but I see some parallels with both species of bears, regardless of how different they are.
00:29:47
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:29:49
Speaker 3: They’re very, very similar to The opinions with grizzly bears may be a little stronger.
00:29:55
Speaker 4: Not maybe.
00:29:56
Speaker 3: I think they’re definitely a little stronger. And actually, I think they’re a little bit stronger from both sides of the argument. And from the anti-hunting side, it draws opinions internationally. You have people nationally and internationally that want to weigh into the fight in the courtroom over how they should be managed and locally managed. Those people have stronger opinions. But quite frankly, I think a grizzly bear population can have more of an impact on local communities than necessarily a black bear population can, again.
00:30:31
Speaker 4: Relatively speaking.
00:30:32
Speaker 3: But, you know, it’s interesting to me that, one, how similar they are, and two, how disparate those groups are such that they will assign this holier-than-thou group platform for a certain species like bears, but then they’ll say, but it’s okay to hunt whitetail deer, or it’s okay to hunt elk, but you can’t hunt bears. And they’re doing the same thing for black bears and grizzly bears.
00:31:02
Speaker 4: When you make an animal.
00:31:04
Speaker 3: A game species, like has been done now in Missouri, then Louisiana, then Florida, for a black bear, You begin to see that side that was just angry and they wanted to kill them all. That begins to lighten up because then bears, at least in their backyard, have some type of added value to their life. Even if it’s not economic, even if they’re not going to lease their property to a bear hunter for X number of dollars a year.
00:31:38
Speaker 4: It doesn’t matter.
00:31:39
Speaker 3: Now it’s a renewable resource area. that they can tap into while they may not draw a bear tag.
00:31:46
Speaker 4: They have the ability to put in for a bear tag.
00:31:49
Speaker 3: So I think it changes their mindset to some extent. And I’ve certainly seen it in more than one state. You know, I just traveled down to my home state of Louisiana where I attended the Acadiana Chapter Banquet. where they raffled the secretary’s tag for $ 18, 000. So, you know, I think people are interested in bear hunting. I think they want to pursue it. I think that it is going to provide value and added benefit to landowners.
00:32:21
Speaker 4: And that’s one of the things.
00:32:22
Speaker 3: That was, for me personally, it was very important because Louisiana is, is like many Southern states.
00:32:30
Speaker 4: It’s the majority privately owned.
00:32:32
Speaker 3: So these animals are living, recovering, thriving on private land. To some extent at the expense of the landowner sometimes. So when I was doing the recovery work and the entire time I was the bear program manager for Louisiana, when I worked with landowners and I worked with a lot of them, I was very honest.
00:32:54
Speaker 4: No, you cannot hunt them now.
00:32:57
Speaker 3: But in order for us to hunt them, we first have to recover them. In order for me to recover them, I have to know how many of them there are. In order for me to know how many of them there are, I have to get on your property.
00:33:11
Speaker 5: So they allowed access based on trust.
00:33:16
Speaker 4: They trusted that I would be good to my word.
00:33:19
Speaker 3: And, you know, I was meaning what I said in that once they were recovered and they were a game species in Louisiana.
00:33:27
Speaker 4: We would have a harvest.
00:33:28
Speaker 3: So for me personally, it’s really gratifying to see that that happened because I feel like I kept my part of the deal.
00:33:36
Speaker 4: You know, I was lying.
00:33:37
Speaker 3: To them all of these years that they in fact do have a harvest and that harvest is going to continue to be monitored and regulated such that bears will be sustainable in the future while allowing a legitimate opportunity for And what I mean by.
00:33:55
Speaker 4: That is you have those that say.
00:33:57
Speaker 3: Oh, 40 tags is too many.
00:33:59
Speaker 4: Well, you also have those that say 40 tags isn’t enough. You know, there’s a bear behind every tree and that kind of thing.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: So a legitimate opportunity is the opportunity allowed based on the data.
00:34:12
Speaker 4: And so, you know, a state has.
00:34:14
Speaker 3: spent the decades that Louisiana has spent collecting data, which is not a cheap thing. It has been an incredibly expensive thing, but it’s allowed them to provide legitimate opportunity.
00:34:28
Speaker 4: And to me, that’s worth the money.
00:34:30
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:34:31
Speaker 1: I mean, just going off of what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard from Hunter Satisfaction from Louisiana already, I heard somebody else, I don’t know if they want me to mention their name or not because they still work in the space, but they said the same kind of thing. They, you know, talking about the folks that wanted to kill all of them. They said, you wait, whenever you, whenever you open that up, they said, whenever you open that up, some of those guys will be the first people you see that if they draw a tag, they’ll be.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: Posing behind it, grinning from ear to ear.
00:35:00
Speaker 1: You know, it’s just like, there’s something about when you, when they actually have access to that and it now is a resource that There’s like a shift that takes place and the hate part of it kind of drifts away, which is preferred. It’s interesting for me because, again, I feel like I’m watching this. I feel like I’m still in the middle of this story here at home in Mississippi. I feel like I’m watching it happen.
00:35:27
Speaker 3: Mississippi is just a couple of decades behind Louisiana, you know, and I say a couple of decades, is it 20 years?
00:35:36
Speaker 4: I don’t know. Is it 12? I don’t know.
00:35:38
Speaker 3: I don’t, you know, I don’t know how many bears are in Mississippi, but I will, I’ve always said it. I stand by it today when Mississippi gets where they’re going in terms of bear numbers. They are going to so far surpass Louisiana. They’re going to have three to four times the number of bears Louisiana ever thought about having. They have better habitat and more of it. And that’s really all bears need. They need suitable habitat and just the time to meet that demand, right? And they will, for sure.
00:36:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I agree. And I look at that. I’m still excited about it.
00:36:13
Speaker 3: Well, it’s something to be excited about. And now in Louisiana, non-residents can put in.
00:36:18
Speaker 4: So that’s pretty cool.
00:36:20
Speaker 3: When a landowner that has been working with the bear program for 20 years can then lease his bear hunting lease and glean some money off of it, that’s a pretty big thing to me. You know, it’s important to me.
00:36:35
Speaker 4: It’s important to them.
00:36:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s added value.
00:36:40
Speaker 4: It’s added value over, over the years.
00:36:43
Speaker 3: You know, we always had between 40 and 60 females on the air every year. So that’s a, that’s a lot of dim work.
00:36:50
Speaker 4: And, Most of the time I was on kind of the.
00:36:53
Speaker 3: Same landowners year to year to year, but occasionally we had new ones. And I always, always, always invited the landowners and encouraged them to come. And not only to come, but to bring their kids and bring their wife and, you.
00:37:08
Speaker 4: Know, bring whomever. And they did. Oftentimes they did.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: And it never ceased to amaze me that when I could bring a landowner that through my interactions with them over the past whatever a little bit, they were somewhat negative about bears, you know, because bears destroyed their feeders and they chewed up, you know, their deer feeders and their deer stands and they got into their ag crops and, you know, all the things, all the things that people say about bears.
00:37:36
Speaker 4: But if you take them on a den visit.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: With their kids or their grandkids or their wives or whatever, And, you know, I kind of always went about it the same way. I’d dart the female and then, you know, pull the cubs out. And because I’m trying to change the collar on the female or whatever, I’d give the cubs to the landowner to hold. And, you know, you’re in charge of these until I can handle it and get back to what I’m doing or whatever. The shift in the mindset was pretty consistent among those that.
00:38:08
Speaker 6: Had somewhat of a negative thought process about bears and to, wait a minute, this is another wildlife resource that is using.
00:38:18
Speaker 4: My property, therefore I’m responsible.
00:38:21
Speaker 3: The shift in mindset was interesting to watch, and I really liked doing it. It was probably one of the better parts of my job, for sure.
00:38:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:38:31
Speaker 1: What’s interesting there is the parallels, again, because the bear program coordinator here in Mississippi, he’s a good friend of mine, and I’ve heard so many similar stories. I’m telling you very similar stories of going to do not some of them, not even den checks, just some of them, just like, you know, workups, um, that Barry’s caught in a trap and he’s going to put a collar on and same deal takes a person out that he says kind of bear averse, you know, like not, not straight up hate them, but like, they’re not just overly tickled that, you know, this bear has now showed up on their place, but he’s, he said he’s never had, he’s never had anybody walk away from that experience with, without a positive feeling towards bears.
00:39:10
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I can’t think of a single time where when I got done and we were talking afterwards, drinking a Coke or whatever, that they were still negative in any way. Then it became more about, well, where does this bear go and where does it live and when does it… leave my property and when does it come back? And then it was more into an information seeking and, well, how many bears are on my property and that kind of thing. And it was a very positive experience in my mind for everybody involved.
00:39:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, and that’s what it takes, which obviously everybody can’t go on a den trip, but I say it all the time on this particular show, it’s impossible to appreciate something that you don’t understand. And every single, I’ve yet to find an exception, every single wildlife conflict, any that involves bears, black bears, grizzly bears, anything, name a species, if there’s conflict… It all derives from a lack of understanding every time.
00:40:19
Speaker 3: You know, it’s interesting the parallels that you can look at and draw. In this project that we have in British Columbia, we’re working with First Nations. First Nations, as you know, they don’t have to follow the season. They can and do go and track bears, kill bears, that kind of thing for conflict or even the perception of conflict. So part of this project was to provide some higher level professional training to their wildlife guardians to allow chemical immobilization, safe handling techniques, and so on.
00:40:54
Speaker 4: So when we were.
00:40:56
Speaker 3: Up there, you just had to wade through the black bears. We were catching so many black bears, you had to shoo them away from the trap sites in order to get the trap set. But we did catch a grizzly bear. So when we started handling bears with First Nations, with these wildlife guardians that had a lifetime of wildlife experience hunting, including bears, but they had never handled a live bear. And the awe that they approached the live bear was palpable and visible. And I think it surprised even them because they all said to the man and individually to me in different times.
00:41:40
Speaker 4: I didn’t know. I’ve never touched a live bear.
00:41:43
Speaker 3: You know, so there’s a presence and to me an awe that goes with that, that they felt and they didn’t realize it was going to happen. And afterwards they were so all in.
00:41:56
Speaker 4: They were there first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It was amazing.
00:42:00
Speaker 3: It was inspiring to see, but I think almost everybody experiences that.
00:42:05
Speaker 4: Whether it be a black bear or a grizzly bear, they experience it for sure.
00:42:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. It just takes being willing to understand.
00:42:17
Speaker 2: The animal a little bit more.
00:42:19
Speaker 1: And you can take it as granular as you want to. It’s like if you take the same principle. I got into turkey hunting when I was young. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve done it. the more I understand turkeys as a species. Do I understand them completely?
00:42:35
Speaker 3: No.
00:42:35
Speaker 1: That’s why they still hoodwink me every spring. But the more that I understand that animal, the more I appreciate them. It’s not a far concept, and it’s not just bears. You take any hunter, the more they hunt them, the more they understand that animal, the more they appreciate that that animal is there. And the same would go to anything.
00:42:56
Speaker 3: Every elk hunter loves elk. Every mountain lion houndsman loves mountain lions.
00:43:03
Speaker 5: I mean, they just, they are so singularly focused on their species and not just the conservation of their species, but the fact that they want that species to persist and thrive.
00:43:15
Speaker 3: That’s the common denominator over all of them. And bear hunters are the same way.
00:43:21
Speaker 4: I mean, I don’t have to tell you, you know that.
00:43:23
Speaker 3: It’s a common misconception and a common, well, lie. I mean- Let’s face it, anti-hunting organizations flat out lie because they can’t.
00:43:32
Speaker 4: They can get away with it.
00:43:33
Speaker 3: And the lie that offends me the most is that hunters hate wildlife because it’s just flat out not true. And the other thing that really begins to offend me and I have a hard time with of this hunting is amoral and unethical. There’s nothing amoral or unethical about it. You know, we’ve been doing it as humans forever. You know, and the other odd thing I find is that the interjection of the word trophy is supposed to somehow then make hunt a four-letter word.
00:44:11
Speaker 4: That makes no sense to me.
00:44:12
Speaker 3: A trophy, by its very definition, is something you keep because you want a remembrance of the event or you are proud of it, and it makes you proud of how you accomplished that.
00:44:24
Speaker 4: You know, cave hunting.
00:44:26
Speaker 3: Dwellings have pictographs and they document their hunts on the walls of the caves they kept trophies back then so there’s nothing again amoral or unethical about trophy hunting it’s just the trophy is what you kept to remember the event so those things that have been twisted up to mean something that they’re not offend me personally and professionally.
00:44:50
Speaker 1: Yeah And, and I’m sure, especially working for, you know, like the, the Safari Club International Foundation. I mean, you deal with the anti-hunting side of it all the time. So, and, and again, we’re talking about stuff that, principles that apply to the same species. You could take like the anti-hunting thing. We can talk about Africa. You work for Safari Club International.
00:45:13
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:45:13
Speaker 1: Like the, the, probably one of the best examples is Kenya, right? Kenya is, Hunting is banned in 1977 and hunting is banned. There’s no hunting in Kenya. They’ve lost like two thirds of their wildlife since hunting has been taken out of that country, made completely prohibited. Like it’s night and day. You go to places, countries in Africa where hunting is allowed and they’re thriving. Oh, there’s places where there’s too much wildlife you see now. But the way I have it in my head here at home, bringing it back to the bears is is I’m like, I know because the history of hunting and wildlife as a country and as a state of Mississippi, in my head, I’m like, if we ever get the black bear population high enough to a point where we can sustain harvest, if we ever get to the point where there is a hunting season again, then I know they’re going to be here for the long haul. Because if you put in a hunting season… You put value on that animal. You put the hunting community behind it, and that animal will subsist.
00:46:17
Speaker 4: Period.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: It just will.
00:46:19
Speaker 4: You’re right.
00:46:21
Speaker 2: It just will. That’s how it works. There’s too much history to prove it.
00:46:26
Speaker 4: You’re right.
00:46:27
Speaker 3: I mean, if you look in the U.S., hunted species, game animals, are not in jeopardy anywhere. And they’re not in jeopardy because hunters aren’t going to allow it. You know, you can look at across the country and those stakes that liberalize a harvest for whatever reason. There’s always a significant portion of the hunting population that.
00:46:47
Speaker 4: Goes, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Is that too many? We don’t want to take too many.
00:46:52
Speaker 3: I mean, it happens all the time here where I live in Wyoming. A couple of years ago, we had that terrible freeze that really impacted the mule deer population, but it really knocked the antelope population down as well.
00:47:05
Speaker 4: And the local.
00:47:05
Speaker 3: Hunters just absolutely refused to put in, for the most part, for a tag for antelope or mule deer for a couple of years. And they did it because those populations.
00:47:16
Speaker 4: Are important to them.
00:47:18
Speaker 3: So you’re right, a game species is some of the best protection any species can want.
00:47:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s just too much proof.
00:47:27
Speaker 4: Oh, again and again and again. Internationally, I agree.
00:47:30
Speaker 1: Personally, I’ve become pretty obsessed, is probably the best word, with Africa in the past few years. And so I do all these history dives with wildlife and hunting history in the continent of Africa.
00:47:43
Speaker 2: I was just there in late June. Great trip. I saw lions catch a warthog. That was crazy.
00:47:49
Speaker 3: A lion?
00:47:50
Speaker 1: They like worked as a team. There was a male lion chasing a warthog. And as soon as he chased him around this bush, another male lion that we didn’t even know was there.
00:48:00
Speaker 2: Jumped out and caught him. It was wild.
00:48:03
Speaker 4: That’s crazy.
00:48:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. But I digress.
00:48:08
Speaker 1: I want to be respectful of your time. So, once again, just so we don’t forget, where can people find, keep up with your work? Like, especially this, well, like the Grizzly stuff, where can people find more on that?
00:48:23
Speaker 3: If they go on our YouTube channel, which is Safari Club International Foundation, we video all of our projects. We bring videographers out there because we want people to know what we’re doing. And if you go on YouTube to our channel, you can see all of our cool stuff.
00:48:38
Speaker 4: We’ve got a bunch of leopard.
00:48:40
Speaker 3: Work going on in Africa right now where we’re helping those countries with their population density and abundance. We are just beginning work down in South America, down in Paraguay and other countries down there. I’ve got an actual really cool project on Asiatic black bears in Japan right now.
00:48:57
Speaker 4: So we’re kind of all over the place.
00:49:00
Speaker 3: But if you follow our YouTube channel, you’ll see all of them.
00:49:04
Speaker 2: No, that’s cool. I’m going to have to check that out myself.
00:49:06
Speaker 3: And your followers that come to Nashville, the foundation has a great big booth right out front in that front hallway where we all are. And one of us is in that booth at all times. So you know, we do nothing but talk about our projects 24-7. So we’re happy to visit with anybody.
00:49:23
Speaker 1: Well, I will look you up there this year because we’ll be there. And I’ll, I don’t know, this stuff fascinates me, if you can’t tell.
00:49:31
Speaker 4: I’d love to talk to you.
00:49:33
Speaker 1: Well, thank you for your time. And thank you for shedding some light on all this work. This is fascinating stuff.
00:49:40
Speaker 2: I appreciate it.
00:49:41
Speaker 4: Well, thanks for having me.
00:49:44
Speaker 1: And that’s going to be all that we have for you today. I hope that you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Be sure to check out some of that stuff that Maria was talking about. There’s going to be some pretty cool content when they roll out with it. And as always, thank you for listening to Backwoods University as well as Bear Grease and This Country Life. It means a whole heck of a lot to all of us over here.
00:50:02
Speaker 2: And we’ll see y’all next time.
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