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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California.
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And for delivery, This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwearless.
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We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.
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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 Ladies and gentlemen, joined today by Tom Seaton from Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Montana native and Tom runs you tell me the title of the program you.
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A
Run Wood bison project biologist for fishing game. Yep.
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Sorry. Wood bison project biologist. Yep. Okay. Can I lay some context?
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A
Yeah.
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To tell the story you're going to tell. Tom's going to tell the story of what I consider to be the most exciting thing. It's big. You're going to be under a lot of pressure. What I consider to be the most exciting thing in, in, in bison recovery in the whole country, there's really nothing like what you guys are doing. In order to set up the story of what you guys are doing, I'm going to tell. I'm going to talk a little bit about what what's going on around the country if that's cool with you.
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A
Sounds great.
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B
Just lay the context. As people know, and we talk about this a ton on the show. For some reason, the American bison or buffalo are the only animal.
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In the.
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United States of America. They're the only wild native animal, mammal in the United States of America that is not treated, generally not treated like a wild animal. I'll give some examples. There's the one I always bring up. So everybody knows. Everybody around the country knows or has some familiarity with the fact that in Yellowstone national park there's a. There's a buffalo herd in Yellowstone national park, and they've been in the park continuously since the beginning of time. Now, there was points in the history when the only ones left in the park were fenced in and they were feeding them hay bales. But they've been there, right? However, when those animals. If those animals walk north out of Yellowstone national park and come into the state of Montana, they stop being wildlife when they leave the park and they become. They. They walk into an environment where they're under the authority of the Montana Department of Livestock. In the last 20 years, there has been some efforts to be more lenient with the animals. There's some. These little things they call tolerance zones around the area of Gardner, Montana, where the bison can leave the park and mingle around without getting rounded up or hazed back in. But it would not be allowable. It is not allowable for a little band of those animals to decide to leave the park and just go wandering their way down the Yellowstone or wandering their way into the national forest and set up shop, say, in the Gallatin Range or set up shop in the Absorcas. They would be under the jurisdiction of the Department of Livestock, who would have the authority to shoot them down, load them up, send them off to slaughter. They're just not welcome. As a wild animal. We have all around the country a lot of habitat where we could be putting buffalo on the ground and building up populations that are big enough to support hunting. And we just choose not to do it with a lot of species that are imperiled or endangered or absent on the landscape. Sometimes it winds up being that the reason we can't recover them is because it would be really hard or it'd be really expensive or there'd be, like, intense social risk. Right? Like putting grizzly bears back in Golden Gate park in California is going to come with inherent risk to individuals. So you don't go and do it with buffalo. We could fix a lot of the problem we created when we Wiped them all out. We could fix a lot of the problem by doing nothing because we have these little populations all around the country that could be allowed to grow and expand. The example I just gave in Montana. And again, this is all setting up for Alaska. The example I gave in Montana is here you have Yellowstone National Park. It's administered by the park Service. The park Service is very friendly toward the animals. Since 2000, they've had this idea that the park can support around 3,000 Buffalo. Three to five thousand, I think, is what they have. Recently, the park national forest, some tribal entities all agreed on a new management plan. And they're like, hey, we're going to double it. We're going to say that the park can hold 6,000. Trusting that some of these animals are going to migrate out of the park. Well, the state of Montana turns around and sues them, saying, no, no, no, you gotta drop it back to 3,000. Because we don't want the risk of these wild animals leaving the park. Elk can leave the park. Bighorn sheep can leave the park. Grizzly bears can leave the park. Mountain lions can leave the park. Black bears can leave the park. Moose can leave the park. Everybody can leave the park, but not him. If he leaves the park, we're going to shoot him. Okay? Or round him up. Then you got this other example, like, we'll jump down to Arizona for a minute. So Arizona has had buffalo, a couple buff, or a buffalo herd going back to 1906. Okay, there's this dude named Buffalo Jones. He was a reformed hide hunter. Toward the end of the animals engagement in the country, when they were wiping them all out, this dude went out and caught some wild ones. He literally went out and roped up some buffalo calves and he bought some from other guys and got this little herd worked up. In 1906, this herd makes its way into Arizona and they set up this game area where these animals live in confinement. Later, they move some to another game area. Eventually they shoot those ones off and bring some in from Wind Cave national park in South Dakota. And so like these genetically pure ones. And then at one point in time, a group of this herd breaks off and they go down and they set up shop in Grand Canyon National Park. So here you have the inverse of what's happening in Montana and Arizona. The Grand Canyon national park is tended to be antagonistic to the animals. They're saying, oh, they're not from here. There's these problems. They're damaging habitat. They're restricting. They're. They're causing trouble with Other wildlife. So we don't want so many of them in the park. And when they leave the park and go on the national forest, they're welcome. So it's like an inverse relationship to what happens in Montana, but for the animals, it boils down to the same thing where again and again and again in the lower 48, their movements are restricted. We have in, in the country, in North America. So between US and Canada, there are about 500,000 buffalo in existence. 94. Somewhere around 94. 95% of all the animals in existence are privately owned. They could be privately owned by a tribe. Okay. Or they could be privately owned by, you know, an agricultural producer. Every, most people have heard of Ted Turner. Ted Turner owns a ton of privately owned animals. They're out on the landscape, but their own. They raise them for meat, they raise them for leather, they raise them for production. They're treated like livestock. So what does that leave? It leaves about somewhere 4 to 5% of the Buffalo that exist in North America are in some way arguably free ranging or wild. Right. You have a small number in the Henry Mountains of Utah. You have a small number in the Book Cliffs area of eastern Utah. Some of those have been moving over into Colorado. Colorado just did an interesting thing and they've made a new rule that was just passed. And they said, if a buffalo walks into Colorado, naturally, we are going to treat it like wildlife. They did what Montana has not done right. Montana has buffalo walking into the state on their own four legs, naturally, but we don't welcome them as wildlife. But Colorado, in a brilliant move, has come in and they've gotten out ahead of it. And they said when an animal walks into the state, naturally, that animals wildlife. If you own buffalo in Colorado, they're still yours. Their livestock. If they walk in as wild animals on their own four legs, they're wildlife. The reason they did that is because some of these Book Cliffs ones in Utah are crossing into Colorado. So Colorado has a future where they're going to have to potentially have a wild herd on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. You have what I would call a wild herd there. As I mentioned, what makes them wild is they can move from one jurisdiction to the other. That's like a definition of wild, right. They can move from the park onto the Kaibab National Forest into a state game area. And when they're doing that, they remain wild animals. So that's like a wild herd. They can move across jurisdictions and remain wildlife. But these are just little isolated things. The reason we had I'M having Tom Seaton here is because he is in charge of a program that I've been watching for over 20 years of finding some ways to bring wild, free roaming bison on into Alaska and put them onto suitable habitat and allow them to live as wildlife. Okay, so as I hand it over to Tom, the first question I'm going to ask him, and this is when I was joking with him, that we might have different understandings of the history, but he's going to educate it on us and it's going to be the first thing you think the listener thinks when you think of bison in Alaska.
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A
Huh?
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B
I didn't know they had bison in Alaska. So, Tom, you can talk a little bit about your program, but for the first question, how do we call. How is Alaska buffalo country? How is Alaska? Like, did Alaska have bison? And if so, when.
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A
Yeah, it seems a little bit odd to a lot of the public, but if we just take today, we've got about a thousand wild bison in Alaska. And when I say wild, I mean, you know, unfenced, unrestricted in any way, subject to natural selection, exposed to all forms of predation that they originally had in North America and, and, and, you know, exposed to a lot of difficult weather. Of course, Alaska's got some difficult weather as far as bison range goes. And so they're valuable animals as far as conservation goes. But it's like say a thousand is about what we have in the wild. And I think a lot of estimates say that there's probably about 10,000 wild bison in North America. Like truly wild, not, not fenced in any way. And so Alaska has around 10% of the world's wild bison, really, which is shocking. I didn't really understand that until I got into it myself. But the reality is that there's not a lot of habitat left for wild bison to be wild anymore. Most places that were good bison habitat historically for the last, say 10,000 years are now agricultural. Bison eat things that are right at the ground level, and that's the same place we like to grow, grow crops, you know, and, and so it's, it's, it's difficult to try to restore bison anywhere, anywhere but Alaska now, like you said, there's just not a lot of habitat left or places to go with them. Go ahead.
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Yeah, I don't agree. Okay, I understand what you're saying.
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Yeah.
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But there are a lot of places.
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You think so?
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B
I think so. But, but it's like a low, it's, it's a different definition than what you're Thinking.
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Yeah.
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B
And I don't want to get into it, but, man, like, the area of Missouri breaks areas in the Gallatin Range areas, in the Madison Range areas, in Absorc. Is just to name a few areas around here. Could definitely have some animals. Yes. They just. It would require more social tolerance.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Than what you're speaking about.
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Yeah. Well, I think there's always been a conflict between agriculture and bison, and I'm not sure I've done some thinking about that, and I just don't totally understand what it is. I mean, there's the obvious part that a bison can graze on crops and damage crops or break fences and things like that. And, you know, in Montana, one of the arguments is to bring disease to cattle. Of course, the disease that they're bringing was originally from cattle and got into bison.
- [14:48]
B
That's one of the great ironies of the whole thing.
- [14:50]
A
Yeah.
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B
Is that. Yeah. Cat. There's a Eurasian disease called brucellosis in cattle. It can cause a cow. It can cause a heifer to a border calf. This disease came in on cattle, was transmitted to elk, was transmitted to bison. Then they got rid of it. For the most part, they've gotten rid of it in cattle. And stockmen are worried that bison will give the cows back their own disease. Elk carry the disease, and no one's worried about elk giving them back their own disease. And no one can point to a case in modern times when a cow has gotten it from a buffalo. But it's kind of. I view it as kind of a red herring. It's not really what they're talking about. They talk about it, but it's not what they're talking about. Well, they're talking about grazing, competition.
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Yeah. I think that perceived conflict with agriculture is why bison are the last great animal to be restored. I think, you know, we nearly wiped out antelope and both species of deer and, you know, buffalo and most other, you know, cats and bears and everything.
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B
And elk. We eliminated elk from New Mexico.
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Totally. Yeah. But now we've brought them all back. Right. We took all this effort to get all these animals back on the landscape, but bison haven't really come back yet. And we don't really want. Or a lot of folks don't really want them to come back because there's really not a lot of space for them. That's what's perceived in my mind.
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B
That is the perception. Correct. Yeah, I agree with that.
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A
I think in Alaska, it's a little different. The Alaska Department of Fishing Game really wants to restore Wild wood bison as a wild animal, performing their wild things in a niche that's unoccupied at this time. For a large lowland grazer.
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B
Can you do two. Can you do two things? Lay out, and I haven't gotten into it. Can you lay out, when you say wood bison, can you contextualize that against what we. What most people are familiar with, be plains bison? And then also, can you talk about historically, prior to any kind of introductions or reintroductions, what, what evidence do we have that they were present in Alaska?
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Sure. I don't know how far you want to go back, but the history really starts about 10,000 years ago, the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of the Holocene, which is, you know, the era that we're in now. And bison were kind of. There's a bunch of species of longhorn bison, you know, larger bison that occurred, you know, like, they're just generally called steppe bison. In The Pleistocene, about 10,000 years ago, when a lot of megafauna in North America went away, bison perspective persisted, but they became shorthorn bison or evolved into shorthorn bison. And it's the two persistent subspecies left of those shorthorn bison are plains bison. And everywhere from northern Mexico through lower 48, you know, eastern Oregon to Pennsylvania, all the way up to central Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia. But then north of that was the wood bison. And they occurred in the boreal forest all the way up to the mouth of the Mackenzie river, which goes into the Arctic Ocean there, and all the way west to the Yukon Kuskwim Delta in western interior Alaska. They kind of stopped at the bottom edge of the boreal forest. And so if you look at a map, you can see that the Great Plains kind of ended and became forest somewhere in central Canada. And it was wood bison in the boreal forest and plains bison south in the plains.
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B
And those suckers look a little different. If you weren't used to looking at buffalo at all. I know she say, I'm gonna say bison, because you like the word bison. If you weren't used to looking at bison at all, and you were driving down the highway at 60 miles an hour, you might just look and be like, oh, some bison. But once you look at them a fair bit, you'd look, even at that speed, you'd think something's different about those. If you were looking at wood bison, you'd recognize something's different. They got like some physical differences with.
- [18:51]
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30 seconds of training. They're abundantly different at 100 yards distance, you know, which to me that's pretty grand for subspecies. Most subspecies, you gotta kind of have them in hand. And you're not really sure what the difference is between the two of them. But plains bison and whip bison are quite a bit different. You know, the plains bison have a much more forward hump. It's a taller hump and more forward. The way their hair lays on the body is a little bit different. A plains bison has that, that really big thick cape, and it goes into thin hair after that with a real strong demarcation between the, the front shaggy hair and the, and the, and the, the thin hair in the back. Wood bison just kind of has curly hair along its whole body. And it is a little bit bigger, you know, or a little bit longer and thicker in the front than it is in the back, but it's, it's fairly uniform. Then, you know, a plains bison has really curly hair around its head. And especially the adult males that get this big kind of afro. And they're called MOP, for lack of a better term, in the hide.
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B
100 days they'd call it a mop.
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A
Okay, yeah. And it's just thick and maybe it's, you know, six, eight inches thick. And sometimes it even covers their horns and everything. Well, a wood bison, a classic wood bison, doesn't have that. A wood bison has like a bill that sticks out that's just like straight, perfectly straight hair that kind of looks like the bill of a baseball cap. And these hairs all lay flat and straight. And they can get the curly hair on the sides that can cover the horns a little bit too. But then plains bison have a really big beard and really big shafts and all these grand secondary sex characteristics that wood bison don't have. Wood bison have really diminished cape and beard and, and shaps and all that. The other thing that I find really interesting is that plains bison roar during the rut, but wood bison are fairly silent.
- [20:31]
B
Oh, really? I've never heard that.
- [20:32]
A
And it's been hypothesized that wood bison occurred in much smaller groups since they occurred in the boreal forest. They, they live in these tiny patches of habitat which are mostly wetlands. And so they never really needed these strong secondary sex characteristics to compete with other males and work out which females they could breed, as opposed to the plains bison that lived in these groups of, you know, a thousand, ten thousand, whatever. You know, when they would come in to rut in these massive groups where they had to roar and have secondary sex characteristics that really stood out above amongst everybody else so they could breed right yeah, yeah. So that's hypothesized why that might. But the whole big hump and the big head and a little bit bigger body size is hypothesized to be a reflection of the demands of the environment in the north. So deeper snow, colder weather, that sort of thing. Well, the reason why snow is important is bison sweep snow with their face. That's how they get to the vegetation in wintertime. And to do deeper snow, you need more bone structure and muscle structure and tendons to be able to sweep that big head. And that's why it's not. The hump is further forward and taller.
- [21:36]
B
How far back do you got to go in Alaska? Like, like, let's get rid of the modern times. Because from a period, I think it was around the 1920s, I wrote about, I wrote about this extensively when I wrote a book that I published 17 years ago called American Buffalo In Search of a Lost Icon. I wrote a story, the story about how some buffalo were brought from Montana and released up in Alaska and that these plains bison from Montana wound up this little shipment of plains bison from Montana formed the nucleus of what would become four little scattered herds of plane bison around, plains bison around Alaska. And at that time in the 20s when they brought them up there, there were none in the state. But if you went back 100 years, 200 years, at some point you would have found in Alaska there were, there were, there were wood bison in Alaska that were wiped out, perhaps by natural causes, perhaps by man. What, what is your. What, what is. What is sort of the academic consensus about when they were there and what happened to them?
- [22:50]
A
Well, it's believed that they were in interior Alaska for most of the last 10,000 years. And there's, there's a paper that we Pub in 2001 and it's on our website and you can read it. It's called Wood Bison in the Late Holocene. Alaska and Adjacent Paleontological, Archaeological and Historical Records. It's written by Bob Stevenson and several other folks. It was published in 2001. And it takes a deep dive into collecting a whole bunch of specimens, radiocarbon dating them. And they look at like accumulation of specimens through different periods in that 10,000 years. And the most recent radiocarbon dating is about 170 years before present. And then they went into oral history. They asked a lot of local native elders about what they knew about bison in the area. And they were amazed to uncover a pretty rich oral history about wood bison, especially in Yukon Flats.
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B
Give me some examples.
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A
So in this paper, I'll read you a couple real short ones here, a couple that really grabbed my attention. And that's. Here's one. Virginia Titus recalls that her father, Robert Albert, described to her how he and his adopted father, Pretty Albert, encountered a bison near Tanana village, probably in the winter of 1918. This occurred when they were on their trapline. And when her father, who was born in 1904, was only 14 years old, her father remembered being scared when they encountered a large animal in the brush. His father shot the animal with a lever action rifle. The first cartridge rifle they had obtained. The animal was a large bison. After butchering the animal, they stored the meat in an underground cellar insulated with grass. The hide was given to their chief, which he used in their quote, unquote talking house as a place to sit. The carcass provided food for their dogs for a long time. Mrs. Titus said that this was the last known occurrence of bison in the Tanana area. And so that was 1918, roughly, is what that's expected to be. And if you get this paper, there's 20 or 30, maybe more, just oral accounts that are a lot like that. But there's a second one that I really enjoy and I'll read it. With regard to their disappearance, to the disappearance of Wood Weissen, Mrs. Mary Sam said that quote, unquote, maybe they ate it up. Suggesting that hunting might have contributed to the disappearance of bison in a Black river area. She also described how on one occasion, her grandparents pointed to another young girl saying, quote, when this young girl grows up and her children grow up, then the bison will come back. And the cool thing is, if you kind of lay it out in a timeline, it's about now.
- [25:31]
B
Oh, the prophecy. The prophecy worked.
- [25:33]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [25:34]
B
Yeah.
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A
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- [29:59]
A
Right. So the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has a policy to not release animals into places that they weren't previously there. And of course, like you say, history is not quite like that. You know, there's deer on Kodiak, Blacktail deer weren't native to Kodiak. They're there and they're super successful. And moose and the Copper River Delta weren't there. And humans did that too.
- [30:22]
B
Elk into elk into a Fognack and Raspberry island and yeah, all that.
- [30:27]
A
And, and of course, even here locally, I'll just do a little side thing real quick right here in Bozeman. There's brook trout, rainbow trout, brown trout, you know, pheasants, you know, chuckers, Hungarian partridge. I mean, that just list goes on. The things that you're really familiar with that you don't realize they were from somewhere else. Anyway, it, there were problems that were created. When you look at things that were released in Australia and Hawaii and stuff where these. There's isolated groups of animals that didn't do well with incoming new animals. And so there's problems that were created. So people are scared of recreating a problem. Well, in our situation in Alaska, there is a lot of a record of wood bison being there. And so what we're really trying to do is restore these animals. And we believe that hunting played a significant part in their demise. And so humans may have caused their disappearance. So we want to kind of correct that. But it is a challenge. Wood bison are listed as threatened under Endangered Species act. And so we can't just grab a bunch of animals and start releasing them. We have to go through all the process of the Endangered Species act, which includes the NEPA documentation, which for us in this particular situation is environmental reviews and environmental assessments. And we have a non essential experimental population rule for interior Alaska so that we can hunt them. That's pretty unique as far as those kind of rules go. But it is complicated to make it happen.
- [31:52]
B
So once, once you guys got the idea, once the state of Alaska, I understand this happened before you're in your current role. At some point in time, like very much in our lifetimes, the state of Alaska started moving ahead with a plan to reintroduce these animals. People might be thinking, where are you going to go get Them from. Can you explain the source herd? Like, if you want to find a sort of disease free, somewhat genetically pure wood bison to begin turning them loose in Alaska. How do you get them?
- [32:31]
A
Yeah, there's. Excuse me, there's a park in Canada called Elk Island National Park. It's east of Edmonton, and they've got plains bison and wood bison that are separated from each other with a highway. And so there's just no mixing between the two subspecies. And they maintain those herds specifically for conservation purposes where they kill, test and live, test for diseases every other year. And they produce animals that can be provided for release to create new herds of plains bison and wood bison. And some of those, if they don't have a need, like if no agency comes along or, or native American group comes along and says, I want these bison for conservation, they can just sell them into, you know, private ownership like you talked about. There's a lot in private ownership, but for the wood bison that they have, we're one of their highest priorities right now. And we have agreement with them to get their bison every other year, their surplus. That amounts to about 40 bison every even year. So 20, 22, 24, 26, like that. And, and we've been getting them for, for a while now.
- [33:36]
B
Do you guys get them for free?
- [33:38]
A
No, we have to pay. It's close. We, we pay for all the effort to collect them from the wild. I think they have 75 square miles in their park and maybe a third of that is wood bison habitat. And so they're collecting out of, let's say, 20 square miles or something like that. So it's not that easy. But they lure them in through supplemental feeding in the end of winter, and then they capture as many as they can. They have to run them through chutes and they, they have this handling facility and they get all these people there to, to, to do that process. And so we kind of pay for that process and then we pay for the disease testing, all the veterinary services that are needed for the new disease testing. You know, they do the disease testing, but then as the state of Alaska, we do it again just to be redundant and, you know, do due diligence to make sure that we don't bring anything from there that, that might be bad for, for native wildlife in Alaska. So that's mainly what we pay for is just the handling and the keeping and then the trucking, you know.
- [34:30]
B
And Canada has, they kind of have their own versions of what you guys are trying to create because they have like wood. Wood buffalo or wood Bison National Park. They have a couple populations that even have that support limited hunting.
- [34:42]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. One of the greatest populations in my view is the one in Yukon Territory between Whitehorse and the border. And that's around 2,000 wild wood bison. And it's still growing at something like 15% a year. Oh, really? Well, something like that, yeah. And they harvest 280 bison a year the last few years out of that herd. And it was only put out in 1988, so it's not very old.
- [35:03]
B
Oh, so it's doing good.
- [35:04]
A
Oh, unbelievable.
- [35:05]
B
Yeah, I've heard from like, like that there's some schools and stuff that will take the students out to do field harvest on those animals and.
- [35:12]
A
Yeah, right. Because bison, you know, if. I think if you lived in North America sometime in the last, you know, a thousand years, up until just 200 years ago, you would have thought of North America as a bison continent. You we think of it now maybe it's an elk continent or deer continent or something, but it would have just been predominantly bison then. But people have lost that connection with, with bison. And so sometimes it takes, you know, training to help people understand how to deal with such a big animal.
- [35:38]
B
Yeah. When, what year was it that Alaska started to have a confinement area where they were keeping wood bison in anticipation of trying to find good habitat to bring them and put them on? It's been going on for a long time.
- [35:54]
A
It has. In 2008, we imported 53 wood bison from Elk Island National Park. A farmer imported some in 2002 ish, illegally because they were designated as endangered under the ESA at that time. And he went and got something in Canada anyway and brought them in without the permits. And then those were confiscated by the Fish and Wildlife Service. And we ended up with those and their progeny in 2006 or so. And then because there was really nothing else that the federal government could do with them. And then we combined those with the ones we imported from elk island in 2008, and then we've received more in 2002, 2004, and we'll get some next spring too.
- [36:41]
B
So what was the most you ever.
- [36:42]
A
Had in one little spot in the captivity? We had about 145 in captivity in 2014 at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation center south of Anchorage.
- [36:54]
B
I saw those ones there one time.
- [36:56]
A
Yeah, they're still about 35 or so there right now. And they've got a really good operation going on there. And those cows are really productive and they produce eight to 10 releasable animals every Year. And so every other year is when we tend to release. And so we can get, you know, 15 to 20 or so bison out of that herd every year and take it out. And then we have some at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Station too. And that's a smaller group, it's like a dozen. But we are importing the ones from Elk Island national park to UAF these days and just holding them there temporarily and then taking them back out to the wild.
- [37:32]
B
Yeah. What's that process like to go find them? When, when I was looking into this subject back in early 2000s, it was kind of undecided where Alaska might try to do a reintroduction. I would hear things like the, the. I hesitate to even say where. I remember initially hearing talk about Yukon Flats, but Yukon Flats hasn't happened yet. Can you, can you explain the process of identifying a place to do it and then the sort of political and social process of ever getting the okay to go take this large herbivore, 1500 pounds, 1600 pound animals, and turn them loose in a place where they have been absent for over a century? Like, you can't just spring that on people, right?
- [38:27]
A
Yeah, no, it's complicated. The first thing we did is after we acquired all this information about the, the paper I discussed with radiocarbon dating, the oral history, the, the habitat that's available in modern times compared to historic times and all that, we took that to the public in a feasibility assessment in 1994 and asked for public input. And the input from the public at large that came in verbal and written feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And that really set the course for Alaska Department of Fish and Game to pursue wood bison restoration in the state. Because the question in that feasibility assessment was do you want to do this or not? Is this something we should pursue? And we were essentially directed by the public to pursue it. So at that time, a wood bison project biologist was created. And there's been a position like that for the last, you know, 30 some years.
- [39:20]
B
And that was Bob Stevenson at the time I met with him in Fairbanks, I believe, years ago.
- [39:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. And so it. And there's been other folks on that program too, over time. You know, sometimes it's as many as three people. But you asked how do we identify places? So what we want, if we're going to try to restore a species, a place that's large enough to have a minimum viable population, and a. Through modeling of genetic work with bison, it's decided that a minimum viable population is more than 400, you'll maintain most of your genetic diversity over 100 years. If you have a population of over 400, it's even better if you can get a population over 1000. So what we were seeking was a habitat patch that was big enough to hold 400 to 1,000 bison or more, something like that. And so it had to have certain characteristics too, of not really deep snow and not really firm snow. It had to be soft snow that wasn't too deep, but also the wintertime food. So you know, bison are generalist grazers, so they can get by with darn near anything in the summertime, but they really need grasses and especially wetland sedges in the wintertime. And so the three largest areas that had those qualities that we came up with and we wrote an environmental assessment about it in 2013 or 2014 were the Anoko Flats, which is kind of west central interior Alaska. Minto Flats, which is just about 50 miles west of Fairbanks. And then the Yukon Flats, which is about 100 miles north of Fairbanks. Well, the Yukon Flats was the original place. And that's where Bob Stevenson was an area biologist. That's where all the oral history comes from. And that's probably the largest and best piece of habitat in all of interior Alaska.
- [41:00]
B
That's kind of. That's a stunning area. Yeah, you got like the Brooks Range to the north, you got the White Mountains of the south. All these big famous rivers flowing out of the Brooks Range coming in there. Oh yeah, tons of mosquitoes.
- [41:15]
A
Yeah. It's a difficult place to stand in the middle of June.
- [41:18]
B
Yeah. Yeah, the Anoko flats. Eventually guys settled on the Anoko Flats.
- [41:25]
A
That was an interesting thing. Since wood bison have as a listing under the esa, oil and gas and mining industry was worried about the influence of that listing on development. And there were no oil and gas prospects at the time in the Anoco. And so a lot of the industry leaders were like, well, we understand you have a non essential experimental population rule that protects us. And we understand that they're only listed as threatened right now. But just to be safe, let's go with the Anoko because what they're worried.
- [41:57]
B
About is that they're worried that you're gonna, you're gonna re establish this population. There's gonna be some protection of the population. They're gonna want to industrialize the landscape and then they're gonna have to hear from people about how there's an endangered species living there. So the argument would be, well, don't put them there, then we won't have to worry about them being there because.
- [42:19]
A
It could potentially stop oil and gas development.
- [42:21]
B
Well, why? I'm just like, I don't want to drag you into, like a quagmire here, but, like, why would anybody ask them anyways?
- [42:30]
A
Oh, that's a good question. Well, Alaska, their economy is based on oil and gas and mining. Really? That's what Alaska's economy is based on. And so all the political leaders and big business leaders care about the fact that we need to be able to extract resources to make Alaska survive. And so that's why I think it mattered. And they have influence in the legislature and the governor and everything else. And it's important. Right. And that's why we spent five years negotiating with the Fish and Wildlife Service to make a non essential experimental population rule that gives full deference to development. And talks about bison can live in places where there's development. And the reality is most of that country's boreal forest. And so any sort of development breaks down that boreal forest into, you know, places where sunlight gets to the ground, whether it's fires or roads or drilling pads or whatever, that turns that into better habitat for bison than forest, really. And so there's. It's a hard argument to say that development would hurt bison anyway. It's just that the Endangered Species act has been used as a club in the past to hurt industry, and the industry leaders know that.
- [43:43]
B
I, I want to just touch on this for a minute, this experimental status, because this is something that you see come up again and again in, in wildlife recovery efforts would be that oftentimes like, let's take, let's take the recent move to bring wolves into Colorado. Okay, here you're, you're, you have portions of Colorado that have no wolves. They were historically there. They've been gone for a long time. And someone proposes, hey, we're going to bring wolves into the state. Well, right away there's a negotiation that's going to happen where you're taking you. You have a landscape that doesn't have an endangered species or a threatened species, and all of a sudden you're putting a threatened species on the ground, Right? And you know that it's going to cause conflict with livestock growers, for instance. So they're like, oh, man, the minute you bring them in, they're gonna start killing my cows, and there's nothing I can do. I can't shoot them and the state can't help me out because they're in danger. They're an endangered species. So you're just creating a headache for me. So this deal that will often get brokered in these situations is people will say, we're going to bring them in and turn them loose, but we're not going to treat them the same way we might treat an imperiled historic population. We're going to give managers greater latitude to deal with this new population that we're creating than we would give managers to deal with a historic population that's imperiled. And it just greases the wheels a little bit. Right. You might come in and say, sure, we're going to turn, you know, we're going to reintroduce bears into this area and there will only be a few, but if a bear is killing your chickens, go ahead and shoot it. You're not going to get prosecuted it. Whereas in other areas you might under different circumstances. So this is kind of like a way to. It's a way to. It's a compromise that can be made when reintroducing animals.
- [45:44]
A
Yeah, well, there's a monumental irony there. Like when I think the ESA was really designed for when, when populations are in a, in a decline to stop that from happening and try to keep animals from going away. They didn't really plan for, I don't think as well for when you're trying to restore an animal on the landscape. And the Endangered Species act itself has probably been the biggest detriment to wood bison restoration in Alaska, because every time we'd want to do something, the bureaucracy and political nature of the Endangered Species act being involved just makes it extremely difficult. And so it would have been a lot easier. There's been several times when political higher ups above me have said, let's just do this with plains bison. This is way too hard. Plains bison aren't listed. And then we have to, from the biology biologist perspective, we have to say, look, you know, our policy is not to release animals here that, that weren't originally here. You know, let's try to stick with wood bison. And it's a real challenge to get around the usa.
- [46:40]
B
I don't want to stick you with having this viewpoint, but. So this is. I just want people to be clear. This is me talking, not Tom talking, but you hear, especially lately you hear a lot of people talk about the Endangered Species act being cumbersome or aspects of it should be revisited. Oftentimes you'll see that and you'll think it's people trying to dismantle protections for imperiled wildlife. A lot of times it's like, kind of like good guys will say, that sometimes too, like people that are pro wildlife will say that for the things we're talking about where it just when they drafted the legislation, they couldn't anticipate all outcomes. And you don't have a crystal ball. So you can create situations that later you're like, I wish we'd have thought of that. And that's the thing that they hadn't contemplated is they hadn't contemplated what about ways in which it would make it harder to restore wildlife. And it happens with other pieces of legislation, like famously like the Wild Horse and Burro Protection Act. When they enacted that, they're like, there's these wild horses out in the desert, people are killing them all off. We should try to save them. And they create, they create this piece of legislation that winds up being its own worst enemy. And then you're just stuck with it. You're stuck with it because it takes a super majority to change it.
- [48:03]
A
Right.
- [48:03]
B
And so then generations thereafter have to live with a cumbersome ESA or have to live with the Wild Horse and Burro Protection act, which is wind up. You could almost at this point call it like the Wildlife Habitat Destruction act is what the Wild Horse Burrow Protection act became. But.
- [48:20]
A
And I think if you deal with.
- [48:21]
B
You just gotta live with it.
- [48:22]
A
Yeah. If you deal with an animal like wood bison that everybody kind of wants on the landscape anyway, it's just an impediment to have the ESA there because, you know, people want this grand resource to be able to use there. It's different than if it was a, a tiny fern that only grew in wet spots along creeks or something. And we really had to focus on trying to make sure there was habitat for this fern. It's not like that. You know, people want bison on the landscape.
- [48:47]
B
So we got a little off subject. But explain the area that we're talking about. Like explain the Anoko, the flats, the wetland. Well, I shouldn't say the wetland, but like basically it's a river coming in from the south, I believe, and flown into the Yukon.
- [49:02]
A
Yeah.
- [49:03]
B
And that's kind of where this site is, right?
- [49:05]
A
Yeah. Well, the, the Anoko kind of comes out of the northeast and the Yukon happens to be flowing to the south there. And they kind of come together to make about. About 40 miles apart. They make this valley and then they kind of come together at the bottom of it. So this valley is maybe 80 miles north and south and 40 miles east to west and sometimes only 20 miles east to west, and it floods on a regular enough basis that it Keeps that habitat in grass and sedge. It inhibits tree growth there because it's so wet. And that's just perfect wood bison habitat. And since it floods too, a lot of the productivity or the, the nutrient value of those plants is really high along with their productivity. And so bison really like it and it's worked out great as a good piece of habitat. The problem that we've had is in that particular place is snow. And we worried about that somewhat in the past before we released bison there that occasionally has as deep snows and ice layers and snows. But the reality is that winters have been very wet and warm in the last decade or to 15 years in Alaska. And that's been really hard on all wildlife. There's, you know, we've had an 80% loss in a lot of sheep populations. We've lost about half our caribou in most places of interior Alaska. And then we've lost. It depends on what you're looking at. But as far as moose goes, it's something like 30 to 40% of Moose have gone away in a lot of places in interior Alaska. And it's mostly attributed to these really difficult winters we've been having where they're just so wet and warm that it makes snow, that it's deep. So it's hard to get through for a lot of ungulates. And it encapsulates the forage where the animals can't get to it. Especially sheep, where they rely on the mountainsides to be blown off so the snow blow off them so they can get to the grass and things they eat. Bison are similar, but they live in the lowlands where they get through the snow without a problem if it's soft. But if there's a rain on snow event that makes an ice layer in the snow, it's much harder for them to get through that vegetation or through the snow to the vegetation. And so one of the things I often have a difficult time with is all the history and the legal process and the political process and the funding has all come together and culminated into now for releasing wood bison. But the weather is just really difficult because it's hard for all ungulates right now. And we're trying to restore a species of ungulate in the midst of this.
- [51:36]
B
Is this winter shape and oatly more of the same?
- [51:38]
A
No, it's the opposite, which is great. Like last winter, the winter of 2425, we had two ice storms even in Fairbanks. It was crazy, you know, trees falling down everywhere and forage getting you know, covered over with ice. But this winter has been like an old school winter. The winters I remember from my 20s and 30s where it's really cold, we've had long, long spells of 30 below, 40 below the snow falls but it's just super Dr. Dry. It's like the way it used to be, you know, so the Snow can be 2ft deep, but you could just smack your hand right through the whole layer of snow. You know, it's just so easy to get through. And so bison and moose are I think are probably doing real well this winter so far. You know, I haven't had any mortalities from snow conditions in the bison herd that we just released in Minto Flats.
- [52:27]
B
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- [54:24]
B
So talk about how you guys got them in, how you guys brought animals in for. On the Anoko Valley.
- [54:30]
A
Okay, so in the Anoko, this is. Well, first of all, I mentioned that local people were really supportive when we were trying to pick between Yukon Flats, Minto Flats and Anoka Flats. The Anoko people were always, hey, bring them here. You know, if. If you got political or otherwise conflicts in that country, bring them to us. And so that was one of the major decisions. Not just the, the lack of conflict, oil and gas industry, but also the, the support from local people made us go through there. So now, now is that, is that.
- [54:59]
B
When you say that, is that with. With native Alaskan? And who. Who is there? Like what group is there?
- [55:04]
A
So there's four villages around the Anoko landscape where the bison are, and that's the villages of Grayling, Anvik, Shagalok and Holy Cross. They call it the Gash area, but you know, just the abbreviation of those four places. And so those are communities that are. They're mostly native, but there's other, you know, people, non natives in those villages too. And they've been involved in the process of deciding whether bison should go there or not through the whole time. Now when we went through all the political process and all the public planning process that we did, we finally got down to, okay, we're going to take bison there in the spring of 2015. And so we had to get bison. This place is more than 300 miles from the closest road. You know, the road system, you know, there's a couple little roads to airports and stuff like that from villages, but it's really remote and it's way down the Yukon river from any road too. So what we did was we had these animals in the Alaska Wildlife Conservation center. And like I said at that time, we had about 145 there. I took 130 of them and took them to the Anoko. But it was kind of a complicated process. The state only had enough money at that time to release a smaller subset than this 145 we had in captivity. And so I kind of had to do it piecemeal bit by bit. And I was able to get donations from Safari Club and Bass Pro and then match that.
- [56:29]
B
Oh, really?
- [56:30]
A
Yeah, match that with Pittman Robertson funds and come up with enough money to fly bison. First truck em.
- [56:37]
B
Safari Club helped out with that.
- [56:39]
A
They did. That's great. Which was great. Yeah, yeah. And first truck bison from the Alaska Wildlife Conservation center to Anchorage airport. Put them on Linden cargo planes C130s and fly them to Shagealuk, which had a good Runway with bison habitat nearby and a place, a little road. We could take bison, we could pull them in these containers to a little pen that we could build along the Anoka River. And so we took 100 total of 50 cows and 50 younger animals there in the spring of 2015. That was like late March 2015. Then we released them on April 2, 2015. And that was. I think there was seven loads. Herc. Loads went back and forth with feed, equipment, bison, all kinds of stuff. But in the previous winter, we'd built this like six acre pen that was kind of divided into two pieces that we held them in. That was about three and a half miles out of the town of Shagaluk. Anyway, we released those animals and then in May and June of that following summer, we released a load of bulls by bar, two loads of bulls by barge. As I realized that I had enough money to do that through donations.
- [57:49]
B
So you brought the females in by plane? Did you not bring the bulls in by plane because they're too kind of wild?
- [57:54]
A
Well, they're big and that, you know, if you fly stuff, it's. It's, you know, the more weight, the more difficult it is. So I brought 50 adult cows and then 50 young animals. Those 50 young animals were about half and half male and female. So there was plenty of bulls there to breed.
- [58:09]
B
Like they would have got old enough bred anyways.
- [58:11]
A
Yeah, y. But I had all these adult bulls in captivity that I wanted them to be out there too. And so the barge. Yeah, I put the barge process out to bid, which would have been 750 miles. I think it's. Yeah, somewhere around 700 and some miles from the barge station at Nenana, where the parks highway hits the Tanana River. They would get barged down the Tanana, down the Yukon to the mouth of the Anoko, and then back up the Anoko to where these cows were. I put that out to bid and one of the bidders.
- [58:43]
B
700 river miles?
- [58:45]
A
Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.
- [58:47]
B
That gives you a sense of the remoteness of that stuff. Like 700 river miles.
- [58:50]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it took like four, four plus days. So we had to truck them about 100, actually like 200 and some miles, 250 miles or so by semi truck, and then get them on the barge and then go down that river. And that whole process was four and a half to five and a half days. But the cool thing is there was a guy named Charlie that owned inland barge at the time. And he drastically discounted his rate to barge those bison 750 miles because he really wanted to see this project succeed.
- [59:17]
B
Oh, really?
- [59:17]
A
Yeah, he was super cool guy.
- [59:18]
B
That's great, man.
- [59:19]
A
And he, he helped us get those animals down there. And so what, what they would do is they'd come down by barge and it would take them all those days. I'd be down there with the cows and I would fly to find out where the cows were and figure out where we could land the barge closest to the cows. And, and with the cows and young animals, we did what's called a soft release where you hold them to kind of get them to calm down before you release them so you don't get animals just like scattering everywhere from fear of the stress of transportation. So we held those animals about 10 days and then they kind of, they stayed there pretty good. Well, then I would figure out where they were at when the bulls were coming and then I would just hard release the bulls, which means you just show up and open the gates onto the bank. But we needed a place where we could land the barge and all that. Anyway, it all worked out pretty good. And about 60% of the bulls got into those cows in the first 24 hours. The other 30% of the bulls would just kind of wander around and eventually connect them with the cows.
- [60:12]
B
But you think they smell them and find them?
- [60:14]
A
Man, I don't know. I think it's smell. I suspect there may even be some sort of low, low frequency sound that they do. You know, like elephants do, that low frequency sound that communicate over long distances. And I can hear bison making low frequency grunts and stuff. But you know, my ear, nobody's ear, human ear, can't go. So I don't know if anybody's tested that with bison, but it's fascinating.
- [60:37]
B
But a bunch of them just went right to it.
- [60:39]
A
That's crazy. So here you have, you know, these animals have been in captivity most of their life. You got these bulls that have never been allowed to be with the cows other than when they were first young animals. You kept them separate in captivity. You fed them hay. They're just in a pen, you know, a 30, 40 acre pen their entire life. You take them to this place that's a thousand miles away in total wilderness and just dump them out on the riverbank and they just navigate to a cow group that's a mile away or something over the course of a night or something. And it's just, it's mind blowing. Other also when we release These cows and young animals, a lot of the young animals we made feeding stations because I had all this grand ideas that I thought, well, if I make feeding stations on these native sedge habitats, they'll kind of transition from captive feeds to wild feeds and stuff. And they kind of kept their calves there a little bit. And by calves I mean like 11 month olds. But the cows started doing this, these exploratory forays and they'd go on a foray until, you know, they'd walk, walk 5, 10 miles until they got out of bison habitat and they would walk back in to where? To that original spot that I released them. And then they would take another exploratory foyer where they in a different direction and they would come back and they did that over and over again until they went all the way around the, you know, all directions and every. It depended on how much bison habitat there were there was available that they would walk through. So to the south, bison habitat goes for 60 miles and they would walk that whole 60 miles and they'd get to the end of it where they hit canopy forest and they would turn back and go all the way back. Oh, really? Yeah, it was really cool. Cool. And so here you have these animals that haven't been wild during their lifetimes that can just navigate a landscape so well and they do all that well. Then in the winter they would go to these places that were really good habitat for winter habitat and summer habitat. And if you look at it, it's.
- [62:27]
B
Places they bank it away in their head.
- [62:29]
A
Exactly. They were just like surveying the whole landscape. Okay, what do we have here? And we're going to cover 1500 square miles in the course of this summer and figure out what's out there and then we're going to use it. And they found places, for example, that have a lower snow load than anywhere else. I didn't even know that this low snow existed in this little snow shadow behind the Russian Mountains, which is about 60 miles to the south. And now they all winter down there. They go down to this place that's maybe 10 miles across that, you know, the storms come in off the YK Delta, they go over the Russian mountains and there's just this little spot where, you know, not little 10 miles across that has low snow.
- [63:04]
B
Like a little rain shadow.
- [63:05]
A
Yep. And they go there, you know, for winter. That's where they winter now. And that they found that 60 miles away from their release site. And so their understanding of navigation and habitat is so much greater than, than us. You know, it's it's pretty cool.
- [63:21]
B
You know, when you, you mentioned doing the cold release and you hear this in. In wildlife work a fair bit where you take animals to a spot where you're going to release them. Could be any number of kind of creatures you do this with. And like you said, you bring them into an enclosure and feed them there and just let them calm down. And then one day you leave the door open, right. And they might even leave and come back, but just try to get them settle in. There's a great story from Alaska. When they brought those ones up in the 20s, they went into this area, Delta Junction, and eventually they got a bunch of them there and they wanted to try to move them around. So at one point they take, I think it was 13 of them out of Delta Junction and bring them up the Solana Road towards Solana Mine in a truck and they just open the door of the truck and shoo them all out of the truck. Well, they split for so long that people thought they were dead. I mean, people. There'd be rumors of them. People flying over would see him or something. And they didn't settle in for 100 miles. And that's the ones that wound up being in that copper herd. Yeah, the copper herd. So, like the Nadina, Daddy and Chedislina, and they're migrating between a glacier and all the way down to the Copper River. But they went a hundred miles before they found a spot they liked, you know, and that's like a cold. That's a hot release right there, man. Oh, yeah, they just split.
- [64:46]
A
You know, I know a daughter of a homesteader named Sharon, and she used to live on the Denali highway. And they would see him years after that release in Atlanta, and she'd say, well, there was, you know, when I was a kid, the bison walked through here, and then three years later they walked through there. And yeah, I think one of the issues with that is that we didn't understand their habitat needs as much then. And if you look at the habitat around Slanta, it's kind of tussock tundra, which is not. It's not quite like alpine tussock tundra, but it's, it's. It's tussocks and it's not what bison select for habitat. They'll eat some. Some tussocks in the spring, you know, especially the top end that turns green first. I mean, that's what a tussock really is, is just a microclimate that allows you thawed parts at the top while the bottom's frozen. Anyway, it seemed like they didn't like that habitat. And that hard release might have been not enough to keep them there too.
- [65:37]
B
So some of the ones you guys cut loose, you were telling me they went on some tracks, man.
- [65:42]
A
Yeah.
- [65:42]
B
If you talk about a few of the outliers. Yeah, like what they did, why they did it, you know. But mostly, I guess you don't know the why, but the what is incredible.
- [65:51]
A
Yeah. I want to make it clear first off that 98 and a half percent of them stayed right where we had a habitat assessment and right where we wanted them to stay. And so these really are outliers. They're very unique individuals.
- [66:06]
B
So that's a solid point. 98.5% stayed put. Of course. Let's talk about the 1.5.
- [66:14]
A
Right. So the 1.5% was three animals. And that was. We had two cows that went on really long exploratory forays and a bull. And I'll explain them all right now. So we had a 10 month old cow that just disappeared right after release, within maybe less than a month of when we released the animals in the spring of 2015.
- [66:39]
B
Not wearing a collar?
- [66:40]
A
Well, she had a collar on, but at that time we made them out of like spandex. Like you'd wrap your ankle with, you know, the spandex wrap with a little canister collar. And it was a vhf, so I had to fly and actually get within like 10 miles of it to hear it. And then since it was made out of spandex with this growing animal so that it would just rip off early. And when I was radio tracking, that one just disappeared. And so sometimes they go off the air and things. And so within a month or so after release, I couldn't hear her and I thought she was just, you know, her collar fell off and fell in the mud somewhere or something like that. So I didn't know. Well. Well, a biologist in Galena spotted her that winter in a habitat about, I think, 150 miles north of where we released them. And she's by herself still. And we went and caught her then and put a collar.
- [67:28]
B
He spotted her from air?
- [67:29]
A
Yeah, he was a biologist doing aerial surveys and spotted her.
- [67:33]
B
And you were able to go find it?
- [67:35]
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, he. Yeah, his name's Brad. He lives in Galena. He's a great biologist. And he, he kind of kept track of her, you know, and so we went and searched for her and found her in the winter when things were froze up. And. And you know, bison, they're not that hard to see. They're. They're dark and they stay in open areas and so you can, you can generally pick them out. Anyway, we put a collar on and we've tracked her ever since. And she stayed up there, which was in the like the, if anybody knows that, that area, it's like the pilot mountain habitat, you know, at a marshy area, the big open marshy areas. And so she liked that. But then she moved down in the Caillou Flats east of Cal Tag after that, she started kind of migrating back and forth between those two kind of really nice wood bison habitats.
- [68:20]
B
Always by herself.
- [68:21]
A
Always by herself. And she stayed. Now she's, she's east of Caltag now in the Kai.
- [68:26]
B
Still alive.
- [68:26]
A
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So she's old. What is she, what would she be this year? She'd be 20 or 12, you know, coming.
- [68:31]
B
She's never like just lived the rest of her life on old spins faster, I guess so.
- [68:36]
A
And we've had some. That the reason why we don't add more bison there is it, it has really deep snows there and I think without the demands of gestation and lactation, she's been able to survive even in these horrible winters where the snow will be, you know, 40 inches deep with ice layers and all kinds of stuff. And she just, she'll just be standing out there and doing her thing and. Yeah, anyway.
- [68:59]
B
Kind of depressing.
- [69:00]
A
It is. Yeah. But here's, here's the very interesting thing is that I often wonder, well, why was it her? Why did she go do that? I tried to take all the animals from captivity, the full social structure that we had in captivity, because bison social structure is a very powerful thing and it's generally matriarchal led. And then these big groups of bison include all the young animals from calves up to about three years old. Once they're three year olds, the bulls kick off and go do their own thing. But the cows tend to stay with the older cows for their whole.
- [69:34]
B
So.
- [69:35]
A
And I think if you look at bison and the way that they're a generalist grazer and they can occupy all kinds of different niche like I mentioned, from northern Mexico to Pennsylvania to Oregon to the, to the Arctic Ocean. I think they can do so much diversity because of their ability to learn how to adapt to a particular site. And they are very, their adaptation is very plastic. They can, since they're a generalist, they can occupy all these places and just learn what the best thing to eat is there. And I think part of that, that Is the education from the adults, you know, like, hey, you know, eat this and not that and go here and not there and that sort of thing. Anyway, that's the preface to the concept of why I think she went away. The cow that gave birth to that calf that did that, she was still back in captivity. She's one of the cows I didn't take out because she was so ornery that I didn't want her to hurt herself in transport. So I left her back in captivity because I thought she just might throw a fit and, you know, hurt herself.
- [70:33]
B
And her calf didn't have that bond.
- [70:35]
A
To the herd and split. Looking for mom. I don't know that this is totally, you know, a guess, but, dude, if.
- [70:40]
B
You could somehow measure her contentment. Like, is she content or not content.
- [70:49]
A
Where she's at now? I don't know. I don't know.
- [70:52]
B
Someone should go.
- [70:53]
A
I think. I think she knows. I think she knows how to get back, you know? Yeah. Maybe not.
- [70:58]
B
Well, if you look at the work of the. The Monteith shop, Kevin Monteith, those things have incredible abilities.
- [71:07]
A
Yeah. To.
- [71:08]
B
To retrace journeys.
- [71:11]
A
Yeah.
- [71:11]
B
Like, when they go somewhere, they can. I mean, from his stuff, his collaring projects, not with bison, but with mule deer and elk. When they go somewhere, they can damn sure walk back on their same tracks like they know where they're going.
- [71:24]
A
And maybe she was kind of in shock when she left because she just got transported him. I. I don't really know. But onto the other things because it ties into that one. A bull. Then in 2016, so a year after release, left and went north to the Caillou Flats, where this cow that had already gone up there, let's say she's cow number one and he's bull number one. She was going back and forth between the Cayu Flats and the Pilot Mountain area. This bull went up to the Caillou Flats. And so at one point, we had both this cow disperser and a bull disperser in the Caillou Flats. And a lot of local people were like, oh, we're gonna make a herd. You know, this is really gonna work out. And then he stayed there.
- [72:03]
B
And then how close did they get to each other?
- [72:05]
A
Maybe 15 miles apart or something like that. So not quite close enough, I guess, to smell each other or whatever.
- [72:11]
B
It's like a romance.
- [72:12]
A
I know it was. And then rut. Rut happens. Right. So the. This bull that did this dispersal, you know, he just takes off and heads north and rut. And she starts heading west. No, no, She's. She was north of him at the time. Time. And they crossed trails like they were like four days different or five days different or something like that. But they didn't, you know, like turn around, try to find each other or whatever. And the bull went. Now onto the story of the bull. He crossed the Yukon, got into the kayak, went all swam. You know, they're good swimmers. They're very dense and they don't have hollow air, so they swim really low. Like when a bison swims. The only thing sticking out is like it's nostril nostrils, its eyes and its horns, and maybe a little bit of its hump and so that you don't see much and they can be drowned easily with waves. But yeah, he crossed the Yukon. In fact, those cow groups and those exploratory forays I talked about in that first summer, we had some that were crossing the Yukon with calves and everything down in that lower Yukon, it's a mile or more wide.
- [73:10]
B
And then going back again.
- [73:11]
A
Yep, they were just, you know, they go over there for a week and then they cross back to Yukon for a week. Yeah, just crazy stuff. Anyway, this bull went north, he went up to Koyukuk, hit the upper Kobach, went into the Brooks Range, got. Got up in the high Brooks Range between the Kobuk and the no attack. And. And Rut was over by then. He got up in there in like October or something. And I don't know what happened to him, but he died somewhere in there in late winter. And if. If he had a GPS collar and she kind of see his movements. And it looked to me like he got up in this high mountain valley and then couldn't get out of it. And I think what had happened is he must have been injured or something, because when we finally dug him out of like nine feet of snow, he died in there. And the way he was trying to make forays out of this valley, he just couldn't make it out. And I don't think it's because it was too much snow at the time. I think that, you know, he got buried in snow afterward. But anyway, he died. And then the other, the third one that I know of, a big dispersal was a cow that left, left the initial range, went south around Antioch and Kalskeg, and then came back to the main herd. And then she left again a few months later and went down by Russian mission, which is so Eniac and Kalskake are on the lower Kuskum. Then she went down Russian mission, which Is the lower Yukon. And when I say those villages, I don't mean, like, right at the village. I mean, that's the closest landmark. Yeah. She spent much of a winter down in the mountains or the hills around Russian mission. And then she worked her way down and ended up on the lower kuskwim. And she was like.
- [74:45]
B
We.
- [74:45]
A
We called her like a diplomat, because everywhere she went, you know, Everybody was, you know, writing us letters and call, man, the wood bison's here.
- [74:54]
B
So people would run into it.
- [74:56]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah. And they were super excited about it. In fact, you know, we got a nice long letter from the village of eke, where they said, you know, hey, how can we get more wood bison down here? We really like this. You know, we want to start a population here, too, and all that. But it went past eke and went to. Down by quinnehawk.
- [75:15]
B
How far from the release?
- [75:19]
A
It's probably something like 150 miles down there, too. I might have to measure it to be more accurate, but that's roughly about right. And she got into that lower cusquim, which is just phenomenal habitat. There's sedge as far as the eye can see, and it's good, thick stuff. And I had a friend from bethel, the biologist there, Radio tracker, and took a picture of her from the air, and she was just fat. She was really having a good time down there, I think, think. And all alone. All alone. And why can't you sling a male.
- [75:45]
B
Over there or go get her and sling her back or something?
- [75:48]
A
Well, with all this good publicity that she was doing down there, I thought that was going to happen. But she got to near a village of quinahawk, and a guy shot her, essentially. He was.
- [75:58]
B
He get in trouble?
- [75:59]
A
He did, yeah. He was. He was a long ways away. He had a 30. 30 that he got for Christmas or something like that, and he. He shot at her like, nine times. And finally got her wounded enough that he came up and finished her off. And then what do you think it was? Was? Well, first he thought it was a bear, and then that's what he said. And then when he got close and saw it had horns, he thought it was a muskox. And. And then he saw it had a collar, so he shot the collar. So we couldn't use any of that information. And then shot the collar. Yeah, right. And then. Then he got it back to the village. So he did take some of it back to the village. And then the elders were like, you ding dong, you shot the wood bison. You Know. And then he felt kind of bad about that, and then we talked to him about it, and he had to give a. He didn't have anything. He couldn't like fine him or put him in jail or whatever. And. And so he. He had to give a public apology on the radio, which he did. And he had to get all the meat to the elders building and in Bethel and, you know, it was all fed out there and stuff like that, so. But it was. It was pretty much a tragedy. It would have been kind of neat to have bison and.
- [77:01]
B
Because I'd like to hear that public apology.
- [77:04]
A
Yeah, me too.
- [77:05]
B
Was it lengthy?
- [77:06]
A
I don't know. I don't know. It was on the radio there. There. Yeah. I. I didn't have an opportunity. Local radio Y. Yep.
- [77:14]
B
So there's kind of a long tradition in America of seeing something you're not quite sure what it is and shooting it.
- [77:22]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:23]
B
That's a. That's like a common response with people.
- [77:26]
A
I've had several old timers call me and say, hey, you can't do this, because people. Local people are just going to shoot them all. And I found that not to be true. I think a lot of most local people are pretty darn excited about it, and they. They want it to. They want to be, you know, conserv. Conservationists for these animals. You know, they want it to work. But there's.
- [77:48]
B
In defense of that one bro, though, the muskox is plausible maybe. I mean, if he wasn't aware that you guys were doing the reintroduction, what the hell else you gonna think it is at a distance?
- [78:01]
A
I don't know. Big brown object.
- [78:03]
B
Yeah, I wouldn't. Time in the fog. We went after what we went after. Grizzly bear turned out to be a muskox in the fog, didn't shoot. But I mean, it was enough to make us cross river. Heavy fog, but it was enough to paddle across the river. And they were like, oh, shoot, that's muskox.
- [78:19]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's all I know.
- [78:23]
B
That was the. Took off, man. You got to go save that one. I'm not gonna be able to sleep at night. I didn't realize it was still alive, man.
- [78:32]
A
I don't know. Yeah, I mean, a lot of folks say that too. We should. A lot of folks argue that we should supplementally feed when conditions get tough, too. There's been times I don't think that.
- [78:43]
B
But I think that wouldn't go along with the objective.
- [78:47]
A
Right. To have wild populations doing wild things. Yep.
- [78:50]
B
It wouldn't It'd be like a, It'd be like, this is just me talking. In my view, if you start feeding them. Yeah, then what are you doing?
- [79:01]
A
Right?
- [79:02]
B
It's not, it's not anything. Well, but here's the Gone.
- [79:05]
A
Well, one of the problems with trying to go do anything with her is that she is outside of the areas listed in the environmental assessment that we can do stuff. That's another thing where it comes down to the esa, the Endangered Species Species act, making things difficult is we have to go with what is written like 10 years ago in that, in that document. We can't just like, go. I would like to go the path of least resistance. There's a lot of villages that say bring them here. But we're like, I'm sorry, we can't because the essay says.
- [79:28]
B
No, I want to be, I want to set the record straight on something. If I was in your shoes, I would do the same thing you're doing. I'm just saying, like, as a guy sitting here feeling all sad about that one and anthropomorphizing its experience, that makes me say, like, go get it. But of course, in your position, you can't go take your mom money and be like, homie, you spend thousands of dollars to do what? Right. Like, I totally understand the issue, but here's, here's when you look at the numbers and I'm rooting for you on this, I'm rooting for you on it. But when you look at the numbers, man, you guys have put more animals on the ground in Anoko, in the Anoko Valley. You've put more animals on the ground than are currently allowed live.
- [80:11]
A
That's right.
- [80:12]
B
So what, like, what does that say to you? I mean, you addressed this series of, of bad winners. Right?
- [80:21]
A
Right. Yeah.
- [80:23]
B
Where, where are you at, like, like, where are you at right now mentally, about this whole thing, knowing that you turned out, what, 140 or.
- [80:31]
A
We released 130 right off the bat.
- [80:33]
B
So you got put 130 on the ground, but you don't have, have 130 alive right now, so.
- [80:40]
A
Correct.
- [80:40]
B
You would expect with a reintroduction and they're exploiting new habitat. They're not competing with other animals. There's all this room to grow. You'd expect that it just be like, boom, boom, boom, like population growth, population growth, population growth, population growth. And that you'd be seeing it like, skyrocket.
- [81:00]
A
Yep.
- [81:01]
B
Right.
- [81:01]
A
That would be the hope.
- [81:02]
B
Yeah. But it didn't.
- [81:04]
A
Nope.
- [81:04]
B
So what's your, like, what's your take.
- [81:07]
A
There's been several years of growth like that, even up to 25% growth in a year. The problem is we've had these catastrophic bad winters with ice, you know, rain on snow events and ice layers in the snow. Like I mentioned, it makes it hard for them to get to their forage. And you can lose a lot more bison to mortality in winter than you can replace that by calves. Cause, you know, there's only so many adult cows that are of breeding age age. So the population can only grow 20% or 25% in a year based on reproduction. But it can lose 80% or 100% in a year. In the spring of 2018, we lost 30%. Spring of 2020, we lost 20%. These are rough numbers. But in the spring of 23, we lost. Was it 23? Yeah. Spring of 23, we lost 50% of the population. And the two previous years were really great survival. So. So 21 and 22, like all of the calves and all of the yearlings survived. And the population was just cranking. And then we had. What happened was it snowed in mid October about 2ft deep, and then it melted down to about 8 inches of just concrete and just locked in their forage. And then they had to go through seven months of winter with most of their forage locked in the ice.
- [82:26]
B
Then you had a bunch get drowned, right?
- [82:28]
A
Yeah, right after we released them in the spring of 2015, we had about nine that we knew of go through the ice. You know, there's always going to be bison going through the ice. That's. That's a common cause of death in, in Canada, you know, where they have a lot more bison than we do. And it's, you know, I mean, humans still fall through the ice, but they're.
- [82:52]
B
Oh, they're real. I've written about this. I mean, they got an incredible capacity to drive the drown. Yeah, you wouldn't think of it.
- [82:58]
A
Well, they're so. They're so low in the water that they can't get out. So once they get in a hole in the ice, it's. It's done. And I've had them go through holes by beaver houses where they're just. They're just under there, you know, and you can't even radio track them until the spring when. When the ice melts. And I can hear the collar and the carcass will, you know, float up to the surface and stuff. But like a moose, when a moose falls to the ice, you can see a whole bunch of struggle where it tried to get out for a long time and stuff because it's, you know, somewhat boring, buoyant. But a bison is so dance. Yeah. They're just under the ice.
- [83:30]
B
So what do you think? Like, what do you think there? What do you think is going to happen? And, and let me set this up too, as you answer that, because here's the deal though. You got like these other, you got these other four populations trying things. So Copper River, Farewell burn, Chitna. Right. Has some. Is that it for, for planes?
- [83:50]
A
Yeah.
- [83:50]
B
So three other groups and Delta. Yeah, yeah, Delta. I knew there's four since the 1920s. So for a century there have been plains. There have been these populations of plains bison which for all intents and purposes could be just as well adapted as anything else to live there. So for a century you've got these populations of buffalo that weren't even put on, on scientifically selected habitats. They were turned out that have sub. That have survived for a century now in Delta Junction. Sure, they, they hang out in those oat fields and there's agriculture around, but the other three groups are just living off the land and they got their ups and downs, but like they made it and if you didn't mess with them, it's safe to assume in 100 years they'd still be there. Right. So that makes me think that like there's a really good chance that these things could take off. I don't know how. Like, I don't know, just seeing like other animals are doing in other places, why not there? But what, what's come to be your opinion about the survivability of that herd and could it ever turn into like thousands of animals?
- [85:04]
A
Well, the way I look at that, an uncle herd as I look at individual years and, and what to try to understand their potential. So they've only been there 10 years and like I mentioned, they're. There's years where the snow was fairly normal, it was fairly soft, they could get through it. That the population gained 20 to 25%. If you can maintain that over the long term, they'll be in the thousands in a short time, a couple decades. The problem is this weather regime that we're in right now is much different than the history that we had before we released them. If you look at the weather records before we release them, compared to just the last 10 years. And I've got a good slide on this and a lot of presentations I give that you can find on YouTube or whatever that in the last 10 or 15 years it's been so wet and so warm in Alaska that we get these rain on snow vents and ice layers and things. And a bunch of that has happened just during this time that the Anoko bison have been out. Even with all that, they still have grown in seven of the 10 years that they've been out there. But the problem is that a catastrophic winter can kill a lot more than what they can reproduce in a year. So right now I'd say they're persistent. But the reality is every one of these populations is an experiment. We could sit on our hands and just say, well let's not do this because it's too scary and they might die. But we can also just say, let's give it a shot. There's good habitat here. The snow, they might be able to handle the snow, they might not. And then you give it a good go. And so that's kind of where we're at now I think is trying to just run these experiments and see if it's a reasonable thing. That's why I mentioned it's so it's such a difficult time, you know, and all like all the money and the legal process and the politics all came together to do it now. But we're in the middle of this thing where ungulates in Alaska are just getting pounded by these warm wet winters. And I'm trying to do it right in the middle of that.
- [86:56]
B
Let's jump to the next one. So that wasn't the only release site. Correct. Some time went by and you moved on to release site number two.
- [87:04]
A
Yeah. So there's the three release sites listed in the environmental assessment and that's the Anoko Flats, the Minto Flats and the Yukon Flats. And we were directed from the commissioner, which is the highest level person in fishing game a couple years ago, to pursue the Minto Flats one. And so we went through the public planning process and, and wrote a management plan and we took bison out to the wild in Minto Flat State Game Refuge in the fall of 2024. And then we held them in a hundred acre release pen that we built out there all winter long and then released them about May 13th of 2025. That was about 60 animals. Since then we've. We had three calves and lost two bison. So we're at 61 animals now. And yeah, that herd seems to be doing pretty well and it's pretty exciting. Now that habitat there doesn't have as much historically of the heavy snows that are wet with icing rain on snow events, but it does happen out there. You know, there wasn't a rain on snow event to my understanding until about 15 years ago in interior Alaska like around Fairbanks area. But now it's much more common and like I mentioned last winter it happened twice in the Fairbanks area. So some of it's just going to be luck. And the weird thing is if it's colder like, like the historic winters, the wind, the snow is soft, bison can get it through without a problem. If it's just a little bit warmer, you have these chinooks that melt out the snow and so then they can easily get to the forage. And when that happens that's happened twice in the Anoko and that only one meltdown in the course of the winter produced about 100% survival on bison that winter. And so all it takes is just a little bit warmer to where in a storm comes, it melts stuff out. Well, we're not in that regularly and we're not in the cold part regular. We're stuck right in this middle thing where snow is wet and there's ice layers in it. And so if there really is climate change that's making us go more warm, I'm hoping we just get off this pinnacle of difficulty one way or another. Another.
- [89:19]
B
Yeah. It'd be like if that would be that as the climate changes, if it wound up being that that was one of the winners, you know, that, that it made that whatever moose suffer and bison. Yeah, it's going to take the, those balancing acts have occurred.
- [89:41]
A
Right.
- [89:42]
B
And it would, maybe it'd be some peculiar balancing act.
- [89:44]
A
You know I'm not a climatologist but a lot of folks from the University of Alaska that I've talked to that are, have mentioned they think the future of interior Alaska is very conducive to bison but not wild to think about. That stuff is changing so fast. You know, like a lot of the predictive models that I'd heard of before in interior Alaska was drier, more drier summers, more fire occurrence. So it would kind of, kind of convert more to an Aspen parkland sort of thing like Yukon Territory is. But it's gotten so much wetter just so fast that. But I don't know if that's still true with those climate models.
- [90:20]
B
Yeah. You know what surprises me is that I guess I don't know if surprise is the right word. Yeah, sure. That wolves don't hammer them or the brown bears don't hammer them. But then you think like they don't know how to deal with them because they can. They Have a defense mechanism. Right. They got sharp horns, they got really powerful hooks. And I've read in the past that, like, it's a. It's a real learning curve for wolves to figure out how to kill one.
- [90:51]
A
Yeah.
- [90:52]
B
Without themselves getting killed. But I think you did say you've had a couple.
- [90:56]
A
Yeah. There's an argument out there that with these reintroduced populations, it takes wolves and all predators maybe a couple decades, 20, 25 years. You know, that's kind of the Canadian experience for the predators to learn how to really kill efficiently. Bison. But even after they do, and even in populations that persist, have persisted forever, like buffalo national park and Yellowstone, predation rates are low in bison compared to all deer species, like, you know, whitetails, muleys, you know, moose, elk, that sort of thing. Much higher predation rates in deer species. And if you think about a bison, they kind of look like a, you know, big, slow animal, but they're not. They're quick and agile, and they can kick with all four feet. They got the horns. They're super strong. They're big, big. They're fast. You know, they're fast runners, and so it's hard to kill those things. And then they work socially together against predators. So, you know, when a bear shows up, they'll. Or any predator. And I've seen this from the air, you know, when wolves show up, they'll approach those predators, which is really interesting.
- [92:02]
B
You know, I mean, they go to them.
- [92:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. They'll just kind of. The calves will kind of work their way to the middle of the group, and the cows will just kind of like walk toward the wolves. And I've seen, really. I've seen a group. Group of bison in the Anoko where there was, you know, three or four wolves kind of around the edge. And. And. And they just kind of had a standoff for half hour, 40 minutes. And then. And. And the cows just, you know, kept, you know, working their way toward the wolves. And eventually the wolves just kind of got tired of it and. And worked their way, you know, went and did something else. That.
- [92:31]
B
That's a spear fisherman move with sharks.
- [92:33]
A
Really?
- [92:33]
B
The friends of mine have shown me. Don't. Yeah, they'll go at. They'll go to him. And it throws the shark's whole perception of what's going on. It like, changes his whole groove. He's like, home at what? Yeah, you're coming to me. And they don't like it.
- [92:47]
A
There's a body language. There's a predator and prey body language. And I remember the. The Most significant time I've ever done that. If you'll allow me. A little rabbit hole here is a buddy and I landed in the spring for bear hunting in. In the Brooks Range. And at night, overnight, the river came up, and so we couldn't take off in the place that we'd landed. And so we had to make a new Runway farther up on this gravel bar, and there's a bunch of rocks. So we're throwing off all these rocks, and we're just, you know, heads down, throwing rocks and. And making this Runway. And at one point, we look up, and there's a wolf that was kind of in between us, and he's scouting us out. And you can tell he's in predator mode. He's looking at us very carefully, you know, and. And, like, kind of stalking us a little bit. And we were kind of just bent over doing all this work. And he thought, man, these must be prey animals, you know? And my buddy, like, looks at me, and there was a gun leaning against the airplane. And you could tell, like, as soon as my buddy, like, went to, like, looked back at this animal in a predatory posture, that wolf knew that immediately. He's like, oh, my God, these are predators. They're not praying. Boom, he was gone in a second. And so. So I think about that a lot when I'm working with wildlife. If I can act like a prey animal, I can, you know, make a lot more progress being around bison than I can a predator. You know, cowboys do that a little bit with horses, too. You know, if you try to act like a predator, they're not real happy about that.
- [94:12]
B
A buddy of mine, we were talking about this. This thing with. With shark body language and sharks, and a buddy of mine who's had a ton of exposure to sharks, he had an interesting observation he made me one time where I was. I was commenting on. And I didn't grow up around sharks, so everything's new to me with sharks. But I was commenting on. It's weird that you can, like, intimidate them by going at them. And he said they can't afford to get hurt. Like, when he gets hurt, he's done. The minute he's hurt, his bodies will rip him apart. They're just careful, you know? And it's like, you think about two of the wolf or a bear, whatever, whatever. Like, they don't want to get hurt, you know, and you put them in. And if you put them in a situation where sometimes you put them in a situation where they're like, I don't know, this thing maybe is going to mess me up. It just changes their conversation, you know, they don't want to get hurt.
- [95:04]
A
Well, back to predation on bison. I think that's their strategy is to try to face those, those predators. And I think with bears it works really well because you got, you know, 20, 30 bison and one bear. It's a little. Wolves can kind of break that because I think wolves as a group can work against a group of bison and finally get them running and then try to pick something out of the population. You see that in the videos from Wood Buffalo National Park. Of course, Wood Buffalo national park is a diseased herd. So both brucellosis and tuberculosis brings down enough animals that wolves can actually have a better time killing animals there than a lot of these non diseased populations. But I think, I think that strategy that bison have to avoid predation is probably central to the reason why humans kill them off in North America is because we have weapons that if you stand and face a human being and the human being has a rifle, you're done. You have to run and get away. And that's what Cervid's deer species have done is they run and get away and they hide and things. Bison are in the wide open and they stand and face you. And so there's an argument out there that that bison are the only really, you know, the only North American ungulate that absolutely requires modern conservation to, to exist because of their predator avoidance strategy. Yeah, it's impossible to just let people shoot whatever they want with rifles or, or even bows and they'll just all be gone.
- [96:32]
B
Well, you look at another one, musk ox have a similar approach and they're very easy to wipe out.
- [96:37]
A
Yep.
- [96:38]
B
They're also existed at much lower numbers, but they were very easy to wipe out.
- [96:42]
A
Yep.
- [96:42]
B
I mean they're ripen those things out. The Russians, Russians, even just the Russians initiating the fur trade was wiping out muskox in the Arctic, you know, because it would be the same thing. Like, yeah, they don't boogie.
- [96:53]
A
And so far, you know, Alaska's been trying to restore muskox too since 1950. And one of the issues there is that bears have figured out, you know, grizzly bears have figured out predation of muskox and they can get them running and pull out animals. You know, musk ox go into that, you know, the tight group where they put the calves in the middle and stuff. But if they can get them running, they can, they can kill some. And I think bison are just so much Larger, you know, bison are, you know, roughly three times larger than. Than a muskox. And it's a little bit tougher for a bear to kind of make that happen, I think. But.
- [97:26]
B
So let's talk about the last one is the last area. So you got the Anoko Valley, Minto Flats, where I've hunted ducks and fished. It's a cool spot. I'll tell you a funny thing. In mental Flats, we one time at Minto Flats, cats had been duck hunting and left our ducks land. I mean, just right in our camp. In the morning we had them all gutted and they're gone. And mink had hauled them off. And we were able to recover them just by hunting around. You find them stashed in the wood pile, stashed in holes, you know, but. So you got some there. But it seems like the real promise, man, is that, that, that the Yukon flash flats would work out like what needs to fall into place to do something at Yukon Flats. And if you imagine it, Yukon Flats. And you can say this about the other release sites too, like if everything went perfectly, what is the estimate of how many you could have at Yukon Flats?
- [98:28]
A
Well, the estimate from the habitat assessment in 1995 was. Was more than 2,000.
- [98:35]
B
Okay.
- [98:36]
A
So that's not really a number. It just means greater than.
- [98:39]
B
Greater than 2,000.
- [98:40]
A
Yeah.
- [98:41]
B
So it could, I mean, let me ask you this. Could it possibly dethrone Yellowstone national park as the high number figuring there, you know, typically around, you know, 3,000, 4,000. Could it possibly. I mean, would it have the potential. Potential to knock that off, to knock Yellowstone off its. Off its bison pedestal?
- [99:05]
A
Well, humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. But I think that, yeah, I think it has the habitat.
- [99:13]
B
Absolutely has the habitat for it.
- [99:16]
A
It's going to depend a little bit about the appetite for harvest from human beings in Yukon Flats and Alaska, A little bit about the social density. So if we have, we end up with a lot of bison in Yukon Flats. How do people do the people like that? You know, when it comes to bison interaction with infrastructure, human infrastructure. And so there's a lot of regulating factors there. But if you just take like what could live in Yukon Flats? Yeah, absolutely. I think we could have way more than Yellowstone in there. But you know, the Asiatic herd in Yukon territory is ahead of us now. They're, you know, they're passing 2,000 with a growing population. And so.
- [99:55]
B
Sorry, say it again.
- [99:56]
A
The, the Asiac herd is the, is the herd between Whitehorse and the Alaska border and Yukon Territory.
- [100:00]
B
Got it. Got it.
- [100:01]
A
They're going past 2,000 animals with a growing herd right now. That's super productive.
- [100:06]
B
I mean, and they're just in, like, boreal forests and like, aspen stands and.
- [100:10]
A
Yeah, it's so weird. Yeah, they're just open mixed forests, essentially, with. With some kind of aspen parkland. They've got some old, like, Pleistocene step kind of habitat on some of the big hills, you know, where it's just kind of these grassy. It looks a lot like that picture on your wall there, where it's just like the grassy slopes with, you know, you know, spruce and things mixed in. But it's mostly boreal forests and a lot of it's burned and stuff, you know. But that. The productivity of that population always astounds me. And I'm a little bit jealous, to be honest with you.
- [100:41]
B
Yeah. So what would it take to be able to do a release up at you? Like. Like what are the obstacles right now to doing a lease release? A release on Yukon flats is the obstacle, having the animals?
- [100:54]
A
Not really. We've got the two captive populations in Alaska. We've got an agreement with Canada to get more animals. We've gone through the public process, the public planning process here. In the last few years. We had our third public planning meeting where we get 30 different interest groups or representatives from 30 different interest groups together in one room, and we sit down for three days and we go through every possible thing anybody could ever want to say about bison. We record all that, we summarize it all, and we turn it into recommendations for the board of game and fish and game and local landowners. It's in what's called a management plan. That's where we're at right now. That public process has happened, and now we have to write that into a management plan, which I haven't done yet. So I'm going to be summarizing the public process here over the next month or two. And then I'll be trying to write a management plan over the course of the next year. We're going to work out some logistics on how to get bison into Yukon flats. So a whole bunch of Yukon flats is national wildlife refuge, and a bunch more of it is native corporation land, Both local native corporations and regional native corporations. And then there's about 500 square miles of state land in eastern Yukon flats. And that's where we're going to go is to that state land. We don't have any access over land to that state land. So we're going to fly them all in and So I got to work out all those details and I've done some proof of concept work with flying bison and smaller airplanes like De Havilland Beavers.
- [102:26]
B
Really?
- [102:26]
A
Yeah, I flew two.
- [102:28]
B
You can stand one up in there?
- [102:29]
A
No, no, no. They're immobilized. So you just dart them, toss them in there with a, a lightweight veterinarian and, and go for it. And so I flew to the Mento Flats that way.
- [102:41]
B
Yeah, because a beaver can haul like £2,000, right?
- [102:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. And you got a 600 pound yearling or something like that. It's no big deal. The two cows that I hauled were 22 months olds and they were, they were something like that, £700 maybe.
- [102:51]
B
So why not barge them in?
- [102:53]
A
Well, the state land that we're going to go to is maybe 20 miles or more from the Yukon River. So there's no barge in. There is a little tiny corner of it that's many, many miles, probably 2, 300 miles from the closest, like boat landing. And you could get there by riverboat. And so maybe you could haul one at a time on this, like, you know, three day treks in a riverboat or something like that. But it'd be a real challenge. So.
- [103:18]
B
But you got the legal go ahead to do it.
- [103:20]
A
Yeah, well, I won't until I write the management plan and the Border Game approves the management plan. But right now all the political support exists and I just gotta make it through that last process of getting the plan written, approved internally in Fish and Game and then approved by the Board of Game, which is a panel of people appointed by the governor that sets wildlife regulations in Alaska.
- [103:47]
B
You know, I mentioned Colorado's recent move to sort of bifurcate bison in the state of Colorado, where they've said there are bison in Colorado that are live livestock. We're creating a new classification. And just remind folks, it's a new classification saying buffalo that come in naturally into the state, that walk into the state, will be treated as wildlife. They pave the way for hunting, which, which is a brilliant move because the thing, a thing you wind up with when you do introductions or reintroduce productions is you wind up with, you might have wildlife managers that are planning on using hunting as a control mechanism in the future, and they'll bring in an animal and then later down the road you'll encounter public resistance to hunting, even though it was the intention all along. People down the road will be like, wait a minute, I thought they were endangered or imperiled. And now you're telling me we're have a hunting season for them. So in Colorado Auto, they've already laid out that they're like they will be a big game animal. And the bill they passed even specified what a tag will cost. They set out the fine. If you kill one or capture one, it's a $110,000 fine. There's $1,000 restitution to the state for the loss of its asset. There's a resident tag press price. There's like a really hefty like $2700 non resident tag price. But they don't even have the animals yet. But they're laying out like, here's what it's going to look like. Right as this becomes a thing, here's what it'll look like. What would it look like in the future? Like, how have you guys contemplated what it would look like when one of these populations is in the many hundreds or moves into the thousands? What would it ever look like to open up hunting opportunities? Because that's probably part of the public buy in with locals is that in some way they are setting up a future in which they have a diversified portfolio of wild game available to them. Yeah, right. So what would, how have you contemplated this?
- [106:13]
A
So the primary reason for this restoration is to restore this subspecies as a component of the ecosystem that functions in this empty niche. So that's the, that's the number one reason. But if we are successful at it, then it will be a renewable natural resource that we can harvest. And that's what you like you mentioned. There's a lot of people that are counting on that. That's why we get a lot of support from dear average person is because they think that someday they could harvest that animal. And it's a pretty big boon, you know, to harvest, you know, 800 pounds of meat or something like that. You know, it's well worth it to a citizen to have that on the landscape. The way our regulatory system works is that every few years for each area, the border game meets and they hear proposals from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. And just average citizens can just put a proposal in to change the regulation in Alaska. And so that then there's a process of locally elected citizen advisory committees in each village and each large community. They can also produce proposals and they vote any proposal from anybody else up or down. And that all works its way up to the Board of Game. And when they get to these Board of Game meetings, the Board of Game reviews that proposal. They hear all the public testimony from everybody else, including the department's perspective Fish and Game Department, which is. Is usually just a biological perspective. And then they make a decision right then there. This is how we're going to do it. But there's a lot of options like I've written in the management plan for the Minto population, or lower Tanana population as it's the formal name where, you know, there could be drawing permits, there could be registration permits, there could be all of the permits that are available to hunt any other species is a possibility. And so we really don't know what that hunt structure is. When we first started releasing animals in the Anoko or before we were going to go to the Anoko with the animals, the planning team there set up this. They had it all figured out. They were like, okay, the hunt's going to be this many drawing permits, this many locally registrate, locally available registration permits.
- [108:18]
B
They were getting into numbers before they had them on the ground.
- [108:20]
A
Totally. Yeah. And they had, they had. We're going to have a trespass fee on, on these lands and, and so people can, you know, access these bison on private lands. And like we're going to have a scholarship fund that above a bunch of these trespass fee dollars goes into and that helps local people go to college to study. You know, they were just going for it. And I thought it was a beautiful piece of work of people trying to work together to make something happen. It was just absolutely wonderful. However, over time when the Anoka population didn't perform as well and then different people, you know, were elected into different. These different groups that helped make that. Then it changed over time. And so, so I think one of the important things to realize is that it's not the people from 1928, when they released the bison in Delta Junction that determine how we're going to hunt those bison today. It's the people of today that determine how we're going to hunt bison today. That's a good point. Through the board of game thing. And so we can record everything that people want to see happen with wood bison now before they go on the landscape. And that's why we have this public planning process where we write down everything everybody says, any opposition, any support, any concerns, all that stuff, and then try to address that in these management plans so that later on when the board game does hear proposals regarding a harvestable surplus in a particular bison population, then they can look back at these recommendations that were there originally and be like, oh yeah, well, they really wanted the harvest to be. To include. Include local people as much as it Includes everybody else and, you know, whatever, and then try to act in that way if they. If they choose to. But as, you know, public trust, resources, there's a lot of conflict there because they're all. And there always will be. That's why we have a board of game and all this, citizen advisory groups and all that is because there will always be conflict about something that we all own together, you know, because we're a territorial social animal, and we want those resources to go to our group, not some other group, you know, whatever our group is. And so it's a challenge.
- [110:29]
B
Yeah, you raise a really good point when you say that when it's time.
- [110:35]
A
If.
- [110:36]
B
And when it's time to do a hunt, it'll be the people, then figure it out. Because, like. Like you said with the original, the 1928 ones, I mean, think about what happened since then and now state, the Native Claim Settlement Act. I mean, you know, I mean, like, you can't anticipate totally. You know what I mean?
- [110:53]
A
Right. And in Alaska, regulations, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but prior to, like, 1989 or so, we could discriminate based on where you live. We could give more permits to people in this town than people in this town because, say, they were closer to the resource or they had more subsistence, you know, history there in a particular resource or something like that. Well, we lost that to a court case in the late 1980s where it said, all right, the Alaska Constitution says that all people have equal access to wildlife resources, and so we have to treat all people equally. We can't discriminate based on where you live. That was a difficult thing. Well, then the federal government stepped in and said, oh, no, that's not fair. Through anilca, we are going to say that you have to provide a priority for rural people on resources forces in, you know, in. On federal land. And so that created this kind of dual management system between the state and the federal government. And that's been really complicated. Well, that just happened.
- [111:49]
B
That's gonna. I mean, we're gonna talk about this on an upcoming episode. But that system is. Is in a review process right now. Yeah, like the current. The Trump administration is reviewing the federal subsistence board and some of the decisions they've made recently. Recently. And so that could be, again, you know, just another. We don't need to get into it now. But I mean, it's like.
- [112:13]
A
But my point is that things change.
- [112:15]
B
They're poking and prodding at it right.
- [112:16]
A
Now, you know, and you just added to It, I mean, I think things change. You know, 30 years ago the state could do that then the federal government can do that. Well, who knows? 30 years from now when we have a big harvestable surplus of bison in a particular area, who knows what the regulations are going to be then.
- [112:28]
B
Hey, I don't want to, I don't want to paint into a corner here. But I mean, just like, mean, just, just for conversation sake, what would you put 130 animals on the ground? Okay, you put 130 wood bison on the Ano in the lower Anoko Valley. If you just had to get like, what would be a number that would make sense to you in the future? Where, if you heard from your grave or wherever you heard heard, hey, they're running a bunch of. They're giving out 20 per permits in the Anoko Valley. You'd think to yourself, well, I hope there's at least blank animals on the ground. 10 permits. They're giving out 10 permits. You'd say, I hope there's at least.
- [113:16]
A
Yeah, you know, I want to see a minimum viable population of 400 or more for the long term term. But we've harvested plains bison. You mentioned all the herds, the plains bison herds in Alaska and a lot of those bisons. Bison herds have been managed at less than 200 for decades and decades. And so we know it's possible. And I think we could have a hunt in the Anoko now. We could have one or two drawing permits there, no problem. Without any sort of issue with.
- [113:45]
B
Right now.
- [113:46]
A
Yeah, right now. But the planning team doesn't want that yet. Now, the last.
- [113:51]
B
It does feel that, I mean, I'm all for a little hunting, you know, but it does feel a little premature.
- [113:56]
A
Well, what they. What the planning. So the planning team includes all kinds of people, right? It's all the local people and urban people and safari club and animal welfare groups and all that.
- [114:05]
B
We all get animal welfare groups in on it. I didn't do anything.
- [114:09]
A
I think I'll let that one go with. So we're doing it. It's just part of. We're trying to get. Be inclusive. Right. You know, get everybody in there. Maybe animal welfare groups is the wildlife, I don't know, like Alaska Wildlife Alliance. And there's another one. I can't remember the name of it right now. Anyway, we just want to keep everybody involved so people don't feel alienated and come back later with the issues. Right.
- [114:33]
B
No, I understand.
- [114:34]
A
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh, so this group that's the Planning team, the site specific planning team for the unoco, they first started out and said, well, we don't want to start any harvest until we have a harvestable surplus of 20 animals. We're going to run, run part of that into drawing permits and part of that into locally issued registration permits so that local people will have the ability to harvest in the presence of drawing permits. Well, when the population wasn't that productive then now they lowered that to 10. They're like, well, when there's a harvestable surplus of 10. And so at the last meeting I was like, well do you guys, there's enough to have a harvest of a few. Do you guys want to harvest a few? And they were like, nope. We want to start this in a way that there's local harvest and, and drawing permits. And of course drawing permits do service local people too, but they just have a small chance of getting the permit. And we have no way because of that court case and the last constitution, we have no way of just giving permits to local people. But we have a way of you can issue local registration permits where you're more likely to get it if you're local. The problem is the planning team can predict this and they can say what they want want, but ultimately it'll come down to a board game action. And nobody's done a proposal to, to, to, to start a hunt in the Anoko. If somebody would, would propose that there should be a hunt in the Anoko, then that would kind of force the issue and we'd have to go through that, that process.
- [116:04]
B
So yeah, With the, when you talk about the permit thing and the local hunt and all, all that, they also have a mechanism, the state has a mechanism too where you have to destroy the trophy value of the animal.
- [116:23]
A
That's, that is in some places. Yeah. In some species.
- [116:26]
B
Yeah, it's not on said. Here's the deal though. You can't take the horns, you gotta cut the horns in half. You would lose a lot of outside. You wouldn't lose my interest, but you'd lose a lot of outside interest.
- [116:38]
A
Yeah, that happens. People do that if they think that the know. Yeah, there's a bunch of little tools like that to try to level the playing field between different user groups.
- [116:50]
B
But I think, man, I think that you got to wait till, you got to wait till you're on a steady upward incline, man. I think it's a little early right.
- [116:57]
A
Now and I think that's going to depend on the weather, which is something we can't predict. Right.
- [117:01]
B
But I think it's like, probably don't care what I think, but I'll tell you anyway. I think that having that, that, I think that having that hunter buy in is really important. And it's a, it's a thing that frustrates me down here in the Northern Rockies and. Well, in the entire, in the West. The thing that frustrates me is it's just an area where you don't see, we don't see widespread hunter buy in on buffalo restoration. I think people can't picture it, meaning this whole brucellosis thing. If someone, if a politician in Montana said, hey man, we're really worried about Bruce Losis, we're going to start killing every elk that walks out of that park. It's political suicide. It's political suicide. Hunters have a fit, you know, hunters that have fit, fit, they're like, if any elk walks out of the park, we're shooting it or hauling it away. Yeah, dude, they would, they would be apoplectic. Hunters would be. And as much as I invite people to be like, no, no, no, listen, like, restoring these animals is a long term hunting play. Like restoring these animals, I'm always like, picture, man, picture that. We have public herds on public land and you draw tags and hunt them like we do for moose and everything. Everything else. And I think it's too far fetched. Like you just don't see hunters in on it some, but not all. It's too far fetched a picture. But I view in order to get more, more of the animals on the landscape, I think that it's going to be really important for hunters to like advocate for that, knowing that it might not even be for their benefit, but it might be for their kids benefit. And that happens all the time. Time because you look at like you go to like look at people in bighorn, all the people that do work on bighorn sheep, okay, all the people that support Wild Sheep foundation, there's a lot of people that support wild sheep recovery and conservation that are never going to hunt bighorns. They're never going to hunt bighorns. I've never hunted a big horn. I'm all for bighorn recovery. Right. So it's not just the people do it. Like the people that were involved in bringing elk back into Camp Kentucky. There were people that were heavily involved in bringing elk back into Kentucky that knew they were never going to hunt elk. But they did it as hunters, right? They did it as they, they were their, their heart as a hunter motivated them to get involved even Though they themselves weren't going to benefit from it. So I think that like, I wish more hunters were involved in, in like in building up public, publicly owned herds, using public land as a long term play of being not just that you're doing the right thing by the wildlife, but motivated as a long term play of restoring this really important game species onto the American landscape. It's like the forgotten game animal.
- [120:10]
A
Yeah.
- [120:10]
B
And you go back and look like the tribes that lived here, here historically, that was their pick, man. They were slumming it when they ate deer meat, they were slumming it when they ate pronghorn. Yeah, that's what they wanted. And I just think we need to get back there.
- [120:27]
A
Yeah, I think that that is the main motivation for most people is the concept that someday they might get something. But we have to be.
- [120:34]
B
But I don't think it's a bad motivation.
- [120:36]
A
No, no, it's not. But we have to be as biologists, we have to be brutally honest with them and say this is an experiment. We're going to try to make a renewable resource. We're going to try to fill this empty niche in the ecosystem and improve nutrient cycling at all trophic levels from insects up to human beings. But it may fail. The Unocca population, as you pointed out, is not climbing at this moment. Maybe these other populations that we try, maybe they won't work out either. But if we look at history and we look at what bison can do do, it might be a massive success. You know, dude, I hope to try.
- [121:13]
B
And earlier I made like I made a comment about, I think before we started recording, I made a comment to you without explaining myself, where I said use an oral tradition or archaeology or paleontology to prove that bison were in the modern period present in Alaska. Right. So that you have the political cover of saying it's, it's a reintroduction, production or recovery effort which relies on you saying they were here and they were wiped out by people or people were influential in wiping them out. That gives you the political cover, right, to go ahead and bring the animals back in. And I said, I don't really even care if it's true or not. What I meant by that is at European contact we had 40 million of them, somewhere around 40 million, you hear 28 million, you hear 60 million. A bunch, there was a bunch. And not all areas are suitable. So in bringing the animal back, me personally, I'm not so concerned about having it match up exactly to where they were historically. I mentioned that group that's living on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. They're spending a bunch of time in Grand Canyon National Park.
- [122:32]
A
Park.
- [122:33]
B
And in this whole conversation about whether the animals belong there is this thing, well, how many were there historically? And they're like, oh, it was marginal habitat at best. It was fringe habitat at best. I'm like, I don't care. It's suitable. Like it's a suitable location for them now. They can be there now. Maybe there, maybe there were more of them 100 miles away. Like, I don't care. The public wants them there. The habitat supports them being there. It's. It's okay for them to be there. Let them be there. Because there's places like they're not going to be in downtown Dodge City, but Dodge City had a lot. It ain't going to have a lot now. So it's like where it's suitable. Put them on there. Right?
- [123:17]
A
Yeah.
- [123:17]
B
Because there's a lot of places we covered up. And so if it winds up being that you can go into valleys and Alaska, Alaska. And it's not. And they're not coming at the cost. They're not pushing moose into extinction, they're not pushing caribou into extinction and local people want them there. I'm like, go for it. Because we have a lot of ground to recover.
- [123:39]
A
I completely agree. Yep. The, the problem is right now is the, the, the constraints of the Endangered Species act make it difficult to just do those paths of least resistance where we find, find places that people want them and the habitat's good and we can just put them there. We just can't go willy nilly like that. We have to stick to the that. And, and it's a lot easier for.
- [123:59]
B
Me to be a dude sitting here like telling you all about everything that should happen. Like, yeah, you're the hu. There's a huge difference between me and you. I mean, I can say all these like grandiose ideas, but then you got to live the reality and like, thank God I'm not putting animals on the ground. You are. So. I appreciate the obstacles.
- [124:16]
A
Yeah.
- [124:17]
B
Know, I appreciate the obstacles. But I, I just like, I, that, that's like a long winded way of saying that. I'm like, I really am elated. Like I'm, I'm.
- [124:27]
A
It.
- [124:27]
B
The work. From my personal perspective, the work you guys doing is beautiful. I think it's like a really cool testament to the state aspects of the political atmosphere, the social atmosphere. The state game agency like to kind of have the audacity capacity to like Try to do this, you know, I think it's great, man. I think it's great. And until someone can come and point out some overwhelming harm that none of us have anticipated, I think it's like full steam ahead, man. I think it should. Like, I wish you guys the best of luck.
- [125:00]
A
Thanks. Yeah. About the harm thing, there are no studies that I know of where bison show that they've. They've harmed other species. But there are many, many studies that I know where bison help other species. You know, like I said, everywhere, from all trophic levels, from insects right on up to, you know, human beings. And so it's. Yeah, I. I think they bring a lot of benefit to most systems.
- [125:25]
B
Yeah. I want to point out folks, like, there's one last thing I'll make on the same point is if you go back to European time of European contact, they think that there were turkeys in 34 states. We have wild turkeys in 49 states now. Why is that? Because it just. No one. People have looked. No one can go and find where they're causing harm. They're not driving species to extinction. They're not displacing native wildlife. Right. It's like they're just not causing problems. That's why we don't have turkey eradication efforts. People welcome them being on the landscape. And I think there's gonna become more and more places where not only do people welcome out in the landscape, there's gonna become more and more places where people like, hey, man, why can't we have some?
- [126:12]
A
Right?
- [126:13]
B
Like, let's get some back. I mean, they're big, they're dangerous. I don't know. Tough.
- [126:18]
A
Yeah. It's like, I hope it can be that way with bison, and I think it can be. I mean. Yeah, they're such a valuable resource. I think it's worth trying.
- [126:27]
B
Oh, man. I'll tell you what, too. I used to, when I first got a hide off one, we'd try to sleep under it. It's got pretty cold before you can sleep under that thing, man. That's all there is. A useful animal, man. But I sure appreciate you coming in and talking about your work.
- [126:43]
A
Glad to be here. Thank you.
- [126:44]
B
And this is home for you originally?
- [126:45]
A
Yeah, Yeah. I was born and raised in Montana. I left when I was 18.
- [126:48]
B
But did you go right to Alaska?
- [126:50]
A
Went right to Alaska.
- [126:51]
B
Where'd you go to school?
- [126:52]
A
UAF Fairbanks.
- [126:53]
B
Yeah. And you're married?
- [126:55]
A
Yeah.
- [126:55]
B
How long you been married?
- [126:59]
A
26 years this summer. But was with her for three years more than that so almost 30 years.
- [127:05]
B
So if your wife is driving by at 60 miles an hour and she looks out the window, can she say would. Would bison or plains bison?
- [127:12]
A
I don't think she could.
- [127:14]
B
No.
- [127:14]
A
I. I'm not totally.
- [127:15]
B
I'm not totally like her, but mine neither.
- [127:17]
A
I understand.
- [127:18]
B
I understand. It's stressful being married. Well, dude, thanks so much for coming on and thanks to your agency for letting you come on.
- [127:28]
A
Welcome.
- [127:28]
B
I know sometimes there's a reluctant to cut people loose and big, long conversations about policy. I don't think you. I don't think you cause any trouble for anybody.
- [127:34]
A
I hope not. We'll find out when I get back.
- [127:36]
B
Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
- [127:37]
A
Yeah.
- [127:38]
B
All right, everybody else, Tom Seaton from Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Tell me the title again.
- [127:44]
A
Wood bison project biologist for Department of.
- [127:47]
B
Fish and Game would Bison project. Project biologist. And if people want to check out, some of you guys work. What's the best place to go Look? Look.
- [127:53]
A
Well, I've got a website. If you just Google, you know, Alaska Wood bison Restoration and Alaska Department of Fish and Game, there's all kinds of documents on there. The. The website's a little bit old right now. We've got a new draft that should come out in the next few months. But, yeah, there's all kinds of information if they want to dig into it.
- [128:09]
B
And if you're looking for where you click to apply for a tag, it's too early. But you can apply for the plains bison hunts, right? You know, you can apply for those. Be allowed to keep waiting to get your wood bison permit. So stay tuned. Thanks again, Tom.
- [128:52]
A
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [128:54]
B
Guaranteed Human.