Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast – Ep. 838: How To Translate Animal Language

Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: George Buman (sculptor, bronze artist, naturalist, animal language and intelligence expert, author of “Eavesdropping on Animals”)
Date: February 23, 2026

---

Overview

This episode dives deep into the fascinating realm of animal communication and “translating animal language,” blending firsthand field insights, cultural stories, and science. Renowned guest George Buman—an accomplished artist, naturalist, and animal vocalization expert—joins Steven Rinella and the crew to demystify how animals communicate, what those sounds mean, and how learning to “listen” to wildlife can permanently reshape your relationship with the natural world. Expect wide-ranging, often humorous discussion on everything from prairie dog and bird dialects to the intelligence of ravens, with side tangents into conservation, hunting ethics, folklore, and tracking skills.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Animal Language and George Buman’s Background

• Animal Imitations: George Buman opens by vocalizing several animal calls (turkey, coyote, wolf, raven, chickadee), demonstrating the complexity and accuracy possible even without instruments.

  • Notable moment: Buman’s raven impression and discussion of its versatility.
  • [03:21-05:11]

• Why Study Animal Language?

  • Buman: “These [animal calls] obviously mean stuff… they can show you things you would never, ever have found.” [06:17]
  • Rinella sets up the show’s theme: It’s not just about recognizing animal noises but understanding their meanings and why animals vocalize.

---

2. Cultural Parallels: Human Relationship with Animals and Shared Myths

• Circumpolar Bear Culture
  • Rinella describes the uncanny similarities of bear myths among human cultures across the northern hemisphere—especially the sacred way bear hunts and interactions are ritualized.
  • “You cannot explain it—how some dude in Siberia, some dude in North America, some dude in Europe, have the same concept…” [09:54, Rinella]

---

3. On Odors, Senses, and the "Nasal Ranger"

• Offbeat but revealing discussion about human/animal perception of smells and defenses, sparked by a correction about skunk scent and lab-made stink.
• The Nasal Ranger: An instrument for measuring odor intensity, leading to jokes about using it to settle household disputes.
  • “I want one so bad, because I want to be able to use it in arguments with my wife.” [23:01, Rinella]
  • “The Nasal Ranger… applies a number to a thing that is just entirely subjective.” [28:31, Rinella]

---

4. Prairie Dogs: Titans of Animal Vocabulary

• Greatest Vocabulary:

  • “Prairie dogs… have incredible vocabulary that goes down to the level of: There's a guy walking through the colony with a green shirt on, and he's tall… There's a badger, there's a hawk, hawk's flying fast…” [34:43, Buman]
  • Computer analysis and field experiments show prairie dogs can invent “new words” for unfamiliar objects [36:25].

• Research Anecdotes:

  • Vervet monkey calls for different threats were played until a specific monkey became the “boy who cried wolf.” Elders then ignored his alarms, showing complex social learning. [40:01, Rinella]

---

5. The Limits of Human Perception: Hearing and Understanding Animal Language

• Sensory Worlds:

  • “Even if we could… speak the same language, we still wouldn’t have a clue what they're talking about… there's culture behind and underneath all that language.” [52:03, Buman]
  • Birds and mammals split and remix sounds (phonemes) in ways we struggle to perceive; frequency and speed matter.

• Techniques:

  • Buman and others now use bioacoustics (recorders running 24/7) plus field notes to sync behavior to specific animal vocalizations.

---

6. Case Studies in Animal Language

Turkeys:

• Are All Gobbles Alike?
  • “A gobble isn't a gobble…. He's gobbling in context to who's around them.” [57:02–58:35, Buman]
  • Young males can do “full gobbles” if big toms are absent; double/triple gobbles may indicate excitement or intent.

Ravens:

• Territorial and Excited Calls:

  • “That three note thing is their song, their territorial call that they use to keep the riff raff out.” [61:45–62:04, Buman]
  • Context alters the phrase: more notes/repetitions when food is present or when rivals appear.

• Food “Meat Call”:

  • Juveniles and non-territorial adult ravens produce a caterwauling call when they find carcasses to summon reinforcements—helping evade dominant territorial pairs.
  • “That call doesn’t mean any food, it means meat, really…” [71:18, Buman]
  • Practical value: listen for these to find kills (or bears) in the wild. [75:01–76:38]

• Attack & Alarm Calls:

  • Ravens use distinctive calls for threats such as golden eagles (consistent, serious repeated notes—a known cue for biologists), and possibly distinct calls for bald eagles.
  • “What happens when there’s a golden eagle? …It’s a very consistent, uniform series of notes…” [90:40, Buman]

Squirrels:

• Air vs. Ground Threat Alarms:
  • “The chucks [in their call] are typically something on the ground. Leaves off the chuck, it's typically for a threat from the air.” [102:53–103:02, Buman]

---

7. Animal Accents and Dialects

• Local dialects occur—ravens in different regions have different vocalizations, even “accents.”
  • “Totally different accent in California. You can see…pockets of agreed upon sound culture.” [104:47, Buman]

---

8. Animals Talk About Humans—And About Each Other

• “We're the ones in isolation. We are out of the conversation.” [106:17, Buman]
• Animals not only code communication about threats, food, etc., but about individual humans: birds remember regulars versus newcomers; pigeons recognize faces even with changing clothes.

---

9. How to Listen: Practical Tips & Field Exercises

The Sit Spot Exercise

• Buman has students spread out for an hour in nature, journal only sounds and animals. Most report “nothing” for 40 min until, with patience, the whole scene resets and comes alive.
  • “We have never…seen the environment we live…in anything other than a state of alarm and disruption…that we have created ourselves.” [112:20, Buman]

Silence Is an Alarm

• “Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in nature that exists.” [116:06, Buman]
• Animals also cue into intentionality—predators and even photographers trigger alarm with focused attention.

Universal Patterns

• You don’t need to know all bird species. “You learn the birds at home and the patterns you find anywhere you go are the same…they’re going to be filled by different species.” [118:39, Buman]

---

10. Ethics, Honoring, and Conservation

• Buman discusses how deeply engaging with animal language changed how, and whether, he hunts, shifting from “what” to “who” one takes from nature.
  • Story: “Mama Deer” who, after years of cautious coexistence, chose Buman’s doorstep to die, seeking refuge. [127:17, Buman]
  • “Now I have to reckon with the fact that it’s not what I’m killing as much anymore, it’s who.” [128:39, Buman]

---

11. Art, Teaching, and Further Resources

• Art as Souvenir: Buman’s bronze sculptures are based on “individual stories that I’ve been let in on…forces me to see details I would miss otherwise.” [135:35, Buman]

• He shares his method of studying animal anatomy (roadkill data, measurements) and how art and naturalist work reinforce one another.

• Yellowstone Summit: Online educational event with over 30 experts—accessible, affordable, and full of content for enthusiasts, families, guides, and educators.

  • yellowstonesummit.com [142:47]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Animal Vocabulary (Prairie Dogs)

"They even came up with a new word, something they'd never heard ‘em say before..."
— George Buman, [36:25]

On Ravens' Intelligence and Social Learning

“They're the best informants in the wild. If you listen to them, they will tell you what you would miss.”
— George Buman, [74:47]

On The Limits of Human Knowledge

“Even with AI...we still wouldn't have a clue what [animals] are talking about. There’s a culture behind and underneath all that language.”
— George Buman, [52:03]

On The Ethics of Hunting

“It's not what I'm killing as much anymore, it's who…When you enter into those spaces with humility, nature's pretty resilient. It gives you more latitude than you would have otherwise.”
— George Buman, [128:39–129:54]

On Listening and Slowing Down

“The most common alarm in nature? Silence.”
— George Buman, [116:06]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Animal Impersonations & Purpose: [03:21–05:56]
• What Animal Language Means: [06:17–06:46]
• Circumpolar Bear Culture/Ethnography: [08:32–10:27]
• Corrections & Skunk Smells / Nasal Ranger: [12:48–28:59]
• Prairie Dog Vocabulary: [34:43–37:26]
• Monkey ‘boy who cried wolf’ anecdote: [38:35–40:18]
• Birds’ Acoustic Perception & Sperm Whale Analogy: [47:30–50:36]
• Turkeys' Gobbles in Context: [57:02–59:40]
• Raven Social & Food Calls (including “meat call”): [60:51–76:57]
• Dialects & Regional Variance: [104:09–104:47]
• Human as Out-Group in Animal Communication: [106:17–106:24]
• Sit Spot Field Exercise: [109:19–113:22]
• Silence as Alarm: [116:06]
• Pigeons Recognizing Faces: [121:20]
• On Shifting Hunting Ethics — ‘Mama Deer’ story: [127:17–128:39]
• Art & Sculpture as Wildlife Storytelling: [135:35–139:12]
• Yellowstone Summit Education Plug: [141:53–143:59]

---

Final Notes

Tone & Language:
The episode is rich with field anecdotes, irreverent humor, and a deep sense of wonder. Both Steven Rinella and George Buman share a tone that’s approachable, thoughtful, and grounded in both outdoor tradition and open-minded inquiry.

For Listeners:
Whether you’re a hunter, birder, guide, tracker, or just a curious outdoorsperson, this episode will enhance how you experience animal encounters and encourage you to truly listen, both for what animals are saying—and what you might be missing.

Transcript

[George Buman]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed human. Okay, so you know, t mobile 5G home Internet is easy on the wallet, but here's some big news. It's now the fastest 5G home Internet according to the experts at OOKLA Speed Test. And yeah, it's a great value because you get a 5 year price guarantee. T Mobile 5G home Internet. It's the fastest 5G home Internet at a great price with savings that stick. Check availability@t mobile.com homeinternet price guarantee. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. It's the fastest. Based on OOKLA Speed Test intelligence Data from the second half of 2025. All rights reserved. Hey, if you're in or around Milwaukee, Wisconsin and you live for hunting season, you need to swing by the Meat Eater Store in Milwaukee. We're stocked wall to wall with the gear we actually use in the field. First Light, FHF gear, Phelps, game calls and more. You'll find us at the corners of Brookfield. Whether you're gearing up for the season, dialing in a setup, or just want to talk shop with people who love to hunt, this is your place. That's the Meat Eater Store Milwaukee at the corners of Brookfield. Stop in, get dialed and get after it.

[George Buman]

If you're an H vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.

[Steven Rinella]

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[George Buman]

We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

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 today we're joined joined by what I say, Jordan. Joined by George Buman, who's a sculptor, a bronze artist, he's a naturalist. But here's the main deal for our, for our purposes here, he's an animal language and animal intelligence expert, teaches courses on the intelligence of animals. Will go to does. Does Things in Yellowstone National Park. Leads seminars there of helping people understand what they're hearing, what they're seeing about how animals do their business. He's got a new book called Eavesdropping on animals. What we can learn from. From wildlife conversations. We're gonna dive in on all that. But just as a little tickler, hit me with. You don't even need to say a word. Okay, now listen, listen.

[George Buman]

This is.

[Steven Rinella]

This is George Buman. No. Brody verify.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

No diaphragm in his mouth.

[Brody]

No. No animals in the studio.

[Steven Rinella]

No animals in the studio. We have some bronze Pete. We have a bronze piece. We have like the makings of a bronze piece in the studio. So that turkey right there, Tap that turkey. So people realize that's not. Okay, that's not. That turkey is not making this noise. Okay, hit us with. Okay, thank you. Hit. Hit us with the. No, hit us with some turkey vocalizations. No, no, this is just. Just flat out okay. Okay. Hit us with some coyotes. Way off. You got a good wolf? All.

[George Buman]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's hear wolf. Oh, dude. Can you do a good elk way off bugle? Yanni does a good bugle, but his Yanni's bugle is miles away.

[George Buman]

Yeah, yeah, mine might be miles away.

[Steven Rinella]

He moves a good mile away off elk. That's a lot closer than Yanni's. Yanni's is like you can't even tell if you heard it or not. Right. We're wondering, you got any good magpie vocals, ravens, anything?

[George Buman]

Ravens?

[Steven Rinella]

Give me the raven.

[George Buman]

Yeah, They're one of my favorites. They've got a lot of. A lot of range, a lot of meaning there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I want to talk a bunch about those guys because, man, they make some crazy ass noises. And it can't be just them making noises for no reason.

[George Buman]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, here's a real challenging one. You just. Just tell me if you can't do it. I wish I could. Can you like this? Test your whistling skills. Can you hit a black. Can you do a black cap chickadee?

[George Buman]

Not to my satisfaction. Yeah, they're. They're starting to do it now too. Not good.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a tough one. But you know how good it works, though.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because people that can do it can bring them in like crazy. That's pretty good.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Damn.

[George Buman]

Yeah. All right.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, we're gonna get it off. And not only that, but what? Like, like, here's the main thing. I want one of the main things I want to talk to you about when we get to it. I gotta do a couple announcements. Is not just the noises, but like, there's the. What, like what they're talking about.

[George Buman]

Yeah. It means stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[George Buman]

It can show you things you would never, ever have found.

[Steven Rinella]

They obviously mean stuff, but like.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because they're not doing it for fun. No, I mean, it might be fun, but they're not. You know what I mean?

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What it all means. One of the main. The first thing, just so you know what's going to come. One of the first things I'm going to ask you about is, you know, a pine squirrel's pissed off noise or whatever his noise is.

[George Buman]

Yeah. I can't do it real good. But there's a ton of meaning in that.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[George Buman]

Ton. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know he's pissed at his buddy.

[George Buman]

Bobcat. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, real quick. So There's a new YouTube. The Bear Grease YouTube channel is becoming its own thing. A little behind the scenes thing here. Clay. Clay started a YouTube channel a million years ago, and it was like the Bear Journal or. Because when Clay owned Bear Hunting magazine, he had. It had a YouTube channel. So it's always been kind of lurking around there. That YouTube channel is going to stay like, that's Clay's baby. But Clay and Bear Nukem are going to build out the Bear Grease YouTube channel. So all about them making them little bows out of sticks, hunting content, mule content, cooking stuff. Okay. And they're also launching their own Instagram page around Bear Grease. And I'll tell you, we haven't gotten into. I might be the first guy to ever mention this. Clay's book that's coming out in a long time from now is exceptionally good.

[George Buman]

Great.

[Steven Rinella]

It's good. I mean, I've only read the first five chapters. It's. It's a book. It's a. It's a book. It's like a history of the black bear. It is good. Including a large chapter on the circumpolar bear culture. H. I don't know if I can. I'm allowed to. Yeah, why not? Clay just. He's turning his book in right now. The circumpolar bear culture is crazy because there's like a latitude band all around the continent. So it touches North America, Europe, Asia, all around the northern hemisphere. It's. Yeah, it's a band of latitudes. Northern. Northern latitudes.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

All around the globe. And if you think about the human diaspora, like how people spread around the world, these are people that split. There's people within this. That split apart way long ago. Like, meaning if you imagine, like, imagine it's humans, Colin. Like, humans are kind of in the Middle east, humans are in Africa, you know, humans are up in Spain, wherever. And eventually some of them come around and wind up in Siberia and some come around and wind up in northern Europe. Now by this point, they haven't been hanging out together for tens of thousands of years. Right. But you look at their religious structures and sort of like spiritual understandings of bears, and you have this circumpolar bear culture where people that wouldn't have no interaction with each other develop or no interaction with each other for thousands and thousands of years develop the same sort of religious understandings of bears and how bears fit into their culture and the shamanistic aspects and like, motivations that are assigned to bears. And you cannot explain it how some dude in Siberia, some dude in North America, some dude in Europe, have the same concept.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Of like, how you treat a bear when you hunt for a bear. What are your obligations to the bear? That you definitely don't want a bear to see you once it's dead. So if you kill a bear, you approach it from behind. Like, these dudes are on the same trip all over the. Do you know what I'm saying? No. It's so weird, man. I hope he's not pissed I'm bringing that up.

[George Buman]

Does he have the bear mother story in there? That one goes all over Northern hemisphere.

[Steven Rinella]

If it's all over, it's in there. He's got every damn thing in there.

[George Buman]

Yeah. That's neat.

[Steven Rinella]

No, it's a super cool book available a long time from now. So. The Bear Grease YouTube channel be run by Baron Clay Newcomb. Yeah. Oh, February 11th, two days before I turn 52. Very auspicious day. Corrections. Here's a great correction. We're gonna start a thing where you win a prize for. You know, we're trying to, like in an age of disinformation, shady information. Yeah, we're trying to. We're gonna have a weekly prize called correction of the week for the biggest fib. So no rewarding people who catch us being wrong.

[George Buman]

Ah, that's a good thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Check this out. For instance, the other day I made a comment and I was. This is me talking about stuff I didn't know. Well, he even has the 37 minute mark at episode 826. What was that episode called? Skunk Smells Her First. No, that wasn't it.

[George Buman]

How Skunks can Ruin a Marriage.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. I said, oh to My defense, I'm still. This is still a correction to my defense. I said I don't think that a human operating word here being. I said, I. On the subject of skunks and skunk essence, I said, I don't think that a human can make. Then I didn't finish quite. Then I. Okay. I said, I don't think that a human can make. I don't think in a lab you could make as pugnacious or resilient of an odor in a laboratory. Guy wrote in, he's like, you're way wrong. They can't. Humans can and have. And he gets into some of these odors. While the skunk odor is due to the olds mercaptans, sulfur containing compounds, he says there are other compounds both synthesized and isolated in laboratories that smell much worse.

[Brody]

I like this one.

[Steven Rinella]

They have a lab based odor called cadaverine, which is a lab produced odor of decaying flesh. They have pyridine, putresine and what he regards to be the worst smell of all time. Thioacetone odor so potent it causes nausea, vomiting and unconsciousness. There was a lab leak. There was a lab leak in Germany where they had. They had a lab leak of thioacetone in Germany. And for a half mile radius around the lab, people reported nausea, vomiting and unconsciousness from a leak.

[George Buman]

Powerful. And what do they use that for usually?

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know why. I don't know how they justify their worries. I don't know how. That's a great question. This would be one of those things when you talk about ridiculous. Maybe when you're like hacking on science, be like the dumb stuff they spent money on.

[Brody]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Making bad smells.

[Brody]

Yeah, what's the point?

[Steven Rinella]

All right, so I stayed corrected. That's a good correction right there, man. I said this is the kind of correction. What would be the prize when you get correction of the week? It's gotta be something good. But it's gotta be that we have a lot of it.

[George Buman]

We're gonna.

[Steven Rinella]

Maybe we gotta have 52 of them.

[George Buman]

Maybe this will excite people more. So we will have a segment sponsored by To Covas. To Covas is.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, they're gonna do the correction of the week.

[George Buman]

They are.

[Steven Rinella]

And you get a pair of kickers.

[George Buman]

Correction of the week. And we will choose the winning correction of the week for. We'll do this for about a month at first to see. And the correction of the week winner gets a pair of Tokovas. Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

So we're gonna start out. You get a pair of Kickers and then. But we'll come up with something comparable every time.

[George Buman]

Sure. Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

That's phenomenal.

[George Buman]

So send in your correction of the week corrections.

[Steven Rinella]

This would be, this would be a great, this would be a great one. I say. And again, I said think. I say, you can't make something worse than that in the lab, guys. Like, yeah, you can. Here's another correction. He calls it a correction by omission. But I'd like to correct him. It's not a correction by omission, it's just a correction. So I don't think he'd win because like, he's saying, hey, here's a correction by omission. And then when I tell you the correction, you realize it's not a correction, it's just a correction. Yeah, he's just trying to soup it up. I said we were talking about retrieval laws. We're talking about that in different states you have these different governing laws about whether you can go and get retrieve game. Okay, so picture that you're sitting there, you're sitting there and you, you, you, you shoot a duck, you know, ducks flying overhead and you shoot a duck and. And all of a sudden he like sails off and plump lands over on the neighbor's place. States clarify. All states have clarified. Like what are, what are you allowed to do? Some states you can just flat out go get it. There's a state where you can leave your gun behind and go fetch it. And there are states like the one I'm sitting in right now, you have no right or authority to go fetch it. You'd have to go take it up with the landowner and be like, listen, man, I sailed the duck over on your place. Can I go grab it? And as terrible as it sounds, I mean, I'm totally like, I'm like totally fine with that rule.

[Brody]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But I would like to think that most landowners would, Would, when approached, facilitate the recovery. I understand. I'm not condemning the rule because I understand that there are situations where someone could set up in a way or they just basically know that that's going to be the outcome.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Brody]

I mean, it could be abused for sure. Especially with big game.

[Steven Rinella]

I feel like. Yeah. Where you're hunting in a spot where you're just, if you're sitting there going like, well, yeah, I know it's going to run on the neighbor's place, but I'm allowed to go get it. So that doesn't matter. Like that, that's probably. That could be potentially problematic. He points out. So I say in In South Dakota, how it's legal to retrieve upland game such as pheasants without land owner permission. Okay. But you gotta be unarmed. We clarified that. Meaning you hit a pheasant, you hit a pheasant, he sails off on the neighbor's place. In South Dakota, you lean your shotgun, whatever, set your shotgun down, you run over and fetch it. He pointed out, and he says that it was correction by omission. He points out, you can't do that with big game. Isn't that weird?

[Brody]

Strange. But I think it might because South Dakota has that rule where you can hunt in the ditch alongside roads. It's like a right away. So I think a lot of those birds that get shot end up 10 yards onto, you know, where you're not permitted to go.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, they're doing it because of the rule. You can ditch hunt.

[Brody]

Yeah, I, I, that's what I think,

[Steven Rinella]

you know, but you can't. Yeah. So just, you can't, you can't. You can chase a pheasant, but you can't chase a deer.

[Brody]

But if a buck sprung up out

[Steven Rinella]

of that ditch and you are allowed to have your dog run over and fetch it. But check this out. Let's say your dog runs over to fetch it. Flush as a pheasant. This is what this guy's saying. If he's wrong, send in a correction and he'll have to give you a prize.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

For correcting him. If your dog runs over onto a pr. Let's say you're hunting, you're ditch hunting, and your dog runs onto some dude's place and flushes a bird off that dude's place, and that bird then flies over you on the right of way. You can't shoot the bird.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Because your dog can go retrieve, but he can't go hunt.

[George Buman]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's basically having a dog with a shotgun. Here's another skunk story that was a bad segue. This guy says this, this last week, I had been skinning a skunk that caught the coyote trap. I wasn't really paying attention when I accidentally poked a hole in its scent gland. After realizing the terrible crime. Oh, we're done with corrections now, right? Yeah.

[Brody]

This is, yeah, this is just a story.

[Steven Rinella]

This is story. Okay. After realizing the terrible crime I had just committed, I put the skunk outside to let things air out. So he was scanning it inside. An hour later, the cop showed up. Well, local police showed up at my house to inform me that there was a terrible smell coming from my house to the point that the local middle school had to go into lockdown because they thought kids were smoking massive amounts of weed. I used the word marijuana. They even had the fire department come to the school to test the air for toxins. Now my whole town has been talking about me and referring to me as skunk boy. I don't think the smell was that bad. But I'm not sure what to do because I make a homemade skunk based lure that I use to catch all my predators. Do I? Oh, here it goes into a question. This becomes like a.

[George Buman]

Like a advice advice.

[Steven Rinella]

This is becoming an advice column. Do I stop making it and risk being less successful? He's load. He's leading the witness.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He asks. Yes. Do I stop making it and risk being less successful on the trap line, or do I keep making it in secret and hope there isn't another incident? I think that there is a middle ground. Hunter. Gregory. See, here's the evidence that naming your kid Hunter doesn't backfire. Yep, his name's Hunter. Didn't backfire. No one names their kid fisherman, angler. Yeah, they probably do.

[Brody]

I don't know. I've never heard it.

[Steven Rinella]

No names or kids. Sports person, outdoors person. His name's Hunter. It didn't backfire. Obviously he's. Obviously he's like neck deep in the disciplines he's from. I'm not gonna give his last name. I think you gotta take this whole operation elsewhere. If it depends, you have the right. Well, what's that machine we want to get the founder of this machine on? Oh, the nasal Raider. Nasal radar. We're calling it Raider, but the nasal. There's a machine that they use that quantifies bad smells. Do you know about this?

[George Buman]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Called the nasal radar. I was saying Nasal Raider, but I was misreading it. That's a correction. The nasal radar. It's like when you get us. Oh, Nasal Ranger. Okay, Nasal Ranger. When you get a smell complaint.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Like some dude skin and skunks. It's so subjective. Yeah, right.

[Brody]

It's like, well, why not bother you at all?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like the lady over there thinks it smells too bad. The guy over here, he doesn't think it smells that bad. So does it smell that bad? The Nasal Ranger is a machine that you put on your nose. It looks like an elk bugle with. With contraptions coming off it. Can you pull this up, Phil, just so people can see?

[George Buman]

If Corinne sends it to me, I can. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You don't have a little computer over there.

[Brody]

And what does it do?

[George Buman]

It.

[Steven Rinella]

I Do. But I. I don't have a picture.

[George Buman]

I guess I could just Google it.

[Brody]

It tells you how bad you think it should smell.

[George Buman]

No, no, no.

[Steven Rinella]

The Nasal Ranger. I watched this whole video.

[George Buman]

This looks insane. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, let's say someone's like, dude, the hog farm next to my place is killing me. It smells so bad. And it winds up being like. Well, according to who? The Nasal Ranger? You. You. It looks like an elk bugle that hooks to your nose. There's a little nose cup, but it's got filters and shit coming off it. Okay. You go out there, and there's a meter that shows, like, what it. Okay. Right there. It looks like if a cop was.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Clocking you.

[Brody]

Nasal radar, you would think that if

[Steven Rinella]

you saw this, you would think a cop is smelling how fast your car is going. Okay.

[George Buman]

There's a whole article in the New York Times from a few years ago,

[Brody]

but what does it do?

[Steven Rinella]

Like, I'm getting to that. But I want to tell you, like, I want one so bad, because I want to be able to use it in arguments with my wife. Yeah.

[Brody]

Be like, see, it's not so bad.

[Steven Rinella]

She sends me one of her, like, twice a year. I can't live like this. Okay.

[George Buman]

Oh, yeah, we can. We can invest in one just like we did the Warner Bratzler Shear Force.

[Steven Rinella]

They're less expensive.

[George Buman]

Oh, wait, that's good.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, we bought that. And I don't know, maybe we spent too much money on that thing for how much we needed it.

[George Buman]

We're going to keep trying to get our money's worth.

[Steven Rinella]

Hey, if you're in or around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you live for hunting season, you need to swing by the meat eater store in Milwaukee. We're stocked wall to wall with the gear we actually use in the field. First light FHF gear, Phelps, game calls, and more. You'll find us at the corners of Brookfield, whether you're gearing up for the season, dialing in a setup, or just want to talk shop with people who love to hunt. This is your place. That's the meat eater store, Milwaukee, at the corners of Brookfield. Stop in, get dialed, and get after it. Okay, here's. Here's my. The other day. Here's my wife. My wife has this to say to me.

[Brody]

She's gonna have a lot more to say to you after you put this in a podcast.

[George Buman]

My wife says, I think it's $2,000, by the way.

[Steven Rinella]

It's 2,000 bucks.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Little background on my wife. My wife has always Worked. She worked all through having babies. She's taking time off of work. And then she. Now she's like, now that she doesn't have babies, she's not working. She doesn't know what people do with themselves. So it's great. She started trying. She's like, I'm gonna try learning how to play tennis. Totally great. Started baking. I am at tennis and can't figure out why my ankles are so itchy. I have small itchy bumps on both ankles. If you brought fleas into our house because of the things you trapped, you need to figure that out now, like, before work. I am not going to live like this. Right. I get these all the time. A lot of times they have to do with offensive odors. And if I had a nasal ranger, I would be able to be like, well, let's check.

[Brody]

You could avoid confrontation.

[Steven Rinella]

I would be like, let's see, is it offensive or not? Let's take the subjectivity out of it.

[George Buman]

We need to make content out of it.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's measure.

[George Buman]

I'm going to talk to our CFO

[Brody]

about getting the subjectivity is the hard part, man.

[Steven Rinella]

That's what the nasal ranger backfire.

[George Buman]

So you can. You can put any kind of ranger on that you want.

[Steven Rinella]

I'll be like, well, you know what? It's actually not offensive because I hit it with the nasal ranger, and it's right in. It's acceptable limits. So now the nasal ranger, you hook it to your nose and so let's say someone's like, comes to you with a. They're complaining about how something smells, and they go, just smell.

[George Buman]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, I'd be like, well, people don't breathe that way.

[Brody]

Right. That's.

[Steven Rinella]

That's not fair. You don't. No one comes around going, not just

[Brody]

last week, I was. I had already boiled this coyote skull

[George Buman]

for Hayden,

[Brody]

but it needed a little touch up. There was some things that were still hanging on there. And my wife left. I was like, I'm just gonna do it on the stove.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure. 100%.

[Brody]

I didn't smell a thing. But when she got back, she smelled it. Yeah. And I was just like, it smells a little like boiling meat.

[George Buman]

That's all.

[Steven Rinella]

Exactly.

[George Buman]

Did you ever do cold water maceration to clean up skulls?

[Steven Rinella]

Ooh, yeah.

[George Buman]

We'd clean out the whole university building that way.

[Steven Rinella]

That's. That is its own kind of. That is a crazy odor. The nasal ranger, you put it up to your nose, and there's a little meter that shows that you're inhaling normally. So you can't go in and not breathe.

[Brody]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And say like, I don't smell nothing because you're not breathing and you can't go in and over smell it. It makes it that you're hitting like a baseline normal breathing and it's got these contraptions on it that are sucking in the air and it's throwing out a calibrated offensive measurement. So you can apply a number to when something reeks.

[Brody]

I love it.

[Steven Rinella]

So let's say someone in the summer, some guy hits deer and it's out by your house or whatever, and it's crawling maggots and someone's like, my God, that smells. Imagine if you could just go, yeah, it's a five.

[George Buman]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

And apply a number to a thing that is just entirely subjective.

[George Buman]

I have a feeling that with 50 years of a life lived, you know, breaking down animals, smelling everything there is to smell, I have a feeling that the nasal ranger will skew towards the gen pop and probably. I think it'll. I think everything you are completely deadened to will read as offensive to most people.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. That's why I need a nasal ranger.

[Brody]

Tweak the settings a little bit.

[Steven Rinella]

So like manipulate.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Brody]

So it comes out in your favor.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. You like hack into the software or whatever to make it like. Not because. Yeah, because what if it backfires in my. And your wife's like, no, dude, this

[George Buman]

is as high as it goes.

[Steven Rinella]

It's an 11. Yep, it's an 11.

[George Buman]

You're like, that's not.

[Steven Rinella]

Anyway, so this guy making this lure and I understand, but I don't know why in the world you're making that next to the school. It's like, I feel like you have a right to do it, but take the operation elsewhere.

[Brody]

Yeah, I mean, he did puncture the

[George Buman]

gland, which I'm sure made it.

[Brody]

Oh, he hundred times worse.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So he probably knows if he's making this lure, he knows that you go down to Murdoch's and you go into the veterinarian care aisle and you get one of them large gauge hypodermic needles. I mean the kind of needle you can look through the son of a bitch, you know what I mean? You get one of those heavy gauge veterinarian needles that they use to inject cattle with, put that into there and suck that smell out elsewhere.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Not at home. Then you mix it in with your Vaseline or your petroleum jelly or whatever you're putting into it. So you got a skunk based paste elsewhere out in the woods. Here's Another tip you might want to know about. And I, I was turned on to this one. It works very well. Get yourself a big sack kitty litter. Get yourself one of those small action packers or whatever you want to use. I don't care. This tub, five gallon bucket, whatever. Fill it with kitty litter. Once you make your lure deep six it. Net cat litter.

[Brody]

Deep six the lure in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Store it encased.

[Brody]

I got.

[Steven Rinella]

Store it in a, in a container deep down in kitty litter for your offensive odors that won't escape that. No. And when I get a nasal range, I'll prove it. I'll prove it. We'll take a draw off some skunk. Then we'll put it down in a bottle and kitty lure and take a draw off it. And you won't. That nays range is not going to pick it up. Another guy wrote in about skunks. He's in the nuisance wildlife removal business. They deal with a lot of skunks in the spring and summer. You could picture this skunk gets in your house, living under your porch. Someone gets upset. They. They catch them in covered cage traps and they kill them with. In a CO2 chamber for euthanasia. Do you guys remember we were talking earlier? Do you remember during the pandemic when they had the like in northern Europe they had to kill all those hundreds of thousands of mink.

[George Buman]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Which they pelt. You know they pelted those all out. They did. Yeah. I thought that it would like make mink prices skyrocket because they killed all the scares or whatever. But someone's like that all went to market anyhow. What I didn't realize, they got these little gas powered rigs. They drive around in on those mink farms and there's a box on the rig and it's harvesting its own CO2. So like you're driving this little golf cart around and it's harvesting its own emissions to youth.

[Brody]

I gotcha.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The whole thing sounds just like not a good line of work. Yeah. Like a tough business to be in. That's how they do that. They're killing them like that. So this dude is saying when they get like a problem skunk, they euthanize it with CO2. Well, anyways. And then they throw them in a freezer, which I don't get. But they had a guy in there and he says, I'll put it delicately and say he lacked attention to detail. He pulls a skunk out of the CO2 chamber too early and places it into a freezer a half hour Later, a different guy comes along and opens the freezer, and there's a skunk. Bam. Fine. No. Oh. Shuts the freezer real quick.

[Brody]

I gotcha.

[Steven Rinella]

Makes a plan on how he's gonna deal with this. But then the skunk is waiting for him the next time he opens the freezer flap.

[Brody]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Nailed him. He says, you can't get that smell out of that freezer.

[Brody]

Oh, yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

[Steven Rinella]

Lastly. Oh, so you do want to say this. You're back to wanting to say this. Okay, please, one more launch. We got a thing coming out called 12 and 26. So that means in 2026, we're gonna release, like, 12 outdoor films. Each episode showcases a hunt from a different meat. Meat eater crew member. The first episode features Yanni's archery black bear hunt in Manitoba, which is out now. So stay tuned for more and check out these hunt episodes, the 12 and 26 series. All right, George, hit me with. Let's. I don't know. I want to get into the animal communication stuff here, and I want to talk about brown sculptures, but I want to dive into the animal communication stuff here. If you could think about from your career in your study of animals, what. And let's keep to what lives around here. What animal do you think lives around here has the. Or not. Doesn't need to be around here. What American animal that people would be familiar with? Who, in your mind has the greatest vocabulary? Land critters.

[George Buman]

You know, probably the one that's been studied that way most, and it's probably because it's only because that's the one that's been studied. That detail is prairie dogs. They have incredible vocabulary that goes down to the level of. There's a guy walking through the colony with a green shirt on, and he's tall. No. Yep. He's walking fast. He's walking slow. It's another guy. He's got a red shirt on or a yellow shirt. There's a badger. There's a hawk. Hawk's flying fast. On and on and on. Yeah, this guy called. What? Yeah. Yeah. They went down to the level of saying, you know, at a certain level, they needed to analyze it with computers because you just can't hear prairie dog at that level.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

So they slow it down. You can see all the bumps and blips on the. In the spectrogram on the computer. And these differences are parsing out with their experimental design here. And they even went to the level of. Let's put something in there they've never seen. Okay. So what they did is they basically put a cardboard cutout, or maybe use plywood, painted it black, put it on wire and strung it through, moved it through, pulled it through the colony. They came up with a new word, something they'd never heard him say before. They put it away. Instead of an oval like the first one, they put out a square. They say something different, they pull it back out. A little while later, they use the same word for the oval.

[Steven Rinella]

Same word.

[George Buman]

Seriously? Yeah, yeah. And that's probably.

[Steven Rinella]

Again, it's all, like, permutations of that. What we would just. When we hear. It's just an alarm call, it's just

[George Buman]

like, like, all right, I'm not getting much out of that. But when you start listening with, like, a lot of this stuff, you're like, oh, there is a little difference there. And if you could listen with the ears of a ground squirrel or a pocket gopher or any of these things, you might hear it, too. But some of those, they can. Like the researchers, it was so funny. They were so accurate that they had different vocalization for dog versus coyote.

[Steven Rinella]

No, really.

[George Buman]

So they're sitting there and the researchers can hear this difference, and they're hanging out, and this. This prairie dog says, ah, there's a coyote coming. And clearly the researchers can see it's a dog. And they're like, ha, they messed up this time. It's like one example. And it gets closer, and it's a coyote. They're like, what the heck?

[Steven Rinella]

Hold on. Say that to me again now.

[George Buman]

So they identified this thing, Right? It was a coyote. They gave the coyote alarm, but the researchers, not knowing their language real well. Well, they knew the language enough to say, hey, they're alarming for coyote. Through their eyes, they're seeing what they think is a dog. Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

So the research is like, oh, it's a domestic dog.

[George Buman]

It's a domestic dog. It looks like a coyote. They just messed up and it gets closer, and, like, son of a gun, it's a coyote. So that stuff, it's actually everywhere. But prairie dogs have been best studied that way. Their vocabulary. They even say that they. They have these sound bites that are like phonemes. They're basically like B, D, A, T, you know, sound fragments that we recombine into making words and sentences, paragraphs. They have sounds that function the same way. So they can recombine these sounds to say, dog, coyote, hawk, badger guy. Yeah, short guy, tall guy coming through the colony.

[Steven Rinella]

I was reading this thing long ago. It's like one of the dirtiest tricks I've ever heard in science. I don't know where they were doing it. I don't know. Where's the vervet monkey live? A vervet monkey?

[George Buman]

Vervets are African.

[Steven Rinella]

It's an African.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They were looking at the vocabulary of vervet monkeys, and they were getting this idea that they had, and it might be more nuanced than this, but they're like, there's a thing that says threat from above. Okay. And it'd be like, certain avian predators. Yeah. And they had a noise that they realized it meant thread on the ground, and they thought specifically it was about leopards. That's what it was. Yeah, leopards. So they would record these vervet monkeys making these vocalizations, and you could play it and get the response. Meaning if there's a threat on the ground, everyone goes into a tree. If there's a threat from the air, the troop all seeks overhead protection. Yeah. Then they recorded a monkey. They recorded his threat call, and they would play it and everyone would respond. But they eventually burned the guy out where he became the boy who cries wolf.

[George Buman]

Poor guy.

[Steven Rinella]

And they burned him out where they're like, he always does that. And he's wrong to the point where if he did vocalize, they would ignore it because they're like, that dude makes that noise all the time. Because they have been playing it to everybody, and they burn the dude out on it.

[George Buman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But this is like, what you're talking about is way more. I mean, like, way more than, hey, on the ground. Hay in the air.

[Brody]

Yeah, that's like at deer camp with the kids. Like, when you and I walk through the prairie dog town, those things are like. But when they see Jimmy, they're like, holy shit.

[Steven Rinella]

They probably do.

[George Buman]

And he's got a gun. He's got a gun.

[Steven Rinella]

Again, it's that one kid.

[George Buman]

Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's. I think you're referring to that. Cheney and Safe Art did a lot of that work in Amboseli national park, where they're looking at those vervets and, yeah, they had a different call for something in the air. Those Marshall eagles, I think they were that different one for leopards, and they had a different one for snakes.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, I remember that now.

[George Buman]

Yep. And, yeah, that's a toughie with these animal vocalizations. Like, how do you know you don't speak that language? So they have these really clunky, sometimes really, you know, mean ways of figuring out, all right, at least it's this level. This is what they're meaning. But in between, like, for me, I listen to a ton of ravens. I just fascinated by ravens, and the stuff they say just blows me away. They've got accents. They've got dialects. They've got stuff you can't even imagine.

[Steven Rinella]

At what point did you first start getting interested in the. Just, like, the vocalizations of animals?

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. My old man, he had an interesting bird taxonomy, like, as a. As a hunter, you know, it was like, there's this huge chunk of birds that were. Tweety birds.

[George Buman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like the ones like. Like outside of my. There's intensely interested in game birds.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a handful of other birds that catch my interest. But then there are the tweety birds.

[George Buman]

Yeah, yeah. Our friend has a system. He has. It's arts and Narts for hawks. Arts are a red tail.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[George Buman]

Narts are not a red tail. I was like, jason, not. You know, it takes red tails to get a couple of years under their belt before they get a red tail. He's like, God damn it. Throws a whole damn system off.

[Steven Rinella]

I was reading in. I think it was in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, where. I think it was in that book where he's talking about Inuit's map drawing. This is early. Like, he was relating of early, like, early contact with certain Inuit hunter groups. And they would draw maps, and they wouldn't do. The maps would be to the scale of interest. So if they're mapping an island and there's a bay where they hunt ducks, when you draw the map, the island gets really small because they don't do it, doesn't matter. And the bay is the map.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's kind of like, here's the part on something, here's the part of interest, and then I'll just kind of rough in something to suggest the rest of it.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And I feel like with a lot of wildlife stuff, it's like elk. Right. The bugle, you know, because it's useful in hunting. And you can probably hunt elk a whole life and never be like, what really is going on with that thing?

[George Buman]

That's the kind of stuff that. Yeah, right.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, like, it works or don't work. Yeah, but it's kind of. You sort of have a. Like, we'll map it from a hunter's perspective. We'll map its vocalization pattern, and it'll only go as far as what I need to know to satisfy my, like, base plan.

[Brody]

You're not really interested in what you might be saying to them, Right?

[Steven Rinella]

It works or don't.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

What was the first. What was the first animal? Was it turkeys? Like, what was the first animal you kind of dove into and started realizing that you were finding out things that maybe other people didn't?

[George Buman]

No. Well, I was obsessed with turkeys. Like, I was like. My career was going to be making turkey calls, going around, calling contests and all that stuff. Upstate New York.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

And they just recolonized that area. So I was taking every spare minute. You could only hunt till noon, but I was going out before school every day during the season. The. This is a funny one. The. The disciplinarian principal. The vice principal, when my folks were in that school, had retired by this point. And I called well enough that he's like, can you come with me? You know, skip school? Come with me out on Monday and Tuesday. My mom's like, hell, no. Frank Dunham wants you to skip. The vice principal wants you to skip school so you can go turkey call for him. I was like, that's legit, right? Hell, no.

[Brody]

Were you mouth calling back? Like, no call, or were you using calls?

[George Buman]

I was doing. I was building wingbone calls. I was building slate calls, box calls. Using my voice. I was doing all of it, you know, and. But it was interesting because sort of like we're talking about in that hunting scene, you know, there was a. There's a core palette of sounds that you use.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

And they do the job. But I hit a certain point. I was actually. When I went to my first calling contest, I'm like, wait a Minute, this is what the guy. There's a guy behind that curtain over there and he's like, tell me if I sound like a turkey. There's no turkeys in this contest. And there's certainly no turkeys behind the curtain saying, yeah, that sounds like a turkey.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, so it's a great point, man.

[George Buman]

I was like, you know, and there was even. I found an article when I was working on the book. This guy who was a judge, he said, you know, if you hear a lot of really bad calling, you know, it's a wild turkey. If you. A lot of really good calling, it's a guy. You know, turkeys make a lot of mistakes. And I'm like, wait a minute, Mistakes? I think it cost them. It cost them. You make a sound, the predators got a beat on you, right? You make a sound. It costs energy to make the sound. Like they're not doing it for no reason. Just because we don't know the reason doesn't mean it doesn't have one.

[Steven Rinella]

But there's the. I get the point. There's no, no, like the point would be this. There's. There's a, there's a YouTube video I love and it's a hen, like a wild ass hen in the woods. And she has the most raucous bad box call yelp, which she stands there and does 27 times in a row. 27 times in a row. If you heard that, there's no way. He'd be like, that's a hen. You'd be like, that is some 12 ass year old kid with his dad's box call and he's just gonna stand on that ridge and do that. Yeah, I would 100% say that that's what that was. I'd be like, ah, some kid up there. It's a hand standard 27 times in a row.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So the like. But. So like if you could interview her. You like home. Are you doing this on accident? Is this all a mistake? She would probably tell you. No, no, what I'm doing is I'm.

[George Buman]

You should have seen the last time I did this.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

You know what happened.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but like, I don't know, like what is she doing? You know, what is she doing?

[George Buman]

Yeah. How much variability is in there that's acceptable for purpose? X. Like you're doing a lost call. It does go on 20 plus notes but like within there. How much stuff's coded in there beyond I'm lost or where the heck are you? That's what they're finding with some of these new studies on songbirds and stuff, because they hear differently than us, they're hearing into these sounds, stuff that, hey, either happens way too fast or. Or as in frequency ranges that we don't register real well. So it's like. It almost seems in some cases, like the size of the animal and their metabolism, their pace of life is coded to their communication. So, like, there was a study where they actually took sperm whale clicks.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't understand what that means.

[George Buman]

Let me explain. So, like, sperm whales, huge animal.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[George Buman]

Communicating. These clicks travel real well underwater. And somebody had the bright idea, you know, they're trying to figure out what the heck these things mean. You know, when are they using this and this. And they've since found out a whole bunch. But somebody had the bright idea to go in and delete all the spaces in between the clicks. And lo and behold, it sounds like a songbird. Like, you hear all the rising and falling of this. You know, we're used to listening to humans, birds, they're communicating so fast. But maybe those smaller animals, their pace of life, their metabolism, whatever it is that makes them them, they're able to, in essence, from our perspective, slow down that sound of the winter wren or the magnolia warbler and hear into little tweaks of individual notes, let's say, and get more information out of that.

[Steven Rinella]

Hey, if you're in or around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and you live for hunting season, you need to swing by the meat eater store in Milwaukee. We're stocked wall to wall with the gear we actually use in the field. First light, FHF gear, Phelps, game calls and more. You'll find us at the corners of Brookfield. Whether you're gearing up for the season, dialing in a setup, or just want to talk shop with people who love to hunt. This is your place. That's the meat eater store, Milwaukee. At the corners of Brookfield. Stop in, get dialed and get after it. I remember some. I was reading somewhere or some guy's saying that, like, when you go to, like, you're gonna. You see a fly and you're just gonna smack them. You know what I mean? That to the fly, he might be like, in a minute, I'm gonna move because there's this thing coming toward me, you know, like, his trip, his, like, trip through life is just. The perception is so different than what we think.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So we think we're going wham. You know, and he's like, no, it's going

[George Buman]

totally. Yeah, man.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, with it. When a bird's just going ape Crazy.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like what something else might be like. Oh, he's saying all kinds of.

[George Buman]

Yeah, yeah. There was a great essay written in the 1930s, I think, 30s, early 40s. About the title is what it's like to be a bat. And the clue, you know, even if we could take the best AI and all these models and figure out their language and speak the same language, we still wouldn't have a clue what they're talking about. You know this. When you go to a different country or even if they speak English, there's culture. There's that culture behind and underneath all that language that when you make a joke among friends, you're like, everybody knows in that group what the hell you're talking about. But even if we could know that language for a bat, for a bird, it takes being able to hear like a bat.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Breathe like a bat. You know, all these things that contribute to them being what they are, that factors into how they interpret what they hear and say.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like, we've long. I mean, like, forever have known that there are decibels the animals communicate in that we flat out don't hear. So it's like sort of. You start with that, like 100. There's things we don't hear that we know we don't hear.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

There's research about the way birds perceive. You know, there's so much iridescence in birds. There's probably something in their eye when they see iridescence. It just reads fundamentally different than what we see when we see iridescence.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

We. They. They take it in.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And the idea that there are, like, you're saying that when you're at a turkey calling contest, what we're going. When we're saying, man, that sounds a lot like a turkey. Could be tons of gibberish to a turkey.

[George Buman]

Yeah. A great example is, like, when I. When I do a hen yelp. I found over years I wouldn't get the same responses if I used box call or a slate. And I. The only thing I could come to is that it sounded good to me, but there was things in my call. Maybe it's missing frequencies or something that made it sound plastic or fake or something just that didn't get the same response. I literally just go to a box called. You know, you got instant response. Like, what's up with that? Yeah. You know, is it. You know, certain frequencies, like high frequency drops off real fast. So over distance, you know, whether it's an elk call or what have you, you're generally picking up the Low frequency sounds that travel better. But when you're right up close to something like, holy cow, you hear that elk bugle right next to the car. If you're in Yellowstone or something, you're like, whoa, I'm missing a ton of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a lot more going on in there.

[George Buman]

What, you know, what are they hearing? You know, they, you know, like a lot of the canines, wolves, coyotes, they can hear, you know, Dave Meech found that in open terrain, wolves can hear up to 10 miles. An open terrain and max, I think for me, unless wind conditions and other things are going on, the max is about three miles for me. So this is where often with students and stuff, I'm like, look, you can't ever hear that. You won't ever smell that. Not even with the nose ranger. Come on. You just can't dupe this. But if you start watching these animals closer, you're like, hey, wait. All of a sudden they're starting to gather up. There's face in one direction and then they howl. Instantly, you know, okay, I'm looking at half of this story. The other half of the book is I've had this happen, you know, friends with radios. They're six miles away. Yeah, yeah. We got the Agate wolf pack there howling to the east. You know, I'm watching the druids. Yeah, they're listening to the west and they're going back and forth, having a conversation for hour, two hours. We can't hear anything but the individual standing in front of us. There's so many animals doing stuff like this that we're like getting these fragments thinking that we know what's going on and when. They're having conversations over space and terrain that we don't even know are happening.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, we'll move away from turkeys in a minute, but.

[George Buman]

Cool word.

[Steven Rinella]

You've obviously been super close to hens. Like all the, like. I don't know what, I don't know, I can't think. Like, at what distance you become aware of it, but they're always making noises.

[Brody]

Yeah, those little noises you wouldn't hear from a hundred yards away, but at 10 yards you can hear it.

[George Buman]

Right? You know? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What? Let's. I'm taking it in the wrong direction. Let's not talk about ones people aren't familiar with. Let's just take, like. Let me ask something real simple. Do you feel that a gobble is just a gobble or do you feel that there are. There are different gobbles that mean different things?

[George Buman]

Yeah, I Think there are different gobbles. And I, I thought for years that Gagobble is just a gobble. And a young tom makes not as good a gobble.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's the idea, right? He sucks at it.

[George Buman]

He just sucks. He hasn't learned how to do it

[Steven Rinella]

because he aspires to one day be

[George Buman]

like, exactly, just blow your hair back.

[Steven Rinella]

But in fact, he's working on it.

[George Buman]

It was in grad school, I was talking with a friend who's really sharp on bird behavior and all things research wise and scientific question answering kind of wise. And he turned my mind on it. And I thought for years, you know, a young tom, you know, full on gobbler, you know, it's like a big full long. And then you hear Jake, you know, it's like it just chunked up and didn't sound right. He's like, no, you gotta understand they're gobbling in context to who's around them. And then I started noticing, son of a gun, he's right. If it was just that Jake had many times where that Jake would actually give a full on gobble because he was by himself. He didn't know the big guy was over that ridge and hauling ass over to kick his butt so he could say whatever he wanted to. And of course he wants to sound like the big guy on campus, right? And I'm like, son of a gun. Then I started seeing in the field, I'm like, a gobble isn't a gobble.

[Steven Rinella]

Maybe it's like a subservient gobble.

[George Buman]

I know I'd love to, you know, correct me and add to it. If listeners have listened for this kind of stuff more, I'd love to learn more about that because my turkey days are a little further back than some other stuff. But it's fascinating just to think of that.

[Brody]

If you could read into a gobble and be like, oh, that gobble. He's like, I'm coming now. That gobble. He's like, nah, I heard you. I'll maybe come.

[George Buman]

Yeah, you get the double gobble. You're like, oh, he's really liking that call, you know, triple gobble. You're like, he's coming. He's like, got to be coming.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you think he's loving the call when he hears the double gobble?

[George Buman]

That always to me seemed like a good barometer to how excited they were. Yeah, yeah, they gobble off the roost and they hit the ground and gobble and kind of gobble along. But once you get them fired up, man, They're. They're double, triple gobbling.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Repeatedly. And you're like, get ready, get ready, get ready. Here they come. You know, so, you know, if you look at it, the more I started looking at it from the turkey's perspective, the more I started understanding from my human perspective.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You say, you think about. Do you spend more time on crows or on ravens?

[George Buman]

We just have more ravens around home, so I spend more time listening to them.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. The other day, it wasn't too long ago, I was watching one, and he just seems to be like. From my perspective, he seems to be just wasting energy. He's flying along, just raising hell. Like, just making racket. Yeah, right. Yeah. At a high way up. And I'm like, he's. He's not with anybody. He's just, like, making racket. Like what? Give me. Give me some insight into what. Like what they're capable of conveying.

[George Buman]

Sure. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And there's got to be something. Like, I found something to eat. Like, that's pretty clear, right?

[George Buman]

Yeah. There's stuff that. It'll blow your doors off. And I, you know, I've only scratched the surface. I've found stuff that researchers haven't found. I've corroborated for myself things that they've found that. Yeah. That. That holds here too. And it's. To me, it's always about starting into these conversations, listening to what's most common. You pick the most common thing close to you and pick the most common thing it says.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

So it's like, I only have pigeons around. Great. Awesome. Use pigeons. Because the lessons you learn through the pigeons actually are going to apply to the red squirrel, the raven, the coyote, all those kind of other things, because you start sensitizing your own nervous system to it. And so when we were living in the park, I purposely. I'd finished my graduate work. I was, like, done with academia. I did not want to read another scientific paper. And in that case, I just wanted the ravens to teach me. It took longer, but I learned a lot more. So the most common thing they were saying was. Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

They like saying that.

[George Buman]

Yeah. Like, on a little. Like, to human, it means I'm a raven. Well, it took me the longest time to realize the ones that were doing that were the ones that were right next to our cabin.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

And it was two. It was the resident pair. I'm like, oh, this is their song. This is their territorial call that they use to keep the riff raff out. Their largest songbird in the world. Even though it's not melodic. That's their no trespassing sign.

[Steven Rinella]

They're the largest songbird in the world.

[George Buman]

Yeah. Yep. Common ravens. And so I was like the least melodic. Yeah, right.

[Steven Rinella]

Largest songbird. But they're coding. But you could, like, so that's funny because I never thought about that classification. They'd be classified as a songbird. They are, okay.

[George Buman]

Yeah. They're in the passerine order, which is all the perching birds, Corvidae family, which is jays, crows, jackdaws, magpies stuff. But that gave me a hook. I was like, okay, I think I know what that three note thing is now. And then the key, and I always stress this to folks, is start listening for where it varies.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

So there's one day I was out and you know, the ravens are out there.

[Steven Rinella]

Hit me with the hymn sitting on a post, being like, this is where I hang out. This is my song.

[George Buman]

Yeah. This is my turf.

[Steven Rinella]

Tell me, give me the noise.

[George Buman]

Okay, Right. And in this kind of group, you know, your listeners, like, making animal sounds is cool. Like in pop culture. Like, you meet somebody at a dinner party and they're speaking to one person in Korean and one person in Italian and another person in French. And you're like, dude, who is this guy? You know, we see that as sophistication. You know, it's like he must have had all this, you know, worldly experience. But you make an animal sound and they're like, you know, like, you know. So I always try to preface this. I'm like, no, that betrays our bias against animals as stupid and under us.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

You need to start seeing them as those creatures that look into the ultraviolet, as those creatures that hear an ultrasonic and subsonic sounds. And those creatures that smell at parts per trillion, like, they best us in so many ways. So listen from that perspective when I make animal noises, because it's a crowd pleaser. But the value in there is starting to get people to listen beyond, okay, that common call, Just counting, there's more notes and it's faster. And I discovered that just simple thing alone was happening when the tourists pulled out on the pullout in the road right below the corral fence and popped out the bag of Cheetos. Like, they see food, they know it's in their territory. I'm going to get it if anybody is. And you sure as hell better not come in here and think you're going to steal it from me. So, like, that extra energy and repeated notes was almost like a more emphatic mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, Mine, Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

You know, we'd walk into an area, you know, as a group, to go sit down and listen and watch. And just us being there, those ravens would jump off their perches and start flying over, doing that, Like.

[Steven Rinella]

But they're not talking to you, they're talking to other ravens. Like, whatever's going on here is in our turf. We're on it. If food.

[George Buman]

That's what it seems.

[Brody]

I got a question for you. So that was a situation where there's people involved and they recognize that that's potential food source. Would you hear that? Did you ever hear that same noise, like when they were like out in the backcountry when there was a carcass around or something?

[George Buman]

That's an awesome question, Brody, because that I've seen that. So it's corroborating the mind. Mind, mind, mind. Like, the one I think of most is there was a spot in Slough Creek, big flats. This bison had died, had been dead for a long time, pretty much eaten up. But the resident ravens, every time another raven came within like half a mile, they were up in the car count.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

And if not flying over toward them to perch and give them another cussing.

[Brody]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

From within the turf. So it's both. Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What. What is they, like, what are they doing vocally around? Like, we know all these sounds. Like, go back turkeys for a minute. We know all these sounds that in our human understanding, we've kind of got it. Like, these are sounds of courtship. Okay. The same way we might look at it. Elk bugle, be like, that's a sound of courtship. What? Like when you hear a raven. You're just hearing raven noises. You don't understand what is a. What are they doing in the breeding season? Like, what kind of things does a raven want to communicate in the breathing season? What would be the equivalent of how we. At least how we perceive to be a gobbler going through the woods, gobbling, you know, trying to draw hens in?

[George Buman]

Yeah, I think it's. It's different for reasons, because they're just socially different.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

You know, turkeys are flock creatures. You know, toms are hanging out together, but the hens and the poults are hanging out together. They mix and mingle in places. Ravens are very much territorial with, you know, kind of a slew of travelers and non residents filtering in and around through there. Except times when somebody kills a bison out our way or an elk, and those big food sources become big attractions. We know now from the research in the park that some of these birds are coming from Bozeman, flying to my house and Gardner and Yellowstone over a carcass to feed on carcasses during the bison hike.

[Brody]

Because word spreads down the valley somehow.

[George Buman]

Yes.

[Brody]

That's wild.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what, man? You know what? Like, gee, we were hunting the area with my kids. We were hunting area this year where, like, there's a lot. There's a big cow elk harvest in a certain area pretty annually. I was even commenting to my kids, like, I'm like, these things know what goes on here, and they're like, in town for it. I didn't know they were in town from far away. I meant. I thought they were in town, like the other side of the valley or something.

[George Buman]

That's what I used to think. No way in hell these suckers are traveling 20 to 30 miles in the morning. So you think of a Yellowstone bird, you're like, oh, that's a big wilderness bird. They just hang out in the park now. They come up, they're either feeding at the dump and Gardner or West Yellowstone or out Cody flying back at midday. They're commuting, literally commuting in the morning off the food source. Flying back in the day to maintain

[Steven Rinella]

their territory, potentially 30 miles away.

[George Buman]

Yeah. And that's daily. You know, say nothing.

[Steven Rinella]

They'd be somewhere to have their own place they would regard as their hangout, their house. Absolutely. Territory.

[George Buman]

So to get back to that, the call that I learned next in sequence with ravens was this. And before I even saw them, I knew they were moving. Right. That's the sound they make when somebody's violated the no fly zone in their turf. So they have to be back there on their territory to hold that space for them. So when the tour season rolls back around and everybody's got frozen pizza and bologna sandwiches, like, they don't have to do any fighting and border control, they're good to go because everybody knows that's their turf. But we're to close the loop on the mating season stuff. Like, I think a lot of these big food source locations end up being like the bar, the dating scene for ravens. And so you'll see them displaying. They aren't vocalizing as much that we can hear if you're close and you hang out at the dump for the ravens, like I do sometimes, and not for the trash. You hear all these crazy soft sounds that probably. I don't know if we'll ever figure out what they mean, you know, like, you know, you probably heard those, like a water drop and stuff. And they use them in context of getting to know each other. And you can tell at times when they display, they're not fanning like a turkey, but they'll puff their throat, kind of hold their beak up. You've probably seen this, especially around a, like a gut pile or something, where the birds converge. Look real close, because in the, in a general sense, when you see those birds that kind of drop their wings a little bit, they're puffing up, they drop their flank feathers. Those are your resident birds, those are the territorial ones who own that space, so to speak. The others are interlopers and they'll be trying to run them off. In fact, when I did start reading back into the literature on ravens, it confirmed what I'd seen in Yellowstone, where what Baron Heinrich, one of the world's leading authorities on ravens, had found near his cabin in Maine was this dead moose. One dead moose and one raven finds, lands and gives this call. And ravens come out of the woodwork and start feeding on it with it. And he's like, that makes no sense, right? You make a beautiful barbecue dinner for you and your family. Before you eat, you have the high school football team come over and dine first. Biologically, behaviorally, that didn't make sense until he started studying them and marking them. And what he figured out was the ones doing that were younger ones and non territorial birds. And that call, which is a great way if you ever injure an animal or you got a downed animal on terrain you can't track them on, you gotta listen to the ravens. Because that call doesn't mean food in a generic sense, any food, it means meat really. So that bird is calling out to avoid being persecuted by the residents who own that turf. So if that bird who found the moose was caught by the residents, it'd be run out and it wouldn't get any food. But by going, it brings in an overwhelming number of other ravens and everybody ends up getting some. Yeah, that.

[Steven Rinella]

I can think of an analog that a friend of mine was accidentally trespassing and found a mammoth jaw. So he had to go over and say, sir, I was accidentally trespassing on

[George Buman]

you,

[Steven Rinella]

and lo and behold, I found a mammoth jaw. What are we gonna do about this?

[George Buman]

And at that point, he called in all his buddies and staying around him to make sure he got the right answer.

[Steven Rinella]

He's like, he's like that raven, he's like, dude, like, I know I'm on your place, it's a big elk, let

[George Buman]

me help you out.

[Steven Rinella]

I just would like to Know what happens with the thing and just try to be part of this, you know, admitting that I'm on your place.

[Brody]

And what I'm going to do is call in a bunch of my buddies to help me pack it out.

[Steven Rinella]

There you go. No way.

[George Buman]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Hit me with the meat call again.

[George Buman]

So let me qualify. It sounds very similar to what young birds do when they're still on the nest and they're fledging. So if you've ever had a raven or a crow nest near your place, you know, they never shut up. Like they just talk. And a lot of that is. Which just grates on your nerves. And it's supposed to, because in essence what they're saying is, mom, Mom, I'm hungry. Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom. Hey, Mom. Right, so if you see an adult bird and the way you tell on a lot of birds, and certainly for corvids is if you see them call, pick up your binox and look in their mouth.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay?

[George Buman]

If the lining of the mouth is black, it's an adult. It's three years or older. We can't age them beyond that. We just know that after about two years the mouth lining is all black. If it's a red pink, it's a juvenile. So if you hear a juvenile going off like that in August or September, you're like, yeah, stupid kids trying to get the parents to still feed them. But if it's a black mouthed adult doing that, you want to start looking, you want to start looking for the magpies going in and out. You want to start seeing if that there's a coyote coming over the hill. Oh, you know, it's just the corroborating evidence that there's something there that you're missing, that the eyes in the sky

[Steven Rinella]

picked up and do the noise again

[George Buman]

and you only have to hear it once. Like, I've had guide friends, they're like, hey, there's a new bison in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. That's it. Don't tell me anymore. I'll go in the park and I'll hang out. I'll go to a real good viewpoint, prominent point and I'll close my eyes and I'll listen for the first time I hear that call. And often, because we often bias our other senses, sometimes I'll point out in the direction I think it is, then that'll open my eyes and there it is, almost without fail.

[Steven Rinella]

Because he's making that racket.

[George Buman]

He's making that racket because it found the food and it's calling in buddies to make sure. The residents don't run him out. You can. That's one of the best ways to find that bear.

[Steven Rinella]

Also, I got mixed up about what he's saying or what you're. He's being like, if I go down by myself, I'm gonna get harassed and run off.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So he's basically calling in like reinforcements so they can go in and feed and they're not. And they got enough people there where it's not going to be.

[George Buman]

Yeah. It's like a smoke screen.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Feathered smoke screen to give them the opportunity to sneak in there without getting beat up. And you'll hear it too. Like, there's an awesome reference. You ever read any of Richard Nelson's ethnography work? From Alaska in Prayers to Raven. There's a passage in the book, man, it's awesome. And there's like a one sentence description in there that I just like, I just want to know what he's talking about there. He said, when the native hunters, the Gwich', in, find a fresh bear track in the snow, they hide and they make the calls of a raven to draw the bear in. And I'm like, oh, really? What is that call? And then he just keeps going. I'm like, no, come back to it. There's two possibilities. One is that non territorial bird saying. Right, that's possible. The other one, which I think is probably more likely is the squabbling calls you hear when ravens are on the ground at a carcass fighting. Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

And they're all duking it out.

[George Buman]

Duking it out. Totally. You hear that? Like, we got a good deal going here.

[Steven Rinella]

Interesting, man. You'd go and get a bunch of guys that could do that and start making that noise and see what shows up.

[George Buman]

Yeah. I don't know how effective it was, but it's effective enough. Apparently in their culture that's a known thing.

[Steven Rinella]

One of my favorite things and make, make prayers to the raven. One of my favorite things that he learns from those guys he's hanging out with is, you know, they'd like to den dig bears.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And their take is like, man, anybody can, you know, because we look at that like, you know, most people look at that like a cowardly act, you know, unsportsmanlike. Their take is like, man, anybody can shoot a bear walking around. Go climb in there and drag them out of there.

[George Buman]

Right. In the old days, they're doing it with a lance.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

They let the bear charge them, you

[Steven Rinella]

know, go climb in there and drag them out and tell me about how easy it is.

[George Buman]

Yeah. Wussy.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a good book. Yeah. He spends a lot of time on, I mean obviously like that, that thing of like the significance of that bird, which is probably in some way motivated by. It's just incredible intelligence.

[George Buman]

Yeah. And I could totally see like people will often ask questions like, you know, the wolves around, you know, are they leading wolves to kills? And so far as we can see, no. Like there might be one or two instances in the last 30 years where somebody can say, I think I'm pretty sure the ravens were maybe goaded those wolves over. A friend of mine was watching a

[Steven Rinella]

brown tap into the carcass or something like, oh yeah.

[George Buman]

Or you know, here's a weak animal. Oh God, there's a carcass right here. You know, it's more, they're just like parasites to the wolves. They're just taking advantage of the wolves kill. I've seen times where wolves will be feeding on the back end of a, an old wore out bull elk. And the ravens are literally in the antlers, like waiting their turn. Come on man, give us, give us a little space here.

[Steven Rinella]

But you don't see that there's like a legitimate, like hey, come quick, this thing's moving.

[George Buman]

No, no, but like the northern cultures all over the globe were like, yeah, that's how we find the caribou. And I think a lot of those signals are as much behavioral. Like for instance, because we live on the edge of the national forest, right north of the park, there's a lot of hunting that goes on and I can go out for a walk with a dog and I'm like, somebody killed something over by the travertine two miles away, just by the continual unidirectional flight of every single raven going that way. So I think a lot of those early cultures probably were not just picking up on sound, but they were picking up on directional flight, flight altitude. If you see acrobatics in the air, they probably, you're close. There's a certain, I don't know, number of hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters that you'll see ravens chasing each other, trying to get food away from each other. And you know, like, so you know, you see that, you're like, oh, we're within a couple hundred yards of that food source.

[Steven Rinella]

I was in Tanzania this summer in the trackers use the, what oxpeckers do in the morning. It's, it's like, it's diagnostic. I mean they don't look at like, oh, maybe, maybe there's Something over there that it's going to.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They're like he's up in the morning when he flies out. He already knows. Yeah, he knows where they're at. The buffalo.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like he knows where they are because he was with him before or whatever. And he's going there.

[George Buman]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, and so. Yeah, in that way. And those messages, they might not go there because of whatever factors, but they're like at daybreak when six of them go.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And disappear down somewhere. Like that's not for something else and.

[George Buman]

But there's a large bugs do that. You know, you probably read Boyd Vardy's, you know, line Trackers Guide to Life or something like that. One of his mentors was finding. Found a lion kill from watching the flies.

[Steven Rinella]

No, same deal. Yeah.

[George Buman]

You know, I interviewed a guy from the book and he didn't. It didn't end up making it into the final cut. But he and his buddy hunted a lot in California. Really rocky ground. You know, the first time it happened they. He shot a buck. It ran off somewhere. Could kind of see, you know, ran out of blood, didn't know, just kind of gave up almost sitting on this, this hill or next to this trail and start seeing. He called them meat bees. You know, yell jackets that you're trying to avoid if you're processing game from getting stung. Yell jackets keep going up this trail. So he followed him and he's used that for years thereafter to find down game. Got it in places he couldn't track.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, Tom Petty, the late Tom Petty, he once said in one of his songs, he says, I can track a single bee to its hive. Which is like how they used to find.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Staying there swarms and stand there, wait till one goes by. See as far as it went. Go there, stand there, wait for another one to go by. You find your buck like that, man.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Badass you can.

[George Buman]

And it's, it's all that's to me. And I don't hunt anymore. And that's a whole different conversation. But just paying attention and trying to see the world through these other creatures eyes, you start picking that stuff up a lot more. And this is what our ancestors, all of our ancestors knew this animal language stuff in far better detail than I do. Like a friend of mine's hung out with the San people in the Kalahari. They are un freaking believable in interpreting non human communication. And the ones who are the best, you would think, are the hunters. He's like, no, actually it's the women. The women are out in the bush digging roots. They've got kids with them, they got old people with them. All these people that are very vulnerable if the hyenas or leopard or the lions come through. So they are ultra peaked. And he went out with them one day and they're digging away and these women just spread out. You're like, dude, that's not safe. Right? From our perspective, hundreds of yards between these different women with the children digging roots and things like that. And he'd walk up to any of them. We're the closest lions. Without even stopping, they point. How far? About this far. Walk to another one. Hey, where are the closest lions? They point, go out and visit multiple women doing this just effortlessly as part of their day. They're absorbing this information as they go. And in that particular case, they went over a couple hours later in a vehicle. There's the fresh lion tracks.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[George Buman]

And even on down of really specific stuff. Like, he told me this story. They were. They were in this. It was small plot of forest, and they hang out there in the day because it gets really, really hot. And they said to them, the white guys, the tourists, do not leave this patch of forest. There's mambas out here, there's cobras, there's hyenas, you know, the whole laundry list. But one of the guys with him there was one of his students in animal language, bird language. And this student of his comes over, he says, hey, I know we're not supposed to leave, but I'm hearing this bird do something that I think might be talking about a snake. Can you come listen to it? So he goes over there with him at the edge of this little patch of. Of trees. And he's like, yeah, I think you're right. But, you know, we're not going to go out there, but let's go get the one white guide. He's got a gun. We'll check it out. So he comes over, the three of them walk out, and he's like, yeah, I think you're right. I think it's a snake. But let's go get Issaquah. This native guy, his name literally translates into cobra. He'll know. So Issaquah comes, the four of them, then walk within. I don't know, we'll say 60, 80 yards. And he's like, yep, there it is. It's. It's a black mamba. Don't go over there. So my friend says to his student who originally found this whole deal, he's like, now watch this. They go back into the trees. And there's like, five women sitting around making beads with ostrich egg shells. And they're just talking. Kids are playing around. People are working on tanning hides. You know, just usual stuff of a community. So they stand there patient, and finally there's a break in the conversation. And the translator says, do you want to ask the question? So my friend says, yeah. Do you ladies hear any alarms right now? And in unison, all five of them point over their shoulder to what is hundreds of yards away. Says, there's a mamba over there. Don't go over there. So not only through their regular routine, but were they hearing it. They also knew exactly what it meant. Have not even seen it with all this other noise and stuff going on. Like, that's the level that not just native Africans, not just native Amazonians. Like, our ancestors knew that. And it's, like, so cool that we're discovering it now. It's like, no, it's neat, but this is really old. And it was used because it was so useful. It was retained because dinner was on the hoof, and you needed to know it was in there before you even went in there to just limit the chaos that life brings at you. So on. And for me, it's like I was guiding a ton, you know, it's like people are paying you to find the bear. Well, if there's anybody on a carcass that's out there, it's probably going to be a bear. Yep. You know, so you got to listen to the raven. You got to watch the duck. So I don't. I want to see a wolf. You know, somebody like, I don't care. You got to watch everything here because everything has a response and a relationship with everything else. And the more you pay attention to that, the more you're going to see all those connections start on just blossom. And what's even more cool is when you see the position you yourself hold. Okay, you're being talked about. They respond to you, Steve. Different than you, Brody. Different than you, Corinne. They respond. You see it in our dogs. Dog has a different bark for the UPS guy because he gives them snacks. Definitely different bark for the FedEx guy. No snacks there. Different bark for the neighbor. Knows that guy pretty well. Different bark for. Or behaviors when one of the family comes home. So we're not in isolation of this, you know, as it's seen in the wild world. Like, we're doing it, our pets are doing it. It's just paying attention a little bit more so that you start seeing it in the places that you want to

[Steven Rinella]

know more, our dog has a greeting for people whose house she has stayed at before.

[George Buman]

What is it?

[Steven Rinella]

Just a level of, like, swirling around, making whiny noises, rolling over on her back. That means she's been. She's like, been dog sat by that them.

[George Buman]

Yeah, well, the crazy thing is, if

[Steven Rinella]

you haven't done that, she's not going

[George Buman]

to do it, right? It's true. It's so true. And like, literally three mornings ago, my wife and I are working at the dining room table, and our dog, we got a black lab, Hobbs. Hobbs starts going bananas like ape. I'm like, what? He only does that level of craziness for the UPS guy. Or if the neighbor's dog comes in the yard because he wants to go play, right? I'm like, what is it? He's just, like, bouncing. They almost look like a coon hound, you know, it's bait. You know, treat a raccoon bouncing on his front feet, barking, barking, barking. I look out the front door before I let him out, and here's a bobcat walking up the stairs from the lower yard into the upper yard, 20ft from the. From the door, and then just veers off. And through the yard, you'd see those tracks. You're like, oh, yeah, that bobcat came through in the night. Like, no, dude, it was 10:30 in the morning. We were working. And we would have missed it had Hobbs. Or in other cases, we've seen lions in our yard because the magpies told us. Yeah, you know, we had a line with four kittens in our yard this spring, and they disappeared after a while. Didn't think we'd see him again. And we're sitting on the porch, my wife and I, and Jenny says, you hear that? I'm like, yeah, magpies. Magpies. When they are social and just hanging out together, they'll go, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk. And you hear it in different places. They're just checking in. But when it goes yak, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. It's like, that's what we heard. And she says, there's something down there. I'm like, I know. And she no more than stands up, walks less than the distance from here to Brody, looks over the railing into the lower yard, and she says, the fucking lion. And because of the forewarning, had enough time, run in the house, grab her camera and got this killer footage of the cat walking like 30ft from our. The corner of our deck. Four to three in the afternoon.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

When you least expect it, it's like when your life is on the line. Like a magpie who might be whacked by a wild cat or a raven who might get whacked by an eagle. Like, look to those things that their lives depend on most. And then you just start seeing this. This whole scene open up as. That's why they're talking that way. And you're just. You're just an eavesdropper listening. I was like, oh, whoa. Like, ravens have a specific call for golden eagles. Some things seem generic, but some things are extremely specific. And this one, it can take a while. Like this one took me about five years to figure out what the heck it meant. I'd heard it. I'm like, whoa, that's different. I can't figure it out. Flying high, just making noise, right? No, no, that's what happens when there's a golden eagle.

[Steven Rinella]

What is that noise?

[George Buman]

Like, so it's a very consistent, uniform series of notes to just go on. And it's serious. And I was having lunch with a guy who runs the bird programs in Yellowstone, and I'm like, hey, Dave, you did your graduate work on golden eagles, right? He's like, yeah, yeah. He's like, do you know this raven call? I've been hearing this raven call. I'm pretty sure it's just for goldens. He's like, oh, yeah, that's exactly what we listen for. To know to get the eagle traps ready. Cause one's coming.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[George Buman]

So you hear that and you're like,

[Steven Rinella]

oh, there's an eagle. Why are they tuned into goldens?

[George Buman]

They're killers.

[Steven Rinella]

So goldens will kill them off.

[George Buman]

They'll like swipe them off a carcass or whatever. I've only seen it twice myself. It happens more, but it's really infrequent.

[Steven Rinella]

But he wants. He wants to eat it.

[George Buman]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

They're eating them.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[George Buman]

It's like the difference between a wolf killing a coyote versus a lion. Lion will eat you. Wolf just kills you.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

You know, so their level of response is different. That lion is going to hunt you.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

That wolf is going to opportunistically kill you because you're filching off its kill. And they know these variations. So I asked Dave, I'm like, so have you noticed a variation for bald eagles? Because I think I have. And he's like, no, you know, he wasn't doing research on them, so he didn't. But on the spectrum of raven chasing another raven off versus raven chasing a golden eagle off, back from that golden eagle end of the spectrum is something that has a few more gaps in it, a few more bits of inflection. And it's hard because you see the value of indigenous knowledge of a landscape, because I only get maybe half a dozen of these in a lifetime, some of these behaviors and calls. But if you've got a hundred other people who are listening for exactly the same thing for a couple thousand years and you're telling the stories, yeah, you see why the Bushmen are so damn good. But I've been able to call it on balds a few times. You know, you hear. And I don't know if you can hear the differences in there. It's not that, and it's not the raven chasing another raven. There's a little more insistence to it. There's a little more uniformity. But compared to the golden eagle, there's still more inflection. There's more spacing in there. And they're doing those things for a reason.

[Brody]

Is all this stuff like, are you doing all this just kind of based on memory and things you're hearing repetitively out while you're out? Are you recording it all to listen to this stuff and get nuance out of it, or is it just for years?

[George Buman]

For 20 plus years, it's been me just listening in ways other people haven't been and making some connections and missing most. Right. But what's really cool right now is my friend's kind of at the center of initiating a bioacoustics project in Yellowstone, which at the most specific level is wanting to disentangle wolf language. You know, can you census a wolf population in a place like Colorado? Can you keep wolves out of a place by playing certain types of. Of howls in an area to keep them out of cattle? Right, right. So they're doing more or less the basic research, though, which is base. You're putting out all these recorders and recording 24 by 7, 365 days a year. But you're not just getting wolves. You're getting everything. You're getting all the ravens, you're getting all the bison conversation, you're getting everything. And we've got one of them in our yard, a part of this project. So what I have now is a spreadsheet on my phone where I see a raven chase a golden eagle over. I just make a time and date Stamp and a note of behavior in my phone. And now I can actually go back because you all had this. If you're trying to take a photo of something, you're trying to record something, it's over before you're done. Especially these things. I only have a few data points ever, but this is always running. It's always running. So I can now make a note. And I'm like raven being, you know, chased by this or raven chasing that. I can go back to the sound recordings and listen to it over and over.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's context.

[George Buman]

Totally. That's where this AI stuff is really cool on one level with wildlife acoustics and other behaviors. But you still need the field time. You still need somebody who's dyed in the wool in the field, and that's all they do to interpret that data. Otherwise, just. It's just noise. So that's the part I really enjoy and I like. I'm really wanting to figure out. I have a strong suspicion of what the alarm coyotes use for when they encounter a cougar. It's different than when they find a wolf because they're bad dudes and they're going to tell everybody about it. They want them known and they want to avoid themselves and their families. But I've only had four instances where I can verify that that coyote through snow tracking or somebody else's observations that coyote was barking at a cougar. One data point. And hope this bioacoustics stuff is allow us to then go in. Because he and I hooked up with a high school honors student kid, wanted a project on wildlife. So we're like, great, we need to train the AI model. So we had him go listen to a bunch of stuff and accumulate enough howls to say, this is a howl. It's not an airplane. This is a howl. It's not a truck. This is a howl of a wolf, not a coyote. So that then you can let the machine listen to a year's worth of recordings without you having to sit there for a year for every single unit.

[Steven Rinella]

And you isolate all the.

[George Buman]

Yeah, right. And there's been an explosion in the amount of info out there in the research world about this kind of stuff in the last 15 years. A friend wrote a book came out in 2012 called what the Robin Knows by John Young. They had to scratch and dig to find any documentation that talked about any of this stuff. You know, everybody's got the app now. Like, here's the song of the robin, you know, here's the song of the Phoebe. You Know all these. What they don't tell you and they can't is what the hell that actually means.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

And so there's been a lot more research in that field recently, which is just. It's pointing to the complexity that we've been ignoring as modern humans for a long darn time. And it's fun. You know, you don't need expensive equipment to engage with this stuff. You just. You don't even need binoculars. Just listen. Well, I don't have good hearing anymore. I shot too many guns or like me, you know, power tools and guns, and I got compromised hearing. But it's not about what you can hear or can see. It's what you do with what you can hear and see. Like, I noticed a friend of mine who's had a lot of the same history, we pick up on cars on dirt road a lot further off than our wives do. Like, get the dogs. Get the dogs in, out of the road. Like, what are you talking about? There's a car coming. Yeah, there's a car coming. I don't hear it. Well, just give it a sec, you know, and there it comes. So each of us comes to the. To the game with a slightly different set of superpowers, if you want to put it that way.

[Steven Rinella]

And.

[George Buman]

And we're tuning into things in ways that you aren't, or you're tuning in stuff that I don't, which is in some ways, like, I don't like to give a lot of instruction on this stuff because I want to hear what you find. And if I tell you what to look for, that's all you're going to see. You follow me, you know, So I really. It's like, yeah, I'm going to tell you some cool stuff to get you started. Plant that seed. But, man, I really want you to do this on your own and teach me what you find. Oh, yeah, the lions, you know, the coyotes do that at the lion. But it's when the lion's behaving like this. So, like when that bobcat came through the yard the other day, I did get a small recording of the magpies. And it was nothing like what I would point out and say, bobcat over there. And what you start to realize is they're oftentimes talking about, sure, they're talking about the animal specifically, but as well in that mix is them talking about that animal's behavior, its intention, you might say. So when a cat is hunting, those alarms go through the roof, they light up the woods. But if the cat, like this One the other day was just kind of like walking through the yard, you know, drops off the retaining wall, sits down on a log in the little cops of cottonwoods. Yeah, yeah, there's a trouble, but we're not ratting it out like crazy, you know. So in many cases you can, you can actually read into the behavior. You can read into the direction an animal is moving. Like so when the coyote is alarming at something like us, naturally they'll often shadow it as it progresses. So you'd be like, okay, there's a, there's a wolf over there and it's going right to left at a trot, I think. And if we want to see it, we're going to have to go over on the hill here where we're downwind. You can start doing these predictive things that our ancestors were using intimately because they're hunting with rocks and sticks. Yeah, you need everything. And this is one of those tools that helps you on that razor's edge of survival. It's like the, you know, the Crow Indian, you know, Crow tribal folks here, they had a, you know, Crow Fair. I don't know if you guys have been to Crow Fair, but they were just a few years ago, a Twitter with the fact this one elder was coming out of the mountains to attend and this photographer friend of mine got to meet him and he's very low key, asking questions. And the elder asked this friend of mine, he's like, so what do you do? I'm a photographer. He said, oh, what do you like to photograph? Bears and wolves and otters and stuff like that. You want to know where every bear is? Every wolf is. He's like, yeah, he's like getting his notebook out. He's like, you know, thinking he's going to draw a map and you know, he's like, he says, no, he says, you listen to the birds. He says, they're like our women. They gossip about everything.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

You know, that's some deep wisdom right there because it's going on all the time. But we just don't give it the credit.

[Steven Rinella]

It's do what. What other animals that people, that people listen would know would have a familiar familiarity with the, with the vocabulary already.

[George Buman]

Yeah, Great ones like gray squirrels.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

Like in North America at least, you know, gray squirrel is a great one. They're in Europe, you know, they've been introduced to Europe and they're a plague over there. But again, nature doesn't care whether you're non native or native.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[George Buman]

Everybody's contributions to this community Conversation is equal and listened to. So gray squirrels, if you spent time in the woods, you know something's coming through when you hear. Which is in contrast to.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it.

[George Buman]

Ever hear that one?

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. Without the.

[George Buman]

Yes, exactly. Look up. That is typically for a threat from the air.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He leaves off the couple, like, whatever

[George Buman]

the chucks or chops or where he

[Steven Rinella]

leaves off the chuck.

[George Buman]

The chucks are typically something on the ground. Same with red squirrels.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, that's him on.

[George Buman]

That's something typically on the ground. There's some dis. There's some debate in the scientific community over what that actually means. And no, it doesn't mean that. It means this and we don't know. And the bottom line is the squirrels know. Listen to squirrels, spend time with the squirrels. Because when they go,

[Brody]

I hate that one.

[Steven Rinella]

What does that mean? Got a version that just means I'm mad at another squirrel.

[George Buman]

There is that. Yeah. You can't discount that. That's for sure. Like, dude, get out of my mid.

[Steven Rinella]

I wish I got all that. Like, I wish I could isolate the one, because I'm real interested in the one where he sees something. But then a lot of times you'd be watching him from afar, and he'd be like, he's fired up. Because he's fired up at that squirrel.

[George Buman]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, he's not telling about some elk coming down the trail. He's, like, pissed at a squirrel.

[George Buman]

And what's really crazy cool is not only is. Are most of these things innate in these species. So, like those vervet monkeys, they are wired from birth to yell at the leopard like they do.

[Steven Rinella]

You think so?

[George Buman]

We know so what they don't. They're not learning language well, yes and no. What they need is refinement of how to use that. So, like, young ones, they've seen in those vervets, like adults, basically, like, cuff the kids, like, shut up. That is a root. It's a tree root. It's not a snake. Oh, all right. So there are these innate tendencies. There's these innate alarms. But then there's also training that comes with the social arrangement that helps them refine it so that the group can agree. Right. And that's also where you end up with these dialects. You know the ravens on Vancouver island, like, dude, they say stuff I've never heard before from here.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[George Buman]

Totally different accent in California. Oh, dude, he's on my song Forward. You know, it's like Mainers. You know, those ravens have different sounds. Same in Alaska. Like, you can see Then it's like there are these pockets of agreed upon sound culture.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

And they're talking about things in pretty complex ways. They're talking about us too, which I don't think a lot of people are realize. They're talking about us in ways that these wild communities are actually across species. Not just across species, across genera, family, order of organisms that are all listening to each other simultaneously. So the mink is listening to the frogs. The frogs are listening to the owl. The owl is listening to the jet going overhead. There's this whole hierarchy of. Of order that they.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a great point that you're. That like as much. You're talking about trying to like, sort figure out what the noises make. There's all these different noises that have to mean something. It's interesting to get into like what are other animals. So here you are a human. Here you are one species hearing an elk bugle drawing conclusions from that. But that an elk is listening to a pine squirrel drawing conclusions from that.

[George Buman]

None of them are in isolation. We are the ones in isolation.

[Steven Rinella]

We're the ones out of the. Out of the conversation, out of the loop.

[George Buman]

And it's not like you gotta go into a wild place to hear this. No. Like, literally, I'm gassing up here in Bozeman before I got here. And the chickadee is pissed off at something. I didn't see what it was, but I at least knew something's going on over there. I've done it enough times. Walk over and be like, oh, I bet nobody in this neighborhood's seen that owl. It's been sitting there. Probably lived there its whole life years, and nobody's known that it's sitting right there.

[Steven Rinella]

We had one hanging dead in that tree the other day.

[George Buman]

Did you really? Yeah. What happened to it?

[Steven Rinella]

We emailed or I texted one of the game wardens and you said there's so much avian influenza right now, and it's hitting owls hard enough where they don't even. They're not even testing all. All the birds anymore.

[George Buman]

That's sad. And that's.

[Steven Rinella]

He was going to come by and grab it, but he was like. He's like. There's a lot.

[George Buman]

Pretty sure of it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Overwhelmed. And that's. Yeah. Like, that's the trouble.

[Steven Rinella]

There's too many to check them all right now.

[George Buman]

That's what I lament is as we see biodiversity tanking around the globe is we're losing these informants. We're losing these community members who are more than happy to welcome us in and share information with us if we slow the hell down. Like something I do with students I've done for years is I'll take them out somewhere in the park. And I said, everybody put your phones, your watches, everything in a bag. Pull out a notepad or a piece of paper and a pencil. That's all you're allowed to have spread out, you know. So we'll have everybody spread out for, you know, a few yards between everybody over a, say, an acre. And we're gonna sit for an hour, 60 minutes. That's it, 60 minutes. And then I just want you to look for any animals. You see, any sounds you hear, just jot them down. And we come together at the end of that and I keep time. And then I have a crude way for them to keep rough timestamps of when we're out there so they can keep time, correlate certain things. And I'll say to them, what, what did you hear? Nothing, man. There was nothing for like, I thought I heard a chickadee, like maybe minute, you know, around minute 40 or when you made the signal for the fourth quarter or something. Like there was nothing. And then there was stuff all over. I'm like, anybody else notice that? Like, yeah, actually the nuthatch came down the tree. I saw coyote. Like, all these things start happening. I said, do you think us going in there screwed things up? Did they know we were coming? And you see the wheels start turning. And the answer to that is absolutely yes. The same signal system that's ratting out the Cooper's hawk coming through the neighborhood or the owl perched up in the spruce is the same system that's telling everybody else about us.

[Brody]

That's super interesting from a hunting perspective because, like, you could be glass and some mule deer that are, say, a thousand yards away, and you're like, they have no idea we're we're here. But maybe they do and they're just not worried about it yet.

[George Buman]

You know, they know the proximities, they know the priors, they know that squirrel isn't going to do that until it sees something of trouble. But they're 300, 400 yards down. If we see the coyote hauling ass up through this meadow past us, we know that trouble's gotten about another hundred yards closer. You know, that that ghost buck that nobody could ever harvest, they, at a very fine level at that age, had to be, have to be tuning into these ultra fine details of alarm in their environment. And every species has a different threshold, you know, so toys, for instance, they're out of there so fast. They're like ninjas. You just notice, like, they're gone. Like where the hell they go. And then the sparrows, you know, pay attention and they make a couple chip notes and then they take off, you know, And a couple minutes later, here comes the dog. Has followed your trail into the woods.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. When you're sneaking along thinking that the thing that's alerting stuff is you crunching leaves. And then you think about and you go like. Like the forest is alive with bird calls and whatever and squirrels and stuff, but you think it's like you stepped on a twig. Yeah, it's a good point. They might have been talking about you for forever.

[George Buman]

Man, the turkeys. Turkeys step on twigs. Elk break branch. Big, big, big stuff. So, like, why aren't they alarming at that? I was like, so pissed as a kid, like, watching these birds on my grandmother's feeder. Like a woodpecker come in and flush everybody. Or a jay or, you know, squirrel sidles up. I walk out, everybody takes off. I'm like, I'm not bad. I'm not a bad guy. Like, come on, let's, you know, hang out. Show me some stuff. And no, it's like you screw the least common denominator as a hiker, a dog walker, a beachcomber, and you scare everybody. That's the piece we don't get, is if you scare the robin, you've already been blown for everything. You scare the brown creeper, you scare the mink. You know, it's like. And then there's this beautiful. This is like gourmet level stuff where you start getting into secondary alarms. So, like, as you slow down, I'll back up just a second. So that one exercise of making Everybody sit for 60 seconds or 60 minutes, I'll say, how many times have each of you gone out in the woods or somewhere just wildish and sat for 60 minutes and done nothing but pay attention? You ask that yourself. Like, you know, hunters some, but yeah, archery, whitetail hunters. Yeah, that's how I learned it a lot.

[Steven Rinella]

That's when you see everything. Well, you got it. Like, you got to go sit there at like an hour in all of a sudden, you're like, where is all this stuff normally?

[George Buman]

Bingo.

[Steven Rinella]

It's like stuff everywhere.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, like I'm acknowledging that you're there, right? So like if you coming up, you tell people if you're trying to get up on a cottontail, be like, last thing you do, don't look at it.

[George Buman]

Exactly.

[Steven Rinella]

Look at it out the corner of your eye. Don't ever aim your eyeballs at it. Because when you aim your eyeballs at it, it knows you're aiming your eyeballs at it.

[George Buman]

Exactly, exactly. It's that language. So as you slow down and as a friend calls it, I love this term, the honoring routine, you start to honor their spirit space. You very quickly can tell what the squirrel's personal space extends to you. Respect that. You give them a little bit of room. Ah, crap. You know, I'm just trying to get to the store. Like I'm not walking around every pigeon. Well, that is the barrier that's going to stop you from moving through the woods like that ghost buck, like that lion. Do you follow me? They are paying attention to the signals in the environment and working around them and using environmental components to their advantage. So there's some places that are worthless to try to hunt until it's a south wind, right? You gotta wait till the wind's right. You see, certain birds and predators hunt when it's pouring down rain. Their, their survival is so narrow on that razor edge and they've got this huge neighborhood watch trying to disarm them and keep them from killing their prey. And so they're doing all these different things to try to subvert the community of communication. That's busting them. That's busting you. That's busting you. You step like, literally, you got two minutes. Usually this is a fun one to play with. Tell a buddy to meet me at this trail intersection at 11 o', clock, let's say, except you get in there at 10 so that means you leave your car or, you know, do whatever you have to do to be sitting down by 10 and let things go back to normal. And then.

[Steven Rinella]

Which is 30 minutes, whatever.

[Brody]

Yeah, yeah.

[George Buman]

It's usually more like 40 to 60 minutes. And then as you're sitting there and the birds are feeding and they're preening and they're singing, you hear the most common alarm in the woods. What is it? Silence. Silence is the most overlooked and most common alarm in nature that exists. So you just might think there's nobody singing over there anymore. And then you see a couple birds, like, hauling ass going from the parking lot area past you.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Set your watch. Two minutes. So you got two minutes to figure out, do you want to scare the tar out of your. My buddy, do you want to hide, or do you want to go to somewhere else where I can watch them and screw them?

[Steven Rinella]

That's a good point about the quietness, man.

[George Buman]

This is what the lion or the deer knows of you is it's got two minutes through the robins, through the sparrows, to do a wide loop out, listen about your progress through all the other birds and animals. And then you've had. I know you guys. If you spent any amount of time in the woods, you come back the same trail you went in on, like, son of a bitch. There's bear tracks right on my tracks, or wolf tracks or coyote tracks or the deer. You know, it's because they walk around you. They're listening and monitoring you through the animal language in the environment. So they're like, oh, yeah, okay, he's still going. He's going left over that ridge. And this stuff is. Is of such high utility that it's. One fellow I mentioned in the book interviewed him. He was training special ops crews, and he had a guy, he trained in bird language as well as tracking, and they had a Humvee ran over an ied, you know, in the road, just made a mess of this thing. And they sent him, this student of the fellow I knew in to find the bomb layer. And he does a few loops around the Humvee site. You know, just chaos, bleeding guys, screaming guys, smoke, fire. He picks up a single set of tracks, leaving. Same set, came in one way, left another. So he starts sign cutting. You know, some of you may know that term, you're moving fast, but you're periodically rechecking that you're on the Prince. Okay, he broke a branch over there, you know, just trying to catch up. And he gets to a certain point where he's this is Afghanistan. There's this wadi, his little ravine, and he hears the alarms. He's like that guy. He's over in there. And as he's standing there trying to figure out what to do, he starts hearing the bird alarms go up this ridge beyond the wadi. And based on what he learned, he went the opposite direction. So he'd get over onto another point, get a clear view of that ridge, and ends up taking the guy out. Never saw him up until that point, but he was clearly delineated in his movements and direction and speed, even through the bird conversations. And that's the thing. He didn't know any of the birds. You don't need to know any of the birds. You learn the birds at home and the patterns you find anywhere you go are the same. They're going to be filled by different species. But like, I've heard so many people say, hey, you know, I never would have seen that mongoose. We were in Africa. But it's responding exactly the way the small sparrows do at my place along the river when the mink comes through. The painted dogs, oh, my gosh, they're like, we never would have seen them. But those birds, whatever they are, are the height off the ground. They're excited in the same way the birds are in my yard when the neighbor's dog gets loose and comes over.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[George Buman]

So that's the. The universality of that concept is fascinating to me that we all are operating on the same level of awareness and use of sound to know what's going on, sometimes miles beyond our own sensory abilities. Like, I know there's wolves in the park two and a half miles away. If I'm walking my dog, I hear, oh, yeah, yeah. At this point, it's. It's not even a if. It's just where. So I'll find that. That signal maker, the coyote or whatever, and I can just set up the scope, and from the deck of the house, you're like, oh, yep, yeah, there they are. It seems like magic to people, but it's not. It's just paying attention better people. And when you pay attention better, you get treated different. That's the real beauty to me is you start getting to know individual wild animals and they. At the same time, they've always already known you.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. It's like, why certain people can be out in their yard and have stuff come into it.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

There's probably some dude listening who's thinking, like, I am. That there's probably some cr. Like, if you think about, like, trying to call mallards or something that. Like

[George Buman]

that.

[Steven Rinella]

There's like some code that you could crack. Do you know what I mean? Like that to a duck, when duck comes over and it's clearly looking for other ducks. And it's like the duck's like, I know that that's not right. Like, I don't get the problem. Right. There's something that's not right. Yeah, you're doing something that's not right. Everybody's just bobbing silly. Yeah, there's something. Like. There's something you could say, you know, there's something you could say that would just make it that. Absolutely. That duck would have to come down. But you'll never.

[George Buman]

Well, never learn it.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what I mean? You'll never learn. Like when he goes like. No, not buying it.

[George Buman]

Yeah. That speaks to another point where I don't sometimes share too much. Because what these animals offer you when you are let into their world is to see their strengths, their incredible talents, but also vulnerabilities. But you see their Achilles heels too. And that I don't. It's thrown around so cliche but sacred. That to me is. There's a sacredness in what they have shared to then betray that. Like a great example. You probably know this from your bison work is bison have this Achilles heel of following the matriarch. And those bison hunters partly annihilated them because of their allegiance to the matriarch. They don't move anywhere. I've watched them for years.

[Steven Rinella]

Explanation. Exploit that.

[George Buman]

Shoot her through the guts so she can't move. And everybody mills around and you just mow the rest of them down. Anybody else tries to take off and chart a new course, you bust them through the guts. Everybody mills around. And you, you know, in one stand, you can get a dozen or 100. I think there was one record of, like, A hundred or something bison in one stand.

[Steven Rinella]

Guy named Vic smith got over 101 time.

[George Buman]

So to me, when you're let in, it's. It's changed the way I. There are things I couldn't reconcile hunting. And part of that was there.

[Steven Rinella]

Are there things about hunting you couldn't reconcile, or there are animals that you couldn't reconcile hunting for?

[George Buman]

It was the. The former, okay? Like, I didn't know what it was. But there was an honoring peace, a recognition, a sacredness that got clouded over in me trying to get that turkey, that tom, that specific tom there, that buck or something like that that. I missed. I've found now. And for me, this is just me. It took me stepping away from hunting and to really soak into their world on their terms, if you follow me, you know, and so they share things like, there's a. There's a mule. Dear doe, model mother, model mama, just. We called her mama dear. And she. She always brought off fawns. She was amazing. In one year, she had triplets. Actually, no, no, I think it was quadruplets, which for mule deer almost never happens. Like, she knew where to feed, build up those reserves, could handle that many kids. And lo and behold, we start into that winter, and it's a bitch. And one by one, we start seeing those fawns not show up in the yard. And pretty soon, it's down to just one. And then we don't even see mama deer. They're gone. I'm like, what the hell? And we had years with this deer. Like, we had enough understanding that I would walk with, at that time, our two black Labradors, each about £70. And I'd go get the mail, the mailbox, like, 10th of a mile up the driveway. And she'd be there grazing, you know, off a distance. But in the meantime, she might come, like, right along the driveway. And I would put my hands on the shoulders of the dogs. They weren't leashed. Our dogs run. But to her, this was my gesture of, it's okay. They're with me, and I'm not going to let them bother you. And there are times we could walk within 12ft of her and the fawns, like, I go sit in the yard sometimes. And she was so comfortable that she would walk between me sitting on the edge of the retaining wall and the edge of the decking, which was like, at most 30ft that she'd walk through. Like, we had an understanding. It wasn't. She wasn't my pet. I didn't, you know, but we gave each other this space and understanding of each other's boundaries. Well, that hard winter that she disappeared, we assumed she was just gone. And lo and behold, like mid February, maybe early March, who shows up on our deck but mama dear? And she's just emaciated. She had this huge patch of hair missing on her back right side, like her lumbar vertebrae. I don't know if she'd been hit by a car. You could see her ribs. And what did she do? She came up and bedded down on the welcome mat to our front door. She came up on the deck, which is, you know, like an 8 inch step up. And she bedded down there every night for, I think it was three or four days until she eventually went under the deck and died.

[Steven Rinella]

Because she knows nothing's going to get her there.

[George Buman]

Exactly. She and I and our family had put in the time for her to see us as in her worst hour, her worst time. She knew she could find refuge with that, with us. To me, that was one of the most crushingly heartbreaking, but also beautiful things at the same time that we had made enough of a connection that she felt that she could live out her last hours in our company. I can't now look at another deer and not offer them that same capacity to reproduce what mama deer did.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[George Buman]

Not that I, let's say wouldn't hunt again, but the way I would hunt and view that is. And the author, Joe Hutto, put it really succinctly nicely this way. It's not.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that the dude did all that work with turkeys.

[George Buman]

He did my Life as a Turkey BBC did and he wrote, he did a great film and book called Touching the Wild on these mule deer down in Lander. And Joe, is he still around? He is. He moved back to Florida. You know, I keep touch now and then and he's such a wealth of.

[Steven Rinella]

I'd like to get that dude on the show sometime.

[George Buman]

Yeah, I don't know if he does

[Steven Rinella]

that kind of stuff.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

That it was a who.

[George Buman]

It was a who. Yeah, yeah. And just every single day of our lives is enriched by paying attention to these conversations and having these individuals come in and out of our world because they are our best teachers. When you have a shit day at work and your family is pissed about something or, you know, it's like, you can always look to that, look at that, you know that coyote over there, it's got a broken leg and it's not making excuses. It's still keeping up with the pack. Be it a little slower, you know, listening to nature at that level is. You start seeing issues and trends that magazines and the popular media want to make into, you know, the save the whales kind of approach where it's like top down, big stop. You know, it's like to me, this is the groundswell of where caring for your environments, real stewardship, real conservation takes place. As you through these conversations and overhearing what matters to them lets you into their world to know what you're doing that is harmful, that you weren't even aware of. Like, oh shit, I guess I, I shouldn't mow the grass there now because those, that's where the bunnies, that's where the, that's where the litter is coming off. Is that hole underneath that long grass. Okay, I won't mow there for a month. More like simple stuff sometimes. Don't cut down that dead tree. That's the woodpecker nest site or that is, that is the sentinel location for the principal players in your neighborhood wildlife alarm system. You take that one seemingly useless dead tree out and all these animals can't get a view now of what's coming before it's on them. You know, it's like, so you have a, a true bottom up level of appreciation and interaction that makes you a better neighbor. I think I feel that way. I still feel like a fool. I still feel ignorant and like I'm making so many mistakes. But I feel, and I know when you enter into those Spaces with that sort of humility. Nature's pretty resilient. It gives you more latitude than you would have otherwise. Like, people ask me, well, should I make animal noises when I'm out? You know, I see some deer when I'm out for a walk or I see the fox, do I make fox noises? I'm like, no, do not. I don't imitate animals in the wild anymore because the reason is I want to see them do what they naturally do. And once you inject yourself, it's game over. It's like pulling the trigger almost. You change the entire equation. I've been with people. We've actually killed animals through making noises and interrupting the situation. I want to see them do what they naturally do so I have a better sense of what they have to teach me. And use your own voice. A lot of indigenous cultures will say, when we talk to the animals in our native tongue, they treat us like family. And so people are like, well, I'm only American. I speak English. And, you know, like, you speak in the most expressive language you have, and be sincere, and you'll start having experiences like, you know, the deer jump up on the morning walk with a dog, and you say, hey, wait, wait, it's us. It's us. And they stop and they go back to grazing. They might even bed back down like that. But if you bring a friend with you to watch, it doesn't work because they're always responding to the lowest common denominator. You bring in somebody that's not paying attention, and we give off infinite amount of micro signals, and they know whether you're paying attention or not. There's stories of, like, horses that can do math and tell time and read calendars and stuff, and they find out they can't do that stuff. What they're doing is queuing off of their handlers at such a fine minute level that it gives the impression that another member of this, you know, another species has these capabilities when they're just. It's called the Kluger Hans effect. They're paying attention to you so. Well, better than most humans pay attention. It's like, how are we missing these cues? Well, your life doesn't depend on it. When it does, you start paying attention to stuff. You know, we all have the capacity like, oh, the furnace shut off. You know, look to the things that are important to us. We still have those capabilities. We just have directed them other places. Right, Right. Like something. There's something screwed up with that trailer got. Pull over, pull over. We got to Check the chains. There's a bearing going out. Or, you know, like, we are laser focused on those kind of details, but the power of our brain to do that can be used then to go back into the natural world like our. Our people did in deep time and know stuff that is magic seeming, but in ways that's really damn fulfilling. You know, when you get. It's like, I'd love to see a mountain lion at all. Like, well, we get. We get photos of them. You know, it's like it changes the whole equation. You have opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise.

[Steven Rinella]

Tell me about the artwork you do real quick.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

So that turkey is a turkey.

[George Buman]

That's a specific one. Inspired by. I gave a couple of talks at a nature center in Utah, and they had three Toms. Tom, Tommy, and Thomas. And after I was done with my. My obligations, I just followed them around with some clay and sculpted. And, you know, it's just. I was just so taken with that dexterity in their tail. It's like a geisha, you know, they wave that tail back. So beautiful, you know, and when you enter into these spaces, you find that words don't really work. And I guess that's. I grew up around sculpture. Tried like hell not to do it, but it came back around in a way that I could do it my way. And for me, it picks up where the words sort of trail off like that. Just that curve of the Achilles on the bear or that shin bone, that line of. Always love bones and skulls. And it's like it was a place to put it. My love of that stuff, like knowing every bone, every muscle from the inside out, then seeing the overlay of the behavior and when they do this, how that bone articulates this way. So I don't use photos, I don't use video. I used to take. Take a ton of that stuff I found. I didn't use it. I got a roadkill kit. I got a tackle box full of calipers and dissecting knives and rubber gloves and my own data sheets. I made up one for birds and one for mammals. So I find a moose or a grizzly bear that something's illegal to have. I can take a full set of measurements and have that archive in my studio to go back to. But more accurately, what it does for me is, you know, on an elk, I find a dead elk, I might take 50 measurements, but in stretching the tape measure or the calipers, that number of measurements guarantees I have my hands on that animal at least 100 different ways. So when I go to work on a sculpture, I'm working from more of a felt sense of the creature. I see just a momentary pose that a fox or a badger, an otter might do or something like. I can freeze that in my mind and I can fill in all the details of what was. Where to make that happen.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Does mo. Does most your income come from the art or from your work as a naturalist and guide?

[George Buman]

Yeah, it's the art by far. Yeah, we're starting to do.

[Steven Rinella]

So you're like, occupationally an artist.

[George Buman]

Yeah, yeah. But when you just kind of follow your interests, you. You kind of start screwing up the ability to be defined. Like, I love. I love, since I was time as a kid, loved stone tools and ancient technology. You know, it took me 30 years and flew to Clovis Point. But like always as a kid, there was just, from the time I was young, a desire to have a felt sense of what it meant to. To make that.

[Steven Rinella]

I was able to do it because I had it teed up for me.

[George Buman]

Did you,

[Steven Rinella]

Cheater? I had everything ready. All I had to do is give it the final little flap and it was all teed up. Yeah, I did. I did a flute, but I took a dirty way to get there.

[George Buman]

That's dirty dude. Because the. Whoever made the preform for you will tell you the flute's nothing.

[Steven Rinella]

I just had the pre form a little final little thump and blew a flute off.

[George Buman]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And I was like, I'm done. Yeah, I could do a second. He didn't break it.

[George Buman]

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

[Steven Rinella]

And then how long did. When, when is the book out and available? Right now?

[George Buman]

It is. It's available now wherever books are sold. You can find them all over Amazon and and beyond. Your local bookstores can order it through Greystone Books.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. The title is Eavesdropping on Animals. What we Can Learn from Wildlife Conversations by George Buman. Got a four by John Young. Anywhere books are sold. Yeah, thanks for coming on, man.

[George Buman]

Thanks for having me. Yeah. Can I give one plug? What do you mean for something other than the book? Oh yeah, we're doing right now. It just went live. We got an online event. That's where some of our education stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, cream put that in the note. Sorry.

[George Buman]

No. Oh no, that's fine.

[Steven Rinella]

Go ahead.

[George Buman]

We have an event for people who love nature in Yellowstone park called the Yellowstone Summit and it brings together we have this year over 30 world expert speakers as we have for the last five years on Yellowstone, talking about everything from filming mountain lions, the history of beavers in the park to population, census of moose, geology, Native American history. If you are thinking of coming to the park and want some insight on what to do and think about, join us. If you longtime Yellowstone or want more deep stuff, join us. If you're from the region. There's nothing that thrills me more than running to somebody from Billings or Butte or you know, Idaho Falls or something is like, oh my gosh, is that

[Brody]

like an ongoing thing or is it one time or.

[George Buman]

Yeah, it's. It's online so anybody with Internet can get involved watch it anywhere in the world. It's registration just opened so by the time this airs, registration will still be open. It goes live on February 19th through the 22nd of this year. And yeah, it's cheap. We try to make it affordable. For 15 bucks, you can get access for 48 hours to all those programs or if you want all access, which, which means you can like, it's great because it's online.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a live component to it. You go, you can watch, you can get a ticket. Watch online.

[George Buman]

So like Deputy superintendent Mike Turnell of Yellowstone will be given a park update and you can show up and ask him questions yourself. So like, yeah, since the flood, you know what actually is going on with the road and things like that. We've got folks who use it for homeschool curriculum. We've got folks who use it to train their park guides. So this is a training tool for them. We got park service people who watch it for their own training. So it's very high level, but also has entry level basic stuff for anybody interested whether they actually ever make it here or not. And just check it [e-mail] got it.

[Steven Rinella]

So yellowstonesummit.com and eavesdropping on animals, what we can learn from wildlife conversations with George Buman. Thanks for coming on, man.

[George Buman]

My pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.

[Steven Rinella]

SA.

[George Buman]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed Human.