Ep. 746: Hornography

Summary

Episode Summary: Ep. 746: Hornography

Release Date: August 11, 2025

In this enlightening episode of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steve Rinella engages in a deep and informative conversation with Kevin Monteith, a distinguished Professor of Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Wyoming’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. This episode delves into the intricate world of deer biology, specifically focusing on antler growth, population dynamics, and the profound impact of environmental factors on these majestic creatures.

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1. Introduction to Kevin Monteith and The Monteith Shop

Timestamp: [01:35]

Steve Rinella warmly welcomes Kevin Monteith, highlighting his expertise and previous contributions to the podcast. Kevin is introduced as a leading figure in understanding deer populations and genetics.

Steve Rinella ([01:35]): "Kevin Monteith is one of the top favorite guests we've ever had."

Kevin Monteith ([05:18]): "Our motto is advancing science and management one data point at a time."

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2. Debunking Myths About Deer Genetics and Antler Growth

Timestamp: [03:40]

The discussion begins with Kevin challenging the common misconceptions surrounding deer genetics and antler size. He emphasizes that factors beyond genetics, such as maternal nutrition, play a crucial role in determining antler growth and overall body mass.

Steve Rinella ([04:27]): "Probably not a year and a half old, but still looks like that. A buck that'll be a runt for the rest of his life."

Kevin Monteith ([04:46]): "We're going to get into all that."

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3. The Common Garden Experiment: Understanding Genetic vs. Nutritional Influences

Timestamp: [35:08]

Kevin elaborates on a pivotal experiment conducted in South Dakota, known as the common garden experiment, which aimed to disentangle the effects of genetics and nutrition on antler growth. By raising deer from different regions under identical nutritional conditions, the study revealed significant genetic differences impacting antler size and body mass.

Kevin Monteith ([35:08]): "Age, Genetics, Nutrition affect antler size."

Kevin Monteith ([40:10]): "Because of bad genetics."

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4. Maternal Nutrition and Its Long-Term Effects on Offspring

Timestamp: [40:39]

The conversation shifts to the negative maternal effect, where the nutritional status of a mother during pregnancy has lasting impacts on her offspring. Kevin explains how improved maternal nutrition can lead to significantly larger and healthier bucks, even across generations.

Kevin Monteith ([40:39]): "Those second-generation males were 50 pounds heavier than their fathers, indicating over 70% of the difference was due to maternal nutrition."

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5. The Impact of Severe Winters on Deer Populations

Timestamp: [52:47]

Kevin discusses the devastating effects of harsh winters on deer populations, particularly focusing on body fat levels and mortality rates. He introduces the concept of risk-sensitive reproductive allocation, where deer adjust their reproductive strategies based on past environmental hardships.

Kevin Monteith ([52:47]): "We lost 70% of our adult females and 65% of our adult males in the 2022-2023 winter."

Kevin Monteith ([73:27]): "The worse the winter, the lower the probability of survival."

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6. Migratory Patterns and Local Adaptations

Timestamp: [77:03]

The discussion delves into deer migratory behavior, highlighting how mule deer are highly faithful to their migratory routes and winter ranges. Kevin explains how migrations are ingrained traits, often inherited across generations, and how disruptions can lead to population declines.

Kevin Monteith ([77:03]): "If you lose certain migratory routes, it's challenging to get them back because adults are so faithful to their established paths."

Steve Rinella ([107:56]): "How do you get them back into new ranges without pioneers?"

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7. Predator-Prey Dynamics and Misconceptions

Timestamp: [129:26]

Steve and Kevin tackle the contentious topic of predators' roles in deer population management. Kevin argues that neither extreme view—that predators either don't matter or are solely responsible for population control—is accurate. Instead, he emphasizes a balanced understanding that integrates environmental factors with predation.

Kevin Monteith ([131:00]): "Neither camp is right. Predation and nutritional capacity both play roles that vary over time and space."

Steve Rinella ([133:53]): "These two wildly different perspectives are missing the nuanced truth."

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8. Future Directions and Conservation Implications

Timestamp: [135:06]

In the concluding segment, Kevin outlines the ongoing and future research planned by The Monteith Shop. This includes exploring the Rose Petal Hypothesis, which examines how female deer occupy and utilize space on the landscape across generations. He underscores the importance of maintaining migratory corridors and habitat memory to support robust deer populations.

Kevin Monteith ([138:28]): "Understanding how females occupy space on a landscape is crucial for maintaining large, robust populations."

Steve Rinella ([142:22]): "If you love wildlife and these majestic landscapes, the Monteith Shop is a great place to support."

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Key Takeaways

• Genetics vs. Nutrition: While genetics play a role in antler size, maternal nutrition during pregnancy significantly impacts deer growth and development.
• Environmental Impact: Severe winters can drastically reduce deer populations, emphasizing the need for robust conservation strategies.
• Migratory Faithfulness: Mule deer exhibit strong fidelity to their migratory routes, making habitat preservation and corridor maintenance vital.
• Balanced Predator Management: Effective deer population management requires a nuanced approach that considers both predation and environmental resources.
• Long-Term Research: Continuous, long-term studies are essential for understanding and supporting deer populations amidst changing environmental conditions.

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Notable Quotes

• On Genetics and Nutrition:

  "Age, Genetics, Nutrition affect antler size." — Kevin Monteith ([35:08])

• On Harsh Winters:

  "We lost 70% of our adult females and 65% of our adult males in the 2022-2023 winter." — Kevin Monteith ([52:47])

• On Predation Misconceptions:

  "Neither camp is right. Predation and nutritional capacity both play roles that vary over time and space." — Kevin Monteith ([131:00])

• On Migratory Patterns:

  "If you lose certain migratory routes, it's challenging to get them back because adults are so faithful to their established paths." — Kevin Monteith ([77:03])

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Conclusion

Episode 746 of The MeatEater Podcast offers a comprehensive exploration of deer biology, highlighting the complex interplay between genetics, nutrition, environmental factors, and management practices. Kevin Monteith’s insights provide valuable perspectives for hunters, conservationists, and wildlife enthusiasts aiming to foster sustainable deer populations.

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For more insights and detailed discussions on outdoor topics, including hunting, fishing, and conservation, tune into The MeatEater Podcast Network.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

This is an iHeart podcast. There's no shortcut to building gear that won't fail. That's why First Light built the new forge waders from the ground up. Field tested, where failure isn't an option. Designed for waterfowl hunters who show up in the dark, who are ready for anything, and who stay when the conditions get brutal. These aren't fair weather waders. They're built or performed. They're built to last. If you're planning your waterfowl season, plan around gear that won't quit on you. Forge waiters by first light. Zero quit season after season. Available now at first light.com that's f I r s t l I t e dot com this is the Meat Eater podcast. Coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, undisturbed. Podcast, you can't predict anything brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out@first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com Kevin Monteith is here today. Second podcast appearance. You're one of the top favorite guests we've ever had.

[Kevin Monteith]

Are you just saying that to be nice?

[Steve Rinella]

I'm telling you, people love that show. Dude, that was a big show. Over the years we've had some big shows that people really liked and just generated a lot of stuff. That was a big show. That was episode 162 and it was called Landscape of Fear. Now we're all the way up on episode 745. So lots changed. Randall's hair has grown like that and been cut back. That was just dozens of times since then.

[Kevin Monteith]

Just a few weeks before Corinne and I started. I think so, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Phil was just getting out of high school. Kevin is here. So. Kevin is the professor of Natural Resource Sciences at at the University of Wyoming's Haub Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Zoology and Physiology. He is the leader of the Monteith Shop. He is here to dispel almost everything you think, in fact, about deer, about deer, about deer and elk, about antlers. He dispelled it before and he'll dispel it again in a new way. Plus other things. All I do now when I'm talking every time, and I had to do this the other day. I had to do this the other day. Who did I do it to? I'm trying to think. Oh, Morgan Potter. A professional hunter in Africa. He was laying on me, the whole genetics. Oh, this area doesn't have good deer. This, you know, not laying it on me. I don't mean to, like, you know, he's a body of mine. The whole, like. Well, that area doesn't have good genetics. And I had to lay on him the old. Not so fast. There's a lot more to the picture.

[Randall]

You see him stiffen up there.

[Steve Rinella]

Like he's itching. Like he's itching to get into it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, not that I said, yeah, a lot goes into it.

[Randall]

I think it might have also been a reaction to some of the.

[Steve Rinella]

Wasn't. This isn't. This isn't a weapon. This is an antique. I'll explain it in a second because it's relevant to my life right now.

[Kevin Monteith]

Relevant to your life?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I'll explain. Not really. For instance, just to give you a pre titillation about what's going to happen, Kevin's just showing me a picture of a buck, a mule deer buck. Anyone on the planet. Anyone on the planet would look at this buck and declare it to be the. A classic year and a half old buck. A classic first rack. Like a spiky little buck with little offshoots. You'd be like, that's a year and a half old buck. Every guy would say that. I would tell my kids, they'd be like, is it a big one if they got it? I'd be like, nah, it's a year and a half full buck. It ain't. It's two and a half years old at three and a half. You'd look at him, he'd be like.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Probably not a year and a half old, but still looks like that. A buck that'll be a runt for the rest of his life. Not because he's from an area with bad genetics. It's because his mom was in piss poor shape when she was pregnant with him.

[Kevin Monteith]

Correct. That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

We're going to get into all that.

[Kevin Monteith]

And a lot more.

[Steve Rinella]

Lots of good research. Lots of good research. But first tell, we were just talking about how you call your place your outfit, which is kind of funny. You call it the Monteith Shop. And we're talking about in, like, in the trades, you know, you meet at the shop. I don't care if you're a tree surgeon, whatever, millwright. You go meet at the shop and then you go off to your job site. And it's funny that you called your scientific lab your shop.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because there's Work going on there.

[Kevin Monteith]

There's. There's work going on there. Yeah. And we, we definitely catch some flack for it because it's not.

[Steve Rinella]

We do.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's. Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Cause it doesn't sound official enough.

[Kevin Monteith]

Doesn't. Right. Yeah. If you're going to be a, I don't know, a scientist or a group that does science, the typical reference is a lab. And I think that's at least in the, in the academic world, that's, that's the norm. And I think despite working in an academic world, I don't think I've ever. I don't think I've ever fit the mold. I don't think I necessarily have a desire to fit the mold. And so in thinking about what it meant for us over time and who we were to be referenced as, you know, that way, to me, what made more sense if we're going to be data generators, hands dirty in the field and, you know, being. Being able to do the work that puts us in as close proximity to the animals that we do. To me, what made sense is a shop, something that's more that associated more with the trades or like a mechanic shop, for example. I often maybe reference us as like diagnostic mechanics working to. Hands dirty in there, working to figure out what's going on with any, you know, particular animal population and working to understand them better. So. And I, and I think, I don't know, I guess like my upbringing and who I am at heart, it fits a lot better than being referenced as, as a lab. So despite the flack that we get for it, we stuck with it.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah. I wouldn't pay attention to that before, Before I explain this. This here knife I'm holding, you got a Monteith Shop shirt on that has what I thought was a Bigfoot guy pumping iron.

[Kevin Monteith]

You did think that. And it's not that. Correct.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, what is it? Because this is something I hadn't heard of. I'm embarrassed to have not heard of.

[Kevin Monteith]

It for as much as I hear you talk about beavers.

[Steve Rinella]

He's got a picture on his shirt of a Bigfoot pumping iron lifting a stick.

[Kevin Monteith]

Except. Except it's not.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

It actually reminds me of the, the sand creatures in Star wars when they shake their Tuscan raiders. Yeah, the Tuscan raiders when they shake their things at one another. That's good. That's good.

[Steve Rinella]

Thanks. Speaking of which, we're trying to. I'm trying to license a song right now that has a line. We did a couple favors for a guy who looked like a Tuscan raider? No, we did a couple favors for some guys who look like Tuscan raiders.

[Kevin Monteith]

This based on a true story?

[Steve Rinella]

I doubt it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay, go on. So it's a beaver holding up a stick. And part of that is the artwork was done by one of our former team members, Rhiannon Jacobac. And we just started doing some work on beavers here over the past couple years and sort of, yeah, became, we became aware of this behavior and it's a behavior often that's very rarely seen in beavers. But there's a scientific paper on it and if you, if you Google stick display in beavers, There is a YouTube video demonstrating them doing it. But amidst like territory holders are at the edge kind of the fringes of potential territories. That sort of antagonistic behavior. They'll, they'll pick up a stick and just go up and down and up and down with that, that, with displaying that stick. And I don't know, I think it's kind of funny too given that, you know, most of our work is on big ungulates and we've done a good bit of work on horns and antlers and those sorts of things. And what they're used as is weapons and forms of intimidation and display. And beavers don't have antlers or horns on their heads, but perhaps picking up a stick does some sort of, has some sort of intimidation element.

[Steve Rinella]

Sure, dude. It's like he's getting pumped. That be like he's getting pumped.

[Kevin Monteith]

Exactly. No, that's exactly right. Our stickers say, have that saying underneath it. Speak softly and carry a big stick.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he's either, you know, if you really dug into it. Is it like a fitness display? You know, is it like, hey man, like this is a hard thing to pull off. Right. When we were at this, when I was just in Africa, we were hanging out these Maasai dudes and they like, they have a, there's this traditional dance in Maasai culture where it's generally like young men and young women. And in this dance there's like a couple, there's like a display, an athletic display of men which is just a flat footed jump again and again, like a spring, like from a flat footed stance that you just jump again and again and again and like get some impressive height, dude. Especially when I, when I was like, let me give it a wing. I was like, yeah, impressive height. And then. Right. It's just a asking like what is it all about? It's just like showing what you got. Your game. Yeah, yeah, A flat footed jump you know, and then for the women, it's kind of like a. You put this disc around your neck and it's like a gyrating move to make the disc shiver.

[Kevin Monteith]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

It's just showing what you got. So that beaver could be like.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, exactly. Balance, strength.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Or he's saying, I'll whoop you with this stick. Or it's like, this is the kind.

[Randall]

Of stuff we got around here.

[Steve Rinella]

You know? You know, I had a beaver. I had a beaver interaction the other day. My, my, My boys, his buddy's family, they had beavers plugging up their irrigation crop. Irrigation system. And I went over to advise him on trying to get rid of them. And I made some caster mound sets. Just like took beaver. A beaver's cast. It seemed like just one beaver, kind of like doing his deal. Put caster out. He just left. I like, I don't know. I can't prove this. I feel like he had like a. Oh, someone's already here. Like left. I'm telling you, he left. He's gone. We keep checking. He's gone.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's wild.

[Steve Rinella]

He had these little dams in this. In a. In an irrigation deal. Yeah, he had these little dams. He had a couple little shit. And caster mounds the size of a cell phone, you know, I mean, we put like a big old cat, two big old caster mouse. I'm not kidding you. That dude moved out. Could be like something interesting to develop for like sort of like non, lethal, right? Non lethal deal is get after him early and just start. Sorry boys.

[Randall]

Making big caster.

[Steve Rinella]

Sorry boys. There's already a bad mofo in town, man. You better go find a new spot to hang out. So he. And it did him good because he's alive. He lived to tell the tale. Yeah. Oh, this knife. So Heather duville's in town. A.K. moosey. I screwed up in my head and I didn't think that she would be here. She could be hanging out right now. But I just didn't think about it. I didn't think. And by. By the time I invited her, we started. We're recording at 9. I. I occurred to me at 8:40 to invite her. She wasn't able to make it. She's shooting pistols. But I'm gonna have her fix this because she's a leather sewer. My old man brought this home from North Africa and whiskey. Whiskey too. That's like gotta be elephant ivory.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Take a look at that.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh yeah. That's awesome.

[Steve Rinella]

It's gotta be elephant. I don't know what the hell? I don't know what kind of ivory it is.

[Kevin Monteith]

It looks exactly like some of this stuff that I have from my grandmother.

[Steve Rinella]

That was from China, so. From China? No, it's from North Africa.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, I know. I'm just saying, like a little Confucius statue carved in ivory.

[Steve Rinella]

I thought you meant that. You're accusing my dad of bringing home some kind of souvenir knockoff.

[Kevin Monteith]

Going on the defense.

[Steve Rinella]

Just like that.

[Kevin Monteith]

Where's the stick?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he. So he was real. Like, whatever it was. He was. I just don't remember what he told me about it. He was real particular about it, though. And this sheath is a weird leather. Look at that leather. I've had some people say maybe ostrich, but you can't see the. A lot of times, an ostrich leather. You can see the. You can see the. The follicle for the feather. I need to have it stitched back up. That was unstitched when I was born.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh, so it's been that way.

[Steve Rinella]

It was. So you know what I just did? I took mineral oil. I put that. I took that sheath and put mineral oil, a little. A couple tablespoons of mineral oil in a vac bag and stuck that sheath in there and vac sealed it, which I'm going to patent as a way to, like, bring leather back to life. Picture what I'm talking about.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's a good idea.

[Randall]

Draw it in.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm gonna patent it so no one else can do it unless they check with me. Put. Take, like an old. Whatever. Old leather belt, whatever. That's kind of played out. Put oil in a bag, vaccine in that bag, then let it sit on your workbench for a couple days and open it up, and that sucker is rejuvenated. Now, a leather guy might tell me that there's a reason that's dumb or not a good idea, but I don't know.

[Randall]

Or he might tell you that people are already doing that.

[Steve Rinella]

You could tell me that. You could tell me.

[Kevin Monteith]

I think it's a good idea.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Don't be surprised when you pull something out and it fell apart. I don't know, but I think I'm on to something. But I need to have it stitched back up. But isn't that something I want to. You know, like those antique road show things?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, what is up with this thing? Randall wanted to know if he came home from the war and it had kraut blood all over it. But I don't know that he. I told him I already cleaned it all off. Randall's got back from Germany, much to Steve's chagrin. Yeah, I don't like that one bit.

[Randall]

Well, you're glad that I'm back.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I'm glad you're back, but I felt. I was nervous the whole time you were over there that things might break out again. Norm MacDonald used to talk about that. Yeah, Everybody's always worried about, like, North Korea.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Russia. He's like, why are they not worried about the Germans? We've already done it. Wars with them. Why'd you think it's over now? Rip, you know. Oh, one other quick thing. I don't want to take up too much of our time, but you know how, like, I'm bad on sports. I'm bad on, like, just generally very ignorant about athletics. I was getting my hair cut. I get my haircut at VIP barbershop, which is great. You gotta call ahead, but it's great. And one thing I like about it is they always playing sports with the volume off, which sounds better, you know, that way and.

[Randall]

Cause there's less of it.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, no, actually, I like it, like, during the. During the Summer Olympics, it was cool because you just watch people run around the track, but you can't hear what's going on. I thought it was very soothing. I'm in there the other day and, like, the big old. There's a huge TV screen. It's the only thing in there. They don't. They don't really. It's not really, like, mega decorated, but there's a huge TV screen. And so normally you sit. Like, when you're getting your haircut, you're looking at the screen, but when you're waiting, your backs to the screen. But the other wall is a giant mirror. And I'm just kind of lost in my thoughts. Half watching a baseball game, but it's in a mirror. Okay. Which I didn't think about. And every time a guy hits the ball, he's running the third, he'd run the other way. And I'm, like, sitting there. I'm honest to God sitting there. Like, when did they change that? I swear, I swear I was almost gonna ask Kevin the barber. I was almost gonna be like, why do these dudes take off running, like, the other way that what you normally would run? All of a sudden it occurred to me, I'm like, oh, it's reversed. Yeah.

[Randall]

Well, you're probably excited because he thought. He thought, boy, the prevalency of left handers is really going up in professional sports.

[Steve Rinella]

I Felt I was so. I was like. So I was so ready to open my mouth and go like, hey, why are they. Yeah. Could have been majorly embarrassed. Could have been a good barbershop. Yeah. A couple quick news bits here. Let me look here a minute. Oh, a movie's coming out. I can't believe I hadn't heard about this before. There's a movie coming out where Bambi goes and seeks revenge. You heard about this? It's called the Reckoning. Bambi, the Reckoning.

[Kevin Monteith]

The trailer.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, everybody says Bambi, but isn't it like Bambi's kid? How does it work? No, no, Bambi's dad gets killed.

[Randall]

Yeah, the mom. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That's who gets killed, right? No, it's his old man.

[Randall]

Yeah, there is. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Remember Spencer tried to work up how many inches of antler.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He. Because Bambi and his dad had the.

[Randall]

Buck does get killed. But I feel like Bambi's also an orphan.

[Kevin Monteith]

Right.

[Randall]

So maybe there's.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, they call it.

[Randall]

Been a while.

[Steve Rinella]

To be honest, it's a C tier creature feature. I guess that means poor graphics.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's made by the same studio that made a bunch of Winnie the Pooh horror films as well. It's like as soon as they enter a certain form of public domain, they just go buck wild on these things.

[Randall]

Interesting.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So the story is like it drinks some toxic something or other and then it becomes monsterized and it has like a million just like Ninja Turtles. The grieving deer decides to take a sip of the nefarious chemical. That local corporation, Wilbergs. It's always. There's always a lot of these movies. There's a animal movies. There's usually a bad corporation.

[Randall]

There's a strain of anti capitalism in all of these.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh yeah, My kids in this little. My kids in this little song and dance club right now for a week. Like just to keep him busy, my little one, just to keep him busy before we go to Alaska, you know, and he's coming home singing. They're teaching him a song. It's like a. It's like a. It's like a flat out like anti capitalist song. He comes home every night and practices. Is it the one from the Lorax? Is it?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. My kids at that same song and dance club.

[Steve Rinella]

Is he?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, what's his name?

[Kevin Monteith]

I've got two, I've got two kids.

[Steve Rinella]

In there right now.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yanni's daughters have done it as well.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Oh, so you think your kid and my kid are in the same song? And dance.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's very. Well, he's not doing the Lorax song.

[Randall]

They're comrades. They're comrades now.

[Steve Rinella]

There's different age groups.

[Kevin Monteith]

And it's not like the Lorax was a book written decades ago with the.

[Steve Rinella]

Same exact anti capitalist sentiment and same plot. Has nothing to do with the Lorax book. It's a guy with corporate attorneys. It's like. Has nothing to do with the Lorax book.

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, yeah, but it's about him cutting down the trees to make the needs and he's draining the resources dry without a thought of. Of the planet or.

[Steve Rinella]

No, that's not in the song. I invite you to look at the song.

[Kevin Monteith]

Is it the one that says how.

[Steve Rinella]

How bad can I be? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like he's like talking about his corporate attorneys are denying like it's like this whole. Either way.

[Randall]

So next week it'll be the international. That one didn't land.

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, it's over my head, Randall.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't get it. What's the joke? That's the old.

[Randall]

Isn't it? The old socialist anthem.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I don't know. Sorry. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. Just gear you can count on. Head to First Light dot com. That's F I R S T L I T E dot com. Kevin, you got. You got stomach for one more news bit?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Is that a news bit? Yeah, you're good.

[Randall]

Yeah, you're good. Coming.

[Steve Rinella]

A Bambi movie's coming out where Bambi becomes a fanged bloodthirsty monster who will stop at nothing to attack his prey. And there.

[Randall]

Stay tuned.

[Kevin Monteith]

Or is prey humans or. We don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm assuming.

[Randall]

Assuming there's a lot of blue collar men.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because. Well, driving around in trucks before, like there's a whole genre of these movies. Like. Like animated animal movies. Yeah, there's a whole genre where the bad guy is a southern. A southerner who hunts.

[Randall]

Mm.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I've talked about this one show a bunch of times. There's a show my kids Used to like. I didn't like them watching it. And there's like a couple. There's like rotating cast of bad guys. One of the bad guys was a wild game chef. One of the bad guys was like a very. That's pretty tame. Yeah. He was a very like effeminate urbanite. Yeah. And one was like a southern chef. Huh. The bat. The villains. Okay. We've talked about on the show. This is news. Ish. We've talked about the show and demonstrated in various video projects. We've done the process called Ike gma. You familiar? It's a fish dispatch method.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh no.

[Steve Rinella]

My first introduction to Ike GMA was not by. It's a Japanese word. My first introduction to Ekgma was not having anything to do with the Japanese and not having anything to do with fish. But it was demonstrated to me in South America with a. A giant river turtle, which is a cite species. But these native dudes had a net and they were using the net to catch fish. And this big turtle gets wrapped up in their net. A giant river turtle. And we're in a camp together. They take the turtle. We weren't able to film this because they were explaining to us that like it's kind of a. No, no. But the turtle had gotten the net, so there's. What could they do about it? Even though they could let. What. Either way, they go get it. They go and cut a switch like a big slender stick and peel the bark off it and basically make like a. What would look like a. Like a. Like a hot dog roasting skewer. Okay. Or like a marshmallow.

[Kevin Monteith]

Marshmallow.

[Steve Rinella]

And take the turtle and flop. Cut his head off. Now when I used to process turtles, we would cut their head off, then you hang them up by the tail and it would be hours. Hours before you could pull his leg. And his leg didn't suck back into his shell. Right. You'd like. You'd hold out a pair of channel locks. This is how my dad taught me to do it. It's kind of gruesome, but it's just how scoffier explains it in laguid culinary. But you hold out a pair of channel locks. So the turtle grabs the channel locks, grabs onto it and you pull out and decapitate them just like you're cutting head off a chicken. This is just how it was demonstrated to me as a child. And then you hang the turtle up and eventually you pull his leg and it doesn't pull back. And then it's time to clean the turtle. These guys In South America, they took a machete and then took that long skewer and inserted it into the spine and ran that skewer all the way down that spine till it was in its tail. And that turtle melted. I mean, melted. It was just like.

[Kevin Monteith]

After they cut the head off.

[Steve Rinella]

Immediately. Immediately cut the head off, ran that skewer. And there. There wasn't. Because, like, a turtle is a. I don't know what's going on.

[Randall]

Like, you know, like disrupting all the nerves.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Like, think of the expression like running around like a chicken when his head cut off, which I demonstrate, which I mentioned to my kids all the time when we're hunting. Like, they'll hit something and it'll kind of do a little mad dash, and they feel real bad for it. And I'll be like, well, you know, think about it. Like, someone cuts a chicken's head off, it runs all over hell. Right. It's like, dead, but not dead. So it just, like, it melted the turtle. I never seen anything like. It turns out this is a common fish dispatching method in Japan. And I've gone with a friend of mine, she was Korean, but still, we would. She would catch a fish and immediately cut its tail. Just cut through the. Cut through the. Cut through the tail to sever the backbone, the spine at the tail point. Right. And then you kind of cock the tail. So it's still connected by skin, but it's now cocked back, folded over. And then she'd take this brass wire. She had copper wire, maybe, whatever the hell it was, Copper wire. She take this copper wire and just in that. In that spine. You follow me?

[Kevin Monteith]

The spinal cord, they're basically going.

[Steve Rinella]

And that fish just. Again, just dreaming, like, just is, like, done.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, you think of a fish flopping for a long time. Whatever, Go. You know, and, like. And it influences how that fish goes through rigor.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And it's just like the fish is just deader and dead. This guy here, there's this company, Shinkle Systems. They've built a robot that uses the Japanese EKG may method of killing fish, which they regard as the most humane way to harvest the animal while producing the best quality meat. The process involves inserting. I forgot this part. It's kind of like a ancillary part of the thing is you put a spike in the fish's brain first. So the process involves inserting a spike into the fish's brain soon that is caught, killing it instantly, reducing the stress that can cause the fish to spoil more quickly. Oh, he's not talking about what? That's what he's talking about. Not running the crinky. Randall? Anyone? Their machine isn't the spine reaming machine. Their machine is just a spike to the head machine.

[Kevin Monteith]

Do you need a machine that seems.

[Randall]

That seems a lot easier to make.

[Kevin Monteith]

It stuns the fish to help humans do that method.

[Steve Rinella]

No. So it's a robot that stuns a fish?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

This is what you get for talking about news articles you haven't read, Jimmy. Like people are always saying like, well, I read an article this morning and I'm like, I always go like, you know, I didn't really read it. I mean, I saw it. Oh. But the guy says a weird thing. So he's talking about how he's. What? Huh? Okay. Oh. Making the subsequent cuts in seven seconds. Is he reaming the spines or not?

[Kevin Monteith]

The human does it. The machine stuns them.

[Steve Rinella]

Shingles. Okay. Shingles. Refrigerator sized machine called Poseidon is. Is operational.

[Kevin Monteith]

Steve reads news so you don't have to.

[Steve Rinella]

Is operational on three fishing vessels off the US west coast. The fish is inserted into the robot, which then uses computer vision to identify the species and its anatomical information. Spiking the brain and making the subsequent cuts in seven seconds. It might be that the bad. This is a bad writer who wrote what I'm reading clearly.

[Randall]

Subsequent cunts makes me think that it's doing more than that.

[Steve Rinella]

It's reaming the spine. This guy raised 22 billion bucks for this thing.

[Randall]

Race should have gotten robots.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what really turns me off though, is one of his quotes. He's got a quote that I think is indefensible. Where's this quote? Oh, here's a quote from this guy who bills himself as. Not bills himself, former SpaceX engineer. But I don't see SpaceX engineer and think fisheries. Primarily because they're very interested in Mars and there ain't no life on Mars. Like, I don't want to go there. You know? He says, we've been fishing for 40,000 years and the tools haven't really changed.

[Randall]

A little bit of an oversimplification.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Are you at all aware of a thing called sonar guided bottom trawling? I mean, holy cow. He's saying that like, Nothing's changed in 40, 000 years, but now we have a robot that can poke a hole in the fish's head. And this is like the right, this is the right direction. I'm like, nothing's changed in 40, 000 years of fishing.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Good lord.

[Randall]

Plastics Internal combustion engines.

[Steve Rinella]

Sonar guided bottom trawls which can literally. Which can literally scrape underwater spires. Whatever. There's another big article about lab grown meat and fish, which Corinne put in here and then pulled out and now they're back in here again.

[Kevin Monteith]

We don't have to cover it.

[Steve Rinella]

No, we're not going to cover it. Okay. I don't care if everybody eats it. I don't want it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, this was more on the lab.

[Steve Rinella]

Lab grown fish that it's, you know, making its.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's getting into some good restaurants or.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know, restaurants in, in Portland.

[Kevin Monteith]

And there are seven states that made it illegal. And the news bit is that last month Texas was the seventh or eighth state.

[Steve Rinella]

Our own. Our own great state made it illegal. Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, Indiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska have done various things to like prevent or slow down or ban cultured cell cultured meat. Texas just did it in June.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, I thought they maybe that's a little bit earlier.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a little bit big brother for my likings. But like, I can't get worked up about it because I just, I'm kind of grossed out by, by lab grown meat. But Corinne, by saying good restaurants. Think about what you're saying, though. The article is pointing out how a Haitian restaurant in Portland is serving lab grown salmon. Now, I haven't been to, like, Haitia recently, but is there, is there like a lot of big Haiti, what did I call it?

[Randall]

Haitian.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Tells you how long it's been since I've been there. Is there like salmon isn't part of, of Haitian cuisine good?

[Randall]

Much less lab grown salmon.

[Kevin Monteith]

The, the chef is, you know, won a James Beard award, so I think that that puts him at some kind of level.

[Steve Rinella]

I've been nominated for James Beard Awards and I don't feel like I'm at any level. Okay, you ready to dig in?

[Kevin Monteith]

Sure.

[Steve Rinella]

All right, how do we start? Because you guys, you guys do so much work, man. Can we start with a recap?

[Kevin Monteith]

We can do whatever. We start with a recap. What kind of recap do you want?

[Steve Rinella]

Can you recap for. Can you recap for, for us and our listener? Just like, I'm sure you give the spiel all the time. The spiel about when we see an area that we declare like bad genetics or bucks don't get big there. You know, that area's got big bucks because it's got good genetics. What is that shorthand for? You know what I mean? Like, like what are some of the things that actually in. In Your mind. And it could include genetics. But, like, what are the sort of hidden factors that are driving whether you're seeing big, giant bucks in your part of the state, you know?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, well, I mean, there's not too.

[Steve Rinella]

Big of a question.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, no, you're good. I'm just trying to figure out how to. How to lean into their age. Genetics and nutrition affect antler size.

[Steve Rinella]

Tell me again.

[Kevin Monteith]

Age.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

Genetics, nutrition.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

And much of our focus for a long time and certainly within, you know, hunting communities as well, we. We tend to offhandedly and frequently refer to genetics. Right. It's hard to. It's hard to open up a magazine and see an article written, you know, about some big buck or big bowl that somebody harvested. And inevitably it's like, man, the genetics in this area are just fantastic, you know, for large antlers. And there's an aspect of that that is. That is true, like to. To grow, you know, a substantial set of antlers, horns, you need to have genetics that support that. Right. But we also. We also get ourselves in the situation, as we frequently refer to that. And I think. I think where some of that's come from is we. We've called it our. Our hornographic culture, where we're. We're so fork focused on horns, antlers, their size. Like, we're so drawn into that, all we can think about is males and the crap that's growing on their head. And so we've referenced that as our. Our holnographic culture. And there's elements of that that are good. That doesn't.

[Steve Rinella]

I just thought the greatest shirt, dude.

[Randall]

Pornography.

[Steve Rinella]

Pornography we got. Can you text someone right away before someone steals this idea?

[Kevin Monteith]

This is going to.

[Steve Rinella]

It's a buck mount. Yeah, A buck mounting a doe. And it says hornography. A big buck.

[Randall]

And proceeds go to Monty's show.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, see? Yes, that's perfect. Proceeds go directly to me. Proceeds go to the Monte shop. Is that fair?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, 100%.

[Steve Rinella]

You don't care if we steal that? I didn't clear that well.

[Randall]

Yeah, but he said, I just sort of threw it out there.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no, no. That's how we're gonna do it, I think. No, that's how we're definitely gonna do it because we just stole it flat out from the guy in a recorded place.

[Kevin Monteith]

We've used that term in a scientific paper in two scientific papers. I mean, we laid it out in a. In a scientific paper. So.

[Steve Rinella]

So here it exists. Can we do the thing? And then if we do, proceeds go to you guys. Yeah, yeah. 100% pornography. That's good.

[Randall]

I know, I know when I see it.

[Steve Rinella]

Sorry, continue on. I just got so damn excited I.

[Kevin Monteith]

Couldn'T even continue Texas into Hunter. So I think, But I think what that does is in. And of course like when we, when you take that scenario where we're focused on the males and then we think about like what has happened, for example, in places like Texas. We, we often think of like Texas and line breeding and the various things that they do to get males to grow these just ridiculous sized antlers at a very young age. And there is a genetic element to that. But I think that's part of what's just translated to us is, well, of course if there's big antlers in this area and not in this area, there's better genetics over here for antlers than there is over over in this other area. So what, what we did to better understand what, what aspects of genetics versus nutrition go into producing large antlers is I think it's fortunately like one of the, one of the most I think elegant experiments and I've ever been able to be a part of. And that is some work we did in South Dakota. And with that work we had animals in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, which had historically been known to grow some impressively large whitetail deer. A number of bars in Custer and other places that have just stupid big whitetail deer. But more recently in the past number of decades, they're all very small. Like we just don't grow big deer in that region anymore versus in eastern South Dakota where we can grow impressively big animals as little as three to four years of age. And so the looming question with that, and it created, it presented the situation to evaluate what you referenced directly and that is, are those animals in southwestern South Dakota, in the Black Hills just genetically different than animals from eastern South Dakota? So we did what we call a common garden experiment, brought those animals into captivity as newborn fawns. So we captured animals from the Black Hills in eastern South Dakota as newborn fawns, fed them, put them on a high nutritional plane. So we bottle raised them as fawns, put them on a high nutritional plane. So we basically max out nutrition, nutrition wasn't limiting in any way, and then raise those animals all the way up to adulthood. And at adulthood, animals from on average, so once they hit peak body mass, antler size animals from the Black Hills. Male males from the Black Hills were 70 pounds smaller than males from eastern South Dakota and had 40 inches of less antler than animals from eastern south.

[Steve Rinella]

Because of bad genetics.

[Kevin Monteith]

Because of bad genetics. Right. And if you so right. Surface level. Right. They've been on good nutrition since the day that they were born. And so clearly that that supports a genetic explanation then at that point 100 case closed. Case closed. Which then we then took that one step further and looked at the next generation of animals born in captivity. So we had Black Hills males and females, allowed them to breed males and females from eastern South Dakota.

[Steve Rinella]

So like no local bucks jumping over the fence.

[Kevin Monteith]

No local bucks jumping over the fence. No. We allowed them to, to breed within their groups from all the animals that we'd raised since newborns, and then raised that second generation of animals all the way up to adulthood. And so one, once that second generation of animals were raised all the way up to adulthood. If we just consider the Black Hills animals, those sons born to those Black Hills males that I was just talking about, those sons were, had 30 inch more antlers than their fathers and were 50 pounds heavier than their fathers, indicating they made up over 70% of the difference that occurred between the first generation animals that we brought into captivity. We didn't do anything genetically same genetics from those, those two groups of animals. What, what was different was the mothers from the animals that were now born in captivity. That second generation of animals, those mothers were on a high nutritional plane. Now if we go back to the wild scenario, when we originally got those animals, the mothers in the Black Hills were on a poor nutritional plane. Ponderosa pine dominated forest, crappy understory, just on a poor nutritional plane. So what that means is called the negative maternal effect. What that means is that those animals that we originally got as newborns from the Black Hills carried the nutritional signature of mom who was living in the Black Hills. And now our new animals that are born in captivity, they're now carrying the nutritional signature of the moms that they're born to in captivity. And those moms are on a high nutritional plane. And there's, there's almost no, I mean when you think about that level of difference, I mean we're talking 50 pounds difference in body mass, 30 inches of antler. Like it's, it's, it's pretty wild to think that we could, through some genetic manipulation in a natural setting, obtain that level of difference. And here we're talking over a single generation of animals, those massive increases in both body size in antlers that are attributed exclusively to nutrition of mom while those young were in utero.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

And so, and even like there's been a number of studies that have been done in Texas from some colleagues of mine down there where they've, you know, gone to great lengths to manipulate genetics by, within enclosures, by taking, you know, helicopter catching males and then, and then culling males that weren't meeting the level of size that they were working to obtain and are basically unable to obtain like a positive change in antler growth over time through that level of very directive, very selective calling.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

So when you think about that, when we translate that to like one area to the next, then what that, what that can mean is that, and there's, there's two sides of it. One, each set of these animals is adapted to their local environment. Not every environment has, has or offers supreme nutrition. Right. So if we consider placing the arid desert to, you know, a migratory mule deer populations that's running up into the high alpine and you know, eating tall forb. Tall forbs all summer long. So all these animals, oh, and, or you know, in the arid system, maybe their winters aren't so bad so that it doesn't take as much for them to persist through winter versus the animals that are in the more temper systems in the, in the mountains. Like it's harder for them to persist through winter. And so even if you just consider that at the surface level, not, not all of those animals can just operate and do the same thing. They're, the way in which they operate, the way in which they obtain and allocate resources has to be adapted to that local environment. So there's a side of that that's influencing antler size that we see from one place to the next, but it's also a reflection of that local adaptation, the nutrition they have present there and their ability to allocate resources to antler development versus other things. So certainly when you consider like males in one region to the next or males in a harvest from one area to the next, like if we're going to compare apples to apples and say there's bigger males here, smaller males here, we first need to of course consider what age classes of males are there. Right. If they're all, if they're mostly two and three year olds versus over here, you know, there's less harvest and they're mostly being harvested at 4 to 4 to 7, we're going to see differences in antler size. But once we've accounted for that nutrition and what we see from one place to the next is going to play a much bigger role than genetics from one place to the next and most of that nutrition and what dictates what A male is going to be for the rest of his life is mom and mom's condition. The condition in utero. Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

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[Kevin Monteith]

So I think what's fascinating about that is then what we see and even as we see from one year to the next. Well, we can see fluctuations in antler size given environmental potential from one year to the next. Food growth, spring conditions, summer conditions, winter conditions, for that matter, from one year to the next. The greatest marker of what a male carries with him actually came before he was even dropped on the ground.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's a buddy of mine in Wyoming, a guy that's very, very shrewd on wildlife and like a lifetime observer of wildlife. He, he was. I didn't get into it with him, but he's talking about it was a wet spring. Right. Anticipating. Yep. Good antler growth.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He's not wrong though. Right? I mean, that's not wrong. That is, that is helpful. But you could also, like a thing you wouldn't hear from a guy is a guy wouldn't come and say to you two springs ago.

[Kevin Monteith]

Correct. Would not.

[Steve Rinella]

I saw a lot of fat does.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

So I'm hoping to draw a tag.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

This year in order to reap the benefits of that great nutritional season that those doughs were enjoying some time ago. It's just not like part of the lingo.

[Kevin Monteith]

Correct.

[Steve Rinella]

You know.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. And so which is also important for us to be mindful of as hunters and even as conservationists, when what we, what we see today, for example, from yield of males or even size of males within a population in many instances isn't a reflection of what happened then or what happened over the past couple years. It's actually a reflection of what happened maybe five years ago. And it's in part, and it's in large part because of the conditions that those males experienced from their mom while they were, while they were in utero and dosing. And it's called, it's called a cohort effect as well. Where we may have years where that were just poorer years or worse winters where moms were struggling in utero and they didn't, they lacked the ability to give their young the silver spoon right out of the gate. And so that signal, even if conditions improve later on in life, just like our example with the common garden experiment, even if condition for that male gets better after that spring and summer, he's still going to carry the mark of mom. Mom's nutritional signature with him for his entire life. So when that cohort of males gets to six years old, they're going to carry that signature. And so especially when we see what's the thing.

[Steve Rinella]

But it's even more delayed.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's even more delayed. And so as we consider even ups and downs and fluctuations within populations, for example, we see reductions in density and we can talk about this too with like bad winters. And then we see nutritional recovery within a population, meaning we have a bunch of fat moms that are able to, you know, to plug into their offspring. I think what's really interesting is oftentimes in periods of population growth, we'll then see, you know, in a few year lag behind that is when we'll see a number of very large males being harvested.

[Steve Rinella]

And it wasn't, it wasn't that again, what's the timeline?

[Kevin Monteith]

So if we, if we see a dramatic reduction in a population, for example, and so that reduction is then tied to reduced competition for food. So nutrition.

[Steve Rinella]

So big winner kill.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep. So nutrition improves for everybody else that remains.

[Steve Rinella]

So there's a big winner kill.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Wipes out all the deer.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

The, the 20% that are still stand and have a gravy now.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because they got all the good bedding areas. They got the good feeding areas.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

All of themselves.

[Kevin Monteith]

Less competition for space and food. Yeah. So nutritionally they're far better off. Which means they're, they're meeting their needs. And then those females are able to invest, allocate more resources to their offspring. So those offspring, and we see this, see this in our, in our work, born bigger, grow quickly and then they're carrying that positive nutritional signature with them. Right. We're not going to realize that positive nutritional signature from a male harvest perspective until maybe four years down the road. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

That's the thing in my little point I was making that it wasn't even accounting for.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's correct.

[Steve Rinella]

Is you'd have to be. I'm excited about this year.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because, because four years Ago.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

There were some big fans, some big fat doe.

[Kevin Monteith]

And then there's. Exactly right.

[Randall]

There's kind of like two like countervailing forces. Then with a bag at winner. Because I think like the traditional understanding is like there's a bad winner and then you have to wait for the bucks to backfill. Like so the, the three year old deer, the old bucks die. The three year old deer become four year old deer become five year old deer. And you see that sort of. But then in a bad winter that those bucks that are born after the bad winter are going to have that limited potential for the rest of their life. But then the bucks born after that are going to have much better potential than the, the ones that died in the winter. So there's like a, there's like a stunted generation right before that generation that's enjoying the more food at the trough, that kind of thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Phil, can we try to animate what Randall just said? Yeah, I'll give charts and graphs.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, sure.

[Steve Rinella]

Can you say that one more time? Well, like, like I, I'm not. I know. Because you're a very smart person. I know that. You're right. I just don't understand what you're saying.

[Randall]

We should have a chalkboard in here.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh, that'd be great.

[Randall]

No, like, you know, like the traditional, I think like the traditional, very simplistic like logic about Winterkill is that old bucks with worn down teeth are gonna die.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Randall]

And then you, that unit, if you're just talking about like a unit, you're saying like, okay, that unit will be back on its feet by the time the younger bucks get to that age.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I would say that. I would say that.

[Randall]

And so it's sort of this like linear, like backfilling. But once those bucks get to that age, then you have the generation that were still in mom during that bad winter. So that generation is going to drop and then the ones from the generations after that, then they're going to have even more food than anyone. So there's almost like a delayed onset. There's like a drop in potential and then a skyrocketing potential. In terms of those cohorts, does that make sense?

[Steve Rinella]

Do you think he's sitting on a publication here?

[Randall]

I don't think it's nearly sophisticated enough to make, make it with Monteith shop paper.

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, so let, let me. I can essentially describe that with what we.

[Steve Rinella]

Please.

[Kevin Monteith]

With what we observed with.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm track Randall's. I'm gonna get out my marker the second time I'm tracking with what we.

[Kevin Monteith]

Observed in the Wyoming range. And so I will say, I want to say before I get into that, like, I mean, so we've been working in the Wyoming range now since 2013.

[Steve Rinella]

But can I, can I. A quick question. I want to hear all about the Wyoming range. I just wanted, there's one thing I want to clarify.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep. Because you, you, you kind of got at it, but I just want to make sure you get at it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Your job is not producing. Your job is. Your mandate is not to help hunters kill huge bucks. No. Okay, so let's clarify. Like, I mean, like, like what is your sort of what gets you up in the morning? It's not like guaranteeing hunters bigger bucks.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

No. No. Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll. Let's sidestep and get to some of those things and then I'll swoop back to our deer work in western Wyoming. So, so our motto is advancing science and management one data point at a time. And so that even ties back to like the reference to our name and that our, our aim is to one, advance science, which means one way to think about that is our goal is to better understand what makes these animals tick, how they make a living within the world that they, that they do, and then take that one, from just like an ecological standpoint, better understand them. And then two, what does it mean for us from a management or conservation perspective? The reference to one data point as a time is we often joke, like the amount of effort we'll put into one single data point because our work, our work is typically, if we can pull it off is long term and it's individual base. And that is we're working to monitor individual animals for as long as we can. So a lot of studies like, like toss a collar on an animal, you know, monitor for a year or two and that's it. Well, yes, we're using collars, but we're monitoring them for as long as we can and we're collecting a whole suite of other information on them.

[Steve Rinella]

You're monitoring generations of deer.

[Kevin Monteith]

We are, yeah, that's exactly right. And so to, to do that. And so, for example, like one animal in particular, it may take a lot of money and a lot of effort on our side of things from a field perspective to monitor that one animal, to collect the data point from that one animal. But sometimes that one animal is such a critical data point to better understanding how, what makes those animals tick. And then if you take a whole bunch of Those individual data points from animals and you pool them together allows, you know, patterns to emerge for us as to what it means for those animals. Notably. I mean I, I get to, I'm very fortunate to be the spokesperson to talk about our work a fair bit. But, but there's so much that happens behind the scenes that I mean, I shouldn't get any of the credit. Our funding sources, we can't do what we do for free. And so like I'm, we're also constantly raising money to make, to make that possible. But Wyoming Game and Fish Commission in particular has had a lot of foresight to support us in some of these long term studies. Groups like Mealy Fanatic Foundation, Wyoming Wildlife Natural Resource Trust and many others that have like been the backbone that make it possible to do what we do. And then all of the field personnel, especially with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, are central to our ability to be successful and support us in the field. And then I, I work in a, with an amazing team of people in the shop, grad students, research scientists that pour their heart and their soul into the work we do, the data collection that, that make all this possible. So want to be able to at least give credit where credit is due. And then if any, if I say anything stupid through the course of this, it's totally on me. All the good things that are said, they should all get the credit for.

[Randall]

And to put a finer point on this, like when you say one data point at a time, what you're doing is catching animals by the dozen and every single one of them, you're taking temperature, you're measuring fat, you're swabbing the nasal passages, you're ultrasounding for pregnancy, you're measuring the size of the fetus. You're. I know I'm missing stuff there, but yeah, like I've, I've gone on a collaring or I guess a check in and coloring day. And it's, I mean it's hands on and it's very specific. It's like how much does this animal weigh on this day of the year? So yeah, like I think just to bring it to a more concrete level, like you're, you're measuring deer.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Randall]

And handling deer. The same deer for, in some cases for years.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's correct.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Be like a thing. If you go back to the landscape of fear, we'll move on from the old times, we'll talk about new. But if you go back to landscape of fear, you ex. Kevin explained that you put a collar on a dough, you Put a collar on her fawn.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

You track her fawn through her whole life. Put a collar on her fawn.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

You're starting to get a picture of where did that doe ever go? Where does the fawn ever go?

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

Does the phone go to new places or the same places?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

When. What are the. What are the movement patterns? What are their sort of relative fitnesses?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Because you're able to look at like, how fit was doe A. What's the condition of her fawn? What's the condition of her fawn?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. It paints like a. An amazing picture.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

When you compare it to a different style of biology, might be like we flew it with a helicopter and did account.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. It's just different. I'm not dogging on that kind of work. This is probably great work. But like, to go like, well, let's look at like a lineage. Like, let's look at these, like, specific animals over a long period of time. And what can we tell about those specific animals that might inform what you're seeing when you fly over the helicopter and count.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Kevin Monteith]

Exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

It's like you're adding. You're adding a really important piece to a. That can plug in or inform all these other methodologies.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep, that's exactly right.

[Randall]

Like when I. When I went with you, I mean, it's. Your students are. Your team members are like 20, 30 people all sleeping in the same forest service cabin, like, rallying out into the field every day.

[Steve Rinella]

I'd have a no drinking rule, wrestling gear.

[Randall]

And at night, at night, like, someone's making spaghetti and someone's. Whatever you call it when you spin the blood vial around.

[Kevin Monteith]

Centrifuge. Centrifuge.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

Like, it's literally a forest service cabin and someone's making spaghetti and someone's centrifuging mule deer blood.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Randall]

And. And then everybody wakes up at 5 in the morning and rallies out again. And a long day, like in February in Wyoming, just like someone's got a clipboard and someone's measuring deer and someone's. Someone's sampling stuff. And it's just like, it's an impressive operation.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Well, and I. And I think, like, even as you described, Steve, the ability to see, to connect those pieces together, which I hope is like more from like a mechanistic perspective, like, how are these things happening? Why are these animals doing what they're doing? The sort of the getting under the hood perspective as to what. What it makes for each one of those animals to Tick. And then as we scale that up, what that means for understanding what's going on within, within the population. That. And that can't happen with like a two year study. Yeah, right. We're talking many, many years to be able to put that together and some of our goals with our work in, in the Wyoming range. So we've been fortunate to work there since 2013. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Let's talk, let's. Let's set that up. We'll talk. We're going to talk about a specific place.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

So do you mind? What is the Wyoming range? Where are we talking about?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, so Wyoming, Salt River Range, Western Wyoming. And it's. It's home to what either is or has been one of the largest mule deer populations in the world. Region G. Region G. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like you might. And if you, if you hang out on mule deer forums.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep. There's a lot of talk about region.

[Steve Rinella]

G and a lot of the talk about region G is accounting, speculating about its future.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

Talking about its challenges, anticipating what are going to be the good years, the bad years. It's under my ferry. Yeah. It is a, a very discussed unit. One of the reasons that's probably true is because it's like a unit that sort of occupies a distinct geographical feature.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. It's like when you say Region G, you're kind of talking about like a range.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know. Yeah. It's very elegant.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

And it is a. Probably in the top three or four mule deer spots that get discussed. Be like the Kaibab. I'm trying to think of the Henry Mountains in Utah. People like talk a lot about Region G. Gets talked about and, and mourned, celebrated.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes, yes. For sure. All. All of those. Yeah. And so that that population, I mean, is numbered. Thought to have numbered, you know, beyond 50, 000 deer. You know, once. Once upon a time. And then kind of leaning into the 92, 93 winter was a time when there were thought to be well over 50,000 deer within that herd. There was a lot of female harvest that was happening at that point in time to work to bring densities down because they were over. Over what game and fish define as the herd unit objective. The 92, 93 winter hit and the population crashed. And then since then it's kind of fluctuated. I don't know if we. Whether numbers matter or not, but maybe like 30 to 40,000ish somewhere. Somewhere in there on the high end. Yeah. And hasn't risen to those levels previously.

[Steve Rinella]

And what would be A low end since 92. So if, let's just, let's just accept. Yeah, I know you're saying like maybe 50,000. Yeah, if we accept like around 50,000. 92.

[Kevin Monteith]

Low end since then.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, like it hasn't hit that height again.

[Kevin Monteith]

No.

[Steve Rinella]

So the, the new high end since then has been 30, 40.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Probably mid, mid-30s.

[Steve Rinella]

And what would you park has been like a low end, the bottom.

[Kevin Monteith]

So I'm going to get to that. But 11. 11,000. Yeah. So we, we started in 2013 doing the things that we do as Randall described, to work to understand nutritional dynamics in the herd and then simultaneously just better learn more things about deer that we haven't Learned previously from 2013. And this was at a time when maybe I forget the exact numbers are probably bouncing around in the upper 30s, maybe around 40, 000. And from 2013 to 2016, what we saw each year was just a general decline in body fat of females both in March and in December. So autumn and spring body fat, it just declined from 13 all the way up until 2016. And then in 2016, 17, we had a bad winter. We lost 30%, 30% of our adult females, pretty much all of our, all of our radio marked fawns. And so in, in going into the, going into that winter, autumn fat at going into that winter was around 7%. So think, remember 7% body fat. We lost 30 that year. Population rebounded, began to rebound after that. Body fat of level, levels of female shot way up. And then we had another bad winter in 1819. Lost 30% of our adult females again. Sorry.

[Steve Rinella]

2019.

[Kevin Monteith]

2018 19. So the 1819 winter 1819.

[Steve Rinella]

Sorry, sorry.

[Randall]

We're working on a history project now.

[Steve Rinella]

I live, me and Randall live.

[Randall]

We're thinking across centuries right now.

[Steve Rinella]

So say the dates again. I'm sorry.

[Kevin Monteith]

That was dumb.

[Steve Rinella]

So dumb.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, no, you're good.

[Steve Rinella]

So winter 2018, 2019.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. So winters overlap calendar years. Right. So 16, 17, winter 1819, winner. Two bad winners. Roughly 30% of adult females. After each one of those years, we see upticks in nutritional condition following that. So body fat of females shoots up. After that, productivity eventually returns. There's always a lag in a year because what ends up happening. This goes back to what you were referencing, Randall. So in those bad winters, fawns, because they're, they're, they're, their metabolic demands are different. They're some of the smallest animals on the landscape and they don't come into winter with much body fat. And this all, all comes down to allocation related principles. Right. And so as a fawn, the energy you obtain is mostly going to grow. You don't have a bunch of like extra energy to put in body fat versus females. Adult females are done growing and whatever extra energy they have, they can put into body fat or, or males. Part of the reason why we see age related dynamics in antler size or horn growth that we do goes to the same principle. Up until they reach asymptotic body mass and so are thus basically done growing in body size. We don't see peak antler size until after that. And that's all principle of allocation. They're first prioritizing.

[Steve Rinella]

That's interesting.

[Kevin Monteith]

Body growth. And then so even, even those age related dynamics, yes, it's age, but it's founded in nutritional principles and how the resources they have and how they allocate energy. So even that's driven by nutrition.

[Steve Rinella]

Hunting demands, preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype, it's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to concert reservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses, just gear you can count on. Head to first light dot com. That's F I R S T L I T e dot com. I want to restate that point for people that are at work and they're only half paying attention.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Or me driving down the road listening to something. I'm listening to Clay's water witching episode right now, which is fascinating. But. But I only catch half what he's talking about because I'm driving. So if you're driving and you're not, you're only half listening. This is good. When a buck throws his. I never thought about this before. When a buck throws his biggest antlers, he's at a point where he's seeing the least amount of body size growth year over year.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

So he's like growing his body, growing his body, growing his body, growing his body. Boom. He's kind of what he is. Then he gets serious about antlers.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right. Exactly. That's right. Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

You can get back to work now.

[Kevin Monteith]

All right, all right. No, no, you're good. So after, after those winters, we see that, we see that uptick in body Fat that occurred thereafter. But it. During those winters we lose almost all the fawns. The females are in poor condition as they exit winter. And then what we see are spikes in stillborns after those bad winters. Really? And. Yep. And we see suppressed birth mass after those bad winters as well. Which again, yes, I'll say this over and over again, but that has nutritional underpinnings as well for a mom for these long lived iteroparous animals, which just simply means they live a long time and they. They reproduce multiple times through their lives. Their best strategy is to have the opportunity to reproduce multiple times as opposed to take one instance and pour all into reproduction because then they're likely to die. If they die, then they lose out on all those other opportunities to reproduce. So what that means for females that are in poor shape, it's better for them to survive and for their offspring to die than it is for them to pour everything they have into their offspring and then compromise their own survival. So that's part of why we see.

[Steve Rinella]

Because if she lives, she might crank.

[Kevin Monteith]

Out three more whatever conditions will get better next number of years and she's gonna have the opportunity to try again. So we see increased still rates of stillborning suppressed birth mass. Birth mass plays a huge role in whether or not they survive thereafter. And so what that means is you have high rates of stillborning. In fact, in some of those years it's like the leading cause of fawn mortality after those bad winters. And so.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and that just because like that fetus.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Isn't it's not getting fed.

[Kevin Monteith]

Malnourished, essentially.

[Steve Rinella]

Malnourished in the womb, dies in the womb of malnourishment.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, that's exactly right. And they're born dead, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. That's another thing I never makes total sense. It is never really thought about.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That, that I never thought about the fact that a doe would like get pregnant.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But then not have a fawn, Right.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh yeah, no, for sure. And I think to sort of sidestep. I think it's also important to point out for deer in particular, both white tailed deer and mule deer, they very rarely abort. So they will typically once they're pregnant, they will care. They will almost always carry it to term. But then they may drop stillborns, for example, in those, in those years with those. Those bad conditions we have when it's gotten really, really bad in those bad winters, we have seen a couple of premature abortions that have occurred. But it's very rare in Deer.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, so she. She births it. She birthed at the right time.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep. But it's stillborn. It's dead. And so a deer strategy is to typically carry the term so they're almost always pregnant. Twinning is very common. And then they'll typically make those sort of, like, nutritional decisions of if they can do it once the young have hit the ground. And so that's why we see that versus critters like pronghorn or moose, for example, where if things get really bad, they may just. They're more likely to just abort on the way. Or for critters like maybe elk. Well, moose, elk, sheep. We see nutritional signatures more strongly tied to, like, how fat they are and whether or not they're going to be pregnant. So those. Those. Those things are evident along. Along the way, regardless. What that means is we're almost missing two cohorts of young in those instances. We lost the. We lost the fawns in the bad winter. We lose the vast majority of the fawns that are born after the bad winter because of that nutritional suppression that has occurred. So there's basically two cohorts. And so if you think, you know, from a hunting perspective, two cohorts, then that once those cohorts would have been four to six years of age. There's not going to be a lot of animals in those age ranges because few of them actually made it through. And anyone that made it through, especially after the bad winter, when females are in. In such poor shape, they're going to carry that nutritional signature of mom barely surviving through that bad winter. And so they're going to be small regardless. Once they. Once they hit that age, then.

[Steve Rinella]

Dude, I gotta. I'm sorry, man. I gotta. I got two questions, okay?

[Kevin Monteith]

I. I have to, like, try to remember where. Where I was. I don't lose track, but I'll ask. No, no. Ask your questions. Go.

[Steve Rinella]

No, I. Write them down and write them down.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay, okay, now I feel like it just derailed you.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no, I just got to write them down.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay. Okay, one sec.

[Steve Rinella]

What's I gotta write down? Not joking. I'm joking, dummy.

[Kevin Monteith]

Keep going. And wait till you write them down.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, Right now.

[Kevin Monteith]

It'S almost as compelling as you reading news stories for the first time. Okay?

[Steve Rinella]

But there's a payoff to this.

[Kevin Monteith]

Phil.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, dude, listen, it's just that what you're telling me is so interesting to me.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay?

[Steve Rinella]

But continue on.

[Kevin Monteith]

All right. All right, so after. After the bad winters, there's, of course, there's the. There's the flush in. In. Well, actually let me sidestep a bit. After those two bad winters, we had enough data where we can look at what determines whether or not female deer survive bad winters. And there's a few factors that, that are critical. Yes, the worse the winter is, the lower probability they have to survive the winter. That's intuitive, right? The more, the better food. So like sagebrush growth on their winter range and in this, in this range, sagebrush is crit. They're the core of their diet through winter. So more and better sage brush growth on their winter range helps them survive good. Their ability to freely move on their winter ranges and just be able to move and access food on their wind range plays a role.

[Steve Rinella]

Is that a function of snow?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, in part a function of snow, yep. And then we also see very strong age dependent relationships. So old females and so especially in a bad winter, we're going to lose old females and then some of the very youngest ones. But otherwise like that sort of prime age from say three to seven or so are pretty solid from an age perspective. But the other driving factor, and the most profound factor is how fat they were going into that winter.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

So I think what's important to consider in that and the reason why it happens this way is if you consider why animals die on a winter and a bad winter and you can, you can almost translate this to like, like any sort of like environmental event that challenges them nutritionally. And that's what a bad winter does. And for an animal to persist through the winter, it just needs to meet its energetic requirements through the course of the winter. And so as you pile up snow, that's going to increase their nutritional deficit. Pile up snow and cold. Right. So thermoregulate cost to thermal regulate, maintain body temperature, cost to locomotion, wade through snow and access food. And it's also restricting food, it's reducing their ability to access the food. So all of those things hamper their ability to meet their daily energy requirements.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Kevin Monteith]

What fat does is it's basically it's as if they packed groceries on their back from summer range. And so if, if and if that's one of the most profound factors that influences over winter survival, what it means is that over winter survival is largely dictated by what they experienced on a completely different range that could be 100 miles away and the food that they had access to there months earlier and they're bringing that with them to winter range and that's helping ensure their survival over winter.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a fact. You don't consider either.

[Randall]

It's like how on the. On alone and some of these survival reality television shows, the contestants try to just pack on weight before they go out there.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it.

[Randall]

That's my. That's my.

[Kevin Monteith]

They're going to take grocery. Yeah, yeah.

[Randall]

You got to bring your reserves.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I ain't ready.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay. So after, and I think one, one significant piece here is after those bad winters, we see the. We see the upticks in. In body fat that's tied to the added precipitation. But those upticks in body fat stay even after that first year. And it stays for a couple different reasons. One reason is a reduction in density. So fewer mouths on the landscape. And that signature is profound within our data. And some, many people don't like to hear that, especially when it comes to deer. They may argue like, oh, density doesn't. Doesn't matter. We don't want to hear that. But it's true. The more miles that are on the landscape, the increased competition for food and that's gonna, that's gonna result in lower body fat.

[Steve Rinella]

Who doesn't want to hear that?

[Kevin Monteith]

It. It depends. Well, and so it depends upon the context of what it means for who doesn't want to hear that. What the potential implications are of it is that. And I guess we'll either get to this now or more so later. But more is not always better. And much of our publics, for example, want more deer. We always want more deer. But more isn't always better when you consider it from a nutritional perspective of what's happening within a population. Yeah. And so, and that, that has been very evident within the Wyoming range with our data there. And so increased prep, fewer miles on the landscape, lower competition. What's also interesting, and this, this goes all the way back to our conversation of why we see, for example, even different antler capabilities of size from one place to the next from a nutritional perspective. But what we, what we see after animals have gone through those bad winters, we evaluated what factors influence their gain and fat over the summer. And it's all the things I mentioned. It's. It's habitat, it's precip. It's density of. Density of deer on the landscape. It's age, it's whether or not you recruited. Whether or not you lactated and recruited young. But the other thing is if you've experienced a bad winter and so in the past. Yeah. And so the animals that live through bad winters, we. What we see within them is this slight shift in how they allocate their, Their Body reserves over time.

[Steve Rinella]

You're kidding me.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, I'm not. I'm not at all. And to the point where they learn. Yeah. And not to, not to like anthropomorphize.

[Steve Rinella]

Too much because it's like you took notes.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's a physiological component. But what it is, yeah, it's. It's an adaptation associated with this like subtle pre programming. Pre programming within the animals that. A slight shift and we call it risk sensitive reproductive allocation where the risk, they. They allocate resources to reproduction in a risk sensitive way. Right. And that risk is associated with what they're going to experience thereafter. And again, if they invest too much into reproduction, they're risking their own survival. Right. Because they need reserves to survive. We have a bad winner that's like life threatening and they barely make it. We see that shift in risk sensitive allocation to the level where there's slight increases in body fat that we see if animals had experienced bad winter past even after we've accounted for all all the other factors that are there.

[Steve Rinella]

And it's not like, you know what I said, like they learn. It's not that. It's not that they're like, hey man, when, when the weather gets bad, I got a little move.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Where I got down to old man Lawrence's haystack. Right. It's not that.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, it's. It's like literally it's physiological and, and I think what can also. And maybe that sounds crazy. It's not. There's been some very elegant work. And so, so that work of mine was led by Taylor Lashar and we drew from some prior work when we decided to investigate that idea from Board Barton, who was able to take semi domesticated reindeer in Norway and ones that were supplementally fed through the winter and ones that were not. And just by way of shifting them, taking the supplementally fed ones and going to a natural pasture or taking the ones that were from the natural pasture and going to supplemental feeding. Animals carried their signature of the range that they were on and how they allocated resources to reproduction. With the exception of those that went from supplemental feeding to the natural pasture, they instantly dropped how they allocated resources to reproduction because it was comp. It was the potential. It was a potentially compromising their ability to maintain themselves, which is. Which is the priority. So I liken it to like winter ptsd. These animals had this life threatening experience and there's this subtle shift within their pre programming and to support that further. And I worked with captive deer for almost a decade. You can have Captive whitetail deer, any, any captive ungulate for that matter, except for maybe domestic animals, and supplementally feed them the entire year so they're on the best nutrition all year round. And we still see cycles in their diet, how much they eat in their body fat and body mass through the entire year, when technically like they're supplementally fed. It could just be constant through the whole year, but it's not. We see these natural rhythms and so they voluntarily through the winter, reduce metabolic rate, reduce appetite and how much they're eating to go through those cycles. And so I think the most, I mean maybe it's like okay, that's cool. So deer slightly reprogram after a bad winter. But I think what it also tells us is that animals are adapted to the local environment within the ranges, in the conditions that they experience. To the point where even within an environment like that, when we see this huge, huge shock to the system, we see animals adapting accordingly. And so that should con, help convince us that when we go from one range to the next, these animals are operating in ways that correspond with that range so that they're locally adapted. Which is the same reason we see antlers the way in which we do females doing what they do. For example, females in the Wyoming range are not going to gain fat the same way that female deer in southeast Montana are going to different range, different environmental conditions. They need different things to be able to persist within that environment. So to go one step further, all these things happening with body fat, the reduction in density within the herd, then we begin to enter into the 22, 23 winter, which this is like, I don't know, 100 plus year winter, like wildest winter that we've seen for decades within that country. We lost 70% of our adult females. All of our radio marked fawns, all of them just all gone. 65% of our adult males. So man, yeah, that dropped the population to 11, roughly 11, 000 animals through the course of that winter. And I mean it was like animals were sort of like got so concentrated on the south facing slope in places where there's like juniper but no food, the, the hedge line, the browse line and the juniper was like almost as tall as me. Where they just, all they would do is just walk these trails around, around juniper, just eating whatever they could. Sagebrush, any sagebrush that was exposed, just like the twigs, everything was eaten to the, to the snow line. I mean it was, it was a very sad experiment experience in an incredibly, incredibly devastating winter in that regard. For that Deer population.

[Steve Rinella]

I had a. He's. It's probably connected to you, but a buddy of mine has a property in Wyoming and he was. There was some research that were doing a little collaring work on his place or feels he might even been talking about your outfit.

[Kevin Monteith]

Could have been.

[Steve Rinella]

It's in western Wyoming. Anyways, he was playing. He was telling me how this guy was telling him that during that winter. He's like. It was that there'd be moments.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

There'd be moments when the mortality signals were like, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

So like within this broad time of, like really hard of. Of prolonged period of intense hardship, there'd be like killing moments.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. And so can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So again, this goes back to what we also talked about before, and that animals simply need to meet their daily energy requirements. And fat helps with that during that winter. And I think this is just a really striking example of this for females that entered winter, that entered that winter. Over 15% of that entered winter under 15 body fat. We began losing them on February 15th. Animal, female deer that entered winter over 15 body fat. We did not start losing them till March 15th, a month later.

[Steve Rinella]

Wow.

[Kevin Monteith]

Which, like, if you could just distill a bunch of data in a very simple manner. That's incredibly telling to just be able to say that.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

So what that meant is that animals were very much on the nutritional edge. And so they're barely getting by. They're barely meeting their daily energy requirements. And so as we would go through that winter, and that winter was very, very cold as well, when we'd see storms come in or. Or significant drops in temperature for a couple of days, we just see spikes in mortality. And that's because what it's done is they're barely meeting their daily energy requirements. We see those. Those drops in temperature, their energy requirements go up, up, because they're needing to meet basal metabolic demands through the winter in that day, and they just can't do it. And so they die. And so that's where the spikes in mortality came from during that period of time. Now, what I think is very. Also very important and incredibly revealing to the work that we've done there, specifically with regards to bad winters. And if we go Back to the 1617 winner, the 1819 winner, the recovery, the recovery in nutritional condition, so body fat that occurred thereafter, and in part, again because of the signals of the bad winter, but also the reduction in density on the landscape, so fewer mouths to feed. We entered the 2223 winter at over 12% body fat. So if you remember. Do you remember what we entered the 1617 winter? 7%. So that's a. That's a huge difference. Entered 7%. During the 1617 winter, we lost 30% of our females. 2223 winter. Way, way worse than the 1617 winner. If we run. We ran. Taylor ran our survival models for the 2223 winter based on a 7% body fat level. So had we started at 7% going into the 2223 winter, we would have lost over 90% of our deer population.

[Steve Rinella]

No kidding.

[Kevin Monteith]

Meaning.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

We go back to 16, 17, 18, 19. The reductions in deer density, the recovery in body fat that occurred thereafter. Those winters saved us in the 2223 winter. Had we come into the 2223 winter at those lower levels that we were experiencing previously prior to those. Those former bad winters, we probably would have lost essentially everything. Meaning if we go back to the more is not always better perspective.

[Steve Rinella]

Sure.

[Kevin Monteith]

Especially in that. I mean, that's the very clear demonstration of. More is not necessarily always from a nutritional perspective. In. In that way.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So you.

[Randall]

If you had more deer going into that winter, it's not the case that more deer would die, but it would be proportional. You'd actually have a higher proportion. If you had more deer on the landscape, you'd have a higher proportion that would die.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's correct.

[Randall]

Than if you had fewer deer going into it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yep. Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

That's great, man.

[Randall]

I mean, it's bad. It's interesting.

[Steve Rinella]

When I say great, I mean it's great what happened to the deer. I'm saying it's a great.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

With input of information.

[Kevin Monteith]

I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Just like understanding.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. There's a lot of power in that. Just like that scenario and, and how it played out for us. I mean, the. The winters. The winters basically presented to us a huge experiment or treatment effect essentially based on, like, the. The severe. The severe nutritional limitation and then the massive reduction in density that occurred with that. Unfortunately, we were doing the work that we were when we were doing it. Otherwise we'd still just. We'd still be talking about, like, how bad winters are and they are bad, but what does it mean for the population? And even this notion that, like, you know, what happens on a winter range, we see it. Right. It's very evident to us these animals die on. On winter range. But at the same time, one of the major reasons why they're dying is because of what they experienced during the summer and if, whether or not they brought enough reserves with them from summer range.

[Steve Rinella]

And you guys thought about, Sorry, go.

[Randall]

Ahead, I was gonna say, and all that stuff would be invisible unless you had those very individual.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's correct.

[Randall]

Data points. Right. Like you're not going to pick that up from, not to poke at the helicopter people, but you're not going to pick that up from an aerial survey. Like it's a very intimate knowledge of specific animals.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. And you're gonna, I mean, you're gonna see the level of loss.

[Randall]

Right. But you're not gonna see the underlying.

[Kevin Monteith]

No. And to be able, you know, for our ability to be able to do that, like we know how old each animal is, we know the fat that they brought with them from summer range, we know where they lived on summer range, and we can connect and build all those pieces together, which also not only allows us to tell those stories, but tell a number of our other stories associated with, with, you know, how and how animals learn to migrate. What does it, what does it mean for them? What does it mean for their reproductive chronology and their cycle through the year and those sorts of things? Unless we have those repeated samples and the things that we're measuring, we lack the ability to be able to paint that picture. And so that deer that you talked about at the beginning, that really small male, he was born, he was born in 2017. So he was born after the 16, 17 winter. And yeah, all day long, in fact, I mean, even as for the potential of antler growth that exists within the Wyoming range, I mean, all day long, when he was three years old, I mean, I would have said, and I think that's kind of what you were referencing too, Steve. I would have called him. He's either a large yearling or a small 2 year old.

[Steve Rinella]

I would have said it in a declarative fashion.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. And he's three. And he's three, three and a half years old.

[Steve Rinella]

And I would have also said I could tell you what he is now. My abilities fall apart when they get up to be like 4, 5, 6 years old, but 100, what you're looking at right now.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

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[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Go.

[Steve Rinella]

Because this is the benefit of being the host. You get to indulge your question. A series of very fast questions. Because I want to.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

More information. Okay. A hot tip.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

You should start a tag service where it's predictive modeling and you sell to people tips. Be like, I would be looking very.

[Kevin Monteith]

Seriously cash in at this point.

[Steve Rinella]

X in four years.

[Kevin Monteith]

I think Meat eater should just hire us and Meat Eater should offer that service. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

It's called the. The Monteith Labs or Monteith Tax or.

[Randall]

Monte's X Meat Eater.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, we'll do that.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay. Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Another quick question. Yeah. The other day, me and my boy are driving down the road, my older boy, and there's all these sirens and paramedics running around and we stop. Well shy. But I take my binoculars and look and I see something quite startling. There's a wrecked motorcycle. There's seven firefighters and paramedics working on a man who's like splayed out on the road. And there's a demolished fawn. I don't have no idea if the guy lived or not that tried to miss a fawn hit. The fawn was a mess on the road. Two days later we drove down that road and there's a doe still standing there like 100 yards away, but looking agitated. 3 o' clock in the afternoon, she's still on her feet looking like agitated down in the ditch. When you with your. Are you able to ever able to pull out of your data sets what that relationship's like? Like if she has a stillborn, does she still hang around? Does she immediately walk away? Do you know what I mean? When she loses a fawn, what is the sort of. There's no way to measure grief.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But like when does she go like, huh, I guess it's time to move on.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Interesting question. And highly variable from one individual to the next.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

In most instances with stillborns though, so we can suspect even just via their GPS data around the birth event, whether or not they had stillborns because they tend to peace out pretty quickly.

[Steve Rinella]

So she knows what happened.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, that's exactly right. And also many females, like if they, if they lose one of their young later on to. To whatever reason Rarely do they stick around. They will often leave. However, there are a handful of females that are just their motherly nature, whatever that is, may. May be there. And even the carcass still when, when we arrive. Highly. Very typically within 24 hours.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

By the time when we're working to get in there, but so clearly quicker than that. Yeah, yeah. They're gone by the time we get in there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep, got it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep. Exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

Here's an observation when you're talking about this, this thing of like gaming out, how much energy am I going to put into this offspring? It's implied. But, but just to point to an example of something entirely different. Like think about a Pacific salmon. When they go, they're going.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, John, I mean like, like kings can kind of delay. A king salmon can delay. He doesn't have to stay to a set schedule. You know, he can whatever. His body will make a decision like, no, nope, not going to go. That's why you get huge kings. Right. That's why you get. You could get a £70 king. Because for whatever reason, for a number of years it didn't click and it didn't run. But these other salmon that are on a set schedule, it's like, I'm going, buddy, I hope the river's right. I hope the river's right because it's happening.

[Kevin Monteith]

Y.

[Steve Rinella]

Question. If I took a deer, if I took a. A buck from Iowa. Okay. 180 inch whitetail from Iowa. 200 plus pounds. 180 inch antlers. And I brought him down and put him in coos deer country in Sonora. Does he just die?

[Kevin Monteith]

Coos deer country and sonori probably die.

[Steve Rinella]

He just dies.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because his pattern.

[Kevin Monteith]

Cows, deer. Did you say cousin? You led me right into.

[Steve Rinella]

I'll fight you over it. Because his groove, his like system.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Just isn't gonna translate.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right. Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

This one's controversial, so you don't even need to answer.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh yeah. That look in your face.

[Steve Rinella]

I just wonder about like, is it even possible? Like, what if you went and looked at human fitness, human physical fitness. Does some of the stuff. Is some of the stuff relevant? People don't like to do that kind of stuff.

[Kevin Monteith]

But like 100. Yeah. I mean there is, there's a substantial amount and of course I don't.

[Steve Rinella]

Maternal nutrition.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh yeah, Huge. There's lots of evidence within human, human medicine associated with maternal nutrition. Maternal.

[Steve Rinella]

Maternal stress.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes. That ties. That translates over generation. Yeah, absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it. That's all my questions. Thank you.

[Kevin Monteith]

Vincent. Humans as well.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay, that's all my questions.

[Kevin Monteith]

Maybe a couple. A couple other things related. Related to some of these ideas. One of them. Okay, so the other thing that we saw after. After a couple of those bad winters is on winter range, we tried to keep our same animal distribution over time, roughly. So if we lose animals, we work to go back in and recatch adult females from that same general area to.

[Steve Rinella]

Keep the same number cooking.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep, Yep, exactly. Roughly 70 adult females is part of that. Is what is with that study. As we were going back to some of the areas where we had routinely caught deer in the past and wanted to replace them, we couldn't find any. Like, there was none in there after those two bad winters. And so it got us scratching our heads of, okay, what does that mean? Did. Did those bad winters just cause animals to, like, yeah, I'm not living here anymore, and shift out of that country?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

When they were pushed by the bad winter because of snow conditions, did they then find a new place that was better and then stay there, or did they just die and they're not there anymore? So we evaluated that question, and while certainly there, There are signals, you know, animals can be displaced a bit by a bad winter. What's also interesting, though, is a stronger signal of that displacement is if animals had a bad winter the prior year. And so, again, it's like this. This winter, ptsd, the shift from where they had lived previously, tends to occur after the bad winter as opposed to during the bad winter. So it's like the memory of the bad winter results in a shift from when they would normally winter. Because. Because stick it out through the bad.

[Steve Rinella]

Winter, and they're like, but I'm sticking.

[Kevin Monteith]

It out, but next year I'm going somewhere else. That's exactly right, because mule deer are incredibly faithful. They're incredibly faithful to their winter range, to their summer range, and to their migratory route, do the same thing year after year as adults. And so they. They sh. They. They shift the winter. PTSD shift after the bad winters.

[Steve Rinella]

But.

[Kevin Monteith]

But what we learned from that work in particular was that the reason why we ended up with these vacant holes on winter range was because animals died and we lost them.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay?

[Kevin Monteith]

And remember, one of the key factors that influences whether or not they live or die through winter is how fat they were. So what that means is what we observe on a winter range with regards to population distribution, for example, yes, it's influenced by what happens there during winter, but it, again, is dictated by what happens during summer. So summer nutrition, where Animals go and their summer nutrition plays a huge influence in winter distribution of animals. So they're. But they're making them like that.

[Steve Rinella]

They're making a mistake.

[Kevin Monteith]

What do you mean they're making a mistake?

[Steve Rinella]

They're not, not to hack on them. They're not thinking it through.

[Kevin Monteith]

They should. Okay, what's the, what's the thinking?

[Steve Rinella]

They're blaming. What would you do? No, no, I'm not, I'm joking, but I'm not joking. Yeah, it's summer range. It's like it has a poor experience on summer range, goes into a season with low body fat, 6% goes to winter range, has a terrible winter on winter range. Its response could possibly be, I need to find a new summer range.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But it's blaming the winter range.

[Kevin Monteith]

You did this on purpose. Beautiful segue. Oh, so they don't find a new summer range. These animals are, these animals are incredibly faithful to their world as adults. And so they don't go find a new summer range. They just, they go back up and do the same thing year after year. So then what that, what that then relates to. I have two things I need to get to make sure I get to. One is reproductive chronology. The other, the other is what it means across generation of animals. So what that means in that scenario and how that plays out is why did that animal end up with that summer range and why did it end up with that migratory route? We know and have known for a bit now that once, once they have their routes as adults, that it's, it's functionally a trait of the animal that it possesses. Kind of like even, even saying that this animal is really dark colored. Well, this Animal has a 45 mile migration. It's summer. It summers in Deer Creek and it winters down in Nugget Canyon. Like it's practically a trait of the animal because that's what it does. So then the question is how did, how did it get there? Why did that animal end up with that? And so the other thing we've been working on doing is understanding the only way to get to that is to start from day one from an animal when it would the day it was born and then follow it alongside moments as you were describing early on. And so we've been working to do that to test this question of ontogeny migration or like how do they learn to migrate? Where does it, where does it come from? And so which is also very hard when you have so many bad winters because it wipes out all your young animals that you've been trying to monitor alongside mom, but we've at least gotten to the point, despite the bad winters, that we've had 16 mother daughter pairs that we've been able to monitor from daughters growing up to be 3 years of age to the point where they're reproductively active. Of those 16, 11 of them adopted mom's migratory route. So they basically do the exact same thing that mom does. Five, however. And this sort of gets back to what you were alluding to. Five, however, changed things up and did something differently. What's, what's interesting in, in that is that those, there's, there's almost, there's not even really like a continuous gradient of like, like this one definitely did like right on top of mom's route. And then, you know, weekends, weekends, weekends. And then we have some that basically don't adopt mom's route. It's either like you do the vast majority of it or you don't at all.

[Steve Rinella]

Got it.

[Kevin Monteith]

And so there are a handful of young females that disperse and do something differently. They find a different migratory route. And so there are a number of them that do things differently, but not as adults. Adults is pretty fixed. The young animals, a few do it, but the ones that do change, it seems like whatever they do during their yearling year, so when they turn one year of age is what they then end up doing for the rest of their lives. Like that's what establishes it. What's also really interesting and is not what I would have expected, which again, our sample size is only 16. We have more to go here to be able to get there to do this. But the ones that adopted a different migratory route, much to my surprise, they largely clung to what where they lived on summer range, but then migrated to a different winter range. And I would have thought it would have been the opposite, especially with regards to what you just said. We'll go somewhere else to summer. The majority of them are still residing close to their natal range where they were born, but they adopt a different migratory route and go to a different winter range, which I'm not entirely sure what to make of that yet, but that's, that's what we've seen.

[Randall]

What if they. So you're saying at sort of the yearling stage, that's the pattern that they adopt for the rest of their lives. Are they. Is there any correlation to like if the mother dies before they turn one, you know, like.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Randall]

Are more of those deer likely to be these sort of pathfinders or what's the relationship there?

[Kevin Monteith]

Very good. Question, which we're only looking at 16 at the moment, but in looking at those 16, there seems to be no relationship to whether or not mom dies or mom lives. That seems to not play a role, at least as of. As of yet. But to then take that to the level of like why we see deer, where we do, how they get there, all of these pieces which determines why animals live where they do and the success that they have for deer anyway, it all starts such early in life. It's a cross generational process, clearly that we need to be able to document from them. And one, maintaining migration is clearly something that translates across generation as young learn from mom. But two, and so that means we're, you know, we're also conserving memory on a landscape.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

But two, also, I think the few animals that did something different maybe is like a glimmer of hope that, you know, when things are lost. So if we lose certain migratory routes, how do we get them back is the question. Because if everybody's faithful to what they know, then nobody's going to go back there. And I, I firmly believe with what we've been able to learn about mule deer over the past 15 or so years, that something that's is hampering us or has hampered us from the past to the present is when we've lost certain animals across the landscape that migrated into certain places before. I mean, there's, you know, many people can say, man, there used to be deer all over this ridgeline and I just don't see deer here anymore. Yeah. And they may reference a number of reasons why they think that is. They may reference it as an elk hole. Now it's full of elk or whatever the case may be. But, but the reason why they potentially don't come back is because the only way to get that backfilled is for animals to be pioneers and venture out into new range, which adults tend not to do. And so we're relying on that small proportion of few yearlings to potentially regain that space. And if we lose this, is that, you know, vacant space? Randall, we've, you know, talked about a bunch as well. If we lose occupancy of those places on the landscape over time, for whatever reason, we lose memory to those places. What that's doing is it's functionally reducing the carrying capacity of the range. If you don't have animals using it, it technically doesn't matter. It may be viable habitat that's there, but for it to matter to the population, somebody needs to be using it and integrating that food into the. Into the population.

[Steve Rinella]

That's so interesting because you look at places like that and you're like, what is it about it? That's not. Why don't they like it?

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right. That's what we think. Yeah. Why aren't they going here? Well, nobody knows to go there and so how do you get them? How do you get them back in?

[Steve Rinella]

You know, in salmon there's a. Sorry, Randall, go ahead. In salmon, some percentage of a run, I always say they screw up. But some percentage of a run doesn't go back to the natal stream.

[Kevin Monteith]

They screw up, end up somewhere else.

[Steve Rinella]

But think about the implications of it.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Because river systems change.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

Point. I mean there could be a river that doesn't have suitable spawning gravel and then a flood, whatever, landslides, I don't know, something. And all sudden, boom. It's great.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Some number of fish. Some fish is gonna like. Some number are gonna screw up and go up that thing and then it could be.

[Kevin Monteith]

Could be something.

[Steve Rinella]

A gold mine.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep. It's a portfolio.

[Steve Rinella]

This place is sweet.

[Kevin Monteith]

Portfolio effect.

[Steve Rinella]

And all of a sudden you create a new. Right. And think about like the thing I always think about that too is like as. As climate changes you have. There's a lot of salmon rivers that would be great salmon rivers. But they're too far north. It's too cold. Right. So as. Because you have that dispersal mechanism, things could just suddenly become kind of. Right.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right.

[Steve Rinella]

And some fish is going to take a left when he should have taken a right and wind up finding a new.

[Kevin Monteith]

Exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean it takes two. But you follow me?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

I got a technical question for you. If I see it, let's say a fella sees a nice buck on the last day of season. Say it's November, fellas, he's a nice buck on November 24th. So you know, no one got him. He could die from other stuff. But the next year on November 24, in your mind, how far is that deer from where he was the year before based on your research?

[Kevin Monteith]

All depends.

[Steve Rinella]

It does.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But he's already an adult. He's already set in his way.

[Kevin Monteith]

So best we. So we're working on understanding those aspects of males as well. Male dispersal from their natal range, how faithful they are to their seasonal ranges as well. And yeah, I mean in general, as you. As you noted, they're living within their. Within their range. Right. And so I think the, the certainly not that far from there. He lived up in that country. Right. The only wild card within that is during a hunting season as males get potentially pushed around. He may have been in a non normal place than what he often is the one year that he's seen versus versus the next year. But certainly, yeah, I could have seen.

[Steve Rinella]

Him at a moment when he was in a spot he don't want to be.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's exactly right. But otherwise he, you know, he lives in that country. So. Yeah, they're there. Yeah.

[Randall]

When you're talking about re restoring a lost migration corridor on this habitat, like because you're, it's a, it would be a yearling. A yearling with some wanderlust that takes off down a new ridge or whatever else. There aren't going to be any other deer that, that then convert to that range. It's all going to come from that deer's offspring, correct?

[Kevin Monteith]

Most likely, yeah. So it's.

[Randall]

So it's a long, it's a cross generation you're talking about, but multiple, multiple generations before you have like a herd of deer using that.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right, yeah. Which reinforces the importance of maintaining what you have because you are maintaining and protecting memory on the landscape. And if once we lose it, especially for a. Such a faithful animal like a deer, we don't, we don't necessarily get it back just like that versus elk, where they'll just go, go, go anywhere. They'll take advantage of whatever happens to be there. But for deer, their memory is like their fence around their world of what they do. And I think another thing that I think, I think this is just super interesting and I think speaks to the level of intimacy between animal female deer and their environment is that if you consider mule deer, who all share a common winter range, okay, some migrate 10 miles, some migrate 120 miles. The one that migrates 120 miles is typically often going to be going to higher elevation, potentially traversing a lot of country, dealing with snow conditions in spring, stuff like that, in an ideal world. And for mule deer, they want to go back and give birth to the range they typically give birth in. We've literally had female deer give birth in the exact same bed site one year after the next. I mean, they're very faithful to their, to their birth sites. So then the question is, well, what does that mean for them to time birth to coincide with when food is available on their summer range and for their ability to get to their summer range to give birth? And so we looked at that in, in as we talked earlier. We not only see animals on the day they're born, but we also see them in utero. So when we re catch females in March, we see the fetuses in utero and we measure their eye diameter, which gives us an indication of how far along in gestation they are are. So we've been able to put those pieces together to look at what factors influence eye diameter in March. So that gestational progression, what determines where they are in March and then what does that mean thereafter? Because one of the strongest signals that determines when animals give birth is how far along they were in gestation and mark. So we can use fetal eye diameter. In fact, we use it to help guide our planning in the spring when we're going to catch mule deer, fawns, or bighorn sheep, lambs. The anticipation of who's going to give birth when we use fetal eye diameter, that we measured in March.

[Steve Rinella]

But that's like fine tuning within a.

[Kevin Monteith]

Pretty narrow window, though, to some degree. For sheep, it can be pretty broad, but for deer, yes, it's fine tuning within a narrow window. That said, what we. So we then looked at. So since fetal eye diameter plays such a major role in when they give birth, we looked at factors that influence fetal eye diameter. And I think one of the most fascinating aspects that influence fetal eye diameter is how far they migrate. So animals that migrate further have smaller eye diameter in March than those that migrate short distances. If that makes. So the ones that migrate short distances are further along in gestation in March, which means they're going to give birth sooner, closer to the. That's right. That's right. And green up is going to happen faster on that range than the range that's way up in the mountain. So. And the influence is roughly for every 10 miles migrated, based on our models, for every 10 miles migrated, that's one day behind in gestation. So for an animal that basically hardly migrates to an animal that migrates 100 miles can be 10 days. Expected differences based on their fetal eye diameter from when they're going to give birth. That animal that migrates 100 miles is going to to give birth 10 days later. Now, to take that one step further. And this happened. I forget the exact year. It was 2020 on June 2nd. I was with one of my team members, Rihanna Jacob Peck, and we went into Deer 96, up into where she gave birth that morning, collared her twin fawns, and then we went on and did other work the rest of the day. And then we got a birth notification from a Vaginal implant transmitter later that evening. We were about two hours before. Before dark. And we're looking at it, and the animal that we just got a birth notification from was about 300 yards down from where we had just been that morning, coloring twin fawns from 96. And I'm like, man, wouldn't it be cool to hustle in there to see if we can collar, like, two animals give birth on the same day that live in the same place? So we hustled in there and then collared the single fawn from that female on that same day. So which makes sense, right? Animals living in the same area giving birth on the same day. So 96 was the one that was up the ridge, and then it was MFO that was down below the ridge. Now, we had three years earlier, in spring of 2017, we had collared MFO who had just been born to 96 in that same place on June 3rd. So I got lost.

[Randall]

Mom and grandma are giving mom and daughter.

[Kevin Monteith]

So MFO who we went in that afternoon to call her, I got. That was 96's daughter from three years prior.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Kevin Monteith]

Really? 96, his daughter from three years prior, giving birth on the exact same day on June 2nd and.

[Steve Rinella]

And 100, 300 yards down the hill.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, exactly. Same place, same birth date. And also she had been born one day difference in the calendar, three. Three years prior. So. And while that's like seemingly an anecdote, we've. We've seen it and had it happen multiple times within these family groups, which indicates to us that not only are is space on the landscape, migratory routes on the landscape, inherited across generational time, but even their reproductive synchrony, the reproductive chronology, is inherited across generational time. Like, that's how in sync they are with their environment. And I think what's also equally fascinating if you consider how the mule deer rut happens, not all of it, but a lot of it happens down in winter range. Right. They migrate down to winter range. And so on winter range, we have all these animals with all these different migratory tactics that are showing up on winter range, and they're all rutting in the same place. And then. But what it means is what's happening is Gladys over here, who migrates 10 miles, she comes into estrus on November 20th. But then Jennifer over here, who migrates 100 miles, she doesn't come into estrus until 10 days later on December 1st. Right. Even though they're on the same winter range in the same place, their ester cycle is tied to actually where they go during the summer. And it has virtually nothing to do with where they're at on that day on winter range.

[Steve Rinella]

Damn.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Hunting demands preparation, persistence and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise. Gear built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements, First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Hunger designed by hunters for hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses, just gear you can count on. Head to first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com besides seeing a lot of stuff that dudes say, do you see things that stay game agencies are doing or the way they're thinking about these issues in management? Do you see things you're like, that just doesn't make any sense.

[Kevin Monteith]

You're. You're wanting me to like step on a landmine?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I would like that.

[Randall]

How, how far, how long does it take for the management to catch up with the science?

[Steve Rinella]

And are you in good communication with everybody?

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, so no matter. There's one challenge with all of this, right? No matter what. We're all, we're all people and we've all, we've all done things a number of different ways and we've just accepted them to be true over time without necessarily pausing and saying, wait, why do I think that? Where did that come from? What evidence support it? And is it just.

[Steve Rinella]

Why do I think that screaming at my kids all the time.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Is helping?

[Kevin Monteith]

That's exactly right.

[Steve Rinella]

Didn't help with me.

[Kevin Monteith]

I mean, so a fascinating example that like when I grew up in, I mean grew up in northeastern South Dakota and we hunted deer every year, whitetail deer every year, just locally there to feed our family. And my dad and my grandpa always used to say, like, man, the deer are fat this year. I guess we're going to have a bad winter. Like they would say that over and over again. And I mean, I remember as a kid thinking, wait, how do they know it's going to be a bad winter? How do they know to prepare for a bad winter? And the thing is we know now, like they don't like that. That is technically not the case. Although if you consider it relative to local adaptation and in the example that we just talked about with this pre programming and allocation of reserves, after experiencing A bad winter. There's simultaneously some truth to that because it's tied to what animals have experienced, maybe less so of knowing they're going to experience something, but it's, it's associated with what's happened in the past. And so I think, think there's just many things that we operate within that we just, we generally don't question this is just how we do things. And so that's, that's where we go. That's where we go. And so there's, there's always, there's always some, you know, some challenges in rethinking where we have been and being willing to reconsider new information. I think that's hard. That's hard for anybody.

[Steve Rinella]

Being diplomatic, probably. And the thing, do you sometimes look at management strategies and management practices and think to yourself, it just doesn't make any sense?

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, sure, okay, sure. But I can also, like there, there's also. And I, I mean, with full respect for my, for my colleagues with management agencies, like, we're also stuck in this, this difficult position where. It's not necessarily a difficult position, but they manage the wildlife resources in trust. Right. Fundamental aspect of the North American model. We're all owners of it, but it's managing it as a trust on behalf of the public. And so what that means is they don't get to just sit in a room and just say, well, here's what we're going to do. Because biologically this is the best thing to do. They also have to consider what the public wants, social pressures. And so it can be an incredibly difficult balance at times. And so oftentimes I view it as, yes, we need to, as we learn things, what can that mean for us? And updating how we think about various management practices, for sure, that's like, maybe that's like, you know, baseline level of what does it mean for us as we consider management practices? But then we don't, you know, to then take that the next step, we don't necessarily get the opportunity to say, okay, we're going to change this. We need to be able to bring that information to the public, which is also what's so incredibly valuable, like, of your platform here and ability to be able to speak about these things is. I think what's critical is that we can bring this information to the public because there are a lot of things that we're just stuck on that have happened for a really, really long time that, oh, this is the solution, this is what we need to do. But it's not as simple as that. So being able to communicate it in meaningful ways that connects with people and maybe change their perspective on things is. Is sort of like ground zero for helping institute management change.

[Steve Rinella]

Would you ever have the time and appetite to take your data sets from your bucks and take a look at lunar phase stuff? Does this interest you at all?

[Kevin Monteith]

Well, so I have just moved that with movement. Yeah, yeah, movement. We. We certainly could. We absolutely could. And you're talking from like a rut perspective because there's so much focus on. Or are you talking like during the hunting season?

[Steve Rinella]

Just the idea. Just. It would be. I mean, you could go down a million rabbit holes, but just generally this.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That deer are moving at different times, moving in different places, different feeding patterns according to moon phase.

[Kevin Monteith]

We absolutely could.

[Steve Rinella]

And you could take. Because you have so much data, someone could go in and look at what you got and map it out to 28 day lunar Cy and say like, lo and behold, they do seem to be. They do seem to behave differently according to the lunar. Or you'd be like, we can't find it. You know, that would be. That would be very helpful to me.

[Kevin Monteith]

Would it?

[Steve Rinella]

Yes. Thank you for doing that. Do we need to endow with our T shirt? Proceed. Should we like, endow a.

[Kevin Monteith]

You absolutely should, like endow a Research.

[Randall]

The center for Lunar Studies. The center for Lunar.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm just taking an intern, crunching some numbers.

[Kevin Monteith]

I already talked to someone the other day about that. We might have him on the show.

[Steve Rinella]

Totally debunks that. He debunked. Well, maybe he can make. Can you have the data sets out?

[Kevin Monteith]

Is that a thing in collaboration? Yeah. So it all depends, but in collaboration. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Here's my next question for you.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

What, what things are you that you haven't been able to do besides lunar phase work? Work? Like, what do you. What do you want to be doing, Jimmy? Like, what do you want to be doing next? Like, what are the. What things do you look at and you're like, I'm inspired by it. And I think I can see a way that we might find some answers.

[Kevin Monteith]

Like with this deer work in particular.

[Steve Rinella]

Any kind of your work.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you know what I mean? Like, you got to have 50 ideas, right. But then in the end you can only do one or two at a time or whatever. I don't know what the numbers are.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. But for sure. Well, I mean, one of the. One of the things which we talked about a little bit is we really need to be able to evaluate the rose petal hypothesis Which I think we've talked maybe a little bit. So the rose petal hypothesis ties to deer in particular, but how they occupy space on a landscape. And the reference to a rose is that you have a matriarchal female that forms maybe the central petal on the rose and then you have her daughters that set up shop around her and then her granddaughters. And so what you end up with is this, this matrilineal line of related females that occupy space on a landscape. They've evaluated this in white tailed deer. It's where the, the idea came from initially. So for white tailed deer it's been used to implement management practices to reduce agricultural depredation related issues. So where deer are getting into crops and that sort of thing. And the idea is that just reducing, removing a handful of deer from the area won't alleviate the problem because you still have other females that are living there and then their daughters and granddaughters are just going to repopulate it. So the notion is if you want no deer there, you need to wipe out the entire rows and then you'll create vacant space and there won't be any deer there and your problem will go away. Well, so as I've thought about one migration, you know, migration is central to our ability to maintain large, robust populations. And then like as adult deer are incredibly faithful to their environment, then where does it come from anyway? And so we talked about ontology, migration, but then taking that one step step further, what does that mean for how females occupy space on a landscape? In particular their natal range. Like do they, even though they're, they're migratory, do they similarly adopt space from mom on their summer range? So do we end up with these then matrilineal lines of occupied space on, on a summer range? And that's what determines why we have animals where we do. And that again we, which we, we kind of alluded to a bit, but that's central to our ability to maintain an abundance of deer because if we lose ro, we create vacant space and they're not there anymore. And we need a firm answer of that to understand what that means across generational time to one, both be able to look forward to what it can mean for management conservation now. But also I think what's equally as a value is to be able to look backwards in time to what it means for us in the past from what we've seen, how the landscape has changed and what we see today and relevant to even just the Wyoming range. When we lose 70% of our deer population, we Inevitably lost roses on the landscape. I mean we had family groups of our radio mark deer that were just completely wiped out. So at that level of loss, like it inevitably happened. So what does that mean for that vacant space over time? And if you like when you, when.

[Steve Rinella]

You'Re somewhere, when you're glassing and you like hunt same place over a few years and you're like, there's always like a little pocket of activity.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

In whatever little spot.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You could just put.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

Gone.

[Kevin Monteith]

Gone. Why aren't they there anymore? What happened? You know, did they get pushed out of there? Well, no, not necessarily. They probably just all died until.

[Steve Rinella]

And no one's gotten, no one's backfilled.

[Kevin Monteith]

That's right. And so what that could mean, you know, we've had, we've had a number of which there's a lot of challenges that mildew face. But if you think this applies to basically like any population of ungulate, if, if animals are not using space, then a population may grow back up, but reach a new abundance where they don't grow anymore. Because if they're not using all that other forage and space on the landscape, it's not functionally part of their carrying capacity. It's like the, yeah. It's like having a pasture, running cattle on a pasture and you have a thousand acre pasture and you, you split it down the middle with a fence and you run cattle on the southern half of it. Are you going to run the number of cattle that you have for the thousand acre pasture? Are you going to run the number of cattle that you have for the 500 acres that they have access to and you're going to run it on the 500 acres, not the thousand. And so when it comes to, even as we think about, you know, nutrition density within any population and you know, I hear this a lot like man, how could nutrition be limiting on summer range? Look at these mountains. There's food everywhere. There's no way that that could matter again. You like, you have to remember what it means for the animals themselves and the spaces that they live and occupy on that landscape because they just don't go willy nilly, wander around unless you're an elk and just access all of the, all of those foods.

[Randall]

So you're talking about, I mean basically habitat loss like you were losing mule deer habitat, even though the habitat looks the same.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, it's a good way, a good way of putting it. Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

It's so interesting. You think about like spots, you're like why are they not here?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Yeah. And when are they going to come back man?

[Steve Rinella]

You know where maybe you're already doing work here. You know where I feel like there's so much personal bias applied to any conversation around ungulate density and predation. Right. You got people who the first thing they want to do anytime there's no deer around they want to tell you about the predators. You got people who basically want to tell you that predators eat grass. Makes no difference. Right. You got these two camps. Camps.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

They're generally not talking about what they regard to be the truth. They're talking about what they wish was the truth or how they've been brought up or trained. Right. These two. These two wildly different perspectives.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you have like are you. Do you consider are there ways to be to. To maybe freshen up that conversation about out what is going on?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

What do coyote like what do coyote numbers mean for deer populations over time? What do coyote numbers mean for distribution?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. Do you weigh in on this 100. Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. So I actually some of my initial predator related work with as it translates to ongula population was actually some of the work I did on mule deer in the Sierra Nevada in California and then I read that word. Did you?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I didn't know it was you.

[Kevin Monteith]

Oh yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Really?

[Kevin Monteith]

I did a whole bunch of work on nutrition predation on deer in the eastern Sierra.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh you're. You know what? You know what? You're right because you're even not. I mean you know, you're right. But I think I saw you now that you're saying this. I saw you cited your work is cited in the bear California's bear management proposal. You're Sierra Nevada works cited there. I just read that and left my mind. Yeah, yeah yeah okay I saw your name there.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. So and then of course we. We've done a number of good bit of predation related work in in Wyoming as well. The to sort of like look look at a big picture relative to the two camps that that you reference and.

[Steve Rinella]

I which camp is right.

[Kevin Monteith]

Well here's the thing. The problem is neither camp is right.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. I had a suspicion.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. And and anybody the the problem is is the moment anybody wants to say predators don't matter because all mortality is compensatory or predators matter. Basically if a canine is on the landscape and it's killing a deer, if that canine wasn't there, we'd have the deer back. Both of those camps are wrong. The fact that there's even Camps is wrong. And it's wrong in part because of the way, the way in which we think about it. And part of the challenge has been like how do we understand what predation means within populations and where we have to go back to regardless. First is what makes a population. What makes a population is everything we've talked about and it's food and access to the landscape. And so the bottom line is unless animals have access to the food and their basic requirements, food, water, cover, then it, then it doesn't matter. And so for example, if we're, if we're in a place where animals are at the capacity of their landscape no matter what, basically any, any young guitar population is going to attempt to grow more young each year than they can actually sustain within the population typically. And so what that means is a number need to die and hence compensatory. And if we're at that point, one dies and it'll, it alleviates some level of competition for the others that remain. And so we end up with this feedback. So that's real. And also, also we can have this situation where predators can play a role. As in we have the capacity to grow more animals based on the food that is here, but predators are keeping it from growing. So we first have to consider food and we can quibble and argue, oh, this level of coyote population, this level of lion population, whatever the case may be, at the end of the day, you can't interpret anything from that. It actually doesn't mean anything. Because even for those predators, like they may have alternative prey that's available to them where it matters, how we understand how predators affect a prey population is actually to understand the pre population and the nutrition and capacity they have to grow before we can actually interpret it what it, what the predators matter or mean at all. And the other reason why I say both camps are wrong or that the very notion like the moment you hear somebody toss something into the camp, you already know they're wrong. And it's because we can be, we can be in a, in a situation, in one single population. And during one period of time predators are limiting growth. And during another period of time they don't matter at all because they're so nutritionally limited that they make no difference. And so you have yes here and you have no over here.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I got it.

[Kevin Monteith]

And then imagine the whole gradient in between. And I've worked in two systems now as an example in the Sierras, in, in the eastern Sierra, where predation mattered for one migratory segment didn't matter at all for the other. And then also looking at it from a time period of. There was a window of time where predation mattered and then a window of time where it didn't matter at all. And I've seen. We've seen the same thing in Wyoming as well. Same picture. Within the Wyoming range, prior to the bad winters, predators really didn't matter because we. We didn't have the nutritional capacity to grow more deer anyway. We were there. So losing some to predators really was gonna be a wash and didn't matter. Now that we've dropped to the level that we have now and our females are fat, robust, we have the capacity to grow. Y. Now we're in a different situation where predators can have a limiting factor and reduce the ability for the population to grow. But then still, at the end of the day, well, what does that mean for us? Should we control predators? Should we have controlled predators over here? Should we not? Like, it's the sort of. Like, it all depends. What are the objectives? Just because you remove predators from a system doesn't mean you're going to get more. More deer back.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, dude, you should be the only guest we ever have on.

[Kevin Monteith]

You'd get so bored.

[Steve Rinella]

No, it'd be a weekly show where I ask you questions.

[Randall]

I like it. I like it because we're never gonna.

[Steve Rinella]

Get through it all. We gotta wrap up. Randall. Gotta do this whole stupid thing we're doing.

[Kevin Monteith]

It's the audiobook.

[Randall]

We haven't even talked about Kevin's fascinating other interests. Taxidermist, hunter.

[Kevin Monteith]

Maybe we should just.

[Randall]

There are layers to this onion.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know.

[Kevin Monteith]

Let's not wait five, seven years again. I don't know how. Whenever it was.

[Steve Rinella]

We did the last round, we got to schedule the next round because we got to wrap up. Dude. It's like, it's really like, you guys are doing super cool work. I wasn't trying to hack on fishing game agencies, man. I was more just trying to express this. I was trying to express this. Like. Like, I just hope there's not a lot of bottlenecks and, and, and in inefficiencies. And, and, and like, being able to take the research you're doing and, and being able to go and say, like, I can't tell you anything, but there's a. I'm. It really looks like this is going on. Are we considering this?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you know what I mean? Like, like, is the flow.

[Kevin Monteith]

No, I get that.

[Steve Rinella]

Is the flow good?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And I'm only saying that because, like, you know I've spent my whole life talking about wildlife. Right. Thinking about wildlife, talking about wildlife. I hang out with people who are obsessed with wildlife and we routinely traffic in stuff that just isn't backed up.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And we say it like fact.

[Kevin Monteith]

Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

And the guys that are doing management are.

[Kevin Monteith]

The.

[Steve Rinella]

Are. My guys are peers. It's like people are operating under assumptions that like, aren't as active. Accurate, you know, and sort of looking at like. Like looking at low deer numbers and be like, well, the reason it's that way is because of whatever.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And then you go, look at me. Ah, man. Dude. It's just a different. There's. There's more to what's going on. It's a longer story. It's not like you can't just. Everything isn't just looking at what just happened. Correct.

[Kevin Monteith]

Absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, you got. You got to dig back. Oftentimes you got to dig back right now. And so in trying to correct a situation, you might be correcting the wrong input.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yes. Oh, absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

Right. Yep.

[Kevin Monteith]

For sure. And. And I think the other. The other side of that as well is, you know, a number of things that we talked about. Some of the things we. We can't necessarily change. We ch. We can't necessarily change the weather and those sorts of things, but which I think can become a bit dissatisfying sometimes when, like precip or snowpack or those sorts of things are such. Play such a driving role. We can manage density and other things like that to help moderate those things. But. But I also think what's really important is our ability to simply manage our expectations as well. What does it mean for us, which is kind of dissatisfying. Right. When you can't say, we'll do this because I want this. Well, maybe we can't get that, but here's the reasons why and we need you to understand that so we can all be. We can all be at the same table with the same information. Be like, okay, here's what we're wrestling with. What is this going to mean for us going forward with whatever the situation may be, from how we use habitat to our presence on the landscape to how we manage hunting season. Reasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Love it. Now you got to come back on.

[Kevin Monteith]

Okay. Happily.

[Steve Rinella]

No, you're not too terribly far away.

[Kevin Monteith]

No.

[Steve Rinella]

Last time we went to you remember that?

[Kevin Monteith]

You did, you did. We got to hang out for a bit. Well, yeah, yeah, it was great.

[Steve Rinella]

We gotta go, though. Me and Randall's thing is actually kind of interesting. I don't want to talk bad about it.

[Randall]

I. I just.

[Steve Rinella]

It's very similar in a way.

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Trying to find out what happened. What h. What did happen? I know. I feel like you were very into it.

[Randall]

I feel like you were very into that project up until this morning. And now the.

[Steve Rinella]

The.

[Randall]

It's dimmed, you know, it's dimmed.

[Steve Rinella]

We're doing very similar work. Yeah, we are.

[Kevin Monteith]

I like it.

[Steve Rinella]

We're looking at. Wow. Yeah. Like, what did happen? All the buffalo.

[Kevin Monteith]

Nice.

[Steve Rinella]

And why and what little micro. Things might have been different. That would have led to a different outcome. We toy with all this. We toy with all this. Good. And. And.

[Randall]

But we don't have the data that you have.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, it's just different kind of work.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And we dispel. We dispel things.

[Kevin Monteith]

See, that's important, too.

[Steve Rinella]

People are like, well, what happened was this. I'm like, yeah, kind of. But also this.

[Kevin Monteith]

Nice.

[Steve Rinella]

Know. Yeah.

[Kevin Monteith]

I look forward to that. Bison are fascinating.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I think you. I think you'll dig it. It's. It's got all the. All the normal gross stuff that we like to put in there, too.

[Kevin Monteith]

Of course, I would anticipate nothing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, we like it to be that you get kind of grossed out, but also you learn some.

[Kevin Monteith]

You have to have that flare. It wouldn't come from you guys. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You got to have that, like, cadence of you being like, oh, yeah. Then you're like, oh.

[Randall]

Phil, can we.

[Steve Rinella]

Clip that for some sound effects?

[Kevin Monteith]

Yeah, that'll be in the new.

[Randall]

We can just splice that in.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, back and forth. All right. Thank you for coming on the Monteith shop. University of Wyoming. Send your resumes. You looking for resumes right now? Oh, man, you drown in the resumes. Yeah, yeah, don't send your resume.

[Kevin Monteith]

Always looking for supporters. If anybody's interested.

[Steve Rinella]

If you're looking to support something great, and I think it was demonstrated here today. If you're looking to support. If you love wildlife, if you love the west, if you love wildlife, if you love these, like, majestic landscapes and you really want to put your money, your conservation dollars to knowledge, this is a great place to put them. If you want to drive knowledge, it's not lobbying, which is important. It's not like on the ground. On the ground. Habitat improvement, rolling up old fences, getting rid of junipers, which is important. It's not that. If you want to contribute to acquisition of knowledge, the convention be extended out into management. I say the Monteith lab is money well spent.

[Randall]

Shop.

[Steve Rinella]

What was that?

[Randall]

Shop.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, what'd I just call it lab. Well, that's what they ought to call it.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You think about it?

[Randall]

I think that's where we started.

[Steve Rinella]

The more I think about it.

[Randall]

Doesn't bode well for a recording session later.

[Steve Rinella]

The Monteith shop damaged. Good. Thank you, Kevin.

[Kevin Monteith]

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Steve Rinella]

There's no shortcut to building gear that won't fail. That's why First Light built the new forge waders from the ground up. Field tested where failure isn't an option. Designed for waterfowl hunters who show up in the dark, who are ready for anything, and who stay when the conditions get brutal. These aren't fair weather waders. They're built to perform. They're built to last. If you're planning your waterfowl season, plan around gear that won't quit on you. Forge waders by first light. Zero quits season after season. Available now at firstlight.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com.

[Kevin Monteith]

This is an I Heart podcast.