Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underware.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Listening past, you can’t predict.

00:00:19
Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I t E dot com. Today we’re joined joined by uh what I say? Joined joined by George Buman, who’s a sculptor of bronze artists. He’s a naturalist. But here’s the main deal for our for our purposes here, he’s an animal language and animal intelligence expert. Teaches courses on the intelligence of animals. We’ll go to those things in Yellstone National Park. Leads seminars there of helping people understand what they’re hearing, what they’re seeing, about how animals do their business. He’s got a new book called Eavesdropping on Animals. What we can learn from wildlife conversations. We’re gonna dive in on all that. But just as a little tickler hit me with, you don’t need to say a word. Okay, now listen, listen, this is this is George Buman. No brody verify, yeah, no diaphragm in his mouth.

00:01:38
Speaker 3: No, no animals in the studio.

00:01:40
Speaker 1: No animals in the studio. We have some bronze pete. We have a bronze piece. We have like the makings of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey right there, Tap that turkey so people realize that’s not okay, that’s not that turkey is not making this noise.

00:01:56
Speaker 4: Okay, hit us with okay, hit us with the note.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Hit us with some turkey vocalizations. No, no, this is just just flat out okay, all right, okay, hit us with some kyotes.

00:02:20
Speaker 4: Way off? You got a good wolfall Oh yeah, let’s hear a wolf. Oh dude, can you do a good elk way off bugle?

00:02:51
Speaker 1: Yanni does a good bugle, but his Yanni’s bugle is miles away.

00:02:55
Speaker 2: Yeah yeahn might be miles away.

00:02:57
Speaker 1: Hit me with a good mile away off elk. That’s a lot closer than Yannis. Yannis is like, you can’t even tell.

00:03:11
Speaker 4: If you heard it.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: You’re wondering you’ve got any good magpie vocalizations? Ravens anything of the Ravens.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, one of my favorites. They’ve got a lot of a lot of range, a lot of meaning there.

00:03:30
Speaker 1: Let me, I want I want to talk a bunch about those guys, because man, it makes some crazy ass.

00:03:33
Speaker 4: Noises and it can’t be just that making noises for no reason.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, no, no.

00:03:39
Speaker 4: Okay, here’s a real challenging one. And just just telling me.

00:03:41
Speaker 1: If you can’t do it, I wish I could. Can you like this tests your whistling skills? Can you hit a black can you do black cap chickenye?

00:03:49
Speaker 2: Not to mind action. Yeah, there’s they’re certain to do it now too.

00:03:56
Speaker 4: Good.

00:03:57
Speaker 1: That’s a tough one, but you know how good it works. So yeah, because people that can do it can bring them in like crazy.

00:04:03
Speaker 2: That’s pretty good. Yep, damn yeah.

00:04:09
Speaker 1: All right, all right, we’re gonna get it off and now that but what like, like, here’s the main thing I want. One of the main things I want to talk to about when we get to I got to do a couple of announcements is not just the noises, but like.

00:04:23
Speaker 4: There’s the what like what they’re talking about?

00:04:26
Speaker 2: It means stuff. Oh, I can show you things you would never ever have found.

00:04:31
Speaker 1: They obviously mean stuff, but like because they’re not doing it for fun. No, I mean, it might be fun, but they’re not you know what I mean. Yeah, what it all means. One of the main the first thing to so you know what’s gonna come. One of the first things I’m gonna ask you about is you know a pine squirrels pissed off noise or whatever his noise is.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can’t do it real good, but there’s a ton of meaning in that.

00:04:55
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Ton, Yeah, you know.

00:04:58
Speaker 1: He’s pissed at his body.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: Fisted at the bobcat.

00:05:05
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, real quick.

00:05:08
Speaker 1: So there’s a new YouTube. The Bear Grease YouTube channel is becoming its own thing. A little behind the scenes thinking here, Clay Clay started a YouTube.

00:05:17
Speaker 4: Channel million years ago and it was like the.

00:05:19
Speaker 1: Bear Journal or because when Clay owned Bear Hunting Magazine, he had had a YouTube channel, So it’s always been kind of lurking around there. That YouTube channel is going to stay like that’s Clay’s baby. But Clay and Bear Nwcomb are going to build out the Bear Grease YouTube channel. So all about them making them little bows out of sticks. Hunting content, Mule content cooking stuff okay, And they’re also launching their own Instagram page, Round Bear Grease and I’ll tell you we haven’t gotten it. I might be the first guy ever mentioned this. Clay’s book that’s coming out in a long time from now is exceptionally good.

00:06:02
Speaker 4: It’s good. I mean, I’ve only read the first five chapters. It’s it’s a book. It’s a it’s a book. It’s like a history of the black bear. It is good, including a large chapter on the circumpolar bear culture. I don’t know if I can. I’m allowed to. Yeah, why not?

00:06:21
Speaker 1: Clay just he’s turning his booking right now. There’s circumpolar bear culture.

00:06:26
Speaker 4: Is crazy because there’s like a latitude.

00:06:28
Speaker 1: Band all around the continent, so it touches North America, Europe, Asia, around the northern hemisphere. It’s yeah, it’s a band of latitudes, northern northern latitudes all around the globe. And if you think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around the world, these are people that split. There’s people within this that split apart way long ago. Like meaning if you imagine, like imagine it’s human’s column, like humans are kind of in.

00:07:03
Speaker 4: The Middle East. Humans are in Africa.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: You know, humans are up in Spain wherever, and eventually some of them come around and wind up in Siberia and some come around and wind up in northern Europe. Now by this point they haven’t been hanging out together for tens of thousands of years, right.

00:07:22
Speaker 4: But.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: You look at their religious structures and sort of like spiritual understandings of bears, and you have this circumpolar bear culture where people that wouldn’t have no interaction with each other develop or no interaction with each other for thousands and thousands of years, develop the same sort of religious understandings of bears and how bears fit into their culture and the shamanistic aspects and like motivations that are assigned to bears. And you cannot explain it how some dude in Siberia, some dudent America, some dude in Europe have the same concept of like how you treat a bear when you hunt for a bear? What are your obligations to the bear? That you definitely don’t want a bear to see you once it’s dead, So if you kill a bear, you approach it from behind.

00:08:17
Speaker 4: Like these dudes are on the same trip all over the do you know what I’m saying.

00:08:21
Speaker 1: No, it’s so weird, man. I hope he’s not pissed that I’m bringing that up.

00:08:28
Speaker 2: Does he have no bear Mother story in there? Is that that one that goes all over Northern Hemisphere?

00:08:33
Speaker 4: It’s all over, It’s in there. He’s got every damn thing in there. Yeah, that’s neat.

00:08:38
Speaker 1: No, it’s a super cool book available long time from now. So the Beary’s YouTube channel be run by Baron Clay nukeomb.

00:08:48
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:08:49
Speaker 1: Oh February eleventh, two days before I turn fifty two, very auspicious days.

00:09:03
Speaker 4: Here’s a great correction.

00:09:04
Speaker 1: We’re gonna start a thing where you win a prize for you know, we’re trying to, like in an age of disinformation, shady information.

00:09:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, we’re trying to. We’re gonna have a weekly prize called Correction of the.

00:09:20
Speaker 1: Week for the biggest fib so no rewarding people who catch.

00:09:25
Speaker 4: Us being wrong.

00:09:26
Speaker 2: Ah, that’s a good thing.

00:09:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, check this out.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: For instance, there dam made a comment and that was this is when we talking about stuff I didn’t know. Well, he even has the thirty seven minute mark. Episode eight twenty six, was that episode called Skunk Smells Her First?

00:09:44
Speaker 5: No, that wasn’t it how skunks can ruin a marriage?

00:09:48
Speaker 1: Okay, I said, oh, to my defense, I’m still this is still a correction. To my defense, I said, I don’t think that a human operating word here being I said, I on the subject of skunks and skunk essence, I said, I don’t think that a human can make.

00:10:14
Speaker 5: That.

00:10:14
Speaker 1: I didn’t finish quite then, I okay, I.

00:10:17
Speaker 4: Said, I don’t think that a human can make.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: I don’t think in a lab you could make as pugnacious or resilient of an order in a laboratory. Guy wrote in He’s like, you’re way wrong.

00:10:36
Speaker 4: They can’t. Humans can and have, And he gets into some of these odors.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: While the skunk order is due to fields mercaptains sulfur containing compounds, he says, there are other compounds, both synthesized and isolated in laboratories that samel much worse.

00:10:57
Speaker 4: I like this one. They have a.

00:10:59
Speaker 1: Lab ba odor called cadaverine, which is a lab produced odor of decaying flesh. They have pyridine putressine, and what he regards to be the worst smell of all time, thio acetone order, so potent it causes nausea. Vomiting and unconsciousness. There was a lab leak. There was a lab leak in Germany where they had they had a lab leak of thio acetone and Germany and for a half mile radius around the lab people reported nausea, vomiting, and unconsciousness from a leak.

00:11:54
Speaker 2: Powerful and what do they use that for?

00:11:58
Speaker 4: Usually I don’t know why.

00:11:59
Speaker 1: I don’t know how they justif either way, I don’t know how. That’s a great question. This would be one of those things we talk about ridiculous maybe when you’re like hacking on science, like the dumb stuff they spend money on making bad smells.

00:12:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, so I’m staying corrected.

00:12:14
Speaker 1: That’s a good correction right there, man, I said, this is the kind of correction.

00:12:18
Speaker 4: What will be the prize when you get correction in the week, It’s gotta be something good. But it’s we have a lot of it.

00:12:23
Speaker 5: We’re gonna maybe.

00:12:25
Speaker 4: We gotta fifty two of them.

00:12:26
Speaker 5: Maybe this will excite people more.

00:12:30
Speaker 6: So.

00:12:31
Speaker 5: We will have a segment sponsored by to Cova’s. To Covas is.

00:12:36
Speaker 4: Well, They’re gonna do the they are.

00:12:39
Speaker 5: Kickers Correction of the week and we will choose the winning correction of the week. For We’ll do this for about a month first to see and the correction of the week winner gets a pair of takovas.

00:12:54
Speaker 1: Oh, so we’re gonna start out you get a pair of ship kickers, and then but we’ll come up with something comparable every time.

00:13:00
Speaker 5: Sure that’s phenomenal corrections.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: This would be this would be a great This would be a great one, I say, And again I said, think. I say, you can’t make something worse than that in a lab. Guys say, hey you can. Here’s another correction. He calls it a craction by omission, but I’d like to correct him. It’s not a correction, bio missions, just a correction. So I don’t think he’d win because like he’s saying, hey, here’s a correction by omission, and then when I tell you the craction, you realize it’s not a correction, it’s just a correction. He’s just trying to soup it up. I said. We were talking about retrieval laws. We’re talking about that in different states you have these different governing laws about whether you can go and get retrieve.

00:13:53
Speaker 4: Game. Okay, so picture that you’re sitting there.

00:13:58
Speaker 1: You’re sitting there and you you you shoot a duck, you know, ducks flying overhead, and you shoot a duck and all of a sudden he like sails off and plump lands overund the neighbor’s place. States clarify. All states have clarified, Like what are you allowed to do? Some states you just flat out go get it. There’s a state where you can leave your gun behind and go fetch it. And there are states like the one I’m sitting in right now, you have no right or authority to go fetch it. You’d have to go take it up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I sailed to duck over around your place.

00:14:37
Speaker 4: Can I go grab it?

00:14:39
Speaker 1: And as terrible as it sounds, I mean I’m totally like, I’m like totally fine with that rule, but I would like to think that most landowners would, when approached, facilitate the recovery. I understand. I’m not condemning the rule because I understand that there are situations is where someone could set up in a way where they just basically know.

00:15:03
Speaker 4: That that’s going to be the outbum.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it could be abused for sure, especially with big game.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: I feel like, yeah, where you’re hunting in a spot where you’re just if you’re sitting there going like, well, yeah, I know it’s going to run on in the neighbor’s place, but I’m allowed to go get it, so that doesn’t matter like that, that’s probably that could be potentially problematic, he points out. So I say, in South Dakota, how it’s legal to retrieve upland game such as pheasants without land owner permission? Okay, but yetta be unarmed. We clarified that meaning you hit a pheasant, you hit a pheasant, he sails off. On the neighbor’s place in South Dakota, you lean your shotgun whatever, set your shotgun down, you run over and fetch it, he pointed out, And he says that it was correction by omission.

00:15:52
Speaker 4: He points out, you can’t do that with big game. Isn’t that weird?

00:15:57
Speaker 3: Strange? But I think it might be. South Dakota has that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside roads. It’s like a right away. So I think a lot of those birds that get shot end up ten yards onto you know, where you’re not permitted to go.

00:16:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, they’re doing it because of the rule.

00:16:17
Speaker 1: You can ditch hunt Yeah, that’s what I think. Yeah, but you can’t. Yeah, so just you can’t. You can’t.

00:16:24
Speaker 4: You can chase a pheasant, but you can’t chase the deer. But if a buck sprung up out of that ditch.

00:16:29
Speaker 1: And you are allowed to have your dog run over and fetch it.

00:16:34
Speaker 4: But check this out.

00:16:35
Speaker 1: Let’s say your dog runs over to fetch it flush is a pheasant. This is what this guy’s saying. If he’s wrong, sending a correction, and he’ll have to give you a prize for correcting him. If your dog runs over onto a private Let’s say you’re hunting your ditch hunting and your dog runs onto some dude’s place and flushes a bird off that dude’s place, and that bird then flies over you on the right of way. You can’t shoot the bird because your dog can go retrieve, but he can’t go hunt.

00:17:14
Speaker 4: And that’s basically having a dog with a shotgun. Here’s a nurse skunk story that was a bad segue.

00:17:29
Speaker 1: This guy says this, this last week, I had been skinning a skunk that caught the coyote trap. I wasn’t really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in it.

00:17:37
Speaker 4: Sent gland.

00:17:37
Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime. Oh, we’re done with corrections, not right, Yeah, this is this is this is a story.

00:17:45
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:17:46
Speaker 1: After realizing the terrible crime I had just committed, I put the skunk outside to let things air out, so he was skinning an inside. An hour later, the cop showed up. Well, the local police showed up in my house to inform me that there was a terrible smell coming from my house, to the point that the local middle school had to go into lockdown because they thought kids were smoking massive amounts of weed.

00:18:15
Speaker 4: He’s the word marijuana.

00:18:18
Speaker 1: They even had the fire department come to the school to test the air for toxins. Now, my whole town has been talking about me and infern to me as skunk boy. I don’t think the smell was that bad, but I’m not sure what to do because I make a homemade skunk based lure that I used to catch all my predators. Here it goes into a question. This becomes like a like a advice advice. This is becoming an advice column.

00:18:50
Speaker 4: Do I stop making it and risk being less successful? He’s leading the witness.

00:18:58
Speaker 1: He asked, do I stop making it in risk being less successful on the trap line, or do I keep making it in secret and hope there isn’t another incident. I think that there is a middle ground Hunter Gregory. See here’s the evidence. The name of your kid Hunter doesn’t backfire. Yeah, his name’s Hunter, didn’t backfire. No names their kid fishermen angler.

00:19:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, they probably don’t.

00:19:30
Speaker 5: I don’t know.

00:19:30
Speaker 4: I’ve never heard it.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: No names are kids, sportsperson outdoors? A person his name’s Hunter. It didn’t backfire. Obviously he’s obviously he’s like neck deep in the disciplines he’s from. I’m not gonna give his last name. I think you got to take this whole operation elsewhere if it depends you have the right. Well, what’s that machine we want to get the founder of this machine on the.

00:20:05
Speaker 4: Nasal raider nasal radar.

00:20:07
Speaker 1: We’re calling the raider, but the nasal there’s a machine that they use that quantifies bad smells. You know about this, called the nasal radar. I would say nasal raider, but I was misreading it. That’s a correction.

00:20:20
Speaker 4: The nasal radar.

00:20:22
Speaker 1: It’s like when you get a oh, nasal ranger, sure, okay, nasal ranger. When you get a smell complaint, like some dude skin and skunks. It’s so subjective.

00:20:34
Speaker 4: Yeah right, it’s like why not bother you?

00:20:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad. The guy over here, he doesn’t think it smells that bad, So it does it smell that bad. The nasal ranger is a machine that you put on your nose. It looks like an elk bugle with contraptions coming off it. Can you pull this up, Phil, just so people can see it? To me again, you don’t have a little computer over there, and.

00:21:00
Speaker 5: What was to do it?

00:21:01
Speaker 6: I do, but I don’t have a picture.

00:21:03
Speaker 2: I guess I could just google it.

00:21:04
Speaker 3: It tells you how bad you think it should smell.

00:21:07
Speaker 4: The nasal Ranger. I watched this whole video, but it.

00:21:10
Speaker 2: Just looks insane.

00:21:11
Speaker 4: Okay, Okay, Like.

00:21:12
Speaker 1: Let’s say someone’s like, dude, the hog farm next to my place is killing me.

00:21:16
Speaker 4: It smells so bad.

00:21:17
Speaker 1: And it winds up being like, well, according to who the nasal ranger you.

00:21:23
Speaker 4: It looks like an Eler bugle that hooks to your nose.

00:21:25
Speaker 1: There’s a little nose coup, but it’s got filters and shit coming off. Okay, you go out there and there’s a meter that shows like what it.

00:21:35
Speaker 4: Okay, right there, it looks like if a cop was, yeah, clocking you radar.

00:21:45
Speaker 1: You would think that if you saw this, you would think a cop is smelling how fast your car’s going.

00:21:50
Speaker 4: Okay, there’s a.

00:21:52
Speaker 5: Whole article in the New York Times, like.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: I’m getting to that, but I want to tell you I want one so bad because I want to be able to use it in arguments of my wife.

00:22:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, be like see it’s not so bad.

00:22:07
Speaker 1: She sends me one of her like twice a year. I can’t live like this.

00:22:13
Speaker 5: Okay, oh yeah we can. We can invest in one, just like we did the Warner Bratsler’s Sheer Force.

00:22:19
Speaker 4: They’re less expensive.

00:22:21
Speaker 1: That’s good, Like we bought that and I don’t know, maybe we spent too much money on that thing for how much we needed it.

00:22:29
Speaker 5: We’re gonna keep trying to get our money’s worth.

00:22:34
Speaker 1: Okay, here’s here’s my here’s the other day, here’s my wife. My wife has this to say to me.

00:22:40
Speaker 3: She’s gonna have a lot more to say to you after you put this in a podcast.

00:22:44
Speaker 5: Wife says, two thousand dollars.

00:22:47
Speaker 1: By the way, there’s two thousand bucks little background of my wife. My wife all has always worked. She worked all through having babies. She’s taking time off of work and now she’s like, now that she doesn’t have baby, she’s not working. She just know what people do with themselves. So it’s great. She started to trying.

00:23:04
Speaker 4: She’s not play tennis totally great, started baking.

00:23:12
Speaker 1: I am at tennis and can’t figure out why my ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on both ankles. If you brought fleas into our house because of the things you trapped, you need to figure that out now, like before work. I am not going to live like this, soie right.

00:23:35
Speaker 4: I get these all the time.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: A lot of times they have to do with defensive odors. And if I had a nasal ranger, I would be able to be like, well, let’s check you could avoid cons I would be like, let’s see is it offensive or not.

00:23:51
Speaker 4: Let’s take the subjectivity out of it.

00:23:52
Speaker 5: We need to make content out of it.

00:23:54
Speaker 4: Let’s measure.

00:23:55
Speaker 5: I’m going to talk to our CFO about getting.

00:23:57
Speaker 3: The subjectivity is the hard part.

00:23:59
Speaker 4: Man, That’s what the ranger.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: So you can you can put any kind of ranger on that you want.

00:24:06
Speaker 1: I’ll be like, well, you know what, it’s actually not offensive because I hit it with the nasal ranger and it’s in it’s inemptible living.

00:24:14
Speaker 4: So now then ranger, you hook it to your nose.

00:24:17
Speaker 1: And so let’s say someone’s like it comes to you with their complaining about how something smells, and they go just smell. Yeah, Well people don’t breathe that way, right, That’s that’s not fair.

00:24:30
Speaker 4: You know, no one comes around going.

00:24:33
Speaker 3: Not Just last week, I was, uh, I had already boiled this coyote skull, but it needs a little touch up. There was some things that were still hanging on there, and my wife laughed. I was like, I’m just gonna do it on the stove. Sure I didn’t smell a thing, but when she got back she smelled it, yeah, and I was just like, it smells a little like boiling meat.

00:24:58
Speaker 4: That’s all exactly.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, we’d clean out the whole university building that way.

00:25:08
Speaker 1: That’s that is its own kind of that is a crazy odor. The nasal ranger you put it up to your nose and there’s a little meter that shows that you’re inhaling normally, So you can’t go in and not breathe and say like, I don’t smell nothing because you’re not breathing and you can’t go in and over smell. It makes it that you’re hitting like a baseline normal breathing, and it’s got these contraptions on it that are sucking in the air and it’s throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement.

00:25:46
Speaker 4: So you can apply a number to when something reeks. I love it. So let’s say someone in.

00:25:53
Speaker 1: The summer, some guy hits deer and stop by your house or whatever, and it’s chromnell maggots and someone’s like, my god, that smells. Imagine if you can go, yeah, it’s a five, yep, and apply a number to a thing that is just entirely subjective.

00:26:08
Speaker 6: I have a feeling that with fifty years of a life lived, you know, breaking down animals, smelling everything there is to smell, I have a feeling that the nasal Ranger will skew towards the gen pop and probably I think everything you are completely deadened to will read as offensive to most people.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s why I need a nasal ranger.

00:26:31
Speaker 3: Tweak the settings a little bit so it comes out in your favor, Like.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: Hack into the software or whatever to make it like not because yeah, because what if it backfires in Your wife is like, no, dude, this is a high as it’s an eleven.

00:26:45
Speaker 4: Yep, it’s an eleven anyway.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: So this guy making this lure, and I understand, but I don’t know why in the world you’re making that next to the school. It’s like, I feel like you have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.

00:27:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean he did puncture the gland, which I’m sure made it. Oh well, he a hundred times worse.

00:27:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he probably knows if he’s making this lure.

00:27:10
Speaker 4: He knows that.

00:27:11
Speaker 1: You go down to Murdochs and you go into the veterinarian care aisle and you get one of them large gauge hypodermic needles. I mean the kind of needle you can look through the son of a bitch, you know what I mean. You get one of those heavy gauge veterinarian needles that they use inject cattle with, put that into there and.

00:27:34
Speaker 4: Suck that smell out elsewhere yep, not at home.

00:27:38
Speaker 1: Then you mix it in with your vasoline or your petroleum jelly or whatever you’re putting in New so you got a skunk based paste elsewhere out in the woods. Here’s another tip he might want to know about. And I was turned on to this one that works very well. Get yourself a big sack of kitty litter. Get yourself one of those small action packers or everyone.

00:27:59
Speaker 4: He was, I don’t care.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: This tough five gallon bucket whatever, Fill it with kitty litter. Once you make your lure, deep six it in that cat.

00:28:08
Speaker 4: Litter, deep six the lure in there.

00:28:13
Speaker 1: Store it incaste. I got store it in a in a container deep down in kitty litter for your offensive odors. That won’t escape that no, And when I get a nasal range, I’ll prove it.

00:28:32
Speaker 4: I’ll prove it.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: We’ll take a draw off some skunk and then we’ll put it down in a bottle and kiddy lure and take a draw off it.

00:28:39
Speaker 4: And you won’t.

00:28:39
Speaker 1: That naise range is not going to pick it up. Another guy wrote in about skunks. He’s in the nuisance wildlife removal business. They do with a lot of skunks in the spring and summer. You can picture this skunk gets in your house, living under your porch. Someone gets upset. They they catch them in cage traps and they kill them with in a CO two chamber for euthanasia. Do you guys remember we were talking earlier. Do you remember during the pandemic when they had to like in northern Europe they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands of mink.

00:29:24
Speaker 4: Which they pelted, you know, they pelted those all out, they did.

00:29:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought that it would like make mink prices skyrocket because they killed all these branch or whatever. But someone’s like that all went to market anyhow. Why I didn’t realize they got these little gas powered rigs they drive around in on those mink farms, and there’s a box on the rig and it’s harvesting its own CO two. So like you’re driving this little golf cart around and it’s harvesting its own emissions. To youth, the whole thing sounds just like not a good line of work, like a tough business to.

00:30:01
Speaker 4: That’s how they do that. They’re killing him like that.

00:30:03
Speaker 1: So this dude is saying, when they get like a problem skunk, they euthanize it with CO two. Well anyways, and then they throw him in a freezer, which I don’t get. But they had a guy in there, and he says, I’ll put it delicately and say he lacked attention to detail. He pulls a skunk out of the CO two chamber too early and places it into a freezer. A half hour later, a different guy comes along and opens the freezer and there’s a skunk. Bam, fine no oh, shuts the freezer real quick. I got you, makes a plan on how he’s gonna deal with this, but then the skunks waiting for him the next time.

00:30:45
Speaker 4: He opens the freezeropp nailed them. He says, you can’t get that smell out of that freezer.

00:30:55
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.

00:31:00
Speaker 4: Lastly, oh so you do want to say this. You’re back to wanting to say this. Okay please? Uh one more launch.

00:31:08
Speaker 1: We got a thing coming out called twelve and twenty six, So that means in twenty twenty six we’re gonna.

00:31:13
Speaker 4: At least like twelve outdoor films.

00:31:16
Speaker 1: Each episode showcases a hunt from a different Meat Eater crew member. The first episode features Yanni’s archery black Bear Hunting Manitoba, which is out now, so stay tuned for more and check out these hunt episodes of twelve and twenty six series all Right.

00:31:34
Speaker 4: George hit me with, let’s don’t know, I want to.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: Get into the animal communication stuff here, and I want to talk about brown sculptures, but I want to dive into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think about from your career and your study of animals, what and let’s let’s keep to what lives around here? What animal do you think lives around here? Has the or not doesn’t need to be around here? What American animal that people would be familiar with in your who in your mind, has the greatest vocabulary.

00:32:12
Speaker 2: Land critters, you know, probably the one that’s been studied that way most. And that’s probably because it’s only because that’s the one that’s been studied that I detail is prairie dogs. They have an incredible vocabulary that goes down to the level of there’s a guy walking through the colony with a green shirt on and he’s tall. No, yep, he’s walking fast, he’s walking slow. It’s another guy. He’s got a red shirt on or a yellow shirt. There’s a badger, there’s a hawk hawks flying fast, on and on and on. Yeah, this guy called what yeah?

00:33:00
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:33:00
Speaker 2: They went down to the level of saying, you know it at a certain level they needed to analyze it with computers because you just can’t hear prairie dog at that level. Okay, so they slow it down. You can see all the bumps and blips in the spectrogram on the computer, and these differences are parsing out with their experimental design here. And they even went to the level of let’s put something in there they’ve never seen. So what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout or maybe you apply with painted black, put it on wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled it through the colony. They came up with a new word, something they’d never heard him say before. They put it away. Instead of an oval like the first one, they put out a square, they say something different. They pull it back out a little while later, they use the same word for the oval. Same words. Yeah, yeah, And that’s probably.

00:34:01
Speaker 1: All like permutations of that what we would just when we hear it’s just an alarm call.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: It’s just like like, all right, I’m not getting much out of that. But when you start listening with like a lot of this stuff, you’re like, oh, there is a little difference there. And if you could listen with the ears of a ground squirrel or a pocket gopher or any of these things. You might hear it too, but some of those they can, like the researchers. It was so funny. They were so accurate that they had different vocalization for dog versus kyote. No really, So they’re sitting there and the researchers can hear this difference and they’re hanging out and this this prairie dog says, uh, there’s a kyote coming, and clearly the researchers can see it’s a dog, and they’re like, ha, they messed up this time. It’s like one example, and it gets closer and it’s a kyote. They’re like, what the heck.

00:34:59
Speaker 4: Hand and say that to me again.

00:35:00
Speaker 2: So they identified this thing right, it was a coyote. They gave the kyote alarm. But the researchers not knowing their language real well, well, they knew the language enough to say, hey, they’re alarming for kyote. Through their eyes they’re seeing what they think is a dog.

00:35:18
Speaker 4: Oh, so the research is like, oh, it’s a domestic dogs.

00:35:20
Speaker 2: It’s a domestic dog. It looks like a kylet. They just messed up. And it gets close, they’re like, sound a gun it’s a coyote, So that stuff is actually everywhere, isn’t. But prairie dogs have been the best studied that way. Their vocabulary. They even say that they they have these sound bites that are like phonemes. They’re basically like ba duh at, you know, sound fragments that we recombine into making words in sentences, paragraphs. They have sounds that function the same way, so they can recombine these sounds to say dog, kyote, hawk, badger guy, short guy, tall guy coming through the colony.

00:36:07
Speaker 1: I was reading this thing long ago. It’s like one of the dirtiest tricks I’ve ever heard in science. I don’t know where they were doing it. I don’t know where.

00:36:16
Speaker 4: Where’s the vervet monkey live? A vervet monkey?

00:36:20
Speaker 2: Verbets are African.

00:36:24
Speaker 1: They were looking at the vocabulary of verbant monkeys and they were getting this idea that they had and it might be more nuanced than this, but they’re like, there’s a thing that says threat from above, okay, and maybe like certain avian predators.

00:36:41
Speaker 4: And they had a noise that they realized it.

00:36:44
Speaker 1: Meant thread on the ground, and they thought specifically it was about leopards.

00:36:49
Speaker 4: That’s what it was leopards. So they.

00:36:56
Speaker 1: Would record these vervet monkeys making these vocalizations and you could play it and get the response. Meaning, if there’s a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree. If there’s a threat from the air, the troop all seeks overhead protection. Then they recorded a monkey, they recorded his threat call, and they would play it and everyone would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where he became the boy who cries wolf. Poor guy, and they burned him out where they’re like, he always does that and he’s wrong, to the point where if he did vocalize, they would ignore it because they’re like, that dude makes that noise all the time because they have been playing it to everybody, and they burned the dude out on it. Yeah, but this is like, well, you’re talking about way more I mean like way more than hey on the ground, Hey in the air.

00:37:58
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s like a.

00:37:59
Speaker 3: Deer camp with the kids, Like when you and I walked through the Prairie dog Town. Those things are like eh. But when they see Jimmy, they’re like.

00:38:07
Speaker 4: Holy kid, they probably.

00:38:11
Speaker 2: Do and he’s got a gun. He’s got a gun against that one kid. Yeah, totally yeah, it’s so, I think you’re referring to that chaining safer. I did a lot of that work in Abaselli National Park where they’re looking at those vervets. And yeah, they had a different call for something in the air, those Marshall eagles, I think they were. That’s different one for leopards, and they had a different one for snakes.

00:38:34
Speaker 4: Okay, I remember that now.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, and there’s that’s a tuughy with these animal vocalizations, like how do you know you don’t speak that language, So they have these really clunky, sometimes really you know, mean ways of figuring out. All right, at least it’s this level, this is what they’re meaning. But in between, like for me, into a ton of ravens. I just fascinated by ravens and the stuff they say just blows me away. They’ve got accents, they’ve got dialects, they’ve got stuff you can’t even imagine.

00:39:10
Speaker 1: At what point did you first start getting interested in in the just like the vocalizations of animals.

00:39:15
Speaker 2: Well, I grew up like you guys did. I hunted and fished and trapped for you know, a lot of my youth because that was you know, the culture I grew up in so I grew up learning call turkeys and ducks and gear, and but like it wasn’t enough for me, just me being me, I was like, I want to know more. You know, what are they doing outside of hunting season? What do they say when this happens? What are they doing when nobody else is watching? And you needn’t watch birds like nobody. I didn’t know anybody that watched birds until I went to college and they’re like, oh, yeah, we’re going to birding.

00:39:51
Speaker 1: Really, you know, mile Man he had an interesting bird taxonomy, like as a as a hunter, you now, it was like, there’s this huge chunk of birds that were tweety birds. Yeah, yeah, they meant like the ones like like outside of my there’s intensely interested in game birds. There’s a handful of other birds that catch my interest, but then there are the tweety birds.

00:40:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. My friend has a system. He has it’s arts and narts for hawks. Arts are a redtail, narts are not a redtail. Was like Jason not, you know, it takes redtails to get a couple of years under their belt before they get a red tail. He’s like, God, damn, it throws a whole damn system off.

00:40:36
Speaker 1: I was reading and I think it was in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams where I think it was in that book where he’s talking about into Its map drawing m This is early like he was relating for early like early contact with certain Into It hunter groups and they would draw maps and they wouldn’t do the maps would be to the scale of interest. So if they’re mapping an island and there’s a bay where they hunt ducks, when you draw the map, the island gets really small because they don’t do it doesn’t matter and the bay ocky is the map. Yeah, And it’s kind of like, here’s the part on something, here’s the part of interest, and then I’ll just kind of rough in something to suggest.

00:41:25
Speaker 4: The rest of it.

00:41:27
Speaker 1: Right, And I feel like with a lot of wildlife stuff, it’s like Elk right, the bugle, you know, because it’s useful in hunting, and you can probably hunt Elko whole life.

00:41:40
Speaker 4: And never be like, what really is going on with that thing?

00:41:48
Speaker 2: Right?

00:41:49
Speaker 1: You know, like it works or don’t work, but it’s kind of you You sort of have a like we’ll map it from a hunter’s perspective, will map its vocalization pattern and it’ll only go as far is what I need to know to satisfy my like base plan.

00:42:06
Speaker 3: You’re not really interested in what you might be saying to them, right it works or don’t?

00:42:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah right. And that’s to human nature, like we’re we’re simplifying machines. That’s what our brains are designed for, is after sensory stuff like problem solving, figuring out what those patterns are. You know, what does that mean? And I only pay attention to the stuff that affects me, you know, But when you start paying attention to what affects them, then the world opens up.

00:42:36
Speaker 4: What was the first What was the first animal? Was it? Turkey’s?

00:42:38
Speaker 1: Like, what was the first animal? You kind of dove into and started realizing you were finding out things that maybe other people didn’t know.

00:42:44
Speaker 2: Well, I was obsessed with turkeys, like I was like, my career was going to be making turkey calls, going around calling contests and all that stop upstate New York. And they just recognized that area. So I was taking every spare minute. You could only hunt till noon, but I was going out before school every day during the season. This is a funny one. The disciplinarian principle. The vice principal when my folks were in that school had retired by this point, and I called well enough that he’s like, can you come with me, you know, skip school? Come with me on Monday and Tuesday. My mom’s like, hell no, Frank Dunhald wants you to skip does vice principal wants you to skip school so you can go turkey call for him?

00:43:29
Speaker 5: Jam up.

00:43:30
Speaker 2: I was like, that’s a gent right.

00:43:31
Speaker 4: Hello.

00:43:32
Speaker 3: Were you mouth calling back like no, no call? Or were you using calls?

00:43:37
Speaker 2: I was doing it. I was building wingbone calls, I was building slate calls, box calls, using my voice. Was doing all of it, you know. And but it was interesting because sort of like we’re talking about in that hunting scene, you know, there was a there’s a core palette of sounds that you use and they do the job. But I hit a certain point. It was actually when I went to my first calling contests, I’m like, wait a minute, this is what the guy there’s a guy behind that curtain over there, and he’s like telling me, if I sound like a turkey, there’s no turkeys in this contest. And there’s certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying, yeah, that sounds like a turkey, you know. I was like, hmm, what you know? And there was even I found an article when I was working on the book, this guy who is a judge. He said, you know, if you hear a lot of really bad calling, you know, it’s it’s a wild turkey. If a lot of really good calling, it’s a guy. You know, turkeys make a lot of mistakes. And I’m like, wait a minute, dude, mistakes. I think it cost them. It cost them. You make a sound, the predator’s got to beat on you, right, you make a sound. It cost energy to make the sound. Like they’re not doing it for no reason. Just because we don’t know the reason doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one.

00:45:02
Speaker 1: But there’s the I get the point. There’s no no like the point.

00:45:05
Speaker 4: Would be this.

00:45:06
Speaker 1: There’s there’s a there’s a YouTube video I love and it’s a hen, like a wild ass hen in the woods and she has the most.

00:45:15
Speaker 4: Raucous bad box call yelp, which.

00:45:23
Speaker 1: She stands there and does twenty seven times in a row, twenty seven times in a row.

00:45:30
Speaker 4: If you heard that, there’s no way he’d be like, that’s a hen.

00:45:37
Speaker 1: You’d be like, that is some twelve ass year old kid with his dad’s box call and he’s just gonna stand on that ridge and do that.

00:45:46
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would one say that that’s what that was.

00:45:49
Speaker 1: I’m like some kid up there. It’s a hand stander twenty seven times in a row.

00:45:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:45:56
Speaker 4: So, but so, like if you could interview her, You’re like, OMETT are you doing this on accident? Is this all a mistake?

00:46:05
Speaker 1: She would probably tell you no, No, what I’m doing.

00:46:09
Speaker 2: Is I’m You should have seen the last time I did this. Yeah, you know what happened.

00:46:16
Speaker 4: But like I don’t know, like what is she doing? You know what is she doing? Yeah?

00:46:20
Speaker 2: How much variability is in there that’s acceptable for purpose X? Like how are you doing a lost call? It does go on twenty plus notes, but like within there, how much stuff’s coded in there beyond I’m lost or where the heck are you? That’s where they’re find with some of these new studies on songbirds and stuff, because they hear differently than us. They’re hearing into these sounds stuff that hey, either happens way too fast or as in frequency ranges that we don’t register real well. So it’s like it almost seems in some cases, like the side of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life is coded to their communication. So like there was a study where they actually took sperm whale clicks. Let me explain. So, like sperm whales, huge animal communicating, these clicks travel real well underwater, and somebody had the bright idea. You know, they’re trying to figure out what the heck these things mean, you know, whe are the using this in this and they’ve since found out a whole bunch. But somebody had the bright idea to go in and delete all the spaces in between the clicks, and lo and behold, it sounds like a songbird. Like you hear all the rising and falling of this, you know, and we’re used to listening to humans birds they’re communicating so fast. But maybe those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolic whatever it is that makes them them, they’re able to, in essence, from our perspective, slow down that sound of the winter ren or the magnolia warbler, and here into little tweaks of individual notes, let’s say, and get more information out of that.

00:48:09
Speaker 1: I remember what I was reading somewhere or some guys saying that, like when you go to like you’re gonna you see a fly and you’re just gonna smack them.

00:48:17
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean that?

00:48:20
Speaker 1: To the fly he might be like, in a minute, I’m gonna move because there’s this thing coming toward me.

00:48:28
Speaker 4: You know.

00:48:29
Speaker 1: Like his trip, his like trip through life is just the perception is so different than what we think. So we think we’re going wow, you know, and he’s like, no, it’s going totally is just going ape shit crazy. Yeah, like what yeah, something else might be like oh, he’s saying, oh kinds.

00:48:58
Speaker 2: Of yeah, yeah. It just there’s a great essay written in the nineteen thirties I think is early forties about the title is what It’s like to be a bat and the clue. You know, even if we could take the best ai and all these models and figure out their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn’t have a clue what they’re talking about. You know this when you go to a different country or even if they’re speaking English, there’s culture. There’s that culture behind and underneath all that language that when you make a joke among friends, like everybody knows in that group what the hell you’re talking about. But even if we could know that language for a bat, for a bird, it takes being able to hear like a bat. Yeah, breathe like a bat. You know, all these things that contribute to them being what they are that factors into how they interpret what they hear and say.

00:49:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, like we’ve long, I mean, like forever have known that there are decibels the animals communicate in that we flat out don’t hear. So it’s like sort of you started with that, like one hundred. There’s things we don’t hear that we know we don’t hear. There’s research about the way birds proceed. You know, there’s so much iridescence and birds there’s probably something in their eye when they see iridescence. It just reads fundamentally different than what we see when we see iridescence. They take it in and the idea that there are like you’re saying that when you’re at a turkey calling contest, what we’re going when we’re saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey could be tons of gibbers to a turkey.

00:50:34
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:50:35
Speaker 2: Great, example is like when I do a hen yelp, I found over years, I wouldn’t get the same response as if I used a box call or slate and I the only thing I could come to is that it sounded good to me, but there was things in my call. Maybe it’s missing frequencies or something that made it sound plastic or fake ors or something just that didn’t get the same response. Literally, just go to a box call. You know, you got incidentt response, like what’s up with that? You know?

00:51:14
Speaker 4: Is it?

00:51:14
Speaker 2: You know, certain frequencies like high frequency drops off real fast, so over distance, you know, whether it’s an elk call or what have you. You’re generally picking up the low frequency sounds that travel better. But when you’re right up close to something like holy cow, you hear that elk bugle right next to the car. If you’re in Yellstone or something, you’re like, whoa, I’m missing a ton of stuff.

00:51:36
Speaker 4: There’s a lot more going on here.

00:51:38
Speaker 2: What you know, what are they hearing? You know? They you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes, they can hear, you know. Dave Meach found that in open terrain wolves can you’re up to ten miles an open train and max I think for me, unless wind conditions and other things are going on. The max is about three miles from me. So this is where often with students and stuff, I’m like, look, you can’t ever hear that. You won’t ever smell that, not even with the nosearranger. Just can’t do this. But if you start watching these animals closer, you’re like, hey, wait, all of a sudden, they’re starting to gather up their face in one direction and then they howl hmm instantly. You know, Okay, I’m looking at half of this story. The other half of the book is I’ve had this happen. You know, friends with radios, they’re six miles away. Yeah, yeah, we got the I got well packed there howling to the east, you know, Yeah, I’m watching the druids or they’re listening to the west and they’re going back and forth having a conversation for hour two hours. We can’t hear anything but the individuals standing in front of us. There’s so many animals doing stuff like that that we’re like getting these fragments thinking that we know what’s going on, and when they’re having conversations over space and in terrain that we don’t even know are happening.

00:53:11
Speaker 1: You know, we’ll move away from Turkey’s in a minute. But you’ve obviously been super close to hens like all the like, I don’t know what.

00:53:23
Speaker 4: I don’t know what.

00:53:24
Speaker 1: I can’t think, Like what distance you become aware of it? But they’re always making noises.

00:53:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, those little noises you wouldn’t hear from one hundred yards away, but in ten yards you can hear it, right, you know?

00:53:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, what.

00:53:37
Speaker 1: Let’s I’m taking it in the wrong direction. Let’s not talk about ones people aren’t familiar with. Let’s just take like, let me ask some real simple Do you feel that a gobble.

00:53:47
Speaker 4: Is just a gobble.

00:53:50
Speaker 1: Or do you feel that there are there are different gobbles that mean different things.

00:53:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there are different gobbles. And I I had thought for years that gobbles just a gobble, and a young tom makes not as good a gobble.

00:54:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, that’s the idea. Right. He sucks at it.

00:54:10
Speaker 2: He just sucks. He hasn’t learned how.

00:54:11
Speaker 4: To do it because he aspires them one day be.

00:54:14
Speaker 7: Like exactly just blow your hair back, but in fact he’s It was in grad school I was talking with a friend who’s he’s really sharp on bird behavior and all things, you know, research wise and scientific question answering kind of wise, and he turned my mind on it, and I thought for years, you know, a young tom, you know, full on gobbler.

00:54:43
Speaker 2: It looks like a big, full long and then you hear a Jake, you know, it’s like it’s just chunked up and he’s He’s like, no, you got to understand they’re gobbling in context to who’s around them. And then I started noticing, son of a gun, he’s right if it was just that Jake had many times, or that Jake would actually give a full armed gobble because he was by himself, he didn’t know the big guy was over that ridge, and Holland asked over to kick his butt mm so he could say whatever he wanted to. And of course he wants to sound like the big guy on campus, right, And I’m like, son of a gun. Then I started seeing in the field and I’m like, a gobble isn’t a gobble?

00:55:30
Speaker 4: Maybe he’s like a subservient gobble.

00:55:33
Speaker 2: I’d love to, you know, correct me and add to it. If listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more, I’d love to learn more about that because that you know, my Turkey days are a little further back than some other stuff that it’s fascinating with Just to think of that.

00:55:48
Speaker 3: If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh, that gobble, he’s like, I’m coming now that gobble he’s like, yeah, I heard you all.

00:55:55
Speaker 2: Maybe you get a double gobble, you’re like, oh, he’s really liking that call, you know, triple gobble. You’ll he’s got to be coming.

00:56:01
Speaker 4: Do you think he’s loving the call when hears a double gobble?

00:56:05
Speaker 2: That always, to me seemed like a good barometer to how excited they were. Yeah, they gobble off the roost and they hit the ground and gobbling and kind of gobble along. But once you get them fired up, many they’re double triple gobbling repeatedly, and you’re like, get ridy, get ready, get ready, here they’re come, you know.

00:56:26
Speaker 4: So hey.

00:56:27
Speaker 2: You know, if you look at it, the more I started looking at it from the turkey’s perspective, the more I started understanding from my human perspective.

00:56:37
Speaker 1: Uh, you say, you think about do you spend more time on crows around ravens?

00:56:42
Speaker 2: We just have more ravens around home, so I spend more time listening to them.

00:56:46
Speaker 4: Okay, the other day, it wasn’t too long ago.

00:56:49
Speaker 1: I was watching one and he just seems to be like, from my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy. He’s flying along, just raising hell, just making racket.

00:57:02
Speaker 4: Yeah right yeah, at a high way out mm hmm.

00:57:06
Speaker 1: And I’m like, he’s not with anybody, he’s just like making racket. Like, give me some insight into what like what they’re capable of conveying. Sure, yeah, and there’s got to be something like I found something to eat, like that’s pretty clear.

00:57:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s stuff that it’ll blow your doors off. And I you know, I’ve only scratched the surface. I’ve found stuff that researchers haven’t found. I’ve corroborated for myself things that they’ve found that yeah, that that holds here too. And it’s to me, it’s always about starting into these conversations, listening to what’s most common. You pick the most common thing close to you, and pick the most common thing. It says, Okay, so it’s like I only have pigeons around, great, awesome, use pigeons because the lessons you learn through the pigeons actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the raven, the coyote, all those kind of other things because you start sensing ties in your own nervous system to it. And so when we were living in the park, I purposely i’d finished my graduate work. I was like done with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper, and in that case, I just wanted the ravens to teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot more So. The most common thing they were saying was.

00:58:25
Speaker 4: Yep. They like saying that. Yeah, like on a lit.

00:58:33
Speaker 2: It took me the longest time to realize the ones that were doing that were the ones that were right next to our cabin, and it was two. It was the resident pair. I’m like, oh, this is their song. This is their territorial call that they used to keep the riff raff out. Their largest songbird in the world, even though it’s not melodic, that’s their no trespassing sign.

00:58:59
Speaker 4: The largest songbird in the world.

00:59:01
Speaker 2: Yep, common ravens. And so I was like.

00:59:05
Speaker 4: The least melodic, you’re the largest songbird.

00:59:10
Speaker 1: But the people you could like so that that that’s funny because I ever thought about that classification.

00:59:15
Speaker 4: They’d be classified as a songbird.

00:59:17
Speaker 2: They are, OK, Yeah, they’re in the passerine order, which is the all the perching birds corvidaet family, you know, which is Jay’s crows, Jackdaws, Magpies stuff. But that that gave me a hook. I was like, okay, I I think I know what that three note thing is now and then the key and I always stress this. The folks is start listening for where it varies. So there’s one day I was out and you know, the ravens are out there to.

00:59:44
Speaker 1: Hit me with the hymn, sitting on a post, being like, this is where I hang out.

00:59:48
Speaker 4: This is my song.

00:59:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is my turf.

00:59:50
Speaker 4: Give me the noise, okay.

00:59:55
Speaker 2: Right, And in this kind of group, you know, your listeners like making animals is cool, like in pop culture, Like you meet somebody at the dinner party and they’re speaking to one person in Korean and one person in Italian and another person in French, and you’re like, dude, who is this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication. You know, it’s like he must have all this you know, worldly experience. But you make an animal sound and they’re like, like, you know, so I always trying to prematice. I’m like, no, that betrays our bias against animals as stupid and under us. You need to start seeing them as those creatures that look into the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear in an ultrasonic and subsonic sounds, and those creatures that smell it parts per trillion, like they best us in so many ways. So listen from that perspective when I make animal noises, because it’s a crowd pleaser, but the value in there is starting to get people to listen beyond okay, that common call just counting. There’s more notes and it’s faster, and I discovered that’s a simple thing alone. Was happening when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the road right below the corral fence and popped out the bag of Cheetos, like they see food, they know it’s in their territory. I’m gonna get it if anybody is, and you sure as hell better not come in here and think you’re gonna steal it from me. So like that extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a more emphatic mine, mind, mind, mind, mind mine, hmmm. Right. You know, you know we’d walk into an area, you know, as a group to go sit down and listen and watch and just us being there, those ravens would jump off their perches and start flying over doing that, like.

01:01:52
Speaker 4: But they’re not talking to you.

01:01:53
Speaker 1: They’re talking to other ravens, Like, whatever’s going on here is in our turf.

01:01:57
Speaker 4: We’re on it.

01:01:58
Speaker 2: If food, that’s that’s what it seems like.

01:02:01
Speaker 4: I got a question for.

01:02:02
Speaker 3: So that was a situation where there’s people involved and they recognize that that’s potential food source. Would you hear that? Did you ever hear that same noise like when they were like out in the back country when there was a carcass around?

01:02:15
Speaker 2: That’s an awesome question, Brodie, because that I’ve seen that, so it’s corroborating. Mind Like, the one I think of most is there was a spot in Slew Creek Big Flats. This bison had died, had been dead for a long time, pretty much eaten up, but the resident ravens every time another raven came within like half a mile, they were up in the ka count and if not flying over toward them to perch and you give them another cussing from within the turf. So it’s both, Yeah.

01:02:48
Speaker 4: What is they like? What are they doing vocally around?

01:02:52
Speaker 1: Like we know all these sounds, Like to go back turkeys for a minute, We know all these sounds that in our human understanding, we’ve kind of got it like these are sounds of courtship. Okay, the same way we might look at it, elk, But you can be like, that’s a sound of courtship. What like when you hear a raven, you’re just hearing raven noise. You don’t understand what is a What are they doing in the breeding season? Like what kind of things does a raven want to communicate in the breathing season? What would be the equivalent of how we at least how we perceive to be a gobbler going through the woods, goblin, you know, trying to draw hens in.

01:03:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it’s it’s different for raisins because they’re just socially different. You know, Turkeys are flock creatures. You know, toms are hanging out together, but the hens and the poults are hanging out together. They mix and mingle in places. Ravens are very much territorial with you know, kind of a slew of travelers and non residents filtering in and around through there. Except times when somebody kills a bison got our way or an elk and those big foods has become big attractions. We know now from the research in the park that some of these birds are coming from Bozeman, flying to my house and gardener and Yellstone over carcas to feed on carcasses during the bison cause the.

01:04:14
Speaker 3: Word spreads down the valley somehow.

01:04:17
Speaker 1: Yes, that’s wild you know what, man, you know what? Like, we were hunting the area with my kids. We were hunting area this year where like there’s a lot there’s a big cow elk harvest in a certain area pretty annually. I was even coming to my kids like I’m like, these things know what goes on here, and they’re like in town for it. I didn’t know they were in town from far away. I meant I thought they were in town from the other side of the valley or something.

01:04:49
Speaker 2: That’s what I used to think. No way in hell. These suckers are traveling twenty to thirty miles in the morning. So you think of a Yellstone bird, You’re like, oh, that’s wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park. Now they come up, they’re either feeding at the dumping gardener or West Yellstone or out Cody flying back at midday. They’re commuting, literally commuting in the morning off the food source, flying back in the day to maintain their terror.

01:05:15
Speaker 4: Potentially thirty miles away.

01:05:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that’s daily, you know, saying.

01:05:19
Speaker 1: No, they somewhere have their own place they would regard as their hangout, their house as territory.

01:05:24
Speaker 2: So to get back to that, the call that I learned next in sequence with Ravens was this, And before I even saw them, I knew that they were moving, right. That’s the sound they make when somebody’s violated the no fly zone in their turf. So they have to be back there on their territory to hold that space for them. So when the tour season rolls back around and everybody’s got frozen pizza and baloney sandwiches, they don’t have to do any fighting in border control. They’re good to go because everybody knows that’s their turf. But we’re to close the loop on the mating season stuff. Like I think a lot of these big food source locations end up being like the bar the dating scene for Ravens, and so you will see them displaying. They aren’t vocalizing as much that we can hear if you’re close and you hang out at the dump for the ravens like I do sometimes and not for the trash, you hear all these crazy soft sounds that probably I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out what they mean.

01:06:37
Speaker 4: You know, like.

01:06:39
Speaker 2: You know, you probably heard those like a water drop and stuff, and they use them in context of getting know each other. And you can tell at times when they display they’re not fanning like a turkey, but they’ll puff their throat, they’ll hold their beak up. You’ve probably seen them, especially around a like a gut pile or something where the birds converge. Look real close. Because in a general sense, when you see those birds that kind of drop their wings a little bit, they’re proffing up, they drop their flank feathers, those are your residant birds. Those are the territorial ones who own that space, so to speak. The others are interlopers, and they’ll be trying to run them off. In fact, when I did start reading back into the literature on ravens, it confirmed what I had seen in Yellowstone where what bren Heinrich, one of the world’s leading authorities on ravens, had found near his cabin in Maine. Was this dead moose. One dead moose, and one raven finds it, it lands and gives this call, and ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding on it with it. And he’s like, that makes no sense, right, You like, make a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and your family, and before you eat, you have the high school football team come over and dine first, like biologically behaviorally like that didn’t make sense until he started studying him and marking them, And what he figured out was the ones doing that were younger ones and non territorial birds. And that call, which is a great way if you ever injure an animal, or you’ve got a downed animal and train you can’t track him on, you got to listen to the ravens. Because that call doesn’t mean food in a generic sense any food. It means meat really, So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted by the residents who own that turf. So if that bird who found the moose was caught by the residents, it’d be run out and it wouldn’t get any food. But by going it brings in an overwhelming number of other ravens, and everybody ends up getting some.

01:08:56
Speaker 1: That I can think of an analog that a friend of mine was accidentally trespassing and found a mammoth jaw, so he had to go over and say, sir, I was accidentally trespassing on.

01:09:17
Speaker 4: And lo and behold up on a mammoth jaw. What are we gonna do about this?

01:09:23
Speaker 2: And that bunny called in all his buddies is standing around him to make sure he got the right answer.

01:09:27
Speaker 1: Because he’s like, he’s like that raven. He’s like, dude, like, I know, I’m on your place. It’s a big elk you. I just would like to know what happens with the thing and just try to be part of this, you know, admitting that I’m on you.

01:09:46
Speaker 3: And what I’m gonna do is calling a bunch of my buddies to help me pack it out there?

01:09:51
Speaker 4: You go, no way? Yeah, hit me with the meat call again.

01:09:58
Speaker 2: So let me qualify. It sounds very similar to what young birds do when they’re still on the nest and they’re fledging. So if you’ve ever had a raven or a crow nest near your place, they never you know, they never shut up, like they just talk, and a lot of that is which just grates on your nerves, and it’s supposed to because in essence, what they’re saying.

01:10:22
Speaker 1: Is mom, Mom.

01:10:27
Speaker 2: Hey mom. Right. So, if you see an adult bird, and the way you tell on a lot of birds, and certainly for corvids, is if you see them, call, pick up your binox and look in their mouth. If the lining of the mouth is black, it’s an adult. It’s three years or older. We can’t agent beyond that. We just know that after about two years, the mouth lining is all black. If it’s a red pink, it’s a juvenile. So if you hear a juvenile going on like that in August or September, you’re like, eh, stupid kids, I’m trying to get the parents to still feed them. But if it’s a black mouthed adult doing that, you want to start looking. You want to start looking for the magpies going in and out. You want to see there it seeing if that there’s a coyote coming over the hell Oh you know, it’s just the corroborating evidence that there’s something there that you’re missing. That the eyes in the sky picked.

01:11:24
Speaker 4: Up and do the noise again, and you don’t have.

01:11:27
Speaker 2: To hear it once like I’ve had guide friends They’re like, Hey, there’s a new bison in the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone.

01:11:33
Speaker 4: That’s it.

01:11:33
Speaker 2: I don’t tell me anymore. I’ll go in the park and i’ll hang out. I’ll go to a real good viewpoint, prominent point, and I’ll close my eyes and I’ll listen for the first time I hear that call. And often, because we often bias our other senses, sometimes I’ll point in the direction I think it is and then I’ll open my eyes and there it is, almost without fail.

01:11:55
Speaker 4: Because he’s making that racket.

01:11:57
Speaker 2: He’s making that racket because it found the food, and it’s calling in buddies to make sure the residents don’t run them out. You can, that’s one of the best ways to find that there.

01:12:08
Speaker 1: Also, what he I got mixed up bout what he’s saying or what you’re he’s being like, if I go down by myself, I’m gonna get her ass and run off.

01:12:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, So he’s basically calling in reinforcements.

01:12:26
Speaker 1: So the thing going and feed and they’re not and they got enough people there where it’s not going to be.

01:12:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s like a smoke screen, feathered smoke screen to give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting beat up. And you’ll hear it too, Like, there’s an awesome reference. Do you ever read any of Richard Nelson’s ethnography work from Alaska? In Prayers to Raven there’s a passage on there book it’s awesome and there’s like a one sentence description in there that I just like, I just want to know what he’s talking about. There he said, when the native hunters quitchen find a fresh bear track in the snow, they hide and they make the calls of a raven to draw the bearon. And I’m like, oh, really, what is that all like? And then he just keeps going. I’m like, no, you know, come back that. There’s two possibilities. One is that non territorial bird saying right, that’s possible. The other one, which I think is probably more likely, is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on the ground at a carcass fight.

01:13:32
Speaker 4: Oh, and they’re all duking it out, duking.

01:13:34
Speaker 2: It out, tolding you that like, we got a good deal here.

01:13:41
Speaker 1: Interesting, man, you’d go and get a bunch of guys that could do that and start making that noise and see what shows up.

01:13:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don’t know how effective it was, but it’s effective enough apparently in their culture that they’re that’s a known thing.

01:13:52
Speaker 1: One of my favorite things, and make make prayers of the raven One of my favorite things that he learned from those guys he’s hanging out with, is you know they’d like to.

01:13:59
Speaker 4: Then dig bear.

01:14:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, and their take is like, man, anybody can you know, because we look at that like, you know, most people look at that like a cowardly act, you know, unsportsmanlike. Their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear walking around, Go climb in there and drag.

01:14:15
Speaker 2: Them right right, And the old days they’re doing it with a lance. Yeah, they let the bear charge them.

01:14:22
Speaker 1: You know, go climb in there and drag them out, and tell me about how easy it is.

01:14:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, Woosy, that’s.

01:14:30
Speaker 4: A good book.

01:14:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, he spends a lot of time on I mean obviously that that thing of like the significance of that bird, which is probably in some way motivated by it’s just incredible intelligence.

01:14:42
Speaker 2: And I could totally see like people will often ask questions of like, you know the wolves around, you know, are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as we can see. No, Like there might be one or two instances in the last thirty years where somebody can say I’m pretty sure the ravens were maybe goaded those wolves over a friend of mine was watching a brown.

01:15:04
Speaker 4: Tap into the carcass or something.

01:15:06
Speaker 2: But yeah, or you know, here’s a weak animal. There’s a carcass right here. You know it’s more there just like parasites to the wolves. They’re just taking advantage of the wolves killed. I’ve seen times where wolves will be feeding on the back end of an old wear out bull elk, and the ravens are literally an antlers like waiting their turn. Come on, man, give us, give us a little space about it.

01:15:27
Speaker 1: But you don’t see that there’s like a legitimate like hey, come quick, this thing’s will no no.

01:15:32
Speaker 2: But like the northern cultures all over the globe were like, yeah, that’s how we find the caribou. And I think a lot of those signals are as much behavioral, Like, for instance, because we live on the edge of the National Forest right north of the park, there’s a lot of hunting that goes on, and I can go out for a walk with a dog and I’m like, uh, somebody killed something over by the travertine two miles away, just by the continual unidirectional flight of every single raven going that way. So I think a lot of those early cultures probably were not just picking up on sound, but they were picking up on directional flight, flight altitude. If you see arab back, you know, acrobatics in the air, they probably you’re close. There’s a certain I don’t know number of hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you’ll see ravens chasing each other trying to get food away from each other, and you know, like so you know you see that, you’re like, oh, we’re within a couple hundred yards of that food source.

01:16:36
Speaker 1: I was in Tanzania this summer. In the trackers use what oxpeckers do.

01:16:44
Speaker 4: In the morning.

01:16:45
Speaker 1: It’s it’s like it’s diagnostic. I mean they don’t look at like, oh, maybe maybe there’s something over there that it’s going to. Yeah, they’re like he’s up in the morning, when he flies out, he already knows.

01:17:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, he knows where they’re at the buffalo.

01:17:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, like he knows where they are because he was with them before or whatever, and he’s going there. Yeah, you know, and so yeah, in that way, and those messages they might they might not go there because of whatever factors.

01:17:17
Speaker 4: But they’re like at daybreak when.

01:17:19
Speaker 1: Six of them go yeah and disappeared down somewhere, like that’s not for something else.

01:17:26
Speaker 2: And the bugs do that. You know, you probably read Boyd Vardi’s you know, line Tracker’s Guide to Life or something like that. One of his mentors was finding found a lion kill from watching the.

01:17:37
Speaker 4: Flies No same deal.

01:17:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I interviewed a guy from the book and he didn’t It didn’t end up making it into the final cut, but he and his buddy hunted a lot in California, really rocky ground.

01:17:48
Speaker 4: You know.

01:17:48
Speaker 2: The first time it happened, they shot a bucket, ran off somewhere, could kind of see, you know, ran out of blood, didn’t know, just kind of gave up almost sitting on this this hill or next to this trail and start seeing. He called him meat bees, you know, el jackets that you’re trying to avoid if you’re processing game from getting stung. Yellow jackets keep going up this trail. So he followed him, and he’s used that for years thereafter to find down game God in places he couldn’t track.

01:18:23
Speaker 4: You know Tom Petty, Late Tom Patty.

01:18:25
Speaker 1: He once said in one of his songs, he says, I can track a single bee to its hive, which is like how these define Yeah, staying there, starms and standing there way till one goes by, see as far as it went, go.

01:18:39
Speaker 4: There, standing there, wait for.

01:18:40
Speaker 1: The nuther one to go by, and you’ll find your buck like that. Man, Yeah, badass, you can.

01:18:46
Speaker 2: And it’s it’s all that’s to me. And I don’t hunt anymore. And that’s a whole different conversation. But just paying attention and trying to see the world through these other creatures, you start picking that stuff up a lot more. And this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors knew this animal language stuff in far better detail than I do. Like a friend of mine’s hung out with the San people in the Kalahari. They are unfreaking believable in interpreting non human communication. And the ones are the best. You would think are the hunters. He’s like, no, actually it’s the women. The women are out in the bush digging roots. They’ve got kids with them, they got old people with them, all these people that are very vulnerable. If the hyenas or leopard or the lions come through, so they are ultra peaked. And he went out with them one day and they’re digging away and these women’s are spread out. You’re like, dude, that’s not safe right from our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women with the children, digging roots and things like that. And he’d walk up to any of them, We’re the closest lions. Without even stopping, they point, how far about this far? Walk to another one, Hey, where are the closest lions? They point, go around and visit multiple women, doing this just effortlessly as part of their day. They are absorbing this information as they go. And in that particular case, they went over a couple hours later in a vehicle. There’s the fresh lion tracks, got it, and even on down really specific stuff, like he told me this story. They were in this It was small plot of forest and they hang out there in the day because it gets really really hot. And they said to them, the white guys, the tourists, do not leave this patch of forest. There’s Mama’s out here, there’s cobras, there’s hyenas. The whole laundry list, but one of the guys with him. There was one of his students in animal language bird language, and this student of his comes over. He says, Hey, I know we’re not supposed to leave, but I’m hearing this bird do something that I think might be talking about a snake. Can you come listen to it? So he goes over there with him at the edge of this little patch of trees and he’s like, yeah, I think you’re right, but you know, we’re not gonna go out there. Let’s but let’s go get the one white guy and he’s got a gun. We will check it out. So he comes over. The three of them walk out and he’s like, yeah, I think I think you’re right. I think it’s I think it’s a snake. But let’s go get aasi Quah. You know this this native guy, his name literally translates into cobra, he’ll know. So Isakulah comes. The four of them then walk within I’ll say sixty eighty yards and he’s like, yep, there it is. It’s a it’s a black mamba. Don’t go over there. So my friend says to his student who were originally found this whole deal, he’s like, now watch this. They go back into the trees and there’s like five women sitting around making beads with ostrich eggs shells and they’re just talking. Kids are playing around, people are working on tan and highs, just the usual stuff of a community. So they stand their patient and finally there’s a break in the conversation and the translator says, you want to ask the question. So my friend says, yeah, do you ladies hear any alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away, says there’s a mamba over there. Don’t go over there.

01:22:27
Speaker 4: Hmm.

01:22:29
Speaker 2: So not only through their regular routine were they hearing it, they also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on, Like that’s the level that not just Native Africans, not just Native Amazonians, like our ancestors knew that. And it’s like so cool that we’re discovering it now. It’s like, no, it’s neat, but this is really old and it was used because it was so useful. It was retained because dinner was on the hoof, and you need to know it was in there before you even went in there to just limit the chaos that that life brings at you. So and for me, it’s like I was guiding a ton, you know. So like people are paying you to find the bear. Well, ha, Well, if there’s anybody on a carcass that’s out there, it’s probably gonna be a bear, you know. So you got to listen to the raven. You got to watch the duck. So I don’t I want to see a wolf, you know some people I like, I don’t care. You gotta watch everything here because everything has a response and a relationship with everything else. And the more you pay attention to that, the more you’re gonna see all those connections start done, just blossom. And what’s even more cool is when you see the position you yourself hold you’re being talked about. They respond to you, Steve different than you, Brody different than you can and they respond or eating our dogs dog has a different bark for the ups guy because he gives them snacks. Definitely different bark for the FedEx guy. No snacks there, different bark for the neighbor knows that guy pretty well. Different bark for or behaviors when one of the family comes home so we’re not in isolation of this, you know, as it’s seen in the wild world, like we’re doing it, our pets are doing it. It’s just paying attention a little bit more so that you start seeing in the places that you want to know more.

01:24:30
Speaker 1: Our dog has a greeting for people whose house she has stayed at before.

01:24:36
Speaker 4: What is it? Just a level of like swirling around, make the wine. You know, it’s like rolling over on her back. That means she’s like been dog sat by them. Yeah.

01:24:46
Speaker 1: Well, the crazy thing is like if you haven’t done that, she’s not gonna do it right.

01:24:50
Speaker 2: It’s true. It’s so true. And like literally three mornings ago, my wife and I are working at the dining room table and our dog, We’ve got a black lab Hobbs. Hobb starts going bananas like ape shit. I’m like, what he only does that level of craziness for the ups guy, or if the neighbor’s dog comes in the yard because he wants to go play, right, I’m like, what is it? He’s just like bouncing. It almost looked like a coonhound. You know, it’s babe, you know, treat to a raccoon bouncing on his front feet. Bark and barking, barking, And I look out the front door before I let him out, and here’s a bobcat walking up the stairs from the lower yard into the upper yard, twenty feet from the from the door, and then just veers off and through the yard. You’d see those tracks. You’re like, oh, yeah, that bobcat came through the night, Like, no, dude, it was ten thirty in the morning. We were working and we would have missed it had hobs or in other cases, we’ve seen lines in our yard because the magpies told us. You know, we had a line with four kittens in our yard this spring and they disappeared after a while. Didn’t think we’d see him again. And we’re sitting on the porch, my wife and I and Jenny says hear that. I’m like, yeah, magpies. Magpies. When they are social and just hanging out together, they’ll go yeka, can hear it in different places they’re just checking in. But when it goes down ye yah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s like that’s what we heard. And she says there’s something down there. I’m like, I know, and she no more than stands up walks less than the distance from here to Brody looks over the railing into the lower yard and she says, fucking lion. And because of the fore warning, he had enough time running the house, grab her camera and got this killer footage of the cat walking like thirty feet from the corner of our deckoree in the afternoon, when you least expect it. It’s like when your life is on the line, like a magpie who might be whacked by a wild cat, or a raven who might get whacked by an eagle, like look to those things that their lives depend on most, and then you just start seeing this, this whole scene open up. Is that’s why they’re talking that way, and you’re just you’re just an eavesdropper listening. I was like, oh, whoa, Like ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Some things seem generic, but some things are extremely specific. And this one and it can take a while, Like this one took me about five years to figure out what the heck it meant. I’d heard it. I’m like, WHOA, that’s different. I can’t figure it out. Flying high just making noise right, No, No, that’s what happens when there’s a golden eagle?

01:27:35
Speaker 4: What is that noise?

01:27:35
Speaker 5: Like?

01:27:36
Speaker 2: So it’s a very consistent, uniform series of notes to just go on and and it’s it’s serious. And I was having lunch with a guy who runs the bird programs in Yellstone. I’m like, hey, Dave, you did you graduate working on golden eagles?

01:28:00
Speaker 4: Right?

01:28:01
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. He’s like, you know this raven call. I’ve been hearing this raven call. I’m pretty sure it’s just for goldens. He’s like, oh yeah, that’s exactly what we listened for to know to get the eagle traps ready because one’s coming.

01:28:14
Speaker 4: Oh really, why are they tuned into goldens?

01:28:20
Speaker 2: They’re killers?

01:28:21
Speaker 4: So goldens will kill them off of those.

01:28:24
Speaker 2: I’ve only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but it’s really infrequent.

01:28:29
Speaker 4: But he wants he wants to eat it.

01:28:30
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they’re eating them. It’s like a difference between a wolf killing a coyote versus a lion. Lion will eat you. Wolf just kills you, you know, till the their level of response is different. That line is gonna hunt you. That wolf is gonna opportunistically kill you because you’re filching off. It’s kill and they know these variations. So I asked Dave and Likes to have, you know, a variation for bald eagles, because I think I have, and he’s like, nah, you know, he wasn’t doing research on them, so he didn’t. But on the spectrum of raven chasing another raven off versus raven chasing a golden eagle off back from that golden eagle, end of the spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it, a few more bits of inflection. And it’s hard because you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape because I only get maybe half a dozen of these in a lifetime, some of these behaviors and calls. But if you’ve got one hundred other people who listen for exactly the same thing for a couple of thousand years, and you’re telling the stories, yeah, you see why the bushmen are so damn good. But I’ve been able to call it on bald a few times. You know, you hear and I don’t know if you can hear the differences in there. It’s not that and it’s not the raven chasing another raven. There’s a little more insistence to it. There’s a little more uniformity, but compared to the Golden Eagle, there’s still more inflection, there’s more spacing in there, and they’re doing those things for a reason.

01:30:17
Speaker 3: It’s all this stuff like are you doing all this just kind of based on memory and things you’re hearing repetitively out while you’re out are like, are you recording it all to like listen to this stuff and get nuance out of it?

01:30:33
Speaker 2: Or is it just for years? For twenty plus years, it’s been me just listening in ways other people haven’t been and making some connections and missing most right. But what’s really cool right now is my friend’s kind of at the center of initiating a bioacoustics project in Yellstone, which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle wolf language. You know, can you sense this a wolf population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves out of a place by playing certain types of howls in an area to keep them on of cattle? Right? So they’re doing more or less the basic research, though it’s just based you’re putting out all these recorders and recording twenty four by seven, three hundred and sixty five days a year. But you’re not just getting wolves. You’re getting everything. You’re getting all the ravens, you’re getting all the bis in conversation, You’re getting everything. And we’ve got one of them in our yard a part of this project. So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my phone where I see a raven chase a golden eagle over. I just make them time and date stamp and a note of behavior in my phone. And now I can actually go back because you’re you all have this. If you’re trying to take a photo of something, you’re trying to record something, it’s over before you’re done, especially these things. I only have a few data points ever, but this is but.

01:32:00
Speaker 4: This is not always running.

01:32:01
Speaker 2: It’s always running. So I can now make a note and I’m like raven being you know, chased by this or raven chasing that I can go back to the sound recordings and listen to it over and over and it’s context totally. That’s where this AI stuff is really cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other behaviors, but you still need the field time. You still need somebody who’s died in the wool in the field, and that’s all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise just it’s just noise. So that’s the part I really enjoy, and I like, I’m really wanting to figure out. I have a strong suspicion of what the alarm coyotes use for when they encounter a cougar. It’s different than when they find a wolf because they’re bad dudes, and they’re going to tell everybody about it. They want them known and they want to avoid them themselves and their families. But I’ve only had four instances where I can verify that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else’s observations, that kyote was barking at a cougar one data point. And I hope this bioacoustics stuff is allow us to then go in because like he and I hooked up with a high school honors student kid wanted a project on wildlife. So we’re like, great, we need to train the AI model. So we had him go listen to a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say, this is a howl. It’s not an airplane, This is a howl. It’s not a truck. This is a howl of a wolf, not a coyote, so that then you can let the machine listen to a year’s worth of recordings without you having to sit there for a year for every single unit, and you know, isolate all the right And you know, there’s been an explosion in the amount of info out there in the research world about this kind of stuff in the last fifteen years. Like a friend wrote a book in h came out in twenty twelve called What the Robin Knows by John Young. They had they had to scratch and dig to find any documentation that talked about any of this stuff. You know, everybody’s got the app now, like here’s the Song of the Robin, you know, here’s the Song of the Phoebe. You know all these What they don’t tell you and they can’t is what the hell that actually means.

01:34:26
Speaker 1: You know.

01:34:28
Speaker 2: And so there’s been a lot more research in that field recently, which is just it’s pointing to the complexity that we’ve been ignoring as modern humans for a long darn time. And as it’s fun. You know, you don’t need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff. You just you don’t even need binoculars. Just listen. Well, I don’t have good hearing anymore. I shot too many guns or like me, you know, power tools and guns, and you know, I got compromised hearing. But it’s not about what you can hear or can see. It’s what you do with what you can hear and see. Like I noticed a friend of mine who’s had a lot of the same history. We pick up on cars on dirt road, a lot further off than our wives do. Get the dogs, Get the dogs in out of the road, Like, what are you talking about. There’s a car coming. Yeah, there’s a car coming. I don’t hear it. Well, just give it a sec you know, and there it comes. So each of us comes to the to the game with a slightly different set of superpowers, if you want to put it that way. And we’re tuning into things in ways that you aren’t, or you’re tuning in stuff that I don’t, which is in some ways, like I don’t like to give a lot of instruction on this stuff because I want to hear what you find. And if I tell you what to look for, that’s all you’re going to see. You follow me, you know, So I really it’s like, yeah, I’m gonna tell you some cool stuff to get you started plant that seed, but man, I really want you to do this on your own and te me what you find. Oh yeah, the lions, you know, the Kyle’s do that at the lion, but it’s when the lion’s behaving like this. So like when that bobcat came through the yard the other day, I did get a small recording of the magpies, and it was nothing like what I would point out and say, bobcat over there. And what you start to realize is there oftentimes talking about Sure they’re talking about the animal specifically, but as well in that mix as them talking about that animal’s behavior, it’s intention, you might say. So when a cat is hunting, those alarms go through the roof, they’d light up the woods. But if the cat like this one the other day, it was just kind of like walking through the yard.

01:36:45
Speaker 4: You know, it.

01:36:45
Speaker 2: Drops off the retaining wall, sits down on a log in the little cops of cottonwoods. Yeah, yeah, there’s a trouble, but we’re not ratting it out like crazy, you know. So in many cases you can you can actually read into the behavior. You can read into the direction in the animals moving. Like so when the kyote is alarming at something like us. Naturally, they’ll often shadow it as it progresses, so you’d be like, Okay, there’s a there’s a wolf over there, and it’s going right to left at a trot, I think, and if we want to see it, we’re going to have to go over on the hill here where we’re down wind. You can start doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately because they’re hunting with rocks and sticks, need everything, and this is one of those tools that helps you on that razor’s edge of survival. It’s like the you know the crow Indian, you know Crow tribal folks here, they had to know Crowfair. I don’t know if you guys have been to Crowfair, but they were just a few years ago. A twitter with the fact this one elder was coming out of the mountains to tend and this photographer friend of mine got to meet him, and you know, he’s very low key asking questions, and the elder asked this friend of mine, He’s like, so, you know what do you do. I’m a photographer? You so, oh, what do you like to photograph? Bears and wolves and otters and stuff like that? You want to know where every bear is, every wolf is. He’s like, yeah, he’s like getting his notebook out. He’s like, you know, thinking he’s gonna draw map, and he’s like, he says, no. He says, you listen to the birds. He says, they’re like our women, the gossip about everything.

01:38:30
Speaker 8: Yeah, you know that’s some deep wisdom right there, because it’s going on all the time, but we just don’t give it the credit it’s due.

01:38:42
Speaker 1: What ah, What other animals that people that people listen would know would have a familiar familiarity with the with the vocabulary already?

01:38:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, great ones likerels. Okay, well in North America at least, you know, gray squirrel is a great one. They’re in Europe, you know, they’ve been introduced to Europe and there a plague over there. But again, nature doesn’t care whether you’re non native or native. Everybody’s contributions to this community conversation is equal and listened to. So gray squirrels. If you spend time in the woods, you know something’s coming through when you hear what what what?

01:39:20
Speaker 4: What?

01:39:25
Speaker 2: Which is in contrast to.

01:39:32
Speaker 4: Does it ever hear that one? But without the yes.

01:39:39
Speaker 2: Exactly look up? That is typically for a threat from the air.

01:39:46
Speaker 4: He leaves off the couple like whatever.

01:39:48
Speaker 2: The chucks or chucks. The chucks are typically something on the ground. Same with red squirrels.

01:39:58
Speaker 4: That’s him, that’s something tally.

01:40:00
Speaker 2: On the ground. There’s some there’s some debate in the scientific community over what that actually means. And no, it doesn’t mean that. It means this, and we don’t know. And the bottom line is the squirrels. Now listen to the squirrels, spend time with the squirrels, because when they got.

01:40:18
Speaker 4: That one, what does that mean? Because there got a version that just means I’m mad at another squirrel.

01:40:25
Speaker 2: There is that. Yeah, you can’t discount that, that’s for sure, Like, dude, get out of my midden.

01:40:30
Speaker 1: I wish, I wish I could isolate the one because I’m really interested in the one where he sees something.

01:40:38
Speaker 4: But then a lot of times you’d be watching him.

01:40:40
Speaker 1: From a fire and he’d be like he’s fired up because he’s fired up at that squirrel. Yeah, you know, he’s not telling about some elk coming down the trail.

01:40:47
Speaker 4: He’s like pissed at a squirrel.

01:40:49
Speaker 2: And what’s really crazy cool is not only is are most of these things innate in these species. So like those vervet monkeys, they are wired from birth to yell at the leopard like they do you think, so we know. So what they don’t always have, well, yes and no. What they need is refinement of how to use that. So like young ones they’ve seen in those verbts, like adults basically like cuff the kids like, shut up that it’s a root. It’s a tree, root, it’s not a snake.

01:41:22
Speaker 4: Oh all right.

01:41:23
Speaker 2: So there there are these innate tendencies, there’s these innate alarms. But then there’s also training that comes with the social arrangement that that helps them refine it so that the group can agree. Right, And that’s also where you end up with these dialects. You know, the ravens on Vancouver Island, like, dude, they say stuff I’ve never heard before from here, Okay, totally different accent in California. Dude, he’s on my surfboard. You know, it’s like Manaier’s you know, those ravens have different sounds, same in Alaska. Like you can see. Then it’s like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture. Yeah, and they’re talking about things in pretty complex ways. They’re talking about us too, which I don’t think a lot of people realize they’re talking about us in ways that these wild communities are actually across species, not just across species, across genera family, order of organism that are all listening to each other simultaneously. So the mink is listening to the frogs, The frogs are listening to the owl, the the you know, the the owl is listening to the jet going overhead. You know, there’s this this whole hierarchy of of order that.

01:42:42
Speaker 1: They have a great point that, like as much you’re talking about trying to like sort figure out what the noises make, there’s all these different noises that have to mean something. It’s interesting to get into it, Like what are other animals? So here you are a human. Here you are one specie hearing an elk bugle, drawing conclusions from that, But that elk is listening to a pine squirrel, drawing conclusions from that.

01:43:13
Speaker 2: None of them are in isolation. We are the ones in isolation.

01:43:17
Speaker 4: We’re the ones.

01:43:20
Speaker 2: And it’s not like you got to go into a wild place to hear this. No Like, literally, I’m gassing up here and bows before I got here, and the chickeny is pissed off at something. I didn’t see what it was, but I at least knew something’s going on over there. I’ve done enough times walk over and be like, oh, I bet nobody in this neighborhoods seen that owl. Mmm, it’s been sitting there, probably lived there its whole life, years and nobody’s known that it’s sitting right there.

01:43:47
Speaker 4: We had one hanging dead in that tree there today, din’t you really?

01:43:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, what happened to it?

01:43:51
Speaker 1: We emailed or our texted one of the game wardens, and you said, there’s so much avian influenza right now, and it’s sitting the owls hard enough where they don’t even they’re out even testing all the birds anymore, that’s said, And that’s he was going to come by and grab it, but he was like, he’s like, there’s a lot.

01:44:07
Speaker 2: Pretty sure of it. Yeah, overwhelmed.

01:44:09
Speaker 4: And that’s yeah, that’s there’s too many to check them all right now.

01:44:14
Speaker 2: That’s what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking around the globe, is we’re losing these informants. We’re losing these community members who are more than happy to welcome us in and share information with us. If we slow the hell down. Like something I do with the students that I have done for years is I’ll take him out somewhere in the park and I said, everybody puts your phones, your watches, everything in a bag. Pull out a notepad or a piece of paper and a pencil. That’s all you’re allowed to have. Spread out, you know. So we all have everybody spread out for you know, a few yards between everybody over a let’s say an acre, and we’re going to sit for an hour, sixty minutes. That’s it, sixty minutes and then and I just want you to look for any animals, you see, any sounds you hear, just jot them down, and we come together at the end of that. And I keep time, and they have a crude way for them to keep rough time stamps of when we’re out there, so they can correlate certain things. And I’ll say to them, what did you hear? Nothing?

01:45:25
Speaker 4: Man?

01:45:25
Speaker 2: There was nothing for like, I don’t know, I thought I heard a chickadee like maybe minute, you know, around minute forty or when you made the signal for the fourth quarter or something like. There was nothing, and then there’s stuff all over. I’m like anybody else notice that, Like, yeah, actually the nutatge came down the tree, I saw coyo. Like all these things start happening. I said, do you think us going in there screwed things up? Did they know we were coming? And you see the wheels starting? The answer to that is absolutely yes. The same signal system that’s ratting out the Cooper’s Hawk coming through the neighborhood or the owl perched up in this spruce is the same system that’s telling everybody else about us.

01:46:14
Speaker 3: That’s it super interesting from a hunting perspective because like you could be Glass and some mule deer that are saying a thousand yards away and you’re like, they have no idea we’re here, But maybe they do and they’re just not worried about it yet.

01:46:29
Speaker 2: You know, they know the proximities, they know the priors. They know that squirrel isn’t going to do that until it sees something of trouble. But they’re three hundred four hundred yards down.

01:46:42
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.

01:46:43
Speaker 2: If we see the Kyle Hall and ass up through this meadow past us, we know that trouble’s gotten about another one hundred yards closer. You know that ghost buck that nobody could ever harvest they at a very fine level. At that age had to be half to be tuning into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment. And every species has a different threshold, you know, so Toey’s, for instance, they’re out of there so fast, or like ninjas, you just notice like they’re gone, like where the hell they go. The sparrows, you know, pay attention and they make a couple of chip notes and then they take off, you know, and a couple of minutes later, here comes the dog has followed your trail into the woods.

01:47:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you’re sneaking along thinking that the thing that’s alerting stuff is you crunch and leaves and if you think about and you’s like like the forest is alive with bird calls and whatever and squirrels and stuff. But you think it’s like you step down a twig. Yeah, it’s a good point. They might have been taught about you for forever.

01:47:44
Speaker 2: Man the turkey step on twigs, elk break brand, big break, big stuff. So like why aren’t they alarming?

01:47:50
Speaker 4: At that?

01:47:50
Speaker 2: I was like so pissed as a kid, like watching these birds on my grandmother’s feet are like a woodpacker come in and flush everybody, or a jay or you know, squirrel sidles up, I walk out. Everybody off. I’m like, I’m not bad.

01:48:02
Speaker 4: I’m not bad.

01:48:03
Speaker 2: Guy, Like, come on, let’s you know, hang out, show me some stuff. And no, it’s like you screw the least common denominator as a hiker, a dog walker, a beach comber, and you scare everybody. That’s the piece we don’t get is if you scare the robin, you’ve already been blown for everything. You scare the brown creeper, you scare the mink.

01:48:28
Speaker 4: You know.

01:48:28
Speaker 2: It’s like and then there’s this beautiful this is like gourmet level stuff where you start getting into secondary alarms. So like, as you slow down, I’ll back up just a second, so that one exercise of making everybody sit for sixty seconds or sixty minutes, I’ll say, how many times have each of you gone out in the woods or somewhere just wildish and sat for sixty minutes and done nothing but pay attention? You ask that yourself, like you know hunters some.

01:49:00
Speaker 4: But yeah, archery, whitetail hunters.

01:49:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s how I learned it a lot.

01:49:05
Speaker 1: That’s when you see everything, well, you got it. Like you gotta go sit there. At like an hour in Alston, You’re like, where is all this stuff?

01:49:12
Speaker 4: Normally?

01:49:13
Speaker 2: Bingo?

01:49:13
Speaker 4: You know, it’s like stuff everywhere.

01:49:16
Speaker 2: It’s normally exactly like you see after that hour. And that’s what this lesson conveys them, is like I’ve never said anywhere for an hour. And so the result is the reason we don’t pick up on so much of this stuff is we have never ever seen the environment we live, our home, the place we think we know the best, in anything other than a state of alarm and disruption, alarm and disruption that we have created ourselves. But the beauty is as you start to pay attention to that, they recognize it in you. And it’s very simple, slow down, walk without an intention. Photographers, you know, even the photograph for not hurting anything, doing anything. The behavior most people take on when they’re trying to get a photo, it’s predator like I see you, I’m focused on you. I’m That is scary as hell to wild animals. What it’s saying is I’m going to get you. I’m getting you.

01:50:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like I’m acknowledging that you’re there, right, So like if you’re yeah, coming up and you tell people if you’re trying to get up on a cotton, ta’ll be like last thing you do. Don’t look at it exactly, look at it out of the corner, your eyeballs at it, because when you aim your eyeballs at it, it knows you’re aiming your eyeballs.

01:50:33
Speaker 2: At it exactly exactly. It’s that language. So as you slow down and as a friend calls it, I love this term that the honoring routine. You start to honor their space, you very quickly can tell what the squirrel’s personal space extends to you respect that you give them a little bit of room. Ah, you know, I’m just trying to get to the store, like I’m not walking around every pigeon, Well, that is the barrier that’s going to stop you from moving through the woods, Like that ghostbuck, like that lion. Do you follow me? They are paying attention to the signals in the environment and working around them and using environmental components to their advantage. So there’s some places there are worthless to try to hunt until it’s a south wind, right, You got to wait till the wind’s right. You see, certain birds and predators hunt when it’s pouring down rain, their survival is so narrow on that razor edge, and they’ve got this huge neighborhood watch trying to disarm them and keep them from killing their prey. And so they’re doing all these different things to try to subvert the community of communication. That’s busting them, that’s busting you, that’s busting you. You step like, literally, you got two minutes. Usually this is a fun one to play with. Tell everybody to meet me at this trail intersection at eleven o’clock, let’s say, except you get in there at ten, So it means you leave your car or you know, do whatever you have to do to be sitting down by ten and let things go back to normal m h.

01:52:20
Speaker 1: And then which is thirty minutes whatever, Yeah, yeah, to lease at least it’s usually more like forty to sixty minutes.

01:52:28
Speaker 2: And then as you’re sitting there and the birds are feeding and they’re preening and they’re singing, you hear the most common alarm in the woods, what is it? Silence? Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in nature that exists. So you just might think there’s nobody singing over there anymore, and then you see a couple of birds like hauling ass going from the park lot area past. You set your watch two minutes, so you got two minutes to figure out do you want to scare the tart and my buddy, do you want to hide? Or do you want to you know, go to somewhere else where I can watch them and screw them.

01:53:16
Speaker 4: This is one about the quietness, man.

01:53:18
Speaker 2: This is what the lion or the deer knows of you.

01:53:24
Speaker 1: Is.

01:53:24
Speaker 2: It’s got two minutes through the robins, through the sparrows to do a wide loop out, listen about your progress through all the other birds and animals, and then you’ve had I know you, guys, if you spent any amount of time in the woods, you come back the same trail you went in on. You’re like, son of a bitch, there’s bear tracks right on my tracks, or wolf tracks or coyote tracts or the deer. You know, it’s because they walk around you. They’re listening and monitoring you through the animal language in the environment, so they’re like, oh, yeah, okay, he’s still going. He’s going on left over that ridge. And this stuff is is of such high utility that it’s one fella I mentioned in the book interviewed him. He was training special ops crews and he had a guy he trained in bird language as well as tracking, and they had a Humbye ran over an ied you know, in the road, just made a mess of this thing, and they sent him, this student of the the fell I I knew, in to find the bomb layer. And he does a few loops around the Humby site, you know, just chaos, bleeding guys, screaming guys, smoke fire. He picks up a single set of tracks leaving same set. Came in one way, left another. So he starts sign cutting. You know, some of you might know that term. You’re moving fast, but you’re you’re periodically rechecking that you’re on the prints.

01:54:56
Speaker 4: Okay.

01:54:56
Speaker 2: He broke a branch over there, you know, just trying to catch up. And he gets to a certain point where he’s this is Afghanistan. There’s this waddy is little ravine, and he hears the alarms. He’s like that guy’s he’s over in there. And as he’s standing there trying to figure out what to do, he starts hearing the bird alarms go up this ridge beyond the wadi, and based on what he learned, he want the opposite direction, so he get it over on to another point, get a clear view of that ridge and ends up taking the guy out. Never saw him up until that point, but he was clearly delineated in his movements and direction and speed even through the bird conversations. And that’s the thing. He didn’t know any of the birds. You don’t need to know any of the birds. You learn the birds at home, and the patterns you find anywhere you go are the same. They’re going to be filled by different species. But like I’ve heard so many people say, hey, you know, I never would have seen that at Mongoose. We’re in Africa. But it’s responding exactly the way the sparrows do at my place along the river when the mink comes through. The painted dogs, oh my gosh, Like we never would have seen them. But those birds, whatever they are, are the height off the ground. They’re excited in the same way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor’s dog gets loose and comes over yep. So that’s the universality of that concept. Is fascinating to me that we all are operating on this same level of awareness and use of sound to know what’s going on. Sometimes miles beyond our own sensory abilities, Like I know there’s wolves in the park two and a half miles away. If I’m walking my dog, I hear, oh yeah yeah. At this point, it’s not even a if, it’s just where so I’ll find that that signal maker or the coyoteor wherever. And I just set up the scope and from the deck of the house, you’re like, oh, yep, you know there they are. It seems like mad to people, but it’s not. It’s just paying attention better people. And when you pay attention better, you get treated different. That’s the real beauty to me is you start getting to know individual wild animals and they at the same time they’ve always already known you.

01:57:22
Speaker 4: Oh yeah.

01:57:23
Speaker 1: It’s like why certain people can be out in their yard and have stuff come into it.

01:57:26
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that kid is the one when he comes to the prairie dog community town, he’s freaking popping our buddy’s off. That guy he doesn’t even care. And they remember real well whether you’ve been nice or especially if you’ve been naughty. So there are times like even pigeons, let’s go back to pigeons, like they remember hundreds of people faces. You can change your clothes, and the pigeons remember you. There’s some there’s a study done in Paris to that effect, one done in Philadelphia where they guessed that the pigeon and rocked up might know and remember thousands of people remember who’s a regular, who’s a tourist, you know, and log all this stuff. We are being patterned all the time.

01:58:15
Speaker 4: There’s probably some dude listening who’s thinking like.

01:58:18
Speaker 1: I am that there’s probably some like if you think about like trying to call mallards or something that like that, there’s like some code that you could crack, do you know what I mean? Like that to a duck when duck comes over and it’s clearly looking for other ducks, and it’s like the ducks like I know that that’s not.

01:58:45
Speaker 4: Right, Like I don’t get the problem.

01:58:48
Speaker 1: Right, there’s some thing that’s not right. Yeah, you’re doing something that’s not right.

01:58:52
Speaker 2: Everybody’s just bothering.

01:58:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s something like there’s something you could say, you know, there’s something you could say that would just make it absolutely.

01:59:04
Speaker 4: That duck would have to come down.

01:59:05
Speaker 1: But you’ll never well, you’ll never learn it, you know what I mean, You’ll never learn Like when he goes like no, not buying it.

01:59:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. That speaks to another point where I don’t sometimes share too much because what these animals offer you when you are let into their world is to see their strengths, their incredible talents, but vulnerabilities. But you see their achilles heels too, and that I don’t. It’s thrown around so cliche but sacred. That to me is there’s a sacredness in what they have shared to then betray that. Like a great example. You probably know this from your bison work, is bison have this achilles heel of following the matriarch. Yeah, and those bison hunters and partly annihilated them because of their allegiance to the matriarch. They don’t move anywhere.

02:00:01
Speaker 4: I watched the exploit that.

02:00:05
Speaker 2: So she can’t move, and everybody meals around, and you just mow the rest of them down. Anybody else tries to take off and charge a new course, you bust them through the guts. Everybody mills around, and you you know, you in one stand you can get a dozen or a hundred. I think there’s one record of like a hundred or something bison in one stand.

02:00:21
Speaker 4: Guy named Vick Smith got over a hundred one time.

02:00:24
Speaker 2: So to me, when you’re let in, it’s it’s changed the way I There are things I couldn’t reconcile hunting, And part of that was.

02:00:41
Speaker 1: There there are things about hunting you couldn’t reconcile, or there are animals that you couldn’t reconcile hunting.

02:00:46
Speaker 2: For it was the former, like I didn’t know what it was, but there was an honoring piece, a recognition, a sacredness that got cloud out. It over and me trying to get that turkey, that tom, that specific tom there, that buck or something like that that I’m I missed I’ve found now and for me this is just me. It took me stepping away from hunting to really soak into their world on their terms if you follow me, and that you know, and so they share things like there’s a there’s a mule deer dough model mother, model mama just we called her Mamma Deer and she she always brought off funds. She was amazing. In one year she had triplets, actually no, no, I think it was tried. Quadruplets, which for meal dr almost never happens, like she knew or to feed build up those reserves could handle that many kids and love behole. We start into that winter and it’s a bitch, and one by one we start seeing those fawns not show up on the yard, and pretty soon it’s down to just one. And then we don’t even see Mama deer. They’re gone. I’m like, what the hell? And we had years with this deer, like we had enough understanding that I would walk with at that time, our two black labradors, each about seventy pounds, and I’d go to get the mail the mailbox like tenth of mile up the driveway, and she’d be there grazing, you know, off a distance. But in the meantime she might come like right along the driveway and I would put my hands on the shoulders of dogs. Not they weren’t even they weren’t leashed, you know, our dogs run. But to her, this was my gesture of it’s okay, they’re with me, and I’m not going to let them bother you. And there are times we could walk within twelve feet of her and the fawns, like I go sit in the yards sometimes and she was so comfortable that she would walk between me, sitting on the edge of the retaining wall and the edge of the decking, which was like at most thirty feet she’d walk through like we had an understanding. It wasn’t she wasn’t my pet. I didn’t, you know, but we gave each other the space and understanding of each other’s boundaries. Well, that hard winter that she disappeared, we assumed she was just gone. And lo and behold, like mid February, maybe early March, who shows up on our deck but Mama, dear, and she’s just emaciated. She had this huge patch of hair missing on her back right side, like a Lombard vertebra. I don’t know if she’d been hit by a car. You could see her ribs. And what does she do? She came up embedded down on the welcome mat to our front door. She came up on the deck, which is, you know, like a eight inch step up, and she bedded down there every night for I think it was three or four days until she eventually went under the deck and died.

02:04:11
Speaker 4: Because she knows it’s nothing going to get her there exactly.

02:04:14
Speaker 2: She and I and our family had put in the time for her to see us, as in her worst hour, her worst time, she knew she could find refuge with that with us. Like to me, that was like one of the most crushingly heartbreaking but also beautiful things at the same time, that we had made enough of a connection that she felt that she could live out her last hours in our company, and that I can’t now look at another deer and not offer them that same capacity to reproduce what Mamma deer did. Yeah, not that I, let’s say, wouldn’t hunt again, but the way I would hunt and view that is. And the author Joe how to put it, really succinctly nicely this way, it’s not.

02:05:09
Speaker 4: Not the dude did all that work with turkeys.

02:05:11
Speaker 2: He did my life as a turkey, and buc did, and he wrote, he did a great film and book called Touching the Wild on these Mulier down in Lander, and uh, Joe, still he is. He moved back to Florida. You know, I keep touching now and then, and he’s such a wealth of show.

02:05:31
Speaker 4: Some time.

02:05:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I been some stuff going on, So I don’t know how he’s doing right now, but I would he’s He’s another one that’s put in the time to see all these other facets that most of us overlook when we say, oh, look a deer, you know, And in the way he sort of described what I’m I feel is like, yeah, I’m going to go hunt again, but now I have to reckon with the fact that it’s not what I’m killing as much anymore. It’s who ye, who am I? Who am I choosing to take out of this population? Is this the matriarch, mama? Is this a fawn, a fawn that has a certain spark and talent that none of the others do. You know, It’s it’d be very hard for me to go into hunt the way I used to when I was younger, and when I did kill something, if I did kill something, I would it wouldn’t be with high fives anymore, you know what I mean, like get that big buck or something like that. It would be you know, silence, silence, with that understanding that.

02:06:48
Speaker 4: That it was a who who.

02:06:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And just every single day of our lives is enriched by paying attention of these conversations and having these individuals come in and out of our world because they are our best teachers. When you have a shit day at work and your family is pissed about something, or you know, it’s like you can always look to that. Look at that. You know, that kid over there is it’s got a broken leg, you know, and it’s it’s not making excuses. It’s still keeping up with the pack. Be it a little slower, you know. Listening to nature at that level is you start seeing issues and trends that magazines and the pop popular media want to make into, you know, the save the whales kind of approach where it’s like top down, big stop. You know, It’s like, to me, this is the groundswell of where caring for your environments, real stewardship, real conservation takes places you through these conversations and over overhearing what matters to them lets you into their world to know what you’re doing that is harmful that you weren’t even aware of. Like, oh shit, I guess I shouldn’t mow the grass there now because those that’s where the bunnies, that’s where that’s where the litter is coming off as that hole underneath that long grass. Okay, I won’t mow there for a month. More like simple stuff. Sometimes, don’t cut down that dead tree that’s the woodpecker nest site or that is the sentinel location for the principal players in your neighborhood wildlife alarm system. You take that one seemingly useless dead tree out, and all these animals can’t get a view now of what’s coming before it’s on them. You know, It’s like, so you have a true bottom up level of appreciation and interaction that makes you a better neighbor. I think I feel that way. I still feel like a fool. I still feel ignorant and like I’m making so many mistakes, but I feel and I know when you enter into those spaces with that sort of humility, nature’s pretty resilient. It gives you more latitude than you would have otherwise. Like people ask me, well, should if I’m should I make animal noises when I’m out? You know, I see some deer when I’m out for a walk, or I see the fox, Do I make fox noises?

02:09:31
Speaker 4: Like?

02:09:31
Speaker 2: No, do not. I don’t imitate animals in the wild anymore because the reason is I want to see them do what they naturally do. And once you inject yourself, it’s game over. It’s like pulling the trigger. Almost you change the entire equation. I’ve been with people, we’ve actually killed animals through making noises and interrupting the situation. I want to see them do what they naturally do, so I have a better sense of what they have to teach me and your own voice. A lot of indigenous cultures will say, when we talk to the animals in our native tongue, they treat us like family. And so however, people are like, well, only American, I speak English, and you know, like you speak in the most expressive language you have and be sincere, and you’ll start having experiences like, you know, the deer jump up on the morning walk with a dog and say, hey, wait, wait, it’s us, it’s us, And they stop and they go back to grazing. They might even bed back down like that. But if you bring a friend with you to watch, huh huhm, it doesn’t work because they’re always responding to the lowest common denominator. You bring in somebody that’s not paying attention, and we give off infinite amount of micro signals and they know whether you’re paying attention or not. There’s stories of like the horses that can do math and tell time and read calendars and stuff, and they find out they can’t do that stuff. What they’re doing is queuing off of their handlers at such a fine minute level that it gives the impression that another member of this you know, another species has these capabilities when they’re just it’s called the kluger Hans effect. They’re paying attention to you so well better than most humans pay attention. It’s like, how are we missing these cues? Well, your life doesn’t depend on it. When it does, you start paying attention to stuff. You know, we all have the capacity like oh, the furnace shut off, you know, look to the things that are important to us. We still have those capabilities, we just have directed them other places right right, like something there’s something screwed up with that trailer got pull over, pull over, we got to check the change. There’s a bearing going out or you know, like we are laser focused on those kind of details. But the power of our brain to do that can be used then to go back into the natural world like our our people did in deep time and know stuff that is magic seeming. But in ways that’s really damn fulfilling, you know, when you get you know, it’s like I’d love to see about in line at all, Like well we get we get photos of them, you know, it’s like that it changes the whole equation. You do, you have opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

02:12:27
Speaker 4: Tell me about the artwork you do real quick, you know.

02:12:31
Speaker 2: I always say my artwork is kind of my tourist trinkets or my souvenirs from living. So every piece is not just done to make a turkey or make a bear. It’s done to tell an individual story that I’ve been let in on. Some of these animals I’ve known for an hour or two, some of them I’ve known for years. Some of them I’ve known for generations. And so I feel that the artwork, to me, is the a focal point to spend a ton of time figuring out what the heck that experience meant to me, if that makes sense, and it forces me to see details I would miss otherwise. And she noticed that that bowl has a knot in his lower you know, metatarsal. He broke that, you know at some point or oh there’s people will say, oh, there’s that that cow elk is you know, walking across the lawn and mammoth she’s in she’s limping. No, that’s actually part of the normal gait. But that one over there she’s got she’s got a tooth infection. Look close, see that little swell here. No, no, not the bulge. That’s the mass of r muscle or the bucinator muscle in her cheek. But right below that, it’s a little you know, it’s like it deepens further still. My my experience with.

02:13:53
Speaker 4: The wild, so that turkey is a turkey.

02:13:56
Speaker 2: That’s a specific one inspired by I gave it a couple of talks at a nature center in Utah, and they had three toms, Tom, Tommy and Thomas. And after I was done with my obligations, I just followed him around with some clay and sculpted, and you know, it’s just I was just so taken with that dexterity in their tail. It’s like a geisha, you know. They waved that tail back so beautiful, you know, And when you enter into these spaces you find that words don’t really work, And I guess that’s I grew up around sculpture, tried like hell not to do it, but it came back around in a way that I could do it my way, And for me, it picks up where the words sort of trail off like that, just that curve of the Achilles on the bear or that shin bone, that line of always loved bones and skulls, and it’s like it was a place to put it. My love of that stuff, like knowing every bone, every muscle from the inside out, then seeing the overlay of the behavi behavior and when they do this, how that bone articulates this way. So I don’t use photos. I don’t use video. I used to take a ton of that stuff I found, I didn’t use it. I got a roadkill kit. I got a tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and rubber gloves, and my own data sheets. I made up one for birds and one for mammals. So I find a moose or a grizzly bear that something’s illegal to have. I can take a full set of measurements and have that archive in my studio to go back to. But more accurately, what it does for me is on an elk, I find a dead elk, I might take fifty measurements, but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers, that number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on that animal at least one hundred different ways. So when I go to work on a sculpture. I’m working from more of a felt sense of the creature. I see just a momentary pose that a fox or a bad or an otter might do, or something like. I can freeze that in my mind and I can fill in all the details of what was where to make that happen.

02:16:08
Speaker 1: Does most of your income come from the art or from your work as a naturalist and guide?

02:16:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s the art by far we’re starting to do.

02:16:18
Speaker 4: You’re like occupationally an artist.

02:16:20
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, But when you just kind of follow your interests, you kind of start screwing up the ability to be defined. Like I love I love since as the time of the kid loved stone tools and ancient technology. You know. It took me thirty years and flew to Clovis Point. But like always as a kid, there was just the time I was young, a desire to have a felt sense of what it meant to to make that.

02:16:50
Speaker 4: I was able to do it because I had to teed up for me.

02:16:55
Speaker 1: I give it the final little flap. I know it was all teed up. Yeah I did, but I took a dirty way to get there.

02:17:05
Speaker 2: That’s dirty, dude, because the if whoever made the pre form for you will tell you the flute’s nothing, little.

02:17:17
Speaker 1: Thumb off right, sounds like I’m done. I could do a second.

02:17:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it’s what’s you know that sort of stuff as well. I just has always turned my crank and I find a flake of obsidian on the ground near the house or something like. I know almost exactly what that what size and dimension that thing would have been off of. I know what direction the blow came from. I know what it was trying to do to take off that lump on whatever the pre form like, just that’s always really been gratifying to me to have that bottom up, inside out kind of look at things, and the art and the educational programs, they’re just kind of you know, the little venier at the top.

02:18:03
Speaker 4: And then hold on, when when is the book out and available? Right now? It is.

02:18:09
Speaker 2: It’s available now wherever books are sold. You can find them all over Amazon and beyond your local bookstores. Can order it through Graystone Books.

02:18:18
Speaker 4: Okay.

02:18:19
Speaker 1: The title is Evesdropping on Animals What we Can Learn from Wildlife Conversations by George Beuman, got a forward by John Young.

02:18:32
Speaker 4: Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, thanks for coming on.

02:18:36
Speaker 2: Man, thanks for having me. Can I give one plug. What do you mean for something other than the book we’re doing right now. It just went live. We got an online event that’s where some of our education is No, oh no, that’s fine. We have an event for people who love nature and Yellstone Park called the Yellstone Summit, and it brings together. We have this year over thirty world expert speakers, as we have for the last five years on Yellowstone talking about everything from filming mountain lions, the history of beavers in the park, to population census of moose, geology, Native American history. If you are thinking of coming to the park and want some insight on what to do and think about, join us. If you longtime yellow Stoner want more deep stuff, join us. If you’re from the region. There’s nothing that thrills me more than run into somebody from Billings or Beed or you know, Idaho Falls or something. There’s like, oh my gosh.

02:19:38
Speaker 3: Is that like an ongoing thing or is it so time or yeah.

02:19:43
Speaker 2: It’s online, so anybody with internet can get involved watch it anywhere in the world. It’s registration just opened, so by the time this airs, registration will still be open. It goes live on February nineteenth through the twenty second of this a year. And yeah, it’s cheap. We try to make it affordable. For fifteen bucks. You can get to access for forty eight hours. Oh to all those programs where if you want all access, which which means you can like it’s great because it’s one.

02:20:15
Speaker 1: There’s a live component too, you can watch. You can get a ticket watch online.

02:20:19
Speaker 2: So like Deputy Superintendent Mike Trannelle of Yellstone will be given a park update and you can show up and ask him questions yourself, so like, yeah, since the flood, you know what actually is going on with the road and things like that. We’ve got folks who use it for homeschool curriculum. We’ve got folks who use it to train their park guides, so this is a training tool for them. We got park service people who watch it for their own training. So it’s a very high level but also has entry level basic stuff for anybody interested, whether they actually ever make it here or not. And just to check it out at Yellstone Summit dot com.

02:20:54
Speaker 1: Got it so Yellstone Summit dot com and eavesdropping on animals what we can learn from wildlife Converse stations with George Buming.

02:21:02
Speaker 4: Thanks for coming on man

02:21:03
Speaker 2: My pleasure guys, thanks for having me