Ep. 873: Clovis First, Saving The Great Lakes, and the World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 873

Clovis First, Saving The Great Lakes, and the World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing

Published: May 7, 2026 | Host: Steven Rinella & the MeatEater Crew

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Overview

This episode of The MeatEater Podcast is a packed "news show" installment, with Steven Rinella and crew covering hot topics in conservation, hunting regulations, archaeological debate, and wildlife infrastructure. The team delivers updates on recent fishing exploits, a behind-the-scenes drama involving a Ken Burns-style "chimpanzee civil war" video, a breakdown of controversial regulatory changes and wildlife politics in Washington and Idaho, a deep dive into the crisis facing Great Lakes whitefish, the Clovis First debate’s return, and a look at the world’s largest wildlife overpass in California.

As always, the show mixes scientific nuance with irreverent humor, personal anecdotes, and a banter-rich discussion among diverse outdoors experts.

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Episode Highlights & Key Topics

1. Key West Tarpon Adventures and Humorous Bickering

• [03:14] Fishing Recap: Giannis returned from Key West after near-misses with tarpon, sharing lessons and heartbreaks from fly fishing. Discussion includes technical tips, excitement, and the infamous "down and dirty" fight style.
  • Giannis: “The next three seconds...I think are the most violent and exciting and chaotic 3 seconds of fishing that I’ve ever experienced...” [06:29]
  • On lost tarpon: "We’re getting ready to literally put our hands on the fish...somehow the tarpon just slowly moves in that direction and...the 100lb of weight in the water gets pulled to that creek mouth and he goes under the bridge." [09:23]
• Sunscreen and Sunburn Tales: Playful jabs about using SPF 100, the (non)science of sunscreen, and red faces.

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2. A Comedy of Chimpanzee Civil Wars and Joke Theft

• [11:28] The Ken Burns "Chimp Civil War" Spoof: The crew discuss a video parody that accidentally mirrored a recent Colbert segment. There’s genuine confusion, embarrassment, and debate about joke “theft” and social trends of meme repetition. Discussion is light-hearted, meta, and self-deprecating.
  • Steven: “I just...go home and I’m laying in bed with my wife, and I show my wife the video. She thinks it’s funny. I send the video to Ken Burns...He replies, ‘Oh, I did one of those. For the Colbert show.’” [12:10]
  • Randall (on originality): “I’d prefer to do it Ken Burns style and read a bunch of fake chimp letters over some mournful fiddle music.” [15:37]
  • Phil: "I'd like to think he knows we're not so blatantly dumb as to rip something off from an incredibly well known and popular show..." [17:14]

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3. Auction of the Oddities & Family Tales

• [28:30] Iconic Auction Items: The upcoming auction features Steve’s dad’s old Ford F150, stuffed with new hunting gear and delivered by Mark Kenyon. Other auction highlights include a nearly missed albino raccoon (lost to time and maggots), a powerful Honda outboard, and reclaimed barnwood.
  • Steven: “We’re gonna have an auction item called Steve’s dad’s shitty old truck filled with great new hunting gear.” [29:54]

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4. Turkey Hunting & Parenting

• [31:43] Brody’s Kid Gets His First Gobbler: Story about persistence, family, baseball schedules, and the pride/stress of guiding a child to their first turkey.
  • Brody: “Both of my boys are playing baseball, and I’m training for that race Steve doesn’t want to talk about...Dudes, you have limited availability. We got to make it happen.” [33:52]

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5. Deep Dive: Washington’s Troubled Game Commission

• [34:17] Guest Segment: Brian Lynn (Sportsman’s Alliance)
  • Explainer: Washington's Game Commission is embroiled in controversy over lost hunting seasons (notably spring bear), alleged political interference, and egregious transparency violations.
  • Corruption Details: Commissioners accused of deleting records, colluding with anti-hunting advocacy groups, violating open meetings law, and disregarding hunter input.
    • Brian Lynn: "There's definite corruption and collusion going on with the animal rights movement...potential felonies being committed...deleting records, text messages..." [37:08]
  • Legal Fallout: Multiple lawsuits, appeals, and pending investigations.
  • Future Outlook: New governor Bob Ferguson is seen as more balanced but commission's restoration remains uncertain.
    • Brian Lynn: “If we can get those four [problem commissioners] who have colluded…and just put people in there who understand...we'd be okay.” [48:04]

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6. Odd and Alarming Wildlife News

• [50:09] Secret Service K9 Handler Video: Analysis of a viral security video where a bomb dog tries in vain to alert its handler about a would-be assassin.

  • Steven: “That dog’s like, hey, him, him, him. It could have cost that dude his life.” [51:53]
  • Side tangent about trusting animal intuition, including hunting dogs and humorous stories about missing a dog’s cues.

• [54:04] Ted Turner’s Passing: Noting the conservationist and fourth-largest US landowner’s death, speculating on his legacy and the fate of his 2 million acres.

  • Steven: “Controversial figure, had a lot of lady troubles and whatnot. But a big conservationist.” [55:19]

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7. Idaho’s Big Hunting Tech Ban

• [56:00] Technology Regulation: Idaho passes a sweeping law restricting drones, thermal optics, night vision, and transmitting cell cams for hunting most big game and upland birds (Aug 30–Dec 31), with carve-outs for game recovery and predator management.
  • Randall: “One of the interesting things is that this working group...were unanimous in their recommendations for drone restrictions...” [57:51]
  • Steven: “There’s no need to hunt walleye...The standard that a wildlife species needs to hold up to...isn’t ‘We only hunt things that are deleterious.’” [39:58]
  • Discussion: Difficulties of enforcement, fair chase principles, anecdotal abuses (using thermals and drones to pinpoint animal locations), international comparisons.
  • Steven: “I'm supportive of...using a dog for recovery...I don't think that’s really a thing that's going to get abused.” [62:41]

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8. Great Lakes Whitefish Near Collapse

• [66:36] Michigan’s Desperation to Save Whitefish: Dramatic decline (2000–2024: 1.6M lbs to 200k lbs). The crisis is due to invasive zebra/quagga mussels filtering out the base of the ecosystem, suffocating spawning reefs, and even sunburning larvae in now-clear waters.
  • Giannis: “The mussels...filter the entire volume of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan every two weeks.” [70:10]
  • Steven: “The Great Lakes have become an experimental aquarium.” [71:58]
  • Remediation Ideas: Banking fish in hatcheries, mechanical reef cleaning, tarping areas to suffocate mussels, but all methods are experimental and costly.
  • Steven: “So many of the Great Lakes problems are already come from people being like, I got an idea.” [75:28]
  • Advice: Stay engaged, tell lawmakers, and spread awareness; agencies are fighting uphill against budget cuts and indifference.

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9. Archaeological Bombshell: Clovis First Rides Again

• [82:59] New Science Upends Monte Verde: A recent “Science” paper reanalyzes Monte Verde’s famed 14,500-year-old Chilean site, formerly the flagship “Pre-Clovis” evidence, and concludes the site is likely ~4,200–8,200 years old, with much earlier artifacts likely mixed-up due to site disturbance.
  • Steven: “Clovis First is back, baby!” [82:59]
  • Background: Decades-long debate; Clovis culture defined by distinctive projectile points ~13,000 years ago, with cultural “explosion” of sites but little pre-Clovis evidence outside of disputed or “weird” sites.
  • Steven: “Why do we have so many great Clovis sites and everything older is wishy-washy or weird?” [101:12]
  • Implications: Kelp Highway and boat-migration models now less compelling; skepticism grows until a “normal” and stratified pre-Clovis site is found.
  • Steven: “I’m done having opinions about it...I was a big kelp highway guy. Now I feel like a fool.” [103:34]

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10. World’s Largest Wildlife Crossing (California & Beyond)

• [107:12+] The Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
  • Background: Decades of fragmented cougar and wildlife populations forced action; $114M bridge is nearly done, covered in local plants, spanning 10+ lanes of L.A.’s 101.
  • Stats: 210ft long x 170ft wide, 8 acres, December 2026 opening. Sizable private funding—minimal taxpayer impact.
  • Brody: “They’re building this vegetated overpass...and the world’s largest wildlife crossing.” [107:28]
  • Controversy: Called a ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ in right-wing media; critics object to cost and perceived lack of human benefit.
  • Connections: Similar crossings in Colorado and Banff (Canada) already shown to reduce accidents and roadkill by 80–90%.
  • Steven (on cost criticism): “If people want to spend their money making giant overpasses for wildlife, I’m like great.” [114:34]
  • Discussion: Wildlife infrastructure as a symbol—either of public waste or effective, necessary coexistence.
  • Massive Successes: Video evidence shown of immense wildlife diversity using existing crossings.

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Memorable Quotes

• Steven (on joke repetition in social media):
  “Someone will come up with an Instagram joke...and everyone’s like, hey, I’m gonna do that too. She recognizes that’s the thing you used to not do, but people do now.” [25:39]

• Brian Lynn (on WA commission):
  “We have the documents...There’s even potential felonies being committed by the former chairwoman of the commission, about deleting records, text messages between commissioners.” [37:08]

• Giannis (on whitefish mussel crisis):
  “The mussels...filter the entire volume of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan every two weeks.” [70:10]

• Steven (on changing archaeological theories):
  “I’m done having opinions about it...I was a big kelp highway guy. Now I feel like a fool.” [103:34]

• Brody (on wildlife crossings):
  “Within five years...reduced vehicle, mule deer, and elk collisions by 90% over a 10 mile stretch...from over 30 annually to nearly zero.” [117:03]

• Steven (outro):
  “Wildlife costs money. It costs money to have...Now you have [wild places] because you try hard.” [120:39]

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Timestamps for Key Sections

| Time | Topic | |-------------|----------------------------------------------| | 03:14–11:08 | Key West tarpon fishing anecdotes | | 11:28–21:24 | Ken Burns chimp spoof & joke overlap debate | | 28:30–34:17 | Auction of the Oddities & turkey hunting | | 34:17–48:08 | Deep-dive: Washington’s Game Commission | | 50:09–54:04 | Secret Service K9 handler breakdown | | 54:04–56:00 | Ted Turner passes; landowner legacy | | 56:00–66:36 | Idaho bans high-tech hunting | | 66:36–82:59 | Great Lakes whitefish crisis | | 82:59–107:12| Archaeological update: Clovis First returns | | 107:12–121:03| California wildlife crossing & global context| | 121:03–end | Final jokes, banter, and outro |

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Final Thoughts

This episode delivers a sweeping look at how outdoor life, conservation, and scientific debate intersect—mixing formal interviews, reporting, and plenty of laughter. Whether you care about fishing, big game regulations, or ancient human history, there’s rich discussion here for hunters, anglers, scientists, and anyone who loves wild places.

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For direct, timestamped listening, start with these highlights:

• [34:17] — WA Game Commission corruption exposé
• [56:00] — Idaho’s hunting tech ban
• [66:36] — Collapse of Great Lakes whitefish
• [82:59] — Latest on Clovis First and Monte Verde debate
• [107:12] — The world's largest wildlife bridge debate

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“You have [wild places] now because you try hard.” – Steven Rinella [120:39]

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For more, visit www.themeateater.com/podcasts or search "MeatEater Podcast" on your platform of choice.

Transcript

[A]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human warning. This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Black Buffalo products are intended for adults aged 21 and older who are consumers of nicotine or tobacco. Black Buffalo spent 20,000 hours working alongside American farmers to build a tobacco alternative that. That actually. Dips like the real thing. Long cut and pouches made from barn cured leafy greens with no tobacco leaf or stem and wintergreen mint straight and more. Check your local gas station or C store or hit blackbuffalo.com and use code meat for 30% off your first order. Black Buffalo tobacco alternative is everything you love about dip, nothing you don't. First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be. Versatile where it matters. No shortcuts, just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out First Lights new fieldwear [e-mail] welcome to the news show, everybody. This week we've got news from Washington's crooked game commission. Did a Secret Service K9 handler get caught with his pants down? Hanoi Randall reports on Idaho hunting tech bans, which I'm generally sympathetic to. The most hated wildlife crossing in the world, which is in California. A plan to save Great Lakes whitefish and Clovis first is back, baby. Plus more

[B]

Clovis. What?

[A]

Clovis First. It's a theory on the peopling of the Americas. Clovis first. Clovis first was there, then they killed it, and it's risen from the dead.

[B]

I love it.

[C]

Those people can't make up their minds, man.

[D]

It's like the coelacanth that fell flat.

[A]

Yeah, no, I got it. That's good. That was a good joke. It's like a Lazarus species. Yanni's back from fishing in Key West. What's going on, Giannis?

[B]

It's funny. The, like, the second or third night after fishing, I was on FaceTime with my gal and she's like, how are you not burned up? I'm like, man, I'm just. I've just learned after 47 years, you put a bunch of SPF 50 on and you can just stay not red. Randall and Max are a little bit cherry.

[D]

I put on SPF 100 on Sunday. I thought it would balance out that.

[A]

I feel like at a point it tapers off, doesn't it? Isn't that like a. Like, there's like A sunscreen scandal that maybe I'm not aware of.

[D]

I. I'm not quite sure the science behind it all, but I retroactively applying strong sunscreen after not having sunscreen doesn't actually. Yeah. In fact, like, you're like, I got burnt bad.

[A]

I'm gonna put it on.

[C]

You need to invest in a 10 gallon hat, man.

[A]

So is that the best. Is that. That's what you got, that you got sun, that you didn't get sunburnt?

[B]

Mark King and I went down to Key west to do a little fishing with our good buddy Jake Gribb that I think most of us here in this room know, man. You know him?

[D]

No. It always makes me feel left out when you say things like that. Still feel like the new guy.

[B]

Well, that's good. It's fresh. Jake's the guy that took me under his wing for some hound hunting. I had forgotten this. The whole way that we met Jake is that he was like an early meat eater fan and was emailing us about going rabbit hunting with beagles in Montana. Do you remember that?

[A]

Like, that's not how I know.

[B]

That's our first contact.

[A]

No, it's not. No, it's not how I know him. His. His. His wife used to work with us.

[B]

I know, but that is after.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

He was like Clay Newcombe. That's how we came about Clay Newcombe, too. He sent an email being like, y' all need to come to Arkansas to hunt squirrels and bears and deer.

[D]

And we're like, how that turned out.

[A]

And you caught a tarpon.

[B]

Yeah. So Mark and I almost caught a tarpon, right? Yeah. Catching on the leader. Catching tarpon comes in many different versions. And yes, is. Is unfortunate but fortunate. I've spent probably seven full days of my life standing on the bow of a boat looking for casting at tarpon. I've hooked one, jumped one, nowhere near catching one. Literally the third cast of the trip. So first morning, it's still dark outside. Kind of like it's. There's not enough. The sun's not high enough where you can actually see in the water. And all of a sudden we're like kind of getting ready because we're filming. So we're getting ready to do like an intro scene. And all of a sudden somebody looks over and goes, oh, my God, they're right there. And like, literally already within casting range. And they're just. When tarpon. When they call tarpon happy. They're almost not even moving. They're just kind of sitting in one spot and Bobbing in a way, like in the current, you know. And so, you know, the yelling starts and, you know, Jake's like, get the rod, but be quiet. Don't make a lot of noise when you move to the bow of the boat. And so I grab a rod, get on the bow, and literally the third cast. I'd never done this. Brody, have you done this much where you cast and then instead of stripping with one hand, you put the rod in your armpit and then strip with both hands, you know, we're done.

[A]

I'm familiar, but I've never had occasion to do that.

[C]

Good, because you won't screw up. And trout set.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, that's.

[C]

If you set with a rod on a tarpon, it's not gonna end.

[A]

Yeah, I've hooked three, and I've never got past the part where they jump out of the water.

[C]

Yeah, that's how it goes for most people.

[A]

And I didn't even. I was even. I only became. I was. It happened so fast. I was only aware that it happened after it happened. Yeah, it sort of dawned on me in the. And I'm like, after it was already gone. It was dawning on me.

[C]

The fish and the key, the tarpon and the keys. I mean, Giannis can tell you, but there's just like, the tarpon and the keys are hard, man. And I would love for someone to explain why they're so much harder to catch on fly in the Keys than they are in Mexico or Belize. Because I've caught shitloads of them in Mexico and Belize. Never landed one in the Keys.

[B]

Go on, Giannis, tell us the re. Another reason for the two handed strip is because it keeps the five moving. There's never this. This.

[A]

It's not going.

[B]

Yeah, you don't, like, let go and then have to reach up and pull again. But yeah, that moment when that fish, when it takes the fly, and then, you know, Jake's yelling at me to strip, and you strip and you feel it come tight from there the next three seconds. I think it's like the most, like, violent and exciting and chaotic 3 seconds of fishing that I've ever experienced because, like, you know that you've attached yourself to something big. It's right there. It's in shallow water. You've got 50ft of fly line that are, like, half wrapped around your toes. And you're just hoping that as the fish runs and jumps, that the line clears the deck and gets on the reel before it, you know, binds up. Because then that later that same morning Mark fed one, got him on and we had a loop go around the reel and I tried to do everything I could to, you know, I'm trying to pull against the 100 pound fish, make a loop to, you know, bring it around the reel. And I just, I couldn't do it for him. And it broke and it's just over. Mine ended this way. I fought him for an hour. It jumped twice. The big ones, he's. Jake said they don't jump too much. He, he guesstimated it. He's like, it was a solid 100. He's like, I don't know if it was 110 or 130, but it was a really big tarpon in his mind. I fight him for an hour, which I was a little disappointed that I didn't fight him better. I had read all the Stu Apt articles and books. Do you know that name?

[A]

No.

[B]

Brody knows it.

[C]

Down and dirty.

[B]

Yeah, down and Stu app taught down and dirty. Basically meaning that anytime you're fighting any fish, but for this instance, tarpon is that anytime that fish's head goes left, you bring your rod tip down into the right and when he, when you turn him to the right, you bring your rod tip down into the left and you're basically not only tiring him out, but you're breaking the fish's will is what he thought. And so that, yeah, he always, you're

[A]

like in a psychological battle with him,

[B]

he felt that like in 15 minutes he could pretty much land any single tarpon by, by doing that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So I didn't, I thought I was going to do that. I didn't do it. But yeah, we chased him all across this base and like a mile or something and we get to the back of this basin, the water's getting shallow. We probably hooked him in five or six feet of water and we're in like two to three feet of water now and there's this little bridge that's kind of like in our periphery. We're not really paying attention to it. And there's a creek, you know, leaving the basin going out it I guess depending on what the tide's doing going in or out. But at this moment it's going out into the creek and somehow the tarpon just slowly moves and moves that direction and we're kind of like Jake's like off the polling platform and he's getting ready to anchor and we're getting ready to literally like pull our hands on the fish. And I honestly think that there was just enough suction from that CREEK that, that 100 pounds of weight in the water gets pulled to that to that creek mouth and he goes under the bridge. So we pull the boat right up to it. The entire boat will fit under the bridge, including the polling platform, except for the sort of holder bracket deal that sits on top of the polling platform that holds the. The pole itself.

[A]

We'll just snap that off.

[B]

We discussed it and we thought that it might cause more damage to the platform if we just went for the snap. And so Jake just told me to hold the reel and bust him off.

[A]

And you never got a scale off it?

[B]

No, I wasn't going to take a scale. Steve's if you don't know. That's the thing they used to do like. I don't know.

[A]

Well, they used to take it in the dark ages.

[C]

I've got a dark scale in my house.

[A]

They used to take.

[B]

You wouldn't take another one?

[C]

No.

[A]

And then they took a scale and now you just let it go in. A shark eats it.

[B]

That is the thing you worry about. Yeah, we actually. So we went offshore to a day and where we fish these wrecks. Like Jake was like, look, don't fight them fast. Just to be a tough guy. Like we. You're literally going to get more fillets if you guys can get these fish in as fast as possible. So don't ever. And we still. Luckily we're mostly catching bonita, which aren't really, you know, nobody really eats those anyways. But we probably pulled in half dozen bonita where there was only the front half of the fish left, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But yeah, Jake had a great trip for us. We went dawn to dusk three days in a row offshore day. We caught mahi, blackfin tuna, the bonitas. And then we ended on mutton snapper. And we each got to catch one big old giant, like 15 to 20 pound mutton snapper, which was sweet.

[A]

I thought it was weird that I didn't even get not only not invited, but didn't know.

[B]

I think.

[A]

I mean, there's like.

[B]

No, there's a lot of things that happen around here I don't think you know about even.

[A]

No.

[B]

Yeah. Did you know Brody and I are both training for big running races?

[A]

Quick note from the last episode.

[E]

Yeah.

[A]

So the, the, the last episode of the news show, we reported on a chimp civil war. Yes, Randall reported on a chimp civil war. Randall and Phil had made a Ken Burns spoof video about a chimp civil war. I think it's funny, we put in the Show. I think it's funny. I go home and I'm laying in bed with my wife, and I show my wife the video. She thinks it's funny. I send the video to Ken Burns, who's been on the show before, and I've said, thought you'd get a kick out of this. He replies, oh, I just did one of those. For the Colbert show.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Who, as I explained before the show, I think does too much facial humor. So then I'm like, wait a minute.

[C]

Like, he didn't do a chimp video for the Colbert show.

[A]

He did.

[D]

He did.

[C]

Really?

[A]

Chimp Civil War.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Right down.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

People haven't seen Randall's video yet. Right down to, like, banana jokes. To, like, a hand writing a letter, which I then thought I wasn't aware. It seems like those guys would have mentioned that they stole the joke from a TV show. And then I was pissed.

[C]

Did they steal it?

[A]

They claim no. I. I'd like. So Kev Burns is like, yeah, here's the link to the. To the thing. And I'm like, oh, my God, I had no idea. And he's like, hey, the more the merrier. And I'm like, dude, I had no idea that's stole your joke.

[C]

You know, Spencer always claims that Jeopardy. Is stealing questions from him.

[A]

The New York Times steals all of our reporting. Yeah.

[D]

So I would like to point out just how obviously linear this is.

[A]

Can I finish my story?

[D]

Yeah, please. Please.

[A]

Then you can take it away.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Then Randall produces for me. It's not dated, but he produces for me a text dating back well before the Colbert thing, in which he says him and Phil are texting, and he says, I want to do it like a Ken Burns Civil War, but there's no date on it. So now I'm so embarrassed. I'm sending this to Burns. I'm trying to validate.

[E]

Okay.

[D]

You sent that to Burns, too?

[A]

Yes. I was embarrassed, and he sent me exclamation points.

[C]

It made me laugh.

[A]

Well, it made me laugh, too. But then I'm like, you can't run it.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And then as they're convincing me that they didn't steal the joke and that it was. It was like. It was that two people. And my wife's like, I don't think they stole it.

[B]

I'm like, they is. Is. Of course they didn't steal it.

[E]

Can we let Randall.

[A]

How is that. Of course. I'm like, if there's two guys that watch Colbert, these two. That's what I said to my wife.

[E]

I haven't watched Colbert.

[A]

No. When you. She said, no one watches Colby.

[D]

When you sent me the email saying Colbert had done it, I thought, the Colbert Report isn't on the air anymore. I forgot that he was doing.

[A]

He's got four more shows or something.

[D]

I forgot. Well, I forgot that he was doing late night. I was thinking about the comedy, the old comedy shows, when he used to

[A]

pretend to be a right wing guy. Yeah. Oh, okay.

[D]

So I will point out that, yeah, like one. This news story was from about a month ago, and it kept getting booted. I texted Phil about covering this as Ken Burns. It kept getting booted because the administration kept doing more horrible things with the Forest Service and. And then the boundary waters. And so I think in that text, I did say, like, shit, we got to cover the boundary waters. Will pun on the chin.

[A]

You did.

[D]

Brody said, it seems like something our audience wouldn't be aware of. So it'll still be fresh.

[A]

Okay, but here's. Here's his proof. I mean, there's no date looking at. We know that at Some point at 10:53am Oh, I can find the date.

[E]

Yeah.

[A]

Randall says, if we had more time, I'd prefer to do it Ken Burns style and read a bunch of fake chimp letters over some mournful fiddle music. Definitely need to talk boundary waters.

[D]

And I'd like to say I need to read a text from Phil. Well, there's a bunch of texts I'd love to read.

[A]

That was on April.

[E]

Okay.

[D]

He says, Phil says, hold on, hold

[E]

on, Randall, for a quick timeline. I had no idea Steve and Ken Burns were having this conversation about like, oh, well, we should probably pull it.

[A]

Like, are my guys frauds or not?

[E]

So we published the podcast at. So some of you may have heard it in the audio only version. We published the podcast episode. I immediately, I get a text from Randall and our content guy at like 6 in the morning saying, hey, did you guys know Colbert did this? Two weeks ago, Randall and I start panicking and texting each other. It was my decision to pull the segment. And Randall can.

[D]

I wanted to pull it too. Cause I was like, I texted Phil and I said, effing Colbert beat us to it. And then he said this about two weeks. This is crazy. I said, I know.

[A]

Blah, blah, blah.

[D]

Phil said, I've seen this happen with comedy writers, and every time I think, yeah, right, you totally stole this. And I pointed out there's a news story about a civil war among animals. If you want to make a spoof, you make a Ken Burns spoof.

[A]

That's what my wife said. I don't think that's true.

[D]

And if you want to make a Ken Burns spoof, your only options are gray and white, like sepia toned images. And then you fake writing a letter. Phil, this is my favorite text. Phil says, I'd like to think he knows we're not so blatantly dumb as to rip something off from an incredibly well known and popular show where it lives on the Internet for everyone to easily find and seen. And the fact that we gave the thumbs up to send it to Ken Burns when he was part of the Colbert one. So we went on and on about this.

[A]

I'm starting to believe you.

[E]

I'm glad we're making some headway.

[A]

But isn't it nice to know that my wife believed you all along?

[C]

You know what we should do?

[D]

Yeah. I was horrified by this.

[A]

Can you play the. Can you play the joke?

[C]

I think we should play them both and see who. Which one wins.

[D]

I think copyright.

[A]

There's 100 times Randall.

[E]

It's so much better.

[A]

A thousand times better.

[C]

There we go.

[A]

Randall's is his. Is his. It's a thousand times better. Just listeners go find the Colbert one. Watch that.

[D]

Yeah. Be disappointed when. You know, the funny thing was it

[A]

makes the same joke a bunch of times.

[D]

Phil and I were, when we were texting with, we were texting with Barge about this that morning and we're both like 100%, we have to pull it. This just looks so stupid. Then I was talking to Barge later and he goes, he goes, what convinces me that you didn't steal this is that if you'd stolen it, you would have been pointing out the differences between the two and you would have been like, I still think we could keep. But Phil and I were both just like so stunned by it. Our initial reaction was, pull the whole thing. I'm going to crawl into a hole. And then after I watched the, after I watched the Colbert one, I was like, you know what? I actually think, like, ours is good enough.

[A]

It's better.

[D]

Ours is better.

[A]

You know why Bars told me he knew you were telling the truth.

[D]

What's that?

[A]

He said people aren't that good at lying.

[D]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Well, he said they would have to be like pathologically good at lying.

[D]

This is like my worst nightmare.

[E]

The fact that you guys are having side conversations with my knowledge about whether or not we lied is like, I want to stay in that hole that I crawled into.

[D]

Yeah. Because.

[B]

Because I know. I was offended too, Phil.

[A]

It Was all happening at the same time. Phil. I'm like, hold up. Because just to come clean, I'm saying the barge. Hold on a minute. There's the same joke. There's a banana. There's like a hand writing a letter. And he's like, but that's a Ken Burns documentary.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

It's just they'd have to be pathologically good at lying to, like, lie about this.

[D]

And I. My. Probably one of my favorite parts of the day was when I said to you, like, the most obvious spoof in the world. Civil War, Ken Burns. And. And you said, I wouldn't have gotten there. I would have thought Guns N Roses, Civil War.

[A]

I would have written the whole song. I don't need your chip war.

[D]

But yeah, because it feeds the furry. I woke up and saw the email from Ken Burns in my phone. And I thought to myself, the little dead chip babies in. In what world is something that I produced, like what? Like some piece of content? In what world does Ken Burns watch that? Like, that's a wild thing to me.

[A]

So the only thing he's ever watched that you made was you stealing his idea.

[D]

And now I found out he's also read one of my texts.

[A]

Someday he's gonna hear something else you did. And he's like, why do I know that name?

[D]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

That's. The son of bitches stole my joke.

[F]

Yeah.

[E]

So anyway, this goes back to last week when we found out. When we found out Colbert had done it. We had. I thought we had three options. One was to just run it without saying anything. And then I thought, well, people are going to think we still. Someone's going to make the connection and leave a comment and say, hey, Colbert just did this. Second option was to, like, do. Record a quick disclaimer beforehand and be

[A]

like, hey, so, hey, I swear I came up with this, but enjoy, I guess.

[E]

And I didn't want to do that either. So, like, the third option was we just pull it and we'll address it later. So that's what we're doing. I think we should show it. It's better than Colbert. You can go watches on your own time. But here's. Here's the one that we ran last week.

[G]

My dearest Bubbles, I write to you from beneath a forest canopy that no longer feels like home. The rainy season has come and gone eight times now since I last held your hand. And still this ruinous conflict shows no signs of relenting. What once seemed a temporary rift among brothers now portends as the primatologists say in a permanent vision of our community, the Western forces of Ngogo press on with a ferocity that defies comprehension. 28 of our number have now fallen. 28 souls. The reports from the front are not fit for juvenile eyes. Chimp genitals torn from their chimp genital places. How awful that the opposable thumbs we have been blessed with by our creator are now used for such unspeakable acts. The men now whisper of infants struck down in their innocence. The white tufts of hair on their rumps will never darken as they typically do among our kind in their fifth year of life. At night, when the moon hangs low over the forests of Kibale, I close my eyes and I am home. I hear the screeches of our brood, and I feel your sagittal crest under my elongated fingers. Our family swinging peacefully amongst the trees in a behavior known as brockiation. In those moments, I imagine that none of this is real. I am merely living in a nightmare of war. And I shall awake with you lying in the dirt beside me. First Sergeant Knuckles, 3rd Canopy Regiment, Central NGO Forces.

[A]

It really is. It's.

[B]

It's. Listen, Randall, you deserve a raise.

[A]

A big part of being a man is admitting when you're wrong.

[D]

I wasn't wrong.

[A]

No, no. I was wrong. Oh.

[D]

Oh, okay.

[B]

I.

[D]

Like, after 24 hours had passed, I'm trying to apologize. No, no, no. But, like, I. I felt like after my blood pressure went down, 24 hours later, I thought, maybe we should have just done it. Maybe we should have just played it. Maybe we overreacted.

[A]

I never thought that you weren't being truthful. I just thought that I even was saying to Katie, she's like, there's no way they know about that. I'm like, there's no way they don't know about it. And I said, there's a thing with younger people that you'll come up. Like, someone will come up with an Instagram joke, for instance, or the example I used to making an April Fool's joke that your company has a product that they don't actually have.

[D]

Right.

[A]

Someone did that. It was funny. People now feel. It's like people are very free and easy with just doing the joke over and over and over and over. Like, the new generations don't mind just stealing everything. So I said, I think that they're from, like, the generation when that's actually okay. And she's like, that's dumb that you think that, but this has all happened very fast. I just. So I never thought that you were fibbing. I thought that you just thought it was okay.

[B]

Absolutely not.

[D]

That's the thing. I was, like, horrified by it and just thought the world is ending. I have, like, a fear in the back of my mind sometimes that, like, there's, you know, like, that unintentionally, you know, you get something like, this happens, and you're just like, this is my worst nightmare. So thanks for. Thanks for standing by us and thanks to the Internet for all the good facts about chimpanzees that I learned while researching that. I just wanted to search for, like, fun things about infant chimpanzees.

[A]

Yeah, you really mixed the vegetables with the meat on that one.

[D]

Yeah, I learned about the. The rump of the. The tuft of fur, you know?

[B]

Did. Did Katie think it was weird that you thought that that was a thing? That. That the. The new generation will just repeat the same joke or the fact that.

[A]

No, she got. She understood that it's okay to steal jokes. And if someone has a funny joke on Internet, like, if you're like me, every time I hear whatever.

[D]

Right.

[A]

And then everybody's like, hey, I'm gonna do that too. She recognizes that that's the thing that you used to not do, but people do now. Yeah, like, the people steal stuff now in a way.

[B]

And I don't even think it's stealing. I think that, like, what the kids do now so often is there's a trend, and, like, if you don't do your version of that trend and post it, like, you're not in the game.

[A]

Yeah, but you're stealing other people's jokes.

[B]

I don't know if it's a stealing. I think it's a participation. Like, you have to do it.

[A]

The auction house of oddities is coming back up. Iconic summer moments deserve an iconic drink. It is Mountain Dew and American original. From their beginnings in the foothills of Tennessee. Biggest fourth of July yet. The refreshing citrus kick of Mountain Dew is the perfect companion to your American summer adventures. No matter where you go or who you are with, bring Mountain Dew to amplify your celebration. When I was in college, Dew was the daytime beverage of choice for all things summer. Rope swings into the river, jumping off bridges, into the river, tubing the river, fishing the river, riding snowboards down the Lake Michigan sand dunes right out into the waves and shooting off fireworks at night. You name it, we were powered by Dew. It's been tasting great since 48. That's right. Two brothers created Mountain Dew in the foothills of Tennessee back in 1940. 8. The refreshing citrus kick is perfect for summer and 4th of July at the grill on the beach or right in the living room. Enjoy the refreshing citrus kick of Mountain Dew in American Original. Tasting great since 48. Look for American Dew limited time packaging or find it in stores near you@mountain Dew.com that is Mountain Dew.com on blood

[H]

trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

[A]

I seen something in the road.

[F]

I instantly thought it was a sleeping

[A]

bag and there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God. He doesn't have a head.

[H]

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

[C]

Indications where he should be right there and. But he wasn't.

[H]

This season we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments. And the people left behind behind, trying to piece them back together.

[A]

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest.

[C]

Somebody, somewhere knows something.

[H]

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, iHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

The auction of the oddities is going to be very good this time around.

[C]

Could have been better.

[A]

Why? What happened?

[C]

That raccoon.

[A]

Oh, almost. The ourselves about it is almost great. We had a guy in Pennsylvania find albino raccoon.

[C]

Roadkill.

[A]

Roadkill on the side of the road. He reports to Brody, hey, there's a pure white raccoon dead on the road. Brody's like, grab it. We'll use it for the auction house of oddities. The guy then lets 8 hours pass 80 degrees laying on the asphalt. By the time it gets to our guys, it's got maggots coming out of it. So that's not in the auction house. But here's the interesting thing that is in the auction house. My old man had a. I think it was a 89 Ford F150. When he died. I drove it for a while, then I sold it to my buddy Matt Drost, who I had no idea is still driving that thing. He's done with it. We just bought it from him. We're gonna. We're gonna have an auction item called Steve's dad's shitty old truck filled with great new hunting gear. We're gonna fill that truck full of hunting gear. New, brand new hunting gear. And Mark Kenyon is going to drive it to your house. Wow. Did I say how much he bought it for? I wish I would have done that. Can you bleep out when I said how much he bought it for?

[E]

Yeah, I'll make a note.

[C]

Are you gonna do a little tune up and paint job on that thing

[A]

already? Tuned up. Tuned up. I have photos of me and the old man doing grip and grins of rough grouse on the tailgate. It's like. Yeah, that's in the auction house. What's not the auction house is our punt gun. Because we're selling that on the same auction we bought it from.

[C]

Is it a stick or an automatic?

[B]

Auto loader.

[A]

I'll tell you something. My second date with my wife.

[C]

That truck, single bench seat.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

No, it's got an extended cab.

[C]

Oh, it does. I'm looking at pictures. I don't see the extended cab.

[A]

It's got an extended cab. You call me a liar?

[C]

No, I'm just seeing. I'm telling you what I'm looking at.

[A]

Home. It doesn't have an extended cab.

[C]

The ones I.

[A]

No, you look at my old man's.

[C]

No, I'm looking at pictures of 89 Ford F1.

[B]

What color is it?

[A]

Green.

[B]

Was. What? Like we're gonna stuff it full of hunting gear? Yeah, all of our. All the stuff that's under the meteor umbrella or way more.

[A]

Well, we're gonna. Mark's gonna dig deeper in that.

[C]

You might want to put a few 55 gallon drums of gasoline.

[D]

I was gonna say maybe a.

[A]

Maybe we'll put a gallon, a couple jug of fuel in a couple jugs of motor oil. And Mark's gonna drive it to your house. This is a great auction item. We got tons of auction items in the auction house this year. It's going to be a great auction. Trying to think of some other highlights from that thing. Oh, when we redid the new studio, all the leftover barnboard. We got a 150 horsepower Honda outboard with about three hours on it. That's going in the auction house. You have to pay shipping. It's palletized. You just got to pay shipping. We'll ship it to you. It's gonna be. It's gonna be hot. We gotta keep moving. Brody.

[C]

Oh, my kid. My little kid got his first gobbler this past weekend. Yeah, speaking of Jake Gribb, he's got a little. Little small chunk of land in central Montana that we went out and hunted. And Steve told me there was never any birds there that's not what I said.

[A]

I killed a bird there. I'm just.

[C]

You were like, it's the kind of place that doesn't have birds regularly.

[A]

But they said it's. They might be on the neighbors.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway, when I got one there, we called it off the neighbors. I said, there might not be one on it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But there might be one on the neighbors.

[C]

Anyway, he got one after.

[A]

Is that a bad.

[B]

I told him the same thing.

[A]

Okay. Yeah.

[C]

We had a long morning of, like, listening to turkeys and not kill the neighbors. No, they were close. They just wouldn't cross the creek. So we had to do a big loop and get around them. And we got in, got into their zone, and it was very strange because, like, we. I could hear one strutting, like, spitting and stuff, drumming, like. Could not see him. And he was, like, kind of behind us, and I didn't want to turn. Anyway, we made another little move, and where that bird was, the grass was, like, almost hip high. Very thick grass. Like, kind of stuff. You don't really see turkeys, like, moving around in. And then, like, six inches of neck and head pop up out of that grass, and that was that. But the highlight of the trip was 410. No, I got him on the 20. I'm over those four tens, man. It's, like, limited capabilities. The highlight was maybe not that it was the fight we had about seeing a wolf the night before.

[A]

Like, he saw a wolf and you didn't?

[C]

Well, it was a coyote. A very white, fluffy coyote. He was. And we got in a big fight because he would not believe that it was not a wolf.

[A]

Did you make him cry?

[C]

No.

[B]

Anyway, Steve said that you were angry about getting that boy a turkey.

[A]

What do you mean? You had a passion.

[B]

You were.

[A]

So far, you had a passion.

[C]

Here's the thing.

[A]

It's like, it was. I have to.

[C]

I. I do. Because he didn't get one last year, which is his first available year to do so. And, like, both of my boys are playing baseball, and I'm training for that race that Steve doesn't want to talk about. And I'm like, dudes, you guys have limited availability. Like, we got to make it happen. So it was perfect.

[A]

We got our chance, and you got it done.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Joined now by. We're joining remotely with Brian Lynn, VP of marketing and communications with the Sportsman's Alliance. If you're not aware of Sportsman's alliance, it's a very good organization that does a lot to defend, protect hunter rights, trapper rights. Like, you have different, different organizations do different things. Like, you have a lot of conservation organizations that do stuff to preserve habitat. They do wildlife work. Sportsman's alliance does a lot of work to, to defend your rights as a hunter, as a fisherman from attacks coming from the animal rights world and other things. And just also just kind of just generally making sure that sportsman interests are being represented on the political and the political sphere. And he's here to talk to us about something we've alluded to a bunch over the years is what exactly what in the world is going on with the state of Washington's Game Commission, and why has there been so much distressing news coming out of the state of Washington such as that they lost their spring bear season back in 21, that there's new talk of bumping the start of the fall bear season because of this sort of fictitious idea that there's conflict in Washington between wildlife viewers and bear hunters, which is, is not a true thing. So over to Brian. Thanks for joining us, man.

[F]

You betcha.

[A]

Happy to be here. So tell us real quick, like, a high level, like, why is there so much, why is there so much talk about Washington's Game Commission? Like, what's going on with Washington's Game Commission? Why have we been talking about this for four years? It seems.

[F]

Yeah, it's been longer than four years. It's been about six now. And that it all goes back to Jay Inslee, our former governor. He and his wife were. This was their pet project is to dismantle the Game Commission and bring in the, the animal rights movement and let them run things here. And he did years and years worth of planting those seeds. And this is what we're reaping.

[A]

And so what are some of the things that, what are some of the things that happened that have led to the current situation where we actually have some of these commissioners being investigated for a host of. I don't think it's, maybe you can correct me, I don't think it's criminal activity, but it's definitely malfeasance. And, and, you know, a mild level of corruption at least.

[F]

Yeah, I, I would push it beyond a mild level. It's. There's definite corruption and collusion going on with the animal rights movement. We have the documents. We have the, we've put them out there. It's on the public page out there that we have. There's even potential felonies being committed by the former chairman, our chairwoman of the commission, about deleting records, text messages between commissioners. We, we put out There that they violated the Open Meetings act in Washington by daisy chaining emails together and basically coming up with a game plan on how game commission meetings are going to run, who's going to introduce what, where everybody stands on the vote while leaving other game commissioners out. They don't do it all on one email. That would be a quorum. But they'll do it with, you know, three or four and then forward it on to another one and say, here's the plan.

[A]

How many game commissioners does Washington have?

[F]

They have nine.

[A]

Okay. And how many were there to represent the animal rights or the. How many were there to represent the animal rights movement or the anti hunting movement? Like what was the split?

[F]

Well, right now it's. Well, when it all happened, when this all went down, spring bear kind of was the impetus for it all. And at the time there was only eight on, on the commission.

[A]

Okay.

[F]

And the spring bear hunt is a special regulation hunt that had to be approved every year. When they voted on it, it was a 4, 4 split. Therefore it didn't pass. It wasn't approved. Oh, that's why it was canceled. It didn't actually get canceled. It just didn't get reinstated.

[A]

I see.

[F]

And that's what kind of kicked it all off. Fast forward from there about a year and they wanted to make that permanent. Well, by that time, Jay Inslee had put people back into place and reappointed or not reappointed. And it's about, it was about a 5, 4 split then. And that's what it went into was they made a permanent change to cancel it about a year after that first initial pass. And so now it's canceled unless there's a biological reason. And they try to make this weird distinction between recreation and wildlife management, which is if, you know, you know, everybody looks at that and is like, what are you talking about?

[A]

Yeah, that. We reported on that last week or I talked about that at length last week. Where they put their. This, this idea that they're saying there's no demonstrated management need, meaning they're saying there's no need to hunt black bears, I would say, but there's no need to fish walleye. There's.

[B]

I would even.

[A]

There's no need to hunt turkeys like that. That's not the, that's not the standard that a wildlife species needs to hold up to that. It's like we, we only hunt things that are deleterious.

[F]

No. And, and even this, the spring bear hunt actually even breaks that idea even more because the whole piece of it why they held it for the major reason, yes, recreation. But the biggest piece, it was only available in, like, three units, three areas. And that's where timber harvest took place, because the bears were waking up and shredding the trees up, like 75 trees a day, I think they were shredding. And so there's a need, there's an economic need, there's a resource need right there, if that's the argument.

[A]

Got it, got it. So tell me some of the things that the commissioners were doing around. Like. Like, I've seen references to destruction of government property, of having basically side meetings outside of the formal meetings. Removing public. Removing public input, planning on disregarding public input. Can you get us. Hit us with a couple examples.

[F]

Yeah, they were working. I mean, even they were working behind the scenes, communicating with each other and working with Washington Wildlife first, which is an offshoot of Wildlife for All. And their whole purpose is to cause this disruption and to change game commissions nationwide to be, quote, unquote, more representative and get other people's interests and use basically the popular vote to. To run game management. And so they would collude.

[E]

They would.

[F]

They had a list of commissioners when they were filling empty seats that they wanted in the place in place, ones they didn't. Ones they put out there for decoys. They colluded with each other on votes. And. And yeah, they. They were just basically anything and everything to do with advancing their ideology. They were pushing. They would even say, this is an ethics issue for me. I don't care. I don't like it. What the science says. It doesn't matter. Melanie Rowland said that.

[A]

Yeah. And you guys put out. You guys put out some information where the commissioners will be discussing official business on official emails. And they would literally just say, let's take this over and then take commission business over to their private emails.

[F]

Yeah, yeah. And they were. They were told. I mean, the null memo came out, and they were told not to use private emails. I think Lorna Smith was even using her husband's email. So you're using private emails, you're using your spouse's emails, you're discussing official business offline in chat rooms, over text messages, phone calls, whatever. This is not how good government operates. I mean, you can even step back in Washington state and say, this isn't even about spring bear hunting. We've appealed to our PRA lawsuit to the appellate court. If this standard of government is upheld, all transparency and accountability in Washington is gone. Like, good government is shot. Because the ruling in our case was as long as they give you a couple of records and tell you every three to nine months that they're still working on it. They can take as long as they want to to give you any public record request. In our case, it would have taken 5,000 years to get all of our records.

[A]

I remember. I remember reading that at the.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

At their proposed rate.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You'd have been 5,000 years in to get the records. And then frankly, like, a lot of. A lot of the records are gone. Right. Like no one's ever going to see them.

[F]

I mean, we don't know. I guess that's what happens when you can't get into it, you know. And again, the null memos showed that they were. Lorna and Melanie especially were delaying things, pretending they couldn't find it, didn't know how to search their emails, couldn't look this up or that up, had deleted it. Oh, that's destruction of property. Oh, let me find it then. Then they found it.

[A]

Oh.

[F]

But when the animal rights movement would put in a PRA request, they were on it just like that. Got it within days. It took weeks and months.

[A]

So what's the next thing that's going to happen here?

[F]

Oh, there's. There's a lot going on. Like, that's all what's happened. We have the PRA lawsuit that's going to appeal the no memo that came out, you know, kind of last fall or. Or so that that popped out. Well, they didn't give that to us in discovery when we filed our PRA lawsuit. So we filed sanctions against the department for doing that. And that hearing was moved from May 1 to. I'm not sure when it got kicked to. But that got moved out back, so got those two lawsuits. Washington Wildlife first and Lorna Smith, who's on the commission, have filed a first. First Amendment federal lawsuit against Kelly Susswin and Deputy Director Amy Windrow for First Amendment violations. And saying that they chilled her speech and silenced her, which I don't know what they silenced because she hasn't quit talking in the five years she's been on there. And you know that they're intimidating her when our records show the exact opposite. She was bullying staff and, you know, there was people trying to stick up for the staff. So they have that lawsuit going on. They've also sued Washington Wildlife first has also sued the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife over their game management plan. Sportsman's alliance just stepped in as an intervener to make sure when that goes to trial. And there's discussions that sportsmen are represented is not just the department and Washington Wildlife first doing this. We're going to watch out and make sure that Hunter's interests are represented.

[A]

And then where does. What's your level of optimism about the commission getting back. The commission getting back into like a firm footing where it's going to do a better job of managing wildlife as a renewable natural resource.

[F]

That depends wholly upon Governor Bob Ferguson. You know, if. If it was Jay Inslee, I'd say zero.

[C]

Okay.

[F]

But with Ferguson, he pulled back to, you know, 11:59, 11:00 be right before Inslee left, he appointed two fish and game commissioners who would have really tilted the balance. Ferguson, to his credit, came in, kicked those guys to the curb, put in two new ones who are fair and balanced and good and whatever. They listened to both sides. So we'll see. The investigation has been taking place. There's been an internal investigation going on for nine months now. It was due. Well, it got extended four times. Was hit the governor's desk April 13th. And so the rumor is that it got sent back for revisions. I don't know what that means. So supposedly sometime in mid to late May, that internal investigation supposed to come out. And we'll see what Governor Ferguson does. Hopefully he removes at the minimum, Lorna Smith and Melanie Rowland, and we'll see what happens with Barbara Baker and John Lemkole. But if we can get those four who have colluded and done other things off of there and just put people in there who understand and want to see wildlife do well and balance it all between the different competing forces, we'd be okay. But we'll see.

[A]

All right, man. Thank you for coming on and talking about it.

[F]

You betcha.

[A]

Brian Lynn, VP of marketing communications at Sportsman's alliance, if you want to find out more about Sportsman's alliance, you can find them online and see about the different ways they engage on your behalf all around the country. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thank you.

[H]

On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker.

[A]

I seen something in the road.

[F]

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

[A]

And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God. Hey, he doesn't have a head.

[H]

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence.

[C]

Indications where he should be right there and. But he wasn't.

[H]

This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

[A]

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest.

[C]

Somebody somewhere know something.

[H]

I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, iHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[A]

Shop the Sherwin Williams sale and get 30% off duration woodscapes and superdeck products May 1st through the 11th. Whether you're refreshing your interior or exterior, we've got the colors to bring your vision to life. And with delivery, getting everything to your door is easier than ever. Shop online to have it delivered or visit your neighborhood Sherwin Williams store. Click the banner to learn more. Retail sales, only some exclusions apply. See store for details. Delivery available on qualifying orders. Okay. Oh, Phil, can we pull that video up real quick?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So here's a video everybody's seen a thousand times. It's. You might have to fast forward it. This is like if you've. On the news, if you've seen the video of the. Of the would be political assassin who came into the White House correspondence dinner. So I watched this video four or five times. I'm exaggerating. I watched it three times. I watched it three times without ever realizing what I was looking at. Then a. A recent podcast guest texted me, if you listen to the show, we recently had on a canine handler an lap. He trains apprehension dogs and other kinds of canine unit dogs for police departments. He was just on the podcast. This video comes out of the guy of the would be assassin barging in to you. Going to yank it up.

[E]

Oh, yep.

[A]

Breaking in through security. And the guy's like, watch this. The canine handler isn't trusting the dog's instinct. And if you see this, this, when that suspect, he. He comes in, he's trying to find his way in. Here he comes. Soon he fires at one of the Secret service guys with a shotgun. When that guy walks by, you see him walk by in the back background, he has a canine like basically with its nose in his back pocket. And the handler is just walking along with the dog. And the dog's like, this guy, this guy, this guy. And the dude's just like missing it. Go back and play it. Watch. There. That's the suspect.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Now watch that dog. That dog's like, hey, him, him, him. It could have cost that dude his life. And then his handler walks him back and two seconds later, yep, the dog's like, no, no, check this out. Check this out. Check this out. The dog's like, check it out.

[B]

The handler's looking in there.

[A]

Two seconds later, the guy emerges. Then the guy busts out of there with a shotgun. Isn't that wild? I would have never noticed that.

[D]

And the. I guess, like, the. The dog is going off fear or.

[F]

Or.

[A]

No, he said, that's a. He says, it's a. He goes.

[F]

He's.

[A]

He's not sure, but he said, almost certainly it's a bomb dog.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And he's smelling certain. Like he's. He's like vapor trailing residues and gunpowder. But the interesting thing is, all everybody there is armed. So it's kind of funny that the dog is like, no, no, him, him, him.

[D]

That's what I thought was weird.

[A]

Yeah. Like, yeah, but the dog is, like, glued to the guy.

[F]

It's crazy because two seconds later, he just emerges.

[A]

Yeah. Two seconds later, there he is. Pulls. Pulls his gun out. The dog's like, hey, check him out.

[B]

That handler was looking at something longer.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like he was interested in something in that room. But then.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

He said, the guy says, I feel like he was slow to pick up the cue. He was slow to pick up the queue. His thing was. The guess thing was, you might doubt he had a lot of examples of where the dog's like, nope, that's it. But people. People miss it. Meaning a dog comes into a room and he goes to a corner of a room and he hangs out. But you don't realize that what he's talking about is the suspects in the drop ceiling. He's like. He's like, the dog's not wrong. It's just right. The dog's like, no, right here. Here's the spot. Because the dog can't be, like, in the drop ceiling. But the dogs and people look at me like, oh, there's nothing in here. You know, so he's just talking about, like, knowing your dog so well that. That you know what he's getting at.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, you see it. This is a lot different, but you see it even with hunting dogs, like bird dogs, when they, like, get birdy, and you're like, ah, there's nothing there.

[F]

Or.

[C]

And you don't trust.

[D]

Or when your dog goes and sits by the door and you're like, he just went out. There's no way he needs to take a shit again. And then five minutes later, you have a message.

[A]

Ted Turner died. Fourth largest landowner

[C]

just down the road here.

[A]

Yeah. So depending on how his will Worked.

[C]

It's a lot of land.

[A]

His air. It could be that. Who's number five? It could be that.

[C]

Oh, you're saying if it gets broken

[A]

up somehow, he'll be number one landowner in America. Stan Kroenke, Sportsman Channel. Outdoor Channel. Right. Stan Kronkey, number one land at 2,700,000 acres. The Emerson family, 2,440,000 acres. John Malone, 2,200,000 acres. Ted Turner, 2,000,000 acres. The Reed family, 1,615,000 acres. Is number five. So there could be a little disturbance. This article just came out the other day. There could be a little disturbance in the force here.

[C]

Yeah. I was asking earlier. I want to know, like, if he's got. Because he's, you know, conservation minded, whether you like him or not.

[A]

Very controversial figure.

[C]

Whether he likes. Had it written up so that land remains, I don't know, as a conservation trust or whatever.

[A]

There's no way it will not, because that was of high priority to him. Controversial figure, had a lot of lady troubles and whatnot. But a big conservationist.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

When you're at Jordan Bud's place, you're looking over at one of his properties.

[B]

I've never been there.

[A]

You've never been to Jordan's? No. Her neighbor of. Of the 2 million blankety blank acres the dude owns, some of it is

[C]

next to his neighbors with him. Was that Corinne's neighbors with him?

[A]

A couple weekends ago. His bison herd was, like, just right behind River Road. They were all hanging out.

[F]

Pretty cute.

[A]

There you go.

[F]

Hundreds of them.

[A]

Randall?

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

There's a story. It's been in the headlines the past week or two. Idaho just spent about two years working through one of the most comprehensive overhauls of hunting technology regulation across the country. And so that's good. Last month, Governor Little signed HB 939 into law. And that all got started with a public process, I think that started in 2024 with a. A working group made up of hunters, conservationists, wildlife managers, who then produced a set of recommendations to the Fish and Game Commission. And then that through a bunch of political input and all this stuff, they decided that that needed to be laws rather than just regs, I guess. So the final law restricts drones, thermal imaging, night vision, and transmitting cell cams for hunting and scouting big game in upland birds from August 30 to December 31 each year.

[A]

Okay.

[D]

There's a carve out for wolves and mountain lions.

[A]

Private and public. No, it's got to be just private or just public. Right.

[D]

I believe so, and so there's, there's this carve out for these technologies for predator management and for recovery of wounded game. One of the interesting things is that this working group, they were unanimous in their recommendations for drone restrictions, and they were one vote short of unanimity for the recommendations on thermal night vision and, and cell cams. So like, they, they came to pretty strong conclusions, all the stakeholders, and then the end result is this bill. For one of the interesting things is Idaho is one of the, the last states to regulate thermals for hunting ungulates. You know, they had obviously restrictions against hunting at night, but the best of my knowledge, they, you could still use a thermal like at, at dawn or whatever to, to locate animals on the mountain, but that's now out drones. There's 45 of 50 states already that have restrictions on drone use. And actually the, the carve out for game recovery kind of puts Idaho, and I guess you'd call it more of like a liberal positioning compared to other states that, that don't allow drone recovery.

[A]

Meaning you can put a thermal unit on a drone. Yeah. And then go be like, well, I'm trying to find the buck. I lost.

[C]

Right.

[D]

And so the, one of the things with these technology bands, when they have these carve outs, it comes down to what you can prove in court and what the intentions are. Like, as far as if a conservation officer runs across someone flying a drone, did they wound a deer? Did they see a deer and then not get a shot and then use their drone to locate it? Right. The same thing for like the wolves. You know, if, if, if you come across someone who has a thermal in their possession, they say they're wolf hunting. You know, as I understand it from talking to a former Idaho game warden yesterday, you know, what you have to do as a, as a warden is sort of ask them questions, oh, hey, how's it going? What are you doing? You know, and sort of make a circumstantial argument about what they're using that thermal for based on where they are, what time of year, what kind of equipment they have, all that stuff. But, you know, it's good. I think that they're, they're being proactive even if on some of this stuff they're a little late. But I feel like as a hunting community, there's been kind of a, a need for some record reconciliation around all these emergent technologies. And it's cool that the working group, I think too was, was hunters and all different stakeholders, and they were on the same page.

[A]

They came. Yeah. They had a. That it wasn't a split.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Down the middle.

[D]

And I think too, like a lot of this stuff, you know, when you, when you look at the considerations in terms of enforcement and whatever loopholes there are enforcing them, a lot of it will come down to social pressure and hunters sort of agreeing on what's fair chase and what's not. And the fact that the working group was on the same page, I think bodes well for that. So, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, if you look 10, 15 years ago, the idea that you would have real time camera traffic keeping track of wildlife in places is sort of hard to fathom. Thermals have come a long way, drones have come a long way, obviously. So there's always kind of an arms race between enforcement and fair chase principles and whatever technology is coming down the pipe. So in Idaho, they got together and they came to agreement and they got it done.

[A]

I've heard two interesting stories about. One was told to me about drone use for hunting. One was told to me and one I read about. The one that was told to me was a guy was saying that they were using, they would use drones. This is in a drone legal state. What was a drone legal state they would use a drone to. When they had a target buck, they would use a thermal on a drone to find out where the buck bedded, which would influence how they set up on it. Because once they knew where it was bedded in its bedding area, then they could pick where best to sit to spend the evening. So that's how they were using it. The article I was reading was some guys got busted for tracking a deer with a drone. And reading the article, neighbors kept saying, these guys have that drone over that buck all the time during hunting season. It's like a buck that a bunch of people knew about. When the game warden came out, they were doing it. When the game warden came out. Yeah, that was in a drone not legal state. And they were sighted and the game warden came out and sure enough, it's like there's a drone over a woodlot, right. And they were like track following this deer around to figure out where it was.

[D]

Well, that's, I mean, that's the funny thing is like, if you have these carve outs for game recovery, and I understand you want to recover animals if you, if you wound them or whatever, but had the warden come out and seen the drone flying, they could have just said, oh yeah, we just got a bad shot on a doe. It just so happens there's this big buck in the area. Right.

[A]

It's tricky, man. It was. I usually have such certainty about what I'd do if I was emperor of the world. Like, I'm supportive of. For instance, I'm supportive of being able to use a dog for recovery.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't think that that's. I don't think that that's really a thing that's going to get abused. You know, I don't think guys are going to be running deer with dogs.

[D]

Right.

[A]

In states where it's not allowed and pretending that they're using a dog to track a wounded deer at night. I just, like, it's.

[F]

It's.

[A]

That's not an issue.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't believe I'm very supportive of those rules where you allow a guy to track a dog. To track a wounded deer or the dog, man. I would have to sit long and hard to think about my thoughts on the drone recovery.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

What's like, the main reason that they're doing this? Like, why do they think that they needed to do this?

[D]

I think just. I think just public pressure, you know, I think it's just a talking. I think, like, there's a lot of states where I was just at a Boone and Crockett event last summer, and that was a main topic of conversation was emergent technologies and fair chase.

[A]

Yeah. Why not? If you. Why not go to, like, a north face and slope and like, go to a north face and slope and buzz a drone around and be like, oh, the elk are bedded right there.

[D]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, like, plenty of people could do it. I already, I already talked to guys, like, even guys I'm friendly with. I already talked to guys that elk hunting, they start a lot earlier now because they just thermal scan. They thermal scan in the morning.

[D]

Yeah. And anything that tips the balance in terms of efficacy then down the road is going to result in reduced opportunity.

[A]

Latvians. Latvians. All thermal scan

[B]

in Latvian.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Yes. Yanni says in Latvia you don't like, even start hunting till you've done a thermal scan.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

They like scan of the area. Be like, no next spot.

[D]

I get it. I just.

[A]

That's why the Russians don't like them.

[B]

No comment.

[D]

I was just waiting to read the room before I said anything there.

[A]

Thank you, Randall. Yeah.

[D]

Is it okay segment he's looking for.

[A]

What I didn't like is you never really said, like, what are the rules?

[D]

Sure did.

[A]

Did he? Like, what are the rules?

[D]

Restricts stone thermal imaging, night vision, transmitting trail cameras for hunting and scouting big game and up birds August 30, December 31.

[A]

Great job.

[D]

Thank you.

[A]

Set. Ralph.

[F]

Top.

[A]

I just got confused.

[D]

Well, I had it further down, but then I thought I should just get it out of the way up top. Maybe I should have returned to the end.

[A]

Saved until that. No, because in classic journalism, all the main pertinent. You load, you top load it with the main pertinent stuff. And then if you want like weird details.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Like if you're reading about a politician being in a sex scandal and like they're sending bad text messages and you're like, well, what was the text message? You'll often find the actual substance of the text messages in the end of the article.

[D]

Yeah, right.

[A]

Because they're sort of like most important to descending importance. So you wind up being like, well, where's the part about what he wrote? And sometimes at the very bottom of the article, what I would be like, well, I'll just put that right up top. Because that's what everybody's wondering. Yeah, everybody's wondering that.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

But they'd be like, well, that's of descending importance. So like in traditional newspaper journalism, it's like, the main thing is here's the rules, here's the new rules.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And as you go down and be like, here's how they put the group together and here's their final.

[E]

So these days they want you to scroll past as many ads as possible before you get to the thing you want to see.

[B]

I'm gonna try to apply that in my segment.

[D]

Do it.

[A]

You're gonna go old school journalism or, or like

[B]

old school.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. Go ahead, Yanni.

[B]

Oh, oh, my turn.

[A]

Yeah. Or I can, I can, I can talk about my thing.

[B]

Oh, I'll just wait. Yeah, I'm fine going. My dad sent us an article. Michigan lawmakers may fun Last ditch effort to save whitefish. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Started digging into it. My God, those poor whitefish. Like, bad, bad, bad, bad.

[A]

This is a 225 year old story or so.

[B]

Well, I don't know what caused the declines prior to the 80s. Do you know?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, well, please speak to that.

[A]

The biggest, the most cataclysmic thing to happen to a lot of these native Great Lakes species is during the logging era when they were making, when they were booming all of the logs. So when they came in and log the Great Lakes.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

They would boom all those logs out in the water.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And they would shed their bark. And so all the bays, the river mouths, the spawning stuff was buried in sometimes 10ft of bark.

[C]

Then later came industrial pollution and that

[A]

was a big early hit. Industrial pollutants and then the non natives.

[D]

Right.

[B]

So the non natives is kind of where I'm going to pick up Zebra mussels and quagga mussels. Both kind of came in the same period of time. 80s, mid-80s one quagga muscles, late-80s, I guess. Let me back, back up. So the slash ditch effort that I read about, it's a good website if anyone wants to read more. These guys have really covered this for years now and done a good job. It's called bridgemichigan.com really, really did an excellent job covering all this stuff. But the Michigan State Senate is, is trying to get some money. An appropriations bill was. Right now they just have like a placeholder amount of like 100 bucks. And like if it goes through or it goes farther, they'll like actually put a number to it. And something I, one number I heard is like 50 million over the next 10 years. So they're looking for a lot of money to do some, to do some research on this research and their idea of how to save them now or at least part of it because there's, I guess there's specific strains within the Great Lakes that are doing worse than others and they're thinking of actually taking them out and then rearing them in hatcheries and then being able to hold on to some stock to then be able to repopulate the Great Lakes once. The issue that I'm going to tell you about now is taken care of, which is the muscles.

[A]

Yeah, like a, like a seed bank. Yeah, like the same way you put. You'd store seeds in a cave. Like the seed bank is in Norway. The global seed bank sounds like a good place somewhere around there anyways that you'd store these, propagate and store these fish for later.

[B]

So the mussels that are the big problem right now, they're. One guy I talked to pretty much said that if it's not sand and it's in less than 50ft of water in Huron or Michigan, it's probably got a muscle on it. And not like a muscle, but covering like it's a coating of muscles. What these mussels do is that they filter the entire volume of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan every two weeks.

[A]

That's incredible.

[B]

It's incredible to think of it that way. Right. And what they're doing when they're filtering, they're feeding on phytoplankton and then all the other little microorganisms that would then eat phytoplankton don't have anything to eat. So you're basically cutting out the bottom of the food web. Right. Or the bottom of the food chain and stuff. Just can't move forward from there. Right. So when. So the whitefish have two issues with that. One is if they're spawning grounds or these reefs where they like to spawn, if they're covered in mussels, they can't spawn there. It just doesn't work. Then two, because this water is filtered and somewhat clarified, it's brighter.

[F]

Right.

[B]

And so the more sun gets down in there and literally the young fish, when they're just little minnows on the beaches, they're literally getting sunburns that kill them because they should have a more turbid water. Right. The Great Lakes, like even now, I don't know if you've noticed it when the last time you went to Lake Michigan, but last time I was there a few years ago, it's a, like a very stark difference in the clarity.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

Compared to when we were.

[A]

Yeah. Now that all the. Yeah. Like all the microscopic food out, then the sun penetrates more, causes more vegetation growth, the vegetation decomposes, makes the water oxygen poor. Some fish are winners, like walleyes.

[B]

Yeah, some, some fish are. It's, I think it's a little short sighted to look at it that way that, you know, I mean, they're, they're winning right now. Oh, it seems like it's not something that's sustainable. That was a word that was thrown a lot around with the people that I talked to that just like we, they, we have to start thinking about sustainability if we have, if we want to heat this thing going.

[A]

I often describe the Great Lakes as they have become an experimental aquarium.

[B]

Yes. As one fisheries biologist I talked to, he said we're trying to basically manage an ocean. Like it's just, it's a giant piece of. So it's very hard to do is what I'm trying to say. You know what he was trying to say by saying that is that it's just such a giant piece of water and you're trying to manage it. And yes, in some ways it's like an experiment, but I think that it's like you can't really control the experiment.

[C]

You also got like anglers who are way more interested in walleye, smallmouth bass, salmon, steelhead whitefish at this point. Right. Like the sport fishing demand for whitefish. I think even if they're around, probably wouldn't be that high, you know.

[A]

Yeah. Those lakes, like if you go back, if you go back to the 1800s, 1700s, 1800s, the commercial fisheries in those lakes are things like huge sturgeon, commercial fishery, whitefish commercial fishery. Like different ciscos and other white fish species drive into commercial fishery. And then the big one, lake trout. What smoked the lake trout was l wives coming in or. Sorry, not l wives coming in. Lampreys. Once Lampreys made it over Niagara Falls. Boom.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, so it's just like things come in, they shuffle everything. They got that whole effort underway to keep the Asiatic carp species out of the Great Lakes. Like the Chicago Sanitation Canal has an electric barrier.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

To try to keep those out. If those jump. I don't know. It's.

[B]

Yeah. It's interesting because I think it was like a penny per dollar dollar spent on those carp. One penny is spent on trying to deal with the muscles. So it's just like for whatever reason, it's not top of mind because I

[A]

don't know how like short of like they're talking about. So they're talking about banking these whitefish species.

[B]

This is just. Yeah. This is one idea.

[A]

One idea. Like bank, like bank them. And this is not a new idea. You remember that Mike Rule.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He's a fisheries biologist. So he's gone in like they had big. In New Mexico, big forest fires where you have unique strains of cutthroat. And when a big fire goes, you know that when it rains, it's going to send all that silt and it's going to kill the river. They have gone in ahead of that occurrence to get strains of cutthroats to basically just go hold them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because you know that you're going to. The whole river is going to get nuked by ash.

[F]

Let it.

[A]

Let the river clean up. Let the vegetation come back with the thinking. You could then put the fish back, some of them back when the habitat comes back, or else you're going to lose yet another river's worth of cuts. So I get the idea it's like just genetic banking. But the part where I get skeptical and I don't understand is I don't even know what the rough idea would be to get muscles under control in the Great Lakes short of did someone develops a virus or a pathogen.

[B]

But that which is being discussed.

[A]

But that trick doesn't get played.

[C]

Yeah. Playing God can go wrong.

[A]

Yeah. Because that's already. So many of the Great Lakes problems are already come from people being like, I got an idea.

[B]

Yeah, let's introduce this fish that'll eat that fish.

[A]

The common carpet. The common carp was intentionally introduced into the Great Lakes when the other. When the native fisheries collapsed, they were like, maybe these guys want to eat carp, and they put them in on purpose. And then people just never adopted it as a food source. And now they have a huge carp problem. Spend tons of money trying to get rid of carp, and there you can get rid of carp with targeted poisoning. I don't. And I don't know, maybe someone has sort of the basic idea of what you do, but I just don't know how you fix it.

[B]

Well, a couple of the other things that they're testing and researching now, as far as getting rid of these mussels is. One is a. They're literally. They have a. Like, they're developing these scraping machines will literally go in and scrape these reefs clean to create so that they hopefully can have habitat where these whitefish can do their spawning, scrape and crush. The other thing that gets. Getting. That's getting thrown out there and messed with and they're researching if it works is suffocating. They're like going down in there with tarps and covering, you know, large areas with tarps because they produce carbon dioxide. And so if they can't get that fresh water in there, it literally. It suffocates them.

[A]

It's like the headache you get when you fall asleep down in your sleeping bag.

[B]

I guess I haven't had that. I know that's the thing that you get, but I haven't had that.

[A]

Yeah, I get, like, carbon dioxide poisoning.

[B]

Yeah. Like, I. So I. I talked to some fish juice biologists. I also talked to a guide that Pat Durkin and I or fished with when we did the Fur Hat ice fishing tour, JJ Malvitz, and then the fish processor, Dan Lindahl, who's. They're all in the same area, which is Green Bay. Green Bay is like this, like, really weird stronghold where the rest of the lakes have gone down something crazy. From 2000 to 24, they went from 1.6 million pounds in 2000. This is, like, commercial catch of whitefish down to 200,000 in 2024. Well, in that same time period, Green Bay has gone from 100,000 to 800,000. It's going up.

[A]

What do they attribute that to?

[B]

Well, Green Bay has a ton of rivers flowing into it. The Fox, the Menominee, and so that is providing those nutrients.

[A]

Oh.

[B]

That we need. So the fisheries biologist was like, yeah, we basically need to figure out how to either produce that base level of the food web or how to, you know, keep the, you know, muscles from disrupting it. But that's what those fish need, you know, that being said, it's even in Green Bay, it's like they're. They're saying it's on the decline. And again, I didn't know how bad it was, but Dan was like, whitefish in the main lake in main Lake Michigan are all but extinct.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It's like, oh, what an amazing fish to you, man. I used to love fishing those things. Just like a great eating fish. Yeah. Beautiful fish.

[C]

I know a place here we can go get them.

[B]

So he. He is a commercial fisherman now, is only catching 20 of his quota. JJ Malvitz, where the. The sports limit per day is 10, which is what it was when Pat and I were there. He's now recommending to clients like, look, they don't freeze all that well. Yeah, like, take what you only need. Like, how about five, you know, instead of doing 10. So hopefully everybody was kind of surprised that the dinar hat and dropped, you know, limits over in Michigan. They had really dropped the commercial, you know, limits. But according to Danny's, like, a little bit too. Too little, too late, because he's like, there's no fish to catch anyways. So dropping commercial limits is not going to do anything at this point. But he wishes that Wisconsin, and especially in that Green Bay area would, you know, reduce harvest a little bit overall.

[A]

The caviar on those fish for a while, I'm not sure now, but I had some friends that were native fishermen, and they were doing better on the caviar than the meat. You know what they call that caviar? American gold. You know, they were exporting it. It's good, man. Yeah, I had a he. I had a whole tub of it, man. We were dipping cool ranch Doritos into that stuff. I had that much of it. Yeah. Not no more.

[B]

It's like a king.

[A]

Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests. Right. That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts@phelps game calls.com. i think you'll be glad you did. And you'll find out that the Steve Ranella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

[D]

I know we have stuff to get to. I have breaking news, though, to my mind.

[A]

To turn us back alive. No.

[D]

I clicked on this link that Yanni shared about the whitefish and I saw in the right hand column the next article most Read says, After 89 years, Michigan hunting and fishing group is done. And I thought, surely it's not Michigan conservation clubs. Yeah, they just, they dissolved on Monday. Yeah, I had no idea. That's.

[A]

Oh, that's sad.

[D]

Yeah, we met some of those guys when we were in Ann Arbor.

[A]

Yeah, that's been a while.

[B]

Hopefully we'll end on some brighter news.

[A]

But I did clubs versus bag, baby.

[B]

I asked everybody, like, what do you, what do you, what can you do? Or what do you wish, you know, people could do? And they were. And everybody kind of said, look, it's about showing that you care. So whether it's like calling, you know, your state. So if you're in Michigan, you know, you want to, you know, tell your state reps to, you know, pass the funding. And I think any Great Lakes state just like talk about it and make everybody know of this issue is the fisheries biologist said there's a ton of people working on it. Noah, usgs, tribes, all the state wildlife agencies that touch the lake, a bunch of universities. And so there's people out there working on it. And I think that the more people know, hopefully the more they care.

[A]

And I have a feeling that every federal agency you just named, when the next budget process is done, they will be just nothing but like a little smoke poof. And that money will be, maybe they'll fight and keep some of it, but most of that money will be stripped.

[B]

I think you're right.

[A]

These dudes and these dudes in DC right now ain't a care. They're going to be like, homit, what white fish? Screw that.

[B]

Got a war to fight instead.

[A]

Clovis first is back, baby. It's third time I said that this is. Okay, so big news here out of the breaking news out of the Monteverde site in southern Chile. I'M explaining this whole thing or bad news for the Monteverde site in Chile, depending on your perspective, in March 2026. So just recently, a guy that was on the podcast for Todd Cerval from University of Wyoming, he's an archaeologist. He published a piece and there are two premier scientific journals. The two premier scientific journals, our Nature and Science, okay. They published in Science a paper called a mid Hol. I'll interpret all this. So don't worry if this doesn't make any sense. A mid Holocene age for Monteverde challenges the timeline of human colonization of South America. All right, Phil's gonna pull up some images for me. There is a site in Chile where they have very good roast beef sandwiches with French cut green beans on them. I recommend to anybody who gets down there. There's a site in Chile called Monteverde. We have a map pulled up showing people it's down. And it's down in Chilean Patagonia. It sits on at the base of a little peninsula coming out into the Pacific Ocean. So way, like, pay attention to all this. Way, way, way south in South America. Getting to the point where you're as far away from Siberia as you can get in the Western Hemisphere. And we know that the first humans that entered the new. That entered North America came through Siberia. This. This in my mind is not a debatable point. No serious person is debating this. They were Siberians that came in. So here we have. We thought we had, or we have one of the oldest known sites of human occupation being as far away as you can get from where they entered the continent, the southern tip of South America. Monteverde has a bunch of sites, but there's one site called Monteverde ii. Can we look at a couple more pictures?

[E]

Yeah. I'm not sure they were.

[A]

You want these dog? I put them in order. This is the Monteverde site. Okay. It's a creek bottom.

[D]

Looks fantastic.

[A]

It's a lush creek bottom in Chilean Patagonia.

[B]

How far is that from the ocean?

[A]

36 miles.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

There's an overhead view. Looks like a great place to hang out. Yeah, you could picture getting some ducks there. You could picture get some trout.

[B]

Turkeys, maybe.

[C]

Not trout.

[A]

They started digging this site in the 1970s, and they found that there were tent structures built there. The tent structures were wrapped in leather, meaning that they were using leather cordage. They found some remains of Pleistocene megafauna. They found hearths where, like, they found campfire sites. Okay. They dated it at 14,500 years ago. Okay. Which puts us at 1500 years earlier than Clovis sites.

[C]

What's it before? What's the general, like, margin for error in that kind of dating?

[A]

Oh, there is one. I'm not sure what those margins, but that's outside. What's funny is the margins are. The margins are flexible, meaning there are areas. There are areas where it's. The margin is wide and there are areas where the margin is close. But when you get a bunch of samples and you date a whole bunch of samples, you get tighter and tighter margins. So they were throwing dates here 1500 years earlier than Clovis sites. Now, Clovis sites, there are many Clovis sites from all over the country. When I talked earlier about, like, the. The humans that came into North America came out of Siberia, that's like a. That that's scientifically established. No serious person argues that point. Another point that no serious person is going to argue is that there is a Clovis culture. Can you jump to my next picture?

[E]

The next one I have is just. Is the T shirt.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Pull it up. Great. Okay. Here's one of our own very own T shirts.

[D]

At Meat Eater, I was worn this this weekend.

[A]

The Clovis hunter's T shirt. Those are Clovis projectile points. These Clovis projectile points. Hell, let's go to the next picture.

[E]

I think that that one didn't transfer. Steve, is that the hand next?

[A]

It's my house.

[E]

Yeah. It was in the wrong photo format. Oh, I can bring it up a different way, though.

[A]

Bring it up a different way?

[E]

Hell, yeah.

[A]

Sure, I'll keep talking. Sure. Clovis points have come from all over the country. You got Clovis points from Washington state. You got Clovis points coming out of Florida. You got Clovis points coming out of New York. The Clovis culture was everywhere. That's a Clovis point hanging on my wall in my house, drawn by an archaeologist. And that's the actual size of that point. That is a honking Clovis point.

[D]

Nice job, Phil.

[A]

Great job, Phil.

[E]

Improvising.

[A]

Working in a bind over there. Now we know that we have Clovisites all over the place. And there's always been this leading debate in like ice age archeology and anthropology is did the Clovis culture show up from somewhere, or was the Clovis culture an American born phenomenon? Meaning did Clovis hunters making these Clovis points these big, these like mammoth hunters, did they walk into the lower 48 as like a people with a technology With a hunting lifestyle? Did they walk in here as them and then explode across the continent? Or was there some trickling of people a long time earlier that came into the continent and lived here for 2000 years? A thousand years. And out of that culture emerged this widespread Clovis culture. Because after Clovis, you see in the country, like, native American cultures, after Clovis split into all these different societies. But it's like this idea that at a time, across the whole country was a culture of people that were unified in their technologies, and then over time, they, like, evolved and split apart and developed all these different ways of living. But at a time, there was, like, these big game hunters making these big honking points, and they settled everything. Okay, this debate is called. Like, this debate would be, was there. Was it Clovis first, or was there a pre Clovis culture? And here's why. This. This Monteverde site's kind of interesting. Ask yourself, what are the odds that you found the actual oldest site ever? There's no way, right? There's no way. So if you find one that's 14,500 years old, what are you missing? Right? Like, we didn't find the first one, and it wouldn't. In the first one. The oldest site wouldn't be as far away as you can get from the entry point. Meaning if that is legit, what do we not know about in terms of who was running around here and when did they get here? Can you jump to my Alaska images? Yeah, this is. Here I am. This is a long time ago. I spent some time up at what would have been the entry point. So this is the western Brooks Range. This is what would have been the entry point to the first Americans as they entered our continent, as they entered the western hemisphere. I'm standing with a French Canadian archaeologist, and we're standing in a tent ring. Okay, flip to the next image. Nope, not Mad Mel Campbell.

[E]

We'll get to him.

[A]

I'll get to him.

[D]

Good pose.

[A]

Here is this. Arrowhead hunting in the western Brooks range is the best possible place to arrowhead hunt because there's no one around to pick anything up. That's a. That's a paleo point just laying there. Look at that thing. Look at that thing. And we would walk away. We would walk away. Go to Mad Mel Campbell. This is our helicopter pilot. After I wrote about this, a private investigator reached out to me trying to find that man.

[C]

He's got some heavy. He's got some heavy bear ordinance there, it looks like.

[A]

Yeah, he didn't like bears. So I'd be flying around this dude. I told the story, but he. They would take a cargo plane and kick fuel drums out on parachutes because you're so far you can't get a helicopter there. They'd kick fuel drums out on parachutes and parachute field. So we had fuel drums here and there out on the tundra. And me and that dude land that helicopter and we'd get out and roll those fuel drums back up to the, you know, and then hand pump the gas into the helicopter. And he was scared of getting attacked by a bear while he was pumping gas. So that's why he carried that.

[D]

It's like a Ruger Super Red Hawk.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the private investigator was like, really trying to find that man.

[D]

Any idea what for?

[A]

I do. Okay. Don't care to get into it.

[D]

We'll chat afterwards.

[A]

Of these pre Clovis sites. The archaeologist Todd Servable from University of Wyoming, he has always been a little suspicious. Here he is in this studio saying, how. How come all of these really old crazy sites. He said, he's explained to me, they're always weird. Why can't anyone find one of these really old pre Clovis sites that is just normal? I said to him, what is a normal site? Here he is back when the walls were white.

[C]

And they're normal.

[B]

Yeah, and they're normal.

[C]

It's not weird shit. It's like chip stone around, hearth features, butchered animal bone.

[A]

It's normal stuff.

[C]

And what we call discrete stratigraphic levels.

[F]

Meaning they're just like really clear occupations if you were to look through them.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. What he's saying is, so you heard him, a normal site. You have hearth features, mean campfire features. So you got dateable charcoal stone where they're making arrowheads or spear points. You got animal bones. And he's saying you have layers that are not disturbed. If you go back to that site that I just had from the western Brooks Range, you're looking at a tent ring. Like, you can see the tent ring. Okay. So you have a fairly undisturbed. Like that's not all buckled under 5ft of ground and it's been washed away by a river. Right? That, that surface right there is like a clean surface that hasn't been jostled around. So what he's talking about is he wants sites where it hasn't been disturbed. You have stratigraphic layers, all right? He went down to this mesa site, the Monteverdes, not the mesa. The mesa sites in western Brooksbank, sorry. They just went down and applied a bunch of new dating technologies that guess down to the Monte Verde site. Guess what dates he's come back with. And this is advanced techniques published in Science 20,000 years. No, no. He's coming back saying it's not a normal site, it's a messed up site. You got a bunch of stuff all mixed up. His dates for Monteverdi. And I want to back up a point I didn't make about Monteverde. We had one of the leading, the one of the leading anthropologists on the peopling of the Americas is a guy named David Meltzer. And I love him. God bless you, David Meltzer. Meltzer went down with other people down to the Monteverde site. And these scientific community put their like stamp of approval on Monteverde. Your kids history books may have been rewritten based on the Monteverde dates.

[C]

Can I ask, is there the people that believe it's that old? Is there, exclamation. A kelp highway theory that they.

[A]

Great point. I should have brought this up. I meant to bring that. I think I had my notes but I skipped it. If you've ever heard us talk about or people talk about a thing called the kelp highway, here's what people are talking about. Humans. If humans were here 14,500 years ago down in southern Chile, 14,500 years ago, they couldn't have walked in because their path would have been blocked by glaciers. You could have been in the Brooks Range. You could have been up and you could have crossed from Siberia and entered Alaska, but you could not have walked south because you would have been blocked by glaciers. So then people had to go like. But they were here because Monteverde. So we know they were here. Since we know they were here. How did they get here? They had to have taken boats. How could they have survived? Well, the kelp, the band of kelp in these inner coastal marine environments were so rich in fish and shellfish that people up in Japan and the Aleutians and Siberia would have built boats. And they must have just boated the shoreline and they were up against shorelines that were glaciated, but somehow they were out and they were able to survive off marine resources and make their way south of the ice sheets. Because we know they were there because we have these really old sites. The Clovis first idea was people showed up the minute the glaciers melted and they walked in. Basically there was a thing called the ice free corridor. So the theory goes there was an ice free Corridor People came down from Alaska, entered the Great Plains right around Edmonton, Alberta, through a narrow opening in the glaciers and spilled onto the Great Plains. Rained hell on megafauna, killed all the mammoths, spread around the whole country instantaneously. The richest hunting ground ever discovered by man gradually split apart into all these different cultures and languages and. And that's how the story went. But sites like Monteverde shot it all to hell. And then it entered this idea. They must have boated down. Well, this new thing. And I'm not way. I'm done weighing in on this whole thing. I'm just trying to deliver the facts or I'm just trying to deliver the debate. I'm done weighing in on it. I bought into Clovis first. I bought into the kelp Highway. Now I'm done. I don't have any opinions. This new crew, and it wasn't just the University of Wyoming people from Chile all over the place. 4200. They're saying that site isn't 145, it's 42 to. To 82. And it's all mixed up. It's all mixed up. Meaning it was discerned up. I, I had a great. I thought of it this morning. I was out turning over part of my garden. Okay. I got the old dirt, I put down compost, I put down grass clippings. And in the spring I turn it. So if you were to go down and dig down 12 inches down in my garden, 12 and be like, ha, look at this piece of grass clipping. It's as old as this other stuff laying next to it. Is it. Or did it get turned over the course of thousands of years?

[C]

It got turned floods or whatever.

[A]

Flooding.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And then imagine that there's a flood and it washes stuff that doesn't belong there into there. Also when you get into, like when you get into. And I'm doing a. Any archaeologist would. Would hate everything I'm saying. I'm just trying to demonstrate some points. I'm not an expert in the field, but picture that out in your yard, you're digging around in your garden and you find some old bone laying there. And you're like, huh, look at that. And you deposit it on the ground. And then later someone comes and finds your gardening area. They find your skin cells all over. And they're like, good God. This man had a mammoth. Here's the mammoth's bone right next to his garden tool. And then they date the mammoth bone. Good God. He was using a steel gardening tool 14,000 years ago.

[C]

And a cell phone.

[A]

Meaning stuff just gets mixed up. So in this paper they put out, in explaining some of the things, there is an idea that, I don't know, maybe it was reworking. People probably picked up fossils. Like, if you were alive 8,000 years ago, would you have thought a mammoth fossil was interesting and brought it home with you? I don't know.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

I don't know.

[D]

It's like when I find a beer bottle from the 60s or 70s or

[C]

an old 3006 shell.

[A]

I found a really old beer one time and drank it. Remember that? Giannis and I got sick.

[B]

It wasn't quite that old, but I drank a.

[A]

It was eroding out of a bank.

[D]

Yeah, I drank a white claw that was unopened at the range cleanup last year.

[C]

You guys are gross.

[D]

Terrible, terrible mistake.

[A]

Did you get sick?

[D]

I didn't finish it.

[A]

Anyhow, Clovis first might be back. That's what these guys. If you go back and listen to that episode, these guys were like, I. In terms of people coming here 14,000, 15,000, 16,000 years ago, they're like just generally paraphrasing a very complicated conversation. They're generally like, show me a normal site that's really old. Show me a great site. Why do we have so many great Clovis sites and everything older is. Is wishy washy or weird now?

[B]

I mean, I feel like they have some explanations for that. Just because the older stuff is, the more likely it's, you know. Sure, it's very time. Time is rough on stuff.

[A]

Very comp. Yeah, the older it is, the less likely it's still around. But why do you see such an explosion of sites at 13,000? All of a sudden it's like, I don't know, why are there tons of 13,000 year old Clovis sites, but no one can show me a normal 15,000 year old site when there's normal 13,000 year old sites all over. Point out this is the last point. I forgot to make it. This picture of us standing by this tent ring. I was invited here by a Pre Clovis enthusiast named Tony Baker. Invited me on this Bureau of Land Management survey cultural survey. He volunteers for this. And he was. He spent a good part of his career. He retired as an oil executive and became obsessed with Pre Clovis. He became obsessed with who really were the first Americans. So he was always interested in finding. He thought that someone up here was going to find, you know, a 25,000-year-old site, a 30,000-year-old site. Something really old. Because it stands to reason. Wouldn't the oldest stuff be closest to where you entered? Yeah, the continent picture your kids come in the room with muddy shoes. Where's most the mud at the door? It's imperfect analogy, that's all. Clovis versus back baby. I don't know.

[C]

I like it. I like it.

[A]

I'm done having opinions about it.

[C]

Well, I don't.

[A]

I've been burned too many times.

[D]

I don't chase the headlines.

[A]

I'm too gullible. I was a big kelp highway guy. Now I feel like a fool.

[C]

But. But why can't it be that the kelp highway existed and the other one, like, you know what?

[A]

I'm the kelp highway. I'm not saying without really old sites, the kelp highway becomes a lot less interesting.

[C]

Yeah. I'm just saying, like, couldn't it have happened concurrently? Not that it happened way before, but that the same thing that some of them went through the middle of the continent and some of them went down the coast.

[A]

Jani, before we started recording, was all excited about a woman being the first to win a race. Some race. Okay. There's a thing about being first. I'm interested. Who was the first?

[C]

What if it was a tie?

[A]

It wasn't just like Yanni and Brody running the first American. And it was probably a little cluster. It was. It was it. I'm going to go and say so. I'm going to say a thing that I know to be true. It was not 100 people, little family group. It was 30.

[C]

20.

[A]

30. The first Americans. It was 20 or 30 people. They walked in killing mammoths or they boated in eating clams.

[C]

Yep.

[D]

Should we all be so lucky someday?

[A]

I got to know. I got to know.

[C]

Going to have to wait for that time machine to get built.

[A]

I want to be with them when they do it. I want to be like, you boys don't even appreciate this. We just crossed into America. Let's crack a champagne.

[C]

They didn't know they crossed anywhere.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Really.

[A]

This is the last point I'll make about the peopling of the Americas. Generations. Generations would have been born and died in what is now the Bering Sea. And not known they were going anywhere.

[D]

Yep.

[A]

Right. You were born there. You died. Maybe you died 200 miles east or east, southeast of where you were born. Maybe because you're always curious, like, what's over the next hill?

[C]

Right.

[A]

But you weren't like, bob, let's go to America. I just got a feeling they were just Being like, it's always better hunting when we go kind of that way.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Because over there, like, he's like, just watch. If we go to the next valley, you watch, if there's something there, I bet I can walk up and stab it. But in our valley, shit keeps running away because we've been here for two years. Let's go over there. He's like, sure enough, look, watch. I'll walk up and stab it. Bah

[C]

drops.

[A]

And like that. Like that. People found Chilean Patagonia because it's always better over that direction.

[D]

Somebody probably said, my dad told me, if you go to the next valley, you can kill more stuff.

[A]

Like, you know what dad always said?

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

If you can't kill anything, go aways south, southeast. He says it's always better.

[D]

Dad's right.

[A]

Thanks for joining the news show.

[C]

We're not doing the wildlife crossings. Oh, you skipped right over me. No, I thought you were mad at me or something.

[A]

No, I skipped it.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Sorry.

[C]

Little ways. No, you skipped it way back before Giannis went.

[A]

Mm.

[D]

Oh, my fault.

[B]

That's why I was caught off.

[A]

Oh, it's right there.

[D]

Twice.

[A]

Sorry, I didn't mean to do that.

[C]

So jump in now.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

All right. It's not the end of the show, guys.

[A]

No. We'll clean it up. The club's first back, baby.

[C]

Yep. The headline is World's largest wildlife highway bridge crossing in California is nearly complete. That's not where I'm going to start. That's the recent headline. If you jump Back to the 1990s, scientists identified Liberty Canyon in western Los Angeles county as a critical wildlife corridor that linked the Santa Monica Mountains to other. Other ranges. Couple decades pass, and there's a lot of concern over habitat fragmentation, especially concerning mountain lions. And this is something we've talked about in the past. The mountain lions in. In Los Angeles County, Southern California, just

[A]

pulled up that iconic image of that mountain lion under the Hollywood sign.

[C]

A lot of problems. One of the huge problems was they're getting hit by cars a lot. And in this particular spot, this, like, pinch point In Liberty Canyon, 300, 000 vehicles daily go through this canyon on Highway 101.

[A]

Yep. My God.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Considering a lot of those are going through twice there and back.

[C]

Sure. But it's a lot. And it's. It's several lanes on each side the highway there. So this idea starts to germinate about a wildlife overpass, which is kind of like when the idea of wildlife overpasses really started getting popular all over the place. And the reason you build these things are habitat connectivity. Because interstates are like walls basically to a lot of wildlife.

[A]

Sometimes literally, because you got a fence on each side and then you got a barrier down the center.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Another reason is critic to maintain critical migration quarters. Like we've talked about the hoback to red desert mule deer migration in western Wyoming. And I'll circle back to that, but that's, that's an example where wildlife overpasses have been used. And then obviously it's, it's to reduce roadkill mortality. So this idea kind of germinates and the concept evolves into a large vegetated overpass spanning Liberty Canyon on US 101 in the Agora Hills, which is western Los Angeles County, I believe. And so the idea comes and then bang. Some major private funding kicks in which was going to allow the construction of this overpass. And that money came from the Annenberg foundation mostly and some other private partners. So April 22nd on Earth Day, groundbreaking begins on the Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. A couple years go by, all there's like heavy structural work going on. Millions of pounds of concrete gets poured. The deck of the bridge gets built over 10 lanes of the highway. And the expected completion is, wow, 2025.

[A]

How big is that sucker side to side.

[C]

I'm gonna, I'll get, I'll get there. So a couple years go by, they're building, building, building. Expected completion is 2025 to early 2026. So 2025 was the final construction phase, which was, you know, what you see there, like habitat shaping and soil placements, things like native vegetation. A million local seeds were planted. And it's described as the world's wildlife largest wildlife crossing. Which we'll get, we'll get to that. And again, as far as size, Steve, 210ft long, 170ft wide. Largest of its kind globally. You can see that it's made to, to like look natural, not just like a, a dirt bridge. Eight acres.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

Doesn't look like eight acres.

[C]

Eight acres.

[A]

Well, because they're not done with it.

[C]

Yeah, species. The species that, that they believe it will support will be mountain lions, deer, coyotes, bobcats, reptiles. Says birds. Well, I guess some birds. Yeah.

[A]

Big old Turk out there strutting.

[C]

Yeah. So anyway, they're building and in 2025, as as happens with construction projects, there starts to be delays and cost overruns. There was flooding that delayed it. Inflation, labor supply chain stuff. So the budget goes up by about $21 million to $114 million total.

[A]

What? What?

[C]

$114 million?

[A]

From what to what?

[C]

Well, it went o. It got to 114 million with a $21 million overrun.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

So it was whatever. Round 90 was the original budget. So this year it's nearing completion and wildlife are already appearing on the bridge. Pollinators and reptiles, birds, things like that. The planned opening is now December 2, 2026. So you know, six or seven months from now. It's developed a little controversy throughout the years as it's been built and was coined the Bridge to Nowhere by some right wing media and, and politicians stealing

[A]

that term from the bridge in Ketchikan, Alaska that would have connected the town to the airport.

[C]

There's a lot of bridges.

[A]

Are there a lot of bridges? But that's a common thing.

[C]

Yeah, got it. But this is like cost delays, like time overrun, cost overrun. And the fact that it's not critical. This is a, a detail that kind of tells you a lot, I think about the attitude towards wildlife, which is it's not critical infrastructure that benefits people. But the thing is, is most of the money came from private and philanth and philanthropic funding. So it's not like the taxpayers are on the hook for the cost of this thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So I'm not, I'm not sure why with the problem.

[A]

It's in some people's minds, including some friends of mine. It's become like in their mind emblematic of everything wrong with California.

[C]

Right, sure.

[A]

And you know which. And I think because they look at the amount of money they look at that you're. You're basically connecting to overdeveloped.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Pieces of habitat that are beyond repair

[C]

for a handful of mountain lions.

[A]

Yeah. They point that it wouldn't happen if it wasn't for this would like it's. It's happening because of the mountain lions.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

All of which. That doesn't rile me up.

[C]

Right.

[A]

If people want to spend their money making giant overpasses for wildlife, I'm like great.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. And we're going to talk about some other ones. The. Until this one is finished. The. In Colorado there's one called the i25 Greenland Wildlife Life Overpass. Do we have that, Phil? That's it there.

[D]

That was nice, Phil.

[C]

That was completed last year and they were calling that one the largest in the world for a little while. But that one is completed in use I25 just south of Denver. So again, probably hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day and already thousands of animals crossings have been recorded there. Significant drop and collisions.

[A]

Really?

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Wonder if you could trap that.

[C]

I don't think people are allowed on those.

[A]

Can't. Can't string snares on those trails and see what comes through.

[C]

Another real, real famous one is the Bamp Wildlife Crossing system.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

And this is. They have like 40 of these things and it's overpasses and underpasses. 80, 90% reduction in wildlife collisions there.

[A]

Really? Yeah. Over how many miles of road though? Well, like over that patch of road.

[C]

I, I mean I'm, I'm sure it's. With 40 crossings, it's miles and miles and miles there.

[A]

I'm. They made 40 of those.

[C]

Yeah. In the Banff area.

[A]

Damn.

[C]

So like these things work. They're becoming more popular and like for a comparison I wanted to the show like actual numbers for reductions in, in roadkill. There's, there's a. Giannis might remember these. There's a Highway 9 between Breckenridge, Colorado and Kremmling, Colorado. About 10 to 15 years ago they started building a series of overpasses there. Can you pull those up, Phil?

[D]

Nice.

[C]

And you can pull up the second.

[A]

Phil's kicking ass, man.

[C]

Yeah, there's, there's a cool one. This was like a real bad spot for, particularly for mule deer mortality in the winter, but also elk. A lot of car crashes, a lot of animals getting killed. So within five years of these wildlife overpasses being completed, reduced vehicle, mule deer and elk collisions by 90% over a 10 mile stretch.

[F]

Really?

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Crashes from over 30 annually to nearly zero.

[A]

No kidding.

[C]

Prevented hundreds of potential collisions and effectively reduced carcass counts by 90%.

[A]

Wow. And you know what we should do? I don't want to have an essay contest, but a bullet pointed email contest.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

If you hate, if you're one of the people that hates wildlife overpasses and you, and you think it demonstrates everything that's wrong with the world, send us a bullet pointed email and we'll have a contest.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Who can have the best bullet pointed email. That's so that it better explains why it's so bad to have wildlife crossings.

[C]

Before you send those bullet pointed emails, watch this video going back to these previous ones. Crossing structure. The, the structures were crossed more than 45000 times by elk, moose, black bears, mountain lions and other species. Do you have that video? So this is, this is a video from a wildlife crossing in Utah and I wish we could fast forward.

[A]

I don't like how they decorated it.

[C]

Yeah, this, this one's kind of, you know, not.

[A]

I would have done it Way different than that.

[E]

Like I can scrub through it looks.

[C]

But if you start, like if you start. This is one wildlife crossing.

[A]

Pine squirrel, moose, porcupine, elk, cougar.

[C]

Yep. Some kind of ground squirrel, brown squirrel, little baby mule deer.

[A]

Man, they did a terrible job decorating it.

[C]

But still, I mean like the things getting used. I think it looks like if you

[A]

gave your kid an aquarium and he put some sticks and rocks in there, just. I'm not buying it. The animals obviously are. There goes a coyote cutting through there. Black bear coming through there.

[C]

So you get the picture. Like this one small overpass and bobcat.

[A]

Oh, good.

[C]

Back up, cottontail. What is it?

[A]

That's like not a pika, but I saw. Oh, there he is. Is he carrying something?

[C]

Yeah, he was carrying something.

[A]

He's carrying some shit. He found dead on the road.

[C]

He went down to the road and carried it out.

[A]

Look at that thing.

[C]

You get the picture?

[D]

Yeah, there's a damn. A former colleague of mine at trc, there's another bear. Daylight Hours is on the Colorado Wildlife and Transportation Alliance. He's a co chair of it and he actually sent me a video a couple months ago that I watched they have on YouTube. That explains how effective these are and the need for additional funding.

[A]

Oh, back up. Brody missed something important.

[C]

What did I miss?

[A]

Watch something spooks this bear here. He's going. He sees it. He stands up and boogies the other direction.

[C]

Bigger bear on the other side of the bridge.

[A]

Is it?

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

Just saying like he winded Yanni. Oh, nope, he's going back ground blind. He changed his mind. That's amazing. That's really cool.

[C]

Yeah, you kind of dig into one and find all kinds of cool stuff about others.

[A]

Why does it bring so much right wing hatred about wildlife crossings? Porcupine?

[F]

I don't know.

[C]

I mean, I think it's. What you said is very true. It's just like a reaction to something going on in California. Right. It's just like that's. That's the attitude.

[A]

It's like a money thing too. But you know what?

[C]

But if some private donor wants to kick down 100 million of their own money, like, come on.

[A]

Yeah, wildlife costs money. Yeah, it costs money to have in world of history. It was like we had wild places because we hadn't gotten around to destroying them all yet. And now we have wild places because we've tried to have them.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

It's just switched. It's switched. You have them now because you're willing to make sacrifices for them. You used to have them because everybody was lucky.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Now you have, because you try hard.

[C]

There we go. That's the news, folks.

[B]

Good job, Brody.

[A]

That was a hell of a beautiful hell of a deal there. I want to go and redo that. Yeah, I'll let it set. The animals obviously like it.

[C]

Steve wants to draw a tag for that one.

[E]

Yeah.

[A]

For that wildlife crossing, I drew the I40 tag.

[D]

Weapons restricted.

[A]

All right, thanks for joining the new show. I know it's a long one, ladies and gentlemen, but that's how it goes. This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.